FD Afternoon Tea 9.17.20

White collars, Post Office face masks, and American Girl's new fannypack

September 17, 2020

Migrant detention remains big bucks, income inequality quantified by the nonpartisan RAND Corp, some guy wore a snake as a face mask on a bus in Manchester, and the new American Girl doll is from the 80s. It is Thursday, September 17th, and this is the Tea.

'These people are profitable': Under Trump, private prisons are cashing in on ICE detainees (USA Today) As the War on Drugs winds down, the worst among us are profiting from replacing incarcerated black bodies with brown bodies.

How White-Collar Criminals Get Away With It (The New Republic) It’s not just that it’s easier for them to get off, it’s that our entire legal apparatus is structured to punish violent crime and indigent defendants, not multinational companies led by sociopathic billionaires with infinite lawyer access.

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1% (Fast Company) If income growth for all wealth levels except the top 1% kept up with GDP levels like it did in the 50’s and 60’s, workers making 33k annually would be making 61k. Even those in the 90th percentile would be making more, 168k vs. 133k. Here’s a handy chart for when people ask where all the money went:

Newly revealed USPS documents show an agency struggling to manage Trump, Amazon and the pandemic (Washington Post) The headline buries the lede, reminding us just how much better our response to this pandemic could have been:

At one point in April, USPS leaders drafted a news release announcing plans to distribute 650 million masks nationwide, enough to offer five face coverings to every American household. The document, which includes quotations from top USPS officials and other specifics, was never sent. But it suggests that the government’s initial interest in tapping the Postal Service as part of its campaign to combat the coronavirus may have been far more advanced than initially reported this spring.

Why Uber and Lyft are taking a page out of big tobacco’s playbook in labor law battle (Guardian) When you’re spending much of your balance sheet on fighting regulation, lobbying to escape labor liability, and change public opinion, maybe just take a minute and remember whose tactics you’re emulating.

Man using A SNAKE 'as face covering' seen riding bus in Greater Manchester (Manchester Evening News) Of course there’s a picture.

‘Vote Democrat to legalize it,’ Sen. Chuck Schumer tells Leafly (Leafly) While I take Schumer’s promises with several grains of salt, talking to Leafly directly about this while making core policy promises, definitely takes the rhetoric a step forward.

Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust (Guardian) 23% of respondents said they believed the Holocaust was either a myth or had been exaggerated. This was no small study either, with data collected from 1,000 interviews across the US & 200 interviews in each state from young adults aged 18 to 39 selected at random.

American Girl's New Doll Courtney Is Totally '80s-Themed (Oprah Mag) In case you weren’t feeling like a fossil, here she is fanny-pack festooned:

Bob Woodward’s Bad Characters (The New Yorker) Isaac Chotiner is a gleaming gem in the crown of New Yorker writing staff. His interviews and long form pieces are not to be missed.

Song of the Tea: After almost a decade on hiatus, Pendulum is back!

One week of Afternoon Tea in the books! How did you like it? Sound off in the comments! Yours,T