Vlad Jecan on Aug 10th 2009 Current Conflicts
The United States have failed to see the evolution of warfare and the political reality of Iraq and Afghanistan before troops moved in. Every war brings changes to society and these particular armed conflicts facilitated the rise of the private military industry. Once the private military firms deployed armed personnel, a series of legal and ethical issues appear: is the employee to be regarded as a soldier or as a civilian? Can private military firms use lethal force? Under what circumstances? If abuses are committed, is the company to be held responsible since it provided weapons and ammunition?
The government failed to provide quick and concise solutions to these problems leading to serious human rights abuses.
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Vlad Jecan on Jan 21st 2009 Current Conflicts
Some political observers have declared that the election of the first black president signals a new era of post-racial politics in the United States — but the data show otherwise, two MIT researchers say. Through careful analysis of 2008 exit-poll data, the researchers found that Barack Obama won the election precisely because of his race, most significantly because of his appeal among black voters who turned out in record numbers.
“Ironically, the candidate whom commentators lionized for ending America’s debilitating racial divisions won the election on the basis of increasingly distinct white and nonwhite voting patterns,” wrote the two researchers — Charles H. Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Political Science at MIT; and Stephen Ansolabehere, professor of political science at MIT — in the current issue of Boston Review. “Racial polarization in American voting patterns was the highest it has been since the 1984 election.”
Despite many predictions, Obama did not “provoke a backlash among white voters,” according to research compiled by Stewart and Ansolabehere. However, the percentage of blacks voting Democratic rose from 88 percent in 2004 to 95 percent in 2008. Hispanic voters — who had been drifting into the Republican camp in recent years — heavily favored Obama; Hispanics voting Democratic rose from 56 percent to 67 percent. “This additional support among nonwhites proved decisive,” Stewart and Ansolabehere concluded.
Indeed, “had blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004, McCain would have won,” they wrote.
This is not to say that Democrats lost ground among white voters; the Democrats did gain white votes but only a modest 3 million. “John McCain, on the other hand, received 2.3 million fewer votes than did George W. Bush in 2004. Most of this loss, 1.5 million votes, came from the net defection of blacks and Hispanics who voted Republican four years earlier; by comparison he lost ‘only’ 1.4 million white voters. Thus, Obama gained not only by bringing new minority voters into the electorate, but also by converting minority voters who had previously been in the GOP stable,” the researchers wrote.
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