Oct. 6, 2023 ❧ The revival of the FCC, a strike at Kaiser Permanente, and more House Speaker shenanigans
Plus: Politico defends the SS, RFK Jr. goes independent, Pakistan deports refugees, Commander Biden keeps biting everybody, and more!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
THE FCC IS ONCE AGAIN REINING IN TECH CORPORATIONS
One of the lesser-known disasters of Donald Trump’s time as president was the complete derailing of the Federal Communications Commission and its role in regulating internet service. Under Ajit Pai, the former lawyer for Verizon who Trump appointed as FCC chairman in 2017, the agency abandoned the core principle that the internet is a public utility regulated under Title II of federal communications law. This meant the end of “net neutrality,” which had forced ISPs to treat all internet traffic as essentially the same, and opened the door for companies to throttle traffic to certain websites and apps while fast-tracking others. In the ensuing years, tech companies took full advantage. For example, Sprint deliberately slowed down Microsoft’s Skype platform in 2018, while web provider Cox decided to offer a “fast lane” for gaming websites and charge an extra $15 a month. Beyond the unfair treatment of consumers, these practices hold an obvious danger to free speech and democratic expression—after all, if tech companies can slow Skype to a crawl, they could just as easily do the same to the website of a political candidate or news outlet they disapproved of. The scope to manipulate what content the public does and doesn’t see online is enormous.
Current FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel has sent a message that reform is on the way. Saying that “repeal of net neutrality put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the public,” she’s announced plans to reverse the Trump-era deregulation, and restore the FCC’s power to regulate internet companies under Title II. As media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting reports, this will allow the agency “to push against price gouging, anti-privacy moves, access-throttling—the whole range of things that makes people hate their internet service providers, and makes [the internet] a less hospitable arena for activism and organizing.” The FCC is expected to vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking relating to Title II at its next Open Meeting on October 19, at which time we’ll know more about the details of Rosenworcel’s regulatory agenda, and how it’ll be enacted. With more and more people relying exclusively on the internet for their communications and sources of news, having a check against corporate power is more important than ever, and this appears to be a step in the right direction. There’s room to go further, though; as Sparky Abraham wrote for Current Affairs back in 2020, the better long-term move would be to nationalize the internet providers and their infrastructure entirely.
FIGHTING BACK
KAISER PERMANENTE EMPLOYEES GO ON STRIKE
On Wednesday, approximately 75,000 healthcare workers—including technicians, pharmacists, reception and administrative staff, and medical assistants—walked off the job at Kaiser Permanente medical facilities, and began a three-day strike, the largesthealthcare strike in U.S. history. Organized under the broad banner of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, the workers are demanding real solutions to the acute understaffing that has plagued the entire healthcare industry for years and has stretched many of them to the breaking point. Speaking to the New York Times, members of Kaiser Permanente’s staff emphasized just how bad conditions have gotten, both for them and their patients:
Mattie Ruffin, 69, a nursing assistant at Kaiser for 17 years, said a lack of adequate staffing had taken a serious toll. When “we’re running room to room, the patients aren’t getting what they need,” Ms. Ruffin said. With so much burnout among workers, “you’re going to see higher hospitalization rates, more infections, more falls,” she said.
Other workers told stories of the financial hardship they’ve faced:
Among the strikers outside a medical center in San Francisco was Edward Lopez-Matus, a medical assistant who drives for Uber 40 hours a week on top of his full-time job, to make ends meet for his two teenage children. “My entire paycheck goes to rent,” said Mr. Lopez-Matus, who said a staffing shortage had left him assigned to help two doctors instead of one, increasing the chances that he could make a mistake.
Needless to say, a strike involving hospitals and medical services carries more urgency than any other kind, and many people will be worried that their procedures could be canceled or delayed if an agreement isn’t reached. Recognizing this fact, acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su has traveled to California to speak with both striking workers and the company itself and attempt to broker a deal. Really, though, the solution is clear: Kaiser Permanente, which reported a net revenue of $2.1 billion in the second quarter of 2023, needs to listen to the unions’ demands, increase pay and staffing levels, and give its workers some much-needed relief.
BIG STORY
CHAOS REIGNS FOR THE HOUSE GOP AS McCARTHY IS TOPPLED FROM SPEAKERSHIP
Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has successfully ousted Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from his position as Speaker of the House. He becomes the first Speaker ever to have the gavel forcibly ripped from his hands. He will leave behind the shortest tenure in the position since 1876, when Speaker Michael Kerr died of tuberculosis nine months into office (though nobody will likely ever surpass Theodore Pomeroy who served as Speaker for a single day in 1869 while his predecessor took the oath to become Ulysses Grant’s Vice President).
McCarthy was ultimately shivved by just eight of his fellow Republicans. It was a loss he could have withstood if he’d had just a modicum of Democratic support. Instead, he swore off the possibility entirely when he foolishly announced that he was “not going to provide” any concessions to the opposition party in exchange for the few votes he’d need. It was his last futile attempt to appease a far-right bloc that has made it clear over the last year that it will accept nothing less than the world. Susan B. Glasser perhaps said it best in her New Yorker postmortem:
By nature an accommodationist, McCarthy was brought down by the surging Trumpist forces within his caucus that he had sought for years to placate. His humiliation, in that sense, is the Republican Party’s writ large—the humiliation of bowing to Trump again and again, only to be met with more and more outrageous demands. McCarthy is modern proof that appeasement doesn’t work.
The record of his suck-uppery to Trump and the Trumpists is too long to recount in full. Perhaps it’s enough to recall that Trump nicknamed him “my Kevin,” and that, during Trump’s Presidency, McCarthy was reported to have sent over to the White House a jar of Trump’s favorite Starbursts, carefully culled of all but his favorite red and pink candies. It was McCarthy’s egregious behavior in the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, however, that really proved him to be a hopeless stooge.
Business in the House has now ground to a halt as the GOP scrambles to find a new leader. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and ranking member Steve Scalise (R-LA) have already thrown their hats into the ring, with Jordan receiving the endorsement from Trump. But since the Speaker doesn’t actually need to be a member of Congress, a few Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), are urging Trump to take up the position himself (though we’re not sure he can handle a side hustle right now given how busy he is running for president and appearing in civil and criminal court).
But whoever emerges from the coming maelstrom clutching the Speaker’s gavel will likely soon find themselves facing the same deadly combination of structural forces that wrecked McCarthy. With such a narrow Republican majority, plans can easily be derailed if just a few Freedom Caucus members get their knickers in a twist, which is inevitable when all legislation will need to pass through a Democratic-controlled Senate. This set of circumstances is a no-win position, leaving whatever poor sap assumes the role to be berated by all sides regardless of what they do. Why anyone wants to subject themselves to the humiliation of being America’s dunk-tank clown strains credulity.
THIS WEEK IN EVIL
Mike Davis (not the cool one) is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and an aide for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. He says he hopes to be appointed as Trump’s acting attorney general if he becomes president again, where he will unleash a “reign of terror.” Here is what he said to a cackling Benny Johnson this week: “We're gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing - anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious.”
This isn’t even the most deranged thing he said this week. Here he is calling the “Black underclass” a “scourge on society”:
AROUND THE STATES
❧ California public schools will now require that students be taught about labor rights under a newly signed law. All schools will now be required to hold a “Workplace Readiness Week” in which students will learn about their right to unionize, the explicit protections they have as minors, and how to avoid workplace abuse. The new law comes as other states have begun to roll back child labor protections, despite an upward trend of violations in recent years. The new law requiring students to be taught their rights was championed by the California Labor Federation after it was revealed that a San Francisco Subway franchisee was illegally keeping the tips of employees as young as 14 and required them to use dangerous equipment. According to Common Dreams, “In 2021, 109 workers aged 19 or younger died from work-related injuries in the United States, and more than 33,000 teenagers were hospitalized for serious injuries sustained at work.” Despite this, no other state requires students to be taught their rights in school.
❧ In 2021, the New York Police Department began publishing an online database that they claimed allowed the public to view their officers’ misconduct history. They touted it as an effort to improve “transparency.” But most of the NYPD’s most prolific offenders are not listed at all. According to The Intercept,
Of the 10 NYPD officers named in the most lawsuits — facing a collective 245 suits in the last decade, with total payouts of more than $7 million — only one is listed for misconduct in the police profile database.
The NYPD has gotten away with this by defining “misconduct” very narrowly—only including cases that result in criminal penalties. Police misconduct claims from civilians are usually left up to commanding officers, who often let them off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, cops with long histories of wrongdoing have not had their histories made public. For example, David Grieco, who’d earned the nickname “Bullethead” had been the subject of 48 misconduct lawsuits that cost the NYPD more than #1 million in damages. Despite having been sued for unconstitutional street stops, illegal arrests, raids without warrants, and even breaking an NBA player’s leg with a baton, he did not appear in the database and still remains on the force as a sergeant.
❧ In Franklin, Tennessee, mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson appears to have self-proclaimed neo-Nazis as a security detail. And by “self-proclaimed,” we mean that the group’s leader, Brad Lewis, has posted on Telegram, “I’m not a cuckservative, I’m an actual literal Nazi.” On Monday night, around a dozen members of the Tennessee Active Club—a white supremacist group who operate a private gym in Nashville, and have photographed themselves holding swastika flags and giving Hitler salutes—showed up to a candidates’ forum at City Hall. According to local reporters, they then escorted Hanson and her husband inside and stood outside watching the venue entrance. When questioned, the men would say only that they were “here to protect Gabrielle” and were “making sure everything goes well.” One was identified as Sean Kauffman, who was arrested for assaulting Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020, and has posted online under the name “Boog Fuhrer.” Hanson herself refused to answer questions about her associates, but her politics are far-right, including fierce opposition to LGBTQ events in Franklin. (In one memorable incident, she claimed that drag queens eat human hearts.) According to Nashville’s News Channel 5, Hanson was also the real estate agent for the very store that houses the Tennessee Active Club’s gym. Since the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, the U.S. has had an increasingly obvious Nazi problem, but it’s rare for open white supremacists to be this closely linked to an actual candidate for office. It’s a disturbing development, to say the least, and one that deserves the strongest possible condemnation.
CHECK FOR ZOMBIFICATION AFTER FEMA’s EMERGENCY ALERT TEST!
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Last week, Canada’s parliament embarrassed itself when its members gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old man who fought with the First Ukrainian Division of the Waffen-SS. For most, it was a moment of shame and reflection, including Canada’s House Speaker, who took responsibility for inviting a Nazi to the chamber and promptly resigned. But not to everybody. Amid this kerfuffle, Politico published an article by Keir Giles, the author of a book titled Russia’s War on Everybody, arguing that this “mass outrage” is unwarranted and that someone being a member of the literal SS doesn’t necessarily make them a Nazi. We are not exaggerating. Here is what Giles said:
This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp. Canada’s enemies have thus latched on to these simple narratives, alongside concerned citizens in Canada itself, with the misstep over Hunka being used by Russia and its backers to attack Ukraine, Canada and each country’s association with the other.
Apparently, it’s propaganda by “Canada’s enemies” that “the SS’s primary task was genocide.” Giles may want to take this up with the American Holocaust Memorial Museum, which writes on its page about the Waffen-SS that,
They were heavily involved in the commission of the Holocaust through their participation in mass shootings, anti-partisan warfare, and in supplying guards for Nazi concentration camps. They were also responsible for many other war crimes.
This is also true of Hunka’s own SS unit, which Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa says “was involved in mass killings of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. They massacred Polish civilians, including close to 1,000 in the village of Huta Peniatska.”
There are plenty of good reasons to be against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But, good heavens! That doesn’t mean that you need to defend every single person who has ever opposed Russia in all of history.
❧ Pakistan may soon deport more than 1.7 million Afghan refugees. The country’s “caretaker” government has accused Afghan nationals of carrying out 14 suicide bombings in Pakistan this year, and has issued a November 1 deadline for any refugees lacking legal status to leave, or be forcibly deported. Amnesty International has warned against the policy, pointing out that “a forced return to Afghanistan could put [refugees] at grave risk,” and that “obstacles and delays they face in registering as refugees or for third country relocation have left them in a legal limbo.” Taliban officials, too, have raised strong objections, arguing that Pakistan’s abrupt expulsion of so many people would be “unacceptable.” It’s not often that the Taliban has the moral high ground on any issue, but considering the human cost of a mass deportation like the one Pakistan has threatened, they’re actually in the right this time.
❧ Argentina’s presidential debates got heated, as socialist candidate Myriam Bregman took aim at the far-right libertarian Javier Milei. Milei made international headlines last month when his party unexpectedly came in first in the country’s primaries. The New York Times calls him “the front-runner” to win the election. With his wild hair and bombastic speaking style, he’s frequently been compared to Donald Trump, and he has some truly wacky policy proposals, like allowing people to buy and sell human organs. But it was Bregman, a human rights lawyer, who stole the show on Sunday. Representing the Workers Left Front—Unity and wearing the signature green of the feminist movements that have recently legalized abortion in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, she mocked Milei as “a cuddly kitten of the rich and powerful,” and delivered a ringing rebuke to his entire worldview:
I am a lawyer, I am a socialist, and I fight every day to transform this society at its roots. Today I have come here to ask you to not feel resigned. There is another way. Because we, the workers, are the vast majority. And if we unite, we have the strength to turn history on its head. We women have already shown that when we mobilize, we are unstoppable. Our country is going through a crisis, and certain people are responsible: the International Monetary Fund, the wealthy, and their politicians… While they starve the people, they go away on their luxury yachts to Europe. Far from that, we do not come to make campaign promises, we come to make a commitment to fight.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has announced plans to run as an independent in the 2024 election. Though he fruitlessly tried before to pose as a progressive alternative to Biden, his anti-vaccine crankery and even weirder forays into anti-Semitism (including the assertion that COVID-19 was engineered specifically to spare Jews) proved too weird to work in the Democratic primary. Early general election polls show that RFK, Jr. at around 19 percent support, which is quite a bit more formidable than other recent third-party candidates though still far too little to pose a threat to win a single state. What makes this interesting is that Kennedy polls much better among Republicans and appears poised to absorb some of the anti-vax vote from Trump, who spent his first few years post-presidency bragging about how he fast-tracked the dreaded jab’s creation with “Operation Warp Speed.” In an election that is likely to be close, the margin of Trump-to-RFK defectors could prove significant. Perhaps a wise decision for Trump (though certainly not for the rest of us) would be to try nudging RFK, Jr. out of the race by promising to appoint him as CDC Director.
TRUMP FINALLY ANSWERS THE QUESTION EVERYONE HAS BEEN ASKING:
Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
❧ Laphonza Butler has been appointed to replace the late Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Somehow, she’s not an improvement. In the Washington Post, Butler’s been touted as “the third Black female U.S. senator in history,” and a “onetime labor leader” with the Service Employees International Union.
However, this account leaves out important facts. For instance, after her time with the SEIU, Butler was hired as a lawyer by Uber to advise them on labor issues, at a time when the company was trying to argue that its drivers aren’t employees and shouldn’t get legal rights and protections as such. More recently, Butler’s tenure as the president of EMILY’s List saw the pro-choice advocacy group spend “tens of millions of dollars” to support Kamala Harris, while laying off important campaign staff ahead of the 2024 election. There are even questions about Butler’s connection to California itself, as she lives in Maryland, and is only eligible for Feinstein’s seat by a “strange constitutional loophole.” With primary elections just months away, it’s unclear if California voters will accept any of this, or if Butler’s time in the Senate will be as short-lived as her predecessor’s was long.
❧ Commander Biden’s rampage against the Secret Service continues apace. The President’s German shepherd has been removed from the White House premises after biting an agent for the 11th time (that we know of) in just over half a year. Commander is, of course, not the first Biden dog to menace the Secret Service—he was, in fact, adopted shortly before Biden’s other dog, Major, was expelled for his own spate of bitings. Back in 2021, Current Affairs magazine made the bold assertion that Biden’s dogs were Soviet agents sent to undermine the White House. This was before the arrival of Commander, who has since gone above and beyond our wildest predictions with his assault on the Secret Service. Take this as the latest bit of assurance (or a warning, depending on who you are) that the staff of this magazine are prophets.
⚜ Some conservatives are embracing “Red Caesarism,” a new authoritarian vision for a possible second Trump administration. In The Guardian, Jason Wilson explains the increasing influence of thinkers at the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College who are embracing the idea that Trump should appoint himself as a dictator:
In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”. In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”...
The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser… He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”…Anton and others in the Claremont milieu are not simply hypothesizing about the future: their dreams of Caesar arise from their dark view of the US…His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”...
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism. “The fact that Trump lost in 2020 has just radicalized a lot of these people – it occurred to them that they might not win a proper election again,” he said. “That would mean that – excuse the language – they’re shit out of luck unless there’s some other path to power. That’s where Caesarism comes in.” ...
Underlining this danger is the fact that Caesarism has won converts beyond Claremont as a solution to perceived decadence and the declining electoral appeal of far-right ideas.
Charles Haywood, a former industrialist the Guardian exposed last month as the founder of a secretive fraternal lodge and a would-be warlord, wrote in 2021 that “I like, if not love, the idea of Red Caesar” since “Caesarism, and its time-legitimated successor, monarchy, is a natural, realism-based system, under which a civilization can flourish”.
The idea has been lodged in the broader sphere of conservative debate in the rightwing writer Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism, in which he proposes a “Christian prince” whose rule would be “a measured and theocratic Caesarism”, and might perhaps be installed by “a just revolution” against secular rule.
OCTOBER 8th IS WORLD OCTOPUS DAY!
There are around 300 different species of octopus, from the giant Pacific octopus to the tiny Wolfi octopus, and all of them are being celebrated this Sunday! One of the most intelligent and mysterious creatures in the sea, octopi are always surprising us; just recently, scientists discovered evidence that they dream, and they’ve built elaborate communal settlements (dubbed Octlantis and Octopolis) off the coast of Wales.
Unfortunately, octopi are also under threat from the seafood industry, which wants to slaughter them in enormous factory farms. Around the world, people have risen up in protest against this horrific idea; this World Octopus Day, why not sign a petition or join an organization to help?
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.