August 20, 2024 ❧ Labor & Palestine at the DNC, Missouri funds anti-abortion groups, and Mexico's “dirty war”

Plus: Remembering Phil Donahue, Purdue Pharma, Perdue chicken, a parliament fight in Turkey, and a bird with a massive mouth

All the news that’s unfit to print

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What's going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

❧ At the Democratic National Convention, labor leaders took the spotlight. But will it translate into policy? On the opening night of the DNC, a high-powered lineup of speakers—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Clinton, and President Biden—took the stage to endorse Kamala Harris for president. One of the most consequential speeches, though, came from United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain, who came out wearing a bright red “Trump is a Scab” T-shirt to voice his support. The crowd seemed pumped for Fain, chanting “Trump’s a scab!” back at him in the familiar “USA! USA!” cadence. Fain took the opportunity to voice his union’s grievances against “corporate greed,” but he was also vocal about his support for the vice president, saying: “In 2024, who will stand with the working class in our fight for justice? Kamala Harris!”

The UAW has almost a million active and retired members (about 40 percent of whom swing between supporting the two parties), so Fain’s word carries a lot of weight in this election, especially in the all-important swing state of Michigan. Six other labor leaders spoke at the DNC too: President April Verett of the Service Employees International Union; President Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; President Brent Booker of the Laborers’ International Union of North America; President Kenneth W. Cooper of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; President Claude Cummings Jr. of the Communications Workers of America; and President Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO. Shuler said Harris would “go after big pharma, corporate landlords, and price-gougers” and bring about a future “where there’s no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job, or as Donald Trump would say, a Black job—just a good union job!”

But is it actually true that Harris will “stand with the working class” and get people “good union jobs?” There’s room for doubt. It’s notable that the DNC also included a speech from California Senator Laphonza Butler, who was once a labor leader with the SEIU, but made an abrupt heel-turn to work as a corporate lawyer for companies like Airbnb and Uber. The latter of which was trying to prevent its drivers from being legally considered “employees,” and thus getting labor rights and benefits. Butler is now in Harris’s “inner circle,” according to the Washington Post, and Harris’s brother-in-law—a major campaign fundraiser—is also an executive at Uber, so she has closer ties with the bosses in that particular fight. Harris has pledged to pass the PRO Act if it reaches her desk, which is good, but the rest of her labor policy is vague at best; as we pointed out last week, she’s promised “to raise the minimum wage,” but won’t say by how much or when. 

Also noteworthy is the exclusion of one of America’s biggest unions: the Teamsters. According to Axios, Teamster leader Sean O’Brien made a request to speak at the DNC, but was “ghosted,” receiving no response at all. It’s likely that the Democrats are unhappy with him for speaking at the Republican National Convention last month, which has proven to be a controversial move—but the solution was to offer a better deal and win the Teamsters’ loyalty, not shut them out. That, too, is a worrying sign. 

It might have been wise for these union leaders to demand some concrete concessions on policy before handing over their valuable endorsements. If Harris gets into office and then governs as a standard corporate Democrat, abandoning her pro-worker rhetoric like she abandoned Medicare for All, it’s their credibility to their members that will be damaged. 

PAST AFFAIRS

Alex Skopic and Nathan Robinson wrote earlier this month that 

“It's a Bad Idea for Harris to Abandon Progressive Policies”

❧ Outside the DNC, thousands of people have also assembled in Chicago’s Union Park to demand that the Democratic Party end its support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Inside the United Center, Liano Sharon, an uncommitted Jewish delegate from Michigan, unfurled a giant banner reading “Stop Arming Israel,” but delegates in front of his group were quick to block the sign with their “We ❤ Joe” convention sign-stick things. Another delegate then snatched the banner away from them:

Another audience member used his Biden stick to whack one of the hijab-clad demonstrators repeatedly in the back of the head, which is a pretty emblematic representation of how the administration has treated its Muslim supporters over the past year.

A few DNC speakers have paid lip service to the suffering in Gaza. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised Kamala Harris for (supposedly) “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.” And Joe Biden even acknowledged that the protesters outside “have a point.” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock said, “I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza… to be okay.” The DNC also granted Uncommitted delegates some un-televised panels to talk about the Palestinian plight, but they were held in a separate venue away from the main stage. This isn’t much, but according to veteran DNC staff member Jim Zogby, prior to these panels, the word “Palestine” had not been uttered at a Democratic convention since 1988.

Ultimately, though, this is just more words words words. The Biden administration’s policy toward Israel has not changed—last week it approved another $20 billion in military aid to Israel, so we can see how well Harris’ “tireless” advocacy for a ceasefire is going. Meanwhile, the actual Democratic platform, released this week, reaffirmed its “commitment to Israel’s security, qualitative military edge, and right to defend itself” and even applauded Biden’s opposition to the U.N.’s “one-sided efforts to condemn Israel.” As journalist Ryan Grim said, it’s a “huge slap in the face” to Uncommitted voters.

Protesters in Chicago’s Union Park on Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention. 

(Photo: Unicorn Riot)

In other news…

• Senator John Fetterman’s communications director—not the one who resigned in March, but the new one—has directly criticized her boss’ fervent support for Israel, saying that “I don’t agree with him” and that “his international views are a lot less nuanced than my generation.” That’s pretty much unheard of in Congress, and a sign of just how bad Fetterman’s positions (and personality) are. (Salon)
  
  
• Numbers USA, an anti-immigrant group with ties to white nationalists, is pushing conservative lawmakers to mandate the use of the website E-Verify to screen employees’ immigration status. (The Lever)
  
  
• George Santos has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in a New York court, and will have to pay nearly $600,000 in restitution and forfeitures. He’s also likely to face prison time. (Associated Press)
  
  
• The Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to reject a settlement that would have shielded the Sackler Family, who own OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma, from civil lawsuits over their responsibility for the opioid epidemic. While this is good, blocking the deal also gets rid of the part that would have required the Sacklers to pay out billions to fight the opioid crisis. As of now, it’s unclear what happens next. (PBS)

Art by Kasia Kozakiewicz from Issue 38 of Current Affairs Magazine, September/October 2022

• In the latest of a long string of embarrassing blunders, New York City Mayor Eric Adams got Pakistan and India mixed up at a press conference, thanking the “Pakistani officers” at an event for India’s independence day. He also said New York City was “the New Delhi of America,” a line he’s recycled before for many different audiences, including when he called it “the Islamabad of America,” “the Tel Aviv of America,” and “the Kiev of America.” (Outlook India)

He’ll compare New York to anything, just name it. 

(Image: NYC Mayor’s Office via Flickr)

• Russell Vought, a policy director for the Republican National Committee and one of the masterminds behind Project 2025, says conservatives would “have a national ban on pornography if we could,” but that pesky First Amendment is in the way. So Vought says they’re “doing it from the back door” (heh) by introducing ID requirements and other barriers to accessing adult content. (Reason)
  
  
• Democrats are trying to block the Party for Socialism and Liberation from ballots in swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, because apparently “saving democracy” requires strictly limiting who participates in democracy. (New York Post)
  
  
• TV host Phil Donahue died yesterday at 88. As the face of one of America’s longest running talk shows, Donahue is remarkable not only for pushing the genre forward, but for his brave willingness to explore topics like civil rights, gay rights, and feminism on television at a time when they were considered taboo. Over his career, his guests included Ralph Nader, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, and Noam Chomsky. Donahue was one of few mainstream voices willing to question American militarism during the Cold War and in the aftermath of 9/11. His opposition to the war in Iraq ultimately led him to be fired from his show on MSNBC in 2003. Here is an interview from the Real News Network in 2014 in which Donahue speaks about how hosting his show led him to question some of his most deeply held beliefs:

AROUND THE STATES

❧ Missouri is giving millions of dollars in public funds to anti-abortion groups who harass women outside of clinics. In a new report for ProPublica, Jeremy Kohler writes that the state has allocated “over $11.2 million in tax credits” to a nonprofit group called Coalition Life “in the past year alone.” Coalition Life is officially designated as a “pregnancy resource center,” but the majority of its activities are simply anti-abortion activism. Most notably, its members are known for donning orange safety vests and doing what they call “sidewalk counseling”—that is, standing outside abortion clinics and trying to harangue women into not using them. In his article, Kohler gives a firsthand account of what this looks like in practice:

On a recent Saturday outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, a woman wearing a reflective orange vest and body camera flagged down a car pulling into the facility. “Hi, can I talk to you a second?” the woman, Sheri King, said to the driver, reaching for a pamphlet in a pocket of her vest with information about alternatives to abortion and birth control. “I’m Sheri.” A Planned Parenthood volunteer bolted toward the car, urging the driver to keep moving. “They’re not with the clinic,” the volunteer yelled. 

“Turnarounds” basically means “women we’ve lectured and/or intimidated.”

(Screenshot: Coalition Life)

Because they’re considered a “pregnancy resource center,” Kohler reports that Coalition Life is eligible for “tax credits worth 70% of their donation amount,” along with a portion of “the $8.6 million the state directly allocates to pregnancy centers.” In other words, every taxpayer in Missouri is giving some of their hard-earned money to fund the group’s anti-abortion activities, even if they support abortion personally. And because abortion has already been banned in Missouri, most of those activities take place outside the state itself. 

Texas does this too, diverting an estimated $140 million from the public coffers to various anti-abortion groups that masquerade as pregnancy resources. In both states, every dollar that’s devoted to projects like Coalition Life’s sidewalk propaganda is not going to actual resources for pregnant people, like free medical treatment. It’s a scandal all around, and it needs to stop. 

Would YOU want this man approaching you about your reproductive choices? 

(Image: Coalition life via Facebook)

READER MAILBAG

A very special thanks goes out to reader Sally of Ontario, Canada, who sent us this wonderful Ronald Reagan postcard! This was serendipitous, as our editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson is actually hard at work on an article about Reagan for Current Affairs Issue 49, coming at the end of August. Keep an eye out for that, and thanks very much for the kind words!

In other news…

• Hundreds of people held a protest march in Anchorage, Alaska after cops fatally shot a 16-year-old girl, Easter Leafa, in her family’s apartment. (Anchorage Daily News)
  
  
• A UPS driver in Texas ended up in the hospital after he passed out due to heat exhaustion and crashed his delivery truck. According to Teamsters Local 767, which has provided video of the crash, the driver was experiencing “heat-related symptoms” including vomiting. But his supervisors rejected calls for assistance, instead requiring him to drive himself back to the facility, in violation of company guidelines. The Teamsters also allege that UPS has not followed through on its promise to install air conditioning units in its new vehicles. (USA Today)
  
  
• A Seattle museum has installed a placard saying that Kurt Cobain “un-alived himself” in 1994, adopting a term TikTok users have coined to get around the platform’s censorship of the word “suicide.” It’s all well and good to be mindful of people’s sensitivities, but using euphemisms to avoid talking about difficult subjects is typically a pretty bad idea. Are we going to be talking about “shooty stick control” or “the big oopsie in Ukraine” next? (USA Today)

(Image: @sovietscifi via Twitter)

• The Department of Defense has been using a fire suppressant that has contaminated the drinking water of millions of Americans over the last half-century. Now, they are defying an Environmental Protection Agency order requiring them to clean up their mess of “forever chemicals” in the water supply of Tucson, Arizona. (Responsible Statecraft)
  
  
• A law passed earlier this year in Utah has made executions in the state much more secretive. (Utah News Dispatch)
  
  
• More than 167,000 pounds of Perdue chicken nuggets have been recalled after customers found metal wire inside their poultry. That’s not what “chicken wire” is supposed to mean. (Associated Press) 

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ A massive new report finds that Mexico’s one-party government committed “systematic and widespread” human rights violations against left-wing opponents during the “dirty war” period that lasted between 1965 and 1990. The more than 3,500-page report, titled “Fue el Estado” (“It was the State”) is the product of a three-year investigation by Mexico’s governmental Truth Commission into the country’s buried Cold War history. 

The killing and disappearances of government critics and other marginalized groups, like LGBTQ and Indigenous people, were common throughout the era. The period is remembered for the violent repression of political dissent, most famously the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, at which police opened fire and killed perhaps hundreds of student protesters just a week and a half before the Mexico City Olympics. 

But the full scale of the state violence during this period has remained buried. The government justified its violence as part of a campaign against guerrilla fighters. But as the National Security Archive summarizes it:

The commissioners accused the Mexican State of unleashing a violent counterinsurgency campaign against perceived opponents—not only armed guerrillas, but a range of dissident groups the government believed threatened the political, economic, and moral stability of Mexico’s ruling party.

The new report, which pulls from the testimony of more than 1,000 survivors, provides new detail on just how widespread, calculated, and brutal the repression was. The report identifies nearly 8,600 victims of human rights violations, including more than 1,000 people who “disappeared” and whose fates are still unknown. One of the most chilling aspects of the report details the prevalence of “death flights” during which victims were shot in the back of the head and then thrown out of airplanes over the Pacific Ocean. According to one witness, military police officer Gustavo Tarín, perhaps 1,500 people were killed in this manner, and the report identifies dozens of these flights having been logged. The report also unearthed 46 previously unreported massacres, including the mass killings of more than 300 Indigenous people in the 1980s and 100 transgender women in the early 1990s. 

If all this feels familiar, that’s because it was hardly unique to Mexico. It was just one of many regimes that carried out similar repression campaigns against left-wing dissidents during the Cold War. As part of the CIA-led Operation Condor, right-wing dictatorships across nearly every country in South America—most famously Chile and Argentina—used similar methods of torture and murder to eliminate tens of thousands of enemies. (They even shared in the practice of throwing their victims out of aircraft, which spawned an infamous right-wing meme about giving “free helicopter rides” to leftists.) And while Mexico was not formally part of the CIA’s Condor network, basically every president to rule during the “dirty war” period had extensive ties with the Agency.

While the latest report pulls back the curtain on the history of this forgotten period, there is still so much that remains unknown. Mexico’s military did its best to obstruct the Truth Commission, destroying documents and even going as far as to spy on its lead investigator. The commissioners also pointed out that the U.S. still holds reams of classified information about Mexico’s dirty war period and urged incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum to make declassification a priority. If the injustices of this period are ever to be reconciled, its perpetrators need to be brought to justice. That can only be done if both the U.S. and Mexico cooperate with efforts to find the truth.

Photos of dirty war-era detainees, which were quietly censored by the Mexican government in 2018. (Image: National Security Archive, via The General Archive of the Nation)

In other news…

• Citing a shortfall in revenue needed to pay debts to the IMF and other international capitalist bodies, the government of Kenya is now reversing many of the concessions it made to protesters back in June, bringing back some of the unpopular tax hikes that caused the protests in the first place. (Associated Press)
  
  
• A massive fistfight broke out in the Turkish Parliament last Friday, as a left-wing MP called the ruling party “the biggest terrorists of this country,” leading to a 30-minute brawl in which dozens of politicians punched and grappled each other. This happened previously in 2020 over a vote on Syria, so Turkey can reset its “years without a parliamentary melee” sign to zero. (The Guardian)

• Amid a historic housing affordability crisis in Australia, the Labor-led government of Victoria is planning to demolish 6,600 public housing units in Melbourne. The government claims that it will make room for the construction of more not-for-profit “affordable” housing, but has been vague about what exactly that means. (World Socialist Web Site)
  
  
• In France, leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is threatening to launch an impeachment effort against President Emmanuel Macron unless Macron appoints his preferred candidate, the socialist Lucie Castets, as Prime Minister. It’s a bold tactic, and one that threatens to create fractures on the French left, as not all of Mélenchon’s allies are on board. (Politico)

After a brief alliance against the far right, Macron (left) and Mélenchon (right) are back to being enemies.

• A cholera outbreak has killed 22 people in war-torn Sudan. At least 354 cases have been confirmed in recent weeks. As the war continues into its 16th month, Sudan’s medical system lies in tatters, with major facilities, including in the capital Khartoum, having been destroyed by the fighting. (Associated Press)
  
  
• Elon Musk has announced that Twitter (which he still insists on calling “X”) will shut down its operations in Brazil. The dramatic decision comes after a Brazilian Supreme Court judge threatened to arrest company representatives if they refuse to take down accounts that spread hate speech and disinformation about elections. (Al Jazeera)

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK

Courtesy of Kuensel, the largest newspaper in Bhutan:

This is actually a fairly serious op-ed about the state of public sanitation in Bhutan; it just happens to sound both hilarious and strangely profound. Great job, everyone involved. 

• In some rather disingenuous framing of the latest round of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, Axios published the headline “Hamas rejects new U.S. proposal for Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.” Within the body of the story, however, author Barak Ravid acknowledged that “Hamas objects to the fact that the proposal doesn't include a permanent ceasefire or comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.” So in other words, the plan they rejected was not actually a “ceasefire” agreement.

• LONG READ: In Responsible Statecraft, Elizabeth Schmidt writes that influence in Africa is at the center of the growing “cold war” between the U.S. and China. One key factor she mentions is how China has a different approach from the West when it comes to providing foreign investment to the continent: 

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, China had surpassed the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner, and more recently as Africa’s fourth largest source of direct foreign investment…

Unlike the Western powers and the international financial institutions they dominate, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition for its loans, investments, aid, and trade. Although it has required that public works contracts be awarded to Chinese companies and that Chinese supplies be used, the agreements have not required a shift in economic models, adherence to democratic principles, respect for human rights, or the implementation of labor and environmental protections.

BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK

The Great Potoo is one of the craziest-looking birds you’ll ever see. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

But while you’d assume there’s no bird more conspicuous, they are actually masters of disguise. Native to Central and South America, potoos spend most of the day motionless among the trees. With plumage colored like bark, they maintain a perfect vertical posture for hours, which allows them to pose as broken-off branches. They have to keep their giant bowling-ball eyes closed for most of the day to avoid giving themselves up, but have imperceptible slits that allow them to monitor their surroundings. 

Bird? What bird? You’re imagining things. Nothing to see here!   (Photo: Ambergris Caye)

They have earned the moniker of the “ghost bird.” And like any good ghost, they are most active once night falls. In the dark, potoos are anything but motionless. They use their gaping maws to gobble up unsuspecting flying insects, and even small birds and bats on occasion. 

But even more ghostly is their signature call. Each species of potoo has its own distinctive sound, but the Great Potoo’s guttural scream is the perfect compliment to its diabolical visage.