Italy held a general election on 4 March. After weeks of deliberation, a government was formed, between the hard-right Lega Party and the populist Five Star Movement. But governing has been fraught. The ideological divisions are the coalition make forming a coherent policy platform challenging. Many of the policies, such as harsh restrictions on immigration, …
Continue reading ‘Why virtually everyone gets Italian politics wrong’ »
“He is asked to stand, he wants to sit, and is expected to lie”. (Winston Churchill)
Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when three quarters of a million Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. Some 100,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon and, with their descendants, have been prevented ever since from returning. The residents of the camps are condemned to poverty, marginalisation and ill-health. This community has also endured …
Continue reading ‘The plight of the dispossessed Palestinians’ »
The successful Republican drive to overhaul the tax code in 2017, resulted in a bonanza of business for Washington’s law and lobby firms. Bolstered by GOP control of Washington, lobbyists saw their business explode grow last year. The prospect of tax legislation and regulatory reform was the big reason why. The 20 largest lobbying firms …
“The problem with Washington today is that there just isn’t enough bribery. In the old days, when parties lacked a few crucial votes to pass important legislation, they could win over opponents with the help of so-called earmarks. These were sentences included in spending bills that directed some of the money to specific projects – …
Continue reading ‘Politics are worse now that earmarks are banned’ »
Anthony Bennett is the author of a book called “The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump”. The author writes that Brexit was the result of successive breaches of trust on the part of the British ruling class. This included the calamity of the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crash and the bank bailout, …
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the richest part of Europe, recently held elections for the borough council. The elections were believed to be unpredictable because of a terrible tragedy that had occurred last year, where a public housing tower block called Grenfell Tower burnt down, killing 71 people. The tower burnt because it …
Acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Mick Mulvaney is working diligently these days to gut the agency he now heads. But Mulvaney isn’t seeing that same diligence from the financial industry movers and shakers he’s endeavoring so hard to shield. Last week, at a financial industry conference in Washington, D.C., Mulvaney told 1,300 bankers to …
Today (Tuesday), the New York state senate has two by-elections. Should the Democrats win, New York state will be under unified Democrat control; the governor’s mansion and lower house are already blue, but the senate is still mostly Republican. One of the senate races is a safe-Democrat Bronx seat. So the only election that matters …
Continue reading ‘Why Westchester County should vote Democrat.’ »
Being politically conservative is a vague, hard to define notion that depends heavily on the context in which the term is used. To be a conservative in an Islamic theocracy is very different to being conservative in a communist dictatorship or a liberal democracy. Even within a country, the meaning of conservative can change over …
Continue reading ‘War is not conservative: The hypocrisy of Trump and May’ »
The first post I’ve done in a long time. I’m at the busiest time of my degree, so yet again I don’t know when I’ll be able to post next. Apologies. But this is a huge issue at the moment, so I felt the need to address it. Anti-Semitism is on the increase in both Britain …
Continue reading ‘Is anti-Semitism a significant problem in Britain and America?’ »
America’s wars spread continually — there are now seven of them, and they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. The Afghan …
Continue reading ‘Wars we barely know about, funded lavishly’ »
The recent indictment of 13 Russians for meddling in the 2016 US election has prompted a hysterical reaction from some pundits. One commentator called the cyber plot “the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past decade”, after 9/11; another warned that Russia and America were now engaged in a “virtual war”, lamenting that the …
Continue reading ‘Don’t blame Russia for our diseased politics: a different perspective’ »
Sorry for the longest post in awhile. I don’t know when I’ll next be able to post again, so I thought I would give this one a good shot. Last year I wrote on American Exceptionalism, and why I believe it is wrong. While America has accomplished an exceptional amount, it is not inherently exceptional; …
To The Sunday Telegraph I was interested in your article about the lost history of the Cornish people who were captured and sold as slaves by pirates from the Barbary Coast during the 17th and 18th centuries. This subject is much better known about in Ireland, where the largest single raid took place. In 1631, …
