Author: Richell Fredson

This has been the mealymouthed critique of President Donald Trump’s trade wars from many Democrats this past week. They awkwardly triangulate between bashing Trump’s catastrophic ideas and touting support for their own similarly spirited, if scaled-down, ideas. No wonder their message is falling flat. Trump’s current tariff regime — including “only” 10 percent levies on 70 countries, plus 145 percent on China — will devastate the U.S. economy. His tariffs imposed so far are estimated to raise a typical household’s annual costs by $2,700, with lower-income Americans shouldering the biggest burden. That’s only a subset of the damage. Recession risks have surged, companies…

Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said. Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia — he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities — and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana’s first single. His primary…