Ryan Mernin

Ted Cruz and John Kasich have formed a temporary alliance in a last ditch effort to prevent Trump from reaching a majority of delegates before the Republican convention. Cruz has agreed not to campaign in Oregon and New Mexico, states where…
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The benefits of the corporatised university go to two groups of people: high level administrators and corporate investors. Professors, whether full time or adjunct, are overworked and underpaid, and students are made to pick up the tab for…
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U.S. foreign policy has slipped into a bombing malaise. The current strategy against ISIS of intermittent airstrikes with very little idea of which resistance groups we’re meant to be supporting on the ground hasn't been working. But every…
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Democratic Party superdelegates were invented for times like these. In 1980, after Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid to Reagan, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) did some soul-purging. Senator Edward Kennedy had challenged Carter…
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One cannot be blamed for assuming that the children of right wing crazies will grow up to be like their parents. The Bush’s have provided the archetype, even if Jeb does appear to be the sympathetic, unloved runt of the litter. It was the…
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Since early March there has been little to no coverage by any major newspaper of Hillary Clinton’s as of yet unreleased speeches to Wall Street. For those who have forgotten, Clinton gave three speeches to Goldman Sachs back in 2013, for…
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Some time ago in the delicate youth of this blog, I wrote an article about “astroturfing”, the process by which big corporations use phony activist organizations to secretly promote their interests. In it I gave as an example California’s…
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When John Milton’s Satan wakes up in hell, after having been cast out of heaven by God, he discovers next to him his loyal Beelzebub, King of Flies, “One next himself in power, and next in crime,” boiling alive in their new atmosphere.…
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Al Jazeera America, the ambitious U.S. branch of the state-funded Quatari news network, is closing down. Only three years old, the TV network and associated news website became relative safe havens from the mad rush of American corporate…
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For fourteen years, beginning in 2001, the U.S. fought a war on two fronts in Afghanistan: one to destroy the Taliban, the other to destroy the world’s largest supply of opium. In the first case, it was initially successful in helping…
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During last Thursday’s Democratic debate in Milwaukee, the two candidates briefly descended into an argument over a man who seems to cast shadows on all corners of global politics: Henry Kissinger. After pointing out Clinton’s friendship…
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In the oft-forgotten 1993 hit The Good Son, Macaulay Culkin stars as Henry Evans, a bright-eyed 12-year-old evildoer prone to torturing animals, orchestrating highway pileups, and luring his younger sister out onto to thin ice. In the end…
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In 2010 Jane Mayer wrote an article in the New Yorker about Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers and owners of Koch Industries who, by creating an expansive network of SuperPAC’s and nonprofits, have become the shameless…
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“Collateral damage”, “War on Terror”, or the much more pleasant “National Conversation”: that they cannot be digested or broken down is what has made these euphemisms so useful for politicians. They should be vomited out of our…
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Welcome to Paradigms of Power, a new blog by the McGill International Review. My name is Ryan Mernin, I’m an English Literature student here at McGill, and I’ll be your host for as long as you’ll have me. The aim of this blog is to make an…
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