What Happened Today: April 6, 2022
The Fed fights inflation; abortion laws tightening; Darwin’s notebooks
The Big Story
With inflation still bubbling up to its 40-year high and consumer prices continuing to climb, the Federal Reserve said yesterday it’s stepping in to try to lessen the squeeze by raising interest rates and rapidly selling assets off its $9 trillion balance sheet, almost half of which it acquired to settle the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just six months ago, the Fed board member and soon-to-be vice-chair, Lael Brainard, resisted calls for the Fed to dial back stimulus policies and predicted that the U.S. economy would make a complete recovery from the pandemic. But runaway inflation and supply chain woes—inflamed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s recent COVID-19 outbreak—has Brainard reversing course. At a central bank meeting yesterday, Brainard warned of extreme risk for lower-income households, who are now spending nearly 80% of their income on basic expenses compared to those with higher incomes who pay 31% of their income.
With more detail to come today on how the central bank’s policy will play out and reshape the economy, the Fed has already forecasted it will increase interest rates at least six times this year to try to temper inflation—the first increase since 2018. Citing the former Fed chief Paul Volcker and his aggressive use of interest rates in the late 1970s, Brainard said wages for the majority of workers today have been outstripped by spikes in consumer prices. The Volcker specter looms large over the current moment as his tactics satisfied Wall Street and reined in inflation but prompted a dire recession that devastated the middle and lower classes in the early 1980s. Economists at Deutsche Bank and RBC Capital Markets are already warning that the Fed’s new policy will cause a recession by as early as next year, which could pull the rug out from under Democrats fearful that a hotly contested midterm this fall could be a preview of an even tougher 2024 election cycle. In a recent NPR/Ipso poll, 40% of Americans said inflation and rising prices were their biggest worry.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/feds-brainard-says-reducing-elevated-inflation-is-of-paramount-importance-11649167528
In The Back Pages: The Marvel Universe: Not So Toady
The Rest
→ In a preview of what’s to come if Roe v. Wade is effectively overturned by the Supreme Court’s forthcoming ruling on a Missouri abortion law, yesterday Oklahoma legislators voted 70 to 14 in support of a bill that bans abortion in almost every instance, including cases of rape or incest. With the signature imminent from Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously promised to endorse all pro-life legislation put to him by lawmakers, any abortion outside emergency procedures used to save the life of a pregnant woman will be a felony in Oklahoma, and offenders could be fined $100,000 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The bill will join a spate of Republican states passing new abortion restrictions that run afoul of the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade but which could stay in place should the Supreme Court uphold the Missouri abortion law now before the court. After Texas passed its restrictive abortion law last year, Texas women soon made up nearly half of those who sought the procedure in Oklahoma, an abortion advocacy coalition said this week.
→ Just as the union effort was gaining momentum at Amazon fulfillment centers last fall, top executives had begun developing a workplace communication app designed to improve employee productivity and happiness but included a chat function that would ban the use of several words, including pay raise, union, ethics, compensation, living wage, restrooms, and petition. The app has not yet been implemented at Amazon, according to an Amazon spokesperson responding to The Intercept, which had obtained the banned words and details of the executives’ plan to launch the software this month. For those feeling left out of the Amazon software experience, you can try out the company’s expanding Amazon Explore program, which pairs users at home with real live humans wearing cameras and a microphone on-site at landmarks worldwide. Plugged in from your kitchen, you can pay a “host” anywhere from Prague to the fjords of Norway to virtually smell the flowers on your behalf.
→ It’s gotten so bad at Manchester Airport, one of the largest airports in the United Kingdom, that the newly hired boss, Karen Smart, simply quit, effective immediately—which relieves her of dealing with the mess there, now several weeks in duration, that has been described as chaotic, dangerous, and unprecedented, and has the city’s mayor calling for the police on standby should the scene devolve into violence. Due to a labor shortage, poor management, and employees either sick due to the rise in COVID-19 cases or walking off the job because of workplace frustration, the airport has struggled to function: Security lines have stretched so long they’re out of the terminal and into the parking lot, baggage returns are so delayed that passengers have abandoned the luggage that’s heaped onto piles around the airport, and flights are being canceled by the hundreds. The upheaval comes at a tough time for the airport, which is trying to serve an uptick of travelers returning from holiday breaks and those about to go away for Easter week. Despite reports of passengers getting sick on the floor and inadequate janitorial staff to attend promptly to the matter, the chief executive of the airport parent company, Charlie Cornish, was appreciative of Smart’s leadership. “While there are sure to be further challenges ahead, I am confident we will soon start to see the benefits of the recovery plans Karen has helped put in place.”
→ With employers relaxing their rules to try to retain and hire enough workers, and more states legalizing the recreational use of cannabis, workplaces are increasingly doing away with employee drug tests. Despite fewer tests, however, Quest Diagnostics, a leading drug-test laboratory, found that positive drug results are at a two-decade high, up 50% last year compared to the number of positives in 2017. The jump in detected drug use across the 6 million workers Quest tested last year was driven largely by marijuana use, Barry Sample, a Quest scientist, told The Wall Street Journal, which has been a buzzkill for employers using lab tests to screen new hires. “We certainly heard from some of our employer customers that they were having difficulty finding qualified workers to pass the drug test,” Sample said, a problem that one owner of a Detroit staffing agency solved by telling employers to reexamine their requirement for worker sobriety. “We had to encourage some of them to reassess their policy, and they did, and we were able to fill many of those jobs as a result,” the owner said.
→It’s another kind of buzz keeping passengers sharp as they prepare to board their flights at Heathrow, Gatwick, and Luton airport terminals (aka the UK airports that haven’t devolved into chaos). According to the Bloomberg Pret Index, which measures sales at Pret coffee shops as an health indicator of airline industry commerce, the purchase of espresso has now surpassed pre-pandemic levels for the first time since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/pret-index
→ Perhaps a more rigorous indicator of the state of the pandemic, at least for Americans: Since early this year, hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 cases have gone down every day, and that’s even accommodating the recent spike in cases thanks to the emerging Omicron subvariant. See the chart below for a visual of what that looks like compared to previous hospitalization rates earlier in the pandemic:
→ Exemplifying the lure of living in the moment, or at least to succumbing to changes in popular sentiment, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser said yesterday that she personally “never supported defunding the police,” just as she rolled out a new $19.5 billion budget that will help bulk up the city’s police force to 4,000 officers over the next decade. The big push to expand the D.C. police force comes after the city suffered 227 homicides last year, the fourth consecutive year with a rising murder rate. Bowser catapulted herself into the national spotlight two summers prior when she took credit for the creation of a two-block-long mural painting of Black Lives Matter near the White House just as widespread street protests called for defunding police departments.
→ Librarians sighed a deep relief when two notebooks used by Charles Darwin to hash out his ideas on evolution were recently returned in excellent condition to the Cambridge Library University. The mystery about what happened to the notebooks deepens, however, because they’d gone missing around 2000, only to be returned last month in a bright pink gift bag inside the library with a note that read, “Librarian / Happy Easter / X.” Included in the 200-year-old pages are Darwin’s “Tree of Life” sketch, an attempt to map the relationship between species. For now, librarians have locked up the books in a vault, ahead of a new exhibit displaying the notebooks this summer.
The Marvel Universe: Not So Toady
You wouldn’t expect the film and TV website IMDB to be an arena for sweeping geopolitical conflicts. And you wouldn’t expect a Marvel superhero to have the sort of courage and moral clarity that most of the world’s nations lack in speaking against the mass murder of civilians. Yet last week, courtesy of the wildly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, we were treated to a lesson in truth and beauty, courtesy of one Moon Knight.
The character, to those uninitiated in comic book geekdom, is a complicated man with split personalities who somehow finds himself the conduit of ancient Egyptian gods. Played by Oscar Isaac in a hotly anticipated new TV show, he kicked things off by facing his nemesis, a villainous cult leader played with scene-stealing élan by Ethan Hawke. This being Marvel, thundering speeches ensued, including one ticking off a litany of mankind’s greatest evils, from the Holocaust to Pol Pot’s murderous regime in Cambodia. And there, amid history’s travesties, it was: a clear and lucid mention of the Armenian genocide, which between 1915 and 1917 saw the murder of nearly a million and a half people by the Turks.
The casual mention of a century-old tragedy on a Disney TV show may not strike you as breaking news, but when it comes to admitting that the well-documented genocide actually, you know, happened, the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations are far more likely to twist themselves into amoral pretzels, like this bit of sophistry, courtesy of the British government: “We recognize and deeply regret the terrible suffering inflicted on the Armenian people in 1915,” goes one of Her Majesty’s official publications. “We believe it is vitally important to honor the memory of the victims; and we must make sure we draw the necessary lessons from history. But while we must never forget the past, we believe that our priority today should be to … find a way for Armenia and Turkey, as the countries which have inherited this tragic joint history, to address that history together.”
The masked Moon Knight, thankfully, was considerably less toady. In the Marvel world, unlike our own, good is still good and evil is still evil, and no one has difficulty understanding the difference or asking for the superheroes and supervillains to reconcile in order to overcome their tragic joint history.
Not that Marvel’s world is much of a safe refuge from our own more cynical one, mind you: No sooner was the Armenian genocide acknowledged on air than anti-Armenian activists took to the internet, going on IMDB and giving the show a poor rating—an act known as review bombing—for no other reason than daring to speak truth to a powerful audience.
What to make of the Moon Knight incident? You could dismiss the whole thing as yet another overblown pop culture controversy, like the Will Smith slap or Kim and Kanye’s bitter divorce, a fit of sound and fury that signifies nothing. But watch the episode with the real world in mind, and its significance becomes clear: As the show debuted this weekend, Russian forces fleeing the Ukrainian town of Bucha left in their wake evidence of atrocities that seem all too familiar to those of us steeped in the remembrance of genocides past.
As we shuddered watching pictures of men, women, and children left dead by the side of the road, many seemingly murdered by gunshots, we were dismayed to hear some cynics take to social media and argue that the violence we were seeing with our own eyes somehow wasn’t real. In 2022 as in 1915, in Ukraine as in Armenia, it’s easier to deny the atrocities than commit to the slow and painstaking work of demanding justice and accountability.
For a generation many Saturdays removed from our grandparents’ synagogue, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the closest thing we’ve got to a serious contemplation of morality. How good of Moon Knight, then, to swing by and remind us that denying history only increases the chances that it may simply and grimly repeat itself.
Hitler seemed to understand this concept when he explained his plans for obliterating the Jews by arguing that when a similar extermination was visited on the Armenians, absolutely no one seemed to care. Those words should still haunt us. We’ve, alas, no shortage of carnage these days, from Ukraine to Syria to the systemic slaughter of Nigeria’s Christians; the path to peace begins with refusing to deny that evil exists. That’s a prerequisite to taking any action anywhere. You hardly need to be a superhero to understand a lesson so basic and profound.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One.
"Hitler seemed to understand this concept when he explained his plans for obliterating the Jews by arguing that when a similar extermination was visited on the Armenians, absolutely no one seemed to care. Those words should still haunt us." Thank goodness the Armernian genocide is being acknowledged. Thank you, Moon Knight and Tablet.