Sept. 19, 2023 ❧ NYC's climate march, an airline strike, and Wells Fargo accountability
plus a scumbag lawyer fights to undermine a billionaire's tax, landlords party to celebrate the joys of eviction, and the U.K. bans a dog...
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
AIRLINE WORKERS ARE POISED TO STRIKE
At American Airlines, more than 26,000 flight attendants have voted to authorize a strike, by an overwhelming 99.47 percent. Unionized under the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), the workers are organizing against low wages, meager retirement benefits, and hours of labor between flights that can go entirely unpaid. They’ve been negotiating with the airline since January 2019—a span of almost five years, for those counting at home—and have got nowhere on core demands for a 35 percent pay increase and reasonable cost-of-living adjustments. Thanks to the archaic and anti-worker Railway Labor Act of 1926, the union and airline had to exhaust several possible mediation processes before a strike could be formally declared, but that didn’t stop American Airlines staff from striking in 1993, exactly thirty years ago. Soon, history may repeat itself.
At Alaska Airlines, meanwhile, another 6,500 flight attendants are threatening to strike during the 2023 holidays, in response to the same poor pay and working conditions. Speaking to the Guardian, Seattle attendant Kiara O’Bryant summed up some of her union’s key grievances:
“All of that time we spend with passengers on the ground or sitting and waiting for other aircrafts in between flights goes unpaid,” said O’Bryant. “There are instances where flight attendants are sitting anywhere from two to four hours, what becomes a mechanical rolling delay, where that full time is not accounted for and paid for. So it’s not just the boarding, but it’s anytime that we are required to be on duty at work in uniform that we are advocating for pay,” she said.
It seems like a perfectly reasonable request, especially considering that entry-level flight attendants can make as little as $24,000 per year—enough to qualify for food stamps in some states, and nowhere near enough to live in expensive cities like Los Angeles or New York City, near the country’s air transit hubs. In contrast, American Airlines posted a $1.3 billion profit in the second quarter of 2023 alone, so it seems they can afford to pay their workers—without whom they can’t fly at all—a little more fairly.
It’s not just flight attendants, though. At Southwest Airlines, the pilots are ready to strike, citing “zero raises in the wake of record inflation, deteriorating work conditions, and increasing cost of living away from home” even while airline executives “pocketed millions in bonuses.” Specifically, Southwest CEO Robert Jordan (no, not this one) received $5.3 million in 2022, despite a massive wave of cancellations that December that the union describes as “the worst operational meltdown in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.”
Taken together, these labor disputes paint a picture of an increasingly dysfunctional airline industry, which has placed short-term profits over the lives and livelihoods of its workers. It’s a situation that can’t go on forever; eventually, there’ll have to be a reckoning, and if it happens to take place at the height of the 2023 holiday travel season, the airline bosses will have only themselves to blame.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, New York State Assemblymember for District 36, has come out in support of the strike. Here he is speaking to striking flight attendants:
A MARCH IN NEW YORK PRESSURES BIDEN TO “END FOSSIL FUELS”
More than 75,000 people flooded the streets of New York this weekend ahead of U.N. meetings and blocked the entrance to the Federal Reserve building. They demanded that President Biden and other world leaders stop the drilling of the oil and gas that is causing global warming and that the Fed undertake the responsibility of regulating climate destruction as a form of financial risk (for reference, the recovery cost from the 341 weather and climate disasters in America between 1980 and 2022 exceeds $2.475 trillion, according to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information).
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also made an appearance, describing the climate movement as “an electoral and a popular force that cannot be ignored.” AOC has, disappointingly, become a stalwart ally of Biden who confronts him far too infrequently. But some protesters in attendance, who gave him the benefit of the doubt in 2020, say that their patience with the president is wearing thin.
One of the attendees, Princess Daazhraii Johnson—a member of the Neets’aii Gwich’in who lives along Alaska’s Yukon River—told The Verge that her people have not been able to fish for salmon for several years, as warmer water temperatures have caused them to die off. “You would think that our leaders around the world would have their eyes wide open. Look at what just happened in Libya. Look at Lahaina. Look at all of the suffering that’s going on around the world,” Johnson said. “Declare a climate emergency. Keep it in the ground, transition us off fossil fuels.” Another protester, a 17-year-old climate organizer named Emma Buretta, was more direct with her ire. “Biden, you should be scared of us,” she told The New York Times. “If you want our vote, if you don’t want the blood of our generations to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”
The Biden administration has fallen far short of meeting the urgent threat of climate change. He has done some decent things, like providing $369 billion in tax incentives for companies that invest in renewable energy production and spending infrastructure funds on transitioning the electric grid and constructing car-charging stations. But these modest gains (often hamstrung by an uncooperative Congress) pale in comparison to how he has dithered or actively made the problem worse, often completely unilaterally. On the campaign trail, he pledged to end oil drilling on public lands. But during his first two years in office, Biden approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than Trump, and last month proposed regulations that would expand drilling further—according to the United States Geological Survey, public drilling is responsible for roughly a quarter of America’s total carbon output. He also approved new pipelines like the Willow Project in Alaska—which is the largest oil drilling project on public lands and is by the Biden administration itself to release approximately the equivalent carbon of 2 million gas-powered cars into the atmosphere over its thirty-year lifetime.
The Biden administration’s attitude has seemed to be that he just needed to be better than his predecessor—a guy who called climate change a “hoax” and said you can “you can turn up the air conditioning”—to earn the support of people worried about climate change. But that bar to clear for being better than Trump is so low that it’s practically in Hell (which, incidentally, may soon become a coveted vacation spot as parts of Earth become uninhabitably hot). It turns out that in order to earn the votes of climate activists, particularly young people who will have to bear the brunt of worsening storms, heatwaves, droughts, and sea level rise, he has to do more than just say, Boy, this climate stuff looks bad, good luck with that man!
One of the key demands made by protesters in New York was that President Biden issue an emergency declaration on climate change, which would allow him to assume more unilateral control to direct resources toward fighting it. Instead, he recently said that he “practically” declared an emergency without actually doing it (which makes it about as effective as the time Michael Scott came out of his office shouting “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!”). As Peter Kalmus wrote in The Guardian amid July’s record-breaking heatwave:
Biden’s refusal to declare a climate emergency and his eagerness to push new pipelines and new drilling – at an even faster pace than Trump – goes against science, goes against common sense, goes against life on Earth… Using executive orders and federal agency rules, and without needing to involve this failure of a Congress, Biden could end new drilling leases on federal lands and waters, block new pipelines and effectively ban fracking. He could unleash a historic education program to counter fossil fuel industry disinformation, using the bully pulpit to build awareness and support. He could prohibit government financing of overseas fossil fuel infrastructure, end energy department fossil-fuel financing programs, ban new fossil-fuel vehicle sales by 2030, prosecute violations by fossil fuel polluters, commit to veto laws granting immunity to such criminals, and more. Declaring a climate emergency would unleash additional powers such as banning oil exports and further accelerating renewable energy buildout on a scale not seen since the mobilization for the second world war. It would send an unmistakable signal to investors still living in the past, to universities that have been shamefully slow to divest, to media outlets that have failed to connect the dots, to all the dangerously lagging institutions of our society. And it would be a desperately needed win for climate activists.
2023 was the worst year on record for natural disasters that exceeded a billion dollars worth of repair costs (Again, those who think transitioning away from fossil fuels is too expensive should look at the costs needed to mitigate natural disasters). And the rate of these severe disasters has increased more than four-fold since 1980. Many of the people who traveled to New York—and are leading the struggle against climate change everywhere—are young and have more skin in the game than anyone else. Many are willing to put their safety and freedom on the line—at least 114 people at these protests were arrested. According to a report from Teen Vogue,
Not long after the action began outside the Fed, New York City police zip-tied protesters and loaded them into police vans, young and elderly alike (as well as a protester dressed in an orca costume).
If leaders like Biden refuse to take action, and instead rest on their laurels simply because their opponents are worse, these young people will be the ones left to pay for it, by growing old in a future that is increasingly dangerous and unrecognizable.
For more on these protests, check out this interview with Alicé Nascimento, the Campaign Director of New York Communities for Change, who was arrested for shouting with a bullhorn:
NAOMI KLEIN ON THE HORROR OF BEING CONFUSED WITH A CRANK
Naomi Klein—author of ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and ‘On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal,’ has a new book on two decades of being mistaken for feminist scholar-turned-conspiracy crank Naomi Wolf. If you are mercifully unaware of who Naomi Wolf is, here is a sampling of some of her tweets:
Check out Namoi Klein’s (NOT WOLF’S) interview with Democracy Now! about her new book ‘Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.’
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Obama’s former Solicitor General is now a lobbyist working to undermine a tax on billionaires before the Supreme Court. According to court filings obtained by The Lever, attorney Neal Katyal recently submitted an amicus brief in the case Moore v. United States on behalf of the anonymously-funded dark money group Saving America’s Family Enterprises. The lawsuit challenges a repatriation tax in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (one of the few corporate tax hikes in a law otherwise filled with cuts). If it is successfully overturned, it will result in major windfall profits. But the dark money group, SAFE, whose senior advisor is on the payroll of ExxonMobil, Norfolk Southern, and Boeing, also hopes that the case will set a larger precedent preventing Congress from ever passing a wealth tax in the future (that is, a tax on wealth earned in previous years in addition to yearly income). Neal Katyal, the lawyer arguing the case, has a record of arguing on behalf of revolting corporate behavior before the Supreme Court: Last year, he won a case defending Nestle’s right to profit from child slavery in Africa and helped Johnson & Johnson avoid paying out to 40,000 patients who got cancer from baby powder contaminated with asbestos. Nevertheless, Katyal has been a regular contributor on MSNBC because he’s anti-Trump (as well as an attendee at this year’s ill-fated Burning Man festival!)
❧ Carrie Tolstedt, a former executive at Wells Fargo, has successfully avoided prison time. In March, Tolstedt pleaded guilty to obstructing an investigation into Wells Fargo’s banking practices, with an acting district attorney saying that she “took steps to cover up misconduct.” This was, if anything, an understatement: the “misconduct” in question was the creation of millions of bank accounts without customers’ knowledge or approval, to inflate sales numbers and meet wildly unrealistic growth targets. “Rampant fraud” would be a more accurate term. Until recently, it looked as if Tolstedt might spend 12 to 16 months behind bars—a modest penalty, in a country where a man is currently serving a two-to-four-year sentence for stealing NyQuil, but a serious criminal consequence nonetheless. Now, though, she’s been sentenced to just three years of probation, a $100,000 fine (Tolstedt received a $125 million retirement package in 2016), six months of house arrest, and 120 hours of community service. Of course, the American prison system is an abomination, and jails can’t solve the issues of inequality and concentrated corporate power that create a Tolstedt in the first place. Still, the double standard is glaring. Receiving just a slap on the wrist and a stern “don’t do it again!”, Tolstedt is yet another example of the way the American justice system bends over backward to absolve the rich, no matter what crimes they’ve committed.
❧ A group of Berkeley, California landlords threw a party to celebrate the end of Covid-era protections against eviction, reveling in their newly regained ability to kick tenants out into the street. The shameful soiree went down last Tuesday evening at the Freehouse Pub, hosted by the Berkeley Property Owners’ Association and their director, Krista Gulbransen. There was a $20 entry fee, but that didn't stop protestors from crashing the party, as one local organizer recounted to the Washington Post:
By 5:30 p.m., they were at “full force” — about 100 people from various tenants’ groups. Protesters heckled and booed as attendees walked past. Once the landlords were inside, protesters spent about 1½ hours marching and yelling anti-eviction and pro-tenant chants.
Around 7 p.m., they marched into the pub, Carbone said. They had a cake with “Hey landlords, get a real job” written on it that they wanted to deliver. Once inside, they found a couple dozen landlords gathered at a patio. Protesters surrounded the periphery and yelled chants such as “Parasite!” “Get a job!” and “Eat cake!” repeatedly.
Carbone said he watched a landlord slap a protester in the face, starting an altercation that others quickly broke up. Soon after, another landlord allegedly punched a different protester in the head.
Predictably, three members of the Berkeley city council issued a statement denouncing “violence of any kind in our community,” and implicitly condemning the protestors. The Washington Post echoed this framing, referring to “the violence that broke out at the party.” But in truth, the violence broke out much earlier than that. If sending armed police to expel people from their homes, simply because they don’t have a certain sum of money, isn’t violent, nothing is—and if you host an event to celebrate being able to commit that violence, you shouldn’t be surprised when people make their objections known.
❧ LONG READ: Many farmworkers in the United States are on temporary work visas, known as H-2As, which allow them to stay in the United States for short periods for employment. Many of these workers are treated horribly, but their employers rarely face accountability from the federal government. For Investigate Midwest, Ryan Murphy reports:
Many H-2A workers face mistreatment from some employers, and the federal government can temporarily ban, or debar, employers from hiring H-2A workers…
“The debarment mechanism really is a joke,” said Gregory Schell, a longtime farmworker advocate and attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services. “It’s not much of an enforcement system.”... Employers who bring in H-2A workers have to follow specific rules. Workers must be provided with safe housing, adequate meals and transportation to their worksites. Despite these legal protections, many workers report problems.
According to a 2020 survey by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant worker advocacy organization based in Mexico, 100% of respondents said they had experienced at least one major legal violation, including sexual harassment, threats of deportation or seizure of identity documents during their employment. Housing is also a concern for H-2A workers. In some cases, farmworkers have been forced to live with shattered windows, leaky doorways and broken fridges. Some are crammed into trailers. Bed bugs are a common concern. One person responded to CDM’s survey by saying they lived in an “iron chicken coop” with bunk beds…
Less than 1% of all U.S. farms are audited for labor law compliance each fiscal year, according to a 2023 Economic Policy Institute report co-authored by Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research. Even though this figure accounts for all U.S. farms — not just those who hire H-2A workers — more than half of investigations uncover H-2A violations.
REMEMBERING MLK’S LABOR ACTIVISM
Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. After arriving at the nation’s capital with more than 250,000 civil rights activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” easily the most enduring address of the American Civil Rights movement.
But the economic dimension of Dr. King’s crusade for justice is often forgotten. His was a vision not just for racial equality, but for class equality as well—two visions that often went hand-in-hand. It’s rarely mentioned that the famous march’s full title was “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”
Here is an excerpt from an excerpt from a largely forgotten speech delivered by King in 1962. As described by Jacobin, who recently republished the address in full, “MLK regarded progressive unions as bulwarks of the civil rights movement. In this rousing 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, he linked the democratic struggles of workers and black people and ended by quoting the ‘beautiful words’ of Eugene Debs.”
Here is an excerpt from King’s address, pulled from the collection All Labor Has Dignity, which contains several of Dr. King’s speeches delivered to labor unions throughout his life.
“Industry knows only two types of workers who, in years past, were brought frequently to their job in chains — Negroes and shanghaied seamen. In those days only these workers were physically bound to their place of employment — the Negro to his plantation by guards, and the seaman by the watery isolation of his ship. Yours was never as humiliating a condition as chattel slavery, but the abuse of your freedom, and dignity of personality, were corrosive and destructive.
The sailors wrote a luminous page of history when they used their mighty strength and unity to civilize their work conditions. Everyone benefitted — other labor groups as well as employers because the violence and instability of the sea life of old could not be a basis for a great commerce. Nor could maltreated, brutalized men be entrusted with the multimillion-dollar ships of the modern era; nor with the safety of millions of passengers who now make the seas a highway.
And so you and your industry have come a long way from great depths to great heights in your journey, achieving democratic practices which put you above many other segments of American life.
What do I mean by this? I believe there is more simple nobility in your work than in almost any other. First, in the progress toward integration you are matchless because an integrated ship is a flower of democracy. On the sea, workers not only toil side by side, but they eat, sleep, and relax on an integrated basis. You are not divided by color, religion, or other distinctions. The men of a department work and sleep and eat without artificially imposed barriers between them. Mastering nature’s giant seas requires unity, brotherhood, and in moments of peril, the color of a man’s skin is of no importance, but the quality of his courage and resourcefulness is all important…
…With all our problems we are optimistic. We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die. We operate in stormy seas, but I often remember some beautiful words of Eugene Debs to the court which imprisoned him for his pacifism:
‘I can see the dawn of a better humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eye toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling-worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may bear the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing — that relief and rest are close at hand.
Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.’”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr ~ Twenty-fifth Anniversary Dinner, National Maritime Union, Americana Hotel, New York City, October 23, 1962.
For more on Dr. King’s egalitarian political project, see Nathan J. Robinson’s article from April 2023, titled “We Must Finish the Work of Martin Luther King Jr.”
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that the American XL Bully dog will be banned from the country by the end of this year. According to The Guardian, six of the ten fatal dog attacks recorded in the UK last year were committed by Bullies, who have also reportedly killed seven people this year. For this reason, they will become the first dog breed to be banned under the hilariously-named Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991. This is the type of story that makes Britain feel like a society from a children’s storybook and not a real country that once subjugated the world through bloody conquest. The United States has had more than 500 mass shootings just in 2023, and yet the prospect of an assault weapons ban seems utterly unthinkable. Meanwhile, if a dozen dogs get a bit too out of control in the UK, they’re banned immediately. Perhaps it’s the name — “XL Bully” — that makes people so quick to react. It’s certainly fair to point out that singling out entire breeds as genetically dangerous based on the actions of a small minority of them has some extremely worrisome implications (Yasmin Nair made this argument regarding America’s anti-pitbull crusade in an early issue of Current Affairs). Nevertheless, whoever named this breed the “XL Bully” surely picked about the most menacing name possible. May as well have just called them “Hulking Murder Beasts” —truly terrible dog PR!
❧ In East Jerusalem, Israeli security forces have assaulted Palestinian worshipers at the historic Al-Aqsa Mosque. The attacks took place during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, as dozens of Israeli settlers entered the mosque’s courtyard to celebrate, seemingly as a deliberate provocation. According to reporting in Al Jazeera, Israeli police did everything in their power to clear the settlers’ path, forcibly ejecting Palestinians from the holy site. Video footage shows one officer repeatedly shoving an elderly woman who objected to the intrusion, and two Palestinian men have been arrested and taken away to “an unknown location.” East Jerusalem itself was illegally occupied by Israel in 1967, and has been a hotly contested site ever since, as Palestinians resist apartheid policies that deny their civil and religious rights—exactly the pattern that’s played out, once again, at Al-Aqsa. The mosque had previously been raided by Israeli police on April 5th, during Ramadan, just one of many violent attacks by the occupation government this year.
❧ Climate change is causing graves to emerge from the Earth. According to a recent report from USA Today, thousands of graves have been disturbed just in the U.S. as a result of flooding, erosion, and other climate-related disasters over the last thirty years. One woman in coastal Mississippi describes seeing a casket jutting from the side of a cliff that has been withered away by the sea, while indigenous graves in Alaska have begun to sink as permafrost melts. Graves have also been washed away in at least five other countries in the last year, including Nigeria, Thailand, and the UK. Amazingly, USA Today did not take this grave situation as a reason for why our leaders should act immediately to transition the globe away from fossil fuel use. Instead, they treat the devastation of climate change as a fait accompli, and propose protecting graveyards with seawalls and even digging up graves and moving them inland…*sigh.*
WHAT IS A VIBE?
In McSweeney’s, Laura Lane answers the question once and for all with her new poem:
Neon lights on diner signs are a vibe.
Neon lights as art is not a vibe.
Midcentury modern is no longer a vibe.
Art Nouveau is back in vibe.
Scandinavia, the area of the world, is a vibe.
A vibey restaurant is not my vibe.
A vibey bar is trying too hard to vibe.
A vibey club is the point of the vibe.
Doing a vibe check every time you go out is not a vibe.
Worrying about vibe-shifts is not a vibe…
A vibe is not to be confused with having a “moment” (i.e., “You’re having a sequins moment” or "I’m loving this sneakers moment on you”)
❧ LONG READ: What would it mean for India to change its name to Bharat? The question arose during the recent G20 summit, where Droupadi Murmu was listed as “President of Bharat” —rather than “India”—on the official dinner invitations. On the same day, government communications listed Narendra Modi as the “Prime Minister of Bharat.” If the country does change its name, it’ll join several to do so in recent years, including Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Turkey, which has successfully petitioned other nations to use the spelling “Türkiye.” As a recent Al Jazeera explainer notes, there is an anti-colonial argument for the change in India’s case:
Naresh Bansal, a BJP member of parliament, said the name “India” is a symbol of “colonial slavery” and “should be removed from the constitution”. “The British changed Bharat’s name to India,” Bansal said in a parliamentary session. “Our country has been known by the name ‘Bharat’ for thousands of years. … The name ‘India’ was given by the colonial Raj and is thus a symbol of slavery.”
In one sense, Bansal is correct. Historically, “Bharat,” “India,” and “Hindustan” have all been used interchangeably by the people who actually live there. But as Al Jazeera goes on to explain, there are more troubling implications:
The name is a Sanskrit term found in scriptures written about 2,000 years ago. It refers to an ambiguous territory, Bharatavarsa, which stretched beyond today’s borders of India and may have extended to include what is today Indonesia. The BJP has already renamed cities and places that were linked to the Mughal and colonial periods. Last year, for instance, the Mughal Garden at the presidential palace in New Delhi was renamed Amrit Udyan. Critics said the new names are an attempt to erase the Mughals, who were Muslims and ruled the subcontinent for almost 300 years, from Indian history.
“BJP” refers to the Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party—the Hindu nationalist, and some would say crypto-fascist, party backing Prime Minister Modi’s increasingly autocratic rule. For an authoritarian politician, renaming a country has obvious symbolic appeal—what better way to impose your will over the nation than by changing its very identity? Moreover, the fact that the BJP seems to have chosen a name from Hindu scripture could be seen as a way of denigrating the country’s Muslim minority—a concerning possibility, to say the least, in the context of increasing anti-Islamic violence during Modi’s tenure.
ANTEATER FACT OF THE DAY
Anteaters eat 35,000 ants and termites every single day!
Come to think of it, anteaters are one of the few animals to be named after what they eat (off the top of our heads, the only other one we can think of is the bird-eating spider, which we have no desire to show you an image of out of solidarity with our arachnophobic readers, as well as the readers who are birds themselves).
One wonders if there is a certain threshold of consumption a creature must pass before its identity is centered around what it consumes. How many more beignets will the editorial staff of Current Affairs have to eat before humans are forever renamed “beignet-eaters?”
And if anteaters make a habit of consuming tens of thousands of ants—some of the most collaborative creatures on earth (as explored in Benjamin D. Blanchard’s article “The Socialist Ant” in Current Affairs)—what does that make anteaters?
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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