Новости за 02.02.2022

Last evening I happened by accident upon a strange coming together of the ends of New York. Seated on couches and chairs in the spacious unpretentious drawing-room were unemployed men, recruited from the bread line and the lodging-houses. These unemployed—there were some thirty of them—were the guests of men and women prominent in the city government and in social reform. They had been called in to give their advice to experts, to explain how relief work should be organized, to discuss the infinitely complex problem of unemployment. Читать дальше...

In all the intensity of feeling aroused by the war, we have somehow let escape us the consideration that the German ideals are the only broad and seizing ones that have lived in the world in our generation. Mad and barbarous as they may seem to minds accustomed to much thinner and nicer fare, one must have withdrawn far within a provincial Anglo-Saxon shell not to feel the thrill of their sheer heroic power. We have heard so much of the German industrialism and militarism that we have overlooked... Читать дальше...

American opinion in its anxiety to find who struck the match that started the blaze of war has tended to ignore the nature and quantity of the fuel. There could have been no war without those latent and brooding national feelings which the occasion touched off into flaming passion. Governments might start the conflict, but no government on earth, not even the most absolute, could keep it going with that intense animus of which every day’s news gives evidence. Only a collective consciousness could do this... Читать дальше...

The business lobby is in a fury about President Joe Biden’s renomination of a soft-spoken economist named David Weil, who propounds the unacceptably radical notion that the nation’s wage and hours laws ought to be enforced. “Wages before inflation are rising for workers of all skill levels amid an historic labor shortage,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized last week (“David Weil vs. Small Business”). Businesses “don’t need a regulator whose main goal is to use coercion to raise costs for employers... Читать дальше...

I remember reading Bob Dylan once saying that he didn’t really write his songs. They were out there, floating in the air; he just happened to be the one who grabbed them. It’s a lovely and kind of poetic thought—that “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and all the others were just objects, at once mystical and animate, suspended in the atmosphere, hovering just out of our reach, and only the Bard of Hibbing occupied the magical wavelength to reach them and pull them to the ground.

In the state that offers the best Senate pickup opportunity for Democrats this cycle, Pennsylvania Democrats are having to grapple with an increasingly unwieldy and heated Democratic primary contest, a fact that threatens to play a major role in the direction of the race—and the balance of the Senate in 2022. 

On Thursday, Sarah Bloom Raskin will go before the Senate Banking Committee for her confirmation hearing to become the vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A former member of the board and former deputy treasury secretary, she is well credentialed for the job. Controversially, she also thinks the trillions of dollars’ worth of climate destruction likely to face the United States this century is something the world’s most powerful bank should consider in its decisions. Читать дальше...

With the Democratic agenda stalled, members of Congress are making the best of what’s around, taking bipartisan action on several key issues. Perhaps their most pressing concern at the moment is something worlds away from petty domestic debates that closed out the calendar year: taking action to deter Russia from launching an invasion of Ukraine. Senators on both sides of the aisle are largely in agreement that time is of the essence, there’s still disagreement as to the best way to get Russian... Читать дальше...