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Showing posts with the label dictatorships

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Trump “was elected fair and square,” states Hamid Dabashi. I disagree. He was not. Neither were the ones before him. Leaving aside the electoral college’s role, how is it fair election when just to be a mayor of New York you need to be backed by millionaires and billionaires? The power of the different lobbies with heavy money, of individuals and corporations, and the corporate media shapes many outcomes. Money matters a great deal in elections,” Adam Bonica from Standford University said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they k
This is from 2017. The motives behind the backing of certain regimes are scantly mentioned though. The article does not go beyond description. The projection of power and support of authoritarian regimes for what reaons?  There is not mention of domestic power structures and power relations in the U.S. itself. No mention at all of the ideological (cultural) hegemony: the Americanisation of the globe require military power to back it up. Primacy is a preponderance vis-a-vis other powers whether they are subordinate allies or rivals. And economic expansion (investing surplus capital) requires stable and predictable world order. Thus the presence of military bases. The article has more of a moralistic tone than an analytical one. How can one talk about military hegemony without situating it the capitalist context? How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes