July 23, 2024 ❧ Heat wave voters, Biden bows out, Anti-whaling activist arrested

Plus: Des Moines cracks down on the homeless, Netanyahu goes to Washington, U.K. votes on child poverty, and beekeeping dogs!

In space, no one can hear the news

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

❧ With the news dominated by the palace intrigue of the Democratic nomination and the recent Trump assassination attempt, even less media attention than usual has been paid to the unprecedented heat waves that have gripped the country this summer. Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded in human history, according to preliminary data from the European Union. Meanwhile, the most recent Heat Map newsletter has some very disturbing reports from the past week from across the United States, where heat has been particularly bad: 

• “Cities like Spokane, Washington and Boise, Idaho will continue to see triple-digit temperatures until at least Wednesday. In fact, on Thursday, Boise might see its 10th day in a row above 100 degrees, breaking the city’s record.”
• “As of yesterday, Oregon’s firefighters were dealing with 81 active fires, burning through over 500,000 acres of the state.”
• “Thermometers in Washington, D.C. reached 104 degrees for just the 13th time in history. The next day, the District capped off a run of four days with temperatures above 101 degrees…”
• And most distressingly: “In [Maricopa County, AZ] alone, more than 300 deaths are being linked to record-breaking heat, NBC News reported on Thursday.”

The issue of rising temperatures has a much greater impact on the daily lives of Americans than the personal foibles of our country’s leaders. One wonders: Will climate change affect how Americans decide to vote? For the New Republic’s Climate section, Heather Souvaine Horn says that “extreme heat may prove in retrospect to be one of the most important stories of the summer”:

[T]hree-quarters of Americans accept the science behind this fatal heat. Seventy-four percent of people in the U.S. now believe that global warming is affecting extreme heat in the nation, according to a large survey released this week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

Let’s put that number into perspective: 74 percent is not only higher than the percentage of respondents in a March 2024 Gallup poll who think Trump would make a good president (35 percent), and higher than the percentage who say Biden would make a good president (30 percent)—it’s higher than both of those numbers added together. More people in the U.S. believe climate change is driving extreme heat than think either party’s candidate would do a decent job in the White House.

While this doesn’t mean that voters are overwhelmingly voting based on their experience with heat waves (and, in fact, the same Yale poll says that only around 47 percent view climate change as something impacting people “right now), there are still voters using this election to mobilize on climate. She points to one group, the Environmental Voter Project (covered by Liza Featherstone in a 2022 issue of TNR’s Climate blog), which has sought to mobilize non-voters who consider climate change their number one issue. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and polls show that they are often “young, low-income, or people of color. All those groups vote less than other demographics.” As heat waves continue to worsen, people will become more desperate for solutions. Those solutions are political in nature, but it is up to politicians to recognize this and present a coherent vision to combat the climate crisis. 

Map: The Guardian

❧ Oh yeah, also… Joe Biden has finally, mercifully, dropped out of the presidential race, prompting outpourings of absurd, exaggerated praise from media elites who now herald him as a heroic, selfless figure. In truth, Biden only stepped down because he lost the confidence of his party (something that happens regularly in real democracies with parliamentary systems), and made the self-interested calculation that it was better to depart willingly rather than face a public mutiny from top party members and donors. 

Many, including those on the left, are now celebrating the ascendance of Kamala Harris’ coconut imperium. But while this probably makes a Trump defeat more likely, and we can have our fun with the memes, it’s important to recognize how little this changes in the broad scheme of things.

In a post on Twitter, author Chris Hedges said it quite well:

“Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years - from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else […]

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties.” 

Our long national nightmare is Joever. 

(Photo: Tom Brenner, New York Times via Redux)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

New in Current Affairs today, "The Kamala Conundrum."

In other news…

• After months of increasing cockiness at the prospect of running against a candidate in obvious mental decline, the Trump campaign is reportedly shocked and mortified by Biden’s decision to drop out. In fact, campaign officials even told the Atlantic that Trump’s selection of the profoundly off-putting J.D. Vance as a running mate “was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” They may come to regret that decision now that they have to actually, you know, campaign. 

Not exactly a fountain of charisma.

• People often call Vance an “isolationist.” But is that really true? On Substack, Ken Klippenstein takes a look at his foreign policy stances, and concludes that “Vance is Trump with a cerebral cortex”: basically the same policies, just a little more subtly expressed.
  
  
• Democrats on the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) have blocked Dr. Cornel West from appearing on the ballot for president in November, despite his Justice for All Party collecting 17,140 signatures—significantly more than the requirement of 13,865. They did, however, admit RFK Jr. with 18,400 signatures. Maybe we should start calling them the “Democratic When it’s Convenient” party? (World Socialist Web Site)
  
  
• More than ten months into his horrifying assault on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington, D.C. to speak to Congress. This is kind of like having Slobodan Milošević speak during the Bosnian Genocide, and to their credit, at least eight representatives so far have announced they’ll boycott the speech. (Newsweek) Vice President Kamala Harris has also said she will not preside over the address, though a spokesperson said it should not be interpreted as a change in policy towards Israel. (Washington Post) 
  
  
• After being convicted for a cartoonish bribery scheme, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has announced his intent to resign. Turns out that getting caught exchanging favors for literal gold bars isn't something that's easy to come back from. (Washington Post)
  
  
• After an embarrassing congressional hearing yesterday in which she dodged basically every question about the Trump assassination attempt, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle also announced her resignation this morning. (New York Times)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

Editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson went on Al Jazeera’s “Listening Post” program to talk about the Trump assassination attempt:

• Many pundits on the right are convinced that Joe Biden, who has spent the last week isolating due to a Covid infection, is actually dead because he has not made any public appearances in recent days. This is, in fact, what you are supposed to do when you have Covid. But yesterday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) demanded that Biden demonstrate “proof of life.” (New Republic) Biden is scheduled to address the nation on Wednesday. (CNN)
  
  
• With basically no path to the White House, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. floated the possibility of dropping out and endorsing Trump in exchange for a role in his administration overseeing health and medicine. Thankfully, Trump rejected the offer. (Washington Post)

PAST AFFAIRS

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Lying Crank Posing as a Progressive Alternative to Biden”

Last year, Current Affairs editors Lily Sánchez (a former pediatrician) and Nathan J. Robinson wrote that, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is someone who lies constantly in ways that seriously endanger the public. In fact, his lies have probably directly caused people to get sick, and possibly die.”

This was dangerously close to becoming reality. 

(Art by Nick Sirotich from Issue 43 of Current Affairs Magazine, July/August 2023)

AROUND THE STATES

❧ After last month’s Supreme Court ruling allowing local governments to criminalize homelessness, the city of Des Moines, Iowa is seeking to do just that. The Des Moines Register reports on a proposed ordinance that would “ban camping and reduce the number of days people have to remove their belongings from public spaces.” Homeless people, who famously don’t have a lot of money, would be fined $50 if they are caught sleeping outdoors. The law will require them to seek accommodations in one of the local homeless shelters. 

Amid a surge of homelessness in the city, finding shelter is increasingly difficult. In recent months, the Register reports, they’ve been at or near capacity. A recent amendment to the proposal would exempt homeless people from punishment if there is no shelter space available. That’s somewhat of an improvement, but there are still lots of reasons that homeless people have said they prefer to live on the street than in a shelter: they are crowded, lack personal space, and often lack proper hygiene. (Many shelters are also gender-segregated, requiring families to split up and presenting difficulties for trans and nonbinary people, and many don’t allow pets, who have to be abandoned to gain access.)

While we shouldn’t stop building shelters, which are important for dealing with short term crises, they are not a long term solution for homelessness. The real solution is to give people homes to live in, either by building new units or redistributing ones that already exist. Unfortunately, Des Moines, has fallen horribly short in that regard. One study from the homeless advocacy group Homeward Iowa found that Polk County needs three times the amount of funding it currently receives for housing, emergency shelter, and other homelessness services. Meanwhile, less than 5 percent of people eligible for programs like Rapid Re-Housing and Permanent Supportive Housing actually received it in 2023. The lack of resources may be about to get worse. Since 2022, Iowa has used federal money it received during the pandemic to fund a Rapid Rehousing Program, but funds are set to run out next year.

With this new ordinance, Des Moines is attempting to solve the problem punitively, as are many other municipalities. But pushing homeless people off the streets doesn’t actually solve their problem. In fact, it inflicts harm on vulnerable people for less than no discernible gain: it is actually more expensive to pay for policing and temporary solutions for homeless people than it is to simply provide them with permanent housing. Belle Ren, a former substitute teacher who became homeless after her unemployment benefits ran out during the pandemic, summed up the issue quite well for Street Sense Media in 2022:

The public resources that aren’t being spent to house me are being spent elsewhere. The public resources that could be helping me get back on my feet are instead being used to treat injury and illness that never would have happened to someone with a roof over their head. Why are we so penny wise and pound foolish? In an effort to spend less on sheltering the homeless, we cost ourselves so much more in treating the symptoms of homelessness. That price tag includes the cost exacted in human suffering. 

A homeless encampment in the bitter Iowa cold.

(Photo: Brian Powers, The Des Moines Register)

In other news…

• After Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention (and called Donald Trump a “tough SOB”), a lot of rank-and-file union members are understandably mad at him. Not only that, but vice president at-large John Palmer has announced that he’ll challenge O’Brien for the union leadership at its next election in 2026. (The Hill)
  
  
• In Georgia, a district judge has ruled that national bail funds can keep operating—at least for now—since a Republican-backed law that banned people and organizations from paying more than three people’s bail per year was “arbitrary.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
  
  
• White nationalist Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper” followers (don’t ask) recently held their fourth America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in Detroit. In a worrying development, plenty of mainstream Republican Party figures were in attendance, suggesting that Fuentes’ open antisemitism and admiration for Hitler are no longer a red line for them. Yikes! (The Intercept)
  
  
• More than 3,100 people were arrested across the United States for their participation in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations this past spring, almost all for nonviolent offenses. Many are now seeing their charges dropped. (New York Times)
  
  
• Maryland’s Attorney General has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Eric Sessoms, a landlord who allegedly sexually harassed his female tenants on numerous occasions. (Baltimore Banner)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ A famed anti-whaling activist has just been arrested in Greenland. In the capital city of Nuuk, Greenland’s police have just apprehended Paul Watson—one of the founding members of Greenpeace, and the world’s most prominent activist against the murderous practice of commercial whaling. 

Killing whales for profit has been banned internationally since 1982, but three nations—Iceland, Norway, and Japan—still allow it, and Watson has been fighting them for decades. After being voted off the board of Greenpeace in 1977 for being “generally troublesome,” he founded the rival Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. This was essentially a group of anti-whaling environmental pirates, who embraced dangerous “direct action” tactics like cutting fishing nets, ramming whaling ships with vessels of their own, throwing stink bombs onto their decks, and even sinking them. (In a 1994 interview, Watson explained that “Our real objective here is to increase their insurance costs, increase their security costs” and “hurt them economically” until whaling was no longer profitable.) From 2008 to 2014 he and his volunteer crew were the stars of Animal Planet’s Whale Wars docuseries, which followed Sea Shepherd’s activities around the world and even inspired a South Park parody. 

Sea Shepherd’s flagship vessel, the M/Y Steve Irwin (yes, it’s named after the Crocodile Hunter) on patrol. (Image: Sea Shepherd Global)

This year, Watson and his crew were pursuing what they called "Operation Kangei Maru," a mission to intercept a newly-built Japanese whaling ship in the Pacific. As Lena Hunter writes for the Copenhagen Post, Japan has restricted whaling to its own territorial waters for the past five years, but the construction of the $47-million Kangei Maru has prompted speculation they may soon return to the Southern Ocean—something Watson hoped to prevent. His own ship, the John Paul Dejoria, had docked at Greenland for fuel and supplies—only to be boarded by a SWAT team who arrested Watson under an INTERPOL “Red Notice” issued by the Japanese government. Depending on how his court proceedings go in Greenland (a territory of Denmark,) he may soon be extradited to Japan to stand trial. 

Watson is a controversial figure, and he could plausibly be called an eco-terrorist. But the whaling industry he’s fighting against is one of the most senseless, disgusting crimes against animals in today’s world. Norway alone has killed more than 14,000 whales since the international ban was put in place, and according to a recent Icelandic study, at least 40 percent of whales that are harpooned suffer “slow and painful deaths.” It’s the people responsible for that atrocity, not the ones opposing it, who should be facing harsh legal consequences. 

Watson is handcuffed and led away. (Image: Captain Paul Watson Foundation)

In other news…

• The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued a landmark ruling that Israel is responsible for “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians based on their ethnicity, and that it “has an obligation to bring an end to its presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as rapidly as possible.” (Washington Post)
  
  
• Ansar Allah—also known as the Houthi movement—have hit Tel Aviv with a drone, killing one person and wounding eight. It’s the first time they’ve struck the city, and Israel has retaliated by attacking the port of Hodeidah in Yemen. (Al Jazeera)
  
  
• Huge street protests have rocked Bangladesh, demanding an end to a quota system that set aside one-third of all government jobs for veterans of the country’s 1971 war for independence. (BBC)
  
  
• For the first time since the disease’s discovery, the majority of AIDS cases are now outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new UNAIDS report. The number of cases has decreased by 56 percent since 2010 across the subcontinent and 39 percent worldwide over the same period. (The Guardian)
  
  
• The government of Nigeria has levied a $220 million fine against Meta, alleging that the social-media company gathered data from WhatsApp users and shared it with advertisers without getting the users’ consent. (Semafor Africa)
  
  
• The U.K. Parliament will soon vote on whether to scrap the Tories’ two-child benefit cap, which has contributed to increased child poverty. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been dragging his feet on eliminating the proposal. But after a mutiny from backbenchers, he has said he’ll consider getting rid of it, too. (The Guardian)
  
  
• President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil says he’s “frightened” by the heated rhetoric around Venezuela’s upcoming July 28 election. He’s urging incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, his sometime ally, to respect the results—even if he loses to political newcomer Edmundo Gonzáles Urrutia, which seems like it may actually happen. (Associated Press)

Art by Tom Humberstone from Issue 48 0f Current Affairs Magazine May/June 2024

• Nguyễn Phú Trọng, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, has died at age 80. He was known for both his anti-corruption campaigns and the imprisonment of human rights activists; now, it’s unclear who will lead the Party in his absence. (The Guardian)

DOG FACT OF THE WEEK

Dogs are often used to help with beekeeping…and they look like this:

Photo: Josh Kennett, via Australian Broadcast Corporation

This wonderful photo is of an Australian apiary dog named Bazz, who is trained, according to Grist, “to sniff out American Foulbrood, a quick-spreading disease that infects bee larvae and wipes out beehives.” 

Apiary dogs are much faster at inspecting hives than human beekeepers—the website Bee Informed describes a Labrador retriever named Buck who trained along drug sniffing police dogs and can “inspect 20 colonies in less than 10 minutes!” But they couldn’t get anywhere near the hives without a bee suit, which protects them from being stung. Most dogs have terrific senses of smell—about 40 times more powerful than ours—which means that any kind can work in beekeeping.

Crusoe the Dachshund from Ontario, Canada is also a beekeeper.