George Packer's Blog, page 227

Donald Trump and Our Messy Nominating System

On October 1, 2015, the Republican National Committee released the rules that would govern the Party’s process for selecting its Presidential nominee. At the time, the headline was that the Party had tweaked its rules to try, in the words of Reince Priebus, the G.O.P. chairman, to “avoid a drawn-out primary process.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Would a National Anti-Trump Movement Look Like?
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Trump Hair Edition
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 20th

What Would a National Anti-Trump Movement Look Like?

Last Wednesday, Donald Trump held a rally at a convention center in downtown Pittsburgh, on the opposite bank of the Allegheny River from the Andy Warhol Museum. The atmosphere was tense enough, as Trump supporters waited to get in and protesters assembled outside, that the police established a skirmish line, inserting themselves between the two groups. Some of the protesters were dressed all in black, with black bandannas covering their faces. At one point, officers were reportedly pepper-sprayed by protesters, who were presumably attempting to get through the police line to the Trump supporters. One of the protesters kicked a cop. When officers tackled him, a young woman jumped on a policeman’s back. A third protester grabbed another cop’s vest. At the same rally, a police officer reached out and casually shoved a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter named Megan Guza, who stumbled to the ground. Encounters like this have become part of the background noise surrounding Trump rallies—the event was a minor national story, not a major one. But they are also a reminder of how complicated the reactions to Trump’s candidacy have been. In the zone of his influence, no one seems to have figured out where the boundaries are.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and Our Messy Nominating System
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Trump Hair Edition
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 20th

Why the Big Banks Can’t Imagine Their Own Demises

One of the signal, but formerly obscure, achievements of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in the wake of the financial crisis, was the requirement that big banks write “living wills” in preparation for their eventual deaths. These documents (the technical term is “resolution plans”) specify everything from how subsidiaries might continue to operate after a head office has declared bankruptcy to how I.T.-service contracts can be transferred to new ownership. Their larger aim is to insure that, in the event of a 2008-level crisis, the big banks can die with dignity, so to speak, instead of requiring taxpayers to bail them out. But, as we discovered last week, when the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation declared the majority of the wills filed last July to be inadequate, large financial institutions can be as reluctant as the rest of us to contemplate their own mortality.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Dubious Logic of Stock-Market Circuit Breakers
Elizabeth Warren’s Challenge to Hillary Clinton
Taking on the Banks: A Conversation with Anat Admati

The Chicago Police, Race, and the Legacy of Bettie Jones

The new report on race and the Chicago Police Department issued last week by a City Hall-appointed task force is, by the standards of bureaucratic language, a full-throated scream. The authors have endorsed what they called the “widely held belief” that Chicago police “have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” They rendered their conclusion in numbers: of the hundreds of people wounded or killed in police shootings in Chicago from 2008 to 2015, about three-quarters were black. Only eight per cent were white; Latinos made up fourteen per cent. When the task force studied traffic stops, the proportions were little better: police were almost twice as likely to stop black drivers as Hispanics or whites. And when things go wrong—when complaints are filed or there is unimpeachable cause for punishing an officer—department oversight is so lax, the Police Accountability Task Force wrote, that it makes “real accountability nearly impossible.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Racial Discrimination and Capital Punishment: The Indefensible Death Sentence of Duane Buck
Me Gusta Trump: Portrait of a Hispanic Trump Voter
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present

Racial Discrimination and Capital Punishment: The Indefensible Death Sentence of Duane Buck

The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund—or the Inc. Fund, as it’s often called—has been one of the leading campaigners in the long effort to convince the Supreme Court that the death penalty is unconstitutional. Early on in that effort, the Inc. Fund was forced to broaden its approach. As the legal scholars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker explained in a law-review article last year, in the nineteen-sixties, the Inc. Fund “focused on the persistence of racial discrimination” in the application of capital punishment, but the Justices “consistently declined to use race as the lens for understanding or regulating the American death penalty.” Inc. Fund lawyers decided “that the best hope for many death-sentenced black inmates might rest on broader reforms—perhaps even abolition—of the capital system.” In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down capital punishment, in Furman v. Georgia, leading to a four-year moratorium on the penalty in the United States, thanks to a winning strategy devised by the Inc. Fund lawyers. They argued that, despite declining public support for the death penalty, states were keeping it so that they could impose it on marginal groups, including the poor and the powerless as well as blacks.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Chicago Police, Race, and the Legacy of Bettie Jones
On Immigration, the Supreme Court Sounds More Like Congress
The Supreme Court Extremism of Clarence Thomas and Chuck Grassley

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s New York Wins: A Preview of the General Election?

Primary season is far from over. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton is fully guaranteed to win the parties’ respective nominating contests. And both major parties will be doing a lot of politicking, voting, and arm-twisting between now and the conventions in July. But, when all is said and done, it may well turn out that the 2016 general-election campaign began in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday night.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and Our Messy Nominating System
What Would a National Anti-Trump Movement Look Like?
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Trump Hair Edition

Wild Parties: In Defense of Political Factions

One of the weirder things about the current Presidential campaign is the outrage shown—you might almost say the umbrage taken—over party rules perceived as anti-democratic or unfair. This cuts in both directions. Bernie Sanders supporters are outraged by the presence of superdelegates, usually darkly described as party bosses, presumably complete with well-chewed cigars and derby hats and jobs for the boys, instead of the weary, long-serving, middle-ranking legislators they mostly are. Why do they get to vote? At the same time, Hillary-ites are outraged that a handful of quixotic caucus-goers get an outsize voice against actual hardworking voters. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is outraged to find that any rules exist at all that require his close attention—that he must, so to speak, read the rules on the inside of the game box in order to win. Bernie merely grumbles, while Trump threatens not to threaten violence. (New York values, indeed: Nice little convention you have here; be a shame if anything happens to it.) Both arguments show a poor understanding of what a party is.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bill de Blasio’s Park Slope Primary
Did the New York Primary Campaign Change Anything?
Bernie Sanders’s Forty-Year-Old Idea

Bill de Blasio’s Park Slope Primary

As Park Slope, Brooklyn, awoke to one of the first mild spring mornings, the fledgling blossoms’ struggle to open against the last chilly winds of the season seemed to offer a special sympathy to a larger neighborhood battle: Hillary or Bernie? Over at the Park Slope Public Library, on Sixth Avenue at Ninth Street, voting in New York’s primaries was commencing. Slopers drifted up the avenue, past the orderly blocks of brownstones, many securing a cup of coffee before turning to the fate of two New Yorkers, one native, one adopted.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Wild Parties: In Defense of Political Factions
Did the New York Primary Campaign Change Anything?
Bernie Sanders’s Forty-Year-Old Idea

Creating a Map to Navigate the Post-Earthquake Landscape in Ecuador

When the shaking, faint but jarring, began, Daniel Orellana, a geographer at the University of Cuenca, in southern Ecuador, was at home with his wife and daughter. It was Saturday evening, around 7 P.M. The tremors subsided, and Orellana eventually went back to a paper he was writing, then took his family to his mother’s house for her birthday. Ecuador, which sits on the seismically volatile part of the the Pacific basin called the Ring of Fire, has a number of active volcanoes and regular small earthquakes, so, although the reverberations were worrisome, they were also familiar to Orellana. He didn’t learn until he returned home, late that evening, that an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 had struck the northern coast, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and collapsing roadways, bridges, and buildings across a wide swath of the country.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Haiti Has a President
Slide Show: Uncanny Valleys
When an App Is Called Racist

Not Even Kabul Is Safe from the Taliban

A trio of true believers from the Taliban blew themselves up in downtown Kabul today, leaving behind the sort of macabre tableau that much of the world has become sadly used to: writhing bodies, severed limbs, wailing mothers. At least thirty people died in the attack, and more than three hundred people were maimed and wounded. But here’s a question worth posing, even now—indeed, especially now, in the fifteenth year of the American war in Afghanistan. What on Earth could the Taliban’s commanders hope to gain from such an act of mass murder, in which many, if not most, of the victims were civilians?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Lives of American Soldiers, Before and After War
Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue
The Streets of Brussels