Carly Sitrin | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2017-10-02T12:30:05+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/carly-sitrin/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Ella Nilsen Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[How Betsy DeVos is quietly erasing Obama’s education legacy]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16229474/devos-erasing-obamas-education-legacy 2017-10-02T08:30:05-04:00 2017-10-02T08:30:01-04:00
Secretary of the Education Betsy DeVos before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during her confirmation hearings in January. | Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos came into the Education Department with a bold vision: that parents should be able to send their kids to school wherever they wanted, by way of government-funded vouchers.

Nine months later, she’s made little progress on that goal. But her Education Department has made other, quieter changes that affect millions of students.

Many of those changes involve rolling back Obama-era regulations. It’s now harder for recent graduates of for-profit colleges to get their loans forgiven. Transgender students know the federal government isn’t backing them up as they fight to use the facilities that match their gender identity rather than the sex assigned to them at birth. And on college campuses, survivors of sexual assault wonder how seriously the Education Department is taking their claims.

So while Congress rejected DeVos’s proposed cuts of $9 billion to the Education Department, and with it, her strategy to implement school choice programs nationwide, it doesn’t mean she’s powerless. By rescinding Obama-era policies, DeVos has made an immediate mark.

A lack of protection for transgender students

M.S. is a 13-year-old girl from Virginia who loves makeup, hanging out with her friends, and keeping up her Snapchat streaks. She considers Jackie Kennedy and Hillary Clinton her role models, calling them “boss ladies,” and dreams of someday moving to California, going to UCLA, and becoming a makeup artist like her favorite YouTube and Instagram stars.

M.S., who is transgender and is identified by her initials to protect her privacy, has been living as a girl since she was in fourth grade. It’s never been an issue among her classmates or friends, she said: “They don’t see me as trans; they see me as their best friend.”

Some of the parents at her school feel differently. That started a local battle that echoed a bigger national debate, a debate in which the Obama administration sided with transgender kids like M.S. and the Trump administration with the parents of her classmates.

Since the fourth grade, M.S. has been advocating for the right to use the girls’ bathroom. For about three weeks after she transitioned, she was allowed to, until a group of parents found out.

What happened next was a school board meeting that her mother, Amy, still remembers vividly: Parents wearing “Save Our School” badges went up to the podium, calling her then-10-year-old daughter an abomination and a predator. One suggested that the school was opening the door for “bullying, rape … and possibly death.”

“It was awful; it’s probably the most alone I ever felt, being in that room that night,” Amy said. Then the board hastily voted to keep her daughter from using the girls’ restroom.

As transgender kids gained more visibility nationwide, the Obama administration released federal guidance on this issue in May 2016. Obama’s Education Department declared that Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in education, protects trans students, and told schools that trans students should be called by their preferred pronouns and names and be allowed to use the bathroom that corresponded to their gender identity.

But the guidance was short-lived — 11 states sued the administration, claiming the directive wasn’t lawful and would be too disruptive for school districts. A federal judge agreed in August 2016, halting it nationwide.

Then, about a month into Betsy DeVos’s tenure, the Education Department and Justice Department sent out a joint letter to school districts rolling back the guidelines, which they characterized as federal overreach. (DeVos herself reportedly opposed the move, but the department she leads still signed on to the letter.)

Neither the guidance nor its reversal really changed anything day to day in M.S.’s school. Her district is still waiting for a court decision in the case of another transgender student from Virginia, Gavin Grimm, who sued nearby Gloucester High School in 2015. His case is still ongoing. But for M.S., knowing President Obama was on her side made all the difference.

“When Obama was president, I knew I had someone that was rooting for me and supporting me,” M.S. said. “All Trump is going to do is nothing, or say no.”

Across the country, protections for trans students are growing at the local level; Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality, estimates that just under half of US schools now have policies in place spelling out transgender students’ rights. But only 13 states and the District of Columbia have anti-discrimination laws on the books protecting transgender students.

Rescinding the Obama guidance isn’t going to take anything away from the schools and districts that have already implemented their own policies. But it makes things more difficult for students like M.S.

“What the Trump administration did I think was to send a message that discrimination against trans students might be okay,” said Tobin.

Those students’ best hope lies with the courts. A federal appeals court recently decided a transgender boy from Wisconsin should be permitted to use the boys’ restroom. Grimm, the transgender student from Gloucester, is still fighting his case in the lower courts, after the US Supreme Court said it would not hear the case this year.

That decision will matter a lot for M.S., who says she wants to advocate for the trans community when she grows up. For Amy, it’s heartbreaking, especially given how much M.S. has flourished since she transitioned. Amy had braced herself for the possibility that her daughter would be bullied by classmates after she transitioned, but the opposite happened. Initially, the kids had questions, but the teasing M.S. had endured stopped. And Amy noticed something else right away — M.S. was happy.

“As a mom, I can see it now,” she said. Looking back at old pictures, “she looks so unhappy. Now the smile takes over her entire face. It was like a puzzle piece shifted for her.”

At the Office for Civil Rights, goals have changed

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is often associated with sexual harassment and transgender cases, but the scope of its work is much broader. It’s charged with enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act in public schools, which is supposed to make sure harassment doesn’t interfere with any student’s right to learn.

“It’s a beautiful mission; it’s a broad mandate,” said Catherine Lhamon, the chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Lhamon formerly served as the assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education under Obama.

Officials at the Office for Civil Rights did not respond to a request for an interview.

One of OCR’s main duties is to investigate harassment complaints from students, faculty, or families. But the Obama administration had a two-pronged approach. It tried to look for patterns with harassment and target systemic problems, and issued guidance on how schools should treat students who were gay, transgender, disabled, or had experienced sexual assault and investigate allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Under DeVos, OCR is closing out a backlog of more than 1,000 investigations at a record-setting pace. They have said they are focused less on systemic problems, to give individual cases a faster resolution. Students sometimes wait years to get their cases investigated, and staff cuts proposed by Trump could drag this out even further. Understaffing has always been an issue at the office; Lhamon said OCR investigators had about 26 cases per person under Obama, which could go up to 45 cases per person under Trump.

“I am still sick about the length of time that it took for us to solve cases,” Lhamon said. “The office was wildly understaffed the entire time I was there. Everybody was working as fast as they could.”

Critics, including conservatives and some legal experts, saw the approach from the Obama administration as heavy-handed. In rescinding it, DeVos said she was correcting federal overreach. But Lhamon said the guidance was supposed to provide schools with answers, after her department fielded many questions from schools about their responsibilities.

“Our view was that we needed to be responsive to the people that were asking questions,” Lhamon said. “The guidance is the job of the office because it tells people what the law is and how to satisfy it.”

Lhamon said she fears that by simultaneously rescinding guidance and closing out investigations, the Trump administration is sending a message to students that they won’t be taken seriously.

“The clearest message in this administration is that student civil rights will not be protected by the federal government,” she said.

Schools uncertain about professional development funding

At the Decatur City School District in Alabama, teachers and administrators are anxiously awaiting news about the fate of a federal program called Title II.

The district gets the vast majority of its teacher professional development funds from this program, about $347,000 in federal money each year, compared to $42,828 from the state. That money is used to keep teacher training current on everything from class planning to technology to helping English language learners.

School districts across the country get $2.1 billion in Title II grants that help pay for professional development and reduce class size. The Trump administration proposed eliminating the grants entirely, and the House Budget Committee also supports the cut.

The program isn’t dead yet, as the Senate appropriations subcommittee for education rejected the cuts. Title II’s fate won’t be decided until December, when Congress is set to vote on the budget. In the meantime, the uncertainty alone is making school districts nervous.

“Across our state, everyone’s just saying there’s no way to replace that,” said Melanie Maples, chief finance officer for the Decatur school district. “We would have to eliminate a lot of the teacher training we would provide. I think for most school districts, that has been their main source of professional development for their teachers.”

Added up, the proposed cut to Title II could impact the professional development of 2.4 million teachers. Cuts to the class size funding would result in more than 8,500 teachers across the nation losing their jobs, according to analysis from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Title II has not been without criticism over the years; many people, including Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have said the program needs more data to show that professional development benefits teachers.

“If you can’t answer that question in a clear and cogent way, you’ve got a problem,” said Mike Soules, president of Corwin, an education publishing company that provides professional development materials to many of the nation’s schools. “It’s an absolutely critical moment — it’s the moment of what do you believe in, where do you think dollars should be spent and why.”

National Education Association director of teacher quality Andrea Prejean said professional development programs help mentor young teachers struggling to adjust. The nation is experiencing a teacher shortage, especially in science and math, in part due to low pay and the high demands of the job.

If the proposed cuts go into effect, “we’re not going to be able to shift almost $2.1 billion from other pots in professional learning,” Prejean said. “Every state is going to lose significant amounts of money.”

School lunch nutrition standards are relaxed

Planning a weekly school lunch menu is like putting together a puzzle. School lunch directors and cafeteria workers have federal nutrition guidelines they must follow to make sure kids eat balanced meals, but they also want to make the food tasty enough for kid to eat it.

When it’s burrito day at the Cleveland Metropolitan School District in Ohio, the district’s executive director food and child nutrition services Chris Burkhardt has to plan things out carefully. The premade salsa has a lot of sodium, so his staff cut it with diced tomatoes and pair it with low-sodium taco meat, to make sure the burritos aren’t too salty. Then he has to make sure he’s not putting too much fat or sugar into a meal to compensate for the lack of salt.

“You could get one side correct, but you could get other side wrong,” he said. “A lot of times we hit the mark, and sometimes we don’t.”

Burkhardt and school lunch directors around the country have a lot of flexibility from the federal government to plan meals. That’s because in early May, new US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that he would put a pause on school lunch standards passed by Congress in 2012 that lowered the amount of sodium and refined grains in school lunches.

Under regulations the Obama administration wrote to implement the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, public schools were required to make their school lunches more nutritious by getting rid of trans fats, setting limits on the amount of sodium, and making sure foods like pizza, bread, and pasta contained 50 percent or more whole grains. Schools were also asked to provide kids more fruit and vegetables.

Burkhardt said the whole-grain pasta was fine if it was served right after it was cooked, but “if you hold it for any length of time, it becomes a gelatinous mess. Whole grains tended to be more mealy; they had a different mouthfeel.”

When kids don’t like school lunches, districts lose money. For instance, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, students threw out at least $18 million worth of food per year, the district’s food service director told the LA Times in 2014.

The Obama administration started granting school district waivers to have the flexibility to use enriched pasta again. When Perdue became secretary, he also halted the standards to lower sodium before they went into full effect.

Many public health experts opposed the move. Doctors and nutritionists pointed to the fact that rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1970s, with about one in five schoolchildren considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And public health advocates were optimistic that the new school lunch standards could help put a dent in the alarming trend; one study by researchers at Harvard, Columbia, and George Washington University estimated that the healthier school lunch standards could help prevent another 1.8 million children from becoming obese.  

A friendlier climate for for-profit colleges

Enrollment at for-profit colleges exploded in the decade before Obama took office. So did the debt those students held — loans they often struggled to pay back. About one in every 10 federal student loans issued went to a student at a for-profit college. But among the loans that ended up in default, or with about nine months of missed payments, 44 percent had been taken out by for-profit college students.

So in 2009, Obama’s Education Department began an ambitious effort to try to close for-profit college programs, as well as vocational programs at all kinds of colleges, if their students didn’t earn enough after graduation to pay back their loans.

They ended up with a regulation known as the gainful employment rule. Vocational and for-profit college programs were judged on whether their students earned enough money to be able to repay their debts. Programs that couldn’t hit the federal government’s benchmarks would eventually be cut off from student loans.

After several court challenges, the final version of the regulation went into effect in July 2015. (In the meantime, the for-profit sector began to struggle, and several major colleges closed their doors.) DeVos plans to overhaul them, and is already dismantling key provisions — part of an overall shift in attitude at the department to be friendlier toward for-profit colleges.

In July, the department announced a one-year delay on the requirement that institutions disclose their graduates’ debt and earnings. On August 8, the department reported to Senate Democrats that it had “no timetable” for sending institutions data necessary to calculate those figures. More than 2,000 programs in trouble under the rule are also able to repeal their results.

Students in debt left in limbo

The new regulations the Obama administration wrote for for-profit colleges, though, didn’t do much for the students who had already attended them and were paying back their loans. Even if the college itself was in trouble, students were still saddled with their debt.

But after the collapse of two major for-profit college chains — Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes — this started to change.

Former students turned to a little-known provision of federal law known as “defense to repayment.” It allows borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness if they were the victims of fraud or misrepresentation by their college or university. After former for-profit college students began using that provision to argue they shouldn’t have to repay their loans, the Obama administration wrote new rules, set to go into effect on July 1, 2017, that laid out exactly when students would be able to have their debts forgiven.

The regulations also required schools that might be at risk of closing to put up financial collateral and banned arbitration agreements, which have kept many students from suing schools they believe defrauded them.

But DeVos has begun efforts to roll back loan forgiveness policies by freezing the regulation, leaving thousands of students in limbo. In addition, the US Department of Education has not approved any borrower defense applications since the beginning of the Trump administration, leaving thousands of students uncertain about the status of their loans.

“They’re just sitting and the department isn’t processing them,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation for Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Connor said that while the Trump administration has been noticeably warmer toward the for-profit college industry, predatory for-profit schools have been around for years, and many administrations have been slow to address the issue.

“I think it’s really far past time for the department to take seriously that students have rights, they’re in their loan contracts, and they can’t turn a blind eye to the fact the law has been broken,” Connor said. “It’s leaving the status quo in place, and the status quo is hurting students of for profit colleges.”

A step back on sexual assault guidelines

Last week, DeVos suddenly announced the Education Department would rescind the Obama-era guidelines that spelled out how universities should respond to allegations of campus sexual assault. The interim guidelines DeVos put in their place gives colleges the option to put a greater burden of proof on the accusers in such cases. It also gives colleges an indefinite amount of time to conduct their investigations and allows some cases to be resolved through mediation.

One of the impacts was confusion among students about what their rights were.

Elizabeth Boyle is a sophomore at Notre Dame University and a student representative for Know Your IX, an organization that advocates for survivors of sexual assault and harassment. After DeVos’s initial speech in early September, Boyle said many Notre Dame students were asking if this meant they were no longer protected under federal law.

“More confusion, more hysteria; it caused students to not know where to turn,” she said. “Knowing a lot of friends who had been assaulted themselves, it caused me great concern.”

In 2011, the Obama administration implemented strict guidelines for how schools should investigate and handle sexual assault allegations, when it sent out a “Dear Colleague letter” that urged universities to deal with allegations of sexual harassment and assault through the proper channels.

It wasn’t just a request; the Obama administration said sexual assault fell under the federal Title IX, which was passed in 1972 as part of a broader education law that prohibited discrimination in education based on sex. Though it mostly applied to women’s college athletics in the beginning, the Obama administration made Title IX the main line for tackling campus sexual assault; if schools didn’t comply with the guidelines, they risked losing their federal funding.

One of the most important and controversial parts of the letter established a new standard of evidence colleges were to use when finding students responsible for sexual assault. In a criminal court, someone accused of a crime has to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Many colleges, in sexual assault cases, had used a slightly lower standard of “clear and convincing evidence.” The Obama administration told colleges to instead use the “preponderance of the evidence” — a greater chance that someone is guilty than not — in their student justice systems, which is the standard of proof in a civil trial.

This lower standard of evidence and other changes prompted many in the legal and higher education communities to sound the alarm, saying the Obama administration was not giving accused parties due process and forcing schools to overreach with rules that were too broad. For instance, in 2014, a group of 28 Harvard Law School professors took the unprecedented step of writing a letter pushing back on the Obama guidance, saying it had caused Harvard’s administration to overcorrect to the extreme.

“I think they created an environment where schools felt in order to keep their federal funding, they had to change their policies to ones stacked against anybody accused,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, one of law professors who signed the letter and faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program.

But Obama’s initiative also won the support of many sexual assault victims and advocates, who believed they finally had a presidential administration taking them seriously and said the guidelines actually made it easier for schools to know the concrete rules they had to follow. That was reflected in the number of investigations into how schools were handling assault cases. Since 2011, a total of 439 investigations were opened into whether colleges were mishandling cases; 79 cases have been resolved, while another 360 remain open.

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[The Weeds: what’s really driving anti-immigration politics?]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16156950/weeds-podcast-immigration-cost-sharing-reduction-charlottesville-emergency-room 2017-08-17T13:30:05-04:00 2017-08-17T13:30:04-04:00

On the August 16 episode of The Weeds, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Sarah Kliff, and Ezra Klein discuss immigration reform, cost sharing reduction subsidies in Obamacare, and emergency room billing.

The Weeds crew unpacks the president’s latest response to the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. Trump said there was blame to be placed “on many sides” for the Unite the Right rally during which neo-Nazis and white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters, causing many injuries and one fatality.

Ezra says Trump’s tweets and clunky public statements after the fact were “floundering and offensive efforts” to address the display of hate and bigotry over the weekend: “We are watching a presidency that is repeatedly expressing a view that this should be a whiter country.”

Matt breaks down the legislation tasked with setting new limits on immigration to the US — the Raise Act, which would both cap legal immigration and change the citizenship process to a more “merit-based” formula.

Sarah and Ezra also grapple with the policy implications of a new Congressional Budget Office report on cost sharing reduction subsidies for low income Obamacare enrollees, and the group muses on why emergency room costs are not standardized from place to place.

You can listen to the episode here, or subscribe to the show on iTunes here.

View Link

Here’s Sarah and Ezra talking about the Trump administration’s debate on whether to eliminate CSRs:

SARAH: The CBO report really laid clear for me that there’s no policy advantage to [eliminating CSRs]. There’s no, like, “Oh, we’re going to save the government money by not paying these funds” or, “Oh, we’re going to make the market work better.” You’re going to increase the deficit, you’re going to raise premiums, you’re going to cause chaos in the market next year. It’s pretty clear that this is about making Obamacare not work very well. It’s about Obamacare sabotage.

EZRA: I think this is very consonant with, what has appeared to me to be, the Republican Party’s actual preference on health care policy for some time now, which is: “What if we had Obamacare, but it was much, much worse. What if we had a reasonably similar structure, but it just didn’t work at all to cover people.”

In this case, because they’ve not been able to pass a bill that did that, they’re thinking about sabotaging it. So you have the literal same bill, and that bill just works somewhat worse. But the whole thing is almost comical.

One thing that I think is a useful point in the politics of this, is congressional Republicans do not want Trump to do this. They have been asking him not to do this. To just keep paying the subsidies, let them go through a normal legislative process, back off, don’t create a disaster for no reason. And Trump is not just defying Democrats, but also, at this point in continuing with this uncertainty, defying Republicans who, if they can’t repeal Obamacare … just make everybody miserable and get blamed for it on the other end. But I don’t know, this is not policymaking. This is pure — I don’t even know what to call this.

Show notes

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[Descendants of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis are fine with moving Confederate statues]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/17/16162200/robert-e-lee-jefferson-davis-descendants-confederate-statues-charlottesville 2017-08-17T12:50:04-04:00 2017-08-17T12:50:01-04:00

The descendants of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson are speaking out about statues of their notorious Confederate ancestors. And they’re all just fine with moving the statues out of public parks.

In the wake of this weekend’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, cities across the country have been removing Confederate memorials. Some — including the president — argue that these changes attempt to erase history.

Lee’s great-great-grandson Robert E. Lee V told CNN that it actually might be better to remove the statue from Charlottesville and put it in a museum.

“If they choose to take those statues down, fine,” he said. “Maybe it’s appropriate to have them in museums or to put them in some sort of historical context in that regard.”

Bertram Hayes-Davis, the great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, also spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon. Hayes-Davis called for moving the statue of Jefferson Davis into a museum: “In a public place, if it is offensive and people are taking issue with it, let’s move it,” he said. “Let’s put it somewhere where historically it fits with the area around it so you can have people come to see it, who want to understand that history and that individual.”

In May, just a few months before the violence in Charlottesville, Hayes-Davis told the New York Times he was more interested in getting Americans to understand his great-great-grandfather than protesting the memorial’s removal:

I think the statue itself is indicative of the problem of America, in that we’re reducing history to one sentence and then we add connotations onto it: Jefferson Davis created slavery. Oh really? Or, Jefferson Davis created the Confederacy. The problem we have in America is we don’t have a lens to understand history through. We have to look at a lens from that period of time, and we also have to have to look at the lens that the person had at that period of time.

Even Stonewall Jackson’s great-great-grandsons wrote an open letter published in Slate addressed to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney. They requested the removal of all Confederate statues from the Virginia city’s Monument Avenue.

“They are overt symbols of racism and white supremacy, and the time is long overdue for them to depart from public display,” they wrote.

The relatives, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, wrote that another one of their ancestors, Laura Jackson Arnold, would be a better fit for a memorial than the Confederate general:

In fact, instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to celebrate Stonewall’s sister — our great-great-grandaunt — Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood, she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of history with Laura Jackson Arnold.

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[How brands respond to political crisis]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/15/16145282/brands-respond-political-crisis-tiki-torches-pr-teams 2017-08-15T11:11:11-04:00 2017-08-15T11:10:02-04:00 As shocking images popped up on the internet of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan marching on the University of Virginia campus this weekend, one group was focused on a specific part of the photos: the tiki torches.

Tiki Brand products, the company that makes torches identical to those carried by the white supremacists, quickly denounced their use in the protests, writing on Facebook, “TIKI Brand is not associated in any way with the events that took place in Charlottesville.”

The company’s response was met with largely positive reactions on Twitter and Facebook. People were surprised but impressed with the company’s decision to post a statement.

Maureen Fernstrum and Marlaina Quintana, two members of the Tiki Brand team at the PR firm Cramer-Krasselt, said there was never any question that Tiki had to issue a response assuring consumers that it did not support white nationalists. (The White House was slower to make that statement.)

“In this instance, it’s not a hard call to oppose hate,” Quintana said. “We had to make a statement because people had already involved us. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not we wanted to get involved.”

Fernstrum said when the images first started to surface on social media, Tiki was being pulled into the conversation; the PR team immediately began monitoring social media to see how the public was reacting, and things were not looking good.

Quintana said they quickly convened a meeting with Tiki, drafted a statement denouncing the protesters, and posted it on Facebook by 4:49 pm, almost an hour before President Trump gave his remarks about the rally placing the blame “on many sides.”

“Letting something like this fester and not making a statement would have been far worse,” Fernstrum said.

The Trump administration offers plenty of moments for brands in crisis

Tiki Brand wasn’t the only brand dragged into the “Unite the Right” maelstrom. Some of the alt-right marchers in Charlottesville also carried signs with a version of the Detroit Red Wings NHL logo, slightly altered to include Nazi imagery.

Companies are finding themselves drawn into — or joining — the Trump administration’s fight more frequently. Skittles clarified the difference between candy and refugees after Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a far-right meme comparing people fleeing conflict to poisoned Skittles. New Balance rejected the idea that its products were the “official shoes of white people” after neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin praised the sneakers on the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer. And Dippin’ Dots wrote an open letter to Sean Spicer after the former White House press secretary’s old tweets doubting whether they were the “ice cream of the future” surfaced.

In the PR world, these moments of negative buzz are known as brand crises.

Tim Coombs, a professor at Texas A&M University and a crisis communications specialist, says that now more than ever, brands are having to think about where they stand on social and political issues because there’s a chance they’ll be pulled into situations like Charlottesville that they never anticipated having to take a stand on.

“If you go back, like, 15 or 20 years ago, companies wanted no part of social issues. Now they don’t really have a choice,” he said.

According to Coombs, social media has played a massive role in how brands interact with their consumers and stakeholders. Years ago, when a product was portrayed in a less-than-positive light, companies could quietly discontinue an item, avoid putting out a press release, and wait for the hubbub to blow over. That’s what Nike did when members of the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves while wearing matching black-and-white Nike sneakers.

Now, Coombs says, branding bleeds into nearly every aspect of American life, from childhood breakfast cereals to life insurance policies, and companies can’t just remove themselves from political situations.

He says brands are having to look at what they value as a company and what their consumers value, because often, aggressive Twitter reactions can result in profit losses.

“If you look at social issues, you’ll usually know what side your stakeholders are on,” Coombs says. “White nationalists are probably not the audience for tiki torches. Are you a white nationalist and won’t now buy a tiki torch? That’s fine; they don’t want to be a symbol of white nationalists. You have to know where you believe your audience stands.”

Coombs says CEOs can also really drive the company’s decisions. Early Monday, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier resigned from President Donald Trump’s council of manufacturers after the president refused to directly condemn the actions of the white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Regardless of who makes the decision — PR team or CEO — Coombs says these social and political risk assessment questions are going to continue to plague brands, and their best bet is to have a plan in place for how they will address it. “There’s a real concern among crisis managers: What if the president tweets about your company and it’s negative? Companies are definitely planning for this.”

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[Read: President Trump’s remarks condemning violence “on many sides” in Charlottesville]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138906/president-trump-remarks-condemning-violence-on-many-sides-charlottesville-rally 2017-08-14T10:57:17-04:00 2017-08-12T16:09:55-04:00

President Donald Trump delivered his remarks to the nation about the violent white nationalist protest taking place in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a pre-scheduled press conference Saturday to announce the signing of a new bill providing funding for the Veterans Affairs department.

Hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered in Charlottesville for a rally called Unite the Right, to protest the removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee on the University of Virginia campus.

The president spoke from Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is currently on a 17-day “working vacation.”

Here is a transcript of Trump’s remarks in full.

Thank you very much. As you know, this was a small press conference, but a very important one. And it was scheduled to talk about the great things that we’re doing with the secretary on the veterans administration. And we will talk about that very much so in a little while. But I thought I should put out a comment as to what’s going on in Charlottesville. So, again, I want to thank everybody for being here, in particular I want to thank our incredible veterans. And thank you, fellas. Let me shake your hand.

They’re great people. Great people. But we’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America. What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society. And no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.

I just got off the phone with the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, and we agree that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true affection– really, I say this so strongly, true affection for each other. Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record — just absolute record employment. We have unemployment the lowest it’s been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country, Foxconn and car companies and so many others. They’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker.

We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad. I want to salute the great work of the state and local police in Virginia. Incredible people. Law enforcement, incredible people. And also the National Guard. They’ve really been working smart and working hard. They’ve been doing a terrific job. Federal authorities are also providing tremendous support to the governor. He thanked me for that. And we are here to provide whatever other assistance is needed. We are ready, willing and able. Above all else, we must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our god.

We love our flag. We’re proud of our country. We’re proud of who we are, so we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen. My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens, but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together. So important. We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other.

Watch: How Trump's Charlottesville response emboldens white supremacists

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[Donald Trump tweeted a very different statement about Charlottesville than other officials]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138666/donald-trump-tweeted-different-statement-charlottesville-rally-white-nationalist 2017-08-14T10:57:52-04:00 2017-08-12T15:33:45-04:00 One official’s reaction to the Unite the Right rally is not like the others: Donald Trump’s.

Most officials are condemning in explicit terms the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of white nationalists rallied Friday and Saturday.

Here’s Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan clearly condemning the events:

Here’s former Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio doing the same:

But Trump isn’t speaking the same language. In his first tweet on Charlottesville, he offered a vague denunciation.

In his second tweet, he called the events “sad!”

It’s an odd combination of reactions given the events that unfolded. Rally-goers first descended on the city late Friday night, carrying torches in an attempt to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from the UVA campus. The rally quickly descended into violence and was dispersed by police.

By noon Saturday, the group of alt-right white nationalists grew to include tangles of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. A militia arrived heavily armed.

The governor of Virginia’s response was to declare a state of emergency:

Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam tweeted his statement urging Virginians to deny a reaction to the white supremacists.

First lady Melania Trump tweeted more directly at Charlottesville, saying, “let’s communicate w/o hate in our hearts.”

Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer released a statement calling the rally “a cowardly parade of hatred, bigotry, racism, and intolerance.”

In response to the president’s tweet, Signer wrote that “our work here is just beginning. Yours is too.”

Vice President Mike Pence retweeted Trump’s tweet adding that he stands “with @POTUS against hate and violence.”

Other members of Congress joined in, including former Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions also released a statement decrying “the violence in Charlottesville and any message of hate and intolerance.”

Former President Bill Clinton added, “we must condemn hatred, violence and white supremacy.”

And Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tweeted that she is “disgusted by the behavior and hate-filled rhetoric.”

Watch: How Trump's Charlottesville response emboldens white supremacists

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[The Weeds: solving the enigma that is John Kelly]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/8/11/16135130/the-weeds-podcast-john-kelly-donald-trump-reince-priebus 2017-08-11T17:41:04-04:00 2017-08-11T17:41:03-04:00

Even though retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly was named White House chief of staff, in place of Reince Priebus, only two weeks ago Friday, that news was quickly eclipsed by the constant deluge of news coming out of the White House.

On the August 11 episode of The Weeds, Dara Lind and Andrew Prokop join Matt Yglesias to revisit Kelly’s role change, from a brief stint as homeland security secretary to chief of staff of a chaotic White House.

Andrew points out that in his position at the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly was publicly perceived as successful both by Trump voters and the president himself for being tough on immigration. Dara adds that this “success” was largely anchored to data showing that immigrant apprehension numbers plummeted in the weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

However, Dara says, this actually shouldn’t be attributed to anything Kelly did outright. She says a phenomenon occurred where Trump’s aggressive threats toward immigrants on the campaign trail and in office dissuaded central American families from trying to cross the border, but now those numbers are creeping back up.

In the meantime, Kelly’s perceived success at DHS has translated into his installment as chief of staff — and as Andrew, Dara, and Matt discuss, there are high expectations for Kelly, who is being put into a near-impossible situation.

You can listen to the episode here, or subscribe to the show on iTunes here.

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Here’s Dara talking about why Trump is difficult to manage and why Kelly will ultimately not succeed in disciplining the president:

Trump really likes it when anybody can walk into the Oval Office or he can walk into anything else. He really doesn’t like any idea that his tweets should be considered some kind of reflection of the policy of the federal government and should maybe be considered — or at least people should be informed — before he goes and bans transgender people from the military on Twitter. Those are things that no chief of staff could do [anything about], that make the White House dysfunctional.

Trump just yesterday said that he doesn’t like intelligence leaks but when they’re White House leaks about who’s in and who’s out, those are coming from people who just want to show him how much they love him and he’s kind of honored by that. That’s a recipe for a dysfunctional White House, and it’s something that has always been part of Trump’s management style. He cultivates chaos; he cultivates people warring for his attention.

Kelly is particularly allergic to politics. He really does not want to be — I mean, everything that he said during his military career was that he never wanted to be doing the exact thing that he is doing right now. And it’s not clear that he’s changed his mind. His honor calculus requires him to be doing this job because he thinks that it’s better that he do it than that he not do it for the country.

But what that means is that Trump thinks of himself as a unique political genius. He thinks that because he pulled out this surprise election win that he has his finger on the pulse of real America and that no one knows better than he does what is actually going to succeed politically. And it’s not clear that anyone can tell him that he’s wrong about that. 

But John Kelly not only has no information but has no desire to tell him that he’s wrong about that, because John Kelly doesn’t actually want to make arguments about what’s going to work politically or not.

Show notes:

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[Reminder: the Trump International Hotel is still an ethics disaster]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16107658/trump-international-hotel-ethics-disaster-walter-shaub-washington-post 2017-08-11T11:44:36-04:00 2017-08-11T11:38:15-04:00

The Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, has been serving as a White House extension since Donald Trump took office, playing host to countless foreign dignitaries, Republican lawmakers, and powerful actors hoping to hold court with Trump appointees or even the president himself.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the hotel’s connection to the president apparently helps it raise its prices: The hotel brought in nearly $18 million in revenue in the first four months of 2017 by charging room rates that were higher than their budgeted prices.

From January to April, the average daily room rate at the Trump International Hotel was $660.28, substantially more than the $495.91 listed for “comparable hotels.” The hotel had apparently projected its average daily rate would be $416.

It also seems like the higher rates are an effort to offset the amount of unbooked empty rooms in the palatial hotel. The documents showed that Trump International had a 44 percent occupancy rate compared with 69 percent for comparative hotels.

Who’s spending all that money at the hotel? Since visitation records are not made public, The Washington Post sent reporters to the hotel every day in May to try to identify people and organizations using the facilities.

What they found was a revolving door of powerful people holding galas in the hotel’s lavish ballrooms and meeting over expensive cocktails with White House staff at the bar.

They included Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whom Politico recently called “Putin’s favorite congressman”; Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), who chairs the General Services Administration, the Trump hotel’s landlord; and nine other Republican Congress members who all hosted events at the hotel, according to campaign spending disclosures obtained by the Post. Additionally, foreign visitors such as business groups promoting Turkish-American relations and the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and his wife also rented out rooms.

Ethics experts — including the former top government ethics official who resigned last month — say this is exactly what they were worried about in a Trump presidency.

Experts want the president to divest from his hotel

Walter Shaub, formerly the director of the Office of Government Ethics, resigned in July after months of sharply criticizing the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses.

The Post story echoed the same concerns Shaub has been expressing since Trump took office, Shaub, who is now senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, said in an interview. The continued business dealings at the hotel “[create] the appearance of using the presidency for private gain,” he said.

While at OGE, Shaub said, he frequently expressed his concern over Trump’s business dealings and conflicts of interest, but the president and his administration are behaving “without concern for the appearance of profiting off the presidency.”

Ultimately, he said, the public can’t know whether the president is making policy decisions based on what’s best for the country or what protects his financial interests.

Despite Trump’s largely symbolic actions — handing off management of the hotel to his adult sons and signing an agreement wherein the hotel has promised to donate any profits made from foreign governments to the US Treasury — all of the money going into that hotel winds up going to him. The Post story demonstrates that people are making choices about whether to go to that hotel based, in part, on the fact that it’s owned by the president.

“What I’m encouraging him to do is follow the ethical tradition and ethical norms” and divest from his businesses, just as every president did before him, Shaub said. But by refusing to do so, the president and the counsel to the president were signaling to the world that “if it’s not illegal, we’re going to go ahead and do it.”

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the bipartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says the Post story isn’t surprising in the least, and that it probably just scratched the surface of what’s truly going on right down the street from the White House.

CREW recently filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s business holdings violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which says it is illegal for government officials to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

“We’ve never had any doubt that there would be a tremendous amount to report there if somebody was willing to put in the resources and find some ways in,” Bookbinder said. “It’s not surprising to me at all that with somebody digging in a bit, they found a lot of this kind of thing.”

The hotel did tell the Post that it “does not market directly to foreign embassies,” but Bookbinder says that is not nearly enough. It’s not a matter of outright marketing — the emoluments clause prohibits receiving payment or gifts, not soliciting them.

“Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust that had the power to sell it,” he says. But beyond that, “it wasn’t as though you had foreign powers or lobbyists trying to hang out at the peanut farm to try and influence the president. It didn’t have that kind of mixing of business and the office.”

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[The Weeds: one reason women really don’t want to work at Google]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/8/10/16119014/the-weeds-podcast-google-sexism-prescription-drugs-doctor-training 2017-08-10T15:10:04-04:00 2017-08-10T15:10:04-04:00

The Google memo has made the rounds — it’s been analyzed, debunked, picked apart — and now it’s made it onto The Weeds. On the August 9 episode, Sarah, Matt, and Ezra unpack the circumstances surrounding the firing of Google engineer James Damore.

Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing against the company’s policies to enhance workplace diversity, insisting that the company’s gender gap in leadership positions and engineering jobs was the result of biological differences between women and men, though it’s been pointed out by the researchers he cites that he misapplied their work.

As Sarah points out in the episode, and in her gender wage gap explainer, Damore’s argument ignores underlying issues of systemic sexism that make women less likely to seek out jobs in workplaces like Google.

She also argues that the diversity issues at some organizations could stem from the presence of colleagues like Damore — that women likely “don’t want to work in an environment where their colleagues think they are mentally inferior to them, where they haven’t been encouraged to think, ‘Yes, you are someone who belongs here; yes, you are someone who’s going to be just as successful.’” She continues: “It seems like an explanation that should fly back at this guy for why aren’t there as many women in tech? Well, it’s because you’re writing memos like these ones.”

The Weeds team also explores options for drug pricing and what regulations the government can institute to make medicine more affordable, while still encouraging drug companies to innovate. They also break down a study that shows doctors who attended less rigorous medical schools were more likely to prescribe more opioids to patients.

You can listen to the episode here, or subscribe to the show on iTunes here.

View Link

Here’s Ezra talking about the importance of innovation in medicine:

Bernie Sanders — he’s had in the past, I don’t know if he’s reintroduced it in this Congress — but he’s had an idea I’ve always thought is a pretty good one.

The way we do drug pricing right now is based on patents. The reward for creating a drug is that you patent it, and then you get — I forget the length of exclusivity — but before other people can make generic versions of that drug, you get 12 years, or something like that, and during that period, the market is not working. You have a government-granted monopoly on this product. You’re the only one who can sell it, and so you can charge basically any price, because nobody can come into the market and undercut you in the way that, like, Apple comes out with a cool new iPod, and somebody else can’t sell you Apple’s iPod but they can make their own iPod; they’ve gotta do it a little bit different, but you’re able to have competition in these spaces.

What Sanders has argued, and other people have argued this too over the years, is that at the very least [we should have] a parallel system. It would be wise, because drug innovation is something we want to incentivize, and the way we’re doing it is currently very inefficient. It also incentivizes companies to create “me too” drugs that just allow them to basically renew their patent on something but doesn’t really work any better or just looks like something somebody else has done, so a lot of the innovation we’re getting is just chasing these monopolies, with no real thought for what people need or where the innovation will be most useful.

So [Sanders] has argued that we would have to have a fund — and it would have to be quite big — that would allow for prize-based drug innovation. So the government would say if you are a company that manages to create a pill — and I’m just completely using a hypothetical example here — a pill that could be a massive improvement on current AIDS cocktail regiments, or if you could create an AIDS vaccine, let’s say. You would get — again, I’m picking a number out of thin air here — $5 billion, but as soon as that happens — and it doesn’t have to be a company; you could be a university, you could be a guy in your garage — you get this $5 billion check, and then the formula is immediately generic so anybody can make it. And so it could be available at very low cost to the public.

And then the government could say what do we feel the most strongly about getting innovation in, and opioids might be a real place for this. If you can create a treatment that is clearly an improvement on current anti-addictive pharmaceuticals, then you would get this huge windfall, and anybody would be able to make the treatment. Or if you could get a treatment that somehow is able to help the obesity crisis, you could get this huge amount of money.

One thing I would note: Democrats are thinking about how to bring drug prices down, but they’re not thinking, in a real way, about how to bring innovation up, and we really somehow need to do both. It’s often presented as a choice, but the system we have right now is not one oriented toward innovation; it’s one oriented toward profit-making, with innovation being one side effect, but also a lot of waste being a side effect, and a lot of people not being able to buy drugs being a third side effect. And I would like to see both Democrats and Republicans thinking a bit harder on this. 

Show notes:

]]> Carly Sitrin <![CDATA[Anthony Scaramucci is angrily tweeting at the journalist who got him fired]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/10/16124916/anthony-scaramucci-tweeting-ryan-lizza-linda-tripp-monica-lewinsky 2017-08-10T10:15:05-04:00 2017-08-10T10:15:02-04:00 Recently-ousted communications director Anthony Scaramucci tweeted that New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza — who published a revealing interview with the Mooch that preceded his firing — “is the Linda Tripp of 2017.”

Tripp was a White House staffer in the late ‘90s who secretly recorded conversations she had with her friend and colleague Monica Lewinsky about Lewinsky’s admitted sexual relationship with President Bill Clinton. The tapes were then used in the investigation of the infamous Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Scaramucci seems to be connecting Tripp’s wiretapping espionage to Lizza’s explosive New Yorker article from late July. Lizza recently published a story detailing an expletive-laden phone call with Scaramucci in which the former comms director threatened to “fucking kill” all White House leakers, said former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” and said Steve Bannon was “trying to suck [his] own cock.” The Mooch was fired days after his comments were made public.

Former theater agent Roland Scahill asked Scaramucci to clarify his comparison between Lizza and Tripp, tweeting “are you accusing [Lizza] of taping the call without your permission?” Scaramucci responded “Yes. He absolutely taped the call without my permission.”

As Lizza made clear in the story, however, at no point did Scaramucci ask the that conversation be off the record (journalist-speak for confidential). In fact, the New Yorker said in a statement to Axios that at one point in the conversation, “Scaramucci requested that one part be off the record, and we respected that. The rest was on the record.”

What’s more, both New York and Washington, DC, are what’s called “one-party consent states” which makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on a phone conversation unless one party to the conversation consents. In this case, Lizza certainly consented.

As Scaramucci’s tweet gained traction online, Monica Lewinsky retweeted it with a wide-eyed emoji.

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