Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Remembering Daniel Ellsberg, Republicans come for school lunches, Biden's human rights agenda (or, lack thereof), a return to the Middle Ages, and more!
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I. REMEMBERING DANIEL ELLSBERG
The lifelong anti-war activist and whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, died this week at the age of 92 of pancreatic cancer.
In 1971, his release of 7,000 pages of top-secret information from the Defense Department about the history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times gave Americans a glimpse into how their government had lied to them over the course of the conflict.. Ellsberg’s release showed that U.S. officials knew they could not “win” the Vietnam war but escalated it anyway. It was an act of bravery that marked him for abuse, surveillance, and legal threats from the U.S. government. His release of the Pentagon Papers was one of the most important single deeds in fueling resistance against the war, began the slow unraveling of the Nixon administration that would ensue over the next three years, and helped to set a precedent that allowed journalists to freely share the disclosures of future whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
Until his dying days, Ellsberg was a prolific speaker, writer, and protester who warned of the dangers of militarism, government secrecy, and nuclear proliferation. He was a fearsome advocate for the whistleblowers who came after him.At the age of 90, he even sought to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act—which has been used to silence people who reveal government crimes—with the goal of challenging its constitutionality.
Ellsberg recognized our government’s capability for destruction, something he chronicled in his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He made the case that the Cold War-era buildup of nuclear weapons was a threat to the survival of the human species. He asked,
“Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever? Does the existence of such a capability serve any national or international interest whatsoever to a degree that would justify its obvious danger to human life? I ask the questions not merely rhetorically. They deserve sober, reflective consideration. The answers do seem obvious, but so far as I know they have never been addressed. There follows another question: Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability?”
Daniel Ellsberg is an American hero of the sort we rarely see. In his honor, here is an excerpt from a beautiful piece written in Current Affairs by his friend, Vietnam veteran and poet W.D. Ehrhart, in March:
“Daniel Ellsberg is a giant. A major figure in American history. And a true hero of mine ever since I was 22 years old. That he has made time and space for me in his life speaks to his great heart and generosity of spirit…Without the Pentagon Papers, I surely would have lived a very different life than the one I’ve actually had. I might have gone on believing in American Exceptionalism. I might have gone on thinking that any country that opposed the United States of America was wrongheaded and deluded and evil. I might have taken the job I was offered as Project Safety Analysis Coordinator for a nuclear power plant being built by the Bechtel Corporation (employer of Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz, among other luminaries). So thank you, Dan, for being who you are and for what you’ve meant to me and so many, many others. The world is a better place because you were in it, and will be an emptier place once you are gone. I love you. Farewell.”
II. THE STORIES WE OUGHT TO BE TALKING ABOUT
REPUBLICANS OUTLINE PLAN TO CUT FREE SCHOOL LUNCHES
The Republican Study Committee, a group which makes up around three-quarters of the GOP members in the House, is testing out a bold new position to win hearts and minds as the 2024 elections approach: ending free school lunches for poor children. Their newly released 2024 budget pledges to cut the Community Eligibility Program from the School Lunch Program, because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.” It should be noted that CEP far from a universal program, and is instead “reserved for qualifying schools and districts in low-income areas.” The only schools eligible to receive it are those with more than 40 percent of their students enrolled in SNAP. As Prem Thakker writes in The New Republic:
“The program enables schools that predominantly serve children from low-income backgrounds to offer all students free breakfast and lunch, instead of means-testing them and having to manage collecting applications on an individual basis. As with many universal-oriented programs, it is more practically efficient and, as a bonus, lifts all boats. This is what Republicans are looking to eliminate.”
This plan comes after other state governments have expanded their free school lunch programs, an idea scorned by many conservatives. For example, in March, as Minnesota prepared to pass a bill that would provide funding for lunches not covered by the federal School Lunch Program, Republican lawmaker Steve Drazkowski complained that the bill was unnecessary, saying “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have enough food to eat…Hunger is a relative term. I had a cereal bar for breakfast, I guess I'm hungry now." According to Feeding America, one in fifteen Minnesotans don’t have enough food to eat, including one in eleven children. Conservative writer Dan McLaughlin, meanwhile, whined on Twitter that ensuring that children have school lunches would lock them in “perpetual childhood” rather than teach them “responsibility.”
If Republicans get their way and end the Community Eligibility Program, it could put nearly 20 million children at risk of losing school meals.
THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARING HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA
Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss poses a blunt question in the New Republic: “What the Hell Happened to Biden’s Human Rights Agenda?” Duss points out that while campaigning, Biden criticized Donald Trump for his coziness with authoritarian leaders around the world and promised to make human rights the “center” of a Biden administration foreign policy. So how’s it going? Well…
“Not only has Biden not honored this promise, day by day, his administration seems to be moving further and further from it. Having promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for its devastating war in Yemen and its assassination of Washington Post journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, among many other abuses, Biden reversed course shortly after taking office. The backdown culminated in his July 2022 trip to Saudi Arabia and has continued with multiple visits by senior administration officials since then, despite ongoing repression. In Israel-Palestine, the administration has steadfastly refused to uphold international law or even to acknowledge that it is being violated on a daily basis…In the Philippines, the administration went forward with arms sales in early 2021 despite the Duterte government’s atrocious and well-documented record of human rights abuses, suppression of dissent, and an extremely violent “war on drugs.” This approach has continued under the new administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., despite a report that the number of killings committed in the context of the “war on drugs” rose after the new administration took office.”
The list goes on. Duss acknowledges that “sometimes [the U.S.] must work with bad governments to achieve shared interests” but argues that “there’s a lot of space between maintaining relationships to achieve those limited interests and the full embrace of state dinners and endless arms sales we’re seeing now.”
III. CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with the election?”)
Biden’s poll numbers grow more hideous by the day: FiveThirtyEight, has his disapproval hovering near 55 percent (nearly 14 points higher than his approval), nearly the worst it has been. The latest polls also have Biden virtually tied with Trump—a man who literally could be running from jail come next November. Some even have him slightly below the world-historically uncharismatic Ron DeSantis, whose own popularity has tanked since his presidential campaign began. The New York Times has a new report on how Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm for Biden is causing the campaign of antivax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to attract an unexpected amount of interest, and causing a “headache” for the incumbent president.
Miami’s mayor, Francis X. Suarez, has entered the Republican primary. Suarez’s most notable contribution to the marketplace of ideas is his brilliant one to fund the city by creating a cryptocurrency named “MiamiCoin,” which brought more than $5 million into city coffers before promptly losing 95 percent of its value and burning tons of investors and residents. It remains to be seen whether his “vision for a Bitcoin America” will remain a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. If that doesn’t work out, he can always campaign on bombing Cuba instead.
We’ve previously discussed the flagrant hypocrisy of Chris Christie accusing Trump’s family of profiting from political office. This profile in The New York Times further accentuates our point, detailing how Christie “has repeatedly capitalized, for personal gain, on the connections he made as one of the best-known governors in the country.”
IV. AROUND THE STATES
UPS workers have overwhelmingly voted to go on strike! If no agreement is reached with the company by July 31, about 340,000 workers will walk off the job, in what would be the largest single-company strike in American history. As we discussed in last Tuesday's briefing, the workers are seeking the end to grueling 14-hour shifts, pay raises for part time employees, an end to surveillance by the company, and air conditioning in their trucks.
Google has made $10 million in the last two years from advertisements that misdirect users seeking abortions to “crisis pregnancy centers.” These centers are known for providing deliberately false information to patients seeking abortions with the goal of dissuading them. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, these groups—while claiming to be “health care clinic[s] that offer comprehensive and unbiased reproductive health”—make false claims about abortion leading to increased cancer risk, overstate the risk of complications, show disturbing visuals to scare patients, and provide ultrasounds with the goal of “shaming” patients into having second thoughts.
Florida has passed a new law banning direct-to-consumer sales by legacy automakers. The law further entrenches the power of one of America’s most parasitic groups of middlemen—car dealers—which have become one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the Republican Party. But most notably, the law—signed by Governor Ron DeSantis—also contains a naked giveaway to Elon Musk in the form of a carveout that allows Tesla to continue selling directly to consumers. DeSantis continues his strategy of serving as Musk’s loyal Renfield.
In an appalling miscarriage of justice, a North Carolina jury has convicted two journalists from The Asheville Blade who were arrested in 2021 for a curfew violation while filming the cops’ dispersal of a homeless encampment. Bodycam footage showed that the police arrested these two journalists “since they’re videotaping.” According to the Department of Justice, “Blanket enforcement of dispersal orders and curfews against press violates [the First Amendment] because they foreclose the press from reporting.” The judge in this case, meanwhile, is reported to have forbidden the jury from considering whether freedom of the press applied in this case and rejected a motion to dismiss it on First Amendment grounds.
THIS WEEK IN EVIL
Michael Knowles says the Road to Serfdom may not be so bad after all!
Many conservative pundits and politicians express a desire to return America to the cultural values of the 1950s. Amateurs, all! The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles has them beat by more than 700 years. “I want our civilization to be as socially conservative as we were in 1220, … before all the modern ideology started corroding our civilization,” he said on his show this week. A return to the morality of the Middle Ages may give Mr. Knowles some aspects of his ideal society: women would be bound to their roles in the home, LGBTQ people would be harshly punished, and political authority would be determined by theocratic monarchies rather than mass politics. But the vast majority of people during that time were either serfs or slaves whose lives were dedicated to toil on the estate of a lord. The aristocracy—which I figure Mr. Knowles imagines he’d be part of as a … podcaster—were a small sliver of society. It’s much more likely that, as one Twitter user put it, “If michael knowles was alive in 1220 he would be a serf in a poor and small feudal kingdom and fed slop. he’d contract the bubonic plague and die at the age of 26. his liege he served will be informed of his death and he would say ‘who?’ in response.”
V. AROUND THE WORLD
Uganda’s AIDS clinics are empty after a monstrous piece of anti-gay legislation was signed. The law includes life imprisonment for homosexual acts and up to 20 years for the “promotion of homosexuality.” Since the law passed, staff at an AIDS clinic in the capital say “the usual daily influx of approximately 50 patients has dried up, antiretroviral drugs pile up unused,” Africa News reports. “The LGBT community in Uganda is on lockdown now," said one American medical resident. “They don't have preventive services. They cannot access condoms... they cannot access ARTS (antiretroviral).” According to UNAIDS, an average of 17,000 people die of AIDS per year in Uganda.
China has accomplished some pretty impressive feats with electric vehicles and renewable energy. Economist Noah Smith—who has written a lot of criticism of China’s economic policy in the past—has an excellent dive into this on his blog. Within fifteen years, China's high-speed rail system has gone from essentially non-existent to one twice the size of all other high-speed rail lines in the world combined. China’s electric vehicle production has also been remarkable, with the country quadrupling its car exports since 2020 to become the world’s biggest exporter (they lagged behind for so long in part because they struggled to meet other nations’ emissions standards for combustion vehicles). And while the country is still the largest contributor to climate change as a result of its expanding coal industry, it has also pulled ahead of the U.S. and E.U. in wind and solar production.
(Lawrence, Martha; Bullock, Richard; Liu, Ziming (2019). China’s High-Speed Rail Development. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79900305) Austria has its own (more successful) Bernie Sanders: After decades of embracing centrism and building a party around the urban middle and upper middle classes, Austria’s Social Democratic Party has elected an actual social democrat as its leader (a result that was held up due to an Excel error). Andreas Babler, the Mayor of Traiskirchen and a former factory worker, has pledged to recommit the party to its roots in social democracy. As Fabian Lehr writes in Jacobin:
“Babler says his campaign is focusing on…Intervention to close the gender pay gap, … fines for companies that pay women less, energy security that creates a universal legal right to heating and bans energy cutoffs for households that can’t pay, a basic child allowance and free school meals for all children from low-income households, a massive increase in state funding for elderly care, price controls and excess profit taxes for the energy market, a ban on real estate speculation, and finally a Green New Deal for Austria that would combine an ecological restructuring of the economy and an expansion of climate-friendly infrastructure with the creation of many new jobs.”
BEWARE! THE DAILY MAIL SAYS REMOTE WORK WILL TURN US ALL INTO BUG-EYED, CLAW-HANDED HUNCHBACKS
VI. SCRUTINIZING THE PRESS
The Ettingermentum Newsletter has an excellent two-part analysis of the career of polling wunderkind Nate Silver and the decline of his once-renowned political horse race site FiveThirtyEight, which he will be departing later this year. The writer of Ettingermentum—an anonymous political science student and poll watcher who was one of the few people on Twitter to correctly identify 2022’s predicted “red wave” as a mirage—describes the web of groupthink and incentives that led Silver’s outfit, once considered a gold standard for polling, to get the election so confidently wrong. In part two of his article, “The Art of Losing: A FiveThirtyEight Story,” he writes:
“FiveThirtyEight would make a hell of a decision in their post-2020 pollster ratings. When faced with the question of recognizing firms like Trafalgar [an openly partisan pollster that outright admitted to re-using a sample population over and over and picking which voters answers to use] for what they were—propaganda outlets—FiveThirtyEight took the firms’ side. When the political world woke up on March 25th, 2021, they would see a polling group that had outright declared the 2020 election stolen with a newly christened A- rating, courtesy of Nate Silver himself. ….It was a stunning decision. Not only did Silver refuse to blacklist Trafalgar, he whitelisted them. He took a firm run by a defective clone of Mike Lindell and declared them to be the industry’s gold standard. Trafalgar was not only a legitimate pollster, Silver said—they were at the cutting edge of a vanguard of new strategies with the potential to save polling itself from destruction.”
VII. UNDER THE HOOD
George Monbiot in The Guardian puts a spotlight on the rise of a climate refugee crisis and how the arrival of people fleeing extreme weather exacerbates the hatred of immigrants in the countries to which they flee. He points out that many of the politicians stoking anti-immigrant sentiment are the same ones passing policies that exacerbate the climate crisis in the first place:
“India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and central America face extreme risk. Weather events such as massive floods and intensified cyclones and hurricanes will keep hammering countries such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Haiti and Myanmar. Many people will have to move or die. In the rich world we still have choices: we can greatly limit the damage caused by environmental breakdown, for which our nations and citizens are primarily responsible. But these choices are being deliberately and systematically shut down. Culture war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms.”
A CAT FROM YESTERYEAR
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.