Tag Archives: political science

Beyond salvation? Democratic party politics on Blog#42

Our system of politics has been breaking for some time. I’ve made numerous public comments on various aspects of our degrading democracy over the last few years.  What I’ve only recently begun to articulate, however, is that the problems we’ve all been focused on in connection to events pertaining to the right, also exist on the left, perhaps to a lesser extent. The rot on the left is my focus here.

Continue reading Beyond salvation? Democratic party politics on Blog#42

The faces of neo-liberalism, Part I: Robert Gibbs, Andrew Cuomo, and Rahm Emanuel

By Rima Regas

The rise of corporate Democrats has gone from a quiet but steady pace since 2010, to a very visible and in-your-face spectacle of late. The face of the party has changed, with some of the old guard gone, but many Democrats who were always at the right-most edge of the party playing more central roles in our parliamentary politics.

In Congress, especially over the past year, we’ve seen deals quietly made by certain Senate Democrats with the GOP, on the backs of the poor and unemployed. The economic agenda of the Democratic party, as a whole, has vanished, as has its vocal support for its blue collar constituencies.  While there are still a few progressives who stump for jobs, the unemployed, our safety net, education, and infrastructure, that talk isn’t backed by any particular legislative effort on the part of the leadership to, at the very least, give the appearance that it is trying to bring these issues back to the fore. Continue reading The faces of neo-liberalism, Part I: Robert Gibbs, Andrew Cuomo, and Rahm Emanuel