Friday, July 21, 2023
Jayapal's Israel comments, cash bail, Trump indictment 3.0 on the horizon, horrifying border patrol behavior, refugees, elephants, and more...
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
ILLINOIS’ END TO CASH BAIL UPHELD IN COURT
Illinois’ policy ending cash bail has been upheld by the state Supreme Court after a case alleging that it violated the state constitution’s bill of rights. Illinois is the first state to end cash bail, though New Jersey and New York have also eliminated it for most offenses. Activists have long sought to eliminate cash bail because it effectively criminalizes poverty. As The Vera Institute of Justice explains,
“Close to half a million people across the country are trapped in jail before being convicted of a crime. They can’t afford to buy their freedom, forcing them to sit in jail while they await trial…Money bail criminalizes poverty by requiring people accused of a crime to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to be released before trial…[and] People jailed pretrial because they cannot make bail are more likely to lose their jobs, fall behind on rent, and lose custody of their children.”
Cash bail is a major reason why pre-trial incarceration grew by 433 percent between 1970 and 2015. Its growth has been helped along by the rise of a $2 billion bail bond industry.
The end to cash bail law was the subject of intense fear-mongering—with some mendacious folks dubbing it the “Purge Law,” to suggest it will let violent criminals walk free. But those accused of violent crimes can still be kept in jail if a judge deems them to be a threat. The only difference now is that a failure to pay bail alone is no longer a justification to keep someone behind bars. In 2023, violent crime did not increase more in Illinois than it did nationwide. In fact, according to the American Bar Association, “the majority of cities that have seen a rise in crime have not eliminated cash bail,” meanwhile,
“Research shows that jailing people while they await trial results in a consistent “criminogenic effect” of pretrial detention, meaning that people are more likely to be rearrested after staying locked behind bars pretrial than similarly situated individuals who were able to return home. It makes sense: pretrial detention has a deeply destabilizing impact on people’s lives. Thus, reducing incarceration—especially when people are still presumed innocent—can benefit public safety while also freeing up taxpayer dollars to be directed to more effective crime controls, such as social services that address the root causes of crime.
BIG STORY
REP. JAYAPAL SMEARED FOR ISRAEL COMMENTS
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is the latest person to be raked over the coals for saying objectively true things about the state of Israel. In a speech before Palestinian rights activists, she said,
“I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us — that it doesn't even feel possible.”
None of these statements should be controversial, as the evidence of explicitly racist policy being carried out by the Israeli government is overwhelming. Just as a few examples:
A 2018 Basic Law says that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
Israeli politicians regularly identify Arabs as a “demographic threat” to its character as a “Jewish state.” To that end, Jews from around the world (including ones who have never set foot in Israel) are given the right to move there unabated while Arabs who were expelled from the territory during Israel’s founding are not afforded that right.
Israeli law bans Palestinians from gaining citizenship or even residency when they marry Israeli citizens, and in a poll from 2016, 97 percent of Jewish Israelis said they were uncomfortable with their children marrying a Muslim.
Which people are counted as authentic Jews is often demarcated based on skin color: For example, Ethiopian Jews are not granted the right of return and face extreme difficulty emigrating, while lighter-skinned Jews from Europe face few hurdles.
The Israeli government supports the eviction and dispossession of Palestinian families to create often Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Meanwhile, various land use laws make around 80 percent of it only available to be leased by Jews.
Israeli politicians routinely make racist comments toward Arabs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously urged Jewish constituents to vote by telling them in 2015, “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” He has also nominated a diplomat, May Golan, who describes herself as “proud to be a racist.” Israel’s current National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, has said it is in Arabs’ “nature” to “kill each other” and often praises a rabbi who wanted to expel all Arabs and establish Israel as a theocracy. A former defense minister appointed by Netanyahu also referred to Palestinians as “like animals, they aren’t human.”
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, whose speech before Congress was the reason Jayapal made her remarks in the first place, has said that marriage between Jews and non-Jews was “an actual plague…” and that “There must be a campaign, a solution. We have to rack our brains to figure out how to solve this great challenge.” Herzog also once thanked a rabbi who gave him a blessing in which he stated the need to “defend the Jewish people from miscegenation [race mixing].”
If we listed every example of how racism is central to Israeli government policy, we’d be here all day. But for pointing this out, Jayapal has been excoriated by basically all of Washington. Forty-three members of her party signed a letter calling her comments “anti-Semitic.” The House then adopted a resolution saying that Israel is not a racist apartheid state, which only nine members voted against. The backlash forced Jayapal to retract her remarks. But she has no reason to apologize for statements of fact that, as Branko Marcetic writes in Jacobin,
“[have] now reached the realm of objective reality unless you’re in Washington, with everyone from the United Nations to human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’tselem reaching that conclusion. It’s also been a charge made by not just storied survivors of South African apartheid, like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, but even some former Israeli prime ministers.”
If a politician in America called inter-ethnic marriage a “plague,” referred to minorities as “animals,” and codified into law that only one racial group had “self-determination,” we would not hesitate for a second to condemn them as racist. Likewise, most of us look back at America’s history of housing discrimination and racial immigration quotas as stains on our nation’s past. Why is it verboten to call out when Israel does these things?
Obviously, other countries have racist policies, which we should also condemn. But it is not anti-Semitic to pay special attention to Israel: we give it $3 billion per year in military aid, far more than any other country on Earth. And much like with Saudi Arabia, it makes sense to spend more time scrutinizing Israel because our government is helping it to perpetuate its worst acts and could theoretically do something to stop them.
Lastly, anti-Semitism is a very real problem that is getting worse. But assuming every criticism of the Israeli government is inherently anti-Semitic cheapens the word entirely. Nobody calls criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen Islamophobic, nor do they call criticisms of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi anti-Hindu. In fact, treating Judaism as essentially synonymous with Israel is quite anti-Semitic itself, because it treats Jews as a monolithic hive mind. It ignores the diversity within Jewish thought—erasing the many Jews who stand in solidarity with dispossessed Palestinians and do not feel that the Israeli government reflects who they are.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on in electoral politics?”)
Trump may be about to be indicted again, this time for his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He said in a manic Truth Social post that he received a “target letter” from DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith. Usually, such letters are sent right before a grand jury is about to vote on whether to indict someone. It’s not exactly clear at the moment what the charges against Trump would be, but a few were recommended by the Democratic House’s January 6 commission last year, including disrupting an official proceeding of Congress, assisting an insurrection, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. We already know Trump repeatedly made claims about election fraud after his aides informed him they were false, resisted calling off the rioters as they stormed the Capitol, and tricked his own supporters into donating $250 million to a fake “election integrity” PAC and instead funneled the money to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ charity, to an organization to employ former Trump staff, to the Trump Hotel chain, and even to a group that organized the January 6 rally.
LONG LISTEN: Listen to this discussion on The Intercept’s “Deconstructed” podcast about a bipartisan effort to ban cluster munitions and how war hawks in the GOP used Marjorie Taylor Greene to derail it.
AROUND THE STATES
Sixteen people have been charged in Michigan for serving as fake electors for Trump in 2020, including the state GOP’s former national committeewoman and co-chair. Although Trump lost the state by more than 150,000 votes, they signed multiple documents claiming that they were “duly elected and qualified electors…for the State of Michigan,” when they were not. Georgia and Arizona are also investigating people who tried to usurp the role of electors for Trump—something that was attempted in seven swing states.
Texas border security officials have been directed to engage in “inhumane” treatment of migrants at the Southern border, according to a horrifying account provided by a Department of Public Safety whistleblower. According to The Houston Chronicle,
“Officers working for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have been told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat.”
Troopers have also erected miles of “razor wire” in the river designed to “trap” migrants. Some of the people found caught in the wire have included, “a pregnant woman having a miscarriage,” “a four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion,” and “a teenager [who] broke his leg…and had to be carried by his father.” It’s far from the first account in recent years of abhorrent behavior by officers at the border: previous ones have detailed beatings of migrants, the dumping out of water left for migrants by humanitarian groups, sexual assaults, and even forced sterilization of women in ICE detention camps.
Florida just passed a new set of standards for educating students on America’s racial history, which has drawn outrage from many educators. The state will now require that students be taught about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The curriculum also lists Florida’s 1920 Ocoee Massacre, at which 50 Black people were murdered by a white mob when they tried to exercise the right to vote, as an example of “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” These attempts at whitewashing American racial history fall in line with the Stop W.O.K.E. Act by Ron DeSantis last year which prevents any racial education that could make white students feel “guilt.”
Phoenix has dealt with temperatures above 110 F for the last three weeks, as part of a record-breaking heatwave that has caused at least a dozen deaths (half of which were of homeless people), and led at least one hospital to reach hospitalization rates equal to the height of the COVID pandemic. More than 80 million people are currently living under heat advisories in the United States, as the global temperature recently reached its hottest point in recent memory. Heatwaves are three times as prevalent as they were in the 1960s. But despite the overwhelming evidence that this summer’s record-breaking heat is a result of human-caused climate change, our media and politicians treat the problem as an afterthought rather than arguably the greatest threat to life as we know it.
As temperatures continue to sizzle, millions of Americans cannot pay for air conditioning. According to The Conversation, one in four households face energy insecurity as a result of struggling to pay for utilities. Three million people had their power shut off last year, with 30 percent of those closures happening during the smoldering summer months. Many more risk their safety by avoiding turning on the A/C on hot summer days. According to the CDC, an average of 702 people die and 67,512 people visit the emergency room due to heat each year. Despite this, only 19 states restrict summer utility shutoffs, while some of the hottest places in the country like Florida and Georgia also have some of the highest rates of utility disconnections.
LONG READ: Meet Maximus—the company that is somehow even more evil than it sounds! In Jacobin, Matthew Cunningham-Cook writes about how the company has made millions helping the government kick people off Medicaid:
“As more than seventeen million people stand to lose health insurance in the unfolding Medicaid eligibility review disaster, there’s one company licking its lips: Maximus, a little-known federal contractor that is one of the biggest players in privatizing essential government services previously done by civil servants — in particular, taking over states’ capacity to determine who is eligible for Medicaid and who isn’t…In a February earnings call for shareholders and Wall Street analysts, Maximus’s CEO Bruce Caswell announced that the current nationwide eligibility review of ninety million people on Medicaid and other government health insurance programs ‘is unprecedented in its scope,’ and will allow Maximus ‘to gain traction in the market.’ As a result of the deluge in Medicaid ‘redeterminations,’ Caswell said, ‘we expect improvement to operating margin.’
SOME CONSIDERATIONS AS YOU PREPARE TO WATCH ‘OPPENHEIMER’
Was dropping the atomic bomb really necessary?
This weekend, the Christopher Nolan biopic about Manhattan Project physicist Dr. Robert Oppenheimer—the father of the atomic bomb—will premiere in theaters. The film chronicles the moral dilemma faced by the man whose creation obliterated anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ignited the nuclear age we still live in today. The use of this doomsday device is often portrayed as a grim necessity undertaken by the United States government to end the Second World War. Our leaders did not relish its use, the tale often goes, but saw it as the best bad option available to avoid even more death. But was this really true? Or is it a post hoc justification for an unspeakable atrocity? As you prepare to view ‘Oppenheimer’ in theaters, we invite you to also watch this extraordinarily thorough and informative video essay on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, in which YouTuber Shaun recounts the events leading up to the fateful decision and the historical context in which they took place.
The video addresses the common justification that the U.S. dropped the bomb to avoid an invasion of mainland Japan, which was estimated to cost more lives than the bomb would. But communications by President Truman show that he and other U.S. officials were instead more concerned with ending the war before the Soviet Union became involved so Stalin could not sit at the negotiation table. The Allies were even offered a peace agreement by Japan on the day of the Potsdam Conference but ignored it, while Truman insisted on forcing “unconditional surrender,” in part to avoid appearing weak before the American public. Many U.S. leaders at the time later said the bomb could have been avoided, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
These are just a few choice facts that call into question the mainstream narrative around our use of the atomic bomb. We highly recommend watching the full video, but if you don’t have two hours to spare, Current Affairs also has an article from back in 2016 challenging the moral justifications for the attack.
AROUND THE WORLD
Syria has been embroiled in a civil war for twelve years now, and throughout the conflict, an estimated 130,000 people have gone missing (this is in addition to the more than 12 million who have been displaced throughout the conflict). Led by Luxembourg, the U.N. General Assembly has passed a resolution to attempt “to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons … and to provide adequate support to victims, survivors and the families of those missing.” The families of the disappeared have fought for years to determine the whereabouts of their loved ones—many of whom are believed to be political prisoners. The Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad has long opposed the efforts of international organizations to find missing people, and securing its cooperation is expected to make the process more difficult.
The U.K. is about to pass a ridiculous, cruel immigration law, which will deport asylum seekers to Rwanda or their countries of origin while they await their claims being processed. The bill is at odds with the country’s obligations under international human rights and refugee law, which could eventually lead it to be struck down by the U.K.’s Supreme Court. More than 24,000 asylum seekers—who, keep in mind, have followed the legal processes to apply for protection, have been informed that they could be deported. Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric, migrants are not more likely than other Britons to commit crimes, and deporting them to a third country actually costs more money than letting them stay. There is no reason to do this other than malice.
Since last month, Kenyans have been protesting against increases to the cost of living and new taxes which disproportionately fall on the country’s poorest citizens. Six people were shot and killed by police this Wednesday, bringing the total up to 27. The taxes in question are intended in part to pay back the country’s debts, many of which date back to the era of British colonialism. Meanwhile, the government scrapped subsidies for fuel and food production that would have helped workers at the direction of the International Monetary Fund, which regularly uses foreign loans as leverage to coerce countries into adopting austerity measures.
LONG READ: Climate change is causing worldwide crop losses and it’s getting nary a mention in mainstream media. As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian,
[A] new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought… We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other… So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act? Why is the Biden administration allowing enough oil and gas drilling to bust the US carbon budget five times over?...
ELEPHANT FACT OF THE DAY
Much like human babies suck their thumbs, baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort!
They also don’t learn how to control their trunks until they are around half a year old, which leads to delightful scenes like this:
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. 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.