Sept. 12, 2023 ❧ Global HIV funding threatened, criminalization of homelessness, and a tenants' union's big victory
Plus psychedelics, housing, children in jail, and elderly sharks...
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
GLOBAL AIDS PREVENTION PROGRAM THREATENED BY REPUBLICAN ABORTION OPPOSITION
A U.S.-led program that combats HIV/AIDS worldwide could soon lose funding as part of the Republican attack on abortion rights. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is estimated to have saved as many as 25 million lives over the last two decades. The program, led by the U.S. State Department has provided HIV testing to nearly 65 million people, helped more than 20 million obtain antiretroviral treatment, and provided critical care that has allowed 5.5 million babies to be born HIV-free.
But the program’s funding, which is renewed every five years, may be under threat as Republicans have seized on State Department language they fear could be code for promoting abortion—namely a call for the PEPFAR to partner with “to partner with organizations that advocate for “institutional reforms in law and policy regarding sexual, reproductive and economic rights of women.” The right-wing Heritage Foundation, for instance, says that PEPFAR is a smokescreen for the Biden administration to “promote its domestic radical social agenda overseas,” and says the program should move towards being financed more by the countries in need (which, it just so happens, are often desperately poor). Heritage calls for a more punitive approach to those with AIDS, with a report from May of this year that HIV/AIDS is “primarily a lifestyle disease (like those caused by tobacco) and as such should be suppressed through education, moral suasion, and legal sanctions.”
Though it was reviled by some corners of the Christian right when founded—including groups like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Shepherd Smith’s Institute for Youth Development, PEPFAR has been renewed over the last twenty years by both parties without much issue (in fact, it may be the single greatest public health achievement by a Republican president). But shortly after Heritage’s white paper, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) — who wrote the re-authorization bill for PEPFAR in 2018— said he would not move forward with it again unless it barred NGOs from using any of the money for abortion services. He chairs the U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, which controls the program’s funding. If this demand is not met, he says he wants to cut the program’s funding unless lawmakers are able to perform annual audits on organizations they believe may be providing abortion services. There is no evidence that this is the case, and PEPFAR organizations are already barred from providing abortion services. Richard W. Bauer, a pro-life Catholic priest who worked for 25 years in HIV clinics in Sub-Saharan Africa, questions in a guest essay in The New York Times how people who call themselves “pro-life” could even consider defunding such a wildly successful program:
How did we get this close to the precipice for an initiative that has enjoyed enthusiastic bipartisan support for two decades? This spring, seemingly out of the blue, a small number of politicians and think tanks made this lifesaving program a target by launching disingenuous attacks based on falsehoods that have been disproved by people close to PEPFAR’s daily work and governance — including me… That same report callously referred to H.I.V. as a “lifestyle disease” and framed antiretroviral therapy as a partisan talking point. In doing so, it flouted not only consensus on how to end AIDS but also the Christian teaching that everyone deserves dignity and compassion. In the wake of the Heritage report, some prominent anti-abortion and conservative groups have said they will give negative ratings to elected officials who vote to reauthorize the program in its current iteration… I remember the days before PEPFAR. We cannot go back to an era when nearly an entire generation was wiped out across Africa. We have come too far in the effort to end AIDS to abandon the course now. Letting PEPFAR lapse would fail to honor the teaching that all human life is sacred and worthy of protection.
DISABLED HOMELESS MAN SHOT BY UNDERCOVER COPS IN IDAHO LAUNCHES LAWSUIT
Brooks Roberts, a homeless man in Idaho, is suing multiple federal law enforcement agencies after forest service officers shot him back in May while he was in a wheelchair, “defenseless and immobile.” Brooks and his mother had been living on forest land in a trailer and came out after hearing Brooks’ brother, Timber, being assaulted by two unidentified people after he’d offered them help with jump-starting their car. The two unidentified people who Brooks believed were robbing Timber were, in truth, undercover cops, who’d concocted the scheme to lure the family out so they could be arrested on misdemeanor charges for overstaying on federal forest land.
Body camera footage has shown that Brooks was armed (which is legal in Idaho, to be clear), but immediately discarded his gun when he realized the people pursuing him—who were wearing plain clothes and did not identify themselves— were police. Nevertheless, the police shot him “through his arm, in his armpit, through his back shoulder, the middle of his back, and several times in his legs,” according to the lawsuit. As a result, Brooks is unlikely to ever walk again. “I’m sorry,” Brooks can be heard apologizing on the video, “I didn’t know you were cops.”
The shooting of Brooks Roberts is a gruesome example of how homelessness and poverty are criminalized and met with needless violence. According to Natasha Lennard in The Intercept,
The Robertses were not staying in trailers — which lacked running water, heat in frigid winters, and air conditioning in brutal desert summers — out of choice. They had been trying to find housing since their eviction in 2020, when Judy lost her job of 13 years at a manufacturing plant after being T-boned in a serious car accident. According to the wrongful shooting claim, the Roberts family tried to find emergency shelter as the Covid pandemic raged but were told all options were full…The following summer, Brooks was injured during an overnight Walmart shift, which left him requiring a wheelchair for mobility. The family was again forced to move by the BLM and set up their trailers further north on Forest Service land. That winter, 26 inches of snow left Judy, Brooks, and Timber snowed in and stuck. Nonetheless, the government continued to charge all three of them with multiple misdemeanor counts related to staying on federal lands.
Homelessness in Boise has doubled since 2020. Bureau of Land Management officers have noted a dramatic increase of homeless people taking refuge in public forests in Idaho. One estimates that the numbers have grown by tenfold at least. In 2018, the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a Boise ordinance outlawing public sleeping, saying that the homeless could legally find shelter on public lands if no shelter beds were available. “The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” it said. It was expected to have wide-reaching effects However, this has not stopped jurisdictions around the country from finding loopholes and continuing sweeps of homeless encampments around the country. Ironically, many cities spend more money policing the homeless than it would cost to simply provide them with housing. As Luke Savage wrote in Jacobin earlier this year,
Contrary to what authorities claim, encampment sweeps have…done little except make life even harsher for the unhoused. Evidence is scant that encampments can actually be linked to increases in crime but, as Malcolm Harris observed last year, the homeless often serve as a convenient scapegoat for officials who would rather outsource social policy to bloated police departments than build public housing. There is considerable evidence, however, that cities are in fact spending far more on criminalizing and displacing homeless people than it would cost to provide them with a place to live. The likes of sweeps, incarceration, enforcement of anti-panhandling laws, and hostile architecture, after all, come with a hefty price tag estimated to be more than $31,000 per person, per year. The annual cost of providing supportive housing, according to the same analysis, is $10,051 — or less than a third the cost of criminalization.
FIGHTING BACK
The news is full of doom and gloom. Here’s our new section about people who make the world slightly less doomy and gloomy!
A CONNECTICUT TENANTS’ UNION WINS BIG
In New Haven, Connecticut, a battle has been waged and won. Back in September 2022, Mayor Justin Elicker signed an ordinance formally recognizing renters’ right to form unions and bargain collectively with their landlords, a move that activists had spent years advocating for.
The need for such unions is pressing, as New Haven—home of Yale University—is experiencing an acute housing shortage, in which rents have risen by an average of more than $300 between 2018 and 2022. Many longtime residents have been priced out of the housing market by landlords catering to wealthy university students, and the few affordable apartments in the city are notoriously run-down, with tenants in some buildings complaining of “vermin, broken kitchen appliances, mold, and water damage.” Tenants’ unions began to form before they were legally recognized, with members of the New Haven Democratic Socialists of America helping to organize the residents of the Quinnipiac Gardens apartment complex in 2021. The new ordinance, though, makes matters easier—and now, the Blake Street Tenants Union has scored an important victory for workers and renters everywhere.
The union was formed in November 2022, after 31 of the 45 tenants at Elizabeth Apartments (on the eponymous Blake Street) voted for it. Their particular landlord was and is, Ocean Management, a megafirm that boasts “over 300 properties and 1,300 units in the Greater New Haven Area.” When Ocean purchased Elizabeth Apartments in 2021, it put its tenants on month-to-month leases, meaning that it could simply decline to renew their contracts at any time, for any reason or none at all. Quite understandably, renters found this precarity unacceptable—and they weren’t too fond of the “broken fire alarms, fire hazards, and rodent infestations” in the building, either. (In a ten-month period, Ocean was fined $14,000 by the city for 56 different safety code violations.) Things really came to a head in June 2023, when the landlord tried to raise rent for ten residents “between 23 to 30 percent, or by $220 to $280 per month.” The tenants fought the move, filing complaints with the local Fair Rent Commission, and the union also got involved, attempting to negotiate a more reasonable arrangement. Rather than bargain in good faith, Ocean served sixteen eviction notices on August 16, seemingly targeted at members of the union and tenants who had filed objections.
The union’s response was swift and decisive. On August 31, they rallied dozens of protestors at city hall, marched to Ocean Management’s offices, and hung up sixteen notices of their own, demanding that the company “end union-busting evictions.” Both Mayor Elicker and Senator Richard Blumenthal, not always the most progressive figure, were in attendance. The union also filed a lawsuit against Ocean, arguing that it had committed illegal retaliation against them. Just two days after the protest, Ocean—perhaps swayed by the bad publicity, the strength of the legal case, or both—withdrew the August 16 evictions, and agreed to formally negotiate with the union after a three-month “cooling off period.” Or, in other words: they backed down. It’s the first time a tenant’s union has been recognized by a Connecticut landlord, and a major demonstration of the power renters can wield when they stand together. In future fights against extortionate rents and abusive contracts, the Blake Street Tenants Union will provide a blueprint for others to follow.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ LONG READ: In other housing news, we’re often told that rents and home prices are so expensive because there simply aren’t enough units being built. Remove regulation, the argument goes, and the real estate industry will be free to create more supply, easing the crisis. But as Brendan O’Brien writes for Truthout, this isn’t necessarily true. In fact, real estate developers and their political allies helped to create the housing shortage, and continue to profit handsomely from it:
The real estate industry, always opposed to public housing, was quick to draw attention to the government costs of public housing while further obscuring the far more massive government subsidies involved in incentivizing the sprawl of suburbanization. As these subsidies created white suburban “utopias,” prices went up. Meanwhile, longstanding disinvestment within inner cities created cheap spaces. Developers and government officials saw their opportunity: Areas were rezoned to draw higher-income residents back to the city. The fact that lower-income people, disproportionately those of color, were pushed out was viewed as a regrettable consequence of the market at work. This situation, with some displaced at the same time others gained access to a valuable asset, became an analogy for the entire economy as the 1980s and 1990s rolled on.
❧ A federal judge has ordered that incarcerated children be removed from Louisiana’s Angola prison. Known as the “Alcatraz of the South,” Angola is a maximum-security facility, designed for adult prisoners. Yet, since October 2022, it’s been used to house minors, ostensibly as a short-term solution until nearby juvenile detention centers can be renovated. According to lawyers working with the ACLU, dozens of young people have been held in a former Death Row building, where they suffer from heat indexes ranging from 100 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit in cells with no air conditioning, along with “inadequate schooling and foul water.” Now, Judge Shelly Dick has ruled that these cruel conditions are unconstitutional, and given the state a deadline of September 15th to transfer the children out. The decision is a welcome one, but the real question is how such an obviously insane and abusive policy was ever considered in the first place. For more on the experience of children at Angola State Prison, check out this documentary by VICE:
❧ California is on the verge of legalizing magic mushrooms. The state senate just passed a bill making it legal for people over 21 to possess or grow plant-based psychedelics, and it’s heading to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom. If signed, California would follow Oregon and Colorado which have also legalized psychedelics over the last few years, but the law will not go into effect until 2025. A growing body of research has shown that psychedelics can be a useful part of the treatment process for post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses, and veterans groups have led the charge for their legality. Research shows that the last fifty years of drug criminalization have not reduced drug usage. Rather, they have just kept the drug trade in the shadows, leaving it up to violent cartels and unregulated dealers, while making it harder for people who struggle with addiction to seek help and arresting millions of nonviolent people. At the same time, many of these same states have been violently cracking down on public drug usage among the homeless. But here’s hoping that California and other states and cities that are decriminalizing drug usage can serve as examples of how non-carceral solutions can work.
REMEMBERING THE OTHER 9/11
Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks—a traumatic day for many Americans. But it also marked the 50th anniversary of a date that is just as infamous for many Chileans.
On September 11, 1973, with the help of the CIA and the Nixon administration, Chile’s democratically-elected president Salvador Allende was overthrown and killed by the military after coup leaders stormed the presidential power. It was the culmination of three years of plotting by U.S. intelligence to overthrow President Allende, a democratic socialist who’d nationalized many key industries and introduced land redistribution, programs that fed the nation’s children, and education expansion. “Those concerned with Latin America’s perennial problems of dependency, monoculture, latifundias, underdevelopment and poverty closely watched Chile’s democratic efforts to solve them. In Latin America’s struggle for change, modernization and development, Allende’s program offered reform as the viable alternative to revolution. The fundamental question was whether reform could bring about the necessary changes to solve Latin America’s problems,” wrote E. Bradford Burns in The Nation in 2009. The prospect of a successful socialist government was viewed by the U.S. as an immediate threat to its Cold War aims. In the words of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
For more about Washington’s attack on Chilean democracy, check out Branko Marcetic’s piece in Jacobin titled “Salvador Allende Was in Washington’s Crosshairs.”
The event ushered in seventeen years of military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet which worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. government and corporate interests. Over Pinochet’s reign, more than 40,000 of his political opponents—including left-wing activists, trade unionists, and proponents of democracy—were tortured and more than 3,000 were “disappeared.” Hundreds of thousands more were forced into exile. Between 1975 and 1989, the CIA helped right-wing military juntas kill an estimated 60,000 leftists as part of “Operation Condor.”
While the rich got richer, poverty in the country soared to 50 percent by 1983 under a ruthless new neoliberal order. But Chileans continued to fight for the right to “decide” their fate “for themselves,” and after more than a decade of pressure, finally restored democracy in 1990.
But the scars of September 11, 1973, still linger. Chile still struggles with poverty as a remnant of the Pinochet era and many of those his regime disappeared have still never been found.
In memory of Allende, who undertook a largely forgotten endeavor to democratize the production of music and film in Chile, Jacobin has a fascinating interview with Chilean artist Pablo Castro Zamorano, who has archived the outputs of a state-run music label that “produced and distributed some of the period’s most vibrant and politically engaged music.”
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ In Morocco, a catastrophic magnitude 6.8 earthquake has rocked the country, killing at least 2800. With its epicenter in the Atlas Mountains, the earthquake has caused devastation in the ancient city of Marrakesh and could be felt as far away as Casablanca. By the World Health Organization’s estimate, as many as 300,000 people have been impacted, either by injury, illness, or lack of food and water. Notably, though, the Moroccan government has appeared reluctant to accept humanitarian aid from countries like the U.S., France, and Germany, which have each made offers. One suspects the recent history of imperialism may have something to do with this, as Morocco, like many African nations, only gained its independence from France in the 1950s—well within living memory. Even today, Western nations have a nasty habit of using humanitarianism as a pretext for all kinds of economic and political meddling, so if Morocco’s leadership is wary, it’s understandable.
❧ More than ten thousand climate activists took to the streets in the Netherlands this weekend after a new report detailed €37.5 billion ($40.5 billion) in government subsidies to major fossil fuel users and producers. The protesters, from Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and other environmental organizations occupied a main road in the Hague which leads to the meeting place for the lower house of the Dutch parliament, and promised not to leave until the subsidies were reversed. These groups have led lots of fierce protests against the world’s largest polluters—in May they were hauled off by police while chanting outside Shell’s annual shareholder meeting in London. In the Netherlands, more than 2,400 had to be detained, while others were beaten, and blasted with water cannons before finally dispersing after occupying the highway for several hours. “The oceans are rising, and so are we,” one group chanted through torrents of water.
As the world has warmed, the number of natural disasters has increased tenfold over the last century and the rate of sea level increase has accelerated in recent decades as glaciers and ice sheets melt. Climate activism, too, is on the rise, and as the threat becomes more dire, it may be the only thing that could pressure our leaders to take action.
❧ Mexico is on track for its first female president. Last Wednesday, the incumbent National Regeneration Movement (or Morena) party nominated Claudia Sheinbaum as its candidate for the 2024 presidential election. Her main opponent, representing the more conservative National Action Party (or PAN), will be Xóchitl Gálvez, currently a member of Mexico’s Senate. This means that, barring any unforeseen twist of fate, the next Mexican President will be a woman, beating both Canada and the U.S. to the milestone. Commentators have hailed the development as an important step for women’s rights in a country still known for its patriarchal “macho” culture, along with the recent decriminalization of abortion by the Mexican Supreme Court.
❧ Elon Musk personally prevented the Ukrainian military from attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea. In his research for a new book on Musk, biographer Walter Isaacson found that the CEO had used his control over the Starlink satellite network to alter the course of the war in Ukraine. When Musk heard that Ukrainian forces planned to launch a “substantial drone attack” on the Russian navy, he refused to enable Starlink internet service in the area—without which the drones couldn’t navigate. (Musk himself has confirmed this.) The episode has already proven controversial, as some critics insist that “Thousands of Ukrainians died as a consequence” of the failed strike. Musk himself, by contrast, says that “SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation” if the plan had gone forward, and he may have a legitimate ethical objection on those grounds. In any case, the main lesson here is that an egotistical billionaire known for making impulsive decisions should never have been allowed to gain this much geopolitical power in the first place.
MAZEL TOV, ELON!
Congratulations to Elon Musk and Grimes on the birth of their third child! They have named the bouncing baby boy Tau Techno Mechanicus. We’d also like to extend a hearty to T.T.M. for having the most normal name of Elon and Grimes’ three children.
But just how bizarre do the names of Elon’s children get? TAKE OUR QUIZ!
ANSWERS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BRIEFING
❧ LONG READ: Niger and Gabon have both had their governments overthrown in military coups over the last few months—making eight coups in total in former French colonies in Africa since 2020. Central to the takeovers in both countries were criticisms of their leaders’ coziness with France, which still has major informal influence in the area. In Jacobin, Harrison Stetler writes that these events arose from popular discontent with the legacy of French colonialism:
Events elsewhere in the Sahel show, yet more starkly, how much anti-French sentiment is breaking apart these ties and the governments bound up in them. Take the case of Niger. In late July, military officers in the capital Niamey ousted the French-aligned, democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum. The junta in power has since stared down threats of military intervention — spurred on by Paris — from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional body, led by countries such as Nigeria and Senegal. In truth, while some in Paris still speak of an “Africa policy,” this is today a rudderless project, as lingering assumptions of national prerogative are eclipsed by declining French influence and capabilities. Former colonies in the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa have their own internal power struggles. Yet the resentment against governments seen as subservient to Paris also expresses deep-seated dissatisfaction with French military presence, its inability to win an ill-conceived “war on terror,” and Paris’s habit of propping up pliant local power brokers.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ LONG READ: The Republicans just released their labor platform for 2025, and it’s exactly what you’d expect. In his excellent Substack, How Things Work, which discusses U.S. labor law and strikes, Hamilton Nolan breaks it down:
They want to roll back “independent contractor” rules to earlier standards that make it impossible for “gig economy” workers to organize and build power; they want to roll back the improved “joint employer” standard, which would allow corporations that have franchises to escape responsibility for bad labor practices; they want to roll back the recently improved overtime threshold, which would make millions of workers ineligible for overtime pay; they want to exempt small businesses from OSHA and NLRB regulations altogether, which would leave millions more workers with no protection from unsafe, abusive bosses; and, despite that litany of calls for less government supervision of the workplace, the one place they do want to increase supervision is over people receiving unemployment benefits, who must be monitored more closely lest they engage in fraud (unlike upstanding business owners, who need no such oversight)...
It proposes to “create non-union ‘employee involvement organizations,’” so that workers have the choice of joining a thing that looks vaguely like a union but exercises none of its power. It benevolently proposes that these pseudo-unions could place a worker on their company’s board—though that would, of course, be a “non-voting, supervisory” board seat…
Also included are proposals to limit the scope of “protected concerted activity” at work; to impose burdensome regulations on non-union worker centers, the only groups that can successfully build power for large numbers of workers who can’t join unions; to do away with requirements that companies disclose the professional union-busting firms that they hire; to eliminate any possibility for “card check” union elections (which don’t even exist today, but why chance it?) and to make it easier for disgruntled workers to decertify their existing unions; and, in a favorite idea of right wing reformers who like to cast themselves as pro-worker, to make laws under the Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as safety laws under OSHA, “negotiable” in collective bargaining. This would, for example, grant impoverished workers the ability to negotiate safety and overtime laws in exchange for pay increases. Perhaps if all of those Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers had had this ability, they would have still burned to death, but at a slightly higher rate of pay.
SHARK & CLAM FACTS OF THE DAY
Sharks can get really, really old. In 2016, a 400-year-old shark was found near Greenland. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers estimated that Greenlandic sharks are the longest-living vertebrates in the world!
The record for most aged animal on the planet belongs to a 507-year-old Icelandic clam called Ming, who sadly passed away in 2006. Still, he looked great until the end. We think he hardly looks a day over 503.
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.
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