What Happened Today: Feb 4, 2022
Olympic turmoil; Journalists attacked in Mexico; Millennial buyer remorse
The Big Story
The Winter Olympics kicks off in Beijing today, though the usually jubilant atmosphere surrounding the medal competitions has been undercut by limited crowds due to concerns over COVID-19 and by an array of intensifying political tensions that have dominated the run-up to the opening ceremonies. In a provocative choice, China tapped Dingieer Yilamujiang, a skier with family ties to the Uyghur region, to be one of the two athletes to hoist the flame into the Olympic cauldron and officially begin the games. The United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and several other nations declared a diplomatic boycott of the games in protest of the Chinese government’s mass detention and forced sterilization—among other crimes against humanity—of the Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. Officials from India also joined the boycott last night when China announced the inclusion in the ceremonies of one of its soldiers who’d been involved in a deadly clash in 2020 with Indian forces along the Himalayan border.
Thomas Bach, the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has struggled to keep the games focused on the athletes, saying last night that explicit meddling in geopolitical affairs with host nations “would lead to the end of the Olympic Games … We are not commenting on political issues.” Corporate sponsors of the games would love to make it all about the athletes as well, though they continue to feel the heat from human rights advocates. Exclusive broadcaster of the games NBC has tried to avoid the controversies swirling around the Chinese government, making the most of its $7.75 billion contract to cover the games through 2032. But Bob Costas, an NBC announcer who had previously covered 12 Olympic Games, was critical of the attempts by organizers to sanitize the misdeeds of the host nation. “The IOC deserves all of the disdain and disgust that comes their way for going back to China,” Costas said recently. “They’re shameless about this stuff.”
Backpages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ Journalists continue to come under attack in Mexico, where at least three have been killed and another wounded in recent weeks by gangs hostile toward the media. At the end of last month in Tijuana, Margarito Martínez was shot and killed outside his home and Lourdes Maldonado López was assassinated in her car, just as the unsolved murder rate for journalists in Mexico hovers around 95%, according to the New York Committee to Protect Journalists. A government program meant to shield journalists has been heavily criticized by advocacy groups and journalists alike because members of the press are provided special emergency alarm fobs that have provided little aid. “What they give us is a damned panic button, and you know what that button is? It is the number of the municipal police supervisor who is corrupt and sold out,” a journalist in Mexico City told the Associated Press.
→ Out now: Issue #03 of The Tab, Tablet magazine’s new printable weekly digest. In this week’s edition: Sheila Heti, Groundhog Day, and the challenge of Friday lunch.
Download it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-tab-printable-weekly
→ Google’s stock rose sharply yesterday after Alphabet, its parent company, reported strong holiday sales and a 41% increase in revenue this past year. The huge growth was driven in part by YouTube, which made $29 billion for Alphabet and a good chunk of change for the creators of YouTube videos, who take home 55% of video ad revenue. That friendly profit split is part of what has allowed YouTube to stay competitive against less creator-friendly platforms like TikTok. Along with benefiting DIY builders and home-cooking influencers, the rise in Google ad profits has been great for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her husband, who’ve just upped their portfolio holdings with at least $500,000 worth of call options for Alphabet stock in December. The Pelosi family trading came just days after the speaker opposed renewed calls by government ethics groups and other lawmakers advocating for legislation that prohibits lawmakers from owning stock. “We’re a free market economy,” she said.
→ The Scroll readers will recall yesterday’s coverage of the record-setting stock loss for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which translated to about $29 billion erased from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, which dropped to a paltry $85 billion. It wasn’t quite so sad a day for Jeff Bezos, who counted a $20 billion increase to his own personal fortune yesterday, thanks in no small part to Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, which continues to grow its stake as the infrastructure for the internet itself.
→ Over in the metaverse, speculators and scammers continue to keep things interesting as Yuga Labs, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club — a set of cartoon NFT apes that runs upwards of $3 million a pop — is now in negotiations with Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, which valued Yuga at a cool $5 billion. The potential deal indicates that the NFT market, worth $40 billion in 2021, is attracting traditional and institutional investors along with more entrepreneurial schemers. Not long after a new NFT project called Doodle Dragons raised $30,000 for charity in January, the project creator sent out a tweet about where the money was really going: “Actually. fuck that. our charity will instead now be ... my bank account. cya nerds.”
→ For every official at the IOC who wishes they could get politics out of the Olympic Games, there’s another dozen institutional leaders who want nothing more than to infuse their operations with charged political rhetoric. But the politicalization of everything isn’t exactly improving the long-term prospects for many of these organizations, as Bill Penzey, the CEO of a spice company in Wisconsin, found out after he tried last month to infuse some partisan rhetoric into his powdered herbs and cinnamon shakers with a sale campaign dubbed “Republicans Are Racists Weekend.” Penzey has made headlines over the past few years for his charged political marketing ploys, which has earned him fawning coverage in places like The New Yorker and Los Angeles Times, but the continual alienation of his customer base has seen him lose large numbers of his mail-order subscribers and left him asking in an email last week for those still reading to pick up the slack with gift-card purchases: “We are still down about 10,000 [subscribers]. Please help.”
→ Cumin and za’atar, so too Teslas and Priuses: Political affiliations determine where eco-friendly automobiles are selling. A new report in Bloomberg shows that 76% of all electric vehicle sales last year were in states that went to Biden in the presidential election. That stark divide is going to make it tough for President Biden’s ambition to make half of all new car purchases electric by the end of the decade. Thankfully, Biden has at his disposal red-state darling Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to aid in the effort, who wrote on Twitter in recent weeks that “the Americans who stand to benefit most from EVs are those who drive the most, often rural drivers—so we’re working to increase charging availability across the country.”
→ Stat of the day: It seems that some millennials aren’t exactly happy about becoming homeowners, as a new survey by real estate firm Clever Real Estate found that 82% of millennials now have at least one major regret with their first home purchase. A survey asking the same question last year found dissatisfaction among about 64% of millennial homebuyers. The jump, analysts say, was driven by an intense supply crunch in the housing supply and low interest rates, which propelled millennials to snap up homes in neighborhoods and cities that many now regret choosing.
Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-regret-buying-first-home-housing-market-2022-2
→ Police departments struggle to keep adequate numbers of officers on the force as resignations rose 18% in the year ending in March 2021 compared to the previous one-year period, according to a recent survey of 200 police departments by the think tank Police Executive Research Forum. The uptick in resignations, coupled with a 45% spike in the rate of retirements, has made it difficult for police chiefs to recruit new employees in an increasingly tight labor market. Though average police pay was around $70,000 in 2020, $14,000 higher than the national salary for all workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the decreased morale across law-enforcement agencies in light of negative media attention has pushed people out of the industry. “I just lost the mental capacity not only to handle and mitigate the violence that you see, but this perception of constant negativity,” John LaValley, a Wisconsin police officer, told The Wall Street Journal about why he left the police force to work on a railroad.
Weekend Reads
→ In this review of The 9.9 Percent, a new book about the more affluent strata of the professional managerial class by Matthew Stewart, editor of American Affairs, Julius Krein, attributes the “complete failure” of the book as a work of persuasion or political economy in part to Stewart’s own embodiment of “various insecurities and pathologies of the 9.9 percent.” This, though, doesn’t mean the book is without value. Rather, Krein argues, its merit is “its own presence as a cultural artifact of, by, and for the 9.9 percent”:
The definitive literary genre of the professional managerial class is the college application essay, and The 9.9 Percent is best approached as another submission in this category. Hence the author’s strange insistence on discussing his personal biography and family history throughout the book—apparently his great-grandfather made a fortune as an attorney for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil—and even greater insistence on explaining how anguished he is by all of it. Rest assured, dear reader, that the author is the right kind of person in all possible ways.
Read more: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/01/elite-grifters
→ For years, healthcare systems have stripped down their hospitals and medical offices to provide just-in-time medical care, with reduced staff and increased expectations that put the burden on nurses and doctors and more money in the pocket of healthcare executives and investors. The incredible vulnerability of the U.S. healthcare provider system was laid bare during the coronavirus pandemic and left hospitals and medical staffing agencies scrambling to hire nurses and medical professionals. Many hiring firms began recruiting immigrants, but a lack of regulatory oversight and ongoing predatory corporate hiring policies led to nurses being coerced into dubious employment contracts with intolerable working conditions. As reported by this new Bloomberg investigation, groups of nurses are fighting back against the hospitals, bringing lawsuits that accuse the health systems of exploitation and human trafficking.
Carmen says she was paid much less than the American nurses around her. She was banned from discussing her working conditions or going out of town without notifying the agency. Health Carousel seemed to keep finding ways not to count her work toward the 6,240 hours on her contract—the first three months of shifts didn’t qualify, the company said, because it considered that time part of her orientation period. Mandatory overtime didn’t count toward her quota, either. And because she couldn’t refuse overtime, her shifts could stretch as long as 16 hours in an understaffed emergency room.
“I was basically trapped,” Carmen says. “Duped.” To pay Health Carousel’s $20,000 quitting fee, she borrowed the money from her boyfriend, who’d been saving for years to buy a house. She’d refused his offer before, out of guilt and pride, but was desperate to get away from Health Carousel without being sued for quitting, as had happened to many of her peers.
→ Who’s pulling the real weight on President Biden’s domestic agenda? Is it the progressive wing of the party? Or are they just bit pieces on a chessboard played by much more concentrated sources of power? For Adolph Reed in this recent New Yorker profile, the real backroom deals are being brokered by “the asset managers of BlackRock,” which for the cantankerous political thinker on the left might be evidence that the narrative of our collective history is “a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed.”
Some of the things Reed said struck me as surprisingly bleak, coming so soon after the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. I had imagined that Reed might take some comfort from the swelling young membership of the D.S.A., but instead he dismissed it, comparing it to the late-period Students for a Democratic Society, full of political naïfs, and noting that Socialism was a somewhat “vaporous concept at this point” anyway. “It may sound odd, but where the hopefulness lies is in recognizing that, as the real left, we can’t have any impact on anything significant in American politics,” Reed told me. “So we don’t have to constrain our political thinking.” To illustrate how far the left is from power, he said something I’d heard him say before: “The most significant left force in the Biden administration on domestic policy is the asset managers of BlackRock, and on foreign policy it’s John Mearsheimer and the foreign-affairs crowd.” Reed did not mention that these developments—that his ideological enemies in the administration were pushing large amounts of social spending in the domestic sphere and retreat from forever wars overseas—might count, from another perspective, as a left-wing victory.
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-marxist-who-antagonizes-liberals-and-the-left
China is demonstrating through those alleged "crimes against humanity" that its leadership is much less street stupid about Muhammadism than is the leadership of the USA, UK, etc. It would be only too easy to let the cancer metasticize. Any coward, e.g. Mata Bharat, can do that, but China's leaders, though reprehensible in other respects, have chosen a better path on this issue. They decided to keep their eyes open, to recognize a natural enemy when they see it, and to thrash that pest into Submission. From what I've gathered elsewhere, they've taken steps to kill the Christianity tumor, too.
If China's southern neighbor, which has a worse Abrahamism problem than China, were not so moody, she would let herself be led by China's good example. Then she would give up petty gestures and start doing what's right—without regard for goofy, suicidal notions about freedom of religion. Let Europe keep those notions to herself and earn the death she deserves for tolerating supremcist cults from the Levant and Middle East.