July 9, 2024 ❧ Victory for French leftists, the Gaza death toll may be under-reported, and LA's homelessness failure

Plus: You can buy bullets in a vending machine now, Iran gets a new president, and there are MANY kinds of "fancy pigeon." 

They say “No news is good news”... Alas, there is news.

STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER

The Gaza death toll is likely much higher than has been reported

An article published in the Lancet medical journal on July 5 estimates that the death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza has been severely underreported. The most commonly cited figures, from the Gaza Health Ministry, put the death toll at around 38,000 over the course of the nine-month-old war. This is already a tremendous loss of life. (So tremendous, in fact, that the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to ban the State Department from citing it.)

But as the Lancet points out, the destruction of medical infrastructure throughout the war has made it vastly harder to adequately document the number of dead. Meanwhile, the Ministry’s tally only includes the “direct” deaths caused by the violence of this conflict. It doesn’t even include the likely 10,000 or more that the UN estimates are buried beneath the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed buildings. 

It also doesn’t include those who have been killed by the “indirect” effects of the war. The Lancet report says: 

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.

Often, the indirect effects of war are far broader in scale than the direct ones. The article cites evidence from the 2008 World Drug Report finding that “in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.” When taking these factors into account, the Lancet estimates that “up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” which would be about eight percent of Gaza’s total population. This, they consider to be a “conservative” estimate. 

To be clear, this is a very crude estimate and the report has not been peer-reviewed. We should treat it more like an educated guess rather than a rigorous study. But the general premise, that the published death toll in Gaza is likely a significant undercount, seems highly likely given the destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure. Regardless of the exact number, far too many people have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result of this military campaign, and it needs to end.

As of right now, there are few signs that a ceasefire will be achieved any time soon. Yesterday, per Reuters, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu said that any potential deal “must allow Israel to resume fighting until its objectives are met” after a brief pause to the war. Given that one of Israel’s stated objectives is to completely remove Hamas from power—something they are nowhere close to doing—this is a totally untenable position. 

The only conceivable solution, it appears, is for the U.S. to force Israel’s hand by withholding weapons sales, something Joe Biden has proven totally unwilling to do for any meaningful period of time. As long as the U.S. continues to provide Israel with the means of perpetrating this mass slaughter, we are no less responsible for it than they are.

These are not conditions anyone should be forced to endure. (Photo: The United Nations)

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

❧ Joe Biden sent a letter to House Democrats yesterday insisting that he will stay in the presidential race and that it’s time for everybody to shut up about him dropping out. The letter responds to nine Democratic representatives who, in recent days, begged him to step out of the race.

Biden reiterated what he said in a televised interview with ABC this weekend, in which he said that he’d only step out of the race if “the Lord almighty” came down and told him to. When asked how he’d feel if that decision ultimately resulted in a Trump presidency, he said, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” which is a startlingly cavalier and narcissistic attitude to have about what he describes as “an existential threat to democracy.”

(Note: The Biden press team actually called ABC insisting that the president did not say “the goodest job”—something a puppy in a meme would say—and, in fact, said “the good as job,” which may actually be less coherent. So that’s where we’re at right now.)

As for the letter, it’s an artifact of pure delusion. Perhaps the most infuriating portion asserts that “We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively.” This is patently absurd. There was not a Democratic primary in any meaningful sense. Two states outright cancelled their primaries. But more importantly, the Democratic Party refused to hold debates—despite the wishes of voters—which delayed voters’ ability to witness Biden’s cognitive state until it was too late. In fact, polling from after last month’s debate now shows that a plurality of Democratic voters want Biden to bow out. If the party really wanted to honor the will of their voters—most of whom did not want Biden from the start—they would have had a serious primary to begin with rather than seeking to stifle any opposition.

But the letter appears to have worked. The Democrats who seemed most likely to call for a Biden replacement have instead begun to rally around him. Yesterday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bluntly said, “The matter is closed… He is not leaving this race. He is in this race, and I support him.” Several other Squad members have jumped in to back Biden as well. So unless something drastic changes, it looks like Biden will be the guy. God help us.

Probably nothing to worry about. (Video: ABC)

❧ Prominent Republicans are once again making disturbing references to political violence. In what the New Republic is calling an “ugly, hateful rant,” GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson—who’s already notorious for his blatant homophobia and comments downplaying the Holocaust—recently said the following to a small church in White Lake, North Carolina:

Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity! When you have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handled. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it…

Defending this rhetoric, Robinson’s spokesperson has insisted that he was only referring to historical enemies of the United States, like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But Robinson began by saying that, “We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent,” and he went on to make a series of paranoid claims about the present-day political left (“[T]he tenets of socialism and communism start coming into clearer focus. They’re watching us. They’re listening to us. They’re tracking us.”) So when he says that “some folks need killing,” it’s hard not to wonder exactly who he considers to be in that category. 

Definitely a normal, well-adjusted man. (Image: Anthony Crider via Flickr)

In other news…

• Speaking of political violence, the Patriot Front white nationalist group just marched in Nashville, chanting things like “deportation saves the nation” and “sieg heil.” It’s the second prominent neo-Nazi march this summer, after the “Blood Tribe” group made an appearance in South Dakota early in June. (The Tennessean)
  
  
• Republicans are already doing “birtherism” to Kamala Harris, claiming her birth to two immigrants makes her ineligible to serve as president. (She was, in fact, born in the U.S., which makes her a citizen by birth.) We have now had two Black people in U.S. history on a presidential ticket and Republicans have accused both of them of being foreigners. (Ron Filipkowski on Twitter). As if that wasn’t bad enough, the New York Post also ran an op-ed saying she could be the first “DEI president.” (The Cut) 
  
  
• Donald Trump is now pretending not to know what “Project 2025” is, even though it was mostly written by former members of his administration. (Slate)
  
  
• Liza Featherstone writes that “Rich homeowners are cutting or poisoning trees for a better view and even better profit,” acts which are wreaking havoc on local ecosystems. She argues that fining them is not sufficient and that they need to be sent to jail. (The New Republic)
  
  
• One of the reasons Joe Biden is insisting on staying in the race: He keeps taking advice from his son, Hunter. Needless to say, this calls his judgment into question. (The Guardian)

AROUND THE STATES

❧ The city of Los Angeles recently spent over $341 million on an aid program for the homeless… but what did they get in return? According to a new community audit by LA mutual aid groups, the answer is not nearly enough. As Elizabeth Chou reports for the Los Angeles Public Press, Mayor Karen Bass announced a program called “Inside Safe” shortly after taking office in late 2022. The program sounded like a good one, aimed at getting people from homeless encampments into safer and more permanent housing. According to figures from the city comptroller’s office, its total costs as of May 31, 2024 amount to $341,059,057. 

The problem is, although Inside Safe has brought more than 2,700 people off the streets so far, only 539 of them have actually been housed, and most of those not even permanently. The lion’s share of the program’s funds— $105,621,034, according to the Comptroller’s figures—went to pay for short stays in motels. Although these are definitely better than sleeping on the street, they don’t offer much of a long-term solution, and several participants in the program say they were mistreated during their motel stays:

• ​​“They made me change rooms multiple times for no reason even though no one new moved into my old room. The staff comes into my room while I’m sleeping.”

• “The new management is mean and cruel. They laughed in my face when I asked for help. So many people get kicked out all the time now, it’s not right.”

• “They never talk to us about housing. They don’t treat us like human beings.”

(Infographic: Community Audit of Inside Safe)

As Chou writes, the report also details other kinds of neglect:

[T]he majority of people they surveyed in the program have not received housing vouchers (more than 85%); say they have never received mental health support (75%) even though many reported suffering from anxiety, depression and poor mental health; and seen rules at their Inside Safe shelter become more strict and prison-like (59%) during their time in the program.

The Comptroller’s figures also show that, under Inside Safe, more people have “returned to homelessness” (735) than have actually been housed (539), with an additional 50 “incarcerated” and 44 “deceased.” Of the 539, only 68 got “permanent supportive housing,” while the majority (305) were entered into “time limited subsidies”—a situation in which they’d receive rent for 12 or 24 months, but nothing beyond that. (The Los Angeles Housing Services Authority describes this with the Orwellian phrase “accessing permanent housing quickly and for a limited amount of time,” which isn’t actually what the word “permanent” means.) As a result, the mutual aid groups report that 236 people who had been housed under Inside Safe, supposedly “permanently,” actually lost their housing as soon as the subsidy ran out. 

In theory, a program like this should have been a great thing for the city. We know that the simplest and best way to solve homelessness is simply to give people homes. But it appears Inside Safe has been plagued by the usual problems of liberal social programs: needless bureaucracy and restrictions, together with the involvement of private entities that siphon money off the top. If they’d simply given each of the 2,700 homeless people an equal share of the $341 million, it would have amounted to roughly $116,000 a person. Instead, they opted for a technocratic mess, with awful results.

Mayor Bass patronizes a homeless person for just long enough to take a photo.

(Image: LACity.gov)

PAST AFFAIRS

Last year, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson wrote that “Homelessness Is An Entirely Solvable Problem.”

“It’s perfectly possible to simply provide a guaranteed right to housing. This is the approach Finland has taken. They’re eradicating homelessness through the novel solution of providing housing for people. They took action, and as a result they went from having a substantial homeless population to the point where, by 2020, “practically no-one was sleeping rough on a given night in Finland.”

“Housing First,” i.e., give people housing before trying to address their health issues, has become accepted wisdom among those who work on housing policy.” 

In other news…

• Hurricane Beryl has made landfall, knocking out two million people's power in Houston. It’s just one example of the extreme weather events happening this week, which climate change is making more common and severe. (PBS)
  
  
• After threatening to strike, Alaska Airlines flight attendants have won a 32-percent pay increase and compensation for boarding time. (Anchorage Daily News)
  
  
• In Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, you can now buy bullets in a vending machine! Thankfully, the machines do check people’s age and ID using a facial-recognition scanner. However, they can’t detect if the customer is intoxicated or muttering “I’ll show them,” so it still seems like a pretty bad idea. (Quartz)

Fittingly, this particular machine is located next to a case of “Bang” energy drinks. (Image: American Rounds via YouTube)

• Experts are warning of another, lesser-known risk associated with climate change: “the eruption of raw sewage into people’s basements and in the streets,” which could threaten cities like Philadelphia in the near future. (WHYY)
  
  
• As Mississippi faces 110F temperatures, its prisons still lack air conditioning. Even faced with reports of inmates passing out and experiencing seizures due to heat, the Department of Corrections still has no timeline for when they plan to install it. (Mississippi Today)

Art by Aidan Y-M for Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 48, May/June 2024

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Masoud Pezeshkian is now the president-elect of Iran. After a tense run-off election against conservative candidate Saeed Jalili, Pezeshkian ultimately won with 53.7 percent, carrying more than 16.3 million votes compared to Jalili’s 13.5 million. He was the only moderate candidate allowed to run by Iran’s Guardian Council, which had previously disqualified him during the 2021 election. 

In the past, Pezeshkian has criticized Iran’s infamous “morality police” and the mandatory hijab, saying that “We have no right to force girls and women regarding citizenship rights. We will not be able to cover women’s heads through coercion.” (Notably, he wears secular clothing himself, and is the first Iranian president not to be an Islamic cleric since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013.) Pezeshkian has also called for a foreign policy that is “not anti-West, nor anti-East,” and is expected to pursue a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the United States. 

There are serious obstacles in his way, since Ayatollah Ali Khameini and the Guardian Council still hold ultimate political power in Iran. As president, Pezeshkian will have some influence over domestic policy, but almost none over foreign policy or the Iranian military. For their part, U.S. leaders like White House national security advisor John Kirby have answered with a blunt “no” when asked if Pezeshkian’s leadership will mean a change in U.S. policy toward Iran. Still, his election may be cause for cautious optimism. If nothing else, it means the people of Iran are seeking political change, even with the limited avenues available to them. 

Pezeshkian is single-handedly keeping the Iranian microphone industry alive. At least he'll have a defensive wall if anyone throws a shoe. (Image: Iran Election 2024 via Twitter)

❧ In a remarkable turn of events, France’s center and left have banded together to keep the far-right out of power. All seemed lost last week, when Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Rally party finished in first place in the initial round of federal elections and appeared on track to gain a governing majority. But Emmanuel Macron’s beleaguered centrist Ensemble forces made common cause with Jean Luc Mélenchon’s socialist New Popular Front to do battle with the right in this Sunday’s runoff, and attained a shocking result: Not only did the far-right not win a majority, they came out in third place, with Mélenchon’s left bloc gaining the most seats and setting him up as the front-runner to become France’s next prime minister. (This is quite an upgrade from the previous favorite for PM, Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old who posts racist memes on Twitter.)

Chart: BBC

After weeks of doomsaying as the fascist ascendance appeared increasingly inevitable, this is a tremendous victory. Harrison Stetler described the scene thusly in Jacobin:

Across the country, left-wing voters and progressives greeted the result with a huge sigh of relief, if not outright jubilation. Well into the night, car horns celebrating the Left’s victory could be heard throughout the French capital, with a large crowd gathering at Paris’s Place de la République to cheer the Nouveau Front Populaire and chant anti-fascist songs and slogans. 

Not only did France avert what could have been its most right-wing government since the Vichy era, the left now has a chance to wield some real power it hasn’t had in more than a decade. Despite his willingness to cooperate here, Macron has left a disastrous mess that needs to be tidied up. The good news is that the left actually has a strong, popular vision for economic reform.

In a rather hilarious attempt at fearmongering, the New York Times’ Catherine Porter wrote that “While many in France cheered what appeared to be a loss for the far right, others were fearful of what the far left might bring.” She goes on to describe their terrifying platform:

The far-left’s proposed platform includes raising France’s monthly minimum wage, lowering the legal retirement age from 64 to 60, building one million new affordable housing units in five years and freezing the prices of basic necessities including food, energy and gas. The state would also pay households all costs associated with their children’s education, including meals at cafeterias, transportation and extracurricular activities.

Instead of drastically cutting immigration, as the far right had promised, the coalition pledged to make the asylum process more generous and smooth.

Egads! Anything but that! 

To be clear, while the left is now in a stronger position, it will still have to engage in horse-trading with the center to achieve anything since no party has an outright majority. This will be a challenge for multiple reasons. For one thing, the New Popular Front is itself cobbled together from four different left parties with vast differences—they are especially divided on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Macron, meanwhile, has said he will bargain with the Socialists and Greens, but not with Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party. Others in Macron’s faction are pushing him to forgo the left entirely and work instead with the conservative Republican party, which came in fourth place. 

The most likely scenario seems to be chaos and gridlock. But given that fascism was on the table 48 hours ago, we’ll take that result!

In celebration, here’s an hour-long compilation of occupation era anti-fascist resistance songs to jam to. Vive la France! Vive la résistance!

In other news…

• El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has threatened a government crackdown on anyone price-gouging food and other basic necessities, saying that “I expect the prices to come down by tomorrow or there are going to be problems.” Bukele is known for his harsh anti-gang tactics and obsession with Bitcoin, but in this case, he might actually have a point. (South China Morning Post)
  
  
• Sierra Leone has banned child marriage. But its leaders are still dragging their feet on calls to ban female genital mutilation as well. (The Guardian)
  
  
• Newly-minted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer says that the Tories’ cruel plan to deport migrants to Rwanda is “dead and buried.” (BBC)
  
  
• Starmer’s Labour government is also expected to drop the previous government’s bid to block the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Benjamin Netanyahu. (The Guardian)

FILE UNDER: "THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD KEEP TO YOURSELF"

Last week it was the Spectator talking about the "mysterious sex appeal of Nigel Farage," and now it's Starmer. How much are British columnists getting paid to write this stuff?

(Headline: The Times)

• As Australia faces historic food prices, Queensland’s Green Party is introducing price caps to “end the rip off.” They also want to break up the “duopoly” held by the Cole’s and Woolworth’s grocery chains. (The Advertiser)
  
  
• Protestors in Barcelona are blasting tourists with water guns. They’re understandably frustrated with “overtourism” to the city, which they say has caused their rents to increase while giving them few of the spoils from increased revenues. (Washington Post)

BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK

There are many strange and wonderful varieties of pigeon!

We all know pigeons. They’re those squat, gray birds who go “coo,” eat discarded French fries, and make messes on car windshields, right? The ones who mustn't drive the bus or question the rules?

Wrong! That’s just one species from the wider world of pigeondom. There’s also the pink-necked green pigeon, found throughout southeast Asia:

The Victoria Crowned Pigeon of New Guinea, which hasn’t quite gotten around to shedding (molting?) its colonial name: 

And the iridescent Nicobar Pigeon, found on various islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans:

The reason we mostly see the common gray rock pigeon (Columba livia) is that it’s uniquely well-evolved to camouflage itself among the asphalt and concrete of a modern city, and can eat pretty much anything, whereas its more colorful kin need specialized forest environments. 

But that’s only the pigeons that occur naturally. For centuries, wealthy European people with too much time on their hands have been breeding special “fancy pigeons” too, and some of them look truly bizarre. The American Pigeon Museum and Library has a full gallery of “fancy pigeons,” which is well worth checking out, since its photopgraphy makes all the birds look like they've been hauled in for interrogation:

Pigeons of interest include the huge, fluffy Marchenero:

The English Pouter, which can puff up its throat like a frog:

And the elaborately frilled Jacobin pigeon (no relation to the magazine of the same name): 

Even Charles Darwin took extensive notes on the different varieties of English pigeon, which influenced his theory of evolution almost as much as the more-famous finches of the Galapagos islands. 

Unfortunately, though, the practice of raising “fancy pigeons” comes with ethical issues. In extreme cases, like that of the “fantail” breeds, it can produce birds who struggle to fly, feed themselves, and otherwise go about their pigeon business because of their exaggerated features. So for the casual pigeon enjoyer, it’s probably best to just watch the ones on the street, and leave it at that. 

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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