Tag Archives: democracy

from Peter Radford Take four. I continue to listen in on the conversation. The election reverberates loudly around leftish circles. Recriminations mount. Criticisms fly. Finger pointing and over-analysis have become all too common. And this is after just a week. Imagine what a month can produce. So far the central narrative seems to be that the Democrats have become isolated from the most consequential issues that regular folk feel are important. The explanation being that the party is...

from Peter Radford Battle is joined … This might annoy some of you — it is my hasty first thought. The Democrats have been thoroughly defeated.  Deservedly so.  They no longer relate to, or reflect, the American working class.  Without building such a relationship they cannot regain power.  Nor should they. Yesterday, early on the morning of election day,  a friend of mine forwarded an article by Robert Reich who argued that, in order to defeat Trump, Harris needed to focus more on the...

I’m reading an article about Kamala Harris in the October 21st New Yorker. This paragraph caught my eye:“When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and Harris’s mother took her in. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris has said. In...

Pushing Back For Democracy Around The World  Given the massive impetus the presidency of Donald Trump gave to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces around the world, it is worth seeing that his defeat in a democratic election, despite his efforts to illegally overturn it, seems to have been followed by some outbursts of pro-democratic demonstrations in parts of the world, even as we saw a major setback for democracy in Myanmar with the military...

Pushing Back For Democracy Around The World  Given the massive impetus the presidency of Donald Trump gave to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces around the world, it is worth seeing that his defeat in a democratic election, despite his efforts to illegally overturn it, seems to have been followed by some outbursts of pro-democratic demonstrations in parts of the world, even as we saw a major setback for democracy in Myanmar with the military...

The fashionable concentration on democracy as the main value threatened is not without danger. It is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that so long as the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary. The false assurance which many people derive from this belief is an important cuase of the general unawareness of the dangers which we face. There is no justification for the belief that so long as power is conferred by democratic...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Planet Money’s new resource for educators pairs podcast episodes with lesson plans, cataloged by topic. It’s a big week for findings from cash studies including: publication of Chris’s study with Fiala and Martinez showing cash benefitted Ugandan participants, but by 9 years later the control group had caught up; Universal Basic Income in Kenya buffered against hard times when COVID and the agricultural lean season hit...

Monday afternoon, 25th May 2020. A beautiful, warm day on which to watch our new overlord make his first speech to the nation. I refer, of course, to Dominic Cummings's press conference.The Daily Mirror and the Guardian had revealed that Cummings had gone to stay in a family cottage near Durham at the end of March, and that he had also been seen in Barnard Castle, about 30 miles from Durham. The country was under full lockdown at the time, with non-essential travel completely banned, so both...

Monday afternoon, 25th May 2020. A beautiful, warm day on which to watch our new overlord make his first speech to the nation. I refer, of course, to Dominic Cummings's press conference.The Daily Mirror and the Guardian had revealed that Cummings had gone to stay in a family cottage near Durham at the end of March, and that he had also been seen in Barnard Castle, about 30 miles from Durham. The country was under full lockdown at the time, with non-essential travel completely banned, so both...

Pulitzer-winning author and host of “On Contact” Chris Hedges joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the influence of lobbyists on establishment media in their coverage of politics and that donors, bankers and billionaires have on the US political process. He argues that the corporate elite sees Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is a much greater threat to corporate power than President Trump, which is why they are uniting so stridently behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the Democratic...