Nov. 3, 2023 ❧ Minnesota sues predatory lenders, Portland teachers strike, and Muslim voters "abandon Biden"
Plus Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty, Virginia disenfranchises voters, Israel bombs a refugee camp, meat industry astroturfing, and the origin of "lucky pigs"
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
MINNESOTA SUES “PREDATORY” LENDERS
In a press release on November 1, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced that his office has filed a lawsuit against the parent company of three online payday loan firms—Bright Lending, Green Trust Cash, and Target Cash Now—which he calls “predatory,” alleging that all three companies “exploit Minnesota consumers in financial need and violate [state] law by charging between 400 and 800 percent interest on small loans.”
Under a new Minnesota law, signed by governor Tim Walz in June, annual interest rates on short-term loans are capped at 36 percent, with “strict limitations” on anything from 37 to 50 percent, and rates above 50 percent are entirely illegal. But a quick look at the websites of the lenders in question reveals that they do, indeed, charge much more than 50 percent. Example rates at Bright Lending are between 700 and 725% APR, while customers are offered “Approx 795% APR” at Target Cash Now, and “from 200% to 2,290% depending on the loan amount” with Green Trust Cash. These are crippling demands to make of people already struggling financially, and some of the complaints received by the Attorney General’s office are genuinely harrowing:
I was lent $800.00 and I am now expected to pay, in 22 installments of $200.12 each paycheck, $4,400.00. That's 699.9856% interest and $400.00 per month. I don't understand how this is legal. Payments of $400.00 per month in addition to my medical bills which I'm paying, will very well bankrupt me.
Beyond being ethically indefensible, these practices would seem to be a clear violation of Minnesota’s usury law—but there are two interesting wrinkles. First, all three of the lenders are controlled by the Island Mountain Development Group, which is owned by two federally-recognized Native American tribes, the Nakoda (or Assiniboine) and Aaniiih (or Gros Ventre). According to some complaints, borrowers have been told that “Minnesota law capping rates does not apply and that they have no real form of redress” because of the tribes’ sovereign status. And second, the companies operate only online and by mail, with no physical presence in Minnesota itself. In the press release, Ellison concedes that the lenders’ tribal status means “monetary relief and penalties are not available,” but insists that any company offering financial services to Minnesota consumers must obey Minnesota law, and promises to seek an “injunction that stops further illegality,” preventing any future customers from falling into a debt trap:
These businesses have been engaging in the worst kind of predatory lending and I’m glad to bring this lawsuit to stop the harm they are causing and help people afford their lives. Let this serve as a warning to any other businesses charging these illegal and outrageous interest rates: if you break the law and cheat the people of Minnesota, we will put a stop to it and hold you accountable.
With an estimated 12 million Americans taking out payday loans each year—especially among minorities, recent immigrants, and others with limited access to traditional banking—governor Walz and A.G. Ellison’s legal crackdown on exploitation could be a useful model for other states to adopt going forward.
FIGHTING BACK
PORTLAND TEACHERS GO ON STRIKE
Tens of thousands of kids in Portland, Oregon are getting some unexpected days off, as the Portland Association of Teachers went on strike early Wednesday morning. It’s the first time the district has struck in its history. In all, 81 schools are closed, affecting an estimated 45,000 students. The teachers’ demands are simple: an 8.5 percent pay increase to help them deal with the rising cost of living, to be followed by raises of 6 and 5 percent in the following years, together with caps on class sizes and more time allotted to plan lessons each day. On the union’s website, several teachers have spoken out about the overcrowded classrooms and tight working schedules that make it difficult to give each student the care they deserve:
In my 3rd grade class, I have 31 students in a classroom, when a few years back there were 23 students. More students mean more needs to address, more hours of prepping, more hours on the phone with parents, and less time with each kid. There isn’t enough room in the classroom, so I have to turn a heater into a desk, I use bookshelves and stools to make seats. I have kids sitting on the windowsill.
Other teachers, according to the New York Times, have been working as much as 20 hours a week unpaid. Some are simply trying to get basic safety concerns addressed, asking for “mice-free and mold-free buildings” that are “no colder than 60 degrees or hotter than 90 degrees.” So far, though, the Portland School District has been reluctant to meet any of the union’s terms. They’ve offered only a 4.5 percent wage increase, and have refused to bargain on class sizes, citing a need to “work within our financial means.” Until their attitude changes, the strike will continue.
The Portland Association of Teachers has a strike fund, to which you can donate here.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Disgraced FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty on seven criminal charges and now faces decades in prison after orchestrating a massive financial fraud that brought down his multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency exchange last year. A billionaire wunderkind once considered one of the most respected people in the fledgling crypto industry, Bankman-Fried (or should we say “Bankrun-Fraud”) is now a symbol of that same industry’s hollowness. As Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson wrote last year, Bankman-Fried is emblematic of “the Age of the Bullshitter”:
Bankman-Fried was supposedly a deeply moral person who lived like an ascetic and had committed himself to the “Effective Altruism” movement, which aims to achieve maximal moral goodness through benevolent acts and philanthropy. But it turned out that Bankman-Fried had essentially gambled away customers’ deposits at his company, leaving the customers in the lurch and destroying Bankman-Fried’s fortune virtually overnight.
❧ Virginia election officials have admitted that they wrongly purged nearly 3,400 voters from rolls just days before the state is expected to vote for its state legislature. Virginia disenfranchises everyone with a felony conviction unless the governor restores their rights. Nearly 312,540 people in Virginia are disenfranchised for past felony convictions according to The Sentencing Project, though around two-thirds of them have served their sentences and are on probation. The people who were purged had all had their voting rights restored but were incorrectly flagged as having committed new felonies if they committed minor probation violations like failing a urine test or missing a meeting. In some cases, after years of voting following the restoration of their rights, voters received notices saying they once again could not vote. Now, the state is rushing to clarify that they still have their rights in time for election day. But, according to Tram Nguyen, the co-executive director of New Virginia Majority, a non-profit civic engagement group, the confusion may still create a “chilling effect” that may make people afraid to vote even if they have the right to do so. Virginia’s state legislature election—which could give Republicans total control over one of the South’s few remaining swing states—is expected to be very tightly contested. Even a few thousand votes could end up making the difference.
❧ The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to rule that domestic abusers have the right to own guns. It will soon rule in the case of United States v. Rahimi, which will determine whether federal law can prevent people with histories of violence from owning weapons before they are convicted of crimes. Of the case’s plaintiff, Ian Millheiser writes in Vox:
Three years ago, according to the Justice Department, Zackey Rahimi and his girlfriend had an argument in a parking lot where Rahimi threatened to take away their mutual child. He then allegedly grabbed her wrist, knocked her to the ground, dragged her to the car, and hit her head on the dashboard. After he realized that a witness had seen this fight, Rahimi allegedly pulled a gun and fired at this bystander. He later called his girlfriend and allegedly threatened to shoot her if she told anyone that he’d assaulted her. This is one of a series of gun crimes allegedly committed by Rahimi. In 2020, he allegedly threatened another woman with a gun. According to the Justice Department, “Rahimi also participated in a series of five shootings in December 2020 and January 2021.” In one alleged incident, he “fired into the man’s house with an AR-15 rifle.” In another, he allegedly followed a truck and “fired multiple shots at another car that had been traveling behind the truck” after the truck’s driver flashed their headlights at Rahimi.
This seems like a guy who most reasonable people would conclude should not be within fifty feet of any deadly weapon. Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit court ruled that Rahimi had the right to own a gun and that the federal law allowing guns to be confiscated from people who have restraining orders against them and who have been deemed by a court to be dangerous to their children or partners was unconstitutional.
As Millhiser points out, this interpretation was only possible because of gun law precedents previously set by the right-wing court’s ruling in last summer’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case—touted as a victory for so-called “originalism” — which says that in order for a judge to uphold a gun law they must show that “analogous regulations” existed at the time of the nation’s founding. Millheiser says that “this places an extraordinarily high burden on any lawyer defending a gun law.” With the Bruen precedent in place, it seems highly likely that the Supreme Court will also rule that domestic abusers have the right to own guns.
❧ A town in Kansas is facing severe drought, and may literally run out of water. Less than 2,000 people live in Caney, Kansas, but all of them are facing emergency conditions. Since the start of the year, all of Kansas’ Montgomery County has seen varying degrees of drought, but Caney has been hit particularly hard. According to reporting in the Kansas Reflector, “the town’s primary water source, the Little Caney River, is so low that the water that remains is stagnant,” and in some places the river has dried up entirely. Even the town’s emergency water source, Timber Hill Lake, can only be drawn from one more time. Restaurants have stopped giving out drinking water, and the public schools, among the town’s largest water users, have canceled entire days’ learning to conserve what’s left. As temperatures drop in November, some much-needed rain may come, but it’ll be a temporary reprieve. There’s a well-established link between human-caused climate change and drought, which has struck around the world in 2023. Until something’s done about the use of fossil fuels, nobody’s water supply will be truly safe.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ In one of the deadliest attacks of its siege on Gaza, The Israel Defense Force bombed the Jabalia refugee camp for three days this week in an attack that killed at least 100 people and wounded hundreds more. The bombing reduced several apartment buildings to rubble and left a massive crater in the center of town.
Humanitarian workers are still picking through to find bodies and trapped victims. Amnesty International reports that several “whole families” had been wiped out in the bombings, which a UN Human Rights Commission spokesperson called “disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
Israel says the attacks also killed two Hamas militants involved with planning the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. This may be the case, but we must ask, is it truly worth it if each dead Hamas commander requires the loss of dozens of civilians? While Israel has not released the total number of Hamas members killed since it began its ground invasion, as of Oct. 22, more than 4,000 Palestinians had been killed while Israel only claimed to have killed 13 Hamas militants—a staggering ratio of needless death. Israel has made abundantly clear that they make no distinction between civilians and militants in Gaza. One former deputy commander familiar with Israel’s strategy, Amir Avivi, told The Financial Times “We are not taking any chances. When our soldiers are maneuvering we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 aeroplanes overhead destroying anything that moves.” This total disregard for civilian lives may explain the staggering civilian death toll we have seen in Gaza—which has surpassed 9,000 people. More children have been killed in the Gaza Strip over just the last three weeks than in all other war zones combined over the last year.
Some leaders in the U.S. have doubled down on their callous disregard for Palestinian civilians, like Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) who said “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent Palestinian civilians’ as is frequently said” and “there are very few innocent Palestinian citizens,” and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said there is “no limit” on the number of civilian casualties he’d accept. Others continue to live in complete delusion, like Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) who said “They [Israel] not targeting civilians. They never have, they never will” ... because somehow targeting apartment buildings is different from bombing the people inside the apartment buildings.
But this attack does appear to have rattled at least a few consciences. While President Biden has still not made any indications of pulling military support for Israel, he has come out to endorse the idea of a “humanitarian pause.” While still a far cry from the actual long-term ceasefire that is needed, this is a notable break from his previous statements saying he would not attempt to reel Israel in. Likewise, former AIPAC employee-turned-CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer finally seemed to grasp the depravity of the situation while interviewing a senior IDF commander:
THIS WEEK IN EVIL
Like with the ubiquitous phrase “officer-involved-shooting,” the coverage of Israel’s refugee camp bombing showed the Western press leaning HARD on the trusty passive voice to make it sound as if the explosion just magically happened on its own:
❧ In Ireland, a pro-meat “declaration of scientists” was astroturfed by the livestock industry. The document in question, the “Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock,” came out back in October 2022, and immediately raised eyebrows with some of its claims. Most notably, the declaration said that livestock farming was “too precious to society to become the victim of simplification, reductionism or zealotry,” and that reducing consumption of meat and dairy “should not be recommended for general populations.” This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which holds that meat-eating needs to decline significantly to be sustainable, and is actively harming the environment. It all makes a lot more sense, though, in light of recent investigative reporting by the Guardian. As it turns out, several members of the organizing committee responsible for the Dublin Declaration have close ties to agribusiness, including Dr. Peer Ederer—an industry consultant who gave a speech to the World Meat Congress soon after the Declaration was issued, complaining about “the meat industry not winning its strategic must win battles”—and Dr. Frederic Leroy, who likewise gives speeches at industry events about how meat companies can “change the narrative.” Dr. Collete Kaster, another committee member, works for the American Meat Science Association (AMSA), which in turn is funded by large conglomerates like Hormel, Smithfield, and Tyson. As Greenpeace lays out in more detail, the whole thing was a collaboration between industry insiders, who emailed each other things like “we’re specifically targeting the Brussels EU bubble” (with regard to shaping opinion and policy.) It’s yet another example of something that appears to be legitimate science, but is actually corporate propaganda.
❧ Zimbabwe is facing a catastrophic cholera outbreak. So far, the country’s health officials are listing an estimated 6,000 cases and around 123 deaths, with no end in sight. Of those deaths, 50 or more came in the township of Chitungwiza, near the capital of Harare. The root cause of the crisis is Zimbabwe’s water and sewage infrastructure, which Human Rights Watch describes as “obsolete,” and which often bursts and leaves raw sewage flowing into public waterways in places like Chitungwiza. Climate change also plays a part, as the World Health Organization notes that Zimbabwe is currently in its dry season, and the country has experienced drought in recent months, making clean drinking water even more scarce. In response to the outbreak, Zimbabwe’s government has banned large gatherings in the affected areas, but this is a mitigating measure, not an actual solution. Humanitarian aid is desperately needed, from wherever it can be found—and the Western press is doing Zimbabwe a disservice by saying so little about this ongoing emergency.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ President Biden’s approval rating among Muslim and Arab Americans has plummeted to a truly catastrophic 17 percent down from 59 percent in 2020, according to polling from the Arab American Institute. His support had already been falling before violence between Israel and Palestine broke out, but absolutely tanked as Biden has repeatedly defended and downplayed Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has meanwhile begun an “Abandon Biden” campaign that is sweeping chapters around the country. Muslim and Arab voters were key to Biden’s victories in swing states in 2020, particularly Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. But now, more of them say they’d vote for Trump, who, as president, gave Netanyahu the green light to annex West Bank settlements and has pledged to reinstate his 2017 travel ban with even more restrictions, including banning those who don’t support Israel’s “right to exist.” Biden is now flailing to win back support among Muslim supporters. Of course, he’s not doing this by putting any pressure on Israel to stop killing so many innocent Muslims. Instead, his administration is wheeling out a vague “National Strategy to Combat Islamophobia” led by its most beloved and charismatic spokesperson, Vice President Kamala Harris. That ought to do it.
❧ There’s a new, bipartisan effort to free Julian Assange. Last week, two members of the House of Representatives—Democrat Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, and Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky—started circulating a letter for their fellow legislators to sign, asking the Biden administration to end its prosecution of Assange on espionage charges. Among other things, the letter—which you can read here—argues that prosecuting Assange, an Australian citizen, will damage the United States’ “bilateral relationship” with Australia, whose Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already advocated for Assange’s release. The representatives also point out that Chinese officials have cited Assange’s case to show that the U.S. is “hypocritical” on matters of free speech. Both are good points; it’s anyone’s guess, though, whether Biden will listen.
PIG FACT OF THE DAY
Pigs are a well-known symbol of good luck. In Germany, the gifting of marzipan pigs is a New Year’s tradition and the phrase “Schwein haben” (“to have a pig”) is shorthand for being lucky.
But what is the origin of pigs as a symbol of luck? Some speculate that it dates back to the Middle Ages. According to the appropriately named Assistant Professor Thijs Porck, who writes for Leiden University’s Medievalists Blog, “There is, indeed, evidence that the idea of a lucky pig was already around in the later Middle Ages, when pigs were assigned a high value in board and card games.”
But he says the association may have begun even earlier, originating with early Germanic tribes and their fascination with the wild boar. Porck continues: “Some Germanic tribesmen, Tacitus wrote in chapter 45 of his Germania, would carry with them ‘formae aprorum’ [images of boars] as a kind of talisman for protection in battle…References to this practice also survive in early medieval literature. The Old English poem Elene, for example, makes mention of an eoforcumbol ‘boar-standard’. In the poem Beowulf, too, there is a reference to an eoforheafodsegn ‘lit. boar-head-sign’, usually interpreted as a banner with a boar’s head.” The boar’s head was not just a symbol in literature, but tribes all around Europe would often wear helmets resembling boards into battle. In fact, helmets from the Swedish Torslunda contained boar imagery as early as the 7th Century!
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Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.