Новости за 12.05.2020

Al Capone is a famous American boogeyman, and a symbol of that mercifully brief and long-ago nightmare, Prohibition. Boogeymen make good movie villains, and Capone has proved a useful anti-hero to American cinema in the years since booze came back. In 1932, only a year after the FBI finally nabbed the Chicago boss on tax evasion charges, Paul Muni played a Capone-like gangster in the pitch-black pre-code masterpiece Scarface (not to be confused with the 1983 “Say hello to my little friend” Scarface). Читать дальше...

In 2003, writing a concurrent opinion in United States v. Lara, a case that determined an individual can be charged with the same crime in tribal and federal court, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas described the contradictory nature of federal case law as it relates to Indigenous policy: “In my view, the tribes either are or are not separate sovereigns. And our federal Indian law cases untenably hold both positions simultaneously.” This week, nearly 20 years removed from Thomas’s assessment... Читать дальше...

The coronavirus pandemic has killed 80,000 Americans. More than a million have been infected. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economic shutdowns enacted to slow the virus’s spread have yielded a 14.7 percent unemployment rate. This is the highest since the Great Depression and an underestimation at that, given that millions of workers were likely misclassified in the bureau’s most recent survey, and the likelihood that millions more have been added to the unemployment rolls in the short time since it was taken. Читать дальше...

Last month, President Donald Trump, who has spent an uneasy year botching the U.S. response to the coronavirus, took another page out of his favorite playbook. In a late-night tweet, the leader of the free world announced he would be signing an executive order to temporarily suspend all immigration into the country. As with many of Trump’s impulsive social media utterances, it was not immediately clear that he was serious about the order, and next-day reports told the story of various government entities scrambling to determine what... Читать дальше...

The Labor Department’s jobs report last Friday was about as bleak as predicted: The official unemployment rate is now 14.7 percent—the highest in the nation’s history since the Great Depression—with the actual rate almost certainly higher. Since March, over 30 million people have lost jobs, with many now struggling to make ends meet.

Jobs and towns built on fossil fuel extraction appear to be headed for disaster. The Trump administration seems inclined to respond by throwing aid at the oil and gas CEOs who helped to engineer the indebted industry’s current predicament. The Resources for Workforce Investments, not Drilling, or ReWIND, Act introduced last week would prevent an outright bailout for corporate polluters. Less attention has been paid to how to protect the communities who stand to lose the most from plummeting oil prices... Читать дальше...