Plus: Americans clamor for climate accountability, South Africa holds its elections, Biden allows a dangerous escalation between Ukraine and Russia, and chickens are on the rampage!
May 31, 2024 ❧ Convict Trump, the Collapsed Gaza Aid Pier and Workers vs. Dollar General
Plus: Americans clamor for climate accountability, South Africa holds its elections, Biden considering a dangerous escalation between Ukraine and Russia, and chickens are on the rampage!
Yesterday, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. A jury of 12 New Yorkers (including one who was apparently an avid Truth Social reader!) found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, charges which carry a maximum of four years in prison. Per the New York Times:
The former president sat largely expressionless, a glum look on his face, after the jury issued its verdict.
The jury found that Mr. Trump had faked records to conceal the purpose of money given to his onetime fixer, Michael D. Cohen. The false records disguised the payments as ordinary legal expenses when in truth, Mr. Trump was reimbursing Mr. Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money deal the fixer struck with the porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her account of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump.
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, just four days before the Republican National Convention. There now exists the distinct possibility that Donald Trump will be the first person since Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1920 to contest the presidency from prison. (Getting convicted for covering up payments to a porn star is, of course, a far less noble reason to go to jail than speaking out against a war under penalty of imprisonment, but Trump and Debs are nevertheless kinfolk in this one department.)
Trump will also appeal this verdict, though it’s unlikely that the question will be settled before Election Day. (If Trump does indeed receive prison time, there exists the hilarious possibility that he may be able to run for president but not allowed to actually vote for himself, as the state of New York bars people in prison from casting ballots.) Speaker Mike Johnson has already urged the Supreme Court to step in to save Trump, who continues to push the fanciful belief that presidents have total immunity from legal prosecution. (A view that he has somehow reconciled with his desire to see President Biden prosecuted). We'd like to think that the Supreme Court will think better of essentially declaring the president a king. But at least two of the justices seem cool with his attempt to overthrow the election result in 2020, so take nothing for granted.
CURRENT AFFAIRS EXCLUSIVE!
In comments to Current Affairs Magazine immediately following his conviction, the former president described his sudden affinity for the project of prison abolitionism and friendship with Angela Davis.
[DISCLAIMER: This is an AI-generated parody... Trump didn't actually say any of this, though we wish he had.]
As for the crime itself, these hush money payments are far from the most egregious thing Trump did while in the White House. (They probably don't even crack the top 100.) And they are certainly the least consequential thing for which he faces criminal indictment. But his lawyers have successfully delayed or derailed the three other, more consequential, cases against him—for squirreling away classified documents, attempting to overturn his electoral loss, and for pushing officials in Georgia to falsely hand him enough votes to win the state. So despite its apparent weakness, the Stormy Daniels case ended up being the one. It’s good to see Trump face accountability for something,even if that something feels relatively trivial.
For a moment of such historical import, though, it does feel slightly strange that this is the thing that may eventually do Trump in. Don’t get us wrong: Trump is a monstrosity, and he absolutely belongs in prison (so long as there are prisons.) But this is the same guy who, while in office, oversaw record numbers of drone strikes that killed civilians, bragged about ordering the assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil as an act of political “retribution,” profited immensely from connections to Saudi Arabia while funding its genocidal war in Yemen, and implemented a policy at the border that separated more than 5,000 children from their families—some of them still not reunited five years later—among many other acts of bald-faced criminality. Of all the things he deserves to go to jail for, not being completely above board while paying off a porn star seems pretty low on the list.
It seems like the things that actually land presidents in real trouble are crimes that disgrace the prestige of the presidency, rather than the ones that actually cause tremendous harm to ordinary people. Nixon wasn’t forced to resign because he carpet bombed Cambodia and kept it secret for months, he went down for wiretapping the office of his opponent. Clinton wasn’t impeached for imposing sanctions on Iraq that starved hundreds of thousands of children, it was for not being entirely forthcoming about a blowjob he got in the Oval Office. George W. Bush never faced any serious legal jeopardy for launching an illegal war in Iraq using a false justification. And Biden’s current impeachment inquiry from Republicans has nothing to do with the fact that he’s currently violating U.S. law by funding the Israeli military’s well-documented war crimes. It’s about whether he was involved with his oafish son’s shady business dealings.
As we celebrate the fact that a president is finally facing a shred of accountability, we should also take a moment to reflect on what our political system considers “crimes” and what is considered ordinary presidential business. Many of the things considered ordinary presidential business are incalculably more harmful.
“Trump’s policies killed many people in the United States and around the world. Hush money is the least of his crimes. But an honest confrontation of his worst offenses creates complications for a political class that commits crimes routinely.”
Dollar General workers protest at company headquarters in Tennessee
On May 29, the Dollar General corporation held its annual shareholders’ meeting in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. In terms of profit, they had plenty to celebrate. In its most recent fiscal quarter, the retail chain—which is the largest in the United States by number of stores, with 18,912 locations—increased its sales by 6.1 percent (year-over-year) to $9.9 billion. But unfortunately for its executives and investors, the workers who actually keep the company running crashed the party.
Organized by a coalition of labor groups that includes the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), SEIU Local 205, Workers’ Dignity, and Step Up Louisiana, more than 200 people made the journey to Goodlettsville and staged a big, noisy protest. Some had signs and T-shirts that said “DOLLAR GENERAL IS A HAZARD,” while others chanted things like “we demand safer stores”; one group even jazzed it up with some brass instruments. Some weren’t even workers, but Dollar General customers appalled by the company’s labor practices. According to Chattanooga’s WZTV, they “could be heard inside the shareholder meeting” throughout. It’s the third time they’ve done this, after similar protests in 2022 and 2023, and the movement shows no sign of slowing down.
There’s a lot to protest about Dollar General, too. Among other things, the company offers notoriously low pay (while giving its executives huge bonuses,) fiercely opposes efforts to unionize its stores, and has a truly abominable workplace safety record. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) considers it a “severe violator,” issuing more than $21 million in fines for safety issues from 2017 to 2023. As if to add insult to injury, some workers on the r/DollarGeneral Reddit page recently reported that the company had chosen to recognize Mental Health Awareness Month by giving them, not mental health resources, but… a single bottle of water:
Compared to the nonsense they’ve had to put up with, the protesting workers’ demands are simple and reasonable. They want decent pay and a safe work environment, nothing less. Specifically, Step Up Louisiana wants the company to address the disturbing trend of gun violence against dollar store workers by hiring “community safety managers” trained in “de-escalation and self-defense,” along with providing paid time off for anyone who experiences violence on the job. Instead, the company hired the union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to conduct an “audit” of its safety situation—which, brace yourself for a big surprise, concluded that everything was basically fine. Until the workers’ demands are met with some real change, rather than corporate bullshit, the protests will only continue.
“Everything dollar stores do follows naturally from the core premise of any for-profit business: to maximize income while minimizing expense. It’s just that wages, safety, and ultimately life itself are expenses. Dollar stores are what capitalism looks like when it finally takes off the mask and stops trying to pretend.”
All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.
“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.
Seriously, we have been sounding the alarms in Current Affairs for years at this point that Biden’s uninspired policy platform and unpopularity with key demographics—particularly young people and minorities—were going to doom him. Back when the primaries were still upcoming, we urged for Biden to step down and for Democrats to seek out a more progressive successor who might not inspire such apathy. This could have been addressed back when there was still time, but with the primaries essentially over, Biden is now the nominee and little can be done about it. There is, of course, something Biden himself could do: treat disgruntled voters’ concerns about his foreign policy, climate, and other issues with a modicum of seriousness.
In Other News
Nikki Haley traveled to Israel and wrote “finish them” on artillery shells that will be used to bomb Gaza. What a piece of work! (Washington Post)
Senator Joe Manchin, America’s worst Democrat, is a Democrat no longer. (The New York Times)
House Speaker Mike Johnson is planning a giant bill filled with conservative policies to be passed immediately if Trump gets back into office. Nice job protecting this guy, Democrats. (The Guardian)
Steve Bannon is calling the Mar-a-Lago raid over classified documents an “assassination attempt” on Trump. (Media Matters)
The Minnesota GOP has endorsed an open antisemite, but none of the congresspeople who have spent the last months going after pro-Palestine college students are condemning him. (Popular Information)
The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo is funneling money into law schools to turn the next generation of legal scholars into right-wing ideologues. (The Intercept)
Hillary Clinton has some embarrassing new merch out to celebrate Trump’s conviction, including a coffee mug that reads, “Turns out she was right about everything.” Yeah...totally. (People)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ According to a new poll from Data for Progress, a strong majority of the American public wants to see oil and gas companies held legally responsible for the effects of climate change. 62 percent of likely voters, including 84 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents and (rather astonishingly) 40 percent of Republicans supported some form of legal penalty “for their contributions to climate change, including their impacts on extreme weather events and public health.” But many were willing to go even further: Another question in the poll asked specifically if voters would support prosecutions for “reckless or negligent homicide.” 49 percent said yes, compared with just 39 percent in opposition.
“All too often, pollsters ask people vague questions about whether people support ‘steps’ to address climate change, without specifying what those steps are. That didn’t happen with this poll,” wrote Heather Souvaine Horn for the New Republic, which covered this poll. She goes on to quote two lawyers for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen—Aaron Regunberg and David Arkush—who argue that the only way to attain justice for the crime of climate change truly is to seek criminal penalties for the people who have been fueling it depsite knowing the consequences for decades.
The crime that best captures the nature, scale, and gravity of their misconduct in most jurisdictions might be homicide. In criminal law, homicide means causing a death with a culpable mental state. If someone substantially contributes to or accelerates a death, that counts as “causing” it. If they did so intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, that counts as “culpable mental state.” So the basic questions in a climate homicide trial are as follows: Did fossil fuel companies substantially contribute to or accelerate deaths, and did they do so at least recklessly, if not knowingly or intentionally? These questions would be presented to a jury. If you think the jury should say “yes,” you’re not alone.
The reason for pursuing criminal accountability is simple: The climate crisis is an all-hands-on-deck moment if there ever was one, and we need to use every available strategy to curtail greenhouse gas pollution. In today’s thinking, tort law—the law of civil wrongs—seeks economically efficient outcomes: The question is about whether one party should give another some money. Criminal law, by contrast, is concerned with society’s fundamental values—with morality. It answers whether conduct is permissible or forbidden. Where tort law prices misconduct, criminal law prohibits it.
Art by Mike Freiheit, from Issue 7 of Current Affairs Magazine, May/June 2017
A journalism group is suing Wisconsin’s Justice Department, hoping to obtain the names, birth dates, and disciplinary records of the state’s police officers. (Associated Press)
In South Carolina, where a third of residents are either Black or Hispanic, the state Supreme Court will soon be entirely white. (The Guardian)
In North Carolina, rising sea levels are causing beach houses to collapse into the ocean. (The Washington Post)
Another F-35 fighter jet has crashed during a routine transfer. Aren't you glad we fund these things instead of healthcare? (KOAT Action News)
A little-discussed court case out of Mississippi could upend “qualified immunity,” the legal doctrine that shields police officers from legal liability. (Popular Information)
A federal judge has struck down the New Hampshire law that bans teaching “divisive concepts” related to race and gender (Politico)
After Idaho’s West Ada School District banned The Handmaid’s Tale and nearly a dozen other books, a graduating senior handed a copy to her school superintendent as an act of protest at her commencement. (The Idaho Statesman)
In Florida, police officers were filmed repeatedly punching and tasing a 16-year-old boy. His heinous crime? Going swimming at an apartment complex where he didn’t live. (WFLA)
Amid global temperature rises, Phoenix has seen a 1,000 percent increase in heat-related deaths over the last decade, including 645 of them in Maricopa County just last year. (Politico)
What’s the one thing worse than a real Atlantic article? An AI-generated Atlantic article. (The Atlantic)
Major League Baseball is finally incorporating Negro League stats into its history. “No longer will the incredible baseball feats of the Negro Leagues be relegated to a separate and unequal category,” says sportswriter Dave Zirin. (The Nation)
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The long-awaited pier constructed by the Department of Defense to deliver aid into Gaza has collapsed. It will now take more than week to repair. But according to humanitarian groups, it wasn’t doing a whole lot to begin with.
On May 18 (left), the pier was looking ship shape. As of Tuesday (right)…not so much.
CENTCOM boasted last week that more than 569 tons of aid, the equivalent of about 38 trucks worth, had been delivered using the pier, which sounds like a lot, but is actually less than a tenth of what is needed to sustain the Strip’s population. A group of 20 aid organizations, including Save the Children, released a statement describing the implementation of the dock as having “created a mirage of improved access while the humanitarian response is in reality on the verge of collapse.”
Israel was already allowing far too little aid into the Strip to feed the people of Gaza, and the result has been what the United Nations calls a “full-blown famine.” The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that 500 aid trucks entering the Strip per day are necessary to provide enough food to sustain the population of more than 2 million. Throughout April and early May, Israel allowed a daily average of 176 trucks to enter the Strip. And since Israel launched its ground invasion of Rafah earlier this month, the amount of aid entering has cratered to a daily average of 58 aid trucks—just over a tenth of what is needed. As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reports, there is now less aid reaching the Gaza Strip since the pier’s construction than before.
The Biden administration has insisted upon the ludicrous assertion that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid despite ample evidenceto the contrary. Of course, if Israel were being so cooperative with the transfer of aid through its own available ports, there’d be no need for the US to build its own ramshackle pier in the first place.
Likewise, the Biden administration has insisted that a “major ground operation” invasion in Rafah would cross the Biden administration’s red line. But somehow, an invasion that has forced around a million people to flee Rafah and involved bombing a refugee camp with 2,000-pound bombs and killing 45 people does not yet qualify as “major.”
As Branko Marcetic wrote in Jacobin, it’s pretty clear at this point that “Biden Doesn’t Have a Real ‘Red Line’ for Horrors in Gaza”:
President Joe Biden very publicly and explicitly identified the point that he would not allow Israel’s war on Gaza to reach: an offensive on the city of Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians had been corralled after months of war…
Biden himself went on CNN this month and said, “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah . . . I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically.”
Despite all this, in keeping with the pattern throughout this war, Israel has simply ignored Biden’s threats and gone into Rafah anyway. What has the president done, in the face of yet another show of defiance from an Israeli government that is more or less openly rooting for him to lose this November, to enforce a red line he had publicly roped himself into? His administration has simply manufactured a series of unbelievable excuses to avoid acting on his threat.
“There hasn’t been an assault or an attack in terms of a ground operation at this time, so let’s not get ahead of where we are,” national security communications advisor John Kirby said earlier this month as Israeli missiles rained down on Rafah, when asked what the definition of an impermissible attack on the city was.
Various US officials have claimed the Israeli assault on Rafah has been “limited” and not a “major” one, so that Biden can simply continue to send Israel weapons, including ones specifically meant for a ground invasion. “Israel’s military operations in that area [have] been more targeted and limited,” Sullivan said this past Wednesday.
This is blatantly untrue.
❧ In a worrying escalation to the ongoing war, President Biden is reportedly considering allowing Ukraine to strike targets within Russia using U.S. weapons. For the New York Times, David Sanger reports that Biden has been facing “months of complaints about the restrictions” against doing so from Ukraine’s President Zelensky, and is now undergoing a “formal — and apparently rapid — reassessment of whether to take the risk.” For their part, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a joint news conference on the 28th in which they both endorsed Ukraine using their countries’ respective weapons within Russia.
The military rationale seems to be that this would allow Ukraine’s forces to take out the missile launch sites that currently fire on their cities from just across the Russian border, and that the move would still essentially be a defensive one. But this is an incredibly dangerous path to take. In a public statement earlier this month—which really didn’t get enough attention in the press—the Russian foreign ministry said that if British weapons are used against its own national territory, Russia would respond by attacking “any British military facilities and equipment on the territory of Ukraine and beyond.” The “beyond” is the crucial word there, and it’s a scary one. Unless the United States and its European allies want to spark World War III—with nuclear powers on all sides—we need to be winding tensions with Russia down through diplomacy and dialogue, not ramping them up.
As usual, these two jerks are doing their best to get everyone else killed.
❧ In South Africa, the early election results are in. At the time of writing, roughly 80 percent of the vote has been counted—and it seems clear that the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed South Africa since the end of the apartheid era in the 1990s, will not have a majority. This was somewhat predictable, since former president Jacob Zuma split from the party last December to form his own called uMkhonto we Sizwe, or the MKP. (For more about this, see our December 19 news briefing.) As it turns out, Zuma took roughly 13 percent of South Africa’s voters with him, which doomed the ANC to fall below the needed 51 percent.
Now, the ANC will need to form a coalition with another party to stay in power. For its part, the MKP has announced that it will refuse to form one unless incumbent President Cyril Ramaphosa steps down. The Democratic Alliance party, which commanded the second-largest share of the vote, also opposes what it calls a “doomsday coalition with the ANC, EFF, MK or a combination of those.” At this point, it looks like the ANC has two options: sacrifice Ramaphosa in order to patch things up with Zuma’s party, or try to make a deal with the socialist Economic Freedom Fighters, who Reuters suggests could be “kingmakers” in the current impasse. Either way, the government of South Africa is about to look a lot different from what anyone is used to.
As Gaza’s health system collapses, hundreds of Palestinian doctors have disappeared into Israeli custody, with some having allegedly been tortured. (The Intercept)
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said Israel should turn the West Bank into ruins, “like in the Gaza Strip.” (Common Dreams)
The Israeli government is requiring the censorship of press discussing the nation’s “administrative detention” system, which holds of Palestinians indefinitely without trial or charge (Al Jazeera). In a powerful statement, the newspaper Haaretz sent an op-ed about the subject to print looking like this (Haaretz):
Ansar Allah, aka the Houthis, have shot down ANOTHER of the United States’ very expensive Reaper drones. (Associated Press)
A UN expert warns that Sudan’s Darfur region is at risk of a genocide as reports emerge of civilians being targeted based on their ethnicity. (BBC)
With focus placed on wars in Ukraine and Gaza, humanitarian aid to Syria is shrinking.(Associated Press)
Jair Bolsonaro's son Flavio, who’s a member of the Brazilian Senate, is pushing a bill to privatize the country’s beaches. (AFP)
In a win for animal rights, Colombia’s congress has outlawed the centuries-old sport of bullfighting. (Associated Press)
Mexico is joining South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. (Middle East Eye)
Venezuela has become the first nation in the Americas to lose all its glaciers… surely there is nothing to worry about. (Axios)
Biden is loosening some sanctions on Cuba by giving businesses with no connection to the Communist Party access to U.S. banks. (The Washington Post)
CHICKEN FACT OF THE WEEK
In the sleepy village of Snettisham, feral chickens terrorize the townsfolk!
Snettisham is a tiny town in Norfolk, in the United Kingdom, with a population of about 2,500. But that isn’t counting the roving gangs of chickens. As the Guardianrecently reported, there are around 100 feral chickens walking the streets of Snettisham, digging up residents’ gardens and clucking loudly. Nobody knows where they came from (besides, presumably, eggs), but they seem to live in a nearby forest and emerge periodically to wreak havoc. One hapless Snettishamian told the Guardian they’re “out of control,” complaining that he now has to wear earplugs to sleep. Others say that tourists have started coming to town to feed the chickens, which also attracts rats. Some, though, appreciate the chickens’ boisterous presence and find the complaints overblown. As one Snettisham dog-walker puts it:
“They’ve been here such a long time and there’s more important things going on in the world than a few chickens. They should get a life.”
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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