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Posts (22)


Transatlantic Left Voices

Sending Arms or Twisting Arms: The U.S. Role in the Ukraine War

U.S. policy on Ukraine is not without divisions—within the administration, in Congress, and in the population at large. So far, however, these differences of opinion have had no major impact on administration policy. If the war continues into the 2024 election season, however, the Biden administration will face increasing calls from Republicans and a Republican voter base to reduce support for Kyiv.

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Transatlantic Left Voices

Biden at One

The Biden administration’s first year was a major course correction after Trump. But U.S. foreign policy needs transformation, not restoration. In its first year in office, the Biden administration has done a reasonably good job of reversing the idiocies of its predecessor. It has failed, however, to establish a just, peaceful and sustainable new U.S. […]

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Transatlantic Left Voices

Navigating the Two-Party System

Unity in opposition to Trump is very different from unity of purpose within the Democratic Party, which at this point is the primary vehicle for thwarting a Republican Party that grows ever more extreme by the day. Progressives who work inside the Democratic Party recognize that President Joe Biden is more amenable to their goals than was Trump. That does not, however, make the Democrats the left.

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Global Solidarity

Beyond Competition: Why the BRI and the B3W Can’t and Shouldn’t Be Considered Rivals

Competition between the BRI and B3W infrastructure investment initiatives will be waged through the corporations and financial institutions of the world’s most powerful nations, and those are the interests who will most directly benefit from that competition. Those who lose out, on the other hand, are likely to be the workers, adjacent communities, and landscapes who will be the first to be squeezed when the competition gets tough. If we take the G7 at their word that the B3W aims to close the infrastructure funding gap while improving the quality and social and environmental impacts of projects, then continuing to portray it in terms of competition with China will undermine its stated goals. Working by example and in parallel, instead of working against China is a more promising way forward.

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Transatlantic Left Voices

Build Back Better: The Fight for Biden’s Legislative Agenda

In the next month, a bitterly divided US Congress is poised to determine not only the fate of the core of the Biden Administration’s domestic agenda, but whether the US will finally begin to move away from the era of market fundamentalism and into a new period of reconstruction. The outcome is also likely to have significant effect on whether Democrats consolidate or lose their hold on the Congress in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. The legislative scramble centers around two major pieces of legislation: a bipartisan infrastructure bill and what the administration dubs the “Build Back Better” budget reconciliation package. Both are slated to be voted on before the end of the fiscal year on September 30.

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Transatlantic Left Voices

Multilateralism and the Biden Administration

The Biden administration faces a number of obstacles to realizing even its modest multilateral restoration, including the pandemic, endemic racial inequality, political polarization, and rising poverty rates as well as challenges within the multilateral project itself. But on global health and environmentalism, progressives will have an opportunity to push U.S. policy in the direction of greater equitable international engagement.

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Global Solidarity

On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era

On the eve of the inauguration of Joe Biden, we at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York commissioned a series of reports on key political issues. We wanted to hear how experts feel the Biden administration might address these issues and better understand how receptive the incoming administration is to a progressive agenda, and know on what issues progressives will have to continue to put pressure. You can read the complete series below.

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Global SolidarityDossiersThe Biden Era

The Changing Same: Biden and the False Promise of a “Return to Normalcy”

This article is part of our series “On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era.” Download a PDF of the full series here. The Liberal Prescription From the modern Liberal perspective, the presidency of Donald Trump was a gross departure from the norms of the American democratic tradition and a deep stain on the […]

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesClimate JusticeDossiersThe Biden Era

How to Design and Pay for a Green New Deal

There is a genuine acknowledgement by the political establishment that more economic relief is needed. They have come to recognize the need for more in addition to the CARES Act that was signed into law in March 2020 and the most recent Pandemic Relief Bill. It is likely that the Biden administration will boost economic relief while it attempts the herculean task of distributing 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in its first 100 days. However, all of this is simply temporary relief that keeps the economy from slipping into a Great Depression. What it does not do is constitute any structural remedy to the deeper socio-economic and ecological problems that we face. For that we must look elsewhere.

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Global SolidarityUnited NationsDossiersThe Biden Era

Biden’s Nuclear Agenda

Biden is no nuclear weapons abolitionist. What arms control and disarmament measures he may wish to pursue will be constrained by the need to spend of his political capital on defending and preserving U.S. constitutional democracy from the attacks of right-wing white supremacist forces, containing the COVID-19 pandemic and revitalizing the country’s devastated economy.

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

U.S.-China: Progressive Internationalist Strategy Under Biden

A progressive internationalist alternative to the escalating U.S.–China conflict requires a transformation of the global system as a whole. To succeed, progressive forces in the U.S. must continue on a path toward taking political power, but we must also significantly strengthen our thinking on foreign affairs. The internationalist dimension of progressive politics remains worryingly weak and has not yet produced a coherent approach to a wide range of difficult questions concerning China that are unfamiliar even to most internationalists in the U.S.

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

Bidenfreude: COVID-19 in the Post-Trump U.S.

But this year’s COVID-19 outbreak alerted the world of a nation’s identity turned inside-out like a smelly sock. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the U.S.’s nearly as fast a fall, however part of a longue durée decline from the its peak as a center of capital, should flabbergast even the sharpest of radical observers. For even a Biden administration may prove no prophylaxis for the COVID-19 outbreak and American decline overall.

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Transatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

The High Stakes of Defending Public Education

This article is part of our series “On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era.” Download a PDF of the full series here. The past four years of the Trump administration’s multi-pronged attempts to hollow out public education—through changes in the tax code, the expansion of markets through choice policies and voucher-schemes, attacks on […]

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

More Military Money, More Problems

An organized left must take stock of strategic cleavages to push for military spending cuts in the near term, and lay the groundwork for major long-term transformation of U.S. policies away from militarism and imperial domination of the rest of the world, and toward social and ecological repair.

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Transatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

A Delicate Balance: The U.S.-Russia Relationship Under Biden

This article is part of our series “On the Precipice: A Progressive Agenda in the Biden Era.” Download a PDF of the full series here. Throughout the Trump years, the specter of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has haunted the American political discourse. In the aftermath of Russia’s well-documented interference campaign in the 2016 election—which […]

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

Pushing Biden to Address the U.S.’s Housing Crisis

Biden’s approach to the housing crisis will depend on the ability of an energized mass movement centered around racial and economic justice to put pressure on the Democratic party to take bold steps like forgiving rent debt, holding leaders accountable, or passing the Green New Deal for public housing.

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Transatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

Class Struggle and Solidarity: What Labor Still Needs Under Biden

The incoming Biden administration projects it’s desire to be the most labor-friendly presidential administration ever, but without organized public pressure, they quickly will be mired in merely reversing problems created in the last four years without any plan to comprehensively address the structural losses of the last 40 years. This kind of piecemeal approach will not be enough to advance the change working people need. A better future for workers and labor is possible, but only if we demand it.

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Transatlantic Left VoicesClimate JusticeDossiersThe Biden Era

Demand Everything: Joe Biden and the Portal to a Green New Deal

The defeat of the climate-denier-in-chief has opened up a chance of survival against climate chaos. Biden’s first months will determine just what the odds are. Movements can leverage even small concrete victories in this critical window to widen the possibility for wholescale economic and political transformation. For many communities failure in the next few years is not an option. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, the world is at the crossroads of socialism or barbarism. And in the case of the climate crisis, it is ecological justice or death.

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Global SolidarityTransatlantic Left VoicesDossiersThe Biden Era

Hopes for New Beginnings on U.S. Trade Policy

President-elect Joe Biden is weighing his options on trade policy. He has stated that his first priorities will be to address the COVID-19 pandemic and start to rebuild the fragile U.S. economy. He is facing pressure from free traders in both parties who are eager to get back to business as usual. But it is a positive sign that he has pledged not to jump into any new trade deals.

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United NationsDossiersThe Biden Era

The Biden Administration and Trump’s Ashes: A UN Phoenix?

What does the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global economic meltdown mean for the United Nations? In the smoldering ashes of the Trump administration’s hyper-nationalist foreign policy, will the UN be around to celebrate its centenary?

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Global Solidarity

At the End of the Week

On Tuesday, November 3, the eligible citizens of the United States elected a new president, representatives, senators and state legislators. This is probably the most important election in decades. Today, on Friday, a lot of the results remain inconclusive. Therefore, it is too early to give a comprehensive analysis. But, of course, the team of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office has a lot of thoughts on our minds that we’d like to share with our audience. So we asked every member of the team: What is on your mind this morning?

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Transatlantic Left Voices

Joe Biden: A winner as Loser

Trump may be “dead” but Trumpism is not – unless and until its social root causes are not dealt with. To do that, it would take at least a program as bold as the socialist Green New Deal for social-ecological transformation.

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