LABOUR DRAGS ITS FEET ON PAY RISES FOR U.K.’s PUBLIC EMPLOYEES
Seeking to promote an image of fiscal responsibility, the U.K.’s Labour Party is refusing to commit to pay rises for public sector workers. Conservative Prime MinisterRishi Sunak offered striking public employees an increase of around 6 percent. This is at least a commitment if a woefully insufficient one (It’s effectively a pay cut if compared to the country’s expected 7 percent inflation rate this year, and considering that the U.K. had the highest inflation among advanced economies last year as well).
Somehow the party of Thatcher has managed to appear more generous than its opposition. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has refused to commit to any increase, even as unions ask for wages to increase in line with inflation.Labour’s sail-trimming is part of an apparent electoral strategy to appear fiscally prudent in contrast to the bumbling Tories who have wrought a shambolic economy—an approach embarrassingly called “Securonomics” (possibly the worst political portmanteau since “Brexit”). Labour began the year promising an ambitious £28 billion economic stimulus that was expected to create 65,000 green energy jobs, but has since backtracked. They have also made ruled out a wealth tax, and made u-turns on publicly funded childcare services, and free public tuition. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been at the fore of this sail-trimming, saying that “economic stability must come first.” (Note for non-UK readers: The “Shadow Chancellor is the opposition party counterpart to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not a government official in charge of overseeing all of the country’s shadows. That might seem obvious, but in a country that has a royal officer specifically in charge of counting all of the king’s swans—and that has also had a Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Stool, Deputy Clerk of the Closet, Silver Stick-in-Waiting, Clerk of the Green Cloth, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, we wouldn’t be surprised by any bizarre official post.)
Under Starmer, Labour has totally abandoned whatever identity it once had as a party for working-class voters. This is perhaps best exemplified by his calling on his MPs to avoid supporting striking workers, saying “You can’t sit around a cabinet table and then go to a picket line.” If the LABOUR Party cannot take a position on labor disputes, then WHAT ON EARTH is it even there for?
Labour leadership insists that this is only a momentary retreat, designed to ensure they don’t overspend during lean times. But during such times is when working people need government intervention the most to ensure their survival. As Andrew Fisher argues in iNews, their insistence on out-austerity-ing their opponents is undermining the nation’s recovery:
“Labour in effect is saying: ‘I’m sorry we can’t implement the solution because the problem persists.’ It is stupidly illogical – like refusing a patient chemotherapy until their cancer goes away… Strong and sustained economic growth won’t happen without putting more pounds in people’s pockets and investing in public services.”
TORRENTIAL RAINS AROUND THE WORLD
A flash flood in Pennsylvania killed five people over the weekend and left two children missing. Between three and five inches of rain deluged Washington Crossing—a suburb of Philadelphia—within an hour, carrying several vehicles away. Meanwhile, India is currently dealing with a record-breaking monsoon season. More than 100 people have been killed in Northern India over the last two weeks and more than 30,000 have been taken to relief camps as roads have caved in, bridges have buckled and buildings have collapsed. Extreme rain has devastated Turkey, China, and Japan in the past few weeks as well.
Floods and storms combined killed more than 8,820 people worldwide in 2022, and climate change is making them worse. According to Isabella O’Malley, Brittany Peterson, and Drew Costley in the Associated Press:
Although destructive flooding in India, Japan, China, Turkey, and the United States might seem like distant events, atmospheric scientists say they have this in common: Storms are forming in a warmer atmosphere, making extreme rainfall a more frequent reality now. The additional warming that scientists predict is coming will only make it worse. That’s because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which results in storms dumping more precipitation that can have deadly outcomes. Pollutants, especially carbon dioxide, and methane, are heating up the atmosphere. Instead of allowing heat to radiate away from Earth into space, they hold onto it. While climate change is not the cause of storms unleashing rainfall, these storms are forming in an atmosphere that is becoming warmer and wetter.
Fossil fuel usage is unambiguously driving the rise in global temperatures, but our politicians and media are doing everything in their power (and coming up with harebrained solutions like painting the earth’s surface white) to avoid having to confront this reality. Unless we get our shit together soon, we can expect these sorts of catastrophic storms to become more and more prevalent. Today in Current Affairs, read Jag Bhalla’s comprehensive demolition of bad, over-optimistic climate models. Bhalla makes the case that if we’re going to fix this catastrophe, we need to be honest about the scope of it, who is causing it, and who it affects.
HOUSE BUDGET BALLOONS MILITARY SPENDING, CUTS EVERYTHING ELSE
The Republican-led House of Representatives has passed an absolute atrocity of a budget for 2024. We discussed in Friday’s briefing how they have worked to chip away at any sort of climate-related spending even amid several rolling weather catastrophes. But that was just the tip of the swiftly-melting iceberg.
To start with, they proposed record levels of military spending—$886 billion, amounting to more than half of the discretionary budget in 2024. This is something both parties are in agreement on, with Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin emphasizing the necessity of “strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China.” In practice, this just means even more money being funneled to the military contractors that spent more than $125 million on lobbying last year. Jonathan Alan King and Richard Krushnic write in Truthout that the aims of war profiteers are directly antithetical to a peaceful world and that increasing tensions with Russia and China are critical to their business model:
“Defense contractors and the military-industrial-congressional complex depend on escalation and conflict to profit…The defense industry couldn’t claim that intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear warhead-armed submarines or B-1 bombers are effective in the war on terror. These big-ticket, multibillion-dollar products require big-ticket enemies. Thus, after a period of thawed relations with the U.S., both Russia and China are once again being presented to the U.S. public as enemies. Currently planned big-ticket items include continued development and purchase of F-35 fighters, replacement of the silo-based ICBMs, purchase of new nuclear weapon-armed submarines, upgrading of B-1 bombers, and development and purchase of a new sea-launched cruise missile.
Of course, because Republicans just couldn’t help themselves, they also had to force a bunch of socially conservative priorities into the bill too (which may actually make it harder to pass). They added amendments forcing the military to stop teaching diversity classes, banning books related to “radical gender ideology” in DOD schools, removing Pride flags from all military bases, and stop providing funding for service members to get abortions or gender-affirming treatment.
Inevitably, these increases in military spending were offset by cuts to just about everything meant to improve people’s lives. The bill would reduce non-defense discretionary spending by 35 percent with huge cuts to (among other things)…
Rail infrastructure (new construction cut entirely, with a 64 percent decrease to Amtrak)
It’s difficult to say how much of this will get through the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Republicans have expressed a willingness to shut down the government to force their priorities through and appeared willing to let the government default earlier this year if Biden hadn’t caved during the debt-ceiling showdown, so there is a good chance that many of these cuts could be realized.
AROUND THE STATES
Iowa’s six-week abortion ban has been temporarily struck down by a federal judge after the state was sued by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. The judge said that the law placed an “undue burden” on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy. Indeed, women are often unaware that they are pregnant at six weeks. The law’s enforcement had already been held up by the state Supreme Court, which deadlocked last month over whether it was constitutional. This will not be the final word on the law, but for now, Iowans can still terminate a pregnancy up to 22 weeks.
The Food and Drug Administration has just approved the first over-the-counter contraceptive pill. The Opill, which is expected to hit shelves in 2024, is expected to make birth control much more accessible to millions of women—something increasingly important as states continue to outlaw safe abortions. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, many patients struggle to get timely appointments for prescribed birth control, and at least one-third have missed a dose as a result. That said, the extent to which access will be improved is unclear, as the pill’s manufacturer, Perrigo, has not made it clear how much they intend to charge for the new medication.
One-third of the people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Biden’s first year posed no security risk, according to a new report from the American Immigration Council. Meanwhile, half of ICE’s requests to hold migrants were for those not deemed security risks. ICE has blatantly disregarded an order from the Biden administration saying that they should only deport people who threaten the security of the border, the public, or the nation. Biden pledged to only target felons for deportation, drawing a contrast with Trump—who used ICE to round undocumented people up indiscriminately. But Biden’s Homeland Security Department has done little to bring ICE to heel as they have done much the same thing.
The city started out by proposing a wide range of budget cuts…Those that remain are telling: for example, half a billion from “rightsizing” the 3-K early childhood education program, or a cut of $17 million for programs for inmates at Rikers Island long performed by outside social service agencies, justified by the claim that they can be more efficiently provided in-house. Social service agencies have seen their budgets fall in the cost-saving efforts. These declines may not be drastic and may even out over the course of the fiscal year; nonetheless, they reflect the city’s underlying priorities. The budget for the Department of the Aging, for example, appears to be declining from $545 million in FY 2023 to $521 million in FY 2024; the Department of Health from $2.9 billion to $2.2 billion; the Department of Social Services from $11.7 billion to $11.4 billion. Many city agencies are understaffed, operating with 10 to 20 percent of positions unfilled.
AROUND THE WORLD
Russia is dangerously close to passing a bill that would radically restrict the rights of transgender people in the country. The bill, which will be voted on this Friday, not only outlaws medical transition procedures but would also annul the marriages of people who have “changed genders” and would bar trans people from adopting or fostering children. Putin’s Russia is the most hostile country in Europe for LGBTQ people. In 2013, it passed a ban on gay “propaganda” (a law that U.S. conservative groups helped to write), designates pro-LGBTQ groups as “foreign agents,” outlaws same-sex unions in its constitution, and has no protections from discrimination or gay conversion therapy. (It is also worth noting that Putin’s anti-“wokeness” is a reason why some U.S. conservativeshaveopenly supportedRussia’s attackon Ukraine. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has also said of the new anti-trans law, “This is all great stuff.”)
According to a new U.N. report, world hunger has gotten dramatically worse over the last four years. The confluence of COVID-19, extreme weather, and the war in Ukraine have led 122 million more people to face food insecurity in 2023 than in 2019, bringing the total up to 735 million total. Despite progress in Latin America and Asia, hunger has gotten worse especially in Africa, as well as West Asia and the Caribbean. In an interview with Democracy Now!, the general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, Million Belay, explains why the problem is particularly bad in Africa: he blames the history of colonial underdevelopment, the need to “commodify” food using agrichemicals and GMOs, and the elite capture of institutions leading to disinvestment in agriculture.
Volkswagen has used A.I. to bring a beloved Brazilian singer back from the dead for a car commercial. Elis Regina—who died tragically young at 36 back in 1982—was digitally reconstructed to perform a duet with her daughter, who is also a well-loved musical icon. The ad drew lots of emotional responses from Elis’ fans, who were overjoyed to see her reanimated. But there is something extremely eerie about the fact that a person who died more than forty years ago can have her likeness reconstructed by a corporation without being around to consent. This instance is particularly hideous given that Elis was famously an opponent of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, which Volkswagen collaborated with. While it’s worth considering the broader ramifications of using A.I. to resurrect our dead loved ones, we should be wary of how we might be unwittingly turned into spokespeople for Lockheed Martin or Monsanto after we die.
Iran has brought back its infamous “morality police” to enforce the Islamic Republic’s mandatory face-covering policy for women. Women deemed to be engaged in “norm-breaking” dress can be arrested and taken to re-education camps for dress code violations. The morality police pulled back momentarily amid protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last year. Police killed 448 protesters and arrested more than 18,000 others throughout the movement, as Iranians challenged the Islamic theocracy. But, now that domestic and international scrutiny has largely died down, the police are once again cracking down, and even introducing new surveillance technology to help them do so.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or “What’s going on in electoral politics?”)
Ron DeSantis has tailored his campaign towards young, extremely online conservatives. But this weekend’s Turning Point USA conference provided evidence that the kids aren’t taking the bait.The gathering for right-wing youths featured a lineup of cardboard cutouts of each GOP primary contender’s face, on which attendees could post comments using sticky notes. Palm Beach Post reporter Stephany Matat captured how the teens responded. As expected, Trump’s face was covered with near-unanimous praise:
Meanwhile, DeSantis got littered with comments like “Cuck!,” “Trump is your Daddy,” and “Meat ball traitor!”
Trump’s primary win in 2016 should remind us not to count anyone out so early. But if Rob DeSanctimonious—whose poll numbers have tanked since the spring—can’t even appeal to his core base of rigidly ideological nineteen-year-olds, then his goose may truly be cooked.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s face is cut off here, but he is to the left of Trump.
Computer…enhance:
RFK, Jr. has flailed about this week in an attempt to explain ludicrous comments he made suggesting that COVID-19 was intended to target certain ethnic groups while sparing others. At a press event, he said:
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately…COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
When asked about this video of him suggesting these were deliberately engineered changes to target certain ethnicities, Kennedy responded:
“Nobody has suggested that these were deliberately engineered changes and I certainly don't believe that they were deliberately engineered…”
“the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons.”
This entire ordeal shows Kennedy’s uncanny ability to shamelessly say “I never said that” even when evidence of him saying that is right in front of him. It’s no wonder he has so effectively built a careerlying voluminously about every public health issue under the sun. It also shows that if you spend enough time swimming through the conspiracy swamps, you’ll always eventually end up blaming the Jews for every ill on the planet.
Biden fired a well-regarded appointee because she had too much personal debt. Since mid-February, Kemba Walden has been the acting cyber director—who handles policy related to software manufacturing and fighting hackers. She has received support from lawmakers in both parties and accolades for being one of a few Black women in a field largely dominated by white men. But despite her excellent qualifications, the Biden administration withdrew her nomination because of her difficult financial situation (according to The Washington Post, Walden has two children in private school and a mortgage) because it could theoretically leave her vulnerable to blackmail (though there’s no evidence that this has happened). One of Walden’s friends commented anonymously on the matter, saying “If the requirement to take a job like this is that you have to be independently wealthy, then it will be a poorer place because you’ll be cutting out a lot of great talent.” This incident exposes the shallowness of Biden’s attempts to pander to both working-class voters and voters of color. Black women are uniquely burdened by student loan debt, meaning that using debt as a disqualifier will harm them disproportionately.
LONG READ: According to a piece by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, Trump is planning to centralize his control over many independent U.S. government agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Justice Department under his direct control if he returns to office in 2025. He also wants to make it easier to fire federal officials who do not align with his agenda and revive the practice of “impounding” funds appropriated by Congress (i.e. not spending them), which was outlawed during the Nixon era. According to The Times:
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America…The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits… Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory. The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them.
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.
