Where We Are This Week 01/06/2023(!)
Slave labor, Biden's immigration policy, and the House goes to extra innings.
Ah, and yet another year begins, and in no time we’ve stripped it of its packaging, tore off its shrink-wrap, and are putting the new plaything into our mouths like the greedy little children we all once were. Or like the new blue jeans your parents bought for you on your birthday that you ripped the tags off - much to mom and dad’s chagrin - before you tried on, we’re committed to this new year before we’ve even had the chance to take it back. But suppose it doesn’t fit?
Well, it has to because as far as I know, gifts from the divine have no return policy.
We’re only a few days in, but has the ‘newness’ of the year been exaggerated? War rages on in Ukraine, the House of Representatives is in utter disarray, and the distinction between corporate America and the federal government is borderline semantic.
On January 1st, we all peeked our weary little heads outside only to be doused with a bucketful of water and noted that nothing has materially changed. In the words of the sagacious Curly Howard, “That’s the same day.”
Nothing gets better just because we notice the elapsing of time. Moving forward, let’s hold each other responsible, and to a higher standard of interaction. The immediate way change is affected is with ourselves, first, and then the hope is that it is so contagious it will spread outward concentrically.
Join me in entering this year full of love, hope, naiveté, and an eagerness to learn because here we are - together. Same as it ever was.
{ As if next year will be better As if I’d allow it to be worse }
This is not my beautiful House (of Representatives)
I know. Two Talking Heads references back to back - and the same song, no less. My intended audience is clearly myself and maybe my wife.
At the time of writing - Thursday night - the House of Representatives has held not one, not two, but eleven votes for the incoming Congress’s Speaker. Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy was the frontrunner for the speakership - and presumably, still is - but is lacking a couple handfuls of crucial votes.
For a speaker to be elected, they must ascertain a simple majority of votes - 218 in this case. Republicans hold the majority membership in the lower body of Congress, so you think this would be a fairly easy process but no, it hasn’t. Vote 1 - McCarthy received 203 votes. By the 11th vote, McCarthy’s totals dwindled to 200. So, by my math, only a few hundred more votes until a speaker is elected.
Congress can’t do any business until a speaker is chosen; no bills, no new members, no congress. McCarthy is so embarrassingly desperate for the leadership position it seems there’s no limit to the concessions he’ll make to members of his own party - while still losing votes. The most recent of which is this: McCarthy has agreed to propose a rule change that would allow just one member (he had already made a concession reducing it to five members) to call for a vote of no-confidence and vacate the position.
At this point, I’m beginning to think McCarthy is either a masochist or a career politician so hellbent on ascending to a position of “awesome power” (Nancy Pelosi’s words) that he’ll agree to anything.
Yes, the politicking and backroom dealing is interesting but that’s not the story here. When was the last time you saw every member of congress in the chamber debating on policy? The $1.7 trillion omnibus bill passed with little fuss, and not nearly this amount of spectacle. Where were these convictions then?
Democrats have remained a monolith throughout this process, casting their collective 212 votes in unison for Hakeem Jeffries. There’s even a pathway that Jeffries ends up Speaker if Republicans reach the point of exasperation where they change the vote requirements from a majority to a plurality. Could the GOP really risk losing the House leadership because twenty or so of their representatives are being - gasp - more principled than their counterparts across the aisle?
In 2021, when Nancy Pelosi’s speakership was up for reelection, it would only have taken five Democrat members to force a vote for Medicare for All in exchange for their support. "The Squad” itself had enough votes to withhold the speakership from Pelosi but refused to do so, toed the party line, acquiesced to institutional power, and betrayed their constituents all at once.
If and when McCarthy is elected - or Republicans drop the ball completely and Jeffries is named speaker - let it serve as a reminder that there is no dividing “aisle”. The aisle is a fiction. We live in a uni-party system masquerading as a two-party system.
Biden on Immigration
When researching this topic I noticed something I hadn’t before. When did we shift from saying illegal immigrant to unauthorized immigrant? Are we at the point where the word illegal has reached such semantic overload that we can’t pair it with the word immigrant? It’s not as insufferable as the shift from homeless to “unhoused” or as pernicious as the rebranding of pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons” - yes, that’s a thing - but annoying to be sure.
After years of the US government meddling in the affairs of other countries, now, President Biden is keen to avoid dealing with the consequences. Thursday, the Biden administration announced they would be placing heavier restrictions on asylum-seekers coming from Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti. Prospective immigrants from these countries will still be allowed to apply for legal immigration via “parole” - an authority that has been shoehorned away from its original purpose - but only if they qualify, i.e. have family members currently in the United States.
It’s certainly a reverse in policy from the Biden administration’s first two years which saw the border continue to go unsecured, unprecedented levels of border encounters, and the releasing of thousands upon thousands of undocumented immigrants into the interior of our country. If you couple that with Republican scaremongering over the repealing of Title 42 (which didn’t come to fruition), some might say we’ve got a little bit of a crisis on our hands.
Restriction and due process are highly necessary when it comes to immigration, but that hasn’t been the policy of the last two years. Now, a crisis is evident, and these vulnerable people’s lives will be used as a political tool to appease Biden’s Republican opponents though it’s citizens from these particular nations whose requests for asylum are likely the most legitimate.
Biden continues to get it wrong.
Citizens from those four nations have endured decades of turmoil directly linked to US government and CIA interference - regime changes, the funding of opposition militias, destabilization, all the hits. After successfully undermining these people’s self-determination, and disrupting their political systems for the better part of the last century, what did we expect to happen? Did we expect the stranger to not show up at our doorstep?
Cobalt Red
I’m often the buzzkill at parties or social gatherings when companies like Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Google and their products are the subjects of conversation. Full disclosure - this is being written on a Macbook in a household with more than one Apple product, but hear me out.
These corporations have actively lobbied against American efforts to curb the use of forced labor practices in their own supply chains while pushing whatever woke agenda in the West that buys them the most social credit. Meanwhile, these companies are exporting slave labor to underdeveloped nations, and their consumers are unwittingly (most of the time) footing the bill.
Journalist Siddharth Kara has a new book coming out entitled Cobalt Red. Kara went to exhaustive efforts to expose the inhumane mining practices employed in order to procure and refine cobalt - a mineral required in just about every rechargeable battery - the majority of which lies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Kara’s interview with Joe Rogan, he details the child labor, and forced labor practices that are ubiquitous in the industry. The scenes of the video Kara plays Rogan of one of these mining operations are so anachronistic that it feels like what it must have been like when the Great Pyramids were being constructed. It’s unnerving, revolting, and deeply depressing what humans are capable of doing to our fellow man.
Given the globalization of nearly every industry, it’s nearly impossible to live ethically, and humanely in the modern world. But the least we can do is try, especially when the evidence is right in front of us. Granted, this could be like the Invisible Children hustle from my teenage years, and I’ll be conned into buying a bracelet, but I’d like to think I’m wiser now than I was then.
This is the problem with the solutions suggested by our political betters. California’s Gavin Newsom has implemented a plan to ban the sale of combustion engine vehicles by 2035. Not only are the costs of electric vehicles prohibitive for large swaths of the population, but think of the impact the increased demand will have at the bottom of the supply chain. The consistently proposed antidote to lowering emissions is a flippant suggestion that we all drive electric vehicles - a product that requires cobalt - but there’s no consternation as to where and how these limited materials are attained. A general life lesson: nothing is without trade-offs, nothing is without consequence.
If you don’t have a couple of hours to spare, watch the nine-minute video above. Kara’s reporting is likely the most important I’ve seen all of last year.
I don’t shop at Nike or Adidas any longer because of similar labor-concerned reasons; fortunately, there are alternative options. Conversely, I’ve long sought to circumvent companies like Samsung and Apple in lieu of a fair-trade, ethically-made phone or computer, and there aren’t any; save for a company called Fairphone that’s exclusively sold in the EU. So, the most we can do at the moment is avoid being suckered into buying the latest model of whatever device they’re peddling at the moment, and stop throwing obscene amounts of money at these companies.
It’s a continuation of the luxury beliefs held in the West, that we must move on from coal and natural gas in favor of ‘green’ energy. One look at the working conditions in the Congo dispels the notion that it’s somehow an eco-friendly industry. Meanwhile, underdeveloped nations across the globe are still burning wood and dung for their fuel, they haven’t graduated to fossil fuels yet, and the Western world would rather deprive them of the relief that oil, gas, and coal would provide. But that’s an article for another time. In short, we must prioritize the welfare of our fellow earthlings ahead of commoditization, ahead of short-sighted ecological hand-wringing. Why isn’t this being debated in the halls of Congress with the same fervor as the Speaker vote?
I don’t want to be the beneficiary of my brother or sister’s enslavement. Some people want to wear Nike, own the newest iphone, etcetera, and I judge no one for the decisions they make. I understand that, and I sympathize. I know I wouldn’t be able to justify every one of my actions if they were to come under scrutiny. I understand everyone has their own lines in the sand. But at least let’s have the conversation about where we draw them. You can preorder Kara’s book here.
With love,
~FDA
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs” - Thomas Sowell
This quote came to mind reading your article this week. Really great work, rounding up our first week of the new year! Look forward to discussing more, especially around the latest revelations in the Cobalt mining. Heartbreaking to see these realities and inhumane practices.