George Packer's Blog, page 157

A National Strike Against “Prison Slavery”

Weekdays are workdays at the Perry Correctional Institution in Pelzer, South Carolina, where Dee, a forty-two-year-old native of Georgia, has spent a decade serving time for a robbery. On typical mornings, he “commutes” from his cell to an on-site furniture factory, where he and other inmates assemble wooden tables and chairs for a private company. But when Dee’s cell door opened on September 9th, the forty-fifth anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, he did not respond as usual to the call to attention. Dee was on strike. “I quit,” he told me a few days ago, speaking via a contraband cell phone. “That was my last day of work.” Dee grew up poor and began committing crimes as a young man, but he had educated himself in prison and joined a group of “jailhouse lawyers” who assist other inmates with legal issues. More recently, Dee had begun to think of himself not just as a prison activist but as a worker. “We’re not compensated for our labor,” he told me. At Perry, inmates earn less than a dollar per hour in the furniture shop. “Slavery is inhumane, no matter its disguise.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the U.S. Is Right to Move Away from Private Prisons
The Meaning of Life Without Parole
It’s Time for Obama to Go Big on Pardons

The Desegregation and Resegregation of Charlotte’s Schools

Recently, protesters and police clashed in the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, following the killing of Keith Lamont Scott, a forty-three-year-old father of seven, who had recently moved to the city with his wife and family. Scott was shot by officers who were searching for a man with an outstanding warrant. Scott was not that man. Officer accounts claim that Scott had a handgun and refused to comply when he got out of his car. Other witnesses say that Scott was actually holding a book, as he often read while waiting for the bus to return his son from elementary school.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Casting Calls for People of Color That Were Not Written by People of Color
This Week in Fiction: Etgar Keret on the Purest Form of Racism
Race, Colonialism, and the Netherlands’ Golden Coach

Donald Trump, American Oligarch

This past summer, when Donald Trump dumped his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in the midst of revelations about Manafort’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs, Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that the real problem wasn’t that Trump is sympathetic to Russian oligarchs, it was that “he is a Russian oligarch.” Trump, Applebaum explained, is “an oligarch in the Russian style—a rich man who aspires to combine business with politics and has an entirely cynical and instrumental attitude toward both.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, October 3rd
Alec Baldwin Is a Perfect Donald Trump
Christie Calls Trump Genius for Plan to Burn Down White House and Collect Insurance

Is Donald Trump a “Genius” Tax Avoider?

The current incarnation of Rudy Giuliani lacks many qualities associated with him when he was mayor of New York City: moderation, tolerance, and an eagerness to cross party lines. But as he showed Sunday morning on “Meet the Press,” where he appeared in his role as a Donald Trump surrogate, he can’t be accused of lacking chutzpah, or what the Brits call a brass neck.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s Taxes
Donald Trump’s Cuba Hypocrisy

Donald Trump’s Taxes

The New York Times has not quite obtained this campaign season’s Holy Grail—a full version of Donald Trump’s most recent state and federal income-tax returns—but the newspaper has come impressively close.­­

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is Donald Trump a “Genius” Tax Avoider?
Donald Trump’s Cuba Hypocrisy

The Shifting Symbolism of the Gadsden Flag

In January of 2014, an African-American maintenance mechanic for the United States Postal Service in Denver filed a complaint charging that he had been subjected to racial discrimination. Specifically, as a recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filing on the matter put it, one of the man’s co-workers “repeatedly wore a cap to work with an insignia of the Gadsden Flag.” The cap design in question involves a coiled rattlesnake over the phrase “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” against a yellow background. You’ve seen it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 30th
Morning Cartoon: Friday, September 30th
Bonus Cartoon: The First Debate

Donald Trump’s Cuba Hypocrisy

In 1998, a decade after his ghostwritten memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” made him a household name in the United States, the New York real-estate developer Donald Trump sent a team of consultants to Cuba to sniff out new business opportunities. According to a story in the current issue of Newsweek, Trump paid the expenses for the consultants, who worked for the Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Their bill came to $68,551.88.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Meaning of Trump’s Early-Morning Tweet Storm
Debate Night at the Apollo

How an Old Hacking Law Hampers the Fight Against Online Discrimination

In November of 2007, Richard Villarreal applied for a job with the tobacco company R. J. Reynolds. He was forty-nine years old at the time, living in Cumming, Georgia, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, and working for Coca-Cola to support his wife and teen-age daughter. Villarreal had eight years of sales experience, and believed he was well qualified for the position of territory manager—described in a posting on the employment Web site CareerBuilder as a liaison to retailers stocking R. J. Reynolds products. He filled out a questionnaire and an application form, uploaded his résumé, and waited, but the company never responded. Undeterred, Villarreal reapplied on five subsequent occasions. Each time, the result was the same.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Baseball’s Data Breaches
Fixing the Worst Law in Technology
JSTOR and the Case of the Over-Downloader

The Meaning of Trump’s Early-Morning Tweet Storm

The tweets Donald Trump sent out early Friday morning about Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe who has emerged as an important surrogate for the Hillary Clinton campaign, raise a number of questions, and the first is: Why was Trump up all night?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Debate Night at the Apollo
How Donald Trump Could Disappear from the Political Scene

Debate Night at the Apollo

Anyone wandering into last week’s debate-watching party at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem might have mistaken the event for one of the venue’s famous Amateur Nights. “Is this Clinton Country?” a moderator asked, warming up the excited crowd, which erupted into loud shouting and applause. The next question—“Any Trump supporters here?”—produced a slow, echoing series of claps from one woman near the stage. A woman seated in the next row raised her right hand and, grimacing, stabbed the air, mimicking the shower scene in “Psycho.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Meaning of Trump’s Early-Morning Tweet Storm
How Donald Trump Could Disappear from the Political Scene