Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading ...job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality-as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world's outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump's moral and political emergency-and to resist it.
InTrump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military-all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away.
But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can't happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that-even now, with the waters ever warming-it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?
Rights as trumps of what? Joseph Blocher
Harvard law review,
04/2019, Letnik:
132, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the archetypal U.S. rights case, a litigant asks a court to block, invalidate, or remedy a government action on the basis that it violates a constitutional guarantee. The archetype emerges from ...three basic characteristics of the U.S. constitutional system: the power of judicial review, the state action requirement, and the enumeration of negative (rather than positive) guarantees. In such a case, constitutional rights are tied to certain kinds of government wrongs. But which wrongs? And how can, or should, rights respond to them?
Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social ...and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: the polarization is unique in modern U.S. history. Today's party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic. Abramowitz shows how the partisan alignment arose out of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most important difference between our current era and past eras, the rise of "negative partisanship"; explains how this phenomenon paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our polarization could even grow deeper. This statistically based analysis shows that racial anxiety is by far a better predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other factor, including economic discontent.
"During extraordinary historical moments - both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, the peak of the civil-rights era - the usual categories dividing 'activists' from 'regular people' ...became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone".
On September 10, 2018, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered an address fiercely criticizing the International Criminal Court (ICC). Bolton challenged the legitimacy of the ICC and ...expressed particular concern over its inquiry into potential war crimes committed by members of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan. He identified retaliatory measures the United States would undertake if the ICC "comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies."
Two of the most important issues defining the Trump Administration were the President's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Administration's dealing with immigration issues. These have been ...regarded, in the popular press and in the scholarly literature, as unrelated. But there is a key common feature in the Trump Administration's response: racism and xenophobia has shaped both the handling of the public health crisis and immigration issues. Understanding the underlying basis for the Trump Administration's reaction to both issues helps to clarify the fallacies, indeed the tragedies in its actions, and the legal errors that have been made.
Strategic power shifts in the Indo-Pacific resulting from the rise of China, combined with the disarray provoked by the tempestuous policies of the Trump Administration towards its allies, have ...created complex challenges for Australian policy-makers in managing their alliance relations with the United States. To understand contemporary shifts in Canberra’s relative bargaining power position within the alliance over time this article conducts a net assessment through the employment of a specially designed framework taking the form of a ‘ledger’ that tallies Australia’s ‘assets’ against its ‘liabilities’. Through this exercise analysts can appraise how its advantages can be strengthened and weaknesses mitigated in dealing with Washington in future bargaining encounters. It also tangentially contributes to the International Relations (IR) literature of ‘intra-alliance politics’ by illustrating how allied ‘bargaining power indexes’ may be operationalised. through the empirical analysis conducted here.
This book determines what can legitimately be regarded as the legacy of the Obama presidency and investigates how far the Trump administration has reversed it.
Unprecedented and unpredictable: this is how US President Donald Trump's administration has repeatedly been labelled during its first term. Beyond the frequent tweets and bombastic rhetoric, however, ...lie a more conventional four years, as the United States navigated an ever-evolving international reality, compounded by a global pandemic and one of the deepest economic recessions in over a century.This Report analyses the continuity and changes that occurred during Trump's first term. Domestically, it investigates the growing political polarization, the country's pre-pandemic economic performance, Trump's approach towards regular and irregular migration, and the US' response to a healthcare emergency. At the international level, this volume looks at how the US stance has changed vis-à-vis China, the Middle East, and Europe.Which long-term trends has President Trump had to ride through? What was his trademark, and what might be his lasting legacy? Publisher's text
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