Friday, July 28, 2023
Pre-trial detention, UPS's contract victory, boiling oceans, DeSantis' Nazi problem, PragerU, mugwumps, lynx, and more!
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
MAN DETAINED FOR SEVEN YEARS WITHOUT TRIAL FOUND NOT GUILTY
A Georgia man named Condell Benyard has just been found not guilty on murder charges after being detained without trial for seven years for allegedly being involved in a drive-by shooting. His co-defendant, Maurice Jimmerson, has been in jail for ten years with no trial. His case just ended in a hung jury, meaning that he will have to wait even longer for a verdict.
The fact that anyone can wait in jail for so long without a trial is totally outrageous. And it’s not as rare as you might think. As of 2021, California had more than 1,300 people who had waited in county jails for three years or more without a conviction (more than 300 of them had been there for more than five). Some inmates at Rikers Island in New York, meanwhile, spent seven, eight, or ten years, locked up without a trial (many also got stuck there without trial during the early stages of COVID, which caused multiple preventable deaths). According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 400,000 people are currently being detained pre-trial—this number has nearly quadrupled since 1980, leaving America with the largest number of untried prisoners in the world. Much of that increase can be traced back to the 1984 Bail Reform Act, which authorized pre-trial detention in many more cases. Despite the right to a “speedy and public trial” in the 6th Amendment of the Constitution, most states have no maximum length for pre-trial detention.
According to a 2022 report by the University of Chicago’s Law School, titled “Freedom Denied”:
“Our system of pretrial detention places significant burdens on individuals, families, and society while providing little provable benefit. When jailed pending trial, people can face physical threats, such as violence or difficulties in accessing necessary healthcare. Detained people also suffer personal costs, such as employment instability, housing instability, and the lost custody of children—all at a higher rate than those who are released before trial. In addition to the criminogenic effects of pretrial detention itself, jailing an individual pending trial increases the likelihood that they will be convicted, sentenced to longer terms of incarceration, and face mandatory minimums, which in turn impede their reentry into society.”
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this briefing stated that, “in all but eight states, the majority of incarcerated people have not yet been convicted of a crime.” This was an incorrect summary of a statistic from the Prison Policy Initiative. Their statistic only refers to people incarcerated in LOCAL JAILS, not ALL incarcerated people. The majority of ALL incarcerated people have been convicted of crimes. That said, there are still 400,000 people currently behind bars who have not been convicted, which is quite terrible on its own. Thank you to Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative for pointing out this error!]
BIDEN’S ASYLUM RESTRICTIONS BLOCKED IN FEDERAL COURT
A California judge has ruled that The Biden administration’s recently introduced restrictions on asylum seekers violate U.S. asylum law. Since 1980, migrants on American soil who face deportation have been legally allowed to request humanitarian protection, regardless of how they entered the country. Biden’s recently implemented policies stopped asylum seekers from receiving the protection they are entitled to under the law. With some exceptions, Biden required them to first seek refuge in Mexico before applying for asylum in the United States. These policies replaced the even more restrictive Title 42, which expired earlier this year and used the pandemic as a justification to turn asylum seekers away without a hearing. The policy Biden later introduced was not much better—it still placed migrants in needless danger. According to Human Rights Watch,
The revamped asylum ban will block asylum seekers at the border from entering the United States for five years unless they obtain an appointment through the cellphone application ‘CBP One.’ Appointments are extremely limited and usually book up within minutes, meaning that asylum seekers wait for months, trying each day to secure a spot. The result is electronic ‘metering”’– forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous conditions at the border for an indeterminate amount of time… Since the implementation of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy in 2019 and Title 42 in 2020, asylum seekers sent to Mexico have experienced kidnapping, rape, extortion, and other abuses by organized crime and Mexican officials.
The judge’s holding up of the policy likely won’t be the final word—it is expected to reach the Supreme Court. But it seems there is a good chance Biden’s restrictions will be upheld, as the Court has previously given the Biden administration wide latitude to determine its immigration policy.
BIG STORY
UPS TEAMSTERS WIN “BEST CONTRACT” IN THE COMPANY’S HISTORY
Under the threat of a strike by 340,000 employees, UPS agreed to meet its workers’ demands while asking for virtually no concessions. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien calls it “the best contract in the history of UPS,” with a statement from the union saying the “overwhelmingly lucrative contract raises wages for all workers, creates more full-time jobs, and includes dozens of workplace protections and improvements.” In total, the tentative agreement will put $30 billion on the table for wages and improved working conditions. The union won some major concessions, including:
Wage increases for both full and part-time employees of $2.75 more per hour in 2023 and $7.50 by the end of the contract in 2028. Delivery drivers will continue to be the highest paid in the nation at rates of $49 per hour. The contract also establishes a minimum of $21 per hour for all part-time employees, including for new hires. Part-time wages will increase by 48 percent throughout the five-year contract.
All full-time drivers will be placed into seniority, ending the two-tiered wage system that allowed newer drivers to earn significantly less than their more senior counterparts.
The end of six-day workweeks and forced overtime. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day will also become a paid holiday.
The company agreed to end its invasive surveillance of employees. All driver-facing cameras and microphones, which were used to track and harass employees on the job, will be eliminated. Meanwhile, managers will have to give 24-hour notice before doing “ride-alongs” with drivers.
All new trucks will be fitted for air conditioning, which is critical as summers become increasingly smoldering. According to some employees, the backs of trucks can reach temperatures of 150 F, and extreme temperatures have caused at least 270 drivers to become sick since 2015. The Teamsters also say the number of deaths caused by heat is severely under-reported.
The contract is an outstanding achievement for the labor movement, which has continued to gain ground since the pandemic. The 340,000 workers who stood together during this fight have every reason to feel proud, not just because they worked together to force UPS to recognize their dignity, but because they have raised the bar for what other workers should expect. The Teamsters are hoping to use the success of this strike as a model for taking on even more formidable challenges, like organizing Amazon drivers. According to Luis Feliz Leon in The American Prospect:
“The tentative agreement showed that a credible strike threat, done right, can grow worker expectations about what work can be and what workers should earn, while raising consciousness that the greatest challenge to inequality and injustice is an organized working class that knows what it wants and is willing to go the distance to win it. The only chance workers have against billionaire CEOs is if they stick together and show up for one another.”
QUIZ: COULD YOU GRADUATE HIGH SCHOOL IN FLORIDA?
Governor Ron DeSantis has committed to ensuring that Florida’s schools are all about “education, not indoctrination.” To that end, Florida has just made Prager University official classroom material for next school year! Despite the name, PragerU is *not* an accredited educational institution, but a far-right YouTube channel funded by fossil fuel billionaires—naturally, one of its earliest videos is called “Money in Politics: What’s the Problem?” Some of its other videos include:
If There Is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong
Climate Change: What’s So Alarming? (in their opinion, nothing!)
Who was Robert E. Lee? (The Confederate general is a hero in their estimation: one of their reasons for this is that he crushed “radical abolitionist” John Brown’s slave rebellion.)
“If You Live in Freedom, Thank the British Empire”
Its videos often contain easily provable lies (a gigantic playlist debunking much of their work can be found here).
Students in Florida should prepare for what their new lessons might look like… thankfully, PragerU’s website provides “study guides” based on information from their videos. We’ve designed a HELPFUL PRACTICE TEST to help you make sure you are able to keep up with Florida’s new freedom-loving curriculum!
All of the following questions are taken verbatim from PragerU’s study materials:
(Answers can be found at the end of this news briefing)
(SIDE NOTE: Despite the unfortunate coincidence of surnames, the writer of this News Briefing—Stephen Prager—bears NO RELATION to Dennis Prager or PragerU. Despite this, he has been asked whether he is related to Dennis on numerous occasions, including by his dentist, multiple professors, a hostess at a steakhouse who took his reservation, and even a person on Twitter who questioned the credibility of his work. Please do not ask him if he is related to Dennis Prager. Doing so will cause him to involuntarily curl into a ball, much like an armadillo that has been cornered by a predator.)
CROOKS VS. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on in electoral politics?”)
More indictments have been handed down against Trump in the classified documents case and another aide, Carlos De Oliveira, has been charged. Trump, Oliviera, and the previously indicted aide Walt Nauta are now accused of ordering that a Trump employee “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.” According to the indictment, Oliviera told this unnamed IT employee that “the boss” wanted the server of security footage deleted.
A speechwriter for Ron DeSantis, Nate Hochman (who was very recently considered by some to be a “rising star” of the young conservative movement before this), created a video for the candidate, which prominently features a well-known Nazi symbol—the Sonnenrad (or “Black Sun”), and posted it to Twitter under an unofficial DeSantis fan account (an account regularly retweeted by DeSantis staff despite having also posted a video of DeSantis alongside Mussolini). He, along with more than 40 percent of DeSantis’ campaign staff, has been fired amid this debacle. The shakeup is also in part due to DeSantis’ tanking poll numbers. It is now an unavoidable fact that DeSantis has a serious Nazi problem: earlier this month another of his most prominent online boosters was revealed to have sent dozens of extremely anti-Semitic texts. There have also been multiple Nazi rallies in Florida where demonstrators were seen flying DeSantis flags alongside Swastikas and SS symbols. Hochman, meanwhile, was known to have worked with and praised the very overt fascist Nick Fuentes long before posting a Nazi video of his own, so the DeSantis campaign can’t plead ignorance for hiring him.
OLD-TIMEY POLITICAL SLANG TERM OF THE WEEK
“mugwump”
The term “mugwump” was popularized during the 1884 presidential election to describe the Republicans who switched from supporting the notoriously corrupt GOP nominee James G. Blaine to the Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland—the switch of around 60,000 of them likely handed Cleveland the election. The creation of the term “mugwump” is sometimes attributed to New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana who said, “Their mug sat on one side of the fence and their wump on the other.” It’s also possible that “mugwumps” came as an offshoot from the Algonquin word “mugumquomp,” which means “war leader” or someone who acts “self-important.” Though it began as a pejorative for someone who broke from the patronage networks that dominated party politics during the Gilded Age, many saw such independence as a virtue, and “mugwump” became a sort of badge of honor for those who considered themselves mavericks.
There are politicians both good and bad who could rightly be described as modern mugwumps. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is the good kind—the independent sort who trips Democrats up when they try to balloon America’s defense budget. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), meanwhile, is the bad kind of mugwump—the sort that serves as a saboteur on the other party’s behalf. It makes sense that such a term would fall out of common usage—after all, it can be confusing when a political label can connote both heroism and villainy. But whatever we might lose in communicative value from bringing it back is dwarfed by what we would gain from the sheer joy of saying the word “mugwump” regularly!
AROUND THE STATES
A group of hedge funds is helping the opioid manufacturer Mallinckrodt avoid paying a $1.7 billion settlement to victims who were lied to about the deadly addictiveness of its product. It was to be paid in installments through 2030, with funds going to help state health departments pay for life-saving overdose-reversal drugs like Narcan (a dose of which costs five cents to produce but is sold for as much as $150). But now, a group of hedge funds that lent them money is planning to take over the company through bankruptcy, which will allow it to avoid paying most of the settlement to the victims. Instead, the hedge funds will profit. According to the Wall Street Journal,
“The funds believe that Mallinckrodt promised too much when it agreed to the settlement, according to people familiar with the matter, and that the company’s money first belongs to senior lenders like themselves, not to addiction victims or state governments. They also argued that if Mallinckrodt continued to make payments to the opioid trust, it would hurt the company’s finances and could breach legal obligations to investors, according to people familiar with the matter.”
It is not hyperbole to say that many of the people who work in finance would (and do) kill thousands of people if it made the value of their stock portfolios tick up even slightly.
DEEP DIVE: Los Angeles landlords are renting low-income housing to tourists instead of using it for…well…people with low incomes. Robin Urevich and Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network were able to find abuses that inspectors missed:
“In 2008, the LA City Council had passed a law aimed at reserving more than 300 residential hotels as low-cost housing. We decided to see if it was working…Gabriel and I searched hotel webpages and online travel sites and found that some places, like the H Hotel in Koreatown, which are supposed to remain available to local residents, had instead morphed into tourist accommodations… ‘Experience the effervescent spirit of Los Angeles with a stay at El Patio Inn, your gateway to the city’s most notable attractions,’ the hotel’s website says…City officials had designated El Patio as residential in 2008…Eventually we identified 21 residential hotels with more than 800 rooms in total advertising to tourists, in apparent violation of city law…
Waters around Florida are reaching temperatures greater than 100 F, which is about as hot as a hot tub. While water temperature records are not kept, this is believed to be the hottest sea surface temperature ever recorded. Rising sea temperatures are very, very bad: it is causing the die-off of coral reefs, starving fish of oxygen (which led tens of thousands of them to wash ashore in Texas last month), making hurricanes more frequent, and melting sea ice so quickly that it could all be gone by 2040, raising sea levels by an estimated 20 feet!
AROUND THE (burning) GLOBE
As oceans heat up, the Gulf Stream may collapse within a few decades and potentially as early as 2025 according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications. The all-important current, which brings warm water from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico up the North Atlantic, is being smothered by the rapid melting of Greenland’s ice caps and the current it is part of, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is currently at its weakest point in 1,600 years. The Gulf Stream has run continuously for 12,000 years (since the end of the last Ice Age)—if it stops, the effects could be catastrophic. According to USA TODAY,
“Such a collapse could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. If it were to happen, it could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast. It also could lead to drastically reduced amounts of rain and snowfall across the central and western U.S., the study's authors say.”
(This should serve as your bi-weekly reminder that climate change is unambiguously being caused by fossil fuel usage—a fact that our media and politicians continue to mention as little as possible, preferring to imply this is a natural unavoidable phenomenon rather than an industrial accident caused by an identifiable villain. As bleak as the situation is for now, it is not hopeless—but only if our leaders get their shit together as soon as possible. They won’t do it unless ordinary people make them. You can take action today!)
Remember the Wagner Group—the murderous, sledgehammer-wielding military contractor that briefly tried to overthrow Putin last month? Turns out they’re still monsters, and their monstrousness spans multiple continents. While the group is most famous for helping to wage Putin’s war against Ukraine, it also has a major presence in Africa, where it has similarly engaged in heinous human rights abuses. According to a new report by Human Rights Watch, Wagner helped Mali’s U.S.-backed military regime commit all sorts of atrocities:
“Malian armed forces and foreign fighters apparently from the Russia-linked Wagner Group have summarily executed and forcibly disappeared several dozen civilians in Mali’s central region since December 2022, Human Rights Watch said today. They also destroyed and looted civilian property and allegedly tortured detainees in an army camp.
Despite waves of protest, Israel is in the process of overhauling its judiciary system to give its government of far-right religious zealots even more unchecked power. A new series of laws will give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overturn rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court by simple majority and remove its ability to oversee cabinet and ministerial appointments. This occurs as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government attempts to pass several laws that turn Israel into even more of a theocracy than it already is (For the record, Palestinians and Israeli Muslims have every right to not care about this, as Israel has always been a theocracy towards them, and even the strongest opponents of the judicial overhaul have barely acknowledged how it will also make the total annexation of Palestine and the displacement of its people even easier). According to Gitit Ginat in Foreign Policy magazine, Netanyahu is pursuing a policy agenda that effectively grants second-class status to anyone who is not an ultra-Orthodox Jew:
“Single mothers will have their state support reduced in favor of ultra-Orthodox families with multiple children…Over the next decade, the government plans to increase the budget of ultra-Orthodox educational institutions by 40 percent. This will make Israel the first country in the developed world that incentivizes schools that barely teach core subjects such as math, science, and English…Meanwhile, secular Israelis will pay six times more in taxes than the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute only 8 percent of the Israeli workforce. Their children will be obligated, as they are today, to serve a full term in the army (three years for men and two for women), while so-called national-religious men can serve in the army for a reduced term and most ultra-Orthodox are exempt.”
LONG READ: As her film hits theaters, protest movements across Latin America are using Barbie as a potent political symbol. Mark Stevenson of the Associated Press writes,
“In Peru, anti-government demonstrators this week dressed up two women in pink and put them in giant Barbie boxes in the main square of Lima, the capital, to protest current President Dina Boluarte, under whose administration police have often clashed with protesters. One actress, whose box was labeled ‘Barbie Dictator,’ held a pink gun. The doll, according to the box legend, ‘includes tear gas and dum-dum bullets.’”
LYNX FACT OF THE WEEK
Lynx cats love to shout at one another during mating season…and it sounds like this:
These two, recorded near Avery Lake in Ontario, Canada sound like they are having quite a spirited debate!
FLORIDA QUIZ - ANSWER KEY
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.