Новости за 28.06.2017

Trumpcare would kill people, and Democrats aren’t shy about saying it. After Senate Republicans released their health care bill last week, top Democratic leaders warned about its deadly consequences, employing rhetoric that might seem hyperbolic were it not supported by strong evidence.

The Republican push to repeal and replace Obamacare is currently stalled in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has delayed a vote until after the July 4 recess because his bill doesn’t have the necessary GOP support. But this embarrassing disarray masks an even bigger problem for the party: The attempted replacement gives lie to President Donald Trump’s supposed populist credentials. Between the House and Senate health care bills, the broad outlines of Trumpcare are clear. It would be a massive tax cut for the wealthy... Читать дальше...

Republicans in the Senate have spent very little time crafting their health care bill, attempting to ram it through with scant input from experts or advocates. That frenzy to get something done without stopping to think about the consequences has landed the bill in trouble: On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delayed a vote on the legislation after the Congressional Budget Office reported that it would leave 22 million Americans uninsured over the next 10 years. But the bill’s flaws go deeper than that headline number... Читать дальше...

There is no single story conservatives can tell to brush aside the fact that the House and Senate GOP health plans will throw tens of millions of people off of their health plans.

Writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci jotted down the fragments that would become his theory of intellectuals. New classes, like the European bourgeoisie after the Industrial Revolution, he proposed, brought with them their own set of thinkers, which he called “organic intellectuals”—theorists, technicians, and administrators, who became their “functionaries” in a new society. Unlike “traditional intellectuals” who held positions in the old class structure... Читать дальше...

Someone recently told me a Dutch saying that goes, Alleen is maar alleen. “Alone is just alone.” The wording is as dull as its meaning: nothing romantic about being alone, it says with resigned repetition. The same careless shrug as in, “That’s that.”

The hero of Kingdom Cons, a newly translated novel by the Mexican author Yuri Herrera, is a singer named Lobo. A street kid left by his parents with just his wit and his accordion, he earns change singing “corridos,” folk ballads, in cantinas in the seedier quarters of an unnamed desert city. For Lobo, “life had been a counting off of days and dust and sun,” until one day he sings a corrido for a big shot dealer known as the King; the song wins Lobo the King’s favor and he moves into his gaudy palace... Читать дальше...