What Happened: July 14, 2021

The Big Story

Overdose deaths killed 93,000 Americans in 2020, an average of 256 people a day, in the largest single-year increase on record, according to new data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While overdoses had been increasing prior to the coronavirus pandemic, 21,000 more people died from them in 2020 than in 2019, a 30% spike in deaths year over year. Roughly two-thirds of those deaths, which disproportionately took the lives of younger Americans, were caused by fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid now commonly laced in other drugs and sold as a cheaper substitute for heroin. BuzzFeed reports that “as little as 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose; one survey conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that 26% of counterfeit pain pills contained that dosage or higher.” But fentanyl and opioids, which together accounted for about three-quarters of overdose deaths, were not the only killers. Year 2020 also set a record for deaths caused by methamphetamines and other stimulants.

Read more here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-14/u-s-had-most-drug-overdose-deaths-on-record-in-2020-cdc-says

Today’s Back Pages: Minneapolis Murders

The Rest

• New emails released in the wake of the Department of Defense canceling its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract highlight the close relationships and overlapping financial interests between government officials and the corporations trying to woo them. The emails, first reported in The New York Times, show Sally Donnelly, a top adviser to former Pentagon chief Jim Mattis, lobbying her boss to take a meeting with Amazon in consideration for the JEDI contract. Among the reasons Donnelly cites for taking the meeting was that “Amazon had hired ‘many’ former U.S. government intelligence experts,” and that “Mr. Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post gave him ‘influence beyond the business world.’” Donnelly had indirect business ties to Amazon through a private consulting firm she ran prior to working for Mattis, which had Amazon as a client and which she sold to a new owner who also had business ties with Amazon. As part of the deal, Donnelly received a $390,000 payment for the firm while she was working for Mattis, which she did not disclose until after leaving her job with the government.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/us/politics/amazon-jedi-contract.html

• It’s getting closer to the day when all sermons are political sermons, suggests a new Pew survey examining what Christian pastors discussed from the pulpit. Between Aug. 31 and Nov. 8, 2020, two-thirds of churches whose sermons and homilies were viewable online mentioned the election at least once in the messages posted to their congregants. The highest degree of politicization was found in evangelical Protestant congregations, 71% of whom heard at least one sermon mentioning the election, compared to 41% of Catholic churches.
Read it here: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/07/08/pastors-often-discussed-election-pandemic-and-racism-in-fall-of-2020/

• Senate Democrats have reached a deal on a $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that now has to move through reconciliation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the deal on Wednesday, and Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Budget Committee, who had originally pushed for a far larger $6 trillion plan, suggested that “the wealthy and large corporations are going to pay their fair share of taxes” in reference to the bill’s funding. The bill retains the expansive definition of infrastructure, including spending on child care and climate change, that is backed by the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill and strongly opposed by Republicans. A separate $600 billion bill focused on physical investment in roads and communications infrastructure has broader bipartisan support.

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif declared the country “only one step away” from reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with the United States in a report submitted to Iran’s parliament this week. Zarif claims that “Biden is prepared to remove not only the sanctions reimposed by former President Donald Trump when he withdrew from the deal, but also most of the sanctions Trump later imposed under his ‘maximum pressure’ strategy,” according to a report in Axios.

• Elie Kligman, an 18-year-old switch-hitting infielder from Las Vegas, is now the second Orthodox Jew ever drafted to play Major League Baseball after the Washington Nationals picked him in the final round on Tuesday. Just days earlier, Long Island native Jacob Steinmetz was picked by the Arizona Diamondbacks. Whereas Kligman does not play ball on the Sabbath, Steinmetz has reached an accommodation with his Creator that allows him to play then as long as he can walk to the games.

• “Maybe it’s not actually that complicated”—a radical outlook in 2021.

You refuse to hold any but the most serious criminals, half of them reoffend on release. Nothing could be less complicated https://t.co/uhi3SUezYX

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 13, 2021

• Four men residing in the United States and alleged to be Iranian intelligence operatives were charged by U.S. prosecutors with plotting to kidnap a New York-based Iranian-born journalist. The still-unnamed journalist and human-rights activist was targeted “for mobilizing public opinion in Iran and around the world to bring about changes to the regime’s laws and practices,” according to a Justice Department indictment that was unsealed on Tuesday.

• Google has been ordered to pay $593 million after being fined by French regulators for failing to comply with a court order requiring the company to “negotiate in good faith” with publishers to work out a system of compensation for content of theirs that Google hosts and uses to drive its ad revenue business. The fine is the second-largest antitrust fee levied against a company by the French government and adds to the more than $1 billion that Google has been fined by European countries over the past year.

• The Tennessee Department of Health is halting vaccine outreach to adolescents for all diseases under “pressure from Republican state lawmakers,” according to an article in The Tennessean that cites “an internal report and agency emails.” The decision comes after Tennessee’s former top vaccine official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, was fired Monday after she wrote a letter as part of an outreach campaign to inform adolescents aged 14 to 17 that they can get COVID-19 vaccines without parental permission. Fiscus went public with her firing, writing in The Tennessean, “I have been terminated for doing my job because some of our politicians have bought into the anti-vaccine misinformation campaign rather than taking the time to speak with the medical experts.”
Read it here: 
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/

The Back Pages

Michael Tracey distinguished himself last year as one of only a handful of reporters across the country to do sustained, ground-level reporting on the aftermath of the massive George Floyd demonstrations. As those protests spread across the United States and then the world, they also turned into riots in a number of cities that did millions of dollars in damage to local businesses and led to the deaths of 25 people. In a phenomenon that is harder to measure, the rhetoric of the protests, much of it picked up and echoed by the press and elite institutions, led police in a number of cities to back off from doing their jobs, which contributed to the ongoing spike in crime.

At the end of April this year Tracey returned to Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed last summer and the protests began. I’m highlighting that piece now because of how directly its observations speak to the ongoing debates over crime and policing. Tracey found that the city had “recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020—after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed ‘Murderapolis’ in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: Between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.”

He found a similar story in Minneapolis’ twin city:

The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day, and there was hardly any sign something was amiss—the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree, as I can personally attest. See below.)

For the people who live in these areas, the answer often isn’t less but more and better policing, as Tracey hears from a local named Kevin:

Kevin C. is 22 years old and lives with his younger sister in their great-grandmother’s house off Lake Street in South Minneapolis—the epicenter of last summer’s riots and protests. He was a protester himself and even had to jump out of the way during an infamous incident when a tanker truck nearly barreled into the crowd he was in on the interstate.

Now, almost a year later, he told me his current preference is for police to be more aggressive in curbing indiscriminate violence in his neighborhood. A few weeks ago, he said, there was a shooting in the alley behind his house—bullets were flying just yards from him and his sister. “The police came, but they didn’t really, like, investigate,” he recalled. “They just shined their lights and then drove off.”

He said he’d noticed a steep decline in police presence lately, especially after last week’s trial of Derek Chauvin ended with a guilty verdict. “Even before the trial,” he said, “they would drive through here, but there wouldn’t be any, like, policing going on.”

Stories such as this have received little sustained attention from the national press outlets because they defy narratives about policing and justice popular among professional class activists and members of the media. Those narratives were never shared in the United States’ poor and working-class neighborhoods, where polls have consistently shown that a majority of people, including those who support Black Lives Matter and police-reform initiatives, also want to keep the police around. Because who wants to live at the mercy of criminals?

Read the full report here: https://mtracey.substack.com/p/one-year-after-george-floyd-minneapolis