Dans cet article, je vous propose quelques points importants du programme de civilisation anglaise en prépa ECG. Ils vous permettront de briller aux concours car en effet, il ne faut pas oublier que la civilisation peut être chronophage, elle est pourtant essentielle tant pour les écrits que pour les oraux. Voici quelques exemples sur des thèmes importants du programme :
Billionaires
In 2018, Americans donated $428billion but the actual number of Americans giving to charity has been falling for almost fifteen years. Why? Because the total share of donations coming from the ultra-rich is skyrocketing. It is the symbol of wealth inequality: the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150m adults.
Big philanthropy goes way beyond basic charity that you and I do. It’s a whole system of financial tools and products that help the rich give away their cash in ways that benefit them.
Philanthropy doesn’t mean donations to traditional charities, it also included gifts to so-called “civic groups” which promote social or political causes while letting you keep your donations anonymous and it helps billionaires change the world however, they want.
One of big philanthropy’s most insidious benefits is “reputation cleaning”. For instance, the Sackler family, founders of Purdue Pharmaceuticals who made billions off the opioid epidemic, slapped their name on every popular museum that you can think of. It created a smokescreen because the arts donations are where people who report for the media live, where influential academics live and where government regulators live. The result is that nobody talked about this crisis during years and the Sackler family made a lot of money by killing people.
Affirmative Action
In America, affirmative action began in 1961 as a government initiative to offer opportunities to historically excluded groups.
In the 1970s, University of California had a quota of spots reserved for black applicants, but when a white guy named Allan Bakke got rejected from the medical school, he sued University of California claiming he was rejected because of the quota for black students
Allan Bakke took his case to the Supreme Court and won, making racial quotas unconstitutional in the US.
In 2008, Abigail Fisher sued University of Texas after the school rejected her. She claims in favor of minority applicants with lower grades and test scores. She wanted to do the same as Allan Bakke. The fact is when Abigail Fisher applied to UT Austin, the State of Texas had this policy: any graduating senior in the top 10% of their class automatically got into the UT school system. But Abigail Fisher didn’t make the cut because she was in the top 12% so that put her up for holistic review.
It’s true there were other students who got in with lower grades and scores than Abigail Fisher but according to ProPublica, only five of those students were black or Latino and 42 were white.
In 2014, a group of Asian-American students suing Harvard accusing the school of unfairly giving preference to other racial minorities which is pretty astonishing when you know that Asian are only 6% of the population and represents 22% of Harvard’s admitted class.
Immigration
Obama prioritized only deporting people with criminal records. Once Trump took office, he immediately reversed course and in two years you see a massive jump in arrests. Under President Trump, arrests are up 42% compared to under president Obama. And while criminal arrests were about the same, non-criminal arrests saw a 333% spike under President Trump.
Much of this brutal crackdown has been at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One of ICE’s main functions is to detain and deport illegal immigrants. ICE is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that was created in response to 9/11, to protect Americans from terrorism. Before that, immigration enforcement was handled by the Department of Justice. Before that, the Department of Labor. We went from immigrants are coming to work to immigrants are going to kill you
Since 1980, the immigrants share of the US population has more than doubled and at the same time the violent crime rate has decreased by more than a third (according to the Marshall Project; University of Buffalo).
Abortion Laws
According to Gallup in 2015, 20% of American told that abortion should be totally illegal.
Since 2010, new state laws have contributed to the closure of about 70 abortion clinics and some as Mississippi is down to one abortion clinic. This phenomenon was created by the Texas House Bill 2.
The Texas House Bill 2 requires abortion clinics to meet the same building standards as outpatient surgical centers, which sound great, but these requirements are very difficult to fulfill and for instance Texas shut down an abortion clinic for having walls too close together. In 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was chosen by president Trump to be a member of the Supreme Court. He is a Conservative which mean that his political party is the one who has the majority right now. That why this summer the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, casting aside 49 years of precedent that began with Roe v. Wade.
