Dec. 15, 2023 ❧ Pharma violates medical privacy, Putin meets his AI clone, and Tennesseans fight back against book bans
Plus Pennsylvania's privatized water, Iowa's run-in with Satan, Chad's brewing coup, and Senegal's gigantic prized sheep!
News is but a social construct.
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
PHARMACIES TELL COPS EVERYTHING
Thanks to a Congressional investigation, we now know something fairly disturbing about the country’s largest pharmacy chains. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year, three Democratic lawmakers—Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden, Washington’s Representative Pramila Jayapal, and California’s Representative Sara Jacobs—launched an inquiry to find out just how secure Americans’ prescription-drug records actually are. As it turns out, the answer is “not very.”
Of the eight companies the legislators questioned, three of the largest—CVS, Kroger, and Rite Aid—said they instruct their pharmacists to simply give patients’ records to police when they’re asked, right then and there in the store, without consulting any legal counsel. As an excuse, they cited the fact that pharmacists often “face extreme pressure to immediately respond to law enforcement demands”—which really seems like a good reason to question the legitimacy of those demands, not comply with them. Meanwhile, the other five companies—Walgreens, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart, and Amazon’s pharmacy division—at least had some legal barrier to police. However, they only require a subpoena to access customer records, not a search warrant. (Unlike warrants, subpoenas typically don’t require a judge’s approval, and are much easier to acquire.) Of the eight companies surveyed, only Amazon actually notifies people that law enforcement has demanded their records.
It should be obvious why this is a problem. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is supposed to give people a strong expectation of privacy when it comes to their health. Clearly, though, the law has a massive blind spot regarding pharmacies. Thankfully, it appears the actual number of cops demanding people’s prescription records is small—according to the Congressional report, CVS (the country’s largest chain) “only received a single-digit number of such consumer requests” in 2022. But as various states debate banning abortion medication and even placing restrictions on birth control pills, that could easily change. Even for people with conservative views on reproductive healthcare, it should still be concerning that the police can see your entire drug history with a bare minimum of effort. As the report concludes, “Americans deserve to have their private medical information protected at the pharmacy counter,” and right now that’s exactly what they don’t have.
PENNSYLVANIA MAY START ROLLING BACK WATER PRIVATIZATION
Pennsylvania has been steadily privatizing its water system, and it’s leading families to pay way more for utilities. The state is now reconsidering a law passed in 2016 which, according to the Penn Capital-Star, “allows municipal water and sewer utilities to negotiate with for-profit utilities for the fair market value rather than the actual value of the system.” For-profit companies have been passing those rates on to consumers, and then some. For example, Aqua PA and Pennsylvania American Water, which purchased a combined 22 municipal water systems under the law increased consumer rates by anywhere from 44 percent to 166 percent. In New Garden Township—whose water system was the first to be privatized after the 2016 law—prices have increased by 85 percent, a cofounder of the advocacy group Keep Water Affordable. Since its passage, customers have paid $85 million more annually for utilities owned by private companies than they otherwise would have, according to state Consumer Advocate Patrick Cicero.
A package of bills has been introduced in the PA House which the Capital-Star says “would require utility companies to use lower values for newly purchased water and sewer systems when seeking rate increases, spread the impact over a longer period, and improve transparency of the process.” This is a good start, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, which is that privatization inevitably drives up prices. One survey of the 500 largest water systems in the country, conducted by the journal Water Policy (summarized by Alex Brown in Fast Company) found that
“Private ownership was the most significant variable in driving up utility bills—even more than aging infrastructure, water supply, and local regulations.”
This seems like a no-brainer. As Marcela González Rivas, one of the Water Policy researchers told Fast Company, “Providing water is really expensive as it is,” she said. “If you then add making a profit as part of the cost of the service, it just makes it really unaffordable.”
FIGHTING BACK
TENNESSEE STANDS UP TO CENSORSHIP
Like many places in the United States, Tennessee has recently seen an increase in the disgraceful, authoritarian practice of book banning. As of July, more than 300 books had been “targeted for removal” in the state’s public schools and libraries, the vast majority of them dealing with gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ rights. In a particularly stupid incident, the conservative group Moms for Liberty tried to ban a picture book about seahorses in Tennessee’s Williamson County, because it showed a male seahorse carrying eggs (something they actually do). This, apparently, “normalizes gender fluidity,” and is just too dangerous to allow.
If any children are reading this news briefing, please shield their eyes from this graphic depiction of seahorse reproduction. (Image: Snopes)
Unfortunately, several schools and libraries have actually complied with these deranged individuals’ demands, and have removed the books in question from their shelves. (Which, of course, only encourages the would-be censors to make more demands.)
Some people, however, have had enough. In Murfreesboro, a man called Brendon Donoho was outraged when the city pulled four books with LGBTQ themes from its public (not school!) library. Now, he’s started a library of his own. Available at borobannedbooks.com, this service loans copies of five commonly-banned books to anyone in Rutherford County who requests them, free of charge. “There is a leadership class of people and they make a lot of political points by finding small groups of vulnerable people and picking on them,” Donoho told Nashville’s WKRN. “So it feels good to know… we can easily meet that need as a community [and] work around whatever kind of nonsense is going on.” Since the mini-library launched in November, it’s already had “several checkouts,” with more likely to come.
More recently, Dr. Susan Groenke, the director of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, has set up a hotline for students across the entire state to request banned books. Available as a Google form, it not only allows people between the ages of 13 and 18 to get otherwise unavailable books mailed to an address of their choice, but it allows Tennesseans to report incidents of book banning that might otherwise go unnoticed. For LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable groups, it’s a vital lifeline.
These programs are admirable, but they’re stopgap measures, not a permanent solution. What’s really needed is political and legal action, like the recent California law that banned book-banning itself in public schools. People in every state should be demanding the same commitment to the free flow of ideas from their legislators, and putting pressure on them to actually deliver. We can’t rely solely on the courage of principled individuals like Donoho and Groenke. All of us have to stand together and make it clear that censorship will never be acceptable—in Tennessee, or anywhere else.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The State of Alabama is being sued over its prison labor programs. In a class-action suit filed on Tuesday, several current and former prisoners allege that the programs amount to “modern-day slavery.” According to Janet Herold, the legal director of the activist group Justice Catalyst Law, prison labor in Alabama forms a “modern reincarnation of the notorious convict leasing system that replaced slavery after the Civil War.” The suit details how incarcerated people are often forced to work long hours for little or no pay—and how some prisons themselves collect a 40 percent fee from the meager wages their inmates earn. One worker cited in the case says she worked on a road crew for just $2 a day, and was pressured to work even if she was sick, since “If you didn't work, you were at risk of going back to the prison or getting a disciplinary [infraction].” Just on its face, it’s hard to see how anyone could possibly justify this, or treat it as anything but the worst kind of exploitation. Maybe a high-profile loss in court, with significant financial and legal penalties, will be what it takes to finally end this abhorrent practice.
❧ The Satanic Temple of Iowa has stirred up a controversy over freedom of speech and religion. Last week, the group got permission to place a small holiday display—including a red pentagram wreath, some candles, and a goat mask made from bits of mirror—in the Iowa State Capitol building, along with the more traditional Christian Nativity scene.
Notably, members of the Satanic Temple don’t actually, literally worship Satan. Instead, they’re more like edgy civil libertarians, whose “Seven Fundamental Tenets” include things like “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” However, that didn’t stop conservatives from throwing a huge tantrum. In a newsletter, state Representative Brad Sherman called the big red goat “disgusting.” He demanded that Governor Kim Reynolds “have this blasphemous display removed immediately,” arguing that because Iowa’s constitution mentions God, “we as legislators and government officials are His ministers.” On the campaign trail, Ron DeSantis concurred, saying “That’s not a religion that the Founding Fathers were trying to create.” Ironically, though, it was Iowa Representative Jon Dunwell—himself an ordained Christian minister—who defended the Satanic Temple’s Constitutional rights, saying that while he personally found the display “objectionable,” he doesn’t “want the state evaluating and making determinations about religions.” Unfortunately, Dunwell seems to have been a lone voice of reason. On Thursday night, the Satanic Temple announced that their display had been vandalized “beyond repair,” and this morning Michael Cassidy—a former GOP congressional candidate—was charged with 4th degree criminal mischief for “beheading” the goat. So in a way, the Temple proved exactly what they set out to: that religious intolerance on the Right, and not the Devil, is what’s really destructive and scary.
❧ Florida is getting closer to a statewide referendum on abortion. After dramatic wins for reproductive freedom in Kansas and Ohio, many people in Florida want to hold their own yes-or-no vote on the issue. A proposed amendment to the state constitution would prohibit any restriction on abortion “before viability”—usually between 20 and 25 weeks—or “when necessary to protect the patient’s health,” overturning Governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban. At the time of writing, the Florida Division of Elections says it’s collected 753,306 signatures in favor of a referendum on the amendment, out of 891,523 needed—and activists have until February 1 to keep submitting them, making it likely the question will appear on 2024 ballots. According to NBC’s Aaron Franco and Morgan Radford, more than 150,000 signatures have come from registered Republicans. There’s still a difficult road ahead, as Florida law requires constitutional amendments to have at least 60 percent support—but when they’re given a chance to vote directly on the issues, Floridians can be surprisingly progressive, passing a $15 minimum wage by referendum in 2020. They may just shock the world again.
LONG READ: In The Lever, Freddy Brewster discusses how America’s largest teacher’s union— the National Education Association—is pushing teachers to buy expensive retirement plans from a private equity-owned insurance company that has been accused of fraud and mismanagement:
Since 2000, the 3 million-member National Education Association (NEA) has been sponsoring supplemental retirement plans run by Security Benefit Life Insurance Company. According to the union’s benefit arm, a separate nonprofit called NEA Member Benefits, there are more than 71,000 participants in the retirement programs, with approximately $3 billion in assets being managed by Security Benefit.
NEA Member Benefits is paid $3.8 million annually for the arrangement, which the nonprofit admits in government filings “creates a potential conflict of interest.” In fiscal year 2022-2023, roughly $150,000 was doled out to state NEA chapters participating in select retirement programs, regulatory filings show.
Security Benefit, a major retirement plan company owned by the private equity firm Eldridge Industries, is currently facing allegations of racketeering and fraud. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2019, claims Security Benefit misled investors about some of its retirement plans and how the products “would — by design — produce near-zero returns due to misrepresented and undisclosed features, risks, charges, and attributes,” the lawsuit states.
In interviews with The Lever, teachers and advocates said the Security Benefit plans backed by the NEA feature high fees and have resulted in poor returns. Two estimates suggest that the retirement plans can cost teachers potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their retirement savings. Surrender charges, penalties for leaving a plan early, for Security Benefit’s products can also run as high as 9 percent, according to Security Benefit’s own data.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ China claims to have made a breakthrough in electromagnetic rail gun technology. Not to be confused with a nail gun, a rail gun is a weapon that’s been speculated about for decades, but never actually deployed by any of the world’s militaries. In the simplest terms, it would use powerful electromagnetic fields (rather than explosives) to propel a bullet or an artillery shell forward, allowing projectiles to travel much faster, fly further, and do more damage when they land. In 2021, the U.S. Navy scrapped its own rail gun project, having spent $500 million on it without much success. Now, China claims to have made a breakthrough where the United States failed. According to a report in the South China Morning Post, engineers in the Chinese navy have built a rail gun that can fire 120 rounds, reaching targets within a range of 100 to 200 kilometers. If that’s true, the weapon would be a terrifying one; as the Post notes, typical artillery shells have a range in the tens, not hundreds, of kilometers. The really tragic thing, though, is that this technology has plenty of peaceful applications that are being ignored. In the same article, Beijing-based journalist Stephen Chen speculates that electromagnetic rails could be used to “zip a train through a vacuum tube at 1,000km/h,” faster than any known land vehicle, or to make space travel easier and cheaper by removing conventional rocket fuel from the equation. It’s only the politics of nationalism and geopolitical rivalry that turn every new technology toward killing, before any other use. If we move away from those senseless, outdated notions, maybe we can actually start making some progress as a species.
❧ Africa has seen a lot of coups recently. Could Chad be next? On Sunday, the country will hold a constitutional referendum—and as Nosmot Gbadamosi points out in Foreign Policy, it’s a precarious moment for its continued stability. If approved, the new constitution would create a unitary state in Chad, allowing General Mahamat Idriss Déby—who took control of the country, supposedly on an interim basis, after his father President Idriss Déby Itno died in 2021—to consolidate his power. Several opposition groups have urged citizens to boycott the vote, arguing that such a “dynastic system” is unacceptable. Meanwhile, Chad is dealing with a refugee crisis, as more than 400,000 people have fled from the civil war in Sudan and ended up there since April. And to add even more complications, Chad is the last Sahel country that still hosts French troops, after recent coups drove them out of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. Chad shares a border with Niger, along what’s often called Africa’s “coup corridor” —and there, too, anti-French sentiment has been building, with violent protests threatening to overrun a French military base after a French doctor reportedly shot a Chadian soldier in September. As Gbadamosi notes, all of these factors seem to spell out trouble ahead, both for Chad and the entire Sahel region.
❧ During a televised news conference in which he took video calls from constituents, Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared visibly shaken after receiving a phone call from…Vladimir Putin.
It was not actually a rogue Putin clone, but “a student at St. Petersburg State University” using a convincing AI simulacrum of the Russian leader. He began by eerily asking the president, “Is it true you have a lot of doubles?” (a reference to the theory that Putin is in poor health and has a legion of body doubles to impersonate him). After provoking some uncomfortable laughs, AI Putin then asked the real Putin how he “view[s] the dangers that artificial intelligence and neural networks bring into our lives?” Putin, visibly annoyed by being asked such a point-blank question by this pushy impostor, responded curtly, “I see you may resemble me and speak with my voice. But I have thought about it and decided that only one person must be like me and speak with my voice, and that will be me.” Roasted! He then clarified that the AI entity questioning him was “my first double, by the way.” He then turned to the subject of AI, saying “It’s impossible to prevent it. That means we should head and lead the process.” Putin has spent the last year blasting the West’s AI “monopoly” and signaled his intentions to get Russia into the race. He has even accused American-made chatbots like ChatGPT of “cancel[ing] Russian culture.” Hopefully, Russia’s incursion into the AI space will lead to some even better algorithmically generated stroganoff recipes and more fashionable tracksuit design ideas.
❧ Israel used US-supplied white phosphorus during an attack against Lebanon in October, which injured at least nine civilians, according to a new report from The Washington Post. According to witness testimony to The Post the use of the phosphorous “incinerated” four civilian homes in Lebanon North of the Israeli border and left three people hospitalized for several days. The use of white phosphorus in civilian areas is illegal under international law, and Amnesty International has called for a war crimes investigation. According to the United Nations,
“Once ignited, white phosphorus is very difficult to extinguish. It sticks to surfaces like skin and clothing. White phosphorus is harmful by all routes of exposure. White phosphorus can cause deep and severe burns, penetrating even through bone, and has been known to reignite after initial treatment.”
Once exposed to oxygen, says Professor Paul Rodgers from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, white phosphorus can burn as hot as 1,500F. It can also reignite for weeks after initially being fired, making any area where it has been used extremely hazardous. Before this, perhaps the most infamous use of white phosphorus in wartime was by The United States during the bloody 2004 siege of Fallujah during the Iraq War, which drove out the majority of residents from the city. Years later, researchers determined a spike in birth defects as a result of the chemical weapon’s use. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has said he was “concerned” about the report that Israel may have used this weapon but reminded everyone,
“White phosphorus does have a legitimate military utility … and obviously, anytime that we provide items like white phosphorus to another military, it is with the full expectation that it would be used in keeping with those legitimate purposes and in keeping with the laws of armed conflict.”
Given that Israel has already used white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza and done a myriad of other things that clearly do not “keep with the laws of armed conflict”, it’s hard to imagine the Biden administration is really all that “concerned.”
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ After months of buildup, House Republicans have officially launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden surrounding potential involvement in his oafish son Hunter’s sketchy business dealings. So far, dozens of witnesses have testified in the probe of the Bidens’ activities, and more than 40,000 documents, including bank records, have been subpoenaed. But despite pulling out all the stops (including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-GA] showing off pictures of Hunter’s schlong on the floor of Congress), Republicans have yet to find a smoking gun directly indicating that the President himself took a bribe or otherwise used his political influence to help his son’s business endeavors. The closest they have gotten to such a breakthrough came in July when Hunter’s former associate Devon Archer testified that the younger Biden sold “an illusion” of “access to his father” in the hopes of wooing foreign businessmen. While this alone does not prove Joe Biden himself was involved in his son’s business entanglements, Republicans can also point to instances in which Biden has outright lied about what his son has gotten up to—such as when he claimed Hunter never had deals with Chinese businessmen, only to have that contradicted by Hunter himself. And even if Joe Biden himself never received direct compensation for his son’s antics, does anyone sincerely believe Hunter earned the seat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company because of his business savvy? As usual, the ability of the immensely privileged to use their family names to skate through life free of consequence is the real story here. And while Republicans will try to turn it into one, influence peddling of that kind is hardly a partisan affair.
PAST AFFAIRS:
“Does Hunter Biden Matter?” by Nathan J. Robinson, from August 2023
“We can see how just being the president’s son results in people showering you with a colossal amount of money, and he certainly illustrates how grotesquely privilege functions in our society. He’s living disproof of the theory that we live in a meritocratic or in any way just world. But being a rich prick is not a crime; if it were, hardly anyone who currently holds public office could continue to do so… Joe Biden’s public image as grandfatherly and compassionate is probably concocted in large part for the cameras, as are so many of the personas of the famous people we think we know. What I take away from the Hunter Biden story is that DC is indeed a swamp, privilege is quite real, and the battle lines of politics are not rightly conceived as being between the “blue” and “red” teams, but between the rich and the rest of us.”
SHEEP FACT OF THE WEEK
People in Senegal love their huge sheep!
A Ladoum ram in Dakar, Senegal with his human caretaker. (IMAGE: Nigeria Livestock Farmers Association via Facebook)
The Ladoum sheep, a unique breed that can weigh as much as 400 pounds, is one of the most beloved domestic animals in all of Africa, sometimes selling for as much as $85,000. Although other kinds of sheep are, sadly, ritually sacrificed during the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha, the Ladoum sheep is more often kept as a prized pet by Senegalese families. “If I had 50 million, I’d spend it all on Ladoum sheep,” says Abib Seck, one animal trader interviewed by the Nigeria Livestock Farmers Association. (Mr. Seck reportedly has 40 of the enormous sheep, and “hopes to buy a separate house for his ovine chums.”) The Ladoum sheep even star in televised “pageants,” similar to the Westminster Dog Show in the U.S., where they’re judged on their size and beauty!
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.
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