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Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In
Focus, “A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent journalist. He
holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He oversaw the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years, and won the UCSC Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as UCSC’s Innovations in Teaching Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also a college provost at UCSC, and retired in 2004. He is a winner of a Project Censored “Real News Award,†and lives in Berkeley, California.
SHARE Wednesday, March 27, 2019 European Union Elections: A Crossroad
Global migration is on the rise as climate change drowns coastlines and river deltas and drought drives people out of arid climates in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America. By 2060, as many as 3 billion people could be affected. The Left and center-left has a responsibility to see immigrants for what they are: potential allies and the future.
SHARE Saturday, June 25, 2016 The Brexit: A Very British Affair
The Brexit vote was a British affair (and promises to be a messy one). The Spanish election is a continental affair that will have reverberations worldwide. A recent manifesto by more than 200 leading Spanish economists charges that the austerity policies of the EU have created an "economic crisis" that "has had devastating consequences for our country, as well as the euro zone as a whole."
SHARE Thursday, November 2, 2017 Brexit and A Brave New World
With Labour on the ascendency, May is reliant on an extremist party to stay in power, and countries like France are licking their chops at poaching the financial institutions that currently work out of London, EU members are in no rush to settle things. May is playing a weak hand and Brussels knows it.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 4, 2013 Boiling a Frog
If you can control 15% of the national vote, you can elect presidents and the congress. That is exactly what has happened over the past several election cycles. Mitt Romney got swamped in the general election, but Republicans hold power in the House of Representatives and in a majority of state houses. There is nothing "fictional" about the 15% solution as an electoral strategy.
SHARE Tuesday, April 14, 2020 India And the Corona Virus: Independent Press Fights Back
Climate change is producing conditions that favor the growth of diseases like the corona virus and vector-driven pathogens like dengue and malaria. The next pandemic is just around the corner, and unless there is a concentrated effort to make health care a human right, it is only a matter of time before the next mega-killer strikes.
SHARE Saturday, June 16, 2018 The Spanish Labyrinth
Newly minted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez must recognize that the Catalan issue is political, not legal, and that force is not an option. As Napoleon Bonaparte's Foreign Minister Talleyrand once remarked, "You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them," summing up the truism that repression does not work in the long run.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 13, 2015 Europe: Shaking The Temple
While Greece will certainly not go back to the failed formula of selling off state-owned enterprises, huge budget cuts, layoffs and onerous taxes, neither is it eager to exit the Eurozone. The latter is composed of 18 out of the 28 EU members that use a common currency, the euro.
SHARE Thursday, January 29, 2015 The Greek Earthquake
One should have no illusions that Syriza will easily sweep the policies of austerity aside, but there is a palpable feeling on the continent that a tide is turning. It did not start with the Greek elections, but with last May's European Parliament elections, where anti-austerity parties made solid gains. If Syriza is to survive, however, it must deliver, and that will be a tall order given the power of its opponents.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 25, 2019 Turkey: Revenge of the Kurds
After 18 years of unchallenged power and success, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suddenly finds himself in the middle of several domestic and foreign crises with no obvious way out. It is unfamiliar ground for a master politician who has moved nimbly from the margins of power to the undisputed leader of the largest economy in the Middle East.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 26, 2012 Four More Years: The Asia Pivot
Washington has shifted naval forces into the Pacific and is in the process of putting 2,500 Marines in northern Australia. While 2,500 Marines are hardly likely to tip the balance of power in Asia, it seems an unnecessary provocation. The U.S. is moving air power into the region as well, including B-1 bombers, B-52s, and F-22 stealth fighters.
SHARE Tuesday, June 25, 2013 Syria and the Monarchs: A Perfect Storm
While the Syrian civil war started over the Assad regime's brutal response to demonstrators, it has morphed into a proxy war between Syria, Iran, Russia, and government of Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq on one side, and the US, France, Britain, Israel, Turkey and the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on the other.
SHARE Friday, June 15, 2012 Greed & the Pain in Spain
The 100 billion Euro ($125 billion) Spanish bailout will fail for the average Spaniard, as bailouts have already failed the Irish, Portuguese and Greeks, and it will lock Spain into generations of debt. The Euro Zone's economies are predicted to contract 0.1 percent for all of 2012, and the jobless rate for the 17-country bloc is 11 percent, higher than at anytime since the Euro was established in 1999.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, February 1, 2016 Hillary and the Urn of Ashes
Clinton's view of America's role in the world is that it is old fashioned imperial behavior wrapped in the humanitarian rationale of R2P and thus more acceptable than the "make the sands glow" atavism of most the Republicans. In the end, however, R2P is just death and destruction in a different packaging. Aeschylus got that: "For War's a banker, flesh his gold."
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 3, 2015 The Price Of Turkey's Election
The finally tally is almost everything Erdogan wanted, although he fell short of his dream of a super majority that would let him change the nature of the Turkish political system from a parliamentary government to one ruled by a powerful and centralized executive -- himself. The AKP won almost five million more votes than it did last June.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 10, 2015 Europe's Elections: A Coming Storm?
The Left in the world cannot expect small countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland to take on the power of international capital by themselves. Not since the rise of Nazism has there been such a pressing need for international solidarity. In a very real way, we are all Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish.
SHARE Monday, October 31, 2016 U.S. Threat to Irish Neutrality
Ireland is not alone in putting itself in harm's way. The US has more than 800 bases worldwide, bases that might well be targeted in a nuclear war with China or Russia. Local populations have little say over the construction of these bases, but they would be the first casualties in a conflict.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 11, 2015 Saudi Arabia: A Kingdom Stumbles
The House of Saud looks more vulnerable than it has since the country was founded in 1926. Unraveling the reasons for the current train wreck is a study in how easily hubris, illusion, and old-fashioned ineptness can trump even bottomless wealth.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 14, 2013 Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget
Comparing the man's accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice's looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was "balanced" with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and "authoritarianism."
SHARE Saturday, November 3, 2018 Afghanistan: Peace at hand?
The news that the Americans recently held face-to-face talks with the Taliban suggests that longest war in US history may have reached a turning point, although the road to such a peace is long, rocky and plagued with as many improvised explosive devices as the highway from Kandahar to Kabul.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 21, 2014 Carl Bloice: 1939-2014. Good Night Sweet Poet
He was one of those people who could not bear the humiliation of silence in the face of injustice and that simple--if occasionally difficult--philosophy was at the center of who he was. Civil rights, free speech, the war in Southeast Asia (and later Central America, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq), women's rights, homophobia, and the environmental crisis: wherever the dispossessed were voiceless, Carl Bloice spoke for them.