Now, four years into their crusade, the movement’s leaders are signaling a determination to expand their reach beyond the urban working poor, who were among the chief beneficiaries of their earlier efforts. Among their new targets: working-class Americans frustrated by an economy that is no longer producing the middle-class jobs they or their parents once held.

Many of these workers voted for Donald J. Trump.

“A whole bunch of us out there are not doing well,” Scott Courtney, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union and one of the chief architects of the Fight for $15 campaign, said in an interview last week.

“In red states, blue states; black, brown, white — people are hurting,” he said. “Sixty-four million of them don’t make $15 per hour.”


As part of the push, thousands of workers turned out in dozens of cities on Tuesday to demand a $15 wage, better working conditions and the right to unionize. Thousands of airport workers, including baggage handlers, cabin cleaners and wheelchair attendants, loomed at the center of the protests, demonstrating and even walking off the job at some of the nation’s busiest airports, like O’Hare International in Chicago.

Leaders of the Fight for $15 highlighted the symbolic importance of the airport workers, whose jobs decades ago paid a living wage. More recently, the jobs have become a source of financial hardship as outsourcing to nonunion contractors has taken its toll — a dynamic arguably central to Mr. Trump’s election.

In other cases, blue-collar workers have lost high-paying union jobs at factories and replaced them with lower-paying jobs at nonunion factories or e-commerce fulfillment centers.

“We’re shining a light on a part of the economy that used to be living-wage work,” said Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, which has spent tens of millions of dollars on the Fight for $15 campaign. “They’re joining with fast-food workers, child care, home care, which have never been living wage work.”

// posted by montag @ 2:27 PM 0 Comments

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump named a vociferous critic of Obamacare and a health policy expert on Tuesday to help him repeal and replace President Barack Obama's signature healthcare program.

Republican Representative Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, will be Trump's Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, and consultant Seema Verma will lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a powerful agency that oversees government health programs and insurance standards.

Trump, a Republican, cast Price and Verma as a "dream team" to help him once he takes office on Jan. 20 with his campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare, the health law formally known as the Affordable Care Act. Since its enactment in 2010, it has been a target of Republican attacks.

Defenders of Obamacare, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, said Price was too extreme. Democrats also criticized the pick because Price has supported barring federal funds for Planned Parenthood, which provides some abortions in addition to birth control, health exams and other services.

"Nominating Congressman Price to be the HHS secretary is akin to asking the fox to guard the hen house," Schumer said.

The 2010 healthcare overhaul, aimed at expanding insurance coverage to millions more Americans, triggered a long, bitter fight between the White House and congressional Republicans, who said it created unwarranted government intervention in personal healthcare and private industry.

Trump has said he will replace Obamacare with a plan to give states more control over the Medicaid health plan for the poor and allow insurers to sell plans nationally.

Both Price and Verma will need Senate confirmation in their positions, and the Trump administration will need congressional approval to repeal and change the health law.

// posted by montag @ 1:49 PM 0 Comments

When President-elect Donald J. Trump met with the British politician Nigel Farage in recent days, he encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses, according to one person present.

The meeting, held shortly after the presidential election, raises new questions about Mr. Trump’s willingness to use the power of the presidency to advance his business interests. Mr. Trump has long opposed a wind farm planned near his course in Aberdeenshire, and he previously fought unsuccessfully all the way to Britain’s highest court to block it.

“He did not say he hated wind farms as a concept; he just did not like them spoiling the views,” said Andy Wigmore, the media consultant who was present at the meeting and was photographed with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Wigmore headed communications for Leave.EU, one of the two groups that led the Brexit effort. He said in an email that he and Mr. Banks would be “campaigning against wind farms in England, Scotland and Wales.”

Mr. Trump and his family’s blending of business and political interests and appearances have received increasing scrutiny during the transition. Since the election, he has met with Indian business partners and his new Washington hotel has become a destination for diplomats. His daughter Ivanka, an executive in the Trump Organization, sat in on a meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and her jewelry company promoted a $10,800 bracelet she wore during a postelection appearance with her father on “60 Minutes.”

Separately, one of Argentina’s most influential television programs reported on Sunday that during a congratulations call from President Mauricio Macri of Argentina after the election, Mr. Trump asked for Mr. Macri’s support for a project to build an office tower in Buenos Aires.

// posted by montag @ 1:36 PM 0 Comments

President-elect Donald Trump intends to launch a broad legislative agenda that includes cutting taxes, rolling back the Affordable Care Act, growing the military and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

The question is how congressional Republicans, after eight years of apocalyptic warnings about the growing national debt, will respond to the dire fiscal implications of proposals that would likely send the deficit soaring.

Taken together, the Trump agenda stands to drain hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the federal balance sheet. His proposed tax cut alone, according to independent analysts, could cost the Treasury as much as $7.2 trillion over a decade.

Some Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, have indicated that some sacred cows might be up for slaughter. Those include federal entitlement programs such as Medicare, long considered a “third rail” of American politics, that Trump himself has shied away from touching.

“You fix the health care problem, you are dramatically fixing the fiscal health of this country,” Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday. “Those are among the things that we have to do if we’re going to truly nurse ourselves back to fiscal health.”

In interviews with more than a dozen congressional Republicans this week — including staunch supporters of Trump and his agenda — most dismissed concerns about potential deficits in a big-spending Trump administration.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who favored austere spending blueprints as House Budget Committee chairman and is now a candidate for a Cabinet post in the Trump administration, said it would be a matter of “priorities.”

“If you prioritize on the things that he and we believe are important … it can actually save money,” Price said.

Most Republicans on Capitol Hill, including former presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), simply dodged questions about Trump’s plans: “We have a debt problem in America that needs to be addressed, but we’re going to wait and see what the proposals are.”

// posted by montag @ 1:38 PM 0 Comments

California’s multibillion dollar marijuana industry, by far the nation’s largest, is crawling out from the underbrush after voters opted to legalize cannabis in this month’s election. In Sonoma County alone, an estimated 9,000 marijuana cultivation businesses are operating in a provisional gray market, and are now looking to follow the path of the wine industry, which emerged from its own prohibition eight decades ago and rose to the global prominence it enjoys today.

But the bruising ordeals of one of the state’s largest cannabis companies, CannaCraft, have made many in the marijuana industry fearful, and they also suggest a long and bumpy road from marijuana’s approval at the ballot box to the same on-the-ground acceptance enjoyed by wine and beer businesses.

When CannaCraft, which produces medical marijuana products, came out of the shadows this summer, the company was hammered for it. It is still recovering from a raid in June by federal and local law enforcement officers on its newly opened headquarters and the seizure of $5 million in equipment, inventory and cash. This year, company drivers have twice been stopped by the California Highway Patrol, and, in one case, 1,600 pounds of marijuana was seized.

In what may be a sign of things to come after the drug’s broader legalization, medical cannabis companies like CannaCraft — which have operated in a quasi-legal, unregulated market, or gray market, for the past two decades in California — continue to be whipsawed by the glaring contradiction between a federal ban on marijuana and still-evolving state laws that should, in theory, shelter the companies from prosecution. Cannabis enterprises deal almost exclusively in cash because banks, fearing federal consequences, will not take their business.

“They are asking people to come out into the open, but there’s this mistrust,” said Dennis Hunter, 43, a founder of CannaCraft who has spent his entire adult life as a marijuana farmer. Mr. Hunter has been arrested three times, and was sentenced in 2005 to six and a half years in federal prison for growing marijuana and fleeing during a raid. “You are basically hiding for 20 years and then you swing the doors wide open. It’s a risk,” he said. “And there’s no clear path.”

The national election threatens an informal, fragile truce between states that have legalized the drug and the federal government. President-elect Donald J. Trump’s proposed choice of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to serve as attorney general has roiled the cannabis industry because of comments the Republican senator has made about the drug. At a Senate hearing in April, Mr. Sessions described marijuana as a “very real danger.”

// posted by montag @ 1:26 PM 0 Comments

President-elect Trump demanded an apology from the cast for making a rare, politically charged appeal from the stage on Friday night to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience, urging him and Mr. Trump to “uphold our American values” and “work on behalf of all of us.” Mr. Trump’s response significantly escalated an unusual protest inside a theater into a furor on social media and cable news.

Mr. Trump, who has stirred bipartisan concern over his habit of attacking those who challenge him, said on Twitter that the actors had “harassed” Mr. Pence, and he issued a battle cry to his supporters by saying that the musical’s cast had criticized “our wonderful future VP Mike Pence.” He continued to assail the show on Twitter on Saturday night, writing that the actors had been “very rude and insulting” to Mr. Pence and claiming that they “couldn’t even memorize lines” — though he offered no evidence and then deleted the message.

His maneuver, in two posts to Twitter early Saturday, stunned the cast members and, judging by social media, jolted many Americans who are worried about the president-elect’s tolerance for dissent after a campaign in which he was criticized for inflaming racial tensions. But it also touched off reaction among other Americans who treasure the traditions of, and respect for, the office of the presidency, and viewed the statement — and the booing of Mr. Pence by some theatergoers before the performance — as out of line.

Mr. Trump lashed out at the show, the most acclaimed Broadway production in years, at a time of demonstrations against his coming presidency. Those include frequent street protests outside Trump Tower along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which is less than a mile from the theater showing “Hamilton.” The president-elect has both castigated the protesters and, after being chided for doing so, praised them for their passion. Advisers, however, say he has been frustrated by the suspicion and hostility that the demonstrators and other Americans continue to hold about his election.

Mr. Trump’s escalation of the “Hamilton” matter also came a day after his $25 million settlement of a lawsuit against Trump University, leading some critics to claim online that he was trying to create a distraction amid negative attention to his surrender on a legal case he had vowed to fight.

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

For decades, those distinctions have rankled many Israeli Jews. The United States, along with the rest of the world, has kept its primary diplomatic footprint not in Israel’s self-declared capital, Jerusalem, but in the commercial and cultural hub of Tel Aviv to avoid seeming to take sides in the fraught and never-ending argument over who really has the right to control this ancient city.

Until now. Maybe.

President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed during his campaign that he would relocate the mission “fairly quickly” after taking office. That in itself is nothing new: For years, candidates running for president have promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and for years, candidates who actually became president have opted against doing so.

But just as Mr. Trump broke all the rules of campaigning, some of his supporters say no amount of hand-wringing by the State Department will change his mind. Jason Greenblatt, an Orthodox lawyer who is advising Mr. Trump on Israel, told Army Radio after the election that the president-elect was “going to do it” because he was “a man who keeps his word.”

Already, many Israelis and Palestinians are buzzing about the prospect. Where would the embassy go? Would it straddle the line between West Jerusalem, which is predominantly Jewish, and East Jerusalem, which is predominantly Arab? Would it touch off street protests in Palestinian cities or a backlash among Arab allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

“Jerusalem is a symbolic, emotional and real issue,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and president of the Israel Institute. “It matters to many Israeli Jews because it would indicate that the United States actually recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which now it effectively does not.”

Which is why Arabs object so strenuously to such a move. “This is a sign that he’s going to side with Israel,” said Mustafa Alani, a scholar at the Gulf Research Center, a research organization with offices in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. “If he does it, it’s going to be a wrong start for his relationship with the Arab world.”

The status of Jerusalem has always been one of the thorniest issues dividing Jews and Arabs. In 1947, the United Nations recommended that the city be declared a “corpus separatum,” meaning an international city, rather than incorporated into either the Arab or the Jewish states then being contemplated on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But in the war that followed its declaration of statehood in 1948, Israel captured the western portion of the city while Jordan seized the east.

Israel took control of East Jerusalem in its 1967 war with its Arab neighbors and annexed it, declaring that the city would remain whole and unified as its eternal capital (and later building many settlements there that most of the world considers illegal). The United States and most other countries refused to recognize the annexation and kept their embassies in or near Tel Aviv. The last two countries with embassies in Jerusalem, Costa Rica and El Salvador, moved out a decade ago.

// posted by montag @ 2:16 PM 0 Comments

Mr. Pompeo, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Pompeo would take control of a spy agency that has been remade in the years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a relentless focus on manhunts, counterterrorism and targeted killing operations. Over the past year, the C.I.A. has undergone a bureaucratic reorganization under its director, John O. Brennan, an effort Mr. Pompeo would decide whether he wants to continue.

Although the Benghazi panel found no new evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama administration or Mrs. Clinton, who was then secretary of state, Mr. Pompeo and another Republican member of the committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, said they were convinced there had been a cover-up. When the committee released its findings in June, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Jordan filed a 48-page addendum that included far harsher criticism of the administration and of Mrs. Clinton. It said that the attacks showed that the State Department was “seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi.”

Mr. Pompeo has been a staunch opponent of the agreement the United States and five world powers struck with Iran in 2015 to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for the lifting of international oil and financial sanctions. In a July 2016 op-ed article that was published on the Fox News site, Mr. Pompeo wrote that the United States should “walk away from this deal.”

Mr. Pompeo has ties to Charles G. and David H. Evil Koch, the billionaire conservatives whose Wichita-based company, Evil Koch Industries, and its employees gave $80,000 to him in 2010 — more than they gave to any other candidate that year, according to the Almanac of American Politics. During his three terms, he has pushed some of their top priorities and defended them against Democratic criticism, writing a 2012 op-ed in Politico under the headline, “Stop harassing the Evil Koch brothers.”

// posted by montag @ 1:34 PM 0 Comments

General Flynn, 57, a registered Democrat, was Mr. Trump’s main national security adviser during his campaign. If he accepts Mr. Trump’s offer, as expected, he will be a critical gatekeeper for a president with little experience in military or foreign policy issues.

Mr. Trump and General Flynn both see themselves as brash outsiders who hustled their way to the big time. They both post on Twitter often about their own successes, and they have both at times crossed the line into outright Islamophobia.

They also both exhibit a loose relationship with facts: General Flynn, for instance, has said that Shariah, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”

As an adviser, General Flynn has already proved to be a powerful influence on Mr. Trump, convincing the president-elect that the United States is in a “world war” with Islamist militants and must work with any willing allies in the fight, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

During the transition, General Flynn has been present when Mr. Trump has received his daily intelligence briefing. As national security adviser, he would have the last word on how the president should respond to crises such as a showdown with China over the South China Sea or an international health crisis like the Ebola epidemic.

But, like Mr. Trump, he would enter the White House with significant baggage. The Flynn Intel Group, a consulting firm he founded after he was fired by President Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has hazy business ties to Middle Eastern countries and has appeared to lobby for the Turkish government. General Flynn also took a paid speaking engagement last year with Russia Today, a television network funded by the Kremlin, and attended the network’s lavish anniversary party in Moscow, where he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow.

Those potential conflicts of interest had led Mr. Trump’s transition team to worry that General Flynn might have difficulty winning confirmation for any post that, unlike the national security adviser role, requires congressional approval, such as director of the C.I.A. But for Mr. Trump, he has one overriding virtue: He was an early and ardent supporter in a campaign during which most of the Washington national security establishment openly called Mr. Trump unfit to lead.

// posted by montag @ 1:23 PM 0 Comments

All Karen Hendrickson wanted was the latest pocketbook from Gucci, the Sylvie, with a glittering gold chain down the front.

But she had to explain herself over and over to police officers who stopped and questioned her, and searched her shopping bags as she sought to cross Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She was trying to reach the Gucci flagship store on the corner of 56th Street, but her shopping trip had an unusual impediment: Gucci is inside Trump Tower. Fifty-eight stories above is the penthouse of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who was engaged in the rocky business of selecting his administration.

“I had to be questioned by three different police officers just to get into this store,” said Ms. Hendrickson, 47, who was visiting from South Orange, N.J., the Sylvie at last in her hand. As she mused on Mr. Trump’s being garrisoned in his penthouse apartment, she wondered why he was not preparing in Washington. “This isn’t a Monday-Friday job,” she said. “This is a very serious job, and you need to spend time in the White House.”

“Go to work now!” she added, her frustration eclipsing the fact that the White House is occupied until the end of January.

They came from as far as England, Italy and Mexico and as close by as Harlem to rarefied turf on the Upper East Side, all to take a selfie with Trump Tower’s golden sign in the background. Below it was a snarl of barricades, armored police officers, lead-footed tourists and aggrieved New Yorkers trying to go about their business. Double-decker tour buses crawled along, inching past on an avenue narrowed at points to a single lane by the police, who also scanned from above in a booth atop a cherry-picker.

Tourists and passers-by were given the once-over by a phalanx of bomb-sniffing dogs prowling the sidewalks. At times, impromptu news conferences congealed on the sidewalk or beside the elevator bank inside the rose-colored lobby, as dignitaries and members of Mr. Trump’s transition team came and went.

“I will not tell you that Gucci and Tiffany are my central concerns in life, but I will say the traffic situation is a very real problem,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said as he stood at a lectern on the sidewalk in front of the building, speaking to reporters after leaving an hourlong meeting with Mr. Trump. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said he expressed to Mr. Trump, a Republican, that New Yorkers were fearful of the ramifications of his policies.

// posted by montag @ 1:46 PM 0 Comments

President-elect Donald J. Trump denied Wednesday that his transition was in disarray, assailing news media reports about firings and infighting and insisting in an early-morning Twitter burst that everything was going “so smoothly.”

But legal and procedural delays by Mr. Trump’s transition team continued on Wednesday, all but freezing the traditional handoff of critical information from the current administration more than a week after Mr. Trump won the presidential election.

The president-elect criticized a report in The New York Times about his early telephone contacts with foreign leaders. In a post on Twitter, he said he had made and received “calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan.”

The Times reported that Mr. Trump had taken calls from the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Russia and Britain, but said they had been conducted haphazardly and without State Department briefings that traditionally guide conversations with foreign leaders.

Of the transition effort, Mr. Trump wrote: “It is going so smoothly.”

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, told reporters Wednesday afternoon that the effort to fill staff positions in the new administration was “very calm, it’s very structured.” He said that reports of chaos were being spread by disgruntled former members of the transition or people bitter about the election results.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was put in charge of the transition last Friday, has counseled Mr. Trump not to feel pressured to make announcements rashly, according to people familiar with the deliberations inside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump was taking a “a very structured, methodical approach” to staffing.

Mr. Miller also rejected as “completely inaccurate” reports that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, had been purging the transition team of people allied with Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, who was removed last week as head of the transition effort. “Couldn’t be further from the truth,” Mr. Miller said.

But Mr. Miller confirmed that Mr. Pence had directed that the transition should not include lobbyists, confirming reports that some existing members of the team had been asked to leave.

// posted by montag @ 2:08 PM 0 Comments

Mr. Giuliani, a loyal, often ferocious backer of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, would be a startling choice to be the nation’s chief diplomat – a relentless former federal prosecutor who has viewed foreign policy largely through the prism of the Sept. 11 attacks, which turned him into a national figure.

Though that ordeal gave Mr. Giuliani a firm grounding in domestic security issues, his formal diplomatic experience is slim. Like other New York City mayors, he made occasional ventures into foreign policy, on issues like the Middle East peace process or more parochial concerns, like going after foreign diplomats for their unpaid parking tickets.

Mr. Giuliani, who mounted brief bids for the Senate in 2000 and the White House in 2008, is now best known for his full-throated advocacy of his fellow New Yorker, Mr. Trump. He delivered a speech on his behalf at the Republican National Convention in which he condemned President Obama, saying he had failed to protect Americans from “Islamic extremist terrorism.”

After Mr. Trump’s campaign was nearly upended by the release of a tape from the program “Access Hollywood,” in which he made lewd comments about women, Mr. Giuliani was the only major supporter who came to his defense, appearing on Sunday morning news shows after other Trump advisers canceled their appearances.

Choosing an unorthodox candidate would be entirely in character for Mr. Trump, who on Sunday named Stephen K. Bannon, a far-right media entrepreneur celebrated by the white nationalist movement, to be chief strategist in the White House. That pick drew a storm of criticism from Democrats, civil-rights groups and even Republicans.

While Mr. Giuliani would lack the experience of the last two secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom concentrated on foreign affairs in the Senate, he claims a particular expertise in diagnosing and combating the scourge of Islamic militancy.

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a top adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, said on Sunday that it would be “unrealistic” to remove Mr. Trump’s children from their roles in running his business empire and place the assets into a strict blind trust like the ones used by previous presidents.

“I think he’s in a very unusual situation,” Mr. Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He would basically put his children out of work,” he added, “and they’d have to go start a whole new business, and that would set up set up new problems.”

As president, Mr. Trump will not be required to sell his assets, which he has valued in billions of dollars. But the vast scope of Mr. Trump’s assets and business dealings is likely to lead to questions about how his actions as president would affect the financial fortunes of him and his family.

Most modern presidents have elected to use a blind trust, which puts their assets under the control of an independent trustee.

The financial arrangement was one of a number of questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s transition efforts, as his team moved toward announcing staff positions, tried to clarify the president-elect’s agenda and sought to reassure those still questioning his fitness for office.

Mr. Giuliani, a vice chairman of Mr. Trump’s transition team who is believed to be under consideration for various posts in the Trump administration, including attorney general, said that fears of a conflict of interest were groundless. He also said that Mr. Trump’s three adult children, who hold leadership positions in his businesses, would not advise him as president.

The three children, Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric, as well as Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, are members of the executive council of Mr. Trump’s transition committee. Once Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Giuliani said, the president will erect “a wall between them with regard to government matters.”

“You have to have some confidence in the integrity of the president,” Mr. Giuliani said. “The man is an enormously wealthy man. I don’t think there’s any real fear or suspicion that he’s seeking to enrich himself by being president. If he wanted to enrich himself, he wouldn’t have run for president.”

// posted by montag @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments

Carrier’s decision to move the factory to Monterrey, Mexico, will eliminate 1,400 jobs by 2019. Mr. Trump quickly made the factory Exhibit A in his argument against the trade policies of Republicans and Democrats alike.

He cited Carrier again and again on the campaign trail, threatening to phone executives at the company and its parent, United Technologies, and to hit them with 35 percent tariffs on any furnaces and air-conditioners they imported from Mexico. To the cheers of his supporters, he predicted at rallies that Carrier would call him up as president and say, “Sir, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.”

Now his supporters expect action. “If he doesn’t pass that tariff, I will vote the other way next time,” warned Nicole Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for a decade and a half and is not certain what she will do if and when her job goes to Mexico.

Carrier isn’t changing its plans. On Friday in a written statement, the company said, “We are making every effort to ease the transition for our Carrier colleagues in Indiana.” The company pointed out that it will finance four-year retraining and educational programs for employees and provide financial help.

For Mr. Trump, now comes the hard part. In interviews in recent days and in March, Trump voters here made clear that if he does not follow through on his promises, they are prepared to turn on him, just as they are seemingly punishing Democrats today for not delivering the hope and change voters sought from President Obama after he won as an outsider in 2008.

And while Mr. Roell is a conservative, Mr. Trump’s tough talk about Carrier, the economy and the future of American manufacturing jobs also appealed to moderates like Darrell Presley, a steelworker in rural Crawfordsville, Ind., who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. “He was for change, and said he would take care of the middle class, but he didn’t live up to those expectations,” Mr. Presley said. “I feel like the American people are at the point where they’ve had it, and this was the last chance.”

Last Tuesday, blue-collar workers across the industrial heartland hearkened to Mr. Trump’s call, putting states never thought to be in serious play, like Wisconsin and Michigan, in his win column.

As president, however, Mr. Trump will face a tough balance. Tariffs and trade wars stand to hurt American workers who make products that are exported to Mexico or China. Few voters will be happy paying more for imported goods.

// posted by montag @ 1:34 PM 0 Comments

“If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” Trump said at the rally. “…These ridiculous rules and regulations that make it impossible for you to compete … we’re going to take that all off the table, folks.”

With Trump’s election and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, many in Kentucky are now waiting to cash in on the Republican promise of more coal jobs.

U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, wasn’t making any promises Friday.

“We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault,” McConnell said at the University of Louisville. “Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it’s a private sector activity.”

The interim president of the Kentucky Coal Association was more direct about the future of coal mining in Eastern Kentucky.

“I would not expect to see a lot of growth because of the Trump presidency,” Nick Carter said in an interview. “If there is any growth in Eastern Kentucky, it will be because of an improved economy for coal.”

Experts agree that environmental regulations placed on the coal industry contributed to a rapid decline of the coal industry over the past few years, but there have been other, more important economic factors at play.

“The issues, particularly in the eastern part of Kentucky, are more than the increase of regulations,” said Ken Troske, Sturgill Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky.

One of those issues is a decrease in demand for coal.

Carter said the low price of natural gas contributes to the lack of demand for coal. As the energy industry builds new power plants, it’s more likely to build plants that run on natural gas because the price isn’t as high.

“We will need to end or do away with the Clean Power Plan that prohibits the building of a coal power plant anywhere in the country,” Carter said.

But even if demand for cheaper coal returns, many of the jobs lost over the past decade aren’t likely to be restored, particularly in Eastern Kentucky.

// posted by montag @ 12:57 PM 0 Comments

Under the ruling by Judge David M. Lawson of Federal District Court, state and city officials must immediately begin providing each Flint resident with at least 96 half-liter bottles of water per week as the city works toward a permanent solution.

“How the water crisis is resolved ultimately will be left to the City of Flint and the State of Michigan,” Judge Lawson said in his preliminary injunction. “Nonetheless, there is an immediate danger to Flint residents.”

The city is not required to deliver water to residents whose homes have properly installed and working filters, are unoccupied or decline the service.

Judge Lawson also ordered that officials provide information in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hmong, to residents about lead levels of city water and how to install filters that properly reduce the contamination.

Lawyers for the city and state could not immediately be reached for comment about whether they plan to appeal the ruling.

The ruling came as a result of a lawsuit filed by Concerned Pastors for Social Change; Melissa Mays, a Flint resident; the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan; and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

Obama Meets 12-Year-Old With Cerebral Palsy Who Was Kicked Out Of Trump Rally

// posted by montag @ 12:00 PM 0 Comments

Today Mr. Trump is making his most selfless pledge of all, promising that if elected president he will walk away from his beloved business empire so he can devote himself entirely to the American people. “If I become president, I couldn’t care less about my company,” he said at one debate. “It’s peanuts.”

With the presidential campaign in the homestretch, Hillary Clinton is now taking dead aim at Mr. Trump’s professed altruistic purpose. She and her supporters are suggesting that Mr. Trump regards the White House as one more moneymaking venture, the most lucrative opportunity of all to advance his family fortune.

“Imagine having a president who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign banks and other foreign entities that he doesn’t tell us about,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally in Pittsburgh on Friday. “Ask yourself: So if he’s sitting across the table negotiating with people from those countries, is he going to put his own financial interests ahead of America’s interests?”

At the same rally, one of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, put it even more bluntly: “There’s going to come a time, if Donald Trump, God help us, was president, where a Putin or an Assad would say to him, ‘Donald, if you do this, I’ll give you $20 billion,’” Mr. Cuban said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

“Do you think he’s going to do what’s right for the country? Or do you think he is going to take the money?”

For more than a year now, reporters from The New York Times have been scouring Mr. Trump’s business record, exploring the cycles of boom and bust, the spectacular reinventions, the shady business partners, the audacious tax avoidance maneuvers and the persistent deceptions that have been the leitmotif of his five decades of deal making.

// posted by montag @ 1:43 PM 0 Comments

The Georgia Security Force is one of scores of extremist militias nationwide that have rallied around the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, heartened by his harsh attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Syrian refugees. But no single issue motivates militiamen more than guns — and the enduring belief that Hillary Clinton, despite her insistence that she is not anti-gun, is plotting to take them away.

The Georgia militiamen mobilized in the woods here last weekend to fire weapons and train for the day when, they believe, they will be forced to defend what they call “our way of life.” Two dozen armed men and women conducted live-fire search-and-destroy drills, pumping out enough rounds to saw through and topple a loblolly pine.

“We thought it was bad under eight years of Obama, but the gun-grabbing is going to get a whole lot worse if Hillary gets elected,” said Chris Hill, 42, a blond-bearded paralegal who goes by the code name Blood Agent and commands the militia. He wore combat fatigues and packed a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip.

When Mr. Trump says he wants to make America great again, a message that has appealed to a broad segment of the electorate, Mr. Hill and his roughly 50 local militiamen are particularly enthralled. They long for an America they believe has been stolen from them by liberals, immigrants and “the P.C. crowd.” Their America is one where Christianity is taught in schools, abortion is illegal and immigrants hail from Europe, not faraway Muslim lands.

These weekend warriors form the obdurate bedrock of Trump Nation: white, rural and working class. They vote, and they are heavily armed, right down to the .22-caliber derringer fired by Nadine Wheeler, 63, a retiree who calls her tiny gun “the best in feminine protection.”

During two days of conversations, grievances poured forth from the group as effortlessly as bullets from a gun barrel. On armed excursions through sun-dappled forests, they spoke of a vague but looming tyranny — an amalgam of sinister forces to be held at bay only with a firearm and the willingness to use it.

They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Mr. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire and real estate tycoon, speaks for them.

“Within the extreme right, many of Trump’s most passionate backers come from the militia movement,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. “The militia movement is overwhelmingly behind Trump’s candidacy.”

// posted by montag @ 1:45 PM 0 Comments