Mar. 15, 2024 ❧ Justice for Nex Benedict, Bernie's four-day work week, and how private equity ruins childcare
Plus: A dead Boeing whistleblower, Nevada's terrible wildlife commission, Virginia's ban on legacy admissions, Cybertruck fails, and stoned rats
I open up my briefing and it’s full of news.
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
PRIVATE EQUITY STRIKES AGAIN
For NBC News, journalist Gretchen Morgenson has exposed a disturbing story of how private equity companies take over, and then systematically dismantle and ruin, vital public health and childcare services that affect thousands of people’s lives. This is a trend that Aaron Wistar has previously written about for Current Affairs, mainly in the context of nursing and retirement homes. But as Morgenson reports, the equity firms are increasingly coming for autism services too.
In 2018, the private equity company Blackstone purchased the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, a company that ran various schools and care centers around the country, as well as providing home therapy for children with autism. At its height, the company had 265 care facilities—but by May 2023, more than 100 of them had closed, and the company had filed for bankruptcy. In the intervening years, the quality of care at CARD locations took a dramatic turn for the worse. For her article, Morgenson interviews Misty Richard—the mother of a child named J.J. who went to a CARD clinic in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—and hears firsthand how bad things got:
J.J. came home one day agitated about thunderstorms, a deep-seated fear for him. The weather was clear, so Richard asked clinic officials if anything had happened with her son that day to stir his distress. After repeated emails asking for details that Richard said the clinic only reluctantly provided, she was shown a video of her son in a therapy session with a staffer flipping the lights on and off in the room, apparently to mimic lightning.
In case it wasn’t clear, this is definitely not something anyone is supposed to do with an autistic child. Apparently, the staffer responsible meant it as an “emotional lesson” for J.J. to “identify what he was scared of,” and after Misty Richard filed a complaint, they were disciplined by the Louisiana Behavior Analyst Board. But it’s Blackstone’s role in degrading the quality of care at CARD in the first place that’s the real story here.
Among other things, the amount of training staffers at the company’s facilities received went down. According to two employees Morgenson spoke to, “average total training time for behavior technicians at the company was 86 hours” prior to the Blackstone takeover, and only 36 hours after it. Meanwhile, Blackstone loaded CARD with $160 million in debt, where it previously had none. “Debt financing” is a common move for companies like Blackstone, as Wistar notes in his article; essentially, it means that some portion of the money used to buy a company in the first place becomes debt on the purchased company’s balance sheet, rather than the equity firm’s.
When this happens, the purchased companies start cutting corners to restore themselves to profitability, often reducing wages, hours, or in CARD’s case, things like training requirements. By 2022, former CEO Doreen Granpeesheh reports that none of CARD’s behavior therapists had gotten a raise since 2019, causing many of them to leave the company; where each facility had an average of 20 such workers before the Blackstone takeover, that number was eventually reduced to 11. So not only was the competence of each new hire lesser than before, but there were simply not enough employees to go around.
This whole horror story just underscores why healthcare, childcare, and other vital public services need to be public services, not investment vehicles for private companies. It should just be illegal for something like an autism clinic—or a hospital, or a nursing home—to be purchased by an equity firm, because nothing good can result. Healthcare and childcare are human rights; they need to be publicly funded through taxes, and made freely available to everyone through universal programs like Britain’s NHS. The alternative is more corporate takeovers, more penny-pinching austerity, and more suffering.
BIG STORY
JUSTICE FOR NEX BENEDICT
[CONTENT WARNING: Transphobia, violence, suicide/self-harm]
On March 13, the Owasso Police Department finally released a probable cause of death for Nex Benedict—the nonbinary 16-year-old from Oklahoma, who died last month after a brutal fight in a high-school bathroom. Benedict’s story has attracted a lot of media attention, and for good reason: it’s both a terrible tragedy, and a damning indictment of the social and political climate in the United States right now.
The facts are, briefly, these: on February 7, Benedict got into what the police describe as a “physical altercation” with multiple older students at Owasso High School. Speaking to The Independent, their mother said Benedict was “badly beaten with bruises over their face and eyes, and with scratches on the back of their head.” Ms. Benedict also reports that Nex had been bullied because of their gender identity, especially after Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt passed a law forcing trans and nonbinary people to use whatever restroom matches the gender printed on their birth certificate. Although the identities of the other students in the fight haven’t been made public, some of Nex Benedict’s last texts—released by a family member to Fox 23 news—say that “they had been bullying me and my friends” for some time.
Afterward, Benedict was treated at a local hospital, gave testimony to the police, and went home. The following day, February 8, they collapsed and died. Until now, it’s been a little unclear what they died of. The police would say only that they “did not die as a result of trauma,” which led the Human Rights Campaign to demand an independent federal investigation. Now, a preliminary autopsy result has been released, which appears to confirm that “trauma” was not the cause of death. Rather—if the report is accurate—Nex Benedict committed suicide, taking a “combined toxicity” of antidepressants and allergy medication.
The idea of a young person taking their own life at 16 is unspeakable. Yet we have to speak of it because similar deaths are all too common. By now, it’s well-known that the rates of bullying, depression, and suicide among LGBTQ people—especially students—are higher than the rates for their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. In a 2023 survey by the Trevor Project, a staggering 48 percent of nonbinary or genderqueer young people in the U.S. had considered suicide, and 17 percent had actually attempted it, compared to significantly lower rates for cisgender youth. 61 percent had experienced depression, and 64 percent of transgender or nonbinary young people said they’d been discriminated against “due to their gender identity.” These statistics are both a crisis and a shame to the nation.
Importantly, the Trevor Project survey found that “nearly 1 in 3 LGBTQ young people said their mental health was poor most of the time or always due to anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation.” There’s reason to think this kind of politics was a factor in Nex Benedict’s life and death, too. In the first place, there’s Governor Stitt’s bathroom ban; if he hadn’t signed it, it’s possible Benedict wouldn’t have been in the school restroom where they were beaten.
There’s also Oklahoma school superintendent Ryan Walters, a proud bigot who says he doesn’t “believe that nonbinary or transgender people exist.” Shortly before Benedict’s death, Walters appointed the infamous social-media influencer Chaya Raichik (creator of “Libs of TikTok”) to sit on his library advisory panel, where she’d help him purge school libraries of so-called “woke” content. In the past, Oklahoma schools have received bomb threats after Raichik featured them on her “anti-woke” social media platforms, and she even got a pro-LGBTQ teacher named Tyler Wrynn fired from Owasso High School in 2022—something Nex Benedict’s mother says they were “angry” about. Together, people like Stitt, Walters, and Raichik have collaborated to create a climate of fear and hatred in Oklahoma, aimed directly at young LGBTQ people and anyone who supports them. Is it any wonder a tragedy like Benedict’s death eventually happened?
In the wake of Nex Benedict’s passing, there have been a variety of responses. In his statement of sympathy for “the family, the community, and our state,” Ryan Walters couldn’t help himself from also complaining about a “woke mob.” Raichik has been gloating, in her usual repellent way, that the cause of death being suicide somehow vindicates her. And President Biden has issued a statement, saying that “Nonbinary and transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know” and that “I will always have your back.” To his credit, this is a sentiment Biden has expressed before, and one of the few areas where he’s clearly better than his Republican opponents.
But words are cheap; what’s needed are actions. The politics of homophobia and transphobia need to be definitively defeated in this country, and any politician who uses anti-LGBTQ rhetoric needs to be swept from office, until none remain. Strong protections for the rights of trans and nonbinary people need to be enacted at the federal level, and enforced, so that the very idea of a “bathroom ban” seems as absurd to future generations as a segregated lunch counter does to us. Even in conservative states, the majority of Americans support LGBTQ rights; all that’s needed is the political courage to enforce the people’s will. To deliver true justice for Nex Benedict, and to save the life of the next young person who finds themself in a similar situation, we have to build a better and more equal society, whatever it takes.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. THE OCCASIONAL DECENT PERSON (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced a bill reducing the work week to 32 hours without reductions in pay. It would require overtime of 1.5 times a worker’s regular salary for hours over 32 each week. Sanders’s bill follows other countries that have recently shortened their work weeks: France’s workweek is 35 hours (they’re considering shortening it to 32), while Norway and Denmark’s are 37 hours. It also follows studies demonstrating that a four-day work week results in greater productivity and reduced stress for employees. In a press release, Sanders also pointed out that “American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s,” but that wages have not kept up with that reality.
A four-day work week has been in consideration for nearly a century (It nearly became law during the Great Depression, and even Republican Richard Nixon ran on it in the 1950s). But it makes more sense than ever now that the advent of AI technology is on track to reduce the need for human labor in a myriad of different ways. Depending on how our society adapts to this change, the AI revolution could either be a nightmare of mass unemployment or an opportunity for us to eliminate large amounts of human drudgery. It will all depend on whether we are willing to fundamentally alter how our economy works. Inevitably, employers will take advantage of this to cut costs by laying off employees and reducing hours, because that is what is in their financial interest. We have every opportunity to use AI for the purpose of human liberation, but in order to do that, we will need to make sure that the resources it allows us to accrue are equitably distributed. This will become increasingly impossible unless we begin to move past our outmoded wage system and into something new. Sanders’s bill would be an important start to the process of adapting us to a society where everyone works less but is still able to enjoy the same standard of living.
❧ A coalition of progressive groups are organizing a “reject AIPAC” campaign. Recently, it came out that AIPAC—the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States—was planning to spend $100 million on campaigns to “primary” pro-Palestinian members of Congress. From that figure, $20 million appears to be earmarked for campaigns against Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress. (To their credit, two different Democrats have refused a $20 million offer to run against Tlaib so far.) This is outrageous behavior, and it’s safe to say that if advocates for any other country—Russia or Iran, for instance—attempted the same thing, it would immediately be denounced as foreign election interference.
Now, AIPAC is finally starting to get some organized pushback. On the 11th, the “Reject AIPAC” campaign made its public launch, with the backing of 25 prominent progressive organizations—including Justice Democrats, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Sunrise Movement, and Our Revolution. As Akela Lacy reports, the group plans to “counterbalance” AIPAC’s efforts to unseat progressives, and to “call on members to disavow AIPAC’s endorsement and instead sign a pledge not to take any more money from the group.” It’s not clear how successful they’ll be—but as the bombs continue to fall in Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu openly thumbs his nose at calls for restraint, it’s about time someone gave the pro-Israel lobby a run for its money.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A whistleblower who raised safety concerns about Boeing airplanes was found dead last weekend. John Barnett, a quality manager who raised concerns about the production of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, was discovered with a gunshot wound to the head in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was about to testify in a deposition regarding his allegations that Boeing retaliated against him for making safety complaints. Barnett’s death has been ruled a suicide by the coroner’s office, but local police say they are conducting their own investigations.
Barnett was one of several whistleblowers who came forward in 2019 to detail the haphazard production and lack of oversight of the Dreamliner in The New York Times. Barnett, who’d worked in quality control for three decades, said he told Boeing about potential safety issues repeatedly and that, instead of investigating the problem, they moved him to another part of the plant. Barnett told The Times:
As a quality manager at Boeing, you’re the last line of defense before a defect makes it out to the flying public. And I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy.
Barnett and the other workers’ complaints came in the wake of two deadly crashes involving 737 MAX 8 jets, which killed a total of 346 people in 2018 and 2019. Boeing has been on the hot seat again ever since this January when a door flew off a 737 MAX 9 owned by Alaska Airways. Boeing, meanwhile, has been found to have failed 33 of 89 product safety audits conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration. Barnett’s Dreamliner has experienced its own share of scary malfunctions, including a sudden nosedive over Australia that injured 50 people.
Given the heat currently on Boeing, it makes sense to wonder if there may have been foul play involved in Barnett’s death. Though Barnett had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of what his brother says was a daily “battle to get Boeing management to do the right thing,” his brother also told The American Prospect that the crude suicide note left at the scene “didn’t sound like John,” while his lawyer Robert Turkewitz says he was “in very good spirits” and that “We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life.”
❧ The state of Virginia has banned college admissions based on so-called “legacies.” In reality, “legacy” is just a polite word for nepotism. It’s the idea that, simply because one of your parents went to a fancy university, you should be admitted to that university no matter how qualified or unqualified you are. George W. Bush, for instance, received a “legacy” admission to Yale despite having below-average SAT scores. Think of it as affirmative action for mediocre rich kids.
Last Friday, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bill called HB 48 into law, banning the practice for good. The new law only applies to Virginia’s public universities, like the prestigious College of William and Mary, but it expressly forbids “any manner of preferential treatment” based on a student’s legacy status or relationship to university donors.
It’s kind of a strange move for Youngkin, a Republican; typically people from his party have been in favor of making higher education more hierarchical and unfair, not less. Still, it’s a welcome development. Last December, Senator Tim Kaine—remember him?—introduced a bill called the MERIT Act that would do the same thing at the national level, and passing it really would be a step forward. Inherited privilege in learning is an ugly, medieval idea, hearkening back to the days when only the nobility and clergy learned to read. It has no place in a modern democracy.
❧ The Nevada Wildlife Commission is really, really terrible. When you hear the words “wildlife commission,” you probably imagine something pretty simple: a commission that protects wildlife. Any reasonable person would. But as Dana Gentry reports for the Nevada Current, that’s not what Nevada has.
Instead, the state’s Wildlife Commission is organized under a “statutory scheme that requires it to have five ‘sportsmen,’ i.e. hunters, fishermen or trappers who have purchased a license in three of the past four years,” along with a rancher and a farmer. In fact, there’s only one actual “conservationist” on the board, who’s perpetually outvoted. So it would be more accurate to call the agency a Wildlife Killing Commission, and that’s exactly how it’s behaved. In 2015, it voted 7-1 against banning coyote killing contests, a cruel and pointless form of “sport” that’s already been banned in nearby California and Arizona among other states. The Commission also supports removing wild horses and burros from public land by the thousand, something critics estimate would leave only “a density of one horse on 1,100 acres.”
These transparently destructive decisions have caused mounting frustration with the agency, and Nevada’s Joint Interim Standing Committee on Natural Resources is scheduled to take a look at the Commission’s recent actions starting on April 5. With any luck, that scrutiny will lead to an overhaul of the whole system, and Nevada will get a Commission that actually looks after animals instead of trying to kill them.
⚜ SLIDE SHOW: With its value collapsing, Tesla bet everything on the release of its flagship vehicle, the Cybertruck. But now that this silver, pentagonal monstrosity is on the streets, its image is largely in the hands of the people who choose to drive it. But in an effort to show off how epic the Cybertruck is, its drivers have a habit of making some truly embarrassing social media content. In Gizmodo, Thomas Germain made a slideshow documenting the many befuddling ways Cybertruck drivers have made asses of themselves in an attempt to make their weird, stupid cars look cool.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ India has passed a new law fast-tracking citizenship for religious minorities seeking refuge in the country, but excludes Muslims from consideration. The law, proposed back in 2019, specifically focuses on minority groups facing persecution in neighboring countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan by granting amnesty to undocumented migrants from those countries if they are members of a list of religious minorities, including Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians.
In some respects, the law represents progress: it reverses a previous one that barred those illegally in India from becoming citizens. But it also represents the latest act by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to marginalize Muslims, India’s second-largest religious group. Despite being majority Hindu, the preamble of India’s constitution defines it as a “sovereign, socialist secular democratic republic.” But Muslims have faced increased discrimination in every facet of life and state-sanctioned violence.
For example, in 2019, when this citizenship bill was first proposed, peaceful Muslim protesters in Delhi, who’d been branded as “jihadis” by Modi’s party were met with a violent pogrom that killed 53 people and displaced more than 2,000 more with apparent indifference from police. As Al Jazeera describes:
Mobs attacked mosques and Islamic shrines (dargahs) and even burned religious scriptures. Gas cylinders, fires, and petrol bombs were used for arson and complete destruction of property, along with iron rods, lathis, tridents, spears and live ammunition. The weaponry used showed a clear intent to kill, destroy and terrorise the minority community. Multiple testimonies reflected police inaction even as the violence unfolded before them, or of police not arriving despite being called many times. In at least one instance, the police patrolling the area refused help, saying they “had no orders to act”.
This suggests that the abrogation of duty to prevent violence, was not a one-off incident or localised operational failure, but a pattern of deliberate inaction over several days.
![Indian Muslims participate in a protest against the Indian government's Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NRP), in Mumbai, India on February 15, 2020 [Imtiyaz Shaikh/Anadolu Agency]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F658cdc08-c583-421f-a284-ec614514152e_1200x800.jpeg "Indian Muslims participate in a protest against the Indian government's Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NRP), in Mumbai, India on February 15, 2020 [Imtiyaz Shaikh/Anadolu Agency]")
❧ Indigenous community leaders in Namibia are calling for reparations from Germany. More than 120 years ago, German settlers in what’s now Namibia committed an atrocity that historians have described as “the first genocide of the 20th century.” As Nosmot Gbadamosi writes for Foreign Policy, Germans systematically drove members of the Herero and Nama ethnic groups out of their ancestral lands, and murdered them when they resisted, slaughtering as many as 100,000 people between 1904 and 1908. An estimated 80 percent of the Herero people were wiped out, together with 50 percent of the Nama. (The full, harrowing story can be found in David Olusoga’s 2010 book The Kaiser’s Holocaust, which describes this genocide in Africa as a precursor to Hitler’s later genocide of Jews in Europe.)
Today, leaders from the surviving Herero and Nama communities are demanding that Germany make amends. They want land reform, and for good reason: as Gbadamosi points out, “Today, white Namibians make up 6 percent of the country’s population of 2.5 million but own more than 70 percent of prime farmland.”
But they’re demanding cash reparations too, noting that Germany has already paid around 82 billion euros to Israel as a form of amends for the Holocaust. With that precedent in mind, it’s hard to imagine a possible argument against paying reparations to Namibians. Unless, of course, it’s the policy of the German government that African lives just matter less?
.jpg){kind=link}
⚜ LONG READ: Despite being far from the Middle East, Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world. In NPR, Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab explain why:
Until 1921, what's now the Republic of Ireland was a British colony. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom. And many Irish people say their experience of British occupation — as well as their own sectarian conflict, and 19th century famine — gives them empathy and shared history with the Palestinian struggle…
Ireland may be a mostly white European country, but many Irish people say they identify more with the Global South's experience of imperialism and colonialism.
"It's the same with South Africa, it's the same with South America," says Kirsten Farrelly, an activist with the group Mothers Against Genocide, which stages weekly demonstrations outside the Israeli Embassy in Dublin. "All these scars are being opened up in us, when we see what's happening to the Palestinians."
In Ireland, that translates into some of the highest public support for Palestinians. (Even more than some majority-Muslim countries, according to historical polling data.) In 1980, Ireland became the first European Union member to call for Palestinian statehood. It was also the last EU member to grant permission, in 1993, for Israel to open a residential embassy. And Irish politicians have delivered some of Europe's harshest criticism of Israel during the ongoing war in Gaza.
RAT FACT OF THE WEEK
The rats of New Orleans are extremely high.
That’s according to the New Orleans Police Department, who said this week that rats and insects had broken into the evidence lockers at NOPD headquarters and started gnawing on all the confiscated weed. In Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick’s own words:
“I want you to see the tray of all of the roaches, major rodents on the floor, the cockroaches, the rats eating our marijuana. They're all high.”
However, not so fast! Because this is a statement by a police officer, and police officers often lie, we must be skeptical. Speaking to Axios, Professor Matt Hill points out that ordinary marijuana “needs to have heat applied to activate the THC to get rats stoned.” Unless the rats found a bunch of edibles, this means it’s fairly unlikely they were actually “high.” Elsewhere in the world, police departments have made even wilder claims about rodents and weed, blaming mice for the disappearance of more than 500 kilograms of marijuana from a warehouse in Argentina. (A forensic expert politely called this story “implausible.”)
In any case, the solution is simple. If the NOPD wasn’t going around confiscating people’s pot all the time—and wasting a vast amount of time and money in the process—they wouldn’t have this problem, would they?
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.
Current Affairs is an independent left 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, via wire transfer, or by sending us a check. Email help@currentaffairs.org with any questions.