Introduction

Greetings Civic Initiative program alumni. We hope to find you well in your respective countries around the world, and hope to give you an update on what is going on in American politics as well as what is going on here in the Civic Initiative in our lovely town of Amherst. (I know you all miss it!)

Here at the Civic Initiative, we have recently received a new grant for a group of students from Pakistan to learn about American Foreign Policy for four weeks in Amherst, South Carolina, and Washington, DC. We have also recently hired nine new civic fellows to replace those that have graduated and moved on to bigger and better things.

The focus of American Politics over the last few days has shifted from health care, Wall Street reform, and unemployment to the weather. Washington DC has gotten over three feet of snow over the last few days, and the snow has hit everyone from the New England to New York City to Chicago. The process of governing will move even slower than usual as the cities try to dig themselves out of these storms.

While health care reform discussion seems to have stalled some what in the last weeks, discussion has continued between Obama and the two houses of congress on job growth to improve our nation’s unemployment rate, now 9.7%.

As far as political mobilization and movement is concerned in America, the news this weekend was dominated by the “tea party convention” in Nashville, Tennessee. The “tea partiers” are a group of fiscal conservatives who first joined together to oppose the stimulus package of last spring and possess a strong distrust of the intentions of president Obama. Only 600 people attended, paying 500 dollars each to see the convention, headlined by Sarah Palin.

Democrats continue to worry about their chances in the midterm elections in November of this year. National approval ratings of the president and the democratic congress have been slowly declining for months, and they are looking for a way to bounce back. As Health Care reform talks have stalled, the democrats have moved their focus to job growth as an opportunity to show bipartisanship and actually pass a bill.

Internationally, America’s focus remains on the conflict in Afghanistan president Obama has committed to completing. At a recent U.N. meeting in London on Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai introduced a plan to reintegrate members of the Taliban in to law abiding society if they promise to renounce violence, and take full responsibility of security within it’s borders within five years. This could mean that the United States could begin to transition troops out of Afghanistan by July of 2011. Despite the fraud-filled election of the previous year, UN leaders expressed optimism that Afghanistan was making slow progress towards peace and stability.

As the spring progresses we will continue to write updates on the goings on of the Civic Initiative and politics in America. We hope to find you all happy and healthy in your respective countries…