Новости за 09.04.2020

It’s become increasingly common to hear people say that America has been shut down by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This isn’t really true: Large sectors of the American workforce have been asked to function as close to normally as possible, and the rest of the country has been leaning on these workers more heavily than ever. “Workers who are still working in the midst of this crisis are cab drivers, they’re restaurant workers, they’re airport workers, flight attendants,” Meghan Cohorst, spokesperson... Читать дальше...

I currently live in Salt Lake City, but I’m originally from the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation and still have cultural connections and citizen connections there—I’m still voting there. There are coronavirus outbreaks there now, in my small community of Naschitti, but I wasn’t there when I caught it. It’s likely that I was exposed when I was traveling in early March on a business trip from Salt Lake to Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Bernie Sanders was always demanding too much, the argument went. “What he’s proposing is very much pie in the sky,” Joe Biden, now the unopposed Democratic nominee, said at the start of March. “If you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how we just can’t trust each other,” Sanders’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, told Ellen DeGeneres this February. The refrain of How will you pay for it?—when discussing health care, free tuition, green... Читать дальше...

It could have been an opportunity to set aside differences and work together. Instead, the coronavirus outbreak has further strained relations between the United States and China. In the past few months, the world has been treated to senseless squabbling over xenophobic virus-origin theories, what to call the virus, and which leader’s initially dismissive response to the outbreak was more reckless.

Much of the emotional power of a march or demonstration comes from being there. Successful labor organizing likewise depends in part on the intimacy that arises when people work near one another. Can you trust that your colleagues will risk their jobs for a strike when, as with many gig workers, you’ve never met? Is it possible to organize when social distancing measures prevent you from gathering in person? On Episode 5 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk with Micah Sifry... Читать дальше...

On the day of the Iowa caucuses in February, the now disgraced and retired MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews made a remark about Bernie Sanders’s chances of winning the general election that unintentionally captured the significance of both his campaign and his rise in American politics. “I’ve dealt with these guys most of my adult life,” Matthews said. “They’re usually the guys at the card table at an antiwar rally. There’d be some old guy with some old literature from this socialist party or that.”