The Impact Of Covid-19 On The Bangladesh Economy
“COVID-19 is likely to have significant impacts on the Bangladeshi economy because it comes at a time when several major indicators of the economy were already in a downward slope. Before the pandemic, economists warned that the country’s “macro economy was under pressure more than at any time in the past ten years.” The government’s denial of […]
How the US is mishandling the pandemic crisis
March 26, 2020, marked the day from which the United States officially began to see more coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world, surpassing China and Italy. This disaster in the making was, unfortunately, predictable. It was a train wreck waiting to happen. Since the beginning of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have […]
The US Electoral College is flawed
“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.“ ~President Abraham Lincoln The U.S. presidential electoral process is a very lengthy, rigorous and costly one. With a diverse population of over 327 million and a multitude of racial, social, cultural and religious backgrounds, an election essentially becomes a methodical process of inclusion, collecting as many demographic and […]
No one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences
So wrote Albert Camus in his great novel, The Plague, and so we are learning its truth as we cower in our shelters from the Coronavirus, spreading the Covid-19 influenza that grips most of the world. We are certainly not free. I and my friends and family, as well as most Americans and it seems a […]
As the Afghan peace process gets underway, reality eclipses magic
Two weeks ago, as we awaited the signing of the US-Taliban Agreement which intends to ignite a peace process in Afghanistan, I wrote of the magic realism in general of US foreign policy and specifically in the agreement about to be signed. The agreement was signed on February 29 in Doha and is now available […]
‘Our Democracy Is In Danger’: Muslims In India Say Police Target Them With Violence
‘Our Democracy Is In Danger’: Muslims In India Say Police Target Them With Violence When Aysha Renna decided last month to demonstrate against India’s new citizenship law on her college campus in New Delhi, it never occurred to her that doing so might be dangerous. Across India, students at other universities were organizing similar rallies […]
Magical Realism in American Foreign Policy
This theme struck me when I attended last week a discussion among three highly respected experts at a Washington think tank of the much-hyped agreement between the US and the Taliban to test the outline of a peace process for Afghanistan with a week-long cessation of violence. This is said to be the much longed-for […]
Trump’s Muslim ban: Iranian-Americans are treated like the enemy within by Azadeh Shahshahani
“I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you,” US President Donald Trump said on Twitter in Farsi last month, presumably talking to the Iranian people. My reaction as an Iranian-American was one of sheer rage. This is a president who issued a ban targeting Iran and other […]
Democratic backsliding and the information battle
Continued backsliding of democracy for more than a decade, globally and domestically, has raised the question—where are we heading? The question, for some, is an innocuous query, while for others it is the first step towards devising a strategy to halt the downward spiral. The democratic backsliding, which began at least 13 years ago, is […]
Will the Democrats follow British Labour down the revolutionary rat hole?
It would seem rational for the Democratic Party in the United States to look carefully at the political dynamics as well as the outcome of the December 12 election in the UK. On the surface, the two elections might look quite dissimilar. The British election was almost existential in nature, given that the primary (really […]