ICYMI: Turning up the heat on workers; Gun-runner to the world; Russians and Republicans; Starve the children

One good news note this week— A federal judge slapped down Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his buddy Elon Musk, granting a preliminary injunction against his subpoena of Media Matters. The judge’s 40-page opinion details the chilling effect of Paxton’s actions, as both Media Matters and the individual journalist who reported on Musk/Twitter/X pulled back from that reporting in fear of further legal harassment. The judge finds that Paxton’s actions are retaliatory and in violation of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press.  

Turning up the heat on workers— Florida laws protect high school athletes from the physical dangers of high heat and humidity during outdoor activity, but give no such protection to outdoor workers. Florida forbids local governments from protecting workers from the heat, under a new law signed last week by Governor Ron DeSantis. 

The Florida legislature and governor decided to protect employers from regulation after Miami-Dade county tried to protect workers from the heat. Miami-Dade county is home to 300,000 of the state’s two million outdoor workers. Last year, Miami saw a 46-day stretch of above-100-degree heat index readings. NPR reported:

“’Last year was the hottest summer in Florida’s history. And this year will likely be the hottest summer in Florida’s history,’ says Esteban Wood, director of the advocacy group We-Count, one of the organizations working on heat protections in Miami-Dade. The new law, he says, represents ‘a profound loss for not only the campaign but for all the families that have for many years been fighting for the minimum—which was just water, shade and rest, and the right to return home after work alive.’ …

“Despite the increasing risks, there are no federal rules regulating when it’s too hot to work, even though thousands of heat-related injuries and dozens of deaths are reported across the U.S. every year. There is a federal requirement that employers keep workers safe on the job, and recommendations for how to do so, including protecting workers from extreme heat. But the guidance doesn’t say exactly what those protections are or what to do when limits are surpassed.” 

California, Washington, and Oregon have passed state-wide heat protection laws. Texas Governor Greg Abbott last year signed a bill forbidding local heat protection rules. Florida and Texas: turning up the heat on workers. 

Gun-runner to the world— The United States furnishes most of the guns used by Haitian gangs, Mexican drug cartels, and other bad actors across the Americas. While other countries have stringent gun laws, U.S. manufacturers, legal sellers, and illegal exporters profit from this huge and usually illegal export business. The Washington Post reported last week on gun-running to Haiti:

“When Walder St. Louis entered the Miami pawnshop in October 2021, his shopping list contained just a few items: Two AK-47s and an AR-15.

“Germine Joly, then head of the Haitian gang 400 Mawozo, had placed the order from a Port-au-Prince prison. St. Louis would soon send two barrels of firearms back to the Haitian capital.

“Heavily armed gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the United Nations has estimated, where they rape, kidnap and kill with impunity. Haiti doesn’t manufacture firearms, and the United Nations prohibits importing them, but that’s no problem for the criminals. When they go shopping, the United States is their gun store. …

“Nearly 85 percent of guns found at crime scenes in Haiti and submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available, were traced to the United States. In the Bahamas in 2022, that figure was 98 percent.” 

Ioan Grillo, a journalist based in Mexico City who wrote Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs And Cartels, connected the dots in a 2022 NPR interview:

“Most of this huge traffic of firearms from the United States to Mexico is happening illegally. They’re driven, and it’s quite easy to drive into Mexico. One of the people I profiled, he was driving from Chihuahua to Dallas. He was buying about 12 to 15 AR-15s, and he was stashing them in fridges, in stoves and taking them into Mexico – that way, paying duty on those.  …

“[The] legal gun trade in the United States also fuels the drug trade, but it also – more than that, it fuels the violence in Mexico. It fuels the violence in Central America. And you see these same guns going down into Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, where it’s very – been very high levels of violence in recent years. You’ve had huge amounts of people fleeing this and applying for asylum in the United States. So from the U.S. point of view as well, you’re creating a more unstable neighborhood. You’re creating large numbers of refugees fleeing to the United States in this same cycle. So you get this issue of guns at the core of U.S. politics, then this issue of refugees, asylum-seekers at the border and these actually both being very connected issues.” 

Russians and Republicans— Now even Republicans are warning about their party’s parroting of Russian propaganda. The Washington Post summed up several recent news reports: 

“Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that it was ‘absolutely true’ that some Republican members of Congress were repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. …

“House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) … said in an interview with Puck News last week that Russian propaganda had ‘infected a good chunk of my party’s base’ and suggested that conservative media was to blame. …

“’We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,’ Turner said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.;”

Starve the children— Children in Gaza face starvation and death. Those who survive will face a diminished future, with physical and mental development permanently impaired. 

“Gaza’s children are going hungry. More than 25 have reportedly died of complications linked to malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization. Hundreds of thousands more face starvation as Israel continues its siege.

Doctors and nutrition experts say the children who survive the lack of nourishment — and the ongoing bombing, infectious diseases and psychological trauma — are further condemned to face a lifetime of health woes. Malnutrition will rob them of the ability to fully develop their brains and bodies. Many will be shorter and physically weaker as a result.”

Meanwhile, U.S. politicians and news media continue their oh-so-delicate dance around whether conditions in Gaza can be called “famine.” Let me suggest a few other terms: moral failure, unfathomable evil, sin, fucking disaster.