July 19, 2024 ❧ GOP vs. Weather, LA Sheriffs Gangs, and Biden's limp rent control policy

Plus: Samsung on strike, New reports that Biden may drop out, proposed Supreme Court reforms, and more wombat butt facts!

♬   “I wanna know, have you ever read the news?”  ♬

STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER

The GOP wants to get rid of the National Weather Service

In recent weeks, much discussion has occurred about the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda for a second Trump administration. Much of it has focused on issues like abortion, trans rights, and immigration, which are all worthy topics. But one of the areas that has been easy to overlook is the program’s prescriptions for destroying hugely important government agencies. The Atlantic just published a disturbing feature on the GOP’s goal to dismantle an agency we probably think about far less than we should: the National Weather Service. As Zoë Schlanger reports, Project 2025 says that… 

NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

Here we see the DeSantis approach to climate change brought to a national scale. In Florida, DeSantis’s administration has attempted to downplay the risks of global warming by simply removing any mentions of it from legislation. Eliminating climate research allows this to happen at a national level, but will also make it much harder for scientists who do not work for the government to obtain data that would allow them to study the issue. Of course, pretending climate change isn’t happening doesn’t make it go away, and will instead make it much harder to predict its effects, like floods and wildfires. But the hope seems to be that by taking away the ability to measure it, people will naturally just stop talking about it.

The complaint that NOAA is potentially “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims” is a pretty revealing and chilling statement. The implication is that something as important as predicting the weather accurately is, at best, of secondary importance and, at worst, an obstacle to the goals of the Trump administration. We’ve seen what this looks like before: In 2019 after President Trump incorrectly stated that Hurricane Dorian was bound for Alabama (and even used a Sharpie to alter an NOAA map to make it look like it was), his administration pressured the NOAA to correct its accurate weather forecast and state that Trump’s frantic lie was true. Achieving this required bullying from Trump’s chief of staff. But if NOAA were to become subject to the president’s whims, it would become expected that if Trump were to, say, claim that it was sunny on the day of his inauguration (when, in fact, it rained), the NOAA would have to report that it was a beautiful day.

For the record, this hurricane did not end up hitting Alabama. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, this would not be a Republican program without also creating the ability for someone to make money from something that is currently free. Right now, “the National Weather Service,” Schlanger writes, “issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year.” But Project 2025 proposes that the agency “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” Schlanger outlines some of the obvious potential outcomes of this: 

[C]ommercializing the agency’s underlying data risks creating a system of tiered services. One could imagine a future where private outfits charge subscriptions for their weather reports, and only some municipalities are able to pay for the best forecasts. Private companies are also subject to commercial conflicts of interest; do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

As the phrase “right-wing populism” continues to be haphazardly thrown around, this is an instructive example of what that looks like in practice. Under the GOP’s preferred system, even something as basic as accurate weather forecasting is treated not as something necessary for the common good, but as something that only the privileged should be able to access and only the super-privileged should be able to control to meet their own ends.

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

❧ President Biden recently announced a plan to cap rent increases at 5 percent per year. Unfortunately, it’s not very good. 

In theory, of course, a policy along these lines would be a great idea. Millions of Americans are currently struggling to pay the rent, with nearly 70 percent of households who earn between $30,000 and $44,999 categorized as “rent-burdened” in a recent Harvard study. Partly as a result of soaring rent costs, a record number of people are now homeless. But although Biden’s proposal sounds good, it falls apart when you begin to poke at it a little. 

In the first place, it’s highly unlikely that it’ll ever become law. Biden might not be President in a few months, and in his first term, he wasn’t able to wrangle enough votes for other big reforms like a $15 minimum wage. But even if this plan did pass, it has so many loopholes that landlords could drive a moving truck through them. It only applies to “corporate landlords,” defined as “landlords with over 50 units in their portfolio.” So, as the Wall Street Journal’s Catherine Rampell points out, there’s nothing to stop a big property owner from creating several different LLCs, each with exactly 49 units, and dodging the policy entirely. Or landlords could stop renewing their tenants’ leases, opting to instead conclude one lease and begin a whole new one, which could have any rent they liked. And even if some landlord was incompetent enough to get charged for making an illegal rent increase, the only penalty the policy has for them is the loss of certain tax breaks—not even a fine, much less any consequence they’d really feel. 

Ironically, the policy Biden accidentally proposed at a recent event is a lot better. Misreading a teleprompter as he spoke to the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, he said that he was “about to announce that they can’t raise [rents] more than… $55.” Now that, we could get behind.

Are you lowering them, though, Joe? Are you really? (Image: President Biden via Twitter)

In other news…

• As if things weren’t going badly enough for him, Biden was also diagnosed with COVID-19 during his campaign stop in Nevada. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  
• There are also growing rumors that Biden may drop out as soon as this weekend, something top Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are now actively urging him to do. (Axios)
  
  
• Before his possible exit, Biden also announced that he’d be willing to support some reforms to the Supreme Court, including introducing term limits, an enforceable ethics code, and eliminating presidential immunity. These are all good ideas, though Republicans are unlikely to agree to them, and it’s hard to imagine that the Court, as currently constituted, would not just immediately strike them down. Congress would likely need to increase the number of justices in order for any of these other reforms to work, something Biden remains reluctant to do. (New York Times)
  
  
• The GOP handed out signs at the Republican National Convention that read “Mass Deportation Now.” In May, the Guardian explored how nightmarish that policy would actually be. 

Remember, it’s actually violence to call this campaign fascist, and you should really tone down your rhetoric because somebody might get hurt. (Photo: CBC)

• Despite the homophobic politics of many of its attendees, an executive at Grindr says the RNC is the “Super Bowl” of anonymous gay hookups. Former Representative George Santos agrees, and is urging his fellow Republicans to “come out of the closet boys!” (Pride.com)

• The Harvard student who spoke at the RNC about “campus antisemitism” has a history of using violent anti-Palestinian rhetoric, writes Matthew E. Nekritz. (Harvard Crimson)
  
  
• Trump’s 92-minute acceptance speech at the RNC was so long and rambling that even the audience seemed to get a bit bored with it. And as usual, he said a bunch of things that were just demonstrably untrue. (PBS)
  
  
• There was one non-horrible guest at the RNC, as Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia insisted on bringing his large English Bulldog, “Babydog,” on stage with him. (Washington Post)

• Chaya Raichik (aka Libs of TikTok), a noted “cancel culture” opponent, has been reporting random minimum wage employees to their bosses for making jokes on social media about the Trump assassination attempt, and claims that at least ten have gotten fired as a result. (Gizmodo)
  
  
• Elon Musk is moving SpaceX and Twitter (uh, “X”) headquarters from California to Texas. Allegedly, it’s because California’s new law protecting transgender students from being forcibly outed to their parents was “the final straw.” But the lack of a personal or corporate income tax in Texas probably plays a role too. (Financial Times)
  
  
• The FBI has unlocked the phone of Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks to reveal that he had searched for campaign stops for Biden as well. It seems he just wanted to shoot a president, any president. (New York Times)
  
  
• One of Trump’s many companies offered assassination-themed sneakers with “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” written on them for $299. They sold out almost immediately. (The Guardian)

Image: Complex Sneakers via Twitter

AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM

JOHN HINCKLEY JR:

Thanks, John. Glad to see you and your cat are doing well in these difficult times. 

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has been spying on a journalist who wrote about its deputy gangs. Back in 2021, investigative journalist Cerise Castle published a very long, very thorough series of 15 articles on the history of racist “deputy gangs” within the LA police. With names like the Lynwood Vikings and the Compton Executioners, these gangs are widespread, secretive, and brutally violent, often celebrating the killing of civilians by the police by getting “998” tattoos—the code for “officer-involved shooting.” And as it turns out, the LASD really doesn’t want anyone talking or writing about them. 

Like many of the deputy gangs, the “Vikings” even have their own logo. (Image: Wikipedia)

As Castle writes for the Los Angeles Public Press, she became the target of harassment almost immediately after her articles went out:

Since reporting on deputy gangs, I have received numerous personal threats of death and rape. Other threats have been directed at my family and loved ones. These threats have arrived via direct message on social media, email, and anonymous texts. I have been pulled over while reporting on the sheriff’s department. I have seen patrol vehicles stationed outside of my house. 

Eventually, she sued the Sheriff’s Department to find out what role, if any, they played in all this. When they finally turned over the relevant email records in a court settlement, she writes, they revealed that “More than 50 members of the sheriff’s department sent more than 800 pages of emails about me in the course of just 7 months.” 

One sheriff’s deputy filed a tip to the department’s intelligence division reporting Castle under the category “Suspicious Activity - Person,” writing that she was “responsible for pushing out the LASD gangs narrative.” (One would think the deputies themselves were responsible for that “narrative,” on account of having so many gangs.) Soon after, the Sheriff’s Information Bureau started monitoring the social media accounts of Knock LA, the outlet that originally published Castle’s reporting. An LASD crime analyst sent an email instructing other analysts to “keep an eye on” Castle, and to “monitor what else she posts as part of this project.” A clinical psychologist who works for the LASD subscribed to Knock LA’s newsletter, and described it in an email as one of multiple “anti-LASD platform(s) we’re tracking.” Castle also reports that she has “noticed different department members consistently watching my Instagram story, including LASD’s official account,” and that she’s “seen patrol vehicles parked outside of my apartment.”

It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on here: police surveillance and harassment of a journalist who exposed their dirty secrets. The LASD’s behavior has already been condemned by members of PEN America, the First Amendment Coalition, the Society for Professional Journalists, the Coalition for Women in Journalism, and other groups concerned with freedom of the press. But that’s not enough. This is a serious threat to everyone’s First Amendment freedoms, and there need to be real penalties for the officials responsible, so it never happens again. 

In other news…

• Seven states—Arkansas, California, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon and Texas—currently have “very high” levels of COVID-19 in their wastewater, according to the latest figures from the CDC. If you’re in one of those states, keep your mask and sanitizer at the ready! (The Hill) 
  
  
• An Atlanta man named James Blitch drove for more than 3 hours to tear down a Confederate flag along the highway in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What a legend. (Jalopnik)

Pictured: The REAL Confederate flag: Robert E. Lee’s dish towel that he used to surrender with. 

(Image: National Museum of American History)

• The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Minnesota’s ban on people younger than 20 carrying handguns was unconstitutional. Heavily armed teenagers: what could go wrong? (Washington Post)
  
  
• In a victory for the indigenous Land Back movement, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will return roughly 1,600 acres of Nebraska land, which it took through eminent domain in 1970, to the Winnebago tribe. (Associated Press)
  
  
• We’re often told that “capitalism creates innovation.” But what does the “innovation” actually consist of? Apparently, flavored vodka that tastes like pork roll, or bagels with egg and cheese. Thanks a lot, invisible hand. (NBC 10 Philadelphia)

Because who hasn’t taken a shot of vodka and thought, “I wish this tasted more like processed meat?” 

(Image: 3BR Distillery via Instagram)

• South Dakota currently has an $81 million budget surplus. So how, you might ask, does Governor Kristi Noem want to spend it? On healthcare or education, perhaps? No! She wants to build more prisons, because of course she does. (South Dakota Searchlight)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Samsung workers in South Korea are going on strike for the first time. The company is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer chips and smartphones, but even amid a labor organizing boom in the nation, the company had never seen a work stoppage over its near six-decades of existence. In fact, until 2020, the company had banned union organizing entirely, a policy it enforced with mass surveillance and intimidation of its workforce.

This past June, the National Samsung Electronics Union, which represents about a quarter of the company’s more than 125,000 workers, launched a single-day stoppage. On July 11, after Samsung responded to the walkout with silence, NSEU announced that it would begin an indefinite strike. 

According to the New York Times:

Union workers are demanding a wage increase by 3.5 percent, improved bonus policies and an extra day of paid vacation. Entry-level Samsung employees typically get over two weeks a year of vacation, some paid and some unpaid. The union also wants Samsung to agree to compensate workers for any lost wages during the strike.

While in recent years union workers have said that they received bonuses of as much as 30 percent, last year they got nothing. The average member earned about 80 million won last year, or around $60,000, before incentives, they said.

While not offering their employees any pay raise, Samsung recently offered its CEO, Han Jong-hee, a 49-percent pay increase that brought his total compensation up to nearly 7 billion won ($5.9 million per year). This is what precipitated the most recent strike. But grievances among Samsung employees have been piling up for decades. 

As Kap Seol writes for Jacobin, “Nothing better illustrates how a workplace without collective labor representation can wreak havoc on even better-paid workers than the cluster of blood disorders among workers at Samsung,” reports of which date back to the 1990s, but were covered up by the company for decades. Workers’ compensation claims were repeatedly denied by the government until a whistleblower finally revealed the number of toxic chemicals employees were being exposed to. These disorders have been found to have caused more than a hundred deaths of employees between 2012 and 2020; and those are just the ones that have been documented. Employees finally won a class-action suit against the company in 2011, which forced Samsung to pay out 100 billion won (just over $72.2 million) and led them to issue a formal apology. But as Hwang Sang-ki, whose daughter died of leukemia after working at a Samsung factory for just 2.5 years, told the CBC: “No apology would be enough considering the deception and humiliation we experienced from Samsung over the past 11 years.”

Seol, who helped document the cases of illnesses caused by Samsung’s workplace conditions, writes: 

Samsung’s brutal anti-labor history and the sacrifices of many of its workers should shatter the myth that good benefits and pay alone can substitute for labor’s own collective bargaining power… The impact of the current open-ended strike will surely continue to reverberate regardless of the outcome because it was sparked by the realization that even the best-paid workers cannot always rely on the benevolence of their employer.

Samsung workers on strike assemble outside the office of Samsung’s CEO, who was presumably rocking back and forth in terror. (Image: @Aldanmarki via Twitter)

In other news…

• In the United Kingdom, Amazon workers at a warehouse in Coventry have lost their unionization vote… by just 28 votes! It’s disappointing, but also a sign that a future victory is very possible. (BBC)
  
  
• The U.K. has also become the first country in Europe to approve lab-grown meat, which will be used in pet food but has not yet been cleared for human consumption. (BBC) We know someone who won’t be visiting anytime soon:

Art by Nick Sirotich from Current Affairs Issue 48, May/June 2024

• A victims’ rights group in Queensland, Australia is calling for children to be released from police watch houses after horrific videos emerged of children being forced into freezing isolation chambers, including a 13-year-old First Nations girl with intellectual disabilities. Last year, the state suspended its own Human Rights Act to allow for children to be detained alongside adults in police cells. Many of the detained children have been mentally ill. (The Guardian)
  
  
• Even the Jerusalem Post—one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most reliable defenders—now acknowledges that the Israeli prime minister is sabotaging ceasefire agreements that could have brought hostages home.
  
  
• Indian police killed 12 Maoist Naxalite rebels in a remote forest on Wednesday. (Barron’s) This is something that happens pretty routinely in the country, as India has had a small, but active communist insurgency since the 1960s. Their base of support comes from indigenous areas, known as the “Red Corridor,” and they have been taking militant action against mineral extraction and displacement from their homelands. (Al Jazeera)
  
  
• New Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian has shown an interest in normalizing relations with Washington, which may involve more aggressive attempts to renew the nuclear deal that the United States backed out of. (Middle East Eye)
  
  
• In a landmark decision, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that gay couples have the same right to claim their partners as dependents for national health insurance as straight couples. (Business Standard)

WOMBAT FACT OF THE WEEK

Wombats use their butts as tools of self-defense. 

A good guy with a butt. (Photo: Inhabitat)

Long time briefing-heads will recall that this is not our first time discussing the noble marsupial’s remarkable rear-end. Last August, we informed you that they are the only animal known to produce cube-shaped poops. But that is just one of the many impressive things their bottoms can do.

Alyce Swinbourne, whom the Guardian describes as an “expert in wombat bottoms” from the University of Adelaide, says that they “use their backside to ‘plug’ up their burrows, stopping predators entering and protecting softer areas of their anatomy.” Their bottoms have very few nerve endings, so they barely feel the sharp claws of a dingo or whatever other animal may be attempting to enter their lair.

You shall not pass. (Photo: Life at Yarrawonga)

But their buttocks are not just tools of protection. Michael Swinbourne, the husband of Alyce and another wombat researcher at Adelaide, told the Washington Post that he’s “seen dead foxes near the entrances to burrows.” This is evidence of a theory that the wombat can deploy a thunder rump maneuver and “slam its butt against the roof or walls of the burrow and literally crush the skull of its enemy.” In other words, the wombat can kill predators by “twerking them to death.” Here is a graphic illustration by the Oatmeal:

In the wombat community, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” is considered a threat.