Mar. 19, 2024 ❧ Chicago votes on homelessness, growing hunger in Gaza, and the CIA spreads misinformation
Plus bright-green sea slugs, forbidden meat, and the mysterious Mr. Klon Kitchen
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
CHICAGO’S BIG VOTE
In Chicago, voters will decide today on whether to fund homelessness services via a new tax on real estate moguls. Unlike other large American cities facing housing affordability crises, Chicago does not have a dedicated revenue stream earmarked for fighting homelessness. Put forward by Chicago’s new left-wing mayor Brandon Johnson, the Bring Chicago Home Initiative would seek to create one by taxing the most expensive real estate in the city. As Truthout reports, it would change the city’s Real Estate Transfer Tax, currently a flat tax of .75 percent on all real estate purchases, “to a graduated system, with a 0.6 percent tax on sales under $1 million, and a 2-3 percent progressive tax on sales over $1 million.”
Even with more than 68,000 residents experiencing homelessness according to the Coalition for the Homeless, Chicago spends a much smaller percentage of its budget helping the homeless than New York and Los Angeles. If passed, Bring Chicago Home would be Chicago’s first crack at expanding its affordable housing stock since it abandoned the project in the 1990s and shifted towards a voucher system, which led to about 16,000 fewer units available for low-income families and wait times for public housing that can be as long as 25 years. According to a study from the University of Chicago’s School of Public Policy, implementing the Bring Chicago Home’s taxation structure could be expected to raise more than $160 million per year to put towards affordable housing. Bring Chicago Home has been met with a last-minute scare campaign promoted by the real estate industry, which has promised that it will raise housing costs for everyone, Anthony Perkins of the Coalition for the Homeless has disputed this:
These are powerful political interests who for generations have raised rents, donated to landlord-friendly politicians and ferociously lobbied against any effort to tax any portion of their profits. They are not credible messengers on what’s best for renters like me.
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Bring Chicago Home will not, in fact, result in rising rents for the overwhelming majority of Chicagoans. Because of the graduated tax structure, most property sales will actually experience a decrease in their transaction taxes, including 94% of all two- to four-unit, multifamily buildings. In fact, two-thirds of the projected revenue will come from properties worth more than $10 million — not mom-and-pop multifamily homes, but large buildings with hundreds of rental units.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians”)
⚜ LONG READ: When he ran for president in 2020, Joe Biden pledged to end tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry within his first year. But four years later, despite record profits, the industry still receives billions of dollars worth of tax breaks. In The New York Times, climate reporter Lisa Friedman explains why these “zombies of the tax code” are so difficult to eliminate:
The oil and gas industry is expected to reap $1.7 billion in 2025 from the intangible drilling tax break, and $9.7 billion over the next 10 years, according to the White House. It is expected to realize $880 million in benefits from the depletion allowance tax break in 2025, and $15.6 billion by 2034.
Instead of investing in their businesses, the oil and gas companies have poured profits into “stock buybacks, mergers, and acquisitions that benefited executives and wealthy shareholders,” the Biden administration said on a fact sheet accompanying the budget proposal[...]
A New York Times analysis of lobbying reports found that energy companies have spent more than $30 million since Mr. Biden was elected on lobbying efforts that included preserving the intangible drilling and depletion allowance tax breaks. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spends more than $100 million annually in lobbying on a wide range of issues, also cited energy tax breaks on its lobbying reports.
NAME OF THE WEEK
In recent News Briefings, we’ve criticized the ridiculous and xenophobic proposal for a TikTok ban currently advancing through Congress. Now, it’s come to our attention that one of the loudest proponents of the ban is a former Heritage Foundation guy named “Klon Kitchen.” What a name! That’s better than Markwayne Mullin, and almost as good as Alabama State Treasurer Young Boozer. If the Left wants to compete in this arena, we need to find a guy named “Blork Washroom,” STAT.
(In honor of Mr. Kitchen, why not take our Conservative Pundit Name Quiz?)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Fox News has spent the last year relentlessly claiming that America is being overrun by “migrant crime,” which is fueling a broader crime surge in America. But according to data analyst Jeff Asher, who looked at crime reports from the 14 states that have released them, so far crime is down in 12 out of 14 and it has declined considerably in the two border states that have reported, Arizona (8.8 percent drop) and Texas (15 percent drop). As Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria point out in Popular Information, “If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.”
Republican politicians, from Jim Jordan to Marco Rubio to Trump have picked up the “migrant crime” story and run with it, zeroing in on individual horrific stories, like the murder of nursing student Laken Riley by a Venezuelan migrant, to suggest a broader trend. But this isn’t actually borne out by this most recent data or the mountain of previous data indicating that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens and documented immigrants. While we should assume Republicans will lie about immigrants, we should not accept Democrats like Joe Biden taking those lies at face value and implementing their policies.
❧ The Jewish Communal Fund, which manages nearly $1 billion in charitable donations, won't allow donations to Jewish Voice for Peace. This scandal came to light thanks to Jordan Bollag, a past contributor to Current Affairs and a friend of the magazine. (Hi, Jordan!) Like a lot of people, Bollag manages his charitable giving through the Jewish Communal Fund, one of the United States’ largest donor-advised funds. “Donor-advised funds” are basically middlemen in the field of philanthropy: instead of donating directly to charities and nonprofits, people donate money to an advised fund, and then give instructions on how to distribute it.
There are complicated tax benefits to doing it that way, but the key thing to understand is that a donor-advised fund acts on its members’ behalf—and typically, it isn’t supposed to completely override their wishes about where their money should go. But according to Bollag, that’s exactly what the Jewish Communal Fund has been doing. In an explosive story at the Intercept, Bollag tells journalist Ryan Grim that he attempted to make a donation to Jewish Voice for Peace, the progressive Jewish group that’s organized many high-profile protests against the bombing of Gaza, back in December. To his great surprise, the donation didn’t go through, although every other transaction he attempted did. When he looked into the problem, the fund’s CEO Rachel Schnoll told him donations to JVP were no longer allowed.
This is even more surprising, because as Grim writes, the fund has only three rules for the causes its members can support: they can’t be antisemitic, conduct illegal activity, or deny Israel’s “right to exist.” Jewish Voice for Peace doesn’t fit any of those criteria—it wants Israel to be a secular state, but has no objection to its existence as a state overall. So there’s no legitimate reason for the Communal Fund to blacklist it, even by the Fund’s own terms. To make matters worse, the JCF has raised no objection to its members supporting openly Islamophobic groups in the past, and did not respond to the Intercept’s request for comment on whether it directs money to illegal West Bank settlements.
For his part, Bollag has condemned the JCF’s rather patronizing attempt to tell him what his politics should be, and what he should do with his money:
By shutting down Jews who support equal rights for all, Jewish Communal Fund is transgressing the Jewish values of debate and social justice. They should cease calling themselves Jewish Communal Fund and start going by Apartheid Communal Fund. I am currently exploring options to take my money out of JCF into a fund that is either unbiased or aligns with my values. I support a boycott of JCF until they change their policy.
❧ The Florida legislature is trying to ban lab-grown meat alternatives. For several years now, scientists have been making progress on growing “cultured” meat—which is intended to look, feel, and taste like regular meat, without requiring anyone to actually kill an animal—from cell samples. The benefits of doing this are obvious. Along with the moral atrocities involved in factory farming, animal agriculture is one of the biggest factors contributing to pollution and climate change today, and scientists say cutting down on meat consumption could “drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions.” But Republican legislators in Florida are having none of that. As Stacey Leasca reports for Food and Wine, there are two separate bills in the Florida legislature right now that would ban lab-grown meat, and even institute criminal penalties for selling it in the Sunshine State. One of them, called SB 1084, is currently sitting on Governor Ron DeSantis’ desk awaiting a signature—and DeSantis has indicated that he’ll sign, saying that “We're not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.” (Isn’t he eloquent?)
If passed, the law would allow any “restaurant, store, or other business” which sells lab-grown meat to have its license suspended, and for any “person who knowingly violates” the ban to be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor. Astonishingly, that’s not even the toughest lab-meat law being considered. In Tennessee, there’s a bill that would punish selling the stuff with a $1 million fine, and Alabama has passed a law making it a Class C felony. Like DeSantis, state Senator Jack Williams has a blunt argument for his bill: “I don’t want Alabamians eating that.” What the Alabamians themselves might want, apparently, doesn’t matter. Not only are conservatives willing to completely disregard the environment and the well-being of animals, they’re willing to forbid certain foods by law when it suits them. It’s a bizarre form of authoritarianism, and it needs to be reversed. The concept of “illegal hamburgers” is just too stupid to let stand.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ A new Reuters report has revealed that Trump’s CIA ran extensive “influence operations” against China. According to unnamed “former U.S. officials,” Trump ordered the CIA to “launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government” in 2019. As journalists Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing report, the covert project included a “small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government,” both within China and “to overseas news outlets.” (That last part is important, because “overseas news outlets” could include pretty much any newspaper or TV network in the world—including ones that operate in the U.S. itself.) Among other things, the undercover CIA officers reportedly spread rumors about corruption in the Communist Party of China and disparaged the global Belt and Road infrastructure-building initiative as a waste of money. There’s a rich irony here, because politicians in the United States have spent years throwing paranoid fits over the idea that foreign countries might be influencing the opinions of U.S. citizens through the internet. This is a bipartisan idea, common in both the Democratic and Republican parties; even allegedly respectable publications like Foreign Policy routinely publish screaming headlines like “The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia’s Information War.” In a lot of cases, this is pure fantasy. For instance, multiple experts recently admitted that there’s no actual evidence TikTok poses a national security threat, despite constant rhetoric about Chinese misinformation and surveillance. But the United States’ intelligence agencies are clearly willing to conduct online misinformation campaigns of their own, even as they condemn other countries for supposedly doing the same. As long as that’s the case, why would anyone—either in the U.S. or overseas—trust anything they have to say?
❧ El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is doubling down on Bitcoin as a key part of his monetary policy. Bukele is what we could politely call an “unorthodox” leader—although “weird” might be more accurate—and he has a longstanding fascination with Bitcoin. In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to make the cryptocurrency legal tender, and Bukele’s government installed 200 bitcoin ATMs around the country. Despite this, the Financial Times reports that it had “little take-up among citizens.” But that hasn’t stopped Bukele from using state funds to buy a single bitcoin—which currently sell in the neighborhood of $64,000—every day since November 2022, slowly amassing a large hoard.
On March 15, Bukele announced that the process would continue “until Bitcoin becomes unaffordable with fiat currencies,” whatever “unaffordable” might mean. He’s also announced plans to store a “big chunk” of El Salvador’s Bitcoin reserves—currently valued around $407 million—“in a physical vault within our national territory,” which kind of seems like it defeats the point of having a digital currency, but hey, what do we know?
Right now, Bukele’s plans appear to be working out, because the price of Bitcoin is up; in fact, if El Salvador sold all its cryptocurrency today, it’s estimated they’d make an $84 million profit. But someone should probably remind the President that these are incredibly volatile speculative assets, and not the sort of thing you want to base a country’s economy on. All it would take is another market plunge—like the one that happened in November 2021, wiping out more than $2 trillion in total value—and the people of El Salvador might wish he’d invested in things like healthcare, education, or measures to address their rising cost of living instead. Anything that isn’t imaginary coins on the computer, really.
PAST AFFAIRS
In a recent interview with Current Affairs, Zeke Faux—the author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall—gives a very different view of El Salvador’s alleged Bitcoin paradise:
“I went down there, and there was nothing to investigate. Nobody uses Bitcoin. It’s a made up story. The made up story is that there is this town called El Zonte, this little surf town where a guy from San Diego started teaching the locals about the magic of Bitcoin, and it created this whole new economy there.
And when I got there, at the first store I went to—this little stand on the side of the road—I asked the clerk for a bottle of water. He goes in the back—you order everything at a window—and comes back with a bottle of water and hands it to me at the window. So, I’m standing there with a bottle of water in my hand, and I say in my gringo Spanish, “Puedo pagar con Bitcoin, por favor?” [Can I pay with Bitcoin, please?] And the guy just grabs the water out of my hand, and says “Basura!” which is trash, and takes it away. He’s gone. He doesn’t even want to deal with me. He’s sick of these gringos who want to pay with Bitcoin. And that was typical—that was not just this one guy. Some stores even had signs that said, “We don’t take Bitcoin.” Get out of here you jerks!”
❧ In Northern Gaza, more than a third of children under two years old are now suffering from acute malnutrition, “due to the wide-reaching impacts of the war and ongoing restrictions on aid delivery,” according to a new report from UNICEF. In just a month, the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition in the North has doubled, from 15.6 percent in January to 31 percent in February. But the problem persists everywhere in the Strip, with rates as high as 28 percent in Khan Yunis and 10 percent in Rafah, which faces an imminent Israeli ground invasion. The UN warns that Gaza could face a famine as between now and May and that 70 percent of the population already faces “catastrophic hunger.” At least 21 people, including 17 children, have already starved to death, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
International aid organizations have been warning about mass starvation of the Gaza Strip for months, as Israel has cut off large amounts of humanitarian aid from entering the besieged enclave. As a report from Refugees International says:
All but two border crossings remain closed to humanitarian traffic, and commercial traffic is even more limited. The Israeli air campaign has meanwhile decimated Gaza’s critical civilian infrastructure, resulting in a total blackout and drastically reduced access to clean water. The blockade has prompted a dramatic reduction in the operational capacity of the prewar aid mechanism. From a pre-war baseline average of 500 trucks per day – both aid and commercial – figures now range between 50 to 100 daily—a massive percent loss of capacity and nowhere near what is necessary to save lives.
While providing Israel with the weaponry being used to inflict this torment in the first place, President Biden has tried to save face by airdropping meager amounts of food aid that are nowhere near enough to make a difference (Throughout the month, the administration boasted about dropping around 38,000 meals a day for a population where more than a million people are starving.) The administration has also announced plans to build a port in Gaza from which to administer aid, which will also likely be of little use because Israel will have full control over what is allowed in. These half-measures (or really more like one-1000th measures) do little more than paper over a campaign of overwhelming destruction. The only way Biden can truly stop this suffering is to pressure Israel to agree to a permanent peace.
⚜ LONG READ: South Korea has one of the longest work weeks in the developed world. As Jiyoung Sohn writes in The Wall Street Journal, they are adopting pet rocks to cope with burnout:
Lee So-hee, a 30-year-old office worker, used to live alone in Seoul. That changed in November when a friend gave her a rock.
“If you really think of your rock as a pet, I do think it makes things a bit less lonely and more fun,” she said.
Pet rocks, a kooky and best-forgotten fad of 1970s America, are resurfacing in South Korea. Unlike the stone-in-a-box craze nearly five decades ago, the sequel is more about serenity than shtick.
South Koreans, who endure one of the industrialized world’s longest workweeks, have a tradition of unwinding in unusual ways. They have lain in coffins for their own mock funerals, checked into prison to meditate and gathered in a Seoul park each year for a “space-out” contest.
Pet rocks are the latest new thing. Lee, a 30-year-old researcher at a pharmaceutical company, calls her pet rock—a girl, she said—Hongduggae. She made it a winter blanket from an old towel. It came into her life during a demanding stretch at work when she was working long hours in the lab, often late into the night.
“I’d occasionally complain to my rock about what a tiresome day I had at work,” she said. “Of course, it’s an inanimate object that can’t understand you. But it’s kind of like talking to your dog, and can feel relaxing in some ways.”
SLUG FACT OF THE WEEK
The “leaf sheep” is the only known animal that can photosynthesize!
Despite the name, the “leaf sheep” is not actually a sheep. Nor is it a sentient artichoke, although it kind of looks like one. Rather, it’s a sea slug—but a very special kind of sea slug. Found in coastal waters near Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the “leaf sheep” grazes on Avrainvillea algae, and absorbs bright green chloroplasts into its own body. This allows it to perform photosynthesis through a unique process called “kleptoplasty,” growing leaf-like structures on its back and using the algae’s sunlight-gathering powers as its own. The “leaf sheep” also lays its eggs in a tidy little spiral pattern on the algae, which is pretty cool!
.jpg){kind=link}
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.