Branko Marcetic

2 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Branko Marcetic

Over the past decade or so, the Green New Deal became a useful punching bag for the Republican Party. This policy agenda, associated with progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was much caricatured as a sure path to a bleak future in which government bureaucrats force you to give up your car and drink out of soggy paper straws.

2 weeks ago | jacobin.com | Branko Marcetic

As with many presidents, how you evaluate Donald Trump’s first hundred days in his second term all depends on how seriously you take his rhetoric. With Trump, there are the ostensible goals that you would have heard on the campaign trail, in public remarks, and in press releases and other official communiques. And then there are the goals being pursued by the various ideologues and profiteers who have latched onto his presidency to advance their own pet interests.

2 weeks ago | jacobin.com | Branko Marcetic

Donald Trump embarked on a trade war with China expecting it might cause a recession that would throw Americans out of work, warning that it would cause “some pain” — despite public surveys showing Americans are afraid of what the tariffs would do to their personal finances, and even as they are already causing job losses and economic suffering for workers and farmers. None of it seemed to have any impact on the president’s decision-making.

2 weeks ago | rsn.org | Branko Marcetic

Great powers often decline through self-inflicted blows. By starting a trade war he was unable to follow through on, Donald Trump may have just dealt a severe one to the United States. Often in history, there’s no blow struck by the enemies of a great power more fatal than the one it inflicts on itself.

2 weeks ago | znetwork.org | Branko Marcetic

Often in history, there’s no blow struck by the enemies of a great power more fatal than the one it inflicts on itself. The British invasion of Egypt in 1956, for example, and the ensuing pushback, walkback, humiliation, and loss of prestige for the country, came to be viewed as the own goal that firmly ended the United Kingdom’s claim to being a global empire.