In the past year, revolutions have swept through Northern Africa and the Middle East in what has been dubbed the Arab Spring. How has this wave of reformative spirit affected the condition of countries around the Middle East, either in terms of internal or diplomatic change? What do you foresee as potential reconciliation for the instability and popular dissatisfaction that persists?
This past year has been one of the most tumultuous ones that I can recall. Social movements have sprung up all across the world from the Middle East to India to South America to Europe to, without a doubt, here at home in the United States. Some of the most entrenched systems are being resisted and, in some cases, even shaken. The energy and enthusiasm of these movements are palpable – who hasn’t had a conversation or a heated debate with a friend, relative, or stranger about one of the movements?
Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent.
The recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (JSCDR) to reach an agreement on the reduction of the federal deficit may turn into a full-blown military budget crisis with enormous, unforeseen consequences for national security if the United States does not act soon.
Antarctica is home to more than emperor penguins and a few dozen humans with science citizenship barricaded in small hermetic bases. It is also host to an estimated 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, alongside large quantities of gold, silver, uranium, and many other rare metals underneath a pristine ice cap still virgin of commercial exploitation. Securing a territory with such a rich underground, in whole or in part, would bless any country with durable energy security and, thereby, increased political independence in the international arena.
The problem with the firmly partisan prism of the media through which most of American politics is dissected is that we lose the many nuances of our political realities. Complexities become distorted and disfigured as they are forcefully shoved into the binary classifications of party politics. Perhaps the most extreme example is the way foreign policy has almost disappeared in today’s political consciousness, not in the least because the Obama administration’s policies defy easy political branding. However, despite the media’s predisposition to ignore what happens outside of Wall Street and Main Street this election season, President Obama’s first term has been rather eventful on the foreign policy front.
Consider the flying toilet. The term comes from the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Within the slum, there is often less than one latrine per 50 shacks, with each 12-foot by 12-foot shack containing, on average, eight people. Kibera sits on government land that never fully transferred legally to its pre-independence residents, and, as such, the government treats residents as squatters with no right or entitlement to legal, social, or economic protection. A complete lack of governmental presence within the slum means that at night, with no street lights and collections of roving thugs (and, at times, predatory policemen looking for a shakedown), using toilets can become dangerous. In response, shacks stock up on plastic bags, defecate or urinate into them after dark, and fling them from their windows out into the streets to bake in the morning sun.
If indeed Occupy Wall Street has failed to become a force in the political mainstream, it is because mainstream politics, and not the movement, is failing to constitute any class or even sub-class (unless that sub-class is the very rich).
The last year has been a big one for American labor unions. From Wisconsin to Alabama to the NBA, policy makers are re-examining their stances on collective bargaining.
Ron Suskind, critically acclaimed author of narrative nonfiction, has been a leading voice in addressing and explaining critical issues impacting Americans on the national stage. A Pulitzer-Prize winner, Suskind was the senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. Suskind’s past best-selling books include: A Hope in the Unseen, The Way of the World, The One Percent Doctrine, and The Price of Loyalty. Ron Suskind’s most recent book, Confidence Men, brings the hidden history of Wall Street and the Obama White House to light. Columbia Political Review sat down with Suskind to discuss the state of journalism, the inner workings of the Obama administration, and the accountability of the financial sector.
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