Mar. 1, 2024 ❧ A "Flour Massacre" in Palestine, cereal for dinner, and Missouri's terrible divorce laws
Plus labor strikes in Minnesota, the return of Marianne Williamson, and Jair Bolsonaro's maritime misdeeds
News is back, all right!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
MISSOURI LAWMAKER FIGHTS TO LEGALIZE DIVORCE FOR PREGNANT WOMEN
A Missouri lawmaker is trying to make it legal for pregnant women in the state to get divorced. Before you ask, yes, this is a story from the year 2024.
Under a 1973 Missouri law, judges cannot legally finalize a divorce if a woman is pregnant, including in domestic violence situations. The ostensible “reason” for this law’s existence (if it can be called that) is that before a divorce can be completed, a custody arrangement must first be made, something that can’t be done until a child is born and its father can be determined. Four other states—California, Arkansas, Arizona, and Texas—have similar laws, and at least nine others leave the decisions up to judges who often make couples wait until the baby is born, according to Newsweek.
In Missouri, Democratic Rep. Ashley Aune, who proposed the change, said she just learned that this “archaic loophole” existed. “I was horrified and confused,” she told The Kansas City Star. “Women in domestic violence situations can potentially be trapped in a marriage and be unable to sever that legal tie with somebody if they’re pregnant.” During a committee meeting, Aune shared a harrowing story from a woman from her community:
“Not only was she being physically and emotionally abused, but there was reproduction coercion used. When she found out she was pregnant and asked a lawyer if she could get a divorce, she was essentially told no. It was so demoralizing for her to hear that. She felt she had no options.”
Missouri’s near-complete abortion ban, which went into effect after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, complicates the situation for these women even further. Astonishingly, Aune’s bill to allow pregnant women to divorce faces an uphill battle in Missouri’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature (To give you a sense of what Missouri Republicans are like, last year they changed the legislature's dress code to require congresswomen to cover their arms).
Freedom Caucus member Denny Hoskins said he’d be willing to consider an exception for abusive situations, but said, “Just because the husband and wife are not getting along, or irreconcilable differences, I would not consider that that would be a good reason to get divorced during a pregnancy.” But proving spousal abuse in court is often very difficult. And, regardless, even people who are not facing abusive circumstances should not have to be trapped in a miserable marriage for any length of time.
While this law concerns pregnancy, it should be noted that there is a growing movement within conservative politics to ban no-fault divorces, under which either partner can choose to dissolve a marriage over “irreconcilable differences.” No-fault divorces only became legal within the last fifty years in most states (Funnily enough, Ronald Reagan—then the governor of California—was the first to sign a bill legalizing no-fault divorce in 1969.) Prior to that, women who wanted a divorce could not get one unless they could prove that their spouses committed domestic violence or adultery (even cases of marital rape were not considered valid reasons in a lot of places).
Taking away the right of women to divorce their partners is becoming a mainstream Republican position. A number of conservative pundits have come out in favor of rolling back the right to get divorced, including the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles. Last year, right-wing “comedian” Steven Crowder was caught on camera berating his pregnant wife, and recorded and aired a lengthy diatribe about the fact that Texas law allowed her to divorce him.
Restricting divorce is not just a wish from online corners, but part of the GOP agenda in several states. In 2022, the Texas Republican Party’s platform called for the legislature to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage.” (Covenant marriage does not allow for divorce in any except the most extreme circumstances, only three states even allow them.) Republicans in Louisiana and Nebraska have also proposed the abolition of no-fault divorce. This should help us understand that Missouri’s fight over divorce is not just about how best to raise a child, but is part of a larger project to eliminate the right to divorce at large.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Michigan held its presidential primaries on Tuesday. Let’s get the less interesting race out of the way first: on the Republican side, Trump dominated his only remaining opponent Nikki Haley, winning by more than 41 points.
The real area of intrigue was on the Democratic side, where voters appalled by President Biden’s unqualified support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza organized a mass “uncommitted” vote against him. Entering the night, “Listen to Michigan” organizers set the goal of getting 10,000 people to vote uncommitted. By the end of the night, more than 100,000 voters, over 13 percent, had cast uncommitted ballots.
This is a powerful statement that should have the Biden administration quaking in fear. Michigan is one of a few swing states that could decide the election. In 2020, he won the state by just over 154,000 votes with far more favorable polling going in than he has this time. He will need every vote he can get and his tanking poll numbers with Arab Americans amid his callous disregard for Palestinian lives could prove devastating. There is something Biden could do (and which past presidents have done) to fix this problem: pressure Israel to halt this brutal war. Until that happens, voters in every primary state must keep the pressure up and demonstrate that their votes should not be taken for granted.
WHY IS THE CURRENT AFFAIRS ORB GLISTENING?
🔮🔮🔮🔮🔮🔮🔮
Within the office of Current Affairs HQ in New Orleans, sits one of this magazine’s most cherished objects. It was bestowed upon the company by an unnamed, hooded traveler who tapped our dear news briefing writer Stephen Prager on the shoulder as he trudged through the dark on Lafayette Street in the middle of his first visit to New Orleans this past December.
Startled, Stephen’s eyes widened as the figure reached into her cavernous cloak and pulled out a perfect glass sphere. The figure then spoke: “When I return…it will let you know…” before vanishing into the night.
“Surely,” thought Stephen, “this is just something that happens to everyone in New Orleans.” Examining the orb more closely, he noticed that in its center, there was a small, carved figure of what appeared to be an axolotl.
Unsure of where to turn, Stephen brought the orb to the office, where it befuddled his colleagues. This, it turned out, was not a normal happening, even in a city known for its dalliances with the supernatural. Was it an omen perhaps? A curse? Or the calling card of a force too inscrutable to understand? Stephen returned to Indiana with no answers.
As weeks and months passed, eaten up by magazine-related follies, the orb remained upon its solitary perch in the Current Affairs office. Until, this week, when Alex Skopic, Stephen’s briefing partner, glanced over to suddenly witness the sphere shimmering with a great spectrum of light and colors. He burst out of his chair and raced into the common room, where he found the rest of the staff huddled around a newspaper.
“It all makes sense now…” said Nathan Robinson, the editor-in-chief. “Marianne is back.”
❧ Mitch McConnell has announced that he’ll step down from his role as Senate Majority Leader in November. This doesn’t come as a complete surprise. McConnell is 82 years old, and he’s shown signs of declining health in recent months, including multiple incidents where he froze up and was unable to speak in public. Nor does it seem likely many people will miss his leadership, unless it’s the various fossil-fuel executives who have kept his Super PACs well-funded over the years.
Since he became a Senator in 1985 (!), McConnell has embodied all the worst aspects of the Republican Party. He’s been a dogged opponent of public healthcare, attacking Medicare for All and trying to dismantle even the meager protections afforded by Obamacare on many occasions. He’s done and said absurdly racist things, posing in front of a Confederate flag in the 1990s and saying that “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans” in 2022. He’s been a loyal friend of the Kentucky coal industry, opposing what he called the “war on coal” and dismissing miners from his district who tried to discuss the dangers of black lung with him. (They got a grand total of two minutes’ time with McConnell.)
Worst of all, he’s been effective at pursuing his horrible goals, spearheading a decades-long GOP strategy to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges—an effort that’s now bearing bitter fruit. In some ways, it’ll be a relief to have McConnell gone as Majority Leader. Then again, the likely candidates to replace him—like Florida’s Senator Rick Scott—might be even worse. Ultimately, the career of one man is a small thing. It’s conservatism itself, and the economic forces that animate it, that need to be done away with.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The multimillionaire CEO of Kellogg’s, Gary Pilnick told struggling families that they can eat “cereal for dinner” during a CNBC appearance about high grocery prices. “The cereal category has always been quite affordable, and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure,” he said. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.” Grocery costs have increased by 25 percent over the last four years (in large part due to corporate price gouging). Leaving aside the total callousness of telling poor families to dine on Frosted Flakes instead of food with actual nutritional value, it should be pointed out that cereal prices have also gone up by 28 percent—more than groceries on average, according to The Guardian. Pilnick, meanwhile, takes home an annual salary of 1 million and 4 million in incentives. As the country has struggled with inflated food costs, Kellogg’s has turned this fact into a marketing ploy, hoping to mainstream the idea of “cereal for dinner.” In 2022, when price inflation was at its worst, they aired this atrocious ad in which Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam lead a family in a chant of “Cereal!” “Dinner!”:
❧ A coalition of labor unions in Minnesota are preparing for simultaneous strikes. Altogether, the organizations represent more than 13,000 workers across a wide range of industries, located mostly in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. One of the most important blocs is the St. Paul Federation of Educators, which represents public school teachers and will strike on March 11 unless their districts agree to raise wages and address staffing shortages. Meanwhile, KSTP reports that “about 8,000 various janitors, security officers, retailers and more” in Minneapolis are prepared to strike as soon as March 2, all of them represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). At least 600 workers in Minnesota nursing homes are also planning a one-day strike for March 5, with more scheduled to vote on potentially joining in. The Public Works department of Minneapolis, which has at least 400 workers organized through LIUNA Local 363, has voted by 98 percent to authorize a strike, saying that they’ve “reached a breaking point” and “feel undervalued and overlooked.”
It’s currently uncertain which unions will actually stage a strike, and which will be able to win concessions from their bosses to prevent one; at the time of writing, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 will not be taking its 2,000 members to the picket line, having secured a 13 percent wage increase in a last-minute agreement. One SEIU local with “nearly 500” workers has also secured a deal. Still, the level of coordination between different unions on display here—embodied in the shared slogan “What Could We Win Together?”—is a new development, and an encouraging one. The ruling class in the United States has gone to great lengths to discourage “solidarity” or “sympathy” strikes, which unite workers across many different companies and unions in a common cause. But despite their best efforts, the labor movement is more active than it’s been in decades. 2023 was dubbed the “Year of the Strike,” with 470 labor actions compared to just 279 in 2021—and if workers in Minnesota kick off a unified effort this March, they could bring the Twin Cities to a halt, and usher in an even bigger year.
THIS WEEK IN RARE BOOKS
The copy of Das Kapital that Karl Marx sent to Charles Darwin is on display in Cambridge!
Like many people, Charles Darwin was gifted a book he didn’t necessarily expect or want, and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Unlike today’s bestsellers, though, the book Darwin received in 1872 was something special: a first edition of Das Kapital. Specifically it was Volume One, the only part to come out in Marx’s lifetime, inscribed and plopped into the mail by Big Karl himself. Ever the polite Englishman, Darwin composed a diplomatic thank-you letter:
“Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin”
This is a funny story, but really, Darwin and Marx had a lot in common. Both were controversial, dissenting figures in the intellectual life of 19th-century Europe. Both wrote enormous books laying out their theories and positions in painstaking detail. Both wore huge beards. And ultimately, both were right—if not about every detail, then about the broad principles that make biology, or economics, work the way they do. Both of them pissed off a lot of conservatives, who have worked tirelessly to slander and smear their reputations, but have never actually been able to refute them. The fact that one gave his magnum opus to the other is just poetic, and if you’re anywhere near Cambridge, the exhibit is well worth checking out.
AROUND THE GLOBE
❧ More than 100 Palestinians are dead after Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd seeking food aid, in what’s being called “the Flour Massacre.” The slaughter took place in the southwest portion of Gaza City, as desperate Palestinians rushed to meet aid trucks on the morning of February 29. Because of the Israeli military’s blockade of Gaza’s borders, very little food or medicine has been reaching anyone there, and the situation is growing more lethal by the day.
As Mosab Abu Toha writes for the New Yorker, many people—including members of Abu Toha’s family—have turned to eating animal feed to survive, and more and more children are dying of malnutrition in what remains of Gaza’s hospitals. By itself, intentional starvation is a serious war crime—but the IDF decided to compound it on Thursday, by firing into a crowd of hungry people who had gathered around trucks delivering bags of flour on al-Rashid street. According to health officials in Gaza, at least 112 people were killed, and more than 750 were wounded. As the Guardian politely puts it, the Israeli government’s version of events “changed over the course of the day,” initially claiming the victims had simply been trampled or run over by trucks before eventually admitting many were shot. Speaking to Al Jazeera, one eyewitness described the scene:
We had come here to get our hands on some aid. I have [been] waiting since noon yesterday. At about 4:30 in the early morning trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap.
Another eyewitness concurs:
We were going to bring flour … then Israeli snipers shot at us. They shot me in the leg. I’m unable to stand up.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has condemned the assault, and so has António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Meanwhile, commentators including Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda have dubbed it “the Flour Massacre.” It’s yet another entry in the long catalog of Israeli war crimes, and another compelling reason for the United States to immediately cease its support for the Netanyahu government.
❧ Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of “harassing” a humpback whale. The country’s Federal Police say he approached the whale on his personal Jet Ski, coming as close as 15 meters (50 feet) away. Under Brazilian law, this is a criminal offense, since any motorized vehicle is required to stay at least 100 meters away from whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals. For his part, Bolsonaro insists that he gave the whale a wider berth, and that the whole investigation is part of a “relentless persecution” by his longtime rival, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. (Asked for comment, the whale said “Oooooeaaauuuh.”) But there’s really no reason for Lula or the Brazilian government to fabricate whale-related charges against Bolsonaro. He’s already in plenty of trouble from an unrelated Congressional probe over the failed coup attempt his supporters made back in January 2023. Instead, it seems like whale harassment is purely an extracurricular activity for him. With any luck, the Brazilian courts will be able to keep this menace out of power and off the waterways.
❧ U.S. Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Ilhan Omar made a special trip to Cuba during the last Congressional recess. Predictably, they’re both being yelled at by deeply tedious Republicans for it, with Marco Rubio blasting the “secret visit with [an] anti-American dictatorship” and New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis attempting to smear Jayapal and Omar as “the Congressional Communist Sympathizing Caucus.” (We didn’t say it was a good attempt.) But the trip wasn’t particularly secret—you can read about it in The Hill—and it actually seems like quite a good sign for relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
According to a Congressional Progressive Caucus spokesperson, the lawmakers visited both members of the government and people from “across Cuban civil society” to discuss human rights in the country and hear their perspectives. Afterward, Omar has renewed her criticism of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, which she blames for much of ordinary Cuban’s suffering. This is the kind of thing elected officials should be doing more of, and it’s a much fairer and more humane approach than the drivel people like Marco Rubio have been spewing for the last few decades.
Meanwhile, another country has been revamping its own foreign policy toward Havana: South Korea! Last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that his country would establish diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time, with the state-run Yonhap News Agency describing the move as an attempt to “expand [South Korea’s] diplomatic horizons.” There are other motives involved, of course—South Korea is scheduled to hold important elections in April, and a new trade partner could be a boon to President Yoon and his party. It’s also a move calculated to deliver a “political and psychological blow” to North Korea, which previously counted Cuba as one of its only allies. Our politicians in the U.S. should take note: if they want to really annoy Kim Jong Un, what they should do is remove all sanctions from Cuba and pursue a policy of friendliness and cooperation. That would show him!
PIG FACT OF THE WEEK
The famous flying pig of New Orleans is alive and well, and living with a state lawmaker!
In our recent Mardi Gras briefing, we missed one very important news story: the Tale of the Flying Pig. As Kasey Bubnash reports for NOLA.com, it seems some folks got excited during all the festivities, and started taking the phrase “throw the pigskin around” a little too literally:
“[A] bystander thought the men were throwing a mini football, but he soon realized they were hurling a terrified, squealing pig to one another. He demanded custody of the animal and the group relented, according to the Humane Society.”
Thankfully, the airborne piglet seems perfectly fine after his harrowing experience. Now named “Earl ‘Piglet’ Long” after a former governor, he’s been given an official pardon by the State of Louisiana—though for what crime is slightly unclear—and he’s been adopted by Republican state Representative Lauren Ventrella, who made a really awful pun about “pork” in the state budget. Earl is extremely cute, and we wish him well in his new home.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. 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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