Bøker av Myhre Jeff

In the first half of 2012, Willard Mitt Romney secured the Republican nomination for the presidency. The fight was largely a foregone conclusion because Mr. Romney had the money and organization and because the hard right was divided among a few candidates. Also, this was a time of political upheaval in Wisconsin, an American state not noted for upheavals of any kind. The hard right governor had taken away collective bargaining from public sector unions, and they fought back forcing recall elections. Although the governor kept his job, the unions had prepared for the November general election, much to Mr. Obamäs advantage. In addition, this period saw the Syrian Civil War escalate. The countries in the periphery of the eurozone suffered from German mandated austerity, especially Greece. Iran¿s nuclear ambitions continued to cause trouble with the big powers in the world, and France elected a socialist president, Francois Hollande, the first socialist in a great many years.

The year 2010 proved pivotal in American politics. It began with the president signing the Affordable Care Act, giving Americans universal (or so it was claimed) access to health insurance ¿ something proposed first by Teddy Roosevelt a century earlier. It ended with a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives thanks to the reactionary Tea Party faction and corporate money spent to stir up the rightist grass roots. Outside the US, Britain elected a coalition government of Tories and Liberal Democrats, the latter's first taste of power in decades. Greece continued to sink under the weight of its debts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-Nam continued to waste lives and money, and Wikileaks released thousands of largely irrelevant classified documents that still managed to upset the powers that be.