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In broad terms, the spectacular diseconomies and immoralities of health-care in the US have long been known to observers the world over. Being in thrall to the monied interests that fund their election campaigns, including health insurance companies, US political elites have steadfastly resisted establishing government-delivered health insurance for many decades...
David KERANS | 13.03.2013 |
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Even the most casual observer of international affairs since the turn of the century is familiar with the willingness of the government of the United States to bypass international law under circumstances it alone determines. The war of aggression launched against Iraq under false pretenses ten years ago this month may be the first example that comes to mind, but there are numerous others...
David KERANS | 26.02.2013 |
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...We know, of course that very powerful monied interests are happy to fuel denial of global warming. Meanwhile, other powerful monied interests are devising ways of profiting from some dimensions of the developing climate crisis. Arguably the most important theater of operations in this respect is water... The list of investors acquiring or preparing to acquire water-related assets is long, and it is imposing: big banks, SWFs, multinational corporations, targeted hedge funds, tycoons, and pension funds all figure in large numbers...
David KERANS | 03.02.2013 |
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The economic hardships of the past few years and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement have made Americans more aware than at any time in living memory of the extraordinary inequalities of wealth that have built up in their society. From bloggers' datapoints to professors' treatises, a steady stream of publications has been feeding the nation's growing appetite for information on inequality and explanations for its emergence...
David KERANS | 12.01.2013 |
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In US history, second presidential terms have had a pronounced tendency to disappoint. The causes have ranged widely, from political scandal (think Nixon and Watergate) to personal scandal (think Clinton and Lewinsky) to a loss of credibility (think George W. Bush). But the upshot has been quite similar in all cases: an inefficacious second term of office. What would efficacy for President Barack Obama's second term mean, and how likely is he to accomplish it?..
David KERANS | 16.12.2012 |
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More than at any time since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, concerns about weather have gripped the US in 2012. Long percolating consciousness about global warming has overlapped with extraordinary weather patterns and records: an avalanche of high temperature marks; a drought of nearly unprecedented breadth, intensity, and duration; extraordinary acreage destroyed in wildfires; massive fish die-offs; and Hurricane Sandy, which flooded portions of New York City and environs in October...Paradoxically, despite the obviousness of extraordinary weather patterns and the seriousness of the implications, the politics surrounding natural resources and climate in the US are deeply hidden from view…
David KERANS | 30.11.2012 |
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The stakes in the 2012 presidential election in the US were quite real... The majority of American voters rejected the Republican agenda, that much is clear. But if that is what they voted AGAINST, what were they voting FOR? Were they voting for a traditional Democratic Party menu of protecting the social safety net, reversing galloping inequalities of wealth, and challenging the dominion of corporations, etc.? Or were they condoning the prevailing trajectory of Obama's first term, namely rolling concessions to the Right, in the interest of enlisting «bipartisan» support for modest reforms?...
David KERANS | 13.11.2012 |
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According to voluminous polling data, nearly half of all likely voters intend to vote for Romney and other Republicans this year, notwithstanding the party's now slavish devotion to 1) supply-side economics (cutting tax rates, especially on the wealthy and on corporations, on the avowed assumption that this will generate economic growth, and thus serve to enhance tax revenues to compensate for the taxes lost by virtue of lower rates) and 2) trimming the public sector of the economy (because, as they insist categorically, the public sector is wasteful in everything it does)... How, then, are we to understand the decision of approximately half of the country to vote against its own economic interests?..
David KERANS | 25.10.2012 |
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...Notwithstanding the galloping dysfunction in corporate-dominated Washington, the public sector of the US economy will not disappear, nor will all of the country's public assets disintegrate. The benefits Americans have enjoyed from these assets stand to shrink, however, and the bite may be fierce indeed. The police department of Detroit has just offered a poignant reminder of this, declaring their city so dangerous that it is unsafe to enter, and warning that they are not capable of responding when needed. In more ways than one, and sooner rather than later, the great mass of Americans will have reason to regret the retreat of their government...
David KERANS | 18.10.2012 |
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Alarms regarding the deterioration of secondary education have beat a steady refrain in the US for more than 50 years, ever since the USSR's Iurii Gagarin became the first man to fly in outer space and magnified fears of an existential military threat from the Soviets. In recent decades the perceived danger from an underperforming education sector is not military, but economic: the threat of falling behind other nations as the world sheds its reliance on manufacturing for a new order, characterized as «the knowledge economy»... The deterioration of secondary and university education is indeed a crisis, and has dovetailed with the aftermath of the financial crisis to produce levels of unemployment among youth not seen since the Great Depression...
David KERANS | 27.09.2012 |
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