Aug. 18, 2023 ❧ Free school lunches, Saudi criticism shut down, forced birth in Mississippi, and a youth climate victory...
Plus Mifepristone limited in court, evictions in Palestine, a newspaper raided in Kansas, libertarians in Argentina, wombats, and more!
Once again we guide you gently through a world of informational chaos, pointing out what matters and disregarding what doesn’t. This week, the Briefing is co-written by Current Affairs contributor Alex Skopic. You may have read Alex’s excellent CA pieces on the Espionage Act, the Unabomber, the lottery, Stalin, Ron DeSantis, and more. And if you haven’t, check them out once you finish today’s Briefing! Remember: your subscriptions to the Briefing help us improve our research, writing, editing, and fact-checking. We want this Briefing to be high-quality and comprehensive, and we’re constantly working to improve it, but we need your support to keep it going! So do consider becoming a paid subscriber, and as always, make sure you check out the print edition of Current Affairs, too! (We’re hard at work on the new issue right now.)
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
MASSACHUSETTS WILL FUND FREE SCHOOL LUNCHES BY TAXING MILLIONAIRES
When Massachusetts kids return to school later this month, every single one of them will be entitled to a free lunch. As part of its new budget, signed into law last week, the state has enacted a 4 percent “millionaire’s tax” on residents earning more than $1 million per year, to be taken from any income above that level. With this simple move, Massachusetts has dramatically boosted its revenue base, with the “millionaire’s tax” accounting for $1 billion of the state’s $56 billion budget, according to CBS MoneyWatch. From that $1 billion, roughly $524 million is earmarked for education, with universal free lunch for K-12 students being one of the biggest single items. The “millionaire’s tax” serves as a replacement for emergency federal funding given during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which allowed schools in all 50 states to offer free meals—and which the Biden administration, shamefully, allowed to expire in 2022.
Now, Massachusetts joins California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont among the ranks of states that provide school meals free of charge, accounting for a combined figure of almost 9 million children. (In Vermont’s case, the meals added a whopping $0.03 to the property tax rate.) By contrast, other states have opted for a cruel and degrading “lunch debt” system, with one Arizona school notoriously stamping children’s arms with the words “lunch money” when they couldn’t pay out-of-pocket for their meals in 2017. It should go without saying that nutrition is critical for kids’ development: food insecurity affects concentration, memory, mood, and motor skills. In a press release, Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern hailed the new arrangement, saying that “no child in Massachusetts will ever have to wonder how to get through the school day on an empty stomach” once it takes effect.
VICE ACCUSED OF SUPPRESSING STORIES CRITICAL OF SAUDI ARABIA
Freelance journalist John Lubbock has come forward with allegations that Vice, which had hired him and two other writers for an article about young Saudi activists working for transgender rights, abruptly canceled the piece after a “high-level intervention by senior Vice managers,” according to an exclusive report in the Guardian. After the company was purchased out of bankruptcy by its former creditors this June, Vice executives made a lucrative deal (speculated to be worth at least $50 million) with the Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group, promising to dramatically expand their Arabic-language offerings. The deal marks a dramatic reversal for Vice, which had previously halted all work in Saudi Arabia after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now, 12 of Vice’s 26 active job listings (at the time of writing) are based in Riyadh, and the MBC partnership has already caused tension for journalists who feel the company’s culture is being subverted:
The impact of Vice’s joint venture with the Saudi-backed publisher has already been felt in the company’s London office. For two years a large photograph of the Sarah Everard memorial protest hung on the wall. To the anger of staff, this photograph was taken down by employees working on the Saudi joint venture and replaced by a giant map of Saudi Arabia.
As Guardian media editor Jim Waterson points out, Lubbock isn’t the only journalist to have their work suppressed: a Vice documentary about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was also “deleted from the internet after being uploaded,” ostensibly over concerns for the creators’ safety. As he solidifies his control over Saudi politics, Bin Salman has launched a propaganda offensive around the world, seeking to distract from his country’s war crimes and human rights abuses through lavish spending on sports leagues and other forms of entertainment. Now, it appears that Vice and its leadership may be just another line-item in his portfolio
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BIG STORY
MISSISSIPPI JUST FORCED A 7th GRADER TO GIVE BIRTH AFTER BEING RAPED
[CONTENT WARNING: RAPE, CHILD ABUSE, AND STATE-MANDATED BIRTH]
A Black 13-year-old child was just forced to give birth in Clarksdale, Mississippi, weeks before she is set to start 7th grade, according to a report from Charlotte Alter in TIME magazine. The child—given the pseudonym “Ashley” by TIME to protect her identity—became pregnant after being raped by a stranger in her front yard. According to Ashley’s mother, who spoke with TIME:
For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom… When she turned 13 that November, she wasn't in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.”… At one point, Regina even asked Ashley if she was pregnant, and Ashley said nothing. Regina hadn’t yet explained to her daughter how a baby is made, because she didn’t think Ashley was old enough to understand.
According to Mississippi’s lawmakers (and lawmakers in many other states), nobody is too young to be forced to give birth. The state implemented a near-total abortion ban last year, with the only exceptions being cases in which the mother’s life is in danger. There are also technically exceptions for rape, but they are purely theoretical, as there is no process for applying for an exception. In Ashley’s case, her mother did not find out about her pregnancy until she was so far along that she would have needed to travel to Chicago to get an abortion—something her mother could not afford to do. So, at the age of thirteen, Ashley was forced, by law, to give birth to her rapist’s baby. Mississippi already has the second-highest maternal mortality rate in the country (a problem that is four times worse for Black women). And though Ashley’s pregnancy thankfully had no complications, she described it in one word: “painful.”
This story is utterly tragic, but it’s important not to treat it like a senseless tragedy of nature. Living, breathing people took a traumatized child and thought it was the moral decision to traumatize her further. The people who passed this law were aware of what its effects could be. Mississippi’s House Speaker Phillip Gunn was asked about nearly this exact scenario by a reporter last year:
Reporter Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today: So, [a] 12-year-old child molested by her father and uncle should carry that pregnancy to term?
Mississippi House Speaker Phillip Gunn: That is my personal belief. I believe life begins at conception.
Every anti-abortion activist, politician, and judge is responsible for what happened here. They also share the blame for the 10-year-old rape victim, who would have been forced to give birth in Ohio last year had she not received an abortion in Indiana (which has also since made abortion almost entirely illegal), as well as the two other unnamed children forced to flee the state to avoid giving birth to their rapist’s children. They are also responsible for the 16-year-old who was denied an abortion in Florida because she was not “sufficiently mature” to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy (though she was apparently mature enough to give birth).
Many of the people who have inflicted this pain on children not only feel no shame but appear to feel proud of what they’ve wrought. For instance, James Bopp, the general counsel at the head of the largest pro-life group in the country (who has written multiple anti-abortion bills passed in the wake of Dobbs), said that if the 10-year-old rape victim who fled Ohio to terminate her pregnancy had stayed in the state:
“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”
Another lawmaker in Ohio, state Rep. Jean Schmidt, was asked how she would feel if a thirteen-year-old were hypothetically forced to carry a pregnancy to term as a result of the law. She said,
“It is a shame that it happens, but there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.”
To our knowledge, there has not been national data collected on how many children have been forced to carry children to term as a result of new abortion bans. Many states claim to have “exceptions” for cases of rape and incest, but like in Mississippi, those exceptions are often extremely difficult to get and function more as fig leaves to make extreme abortion bans appear more reasonable. As Fabiola Cineas wrote last year in Vox,
Most of the rape and incest exception clauses in abortion bans say that an abortion seeker must report the sexual assault to the police and then give the police report to their abortion provider, a process advocates say creates added stressors and hurdles for pregnant people… The majority of sexual assaults — two out of three — are not reported to the police, and rape victims are often assaulted by someone they know, which further complicates their decision to file a report since they fear retaliation or believe the police won’t help, among other reasons. And when people do report having been sexually assaulted, they are often not believed by law enforcement.
According to 2019 data from the Guttmacher Institute, 10,399 women who were raped received abortions. Given that more than two in five women of reproductive age live in states that have banned or restricted abortion since the Dobbs ruling, it seems fair to estimate that thousands have been forced to carry pregnancies to term after being raped as a result of state-level abortion bans.
The above quotes, and many others, show that many lawmakers and activists in the anti-abortion movement view forcing rape victims and people facing dangerous pregnancies to give birth as not only a tragic byproduct of their laws but as a good in and of itself. Obviously, they should all be kept as far away from public office as possible. But, unless you live somewhere represented by them, there isn’t much you can do about them. However, there are other ways to spite them by helping out their victims: Here is a list of abortion funds you can donate to, which help women around the country who live in states with bans pay for travel, childcare, and other expenses.
Subscribe to The Current Affairs Podcast, where we have a three-part series on abortion in the United States!
PART I. Abortion in America: Carole Joffe on the "Obstacle Course" to Get Necessary Medical Care
PART II. Diana Greene Foster on "The Turnaway Study"
PART III. Debunking The Right's Bad History of Abortion Laws w/ Leslie Reagan
AROUND THE STATES
The conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just made the abortion drug mifepristone more difficult to obtain. It is now no longer possible to receive the drug via telemedicine or through the mail. It must now also be used within the first seven weeks of pregnancy (which is before around 20 percent of women know they are pregnant). Drug-based abortions account for more than half of the abortions that occur in the U.S. Opponents of the drug, including a Texas district judge who suspended its FDA approval earlier this year, have pushed bogus claims of its danger. But according to a 2013 review of 87 trials, less than one percent of users reported serious side effects. Meanwhile, the drug is responsible for a lower death rate than Tylenol, penicillin, or Viagra.
Kansas police officers have raided the offices of a local newspaper, seizing journalists’ computers and cell phones. The Marion County Record, although small, is “uncommonly aggressive for its size,” and “has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials,” according to the New York Times. Last Friday, local police stormed into the Record’s offices and turned them upside down, hauling away servers and personal devices belonging to the staff. Their legal justification, ostensibly that The Record had violated the privacy of a local business owner, remains unclear at best; when asked to justify his actions, police chief Gideon Cody would say only that “the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated,” which doesn’t sound thuggish and authoritarian at all. Tragically, the paper’s 98-year-old co-owner Joan Meyer died soon after the raid, reportedly saying that she had been “stressed beyond her limits” —and also that “these are Hitler tactics, and something has to be done.
A group of young climate activists—aged from five to 26—has triumphed in Montana, where a court just affirmed that the state government is constitutionally required to provide its people with “a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” The judge ruled that by passing laws to expand oil drilling, increase coal mining, and build new power plants with no regard for carbon emissions, state legislators violated this duty. Indeed, America’s carbon output is at record levels, and the climate change it causes has triggered catastrophic effects not just in Montana, but around the globe. Montana’s lawmakers will now have to take environmental impacts into account when passing energy legislation (assuming this case does not get overturned by the Supreme Court). It remains to be seen whether this will set a wider precedent in climate-related court cases, such as those brought by several states and cities against oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell that could force them to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in damages for downplaying or ignoring the risks of climate change.
Real estate speculators have descended, vulture-like, on Maui. In the wake of its recent catastrophic wildfires, Hawaii has suffered both insult and injury. President Biden, who is definitely in complete control of his faculties, appeared to forget the name “Maui” on Wednesday, referring to the island as “the one where you see on television all the time.” Meanwhile, the real estate industry has been sending its best and brightest, with locals reporting that they’ve received unsolicited calls from out-of-state investors “seeking to buy up what remains of their island homes and property” at cheap rates. Naomi Klein calls it another example of what she termed “disaster capitalism” in her landmark 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. This is “the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself,” something she’s also documented following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. As a recent TIME feature explores, the entire modern history of Hawaii is one of people being dispossessed from their land by wealthy outsiders, and the latest round of speculation is just a particularly grotesque example. More than 110 people have been declared dead as a result of Hawaii’s historic wildfires, and an estimated 1,300 are missing. Meanwhile, Hawaii’s only burn unit is struggling to treat all the incoming patients. You can donate to the American Red Cross’s disaster relief efforts and the Hawai’i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, which provides resources to displaced families.
A USEFUL CONTRAPTION FOR THE SUMMER MONTHS
Soon, the New York Times will recommend we all purchase one of these instead of doing something about climate change.
AROUND THE WORLD
A migrant boat was found off the coast of Cape Verde, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, earlier this week, and as many as 92 of its passengers are presumed dead. The Senegalese vessel, which was reported to a Spanish NGO nearly a month ago, initially carried 130 people through the deadly migration route from West Africa to the Canary Islands (en route to Spain), but only 38 survivors were found when the boat was discovered by fishermen with seven dead passengers also aboard. A spokesman for the International Organization for Migration said that he believes the search efforts “have not been sufficient” and that he has asked for greater search resources that could have saved more lives. Migrant rescue efforts across the European Union have been woefully under-resourced and left thousands to die needlessly. Maurice Stierl in Al Jazeera calls it “strategic neglect.” He writes:
By further withdrawing their rescue assets, European actors have produced a rescue vacuum in the central Mediterranean…A 2021 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights suggested that “the damage and death along the central Mediterranean route … is the result of a failed system of migration governance”, emblematic of which are the “significant delays and failures to render assistance to migrant boats”.
After being forced out of their home by Israeli settlers, a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem has been forced to pay 50,000 shekels (more than $13,000) for their own eviction. The Sub Laban family had lived in the house since 1955, but because the home belonged to Jews prior to 1948, any Jewish settler is allowed to claim it as their own and kick out the family living there (Palestinians cannot do the same with lands in Israel, if you can believe it). As Haaretz reports,
In July, Nora and her husband Mustafa were ordered to evacuate the house. At about 6 A.M. one morning, a large police force blocked off the whole area and about 20 police officers broke into the house and extracted Mustafa and six left-wing Israeli activists that stayed with him. Nora was away receiving medical treatment at the time of the eviction.
After being kicked out of their home by police, the Sub Labans received a letter saying that they were responsible for paying 17,187 shekels to cover the wages of the police officers who evicted them, as well as 17,000 shekels to the company that carried out the eviction, on top of the 13,000 shekels they already owed to cover the legal expenses for the settlers who moved into their home. This story is perfectly illustrative of how the Israeli legal system abuses and dispossesses Palestinians. According to the U.N., around 150 other Palestinian families in East Jerusalem are currently being threatened with forcible eviction by Israeli authorities to make way for Israeli settlements. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 14,200 Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli settlements since 2009. The U.N. has also documented 591 attacks by settlers against Palestinians just this year, which resulted in 204 injuries and six deaths.
LONG READ: Finland’s center-right National Coalition Party has just invited the far-right Finns Party into government, and it’s been an embarrassing disaster for all involved. As Tatu Aphonen writes in Jacobin,
Finland’s new government had been in power for less than two weeks before entering into crisis. Vilhelm Junnila, the new minister of economic affairs, from the nationalist Finns Party, turned out to have had a history of far-right signaling, including jokes implying affinity toward Adolf Hitler. In a tight vote of confidence, he didn’t even get the support of all the new government’s ministers and resigned in disgrace a few days later. Junnila is not the only controversial politician in his party. Many other Finns Party MPs have been convicted of ethnic agitation. The party’s ideological leader Jussi Halla-aho, now the speaker of the Parliament of Finland, once wrote about his desire for foreigners to rape several left-wing and liberal female politicians.
But the Finns Party is merely a sideshow to the “neoliberal” faction that brought them into power in the first place. Aphonen continues,
They are an accessory to this government, playing second fiddle to bring neoliberalism and austerity to a new level, a local variation of a model that is being replicated across Europe… This new government’s program… includ[es] personal fines for workers on wildcat strikes, restrictions on sympathy strikes, and making the first day of sick leave unpaid. Exceptionally, the government is choosing to interfere in the wage-setting process itself, decreeing that no unions should be able to negotiate general wage contracts where the wage raises are set by the export industries.
We’d like to personally thank Tatu, who reached out to us to make us aware of his writing about Finnish politics! If you have a story you’d like to see us discuss in the briefing (including ones you have written!), please send us an email at briefing@currentaffairs.org.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
LONG READ: An explicit “anti-democracy” think tank—the Claremont Institute—has been wheedling its way into a position of influence in Republican politics. As Katherine Stewart writes in The New Republic,
Extremism of the right-wing variety has always figured on the sidelines of American culture, and it has enjoyed a renaissance with the rise of social media. But Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example… Any and all means to annihilate the power of the woke, up to and including political violence and overturning elections, must be seriously considered if we (right-thinking Americans) are to “save our country.”
In addition, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has an article about Richard Hanania, a Claremont-published writer who was widely respected in mainstream conservative politics (and even published in The New York Times) before being outed for having a blog filled with white supremacist and eugenicist ravings. Hanania’s rise to prominence was carried along by Silicon Valley billionaires, who have poured tens of millions into Republican politics. Bouie writes,
The question to ask here — the question that matters — is why an otherwise obscure racist has the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve? … If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.
WOMBAT FACT OF THE WEEK
Wombats poop cubes! These Australian marsupials are, in fact, the only animals known to poop cubes—a fact that has long mystified scientists.
According to a report in the journal Soft Matter (lol), researchers examined wombat intestines and found that the cubes were a result of unusual muscular contractions in the colon. “Using laboratory testing and mathematical models, a team of researchers found there are two stiff and two flexible areas around the circumference of the wombat intestine,” a CNN report on the study says.
But why cubes? The researchers speculate that wombats evolved to do this because they tend to mark their territory by pooing on rocks and logs, and cubes are less likely to roll off. This could explain why wombats in captivity have less cubic poops than their wild counterparts. According to Science magazine, “The squarer the poop, the healthier the wombat.”
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. 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. Current Affairs is 100% reader supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.