George Packer's Blog, page 213

Another Blow to Holding Banks Accountable for the Financial Crisis

Back in the late-housing-bubble period, in 2007, Countrywide Home Loans, which was then the largest mortgage provider in the country, rolled out a new lending program. The bank called it the “high-speed swim lane,” or H.S.S.L., or, even more to the point, “hustle.” Countrywide, like most mortgage lenders, sold its loans to Wall Street banks or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants, which bundled them and, in turn, sold them to investors. Unlike the Wall Street banks, Fannie and Freddie insured the loans, so they demanded only the ones of the highest quality. But by that time, borrowers with high credit scores were getting scarcer, and Countrywide faced the prospect of collapsing revenue and profits. Hence, the hustle program, which “streamlined” Countrywide’s loan origination, cutting out underwriters and putting loan processors, whom the company had previously deemed not qualified to answer borrowers’ questions, in charge of reviewing loan applications. In practice, Countrywide dropped most of the conditions meant to insure that loans would be repaid.

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Related:
Making Insider Trading Legal
Exclusive Video: Violence Inside Rikers
After Shelly Silver, It’s Time to Drain the Albany Swamp

The Surreal Presidential Debate You Didn’t See: Libertarians in Las Vegas

Two years ago, the Times Magazine put on its cover a photocopied image of Rand Paul, accompanied by a provocative headline: “Major Threat: Rand Paul and the Libertarians Could Win Young Voters for the G.O.P.—If the Party Doesn’t Shut Them Down.” The cover was designed to look like a hardcore-punk flyer from the nineteen-eighties, and its sentiment has come to seem nearly as old-fashioned. Senator Paul’s Presidential campaign was startlingly ineffective—shut down not by the Republican Party but by Republican primary voters, who were profoundly unimpressed. They opted, instead, for Donald Trump, the least libertarian candidate in the field; he summarizes his platform as “I’m going to win and we’re going to take care of everybody.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has spent much of her campaign telling voters how much she has in common with the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

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Related:
Seventeen Words That Spelled Trouble for Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders’s Political Ancestor, Wayne Lyman Morse
The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

The Journey from Syria, Part Four

In the last episode of “The Journey,” the group dynamics began to fray. More than a hundred refugees and migrants had left Greece together on foot, but the able-bodied among them had little patience for those unfit for the trek. Within two days, they had abandoned an old man by the side of the highway. (The filmmaker, Matthew Cassel, arranged for him to be picked up by an ambulance.) A group of young men insisted on splitting off from the large families and marching at their own pace. “The easy part was hard for you, and the real shit is yet to come,” one of them told a group of mothers and children.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Journey from Syria, Part Three
The Journey from Syria, Part Two
The Journey from Syria, Part One

Teaching Anti-Extremism in Kenya

When I first met Ayub Mohamud, he was preparing a lesson for the next period at Eastleigh High School, a boys’ secondary school in Nairobi, Kenya. The school is in Eastleigh, a working-class residential and commercial district nicknamed Little Mogadishu because of the mostly Somali immigrant population there; a good number of the school’s students are Somali or Somali-Kenyan, and many are Muslim. Mohamud, who teaches Islamic studies and business, jogged up a flight of stairs in the school’s courtyard and entered a classroom, where students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one had already assembled for an Islamic-studies class. “As salaam alaikum,” he greeted them. “Wa alaikum salaam!” they said in return.

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Related:
Mercy for a Terrorist in Norway
Elephants in Dust
Stop Humiliating Teachers

Andy Murray Versus the French

The tennis player Mathias Bourgue, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman, is ranked No. 164 in the world. Until today, in the second round of the French Open, he had never played a five-set match. He had never played anyone inside the top fifty. Until he beat Jordi Samper-Montaña, a Spanish qualifier, in his first-round match—it took him nearly three and a half hours—he had never played in a major.

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Related:
Why Tolstoy Took Up Tennis
David Foster Wallace’s Perfect Game
Maria Sharapova Plays the Long Game

The Challenges Facing Hillary Clinton

With some people I know in panic mode about the latest opinion polls showing Donald Trump performing well in a prospective fall campaign against Hillary Clinton, I thought it might be worth stepping back a bit and looking at the prospects for such a race in November. For Democrats and others alarmed by Trump’s advance, the outlook is reassuring, but not entirely so. Assuming that Hillary Clinton wraps up the Democratic nomination pretty soon, she will be the firm favorite to win the general election. But she faces some significant challenges, not least of which is confronting a demagogue who daily traduces her and her husband.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 24th
Do Trump and Clinton Matter?
Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 23rd

The Journey from Syria, Part Three

In the second episode of “The Journey,” Aboud Shalhoub and his brother Amer set off from Athens for the Macedonian border. Amer had not come to meet Aboud in Greece alone, as expected, but in the company of a young Syrian mother named Fadwa and her two daughters. Fadwa sought to build a life in Sweden, while Amer and Aboud were determined to reach the Netherlands. But in the Balkans, it was best to travel as a group.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Journey from Syria, Part Two
The Journey from Syria, Part One
Iran’s Grim News from Syria

Dilma Rousseff and Brazil’s Horrible Year

Brazil’s embattled President Dilma Rousseff was forced to step down from office earlier this month, pending impeachment proceedings, after a majority of lawmakers in her country’s Senate and lower house of Congress voted to suspend her. Rousseff is accused of doctoring official budget figures and using money from state banks in order to hide the real state of Brazil’s shrinking economy, so as to help her win reelection, in 2014. Her removal took place as she suffered from plunging popularity ratings amid an economic recession and a string of corruption scandals involving her government, the state oil company, Petrobras, and other Brazilian corporations, including the construction giant Odebrecht. (Rousseff has not been accused of personal, self-enriching corruption.) She decried her removal as a “coup,” the result of a “conspiracy” against her, and she accused Michel Temer, the country’s gleamingly conservative Vice-President, who has now replaced her, of being part of it. Temer’s first actions—he promised a series of pro-business reforms, slashed the number of Brazil’s ministries by nearly one third, and named an all-male and mostly white cabinet that included a soybean tycoon as agriculture minister and an evangelical creationist as trade minister—did little to dispel the whiff of suspicion that a political counter-revolution was taking place, following thirteen years of rule by the left-of-center Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party. (In the latest twist, a leaked tape recording, apparently from March, captures Romero Jucá, a senator under investigation in the Petrobras scandal, speaking with a former senator who was also under investigation about a “pact” to “change the government” and install Temer. Jucá was recently appointed Temer’s planning minister, but stepped down on Tuesday following the recording’s release.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Dilma Rousseff and the Chronic Dysfunction of Brazil’s Politics
A Stronger Link Between Zika and Birth Defects
The Collapse of Dilma Rousseff, the Richard Nixon of Brazil

The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis

This month, regional battles over the right of transgender people to access public bathrooms were elevated to national legal theatre. First, the Justice Department told North Carolina that its recent law, requiring education boards and public agencies to limit the use of sex-segregated bathrooms to people of the corresponding biological sex, violated federal civil-rights laws. Governor Pat McCrory responded with a lawsuit, asking a court to declare that the state’s law doesn’t violate those federal laws. Meanwhile, in a suit filed on the same day, the Justice Department asked a court to say that it does.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the May 30, 2016, Issue
The Politics of Bathrooms
Transgender Rights and the End of the New South

The Journey from Syria, Part Two

In the first episode of “The Journey,” Aboud Shalhoub travelled from Turkey to Greece aboard a small dinghy packed with refugees that puttered across the Aegean Sea under the cover of darkness. Now, having reached Athens, Shalhoub hikes up to the Acropolis, in the center of the city. “We’ve reached a country where there’s real freedom,” he tells the filmmaker Matthew Cassel. “I’m speaking from the birthplace of democracy.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Journey from Syria, Part One
Iran’s Grim News from Syria
How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East