August 30, 2024 ❧ Kamala wants to build the wall, huge reforms in Mexico, and the ACLU sues over campus Palestine protests

Plus: New data on police violence, RFK abducts a dead whale, and a “suspicious incident”    

Somebody once told me the news was gonna roll me

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What's going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

❧ Kamala Harris wants to build the wall. At least, she has spent the first month of her campaign pledging to pass a bipartisan border enforcement bill that would require hundreds of millions of dollars—money appropriated during the Trump administration—to expand the border fence. Speaking to Axios, Republican Senator James Lankford emphasized just how Trumpian the “bipartisan” bill is: 

It requires the Trump border wall... It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.

Republicans are seizing on the decision as a blatant flip-flop, and they’re right. Harris called the wall a “stupid use of money” back in 2017 and pledged to “block any funding for it” while in the Senate. She later called it Trump's “medieval vanity project.” But now, in an attempt to brand Republicans as unserious about border security (since they blocked that bipartisan compromise bill multiple times over the past year), she has essentially adopted many of their positions on immigration.

Harris (and Biden before her) has attempted to thread the needle by using softer rhetoric, not outright demonizing immigrants as Trump does. But during her time as vice president, many of Trump’s most inhumane policies towards migrants not only continued but expanded. President Biden replaced Trump’s Title 42 restrictions with even tougher ones, requiring migrants to request asylum in at least one other country before being given safe harbor in the U.S. He has deported tens of thousands of Haitians back into a war zone. And he effectively ended the right to claim asylum earlier this year in response to high numbers of border crossings.

As vice president, Harris has touted herself as a central part of the Biden administration’s border policy, so she should be considered equally culpable for his decisions. And while the Biden administration’s impact on migrants is bad enough on its own, backing off the affirmative case for immigration has given Republicans a sense that they can go even further and get away with it. Trump has always demonized immigrants, but it’s hard to imagine even four years ago that the Republican National Convention would have handed out “mass deportation now” signs to attendees. But now that Democrats have basically agreed to all the things the GOP used to campaign on, they need something to distinguish themselves as the more anti-immigrant party. So, they promise a mass purging of the undesirables.  

This demonstrates a fundamental truth about Kamala Harris that has become apparent since she became the nominee: Her principles are paper thin, and she will abandon any of them to get elected. She’s already sworn off Medicare for All, a ban on fracking, and a federal jobs guarantee in an effort to appear more moderate. After seeming to propose price controls to curb corporate price gouging, her campaign immediately backed off when the press got mad. And now, in response to immigration polling, she has even signed onto perhaps the single most visible emblem of Trumpism: “the big beautiful wall.” We have to ask, is there any conviction Harris holds that she isn’t willing to sell for the right price?

We did it, Joe! 

In other news…

• Harris also said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” as a result of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. But she also said that there would be “no change in policy” as far as arms shipments to Israel. So apparently “far too many” dead is still not enough for her to actually do anything about it.
  
  
• The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s second attempt to forgive some student debt for millions of Americans. After their initial forgiveness policy was struck down last year, the Biden administration implemented a new policy under the Higher Education Act, which was designed to be more legally bulletproof. The policy has been kicked down to the Eighth Circuit but is likely to return to the Supreme Court, which seems dead set on preventing debt forgiveness no matter what. (New Republic)

• In advance copies of his new book Save America, Donald Trump reportedly threatens to jail Mark Zuckerberg for life if he “does anything illegal” to sway the election, claiming the tech CEO “steered [Facebook] against me” in 2020. (Politico)
  
  
• In the latest installment of his series on “the lesser-covered but still potentially disastrous Trump campaign promises,” Radley Balko looks at Trump’s rather incoherent vow to give “immunity” to certain law enforcement officers. From Trump’s public statements on the matter, Balko concludes that “what Trump actually wants is absolute immunity for the law enforcement officers and public officials who support him and his policies, and punishment and retribution for those who don't.” (The Watch)
  
  
• As the next step in his never-ending grift, Trump is also selling bizarre “digital trading cards” of himself for $99 a pack. (USA Today)

“NFT” apparently stands for “Nice Flat Trumps.”

(Image: CollectTrumpCards.com)

 
• A Kroger pricing executive, Andy Groff, admitted in an antitrust hearing this week that the grocery store chain is guilty of price gouging. In an internal memo revealed during the hearing, Groff acknowledged that “on milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.” When asked about the comment, he acknowledged that the company’s goal was to “pass through our inflation to consumers.” (Common Dreams)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

Responding to economists who have attempted to deny corporate greed’s role in inflation, Stephen Prager wrote this week that “Price Gouging is Definitely Real, and We Should Definitely Do Something About It.”

• The Democratic National Convention was a superspreader event. According to NBC News, members of Kamala Harris’ campaign staff, as well as multiple delegates and journalists have come back from the event with positive COVID tests. But for Discourse Blog, Caitlyn Schneider writes that she was not at all surprised that the DNC took zero precautions despite a recent COVID surge: 

This is an administration that just earlier this year suspended free at-home COVID tests, and eased mask recommendations and isolation guidelines for COVID-positive people, supposedly in pursuit of making the rules more “simple.”

Everything else was declared “brat” at the DNC, so why not the virus?

• We continue to learn more about Robert F. Kennedy’s rampage against the animal kingdom. After it came out last month that he once left a dead bear carcass in New York’s Central Park, the Center for Biological Diversity dug up a 2012 Town & Country article in which Kennedy’s daughter, Kick, revealed that her father once sawed off a dead whale’s head with a chainsaw and “then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco.” Kick recalled that “every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet.” 

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing Indiana University over its “expressive activity policy,” which forbids acts of First Amendment protected protest between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. The policy forbids all kinds of acts of free expression—even non-disruptive ones like holding signs or wearing t-shirts with political messages—during late hours. 

While the policy does not explicitly reference pro-Palestine demonstrations, it is clearly intended to tamp them down. At the end of its last semester, 57 demonstrators were arrested over the course of three days at I.U.’s Dunn Meadow, where they’d established a solidarity encampment and demanded that the school divest from companies that profit from Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. With permission from the school administration—which changed its decades-old free speech rules overnight—police violently dispersed peaceful protesters and even pointed a sniper rifle at them from atop a building. The encampment nevertheless continued over the summer, but shortly before the beginning of the fall semester, I.U. had it cleared, and the entire area fenced off.

Since the fall semester began, the I.U. Divestment Coalition and other pro-Palestine groups have attempted to test the limits of the school’s new expression policy. During the first week of the semester, more than 40 students and faculty gathered at the school’s Sample Gates for a vigil “mourning the loss of freedom of expression,” which they held at 11:30 p.m. Sure enough, the Indiana University Police Department reported two of the protest’s leaders to the school administration—Germanic studies professor Ben Robinson and informatics graduate student Bryce Greene, who is the founder of the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. 

The letter served to Greene is positively dystopian. It requires him to either “accept responsibility for the decisions [he] made and the harm caused” or submit to an adjudication process that could result in “disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion.” As the school’s most visible pro-Palestine activist, Greene has been singled out previously by the IUPD and was served a totally arbitrary five year suspension from campus for “trespassing” which was reversed over the summer after his criminal charges were dropped. 

Greene believes that he and Robinson are being targeted once again. “The fact is, it doesn’t look like they were actually going after me for any violation of policy,” he told the Indiana Daily Student. “If that were the case, then there would be other people other than me and Ben Robinson who would be under the microscope right now. But both myself and Ben have been very active on this campus fighting for various causes, and the university decided to single out us.” In addition to his pro-Palestine advocacy, Greene is also active in the school’s Graduate Workers Coalition, which has been in a protracted battle for recognition with the I.U. administration and held a three-day strike last semester.

Greene and Robinson are two of ten plaintiffs being represented by the ACLU in its lawsuit, which was brought before the Southern Indiana District Court. “The protections of the First Amendment do not end at 11:00 p.m., only to begin again at 6:00 a.m.,” said Ken Falk, the legal director of the Indiana ACLU. 

As school starts back up around the country, I.U. is one of many campuses that have put new measures in place to restrict pro-Palestinian speech. New York University recently unveiled a new policy stating that criticizing “Zionism” and “Zionists” could constitute discrimination and violate the student code of conduct. Other schools have implemented rules banning encampments, limiting the hours during which free expression can take place, and restricting the use of signs and messages written with sidewalk chalk. The suppression of speech is happening on a nationwide scale at institutions of higher learning, and it is extremely admirable that students and faculty continue to risk their careers in order to stand up not only for their rights to free expression, but for the rights of Palestinians to live in peace and freedom.

Signs posted at the recently bulldozed Dunn Meadow with the school’s “expressive activity policy.” (Photo: Carolyn Marshall, the Indiana Daily Student)

❧ The Mapping Police Violence project has released its new website, which tracks data on police brutality and the use of force across the United States. There’s a huge amount of information to dig through on the platform, but the project’s administrators have boiled it all down into six main “findings,” some more surprising than others:

1. “In 2022, [U.S.] police reported using force against 1 person per every 1,000 residents in their jurisdiction.”
2. “8 in 10 police departments reported using force at higher rates against Black people than white people per population.”
3. “Police agencies with larger budgets reported using more force, including places with similar crime rates.”
4. “Half the police agencies increased total reported use of force after the murder of George Floyd.”
5. “Most places with DOJ interventions [to investigate misconduct or mandate policy changes] reduced total reported use of force from 2017-2022.”
6. “State laws still limit access to use of force data in 31 states.”

The last finding is especially worrying, because it suggests that we still don’t know the extent of the police violence that’s going on. (Unsurprisingly, the worst state among the 50 in this respect is Alabama, where only 6 percent of the relevant data has been obtained by Mapping Police Violence.) But local journalists are already making good use of the data we do have.

This week, reporters with the Minnesota Reformer found that police in the Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—use significantly more force than the national average, debunking the idea that any meaningful “defunding” or reform took place since the George Floyd murder. (This is even relevant to the election, as the idea that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a “weak on crime, defund the police liberal” is a key Republican attack.)

Next question: What the hell is going on in Kent, Washington?

(Chart: Minnesota Reformer)

Meanwhile, the data we have is more than enough to validate the ideas that people were protesting in the streets for in 2020. Defunding the police reduces police violence and harassment against civilians, and so does increasing federal investigations and oversight. Those policies—not the failed ones of more funding and “training” for violent cops—should be the norm going forward. 

In other news…

• Approval for labor unions in the U.S. has reached a near-record high, according to a new Gallup poll, with only 23 percent of Americans saying they dislike them. (Axios)

(Chart: Axios)

• Voters in Missouri are expected to vote “yes” on ballot measures for a minimum-wage hike and legalized abortion, despite Donald Trump and Josh Hawley also leading in the same YouGov poll. (Missouri Independent)
  
  
• A new report from the Department of Justice says officials in Kentucky are putting too many people in psychiatric hospitals unnecessarily, and are failing to provide “adequate community-based mental health services” in a wide-reaching violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Louisville Public Media)

THIS WEEK IN VAGUE NEWS

What was the “suspicious incident,” you might ask? Good question! We have no idea. All we can tell from this news story is that the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management “arrived in [Lincoln Woods] park around 10:30 a.m. for reports of a gray van which had already left the park” and “spoke with witnesses, but could not get the van’s license plate number.” Maybe it was a slow news day over there, because that doesn’t seem very interesting. But in the Department’s defense, seeing a gray van IS pretty suspicious. 

• Transgender people in Florida are having their treatment terminated after the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a state law restricting gender affirming care for both teenagers and adults. “This decision implies that laws discriminating against transgender people are likely to be considered valid and constitutional by the 11th Circuit Court,” writes independent journalist Erin Reed.
  
  
• In a moment of true irony, Republican state Representative Tex Fischer could be disqualified from running for re-election in Ohio—all because the state passed a transphobic law requiring candidates to list their birth names on the ballot, and “Tex” neglected to mention that he was originally called “Austin James Fischer.” (WCMH Columbus)

You can probably make your own “leopards eating my face” joke here. 

(Image: Rep. Tex Fischer via Twitter)

• Starting on September 1, people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) will be required to go through an interview process to keep receiving their benefits, presenting an added obstacle to getting them the help they need. (Source New Mexico)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Mexico has “paused” diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Canada over its planned judicial reforms. September will be the last month in office for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, before president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum is sworn in on October 1. For most heads of state, the final month of their term would be a quiet “lame duck” period, dedicated mostly to tidying up loose ends. But AMLO’s situation is a little different, because his last month overlaps with the first month of a new Mexican Congress, in which his Morena party has a supermajority in one house and is nearing a supermajority in the other. Before he bows out as Mexico’s president, AMLO has taken advantage of the situation to push for one final, ambitious project: comprehensive judicial reform. 

He’s not done yet. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Under the Morena government’s plan, the Mexican constitution would be amended to fundamentally change the way judges get their seats. Instead of being political appointees, they would now be elected directly by the Mexican people. As the Financial Times reports, this would mean firing roughly 1,600 incumbent judges—including the Supreme Court—and holding a wave of elections to find their replacements. “Voters would choose nine new top justices from a list of 30 candidates proposed by legislators, the president and the judiciary, as well as electing hundreds of new federal judges,” FT says. At the time of writing, the plan has passed a congressional committee and is set to be debated and voted on by Mexico’s Congress next week. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States and the global financial elite are not very fond of this plan. On the 27th, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators including Marco Rubio and Tim Kaine (that’s where he went!) issued a statement of “concern” about the reforms, urging Mexico to adopt only policies that “protect judicial autonomy and strengthen investor confidence.” Ken Salazar, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, also made the baffling statement that “popular direct election of judges is a major risk to the functioning of Mexico's democracy.” (Democracy, you see, is best protected when you don’t let people vote for things.) 

The business press is also unanimously negative, with the Economist calling the plan “AMLO’s dangerous last blast” and the Wall Street Journal saying that elected judges might allow Morena to “grant state-owned energy companies priority over private investors,” (Oh no, anything but that!) and warning that “reversing market reforms” and ushering in a “state-dominated economy” is also a possibility. In other words, global investors see the Mexican judiciary as an important bulwark against anything that resembles socialism, and are getting spooked now that it may actually become a democratic institution.

Even things called “Supreme” have room for improvement. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In response to Ambassador Salazar’s criticism, the Mexican government has taken an unprecedented step. They’ve officially “paused” diplomatic relations with both the United States and Canada, with AMLO saying he wants a “statement from them that they are going to be respectful of the independence of Mexico” and not meddle in its internal affairs. Canada has obliged, issuing a statement from its Global Affairs department on the 28th—but so far, the United States has not. This is worrying, especially given the long history of U.S. interference in Latin American democracies (including Mexico’s), and the comments Republican leaders like Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham have openly made about attacking Mexico if its government displeases them. If they have any sense at all, the Biden State Department needs to take Canada’s lead and issue that statement about respecting Mexican sovereignty ASAP.

Beyond that, though, the United States might benefit from copying AMLO and Morena’s plan. North of the border, we have a Supreme Court where justices openly take expensive gifts from conservative activists with a vested interest in their cases, and then vote to strip away our reproductive rights and unleash the cops on our homeless neighbors. Why shouldn’t we do what our counterparts in Mexico are doing, and boot them all out in favor of elected replacements? It might significantly reduce the amount of el corrupción. 

In other news…

• Israel launched an airstrike upon an Anera aid convoy on Friday, killing five people. The convoy had been approved by the Israeli military and was carrying medical supplies to an Emerati-run hospital in Rafah (Middle East Eye). The attack comes shortly after the United Nations World Food Program paused the movement of its employees in the Gaza Strip after the Israel Defense Force fired upon a clearly marked aid truck—thankfully, no employees were injured in that attack (Al Jazeera). As Gaza fell into starvation and faces outbreaks of disease, Middle East Eye found that, as of April, Israel had attacked at least 357 humanitarian sites and aid convoys,  a number that has surely increased substantially since then.
  
  
• Cops in Zimbabwe arrested a Ugandan tourist, Tom Ssekamwa, for the crime of possessing… a sex toy. (A phallic one, that is.) It’s just the latest homophobic move from a government that has also blocked scholarships for LGBTQ people this year, and Ssekamwa is set to be deported. (Pulse Uganda)
  
  
• In Algeria, Fethi Ghares—a left-wing opposition leader who was involved in the 2019 Hirak protests—has been detained on charges of “insulting the president of the republic.” While the so-called “crime” is being investigated, both Ghares and his wife Messaouda Cheballah must report to court every 15 days, and neither is allowed to post online in the lead-up to Algeria’s elections on September 7. (Barron’s)

Ghares in 2021. (Image: Kamell Rachid Louh via Facebook)

• The British Labour government is planning to cut heating benefits for more than 9 million elderly people this winter. Charities are warning the cuts could cause a “public health emergency,” but Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, insists they’re necessary in order to “put the public finances on a firm footing.” In unrelated news, it’s estimated that the U.K. spends roughly £12,000 every minute on nuclear weapons. (Morning Star)
  
  
• Since Ukraine began its incursion into Russian territory, fighting has raged dangerously close to the Kursk atomic power plant. In an interview with Democracy Now!, Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense, and foreign policy expert Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, discuss the heightened risk of the Russia-Ukraine War resulting in a nuclear catastrophe.

• A 23-year-old Sri Lankan asylum seeker, Mano Yogalingam, died by self-immolation on Tuesday evening. After fleeing war in 2012, he’d spent more than a decade in legal limbo living on a temporary visa and “woke up every day wondering if it would be the day he’d be forced to return to the persecution he fled.” He was involved in advocacy for his fellow migrants, helping to organize a 49-day protest outside the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne earlier this year. But according to a friend, “The psychological torment inflicted by the Australian government’s cruel and inhumane policies, compounded by personal challenges, drove him to a point where he believed he had nothing left to live for.” (The Guardian)
  
  
• LONG READ: Kamala Harris keeps saying that she “won’t cozy up to tyrants,” like Vladimir Putin. But for Responsible Statecraft, Jack Hunter writes “negotiating with adversaries” is not a bad thing: 

When Winston Churchill famously said that “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” he clearly meant that talking was preferable to armed conflict.

Neocons have long held the opposite view: Diplomacy could prevent war, their primary goal, so better to avoid it. A tried and true method in preventing diplomacy is to accuse anyone who wants it of siding with America’s enemies […]

American presidents meeting with authoritarian leaders hostile to the United States is nothing new. Reagan did it. Obama did it. John F. Kennedy did it. Bill Clinton did it. Even George W. Bush did it, despite Republicans in his camp traditionally being the loudest voices against doing this.

Donald Trump did it too, and Kamala Harris appears to be saying she won’t.

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war, something anyone eyeing the presidency of the United States should have learned by now.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WHALE SHARK DAY!

On August 30, marine biologists—and shark enjoyers of all kinds—celebrate the biggest shark of them all: the Whale Shark. Known to scientists as rhincodon typus, these ocean-dwelling behemoths can grow up to 20 meters (65.6 feet) long and eat 46 pounds of plankton every day! They are, as the kids no longer say, absolute units. In fact, they're the third-largest creature of ANY kind in the sea, behind only blue whales and fin whales. And unlike many large sharks, they’re perfectly peaceful, often allowing scuba divers to swim right next to them without a fuss.

A whale shark welcomes a primate guest. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

As the World Wildlife Federation points out, every whale shark has a unique pattern of spots that functions like a fingerprint, allowing scientists to identify around 10,500 individuals so far. So if one happens to commit a crime in your neighborhood, you stand a decent chance of tracking them down. 

We call this one “Jeff.” (Image: Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute.)

Unfortunately, whale sharks are also endangered, thanks mostly to the arrogance and selfishness of humans who’ve been hunting them for meat and oil and hitting them with boats. If you’re able to, why not mark International Whale Shark Day by volunteering or donating to one of the conservation efforts trying to help them out?