Новости за 20.11.2020

Right now, cities and states across the country are being forced into crippling budget cuts. As tax revenues fall in the pandemic-induced recession, officials are shrinking public payrolls and slashing services. Even the traditionally Republican American Enterprise Institute has come to warn about the risks to the economy from these cuts, projecting a $105 billion shortfall in state revenues in the current fiscal year—and a gap more than twice as large in the coming year.

About two years ago, before the Sunrise Movement became a household name, the activist group staged a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. They were joined by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in one of her first days on the Hill, who proposed her colleagues in Congress develop a plan for an economy-wide mobilization to take on the climate crisis: the Green New Deal. Since that time, that framework—for massive public investment and rapid decarbonization—has been the standard against which climate policy is judged. Читать дальше...

Remember hazard pay? That fleeting practice of employers raising essential workers’ wages during the pandemic—also known as a bare-minimum gesture of decency—first surfaced around the same time that New Yorkers were applauding nightly from their windows for frontline personnel and Congress had deigned to pass the first (and so far only) stimulus package. It’s long gone, though. Nine months and 250,000 deaths later, nearly every state in the country is undergoing what experts have called “uncontrolled spread” of the coronavirus... Читать дальше...

Earlier this year, Kelly Loeffler—by many accounts the richest person in Congress—decided she wanted just a little more. Publicly, Loeffler, a former asset management executive whom Georgia’s Republican governor had appointed to the Senate in December, was confident, reassuring, and, above all else, dismissive about Covid-19. “Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness,” she tweeted in late February. “@realDonaldTrump & his administration... Читать дальше...

Three years since Charlottesville, armed clashes at street protests over racial justice are still a defining feature of American politics, but the constellation of participants has changed. The white supremacists who paraded in fascist sword-and-sandals kitsch with homemade shields and spears have sharply receded. But the paramilitaries who showed up that August claiming to be neutral security are now represented in greater numbers. Nazis are out, patriots are in. And while cops sat on the sidelines in Charlottesville... Читать дальше...

“That’s what’s at stake right now: our democracy,” Barack Obama said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. Some version of this warning—somehow both apocalyptic and Pollyannaish—reverberated among political analysts for the entire presidential campaign, as it has for generations. The Arena, an 1890s magazine of the left, invoked the phrase sarcastically, saying that “our democracy” was happy to let its citizens become “serfs” to big business. In 1914, The Atlantic wrote... Читать дальше...