6A
opinion
Friday, August 7, 2015 | west hawaii today
D
ebating Donald
Trump is like
boxing with smoke.
You may have the facts
on your side, but for this
Republican presidential
candidate, facts are
mostly beside the point.
Take, for example, his
recent slap at President
Barack Obama’s legacy.
Americans won’t elect
another black president for
a long time, Trump said
in an interview on “ABC
News Sunday,” because of
Obama’s “poor standard.”
“I think that he has set a
very poor standard,” Trump
said. “I think that he has
set a very low bar and I
think it’s a shame for the
African-American people.”
On income levels and
unemployment, Obama
“has done nothing for
African-Americans” he
continued. “They are worse
now than just about ever.”
Well, it didn’t take
PolitiFact.com long to
shoot down Trump’s
assertions as “false.”
Black unemployment,
for example, “improved
significantly” from 12.7
percent when Obama
entered office to 9.5
percent this June. Just
imagine, Obama’s
supporters would say, what
he could have done with
a cooperative Congress.
Yet the TV interview
question came from a
gloomy assertion Trump
made on Twitter last
November. “Sadly, because
President Obama has
done such a poor job
as president,” Trump
tweeted, “you won’t see
another black president
for generations!”
Oh? Does Trump really
think America’s voters —
who, by the way, elected
Obama twice with more
than 50 percent of the
popular vote — would
be that racist? Probably
not. But to his support
base, there’s no need to
let a shortage of facts
get in the way of a sharp
poke at Obama.
Yet Trump expects
strong support from
voters of color who the
Republican establishment
fears he will push away. “I
think that I will win the
African-American vote,”
he said, “and I think I will
win the Hispanic vote.”
That makes one
of us, Don.
A new NBC News/Wall
Street Journal poll released
Sunday, for example, found
75 percent of Hispanics
polled in Nevada viewed
Trump negatively —
and 61 percent viewed
him “very negatively.”
Some 55 percent
thought his references
to immigrants as rapists
and criminals was
“insulting and racist.”
Yet even in that poll of
Hispanic voters, 14 percent
said that Trump showed
“guts to say exactly what
was on his mind about
an important problem
(illegal immigration)
we need to deal with.”
Now we’re getting to
the true significance of
Trump’s surge to the lead
in a field of candidates that
is as crowded as a public
school classroom in a low-
income neighborhood.
What excites voters at
this stage is not that Trump
has much of a chance
to win the nomination
— he merely holds the
largest minority of votes.
Rather, it’s that he serves
as a public megaphone
for a segment of the
electorate that wants their
frustrations to be heard.
That’s why details don’t
matter when the Donald
is “trumpsplaining.” That’s
my term for his relentless
tendency to jump without
a hint of self-doubt
right into explaining
things that obviously are
completely outside of his
personal experience.
“Trumpsplaining” is
like “mansplaining,” a
term that some feminist
bloggers apply to the act
of explaining something
to someone, typically a
man to a woman, without
any thought to whether
the person hearing the
explanation already knows
more about the topic
than the explainer does.
“Trumpsplaining,”
like everything else in
Trump’s hype-inflated
galaxy, is the biggest
(“Huge! Huge!”), boldest
and most condescending
tone-deaf mansplaining
that any narcissistic
ego ever produced.
Trumpsplaining
describes how Trump came
to Chicago in June and
preached to my colleagues
on the Chicago Tribune’s
editorial board — which
knows a thing or two about
Chicago — about how
“Crime in Chicago is out
of control and I will tell
you, outside of Chicago,
it’s a huge negative and a
huge talking point, a huge
negative for Chicago.”
Huge, huge! Gee, thanks,
Don. We’ll get right on that.
Ultimately, I don’t expect
Trump to see the inside of
the White House unless
it’s with a tour group. But
for now, he expresses the
frustration of voters who
think the system has failed
and that the “change”
promised by Obama isn’t
the change they want.
Who cares whether he
has the facts right? He’s
saying what they feel.
Email Clarence Page at
cpagetribune.com.
Drivers must stop for school
buses with flashing lights
What will it take for people to understand
that when a school bus is stopped, with
red lights flashing and flashing STOP
sign extended, you have to stop. As a
school bus driver, every day there is
at least one vehicle that runs past my
extended, flashing STOP sign. Is it going
to take one of the children getting hit
and injured to get this point across?
I have given the Hawaii Police
Department my stops and times I’ll
be at each stop and have asked them
to come sit and watch. It upsets me
that people are in such a hurry that
they can’t respect the law and stop. It
could be their child that gets injured.
Hank Davis
Kailua-Kona
Kudos to the protest leadership
I would like to commend the Mauna Kea
protester/protector leadership. In the short
time they have been on the mountain they
have out-thought and out-maneuvered
the state Department of Land and Natural
Resources, Hawaii Police Department, state
Attorney General’s office and the governor.
A few weeks ago, the protester/
protector leadership got the leader
of the DLNR, then present on the
mountain, to apologize to them for
“doing his job.” I’m glad the leadership
could get this person to acknowledge
he had chosen the wrong career path.
Today, I read that on June 24, the
protester/protector leadership stopped
an HPD convoy consisting of a police
captain and 50 officers from proceeding
up the mountain until the leadership got
all the officers’ names and badge numbers.
This prevented all of the officers from
getting to their assigned duty stations
up the mountain for about an hour. The
command presence of the leadership
overwhelmed the police captain who lost
control of the situation. The result of
this captain’s loss of control resulted in
personnel complaints against a quarter
of the officers he “led” up the mountain.
I’m sure volunteers for the next
mission up the mountain will be hard
to find. Again, congratulations to the
protester/protector leadership, you
have now demoralized our entire police
force, as well as the DLNR officers.
Maybe next time the protester/protector
leadership should bring a camera and
photograph the officers sort of like a police
line up. Maybe bring some ink and paper
to fingerprint the officers. Also have the
officers bring their personnel file so the
leadership can screen the officers before
letting them up the mountain. The officers
who aren’t allowed up could be provided
with brooms and they could do a general
cleanup of the illegal campsite, maybe
even help paint protest signs. Great for
community relationship building.
As for the state government, what
can I say. These beloved officials have
passed emergency laws that managed to
keep all of the state’s recreational users,
hunters and local business, as well as
the tourists off of the mountain while
allowing only the protester/protectors
full access and camping rights.
Well done. I hope the protest/protector
leader runs for office, he seems to be the
only person who knows what he is doing.
Taky Tzimeas
Kailua-Kona
A long time coming, sunlight on the executive pay gap
Explaining the audacity of Trump
Clarence Page |
Tribune Content Agency
Editorial |
The NewYork Times
A
fter years of delay, the
Securities and Exchange
Commission approved a
sensible final rule on Wednesday
that will force publicly traded
companies to reveal how the
pay of chief executives compares
with that of typical employees.
The new “pay ratio” rule, part
of the Dodd-Frank financial
reform law, requires companies
to compute and disclose the
ratio of chief executive pay to the
median pay of employees, while
skillfully addressing complaints
from corporate America that
doing so would be a costly logis-
tical nightmare. For instance,
it allows statistical sampling
to compute median pay, which
will make the calculation eas-
ier for companies with many
employees in differing locations.
The rule also addresses cor-
porate concerns that are clearly
political, while upholding the
law’s purpose, which is to expose
the gap between pay for the top
boss and pay for everyone else.
For instance, companies with
large and generally low-paid
foreign workforces are under-
standably worried about large
pay gaps. The rule lets companies
exclude a small share of their
foreign workforce, generally up to
5 percent, a compromise that will
not alter the ratio substantially.
Similarly, the rule lets com-
panies report the ratio every
three years, rather than every
year, as was previously pro-
posed. That is not ideal, but once
pay-ratio information starts to
become available, sharehold-
er demand for consistent and
timely disclosure is likely to lead
to more frequent updates.
Unfortunately, the rule does
not take effect until 2017, which
means the first disclosures will
appear on securities filings in
2018. That is a lot of time for
opponents to try to derail the
rule, especially if Republicans,
who have consistently opposed
the pay-ratio disclosure, take the
White House in the next election.
Still, they would be fighting
a rule whose time has come.
Shareholders were recently grant-
ed the right to cast advisory votes
on executive pay; the pay-ratio
measure will inform those votes
by providing a benchmark to
gauge whether executive pay is
excessive. It will also provide a
counterweight to current prac-
tice, which is simply to compare
an executive’s pay with that of
other chief executives in the
same industry. That method
has contributed to ever upward
spiraling executive pay: CEO
compensation is currently about
300 times that of typical workers,
compared with 30 times in 1980.
Company-specific ratios will
also help shareholders evaluate
the effect of skewed pay policies
on company performance. What
are the consequences for morale
and turnover? Is a company
courting reputational harm by
paying its chief lavishly while
paying its workers poorly?
The vote on the five-member
SEC was divided on partisan
lines. The two Republican com-
missioners who opposed the
pay-ratio rule have also opposed
other recent executive-pay
proposals, including one on
“pay versus performance” that
would detail how executive pay
tracks company results, and
one on “clawbacks” that would
require executive bonuses to
be revoked if the financial
reports on which they were
based turned out to be wrong.
The pay-ratio rule will need
to be carefully policed, by
regulators and shareholder
activists, to guard against non-
compliance and manipulation.
Properly enforced, it can give
shareholders information that
can help foster much needed
change in corporate norms.
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