Tag: Political science

  • Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II

    Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II

    Orientation Unfortunately, in the United States the terms “liberal, “democracy” and “capitalism” are all mushed together according to the following logic: All democratic societies are liberal; All liberal societies are capitalist and All democratic societies are capitalist In Part I of my article, I challenged this logic because many capitalist societies have dictatorships and some […]

  • Capitalism’s General Crisis is Back with a Vengeance

    Why are we experiencing a period  of such crisis in international relations in Britain, Europe, the Americas and across the world? So many responses to this question fail to locate it in what the international communist movement has long called the “general crisis of capitalism.” At its base, capitalism cannot resolve the cyclical and structural […]

  • NYS: Why Are Authoritarian Entities Needed to Create Charter Schools if They Are So Popular?

    NYS: Why Are Authoritarian Entities Needed to Create Charter Schools if They Are So Popular?

    The charter school industry has been operating in overdrive for several decades, trying desperately to convince everyone that charter schools are amazing, unassailable, and always in high demand. But if charter schools are marvelous and popular why have charter school promoters spent years using top-down heavy-handed entities comprised of unelected pro-privatization individuals to impose charter […]

  • Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative

    Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative

    You’ve always looked for leaders, strong men with no faults. There aren’t any. There are only men like yourselves. Speaking of leaders, they change, they desert, die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A united people is the only lasting strength. — Emiliano Zapata, 1952, to his followers In Yankeedom, the terms “liberal”, “democracy” and […]

  • Dooming the Chagos Deal: The Diego Garcia Dilemma

    When remote islands start to interest chatterboxes in think tanks and bureaucrats in foreign ministries, we can only assume that some matters will be exaggerated over others. With the Chagos Islands, there is one matter that is hard to exaggerate.  The plight of its indigenous population has been horrendous, treated with brutish contempt by the British […]

  • Michael Parenti, 1933-2026

    With the death of Michael Parenti, we have lost one of the greatest dissident voices in American history. Parenti earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and taught at a number of colleges and universities, never attaining a tenured position because he was “red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left […]

  • Michael Parenti: An Appreciation

    … for nearly two decades, every evening in the week, the dean of American newscasters, Walter Cronkite, would end his CBS television news show with the statement: “And that’s the way it is.” On the eve of his retirement in 1980, Cronkite admitted that isn’t the way it is: “My lips have been kind of […]

  • Diplomacy, Law, and Nonviolent Power

    Read Part 1. This is the second of four TFF-created idea portfolios designed to curb the global reach of the United States and, in both the short and long term, help catalyse a worldwide nonviolent resistance to what many observers describe as the Trump administration’s uniquely confrontational, destructive and world-threatening policies. These portfolios outline what […]

  • The Barr Doctrine, Noriega, and Maduro

    US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense of iconoclasm is misplaced. While his conduct regarding the abduction of Nicolás Maduro certainly dumps mightily on the precepts of international law, legal advisors in […]

  • Wealth, Authoritarianism, and Media

    It’s official. This tormented, heated, traumatised planet is now home to over 3,000 billionaires. (That number was reached last year.) In October 2025, Elon Musk became the first man to have wealth exceeding half a trillion dollars. These developments could still take alongside the fact that one in four people across the globe face hunger. […]

Generated by Feedzy