June 11, 2024 ❧ Leonard Peltier's chance at freedom, California's free grocery store, and worrying gains for the European far right

Plus: New York scraps traffic reform, the UAE supports violence in Sudan, Friedrich Engels rolls in his grave, and spiders are mostly harmless. 

Nattering Nabobs of News

STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER

Free Leonard Peltier!

In Florida, Leonard Peltier—one of the longest-held political prisoners in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter—is about to receive a parole hearing, his first in ten years. Peltier is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, and a lifelong activist for Native American rights who became involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970s. 

Just as they did with the Black Panther Party in the same era, the FBI waged a covert war against AIM, surveilling and sabotaging the group at every turn. Hostilities came to a head in 1975 when several FBI agents came to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota—formerly the site of the infamous Wounded Knee massacre—to serve arrest warrants for AIM members, leading to a shootout. One activist, 21-year-old Joseph Stuntz, was killed by what the Justice Department would later conclude was a “law enforcement sniper.” Two FBI agents were also wounded in the crossfire, and then shot at point-blank range. In 1977 Leonard Peltier was convicted of their murder, and he’s been in prison ever since. 

Peltier’s 1977 arrest. (Image: NDN Collective)

For his part, Peltier and his lawyers have always insisted that he’s innocent—the victim of a government frame-up involving witness intimidation and falsified evidence. Given the long, sordid history of the American police and court system, that isn’t hard to believe. But it hardly matters. The important thing is that none of the violence at Pine Ridge would have occurred if the FBI were not trying to suppress a Native activist movement, after centuries of oppression and genocide committed against Native Americans.

Innocent or guilty, Peltier has served 47 years in prison. He is now 79 years old, and in poor health, meaning the current parole hearing will likely be the last of his life. Humanitarian groups like Amnesty International have called for his release, as have Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, and several U.S. lawmakers over the years. The fact that he’s still behind bars, despite clearly being no threat to anyone or anything, is both absurd and cruel. The parole board needs to do the right thing, and send him home. 

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

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

❧ We are now less than five months away from Election Day and Joe Biden’s campaign website still doesn’t have a list of policies for his second term. Virtually everyone running for office—especially the presidency—has a page on their campaign website describing their positions on issues. By this time in their respective election seasons, 2012 Obama had an extensive “issues” page and 2020 Trump had a list of “promises kept.” (And who could forget Elizabeth Warren’s much-ballyhooed list of “Plans”?) 

If you go to Biden’s website, as of June 11, you are greeted by the usual donation page that most campaign sites have. If you pass that and scroll down, you get a minute-long video mostly talking about the dangers of Trump—his threats to abortion and pledges to be a “dictator” — and boasting about the Biden campaign’s massive network of donors and volunteers. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer the question that most people who would go to a campaign site are probably interested in: what exactly is this guy running for? 

In order to shed a bit more light, you can go to the White House website, which has a list of “Accomplishments” like lowering drug prices and expanding infrastructure. It’s already bad that you need to go to a separate website to figure out what Biden’s positions on issues are. But it still doesn’t even tell you what he plans to do in the future. If you go next door to the “Priorities” page, it’s clearly not been updated since he took office in 2021: The first priorities all relate to managing COVID-19 by launching a vaccine program, expanding testing, re-opening schools, and passing the American Rescue Plan—stuff that has not been at the top of voters minds in years. 

“Wait, are schools still closed? Is there still no COVID vaccine?? What has Biden been DOING these last four years???”

At least Donald Trump has several pages of short videos on his site—in a section titled “Agenda 47” — where he outlines the (mostly evil) things he wants to do in a second term, like end birthright citizenship, persecute trans people, and put university endowments toward what is essentially government-funded PragerU (yes, really). Republicans, of course, also have their insane “Project 2025” manifesto, which outlines in 900 pages an encompassing plan to give Trump maximum control over all aspects of America’s civil service.

The weird thing is, Biden actually does have agenda items for a second term. Granted, a lot of them are unfulfilled goals for his first term—like tuition-free community college, universal pre-K, and increased taxes on corporate wealth and stock buybacks. But these are still good, if not super ambitious, things to center a campaign around. 

A campaign website may seem like a small thing, but they still get millions of views. The impression one would get from looking at Biden’s is that his one and only selling point is not being Trump. And with Biden’s approval rating at an all-time low, it seems like it might serve him well to actually stand for something that will make people’s lives better.

Maybe some of these campaign slogans would help. Or not.

(Graphics by Cali Traina Blume for Issue 47 of Current Affairs Magazine, March/April 2024)

In other news

• Hunter Biden has been found guilty in a Delaware court on three felony counts relating to his illegal purchase of a handgun in 2018. (Associated Press)
  
  
• GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake, a prominent Trump ally, just gave a speech in front of the Confederate flag in Arizona. When questioned by the Guardian, representatives for Lake’s campaign refused to explain, saying they wouldn’t “respond to British propaganda outlets.” (The Guardian)
  
  
• Former Breitbart executive and Trump strategist Steve Bannon is going back to prison after he defied a subpoena by the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6. (Politico) In 2022, leaked audio from Bannon obtained by Mother Jones revealed that Trump’s claims to have won the 2020 election before all the votes were counted were a premeditated strategy to make Biden’s victory look fraudulent.
  
  
• In an interview with Tucker Carlson, libertarian congressman Thomas Massie revealed that every Republican member of Congress has an “AIPAC babysitter” who makes sure that they vote for bills supported by Israel. Remember when everyone called Ilhan Omar the moral equivalent of Hitler for suggesting that AIPAC had influence over Congress? (Mediaite) 

AROUND THE STATES

❧ For more than five years, New York City has been working to implement a plan to reduce traffic congestion and bulk up public transportation. Governor Kathy Hochul has abruptly suspended it just weeks before it was set to launch.

The plan would have charged tolls on drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan, which were expected to raise $1 billion each year for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. These funds could have been used to finance improvements to rail and bus lines, which are used by the overwhelming majority of the city’s low-income residents. Not only would this congestion pricing scheme help to reduce New York’s carbon usage by limiting the number of cars on the road and fund a critical public service (which mainly benefits the city's poorer inhabitants), but the MTA also estimated that the average New Yorker spends 117 hours per year sitting in traffic. In the New Republic’s climate section, Kate Aronoff made a list of just a few of the things New Yorkers could have spent that time doing instead:

• Be well on your way to becoming proficient in a new language
• Spend 23 hours each contemplating your life, or just hanging out, in Pelham Bay Park, Prospect Park, Central Park, Astoria Park, and Ocean Breeze Park
• See 45 baseball games (Go Mets)
• Take advantage of public tennis courts to get good enough to strike up a Challengers-style romance with your coach or a fellow player
• Undergo roughly 35 weeks of psychoanalysis
• Watch the Godfather trilogy 13 times, every live-action Star Wars feature nine times, or every film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe 1.5 times
• Complete 78 percent of the training required to become a Certified Public Accountant
• Attend 20 raves

So why did Hochul kill the plan in the eleventh hour? She claims it could hurt the city’s financial recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by deterring tourism and travel to the city. This, of course, ignores the entire point of the program, which is to make other modes of transportation cheaper and more efficient. But as the Lever reports, this is a massive u-turn from a position she espoused just two weeks ago, when she told leaders at the Global Economic Summit that congestion pricing is “what cities are meant to do.” Perhaps it has something to do with a $36,000 campaign donation she received from car dealership lobbyists—half of which came directly from a lobbying group that opposed the pricing scheme.

We can’t say for sure whether Hochul’s decision is the result of corruption or the result of genuine ideological opposition to reining in car usage. But as Abdallah Fayyad put it for Vox:

Hochul’s decision reflects a broader problem in American urban planning: who we design our cities for. When it comes to street design in particular, drivers are often lawmakers’ chief consideration, not transit riders or pedestrians. That’s why so many highways plow through so many downtowns and residential neighborhoods; why parking spaces are often prioritized over bus or bike lanes or expanded sidewalks; and why congestion pricing seems so politically unfeasible in New York and elsewhere. 

When cities are designed with mostly drivers in mind, they tend to be built for commuters and not residents, making them less attractive to live in or even visit outside of work. The decision to scrap the congestion pricing, even temporarily, once again puts commuters over residents and drivers over transit riders. 

PAST AFFAIRS

In our 37th Issue, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson wrote about how "We Can Have a Public Transit Paradise":

Art by Erick Wonderly from Issue 37 of Current Affairs Magazine, July/Aug. 2022

❧ California just got a free grocery store. Last week, the District 10 Community Market opened its doors in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, which has been categorized as a “food desert”—an area where affordable, nutritious food is scarce or non-existent—by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Outwardly, it looks just like any other grocery store, albeit a small one with only four aisles. Unlike food banks, which typically stick to shelf-stable canned and boxed foods, it has healthier offerings including fresh fruits and vegetables, milk and eggs, and so on. The only difference is that everything is free, funded by the city government. 

Speaking to SF GATE, district supervisor Shamann Walton said the Community Market will allow low-income people to “shop with dignity,” picking their own groceries rather than being put into a one-size-fits-all allotment system like many traditional food banks. There are certain limitations: to use the market, people must live within certain zip codes, make less than $45,180 (or $93,600 for a family of four or more), and be referred by one of several local organizations. Most restrictively, they must have either a child or a diet-related illness, which will exclude many single people struggling to afford food. So there’s definitely room for improvement. Still, this is an encouraging program by a city government that’s at least trying to meet its residents’ basic needs—something every city on Earth should be doing. 

(Image: Mayor London Breed via Facebook)

In other news

• Adobe has been facing backlash all week after newly released terms of service suggested that users’ work in apps like Photoshop could be used to train the company’s AI programs without their permission. Now the company is backtracking and will roll out new terms of service on June 18 that it says will clarify that this is not the case. (The Verge)

• At a recent Trump rally in Arizona, 11 attendees were rushed to the hospital after falling ill in the 111° Fahrenheit heat. Maybe they’ll reconsider the whole “climate change” thing now? (BBC)

• In another dystopian example of workplace surveillance, retail workers at TJ Maxx and Marshalls stores in Boston are now being forced to wear body cams on the job. (Boston 25 News)

• Real estate developers in North Carolina are trying to build houses on a Native American archaeological site, which may contain human remains up to 3,000 years old. (Axios)

• As Biden cracks down on immigration, Gruesome Gavin Newsom is following his lead in California by rolling back the state’s legal support for migrants. (TruthOut)

• In South Dakota, more than a dozen neo-Nazis marched to the state capitol building on June 8 and displayed a swastika flag, before being dispersed by police. (KXLG)

• Missouri’s Attorney General is fighting to keep the wrongly accused locked up by opposing exonerations recommended by local prosecutors. (The Intercept)

• The latest trend in conservative media is drinking “raw milk.” Unlike the dreaded “state-approved milk,” this product has not undergone the pasteurization process to have dangerous bacteria removed. Louisiana—a state that previously banned the sale of raw milk—has hopped on the trend, and is set to legalize its sale. (Axios) 

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ The European Parliament, which proposes laws for the European Union, just held elections across the coalition's 27 member states. Far-right parties made worrying advances and are projected to control more seats than ever before. 

Probably the most concerning news comes out of Germany, where the Nazi-aligned Alternative for Germany party (AfD) had the best showing, outperforming Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. This is despite the fact that AfD’s leader was thrown out of the EU’s far-right coalition after its top candidate, Maximilian Krah defended the Waffen-SS in a newspaper interview. And lest you think we were joking about the whole “Nazi-aligned” thing, reporting from the German investigative outlet Correctiv revealed that high-ranking members of the AfD also met with members of open fascist groups to make plans for the mass forced deportation of minorities from the country. 

France and Italy had similar lurches to the right. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party — both of which are violently anti-immigrant and have roots in their respective countries’ mid-century fascist parties — made gains as well. In France, where National Rally more than doubled the support of his party, centrist President Emmanuel Macron made the harried decision to call a snap legislative election to be held at the end of June.

This isn’t a cause for full-blown panic. The far-right still does not have enough seats to call the shots (that remains in the hands of the usual bloodless technocrats), though they’ll now have a greater sway over issues like immigration and climate legislation. Their victories were also largely concentrated to a few large countries, while they struggled in Spain and across Scandinavia. Still, the result is quite scary and points to a failure of liberal parties to give people the sense of security they want. As Robert Kuttner writes for the American Prospect:

The more fundamental reason is the steadily worsening condition of Europe’s working classes and the general failure of mainstream social democratic and labor parties, which have been part of the neoliberal governing consensus, to provide fundamental relief. After more than a decade of austerity, the vote against the center-left and center-right is a vote against the status quo.

The failure of the far right to gain ground this time in Scandinavia may be due to the fact that Nordic social democracy, though weakened, still delivers substantial benefits to the citizenry. And in Finland and Sweden, where a conservative coalition includes far-right parties, a vote against the far right is, for now, a vote against the status quo.

History shows that the ultranationalist right gains when the mainstream abandons working people. Labor and social democratic parties in Europe have a long way to go before they win back the broad support of the citizenry.

MEANWHILE, IN REAL ESTATE

Do you have more money than sense? Do you want your next apartment to be nauseatingly ironic? Then consider the luxury penthouse named after Friedrich Engels that’s just been offered in Manchester! With a £2.5 million price tag, “The Engels” has 3,126 square feet of floor space, three bedrooms, and a home office—and all in a city with a massive housing crisis, where normal people struggle to afford a roof over their heads! Best of all, the flat's appliances are run from a clean renewable energy turbine powered entirely by the force of Engels spinning in his grave. 

(Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, there’s also the University of Salford’s giant fiberglass climbing rock shaped like Engels’ beard. He might have been more open to that.)

(Image: Salford Star)

⚜ LONG READ: In the Guardian, journalist Husam Mahjoub writes that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and its foreign policy are “fuelling” the deadly civil war in Sudan—and that “there’ll be no peace until we call it out”:

The United Arab Emirates is the foreign player most invested in the war. In fact, without its direct and all-around support, the RSF [Rapid Support Forces militia] would not have been able to wage war to the same extent. 

Sudan is key to the UAE’s strategy in Africa and the Middle East, aimed at achieving political and economic hegemony while curbing democratic aspirations. Since 2015, it has sourced fighters from both factions to join its conflict in Yemen. It is the primary importer of Sudan’s gold and has multibillion-dollar plans to develop ports along Sudan’s Red Sea coast. By supporting the RSF in Sudan, it has undermined the democratic transition that followed the 2019 ouster of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s dictator for 30 years.

Upon the outbreak of war, it reportedly established logistical operations to send weapons to the RSF through its networks in Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda and the Haftar and Wagner militias. It has reportedly disguised armament and supplies as humanitarian aid. In addition, RSF business, finance, logistics and PR operations are carried out from the UAE. Injured fighters are reportedly airlifted to be treated in an Abu Dhabi military hospital. And Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), the RSF commander, is said to have visited a few African countries on board an Emirati airplane belonging to a company owned by an Emirati royal and adviser to the president.[...]

Most crucially, the international community must confront the UAE’s detrimental role in the conflict, which it has carried out with impunity, leveraging its alliances with both the west and Russia. If not, Sudan risks descending into a state of perpetual war.

Members of the RSF in 2023. (Image: @RSFSudan via Twitter)

POLL OF THE WEEK

According to the British, the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Normandy just weren’t that important. (Redfield and Wilton Strategies)

In other news

• Over the weekend, an Israeli mission that rescued four hostages from Hamas captivity killed more than 270 Palestinians and injured another 700 in the Nuseirat refugee camp (Al Jazeera). It’s being praised as a “success” by American politicians even though the attack involved soldiers using an aid truck to infiltrate the camp, which is considered a war crime (New Arab). It also bears repeating that a deal to return all the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire has been on offer for weeks from Hamas, but Netanyahu won’t agree to one unless it polls well. (NBC News)
  
  
• After an underwhelming performance in India’s elections, Narendra Modi took the oath of office for his third term as Prime Minister. But many were distracted by a mysterious, unidentified cat-like creature that wandered behind him during his speech. (The Statesman) The Delhi police described it as a “common housecat,” (Daily Messenger) but this thing looks huge:

• In the UK, the Tories are hoping to turn around their grim electoral fortunes with something everyone can get behind: Bringing back mandatory military service! (BBC)
  
  
• Saulos Chilima, the vice president of Malawi, has died along with 9 other passengers after his plane crashed on Monday. (The Maravi Post)
  
  
• This month, the first-ever “Miss AI” pageant was held, in which entirely computer-generated models from around the globe were judged on their beauty. Real pageants already treat the women who participate as less than human, so it hardly feels like a jump to just remove the humans altogether! (NPR)

SPIDER FACT OF THE WEEK

[Our arachnophobic readers may want to sit this one out. Sorry…]

The Joro spider is nothing to worry about!

In the last few weeks, there’s been a wave of scary headlines about Joro spiders, a species of arachnid from East Asia that’s started showing up in the southern United States. In People Magazine, we can read “All About the Venomous Flying Spiders Invading This Summer”; in Live Science, a warning that “Giant, invasive Joro spiders with 6-foot webs could be poised to take over US cities”; and in the Boston Globe, ominous tidings that “Large and venomous Joro spiders are moving up the East Coast.” Sounds scary, right?

Well, not really. As it turns out, these poor spiders have been unfairly maligned. In a refreshingly realistic article for National Geographic, Jason Bittel reassures us that Joro spiders aren’t dangerous at all—unless you happen to be a small insect, that is. In the first place, they can’t actually fly, so much as drift through the air on balloon-like silk structures, something many other spiders do. And while they are technically “venomous,” it’s a very weak venom, which can’t harm humans or even pets—especially since Joro spiders’ fangs are usually too small to pierce mammals’ skin. (David Coyle, a professor at Clemson University, says he’s handled several Joro spiders with bare hands and never been bitten.) They’re also very timid creatures, freezing up at any sign of a threat. In other words, there’s no reason to worry—and all the panic says more about people’s irrational fear of the new and different than anything else. 

In fact, they’re kind of cool-looking. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)