Citizen Cartwright

Being morally ambitious

I’ve written before about Rutger Bregman, who was described in a New York Times interview over the weekend as “something of a professional optimist.”

Bregman has a new book out titled “Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference” — an effort to “meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into social good,” as the Times puts it.

He also is cofounder of the School for Moral Ambition, which seeks to help as many people as possible devote their careers to some of the most pressing challenges we face.

Bregman says that in the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, “You had figures such as Alva Vanderbilt — a fascinating character who was this very decadent woman, incredibly rich, but later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, became a radical suffragette and one of the main financers of the women’s rights movement. She reminded me of MacKenzie Scott, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S.” 

Bregman says: “Someone said this to me recently: If you are watching the news right now and you’re not terrified for yourself because you have some savings or a nice job, then you are the person who needs to stand up.”

Results of lawmakers’ all-nighters on ‘big, beautiful bill’

I’d love to be able to give you details of the legislation approved Wednesday as three House committees advanced their parts of the bill.

 

But with a gigantic bill like this — intended to make spending cuts to offset the costs of making President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent — it’s routine that important details only emerge after Congress has passed the bill and the president has signed it.

 

There’s also this dynamic: 

 

"The House Energy and Commerce Committee was 16 hours into a nearly 27-hour markup [session to change and approve the bill] when it became clear that top Republicans on the panel weren’t clear on what key Medicaid provisions in the legislation they were actively debating would actually do,” Politico says.

 

The best summary of what’s in the bill that I can find continues to be this one from The Associated Press, published before the three committees finished their work.

 

The legislative package combining all the House committees' work is to be put together by the House Budget Committee on Friday.

 

Here are some details on Energy and Commerce’s health care piece of the bill, from Politico.

 

Here is a rundown on the House Agriculture Committee’s approval of $300 billion in nutrition spending cuts, also from Politico.

U.S.-China tariff deal still means higher tariffs and uncertainty

The agreement Monday to cut tariffs between the two countries 115 percent — reducing U.S. tariffs on China to 30 percent and China’s on U.S. goods to 10 percent — “leaves tariffs higher than before Trump started ramping them up last month. And businesses and investors must contend with uncertainty about whether the truce will last,” says The Associated Press.

The deal lasts 90 days, to give time for U.S. and Chinese negotiators to reach a more substantive agreement. 

But Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, says three months is “an extremely short amount of time to address the range of contentious trade matters that remain between the U.S. and China, including dealing with excess manufacturing capacity, excessive subsidization of Chinese firms and transshipment efforts by Chinese companies. Similar negotiations typically take well over one year.”

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, says 90 days is also a relatively brief time frame for companies to try to restart stopped shipments from China, given how long it can take to book space on cargo ships and move products by sea, The New York Times reports.

Many businesses delayed or canceled orders after President Trump put the 145 percent tariff on items made in China last month. Now they’re worried that a mad scramble to get goods on ships will lead to bottlenecks and increased shipping costs, says a separate AP article.

Marc Rosenberg, founder and CEO of The Edge Desk in Deerfield, Ill., invested millions of dollars to develop a line of $1,000 ergonomic chairs but delayed production in China that was to begin this month, hoping for a tariff reprieve.

Rosenberg says it's good that U.S.-China trade talks are ongoing but that he thinks the 90-day window is “beyond dangerous” since shipping delays could result in his chairs still being en route when the temporary deal ends.

“There needs to be a plan in place that lasts a year or two so people can plan,” he says.

More on DOGE consolidation of Americans’ information in 1 database

The Trump administration’s moves increase the risk of exposing data to hackers and other adversaries, according to security analysts, and experts worry that any breaches could erode public confidence in government, The Washington Post reports.

 

“Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” says Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.”

Civil rights advocates and some federal employees also worry that the data assembled under DOGE could be used against political enemies or for decisions about funding or basic government services.

 

Here is historian Heather Cox Richardson on the Post article and related developments.

Trump’s Justice Department on school integration

Last week, the Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana, calling its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggesting that others dating to the Civil Rights Movement should be reconsidered.

Civil rights activists say many orders have been only loosely enforced in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean problems are solved, says Johnathan Smith, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration.

“It probably means the opposite — that the school district remains segregated. And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954,” says Smith, who is now chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law.

Last year was the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. “It signaled the end legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States,” says the National Archives in its summary of the ruling. 

The ruling was so important in American history and progress that the Archives includes its summary among its Milestone Documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the $7.2 million check for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, Thomas Edison’s patent application for the light bulb, the surrender agreement signed by the German Army 80 years ago today.

Last year, an Associated Press analysis found that while schools in recent decades have grown far more diverse, they are, by some measures, more segregated.

On one hand, the number of African American and white students who go to school almost exclusively with students of the same race is at an all-time low, AP said.

On the other hand, “huge shares of students of color still go to schools with almost no white students. Hispanic segregation is worse now than in the 1960s. The nation’s largest school districts, in particular, have seen a surge in segregation since the 1990s, according to research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project,” AP said.

More than 130 school systems are under Justice Department desegregation orders, AP says, citing records in a court filing this year. The vast majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with smaller numbers in states including Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Some other districts continue to be under separate desegregation agreements with the Education Department.

Last week’s Justice Department dismissal has raised alarms among some people who fear it could undo decades of progress. Research on districts that have been released from orders has found that many experienced greater increases in racial segregation than those under court orders, AP says.

“In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students,” says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who studies educational inequity.

What consumers can expect amid China tariffs

"Trade experts say that companies have stockpiled enough inventory in recent months that, if the White House reverses course soon and significantly drops tariffs on China, much of the pain for the U.S. economy and consumers can be avoided," The New York Times reports.

Data from the Institute for Supply Management shows U.S. inventories at their highest level in more than two years.

Many firms say tariffs above 50 percent on Chinese imports are enough to stop trade entirely, the Times says. With tariffs now at a minimum of 145 percent, and in some cases much higher, that would mean the Trump administration likely would have to drop its China tariffs by at least 100 percentage points to meaningfully restart the flow of goods, says the Times.

The reason consumers haven’t felt many effects of tariffs yet is because it takes 20 to 40 days for a container ship to travel across the Pacific Ocean. Last month, the number of container ships departing China for the United States dropped by about a third, says the Times.

Then it takes another one to 10 days for Chinese goods to make their way by train or truck to various cities around the country, economists at Apollo Global Management said in a recent report. 

That means the higher tariffs on China that went into effect at the beginning of April have just started to result in a drop in the number of ships arriving at American ports.

By late this month or early June, consumers could start to see some empty shelves, with layoffs for retailers and logistics industries.

Also, on May 2, the Trump administration eliminated a loophole that had enabled Americans to buy goods directly from China without paying tariffs if the package was worth less than $800.

So American shoppers are seeing higher prices when they check out at Amazon, Shein and Temu, and Chinese exporters are scrambling to find buyers outside the United States.  

Here is a Times article on the effects of the tariffs on China’s factories and workers. 

Here is a Q-and-A on packages worth less than $800, from Wired.

Australia, like Canada, says no to Trumpism

In elections five days apart, centrists in both countries saw their fortunes revived, as parties that had borrowed from the MAGA playbook lost, says a New York Times analysis.

Canadians on April 28 gave the left-leaning Liberal Party a fourth term in office, after the party trailed badly in the polls at the beginning of the year. Canadians embraced the tough-talking approach of Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former central banker, while shying away from the conservative candidate, Pierre Poilievre, who was viewed as being too similar to Trump, says The Wall Street Journal.

A similar dynamic played out in Australia’s election on Saturday. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was down in the polls at the start of the year, though by a narrower margin than Canada’s Liberals. As the election grew closer, the polls flipped. Much of the campaign centered on how best to address the high cost of living, inflation and affordable housing, but Albanese and his main conservative opponent, Peter Dutton, also sparred frequently over who could best negotiate with Trump, the WSJ says.

Australians also watched with alarm as the balance of their mandated retirement accounts fluctuated wildly with the markets in reaction to Trump’s policy announcements, says a second Times analysis.

“The Trump tariff decisions that were seen as mad by Australians, that really accelerated the process of people looking at Dutton, and at Trump, and going, ‘No,’” says Chris Wallace, a professor of political history at the University of Canberra. “It’s a victory for sensible, centrist politics.”

Australians’ repudiation of Dutton and the campaign he waged was most apparent in his defeat in the parliamentary seat he had held for 24 years, says the Times. And that was another parallel with Canada’s election, in which Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost the parliamentary seat he'd held for 20 years.

‘DOGE is building a surveillance state’

“President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him,” says Julia Angwin, a longtime investigative reporter, in a New York Times opinion article. 

“The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top IRS officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them),” she says.

“Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security,” Angwin says.

And “this month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data,” she says.

Angwin cites Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm, who in 2009 envisioned the assemblage of a DOGE-like amount of data into what he called a “database of ruin.” He said, “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft.”

Several lawsuits allege that DOGE's data incursions violate the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, but that law doesn’t give judges the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily stop illegal actions, Angwin says.

The United States is the only one of the 38 developed nations making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that lacks a data protection agency to enforce comprehensive privacy laws, she says. 

Congress could defund DOGE, repeal Trump’s executive order establishing it, or support legislation that Democratic Sens. Ed Markey, Mass., and Ron Wyden, Ore., have introduced to update the Privacy Act to provide more meaningful fines and criminal penalties.

“This should be a bipartisan issue,” Angwin says. “Because once we create a database of ruin, none of us are safe from having our information — no matter how innocuous — used against us.”

Trump’s crypto conflicts

The president's return to the White House “has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty,” says The New York Times.

World Liberty, “has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history,” the Times says.

A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of some revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash, the Times says.

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who runs the family business, told the Times.

Trump now is not only a major crypto dealer; he's also the industry’s top policy maker, the Times says.

The range of conflicts of interest amid “World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force” include, according to the Times:

— World Liberty has directly benefited from Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the company has invested in.

— World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors overseas, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by the Times, creating a new way for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Trump.

— Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed companies that the federal government accused of wrongdoing.

— World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit large payments as part of the deals. “Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives,” the Times says.

Trump’s latest proposal for Ukraine

The president and his top aides demanded on Wednesday that Ukraine accede to a U.S.-designed proposal that would essentially grant Russia all the territory it's gained in the war, while offering Ukraine only vague security assurances, says The New York Times.

The plan, which also would explicitly block Ukraine from ever joining NATO, was rejected by Ukraine President Zelensky.

It isn't clear whether the U.S. announcements are part of a pressure campaign to force Zelensky to make territorial concessions or whether they're intended to create a pretext for abandoning U.S. support for Ukraine, the Times says.

Vice President Vance said while traveling in India that the United States would “walk away” from the peace process if both Ukraine and Russia refused to accept the American terms. But Zelensky clearly was the target, says the Times.

European allies, who in recent weeks have been promising more military and economic support for Zelensky, have said Trump is essentially switching sides in the war, and that his real goal is to cast Ukraine aside and to find a way to normalize American relations with Russia. Trump and his top aides already have started discussing the prospect of lifting sanctions on Russia and entering energy and mineral deals with Russian President Putin, the Times says.

Whatever Trump’s motives, what happened Wednesday signaled the possible abandonment of the American commitment to Zelensky that the United States never would engage in talks that excluded the country from determining its own fate, the Times says.

The United States didn't release a text of its proposal, but European officials who've seen it say that under its terms the United States would recognize Crimea — which Russia seized illegally in 2014 — as Russian territory. Crimea was part of Russia for hundreds of years, but it was given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev nearly seven decades ago, the Times says.

Here is a detailed rundown from historian Heather Cox Richardson.