Sept. 26, 2023 ❧ A looming government shutdown, the cartoonish corruption of Bob Menendez, and a standing ovation for a Nazi
Plus, Manchin's anti-green op-ed, how "altruistic" corporations made child hunger worse, car culture, the worthlessness of NFTs, and the supersonic speed of snails...
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
COMPANIES THAT PLEDGED TO FIGHT HUNGER LOBBIED AGAINST THE CHILD TAX CREDIT
Several companies that claim to advocate for ending child poverty were involved in lobbying efforts to kill the expanded Child Tax Credit. As we covered last week, the end of the program led to a staggering increase in child poverty from 5.2 percent (the lowest since records began in 2010) to 12.4 percent and dragged an additional 5.2 million children below the poverty line. But while making charitable donations and claiming to be on the front lines of the war on child hunger, Citigroup, Walmart, and Kellogg’s each contributed to efforts by corporate lobbying groups, including the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce, which “spent millions of dollars successfully lobbying against the poverty measure” the following year, according to reporting by Judd Legum, on the Substack blog Popular Information. The companies posture as advocates for the hungry, pointing to millions of dollars in donations to hunger charities as evidence of their altruism. But what they donated is a fraction of the resources that would have gone to helping hungry children had the Child Tax Credit they helped to kill instead remained in place. For example, Legum writes,
Citi’s “multi-million” dollar donations to anti-hunger groups pale in comparison to the $100 billion dollars the government was set to invest in children across the country. To provide a sense of scale, the annual CTC investment would be 20,000 times more than Citi’s $5 million contribution during the pandemic.
MANCHIN ARGUES THAT THE INFLATION REDUCTION ACT ISN'T GREEN
When the Inflation Reduction Act passed back in August 2022, liberal pundits constantly told us that it was “a major victory” for the Earth’s climate and that any comments to the contrary were just ill-informed whining. In one particularly memorable op-ed, Slate senior editor Jordan Weissmann lamented the idea that “a portion of the internet-poisoned left has already written off the legislation as a giveaway to oil and gas interests that will do little to help the climate,” and dismissed a wide swathe of criticism as “just kneejerk resentment toward the Democratic Party.” Such was the tenor of the times.
Now, though, Senator Joe Manchin has an op-ed of his own in the Wall Street Journal, in which he argues that the Inflation Reduction Act was, in fact, a giveaway to fossil fuel interests. It’s just that Manchin, whose family owns a coal company, sees that as a good thing. In the article, titled “A Law That Isn’t Red or Blue—and Sure Isn’t Green,” Manchin points out that the IRA (not the cool one) “required the government to auction millions of acres of oil and gas leases before it can auction acreage for wind and solar farms,” that it has “spurred 10 oil and gas lease sales so far, resulting in $564 million in total receipts,” and even that “Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we are producing fossil fuels at record levels.” These are just a few choice quotes; the article is full of little factoids like these. In the wake of climate-driven disasters like the lethal flooding in Libya (see below for more) it makes grim reading.
So, once again, the “internet-poisoned left” has been proven entirely correct. It’s worth noting that Current Affairs called out the Act’s climate shortcomings at the time, as did Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. Perhaps the liberal commentariat will try listening next time? Just a thought.
BIG STORY
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN ON THE HORIZON
With less than a week remaining until the September 30th deadline, a government shutdown is looking more likely by the day. It would be the 22nd time the U.S. government has ground to a halt in the last 50 years, and in Axios, April Rubin has an enlightening breakdown of the previous 21 times. In most cases, Rubin writes, shutdowns have pitted one political party against another over a particular hot-button issue. For instance, in late 2018 and early 2019, congressional Democrats balked at then-president Donald Trump’s demands for $5.6 billion in funding for his proposed border wall, causing a 34-day shutdown—the longest on record. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the issue in question was whether Medicaid should fund abortions, and the year 1977 saw three separate shutdowns for 28 days combined.
The current impasse, though, is a little different. It doesn’t hinge so much on conflict between the parties, but dysfunction within the Republican Party, as the hard-right faction represented by figures like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene stubbornly blocks any attempt at a compromise deal by party leadership. In the last few days, Trump has voiced his support for the renegades, posting “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” to Truth Social. And “everything” is a long list, including demands to defund prosecutors who have indicted Trump, dramatically increase border security, and cut more than $100 billion in federal spending. Unlike previous shutdowns, there isn’t a single lightning-rod issue, but a tangled mess of them, making the whole thing that much harder to resolve.
In his post, Trump insisted that “Whoever is President will be blamed” if the government does shut down. His fellow Republicans, however, aren’t so sure. According to recent reporting in Politico, some of them feel a “keen sense of apprehension that their party will suffer badly should a shutdown transpire,” and Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho has summed up his worries in a truly immortal quote:
We always get the blame. Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.
With an estimated 4.5 million federal workers who wouldn’t get paid during a shutdown, there would certainly be plenty of blame to go around.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott’s border buoys may have killed a three-year-old child. The boy’s family, undocumented migrants, were reportedly trying to cross the Rio Grande and enter Eagle Pass, Texas last Wednesday. As they waded and swam along, the child was “swept away by the current,” and drowned. He was pronounced dead in a nearby hospital. All this happened just north of one of the Governor’s notorious floating barriers, which contain circular saw blades intended to maim anyone who comes near, and which have been widely condemned as inhumane. There’s a strong possibility that, if it weren’t for that barrier, the family might have made the river crossing safely—and if that’s the case, this child’s death is on Abbott’s hands.
❧ NFTs are now almost totally worthless! According to a new report from dappGambl—a group of crypto experts—95 percent of the once-vaunted “non-fungible tokens” are now worth absolutely nothing. In Rolling Stone, Miles Klee calls it “a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.” Whaaaaaat? You mean to tell us that spending tens of thousands of dollars to “own” a .jpg image of a wretched cartoon ape turned out to be an unwise investment? Who could possibly have predicted that such a thing could happen? If there’s any silver lining, at least tons of CO2 got burned for no reason!
❧ Gavin Newsom is lobbying the Supreme Court to allow more sweeps of homeless encampments. In an amicus brief filed last Friday, the California Governor urged the court to reevaluate a Ninth Circuit ruling from 2022, which held that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon could not criminalize the act of sleeping outdoors. Newsom, a self-proclaimed “progressive Democrat,” insists that this ruling has “paralyzed communities” who want to “enforce common-sense anti-camping laws,” and that “encampment resolutions are a vital tool.” The term “encampment resolutions” is a cowardly euphemism for what Newsom is really defending: violent sweeps by the police, in which homeless people can be forcibly removed from an area and have their few remaining possessions confiscated or destroyed. On this issue, Newsom is in perfect agreement with Donald Trump, who also wants to “ban urban camping wherever possible.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court—which sports a 6-3 conservative majority and a new corruption scandal every few weeks—can’t be trusted to do anything remotely helpful here.
ROBOCOP OF THE WEEK
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has invited this gumdrop-shaped NYPD cop-bot to sit with him at the table of success. Here he is doing the patented hand-heart with this bargain-bin R2D2, seemingly unaware that it does not have hands of its own.
It does, however, have four security cameras, which the 420-pound being—developed by the California-based company Knightscope and known as “K5”—will use to patrol New York’s subway system for evildoers. Though it moves at 3 mph and cannot apprehend people, according to Adams, it will be used to “keep you safe” by “record[ing] video that can be reviewed in case of an emergency or a crime.” New York says that facial recognition technology will not be implemented—but Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the privacy rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Times that this “trash can on wheels” could very easily have such invasive tech incorporated.
Given that Adams is proposing across-the-board budget cuts on everything from education to housing, it seems like dumping thin city funds into a large, loafing android may be fiscally unwise, and perhaps even cruel given the more than 84,500 people facing homelessness (including 27,500 children) in the city. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented on Twitter that “NYC schools got defunded to pay for these privacy disasters on wheels.”
But fear not! Adams assures us that K5 only costs $9 an hour to operate, which is “below minimum wage.” It also receives “No bathroom breaks. No meal breaks,” as it does not require such things. Truly a dream employee! It will be an apt companion to the not-at-all unnerving Boston Dynamics “Digidog” police canine introduced two years ago.
The future is now!
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Colombian President Gustavo Petro has a warning for the United States. In a three-part interview with Democracy Now!, Petro relates how he’s seen an unprecedented “human exodus” in Colombia, as migrants from Venezuela pass through in record numbers on their way to the U.S. and fall prey to “forms of new slavery” from human traffickers. With rare moral clarity, Petro lays the blame for this “human catastrophe” on the U.S. sanctions regime, and urges the Biden administration to lift its restrictions:
[T]he blockade against Venezuela has had a boomerang-type response, now hitting the very United States, which are the ones who decided to impose the blockade. So, knocking at their door are the population that they drove into poverty. Venezuela is a rich country. They have an endless amount of oil and gas, and Venezuela’s population was relatively stable, whatever the regime, whether it was under Chávez or what they call el Punto Fijo. But with the blockade, the standard of living of these persons collapsed. They basically totally threw off the equilibrium that the majority of Venezuelans were accustomed to. Many of them have left, and now what they want is to make it to the United States. How can one partially reduce the exodus? Well, lift the blockade against Venezuela.
❧ Climate change made Libya’s catastrophic flood—which killed more than 11,300 people—drastically more severe. The storm was estimated to have been 50 times more likely, and rainfall 50 percent more severe than it would have been in a climate that was 1.2 C cooler, according to a new report. It also worsened floods that devastated Greece and parts of Turkey and Bulgaria this summer. World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists supported by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies used rainfall data and existing climate models to reach an estimate. They acknowledged that climate change was not the only factor contributing to the severity of these disasters and that they were exacerbated by destabilization in Libya, as well as deforestation and urbanization in Greece. While they state that “uncertainty in these estimates are high,” they say that an impact was highly likely given the well-established fact that warming causes the atmosphere to retain more water vapor. In a statement to the Associated Press, Friederike Otto, a scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said “It would be really careless to say there was no change.” In response, the Red Crescent called it “a wake-up call for the world to fulfill the commitment on reducing emissions, to ensure climate adaptation funding and tackle the issues of loss and damage.”
❧ Oops! The Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to a “Ukrainian hero” who turned out to be a former member of the Waffen S.S.
When Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced the veteran, 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, as someone who fought “against the Russians” in World War II, it really should have raised some alarm bells. Even if you get your history solely from cable TV, you should know that the Soviet Union was on the Allied side in that particular war; with the exception of a handful of Poles and Finns in the 1939 Winter War, fighting “against the Russians” means you fought “for Hitler.” Indeed, it soon came out that Hunka had served with the “First Ukrainian Division,” more commonly known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Rota spent the next 24 hours furiously backpedaling, insisting that he’d known nothing of Hunka’s Nazi past, and giving his “deepest apologies” to Jewish Canadians. But really, how credible is this plea of ignorance? There are 448 members of the Canadian Parliament, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also in attendance; did none of them hear about a 98-year-old anti-Russian fighter and say “Hang on a second?” There are three possibilities, none of them good: either Canadian politicians are ignorant of the most basic historical facts, they clap like trained seals for anything they’re told to, or they don’t see anything particularly bad about honoring Nazis if it’s politically convenient. Most likely, it’s a combination of all three—and they may have handed Vladimir Putin, who’s justified his criminal invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it’s chock full of Nazis, a significant propaganda victory.
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FURTHER DEBUNKINGS OF PRAGER UNIVERSITY
In this video from The Lever’s Audit Podcast, health insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter (who we have also interviewed!) joins the hosts to debunk right-wing propaganda outlet PragerU’s videos about healthcare:
If you like what you see here, Current Affairs has a fun, colorful new guide exposing the manipulative rhetorical techniques PragerU uses in its educational videos, which have now become part of school curriculums in Florida and Oklahoma.
You can purchase a print copy of “The Student’s Guide to Resisting PragerU Propaganda” using the link below. If you are an educator or school librarian, email us at editor@currentaffairs.org to inquire about getting discounted copies for your classroom or library!
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has been indicted for some of the most cartoonish corruption in recent memory and has stepped down from his post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez and his wife have both been charged for allegedly using their power to help out New Jersey businessmen—one of whom was a major campaign fundraiser. He also did the bidding of an Egyptian associate with close connections to the military—getting the U.S. to lift a ban on selling arms to the country and even helping the man obtain monopoly rights for his halal foods business. According to The New York Times, Menendez received bribes, including “a luxury car, expensive exercise machines, mortgage payments, bars of gold bullion, and more than $500,000 in cash.”
In an era when most forms of political bribery have essentially been legalized, this is the kind of brazen, Tammany Hall-style graft that you don’t often see anymore. That it’s coming from Menendez is utterly unsurprising. Even by Senate standards, he is a world-class scoundrel—the kind of guy the “Crooks vs. Sickos” section was made for. This is not his first rodeo with corruption schemes—he’s previously been charged with helping a notorious Medicare fraudster avoid being audited and obtain visas for his mistresses in exchange for massive campaign donations. He also happens to be one of the worst Democratic senators on foreign policy—and is particularly known for pressuring for aggressive sanctions that have helped to devastate Cuba and Venezuela. Here’s hoping this is the merciful end of his political career.
LONG READ
⚜ In The New Republic, Jack McCordick writes about “How Car Culture Funnels Drivers Into Debt, Jail, and Danger”...
Look under the hood of many of the past decade’s spectacular instances of police violence, and there’s a high chance you’ll find a car and its attendant law enforcement prerogatives. A new generation of Black-led protest began in Ferguson, Missouri, when police officer Darren Wilson stopped Michael Brown because he was in violation of a municipal jaywalking ordinance, almost exclusively wielded against Black pedestrians. The Justice Department report that followed showed that the cash-strapped municipal government was balancing its books by imposing fines and fees on its Black residents through traffic stops, treating them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”
Add to these dangers the fact that cars—a necessity in most parts of the country—are expensive and that taking out an auto loan can lead to a variety of financial perils. Auto debt nearly doubled in the decade following the Great Recession and recently reached a record high of $1.56 trillion—slightly below the total sum owed in student loans, which received significantly greater attention in the media and public policy. Earlier this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general sued one of the country’s largest subprime auto lenders, alleging that it pushed predatory loans on “millions of financially vulnerable consumers.” The car-buying experience, the suit claims, turned “into a nightmare” for the lender’s debtors, who “face unaffordable monthly payments, vehicle repossessions, and debt collection lawsuits.”
For over a century, the automobile has served as an icon of American prosperity and individual liberty. But for a large portion of drivers, the car opens into worlds of unfreedom: into the gaping maw of America’s courts, jails, and prisons on the one hand and into the arms of predatory creditors on the other. That, at least, is the thesis of Cars and Jails, a new book by NYU professors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross. Cars, once America’s most important industrial commodity, are now, for so many, a vehicle of debt-driven extraction. They are also the setting of the most common interaction between citizens and police—one that plays out on streets and highways more than 20 million times annually, often as a humiliating ritual of domination and submission. How did this happen?
SNAIL FACT OF THE WEEK
Snail racing is a real thing that you can bet on.
The village of Congham in Norfolk, England has been hosting the annual Snail Racing World Championship since the 1960s. Many snail racing events take place around the world, but the sport’s cultural capital is England.
According to NPR, “The championship pits dozens of snails against each other, putting their gliding skills to the test. The slimy contestants are placed on a round table. Two circles are marked in a white tablecloth, one at the center, the starting point.” The winner is the fastest snail to travel 33 cm (13 inches).
Here is some footage of 2019’s Championship race, which was won by a snail named Sammy:
According to Nicholas Dickinson, whose snail Evie won the race in 2023, “Anyone's allowed to participate. And they can either bring their own snail, or they can rent one of ours…Their trainers all shout and holler for their respective snails to try and encourage them across the finish line.”
Most winners take around six minutes to complete the course. Evie’s winning time was more than 7 minutes. But in 1995, a true marvel graced the snail-racing world. That year, Archie the Snail made a world record sprint, finishing the course in exactly two minutes, a record that stands today. “He's generally regarded as the greatest snail of all time, Archie the GOAT. And he's talked about every year with great fondness, and it's his record that's now stood for more than 25 years that everyone tries to emulate or get even close to,” Dickinson told NPR. But even victors who trail far behind the record are always rewarded with the customary tankard full of lettuce.
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.