When Donald Trump’s top two White House officials, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, appeared together at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference the other day, Bannon (the big ideas member of the duo) outlined the top three priorities or “lines of work” of the administration: The first is kind of national security and sovereignty and […]
16 Nov
Guest post by JAMES ROBERTSON The general elections on 8 November 2016 were a massive vote of “no confidence” in the US political establishment. Whether measured in the active support for Trump’s populist campaign or in the passive refusal of millions of voters to turn out for Clinton, the message was clear: millions of Americans […]
10 Nov
When I wrote my first Left Flank piece on Trump back in January, I concluded: All this suggests it is way too early to be sure that a Democratic nominee can easily beat Trump. Equally, a Trump victory should not be considered hard proof of a deeper right-wing shift in US society, or even a […]
02 Mar
GUEST POST BY SIMON COPLAND Last weekend dealt a blow to the Bernie Sanders juggernaut. Pipped at the post by rival Hillary Clinton in Nevada and crushed by her in South Carolina, Sanders’s route to the Democratic nomination is looking tougher than ever. Many will mourn this potential loss. Yet I am not feeling the […]
25 Jan
Racist … fascist … Islamophobe … a racist piece of shit … immigrant hater … a right-wing nativist populist … bigot … racist asshole … an ugly and dangerous force in American politics … full fascist —Recent descriptions of Donald Trump from various sections of the US liberal and socialist Left We’re at that stage […]
12 Aug
We live in dangerous times. The last week has seen Russia impose trade sanctions on Australia, in a quite understandable response to the sabre rattling over Ukraine by our idiot politicians, and in particular, the enthusiasm displayed by Julie Bishop in backing sanctions against Russia. Sanctions and counter sanctions. The European Union and Russia are […]
20 Nov
I suppose we’ll never know if when Kevin Rudd dropped the word “Konfrontasi” into the pre-election debate on Tony Abbott’s “turn back the boats” policy he was merely stirring up his Coalition opponents or whether he was directly aware of the depth of contempt Indonesian elites had towards the Coalition’s sabre-rattling. The term certainly had […]
30 Aug
This piece was written for the UK Stop the War Coalition’s website. It may seem wearily familiar — a rush to war, disputed intelligence dossiers and a determined effort to proceed without even UN Security Council authorisation. There are echoes of Iraq ten years ago, and it casts a long shadow upon the mounting political […]
09 Nov
Comments Off on The capitalist crisis, Obama’s re-election and the US Left
Perhaps more than for a long time, the US presidential vote earlier this week was dominated by a clear message to the Left, the working class and minority voters: the absolute necessity to vote for the “lesser evil” in Obama. Compared with the sense of hope that pervaded Obama’s election in 2008 (for one of […]
07 Aug
Comments Off on US capitalism: ‘Take the money & run,’ or, ‘This sucker could go down, Mark II’
By liz_beths and Dr_Tad It is hard to grasp the epochal significance of ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating, nothing less than an ideological humiliation of the world’s largest national economy. This after a week dominated by massive falls on stock markets across the globe and the “resolution” of the political […]
26 Feb
Comments Off on Trump, Bannon & ‘deconstructing the administrative state’