May 24, 2024 ❧ CEO Pay, spying on protesters, and Florida's "Freedom Summer"

Plus: What would Trump's deportation plan actually look like?, the Supreme Court upholds racial gerrymandering, microplastics in your balls, and a bird you ought to know about.

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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER 

American CEOs became even more overpaid in 2023

In a new analysis for the Wall Street Journal, finance journalist Theo Francis took a look at the rate of pay for top executives in U.S. companies and how it’s changed over time. What he found was unsurprising, but still profoundly annoying: among companies listed on the S&P 500, CEOs are now paid a median salary of $15.7 million per year, the highest rate ever recorded. The average CEO in the dataset received a 9 percent raise in the last year, while at least one in four got a raise of 25 percent or more. Francis calls this trend the “Musk Effect,” saying that the Tesla and Twitter (we’re not calling it “X”) CEO is “reshaping the landscape of executive pay” with his own bloated compensation packages, the most recent of which will amount to $56 billion if it’s approved. The McKinsey corporation also shares some of the blame, publishing influential papers on corporate compensation that helped shift the needle upward.

This is, of course, a perverse and insane way for the economy to be organized. Nobody can possibly do enough work, or contribute enough to the world, in a single year to justify a salary in the tens of millions. That’s the kind of money that should be taxed and redistributed to build things like schools and hospitals, not fatten individual people’s wallets. What’s more, it isn’t even CEOs who make companies function to begin with. It’s the ordinary people who work far below them on the organizational chart, actually producing, assembling, and distributing the products the companies sell. The mechanics on the Tesla assembly line, or the software engineers toiling away in the bowels of Microsoft. The millions being siphoned upward to CEOs are the product of that labor—the workers’ “surplus value,” as the Marxists say—not the alleged genius of people like Musk. In that light, every multimillion-dollar CEO paycheck is really just a colossal act of exploitation and theft. 

Congress and intel agencies are spying on pro-Palestinian protesters, trying to link them to terror groups

A new investigation by former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein has made some disturbing, if not shocking, revelations about how Congress and the intelligence community are attempting to surveil and criminalize pro-Palestine protesters: 

The National Counterterrorism Center, created in the wake of 9/11 to combat al Qaeda, is now working overtime to find evidence of foreign funding of pro-Palestinian student protesters, I have learned. The effort follows repeated calls by Congress for the federal government to investigate university protesters’ purported links to Hamas, and coincides with a push by the FBI and homeland security bureaucracies to link the campus demonstrations to foreign actors. 

Earlier this month, Mark Green, the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking if the FBI had any “had any related undercover employees, online covert employees, or confidential human sources” within pro-Palestinian protests, which he refers to as “pro-Hamas.” Klippenstein writes: 

By sending the letter, Congress is in effect pressuring the FBI to penetrate the protests with both on-the-ground and online informants (if it hasn’t already). An obvious threat to the freedom of speech and association enshrined in the Constitution. 

It is illegal to “knowingly provide material support or resources” to groups designated as terrorist organizations. But the letter justifies surveillance on the basis that “individuals who endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization are patently dangerous, and potentially criminal.” Leaving aside that being a member of a pro-Palestine group is not equivalent to being “pro-Hamas,” merely expressing support verbally for a certain group is First Amendment-protected speech and in no way amounts to “material support” for terrorism.

Nevertheless, the federal government is moving forward with investigations into pro-Palestinian groups using this terrorism justification. The House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen requesting “Suspicious Activity Reports” about the bank activities of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow on the grounds that they are “organizing, leading, and participating in pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American protests.” (Two of those groups, it should be mentioned, are explicitly Jewish organizations, so the antisemitism accusation strains credulity.) Critically, the letter does not actually suggest any material relationship between the protesters and terror groups, but merely a “malign influence on college campuses and to the national security implications of such influence on faculty and student organizations.” In other words, their concern is about their opinions, not their actual deeds.

As Klippenstein writes: 

The fearmongering about the protests having some shadowy terrorist sponsor has been a gradual crescendo ever since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Earlier it was hawkish types like Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to crack down on pro-Hamas extremism among its ranks. But since then the calls have broadened to include ordinary Americans. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a member of the Judiciary committee which oversees the FBI, has also called “to put any student who promotes terrorism on behalf of Hamas on the terrorist watchlist.” (The watchlist is maintained by the FBI and based partly on intelligence provided by NCTC.) And it’s not just Republican members of Congress. Democratic Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has also sought to tie the protests to foreign governments, alternatively telling protesters advocating for a ceasefire to “go back to China” and saying some protests are “connected to Russia.”

But they have not actually produced any evidence of this shadowy funding. It’s merely a pretense for them to attempt to threaten protesters without appearing to violate their right to free speech. Of course, some state governments have gone even further into the territory of explicitly banning certain pro-Palestinian statements. Just this past weekend, a video emerged of protesters at the University of Texas San Antonio being told that, under an executive order from Governor Greg Abbott which required colleges to police “antisemitic” speech, the school administration would be forced to call the police on students if they chanted the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” At a previous demonstration in late April, protesters alleged in a lawsuit they were banned from even mentioning the state of Israel as the result of Abbott’s policy. In these cases, there was not even a pretense of national security concerns, simply “We disagree with what you are saying, so you are banned from saying it.”

What Congress and the intelligence community are doing are slightly more sophisticated versions of the same suppression tactics. Both are contributing to one of the widest-ranging crackdowns on free speech in recent memory.

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, "What's going on with our politicians?")

❧ Pride month is coming once again…unless you’re in Florida. In which case, Governor Ron DeSantis has something even better: “Freedom Summer.” And what better way to celebrate freedom than by instituting weird, arbitrary rules for others to follow? DeSantis’ Department of Transportation has banned municipalities from lighting up bridges with rainbow colors for the entire summer. If they want to light up their bridges at night, they will only be allowed to do so using the colors red, white, and blue. “Thanks to the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation,” said Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, apparently without a hint of irony. 

Florida is a decisively un-free state for anyone in the LGBTQ community—so bad that both local and national LGBTQ organizations advise people not to travel there. In addition to its notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law, journalist Erin Reed lists a number of restrictions that have made trans people’s lives there considerably less free:

Florida has a law that allows for the arrest of transgender people for using bathrooms according to their gender identity and another policy targets transgender people’s drivers licenses. Florida has also put into effect a policy that says trans people “misrepresenting” their gender on their drivers license could be guilty of fraud.

The fact that Florida Republicans are banning gay lights in a display of “freedom” is a pretty apt distillation of how many conservatives think of that concept. Freedom to them is not defined as something universal, but the ability for a protected in-group to trample on a despised out-group unfettered.

(Even the use of the phrase “Freedom Summer” feels like an intentional dig, as that was famously the name the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee gave to its efforts to register black voters throughout the Deep South in the summer of 1964 and DeSantis’ Florida is also quite hostile to black voting rights. Though it’s also possible that learning about the Freedom Summer is considered “critical race theory,” and no longer permissible under Florida law.)

Making the highway look like this is banned in the name of freedom. (Photo: The Tampa Bay Times)

⚜ LONG READ: Donald Trump wants to deport at least 15 million people. What would that actually look like? On Substack, journalist Radley Balko gives us the answer: 

I asked several immigration experts what it would take to deport 15 million people. That figure is twice the population of New York City. In fact it’s about the size of the three largest U.S. cities combined — New York, L.A., and Chicago — plus Pittsburgh. A state of 15 million people would be the fifth most populous in the country — ahead of Pennsylvania, and behind only California, Texas, New York, and Florida. The pre-World War II Jewish population of Europe — including the Soviet Union — was about 9 million. So just in terms of transporting people, we’re looking at an operation that would need to be two thirds larger than the Nazi transport of Jews during the Holocaust — if they’d managed to get to every Jewish person on the continent.

The Trump immigration plan would be the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II. What would it cost? In 2017, ICE estimated that it cost an average of $10,854 to deport one person, or about $14,000 in today’s dollars. Under this calculation, Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people would cost about $210 billion, or about 14 percent more than the annual budget of the U.S. Army.

Thus, Balko says, the plan wouldn’t just be a humanitarian disaster on a colossal scale. It would also “destroy the economy”—both because of its enormous price tag, and the fact that immigrants and their labor are a key part of making the country actually function. It’s simply unhinged on its face, and it would take a real zealot—like, for instance, Trump’s openly racist advisor Stephen Miller—not to see that. 

As if to underscore the far-right nature of his campaign, Trump himself recently shared a video on Truth Social that included the phrase “unified reich” in a fake newspaper headline about a second Trump term. The video was quickly deleted, and Trump’s press secretary insists it was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.” That could be true. But as Margaret Sullivan writes for the Guardian, it’s hardly the first time Trump and his campaign have evoked Nazi imagery, and it’s probable that “you’ll hear no apology, no disavowal, no expression of regret. And certainly no promise that this will never happen again.” Taken in context with the immigration plan, that’s just disturbing. 

Maybe it’s us, but the only Reichs we like are Robert and former Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Frank. (Truth Social screenshot via Mississippi Free Press)

AROUND THE STATES

❧ In Michigan, a homeless woman lived inside a supermarket sign for a year. The location was a Family Fare grocery store in Midland, Michigan—and as it turns out, its large, triangular sign contains an attic-like hollow space. In late April, contractors working on the roof noticed a mysterious extension cord leading into the sign. When they investigated, they discovered something remarkable: a woman had built a tiny living space inside, complete with a desk, a printer, a Keurig coffee maker, and even a houseplant. When the store managers called the police, the woman told the cops she’d lived in her “safe spot” for “about a year,” and was “not damaging anything.” She seemed to be employed, asking for time to call her boss and arrange for a truck to collect her things (which the cops, in typical form, denied), and in general was very calm and polite about the situation as she left. 

The conservative media loves to demonize homeless people, slandering them as innately dangerous, but this woman is closer to the reality: just an ordinary person who happens to lack a permanent place to live. Under capitalism, all of us are closer to being homeless than we are to being rich, and we should remember it. 

Image: Google Street View

It’s not much, but it’s better than the street. (Image: MLive via YouTube)

And of course, the real crime here isn’t trespassing on a grocery store roof. It’s the existence of a society that forces people to resort to desperate acts like that, just to find a safe place to sleep. In the U.S. right now, the homelessness rate has skyrocketed, increasing by 12 percent to an estimated 653,000 people in January 2023. (But remember, folks, Bidenomics is working just great!) There’s no excuse for that in any nation, but especially not in the richest on Earth. As a society, we need to drastically curtail the power of landlords and real-estate speculators, redistribute much of the existing housing, build a lot more housing through public works projects, and end this sorry state of affairs. 

The dip is because the United States effectively solved homelessness, then un-solved it again. Graph: American Inequality

❧ The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld an obvious racial gerrymander in South Carolina. By a 6 to 3 vote, the court’s conservatives ruled that a map that crammed most of the state’s Black voters into a single congressional district did not constitute an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, but a constitutional partisan one. 

The map had previously been struck down by the U.S. District Court for South Carolina, which said that it “ultimately exiled over 30,000 African American citizens from their previous district [62 percent of them] and created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County and the City of Charleston.” The court determined that “race was the predominant motivating factor” in how the district lines were drawn up. But Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ruled that their complaint did “little to show that race, not politics drove the legislature's choice.” (Clarence Thomas went even further, arguing in a separate concurring opinion that even explicit racial gerrymandering should also be allowed because he believes that all Supreme Court intervention on the question of discrimination is illegitimate, going all the way back to Brown v. Board of Education.)

In 2018, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that cases involving partisan gerrymanders were political, rather than legal, questions and therefore “non-justiciable” for the Court. Of course, as Janai Nelson of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund points out, that just gave the court “a pass to grapple with race discrimination when states use partisanship to mask it.” It’s now apparently gotten to the point where even packing more than half of a county’s Black residents into a single majority Black district is not obvious enough to be considered a racial gerrymander. Legislators very rarely come out and say, “We are trying to dilute the power of Black voters,” but we all know they do it. (See the 2019 revelation of deceased GOP gerrymandering czar Thomas Hoefeller’s collection of files, which explicitly used racial data to draw up congressional districts to advantage Republicans.)

The New York Times referred to the question of how to regulate gerrymandering as “a constitutional puzzle: how to distinguish the roles of race and partisanship in drawing voting maps when Black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats.” But maybe the fact that we keep having these constitutional debates over racial vs. partisan gerrymandering is a sign that the system is flawed. Perhaps we should consider that allowing elected officials to draw electoral boundaries is a ridiculous practice to begin with and consider fairer alternatives, like letting independent commissions draw districts or adopting proportional representation.

During the case against South Carolina’s congressional map, the ACLU showed its resemblance to a “two-headed dragon” to make the point that it put together multiple cities in order to cram Black voters into a single congressional district. (Image: ACLU)

REMEMBER: You can make gerrymandered Congressional districts into delicious gingerbread cookies! 

GOOGLE HAS UNVEILED ITS NEW “AI OVERVIEW” FUNCTION FOR SEARCHES…THINGS ARE GOING GREAT:

From: @tomwarrenuk on Threads

From: @PixelButts on Twitter

From @VeryRegular on Twitter

From Brian Merchant on Twitter

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Spain, Norway, and Ireland have moved to recognize a Palestinian state starting on May 28. As the Washington Post points out, they’re joining 140 countries who already do so, the most recent addition to the list being Mexico in 2023. To drive home what that means, the current map looks like this:

Map: The Washington Post

Wow, look at all that green! That’s most of the planet! Even bitter rivals like India and Pakistan agree on Palestinian statehood. And the picture may soon shift even further in favor of Palestine, as Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris says he’s “confident that further countries will join us in taking this important step in the coming weeks,” and has been in talks with Slovenia, Belgium, and Malta on that subject. 

Of course, if it weren’t for the repeated vetoes of the United States, the United Nations would have recognized the State of Palestine long ago, and this country-by-country piecemeal approach wouldn’t be necessary. At this rate, it’ll soon be just the U.S. and Israel (plus maybe Micronesia or the Marshall Islands) who hold out against the overwhelming tide of world opinion. You know, just like the U.S. used to in support of apartheid South Africa. 

❧ Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called a surprise general election for the United Kingdom. The announcement came on May 22, in the middle of a pouring rainstorm—an oddly appropriate atmosphere for a U.K. Conservative government that’s been beset with troubles and controversies, and suffered significant losses in the last round of regional elections. The nationwide vote is scheduled for July 4, months sooner than anyone previously expected, and the Labour Party is widely expected to come out ahead. In a recent statement, Labour leader Sir Keith Keir Starmer said he believes Sunak has rushed things to avoid the political fallout from his plan to deport refugees to Rwanda, which won’t take effect until after July 4. Unfortunately, Starmer himself isn’t much better on immigration, and tempered his criticism of Sunak by decrying “the terrible loss of control of the border” and saying that “we have to tackle the small boats that are coming across.” The situation resembles the one in the U.S., where voters are asked to choose between a terrible right-wing government and one that’s perhaps marginally better, but still pretty right-wing. 

Still, there are some parliamentary races worth keeping an eye on. In the Islington North constituency, Jeremy Corbyn—who’s been banned from standing as a Labour candidate after years of baseless smears about antisemitism—is going to run as an independent, and has received the backing of the influential RMT railway union. In Hackney North, Diane Abbott—Britain’s first Black female MP, and Corbyn’s most important ally—is appealing her own suspension from Labour, noting that former Tory Natalie Elphicke has been welcomed into the party with open arms. Most intriguingly, the election will be a trial by fire for the fledgling Workers’ Party of Britain, which has vowed to stand candidates for every seat in Parliament as a direct challenge to Starmer’s right-leaning version of Labour. With just over a month to go, we won’t have to wait long for results. 

Of all the qualities people look for in a politician, “damp” usually isn’t one of them.

(Image: James Ball via Twitter)

❧ The Biden administration was planning to release 11 Yemeni Guantánamo Bay inmates, but abandoned the idea after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel “amid concerns about political optics,” according to four U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News. According to the New York Times, none of the prisoners had even been accused of crimes, let alone convicted of any. They had all been reviewed by a national security panel and cleared for transfer. And yet, with the plane on the tarmac ready to airlift them to Oman, it was suddenly called off.

More than two decades after it opened, 30 men are still being held at Guantánamo without having ever been put on trial. Sixteen of those thirty have been approved for release, but many have been forced to wait at Gitmo for years afterward. According to independent journalist Andy Worthington, for the website Close Guantánamo:

Every month these tallies become ever more shocking. As of today, May 21, these 16 men have been held for between 606 and 1,300 days since they were approved for release, and, in the three outlying cases based on the deliberations of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, for 5,233 days.

 The 11 Yemenis are among them, and seven months later the Biden administration has not clarified when they will actually be given their freedom. The officials who described Biden’s concern over “optics,” also indicated that as the election grows nearer, the chance of Biden releasing these inmates grows slimmer. 

This is horrifying for a number of reasons: (1) Biden is willing to let nearly a dozen innocent people rot in jail because it might slightly boost his election chances (2) The Biden administration apparently takes for granted that, in a time of war, releasing people with nothing to do with the current conflict will be bad for “optics” just because they also happen to be Arab, and (3) If their release is delayed until after the election, it could mean that they are stuck in Guantánamo for at least another four years, as Trump halted transfers out of the prison last time he was in office. It is a stunning display of moral cowardice by the Biden administration.

The eleven men, who were supposed to have been airlifted to Oman in October. (Photos: Close Guantanamo)

❧ Pee may not be stored in the balls, but microplastics are, according to a new study covered in the Guardian. Scientists at the University of New Mexico tested the testes of 23 humans and 47 pet dogs, and they discovered microplastics in every single one of them! The researchers also found that in the dog testicles, higher amounts of PVC correlated with lower sperm counts. Though such a small sample is not enough to prove a link, it’s evidence of the suspicion scientists have had that the decline in male sperm counts over the last few decades is the result of chemical pollution. According to the Guardian: 

Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in.

The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.

PAST AFFAIRS

In our Sept./Oct. 2023 issue of Current Affairs Magazine, Arjun S. Byju and Benjamin Charles Germain Lee wrote about “How Declining Sperm Counts Have Seeded A Crisis of American Individualism.”

Art by Mike Freiheit

Tucker Carlson’s 2022 Fox Nation special The End of Men begins by showing us Americans of yesteryear—hale California teens performing calisthenics, daring construction workers lunching atop a skyscraper. We then glimpse an array of modern Americans depicted as a horde of overweight bodies led astray by an incoherent octogenarian president. There’s the requisite gendered joke about “man boobs,” the body shaming intentional. The close-ups of torsos flexing and sweating. An uncomfortable fixation on supple, youthful, white bodies as the picture of health; a disquieting revulsion at body fat, old age, infirmity.

The special features a montage of virile, muscular white men engaging in canonical acts of masculinity: wrestling, firing guns, grilling steaks. It then cuts to a static shot of an illuminated naked human, arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Unlike da Vinci’s sketch, however, Carlson’s caricature of a man is slightly more modest: his genitals are obstructed by an appliance emanating a red light. It is a “testicle tanner” intended to combat nothing short of an existential threat to mankind, or more particularly, men. The half-hour special repeats ominous refrains about this looming disaster. Conspiracy theorist and 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a cameo in order to proclaim that “we’re headed for a calamity.” …

The science is clear: male fertility has fallen over the last 50 years, with sperm counts now roughly half of what they were in 1970. The cause of this phenomenon remains unclear, although many suspect changes in diet, lack of exercise, pollution, and endocrine disrupting chemicals as potential factors. Female fecundity, too, has declined over the same period. But other measures of female fertility, such as increasing miscarriages and diminishing ovarian reserve, have also been observed, the latter among those seeking assisted reproductive technology.

To those on the left who are often mindful of environmental and corporate deregulation, the decline in sperm count may be yet another consequence of pollution and environmental damage. If nothing else, it is an opportunity to bring further attention to the systemic injustice of climate change and to galvanize collective action. To Tucker Carlson et al., however, the fixation on declining sperm counts is a crisis of the individual, or more precisely, the individual white man, whose vanishing sperm and thus vanishing “masculinity” spell the end of man.

NOTEWORTHY BIRD OF THE WEEK

Deep in the Arctic Tundra you may be able to spot a Rock Ptarmigan, but you’ll have to look closely. During the winter, they shed their brown feathers to turn a ghostly white color that camouflages them perfectly in the snow…At least, it would were it not for the bird’s strikingly expressive crimson eyebrow comb.

Photo: Don-Jean Léandri-Breton, Macaulay Library via Cornell Labs

 These eyebrows are a distinguishing feature of many grouse species but are particularly pronounced against a pale white backdrop.

If somehow you missed the bright red, the ptarmigan will make its presence known using its unique call, which sounds like it’s trying to warn you about the presence of a werewolf: