What Happened Today: April 12, 2022

Mass shooting in New York; Inflation soars; True tales of America’s fentanyl crisis

---

The Big Story

Inflation in the United States, which is the issue likely voters identified as their top concern in a series of national polls last month, is rising at its fastest pace since 1981, according to new government data that shows inflation hitting 1.2% in March, meaning consumers were paying an average of 8.5% more last month than they were in the same period a year earlier. Driven largely by a surge in energy and food prices, inflation has outpaced wage growth for American workers, which explains why almost a third of respondents surveyed in a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll from March 23 to 24 picked inflation as the most important issue facing the country, with 76% saying it affected them “somewhat or a lot.” In a recent CBS poll, 66% of respondents said that inflation had been “difficult or a hardship” for them. The White House has rapidly cycled through a number of strategies in its attempts to mitigate the political consequences of runaway price increases. Last May, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the Biden administration believed inflation would be “temporary, transitory.” In September, Psaki tried to spin new inflation figures by pointing to the fact that prices were rising at a slower rate than they had in previous months. In January of this year, with the price hikes obviously not going away, President Biden responded to critics who claimed that his $2 trillion Build Back Better bill was contributing to inflation by placing the blame on corporate greed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February triggered the latest messaging change, the one still in effect: The White House insists Moscow is responsible for continued inflation, and Biden refers to “Putin’s price hikes.”

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-inflation-consumer-price-index-march-2022-11649725215

In The Back Pages: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

---

The Rest

→ A gunman wearing a gas mask opened fire on a Brooklyn subway platform Tuesday morning, shooting 10 people and injuring at least 29 more in an attack that could have been even worse, police sources said Tuesday afternoon, if the shooter’s gun had not jammed. Police have not yet identified a suspect or motive in the mass shooting, nor ruled out the possibility that this was a terrorist attack. The gunman, who witnesses say was wearing a colored safety vest, the kind used by construction workers, and a gas mask over his face initiated the attack by deploying a smoke bomb inside a train car as it was pulling into the 36th Street station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn at about 8:24 a.m. New York’s Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell identified the suspect—who was still on the run, having evaded law enforcement for more than eight hours, by the time The Scroll was published Tuesday afternoon—as a roughly 5-foot-5 black man with a heavy build, weighing about 170 pounds. Surveillance cameras in the station that were in positions to capture the shooting were not working. Initial reports that there were explosive devices discovered on the platform were later revealed to be false.

Read more: https://nypost.com/2022/04/12/nypd-investigating-possible-explosion-in-brooklyn-subway-station/

→ Less than two months after lifting its mask mandate, Philadelphia is reinstating the requirement for residents to wear masks in restaurants, schools, stores, and other indoor public spaces. The measure is being taken in response to an increase in new COVID-19 cases in the city, which have not yet led to an increase in hospitalizations, and appears to entirely ignore new evidence casting doubt on the effectiveness of masking as a method of preventing infection. “To the extent that COVID-19 remains a problem in cities like Philadelphia, it is due to relatively low booster uptake among the elderly,” notes Park MacDougald in UnHerd—a problem unlikely to be solved with a new mask mandate.

Read it here: https://unherd.com/thepost/philadelphia-moves-towards-a-perma-covid-regime/

→ The mayor of Mariupol, a key port city in the southeast of Ukraine that has come under sustained assault from Russian forces, said on television Tuesday that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed in the city since the start of the war, and possibly more than double that figure. Speaking with the Associated Press on Monday, Mayor Vadym Boichenko accused Russian forces of using mobile cremation units in Mariupol to burn corpses that had piled up in the streets of the city while blocking humanitarian organizations from entering. Boichenko also acknowledged the difficulty of getting an accurate casualty count while fighting persists.

→ Germany’s new president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, confirmed Tuesday that his planned visit to Kyiv was blocked by Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Despite some changes in policy since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Berlin remains Moscow’s most important strategic ally in the European Union. The relationship is rooted in the German reliance on Russian energy, a dependency that Steinmeier helped foster when he served as foreign minister under Germany’s previous leader, Angela Merkel. While Steinmeier said he wanted to visit Kyiv as a show of support, Germany’s energy trade with Russia continues and is likely to remain a bedrock of relations between Germany and Ukraine in the near future as the German government doubles down on its ban on nuclear power.

→ Another inch closer to the bottom of the barrel in the decline of the legacy media.

CNBC Now @CNBCnow

Fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence, sources tell CNBC, casting doubt on the future of the app following the combination of Discovery & WarnerMedia.

cnbc.comCNN+ struggles to lure viewers in its early days, drawing fewer than 10,000 daily usersThe paltry audience casts doubt on the future of CNN+ following the recently completed combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia

→ China is rapidly expanding its nuclear capabilities, working to double its arsenal of deliverable nuclear warheads from 350 to 700 in the next five years. This would still leave China far short of the United States’ stockpile of 5,500 nuclear warheads or Russia’s 6,257, but it sends a muscular message as the Chinese government seeks to solidify its dominance in Asia. Analysts believe that the rapid buildup is specifically intended to caution the United States against meddling in China’s affairs—especially if President Xi Jinping decides to invade Taiwan, a self-ruled Chinese island that frequently floats the idea of seeking independence. “Taiwan independence separatism is the biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland,” President Xi said in October, “and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation.”

→ Does wealth inequality drive status competition? A recent paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that higher levels of economic and social inequality contribute to a greater desire, for members of all classes, to achieve more wealth and status. The authors, Zhechen Wang from Fudan University and Jolanda Jettens and Niklas K. Steffens from the University of Queensland, begin by arguing that wealth inequality—what they define as the unequal distribution of economic resources—is at the root of a range of societal ills, from reduced life expectancy to a lowered sense of life satisfaction and a general lack of social cohesion. The authors then argue that individuals living in unequal societies are more likely to interpret the world in terms of wealth and to be anxious about their own status. One study surveyed 321 Amazon factory workers, who were asked to imagine themselves as members of a highly unequal society, Bimboola. Some workers got to be rich, with mansions and nice cars; others lived in “run-down” housing, relied on “rusty bicycle[s]” for transport, and received no vacation time. The poor workers, the study found, were not happy with their assigned roles.

→ The sun might be setting on the Imperial CEO. Last week, JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest bank in the United States, signaled that Jamie Dimon, who has been CEO of the company since 2005, would likely stay on as a “non-executive chair” of the board when he retires as chief executive. Dimon has been serving as both the company’s CEO and board chairman since 2006; chief executives who chair their own boards are called “Imperial CEOs” because they control not only their company but also the board that might otherwise serve as a counterbalance to their power. The Imperial CEO has been a mainstay of American business; while 2% of British companies are headed by Imperial CEOs, as are 2.7% of Austrian or Swiss firms, 43% of American businesses, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, are ruled by would-be Napoleons, though the trend is toward separation, with investors and board members looking to untangle potential conflicts of interest. Also, CEOs have gotten too busy to chair their boards. “Expanding obligations for CEOs, from the demands of day-to-day management to making decisions on whether to take a stand on social issues, makes it harder for top executives to find time to chair the board as well,” notes the Financial Times. The titans of finance, it seems, are buckling under the pressure to weigh in on social issues.

Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/a4703c18-8ed2-457c-8120-d995e46fac7d

---

---

Scroll critic John Pistelli reviews Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth 

From 2010 to 2019, almost 500,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, with a staggering 92,000 more dying in 2020 alone, many of them killed by synthetic drugs like fentanyl and meth. In The Least of Us, journalist Sam Quinones—also the author of Dreamland (2015), a book about the opioid epidemic—puts names, faces and, above all, an economic and social context to this unprecedented death toll.

Quinones narrates 30 years of global history in which fentanyl and meth have been the drugs of choice for desperate Americans left behind in the global economy. Fentanyl and meth are synthetic—lab-produced rather than plant-based. They can therefore be mass-manufactured, often by individual entrepreneurs rather than gangs or cartels, and globally sold in quantities far larger and at prices far lower than non-synthetic drugs like marijuana or heroin. In a downward spiral, many addicts who initially get hooked on expensive prescription opioids like OxyContin run out of money and move to heroin, and from there to the even cheaper and deadlier alternative, fentanyl. Even a small amount of fentanyl, which is now used to cut many other drugs, can trigger a fatal overdose. The synthetic meth that began to spread in the United States in the late 2000s, supplanting earlier and milder varieties, causes a schizophrenia-like mental illness and has filled small-town and big-city streets over the past decade with its raving and hallucinating victims.

Aiming to engage readers with fast-paced suspense, Quinones adopts a kaleidoscopic narrative structure that mimics the frantic cross-cutting of a crime thriller. Based largely on interviews and on-the-ground reporting, The Least of Us moves rapidly from anodyne Ivy League chemistry departments to meth labs in the Mexican desert, from L.A. tent cities where meth addicts trade drugs and sex, to the boardrooms where pharmaceutical shareholders and executives plot to market addictive painkillers to the nation’s doctors.

Spanning the globe, Quinones explains how Mexican traffickers turned away from plant-based drugs to synthetics and began flooding the market in the past decade, as well as how Chinese dealers, hoping to benefit from their country’s rising economy, sold fentanyl over the dark web to American pushers. When the father of a young American who died of a fentanyl overdose discovered the drug’s Chinese origin, he described the situation as “a chemical attack on the United States.” With an eye for grim ironies, Quinones notes that the father traveled to China in the 1980s after Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms to sell plastics the Chinese couldn’t then produce for themselves. The Chinese-sourced fentanyl that killed his son completed a circle that began with the increasingly globalized economy of the late 20th century.

Despite the book’s global ambit, though, at the heart of The Least of Us is the subtitle’s promised “tales of hope” in Rust Belt small towns. Under assault from maddening and sometimes lethal synthetic drugs, their citizens managed to restore some semblance of order and promise of a future. In Clarksburg, West Virginia, a doctor disgraced during the opioid crisis redeemed himself by convincing the town’s churches to help its meth addicts, first by housing them during a cold snap and then by creating recovery programs. Quinones also shows how the law-and-order Republicans of Ohio and Kentucky were forced by the addiction epidemic to reform institutions like county jails and drug courts. They reoriented them away from the punishment or warehousing of criminals and toward reintegrating recovered drug abusers into society. Instead of arguing for a Progressive “decarceral” approach to moving drug offenders out of prisons, or a libertarian ideal of drug legalization, Quinones advocates repurposing the criminal justice system to help addicts by using arrests to remove them from daily situations in which they’re likely to keep abusing potentially fatal substances, and then by organizing treatment support groups within jails to begin their rehabilitation.

In his account of Muncie, Indiana, Quinones reveals the book’s overall thesis. He laments the decline not so much of the car industry that once sustained the city as of the culture that grew around it, particularly in the small tool-and-die shops that supplied the automobile factories. These small businesses, often family owned, become The Least of Us’s central symbol for what was lost in the United States with globalization, what Quinones calls “the tool-and-die philosophy of life” marked by “[w]ork leavened with an occasional small improvement” leading to a sense of personal fulfillment and communal participation. To this optimistic philosophy of hardworking incrementalism, Quinones counterposes the quick fixes and painless solutions promised by drug traffickers and the global corporations they imitate. These corporations not only destroyed the United States’ industries, he argues, but also strive every day to addict us to material and spiritual “drugs,” from processed foods and video games to online pornography, social media outrage, and political tribalism. 

Ironically, one of the book’s drawbacks is its fast-paced thriller structure, which re-creates some of the same hungering for a quick fix that Quinones elsewhere deplores. Designed to be marketable to busy readers craving an addictive page-turner, the book has an occasionally confusing fragmentary structure that replicates the experience of having one’s attention scattered on a web browser over too many open tabs. With this perhaps unwitting formal concession to the social and economic climate he decries, Quinones testifies all the more persuasively to the ubiquity of its damage.

Quinones avoids assigning blame to national leaders for this cultural and economic degradation, an evasion that blunts the book’s force. Instead, he rehearses at length the now-familiar story of the Sackler family, though he admits they’ve become something of a scapegoat for larger problems. As shareholders in Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the Sacklers have been blamed for inciting the opioid epidemic in the 1990s by pushing the addictive OxyContin as a miracle pain-cure on doctors, who in turn prescribed it needlessly and in excessive quantities to patients in the most desolate parts of the country. But when Quinones satirically describes some admittedly dire-sounding performance art by one of the Sackler brothers’ wives toward the end of the book, readers might feel the two pages devoted to this rather demagogic cheap shot would have been better spent on the bipartisan political consensus that hollowed out the United States’ industrial belt in the first place.

In lieu of politics, Quinones commends religion. He borrows his book’s title from the Gospel of Matthew—“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me”—and suggests that nothing less than a spiritual revival may be needed to heal our nation of pathologically atomized addicts. Though he is not a Christian, he asserts that “much of what neuroscience has learned about our brain confirms religion’s truths: humans need love, purpose, compassion, patience, forgiveness, and engagement with others.”