By: Paul Grenier Given the recent near-hysteria over Russia’s alleged hacking of US political email traffic, it is difficult to imagine a US-Russia relationship established upon a peaceful footing—or, to put it another way, a relationship so stable and constructive that it no longer would depend on the vagaries of changing political personalities. Let’s look at it first through the …

In My Life: A Provincial’s Story, published in 1896, Chekhov has a particularly devastating portrait of the muzhiks, the Russian peasants, that in its own way demonstrates all the intractability of the Russian social and political condition throughout history. “They were mostly nervous, irritated, insulted people; they were people of suppressed imagination, ignorant, with a poor, dull outlook, with ever …

The WEST should become the North, with RUSSIA as an essential part The “West,” as we have known it, is dying before our eyes. The liberal institutional, economic and intellectual carapace which (under both “right-wing” and “left-wing” governments) has enclosed and restricted Western thought since the end of the Cold War is now disintegrating. It has been corroded by a …

“To a degree, the West is reaping what it sowed from a major strategic blunder in the aftermath of 9/11 —  the entire concept of a war on technique, that is, terrorism. Defining the enemy, when fighting a concept, was impossible.” In recent months, terrorism has not just become more lethal and more common, but more widespread also. The death …

The Oxfam report “An Economy for the 1%,” which was released in January this year, showed that the richest 1% of the world have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest. Although world leaders have increasingly talked …

On October 21, South African government shocked the world with the announcement that it is pulling out of the International Criminal Court because the institution was exclusively prosecuting Africans and ignoring Western injustices done to the people of Africa. South African Justice Minister Michael Masutha said that the ICC was “inhibiting South Africa’s ability to honour its obligations relating to …

On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump managed to pull the biggest upset in US politics by tapping successfully into the anger of white voters and appealing to the lowest inclinations of people in a manner that would have probably impressed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels himself. Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the US …

Two years ago, I argued that America was suffering from political decay. The country’s constitutional system of checks and balances, combined with partisan polarization and the rise of well-financed interest groups, had combined to yield “vetocracy,” a situation in which it was easier to stop government from doing things than it was to use government to promote the common good.  …

by Joseph Stiglitz There have been around 70 currency unions which have broken up since the end of the Second World War. More has been written about euro than all the other currency unions put together primarily is because it is an unnatural creation. It was a step toward political union rather than a natural consequence of a political union …

Iván Martén and Philip Whittaker In the realm of global economy, the study of oil prices and its link with economic growth has always been an interesting subject. Both have been like distant cousins who disliked each other as they, traditionally, have been inversely related to each other; a fall in one meant the rise in the other. The received …