Dec. 19, 2023 ❧ Carols for a ceasefire, Rudy pays out, Homelessness up in last year
Plus a Thai MP jailed for insulting the monarch, probation reform in Pennsylvania, a major schism in one of America's top churches, and frozen frogs..
A piping hot bowl of news gumbo!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
HOMELESSNESS AT A RECORD HIGH
Homelessness has grown 12 percent in the last year according to numbers released last week by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As of this past January, 653,000 people in America—roughly 20 in every 10,000—were dealing with homelessness, with disproportionate numbers of people of color. After seven months of decline, home prices have risen for the last eight months with the S&P’s Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index, reaching a historic high in September. According to Peggy Bailey, the vice president for housing and income security at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “The main driver of homelessness and housing instability” is “the gap between low incomes and rent costs.”
Joe Biden has set the goal of reducing homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. But the expiration of COVID-era rental assistance, stimulus payments, and eviction moratoriums throughout his term have sent the trend in reverse. The National Low Income Housing Association estimates that the US has a shortage of 7 million affordable units for those in poverty. But the Biden administration has done little to expand the housing supply. For instance, despite laying out a Housing Supply Action Plan in 2022 to close the shortfall of affordable housing, very little new spending was authorized to actually accomplish this in that year’s infrastructure bill.
While the homeless suffer the absolute worst effects of America’s housing affordability crisis, tens of millions of Americans who are not homeless are still feeling the crunch. Nearly 11 million households spend more than half of their income on rent and young families increasingly feel that homeownership is a pipe dream because of costs. And while a certain subset of unfathomably annoying commentators continue to insist that America’s negative feelings about “Bidenomics” are based purely on “vibes,” and not their actual experiences, the increasing unaffordability of housing is a very good reason for pessimism.
PAST AFFAIRS
“Homelessness Is An Entirely Solvable Problem” by Nathan J. Robinson (from April 19, 2023)
Here in New Orleans, if you drive along the underside of the US-90 overpass downtown, you’ll pass by a depressingly long string of homeless encampments. It goes on and on, and personally every time I see the tents I become angry, knowing that a few blocks away there are multi-million dollar antebellum mansions with empty rooms galore. I don’t like living in a society that refuses to give people even a bare room with a soft bed as a basic entitlement. Morally, the existence of any involuntary homelessness seems to me to be a strong indictment of the country.
Here’s the thing: we could stop it whenever we wanted. Our local paper recently reported on residents’ rising “concern” about homelessness in the city, noting that with the tent communities come trash piles, drug use, and violence. But the paper also noted a rather astonishing fact: three years ago, the paper says, “homelessness in New Orleans was essentially eradicated thanks to an influx of HUD and FEMA dollars that funded hotel stays for unhoused people.” In fact, “after the first push in early 2020, the number of people living on the street dropped to only about 30 in June 2020.” But “since the housing initiative ended in Jan. 2022, the total number of homeless people in New Orleans is creeping toward pre-pandemic levels.” So, we essentially solved the problem. (Only 30 people living on the street throughout the city!) And then we un-solved it.
It shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp: if you allow people to have free hotel rooms, they won’t live on the street, and if you don’t, they will… Homelessness is a very simple problem that is often over-analyzed. The fact is that there is a group of people who have found themselves (for whatever reason) unable to secure a roof over their heads. Usually, they simply don’t have enough money, because rent is very high and wages are very low, meaning that even if you work full-time it’s extremely hard to afford a small apartment in many cities. There’s a very direct correlation between how expensive housing is and how many homeless people there are. It’s perfectly possible to simply provide a guaranteed right to housing. This is the approach Finland has taken. They’re eradicating homelessness through the novel solution of providing housing for people. They took action, and as a result, they went from having a substantial homeless population to the point where, by 2020, “practically no-one was sleeping rough on a given night in Finland.”
FIGHTING BACK
CEASEFIRE CAROLS FOR GAZA
This Christmas season, many people are finding it hard to celebrate. After all, the Israeli military’s merciless bombing of the Gaza Strip is now in its third month, with a death toll reaching 19,968 on Tuesday morning. In Bethlehem itself, the Palestinian Christian community has canceled many celebrations in the face of the ongoing massacre.
In the United States, though, protestors are taking the holiday as an opportunity to demand peace on Earth. They’ve begun singing “Ceasefire Carols”—classic Christmas songs, rewritten with lyrics about the crisis in Palestine—outside the homes of their elected officials, in their local malls, and anywhere else people might listen. In Minneapolis, more than 200 carolers gathered outside Senator Amy Klobuchar’s house, singing an altered version of “White Christmas” (which becomes “I’m Dreaming of a Ceasefire.”) They also gave the Senator a large card, asking that she support an immediate end to the bombing. In Louisville, Kentucky, a smaller group crashed a fundraising event for the Kentucky Senate Democratic Caucus, singing the haunting “O Broken Town of Bethlehem”:
O broken town of Bethlehem,
Your people long for peace.
Curfew, raids, and barricades
Have brought them to their knees.
Still they long for justice
And still they make their stand.
Hopes and fears call through the years,
“Come heal this holy land.”
In Utah, meanwhile, another group of carolers made their way through a mall in Salt Lake City, before singing loudly at a city council meeting.
This latest form of protest shows, yet again, how people of all faiths are united in their support for Gaza. We’ve already seen the courage and dedication of Jewish groups like IfNotNow and Rabbis for Ceasefire, and that of Muslims around the world; now, it’s people from largely Christian backgrounds taking action during their own holiday season. Their solidarity is a rebuke to the Islamophobia of some American evangelicals, and together, these interfaith groups form a powerful chorus.
The Ceasefire Carols movement has a Linktree page with their songbook, social media, and other materials available here. Upcoming events are scheduled for New York City and San Francisco (both on December 23), among other places. If you happen to be in one of those cities, why not lend your voice to the growing call for peace?
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A Mississippi cop who shot an 11-year-old won’t be indicted for it. By now, it’s well-known that U.S. police unleash random, mindless violence against anyone they see fit, and usually get away with it. But even by those standards, this is an egregious case. The officer in question is Sergeant Greg Capers of the Indianola, Mississippi police force. According to Carlos Moore, an attorney for the prosecution, Capers was responding to a domestic disturbance call from a woman named Nakala Murry, when he decided to pull a gun on her 11-year-old son:
Capers yelled into the home and ordered anyone inside to come out with their hands up, Moore said. He said Aderrien Murry walked into the living room with nothing in his hands, and Capers shot him in the chest.
Aderrien, thankfully, survived—although he was hospitalized for several days with a collapsed lung, among other injuries. In a public statement, Capers insists that the shooting “definitely wasn’t intentional,” and that he feels just terrible about it. Apparently, that was enough for a grand jury to let him off without criminal charges. Still, it’s hard to imagine what the justification for “unintentionally” shooting a child in the chest could be. The jury’s decision is especially surprising when you consider that Capers also has an unrelated excessive-force lawsuit against him from December 2022, when he reportedly tased an Army staff sergeant “up to four times,” choked him, and pointed a gun at him while he was handcuffed. Although Capers won’t face charges, the Murry family has filed a $5 million lawsuit against the city of Indianola, which may offer some semblance of justice. Still, nothing can truly compensate them for the trauma they’ve gone through at police hands. Cops across the country need to be demilitarized, disarmed, and yes, defunded, so no family has to deal with such a nightmare ever again.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The Sheriff and his Deputies should never be armed in public. Every urban riot, shoot-out and blood-bath (involving guns) in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.”
From Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign platform, when he ran for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1970.
❧ Pennsylvania is getting much-needed probation reform. But there’s still room for improvement. Last Thursday, PA Governor Josh Shapiro signed SB 838—more commonly known as the Comprehensive Probation Reform bill—into law. The legislation requires that a person’s probation be reviewed after 2 years or 50 percent of their sentence has passed, whichever comes first. It also instructs judges to have a “presumption against confinement” when it comes to so-called “technical violations”—things like showing up late to a parole appointment, visiting a family member in another state without permission, and so on. According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, at least 128,000 people were incarcerated for these “non-criminal violations of parole” in 2021, accounting for “27 percent of all admissions to state and federal prisons.” In Pennsylvania, the issue gained prominence when Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill was sentenced to 2-4 years in prison for misdemeanor violations of his parole (including the truly heinous crime of popping wheelies on his dirtbike). The experience led him to co-found the nonprofit REFORM Alliance in 2019. The Alliance was instrumental in pressuring Pennsylvania lawmakers to overhaul the state’s parole system, and Meek Mill spoke at the signing of SB 838:
“Every time I [crossed] the Ben Franklin to go pick my mom up to take my son to school in New Jersey, I was actually committing a crime the whole time from technical violations,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for this position. I don’t want to do it. It’s not for clout. It’s something that I stand for. It’s something that I live for, and I appreciate y’all for helping me.”
However, as the Pennsylvania ACLU points out, the new law has a few glaring weaknesses. Most importantly, it does nothing to limit the length of probation sentences a judge can hand down. Pennsylvania remains one of just seven states without such a limit. SB 838 also allows judges to continue using what the ACLU calls “probation ‘tails’—a term of probation imposed after a period of incarceration.” This is especially perverse since probation is supposed to be an alternative to incarceration, not an additional punishment. It’s good to see reforms being made, but a lot more remains to be done. The end goal, after all, is not to make the injustices of policing and imprisonment slightly less awful, but to dispose of them entirely.
❧ A major schism is occurring within one of America’s largest Protestant denominations. Since 2019, more than 25 percent of congregations have left the United Methodist Church over its increasing tolerance of LGBTQ people. Though the church still bans same-sex marriage and forbids “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from becoming ordained, some progressive congregations have been defying these rules. And while church policy at the national level has not been revised, at the regional level, each of its five regional jurisdictions approved a resolution last year stating that “LGBTQIA+ people will be protected, affirmed, and empowered” while the church’s Western Jurisdiction elected Cedrick Bridgeforth as just the second openly gay bishop in the church. The Methodist Church is one of the central denominations of what is commonly called “Mainline” Protestantism—members of mainline denominations are generally more socially liberal and culturally pluralistic than their Evangelical counterparts. However, identification with mainline denominations has been declining rapidly since the 1960s when more than half of Americans identified with them. Despite what Bishop Bridgeforth describes as efforts to move “the alignment of the [Methodist] denomination more with the mainstream of our country,” it has rapidly been hemorrhaging members as a greater number of Americans now describe as “unaffiliated,” with polls suggesting that the increased association between Christianity and right-wing politics may be hurting its public viability.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ In the disputed Essequibo region, Venezuela and Guyana have agreed to avoid using military force. Back in November, we told you about the referendum Venezuela’s government planned to hold, on the question of whether or not to annex the oil-rich Essequibo territory (which is currently within Guyana’s internationally-recognized borders.) Well, they held it, and by some reports, 96 percent of Venezuelans voted to add Essequibo to “the map of Venezuelan territory.” Of course, any vote where 96 percent of people agree on something is probably fraudulent to some extent, but the referendum prompted widespread fears that Venezuela would invade its neighbor, similar to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem likely to happen—at least for now. In a tense meeting last Thursday, leaders from both countries agreed they would “not threaten or use force against one another in any circumstances,” and would “refrain, whether by words or deeds, from escalating any conflict.” There was outside pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to keep the peace, most notably from Brazil, which moved troops to its border with Venezuela soon after the referendum. The sanctions relief Venezuela recently negotiated with the U.S. also plays a part, as Maduro may be reluctant to risk losing the progress his country has made in that department. Both he and Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali, have agreed to hold further meetings in Brazil in roughly three months, and attempt to resolve their underlying issues by diplomatic means. For the sake of the millions of civilians living in both countries, we can only hope it stays that way.
❧ In South Africa, former President Jacob Zuma is breaking with the African National Congress (ANC) to create a new political party. Zuma, who served as South Africa’s president from 2009 to 2018, has been harshly critical of incumbent leader Cyril Ramaphosa, who he calls a “proxy of white monopoly capital.” In a statement on Saturday, he said that he “cannot and will not campaign for the ANC of Ramaphosa,” and would instead create a new political party called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). It’s a deliberately provocative name, referring to the paramilitary wing of the ANC when it was an illegal party fighting apartheid. Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a corruption inquiry in 2021, and has been dealing with chronic health issues, so it seems unlikely he’ll run for office himself. Currently, he says only that he’ll vote for the MK in 2024’s nationwide elections. However, his radical rhetoric—which describes the party’s mission as a “new people’s war,” and insists that “there can never be reconciliation without socio-economic justice and equality”—is likely to influence the MK’s agenda moving forward. The ANC is already on shaky ground heading into 2024, having dipped below 50 percent in South African polls for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994. In contrast, the hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters party has been on the rise, becoming South Africa’s third-largest party in 2019. With Zuma’s MK added to the mix, it’s difficult to say what next year’s election will bring—but South Africa’s politics may well be in for a radical shakeup.
❧ A progressive member of Thailand’s parliament, Rukchanok Srinork, has been given six years in prison for insulting the monarchy on social media—a crime under the country’s lese-majeste law. Rukchanok, a 29-year-old former activist—nicknamed “Ice”— who’d just begun her first term in office, was charged over two tweets she’d made criticizing the monarchy before her election. One of her tweets criticized the monarch for profiting from COVID-19 vaccine contracts while another shared an anti-monarchy quote from 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot.
Thailand’s law against speech which “defames, insults or threatens” the ruling family is one of the strictest in the world, carrying a maximum penalty of fifteen years. Additionally, anyone can bring an accusation that must be investigated by authorities. Often trials are held in closed tribunals while the UN says many arrested dissidents are held for long periods without bail. The lese majeste law was a subject of massive protests led by young activists against the country’s monarchy and military government in 2020 and 2021. Rukchanok was one of those activists, who then joined the social democratic Move Forward Party and won a shock election in the Bang Bon constituency, which is controlled by one of Thailand’s most powerful political families, which led her to receive the nickname “giant killer” by one Thai media outlet. Move Forward won the most seats in the Thai parliament during elections in May, but failed to form a governing coalition due to its lone opposition to the speech law. Rukchanok, currently released on bail, says she plans to appeal the sentence. Her outrageous prosecution under this law is one of many that have been brought against prominent pro-democracy activists—since the protests broke out in 2020, at least 1,930 people have been prosecuted for speaking out against the government, including 216 children, according to the advocacy group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What is going on with our politicians?”)
❧ In a dramatic court verdict, Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $148 million for defaming election workers. Mr. Giuliani’s trial took just four days, and a Georgia jury awarded the enormous sum to just two people—Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss—who served as poll workers during the 2020 presidential election. Since Donald Trump’s loss, Giuliani has been spreading absurd conspiracy theories about voter fraud, and he’s targeted Freeman and Moss in particular. On multiple occasions, he posted what NBC calls a “brief, heavily edited clip of security footage” which supposedly showed the women handling an unauthorized USB drive while counting votes. (Moss maintains that the “USB drive” was, in fact, a mint.) Thanks to Giuliani’s smear campaign, Freeman and Moss received a torrent of racist threats and harassment, and Freeman had to flee her home after Trump supporters started showing up on her doorstep with bullhorns. On Friday, the jury sided with the poll workers, ruling that Giuliani must pay each of them at least $24 million for defamation alone, plus additional money for emotional distress and punitive damages. It’s not the only legal trouble “America’s Mayor” has found himself in lately, either. In a related case, Giuliani has pled not guilty to criminal, rather than civil, offenses connected to election interference in Georgia, and he’s been sued by a former aide for alleged sexual harassment and assault. Taken together, these cases may well bankrupt him, or even land him behind bars. In the United States, it’s pretty difficult for a rich, well-connected man to actually face consequences for his actions—but Giuliani is proving that if you just keep committing crimes, it can eventually happen.
NEW YORK IS A COMPLICATED CITY
Listen to current mayor Eric Adams describe his year:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
FROG FACT OF THE DAY
During long, cold winters, most animals choose to burrow someplace warm or migrate south for survival. But frogs are built for the cold. Some species can have the majority of the water in their bodies freeze without dying.
Matt Ormsby of the Missouri Department of Conservation, in an interview with Spectrum News, says wood frogs—the only frog species found north of the Arctic Circle—can remain semi-frozen for as long as eight months. “Water outside the cells does freeze inside the frog but the cells are protected. Nearly 65% of the frog’s body is frozen solid. Most of this is in the abdominal cavity surrounding the organs and in the eye lenses and water between the skin and muscle. The heart and lungs stop while the frog freezes.”
How do they manage to not die? “The biggest part of the process is the special glucose that the frog’s liver produces just before the freezing process. This special glucose is sent to all tissues, organs, and cells in the frog’s body, which acts somewhat like a natural antifreeze and keeps the water inside the cells from freezing and causing damage.” Though wood frogs can brave the most fearsome chills, gray treefrog, Cope’s gray treefrog, spring peeper, and boreal chorus frogs also partially freeze during winter.
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 an independent progressive media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners. We offer a beautiful bimonthly print and digital magazine, a weekly podcast, and a regular news briefing service. We are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with EIN 83-1675720. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Donations may be made through our website www.currentaffairs.org/donate, via wire transfer, or by sending us a check. Email help@currentaffairs.org with any questions.