George Packer's Blog, page 128

Trump’s Brazen Dodge to Avoid Dealing with His Conflicts of Interest

The big Donald Trump news of the past twenty-four hours isn’t the fact that he’s nominating Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, to be Secretary of State. We’ve known for a few days that was coming, just as we knew that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was the favorite to be Trump’s choice as Energy Secretary. (This despite the fact that, in 2012, when Perry ran for President, he wanted to abolish the department.) And, no, I’m also not referring to Kanye West’s visit to Trump Tower, which sent social media into a frenzy.

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Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 13th

The Battle for Aleppo, Syria’s Stalingrad, Ends

Aleppo has been part of human history for some five thousand years. Abraham is said to have grazed his sheep on its slopes and donated their milk to the local poor. Alexander the Great founded a Hellenic settlement there. The city is cited in the Book of Samuel and Psalm 60, and for centuries its residents reflected the three great Abrahamic faiths. It was at one end of the ancient Silk Road, and a major metropolis in the many empires that conquered and ruled the region. Its medieval Citadel, pivotal during the Crusades, is one of the world’s oldest and largest castles. More recently, Shakespeare referred to Aleppo in both “Macbeth” and “Othello.”

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Having Tea with Hezbollah’s No. 2
Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack
Bana Alabed, Twitter’s Child Witness to the Battle for Aleppo

What Happened, Exactly, in Oakland’s Ghost Ship Fire?

The photo that first circulated of Derick Almena, the landlord of the Ghost Ship, the Oakland performance space and group house where thirty-six people were killed in a fire, on the night of December 2nd, was a mug shot from a 2015 arrest. The photo gave him a kind of demonic glaze. Almena came into fuller view on Tuesday, when he gave an interview to the “Today” show, in which Matt Lauer pressed him about whether the building had been a safe place to hold a party. Almena defended himself on that count, saying that when he’d rented the warehouse it had been legal, though the space had also been much modified since. He seemed more focussed on the matter of his moral culpability. “I lay my three children down there every night,” Almena said.

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Lower Manhattan’s New Voice in the State Assembly

Yuh-Line Niou, who will soon take office as the first Asian-American to represent lower Manhattan in the New York State Assembly, began her working life the summer after her sophomore year in high school, eighteen years ago, as a temporary nurse’s aide. Niou’s mother, a nurse, had told her to “make herself useful.” The edict stuck and other jobs followed: as a hostess at a Japanese LaserDisc karaoke bar, car mechanic (“technically, I was the oil-and-lube girl”), legislative intern, and lobbyist. The other day, Niou stood on Bayard Street, outside what was once Winnie’s, a beloved watering hole in Chinatown that was shuttered last year, where she’d spent a stretch in 2010 mixing cocktails.

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Trump Against the American Worker

The mission of the federal Department of Labor is both sprawling and clear: “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.” Though not often in the headlines, the department enforces hundreds of laws and thousands of regulations affecting some ten million businesses and a hundred and twenty-five million American workers, and it has a distinguished history. It celebrated its centennial in 2013. Its headquarters is in the Frances Perkins Building, which is named after its longest-serving secretary.

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Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 12th

Having Tea with Hezbollah’s No. 2

Across Lebanon, Hezbollah runs special cemeteries—some with their own Facebook pages—for its fighters. I recently visited several of them, including the new Garden of Zeinab, named after the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter, where I counted a hundred and fifteen recent graves. Each was covered with a long white marble slab that detailed the fighter’s life; the headstone showed a large color photograph. Khodor Safa, nineteen, was in the front row. He died in September, “performing his jihadi duties,” the grave said. His slab was decorated with three votive candles, artificial white flowers, and a small Koran. Nearby, a large balloon offering “Congratulations”—for martyrdom—was attached to the grave of Ali Hussein Wehbi. Several families tended to other gravestones, dusting them off, laying flowers, or sitting alongside them in plastic chairs made available to visitors.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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An Insider-Trading Ruling That Delights Prosecutors—and One Manhattan Judge

Last week, prosecutors rejoiced when the U.S. Supreme Court decided an insider-trading case called Salman v. United States, and in doing so clarified that leaking confidential information so that friends and relatives can make money in the stock market is a crime, even when the leaker doesn’t get an economic benefit. Perhaps the person most pleased with the decision, however, was not a prosecutor but a certain white-haired Manhattan judge with a neatly trimmed, white beard.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Clarence Thomas’s Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints

Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack

For any would-be authoritarian strongman, a lesson of history is that you can’t do it by yourself. To accumulate power and vanquish your opponents, you need powerful elements of the state—such as the police, the armed forces, senior politicians, and the judiciary—to go along with your designs, or at least to stand aside as you do as you will. In some cases, such as Weimar Germany and Vittorio Emmanuel III’s Italy, many people in positions of influence were willing to support an authoritarian upstart because their commitment to democracy was weak or nonexistent to begin with. In other cases, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, elected leaders exploited threats of terrorism and domestic chaos to justify the curtailment of political rights and the harassment of political opponents.

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Trump Against the American Worker
Thirteen Women Who Should Think About Running for President in 2020
Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 12th

Thirteen Women Who Should Think About Running for President in 2020

Here is a New Year’s resolution for Democratic women in politics: be at least as brazen as Republican men are in deciding whether to run for President. It’s not just that Donald Trump had no record of public service and a long list of what might be considered disqualifying attributes and actions. Ben Carson had no experience in elected office, and other candidates had very little. Marco Rubio was greeted as the future of the Party when he decided to run just two-thirds of the way through his first term. That was only two years’ more experience in the Senate than Ted Cruz, one of the final contenders, had. In 2017, there will be a dozen Democratic female senators with more experience. And why limit it to the Senate, or to any particular level of elective office? Women, in all professions, tend to feel that they need to make their résumés perfect before putting themselves forward. Maybe they should stop thinking that way, at least in American politics, where insiderness does not seem to be particularly valued at the moment. Here’s another test to think of before asking whether a woman is enough of a national figure to jump into the Presidential race: How well known was the state senator Barack Obama in 2004?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Against the American Worker
Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack
Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 12th

Rex Tillerson, from a Corporate Oil Sovereign to the State Department

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The Political Bargain Behind Trump’s Cabinet of Lamentables
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