December 17, 2024 ❧ Privatizing the mail, a potential strike at Amazon, and RFK’s lawyer wants the polio vaccine gone

Plus: More mysterious drones, Australia arrests climate protesters, Trump settles a lawsuit, and rats wearing tiny backpacks

Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight

and stand there and read the news?

AROUND THE STATES

❧ Labor strikes may be hitting Amazon during the peak of the holiday season. In the Metro Atlanta area, more than 200 drivers unionized under the Teamsters say they’re “overwhelmed” with work, and are threatening to stage a walkout as early as next week if their demands for better pay and more predictable scheduling aren’t met. Drivers in Skokie, Illinois have also voted to authorize a similar strike, and so have their counterparts at four California facilities, and in Chicago. Altogether, the Teamsters say they’ve organized 7,000 Amazon workers. If they all strike at once, it could cause quite a disruption for everyone’s holiday plans—and it would be entirely Jeff Bezos and his fellow bosses’ faults for pushing them that far. (The Guardian)

This may turn into a showdown with the ultimate Yuletide villain.

 (Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine)

❧ New Jersey remains in the throes of DRONE MADNESS. In our last briefing, we quickly examined the claims of Representative Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ)—who was adamant, despite a lack of evidence, that the unidentified aircraft he’d seen swooping over the Garden State came from a nefarious “Iranian mothership” that didn’t actually exist. Since then, Drone Madness has only continued to proliferate across the Eastern seaboard. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who lambasted the government for its “dismissive attitude,” published a video he recorded of small lights in the sky. A meteorologist pointed out that he had, in fact, videotaped the constellation Orion, reassuring him that it “will be in a similar place tomorrow.” 

This is characteristic of most sightings that have been reported, which consist of little more than the grainiest photos and videos anyone has ever seen of blinking lights. That said, politicians are convinced (or at least attempting to appear convinced) that something unspeakable is whizzing across our skies. Rep. Chris Smith (also R-NJ) began drafting legislation that would deputize local police to shoot down drones, so we can “bag one”—because cops haphazardly firing a Glock at lights in the sky could certainly never have unintended consequences. Donald Trump himself has claimed that the government knows more than it’s letting on about the drones, saying “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”

If there truly is more to this story, then it obviously should be made public. But if these are just regular aircraft, then it’s hard to imagine that such an explanation would satisfy Republicans who seem determined to believe that something horrible is going on up there. When so much of your political platform involves fearmongering about fictitious threats, you’re kind of predisposed to get caught up in scares like this one. 

Obviously this must be shot down immediately. Ask questions later.

(Image: CBS 8 San Diego via YouTube)

❧ After the shooting of United Health CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month, New York state is considering implementing a special hotline for CEOs to report perceived threats. As Ken Klippenstein writes, “the proposal is a sign of the acute concern by government officials when it comes to business executives — even though there have not been any other documented attacks on CEOs and the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, has been arrested.” Politico reports that New York Govenor Kathy Hochul has held a meeting with 175 corporate representatives over security worries. It also reports that New York’s security forces has been coordinating closely with Katherine Wylde of the business group Partnership for New York City, who describes the “Demonization of corporate executives” as a potential new pipeline to domestic terrorism.

In fact, last week a mother of three in Florida was charged with “threats to conduct a mass shooting or act of terrorism,” after she uttered the phrase “Delay, Deny, Depose” and said “You people are next” after having her insurance claim denied over the phone by Blue Cross Blue Shield. She later apologized and clarified she had no intent to commit a crime and didn’t even own a firearm. As Klippenstein writes, it’s a “nice little reminder of just how responsive government can be when it comes to corporate executives.”

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

❧ RFK Jr.’s lawyer wants to get rid of the polio vaccine. As the New York Times reports, Aaron Siri—who’s been helping Kennedy interview potential staffers for the Department of Health and Human Services, and may get an administration job himself—is also a dangerous anti-vaxxer. Among other things, Siri filed a petition in 2022 for the FDA to revoke its approval of the vaccine for polio, which has saved countless lives since its invention in 1955, and he wants to “pause the distribution” of 13 other vaccines. 

Siri’s argument is both simple and heinous: he doesn’t approve of vaccines, including those for polio and Hepatitis B, that haven’t been given a double-blind clinical trial. For us non-scientists, that means a trial where both the real medication and a placebo are tested, and the results compared against each other. But the issue with doing this for the polio vaccine should be obvious. It would require giving a child a fake vaccine and then sending them out in the world without protection from real polio to see what happens, possibly harming their health in the process. That’s so wildly unethical that only a total crackpot would see it as an option. 

Even Donald Trump realizes how dangerous this guy is. He’s been trying to soothe the public’s nerves about RFK Jr. and his lawyer, reassuring everyone that he’s personally a “big believer” in the polio vaccine and that “you’re not going to lose [it]... that’s not going to happen.” Let’s hope he keeps his word on that, because the prospect of polio making a comeback and putting people in iron lungs thanks to Siri really doesn’t bear thinking about. 

Please, let’s not go back to this. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

❧ ABC has settled a ridiculous defamation lawsuit with Donald Trump. At issue were statements by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who questioned Rep. Nancy Mace in March over why she’d support a presidential candidate who’d “been found liable for rape by a jury.” Trump’s lawyers sued ABC, claiming defamation, as Trump had only been found liable for the “sexual abuse” of Carroll and not “rape.” (How dare you call my client a rapist? He is merely a sexual abuser!) 

Initially, ABC used the defense that Stephanopoulos’ statement was “substantially true” which seemed particularly strong since even the judge in that very case acknowledged that Trump was guilty of something that would commonly be understood as “rape.” Nevertheless, ABC backed down this week after a judge denied a motion to dismiss the case. Stephanopoulos issued a groveling apology and the network agreed to pay out $15 million that will fund Trump’s presidential library and museum. This is quite a pathetic capitulation that will surely embolden Trump to go after the press in other ways. (Washington Post)

❧ Trump wants to privatize the United States postal service, which—as Ben Burgis writes for Jacobin—would be an absolutely awful idea that would make the service both more expensive and less comprehensive. He writes:

The very design of the postal service is tied to its public mission. Indeed, common sense should tell anyone that no private company would ever have an incentive to carry a letter from Los Angeles to rural Alaska for seventy-three cents (the current cost of a USPS stamp).

And there are large swathes of the country where, if the public post offices were closed or sold to corporations whose first duty was to shareholder revenues, it simply wouldn’t be profitable to offer mail service at all. The USPS has a “universal service” mandate that requires it to operate everywhere in the country. No private alternative ever would.

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is about six months ahead of Trump. Instead of talking about having the UK’s Royal Mail taken over by private interests, he’s actually sealed the deal. On Monday, the BBC reported that the Labour government had inked a “legally binding” arrangement to sell the Mail’s parent company to a Czech billionaire named Daniel Kretinsky for £3.6 billion, or about $4.58 billion U.S. dollars. Kretinsky is a certified oligarch who already owns a 10 percent stake in the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain, and his portfolio just got a lot bigger. Supposedly there are safeguards in place, including a “golden share” that remains in government hands and prevents Kretinsky from making any dramatic changes to Royal Mail’s structure without state approval. But this is still a distressing example of selling off iconic public goods for short-term gain—something you might expect a free-market Conservative, not anyone calling themself a Labour Party PM, to do. 

Presumably these all have to be stenciled “Kretinsky” now. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

❧ Australia came in #1 in a new ranking of the world’s countries! Unfortunately, it was for who’s the most aggressive about arresting climate protesters. The study came out from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and it shows that in Australia, roughly 20 percent of climate and environment-related protests end up involving an arrest. That’s more than the U.K. itself (17.2 percent), more than Norway (14.5 percent), and even the United States, which for all its cuff-happy cops arrests green demonstrators just 10 percent of the time. However, there’s a caveat: some countries, like Brazil and the Philippines, have low “arrest” rates because protesters there tend to simply be killed instead. (ABC)

❧ The London-based nonprofit Airwars has some new data demonstrating that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was vastly more destructive than any other military campaign in the 21st century. In the first 25 days of bombing in October 2023 alone, it counted 5,139 civilians killed— four times more than in any other conflict they have documented since 2014. 1,900 of those civilians were children. They conclude, “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st-century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.” As Branko Marcetic wrote on Twitter, that’s “because it's not really a war as we tend to think of it—it's a militarised human extermination campaign.”

The yellow bar represents Syria in January 2016, previously the deadliest month for

children on record. The blue is Gaza in October 2023. (Graphic: Airwars)

❧ North Korea suffered its first casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war according to the Pentagon and Ukrainian intelligence. In the fall, North Korea deployed thousands of soldiers to help the Russian war effort, a frightening escalation that raised the risk of the conflict spiraling out into a global war. Now, it is believed that at least 30 North Koreans were killed or injured this week fighting in Kursk to push back Ukraine’s counteroffensive. (BBC)

❧ An arrest warrant has been issued for former Bolivian president Evo Morales for the alleged sexual abuse of a 15-year-old girl, with whom he is accused of fathering a child in 2016. Morales has repeatedly denied the allegations, claiming they are part of a plot by President Luis Arce, a one-time ally in the Movement for Socialism party (MAS), with whom Morales has been involved in a bitter power struggle for the past year. The warrant was first reported in October after Morales refused to testify about the complaint, but prosecutors considered it unactionable because Morales supporters had barricaded the highways leading to Cochabamba, where Morales had been in hiding. (Prensa Latina)

❧ Pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world. The conservation group Planet Wild is working to save them. These strange, adorable critters have been hunted nearly to extinction, with their scales being harvested to produce luxury goods. Planet Wild and a group of Vietnamese wildlife rescuers undertook a daring mission to rehome some of the country’s last remaining pangolins. You can watch it on YouTube below and check out some of their other missions here:

RAT FACT OF THE WEEK

Speaking of the fight against animal trafficking, there’s another secret weapon: Rats with tiny backpacks!

“Where’s Dean Martin? You said we were going to see the Rat Pack!”

According to the Guardian, researchers for the Belgian-founded, Tanzania-based NGO Apopo trained African giant pouched rats “to sniff out pangolin scales, rhino horns, elephant tusks, and hardwood.” They could even sniff them out when disguised by common objects like “peanuts, leaves, wigs and washing powder.” The rats used by Apopo have a keen sense of smell and have previously been used to detect landmines and tuberculosis. 

But you’re probably wondering: Where does the backpack come in? This getup contains a beeper that the rats were trained to click when they detect illegal contraband. In one test at a hub in Dar es Salaam notorious for trafficking, the rats did astonishingly well, discovering 85 percent of the contraband that was planted by researchers. They may put sniffer dogs out of business, as the study determined that they were capable of remembering smells for longer.

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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