What Happened Today: April 1, 2022
Major immigration policy overhaul; win for Amazon union; Bible timeline revision
The Big Story
The clock is now officially ticking on the pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, announced this afternoon that she has rescinded her agency’s order for the policy effective May 23, which will provide the Department of Homeland Security roughly eight weeks to implement a protocol to handle what recent press reports indicate could be an initial flood of some 170,000 migrants at the U.S. southern border. First enacted in March 2020 by the CDC under President Trump as part of the administration’s effort to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, the policy has allowed U.S. border patrol to swiftly deport migrants without hearing their asylum claims. It was used extensively last year, dispelling a record 1.7 million migrants at the U.S. southern border, even as the CDC has relaxed other protocols relating to the pandemic. The inconsistency in the CDC’s pandemic policy justifications (a perennial theme) has been a primary source of consternation for many Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer, who wrote in a recent letter, “As we have clearly reminded President Biden, we have a moral imperative to live by our values.”
As ever, this isn’t about values. Others have pointed out that Title 42 remained on the books just as President Biden made splashy overtures to bring in 100,000 refugees from Ukraine and tens of thousands displaced from Afghanistan—which gets closer to the crux of the issue: Right now, American officials on both sides of the aisle have no coherent policy in place or in the works for what to do about immigration writ large. Ahead of the CDC announcement, White House spokesperson Kate Bedingfield told the press this week that after border officials resume hearing asylum claims, migrants will still be “expeditiously” deported, noting that “economic need and flight from generalized violence is not a basis for asylum”— even though that seems to be the set of conditions behind the invitation to Ukrainian and Afghanistan refugees. Indeed, the double standard underscores that at this moment, hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the world are about to show up at the door, and American officials don’t quite know how to handle it.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-end-covid-order-blocking-asylum-seekers-border-2022-04-01/
In The Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that it will tap into the United States’ national stockpile of oil, promising a “historic release” of 100 million barrels a day to reduce the cost of gas by as much as 35 cents a gallon. “Enough of lavishing excessive profits on investors and payouts and buybacks when the American people are watching, the world is watching,” Biden said amid news that he is now seeking to pass a “use it or lose it” policy that would “make companies pay fees on wells from their leases that they haven’t used in years and on acres of public lands that they are hoarding without producing.” The call to maximize the United States’ fossil fuel production is at odds with many of the president’s climate change promises and policies, perhaps inspiring the administration’s decision to authorize the use of the Defense Production Act to mine and process more lithium, cobalt, graphite, and manganese—all essential for creating renewable energy sources.
→ The U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its projections on food costs for the year, predicting an almost 8% year-to-year rise from 2021. This will bring food prices in the United States to their highest point since 1981. In the Eurozone, meanwhile, food prices have seen a near 8% year-to-year rise, a spike at the grocery store that’s instigated the rate of inflation and now threatens a legitimate food crisis in many less-developed countries, not least because 30% of the world’s wheat comes from Ukraine and Russia, a supply that the two nations will not be able to maintain as the war continues.
→ All Russian forces have now withdrawn from the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which Russia seized shortly after invading Ukraine. Russia forced more than 100 workers and 200 guards to live at the site to maintain the plant’s complex safety protocols. The Russian army abandoned Chernobyl yesterday after several hundred of its soldiers began to suffer “acute radiation sickness” while digging trenches in the “Red Forest” just outside the plant—so named because during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, thousands of pine trees turned red. The irradiated Russians have since gone to Belarus for treatment.
→ Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island voted to unionize today, becoming the first U.S. Amazon workers to do so. The major victory for the labor movement faced stiff opposition from Amazon, the second-largest employer in the United States, which had been found by the National Labor Relations Board to have illegally interfered with a union drive by Amazon employees in Alabama last year. In Staten Island, warehouse supervisors held mandatory anti-union meetings and blanketed bathroom stalls with anti-union messaging. Perhaps the employee bathroom breaks weren’t long enough for the messaging to become effective, though. Heading into what will surely be a contentious contract-negotiation process, the Amazon Labor Union will seek to bump up wages, increase break time, and eliminate mandatory overtime shifts. Later this month, workers will vote on forming a union at another Amazon warehouse in Staten Island.
→ A new study from the VA St. Louis Healthcare System examined the records of 180,000 patients and found that those who have had COVID-19 were 40% more likely to develop diabetes. The new finding comes after the same researchers found an increased risk for kidney disease, heart failure, and stroke for those who previously had COVID-19. Some in the medical research community have pointed out that the study’s population of Veterans Affairs patients skews older and overweight, meaning they’re already prone to these illnesses. Still, the significant link between COVID-19 and diabetes has raised the alarm. As one member of the research team wrote, after the pandemic is over, the United States will confront a “legacy of chronic disease.”
→ Perchlorate, a chemical compound found in fireworks and rocketships, can now also be found in our drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its decision yesterday to uphold a Trump-era policy that perchlorate would not be regulated. The Trump administration reversed an Obama-era ban, arguing that the chemical is not found widely enough in drinking water to necessitate federal regulation. Environmental activists and pediatricians, however, say we should be alarmed that it can be found in our drinking water at all. The compound can damage brain development in children and fetuses, the American Academy of Pediatrics said, and can measurably lower the IQ of newborn—which is why the Obama administration sought to regulate it in the first place. In 2011, when Obama’s EPA announced its limits on the chemical compound, it said that perchlorate runoff could be found in the drinking water of 16 million Americans.
→ The $1.5 trillion spending bill that Congress enacted in March was packed with pork, as Democrats and Republicans made the most of their first opportunity in more than a decade to add earmarks to bills. In 2011, following a series of congressional spending scandals, and with the Tea Party leading a cost-cutting crusade, Congress voted to end the earmarking practice whereby members bury unrelated funding needs in omnibus bills; this past March, however, it brought the earmark back, and the enormous spending bill that Congress just passed included $9 billion in earmarks, according to The New York Times, with funds going to a miscellany of projects in every state. The change, rather than suggesting a new era of congressional dysfunction, is coming with overtures of the opposite. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are hopeful that earmarks might incentivize the passage of more bills.
→ An amulet from the Bronze Age that was discovered at an archeological site on Mount Ebal in Israel may be the oldest known reference to YHWH, the Jewish God of the Bible. The artifact was discovered in 2020, and it took researchers three years to technologically read the brittle item and decode its pre-alphabetic text; they revealed their findings at a press conference in Houston on Thursday. Dating to circa 1200 BCE, the “curse amulet,” as the two-centimeter folded lead tablet is known, proves that Israelites were literate and had already composed sections of the Bible at the time they entered ancient Israel; this would have enormous consequences for the dating of the Bible, which many scholars believe was composed centuries later than this tablet suggests. “This is a text you find only every 1,000 years,” Prof. Gershon Galil of Haifa University told The Times of Israel.
Your Weekend Reads
The year’s best piece of sports writing thus far is also an excellent interrogation of the influence technology has had on our media landscape and of the celebrities and athletes that serve as vehicles to produce a constant stream of audio and visual content. In this piece for his Substack, Ethan Strauss writes about how the most famous athletes of our time are meticulously foregrounding their mental health struggles to a rapturous audience of fans and sports media. It’s a major evolution from a previous era of sports endurance and athletic triumph, this “shift from celebrating triumph over adversity to praising pressure evasion.” It’s led to “an elevation of narcissism. Don’t focus on others and their picayune pressures. Focus on you. Put yourself first. That’s the road to mental health.” Strauss unpacks how that change is tied up in the explosion of social media platforms where even to challenge this new ethos is out of bounds:
The premise, in not just journalism but all kinds of professional-class settings, is that group sympathy at scale is some magical elixir. Dismissal of grievance is the opposite, a poison that must be viciously opposed. Sometimes, it seems like the greatest taboo in these settings is to reject a fashionable pity party. To say “you’re not a victim” isn’t just considered dickish, but wholesale heresy.
Read it here: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/pity-the-zoomer-athlete?s=r
Does anyone need more lit crit about the New York Intellectuals? Maybe not, though this is a good one by Merve Emre on the occasion of a new biography of Elizabeth Hardwick and a new collection of her nonfiction. As Emre writes, almost anything could provoke Hardwick into “astonishing acts of savagery” in her criticism, including but not limited to “academics, politicians, youth cults playing at revolution, biographers, diarists, and, above all, marriage.” But Hardwick wasn’t in the practice of brutality for its own sake; as Hardwick so often demonstrated, “the expression of judgment was an act of persuasion, not coercion. The art of criticism turned on convincing readers that one’s judgment was not merely a permissible opinion but a universal truth.” In this way, Emre’s essay is as much about Hardwick as it is about the substance of good criticism:
Push the conceit a little further, and the responsibilities of the critic are clear. Her obligation is to her materials—to apprehend them faithfully, to represent them honestly, and to coax from fiction’s acting, speaking, and thinking beings those half-glimpsed truths of the human condition. Her resolve is strengthened by a stubborn, if short-lived, fidelity. Hardwick’s best essays attend with considerable energy to a single author, sensing that other critics paid for breadth, and for the grand pronouncements about the state of fiction that often accompanied it, with a certain shabbiness of thought. The “we”—invoked by couples and critics alike, and never more pointedly than in moments of insecurity—troubled her with its falseness, its unscrupulous and overbearing insistence on a single, shared vision. “I am not a law-giver,” she liked to assure people. She knew that the last thing anyone needed was more laws or people eager to enforce them.
Read it here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/04/21/the-act-of-persuasion-elizabeth-hardwick/
“As we have clearly reminded President Biden, we have a moral imperative to live by our values.”