Oct. 27, 2023 ❧ The absurd cost of homeownership, a deal for autoworkers, and a javelina insurgency
Plus the House's awful new Speaker, Florida's crackdown on free speech, the British Navy's weird and racist policy, trans rights in Japan, and the TRUTH about caterpillars...
STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
MORTGAGE RATES HIT A 23-YEAR HIGH
For the first time since 2000, the 30-year fixed mortgage interest rate has reached 8 percent, a dramatic increase from just 4.42 percent last March. The change is largely driven by the Federal Reserve’s anti-inflation fiscal policy, which has seen it hike interest rates across the board several times in an attempt to slow down the overall economy. Sure enough, the housing market has slowed; according to the National Association of Realtors, sales of existing homes were down by 15 percent this August compared to the previous year, and the Mortgage Brokers Association says applications for new mortgages have hit a low-water mark not seen since 1996.
But if you happen to be a normal person and not a banker, that’s really not good news. As ABC News diplomatically puts it, both trends are a result of the “sharp rise in costs for potential homebuyers”—or, in other words, the fact that people literally can’t afford to buy homes, who would have been able to a little more than a year ago. (In July, the average home payment in the United States was $2,605, an increase of 19 percent from the previous year.) And buyers aren’t the only ones affected; as Liam Geraghty writes for the UK’s Big Issue, it’s a well-established pattern that residential landlords pass mortgage-rate hikes on to their tenants in the form of rent increases, making an already-expensive housing market even worse.
Astonishingly, Fed chairman Jerome Powell has indicated that yet another of these rate hikes is possible in November, adding fuel to the fire. It seems to be the only solution the overseers of capitalism can think of. But as Grace Blakely wrote for Jacobin last year, another, more socialist model is possible:
[H]igher interest rates will translate into even lower living standards for the millions of people already being severely impacted by high inflation… Rather than raising interest rates, we should be arguing for price controls over the short term, and public support for the provision of basic necessities over the long term.
BIG STORY
UAW SECURES TENTATIVE DEAL WITH FORD
After forty-one days on the picket line, the United Auto Workers have won a deal with one of Detroit’s Big Three. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday night, UAW president Shawn Fain confirmed that “our Stand Up Strike has delivered,” calling the new agreement “checkmate.” Vice president Chuck Browning added that this will be “the most lucrative agreement per member since Walter Reuther was president,” and he wasn’t kidding. Among the terms listed by the Detroit Free Press, Ford has agreed to a 25 percent wage increase over the next 4 and a half years, with 11 percent to come in the first year alone. The starting wage will increase by 68 percent, to over $28 an hour, and cost-of-living adjustments the union had given up during the 2008-09 recession will be reinstated. Perhaps most importantly, the two-tiered system of employment, in which new hires made less money for the same work, will be abolished.
Throughout this strike, the mouthpieces of respectable public opinion cast doubt on Fain and the UAW. Michigan’s News-Herald called Fain’s militancy “wrong-headed and a disservice to the membership,” the Associated Press wondered aloud, “Has he reached too far?”, and the New York Times insisted Fain “must prove that his hard-core tactics pay off.” Well, they’re paying off—and with one automaker down, the pressure is now on GM and Stellantis to make their own deals, or be left behind.
FIGHTING BACK
JAVELINAS LAUNCH INSURGENCY ON AN ELITE ARIZONA GOLF COURSE
As we’ve chronicled at numerous points throughout this briefing’s history, animals around the world are in open revolt against humanity. This summer, we observed squadrons of orcas capsizing cruises, giant snails overrunning Florida to chomp through stucco walls and car tires, and a rotund black bear marauding the refrigerators of Lake Tahoe revelers. The war of nature versus humanity escalated again this week in the deserts of Arizona. The insurgents were a hoard of furry, stubby-legged pig-like animals known as “javelinas” who were filmed ransacking one of the state’s most exclusive golf courses.
The club’s assistant superintendent posted a video on Twitter of the “carnage” done to “what should be one of the most beautiful golf courses in the world.” The video shows dozens of patches of torn-up green, which she says was caused by a “herd of javelina.”
Many of the articles covering this raid describe the javelinas as foreign invaders, but they are actually restive natives fighting to preserve their home. As Benji Jones writes in Vox,
Though javelinas have been spreading north in recent decades, they’re a native species to the Southwest. Golf courses are destroying their habitat, not the other way around. These animals are using what resources they can find — in this case, juicy fairways and water-filled roots under a golf green. We can’t fault them for that.
The landscapes where javelinas and other wildlife find food are also shrinking. For decades, humans have been replacing wild habitats like grasslands, deserts, and woodlands in Arizona — one of the nation’s fastest-growing states — with housing developments, malls, and, of course, hundreds of golf courses. “[Javelinas] really don’t have much choice but to use artificial resources,” Burnett said, referring to human landscapes like golf courses. “That’s how they’ll survive.”
Even the house organ of caddy colonialism, Golf Digest, acknowledges that the javelinas are acting in self-defense and credits their resilience:
“Javelinas are stubborn and stout. They defend their territory aggressively and sometimes fighting each other to the death over a prickly pear, their favorite snack. They travel in herds of five to 15, though some as large as 50 have been reported. When moving in numbers, even cougars—one of earth’s apex predators—are afraid from them. So what chance does a greenskeeper stand?”
This javelina insurgency picked a rather perfect symbol of human excess and hubris to target. The Seven Canyons Golf Club in Sedona costs $25,000 to $50,000 to join and $10,000 to $15,000 annually, making it the exclusive domain of America’s elite. In addition to serving as sprawling monuments to America’s class (and, often, racial) hierarchy, ritzy golf clubs like it are also extraordinarily wasteful. According to Ray Brescia of City Monitor:
The typical golf course uses over 300,000 gallons of water a day and applies harmful pesticides and fertiliser to the grass, which then can often leach into groundwater and water systems. The lawnmowers that manicure that grass make significant contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. And – because many courses were built before the laws that might have required an environmental impact statement prior to their construction – these effects are almost never taken into account when considering the true cost of operating and maintaining golf courses today.
Hilariously in hindsight, the website for the Seven Canyons describes the course as living “in perfect harmony with the natural environment and the spirit of Sedona.” The javelinas have given the lie to that.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Mike Johnson is now Speaker of the House. He’s awful. Johnson’s election comes after weeks of internal dysfunction, in which three other would-be Speakers—Louisiana’s Steve Scalise, Ohio’s Jim Jordan, and Minnesota’s Tom Emmer—tried and failed to secure enough support for their own bids. It’s not like there were any good options in there, but even so, Johnson’s track record is particularly grotesque. The New York Times calls him one of the House’s “staunchest conservatives,” which is a polite way of putting it; “bigoted would-be theocrat” is another. As a CNN report details, Mr. Johnson does not like gay people, having written in 2004 that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural,” has compared gay marriage to bestiality, and defended a Texas law criminalizing gay sex in 2003. He also has deep ties to Christian nationalism, having worked as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that opposes the separation of church and state as a concept. After Obergefell v. Hodges legalized gay marriage nationwide, he took to the pages of Answers in Genesis, a creationist website that claims the Earth is only a few thousand years old, to rail against “radical secularists” and insist that “it is not ‘bigotry’ to remind people of God’s claims on our lives and biological reality.” He also receives extensive donations from the fossil fuel industry and doesn’t believe burning fossil fuels causes climate change. (The two facts seem related.) In short, Johnson is a nasty piece of work, and it’s an embarrassment that a supposedly civilized country put him in any position of power. With any luck, the GOP-led House will continue to be paralyzed by infighting, and he won’t be able to inflict his deranged views on anyone else.
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HISTORY’S FUNNIEST ARMED ROBBERY
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Colorado may soon prohibit police from using the term “excited delirium.” For decades, “excited delirium” has been used to explain away deaths in police custody, and to justify officers’ use of lethal force. Supposedly, it describes a medical condition of “extreme agitation, hyperthermia, hostility, exceptional strength and endurance without apparent fatigue,” which can occur unexpectedly and threaten the lives of police. As Arjun S. Byu wrote for Current Affairs in 2021, this provides a handy excuse for any violence the police wish to deal out:
(Pseudo)science, with its connotations of impartiality and inevitability, permits extreme cruelty, namely by telling us, “That is how they are.” And in the case of excited delirium, “This is how they must be handled.”
In fact, “excited delirium” was used as a defense in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, and in the death of Elijah McClain, who was given a lethal dose of ketamine by Colorado police. The problem is, that there’s no scientific evidence that the condition exists. This April, the National Association of Medical Examiners issued a statement warning against its use (after years of supporting such diagnoses) and the American Psychiatric Association did the same in 2020, noting that the term has been “disproportionately applied to Black men.” Now, Colorado state representative Judy Amabile has indicated she’ll introduce legislation to ban the term from both police training and coroners’ reports, calling it “junk science.” California has already banned “excited delirium” as a cause of death, and as awareness of the term’s sketchy history grows, more states may follow suit.
PAST AFFAIRS
For more on “excited delirium,” read Arjun S. Byju’s article in Current Affairs from April 2021 titled “Excited Delirium: How Cops Invented a Disease”
“Focused on proving why excited delirium is not ‘real,’ they missed a broader point: why are diseases like excited delirium manufactured in the first place, and how are cultural beliefs and stereotypes reflected in the process of categorizing, diagnosing, and treating illness? Put another way, surely something suspicious is going on when a bunch of young Black men die suddenly upon encountering the police—whether it’s a ‘legitimate’ clinical syndrome or not. If excited delirium is, as advocates maintain, a sterile, biochemical process—which remains doubtful—then the phenomenon is still a tragedy. For here are sick people, receiving not a hospital bed and medication but a hogtie and electroshock. Even if we accept the (very) debatable idea that excited delirium is real, it requires compassion and dedication to better outcomes. For every sickness—manmade or not—has its own narrative, a parable of suffering and diagnosis, and hopefully, triumph.”
❧ In an extraordinary violation of the basic right to free expression, Florida’s university system chancellor—appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis—has ordered that state universities disband the “Students for Justice in Palestine” group. The order says colleges must “crack down” on the group after the national organization released a “toolkit” for a “national day of resistance.” The document reads:
We are asking chapters to host demonstrations on campus/in their community in support of our resistance in Palestine and the national liberation struggle — one which they play a critical role in actualizing.
Because the group used the phrase “resistance” to describe Hamas’ attack on Israel and later in the document used the word “resistance” to describe their demonstrations, the DeSantis administration claims that the group is “knowingly provid[ing] material support…to designated foreign terrorist organization,” which is a felony in Florida. This is a ridiculous stretch. If you look at the toolkit in question, all the methods the group promotes are peaceful: including campus demonstrations, sit-ins, putting up fliers, and signing petitions. None of these things amount to “material support” under the law. And if the state believed they were providing material support to terrorists, wouldn’t they be…you know…arrested instead of just banned from protesting? This is a very clear attempt to use lawfare to silence critics of Israel, and it’s not the first that Florida has undertaken. In 2019, the DeSantis administration passed a law banning “anti-Semitism” on college campuses, which treats supposed “double standards” against Israel as being the same as Holocaust denial or threats of violence against Jewish people. DeSantis also sponsored a 2016 law that prohibited state investment in companies that boycott Israel, which he proudly said “aims to stymie the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement.” Combatting actual anti-Semitism is extremely important (and we wish DeSantis were half as vociferous in condemning the actual anti-Semites who support him as he is in condemning critics of Israel), but as we wrote in a July briefing:
Treating Judaism as essentially synonymous with Israel is quite anti-Semitic itself, because it treats Jews as a monolithic hive mind. It ignores the diversity within Jewish thought—erasing the many Jews who stand in solidarity with dispossessed Palestinians and do not feel that the Israeli government reflects who they are.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Speaking of the diversity within Jewish thought, we highly recommend the 2004 book Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel, edited by Adam Shatz. It’s an anthology, demonstrating that “some of the fiercest and most eloquent critiques of Israel and Zionism have been made by Jewish thinkers,” including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken reportedly pressured Qatar to change Al Jazeera’s Palestine coverage. When he’s not committing crimes against the Blues, it seems, Blinken has been hard at work trying to suppress international journalism. According to an exclusive report in Axios, the Secretary urged Qatari officials to “tone down Al Jazeera's rhetoric about the war in Gaza,” claiming that the Doha-based network is “full of anti-Israel incitement.” The report, which cites “three people who attended the meeting,” doesn’t indicate what specific stories Blinken was referring to, and it suggests he was talking about the Arabic-language news, rather than Al Jazeera English. Still, the allegation is disturbing. It suggests that little things like freedom of the press are secondary, compared to Blinken’s promise that Israel will “always have the support of the United States,” and that the U.S. government is more than willing to manipulate the news behind closed doors to get the results it wants.
❧ Citing security risks, the British Navy will no longer have “Chinese laundrymen” on its warships. For the Times of London, Ali Mitib writes that the Navy is “ending its century-old tradition of having Chinese servants” onboard, out of concerns that they might be spies for Beijing. This is, of course, bizarrely racist on two levels—first because having “Chinese servants” was still an ongoing practice in 2023, and second because the Navy’s fears that Chinese laundry workers are inherently untrustworthy are the only reason the practice is ending. But fear not; the British are simply replacing Chinese staff with “Nepalese Gurkhas,” so there’ll still be a weird race-based dynamic, and they won’t have to do their laundry. Heaven forbid.
❧ Japan’s Supreme Court ruled against an extremely invasive law that requires people who seek to change their gender to undergo physical sterilization. The 15-judge court ruled that such a burden forced trans people to make a “cruel choice between accepting the sterilization surgery that causes intense bodily invasion and giving up important legal benefits of being treated according to their gender identity” and violates the constitution’s equal rights protection. Though the court did not strike down other requirements for gender transition—such as requiring trans people to be unmarried, have no children, and undergo sexual reassignment surgery to transition on legal documents—the ruling is a positive for LGBTQ rights. But Japan still has a long way to go toward actual equality. It is the only G7 country that does not recognize same-sex marriage and there is no national ban on discrimination in employment, housing, and education. An anti-discrimination bill was introduced in the Japanese Diet in 2021 but it failed to pass. However, the Diet ultimately passed a law in June seeking to “promote understanding” of LGBTQ groups while saying government entities, businesses, and schools “need to strive” to avoid discrimination (How nice of them!). The Japan Alliance for LGBT Legislation writes: “Japan needs a LGBT Anti-Discrimination Law equivalent to the standards of other industrially-developed countries.”
LONG READ
⚜ Beginning with the Arab Spring in 2011, the last decade has seen a massive surge of worldwide protests against numerous forms of injustice everywhere from the United States to Hong Kong to Egypt to Chile. But they have struggled to generate enduring change. In Vincent Bevins’ new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, he explores ten protest movements that have taken place over the last decade and examines why they failed. Osita Nwanevu, who reviewed the book for the New Republic, writes:
Most critiques of contemporary mass protest focus on the roles that technology and social media in particular have played in pulling demonstrations together. Facebook and Twitter brought thousands to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, yes, but also, as prominent critics like sociologist Zeynep Tufekci have argued, those same mechanisms may have ensured that the movements they sparked wouldn’t endure for long. Digital coordination, Bevins writes, allows for “the existence of big protests that come together very quickly—so quickly, perhaps, that no one knows each other, people are trying to realize contradictory goals, and after the initial energy fades, nothing remains.” The initial energies social media loosed in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere were real and explosive—governments did shake, and regimes did fall. The question at the heart of the mass protest decade isn’t why social media–driven uprisings failed to change conditions where they happened, but why the changes forced by those uprisings—even at their most potent and least ephemeral—were either limited in scope or reversed, remarkably often, by leaders worse than the ones activists did manage to topple…
“I spent years doing interviews,” Bevins eventually concludes, “and not one person told me that they had become more horizontalist, or more anarchist, or more in favor of spontaneity and structurelessness.” Instead, the activists he spoke to, across disparate movements motivated and shaped by different grievances and conditions across the globe, offered up a loose consensus, more supportive of formal structures and leadership in mass movements—or of, at the very least, having a stable contingent of activists ready to represent them and articulate ideologically informed demands. “We thought representation was elitism,” one Egyptian activist told him, “but actually it is the essence of democracy.”...
Given the risk that the wrong people win out in the end, Bevins counsels sobriety. “If you cannot carry out a revolution and are not in a position to negotiate reforms, then perhaps it is acceptable to do nothing at all,” he cautions. “Better yet, to organize, analyze, and strategize—to put yourself in the best position for the next opportunity. Sometimes, the right action may be to wait. At the least, recent history suggests you should not try to effect maximum disruption at any moment that this appears possible.”
That’s an insight that might be applied as readily here as anywhere else. While we’ve seen more than our share of demonstrations in this country over the last decade, the movements behind them have had a mostly salutary but mostly diffuse impact on our politics. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter fundamentally altered debates about economic inequality and racial justice. The discursive shifts those movements brought about have manifested themselves in actual policy; those and other protest movements have moreover trained and elevated a generation of progressive leaders who have made an impact as both activists and practitioners of formal politics.
But the institutions underpinning our politics and our economy have survived the decade mostly unchanged and unscathed; in general, we have about as many reasons to hit the streets now as we did 10 years ago. And when we do, we ought to take more than mere inspiration from movements abroad—it’s their failures that we might learn the most from.
PAST AFFAIRS
In Current Affairs, author Raina Lipsitz also has a terrific review of If We Burn in which she writes:
“If We Burn amply demonstrates that not every mass protest is worthwhile, let alone world-changing, even when those who take part experience “intense, life-changing collective euphoria.” Intellectual, moral, and political commitment to a movement, even when it’s unpopular or dangerous, is not only compatible with but necessary to making lasting change. By the same token, being so committed to a cause that you are willing to die for it—or get others killed—will not, by itself, guarantee success. As some of Bevins’ subjects explain, it’s wrong to trade some people’s lives for the ego gratification of others. Or, in Bevins’ paraphrase, “If you want the feeling of mass ecstasy you should go to a music festival instead of encouraging vulnerable young people to go out and get killed.” Yet “just as common” among those he interviewed is the belief that such ecstasy is, in fact, “the most real thing that one can ever feel” and “a stunning, momentary glimpse of the way that life is really supposed to be.”
CATERPILLAR FACT OF THE WEEK
Caterpillar legs are a scam!
The little nubbins they use to move around are not actually legs at all. Instead, they are something called “prolegs,” which sound similar to regular legs but are actually completely different. Prolegs don’t propel the caterpillar forward as legs typically do for vertebrates. Instead, they act as anchors, keeping the caterpillar steady as it uses the other muscles in its gelatinous body to inch along.
According to a delightful website called TheCaterpillarLab.org, “At the tip of each proleg is a pad called a crochet, which is covered in tiny barbs…The tiny barbs work like Velcro to tightly attach the prolegs to all kinds of substrates, including leaves, twigs, and fingers. If you’ve ever held a caterpillar, you’ve probably felt those sticky crochets on your skin!”
Their real legs, which they only begin to use after they transition into butterflies or moths, are located on their thoraxes right below the head. But these legs don’t help them move around as larvae.
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.