August 9, 2024 ❧ Kamala scolds Gaza protesters, a national tenants' union, and trans rights in Nepal

Plus: How to fight Wall Street with a cello, LA's homeless deaths, free diapers in Tennessee, AIPAC buys another primary, and a house fit for a mouse.

Maybe the real news was the friends we made along the way.

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The U.S. is getting a national federation of tenant unions. As rents skyrocket and landlords resist providing air conditioning during an extreme-heat crisis, there’s been one encouraging trend: the rapid growth of tenant unions across the country. Renters have been organizing and standing up for their rights everywhere from North Carolina to New Mexico, and in some cases they’ve even forced large corporate landlords to the bargaining table. Now, their movement has taken a new step forward. 

This Tuesday, five tenant unions—representing Bozeman, Montana, Louisville, Kentucky, the South Side of Chicago, Kansas City, and the entire state of Connecticut—combined their forces to form the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a “union of unions.” As Rebecca Burns writes for In These Times, each of the founding members has impressive accomplishments. Bozeman Tenants United, for instance, successfully lobbied for a ban on new rentals by Airbnb and similar companies in the city, and even got one of its members elected as deputy mayor (a role that transitions to regular mayor after two years, starting in 2026.) The other four unions are equally formidable, and TUF’s opening statement says that the coalition is “starting small on purpose” and “plan[s] to expand in 2025.”

This is exactly what the United States needed. For too long, renters have been at the mercy of a handful of wealthy individuals and corporations, who own all the property and dictate the terms of everyone else’s life. There was a brief, promising attempt to organize a National Tenants Union in 1979, but that organization collapsed after a few years, and there’s really been nothing similar since. Now, TUF has the potential to serve a similar role for tenants as the AFL-CIO does for industrial workers—or better still, the Industrial Workers of the World. If it grows big enough, it could even become a political force whose endorsement can sway the course of elections, like those of the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers. More power to it!

Photo: Bozeman Tenants United

In other news…

• John Mark Rozendaal, a 63-year-old professional cellist and former Princeton professor, has been issued a restraining order by the NYPD for playing his cello in front of Citibank’s world headquarters as an act of protest. Citigroup, which owns the banking conglomerate, is the second-largest funder of fossil fuel projects worldwide, having invested $396 billion between 2016 and 2023, and its corporate headquarters has become a key target for the ongoing “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” climate protests. Rozendaal is now subject to arrest if he returns to protest again—and he wouldn’t be the first to be hauled away, as NYPD Assistant Chief James McCarthy estimates that his department has arrested more than a thousand people at Citibank this year. Still, the cellist and his fellow activists have already sworn to defy the restraining order, and come back anyway. (Inside Climate News)

$396 billion can’t stop one determined man with a cello.

(Image: Summer of Heat on Wall Street)

• More than 11,500 people have died while homeless in Los Angeles over the past decade. Over a quarter of them, more than 3,000, were older than 60 years old. And the crisis continues to grow. Last year, there were four times as many fatalities as ten years before. “The data offers a snapshot of a crisis in a region that’s becoming increasingly unaffordable, where there’s not enough housing support to meet the needs of the population, and where many residents are struggling to access critical medical care and mental health treatment,” reports the Guardian.
  
  
• In yet another disaster linked to climate change, a melting glacier has caused an “outburst flood” in Juneau, Alaska, damaging more than 100 homes. (Alaska Beacon)
  
  
• Gideon Cody, the police chief who authorized a raid on a local newspaper in Marion, Kansas last year, will face criminal charges over the abuse of power. (Associated Press)
  
  
• A middle school in El Paso, Texas has banned its students from wearing all-black clothing, claiming it’s associated with “depression” and “criminality.” Apparently having their right to free expression trampled is supposed to make the kids less depressed? (My San Antonio)
  
  
• The American Federation of Teachers is suing the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) which handles around 8 million people’s student loans—alleging that it gave borrowers misleading information about their loans and illegally deducted payments from their bank accounts without consent. (The Guardian)
  
  
• Republicans in Utah have banned 13 books from public schools statewide, including Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, Forever by Judy Blume, and the first five installments of the Court of Thorns and Roses fantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas. Of the 13 books prohibited, 12 are by women, which doesn’t exactly seem like a coincidence. (Salt Lake Tribune)

Schoolchildren in Utah will now be safe from this dangerous poetry, if not from assault rifles. 

• For In These Times, Sarah Jaffe profiles the “Minnesota Model” of activism that has surged in recent years, resulting in huge policy victories: 

The Minnesota Model has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage (with proposals to bring it up to $20); so many union contracts it’s hard to count, for janitors and tenants and teachers.

• The Tennessee Medicaid system, “TennCare,” is now the first in the nation to include free diapers—up to 100 of them per month—among its services. This is a rare good decision from a state with a Republican governor, and something the other 49 states should be copying. (WBIR)
  
  
• The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as “Angola,” has been ordered by a federal court to make reforms to its “farm line”—the system in which prisoners are forced to do agricultural work by hand, often in brutal heat. But so far, legal advocates for the prisoners say very little actual reform has been made. (The Lens)

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)

❧ Kamala Harris just scolded protestors against the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. At a campaign event in Detroit, Harris had her first encounter with pro-Palestinian protestors since she officially became the Democratic candidate for president—and it did not go well. When chants of “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!” broke out in the crowd, she got visibly frustrated, and replied: 

“We believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now… You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

Harris was, indeed, speaking. The problem is that she wasn’t listening. People don’t come out to protest Democrats over Gaza because they “want Donald Trump to win.” That’s absurd. They do it because they’re horrified by the crimes against humanity their tax dollars pay for: the bombing, the starvation, the deliberate destruction of schools and hospitals, the use of white phosphorus in civilian neighborhoods, and the sadistic abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israel. (More on that later in the briefing, unfortunately.) 

The correct response would have been for Harris to simply tell the protestors, “You’re right, and U.S. support for this war will end.” When she replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, there were vague suggestions in the media that she might make a “foreign policy shift” in a more humane direction. But this moment was a test, and by lashing out at the protestors, she failed it. 

Even worse, Phil Gordon—the national security adviser to the Harris campaign—announced on Thursday morning that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel” and will “always ensure Israel is able to defend itself,” putting the kibosh on previous reports that she might be open to halting arms sales. It’s the first concrete statement the campaign has made on Israel policy, and it’s in favor of more bombing and death. There are still months to go in this election, and Harris has time to change course. But if she wants to earn the votes of people who care about human rights and putting a stop to genocide, this won’t cut it. Not even close. 

In other news...

• Representative Cori Bush (D-MO) lost her primary on the 6th, thanks largely to the millions of dollars AIPAC has been spending to unseat critics of Israel. In Jacobin, Ben Burgis writes that “Bush took a stand for basic human decency — and for that crime, she was drummed out of Congress.”
  
  
• Meanwhile, Valentina Gomez—the Republican candidate for Missouri Secretary of State who became notorious online for calling liberals “weak and gay”—also lost her primary, getting only 7.4 percent of the vote. That’s just embarrassing. (PinkNews)
  
  
• The FBI is investigating Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) over allegations of campaign fraud, and agents have seized his phone. It’s generally not a good sign when that happens! (Tennessee Lookout)
  
  
• Politicians love insider trading. But VP candidate Tim Walz, extraordinarily, does not own any stocks, mutual funds, bonds, private equities, or other securities, Axios reports. (Not even cryptocurrency!) Ben Shapiro says Walz’s lack of investments “would explain the socialism.” But not owning stock actually makes Walz like the majority of Americans, who either don’t own any stock or own a small amount indirectly through a 401(k) or other fund. In fact, the majority of stock is owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 50 percent own just 1 percent of it.
  
  
• Does the United States need a labor party? It sounds like a good idea, but for How Things Work, Hamilton Nolan argues that in our current electoral system, it would likely run into all the same challenges that other irrelevant third parties have. Instead, he proposes that the labor movement should try to take over the Democratic Party or work towards electoral reforms, like proportional representation, that would allow third parties to actually stand a chance.

AROUND THE WORLD

❧  Nepal’s supreme court just ruled that trans women are women. The landmark decision came after the 27-year-old Rukshana Kapali, a transgender woman and prominent activist, brought more than 50 lawsuits against the Nepalese government for refusing to recognize her as a woman on legal documents. According to Human Rights Watch:

Trans people in Nepal today who want to change their gender markers to “female” or “male” are typically forced to undergo surgery, which requires traveling outside the country, and then in-country medical assessments, including invasive examinations of post-operative genitals. Even people who are attempting to obtain documents marked “other” are subjected to this humiliating and unnecessary medical scrutiny. 

Due to her inability to “prove” her status as a female by submitting to this invasive medical examination, Kapali was refused registration at her college and denied the ability to take exams.

However, in a decision made in November 2023 but not publicized until last week, Nepal’s supreme court ruled that these requirements violated Article 16 of the nation's constitution, which states that “Every person shall have the right to live with dignity.” Importantly, the court did not merely object to this policy because it was an invasion of privacy (though it certainly is) or because Kapali faced discrimination (though she certainly did). According to the Himalayan, the court also ruled that the right to dignity includes “one's right to live with the gender identity he/she feels other than the gender assigned at birth.” 

Nepal’s court clarified that it was only issuing a narrow ruling in Kapali’s case and that other trans people would need to submit separate claims to have their preferred gender recognized. But this is still a huge deal. It sets an important precedent, providing a legal recognition for transgender people to self-identify as their preferred gender. This puts Nepal in a rarefied group of just 20 other nations worldwide that recognize the right. (For the record, a lot of supposedly “liberal” Western democracies like the U.S., U.K., and Australia lag behind.)

Photo: Rukshana Kapali, via She is the Story

In other news…

• A horrific video has emerged confirming the accusations of sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners of war by Israeli soldiers. It comes shortly after the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a massive new report revealing how Israel has transformed “more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.”
  
  
• After a week of racist and anti-immigrant attacks across the United Kingdom by the far-right, tens of thousands of anti-racist counterprotesters have poured out across the country to protect refugee centers and immigration law firms that had been marked for attacks. (The Guardian)
  
  
• Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont has returned to Spain, defying an active arrest warrant for his role in organizing Catalonia's 2017 independence referendum. (El País)
  
  
• After a student-led protest movement ousted Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus has been appointed to lead an interim government. (Al Jazeera)
  
  
• The French Left is pressuring President Macron to make Lucie Castets, a largely unknown socialist economist who works for the Paris City Hall, as prime minister. Castets recently revealed that she is married to a woman, and she’d be the second openly gay person to hold the position. (RFI)
  
  
• Iran has reportedly executed 29 people over the course of two days this week—mostly for drug offenses or murder—bringing the number to 345 on the year. The United Nations has decried the number of executions in the Islamic Republic as “alarmingly high.” (Associated Press)
  
  
• Inside Climate News profiled Hugo Loss, an analyst for Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency who is responsible for stopping illegal logging, poaching, land grabbing, and attacks on indigenous tribes. It was recently revealed that Loss and more than a dozen other environmental officials were illegally spied on by Brazil’s environmentalist-hating former president Jair Bolsonaro.
  
  
• The US has more than 60 secret bases across the Middle East according to a new investigation by the Intercept, and over a dozen have been attacked since Oct. 7, 2023.
  
  
• Antarctic tourism has been booming, even as the continent has been slowly melting. It has revealed a strange paradox: “The more people visit it, the more people feel a passion to protect it from human impact. And yet every person who goes there inevitably contributes to its destruction: the BBC estimates that the average carbon emissions for an Antarctic tourist are 3.76 tonnes – roughly what a person typically generates in an entire year.” (The Guardian)

MOUSE FACT OF THE WEEK 

Wimbledon’s used tennis balls are turned into cozy houses for endangered mouses. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Every year, the famed Wimbledon tennis championships use more than 50,000 balls over the course of the competition. After being vociferously whacked back and forth, most of them become worn out and unable to be used. They need to go somewhere. Rather than toss them in landfills, a group of conservationists came up with a clever alternative use for them in 2001: They could be used to help protect Britain’s smallest mammal, the harvest mouse.

At just 5 to 7 cm—about the size of your thumb—these little guys face a lot of danger in the wild. In addition to worrying about natural predators like birds of prey and weasels, their habitats are often destroyed by human farming.

This is where the tennis balls come into play: after the tournament ends, conservationists poke a small hole in the balls and attach them to poles about a meter off the ground. This makes for the perfect little loft where harvest mice can live in relative safety. Not only are the holes too small for their predators to enter, but the balls have enough room to fit as many as ten harvest mice inside!

Photo: Roger Tidman, FLPA, via the Telegraph