George Packer's Blog, page 202

A Corporate “thankyou”? No, Thanks

Welcome to the Week in Business, a look at some of the biggest stories in business and economics.

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Related:
Donald Trump Chooses Michael Bay as Running Mate
LinkedIn’s Complicated Bet on the Future of Work
The Paul Ryan Delusion

Charleston and America, One Year Later

Friday marks one year since nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, had welcomed the killer, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, into their bible study, and prayed with him, before he opened fire. After the massacre, the family members of the slain men and women, in the throes of unimaginable grief, offered radical forgiveness to Roof. “You took something very precious away from me,” one relative said, addressing Roof during a court hearing. “But I forgive you.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Hate That Remains, a Year After Charleston
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 14th
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control

More Fighting Words from Bernie Sanders

If there was any doubt what Bernie Sanders would say in his live online address on Thursday night, he quickly resolved it by making clear that this was no concession speech, but rather a rallying cry for his supporters, and a road map for a future that extends well beyond Tuesday, November 8th. “Election days come and go,” Sanders began. “But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end. They continue every day, every week, and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton, After the Clintonites
The Paul Ryan Delusion
A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops

Former Ambassador Robert Ford on the State Department Mutiny on Syria

The Obama Administration has long been divided over what to do about Syria. The crisis produced one of the biggest differences between President Obama and Hillary Clinton, his first Secretary of State. The policy chasm has only deepened during the five years of conflict, which has now reportedly claimed almost half a million lives. The State Department acknowledged tersely on Friday that more than fifty American diplomats had recently submitted a letter of complaint about U.S. policy in Syria through its Dissent Channel, a sort of complaint box through which employees can voice their disagreement with official policy without fear of reprisal. Travelling in Europe, Secretary John Kerry told reporters, “I think it’s an important statement and I respect the process very, very much, and I will probably meet with people or have a chance to talk when we get back.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Do F.B.I. Stings Help the Fight Against ISIS?
The Case Against Assad
The Journey from Syria, Part Six

The Unintended Consequences of the Stanford Rape-Case Recall

When the Supreme Court refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992, a plurality of the Justices famously explained that doing otherwise would look like surrender to the intense political protests directed at the Court. If it appeared that the Justices were bending to pressure, the plurality opinion argued, the public’s view of the legitimacy of the Court itself would be damaged. And undermining the Court’s legitimacy would ultimately harm the country, which needs to have confidence that the Court can decide legal cases independent of political causes. “The Court’s concern with legitimacy is not for the sake of the Court but for the sake of the Nation to which it is responsible,” Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter wrote.

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Hillary Clinton, After the Clintonites

The past ten days have emphasized the long arc of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. On June 9th, President Obama’s endorsement bound her candidacy to his Presidency, and bound the three major figures of recent Democratic Party history (one Obama, two Clintons) together, too. “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to ever hold this office,” Obama said. Then, on Tuesday, the President gave a blistering speech against Donald Trump at the Treasury Department, and Clinton, speaking at the same time, in Pittsburgh, echoed him, nearly word for word. Obama promised himself as an eager surrogate, and Clinton’s staffers quickly made use of the White House photo archives: two leaders together, confronting crises.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
More Fighting Words from Bernie Sanders
The Paul Ryan Delusion
A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops

The Hate That Remains, a Year After Charleston

In February, 1896, the former Confederate General Bradley T. Johnson addressed the Ladies Memorial Association of Richmond, Virginia, which was dedicating the former White House of the Confederacy as the “treasure house of Confederate history and relics.” Historian David Blight recounts the moment in “Race and Reunion,” his history, published in 2001, of the ways the Civil War has been remembered. Blight writes, “Johnson boldly declared that the ‘South did not make war in defense of slavery; slavery was only the incident, the point attacked.’ And the attack had been that of a ‘free mobocracy of the North’ against a ‘slave democracy of the South.’ ”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Charleston and America, One Year Later
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 14th
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control

LinkedIn’s Complicated Bet on the Future of Work

LinkedIn, the business-oriented social-networking company that Microsoft acquired, this week, for $26.2 billion, was founded on two premises. The first was that, even in the winner-take-all world of Internet businesses, there would still be room for a niche company (meaning, in this case, only four hundred million registered users, and a hundred million users per month). The second was that what it means to work in a business is now profoundly different from what it was in the Organization Man era. White-collar employees are highly unlikely to spend a lifetime with a single employer, and more and more are not employees at all in the traditional sense. They self-manage their careers, in part by maintaining online personal networks, rather than have them managed by a corporate human-relations department.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
LinkedIn and the Modern Worker’s Wandering Eye
Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn
Microsoft’s Very Good Day

The Paul Ryan Delusion

There are essentially two Republican parties right now: the Party of Donald J. Trump and the Party of House Speaker Paul Ryan—who has, nonetheless, endorsed Trump for President. One of the ways in which members of the Ryan faction delude themselves is by believing that Ryan’s policies would dominate if Trump were President and Ryan remained Speaker of the House.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, June 16th
A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops
Trump’s Unrecognizable America

Murder of British M.P. Heightens Uncertainty Over Brexit Vote

As I sat down to write this post, on Thursday morning, there was a week to go until the British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, and a “Leave” vote was looking like a live possibility. Politicians who had endorsed a vote to “Remain” were getting nervous, and the financial markets were gyrating with every new opinion poll. As for the British people—well, until Thursday lunchtime many of them were busy watching the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, which is being held in France. Then, Thursday afternoon, came the shocking news about the brutal murder of a Member of Parliament by a man who, reportedly, shouted “Britain first!”—the name of a far-right organization that is virulently opposed to immigration and to the E.U.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A New Way for the Wealthy to Shop for Citizenships
The Economic Arguments Against Brexit
The E.U. vs. B.D.S.: the Politics of Israel Sanctions