Chrystia Freeland Quotes
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Sprawling, earnest, and ambitious - its modest title is 'The Future' - Al Gore's new book embodies both the virtues and the flaws of its author. But those hardy souls who slog past the weaknesses will be rewarded by a book that is brave, original and often fun.
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The progressives like to talk a lot about poverty - and you should. However, it's the guys in the middle who have really been hurt by the global economy . The people at the bottom have been holding on to their jobs quite well, actually.
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If the Tea Party gets its way, there will be less government - which is great for the elites. They don't need the government.
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The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world. Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.
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Corporations are not employment agencies, and judging them by that metric is a mistake.
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The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.
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In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.
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Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.
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Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.
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One consequence of Russia's klepto-capitalist model is the growing appeal of government jobs, with their lucrative opportunities for payoffs.
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The chief job of foreign policy today is helping to figure out the rules for the global economy and defending each nation's interests within it.
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When Canada works to counter extremism and terrorism, particularly in the Middle East, Israel is always a natural partner and a close ally.
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Urbanites may picture farmers as hip heritage-pig breeders returning to the land, or a struggling rural underclass waging a doomed battle to hang on to their patrimony as agribusiness moves in. But these stereotypes are misleading.
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Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.
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Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.
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I am a very strong supporter of our government's view that it is important to engage with all countries around the world - very much including Russia.
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Assad is not the greatest ally to have.
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Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it - there is a reason economists talk about 'the curse of oil,' and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.
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The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.
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Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.
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This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.
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Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.
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One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.
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A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.