❧ Justin Trudeau says he’ll soon resign as Canada’s Prime Minister. The announcement comes as Trudeau and his Liberal Party face multiple crises, including the surprise resignation of deputy PM Chrystia Freeland—who accused Trudeau of being unprepared for Donald Trump’s “aggressive economic nationalism” and tariff threats—and a soaring cost of living for ordinary Canadians. Now, polls and prediction markets show that the Conservative Party is likely to win the upcoming 2025 elections, making its leader Pierre Poilievre the next Prime Minister. Trudeau’s post-leadership plans are unclear, but now he’ll have more time for his first love: doing blackface. (CBC)
❧ European banking firm Credit Suisse had more extensive dealings with the Nazis than they’ve previously admitted. As journalist Margot Patrick writes, a cache of documents marked “American Blacklist” was recently uncovered which detailed “several Nazi-linked accounts that were discovered by the bank in the 1990s but never disclosed to investigators,” including “an operational account controlled by high-ranking Nazi SS officers.” Investigators led by independent ombudsman Neil Barofsky say they’ll release a full report early next year. (Wall Street Journal)
The “American Blacklist” stamp used for Nazi business.
In “Nazis on Aisle Nine,” Alex Skopic explores how many of the companies and brands we know today—from Coca-Cola, to Bayer, to IBM—made their own lucrative deals with the Third Reich, and got away with it largely unpunished.
❧ Argentina’s President Javier Milei is pushing for a 12-hour work day. Milei’s government is planning to reform the country’s Labor Contract Law, and virtually all of the changes he’s proposed would make things worse for workers and better for bosses. Along with longer working hours, Milei also wants to legalize “vouchers” and “coupons” that can only be used in certain stores as a form of payment in place of actual currency. In other words, he wants to bring back company scrip, a notorious anti-worker practice that was fiercely opposed by the trade unions of the 19th and 20th centuries. What a scumbag! (11 Noticias)
❧ After endorsing a Nazi party in Germany, Elon Musk has shifted his gaze west to the United Kingdom. He has spent the last week tweeting relentlessly about the years-old “rape gang” scandal, during which about 1,400 minors were found to have been beaten, raped, and trafficked between 1997 and 2013 in the North English town of Rotherham, mostly by British-Pakistani men. Musk has branded high-ranking members of the Labour Party, most notably Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who was head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013—as “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes,” a charge the PM has denied and attempted to refute. There is a grain of truth in what Musk is saying—the British government and police absolutely let the victims down in this case, ignoring evidence of these crimes for decades.
The problem is that Musk has used this heinous crime to cast aspersions on all Asian immigrants in the U.K., even claiming that Muslim men had committed “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions of rapes” in the country, which is totally unfounded. He’s also spread a number of false statistics in an attempt to argue that Pakistani immigrants are responsible for the majority of sexual assaults in the country. We don’t have the space in this briefing to evaluate them all in detail, but Pakistani journalist Clynergy has a useful thread explaining why his evidence is totally fabricated. Musk is once again using the same playbook he has used to try to influence German politics: unleashing an avalanche of bullshit to inflame the population against immigrants.
❧ Also in the U.K., the odious misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has launched a right-wing political party called “BRUV” (for “Britain Restoring Underlying Values”). This sounds ridiculous, and it is, but then so was the idea of Donald Trump becoming president back in 2015—and Tate still has a worryingly large online following, so it’s not impossible that “BRUV” could cause problems in the near future. (Indy 100)
First order of business: too-tight suits and scraggly facial hair for everyone.
❧ And lest you think the U.K.’s major parties are any more serious, Labour was forced to apologize this week for a bizarre video of A.I. generated animals published on its official TikTok page. The 34-second video, which followed a popular trend on the platform, was titled “This Labour government’s plan to change Britain for the better as animals.”
The video’s concept is embarrassing enough (not to mention probably a huge source of carbon emissions that the environmentally conscious hedgehog above would not approve of). But what actually led Labour to take the video down was that it contained a Portuguese song with some staggeringly sexist lyrics.Current Affairs is calling for a complete moratorium on liberal parties around the world using TikTok until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ America’s tech elite are donating millions to Donald Trump’s inauguration. So far, Trump has raised an estimated $150 million for his reelection bash, the most of any U.S. president to date. (By contrast Joe Biden had just $61.8 million, although it feels a little gross to use the words “just” and “million dollars” in the same sentence.)
A significant chunk of the money is coming directly from Silicon Valley oligarchs. Apple’s Tim Cook has personally donated $1 million, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is donating another $1 million, Amazon has given $1 million (and is making a Prime documentary about Melania Trump), and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has also handed Trump $1 million. Not to be outdone, both Uber as a corporation and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have made separate donations of $1 million apiece. It’s a perfect example of how, whether their professed politics are liberal or conservative, big capitalists ultimately stick together as a class.
Meanwhile, one of these CEOs is also censoring any criticism of his actions. At the Bezos-owned Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from her job after she was told she wouldn’t be allowed to run a cartoon making fun of Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires for their fealty to Trump. So much for the whole “democracy dies in darkness” schtick!
❧ Donald Trump (a man some have heralded as a principled “anti-imperialist”) continues to talk about expanding America’s borders by force. In a press conference Tuesday, he said he would not rule out using military or economic coercion for the U.S. to take over Greenland and recapture the Panama Canal. He also seems serious about his desire for the U.S. to annex Canada, but has said he only seeks to use “economic force” to do so. And if you were wondering, yes, he still wants to invade Mexico to fight cartels too. Trump’s antics (like referring to Justin Trudeau as “governor”) are all so ludicrous that it’s tempting to assume he is merely joking around. But if it’s a joke, he sure is committed to it, and so are members of his party, like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who said that the only problem with the certification of Trump’s electoral victory on Monday was that “they skipped Canada.” Given Trump’s obsession with President William McKinley, who is most remembered for his imperialist expansion of America’s borders, we should probably take him at his word. (USA Today)
❧ The financial website Unusual Whales just released its annual report on Congress members’ stock holdings and transactions. Like every year since the reports started in 2020, our elected leaders did significantly better than market averages, with both Democrats and Republicans outperforming the SPY ETF (which tracks the S&P 500 companies as a group):
Thanks in part to this kind of data journalism, there are growing calls to ban politicians from trading stocks at all, since there’s a fairly obvious conflict of interest between public service and personal enrichment. In the meantime, you can read a detailed breakdown of which senators and representatives have been the most successful at lining their pockets. How did yours do?
❧ And in a sliver of good news, the number of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is now down to just 15. After holding them for more than 20 years without any charges, the U.S. government is releasing 11 Yemeni prisoners to neighboring Oman. It’s an act of justice that is long, long overdue, though it will hardly erase the two decades of misery and squalor these men were forced to endure. With just under two weeks before the return of President Trump, who has halted the release of Gitmo inmates, the Biden administration should move swiftly to release the other 15 as well and close down the wretched place once and for all. (Washington Post)
PAST AFFAIRS
Last year, as the release of these 11 Yemeni prisoners were delayed due to “concerns about political optics,” Stephen Prager wrote about how the arbitrary nature of Guantánamo “has shattered the illusion of a 'fair' justice system.”
❧ New York City has begun its congestion pricing policy. The city will now charge a $9 toll per day for motorists who drive personal vehicles through parts of Manhattan at peak hours. In addition to reducing traffic on the roads, which will reduce pollution and make more space for emergency vehicles, the policy is intended to raise money for the city’s public transit system. The policy has worked well in Europe and already appears to be working in the Big Apple as well, with commute times dropping considerably the day the policy went into effect. It remains to be seen whether this will continue, but it’s a good sign. (New York Times)
❧ Big Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are suing Vermont over its climate laws. Back in May, the state’s legislature passed a groundbreaking law that would require fossil fuel companies to pay damages when climate-related natural disasters strike—and the industry isn’t happy about it at all. They’ve filed a suit in Vermont’s U.S. District Court to block the law, arguing that Vermont has overreached its authority by targeting companies located outside its borders and that it’s impossible to “accurately and fairly” establish a cause-and-effect relationship between emissions and disasters. As other states consider similar laws, this will be a milestone court case. (Common Dreams)
❧ Ohio's Governor Mike DeWine has signed a law making it harder for citizens to access police bodycam video. Under the new law, cops can charge people the “estimated cost” of processing the video, which can be as much as “$75 an hour for work, with a fee cap of $750 per request.” This presents a needless barrier to journalists and anyone else trying to hold the police accountable for misconduct, and it also applies to video from inside Ohio jails and other incarceration sites, making the issue that much worse. (News 5 Cleveland)
❧ COVID is once again surging across the United States. According to CDC data, all the important metrics for the disease—positive tests, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and deaths—spiked in December after a relatively calm autumn. Worse, preventative measures are down, with only 21.4 percent of American adults taking the latest vaccine booster. (Truthout)
❧ COVID isn’t the only disease wreaking havoc. On Monday, Louisiana recorded the first human death in the United States from bird flu. The state’s health department reported that “the patient was over the age of 65 and was reported to have underlying medical conditions.” He was also exposed to the virus through contact with infected fowl in his backyard rather than an infected human, the latter of which could cause yet another horrific pandemic. The CDC investigation concluded that the patient’s illness contained mutations not found in the infected birds, which is a worrying sign. But they still maintain that the public health risk of bird flu is “low.” (CBS News)
❧ Workers are on strike at America’s biggest ski resort. On Dec. 27, the peak of holiday travel, 200 ski patrollers at Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort walked off the job after attempting to negotiate a pay raise for the better part of a year. Ski patrollers have a challenging job that requires a lot of expertise and training: They are responsible for keeping skiers safe by responding to accidents and carrying injured skiers to safety. The Park City Professional Ski Patrollers Association has called for an increase in their wages from $21 to $23, which is still below what is considered a livable wage ($27). But Vail Resorts, the $6.6 billion company that owns Park City, has refused to budge, instead blaming the strikers for their “impact on the guest experience.” (Associated Press)
Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association after voting to authorize a strike
In 2020, a group of British and American scientists embarked on a groundbreaking new project: strapping red-and-blue cellophane glasses to cuttlefish. They were trying to find out if mollusks have stereoscopic vision the way humans and other mammals do, which would reveal a lot about how the sea creatures’ brains work.
The experiment was simple: project differently colored images of a shrimp on the tank wall, and see if the bespectacled cuttlefish interpreted them as a single 3D shrimp and tried to eat it. And sure enough, they lashed out their tentacles, just as they would to catch real prey! So it seems when it comes to depth perception—and movie-watching habits—our species aren’t so different after all.
This is the one guy who saw Kraven the Hunter on opening day.
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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