Associations Between Psychosocial Well-Being,Stressful Life Events and Emotion-Driven Impulsiveness in European Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Knowing the extent to which mental well-being and stressful life events during adolescence contribute to personality characteristics related to risk-taking...     

Puerto Rico: National security,economic growth and colonialism

Abstract

Puerto Rico's significance for the US state and imperialism has gradually deteriorated. In the context of recent global changes and new developments in the US political economy the logic that justified colonial control cannot be sustained. However, an array of counteracting political and economic forces are conspiring to overcome the altered material and geopolitical conditions that make evident the need for Puerto Rico's decolonization.

Colonialism has given rise to an array of forces that impedes any changes in Puerto Rico's formal political status. Where once the US state, corporate capital and the dominant political forces in Puerto Rico were in relative agreement on sustaining the colonial enterprise, a new constellation of competing forces has emerged. Within Puerto Rico proponents for the status, quo and those who agitate for statehood have reached virtual electoral parity. Monopoly “capital, primarily in Pharmaceuticals, dominates the local economy. However, it is challenged by North American unions and their congressional allies who seek to rescind the lucrative fiscal policies that account for these firms exorbitant profits. Agencies of the US state and congressional committees are at odds on what needs to be done to sustain an unmanageable, increasingly expensive and anachronistic colony.

This essay presents a framework for examining the array of forces and conditions that continue to erode the colonial relation and that explains colonialism's fragility in the current period of global readjustment.     

'Brazil Needs to Change': Change as Iteration and the Iteration of Change in Brazil's 2002 Presidential Election1

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's triumph in Brazil's 2002 presidential election was construed in terms of a promise of radical change against the holders of the status quo . This article argues that in fact a more subtle political game was a stake in the election, a contest over the meaning and limits of change itself. The article examines how the various players – Lula da Silva, outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the PSDB's presidential candidate José Serra – invoked and iterated a discourse of change to define and redefine the political dividing lines that marked out the electoral dispute and attempted to set or fix the distinctions between their political positions.