Apr. 19, 2024 ❧ Nestlé sells addictive baby products, Israel strikes Iran, and Mickey Mouse joins a union
Plus new sanctions on Venezuela, a so-called "Confederate Heritage Month," and a very important question: could Donald Trump fight a dog?
Every Which Way But News
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
NESTLÉ GETS BABIES HOOKED ON SUGAR IN “POORER COUNTRIES”
Thanks to the Swiss investigative journalism group Public Eye, we now know something alarming about one of the world’s largest food and childcare companies. In an extensive series of product tests, researchers with Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) compared baby products sold by Nestlé in various countries, testing them for added sugars and other sweeteners. In particular, they looked at packages of Cerelac infant cereal and Nido powdered milk, two of Nestlé’s most popular brands. In both cases, the investigation found that Nestlé was adding sugar to the mix when the products were sold in “poorer countries”:
Almost all the Cerelac infant cereals examined contain added sugar – nearly 4 grams per serving on average, equal to roughly a sugar cube – although they are targeted at babies from six months of age. The highest amount – 7.3 grams per serving – was detected in a product sold in the Philippines. Most of the Nido powdered-milk products for young children from one to three years old examined also contain added sugar – almost two grams per serving on average. The maximum value (5.3 grams) was detected in a product sold in Panama. In Switzerland and in Nestlé’s main European markets, such products are sold without added sugar.
To state the obvious, there’s a reason European countries don’t want added sugar in their baby food. As Rodrigo Vianna, a Brazilian nutritionist who spoke to Public Eye, points out, it’s “unnecessary and highly addictive,” and can cause infants to “get used to the sweet taste and start looking for more sugary foods, starting a negative cycle that increases the risk of nutrition-based disorders in adult life,” including obesity and diabetes. Obesity in particular is an ongoing global health crisis that affects roughly an eighth of the world’s population, particularly in “low- and middle-income countries,” where the World Health Organization says it’s “on the rise.” Being fed sugar from Day One can’t possibly help—but for a company like Nestlé, getting customers hooked early is a highly effective business model.
In fact, the entire market for products like powdered infant milk is a pretty exploitative one. In a 2023 editorial, the British medical journal The Lancet condemned what it called the “predatory tactics” of companies like Nestlé:
For decades, the commercial milk formula (CMF) industry has used underhand marketing strategies, designed to prey on parents' fears and concerns at a vulnerable time, to turn the feeding of young children into a multibillion-dollar business. The immense economic power accrued by CMF manufacturers is deployed politically to ensure the industry is under-regulated and services supporting breastfeeding are under-resourced[...] typical infant behaviours such as crying, fussiness, and poor night-time sleep are portrayed by the CMF industry as pathological and framed as reasons to introduce formula, when in fact these behaviours are common and developmentally appropriate.
In other words, powerful multinational companies are manufacturing a need for products like Nestlé’s Nido where none actually exists. (The Lancet also has a very long article showing how the industry has lobbied against policies like paid maternity leave, so fewer women will breastfeed and more will buy its products.) That’s bad enough in developed countries like the United Kingdom, let alone in places like Senegal and Bangladesh where addictive added sugars are being introduced. Speaking to Public Eye, one professor of Public Health from South Africa said these practices are “a form of colonization and should not be tolerated,” and she has a point.
FIGHTING BACK
MICKEY MOUSE JOINS THE UNION
On Wednesday, the actors who portray iconic characters like Goofy and Donald Duck at Disney’s California theme parks filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, demanding an election to form their own labor union. The proposed union would be called “Magic United,” and would represent roughly 1,700 “parade performers, character actors and support staff,” according to the Associated Press. Of that number, around two-thirds have signed the NLRB petition.
Despite its family-friendly image, Disney has had issues with labor rights and worker safety for a while now. In a 2019 interview with Democracy Now!, Abigail Disney—who’s related to old Walt, but not a fan of the present-day Disney corporation—described the low pay and harsh working conditions a lot of people deal with at the various theme parks, contrasting them to the ridiculous salaries and bonuses paid to CEOs like Bob Iger (who made $31.6 million in 2023 alone.) More recently, one performer who spoke to the Associated Press said she had to wear black contact lenses as part of her Disney costume, which “stained her eyes gray” —and she was “paid less for that job than someone who played a similar role but who was in a union.” Other actors had safety concerns when the company urged them to resume hugging park customers while COVID-19 was still an active threat.
There’s good news too, though: some of Disneyland’s staff, like its food-service workers and fireworks operators, are already unionized. So it’s not like Magic United will be starting from scratch. They just need to complete the job of getting everyone a fair deal for their labor. Right now, it looks like a vote could be held sometime in May or June, and if Disney is smart, it’ll recognize any union that results straight away. Otherwise, wouldn’t it be a shame if the world’s little tourist kids had to see a picket line at the castle gates?
You can learn more about Magic United at the union’s official website.
BIG STORY
ISRAEL STRIKES IRANIAN TERRITORY
In the latest terrifying escalation, Israel launched strikes inside Iranian territory last night. These came in response to the Islamic Republic’s drone and missile attacks last weekend, which were themselves acts of retaliation to Israel’s attacks on the Iranian consulate in Syria which killed several military commanders. Quoting Iranian officials, The New York Times reports that last night a missile hit a military airbase near Isfahan, a city in central Iran containing several nuclear sites. Though, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, none of them were hit. About 500 miles north, Iran also said it shot down a separate barrage of drone attacks. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US “has not been involved in any offensive operations,” but Israeli sources confirmed American foreknowledge of the attack.
While it’s hard to know at this point the extent of US involvement, we should immediately be wary when US officials claim a lack of involvement in “offensive operations.” Basically every military under the sun describes their actions in defensive terms even if they are purely aggressive, so pleading innocence from “offensive operations” is essentially meaningless.
While any military action undoubtedly brings the prospect of war closer, it does seem as if this retaliation could have been much worse. Per The New York Times, Israel came dangerously close to ordering a much broader assault on Iran last weekend, but reportedly pulled back after chiding from Biden and other world leaders. According to The Times of Israel, Iran thankfully has no immediate plans for retaliation. In fact, even as Israel has accepted responsibility for the attacks, Iranian officials have raised the possibility that someone else may have been responsible, which seems like a sign that they are trying to de-escalate tensions.
Still, it’s hard not to be on edge: The same report also indicated that some of the more fanatical members of Netanyahu’s cabinet want to Israel engage in a full-scale war with Iran. The most prominent of these is far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who responded to news of Netanyahu’s strike on Iran with one word on Twitter: “Lame!”
If there’s anything we know about Netanyahu, it’s that he is willing to do anything, consequences be damned, to hang onto power. And appeasing the sizable number of lunatics in his coalition is instrumental to that. As long as the war in Gaza— itself a monstrous crime—continues, the risk of spiraling into a catastrophic war with potential nuclear implications remains.
CHECKING IN ON THE OLD HORSE RACE
Here are the latest polls from the 2024 presidential election!
We usually don’t care much about election polling at Current Affairs, but these ones from Echelon Insights seem important:
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Republican state attorney generals have been abusing their power to obtain the private health information of transgender people, according to a report by the Senate Finance Committee. The report, published by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) singles out four AGs in Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri and Texas for requesting hospital records of transgender individuals. According to the report:
Framed as civil investigations seeking to determine if there has been misuse of Medicaid funds (Tennessee) or violations of consumer protection laws (Indiana and Missouri), these campaigns investigate medical providers on their provision of transgender medical care. In their sweeping anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns, Attorney General offices demand a host of invasive items such as unredacted physical and mental health records, photographs of children’s bodies, correspondence to hospitals’ general email addresses for LGBTQIA+ patients, and lists of people referred for transgender health care. Texas, for example, has requested invasive medical information from providers, but has not yet made public what misconduct charge it is pursuing.
Hospitals often acquiesced to these demands, giving up reams of personal information, including about minors. The worst offender was the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which handed over 65,000 pages worth of documents, including the medical records of 82 transgender individuals to Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “The information included the personally identifying information of its patients and some of the most intimate details of their private lives. VUMC did not inform its affected patients that it had done this,” according to a class action suit by two of the victims.
Naturally, finding out that the state was rifling through their medical records was terrifying. One LGBTQ support hotline reported receiving hundreds of fearful calls from young trans people and their parents, with many displaying signs of “intense fear, agitation, hopelessness, isolation, and sense of worthlessness. Many were already experiencing depression and were withdrawn from friends and family due to the recent political climate regarding transgender health care for minors.” According to the report, many young trans people in Tennessee still struggle with “serious mental health effects” as the result of such a violation of privacy.
❧ The Governor of Mississippi is celebrating something called “Confederate Heritage Month.” As Ashton Pittman reports for the Mississippi Free Press, Governor Tate Reeves proclaimed the month in a Facebook post for Beauvoir, the former home of Jefferson Davis and site of his so-called “Presidential Library.” The site is owned and operated by a group called the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, which Pittman describes “a neo-Confederate organization that[...] whitewashes the Confederacy’s racist past and downplays the role of slavery in the Civil War.” Astonishingly, it’s the fifth time Reeves has done this, after prior “Confederate Heritage” proclamations in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
“Confederate Heritage” is a very strange thing to celebrate, because the Confederate States of America only existed for a little more than four years—from February 1861 to May 1865. Most people have shoes that have outlived the Confederacy. In that short time, the only “heritage” it possessed was the violent defense of slavery and white supremacy. (It’s no good waffling about “state’s rights,” either. The CSA’s most important leaders openly admitted that “the great question of the permanence of slavery in the Southern States" was their central concern.) And as everyone should know, the Confederacy’s brief history ended in a humiliating defeat. As a feeble excuse for promoting what’s essentially National Racism Month, Governor Reeves has said that he believes “we can all learn from our history.” And indeed, we can. But if Reeves wanted to make sure everyone understood exactly what the Confederacy was all about, he’d spend the month showing the ghastly remains of whips, brands, and other instruments of torture used on its plantations. Those, together with the white flag of surrender, are the only legacy it’ll ever have.
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AROUND THE WORLD
❧ It’s been a year since the outbreak of civil war in Sudan, and the situation is growing more and more grim. As Ishaan Tharoor notes for the Washington Post, conflict broke out between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary militia loyal to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, back on April 15, 2023. Since then, the Sudanese people have suffered horribly on all sides of the war. By the United Nations’ best estimates, more than 8.6 million people have been displaced in total, and 25 million are in “dire need of humanitarian assistance,” with 18 million facing hunger and malnutrition (including 3.5 million children.) Atrocities on a terrifying scale, like the ethnic massacre of anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people in a single city, have been committed. Despite all that, the journalists and political leaders of the broader world have paid surprisingly little attention to Sudan. As Tharoor puts it, “the wars in Ukraine and Gaza… have put Sudan in the shade” where the international community is concerned. Worse, the United Nations has failed to gather enough funds for humanitarian aid, setting a goal of €4.1 billion and reaching only €2 billion as of April 15. That’s both a tragedy and a grave shame to the countries involved. The world has a responsibility to Sudan, just as much as it does to Ukraine or Palestine, and a dramatic redoubling of international efforts—financial, diplomatic and political—is needed to bring peace. As Tharoor explains:
In its Sudan briefing, the International Crisis Group, a think tank, urged countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to use more of their leverage to bring the feuding factions to heel, open up access for humanitarian relief and place Sudan back on a path to stability. “The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region,” noted the Crisis Group. “Time is of the essence — particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.”
❧ The United States is preparing to re-impose sanctions on Venezuela. During one of his occasional bouts of good sense, President Biden and his State Department had relaxed the crippling sanctions on Venezuela’s oil exports—the most important sector of the country’s economy—back in October 2023. It was an encouraging moment after the rabid hostility shown by Donald Trump, who not only imposed a brutal new sanctions regime but suggested invading Venezuela on several occasions. (And we wonder why they don’t like the U.S. very much!) As part of the deal, President Nicolás Maduro and his government agreed to a variety of election reforms, to be put in place before Venezuela’s general elections on July 28.
Now, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller is saying Maduro reneged on his end of the deal, having “prevented the democratic opposition from registering the candidate of their choice.” This is a reference to María Corina Machado, the leading opposition candidate who has been banned from running for President. As a punishment, the United States has allowed General License 44—which temporarily authorized deals for oil with Venezuela—to lapse, and will re-impose the Trump-era sanctions.
It’s certainly true that Venezuelan elections are not exactly “free and fair.” Apart from Machado being banned, past cycles have seen widespread allegations of vote-rigging, and turnout was as low as 46 percent in 2018. But it’s hard to see how choking the economy will help matters. As Jacob Batinga wrote for Current Affairs in 2022, it’s not the leaders of a poor nation who feel the bite of financial sanctions, but the poorest citizens. In Venezuela specifically, it’s estimated that more than 40,000 people died between 2017 and 2018 as a direct result of U.S. sanctions that prevented life-saving medicines from reaching the country.
Meanwhile, it’s not like the United States actually cares about democracy overseas. President Biden has no issue maintaining a cozy alliance with Saudi Arabia, a hereditary monarchy which assassinates journalists for political dissent, or approving millions of dollars in military aid to the dictatorship in Egypt despite its human rights abuses. Rather, as Noam Chomsky has argued throughout his career, the U.S. goes out of its way to punish “successful defiance,” meaning any resistance to its own economic interests and political domination. Make no mistake: that’s exactly what we’re seeing here, too.
❧ In Gaza, the Israel Defense Force, supposedly “the most moral army in the world,” is reportedly playing the sound of crying babies and women from drones to lure Palestinians from their homes so they can be shot. A report from Middle East Eye reads as follows:
On Sunday and Monday night, residents of the northern parts of Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp woke up to the sounds of babies crying and women calling out for help.
When they went outside to locate the source of the cries and provide aid, Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them.
Samira Abu al-Leil, a resident of the refugee camp, told Middle East Eye that she heard Israeli quadcopters opening fire during and shortly after playing the recorded sounds, which lasted for several minutes and recurred multiple times on Monday night.
"I heard a woman crying and screaming for help, saying, ‘Help me, my son was martyred’. The sounds were coming from the street and they were bizarre," the 49-year-old said.
“Some men rushed out to the rescue, only to be shot by the quadcopters that kept roaming all night long." According to eyewitnesses, at least seven to 10 people were injured by the quadcopter fire overnight.
Residents were unable to help the victims, as the "quadcopters were firing at anything that moved". However, an ambulance managed to reach the area and transport them to hospital.
This is one of those war stories that sounds too bloodcurdlingly evil to be real, even for an army that has committed countless unspeakable atrocities over the course of the last six months. But video evidence shows that drones are indeed playing the sounds of screaming children. Middle East Eye published this recording shared by Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif of Al Jazeera:
It seems impossible at this point that any honest or reasonable person could still deny the plain truth that Israel’s military is systematically targeting civilians. But if there was any doubt, this new piece of evidence should smash it to smithereens. A drone that plays the sounds of women and children crying is not something that just pops up incidentally, nor is it something that can be whipped up by a few “bad apples.” It’s something that requires intention, forethought, and approval by people at the highest levels of authority.
❧ A group of around 20 global NGOs is urging France to pay reparations to Haiti. In Geneva for a UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD), the groups are seeking a new commission to oversee a repayment of a more than 200-year-old debt owed to Haiti by its colonizers:
In 1804, after the island’s slave population led a successful revolt, the French government required it, at gunpoint to compensate the slaveholders who’d lost their “property.” In other words, former slaves and their descendants were forced to pay reparations to compensate their owners. As Haiti suffered decades of subordination by the US throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was also forced to pay around 40 percent of its national income to service debts to America and France. All-in-all Haiti is estimated to have paid $20 to $30 billion in today’s money to pay off their former colonizers in payments that did not end until 1947. University of Virginia scholar Marlene Daut calls it “the greatest heist in history” and says that it “severely damaged the newly independent country's ability to prosper.”
Today, Haiti is one of the world’s poorest countries and is ravaged by instability and civil war. A New York Times piece examining the history of the “ransom” argues that this debt is “the root of Haiti’s misery”:
It is often called the “independence debt.” But that is a misnomer. It was a ransom.
The amount was far beyond Haiti’s meager means. Even the first installment was about six times the government’s income that year, based on official receipts documented by the 19th-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin…This became known as Haiti’s “double debt” — the ransom and the loan to pay it — a stunning load that boosted the fledgling Parisian international banking system and helped cement Haiti’s path into poverty and underdevelopment. According to Ardouin’s records, the bankers’ commissions alone exceeded the Haitian government’s total revenues that year.
The double debt helped push Haiti into a cycle of debts that hobbled the country for more than 100 years, draining away much of its revenue and chopping away at its ability to build the essential institutions and infrastructure of an independent nation. Generations after enslaved people rebelled and created the first free Black nation in the Americas, their children were forced to work, sometimes for little or even no pay, for the benefit of others — first the French, then the Americans, then their own dictators.
Two centuries after French warships blew their terrifying cannons from Port-au-Prince’s harbor to celebrate the debt, the echoes from that moment still wash across the country in its slums, bare hospitals, crumbling roads and empty stomachs, even in the countryside, once considered the most lucrative and productive in the world.
ANT FACT OF THE WEEK
When it rains, ants unite to form giant waterproof Ant Balls™ to protect themselves.
During Hurricane Harvey, which was apparently not horrifying enough on its own, Texans documented gigantic masses of fire ants floating together in tightly compact rafts. According to HowStuffWorks, this is a millennia-old survival strategy. Jesslyn Shields writes:
“These ants do shockingly well in wet weather because they evolved on the Amazon River floodplains, which means they're used to their nests being inundated during the rainy season each year. They've had a couple million years to come up with a flood drill, and it involves sticking together.
Fire ants are eusocial, which means one ant can't survive by itself — they all need each other, and a queen to produce offspring for the entire colony. So, when their nest floods, all up to 500,000 or so worker ants surround their queen and her eggs, linking arms and forming a floating raft with their waxy bodies, creating pockets of air for buoyancy.”
While fleeing for your life from a natural disaster, surely an amorphous floating pile of several hundred thousand fire ants will make the situation feel less apocalyptic. (HowStuffWorks)
This is what they do in a pool of water. But they have a separate formation for when it gets wet on dry land. According to Scientific American: “They’ll climb atop each other to a form a solid mass around the plant stem in the shape of the Eiffel Tower – sometimes as high as 30 ants tall. The ant tower serves as a temporary encampment that repels raindrops.” Their collaborative ethos is further evidence of what we’ve always said: ants are socialists.
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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