December 13, 2024 ❧ Biden’s pardons, insurance industry propaganda, and Tories vs. sandwiches

Plus: A “free market” Syria, a SpaceX company town, stock buybacks, and innovations in whale fashion

Whose house? News house!

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

❧ As the end of his term approaches, President Biden has started to pardon people who aren’t related to him—and his selections are a mess. As The Hill reports, Biden has issued nearly 1,500 clemencies and 39 actual pardons, the most in a single day by any president. That certainly sounds good on its face, but there are problems. 

First, there are notable absences, like environmental lawyer Steven Donziger (who has essentially been railroaded for his legal efforts against Big Oil,) Native American activist Leonard Peltier, and Black Panther Party member Mumia Abu-Jamal. Peltier and Abu-Jamal were both convicted of murder on highly doubtful evidence, and both are senior citizens with serious health conditions, so they will almost certainly die in prison if Biden does not pardon them. 

Even worse, Biden has seen fit to commute the sentence of Michael Conahan, the infamous “Kids for Cash” judge who received kickbacks for sending children to for-profit juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania. So apparently Biden intends to end his political career the way he began it: on the side of corrupt and abusive business interests, and against anyone who actually deserves help. 

From left to right: Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Steven Donziger

❧ It could be worse, though: on Truth Social, which he’s joined for some reason, Senator John Fetterman recently said that Biden should also pardon Donald Trump for his 34 felony convictions, which Fetterman calls “bullshit.” Remember when people thought that guy was the “future of the Democratic Party?” (Politico)

❧ Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC), who you might know from her vicious and obsessive transphobia, claims she was “physically accosted” at an event for foster youth. But eyewitnesses disagree, saying a pro-trans advocate merely shook her hand firmly, and one of Mace’s former staffers calls the alleged assault a “pathetic ploy for attention” on her part. It’s also worth noting that Mace claimed in 2021 that someone had vandalized her home with handwriting suspiciously similar to her own, so, you know, several grains of salt here. (Huffington Post)

Mace trying her best to look like a sympathetic victim

of the Dangerous Left. (Image: Art Candee via Twitter)

❧ The House has passed a resolution calling for public school students to be taught about the “evils of communism.” The non-binding resolution calls for public schools to adopt a curriculum created by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group with close ties to neoconservative foreign policy ideologues. 

There is nothing wrong with students being taught about, for instance, atrocities committed by Communist regimes like Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, of which there are many. But the curriculum put forth by the VoC goes well beyond that into political evangelizing—for instance, one lesson instructs teachers to “Take away a student’s favorite pencil or pen, backpack, phone, etc.” to teach about the evils of private property confiscation. 

VoC has also been criticized for downplaying the crimes of Nazis and other fascist regimes during World War II. (A memorial by a similar group in Canada was recently found to have included many Nazi war criminals among its “victims of Communism.”) However, when Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) suggested that the bill be rounded out to require teaching about the evils of fascism and McCarthyism as well, Republicans on the House Rules Committee unanimously shot him down. (The Intercept)

An image that will presumably be appearing in textbooks across America soon.

(Art by Tom Chitty from Issue 26 of Current Affairs Magazine July/Aug. 2020)

❧ Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both of whom are leaving the Senate in January, have stabbed the American working class in the back one last time. As Matt Bruenig reports for Jacobin, both of them have voted to block Democrat Lauren McFerran from being reappointed to the National Labor Relations Board. This means that when Donald Trump gets into office next month, he’ll both appoint McFerran’s replacement and fill the two vacancies on the six-member board, handing a 4-2 majority to the GOP and their anti-worker agenda. As Manchin and Sinema pass through the “revolving door” from public to private sectors, expect them to be richly rewarded with cushy jobs in the near future!

❧ According to an investigation by the Lever, health insurance companies have spent more than $120 billion since 2010—money that could have gone towards covering insurance claims—on stock buybacks that enrich top executives and shareholders. Meanwhile, one in three Americans are struggling with medical debt and nearly a quarter say they’ve avoided seeking healthcare due to the cost. The worst offender, if you can believe it, is good ol’ UnitedHealth, which has more than doubled its stock buyback spending since 2010 while denying more claims than other insurers. Why are people mad at these guys? Who’s to say…

Graphic: The Lever 

FOLK SONG OF THE WEEK

One small silver lining to things Getting Really Bad is that it tends to produce some great music. And just as the Dust Bowl gave us Woody Guthrie and Vietnam gave us Phil Ochs, the depredations of our modern healthcare system have introduced us to Jesse Welles, whose song “United Health” went viral on TikTok this week. In just a minute and a half, he managed to perfectly encapsulate the rage that millions are currently feeling towards the healthcare industry: “You paid for the paper, you paid for the phone. You paid for everything they need to deny you what you’re owed.”

It’s not the first time modern inequality and injustice have been channeled through folk revival. But unlike Oliver Anthony, whose viral “Rich Men North of Richmond” croon was boosted last year by right-wingers who appreciated his “populist” bashing of welfare moochers, the Arkansas-based Welles directs his venom at the people who actually deserve it: Companies that profit from slave labor, opioid manufacturers, and warmongers who use patriotism to paper over mass death. If that sounds like the sort of catharsis you need, check out his new album, Hell’s Welles!

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The corporate media are not handling the Luigi Mangione story well. We now have the first official survey about the accused shooter’s public approval rating, and it shows that although people dislike murder generally, roughly “31% of U.S. adults under 45” have a positive view of Mangione—significantly higher than the group that has anything good to say about UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson (16 percent) or the health insurance industry as a whole (26 percent.) 

Graphic: Center for Strategic Politics

In response, America’s biggest corporate media outlets are trying to prevent pro-Luigi and anti-industry sentiment from spreading any further. On Fox News, the hosts of Outnumbered called for a crackdown on anyone joking about the assassination online:

Look, if you are an employer, if you are a boss, if you are a teacher, if you are in charge of admissions anywhere in this country right now, check your employees, check your children, check the social media of anyone over which you have control of their employment, their education, their influence to see if that they have participated in the online hailing of an alleged murderer[...] I need to see there be some accountability. 

Meanwhile, the New York Times has run an op-ed by the CEO of UnitedHealth’s parent company, in which he admits that his industry is “flawed” (no kidding!) but defends its existence as essentially legitimate. They’ve also printed a truly execrable column from Bret Stephens, who claims that “Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero.” 

The Times has also been suppressing information and images that it believes could lead people to conclusions it doesn’t want them to make. As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein points out, they refuse to print Mangione’s full manifesto (even though it’s quite short), and leaked internal messages from editor Andrea Kannapell say this is “so as not to provide bullhorn.” (No issue with providing a “bullhorn” to UnitedHealth, apparently.)

Do you really want these people deciding what information you should get?

(Image: Ken Klippenstein)

Top editors at the NYT have also issued guidance to “dial back” on publishing pictures of Mangione’s face out of fear of “amplifying the crime.” Klippenstein describes the whole approach as “media paternalism” and blasts the Times for its “selective disclosure” of the information it wants its readers to have, and he’s right. This is yet another object lesson in why you can’t trust the corporate press to tell you the unfiltered truth about a situation, and why supporting independent journalists like Ken is critical. 

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❧ Documentarian Michael Moore has a much better take on the Mangione situation. On his blog, Moore writes:

The anger is 1000% justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger... Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away.

Moore has also made his acclaimed 2007 film Sicko, about that same “rapacious” system, available to watch for free on YouTube. Check it out below:

❧ In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy has signed a law banning book bans. Called the “Freedom to Read Act,” the new legislation says that no public school or library may remove a book because of “the origin, background, or views of the material or of its authors,” or based on “a disagreement with a viewpoint, idea, or concept, or solely because an individual finds certain content offensive.” However, the law leaves a big exception for material that’s deemed “developmentally inappropriate” for students, so there’s still room for conservatives to argue that things like the memoirs of gay people are “inappropriate,” making this a flawed solution at best. (The Hill)

❧ Also in New Jersey, or more precisely, above New Jersey, there’s been some odd activity in the sky. Since last month there have been dozens of drone sightings over the Garden state. It’s legal for anyone to fly a drone in the state, but the ones spotted have been the size of an SUV, quite a bit larger than the ones typically flown by hobbyists. They’ve also been seen whizzing over some sensitive sites, like Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf course and a U.S. military research facility. In a possible effort to recapture the magic of last year’s Chinese Spy Balloon Emergency, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) said he believed the drones were coming from an “Iranian mothership,” but the Pentagon was quick to shoot that idea down. As of Friday, there’s still no clear answer about who, or what, is flying these things. (The Independent)

❧ Opponents of the death penalty in Arizona are pushing for Governor Katie Hobbs to release an investigation into executions in the state. After a horrifying botched execution in 2014 that left a man gasping for air for two hours following a lethal injection, Arizona halted executions for more than eight years before restarting in 2022. Hobbs stopped them again but said she’d be willing to bring back the practice if it could be done humanely. She commissioned an investigation in 2023 into the history of executions in the state. But the results have not been shared with the public. But she is now pushing to resume capital punishment despite the outcry. (AZ Mirror)

❧ In true old-timey robber baron fashion, Elon Musk is hoping to turn a SpaceX base in Texas into a company town. The company filed for an election this week for the rocket launch site Starbase, a rocket launch site where many employees already live, into an official city. (Because Elon Musk has not encountered any memes created after 2011, he wants the leader of the municipality to be referred to as “the Doge.”) Musk already has one company town, also in Texas, called Snailbrook, which is run by his Boring Company and has drawn numerous environmental complaints. As Rani Molla reported last week for Sherwood News, the company also vastly overpromised amenities to its residents:

Its plans called for an initial 110 single-family homes for his employees. Two years into the project, the town is mostly just a bodega, a smaller-than-planned school, and about 15 trailers tucked behind Boring’s facilities. When I visited, it felt like a rushed job with unfinished walls and a broken-down playground.

❧ Elsewhere in dystopian tech news, posters have been spotted around San Francisco urging passersby to “Stop Hiring Humans.” It is for a software startup called Artisan, which sells “A.I. sales agents” to companies. “Artisans won't complain about work-life balance,” reads one billboard. “Artisan's Zoom cameras will never 'not be working' today,” reads another. Their pitch, in short, is that humans, with all their pesky needs for food, shelter, and basic dignity, are too much of a hassle for the jet-setting business owner to deal with. There has to be a better way! 

Of course, there is a better way for technology like this to be utilized. Working as a remote sales representative is a mind-numbingly tedious job that nobody should have to do unless they enjoy it for some reason. We could make it so that the money saved using A.I. is collectively pooled to allow as many people as possible to stop doing bullshit jobs and have more time for leisure. But this is capitalism, so instead, it’s pitched merely as a way for companies to maximize their profits by laying off as many humans as possible. (Ars Technica)

Photo: Gigazine

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Syria’s new government says it’ll transition to a free-market economy. If past examples like the collapse of the Soviet Union are anything to go by, this will be great news for foreign investors and the domestic oligarchs who are in a position to make deals with them, but not-so-great news for ordinary Syrians who don’t have the money to engage with the “free market” in the first place. Still, the bigger question is whether the incoming Trump administration will end the United States’ crippling sanctions against Syria, which really can’t be defended now that Assad is gone. (Reuters)

❧ Animal activists are trying to stop a festival in Nepal where thousands of animals are ritually sacrificed. The Gadhimai festival, which happens every five years in a town near the Indian border, culminates with a mass sacrifice of goats, pigeons, and buffaloes. Participants believe that the sacrifices to the goddess Gadhimai bring good fortune. But animal rights activists call it “an appalling bloodbath,” and have petitioned for the Supreme Court to intervene to stop the slaughter. Though the number of animals sacrificed has gone down significantly in recent years, thousands are still killed. Activists have also helped to rescue more than 750 of the animals to safety for release in the wild. (CNN)

❧ Colombian mercenaries are now being deployed in Sudan’s horrific civil war. As the Wall Street Journal reports: 

Several regional governments are vying to assert their influence as the fighting escalates, led by the United Arab Emirates on one side and Egypt on the other—with devastating consequences for Sudan’s 48 million people, some of whom are now in the grip of famine. At stake is control of Red Sea shipping lanes, some of Africa’s largest gold reserves and the contested waters of the Nile.

The UAE, which had already been sending weapons to Rapid Support Forces militants in Sudan, also paid a group of around 160 Colombian soldiers for hire to back RSF up after it lost ground.

WHAT’S PYONGYANG’S TAKE ON RECENT EVENTS IN THE SOUTH?

Things have been quite chaotic in South Korea of late after President Yoon Suk Yeol’s bumbling attempt to declare martial law last week. But strangely, their adversaries to the North—who Yoon has taken a hard line against—have been silent about the matter. That is until Wednesday, when North Korean state media finally gave its take, blaring that “The puppet Yoon Suk Yeol” had “unleashed the guns of the fascist dictatorship on the people.” This is pretty much true…though for North Korea to call somebody else a dictatorship is a tad ironic.

 That quote came from the Korean-language outlet KCNA. Being uncultured American swine, we occasionally like to check what’s going on in the Pyongyang Times, North Korea’s only English-speaking news source. Sadly, they have not provided a take on the Yoon situation. Though, this is somewhat understandable, as there have been a lot of General Secretary Kim Jong-Un’s Revolutionary Activities to keep tabs on:

❧ A new YouGov poll on the approval rating of various “isms” shows that people in the U.K. prefer socialism (which has 38 percent in favor) to capitalism (which came in at 30 percent). Fascism ranked dead last with only 1.9 percent support, and we certainly hope that was because people kept slipping and hitting the wrong button. (UnHerd)

❧ Also in the UK, newly-elected Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has shown she’s tapped into the public mood by claiming that sandwiches aren’t “real food” and that taking a lunch break “is for wimps.” Even Reform UK leader Nigel Farage found this ridiculous, saying that lunch is “pretty cool”—but since Britain is still in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis where many people can’t afford food at all, maybe they’d both be wiser to keep quiet. (BBC)

ORCA and SALMON FACT OF THE WEEK

Among orcas, salmon hats are back in style!

In 1987, whale watchers studying Puget Sound made a strange observation: the local orcas had developed a penchant for wearing dead salmon on their heads. It all started with one female orca from “K-pod,” one of the several distinct groups of whales in the Sound, who started carrying a salmon around on her nose for no obvious reason. She soon had imitators, and the “fad” for salmon hats expanded to the entirety of K-pod and two other pods as well. Like a human fashion trend, it lasted for about a year before disappearing. 

Now, though, the salmon hats are back! As James Felton writes for IFL Science, orcas have once again been spotted wearing their fishy chapeaus around Puget Sound after a 37-year break, and this time it’s a whale dubbed “J27 Blackberry” at the forefront of the craze. Speaking to New Scientist, researcher Deborah Giles confessed that “we have no idea why this started[...], why it happens or why it seems to be started again,” but other scientists speculate that it could be a way for the orcas to save excess food—“less of a salmon hat trend, and more a case of using their head as a lunchbox.” 

“Where e’er I go, they shout, Hello! Where did you get that hat?” 

(Image: SalmonBusiness.com)

Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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