The coming week will see an enormous festival of US alliances with and in Australia, with the biggest “Talisman Sabre” exercise ever, and a visit to Australia by the US Secretaries of State and Defence for the annual “AUSMIN” talks. All of this has been made more glamorous by the arrival of a new US Continue reading »
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The fast rise in global warming manifested by current extreme weather events betray a dangerous underestimation of the Earth’s liveable climate, while governments ignore climate science, claim to set limits on domestic emissions but allow major export of fossil fuels and emissions worldwide on a scale threatening life on Earth. With current policies there appear Continue reading »
Any activity trying to create an inherent ‘goodness’ about engaging in warfare is in no way an admirable activity. Creating game-play interactives of real-life devastation of civilians that invite children to ‘compete’ is reprehensible. Doing so with no realistic acknowledgement of the human cost is utterly, deeply contemptible. Andrew Fraser’s very noteworthy article recently in Continue reading »
Peter Dutton incessantly declaims about the cost of living crisis, blaming the government. But what would he do instead? First, we need to remember that the Albanese Government inherited the cost of living crisis. Indeed, like Dutton does now, Labor similarly complained about the cost of living crisis when they were in Opposition. The difference Continue reading »
Accountancies have bolted on non-accounting services in the same way pharmacists dispensers bolted on front-of-house sales of cosmetics and liquorice. Like tinkers of old they knocked on the doors of organisations: ‘Any jobs we can do for you?’ Craftsman: Definition. One proficient in a craft or trade. (One who knows how to fix their stuff Continue reading »
Some politicians have decided to do what is better for them and their re-election and position rather than what’s good for Australia. They think the smart thing to do is trash the whole idea of the Voice. Ego, power, position and privilege have nothing to do with the Voice. It has to do with Australian Continue reading »
Two years ago a group of us gathered beneath the pandanus and fig trees in pouring rain near Main Beach, Byron Bay NSW. We had come together to commemorate Julian Assange’s 50th birthday. As we discussed the latest developments in Julian’s situation up to that point in time, we didn’t think we would have to Continue reading »
Since the Lowy Institute’s first Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey was published in 2021, Australia’s relations with China have undergone significant upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic, the rupture in Australia–China relations, the election of a Labor government and the turbulence in both countries accompanying their re-openings after their COVID-19 lockdowns has placed Chinese Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 23, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
COVID
First major survey of doctors with Long Covid reveals debilitating impact on health, life and work
They’ll never stop trying Of course: Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program. In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement. Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program. It’s in the DNA of the Republican Party to end the safety net. It just is. Trump may have temporarily taken it off the table but it will be right back on the minute he leaves the scene. I have never believed for a minute that this was a permanent change of ideology.
Meadows was in the thick of everything in Trump’s last year in office from the COVID mess to the Big Lie and he’s been MIA in the media since it was over. He wrote his book, which was full of some colorful details that made Trump angry and he provided a lot of emails to the January 6th Committee before clamming up. But nobody knows to what extent he’s been cooperating with the Special Counsel, not even Trump. According to reports Trumpworld is very nervous about that. According to the Washington Post, the Special Counsel is interested in him but it doesn’t sound to me as if he’s cooperating: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
Draw your own conclusions Anne Applebaum responds (h/t Laffy) to the Russian missile attack overnight on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa: “I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.” “Russian missiles badly damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, sparking outrage and prompting President Zelensky to vow retaliation,” CNN reports: Odesa is a key cultural center, and has long links with Russia. It was founded under Catherine the Great and was once Russia’s second most important port. Euromaidan Press: During the night of 23 July, Russia launched five types of missiles at the south-Ukrainian port city of Odesa, destroying port infrastructure, residential buildings, and the largest Orthodox Church in the city, Operative Command South said.
In this Doctor Who multimedia event update, Doom's (Sooz Kempner) Day is already off to a rough start, and there are still 19 hours to go.
Why small is still beautiful Tripp Narup ran for and lost a state senate seat in red, red Iowa. As a Democrat. Because the last time he’d voted in Iowa’s 9th district there was no one for him to vote for. Narup tells Salon’s Kirk Swearingen that only 17% of voters are registered Democrats in that southwest Iowa district. He tells Salon: After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.
Americans might want a third party, but the latest attempt from No Labels offers more of the same corporate politics with even more billionaire control.
That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting — indeed, it is under obligation to do so — from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form. But for […]
Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need more cheaply.
The post Senate Committee Passes Potential First Step to Radically Lower Drug Prices appeared first on The Intercept.
Especially when it comes to migrant workers I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.
The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them: Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote. As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
YOUTH Leading The World Coffs Harbour, an OzGREEN program, convened its 2023 congress at The Link, Toormina, on Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 July, with delegates aged 12-25 years. Hosted by co-founder of OzGREEN, Sue Lennox AM, who founded YLTW, the two-day event connects young people locally and globally to help mobilise the next generation...
The post Young people plan actions to make shifts in the world appeared first on News Of The Area.