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Laurence Fox has been dropped by his acting agent over the phone, he has claimed.

The actor, who has been continually embroiled in controversies throughout the year, said that his former agent's decision "reaffirmed exactly why" he has opted to launch his Reclaim political party.

In September, Fox announced he was launching the party to fight the so-called culture wars. The group was described by one Westminster source as basically a Ukip for culture.

It has apparently been set up to provide a political movement for people who are tired of being told that we represent the very thing we have, in history, stood together against.

I want to thank my acting agent who let me go on the phone just now for reaffirming exactly why I am doing what Im doing," Fox wrote on Twitter.

Still waiting for a single example of anything Ive ever said or done that could ever be deemed racist. We will reclaim freedom, fairness and common sense.

Foxs press representative confirmed to The Independent that the actor has parted ways" with his agent.

The star has been in the spotlight since January this year, when he appeared on the BBCs Question Time and made headlines for refuting claims that the medias treatment of Meghan Markle was racially motivated.

He said the row was boring and claimed: Its not racism. Were the most tolerant lovely country in Europe.

In an April interview with The Sunday Times, Fox revealed that his appearance had caused a row with his brother-in-law, the actor, comedian and writer Richard Ayoade, after Fox begged him to support his stance on social media.

Ayoade, who is half-Nigerian, was reportedly furious at this, and told Fox: You have never encountered racism.

Laurence Fox is launching his own political party to fight culture wars

(Getty Images)

Fox responded: Yeah, of course I have. Ive encountered racism from black people towards me, when I was working in Kenya [as a safari driver] for seven months. Its the way youre spoken to racism can be deferential.

Asked by the interviewer what he meant by the idea that racism can be deferential, Fox answered: This is why you dont get actors involved in chats like this. Because Im just not smart enough to do it.

Fox was initially best known as the star of TV drama Lewis, which ran between 2006 to 2015.

Continued here:
Laurence Fox dropped by acting agent over the phone amid controversies - The Independent

The fact that United States was unable to know the name of its new president for several days after the polls closed was like a sort of corporal punishment for a country being forced to atone in a painful way. Nov 14, 2020

By Prof Massimo FaggioliThe fact that United States was unable to know the name of its new president for several days after the polls closed was like a sort of corporal punishment for a country being forced to atone in a painful way.

Now we know that it will be up to Joseph R. Biden Jr, a Catholic, to begin the process of healing the moral and corporal wounds Donald J. Trump has inflicted on the country by the way hes handled the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing crisis of globalisation.

The American presidency is not just a political office. It is also an office with moral and religious aspects. And Joe Biden will assume that office at a time when political identities in his country have assumed theological and dogmatic intensity.

A realignment of the political relationship between Washington and the Vatican US Catholicism is not detached from the global world. On the contrary, it is at the centre of the convulsions in the body of the Church, one of the consequences of the crisis of globalisation and world order.

In a Biden presidency one can expect a realignment of relations between the United States, even if there are some important unknowns on certain international issues.

But this realignment will have to deal with a deeply divided Church on US soil, as well as a global Catholicism that is also divided.

One of the fruits of globalism has been an opposition to Pope Francis.

The Latin American Jesuit Pope expresses his message on the most relevant issues at the public level (such as women, homosexuality, environment) in ways and through channels different from those used by his predecessors. That message is received in contrasting ways in various parts of the world.

There has been unprecedented confrontation between the Trump administration and the current pontificate, beginning early on with the issue of immigration and on full view just last month when US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, publicly chastised the Holy See for its 2018 agreement with China (which has since been renewed).

Its not clear how much this open hostility impacted the results of the US presidential election, but it has had a very evident effect on the Church.

It has helped deepen the internal rift within American Catholicism, evidenced by the number of bishops and priests who continue to back Donald Trump till the bitter end some via the new ecosystem of independent Catholic media and social media.

Trumps attempt to divide and conquer US Catholics Over the past four years the White House (through officials like Bannon and Pompeo) has directed a political attempt to divide the Church in two for and against Pope Francis.

A handful of American bishops and a number of high-profile lay Catholics have given their blessing to this attempt. But the effort at division has failed.

Nonetheless, the ecclesial attempt remains, in a Church in the United States that is divided like never before. The culture wars have taken the form of intra-ecclesial theological wars and have exposed American Catholicism to the risk of a soft schism.

The Trump presidency and the 2020 elections have shown the extent to which the two Catholic ecclesial parties have identified with the platform of the opposing political parties.

While there is some of this among that group of Catholics that support Biden, it is much more obvious among the Catholic faction backing Trump. It has blended a proclaimed theological orthodoxy with a political orthodoxy, thus leaving very little room for argued dissent.

The moral failure of institutional Catholicism in the United States can be seen in the desperate attempts to stop the LGBTQ agenda and in the inability of the Church here to speak with a unified voice on the issue of racism.

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The end of the Trumpian captivity of the American Church - Malaysian Christian News

[Heres what you need to know about Pfizers Covid-19 Vaccine.]

On Nov. 17-18, DealBook is holding our first Online Summit. Join us as we welcome the most consequential newsmakers in business, policy and culture to explore the pivotal questions of the moment and the future. Watch for free from anywhere in the world. Register now.

The pandemic is still raging, but it would be hard to tell from the ecstatic stock market, which flirted with record highs thanks to promising clinical trial data on a coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech. Futures today suggest that yesterdays rally could be extended.

Hopes that the pandemic will come under control scrambled the usual pattern, with shares soaring for the sectors most linked to growth in the broad economy, like energy and banks, and the companies most affected by lockdowns, like AMC (up 51 percent), United Airlines (up 19 percent) and Macys (up 17 percent). Tech-heavy stars of the pandemic were the days biggest losers, like Peloton (down 20 percent), Zoom (down 17 percent) and Netflix (down 9 percent).

The probability of an L-shaped recovery has been significantly reduced, said Johanna Kyrklund, Schroders chief investment officer. We may finally have found the catalyst to spark a move away from the stay-at-home stocks that have benefited from lockdown, towards recovery stocks.

There are reasons to be wary. Experts cautioned that even if Pfizer wins approval for its vaccine and itll need much more data doses will be initially available to only a small sliver of the population. As our colleagues at The Morning newsletter note, there are two very different coronavirus stories happening now: While the markets are rejoicing, records for coronavirus infections are being set daily.

The key question: Are investors getting ahead of themselves? These are the types of moves that tend to run out of gas if the underlying data doesnt quickly confirm the enthusiasm, Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, told The Times. The sharp turns call into question the efficiency of supposedly all-knowing markets, as the Deal Professor notes below.

Europe charges Amazon with antitrust violations. The E.U.s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, accused the e-commerce giant of exploiting data it collects from third-party merchants to boost its own sales. We must ensure that dual-role platforms with market power, such as Amazon, do not distort competition, she said.

Most Republicans back President Trumps refusal to concede. Officials like Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, declined to rebut Mr. Trumps false claims of illegal votes and a stolen election. Separately, lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, two big law firms working on Mr. Trumps legal challenges, have voiced concerns about their work.

Top SoftBank executives resign as directors. Three senior managers including Rajeev Misra, the head of the Vision Fund, and Marcelo Claure, the companys C.O.O. are stepping down from the board, amid pressure to improve SoftBanks corporate governance. (Theyll stay as executives.)

The E.U. imposes new tariffs on American goods. The $4 billion in levies, on products like aircraft and chocolate, follow a W.T.O. ruling allowing the bloc to retaliate against the U.S. over illegal subsidies to Boeing. The U.S. imposed tariffs on European goods last year after a similar ruling about Airbus.

Bill Grosss property fight with his neighbor heads to court. A trial over competing harassment claims by the famed bond investor and the entrepreneur Mark Towfiq began yesterday. Mr. Gross reportedly said he would stop blaring the Gilligans Island theme song if the neighbor dropped his complaint; a lawyer for Mr. Gross accused Mr. Towfiq of being a peeping Tom.

Steven Davidoff Solomon, a.k.a. the Deal Professor, is a professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and the faculty co-director at the Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy.

Recent weeks havent been good for the efficient markets hypothesis. First, the pollsters got the election wrong, failing to forecast the results for many of last weeks contests. Then, yesterday, investors got the markets wrong.

The burst upward in stocks was aided by the thesis that the calmness of a post-Trump era and divided government would be a boon to business. But make no mistake: Most of the rise was related to Pfizers vaccine news.

Whats so surprising about the rise is that it shouldnt have happened. This vaccine announcement was completely expected. Pfizer and other companies developing vaccines have been signaling a November announcement for weeks. And, in fact, some market observers have been factoring this into their advice on positioning.

Marko Kolanovic, the head of macro quantitative and derivatives strategy at JPMorgan Chase, has been right all year. He called the market bottom, then called the Nasdaq high as well as the turn to consumer cyclicals. He also put out a series of reports leading up to the election noting that evidence beyond the polls suggested President Trump would do better than expected.

Mr. Kolanovics forecasts show what were missing, despite being able to access more information than ever. People are driven by fear, live in the moment and get distracted by a deluge of extreme views on social media. This has been compounded by political bias which infects everything, including assessments of the markets. Trading is consumed by momentum plays and the Robinhood crowd. People have too much information and take longer to process meaningful signals.

All of this is to say that markets may still be efficient in the long term, but these days it takes even longer for this to become clear.

Rich Handler, the C.E.O. of Jefferies, in 20 Things I Wish Someone Told Me The Day I Started My Career As An Analyst On Wall Street

The Affordable Care Act is up for debate at the Supreme Court today. If the law is invalidated, some investors have prepared for refunds on past investment income. Indeed, the litigation has generated a flurry of queries and I.R.S. protective refund claims, tax experts say.

Todays arguments are about Obamacares individual mandate, a penalty for not taking out health insurance. Challengers say that when Congress set the penalty at zero in 2017, they broke the justification given for the entire law in a previous Supreme Court ruling, which depended on treating the mandate as a tax. Theoretically, if Texas and other Republican-leaning states backed by the federal government succeed in striking down the law, refunds could be available on other taxes associated with the A.C.A.

The I.R.S. cited the case in guidance on protective refund claims earlier this year. These claims are placeholders, reserving the right to file after deadline, depending on a future event like litigation. Some filers hope that other taxes will be invalidated if the A.C.A. is struck down, including a 3.8 percent hike on net income investment passed in a 2010 companion law.

Its a long shot. Even if the individual mandate falls, the court may preserve the health care law, and even the whole law falling wouldnt guarantee some of these refunds. Because arguments for unconstitutionality of the mandate depend on a change in law that was enacted in 2017 and did not take effect until 2019, it seems very unlikely that the court will hold that the A.C.A. was invalid as far back as 2016, Jonathan Gifford, a tax attorney at Cleary Gottlieb, told DealBook. But people filing protective refund claims presumably are thinking that anything can happen, and in 2020 that certainly seems truer than ever.

The Timess Brooks Barnes writes from Los Angeles: Months after his blink-and-you-missed it tenure as TikToks C.E.O., Kevin Mayer has taken on a new role: senior adviser to Len Blavatniks Access Industries.

He will bring invaluable knowledge and insight to Access, which owns media businesses like Warner Music and the sports streaming service DAZN, Mr. Blavatnik said. Before joining TikTok, Mr. Mayer led Disney+ and had been a contender to succeed Bob Iger as Disneys C.E.O. President Trumps pressure on TikToks Chinese owners curtailed the networks global ambitions, prompting Mr. Mayer to leave after just three months.

Mr. Mayer called the Access role a key component of my future endeavors. He has also held talks to join Redbird Capital, the sports and entertainment investment firm that recently launched a SPAC.

Travel is down, but when it returns it will be a little easier to get to the airport, a meeting or anywhere else at a set time. Later today, Uber will announce a feature that the business community has long wanted: reservations.

How it works. Through Uber Reserve, riders can schedule trips up to 30 days in advance in more than 20 U.S. cities. The program, which launches next week, will present its fare upfront, as usual. If a pickup doesnt arrive on time, riders get a $50 credit.

Its a swipe at legacy car services. The new program challenges the biggest advantage that car and limo services had over on-demand ride-hailing. But it may take some time to see any impact, given how little people are moving around these days.

Deals

NextEra Energy reportedly offered to buy a rival power utility, Evergy, for $15 billion in stock, months after being rebuffed by Duke Energy. (Reuters)

VF Corporation, which owns Vans and Timberland, will buy the buzzy streetwear brand Supreme for $2.1 billion. (NYT)

Politics and policy

Renewing the Feds emergency loan programs, which are set to expire at the end of the year, has become a bitter political fight. (NYT)

Britain will require big companies to report on climate risks. (Guardian)

Tech

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to continue the Justice Departments antitrust lawsuit against Google and may file competition cases against Facebook, Amazon and Apple. (NYT)

Zoom agreed to third-party audits of its security protocols as part of a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. (Protocol)

Best of the rest

Since President Trump took office, corporate America has been thrust into the culture wars like never before. (NYT)

Four Seasons the landscaping company, not the hotel is capitalizing on its unexpected role in the Trump campaigns legal challenges, selling shirts with slogans like Lawn and Order! (NYT)

Wed like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

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Are Markets Overexcited About Pfizer's Covid-19 Vaccine News? - The New York Times

Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats saw an increased share of votes from white working-class voters in 2020. What did he do to win this crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class. Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect.

After 2016, Democrats worried whether they could appeal to enough white working-class Trump voters to win in 2020 without alienating and disrespecting a key Democratic constituency: voters of color.

They just did. Biden won because he won back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The percentage of white working class men voting Democratic increased from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2020, while among white working class women, support for Democrats increased from 34% to 36%. These voters played a key role in delivering victories for Biden in the Rust Belt states where Clinton lost the presidency in 2016.

But white working-class voters were not the whole story by any means. Biden also won the election this year because he flipped Arizona and probably Georgia, which had not voted Democratic in a presidential election since the 1990s, and by holding on to Nevada. Large Latinx turnout played an outsized role in both Arizona and Nevada. Black voters played a central role in Georgia, thanks to the voter-turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams. Not to mention that Congressman Jim Clyburn and Black voters saved Bidens candidacy when it was faltering, by delivering a win in the South Carolina primary.

Bidens winning coalition was a race-class coalition. This election shows that Democrats can simultaneously appeal to voters of color and to enough (though hardly all) working class whites. The election also severely undermines the demography is destiny thesis that people of color will rote-vote Democratic. Trump won 45% of the Latinx vote in Florida, fueled by Cuban and Venezuelan Americans whom he courted for years through relentless messaging that Democrats would bring socialism. More shockingly, Democrats also lost Texas in part because Latinos in South Texas swung to Trump, cancelling out Democrats gains in urban areas. Mexican Americans within spitting distance of Trumps wall swung strongly for him. How does this make sense?

There are plenty of reasons. Many Latinos have a strong religious orientation, traditionalist views of gender and family, and a strong commitment to small business. All politics is about identity, for sure George W. Bushs as much as Kamala Harriss but demography is not identity. After all, we arent confused that all white people dont vote the same way.

What did Biden do to win crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class. Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect, which had been sorely lacking when Clinton decried Trump supporters as deplorables and Barack Obama condescendingly described Midwestern working-class voters as bitter people clinging to guns and religion. Biden instead pointed out that Trump was a fake while signaling his own respect for working class folks: Ive dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didnt have a lot of money or your parents didnt go to college. Guys who think theyre better than you. Guys who inherit everything theyve ever gotten in their life and squander it.

In all the election coverage, theres surprisingly little discussion about that ocean of red voters in rural middle-America. These left-behind Americans are being treated as irrelevant, which is precisely what caused them to see red in the first place. Its time to reread Katherine J. Cramers The Politics of Resentment, which depicts Wisconsins veer to the right with the 2010 election of Scott Walker as governor. The class resentments Cramer found in Wisconsin reflected not culture wars about abortion and gay marriage but a sense of having been belittled and left behind. There are huge swaths of the rural U.S. with no hospitals and no grocery stores that have left many Americans with limited access to essential health care and fresh food. Cramer describes a rural consciousness: the sense that the government must be mishandling my hard-earned dollars, because my taxes keep going up and clearly they are not coming back to benefit people like me. So why would I want an expansion of government? She found opposition to Obamacare even by people in obvious need of medical care. Obamacare was too expensive to fit their families budgets; with all the focus on covering the poor, these folks in the fragile and former middle class felt left out again.

If there is any silver lining to the Electoral College (a stretch, I admit), it is that it makes it essential for Democrats to signal to the heartland not just the Rust Belt but also rural America that government will work for them. This is all the more pressing because rural votes are also overweighted in the Senate, which may well retain a Republican majority despite the flood of blue-state campaign contributions to senatorial campaigns. Until Democrats find a way to appeal to rural voters, Bidens ability to deliver, for anyone, may well be hamstrung by Mitch McConnell.

With their coalition of people of color, the white working class, and college-educated liberals, Democrats won a close election in the midst of worldwide death and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. They need to reach out to rural voters, too, if they are to end the Gilded-age-level inequality, and help Americans of all races gain access to stable middle-class lives. For centuries, rural people in China were of shorter stature than city folk because elites kept the wealth in the cities. If we do the same, it will fuel support for future Trumps. Americans do not accept stunting as their due nor should they.

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How Biden Won Back (Enough of) the White Working Class - Harvard Business Review

If indeed Donald Trumps presidency has been cut short after just one term, then the next several months will be devoted to defining Trumpism and interpreting the countrys repudiation of it.

The theories will be diverse, but one to anticipate is that Joe Bidens victory suggests the rehabilitation of political centrism, which has sustained challenges by perceived outsiders of all stripes over the last decade. The window for experimental alternatives to sanctioned establishment politics represented in the minds of many moderates by Trump and Bernie Sanders alike, never mind the diametrically opposite politics of the Right and the Left will be declared closed.

That explanation is attractive in its simplicity, and especially seductive for anyone with a major stake in restoring popular confidence in the existing political elite. But it doesnt accurately reflect the nature of the race. Biden as the establishment versus Trump as the gate-crasher is a throwback to the last election, when Trump was a real estate mogul and reality television star with no political experience, not the incumbent presiding over a nightmarish series of interlocking crises.

This election was different. It was chiefly a referendum on which menace the American people wanted their leaders to focus on: the coronavirus and its associated economic catastrophe, or an assortment of left-wing bogeymen. In other words, it was less a contest between political insiders and outsiders than between main attractions and sideshows. The politically vacuous Biden campaign certainly failed to do justice to the main attractions, but when American voters chose him by a fraction they also chose to elect a leader who at least gave the impression of focusing on ending the pandemic rather than, say, alleged roaming bands of Antifa.

Reality in the United States is exceedingly grim, so Trumps primary campaign strategy was to deflect it. In particular, he sought to rile up his base about the fabricated threats of Democrat-run cities falling to anarchists and looters, cancel-culture totalitarianism perpetrated by evil people, and imaginary large-scale voter fraud, all while flattering fringe elements of his coalition like the Proud Boys, QAnon, and the right-wing militia movement. Bidens strategy, on the other hand, was to lay low, keep things simple and vague, and passively absorb support from anyone more concerned about the coronavirus pandemic and economic recession than Trumps culture-war melodrama.

On many questions, from climate to health care, Bidens ambitious promises regarding the crisis and recovery were not very specific and his specific promises were not very ambitious. But he at least cleared the low bar by acknowledging the severity of the nations situation, in which 230,000 have died, twelve million have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance, eight million have been pushed into poverty, and so on. That acknowledgment appears to have been sufficient to distinguish him from Trump, who routinely downplayed both the public health and economic dimensions of the present catastrophe.

Trumps apparent disregard for the gravity of the pandemic left plenty of people cold, including elements of his own base. Take the example of Arizona seniors, a crucial demographic in this race. In 2016, Trump won Arizona voters over the age of sixty-five by 13 percentage points, a level that he will not even come close to matching this time.

Why the reversal? One profile of voters in Maricopa Countyfeatured a steadfast Trump supporter living in a retirement community outside Phoenix who fretted about distant Black Lives Matter protests and the need to restore law and order, despite the fact that her own suburb of Peoria recently made a list of the fifteen safest cities in America. Another profile of Arizona seniors featured a man who had voted Republican all his life, but who was switching to Biden because Trump is not accepting responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and doesnt talk about the vulnerability of people in our age, 65 and older, group, even though he is part of that group.

All evidence points to a situation in which those who abandoned the president were concerned about things that concretely threaten them, while the Trump holdouts were preoccupied with the phantasmic picture of apocalypse the president spent the campaign painting. In other words, those who stayed with Trump were stubbornly attached to a fantasy, while those who abandoned him were lured away by reality.

Theres an important lesson here, and it isnt that the path to electoral victory runs through centrism. Its that when push comes to shove, more people care about their material conditions than cultural shadowboxing.

Increasingly Americans are the captives of sprawling, convoluted, perpetually-evolving partisan storylines conservatives and liberals alike which colonize their minds and feed an intense political tribalism that disables all other modes of reasoning. Trump placed his bet on the idea that this type of cultural bogeyman politics would always be stronger than the allure of, for example, not dying of a deadly virus or not filing for bankruptcy after months of unemployment without relief. Yes, it was too close for comfort, and clearly plenty of people still bought what Trump was selling, but in the end Trumps instinct was wrong.

The crisis heightened peoples attention to their own uncertain well-being. Biden did the minimum required to take advantage of this. He predictably refused, for example, to run on a broad expansion of public health insurance, even during a public health crisis and when a supermajority of the nation supports it. Nor would it be accurate to suggest that the Democrats this time were never guilty of hysterically demonizing their opponents; per usual, there was plenty of paranoia and vilification to go around. But what mattered was that in the end, the pandemic was Bidens issue. Voters associated him, and not Trump, with attention to the crisis at hand.

On some level, this should encourage an otherwise fairly demoralized American left. After all, were the ones whose program consists of securing good health care, housing, education, infrastructure, and employment for everyone. While we didnt have a candidate in the race this week, we should interpret the result as smuggling in a small affirmation of the basic premise animating our political approach: that while ordinary people may have all kinds of perverse ideas and reactionary attitudes, direct appeals to what people need to survive and live decently have the power, on occasion, to dislodge delusions.

Now, imagine the kinds of margins wed have seen if Trumps opponent had actually campaigned on an ambitious platform that connected politics directly to peoples material conditions. Whatever else it accomplished, such a campaign would have helped to snap millions of people out of the fog of political hypnosis. For the Left, that is the first step toward victory.

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Trump's Culture Wars Were Meant to Distract From the Crisis. It Didn't Work. - Jacobin magazine