Sept. 29, 2023 ❧ Indigenous land rights in Brazil, a monopoly suit against Amazon, and the end of the writers' strike....
Plus Biden on the UAW picket line, Slovak Trump, a vote on Australian indigenous rights, another baffling Republican debate, and more!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
BRAZIL’S SUPREME COURT RULES IN FAVOR OF INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS
Brazil’s indigenous groups were just handed a major win by the country’s Supreme Court. The Court, in a 9-2 decision, overturned a restriction that stood as a barrier for indigenous people hoping to reclaim ancestral lands—it required them to prove they had occupied or contested the territory before 1988, when Brazil’s current constitution—which entitles indigenous people to lands they traditionally occupy—went into effect. Many indigenous people are nomadic, while others have been pushed out by large miners and farmers with the government’s backing during Brazil’s more than 20 years of dictatorship. More than 800,000 live on ancestral lands, mainly in the Amazon as well as some states with large amounts of farm land.
Many celebrate it as “the ruling of the century,” following decades of fighting against illegal land grabs, which accelerated under President Jair Bolsonaro, who pledged that indigenous people “will not have a demarcated square centimeter” of protected land despite his constitutional obligation to guarantee their rights to it. Just between 2020 and 2022, Brazil’s native peoples lost more than 250,000 hectares of land to private companies. And between 2012 and 2021, at least 342 land defenders were killed in Brazil — more than any other country. Most of the cases were never investigated. President Lula De Silva, who returned to power earlier this year began to right the ship somewhat, granting 800 sq. miles of land back to indigenous people, protecting them from illegal logging and farming and took steps to cut off supplies to gold miners that illegally occupy indigenous lands. But the process of demarcation can take decades, and will require ongoing political support and enforcement.
“We’ve won the battle, but not the war,” Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, said of the latest Supreme Court ruling. “We will continue to fight for Indigenous territories to be demarcated, so that the rights of indigenous peoples are safeguarded and protected.”
BIG STORIES
THE HOLLYWOOD WRITERS’ STRIKE ENDS IN A DEAL
After 148 days on the picket line, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) has secured a tentative deal with their opposition, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Nothing will be final until union members have a chance to vote on the proposed three-year contract, which they’ll do between October 2 and 9, but WGA leadership has hailed the deal as “exceptional—with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.”
They have good reason to be proud. Among the terms that have been disclosed so far, the WGA has secured an immediate pay increase of 5 percent for its members, to be followed by another 4 percent in May 2024 and 3.5 percent in 2025. They’ve won important protections against AI, including a declaration that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material,” and therefore can’t be used to deny full writing credits to human beings. They’ve also secured a residual system based on streaming views, in which any streaming program viewed by more than 20 percent of a platform’s subscribers is eligible for “a bonus equal to 50% of the fixed domestic and foreign residual,” and a transparency agreement will require companies like Netflix and Amazon to actually disclose their viewing figures to the union. Not every demand has been met in full, but the gains are significant.
(You can read the WGA’s full summary of the deal here.)
For Jacobin, Alex Press interviewed Devin Delliquanti, a Daily Show writer and member of the Guild who summed up the feelings of many of his fellow workers:
I just want to say that when you stand up and fight, people tell you that you will lose. And people tell you that they will break the back of your union. And that it was a mistake. And that you should be grateful for what little they offered at first, even if it’s crumbs. Don’t believe them. Stand up and fight for what you’re worth. Because fear is their weapon, but solidarity is ours.
AMAZON FACES ANTI-TRUST LAWSUIT FROM FTC AND STATE GOVERNMENTS
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state governments are suing Amazon, alleging an “ongoing pattern of illegal conduct [that] blocks competition, allowing it to wield monopoly power to inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle innovation for consumers and businesses.”
The FTC pointed to several tactics used by the e-commerce behemoth to advantage itself at the expense of consumers. They are accused of using “anti-discounting measures,” such as burying sellers that offer lower prices than Amazon in search algorithms to the point that they become “effectively invisible.” They also allege that Amazon requires sellers that use Prime “a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon” to also use Amazon’s expensive fulfillment services, which makes it more expensive for them to sell on other platforms. “There is immediate harm that is ongoing here,” said FTC Chair Linda Khan, “Sellers are paying one of every two dollars to Amazon. Shoppers are paying higher prices as a result not just on Amazon but across the internet.”
“Amazon’s illegal, exclusionary conduct makes it impossible for competitors to gain a foothold. With its amassed power across both the online superstore market and online marketplace services market, Amazon extracts enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach,” the FTC writes. They fill their search results with junk ads and bias consumers towards Amazon products that are of lower quality. They charge exorbitant fees to sellers— “that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business,” which the sellers then pass on to customers in the form of higher prices.
The heavily redacted lawsuit stops short of outright declaring Amazon an illegal monopoly, even though it has a market cap of $1.3 trillion, which is greater than the GDP of 92 percent of countries on Earth. While the broad accusations are present, the preponderance of black ink means details are sparse. In The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik laments that “With a few random exceptions…every potentially interesting quote from an Amazon executive, former Amazon executive, [redacted] e-commerce/would-be Amazon competitor executive, and Amazon third-party seller was redacted…
Although the FTC is fighting to have the full report released to the public, Amazon and its allies in the media have used the large number of redactions to, in Tkacik’s words, glibly pronounce the allegations variously as old news, ‘nothingburgers,’ and/or the product of some kind of creepy personal vendetta,” whereas,
If the complaint were fully accessible to the public, it could potentially stand as a defining—and redeeming—moment for a kind of Evidence-Based Populism that the White House has clumsily dubbed “Bidenomics,” in which old-school small-d Democrats attempt to bring rule of law to the unaccountable corporations using unfair and extralegal tactics to exploit workers, small businesses, and consumers alike. But as it was filed, the redactions made the moment frankly more disorienting than edifying.
Nevertheless, she also writes that even a more narrow focus on how Amazon is screwing consumers could still be effective and powerful on its own,
If Amazon’s backdoor price-fixing is the focus of the complaint, it’s probably a shrewd one because the practice of rooting out rogue discounters for retaliation so unambiguously subverts what we imagine to be “market forces,” to the detriment of both sellers and customers. Both Amazon sellers and consumers alike intuitively grasp that they are paying more than ever for the same crap: Seller fees rose 30 percent during the pandemic alone, as the Consumer Price Index rose 20 percent. Amazon’s gross profits roughly doubled over the same period.
Even if it does not go the distance to actually break up Amazon, this lawsuit—along with others against Google and Apple—could hopefully herald a new era in which America’s tech monoliths face some modicum of accountability for the power they have over their lives.
FIGHTING BACK
❧ CVS pharmacy workers have staged walkouts across Missouri, in protest against “inhumane working conditions and unsafe patient care.” Fearing retaliation, several of the workers spoke anonymously to local news station ABC 17 (KMIZ) on Tuesday and Wednesday. They paint a grim picture of conditions at the healthcare chain, saying CVS has dramatically cut the number of hours a pharmacist can be aided by a technician each week, and often schedules only one worker to staff a pharmacy serving hundreds of patients:
“I was there all by myself. We were 82 pages behind. Each page represents 15 scripts,” an employee who was forced to cover one of Columbia’s Schnucks locations said. “I was there all by myself for three straight days.”
Apart from the toll they take on workers, these conditions are obviously unsafe for CVS patients. All it would take is one stressed and overworked pharmacist accidentally mislabeling one prescription to cause someone serious health complications. Nor does the retailer, which reported $322.5 billion in revenue last year—up ten percent!—have any excuse for not staffing its stores adequately. So far, KMIZ reports that “at least 32” pharmacists have walked off the job in the Kansas City metro area alone, along with others in Jefferson City and Columbia, Missouri. The American Pharmacists Association has issued a statement of support, as has the 80,000-member National Pharmacy Technician Association and if conditions don’t improve, more walkouts may follow in the days and weeks to come.
❧ In Las Vegas, 60,000 hospitality workers have voted to authorize a strike. Represented by both the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the closely-allied Bartenders Union Local 165, the workers—among them kitchen staff, housekeepers, waiters, and drink servers—approved a possible strike by a 95 percent vote on Wednesday, crowding into an arena at the University of Nevada to cast their ballots. 40,000 of them have been working without a contract since September 15th, and if they walk out, it could “effectively freeze all activity on the Las Vegas strip,” according to The Hill. Among the most important demands are pay increases, reduced workloads for hotel housekeepers, protections against new technologies that could replace human staff, and “safety buttons” for each worker to call for help if they’re endangered on the job. Like Detroit, Las Vegas has a Big Three of employers—Caesars Entertainment, MGM Resorts, and Wynn/Encore Resorts—who would be the main targets of any strike, and with whom negotiations are ongoing. The city will host the Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race in November, and the Super Bowl in February, making the employers particularly vulnerable to a strike, and this fall an ideal time for the unions to make their move.
A LABOR POEM FROM THE 1920s, STILL RELEVANT TODAY:
From the 1925 anthology Poems for Workers, originally sold for ten cents!
AROUND THE STATES
❧ New records requested by the Florida Freedom to Read Project reveal that officials for Charlotte County’s school district—Superintendent, Mark Vianello and attorney Michael McKinley used Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law to order that “Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers.” When librarians asked for clarification, saying “Are we removing books from any school or media center, Prek-12 if a character has, for example, two mothers or because there is a gay best friend or a main character is gay?” Vianello responded “Yes.” Even for self-selected books for silent reading, they clarified that “[t]hese characters and themes cannot exist.” Defenders of DeSantis’ law have long bristled at its being labeled “Don’t Say Gay” by opponents. DeSantis himself has called the idea that his law is being used to ban books a “hoax.” But what transpired at Charlotte School District—and the many others that have taken books with LGBTQ characters off shelves—is evidence that the bill’s opponents were right all along about how it would be used.
❧ Someone attacked the Cuban embassy in Washington, DC with two Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt in Sunday’s bomb-throwing attack, which Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel is calling an “act of violence and weakness that could have cost valuable lives.” Likewise, no motive has been determined—although the fact that the incident took place just days after anti-communist Cuban-Americans demonstrated against Díaz-Canel’s visit to the United Nations in New York seems unlikely to be pure coincidence. It’s not the first time the Cuban embassy has been targeted; in 2020, a man opened fire on the building with an AK-47, although fortunately no one was hurt then either. Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs has warned that “anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism when feeling they enjoy impunity,” and with U.S. officials like Ron DeSantis publicly telling Cuban diplomats that they should “go back to Cuba where they belong,” it’s not hard to see how a climate of hostility and inflammatory rhetoric could embolden people inclined to violence.
PAST AFFAIRS
From April 2020, check out Elisa Shoenberger’s deep dive into the history Cuban propaganda art, titled “How to Sell a Revolution”:
“Smiling workers. AK-47s. Charlie Chaplin. These are only a few of the diverse array of images found in Cuban poster propaganda after 1959. Cuban revolutionary heroes like Che Guevara and Jose Martí, and international comrades like Angela Davis and Ho Chi Minh also feature prominently in posters, sometimes in bright bold colors, other times in black and white photo collages. The posters are a real contrast from the dreary hack work that people usually associate with the word “propaganda.” But despite their high artistic quality, these posters should not be mistaken for art for art’s sake: The artists had a mission, and that mission was to sell a particular image of the Cuban Revolution to the Cuban people as well as the rest of the world.”
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Almost half of the ethnic Armenian population has fled Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested “breakaway” republic within Azerbaijan's borders. Like many former Soviet territories, Nagorno-Karabakh declared itself an independent republic in 1991—but its sovereignty has never been recognized by Azerbaijan, which surrounds it geographically, and has launched periodic attacks against it. Last week, the situation escalated into outright war once again, and Azerbaijan seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh in a military operation the New York Times describes as “stunningly sudden.” As a result, at least 53,000 ethnic Armenians have fled the region, fearing possible ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, and have become refugees in Armenia itself. In part, the republic’s downfall is a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russian peacekeeping forces had been stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh since 2020, but were accused of “spontaneously leaving the region” after the European war broke out in 2022—opening the door for Azerbaijan to launch its own, smaller-scale invasion, and cause a humanitarian crisis.
❧ Australia will soon hold a landmark referendum on indigenous rights. On October 14, the nation will vote on whether to enshrine a mechanism that would allow Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have a “Voice to Parliament,” that would allow them to advise the government on issues of importance to them. Indigenous groups have inhabited the Australian continent for more than 60,000. Following the arrival of English settlers at Botany Bay 1788, who declared the land “empty.” Australia’s first peoples (of whom there were anywhere from 750,000 to 1.25 million) were subject to mass dispossession. More than 10,000 were murdered in frontier massacres by white settlers, while nearly 60 to 90 percent of the population was killed by foreign disease. Today, Australia’s roughly 800,000 indigenous people still face stark inequality—they are disproportionately poor, more likely to be incarcerated, and have a life expectancy of eight years less than non-Indigenous Australians. There is also a long history up until the 1960s of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being forcibly removed from their families with the explicit goal of “convert[ing] the half-caste [a derogatory term for Indigenous people] into a white citizen,” as a 1937 law put it. Many indigenous activists see the “Voice” referendum as an opportunity to right a historic injustice and entrench genuine power for indigenous people, while others see it as a weak compromise that assuages white guilt while giving only symbolic power to Indigenous people. Though it has the support of Australia’s Labor government and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, 60 percent of the country says they will vote “No” on the referendum.
❧ Slovakia’s longtime president—who some compare to Trump—is trying to stage a comeback. Robert Fico, the former prime minister who leads the country’s Direction-Social Democracy Party, which has a pro-welfare stance but has been dogged by corruption scandals and mafia connections, while increasingly running on social conservatism and anti-immigrant fearmongering. Fico previously rode to power on the back of such fearmongering in 2016 saying that “Islam has no place in Slovakia.” In 2018, he was pushed to resign after mishandling the investigation of a journalist who profiled government corruption and was murdered by the mafia (Fico has previously called members of the press “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.”) Fico’s government was later revealed to have direct connections with the suspected murderer, and Fico was himself charged with running a criminal organization last year. In a similar fashion to Trump, he is now seeking return to power with the possibility that it could be used as a shield against prosecution. An Ipsos poll from Thursday has Fico’s party SMER at 20.6 percent, just ahead of the Progressive Slovakia Party (generally considered more socially liberal, but economically centrist than SMER) at 19.8. If Fico is elected on September 30, Paul Taylor in The Guardian writes that his agenda will likely be similar to Europe’s other “mini-Trumps,” like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński:
Fico claims the incumbent liberal government is trying to steal the election because some of his associates, including a former police chief, have been arrested in corruption investigations. Fico, whose Smer party is a member of the European Socialists and Democrats group, blames the west for Russia’s war on Ukraine and says he’ll stop all aid to Kyiv if he wins. Slovakian analysts fear he will dismantle the country’s judicial independence and purge corruption fighters, as Orbán and Kaczyński have done, and that he will join them in fighting the EU’s migration pact, which requires member states to either take a share of asylum seekers or contribute financially to their reception in other countries.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Senator Dianne Feinstein has died. Feinstein, 90, had been under pressure to resign after months of decline, which had impeded her work in the Senate. Her passing sets off a scramble to replace her. Feinstein’s political legacy was mixed. She opposed single-payer healthcare and the Green New Deal, but also led a major investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.
❧ In an unprecedented step for a sitting U.S. President, Joe Biden joined the UAW picket line on Tuesday. “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW, you saved the auto industry back in 2008 and before,” the president said, donning a baseball cap with the union’s logo. “You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” Needless to say, Biden’s appearance was a strategic political move. Michigan is a must-win battleground state for 2024, and the UAW has yet to bestow its all-important endorsement. Donald Trump wants it too, even if his chances are slim, and he’s also been speaking to Michigan auto workers—although as Alex Press notes in Jacobin, he visited a non-union parts supplier, as a guest of the boss. However self-interested Biden’s calculations may be, for a U.S. president to actively side with striking workers is historic. It draws a sharp line between Biden and Barack Obama, who stayed carefully neutral on labor disputes during his eight years in office. Notably, Obama’s former advisor on the auto industry, Steven Rattner, was among Biden’s harshest critics on Wednesday, spluttering that “for him to be going on a picket line is outrageous” in an interview with NBC. It’s a sign of how times have changed, and how the American labor movement is gaining ground, that comments like Rattner’s now sound weak and out-of-touch—and that, for Biden, supporting a strike has become the politically safe move.
❧ There was another Republican primary debate on Wednesday night that was somehow weirder and more shouty than the first one.
Here are the top six most surreal things that happened during it:
6. Vivek Ramaswamy said “Put people back to work! We are spending taxpayer money to pay people more to stay at home than to go to work,” a thing which has not been true since mid-2021. Meanwhile, currently sits at 3.8 percent which is quite low by historical measures.
5. Chris Christie hit Trump for “ducking” the debate, saying, “if he keeps skipping debates, he would deserve a new nickname: “Donald Duck.” As the AP writes, “Scattered laughter was slow to follow.”
4. Doug Burgum annoyed the shit out of the moderators by interrupting constantly.
3. Nikki Haley said to Vivek Ramaswamy, “Honestly every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.” This would normally be an apt response to most statements by Vivek. But in this case, Haley was railing against his use of TikTok “to reach a younger generation” of voters, which is pretty unobjectionable.
2. Tim Scott said that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was harder for Black people to survive than slavery.
1. Chris Christie called out Biden for “sleeping with a member of the teachers union”... otherwise known as his literal wife, who happens to be a teacher. This was followed up by Mike Pence, who felt inclined to interject that he, too, has “been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years.” Cool.
LONG READS
⚜ Rupert Murdoch has stepped down from his position as the chairman of the Fox News company, and will leave the position to his son Lachlan. In Current Affairs, our editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson wrote that “Murdoch’s vast empire of toxic right-wing propaganda, from the British tabloids to the Wall Street Journal to Fox News, has poisoned the brains of millions and made the world dramatically worse.” A few years ago, on his blog Welcome to Hell World, Luke O’Neil demonstrated this thesis in harrowing detail by soliciting mail from poor souls whose perfectly kind loved ones had their brains turned into tapioca pudding by Fox News. In honor of Murdoch’s departure, here some letters from his piece, titled “I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family”:
✉ “My parents came to visit me in LA recently…They are the sweetest, warmest, supportive, most generous people on earth—but over the past few years I’ve picked up on distinct symptoms of Fox News brain poisoning. During their trip we were just hanging out and chatting when my dad, unprompted, says “They say there’s a lot of Mexicans here in Southern California.” Uh, yeah, dad. This actually used to be Mexico, so I think some people of Mexican descent may have stuck around. Then my mom chimes in “Oh sure, they just come right over.” Come right over?! The implication being they all scaled a wall, not even considering the fact that most families have been here for generations, descended from people who migrated here for a better life just like our own familial ancestors did.”
✉ “I turned it on as a teenager and showed it to my parents as a goof. I was laughing at how irresponsible Bill O’Reilly acted on air as an anchor. My mother, a centrist Republican, thought it was funny. My Dad started watching regularly. Soon it was the only programming he ingested other than talk radio. He became addicted to the anger. He thought if he was angry at all the “injustices” Fox News presented to him he must be righteous. He grew more irritable. He banned watching any news other than Fox News in his presence and failure to adhere would lead to abusive emotional outbursts. Soon he lost his sense of humor. Everything became about punching down at gays and minorities. Then he started making derisive comments about Democrats during family functions when it was considered inappropriate. He declared his favorite show was “The Five”, which then led to it being required viewing at our dinner time. If any real life occurrence interferes with him viewing “The Five” our family would be subjected to hours of screaming and cursing. He then became more paranoid, claiming that power or cable outages were a plot by the Democrats (who secretly control everything).”
✉ “It happened to my dad and my aunt. Last time I saw my aunt she told me there's an ISIS training camp in upstate New York and it has been there for years. She used to be a new age hippy person. Now she barely leaves her house in the woods in central Massachusetts…”
✉ “I am also an orphan of Fox News. My mom’s brain is completely broken from it, and we have less and less to talk about it every time we see each other. I think what really did it for me was after Tamir Rice was murdered I brought it up at breakfast for some insane reason and my mom said “well, he looked fully adult.” Prior to that she had said stuff like she thought Obama was a Muslim and other racist Fox News parroting, but when she erased the human worth of a child like that I knew she was truly lost. I would describe it as I still love my mom but I don't really like her.”
PIGEON FACT OF THE WEEK
Pigeons are not only useful for carrying messages to newsrooms and across battlefields, they are also excellent at math!
According to a 2011 study in Science, pigeons “can be trained to use abstract mathematical rules to decide which of two images contains a higher number of elements such as circles, squares and triangles.”
In the experiment, the CBC writes, researchers “taught three pigeons to peck, in ascending order, lists of three items that consisted of one, two or three shapes that sometimes varied in size, shape and colour. If they completed the task correctly, they were rewarded with some wheat.” Prior to the study, it was believed that humans and some primates possessed such skills, but the researchers found that pigeons were on par with rhesus monkeys.
This makes us feel a bit less bad about employing a pigeon as our accountant.
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.