What Westerners call the West or Western civilization is a geopolitical space that emerged in the 16th century and expanded continuously until the 20th century. On the eve of World War I, about 90 percent of the globe was Western or Western-dominated: Europe, Russia, the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and much of Asia (with the partial exceptions of Japan and China).[Read More...]
The collapse of the short-lived Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid validates the argument that the political crisis in Israel was not entirely instigated and sustained by former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Bennett’s coalition government consisted of eight parties, welding together arguably one of the oddest coalitions in the tumultuous history of Israeli politics. The mishmash cabinet[Read More...]
Priti Gulati Cox, It’s Time, ink on vellum, embroidery. See closeups of individual images here. On Juneteenth weekend, tens of thousands of people walked up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol as part of the epically titled Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. (Priti Gulati Cox and I traveled via Amtrak[Read More...]
Trump’s appointments reveal the frightening far-reaching power of a corrupt president. Grasping the enormity, the breadth, and the depth of “Trump corruption” is rather astonishing. Most news junkies and politicos alike are quite familiar with the in-your-face looting, skimming, and self-dealing of the president and his family members. Beyond the family corruption, there is a much larger world of Trump[Read More...]
It’s hot and hazy as July rolls around. Growing up in the Baltimore swamplands, we used to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Meaning that the humidity was harder to deal with than the feverish temperatures. At some point in my family, the phrase morphed into: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.” At the time, we meant[Read More...]
Sri Lankan crisis is likely to remain classic illustration for a long time of how “power-holders” can be forced to give in to aggressive command displayed by common people’s “power”. When people decide and choose to exercise their power as they have in Colombo, all “strategies” of curbing the same can burst like bubbles. There is a limit to which[Read More...]
“As oil and gas prices rise so does the price of artificial chemical fertilisers – the lynch-pin of industrial agriculture’s claims to be ‘efficient’. In the UK, the price of nitrogen fertiliser has doubled over the past year to around £330 per tonne. With oil currently at over $130 a barrel and with OPEC warning it could reach $200 by[Read More...]
This week President Biden will pay a visit to Saudi Arabia. As it has been widely pointed out, this marks a shift for the president who came into office calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state for its many human rights violations. The kingdom’s reputation in the U.S. media has shadowy since the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi[Read More...]
“The American Century Is Over.” So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper’s Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: “What’s Next?” What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and two decades after the Global[Read More...]
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has described Boris Johnson’s political tenure as “…one of the most shameful sagas in the history of British politics …[who] presided over a government defined by lies, sleaze, an utter lack of integrity, unlawful behaviour, incompetence, and a damaging culture of impunity in public office”. Sadiq further said that “At every turn, his government has sought[Read More...]
