July 16, 2024 ❧ Trump gets shot, J.D. Vance runs for VP, and police body cams are a fraud

Plus: A Kenyan beekeeper fights deforestation, China holds its big economic meeting, and leeches can jump now. Oh dear. 

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STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER

Police body cam? More like police body scam!

Alec Karakatsanis, the renowned civil rights lawyer and Current Affairs contributor, has done it again. In a new study for the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, Karakatsanis takes a long, hard look at how body cameras have been introduced at police departments around the United States, and what effect they’ve had on rates of police violence. As it turns out, the answer to the latter question is: basically none. 

As Karakatsanis writes, the push for body cams started in earnest after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In the ensuing years, introducing more body cameras has been one of the go-to “reforms” (along with more “training”) that’s always rolled out after a case of outrageous brutality from the cops. And yet, Karakatsanis points out, “In each year after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, U.S. police have killed more people than they had the previous year, despite deploying hundreds of thousands more body cameras.” (More details can be found in the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database, or at Mapping Police Violence.)

Note how each year mark is higher than the last? (Image: Mapping Police Violence.)

This is an extraordinary statistic. It suggests that, contrary to the rhetoric that suggests body cams will bring more “accountability” and “transparency” to police, they actually do very little to make them less violent. So why were they really introduced? Karakatsanis suggests the reason is twofold: first, because tech companies like Axon and Motorola have lobbied for them, winning themselves billions of dollars worth of contracts in the process. And second, because even before Michael Brown’s death, police wanted to introduce them as a new form of surveillance—not of cops, but everyone and everything around them:

[P]olice and prosecutors wanted body cameras because the cameras gave them the most powerful new form of evidence: outward looking videos that bureaucrats could create, direct, curate, edit, and control both in terms of what is captured, what is left out, and at which political moment what is captured is publicly released. Body camera videos are now routinely used in almost every prosecutor office in the U.S. as evidence to get mostly poor people to quickly plead guilty to things like drug possession and trespassing. They are almost never used against police officers. To the contrary, the videos are often given privately to police officers prior to those officers’ internal statements about controversial incidents in which they used violence to create and standardize initial police narratives with the goal of reducing potential civil and criminal liability. 

Add to this the fact that many body cams can be turned off by the police whenever they like, and the full picture takes shape. Rather than a method of reform, the cameras have become just another tool in the arsenal of “copaganda.” To actually stop the killings, defunding and abolition—meaning the abolition of the conditions that cause crime in the first place, most importantly poverty—is the way to go, not more police funding and technology. 

From Issue 13 of Current Affairs Magazine, May/June 2018

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BIG STORY

Trump got shot

By now, you’re probably aware that former President Donald Trump got shot this past weekend while speaking at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania. In what many of his supporters are describing as an act of divine providence, Trump turned his head at exactly the right time, and the bullet, fired by a sniper several hundred feet away, grazed his ear, leaving a trail of blood. After more than a minute on the ground, a bloodstained Trump arose and pumped his fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” at the audience before being hauled off by the Secret Service. Sadly a supporter in the audience, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was killed while shielding his family from the gunfire and two others were left critically injured.

The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks (perhaps the ultimate example of nominative determinism), was also shot dead by the Secret Service seconds after firing a volley of shots at the president. If he had a political motive, it is indecipherable. Crooks once donated $15 to a Democrat-aligned PAC, but he was also a registered Republican who former classmates say “definitely was conservative.” Thankfully, though, he seems to have been a standard-issue angry young white man, of a type that’s become all too familiar since the Columbine shootings in 1999. If he had been a member of some marginalized group, the shooting would doubtless be used as an excuse for violent retaliation and police repression against that group, like what American Muslims suffered after 9/11. So that’s a silver lining, of a kind.

It’s definitely a good thing that Trump survived. Not because we are fans of his, but because (1) shooting politicians you don’t like is bad, and (2) the lid likely would have blown off the country if hundreds of millions of people saw his head pop like a balloon on live television. With that said, as far as the election is concerned, this is a disaster. Instead of a venal demagogue with authoritarian ambitions, Trump has—at least for the moment—lucked into the one thing capable of making him appear not just sympathetic, but resilient and strong. The claims that this shooting was “staged” are obviously ridiculous, but it’s easy to see why so many people felt that way as a gut instinct. This photo feels like something concocted in a lab to make Trump seem cool and epic:

They say life imitates art. In this case, the art was by John McNaughton.

(Photo: Evan Vucci, the Associated Press)

The contrast between the two candidates, at least as far as their personal constitution goes, could not be more stark. Trump is now the guy who survived being shot. His opponent is a guy who responded to the shooting by saying that “Former Trump is not seriously linjured [sic]” and who looks like he’d dissolve into dust if a gun fired within ten feet of him. With all the attention off Joe Biden’s clear mental decline, he now seems intent on riding out the storm. Axios reports that in the wake of the shooting, “Biden-skeptical” Democrats have backed off attempts to convince the president to drop out, because it would be “bad form” and would not “meet the moment.” Given that Democratic delegates will cast their votes for the nominee before the end of the month, there may not be another “moment” available for them to make the badly needed swap. But now that conversation appears frozen in amber, potentially for good.

Even worse, Democrats have effectively acceded to the Republicans’ bad faith narrative that this shooting happened because they (very reasonably) accused Trump—a man who calls his political opponents “vermin” and who wants to deport 15 million people—of having fascist aspirations. In his address following the shooting, Joe Biden blamed the attack on “heated” political rhetoric. As Josh Cohen (aka Ettingermentum) put it on Substack, this “has amounted to [Democrats] essentially saying that their most important message—attacking Trump—is not just misguided, but downright dangerous.” 

Are Democrats concerned that they are on track to lose an election in which they say “democracy is on the ballot”? Not particularly, it seems. In fact, one senior House Democrat even told Axios that “We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” Another anonymous political consultant told NBC, “The presidential contest ended last night” and that it was “time to focus on keeping the Senate and trying to pick up the House.” (For the record, if Biden loses the election, Democrats will almost certainly not retake the House.) With so much on the line, for Democrats to throw in the towel when there is so much that can still be done to right the ship is totally unacceptable. Just because Trump got shot does not mean that the “civil” thing to do is to let him win the election.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

The murder of a factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of proprietors devoid of any social significance. Whether a terrorist attempt, even a ‘successful’ one throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete political circumstances. In any case the confusion can only be short-lived; the capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function.[...]

If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister. 

— Leon Trotsky, 1911

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

In a new online exclusive, Stephen Prager writes that, despite the chorus of condemnation for it in the wake of Trump's shooting, "Political Violence is All Around Us":

“To the extent that the members of the ruling class care about any of this, it’s only insofar as it affects their personal power and well-being.”

FIGHTING BACK

People in Kenya are using hidden beehives to protect mangrove trees 

Mangroves are an extremely important tree, both in Kenya and many other coastal nations. They provide a natural buffer against flooding caused by hurricanes and other natural disasters—which are becoming more and more common as climate change ramps up. But they’re also increasingly under threat from the logging industry, which mows them down by the million for timber and charcoal, and from climate change itself. Worldwide, a new report suggests that half of the world’s mangrove ecosystems are at risk of collapse. In Kenya specifically, around 40 percent were “degraded” as of 2018.

So a Kenyan beekeeper named Peter Nyongesa has turned to a new strategy: hiding beehives among the mangroves, so anyone who tries to cut them down will be swarmed and stung. Nyongesa is part of a local environmental movement called “Tulinde Mikoko,” Swahili for “Let’s Protect Mangroves,” and he’s been doing this since 2019, having tried and failed to persuade the loggers to stay away. He now has 11 hives, stationed at undisclosed points along the coastline near his native Mombasa, and hopes the bees will help to keep the whole area safe for years to come. It’s an unorthodox tactic, but one climate activists in other countries could learn from. Maybe people would be less eager to build pipelines or fracking wells if they knew they’d encounter big, angry bees there too?

Plastic pollution is also a threat to the mangroves, as you can see. Maybe a few well-placed bee swarms could help with that too. (Photo: United Nations)

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

❧ Yesterday, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump finally announced his long-awaited vice presidential nominee: Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Throughout his relatively short political career, Vance has managed to embody two completely different brands of obnoxious conservative elitism. 

A Yale Law graduate turned venture capitalist, hailing from a depressed town in Appalachia, Vance first reached public acclaim for his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, a book about how poor rural Americans are a bunch of welfare queens who “blame everyone but [themselves]” for their situations. Vance’s description of working class white culture as backwards made him a darling in elite media circles looking for a decoder ring to explain the rise of Trump. Vance himself styled himself as a “Never-Trump” Republican and even once suggested Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” 

But since then, he’s done a 180-degree turn. Well, not exactly. He still believes Trump could be a dictator, but now thinks that’s a good thing. After spending several years slurping up the work of “neoreactionary” pro-monarchy writers like Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, Vance wants Trump to enact a purge of the federal government. In a sweeping 2021 profile of the so-called “New Right” for Vanity Fair, James Pogue quoted Vance saying he wanted Trump to:

“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Image: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons

Lest you think Trump might use his VP pick to allay worries about his extreme Project 2025 agenda, Vance is fully on board. He has recently said he supports banning abortion “very early in pregnancy” and has even argued that there should not be exceptions for rape and incest (which he called “inconveniences”) and has pressured lawmakers to drop legislation preventing police from tracking women who cross state lines to terminate a pregnancy. He introduced a bill to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors and ban universities from promoting it for their adult students. (Vance is quite fixated on trans people specifically: he infamously told Tucker Carlson that his opponent for the Senate, Rep. Tim Ryan, planned on “flooding America with illegal aliens, and… fund[ing] gender reassignment surgeries for those aliens.”) He is also a fan of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s policy requiring universities to disseminate government propaganda.

Vance often makes overtures to the “heartland” and the white “working class,” leading some to characterize him as a threat to the GOP’s business wing. But his economic program consists of little more than deporting immigrants, slapping more regressive tariffs on products, and making Ivy League schools less woke. When it comes to concrete issues related to labor, he’s revealed his true colors: For example, during last year’s United Auto Workers strike, Vance repeatedly bashed the union and blamed workers’ woes not on the companies that were underpaying them but on the existence of electric vehicles (which the UAW is actually fine with as long as the workers are unionized). He is also opposed to universal child care, which he claims is “class war against normal people.” (In fact, most “normal people” with kids have jobs.)

Picking Vance, rather than one of his more moderating options (R.I.P. Doug Burgum), is a sign of cockiness from Trump to be sure. He now feels secure enough in his chances that he can pick a loyalist who is all in on the most extreme, potentially alienating aspects of his platform. But while he’s clearly feeling himself now, we can never underestimate the capability of the far-right to overplay its hand and get too weird and creepy for people to stomach. 

Normal guy alert. 

In other news…

• In even more good news for Trump, the criminal case over his hoarding of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom has been dismissed. (Associated Press)

It was a perfect bathroom, folks. Everyone said so. (Image: Dept. of Justice via Axios)

• New Jersey Senator “Gold Bar Bob” Menendez, on the other hand, has been found guilty of taking “hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes.” (New York Times)
  
  
• Just months after saying he was “not donating money to either candidate,” Elon Musk has emphatically endorsed Donald Trump and pledged to donate $45 million per month to a Trump Super PAC. (New Republic)
  
  
• The left can’t just campaign against Project 2025, “they need a positive moral vision to run on,” writes Adam Johnson. (In These Times)
  
  
• On Substack, Ken Klippenstein explains how the Secret Service screwed up so badly and missed the Trump shooter.
  
  
• At the Republican National Convention, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gave a speech blasting corporate “welfare” and praising “democratic unions.” Believe it or not, the response from the crowd of “union-hating ‘job creators’” was tepid. (New York Magazine)
  
  
• Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will now receive Secret Service protection, something he’s been requesting for months. (The Hill)
  
  
• The chairman of the Alabama GOP is complaining about people calling the U.S. a “democracy,” saying that democracy “leads to socialism.” He's right! It does! But that's a good thing. (AL.com)

AND NOW, THE BORING NEWS

It’s been a hectic few days, hasn’t it? Presidents getting shot, genocide in Gaza, poverty, pestilence, wars and rumors of wars. To give you a momentary break from All That Unpleasantness, let’s take a look at the corners of the world where not much is going on at all. Maybe one day soon, when the big issues have been sorted out, we can all hope to be this dull. 

(Headline: Grayson County News)

(Headline: BBC)

(Headline: Pyongyang Times)

(Headline: Albanian Daily News)

The answer, apparently, is "Iron Rail Brewing." (Headline: Topeka Capital-Journal)

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The union for California prison guards has spent $2.9 million to support Governor Gavin Newsom—that’s 31 percent of all the union’s political spending since 2001. As Nigel Duara and Jeremia Kimelman report for CalMatters, it’s all part of union president Glen Stanley’s plan to make correctional officers an “800-pound gorilla” in California politics. This probably explains why Newsom has backed plans to make shoplifting a felony after three offenses, increase so-called “sweeps” of homeless camps by police, and make other “tough-on-crime” policy moves in recent years. And this guy is supposed to be one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars!

(Chart: CalMatters)

PAST AFFAIRS

“Gavin Newsom is Not a Progressive,” by Stephen Prager

In other news…

• The residents of an apartment building in Bloomfield have formed a chapter of the Connecticut Tenants’ Union after months of dealing with mold, uncollected garbage, and unfair rent increases. (Fox 61)
  
  
• Nebraska now requires you to upload your ID in order to view porn, leading Pornhub and other smut-peddlers to shut down their operations there. Several other red states are adopting similarly creepy policies, which create a pretty obvious avenue for blackmail if the ID records are ever hacked. (Nebraska Examiner)

Rest assured, you will never need an I.D. to purchase a copy of Current Affairs. (From Issue 25, May/June 2020)

• A law in Idaho just went into effect allowing people to sue any library that provides “obscene” or “homosexual” content. In an effort to comply with the law, some libraries will not allow children to enter without being accompanied by their parents. (Truthout)

On July 1, the day Idaho’s law went into effect, a resident saw this sign posted at the Idaho Falls Public Library and posted it to Reddit. (r/idaho)

• Cops in Springfield, Illinois killed a 36-year-old Black woman, Sonya Massey, after she called them to report an intruder she believed had entered her home. Body camera footage has not been released as of Tuesday and the community has launched protests. (NBC News)
  
  
• Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed a five-year moratorium on building any new prisons or jails. That’s a good start, but why not make it permanent? (Truthout)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ The Chinese Communist Party has begun its four-day economic meeting. Officially known as the “Third Plenum,” the conference brings together all 376 members of the party’s Central Committee (205 regular and 171 alternate). It happens roughly every five years (in between “plenums” on other topics), and sets China’s economic agenda for its next “five-year plan.” This particular meeting is slightly overdue, since it was expected to happen in the fall of 2023—but President Xi Jinping and Chinese state media are promising that it will be “epoch-making.”

The really striking thing, though, is that the party’s agenda doesn’t seem very communist at all. As Reuters reports, the main concern Xi and his associates seem to have is that the Chinese economy “could settle into a long period of low growth or even Japan-like deflation.” As a result, their main goal is simply to promote economic growth, and they’ll reportedly be discussing ways to “boost domestic consumption and revitalise the private sector.” Speaking to the UK’s Morning Star, Tian Xuan, a professor at Tsinghua University and member of the National People’s Congress, says we can even expect to see “reforms aimed at further developing venture capital—investment funds that put money into startups” for “technological innovation.” All of this sounds like it could come straight from any center-left party in Europe, not an ostensibly “communist” one.

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, though. In a 1978 meeting of the Third Plenum, Deng Xiaoping’s government turned away from Marxism and toward pro-market reforms, setting the tone for the next several decades. In the 2013 plenum, the party proclaimed that it would “straighten out the relationship between government and the market, allowing the market to play a decisive role in allocating resources.” This is just another step along that same liberalizing path. To be sure, there are some admirable things about China’s handling of its economy, like when the government recently capped CEO pay at $400,000 a year. But if you want a socialist project that will actually overthrow capitalism, rather than participate in it, you’ll have to look elsewhere. 

The slogan “follow our party, start your business” is probably not what the revolutionaries of 1949 had in mind. (Image: Maya Wang via Twitter)

In other news…

• Sharma Oli, the chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), has taken office as Prime Minister. Rather uniquely, Nepal has mostly socialist and communist electoral parties, and Oli has previously served as PM on two separate occasions. (Kathmandu Post)

Policy aside, Oli’s hat game is strong. (Image: CPN-UML)

• The government of Pakistan has filed to ban former prime minister Imran Khan’s political party, the PTI, accusing it of vague “anti-state activities.” (Al Jazeera)
  
  
• Climate activists in Scotland have shut down an air-polluting incinerator in one of Aberdeen’s most depressed working class neighborhoods. “The system that allows energy companies to make record billion-pound profits from polluting communities like Torry must be replaced. A fair world must have the interests of everyday people and their communities at the heart of it,” said one of the organizers. (Morning Star)
  
  
• Kenya’s anti-government protesters have found some creative ways to use A.I. (Semafor)
  
  
• The Egyptian government says it’s built 1.5 million housing units over the last ten years, providing homes for between 6 million and 7.5 million people, most of whom are youth and low-income individuals. (Daily News Egypt)
  
  
• In addition to all the other reasons war is horrible, it’s also causing a major drop in vaccination rates in places like Sudan and Yemen, the United Nations warns. (The Guardian)
  
  
• In the Gambia, conservative legislators nearly reversed a ban on female genital mutilation. But thankfully, “attitudes changed as rights activists campaigned and as doctors, religious figures and others testified…about the consequences of the practice” and the ban remains intact. (Associated Press)
  
  
• British Amazon workers at the company’s Coventry warehouse are currently voting on whether to join the influential GMB labor union. Results should be in soon! (The Guardian)

ANNELID FACT OF THE WEEK

Leeches can jump!

We’re not happy to report this, nor should you be happy to hear it. It’s already disconcerting enough that there’s a wormlike creature out there who wants to suck your blood. But thanks to Mai Fahmy, a biologist who recorded leeches on a trip to Madagascar, we now also have to live with the knowledge that at least one species of leech, chtonobdella fallax, is capable of “rearing back like a snake ready to strike before springing forward,” as Science Magazine describes. 

As of yet, we don’t have any evidence that these little bloodsuckers are capable of leaping onto their hosts. The video evidence we have shows one hopping from a leaf onto the ground. 

But according to Science: “The debate over whether land-dwelling leeches can jump onto their hosts has festered for more than 130 years. Written accounts of the behavior date as far back as the 14th century. But with no hard evidence to those anecdotes, some experts have argued those leeches may have simply fallen from overhead or grabbed onto passing bodies from lofty, leafy perches. Now, scientists have the video to refute this.” 

Video: Fordham University