The election of the left populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as president of Mexico is an historic breakthrough for progressives there. It could also offer progressives in the United States a path out of their own political stalemate on immigration…
Author Archive for jeff.faux
The Case for Solidarity; race and class fifty years after the Kerner Commission
by jeff.faux •
On March 1, 1968, a presidential commission chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois issued what became an historic report on race relations in the United States. The nation, it concluded, was actually two societies: one white, the other black–…
How What We Do There Drives Central Americans Here
by jeff.faux •
The “caravan” of some 200 Central American refugees at our southern border has given Donald Trump another opportunity to inflame the already incendiary debate over immigration from the south. Tweeting that “our country is being stolen,” he called out the National…
Attack on Syria; Who is Left to Defend the Rule of Law?
by jeff.faux •
In addition to the three Syrian chemical facilities they attacked on Friday, Donald Trump’s missiles hit a target they didn’t aim at –– the veneer of hypocrisy that allows the American governing class to justify itself as the global champion…
Why Are U.S. Troops Still in South Korea, Anyway?
by jeff.faux •
For the past year, Donald Trump and his chief advisers have responded to North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program by warning that “everything is on the table”—including war. That is not true. Missing from the table is the one option that could…
Ron Blackwell (1946–2018)
by jeff.faux •
Ron Blackwell, a friend to the Economic Policy Institute since its early days, died on February 25. Ron had a long career in the labor movement, starting with the Amalgamated Textile Workers Union in New York, moving to the AFL-CIO in…
Davos is Trump’s Kind of Town
by jeff.faux •
The global punditry is all a twitter this week with the prospect of Donald Trump going to Davos – the chic winter gathering place of the world’s rich and powerful. The media narrative is that this will be a titanic…
Trump: No Isolationist
by jeff.faux •
Denis MacShane is correct to criticize the U.S. pullout of UNESCO as unproductive (The Globalist, October 25, 2017). But to label Trump an “isolationist” who is taking the United States back to the 1920s is a misdiagnosis. Given Trump’s manic instability…
How Our Foreign Policy Helps Create Our Immigration Crisis
by jeff.faux •
As his price for not deporting roughly 800,000 “Dreamers” who came to this country as children, Donald Trump demands an escalated war against immigrants, topped by his nightmarish 2,000-mile wall along the Mexican border. Democrats have said no. Whether or not…
A Short History of American Empire
by jeff.faux •
Review of The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the birth of American Empire, by Stephen Kinzer Toward the end of this history of the domestic conflict over U.S. overseas expansion at the close of the nineteenth century, Stephen…