What Happened Today: June 9, 2022
Russian begins show trials; social justice union busting; Kensington drug cartels
The Big Story
Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russian forces last month in the southern city of Mariupol count among the more than 1,100 cases the Investigative Committee of Russia is pursuing as part of what it calls its campaign to hear “crimes against peace”—but will amount to a massive show trial of Ukrainian prisoners of war. The cases against Ukrainian soldiers feed into the larger narrative Russia has used as the pretext for its invasion; namely, to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians,” President Putin said in February. Though those brought to trial could ultimately be used as bargaining chips by Russia to trade for its own captured soldiers, it appears that Russia is equally interested in ushering these types of trials to their ultimate conclusion. Today, two British men and one Moroccan man working with Ukrainian armed forces were found guilty in a sham court set up by Russian officials in the Donetsk People’s Republic, one of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine that Russia said before the latest invasion it would fight to liberate from Ukraine. The soldiers were found guilty and sentenced to death for “actions aimed at seizing power and overthrowing the constitutional order of the DPR,” a court official said.
In the Back Pages: Opiate City: A Kensington Chronicle
The Rest
→ Gone are the days when corporations would bust union drives with good old firings and intimidation. With unionization efforts surging at companies across the country, from coastal behemoths such as Amazon and Starbucks to small businesses operating deep in red states, management is changing its tactics and looking to take advantage of “social justice-driven” campaigns by “attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization,” according to The Intercept. Such tactics were at the forefront of a conference this past April on “union avoidance,” where experts who were once branded as anti-union consultants have blossomed into “diversity executives” or developers of “belonging”; such figures now form part of a $340 million industry that advises companies on how to exploit the language of diversity so that management can walk the tightrope of appearing “inclusive” while destroying demands for greater pay and benefits.
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/07/union-busting-tactics-diversity/
→ At a Federal Drug Administration meeting this week, new data (see below) on the incident of patients suffering from myocarditis within a week of receiving COVID-19 mRNA doses showed that young men ages 12 to 15 were succumbing to the condition at a rate as much as 10 times higher than boys between the ages of 5 and 12.
→ That uptick in U.S. cases tracks with similar findings of the condition for young men in Israel, just as Alan Salzberg and Abraham Wyner wrote in a new Tablet piece earlier this week about the Israeli studies: “Recent data from Israel show that a small number of kids and young adults, especially young males, are more likely to suffer serious and potentially life-altering consequences to their heart from the booster than to be hospitalized with COVID-19.”
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/the-insanity-of-mandating-camp-boosters-for-kids
→ In early June, critically acclaimed indie band Big Thief announced two concerts in Tel Aviv and bravely stood its ground against activists shouting at it that playing music in Israel was wrong—even if, or perhaps because, one of its four founding members was born and raised in Tel Aviv. “It is important for us to share our homes, families, and friends with each other … It is important for us to go where we have family to share space and play for them. It is foundational,” Big Thief wrote this week, a sentiment it’s expressed about Israel and BDS previously. Well, it turns out that foundational connection to family wasn’t so strong after all. This morning, Big Thief caved to the activist pressure, canceled its shows, and begged for forgiveness. “We acknowledge that aspects of our previous post were written unclearly and in avoidance of the magnitude and importance of this conversation. We also recognize there are limitations in our perspectives based on our various layers of privilege,” Big Thief wrote on Instagram, alienating both those in Tel Aviv and anyone who thought the group might have had the guts to stand by its beliefs.
→ MAP OF THE DAY: The most thorough cartography of New York City’s bagelries ever made, with 202 bagels tasted and then graded according to a nuanced five-tier system developed by creative duo Mike Varley and Jessi Highet, aka Highley Varlet. The team spent 13 months eating as many as six bagels per day to produce this invaluable resource. Click on the image below to explore the map—and to purchase a bagel with shmear NFT, if that’s your thing.
→ A staggering 1 out of every 5 North Carolinians is in medical debt, and in rural counties, that percentage gets even higher, with some 43% of residents reporting unpaid medical fees, according to the Urban Institute. In response, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers is trying to pass a bill that changes how hospitals charge their patients and how medical debt gets treated on debtors’ credit reports. “The moral thing to do is to stop weaponizing people’s credit score,” said North Carolina Treasurer Dale Folwell, who is drafting the bill with lawmakers. Currently, some uninsured or underinsured patients who can’t pay for their care are given credit cards to pay their hospital fees—a practice that plunges many of them into credit card debt. The bill, currently under consideration, would require hospitals to treat uninsured patients who cannot pay as “charity” cases and recoup the tax benefits accordingly.
→ The worldwide shrinking is now upon us: Coffee cans are 10 ounces smaller, tissue counts are down per box, Gatorade bottles are shorter, and even the share size bag of Haribo gummy bears has shedded an ounce. Typical during times of intense inflation, the phenomenon known as shrinkflation is coming for hundreds of consumer products, with less being offered to consumers, even as prices keep going up. Some companies have owned up to the need to shrink their products because of higher costs in labor and materials, like Japan food maker Calbee, which slimmed its veggie chips down by 10% while increasing prices by 10%. But other companies have been coy about the changes, which some analysts say might have less to do with higher expenses than with the opportunity provided by inflation to spike costs for consumers. “I’m not saying they’re profiteering, but it smells like it,” said Hitendra Chaturvedi, an Arizona State University business professor. “Are we using supply constraints as a weapon to make more money?”
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 2,903. The difference between how many rental units (7,669) and Airbnb units (10,572) were available in Manhattan in April 2022. While renters face surging prices and bidding wars for limited stock, more and more apartments are being listed for short-term use, intensifying a dynamic that makes New York City a wonderful place to visit—or to own extra property in—but an increasingly difficult place to live.
→ Fire season has come to the United States early, with well over a million acres already burned this year, far exceeding the usual average for early June. This isn’t stopping homebuyers from purchasing properties in areas at high risk of wildfires, according to Redfin, which reports that homes in high-fire-risk zones are selling for 27.6% more than homes in areas with low fire risk. “High-risk homes sell for more in part because remote work has allowed many Americans to move to suburbs and rural areas, which are often more vulnerable,” the report found. The increased interest in high-risk areas bucks another trend that Redfin had tracked, which is that homebuyers are becoming increasingly worried about global warming and its impact on their safety and investments. “The latest data,” National Mortgage Professional Magazine notes, “proves that oftentimes [environmental concerns are] not a dealbreaker.”
→ Over the past 13 years, as many as 510,000 New York City students failed tests because of the heat, according to a recent study of the impact of classroom temperatures on test scores that was published in the American Economic Journal. In some cases, the heat had an outsized impact on students’ futures, with 90,000 students forced to delay their graduations after failing required exams. The study found that schools with better air-conditioning saw their students perform better and that most of the schools lacking adequate AC were located in poor areas with more minority students. “Without air-conditioning, a 1°F hotter school year reduces that year’s learning by 1%. Hot school days disproportionately impact minority students, accounting for roughly 5% of the racial achievement gap,” according to the study. The findings were also consistent globally: “Across countries, a 1°F increase in average annual temperature is associated with 0.02 standard deviation lower math scores for 15-year-olds taking the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Opiate City: A Kensington Chronicle
Thursday morning, the Pennsylvania Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro stood alongside Philadelphia’s mayor, the chief of police, and a map of North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood to explain the business structure of the drug cartel his office had brought down this week. It was the seventh campaign undertaken as part of the Kensington Initiative, Shapiro’s attempt to crack down on what has become the largest open-air drug market in the United States.
In Kensington alone, the drug trade is now a billion-dollar cash economy, which means more money gets spent on drug deals there than what the entire city of Philadelphia spends in a given year on its buses, subways, parks, street cleaning, prisons, and fire departments combined. That you could take all of the money out of the drug market and essentially run much of the city’s core functions speaks to both the scale of the problem there and the intense need for a dedicated institution with the resources to address it.
Since launching the Kensington Initiative, AG Shapiro has struggled to get results. Organized drug trafficking networks have turned the neighborhood into a seemingly lawless den where drugs and prostitution flourish, guns trade freely, and homeless camps spread over one street after another, leaving the residents who live there helpless to do anything about it.
The target on Thursday was the Coates family, led by father and son Curtis Coates Sr. and Jr., who, along with 23 other members of their cartel, were arrested for their drug trade rental empire. While the Coates made a great deal of their money selling the fentanyl that has essentially replaced the heroin and prescription opioids on Kensington streets, they were also making upwards of $30,000 a week renting out Kensington street corners to other cartels and smaller dealers. That comes out to a roughly $1.5 million line item in the annual Coates family revenue ledger. Beyond the dollar value of controlling marquee drug corners, the enforcement of who gets to sell where allowed the Coates cartel more unfettered distribution of their own wares. During the raid, law enforcement collected 82,966 doses of fentanyl and heroin.
To what extent law enforcement will be able to keep those corners from falling into the hands of other cartels competing with the Coates remains to be seen.
Here, then, is as good a moment as any to say that I’ll be writing regularly on Kensington in a new Back Pages column for The Scroll. Though ostensibly about many disparate elements—from the drug trade itself to the law enforcement effort to control it, the housing and homelessness issues attached to it, and the dozens of nonprofits that now service the plight of Kensington residents and drug addicts alike—the overarching question of this column will simply be, How did this happen? Why did this happen here?
Shapiro’s office has spent the past three years trying to control the drug trade in Kensington, making 117 arrests before taking down the Coates family this week. Though tackling one of the biggest cartels in Kensington will no doubt help, Kensington’s drug trade is propped up by much more than one single family and will require more than what can be accomplished by the state attorney general and the city’s enforcement agencies. “We must cut off the supply of these poisons that come into our neighborhoods. Through the U.S. mail and through the U.S. border,” Shapiro said, referencing the steady stream of fentanyl, cocaine, and heroin that continue to flow over the U.S. border and through its ports into massive markets not only in Kensington but throughout the country.
To look closely at Kensington is to see something about what has happened all across the United States. Since the explosive abuse of prescription opioids that began in the 1990s, the nation’s drug addiction problem has become dramatically worse as a significant portion of users have moved on to fentanyl. Last year saw the largest total of Americans ever to die from drug overdoses—108,000 people—a death count that was 30% higher than in 2019. The post-pandemic overdose trend has alarmed even the more jaded drug trade veterans, not only because of how many people are overdosing on fentanyl but also because of the surge in other substances. Last year compared to the year prior, cocaine and meth overdose deaths were up 23% and 34%, respectively.
There has been some effort at the national level to curb the epidemic. The Drug Enforcement Administration launched Operation Overdrive in February, pushing federal agents and intelligence gathering into 34 city hotspots across 23 states to try to reduce the drug trade and the violence attached to it. The Biden administration has also tried to direct federal dollars to the effort with a $41 billion bill to temper the overdose epidemic, with earmarks to thwart the drug trafficking at the border, though getting it passed seems like a political nonstarter at the moment.
Despite, or because of, the slow rollout of state and national efforts, local neighborhoods continue to bear the brunt of the epidemic, with some community members taking it upon themselves to literally stem the bleeding. Along with the drug epidemic, Philadelphia has endured record-breaking gun homicides, with North Philadelphia being one of most prevalent areas for street shootings. So many people were getting shot that Kensington resident Rosalind Pichardo decided to launch her own campaign called Operation Stop the Bleed, passing out 400 kits containing tourniquets and training 200 community members who can respond quickly to the victims of the nightly shootings.
For now, the bleeding continues.
It is disgraceful that any band with one member who is Israeli by birth capitulated to the BDS Twitter mob.
As long as Philadelphia has a public defender on steroids masquerading as a DA, it will remain drug capital and home to a drug cartel