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| Presented By AT&T |
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| Axios AM |
| By Mike Allen ·Aug 05, 2021 |
| Happy Thursday! Smart Brevity™ count: 1,483 words ... 5½ minutes. Edited by Zachary Basu. |
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| 1 big thing: Inside a Kamala Harris crisis dinner |
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| Vice President Harris boards Air Force Two in Mexico City in June. Photo: Hector Vivas/Getty Images |
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| A group of the Democratic Party's most influential women met for dinner at a home in the nation's capital last month to game out how to defend Vice President Kamala Harris and her chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, against a torrent of bad press, Jonathan Swan reports. - Why it matters: It's telling that so early in the Biden-Harris administration, such powerful operatives felt compelled to try to right the vice president's ship.
The host was Kiki McLean, a Democratic public affairs expert and former adviser to both Clintons. - Her guests included Harris confidant Minyon Moore; two former DNC officials, Donna Brazile and Leah Daughtry; Biden adviser and leader of his outside group, Stephanie Cutter; former Hillary Clinton spokeswomen and Democratic strategists Adrienne Elrod and Karen Finney; and former Obama White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri.
- Nobody from the vice president's office was at the dinner, but Harris is attuned to her outside network of supporters. Harris' office declined to comment on the dinner.
These were old friends getting together for the first time since the pandemic began, and celebrating a Democratic president after the Trump years. But the dinner had an urgent purpose. - Harris had been hit with a series of press accounts describing rampant dysfunction in her office.
A person familiar with the dinner said the point was "how can this group be supportive from the outside" and ensure her team was "making the most of this moment — as the first woman of color in the White House." - The women discussed how they could leverage Harris' record as a prosecutor, California attorney general and U.S. senator to blunt criticisms of her performance as vice president.
Another source familiar with the dinner said attendees saw sexist overtones to the Harris coverage, and discussed how they could "make sure the press knows this." - "Many of us lived through the Clinton campaign, and want to help curb some of the gendered dynamics in press coverage that impacted HRC," this source said. "It was like: 'We've seen this before.'"
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| 2. Charted: Jobs that are still gone |
 Data: BLS. Chart: Sara Wise/Axios A lot of industries have permanently lost jobs during the pandemic, while very few have gained, Sam Ro writes in Axios Markets. - Total employment will eventually recover to its pre-pandemic level — Wells Fargo senior economist Sarah House sees that happening in late 2022 or early 2023.
- But the headline unemployment rate might never get back down to the 3.5% we saw pre-pandemic.
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| 3. Wealthy people are renouncing U.S. citizenship |
 Reproduced from Andrew Mitchel LLC. Chart: Axios Visuals The number of Americans who renounced their citizenship in favor of a foreign country hit an all-time high in 2020: 6,707, a 237% increase over 2019, Axios' Jennifer A. Kingson reports. - While the numbers are down this year, that could be because many U.S. embassies and consulates remain closed for COVID. Taking this grave step requires taking an oath in front of a State Department officer.
Why it matters: The people who flee tend to be the ultra-wealthy, seeking to reduce their taxes. New tax and estate measures proposed by President Biden could, if implemented, accelerate this trend. Context: Only the U.S. and Eritrea tax people based on citizenship rather than residency. For most countries, if you are a citizen but don't reside there, you aren't taxed in that country. What's happening: The IRS publishes a quarterly list of the names of people who have renounced their citizenship or given up their green cards, but it only includes people with global assets over $2 million. - The numbers started swelling in 2010, when Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, which increased reporting requirements and penalties for expats.
- The Wall Street Journal discovered that the lists aren't up to date: A lot of people who were reported to have renounced citizenship in 2020 actually did so years earlier.
David Lesperance, an international tax lawyer based in Poland who specializes in helping people renounce U.S. citizenship, says: "There are probably 20,000 or 30,000 people who want to do this, but they can't get the appointment." - "It's a year and a half to get an appointment at a Canadian embassy ... Bern [Switzerland] alone has a backlog of over 300 cases."
What we're watching: Biden's proposal to raise the top capital gains rate to 43.4% prompted a lot of calls to Lesperance from people wanting to find out which foreign countries might grant them citizenship. |
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| A message from AT&T |
| AT&T is connecting communities to their American Dream |
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| AT&T is making a $2 billion, 3-year commitment to help ensure broadband is more accessible and affordable for more people in the U.S., so low-income families like Susana's have the opportunity to succeed and thrive. Find out how. |
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| 4. Pic du jour: Greek sheep |
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| Photo: Thodoris Nikolaou/AP |
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| Sheep flocked together yesterday during a wildfire on the island of Evia, about 100 miles north of Athens. People were evacuated in boats, and the birthplace of the ancient Olympics was threatened. - Just asking: Why don't humans have this response to existential threats?
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| 5. Why vax passports may never be a thing |
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| Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios |
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| Several practical and technological hurdles stand in the way of widespread vaccine passports, Axios health care editor Tina Reed writes. - Why it matters: COVID vaccine mandates are quickly gaining steam, reviving interest in an easy, electronic way for people to verify that they're vaccinated. But that technology is still far from perfect.
What's happening: New York City, the first U.S. city to impose a vaccine requirement for many indoor businesses, will accept Excelsior Pass, an app developed for New York state, to verify people's vaccine status. - Plenty of glitches have been reported with the Excelsior app, preventing people from verifying their status.
Some experts fear that vaccine passports would provide a false sense of security to the vaccinated, particularly as new variants emerge. The bottom line: We may have to stick with the CDC's (poorly sized) paper cards to prove we're vaccinated. |
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| 6. One of the worst depressions in 150 years |
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| Obliterated grain silos in Lebanon's capital, Beirut, yesterday on the first anniversary of the blast that ravaged the port and the city. Photo: AFP via Getty Images |
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| Both the N.Y. Times and Wall Street Journal have front-pagers today saying Lebanon, a year after the ammonium nitrate blast in Beirut, is enduring one of the world's 10 worst financial collapses since the mid-1800s. - What does that look like? With hyperinflation topping 400%, brawls "have erupted in supermarkets as shoppers rush to buy bread, sugar, and cooking oil," The Journal reports (subscription).
I went down the rabbit hole, and it turns out the World Bank has a list of the world's worst systemic banking crises, going back to 1857. - America's Great Depression, 1929-33, is No. 14.
- Lebanon today would be top 10 or even top 3.
Go deeper: Chart of the world's 25 worst economic crises, 1857-2013. |
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| 7. 📱 Behind the scenes: Joe Biden calling |
| President Biden nominated Mark Brzezinski — a former U.S. ambassador to Sweden, and son of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter — as ambassador to Poland. - Biden called his sister, Mika Brzezinski of "Morning Joe," to congratulate her. According to a person familiar with the call, Biden said: "I'm trying to give your brother Poland. What's his number, Mika?"
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a Warsaw native who championed freedom for the Polish people. The historian Michael Beschloss tweeted this entry from the 1949 yearbook of McGill University in Canada: |
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| 8. Ben Shapiro helps spark Politico union drive |
| Ben Shapiro on the set of "Candace" in Nashville in April. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images Ben Shapiro, labor organizer?! - The online conservative powerhouse, whose "The Authoritarian Moment" debuted yesterday on the N.Y. Times bestseller list, is unwittingly helping animate a drive in Politico's newsroom to unionize with the NewsGuild.
- Politico bosses faced an internal revolt in January after Shapiro was allowed to guest-author Playbook for a day. Pro-union staffers are pointing to the company's handling of the debacle.
Union organizers have been conducting informational sessions with editorial teams and gathering signatures for a statement to management, Axios' Sara Fischer scooped. - Politico spokesperson Brad Dayspring said publisher Robert Allbritton "understands that the decision to form a union is the choice of the newsroom employees who would be impacted by it, and POLITICO would respect the process and the majority decision of those employees."
Keep reading. |
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| 9. Ina's Tokyo diary: Venturing into the city |
| Photo: Ina Fried/Axios Axios' Ina Fried reports from Tokyo: I've now been here 14 days, so I'm allowed to go to shops and restaurants and on public transit. - Between table-tennis matches, I walked to Shinjuku rail station and checked out the Apple store and some local shops.
- At Bic Camera, an electronics chain and department store, I was able to get what my son most wanted — an authentic Japanese beyblade, the spinning attack tops popular with kids.
Feeling brave, I decided to take a train the two stops back from Shinjuku. - A nice man helped me find my way, so I gave him one of the Olympic pins I collected. A woman on the train asked where I was from. When I said San Francisco, she started singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." She got a pin, too.
Axios Olympics dashboard ... Events to watch today ... In photos: Tokyo Olympics day 13. |
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| 10. ⚾ Every club to play Opening Day for first time in 53 years |
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| Angels' Shohei Ohtani sprints around third on his way home against the Rangers in Arlington, Texas, on Tuesday. Photo: Tony Gutierrez/AP |
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| Major League Baseball will open the 2022 season on March 31 — as long as there isn't a work stoppage — and will try to have every team play its first game on the same day for the first time since 1968, AP reports. |
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| A message from AT&T |
| AT&T is connecting communities to their American Dream |
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| AT&T is making a $2 billion, 3-year commitment to help ensure broadband is more accessible and affordable for more people in the U.S., so low-income families like Susana's have the opportunity to succeed and thrive. Find out how. |
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