What Happened: July 1, 2021

The Big Story

The number of young adults dying in the United States has increased by a dramatic 25.2% over the past nine years. The deadly trend is captured in a Bloomberg article reviewing newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows deaths spiked among Americans 25-34, in prime working age, while the mortality rate for both older and younger age groups substantially decreased over the same period. The long-term trend of higher mortality rates among young adults in the United States shot up even higher during the coronavirus pandemic as COVID-19 led to a one-year increase of 24.5% for the 25-34 cohort. Before the 2020 spike in mortality due to COVID-19, so-called “deaths of despair” drove the trend, a label that includes drug overdoses driven by the rise in opioids, especially the highly lethal synthetic fentanyl, as well as a rise in homicides and suicides among younger Americans. As context for that despair, the Bloomberg article points out that “Americans under 40 saw their share of U.S. household wealth fall to a record low 4.3% in 2009, and that the current 5.9% is still lower than at any time before 2008.” Faced with dwindling economic opportunities, young Americans are also more alone, with fewer friends (a recent study found that one in seven American men reports having no friends at all, a 400% increase since 1990), less sex and romance in their lives, and fewer communal attachments through family and religion.

Read it here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-18/young-american-adults-are-dying-and-not-just-from-covid

Today’s Back Pages: Everything They Said About Race and Trump Was Wrong Part VII


The Rest

Speaking to a crowd of 70,000 people in Tiananmen Square during an elaborate celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary Thursday, President Xi Jinping threatened to “bash the heads” of foreign powers who interfere with China. Xi also promised to reunify China with Taiwan, the contested island nation whose independence is protected by treaty agreements with the United States.

A key government witness in the U.S. government’s case against Julian Assange now says that he fabricated his allegations against the WikiLeaks founder to avoid prosecution in the United States. The claims were made by Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, a former volunteer for WikiLeaks who was also acting as an informant for the FBI during the same period. Stundin, an Icelandic publication that broke the news of Thordarson’s reversal in an interview with him, reports on having seen source documents and chat logs that back up his claims.
Read it here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/28/assa-j28.html

Congratulations to private equity firms! They’ve broken a 40-year record by closing 6,298 deals worth more than $500 billion in the first half of 2021. Hopefully some of that record-setting lucre will go toward creating jobs and boosting wages for American workers who lost $3.7 trillion in earnings over the coronavirus pandemic.

Former President Donald Trump’s private business, the Trump Organization, along with its chief financial officer, Alan Weisselberg, were indicted by a grand jury Thursday on 15 felony counts of conspiracy, schemes to defraud, and criminal tax fraud. In a statement, Trump called the indictment a “political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats.”

Amazon is attempting to undercut the looming anti-monopoly case against the company by going after new Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan—known for her strong stance on antitrust matters. The tech and commerce giant claims that Khan’s past criticisms of Amazon show bias, and is petitioning for her to recuse herself from all matters involving the company.

Welcome to the world of at-will bot employment. Stephen Normandin, a 63-year-old Army veteran who worked as a contract delivery driver for Amazon for almost four years, tells Bloomberg that he was fired by automated email after “the algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn’t doing his job properly.”
Read it here: https://archive.is/3GtSv#selection-3547.0-3547.463

The U.S. and Japanese militaries have been carrying out secret war games and joint training operations centered on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, according to a report in the Financial Times. The exercises began in the last year of the Trump administration and have continued under the Biden White House.

The death toll from the record-breaking heatwave in the Pacific Northwest appears to be in the hundreds. Officials in Oregon, where temperatures have topped 115 degrees Fahrenheit, say that more than 60 people have died due to the heat. Public health officials in Canada’s British Columbia province report hundreds of additional deaths suspected of being caused by the heat.

Part-time Tel Aviv resident Quentin Tarantino finally responded to months of criticism over his less-than-heroic portrayal of martial arts legend Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, during an appearance on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Tarantino, who has been trying to learn Hebrew after marrying the Israeli singer Daniella Pick, said that he understands why Lee’s daughter is upset but that everyone else can “suck it.”

The Back Pages

Yesterday’s Back Pages looked at Thomas Edsall’s New York Times column examining how the New York City mayoral race showed “the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left.”

To recap: Edsall keyed in on how the racial breakdown of voting in New York City defied the media-conditioned illusion that hyper-progressive policies such as defunding the police appeal to the “communities of color.” In fact, most working-class New Yorkers of all races voted for the more moderate pro-law-and-order Eric Adams, who they felt best represented their interests. The more prorgressive candidates in the race, loudest in their embrace of the new doctrines of racial justice, did better among wealthier voters and upper-middle-class whites.

Now, we have more data, this time from a new Pew survey analyzing the 2020 national electorate, that once again illustrates how far off the dominant narratives about race and political preference are from the actions of voters. It turns out that Trump’s performance with Hispanic voters improved even more than was previously realized and went up by 10 points from 2016.

Maybe it’s no accident that Trump gained support from Hispanic voters, especially when leading Democrats were expending their energy demanding that people adopt academic neologisms such as Latinx as tests of their moral purity—a label rejected by the overwhelming majority of people who it claims to represent. All of which makes it even stranger that Joe Biden has now chosen to adopt Latinx, a term that he can’t even pronounce and that has little support outside  the media-activist-academic nexus.

Over the same period, 2016 to 2020, white men’s support for Trump fell by 13 points. All of which tells you nothing at all about which party will best represent you or which politician deserves your vote. But it does show, once again, that the most strident and emphatically self-righteous voices in the United States’ Great Awokening who claim to speak for political identities they themselves construct, such as “communities of color,” speak only for themselves.

Read it here: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/

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