Lately, Brenda Arjona has been leaning hard on the campus food pantry. The 33-year-old single mother and third-year anthropology graduate student says she makes around $2,200 a month after taxes as a part-time teaching assistant at the University of California Santa Cruz. She also pays around $1,700 a month for the two-bedroom she shares with her 10-year-old son in student housing. After that, there’s little money to spare.
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Last week, Via Rail, one of Canada’s major train operators, canceled most rides across Canada after Canadian National Rail, the company that owns most of the tracks Via’s trains run on, shut down its eastern network. The rail lines had become a target of protests against the TC Energy-backed Coastal GasLink Pipeline, a 416-mile natural gas project that cuts through the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
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One of my earliest memories of economic babble was President Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, boasting that there were more Americans working than ever before. I hadn’t yet taken up the study of economics (I obtained a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1971), but I knew enough to be suspicious. After all, in a continuously growing economy, there will always be more Americans working than ever before, almost every year. The same can be said for the “stock market records” repeatedly touted by President Donald Trump. Читать дальше...
If you wanted to boil down conservatism to a single anodyne formula, it might be “reverence for the past.” But reverence, as opposed to respect or understanding, often requires a selective memory: Inspect an image too closely, and flaws that seemed accidental might appear pervasive, even essential. While we usually think of writers and intellectuals as transmitting knowledge, the role of conservative intellectuals is just as often to enable those selective forgettings that make the persistence of their movement possible. Читать дальше...
