Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Pharma profiteering, crypto colonialism, Spain's election, Alabama defies the Supreme Court, oil spills, wildfires, "X," and more!
Welcome to your Tuesday briefing! The Current Affairs staff works round the clock to assemble all of the critical news you need to navigate your week. Around here, the keyboards never stop clacking, and the presses never stop whirring. We know that you don’t have time to read all of the news yourself. You need someone to digest, process, and summarize it. That someone is this magazine. If you like our News Briefing, please do consider subscribing to our insightful podcast and fabulous print edition. (Briefing subscribers can get $20 off with this link.) And remember, our Briefing staff would love your feedback and suggestions for stories to cover. Send letters of inquiry, complaint, and suggestion to briefing@currentaffairs.org.
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
PHARMA PROFITS KEPT A CRITICAL HIV DRUG OFF THE MARKET FOR A DECADE
Gilead Sciences, one of the world’s largest drugmakers, delayed the release of a critical HIV medication to extend the patent life of an older version for as long as possible. This is evidenced by a trove of documents from the lawsuits against the company, in which 26,000 HIV patients allege damage to their bones and kidneys from using the older medication. Gilead held up the release of the drug for nearly a decade to maximize profits. According to The New York Times,
“The ‘patent extension strategy,’ as the Gilead documents repeatedly called it, would allow the company to keep prices high for its tenofovir-based drugs… Gilead’s apparent maneuver with tenofovir is so common in the pharmaceutical industry that it has a name: product hopping. Companies ride out their monopoly on a medication and then, shortly before the arrival of generic competition, they switch — or “hop” — patients over to a more recently patented version of the drug to prolong the monopoly.
The prevalence of such a strategy—which actively holds up patients’ access to new drugs—belies the persistent industry canard that keeping drugs in the hands of private companies, and letting them jack up the prices to infinity, is a cost we have to bear for “innovation.” It is evidence of how the supremacy of profits above all else contradicts human welfare.
CRYPTO BROS ARE DOING COLONIALISM
According to a newly released memo, the disgraced owner of the crypto trading platform FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, planned to buy the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru (which has 12,000 people living on it currently) to build an apocalypse bunker for himself and his clique of billionaire benefactors. Bankman-Fried, who was arrested earlier this year for allegedly stealing oodles of money from his customers, wanted this shelter to be used in “some event where 50-99.99% of people die” to “ensure that most [effective altruists] survive.”
At multiple points in Current Affairs, we’ve discussed “effective altruism,” a movement among wealthy “philanthropists” that frequently boils down to consolidating as much wealth as possible into the hands of a few brilliant, benevolent individuals so they can disperse it where it needs to go (as Nathan J. Robinson cataloged back in 2022, their priorities can be extremely warped.) Bankman-Fried’s exclusive disaster dungeon seems like evidence of this: Instead of using their money to, say, try to prevent the very obvious apocalypses like nuclear war or climate change that stare humanity in the face, they are hoarding wealth and resources to ensure their small coterie survives if they occur. We here at Current Affairs are nowhere near billionaires, and we may simply be incapable of understanding the elaborate rational utilitarian calculus that leads to their conclusions, but hiding on a remote island while the human race collapses does not sound particularly altruistic.
Back in 2013, I thought it was amusing and silly, and I could get cool papers out of it. In 2018, I thought it was amusing, but pretty bad. [Now] it’s time to really think about burning it down. Now I just want to take the entire cryptocurrency space and throw it into the sun. I know astronomers will tell you it’s easier to throw something into the void of space than to throw it into the sun. But it’s worth the extra energy to make sure some alien doesn’t find this mental virus. — Computer Scientist Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency, Current Affairs, 2022
This is not the only instance of crypto bros using their wealth to carve out exclusive fiefdoms in far-flung corners of the world. At the same time, a Delaware-based company called Próspera is suing the government of Honduras for ending a policy that gives American companies sovereignty over portions of the country through what were called “Economic Development & Employment Zones.” The company, with backing from Silicon Valley vampires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, was in the process of using this trade agreement to build an autonomous tax-free, libertarian city-state, which would use Bitcoin as legal tender (much like the Ayn Rand-inspired “Galt’s Gulch” experiment in Chile, which collapsed hilariously a few years ago). In the process, they would be pushing out the indigenous people who live on the island of Routan, where the construction of the colony was underway. In an interview with Democracy Now!, indigenous activist Venessa Cardenas said:
“It has had a psychological impact, as well a physical impact… We don’t know when we will have—when our home will be taken from us.”
The Honduran government repealed the law, effectively re-establishing its sovereignty over the land and killing the project. In response, Próspera, seeming intent on looting Honduras one way or another, launched a lawsuit seeking $11 billion, which amounts to more than two-thirds of the country’s total 2022 budget.
(Thank you to our wonderful reader, José, who shared this story with us! If you have a story you’d like to see this briefing cover, please send an email to briefing@currentaffairs.org.)
BIG STORIES
ALABAMA DEFIES THE SUPREME COURT TO UPHOLD A RACIST GERRYMANDER
In one of our first briefings, we discussed how the Supreme Court overturned a congressional map drawn by Alabama Republicans that was flagrantly gerrymandered to limit the power of its Black voters, so much so that even John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh could not deny it. The state is nearly one-third Black, but the map crammed most of the state’s Black residents into a single congressional district while leaving the other six majority white and Republican. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that Alabama redraw the map to include a second majority-Black district “or close to it.”
When the Alabama legislature drew up its new map, which has been passed by the governor, it still did not contain a second majority-Black district. Instead, they created two districts: one which is 51 percent Black, and another which was 40 percent Black. The Supreme Court’s vague wording makes it a bit unclear whether this is allowed, but it’s hard to imagine any universe in which 40 percent is considered “close to” a majority. It appears as if Alabama is openly defying the United States Supreme Court. And given the history of how the state responded to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, with Governor George Wallace pledging to “[stand] at the schoolhouse door” to prevent the implementation of school desegregation, we are not exactly in uncharted territory.
Still, it’s rather surprising that the first state to so brazenly flout the most conservative court since the Lochner era was a Republican one. If they get away with this, it could be an example of the conservative movement cutting off its nose to spite its face. Liberal states sure have a lot more Supreme Court decisions that they would like to defy right now, and this could set a precedent that such defiance is possible. For example, if Alabama can ignore a ruling on racial gerrymandering, why couldn’t, say, Colorado re-instate its law protecting gay people from discrimination by businesses, which the court struck down? Or why couldn’t Biden continue to forgive student debt relief under the HEROES Act after the Court ruled it unconstitutional? Some legal scholars have already been urging Biden to defy the Supreme Court’s rulings, such as Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin, who wrote a letter last week saying:
“We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations.”
While it’s hard to say at this point how an attempt at nullification would play out, it seems very shortsighted of Republicans to do anything that undermines the authority of the Supreme Court, given that it’s probably the single most powerful body they have for enforcing their policy agenda. And while we unequivocally oppose any efforts to use redistricting to disenfranchise minority groups, it would be nice if this had the byproduct of undermining the authority of the Supreme Court, which we have argued should not have the powers it possesses in the first place.
SPAIN NARROWLY THWARTS THE FAR-RIGHT
Spain appears to have held off electing its most right-wing governing coalition since the Franco era. Its snap election over the weekend seems poised to see its socialist governing coalition swept out of power in favor of one containing the far-right Vox party. Vox had steadily gained seats amid backlash to the Catalan independence movement and anger at immigrants, LGBTQ people, and climate change mitigation measures. Some of its members openly wax poetic about returning to the days of dictatorship, such as Minister of Culture Vicente Barrera, who posted on social media that “right-wing politicians should cure themselves of the anti-Franco complex.” According to El País reporter Miguel González, in an interview with The Guardian,
“Vox is an ultra-nationalist party – I think that’s the best definition…Within Vox, you have sectors that came from the fascist Falange party and ultra-Catholic sectors that are pro-life and absolutely against abortion and gay marriage.”
Leading to election day, Vox appeared in a position to become kingmakers and potentially exert authority over the majority coalition. But they actually performed quite poorly in the election, losing 19 seats. The incumbent Socialist Workers Party and the rising left-liberal party Sumar both gained seats in spite of negative expectations for the left bloc.
There is now no clear majority coalition to govern Spain, but it appears that after underperforming, the far-right’s star has fallen dramatically. It now appears as if the left bloc will need to woo the nation’s Catalan and Basque independence parties to cobble together a coalition. According to Aitor Hernández-Morales in Politico, this will be no easy task:
“Although [Socialist Workers Party leader Pedro Sánchez’s] left-wing coalition government has sought to mend ties and take a softer approach with Catalan separatists during the past four years, relations are by no means ideal. Puigdemont, who fled Spain in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, remains in self-imposed exile in Belgium. The politician, who is currently a member of the European Parliament, recently had his legal immunity stripped by a top EU court, paving the way for his extradition to Spain. On Sunday, Junts candidate Míriam Nogueras told the press her party had “understood the result” and would ‘take advantage of the opportunity.’”
DON’T GO BREAKING MY CHART
A new study from a group of Harvard economists who study inequality demonstrates that among students with the same test scores, those in the top 0.1 percent of the national income distribution were 2.2x more likely to be admitted into Ivy League schools. Given the wealth distribution in America, this means that white students are more likely to be given a significant boost. Fascinatingly, many of the people most scandalized by affirmative action for groups that have historically faced social and economic disadvantage do not seem particularly concerned about the advantages afforded to people who already have every other conceivable advantage in life.
AROUND THE STATES
The U.S. Border Patrol is caging migrants outdoors amid Arizona’s historic heatwave. Temperatures have exceeded 110 F for nearly a month, which has contributed to 18 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County this year (and 69 more which are also suspected to be heat-related). Photos taken by The Intercept at the Ajo Border Patrol station, which is in a remote part of the Arizona desert, showed a group of around 50 detained migrants held in a chain-link pen with little access to shade. Customs & Border Protection did not answer questions about how long people are kept out in the heat and whether children are detained there. These images, and other recent reports of horrifying treatment at the border under the Biden administration, serve as a stark reminder that, despite differences in rhetoric between Republicans and Democrats on immigration, the inhumanity of our border enforcement is a bipartisan affair.
Since Texas’ 2021 abortion ban, the total number of infant deaths has climbed by 11.5 percent, undoing nearly a decade of declining infant mortality. This climb follows the passage in 2021 of a law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which has forced many women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term.
A nonprofit group just saved 22 local newspapers in Maine from being bought by private equity companies. The National Trust for Local News has been intervening to bring struggling papers under non-profit local ownership, and between 2017 and 2022 has launched 135 nonprofit newsrooms across the country. At the time of its founding, Robert Kuttner reports in The American Prospect, “private equity operators were swooping in and buying up papers by the thousands, and making profits by paring staff and news coverage to the bone.”
Also in The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper writes about how the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes against Hollywood studios are not only about pay, benefits, and working conditions (though those things are obviously critical). The strikes are also about protecting the quality of the TV and films they make and preventing the creative process from being handed over to soulless A.I. programs:
“[A.I. models] can conduct convincing small talk, summarize large texts with decent accuracy, produce surrealist pictures, churn out a rough draft of an essay on about any topic in seconds, lie with total confidence, and perhaps even carry out something roughly akin to reasoning. What they can’t do at all is produce novel film or TV at a high standard of artistic quality by themselves. And given how the models are trained on terabytes of human-produced internet data that is already being corrupted by AI-produced spam, there’s no reason to expect them to be able to do so in the near future. In an industry like film and TV, AIs can only be a complement to human labor, not a substitute.”
Child labor increased by 37 percent between 2015 and 2022, as fourteen states have rolled back protections against it, and have introduced new measures, like sub-minimum wages for youths, that make it more profitable. Steve Fraser in The Nation has some disturbing reporting:
“The blunt truth of the matter is that child labor pays and is fast becoming remarkably ubiquitous. It’s an open secret that fast-food chains have employed underage kids for years and simply treat the occasional fines for doing so as part of the cost of doing business. Children as young as 10 have been toiling away in such pit stops in Kentucky and older ones working beyond the hourly limits prescribed by law. Roofers in Florida and Tennessee can now be as young as 12. Recently, the Labor Department found more than 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses in Minnesota and Nebraska…At this point, virtually the entire economy is remarkably open to child labor. Garment factories and auto parts manufacturers (supplying Ford and General Motors) employ immigrant kids, some for 12-hour days. Many are compelled to drop out of school just to keep up. In a similar fashion, Hyundai and Kia supply chains depend on children working in Alabama.
HORRIBLE TAKE OF THE DAY
Alexander Karp, who runs Peter Thiel’s infamous Palantir, writes in the New York Times that the U.S. has no choice but to go full speed ahead with the development of “AI weapons.” The “grim reality of an ongoing geopolitical struggle for power” means that an arms race has begun and “our hesitation, perceived or otherwise, to move forward with military applications of artificial intelligence will be punished.” (Palantir itself stands to benefit handsomely from the resulting military contracts, raising questions of why the NYT chose to publish such an obviously self-serving piece of writing.) Karp gives no consideration to the catastrophic potential ending of the global arms race he thinks we should fling ourselves into. Armageddon, here we come!
GOODBYE TWITTER, HELLO “X!”
In his latest fit of genius, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced this weekend that the site will be changing its name to “X.” Musk tweeted...or, Xed. “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” (Sadly, this is not the only way in which the global rich are bidding adieu to all the birds.) Now, most conventional marketing strategists would advise that when you have one of the most recognizable brands on the internet—one so well-known that it has led to the word “tweet” being added to the dictionary—you should probably not completely shred that brand recognition by changing to a name which could easily be mistaken for a porn website. But that’s just the Conventional Wisdom. True disruptors know better! Musk also apparently wants to turn “X” into not just a social platform, but an “everything app”—according to CEO Linda Yaccarino, “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” Elon has said that he thinks X will soon encompass “half of the global financial system.” This, too, is a genius masterstroke. Generally, when your current enterprise is hemorrhaging billions of dollars, most financial advisers would suggest you undertake half-a-dozen extremely costly new ones.
We here at Current Affairs are inclined to follow the best and brightest business minds in the world. Thus we hereby announce that Current Affairs Magazine will be changing its name as well. Henceforth, this enterprise will be known as “❧” We believe this symbol encompasses the creative and whimsical spirit we hope to embody. We are still working out the details, such as how “❧” will be spoken aloud (a question that has led to several heated arguments within the ❧ company Slack), but we figure such a matter can be resolved at a later date. At Current Affairs, we built a brand with instant name recognition within the independent left publishing sphere—but in keeping with the business methods of Mr. Musk, for whom we have great respect, we feel it is important to periodically confuse and unnerve our core base of readers. As much as it pains us, we will also be following in X’s footsteps and ditching our once-ubiquitous bird-related content. (Save for the parrot facts at the end of today’s Briefing.)
In keeping with Musk’s strategy, we will be moving beyond the publishing sphere and will be opening a series of chain restaurants, haberdasheries, private equity firms, and affordable family resorts. We believe that this combination of destroying brand recognition and undertaking several new, untested ventures at once cannot possibly fail. After all, Elon Musk is the richest man to walk the Earth, and it is core to the ❧ worldview that one’s net worth is directly proportional to their intelligence and value as a human being. Surely this bold step cannot fail—if it does, then it would mean that Mr. Musk is not in fact a transcendent business genius, and is in fact a clueless oaf with no idea what he is doing. This is, of course, impossible. If that were true, how could he be so rich?
AROUND THE GLOBE
A large oil spill has been detected in the Gulf of Mexico. It appears to originate from a Petroleos Mexicanos platform that caught on fire on July 7. As of last week, the spill was estimated to be about two-thirds the size of Mexico City. Interestingly, this spill was not initially reported by the Mexican government (which owns Pemex) until a coalition of environmental groups spotted it and accused them in an open letter of “opacity,” saying that “the authorities have not given any notice of its causes and consequences.” Pemex denied this claim and refuted the numbers. Meanwhile, the NGOs also alleged that there had been another spill in the area in June that covered 270 sq. km. They also pointed out that Pemex accidents have more than doubled in the last two years while funding for maintenance has been cut in half. It should be noted that despite the proximity to our shores, there has been very almost zero American media coverage of this spill.
Russia says cluster bombs killed a war reporter in Ukraine and wounded three other people. Meanwhile, a German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, says Russian cluster bombs injured one of its reporters too. Neither of these reports has been independently verified, but given the carnage we’ve seen from these illegal munitions throughout this war and others, we would not be surprised if they are true. (For more on why our sale of cluster munitions to Ukraine is a moral atrocity, check Current Affairs’ recent article on the subject.)
At least 82 wildfires have broken out across Greece over the last week, forcing at least 19,000 people to flee the island of Rhodes. Twenty-five people were also killed as wildfires raged across Algeria on Monday. These disasters occurred as Europe and North Africa deal with what is expected to be a record-breaking heatwave, The heat has caused increasingly dry conditions which lead tinder to catch fire more easily. We likely sound like broken records at this point, but the increase in natural disasters we are seeing worldwide—from flash floods to wildfires—are all direct results of global warming. Climate activists are not just trivially “talking about the weather,” as Chris Rufo recently put it in his debate with Nathan J. Robinson on the Current Affairs podcast. We are talking about irreparable damage to our ecosystem that will make extreme, devastating weather events more common and lead to countless avoidable deaths!
The South American nation of Guyana is poised to become the oil giant Exxon’s leader in oil production. Amy Westervelt writes in The Intercept about how the oil company has taken over Guyana’s government and is using the country to carry out extremely risky drilling experiments:
“Exxon’s drilling project in Guyana is the riskiest kind: deep-water offshore drilling, which involves intense pressure bearing down on complex equipment. The conditions are similar to those that preceded the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which spewed oil and gas throughout the Gulf of Mexico, costing BP $69 billion. Exxon’s own environmental impact assessments indicate that such a disaster in Guyana could send oil to the beaches of 14 different Caribbean islands, most of which depend on fishing and tourism — and all of which could hold Guyana liable for damages…In Guyana, it’s become hard to distinguish where the oil company ends and the government begins. Exxon executives join the Guyanese president in his suite at cricket matches, and the vice president regularly hosts press conferences to defend the oil company.”
BIRD FACT OF THE DAY
Parrots are taking over the world!
“At least 60 of the world's 380 or so parrot species have a breeding population in a country outside their natural geographical range,” according to Scientific American. You can find them in New York, Chicago, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin. They can also be found in all of Mexico’s ten largest cities as well as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, Athens, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Check out this video of wild parrots roosting in Brooklyn:
How did they get there? According to Scientific American, “Each successful transplant has its own story: some are benign, others a threat to the local wildlife; some are abundant in their home ranges, whereas others rely on cities as a refuge from extinction. All are by-products of the pet trade and animal trafficking around the world… Parrots seem to have started establishing populations outside their native ranges more recently. Research published in the Journal of Zoology documents parrots breeding in the U.K. as early as 1855. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that demand for pet parrots spiked. As more birds were released by or escaped from their owners, colonies started forming in cities around the world. During that era, importers brought Monk Parakeets from South America into the U.S. by the thousands. The birds were breeding in Illinois by 1968 and on Long Island by 1971. They were even reported to be breeding in North Dakota in the 1970s.”
[CORRECTION: We would like to formally apologize to our many readers in the emu and ostrich appreciation communities. A recent advertisement for this briefing included a clip art image of an ostrich which was wrongly referred to as an “emu.” The mistake is inexcusable, and an internal investigation has been launched along with a comprehensive reevaluation of processes and procedures in the Clip Art Division. Attendance of a Bird Identification Training Program is now mandatory for all Current Affairs staff. Moreover, to the many readers who are themselves emus and ostriches (internal metrics suggest that this amounts to approximately 1/3 of total readership), we would like to stress that we consider you to be valued members of the Current Affairs family.]
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.