Mar. 8, 2024 ❧ Kathy Hochul's subway soldiers, a "Strippers' Bill of Rights," and real live sandworms
Plus a campaign to free Abdullah Öcalan, Kyrsten Sinema leaves Congress, and a man with opinions about the Holocaust
The news must flow
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
KATHY HOCHUL SENDS IN THE TROOPS TO STOP SUBWAY CRIME
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dispatched the National Guard to patrol the New York City subway system, where they are conducting searches of commuters’ bags. Adding to the 1,000 cops Mayor Eric Adams sent to patrol the subway stations last month, there are now around 750 fully outfitted soldiers carrying loaded assault rifles. After some high-profile violent crimes frightened passengers last month—including two commuters who were attacked with a hammer and a conductor who was hospitalized after having his neck slashed—Hochul sent in the troops to “[ensure] all New Yorkers feel safe on our subways.” (Indeed, what is more common than having your belongings rifled through by a man with an assault weapon?)
It’s certainly understandable that New Yorkers would be nervous to ride the subway after hearing about such attacks. But as we’ve seen again and again, terrifying anecdotes are often used to create the impression that New York has become a crime-ridden sewer reminiscent of Taxi Driver. Last month, Alex Skopic explained in Current Affairs that shoplifting paranoia had more to do with sensational media coverage than actual stats. That is the case here. According to a New York Times analysis:
“Officials have spent millions to make New Yorkers transit riders feel safe. The investment is motivated more by passengers’ perception than by crime rates…Although surveys by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, show that a number of riders feel unsafe, data has not always confirmed the public’s perception. Crime rates jumped during the coronavirus pandemic starting in 2020, but the subway became safer last year.
In mid-2022, there was about one violent crime per one million rides on the subway, according to a New York Times analysis. Since then, the overall crime rate has fallen and ridership has increased, making the likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime even more remote. Last year, overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as the number of daily riders rose 14 percent.
Even Hochul admits that subway crime is “Not statistically significant, but psychologically significant.” (We must grudgingly credit Will Stancil’s usually nonsensical “vibes” theory of politics as being true in this case). But while being surrounded by armed agents of the state may make some people feel more comfortable, that comfort probably has a lot to do with who you are and what you look like.
New York’s stop-and-frisk policy has been found to routinely discriminate against Black and Latino residents even when they committed crimes at equal rates. And though the practice was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 and has become less frequent, stop-and-frisk is still very much alive, and the racial disparity is still high. According to a 2020 review of police stops, 91 percent of people stopped by police were New Yorkers of color, and Black New Yorkers were stopped in 56 percent of cases despite being only 24 percent of the population.
Even though Hochul’s system is supposedly “random,” that also likely violates the 4th Amendment right against unreasonable searches (in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled against random traffic stops that lack “reasonable suspicion”). And most importantly, New York has flooded the subway with cops before and it has not led to a drop in crime. As Sam McCann and Aaron Stagoff-Belfort at the Vera Institute of Justice wrote in 2022:
In 2020, 10 percent of New York City’s police force was patrolling the subway even though just 2 percent of crime occurred there. Pouring police into areas with relatively little crime leads to police over-enforcing what they encounter: trivial infractions like fare evasion, vendor licensing, or public sleeping. Adams ordered officers to prioritize making arrests for these so-called “quality of life” infractions and trumpeted a 51 percent increase in fare evasion arrests. That kind of “broken windows”-style policing fails to prevent acts of violence that jeopardize public safety.
Recent history illustrates this failure. From December 2019 to the end of 2020, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo flooded the public transit system with police, instructing them to crack down on fare evasion and homelessness. Cuomo’s attempt to police his way out of the city’s housing crisis failed. Costs for police overtime soared 21 percent, and unhoused populations in the MTA’s busiest stations surged 45 percent last summer. NYPD practices on the subway sparked allegations of racism and an investigation by the state attorney general’s office. And the largest police presence on the MTA in a quarter century coincided with growing public safety concerns underground.
Throwing more cops at the problem is not just ineffective, but costly, depriving the city of resources that would be more effective at addressing the root causes of crime. The latest New York City budget did exactly the opposite: cutting virtually everything in the budget except for the NYPD, including hospitals, social services, education, and homeless services. Flooding the subway system with troops is an ineffectual, authoritarian solution that has more to do with making Hochul look tough and serious about crime than about actually solving it.
FIGHTING BACK
HOW TO NEUTRALIZE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
In Maine, an important vote has just taken place with virtually no media fanfare. On March 6, the state’s House of Representatives voted by a margin of 74 to 67 to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—a growing alliance of state governments who want to end the undemocratic power of the Electoral College once and for all.
As you probably know, the Electoral College is a deeply weird institution. In the simplest terms, it allocates “electors”—538 of them—across the 50 United States, with the number of electors in each state based on how many U.S. Representatives and Senators that state has. To make matters more confusing, each candidate in a Presidential election has their own “slate” of electors, and those people only become the actual electors if their person wins. (This system was the root of Donald Trump’s whole “fake electors” scam in 2020.) It’s all a garbled mess, but the practical upshot is that the electors pick the President, not the actual voters. Paradoxically, it’s perfectly possible for a candidate to win the “popular vote”—getting more votes, in total, than their opponent—and still not become President, because the Electoral College math didn’t tilt their way. In fact, both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton suffered this unfortunate fate within the last few election cycles.
Like many things in the United States, the Electoral College is obviously stupid and unfair. It’s a common saying that “land doesn’t vote, people do,” but the College system amplifies the votes of relatively empty states like Montana and the Dakotas (which tend to vote conservative) and disadvantages the more populous ones like New York and California (which tend to lean left,) giving a significant edge to the political Right overall. But its existence is also enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, so there’s never been a clear way to change things without a Constitutional Convention. Until now, that is.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—not exactly a name that trips off the tongue—is surprisingly simple. As Devon Hesano writes for Democracy Docket, each state in the Compact agrees to allocate all of its Electoral College votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. This agreement is hypothetical for now, but will come into force if enough states join to add up to 270 electors—famously, the number required to “win” the Electoral College. If and when this happens, it’ll be guaranteed that the winner of the popular vote will also win the Presidency. Had this happened in 1999, the terms of George W. Bush and Donald Trump would have been prevented, and world history would be entirely different. And right now, the effort is gaining ground, with 205 electoral votes already secured in the Compact states. The most recent addition was Minnesota, which brought its 10 electors to the table in May 2023. If the Maine Senate votes the same way the House did, that number will bump up again to 209—and if people around the country organize and lobby their legislators to reach 270, we’ll be that much closer to having an actual democracy.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ The “Uncommitted” protest vote over Gaza did very well on Super Tuesday. The movement to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary, rather than for Joe Biden, first started to rattle the doors of the electoral process at the end of February. Back then—boosted by some very public support from Representative Rashida Tlaib—more than 100,000 people in Michigan cast their ballots for “uncommitted” to make their opposition to the ongoing massacre in Palestine clear. That amounted to 13.1 percent of the Michigan vote, which really should have been a wakeup call for Biden. Not only did all those people find his Palestine policy so appalling they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him, they actually went out of their way to vote against him. And on Super Tuesday, the results were even more dramatic. In Minnesota, 18.9 percent of Democratic voters went for “uncommitted,” winning 11 primary delegates for the protest campaign. In North Carolina, “No Preference” got 12.7 percent; in Massachusetts it was 9.3 percent. Altogether, Truthout’s Sharon Zhang estimates that “over 250,000 voters” around the country registered a protest vote—and since some states don’t offer an “uncommitted” option, the number who’d like to is probably significantly higher. This means Biden is in serious trouble, especially since Michigan is one of the most important swing states in the entire country. If he wants even a vague chance of victory, his attitude toward Palestine needs to change, and fast.
❧ Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced that she is leaving Congress. So goes perhaps the most villainous member of the Democratic caucus in the Biden era—one responsible, along with her fellow “moderate” Joe Manchin—for standing in the way of virtually every bit of even semi-progressive legislation attempted during the first few years of the Biden administration. Under the thin gloss of “bipartisanship,” and with a religious adherence to the antiquated institution known as the “filibuster,” she stood in the way of everything from improving voting access in areas beset by GOP suppression tactics and protecting abortion rights after the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Often proudly describing herself as someone with no real beliefs beyond preserving the status quo, she was an undisguised agent of the corporate donors who spent lavishly on her. Along with Manchin, she killed the pandemic-era Child Tax Credit, which had cut child poverty in half (it has since increased past pre-pandemic levels.) After a nearly million-dollar donation from Wall Street interests, she blocked a tax on private equity and hedge funds. And even as her home state was brutalized by wildfires, she helped to cut most of the climate provisions out of one of Biden’s signature spending bills.
Shameless corporate shills are dime a dozen in the Democratic Party. And though Sinema was already worse than most, what will make her infamous for years to come is how much she seemed to relish being the center of attention, with the fate of critical bills spinning on her finger while the country watched with bated breath. During negotiations, she was famously aloof, refusing to speak with other members of her party and giving the public cryptic answers about what she planned to do. The press often covered her as John McCain in a pink wig treating her as an inscrutable maverick playing 5-D chess rather than a mercurial egomaniac with no real beliefs (The New York Times wrote five articles focused on her eccentric wardrobe, with one subhead reading “Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes it’s a strategy.” Good grief, reporters can be such rubes!)
Try as she might have, her positively adorkable sweater and miniskirt and exaggerated curtsy did nothing to soften the blow when she served as one of the deciding “thumbs down” votes against raising the minimum wage—instead, it only accentuated how little she cared about anyone or anything. As she heads off into the sunset, presumably to a seven-figure salary at a plush lobbying firm, the image of her trying to make poverty wages cute will define her career.
⚜ Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer is pushing for high school students to be investigated for holding a walkout in solidarity with Palestinians. In The Intercept, Matthew Petti writes.
The teenagers gathered outside Teaneck High School on a chilly Friday afternoon in February, watched by a heavy police escort and an NBC news crew. They unfurled a banner bearing the Palestinian flag and marched around the streets of suburban Teaneck, New Jersey. The protest was part of a statewide “day of action” for Palestine…
The demonstration was just the latest student-led protest against decisions the Teaneck town council made last October, when it voted for a resolution in support of Israel and against one expressing sympathy with Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Marey had stood outside the council meeting and watched her mother, Reem Fakhry, lead chants of “Free Palestine.”
The war had come home, so to speak. Israel’s siege of Gaza was no longer a violent tragedy happening to Muslims in another land, but something that leaders in Teaneck actively supported — and something that the best friends could fight back against personally.
“She realized that our town had taken this unilateral, one-sided stance where they decided that our town was basically part of Israel, without looking at the fact that we were part of this town as well,” Fakhry, Marey’s mom, said of her daughter. Halak told The Intercept that the town council resolution “was really unfair and it dehumanized the Palestinians who are under siege.”
The girls organized a teach-in and walkout at their high school in November. It led to an unexpected flood of backlash from the town’s adults, including elected officials…
Members of the town council were key instigators — and they found a willing audience in a sitting member of Congress. Within hours of the November protest, council member Karen Orgen emailed videos of it to nearly two dozen people, among them Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., according to emails The Intercept obtained under the New Jersey public records law. Gottheimer did not respond to that thread, but three hours later, fellow council member Goldberg wrote an email thanking him and other officials for their “hard work.” Soon after, Gottheimer issued a statement condemning the Teaneck school district’s “decision allowing an antisemitic, anti-Israel protest during school hours.”
Gottheimer has become fixated with Teaneck’s high schoolers. At his urging, the U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights probe into discrimination at Teaneck High. After the school district announced that it would partner with two Jewish and Muslim civil rights organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American Islamic Relations, respectively — Gottheimer publicly accused the Muslim organization of glorifying terrorism and demanded Teaneck cut ties with it. CAIR’s New Jersey chapter denounced Gottheimer’s “defamatory attacks” in a written statement.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Republicans in North Carolina have nominated a bizarre extremist for governor. This is both absurd and terrifying. On Tuesday, Mark Robinson easily won the GOP gubernatorial primary in North Carolina, defeating his nearest rival by a margin of 64.8 percent of the vote to just 19.2 percent. Until that point, most people outside of North Carolina had never heard of him—but it’s rapidly becoming clear that he’s an absolutely horrific candidate.
At his new independent media outlet Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan has a rundown of the most offensive things Robinson has done and said, and the list is long. Robinson is blatantly homophobic, comparing gay people to “maggots” and saying the Pride flag “makes me sick every time I see it.” He’s xenophobic, referring to Muslim immigrants as “INVADERS” and even sharing Hitler quotes about “pride in one’s race” on Facebook. By far the worst thing, though, are the comments where he appears to deny the Holocaust. In another Facebook post which is somehow still up, Robinson complains that “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” putting “6 million Jews” in air quotes. In another, he writes that “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”
As Hasan points out, Robinson has also said that the Marvel movie Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist[s]” in order to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets,” referring to an anti-Black slur in Yiddish. The antisemitism isn’t even remotely subtle, and it’s incredibly concerning that a guy who might well become a U.S. Governor is spewing this kind of rhetoric. The GOP already has a pretty significant problem with fascism and Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism, with sieg heil-ing neo-Nazis openly walking around at CPAC this year, and this definitely won’t help. We can only hope that when his repulsive views become better known, Robinson will lose badly in November—and maybe even drag the rest of the Republican Party down with him.
❧ Washington Governor Jay Inslee is expected to sign a “Strippers’ Bill of Rights” into law. Formally known as SB 6105, the legislation would provide a wide range of new workplace rights and protections for people in Washington’s adult entertainment industry. Among the most important, it would strengthen the requirement for strip clubs to maintain customer blacklists, banning anyone who harasses dancers or crosses their professional boundaries for at least three years and reporting their misconduct to similar venues in the area. It would also require clubs to install keypad locks on dressing rooms, and “panic buttons” so workers can quickly call for help from security—along with requiring them to hire at least one security guard in the first place, which some establishments currently don’t. Finally, it would repeal Washington’s so-called “lewd laws,” which prohibit any form of sexualized entertainment in a business that serves alcohol, and have often been used to justify police raids on gay bars and clubs. (Earlier this year, Seattle police raided four gay bars and took photos of patrons following reports that some of the fellows in attendance were *gasp*...shirtless.)
Strippers and other sex workers are often left out of the conversation about workers’ rights, but they shouldn’t be: by some estimates, there are around 150,000 exotic dancers in the United States, and between 60 and 75 percent of them experience some form of harassment on the job. To help correct that situation, labor groups like Strippers Are Workers have been organizing and lobbying for the Washington bill, and their efforts are finally paying off, with it passing both the state House and Senate. Everybody deserves a safe workplace, no matter what industry they’re in—and if Governor Inslee signs the “Strippers’ Bill of Rights” into law, he’ll be making sure they get exactly that.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The United States secretly sent 100 weapons sales to Israel, according to a new report from The Washington Post. Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, only two weapons sales of $106 million and $147.5 million had been made public—in both cases, the Biden administration bypassed Congress using emergency authority. But according to The Post:
“In the case of the 100 other transactions…the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress, according to U.S. officials and lawmakers who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.”
It is already bad enough that the Biden administration is providing weapons to a military that has killed more than 30,000 people as part of one of the most destructive wars in recent memory. It’s bad enough that these shipments have continued even as a USAID cable warns that Israel’s looming ground invasion into Rafah will “result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response.” It’s bad enough that these shipments have continued even after Israel fired indiscriminately on hundreds of desperate, starving people attempting to reach humanitarian aid trucks. Biden is shipping these weapons, that are being used to slaughter thousands of innocent men, women, and children without even being willing to face the public and subject that decision to an honest debate.
❧ A campaign to free the Kurdish resistance leader Abdullah Öcalan has collected more than 1.5 million signatures. Öcalan is the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist faction fighting to build a sovereign “Kurdistan” from the ethnically Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. (The Kurds have historically been oppressed, and even targeted for genocide, in all three countries.) He’s also an important figure in the history of anarchist and communist thought, and one of the longest-incarcerated political prisoners in the world.
The Turkish government designates the PKK as a terrorist organization, and in 1999—with U.S. help—they abducted Öcalan during a trip to Kenya, and threw him into prison on the isolated island of İmralı. While behind bars, he became inspired by the writings of libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, and wrote several books of his own exploring the politics of anarchism, national liberation struggles, and feminism. (Many, including War and Peace in Kurdistan, Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution, and Democratic Confederalism, are available as free PDFs on FreeOcalan.org.) Öcalan’s ideas became the foundation for the revolution in Rojava, which has produced one of the most egalitarian societies in the Middle East, and for the YPG/YPJ militant groups who were instrumental in the defeat of ISIS at Raqqa in 2017.
Now, after more than 23 years’ imprisonment, supporters of Öcalan and his political movements have launched a campaign in Syria to gather signatures demanding his release. They’re planning to deliver letters to 11 worldwide human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, and the International Criminal Court. In particular, they allege that the Turkish government has tortured Öcalan—something that’s been corroborated by his lawyers—and urge the European Committee to visit İmralı and inspect conditions there. Ferzende Munzur, the campaign’s spokesperson, says more than 1.5 million people have signed so far, with more coming in all the time. It’s not clear whether any amount of signatures would sway Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government has been getting more and more autocratic. But Öcalan’s freedom, and the prevention of torture anywhere in the world, is a critical human rights issue that Western organizations should be a lot louder about.
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SANDWORM FACT OF THE WEEK
There are real animals who resemble the Sandworm Shai-Hulud from the Dune series!
They’re called amphisbaenians—or more commonly, “legless lizards” or “worm lizards.” Although they resemble burrowing worms, they’re actually reptiles with complete skeletons. There are more than 200 different species, some with tiny vestigial legs and others with none at all. None of them, sadly, reach the mammoth size of Dune’s sandworms—but almost all tunnel through dirt and sand like their fictional counterparts, some rarely visiting the surface world at all. In a recent study published in The Anatomical Record, scientists in Texas conducted CT scans of the skull of Zygaspis quadrifons, otherwise known as the Kalahari round-snouted worm lizard, and described the results in painstaking detail.. As Adam Hartstone-Rose writes, this species sports a “single large central tooth”—a feature which may be unique to amphisbaenians, who he calls “intra-terrestrial aliens,” among all vertebrates!
