Politics Archives - Page 76 of 113

Democracy

Gray is Beautiful, Part 1

On the Social Condition and Fractured Society in Donald Trump’s America

March 23, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This is the first part of a three-part post, originally drafted as a lecture, drawn from my published and unpublished writings over the past decade, to be presented to Democracy Seminar participants in Gdansk, Warsaw, Budapest, and Berlin (to a group of Turkish exiles). Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the ...

Europe & Central Asia

Labor Rights in the Time of Pandemic

Hungary’s return to the 19th Century in response to Covid 19

March 23, 2020 • by Laszlo Bruszt

This step is unprecedented in the post-second World War continental law that uses Labor Codes to provide guaranteed rights to employees. It also deviates from the more recent treatment of labor relations during the pandemic in the OECD countries. This move back to absolute ‘freedom of contract’ is reminiscent of ...

Politics

Pardon Me — Are You Richard Burr, Sir?

Senators profiting off insider knowledge are not giving away their shot to make money from a crisis

March 20, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

The same day that Trump told the nation, “It’s going to disappear. One day, like a miracle. It will disappear,” Burr told members of an exclusive club that the novel coronavirus was fast-moving, like the 1918 pandemic, and could lead to school closings and military mobilization to combat it. Thirteen ...

North America

For the Love of Humanity, We Should Never Stop Talking About “Bernie Bros”

A response to Jesse Singal

March 19, 2020 • by Anne Taylor

In the 2016 election cycle, I worked for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Those months are a blur. In October 2015 I was an eager volunteer in a student group at the University of Colorado Boulder; within two months the campaign hired me as their first field organizer in the ...

For the Love of Humanity, We Should Never Stop Talking About “Bernie Bros”

Activism

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

An Interview with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Author of Vigil: Hong Kong On The Brink

March 17, 2020 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Mark Frazier

Mark W. Frazier [MF]: Your book was released on February 11, in the midst of a public health crisis in mainland China that has meant massive disruptions to life and work in Hong Kong, the cancellation of a major international arts festival, and the cessation (for now at least) of ...

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

Activism

From Mad Cows to Coronavirus

When Government Fails, Grassroots Activism Flourishes

March 17, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

This was bad enough; but in March 1996, Britain’s secretary of state for health announced ten cases of something similar in another species: a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) had been diagnosed in human patients. CJD is a fatal disease caused by a rampant protein that eats away the brain cells ...

North America

The Great Immobility

March 17, 2020 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Less obvious is the lesson we could come to learn about mobility. At first glance, the restrictions on travel to the United States seem to affirm a common trope: our borders need to be sealed against immigrants who would do us harm. Build the Wall; stop the germs! But there is another ...

North America

Confessions in a Time of Plague

Or, the Virtues of Ideological Inconsistency

March 16, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

A revised version of my doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Robert Dahl while I was a grad student at Yale, my book was titled Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View. In it, I offered an earnest defense of neo-Marxist theories of power circa 1986 (drawing on the work of theorists such ...

Democracy

Coronavirus Testing Lag? Not My Fault, Says Trump

The president who insists that he alone can solve all problems runs away from this one. It could be fatal.

March 14, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

This quotation, from Trump’s answer, when a reporter asked him if he took responsibility for the lag in testing for the novel coronavirus, will be in every single history book written about this era. He went on. When PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked why he doesn’t take responsibility for ...

Coronavirus Testing Lag? Not My Fault, Says Trump

Politics

The Pandemic Highlights the Capacities of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Klain

March 13, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Trump has made war on science, journalism, the welfare state, and constitutional democracy. He has made a mockery of public service and he has poisoned public discourse. He has enriched the financial elite along with his kleptocratic family and friends, bestowing on the adulating mobs who follow him a little ...

The Pandemic Highlights the Capacities of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Klain

North America

COVID-19: The Fierce Urgency of Now

National political organizations need to recalibrate: this is not business as usual

March 13, 2020 • by Micah L. Sifry

Indivisible isn’t alone. The Joe Biden for President campaign is currently asking people to sign-up to knock on doors for him in Florida, Arizona, and Illinois. AccessNow, the digital rights organization, just sent me an email asking for nominations for the “Privacy Defenders and Offenders” project, with the winners of the Privacy Defender ...

Democracy

Testament of our Revolution

What we can learn today from the Czechoslovak Experience of 1977

March 12, 2020 • by Martin Palouš

-James Dodd On February 21, 1990, Václav Havel -- still under arrest less than four months previous as a “subversive element” -- addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in his new capacity as Czechoslovak President. He was welcomed as a leader of the Velvet Revolution, which brought to an ...