Новости за 30.03.2020

On Saturday morning, as hundreds of tribes were mobilizing their emergency responses to the coronavirus, a shock wave reverberated through Indian Country: Mashpee Wampanoag Chairman Cedric Cromwell announced that Darryl LaCounte, the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, had called him with the news that Mashpee land would be taken out of trust, effectively terminating the tribe’s legal claims to sovereign land. 

In the United Kingdom, the government has pledged to cover 80 percent of the wages of workers left unemployed as the result of the coronavirus. Ireland has enacted an emergency nationalization of its hospitals to meet public demand during the crisis. On Sunday night in the United States, in the absence of a functioning social safety net or guaranteed health care, people got the “Living Room Concert for America,” hosted by Elton John and broadcast by iHeart Radio and Fox. The event, meant to take... Читать дальше...

As Congress rushed to pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package last week, many in the press could only marvel. Not only was the size of the bill itself unprecedented—dwarfing 2009’s $831 billion stimulus to combat the Great Recession—the level of cooperation was, as well. Prone to endless laments of the lack of comity in Congress, the D.C. press corps applauded the display of unity in Washington. This “kind of bipartisan agreement for any actual legislation, let alone something this massive and complicated... Читать дальше...

For longtime central Michigan farmer Bob Thompson, the coronavirus comes at a particularly bad moment. “It has been a tumultuous period these four or five years in agriculture. It has pushed many smaller farmers to the brink of bankruptcy,” he told me. “I fear that it’s going to be considered the last nail in the coffin … it will be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Last week, the head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard, predicted that in the second quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy could see a 30 percent unemployment rate and a 50 percent drop in gross domestic product. Both of these numbers far surpass their respective equivalencies during the Great Depression, with the slash in GDP dwarfing the downturn of the 2008 crash by factors of 10. “This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter,” Bullard said during the press call, voice quiet and flat. Читать дальше...

A week before last Thanksgiving, a group of Republican attorneys gathered at the tony Madison Club a few blocks from the Wisconsin State Capitol to learn what they could do to help reelect President Trump. Established in 1909, the club has hosted Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, as well as the Dalai Lama.