CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
❧ Trump’s housing policy, like the rest of his ideas, is bizarre and cruel. This aspect of the MAGA agenda hasn’t been discussed much, compared to things like Trump’s plans to deport 15 million people or slash environmental regulations. But, as Jessica Washington writes for the Intercept, Trump also has a plan for the physical living spaces of the United States, and it’s an awful one. Essentially, Trump envisions two very different Americas, segregated by economic class: futuristic “Freedom Cities” for those who can afford them, and prison-like tent camps for the poor.
For the well-off, Trump’s plan sounds like something straight out of Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077. Last March, the ex-president announced on Truth Social that he wants to build ten completely new cities on federal land, and called for contest entries to tell him where the “Freedom Cities” should be. Trump also said he’d devote federal money to sparking a “revolution in air mobility,” building “vertical takeoff and landing” vehicles for individuals and families—in other words, flying cars.
Trump apparently thinks he’s going to build something like this in the middle of Nevada. (Image: Wookiepedia)
There are obvious parallels here to NEOM, the Saudi royal family’s mega-city project in the deserts of Tabuk Province. Trump routinely boasts about his “wonderful” relationship with the Saudi elite, and has financial connections to them through his golf courses and proposed Trump Tower in Jeddah, among other questionable enterprises. Now, it seems he’s taking inspiration from the Saudis’ city-building plans too. But as Jessica Washington points out, NEOM has run into all kinds of problems and delays, and relies on an exploited and abused workforce for its construction. So while Trump might want to build luxury developments in the middle of America’s deserts, it’s likely that it would be an absurd disaster if he actually tried.
No word yet on whether Trump’s “Freedom Cities” would come with their own Orb.
Meanwhile, there are some people Trump definitely doesn’t want around in his utopia. Like a lot of conservatives, he says the problem with American cities is that they’ve “become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged”—in other words, that poor people and those dealing with addiction disorders live there. (Giving the game away, he even calls the problem “the nightmare of the homeless,” not of “homelessness.”) If you find yourself living on the street in Trump’s America, something that’s increasingly likely as rent costs skyrocket, you wouldn’tbe getting an invitation to pilot a flying car around a “Freedom City.”
Instead, Trump has promised to “ban urban camping”—that is, sleeping outdoors—and to “use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets.” In practice, this would look like a nationwide expansion of the violent anti-homeless “sweeps” being carried out in cities like San Francisco and Denver. In Trump’s version—which he’s proposed repeatedly since at least 2022—homeless people would be “removed” by the police and placed in “tent cities” on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities.”
Ostensibly, there would also be resources at these camps, including “doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists”—but given the last Trump administration’s reluctance to spend money on programs for poor people, including Trump’s attempt to kick 700,000 people off food stamps, it’s questionable how generous the “support” would actually be.
As Maura Zurick wrote for Newsweek last year, Trump’s plan is essentially to make homelessness itself illegal. If you can’t afford a place to live, Trump would ensure your only option is to live in a government-run prison camp (er, sorry, “tent city.”) Meanwhile, the government resources that should be used to house you would instead be spent on a crackpot scheme to invent flying cars, something nobody actually needs. If this sounds like outright class war, it’s because it is.
This, but everywhere: The Trump vision. (Image: CalMatters)
In other news...
Trump has also been sued for defamation by the Central Park Five—the group of African American and Hispanic men he lobbied to have executed in the 1980s, and who were later exonerated by DNA evidence for the assault they’d been accused of. Trump claimed in the September 10 debate that the Five had pled guilty, which they hadn’t, and that the victim of the 1989 assault died, which she didn’t. So this really should be an open-and-shut case. (NBC)
Before he had Truth Social, Trump just put his murderous racism in newspaper ads.
Elon Musk, who has now become the leading donor and proponent for Donald Trump’s election, is giving away $1 million to Pennsylvanians who register to vote and sign a petition from his pro-Trump America PAC. He is also paying individual Pennsylvania voters $100 if they registered to vote and sign the petition. This is possibly illegal, as election law explicitly outlaws paying people to register to vote. Still, there’s a good chance that the pro-bribery and pro-billionaire Supreme Court would allow it. (Washington Post)
The Biden-Harris administration has proposed a federal rule that would make over-the-counter birth control (including daily pills, condoms, and Plan B) free to women with private health insurance. Sounds good, but why did they wait until two weeks before an election to do this? (NPR)
For the We the Unhoused podcast, host Theo Henderson takes a deep dive into the concerns of an important voting demographic that nobody seems to be talking about: homeless voters.
In a worrying sign for her chances next month, Kamala Harris has chosen to make her closing pitch to voters by hitting the campaign trail with… Liz Cheney. You know, the representative who lost her own primary, and who nobody seems to particularly like. The strategy appears to be for Harris to draw voters from Nikki Haley, another candidate who lost badly and isn’t very popular. This should go well. (Newsweek)
The excitement just ripples off the stage. (Image: Kamala Harris via YouTube)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The United States’ first carbon sequestration plant is a leaky disaster. In countless political speeches and ad campaigns from the last decade, we’ve heard terms like “clean coal,” “clean natural gas,” and even “clean energy fracking.” Usually, these terms refer to a technology called carbon sequestration, also known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The details are a little technical, but the gist is that “sequestration” sucks the carbon dioxide from the air near an emissions source, like a factory or power plant, pipes it somewhere else using a compressed pipeline, and stores it in a tank deep underground. This is usually billed as a way to mitigate climate change while still burning fossil fuels—but as people in Illinois are now discovering, it doesn’t actually work very well.
The CCS plant in Decatur, Illinois was the first of its kind to be constructed in the United States, back in 2011. At the time, it was promoted as a “bold undertaking to store one million metric tonnes (1.1 million short tons) of carbon dioxide in a sandstone reservoir 1.3 miles (2.1 km)” below the ground. There’s only one small problem: it leaks.
Last month, an EPA investigation revealed that there was already significant corrosion in the Decatur plant’s subterranean pipes, reportedly “5,000 feet underground and lower,” and that fluid was leaking out. The “fluid” in question is what the industry refers to as “CO2-rich brine,” basically a thick saltwater solution that’s been infused with as much carbon dioxide as possible. According to the Chicago Tribune, “less than 8,000 metric tons” (or “three days’ worth of carbon injections”) leaked in March. That’s a big problem, because Lake Decatur and the aquifer that surrounds it are considered the “sole source” of safe drinking water for several communities in Central Illinois, including Decatur itself. If the carbon-brine slurry gets into the groundwater, thousands of people could be affected. And things get worse: last week, a meeting of the Decatur City Council learned that the plant had leaked again.
That’s not the only risk associated with carbon sequestration, either. Across the country, there have been multiple incidents where the pipelines used to carry compressed carbon dioxide to its final resting place have ruptured and leaked, spewing concentrated CO2 into the atmosphere. It happened in Sulphur, Louisiana this April, and in Satartia, Mississippi back in 2020. In both cases people living nearby got sick from inhaling the gas—which is heavier than oxygen, and displaces breathable air—and in Satartia at least 45 people were hospitalized as a result.
In the much-touted Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration gave what Time magazine called a “bonanza” to the CCS industry, increasing government subsidies for capturing Co2 from $50 to $85 per metric ton. But as people in Illinois, Mississippi, and Louisiana now know, compressing your carbon pollution and putting it underground doesn’t actually solve anything. The problem is fossil fuels themselves. We need to stop burning them, not just try to bury the inevitable by-products. Until we do, the waste will always come bubbling back up.
A wave of labor strikes has broken out in the Southern California healthcare industry. On Monday, more than 2,400 mental health professionals began a strike against Kaiser Permanente, demanding better pay and a relaxed schedule that would allow them “more time in between appointments to prepare for patients.” Meanwhile, workers at seven CVS pharmacies walked off the job on the 19th, also looking for better wages and accusing the company of severely understaffing its stores. (Associated Press)
Animal rights activists in Pennsylvania have once again released hundreds of minks from the Stahl fur farm, the last facility of its kind in the state. It’s the second time the farm has been raided, after a previous mink jailbreak freed as many as 8,000 animals last year. Unfortunately, two activists were arrested and charged with felony agricultural vandalism, among other crimes. There’s now a fundraising effort for their legal defense and jail commissary, which you can find here. (Animal Liberation Press Office)
Students in Georgia are rallying against what they call “inhumane laws that attempt to suppress the vote for Black and brown people,” including one law that forbids giving water or snacks to people waiting in line to cast a ballot. In some precincts, voters in Georgia had to wait as many as seven hours to vote in 2020—and it wasn’t the wealthy white neighborhoods that were unfairly delayed. (NBC)
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has condemned the state legislature for intervening to halt the execution of Robert Roberson last week. Roberson was convicted of murdering his two-year-old daughter in 2003 and placed on death row, but new evidence has since emerged revealing that he is very likely innocent. Nevertheless, Abbott says the legislature “stepped out of line” last week when it called Roberson to testify in a last-ditch bid to delay his execution, as he believes that the power to decide life and death constitutionally belongs “only to the Governor.” But he’d refused to use it, even to save a likely innocent father from being put to death. (Texas Tribune)
Robert Roberson, who has sat on death row for more than 20 years.
As of yesterday, 26 people are still missing in North Carolina following Hurricane Helene according to North Carolina state officials. It’s down from a week ago when nearly a hundred people were still unaccounted for. (New York Times)
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Most of Cuba’s 11 million residents have been without power since Friday, after one of its largest power plants failed. It is the worst blackout the island has experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Wall Street Journal describes the scene: “Rolling outages affecting everything from running water to the operation of banks, ATMs or debit-card terminals, sparking severe shortages of cash and halting distribution of basic goods and services such as drinking water.” Cuban officials were able to bring back some power on Friday night only to have it knocked out again the following day. The government reported that 90 percent of power has been restored to Havana as of Monday evening, but schools and non-essential workplaces will remain closed until Thursday. And to make matters worse, those on the Eastern part of the island were forced to endure Hurricane Oscar, which made landfall Monday night, without power.
A blackout of this scale has been anticipated for some time. Fidel Castro once described Cuba’s power plants as “prehistoric”—most of them are nearly 50 years old. But the immediate cause of this collapse was the sharp drop in fuel imports to Cuba, which mostly come from its ally Venezuela. In the midst of Venezuela’s current economic crisis (which has itself been exacerbated by U.S. sanctions), its oil exports to Cuba dropped by more than half. This may not be such a problem were Cuba not cut off from much of the global economy by an American embargo—which was put in place in the early 1960s with the explicit intention “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” This policy severely restricts the ability of Cuba to do business with any company or nation with ties to the U.S. (which is most of them) and forces it to rely on nations like Venezuela.
Moreover, many of the sanctions specifically target Cuba’s ability to produce and import oil. As Liberation News writes:
As part of its intensification of efforts to strangle the Cuban Revolution, the energy sector was one of the main targets of the 243 new measures imposed during the Trump administration. In 2019, new measures targeted two Cuban enterprises called Cubametales and Panamericana – which were central to oil and gas purchases. Since then, the importation of fuel has been an even more profoundly difficult task for Cuba, and the system finally reached a breaking point. These Trump-imposed measures have been maintained by the Biden administration.
The United Nations estimates that, as of 2018, the U.S. embargo cost Cuba $2 billion each year, and has cost $130 billion since it was imposed in 1962. (Other estimates are significantly higher). The needless cruelty of the policy is something basically every country in the world recognizes. Last year at the United Nations, 187 nations voted for a resolution to end the embargo, while a grand total of two (the U.S. and Israel…shocking, we know) voted against it. It was the thirty-first time the body had voted to end the embargo.
In response to anger from the Cuban government, a State Department press release contended that “The United States obviously is not to blame for today's blackout on the island or the overall energy situation in Cuba.” Surely, no one factor is entirely to blame. But when sanctions have directly targeted Cuba’s ability to generate power, it seems impossible that this had no hand in making it harder for the country to generate power. Of course, one way to test whether the U.S. truly had a hand in Cuba’s woes would be to lift the embargo so we can see how the country fares as a result.
Anytime a U.N. vote looks like this, it’s generally a good bet they’re
CNN ran an astonishingly tone-deaf feature about the “mental health toll” that perpetrating genocide is taking on IDF soldiers in Gaza. Buried within the story is the account from one soldier, who CNN somehow expects us to find sympathetic, who admits to driving bulldozers over people “dead and alive, in the hundreds.” He describes the people being run over as “terrorists,” but later says “there is no such thing as citizens,” which implies that he considers everyone in Gaza to be among the “terrorists.” We can infer that a lot of the victims of the Israeli killdozer were likely innocent people. (Especially since we know from past reports that Israel has used bulldozers to destroy homes with families inside, desecrate the corpses of children, and, earlier this week, demolish a U.N. observation tower.)But CNN is keeping our focus on the real victim—a soldier who “can no longer eat meat” because it reminds him too much of the human bodies he destroyed.
The Turkish religious and political leader Fethullah Gülen has died in exile at his Pennsylvania home. Gülen was a highly controversial figure, considered a terrorist by the Erdogan government for his alleged role in Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt—a charge he strenuously denied—and a principled dissident and reformer by his allies. He was 83 years old. (Al Jazeera)
Moldova has narrowly voted to join the European Union, in an election overshadowed by widespread allegations of meddling by Russia (which would prefer it did not join.) (Semafor)
In a major victory for the international labor movement, workers in Ontario, Canada just won the first-ever union at a Walmart warehouse in North America. The organizers had a few innovative tactics, including a symbolic “Red shirt Wednesday” and translating their materials into Punjabi for immigrant workers, that other campaigns could learn from. (Jacobin)
Scurvy —a disease most commonly associated with 18th-century seafarers who lacked vitamin C—is making a comeback in wealthy countries due to inequality and lack of access to affordable, nutritious foods. (Jacobin)
MOUSE NEWS OF THE WEEK
The New York Post is one of the worst publications in America. On a good day, it merely sounds like—to quote comedian John Mulaney— “someone read a better newspaper and is trying to text you everything they can remember.” But most days, it is racist, sloppy, vapid, and hell-bent on convincing its readers that if they spend a single second walking the streets of any American city they will immediately be stabbed, murdered, and probably eaten by gender-bending migrant thugs.
Following the Post’s trail of slime typically yields little of value. But if you follow it long enough, you will stumble upon a transcendent piece of journalism. This past weekend, we witnessed one:
We have never shied away from important reporting on remarkable animal derrières. (See our coverage in past briefings on the remarkable thingswombats can do with their behinds.) The Post’s coverage of this “bootylicious rodent” (their words), who was observed in a park in Utah, is not nearly as detailed as we would like. (What species was it? Are there any rodent experts who can explain how this happened?)
Still, the report does include some vintage New York Post wordplay: “It’s certainly not a titmouse.” The Post does not appear to be the first source to spread the video—that credit goes to a video licensing company called Newsflare, which uploaded it to YouTube a day before the Post (and which mostly seems to traffic in delightful animal videos).
But still, without the Post, there’s a good chance that news of this mouse would never have seen the light of day. No other media outlet has had the courage to cover this mouse, despite its obvious newsworthiness. But the Post fears nothing. So despite our differences, we must give the tabloid plaudits on their journalism and a hearty congratulations on their future Pulitzer.
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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