A how many speeds Europe? As the EU flounders in the face of reality, another non-solution to the eurozone's woes is being proposed: more control, less democracy and a long slump. And so the prospect of a two-tier Europe is upon us – at least that's what's being whispered in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. In truth there is already a two-tier Europe. A three-tier one, in fact. The inner core is the eurozone. If you wanted to, you might even call the Germanic economic core of Europe a tier, so how many is that, then?
The truth is that the European Union is about as united as a conference of anarchists. Anyone who has been paying attention to European affairs in the last decade will have heard it all before. From a purely technocratic point of view EU leaders could be forgiven for wanting to confine the damaged economies of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and even Belgium to the sin-bin. He needn't worry. Image by OpenDemocracy. How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich | Politics News. The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet.
Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy.
" Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE! " The year was 1985. Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. Then something strange happened. We Are the 99%: Models of Public Opinion that Explain the Occupy Wall Street Movement | Age of Engagement. -- Guest post by Luis Hestres, American University doctoral student. Ever since the financial crisis hit the U.S. in late 2008, many political commentators (mostly on the Left) have wondered why public opinion hadn’t mobilized behind Wall Street reform in the U.S. as strongly and visibly as in other nations. The Occupy Wall Street movement seems like the embodiment of the sort of reaction to the crisis these observers thought missing, but still—why the delay?
A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt. University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues: Public opinion as reason versus social control. References See Also: Occupy Wall Street & the History of Leaderless Movements. What's the Latest Development? The movement to Occupy Wall Street has already become a veritable who's who of activism with Michael Moore, Jeffrey Sachs and Slavoj Zizek in attendance. Yet a visible leader has yet to emerge from Zuccotti Park in New York City. Rather than select a figure head, OWS "wants to avoid replicating the authoritarian structures of the institutions they are opposing.
" During the daily general assembly meetings held in the park, individuals are invited to voice a concern and explain his or her point of view. What's the Big Idea? Ford University sociologist Heather Gautney says that leaderless movements like OWS have been successful at changing the orientation of American society.
The feminist and gay rights movements both eschewed formal leadership in favor of a decentralized decision making structure, she says. Moral decline and the end of big ideas. So Is America a Christian Nation? | Politeia. The U.S. is historically a Christian country. It's not just that 3 out of 4 Americans identify themselves as Christian. It's that the colonists who fought in the American revolution and who founded the United States were very largely—and often very devoutly—Christian. Their religion played a crucial role in shaping the U.S. system of government.
But that is not at all the same as saying the U.S. is a Christian nation. In fact, it is in many ways an explicitly secular nation. As my new Big Think colleague Adam Lee—welcome, Adam—recently wrote, the U.S. Constitution is formally godless in the sense that unlike most of the landmark legal texts before it, it doesn’t invoke God to justify the political order that it created. Another fellow Big Thinker, Peter Lawler, argues that it is wrong to construe the Constitution’s silence on points of religious doctrine with atheism.
More than anything else, I would argue, America is a modern nation. Photo: Scott Catron. The End of the Future - Peter Thiel. When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come and see.” So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine.” (Revelation 6:5–6) Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity.
The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains.