Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Drug prices, pipelines, ISIS, Manipur, police brutality, UFOs, smashing bottles, the elderly, spherical birds, and more!
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
NEW SENATE BILL COULD DRAMATICALLY LOWER DRUG PRICES
A bill in the Senate could pave the way for dramatically reducing prescription drug prices by changing the way patents are managed. The bill, which passed out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions after a deal between Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and ranking Republican Bill Cassidy (R-LA), allocates $3 million to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study a new method of funding prescription drugs. According to Jon Schwarz in The Intercept,
“The bill’s language specifically instructs NASEM to examine two ways of funding new drugs: the government paying for it directly, and innovation prizes for inventors…Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need, while at the same time saving regular people huge amounts of money…The most important thing to understand about drugs is that they are expensive to discover and test for safety and efficacy — but once that’s done, they’re generally cheap to manufacture…In the 10 years from 2009 to 2019, the lower costs of generics saved the U.S. health care system $2.2 trillion.”
This would uproot the current system, under which pharmaceutical companies pay for the cost to develop drugs (usually with heavy government subsidies) and are then granted a patent that lasts twenty years, which gives them the exclusive right to produce the medicine without competition, which allows them to reap massive profits. As Schwarz writes, the industry is already lining up its horses for a massive fight over this bill:
“The pharmaceutical industry will be doing everything possible to knife this positive development in its crib. PhRMA, the industry’s trade group, has released a statement that it is ‘deeply concerned’ because a new system of drug development could let “the government pick winners and losers.’ That’s a power they intend to keep for themselves, along with all the profits that flow from it.”
SUPREME COURT ALLOWS PIPELINE CONSTRUCTION TO RESUME
The Supreme Court just lifted a stay on the construction of the 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline, which, according to the New York Times, will carry two billion cubic feet of natural gas daily from northern West Virginia to southern Virginia. The ruling comes after Senator Joe Manchin (who else?) pushed through a rule in the debt ceiling negotiations barring legal challenges to the pipeline. But a U.S. appeals court blocked the pipeline following a lawsuit by The Wilderness Society and other environmental activists. This pipeline is considered “uniquely risky” by environmental hydrologist Jacob Hileman (which is saying something considering how harmful previous pipelines like Keystone XL and Dakota Access have been). According to the Natural Resources Defense Council,
“Mountain Valley Pipeline…would have high explosive risk if it is completed and enters operation. Its large diameter and high pressure are enough to make it a higher risk pipeline than most other gas transmission pipelines. This risk is further increased by the steepness of the Appalachian mountain slopes it would traverse for long distances. MVP is designed to traverse 75 miles of the steepest slopes in Appalachia and more than 200 miles with ‘high landslide susceptibility,’ which places it at higher risk for explosions…This is not a hypothetical risk. MVP has already caused dozens of ‘slips’ where a slope has become unstable, including slopes outside of the pipeline’s right-of-way. And, in 2019, MVP itself reported that a landslide along the pipeline route ‘progressed to the point where a residence directly downslope is unsafe to be occupied.’”
But even if we leave all these risks aside, it’s well past time that the U.S. government starts moving away from natural gas (which is actually much more harmful to the environment than previously acknowledged). Given the many rolling catastrophes that are currently being unleashed by climate change, from wildfires to overheating oceans to flash floods to record heatwaves. But President Biden, who once upon a time called climate change the “number one issue facing humanity,” supported this pipeline as well as another gigantic oil project in Alaska.
AROUND THE STATES
After the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols earlier this year, the Department of Justice is launching a civil rights investigation into the Memphis Police Department. The Memphis Police Department has long been the subject of complaints about needless violence inflicted on defenseless people, including those who had already been restrained (as was the case with Nichols), as well as pervasive racism within the Department. A New York Times investigation of the unit which brutalized Nichols—known as “Scorpion”—found that they routinely engage in racial profiling against young black men.
Speaking of federal probes into unspeakable acts of barbarity by law enforcement, here is a haunting video by YouTuber Big Joel about the 89-page DOJ report on the pattern of misconduct within the Minneapolis Police Department. We discussed this report when it was released back in June. But our coverage was primarily focused on the DOJ’s broad conclusions: that there was a systemic pattern of excessive force, discrimination, and First Amendment violations by the MPD. While it was very important to note the report’s broad findings, the use of such general terms doesn’t really do justice to the unhinged cruelty Minneapolis cops routinely displayed. Big Joel’s video, which summarizes how they needlessly assaulted many often totally innocent people, demonstrates the ugly state of American policing in ways a list of statistics simply never could:
The Houston Independent School District’s superintendent is eliminating librarians at 28 schools and will replace some libraries with what opponents call “discipline areas,” where troublemakers will be separated from their peers and learn remotely. The schools that will lose their libraries are primarily in the most underprivileged parts of the district with predominantly minority students. Many are already falling behind in reading levels, and teachers in the district say that this will make the problem much worse, as students typically perform better at reading when they have a wide selection of choices and can easily find works that interest them. The teachers have also pointed out that behavioral issues have increased at both poor and wealthy schools, but only the poor ones had their libraries closed to make way for these punishment areas.
While fighting tooth and nail against striking actors (87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 annually) and screenwriters (who make an average of around $69,000 per year), Netflix is hiring new people to research and create AI content for lavish salaries: One position for an “AI Product Manager” lists a salary of $900,000 per year. Another listing for a technical director for generative AI which can produce text, images, and video from data inputs, goes for $650,000 per year. One of the striking actors’ key demands is to ensure that studios will not be able to scan their likenesses to be re-animated without their consent using AI programming. TV and film writers also seek guarantees that they will not be put out of work by programs like ChatGPT. According to UChicago computer science professor Ben Zhao, who spoke with Ken Klippenstein in The Intercept:
“It seems clear that the entertainment industry is willing to make massive investments in generative AI, not just potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, but also valuable access to their intellectual property, so that AI models can be trained to replace human creatives like actors, writers, journalists for a tiny fraction of human wages.”
After Elon Musk suddenly changed the name of Twitter to “X,” a gigantic, blindingly bright, flashing sign was added to the company’s office in San Francisco without a permit from the city. Within a weekend the Department of Building Inspection received 24 complaints about the sign, leading it to mercifully be taken down. We are all for vibrant signage, but there is a time and a place for such things. Just imagine trying to sleep with this ungodly thing blinking in your face all night:
What’s the deal with all this UFO talk in Congress? We don’t really know or care (There are enough nightmarish things happening on Earth already that even if aliens turned out to be real, it would still probably only be like the eighth most concerning thing going on in the world). However, if you are curious about the prospect of visitors from beyond, Matt Stieb of New York magazine has a rundown of the rather unbelievable things “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, had to say in Congress last week (by unbelievable, we don’t mean amazing, we mean that we do not believe him):
“Grusch claims that while on the intelligence community’s UFO task force, he became aware of secret programs inside the U.S. government that were in charge of unsanctioned technological research related to UFOs. Grusch also claims that people have been threatened and physically hurt in the Pentagon’s coverup of the alleged UFO evidence and what he called ‘biologics.’ Throughout the hearing, Grusch said he cannot expand on his bold allegations that the U.S. is in possession of alien technology and the remains of non-human pilots whose UFOs had crashed. Because the majority of the information Grusch alleges he is aware of is classified, most of his answers are brief. ‘I can’t discuss that in an open session,’ he said on several occasions.”
BAFFLING (BUT INEXPLICABLY COHERENT) POLITICAL AD OF THE WEEK
The Democratic Party’s official TikTok channel (yes, they have one of those) released a video last week titled “2024 GOP presidential candidates as glass bottles rolling down stairs.”
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The concept is rather avant-garde for a party that is usually so horrendously boring in its messaging.
Many of the choices make an odd kind of intuitive sense even if they are difficult to articulate (Ron DeSantis being represented by a careening jar of pudding is a particularly inspired choice, as is the bottle of whatever alcohol represents the terminally weird and unpopular Tim Scott exploding spectacularly on the first step).
We are curious about what bottles our readers would choose to represent some of the Democratic candidates. We have some ideas: Joe Biden, for instance, could be portrayed by a jar of melted ice cream that crashes into the side of the stairwell but somehow does not explode. Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, could be represented by a tanker of vinyl chloride that explodes into a menacing, carcinogenic cloud midway down the steps.
AROUND THE WORLD
Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, has just been overthrown in a coup by his own guards. General Abdourahmane Tchiani now rules the country and has suspended the constitution after the military junta took the deposed president, hostage. Niger (and much of the wider Sahel region) has been besieged by violence from Islamist groups for decades and around 1,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed there to advise the military on counterterrorism operations. But it appears that one of the coup’s plotters, Moussa Salaou Barmou, was trained by the U.S. military. According to The Intercept, US-trained military officers have taken part in 11 coups in West Africa since 2008.
A suicide bombing at a political rally in Khar, Pakistan killed at least 55 people this weekend and injured nearly 200. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by ISIS-Khorasan, a subgoup of the larger Islamic State which has become more prolific in the area near the Afghanistan border since the Taliban rolled back into power in Afghanistan two years ago. The party whose rally was bombed, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, is closely allied with the Taliban. Contrary to what you might expect given their many shared hobbies and interests, ISIS and the Taliban despise one another and each view the other as strategic rivals in the region who compete for members. ISIS also thinks the Taliban are too nationalistic and friendly with Shiites, while the Taliban considers ISIS to be excessively violent (and if the literal Taliban is telling you to chill, it might be time for some self-reflection).
The northeastern Indian state of Manipur has been in the grip of violence for months as two of its most disadvantaged groups—the Kukis and Nagas (Christian minority groups)—launched a protest movement against the government that is predominantly ethnically Meitei (and led by Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu-nationalist BJP). The Hindu-majority Meitei government recently launched new policies that the Kuki minority say discriminate against them in hiring, allow them to more easily be evicted by Meitei settlers, and cast them as illegal immigrants. In violent clashes between Meitei and Kuki militias, Kukis have made up the majority of victims. Meanwhile, local police have been accused of cracking down on peaceful Kuki civil rights groups. Attacks by the Hindu Meitei majority against Kukis—including many lynchings and sexual assaults—were largely ignored by the press (partially helped along by a media blackout in the region) until a galling video of a public gang rape of two Kuki women by a group of Meitei men went viral and sparked outrage around the country. Many Indians have criticized India’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi (whose party also governs Manipur) for ignoring the violence for months. According to state officials, around 150 people have been killed and around 60,000 have been displaced, but human rights groups estimate those numbers to be much higher. (Thank you to our fabulous reader Udit, who recommended we cover this story and provided TONS of useful articles and videos to help us better understand the context! We always appreciate receiving story ideas from our community of readers. If you would like to recommend a story, please email us at briefing@currentaffairs.org.)
The European Union has made a deal to pay Tunisia $1.12 billion to stand in the way of migrants coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Jody Ray writes in Jacobin about how the North African nation has become a hub for violence against desperate people:
“The developments provide a stark reminder that politicians continue to see the plight of migrants from Africa to Europe as a primarily domestic problem, not an issue stemming from global inequality and war…This stated policy has seen Tunisian authorities remove hundreds of migrants to a desolate area along the border with Libya, following a wave of xenophobia and violent attacks against foreigners, some not even migrants…Interviews conducted by [Human Rights Watch] found that migrants had been forcibly arrested ‘by police, national guard, or military in and near Sfax, a port city southeast of the capital, Tunis.’ They were then transported ‘300 kilometers to Ben Guerdane, then to the Libya border, where they were effectively trapped in what they described as a buffer zone from which they could neither enter Libya nor return to Tunisia.’
WORD OF THE WEEK
“Gerontocracy”
This term, for an oligarchic society run by the obscenely old, spiked in Google search results after both Senator Mitch McConnell (81 years old) and Dianne Feinstein (90 years old) each had calamitous brain malfunctions on the floor of the Senate this past week. McConnell totally spaced out in the middle of a speech:
Feinstein had to be continuously prodded by her aides to simply say “aye” during a roll call vote instead of giving a rambling sermon:
We don’t seek to make light of the obviously declining mental acuity of these two, or any of the wonderful senior citizens this fine country has to offer. Aging and its many effects are unavoidable and nothing to be ashamed of! However, our grace can only go so far when the people who hold the world’s fate in their hands—who decide whether we go to war and whether children get fed—are too mentally cooked to even finish their own sentences. McConnell and Feinstein are certainly quite a bit older than average, but they are smaller outliers than you’d expect—the *average* U.S. senator is 64 years old (giving the U.S. the seventh oldest legislature in the world!) And given that President Joe Biden is not exactly firing on all cylinders these days either (perhaps best evidenced by his profound assertion that “America is a nation that can be defined in a single word: ‘awdsmfafoothimaaafootafootwhscuseme’”) it sure seems like “gerontocracy” is an adequate way to describe our country’s political class. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having elder statesmen and stateswomen around: Bernie Sanders, we should mention, is the same age as Mitch McConnell and remains cogent as ever. But it’s probably best for our most ancient leaders to hang it up once age affects their ability to do their jobs (Though we’d prefer to have McConnell puttering around than whatever horrifying Kentucky version of Blake Masters may be lurking just out of view). Our elders shouldn’t have to spend their final days shambling through Appropriations Committee hearings. They should get to spend them doing things that bring them the utmost joy: like building model train sets, plowing through John Grisham novels, and responding to emails from socialist grad students!
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What is going on with electoral politics?”)
It appears that President Biden totally lied when he said he had nothing to do with his son Hunter’s business dealings. Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer revealed in closed door testimony before the House Oversight that the then-vice president routinely joined his son’s phone conversations with Ukrainian gas company Burisma—one of Hunter’s clients. Archer said Hunter Biden put his father on the phone with his business associates 20 times over 10 years, peddling “the illusion of access” to the powers of the Oval Office. Democrats protest that this still does not prove that Biden directly benefitted from any of these deals. But the fact that he lied to the public so blatantly by repeatedly stating he had no involvement makes it hard to not imagine the worst. As the New York Times reports, the new testimony “underscored that [Joe] Biden had made false or misleading statements regarding his family members’ finances” and the White House has now “ begun speaking in less declarative terms about the matter,” meaning that they’ve gone from saying that Joe had nothing to do with Hunter’s business to saying that Joe was not “in” business with his son.
Last week, Ron DeSantis speechwriter Nate Hochman was fired after he was found to have created a video that prominently displayed Nazi iconography alongside the candidate. But a new trove of texts released by Semafor shows that Hochman did not go rogue. In fact, many DeSantis campaign staff contributed to the video and Hochman showed it off in a group chat called “War Room Creative Ideas.” The chat included DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw, who told campaign staff to keep making the bizarre meme-filled videos that have since gotten the campaign into trouble in recent weeks—including a nauseating anti-LGBTQ video which compared DeSantis with fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman (the creator of this video remains on the DeSantis staff, by the way). That such freakish content could been seen by so many people, with no one raising concerns, reflects just how thoroughly the brains of Team DeSantis have been sautéed by the Internet.
Kyle Lamb, the campaign’s director of research and data, said the Nazi video “belongs in the Smithsonian” according to the texts disclosed in Semafor.
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
The bearded reedling is the most spherical bird we’ve ever seen
Though, if you can find a rounder one we will certainly not object.
At 16.5 cm in diameter, they can fit comfortably in your hand. They can also do perfect splits!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. 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.