February 7, 2025 ❧ The Super Bowl police state, Trump’s plans for Gaza, and Colombia’s president

wants to legalize cocaine

Plus: 10,000 grocery workers on strike, a blind man with a gun, and a really weird fact about platypuses

“Good news, good news, good news

That’s all they wanna hear”

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The Super Bowl has come to New Orleans, and the city is looking downright dystopian. As game day draws near, billionaires have started pulling up in their luxury mega-yachts and parking them along the Mississippi River, where they dwarf everything else around them. Right now, there are at least two of these obscene monuments to wealth and privilege in town. One is the 90-meter “DreAMBoat,” owned by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank (who also owns the Atlanta Falcons) and valued at around $180 million. The other, even bigger and stupider yacht is the 122-meter “Kismet,” which cost Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan a reported $360 million. That one’s parked right outside the Audubon Aquarium, within walking distance of the Current Affairs offices, and it looks like this: 

(Photos: Alex Skopic for Current Affairs)

Really, the photo doesn’t do it justice; in person, the thing absolutely looms over you. It’s hard to imagine why a single human being should be allowed to own something like this, or why you’d even want to. The “Kismet” reportedly has nine cabins, three pools, and four fireplaces, plus a “helipad, salon, spa, indoor and outdoor theater, dance floor, gym and elevator,” but at the end of the day you can only use one thing at a time, so what’s the point? Well, the point seems to be pure ostentation, with the hyper-rich rubbing their wealth in everyone else’s face.

Meanwhile, it’s a whole other picture for the poor. As we reported back in the January 21 news briefing, Governor Jeff Landry and his minions have been rounding up homeless people from the streets of New Orleans and making them stay in a huge warehouse in Gentilly, outside the city proper. The Guardian has just brought new details about the situation to light, and they’re horrifying. Until recently, the warehouse “did not have sufficient cots, adequate heating or even enough blankets” for the historic snowstorm that hit New Orleans on January 21, and people staying there report they were forced to do so under threat of arrest: 

Christopher Aylwen, who had been unhoused for nine months, said he had been approached by law enforcement officers that morning and told that a bus was waiting to take him to a new facility. When he declined, officers told him: “It’s either that or jail.” He offered to move but was told: “No, you can come with us or we’ll cuff you and throw you in jail.”

This morning, your humble editors took a trip out to Gentilly to see for ourselves what the conditions are like—but we didn’t get far. The area itself is desolate, with only warehouses, freight trains, piles of gravel being stored, an industrial canal, and ironically enough, a business that repairs yachts just down the road. When we pulled up to the facility, there was a cop in an unmarked car who had clearly been posted in the parking lot to turn journalists and other meddlers away, which she did. (The officer told us that if we wanted access, we’d have to speak to “the woman who runs the place,” but that this person wasn’t there and she had no idea when she would be, which seemed like a stonewalling tactic.) We were only able to take this photo on the way out, which seems to show some kind of staff members (possibly more cops) regulating who can come and go—plus a barbed-wire gate:

What’s going on in there? Well, you’re not allowed to find out. 

This fits with the Guardian’s reporting, which says that the press “has not been permitted entry to the site.” It’s also pretty sinister, because if conditions were good in the improvised shelter, presumably the Louisiana state government would want to brag about its success. Hiding a location from journalists is almost never a good sign. 

Speaking of cops, there are far too many of them in New Orleans right now. It might be an exaggeration to say there’s a police car on every street corner, but not by much. Just walking through the French Quarter, you can encounter every subspecies of cop imaginable: traffic cops, motorcycle cops, K9 cops with drug-sniffing dogs, cops in helicopters circling ominously overhead, cops on bicycles with high-vis vests, and so on. Many of them are really National Guard members like the fellow pictured below, with vehicles and weapons designed for war:

Just a man, standing in front of a street, waiting to shoot something. 

Now, it’s true that New Orleans recently suffered a harrowing terror attack—and Donald Trump is coming to watch the Super Bowl too, which might justify a little added security. But there are reportedly an additional 200 state police and 300 National Guard troops on top of the NOPD, for a total of “approximately 2,000 law enforcement officers” in the city, nearly all of them armed. That’s just overkill, and for the price of all this coppage we could probably have housed, fed, and given medical and mental health care to hundreds of people who need it—you know, programs that actually make people safer, instead of putting them under armed occupation for a few days. But then who would guard the super-yachts and keep the homeless people out of sight for the tourists? 

❧ Anti-Trump “50501” protests broke out around the country on Tuesday. The number stands for “50 states, 50 protests, one day,” and it appears the movement was successful in its goal of holding an anti-Trump rally at every state’s capital building. Particularly big and notable rallies happened in Des Moines, Iowa, where the 50501 crowd counter-protested a scheduled Moms for Liberty event; in St. Paul, Minnesota, where thousands of people turned up, and even in Austin, Texas and Tallahassee, Florida. The protesters have all kinds of disparate reasons to oppose Trump, from LGBTQ rights to anti-deportation to outrage at Project 2025 and Elon Musk’s recent antics, but one thing is clear: just a few weeks into Trump’s term, Americans are starting to push back. (Associated Press)

❧ In Colorado, around 10,000 workers at the Kroger-owned King Sooper grocery store chain are on strike. Unionized under the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, the workers are rejecting a labor contract that would give them all raises over the next four years, but would also divert money from retiree health benefits to fund the raises, which the union calls “illegal.” Right now at least 77 stores in 22 different Colorado cities have reduced operating hours because of the strike, and many of the customers seem to be in solidarity, with shoppers avoiding the stores that are open and “honking in support” from the highway. (Denver Post)

(Image: Senator Jessie Danielson via Twitter)

❧ Following the lead of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Arizona’s Republican Party has introduced a bill that would ban food stamp recipients from using the money to buy sugary drinks and snacks. The most recent iteration of the bill failed to pass a deadlocked committee vote, but it was not the first attempt and likely won’t be the last. This is being pushed as a solution to obesity, which is certainly a problem. But there’s an obvious strain of classism that’s hard to miss. Republicans certainly aren’t pushing to ban these tasty treats for everyone. GOP state Representative Matt Gress, who argued that SNAP recipients should be banned from buying soda, candy and energy drinks, even admitted that “I still buy candy, but I buy it with my own money that I’ve earned and I’m setting the incentives for myself.” This sounds less like someone concerned about improving public health and more like someone who thinks poor people should be denied the pleasures that others take for granted. (AZ Mirror)

❧ In Indiana, a blind man just got a handgun license. Terry Sutherland, who’s been blind since he was a teenager, got a concealed carry permit as a stunt to prove a point: that it’s far too easy to get access to deadly firearms in the United States. He says he used his usual cane to get around the city council building in Indianapolis, and expected to be told “Listen, you can’t aim a gun or put a bullet where it’s supposed to go, so we’re not going to give you this”—but nobody raised any objection. What a country! (WISH TV)

Art by Mike Freiheit from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 44, September-October 2023.

❧ Trump is launching an attack on California’s high speed rail development project. The project to create America’s first bullet train line—which would run from Sacramento to San Diego— has been in the works since 2008, but it has taken longer and cost more than expected. High speed rail is something that lots of other developed countries have, but the Republican administration, which is vehemently against any form of public transportation (and currently ruled by a man who sells expensive cars) has sought to oppose it. Representative Kevin Kiley (R-CA) has already introduced legislation to cut off federal funding to the project, and this week Trump went on a largely fact-free tirade against it, accusing it of being “very, very corrupt” and calling for an investigation into it. For StreetsBlogCal, Damien Newton breaks down why most of what Trump said is total bullshit and why, despite its costs and flaws, seeing this project through to the end is important.

Something tells us that if you pitched a high speed rail proposal to Trump, he’d fall in love with the idea if you let him call it the “Trump train” or something of that nature.

(Map: Wikimedia Commons)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

We’re hosting an open mic for writers! 

The event is called “Nom de Plume,” and it’ll be happening at the Columns Hotel in New Orleans on Wednesday, February 12. Sets are five minutes long, and you can read any kind of writing you like—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc. (But nothing too gross or weird, please.) If you’re in the neighborhood, just RSVP at the link below if you’d like to come on down!

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ President Trump has announced that he plans to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. During a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president made an announcement that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it,” and will displace the “1.8 million” Palestinians living there to other parts of the world. (The fact that Trump said “1.8 million” is quite eye-catching, since the population of Gaza prior to October 2023 was about 2.2 million, implying that potentially hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed over the last 16 months.) He has made it clear that this displacement would be permanent, saying that “all of them” would have to leave, implying that they could be accepted by neighboring Jordan and Egypt.

Trump described this U.S. occupation as a humanitarian, even selfless, endeavor to “take over and develop” Gaza. “The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” Trump said. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.” Meanwhile, the person most responsible for turning it into a “demolition site” sat next to Trump, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

There are no words to adequately convey the magnitude of what is being proposed here, other than that it would be an unparalleled atrocity and rank among the worst crimes in recent history. A lot of Palestinians probably would like to leave the Strip. But America and Israel are the reason for their misery, yet they now openly plan to profit from cleansing the land of its population and turning it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Many others would surely want to stay and fight against their permanent dispossession, as they’ve been doing for nearly a century. Though Trump has walked back the idea of sending U.S. troops in recent days, an actual “takeover” would require them to forcibly remove Palestinians en masse, which would be a catastrophic war crime.

Trump’s plan drew shocked responses from many parts of the political spectrum, including some Republicans. There were some like libertarian Rand Paul (R-KY) who expressed the expected trepidation, saying “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers blood.” But even Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has never seen a war he didn’t like, said that the people of his state would “probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza.” One person firmly in the pro-ethnic cleansing camp is John Fetterman (Likud-PA), who said he’d “fully support” the plan even if U.S. troops were a part of it, calling the idea of ethnic cleansing “provocative.” (That’s a bit like calling the Holocaust “a bit outside the box.”)

If anything is going to stop this, it probably won’t be a congressional majority that is firmly in the thrall of Trump. But it could come from other regional players. Arab nations immediately expressed outrage following Trump’s announcement. Saudi Arabia, which has long insisted on a Palestinian state as a pre-condition for any “normalization” with Israel seemed to reiterate that an ethnic cleansing would destroy any chance of a deal. And neighboring countries that Trump invisions as landing spots for displaced Palestinians, Egypt and Jordan, issued their own statements of rejection, with Jordan saying it would amount to a “declaration of war.” It remains to be seen if these nations will actually be willing to stand up to the U.S. 

❧ Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro says cocaine should be legalized to end drug-related violence around the world. During a very long government meeting this week, Petro said that cocaine is “no worse than whiskey” and that the global drug trafficking business could be “easily dismantled” if the drug were just legalized and “sold like wine.” Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration, as scientists say cocaine is significantly more addictive than alcohol—but Petro does have a point, as cocaine was only made illegal in the United States in 1914. Before that you could buy it over-the-counter in pharmacies and even grocery stores, in various forms, so regulating it and selling it “like wine” wouldn’t be as crazy as it sounds. Right now it’s unclear if Petro will put his idea into action and make the drug legal in Colombia itself—but at any rate, that would be better than the brutal “war on drugs” policing that has ruined countless lives around the world, while doing little or nothing to stop drug use itself. (Colombia One)

He’d like to buy the world a coke. (Image: President of Colombia via Flickr)

❧ In Cambodia, aggressive “monkey gangs” are harassing tourists. The simian miscreants reportedly spend their time hanging around popular monuments like the temple at Angkor Wat, waiting for people to open snack packages before they pounce. However, it’s really the fault of nature’s most annoying creatures: YouTubers, who started feeding the monkeys human food for videos and changed their habits “from being wild animals to domestic ones that are aggressive, steal food, and cause injuries among people.” This is why Pakistan, which put a social media influencer on probation for owning a pet lion, had the right idea. There really ought to be strong legal protections to stop people disrupting an animal’s natural way of life for internet clout. (South China Morning Post)

To be fair, the tourists are basically in the monkeys’ living room, not the other way around. 

(Image: University of Denver via Flickr)

❧ Google is dropping its pledge to avoid using AI for the purposes of weapons and surveillance. The company has taken out a section from its ethical guidelines barring it from using its technology to do things that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” According to a blog post, their softened stance on the question of “harm” was motivated by a belief that “democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights.” Have they seen what “democracies” have been doing with weapons lately? (Washington Post)

Well, clearly THIS slogan no longer applies. (Photo: Dvir Gallery, via the Times of London)

❧ Despite claiming that the program is back up and running, the Trump administration’s DOGE is still blocking the dispersal of funds for lifesaving HIV treatment around the world. They’ve made the situation even worse by placing nearly all of USAID’s employees on administrative leave. As Wired reports: 

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office last month was to sign an executive order freezing foreign aid, much of which flows through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent agency that represents less than 1 percent of the overall federal budget. The administration later said that “lifesaving” work was exempt and could continue. But USAID employees and officials from non-profit organizations say they are still being blocked from doing vital work on ending the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The consequences may be dire: “At a minimum, 300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV, now do,” one current USAID worker estimates.

❧ And in a bit of good news, Spain’s government is pushing to shorten the work week. Spain’s left-wing Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz introduced the measure, which reduces the legal work week to 37.5 hours a week, down from 40 without a reduction in salaries. “The proposal is about living better, working less and being much more productive and more efficient economically,” Diaz said. The legislation has passed through the cabinet despite the objections of employers groups. It now moves to the parliament where socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will have to fight to get it through despite lacking a clear governing majority. (Reuters)

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

❧ Elon Musk and his gang of feral youths (one of whom just resigned over racist tweets and another of whom just had a screaming tantrum) are still illegally ransacking the federal treasury. According to the Wall Street Journal, they have now gained access to the payment services for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Musk has said that this agency—the one that provides healthcare funding to tens of millions of people—is “where the big money fraud is happening.” (He should maybe go after Senator Rick Scott over “big money fraud” in the Medicaid system, but something tells us he won’t.) It’s important to point out that Musk hasn’t actually demonstrated any instances of actual fraud he’s uncovered yet. Most of what he calls “fraud” are really just instances of spending that he personally disagrees with. It seems like no accident that he’s going after Medicare and Medicaid right now and not, say, the Defense Department. Even though the Department has famously never passed a financial audit, it seems unlikely Musk would ever touch DOD funding because his companies receive billions of dollars worth of it each year. 

Herein lies the problem with letting a tech magnate singlehandedly decide what counts as “waste.” He has financial entanglements with nearly a dozen federal agencies and has faced legal penalties from others like the National Labor Relations Board and the Environmental Protection Agency. But the Trump administration does not seem concerned about this. When a reporter pointed out Musk’s billions of dollars of federal funding and asked what steps the administration is taking “to address that conflict of interest,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded that, “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” In other words, he will be in charge of investigating himself!

❧ Speaking of conflicts of interest, it was revealed this week that newly-minted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth left his transaction history on the banking app Venmo public. In the American Prospect, Luke Goldstein reviews them:

Hegseth’s Venmo profile, left on public, reveals a digital Rolodex stocked with C-suite executives who have serious financial stakes in befriending the top dog at DOD. Despite the depiction of Hegseth by both Trump acolytes and Democrats alike as an anti-establishment crusader, his contacts are stocked with consummate Washington insiders from the political, media, and donor class […]

Heavily featured in the list are a new generation of tech-centric defense contractors hailing from Silicon Valley, a break with the old-guard citadel in Northern Virginia. These include officials with GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. While this cohort already receives billions of dollars’ worth of defense technology–related contracts, they’re hungry for more. They recently announced their intent to form a joint cartel to compete against legacy contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon for a wide array of government procurement and services.

PLATYPUS FACT OF THE WEEK

Platypuses sweat milk to feed their young!

Platypuses are one of the most unusual creatures that roam the earth (So strange, in fact, that the scientist who first wrote about them believed he was being pranked, as we wrote about in a briefing last April). 

They are considered mammals but lack many of the usual mammal-ish characteristics. Unlike most other mammals, they lay eggs rather than birthing live babies. But because they are warm blooded, have fur and produce milk, they still check enough of the boxes to obtain their mammal card.

But on the last point—producing milk—platypuses aren’t exactly following the usual mammal trends either. Unlike every other mammal, they don’t have nipples. Instead, as the BBC’s Science Focus puts it, “the milk just oozes from the surface of their skin” out of mammary glands. In order to feed their young, platypuses simply lay down and let them slurp it off the fur of their belly. (Actually—bonus platypus fact!—they don't actually have a belly but just a really long esophagus that connects directly to the platypus’ intestines.)

This is already remarkable enough. But we have barely even scratched the surface. Because platypus milk has to be sucked from the fur of the mother—which is not exactly sanitary—it naturally contains unique antibacterial properties. Scientists have discovered that this milk can be used to fight off even the most powerful antibiotic resistant bacteria. So in the event of a large-scale superbug outbreak, platypus milk could hold the key to saving tons of lives. So if you see a platypus, tell them thank you!

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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