Speaking of fascism: Former President Trump said Friday for the first time publicly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would bring back a travel ban “even bigger than before,” alluding to his administration’s restrictions on travelers from heavily Muslim countries. The first two bans faced steep challenges in court, but the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2018. That ban barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. President Biden signed an executive order reversing the ban his first week in office. Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told his audience. “Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn’t come here if they had that moniker. They couldn’t come here.” “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers.
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Apparently, he wants to bring fascism faster: “By refusing to speak to the needs of the poor and working people, the Democratic Party helps to facilitate and enable the Trumps and the DeSantises and others. So, you end up with neo-fascism being in some ways dependent on neoliberalism and vice versa. That cycle, going around and around, means that we’re going to end up with fascism sooner or later. Every Democratic administration will just be a caretaker and a postponement for fascism to come. I am profoundly anti-fascist, and therefore I am trying to get at the roots of fascism.” Right, yeah. That makes sense. Sure it does. Meanwhile he’s running as the Green Party candidate and will probably be on the ballot in the swing states. And he could easily siphon off enough votes to put Donald Trump back in the white house. That’s how we’ll get at the roots of fascism? I hope the Democrats take this threat seriously. Quite a few people think that protest votes are their way of sticking it to the powers that be. But the people who will be hurt won’t be those in power.
Catherine Armstrong [1], The University of York, 2023 Introduction The Universal Basic Income (UBI) guarantees every adult an income. The Job Guarantee (JG) provides employment to everyone willing and …
The post Should we favour a Job Guarantee over a Universal Basic Income as a means of achieving a more socially just society? appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.
It isn’t really news that Donald Trump tried to “weaponize” the federal government against his political enemies. After all, he did it right out in the open many, many times. Here’s just one example from October of 2020, before the election: Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough. Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration. “Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!” How about this?
Torres Strait Islanders and the people of Vanuatu pursue legal action to force inept governments to stop climate change. The Great Barrier Reef is at severe risk of disappearing as a result of climate change, which is also causing Earth to wobble on its axis. Torres Strait Islanders v Australian Government In June the ‘Australian Continue reading »
The Wagner coup equation doesn’t compute. It just doesn’t add up. Herbert Wulf gave us a concise summary of the surreal 24 hours that gripped the world. But there are missing pieces of the puzzle that we haven’t been given. And now we learn that the Wagner boss is back in St Petersburg, Russia. In his classic The Art of Continue reading »
When it comes to propaganda the Chinese could learn a thing or two from the Western media. A dictionary definition of propaganda states that it is “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.” In the West, our mainstream media warns us of the dangers Continue reading »
Cardinal George decided I was a potato. Yes, me and all the other talented committed women of the catholic church. My hope is that George Pell’s death spells the end of the misogyny, clericalism and conservatism within the Church and the fallen potatoes finally get a chance to lead a community with wisdom and kindness. Continue reading »
It probably wasn’t the best time to venture near to the Belarus border. But that’s exactly what I did a month or so ago. I spent a couple of weeks with my extended family in a small Polish town called ‘Azmol’ (not it’s real name). And extended the family certainly is, concentrated in a single Continue reading »
Picture the Western media’s outrage if a Russian helicopter gunship went into an occupied Crimean city neighbourhood and began shooting missiles at civilian homes, claiming a militant lived in one. “War crime” would resound. When this occurred in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two weeks ago, killing seven people, including a teenager, it was framed as a Continue reading »
The denialists will never, ever accept climate change The world is burning up right now with temperatures soaring even in places like the arctic. The scientific consensus is that this is caused by climate change and common sense can tell any yokel on the street that this is not normal. However, the wingnuts will never accept this presumably because they either care more about their fossil fuel portfolios or they care more about owning the libs than anything else in this world. Here’s an example from Paul Hindraker (aka Hindrocket for those of you who remember the good old days of blogging.) This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago. At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments: Then there is this: Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members. “I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday. “I do think that there are ebbs and flows.” Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown. She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024. Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Wow. Twenty years. I’ve recently (perhaps not so recently) aged into the demographic who recall events from twenty years back, even though those events occurred in an already reasonably established professional life. That still seems wild to me. I learnt quickly that saying things to the youth like ‘Well, I’m old’ doesn’t yield reassuring denials. […]
As Chris suggests, one of the most memorable disasters at Crooked Timber was the seminar on David Graeber’s book, Debt. Timothy Burke described it at the time as conveying: that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way. […]
Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences. First I asked him what a blog was. After he explained I told him that I, a […]
No SNL cold open. Season’s over and writers are on strike. Politico: A Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded Friday that Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 presidential election in support of former President Donald Trump. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel declared in a 38-page decision. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”
Burn it down and start from scratch? It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that. Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go. I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis.
I did something both awesome and ill-timed. Well, first I should back up and remind you of something I told you before at some nebulous time in the past, and that is that I am an immersive daydreamer. I said that I was a maladaptive daydreamer but I didn’t even think that was right, because […]
Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence. Looking back at posts from that time, it’s startling how active we […]
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The leader of the anti-Putin Russian Volunteer Corps is publicly connected to Robert Rundo and Christopher Pohlhaus.
The post Russian Militia Has Links to American Neo-Nazi and Anti-Trans Figures appeared first on The Intercept.
Caterpillars are a remarkable bellwether of environmental changes.
The post The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the Ecosystem appeared first on Nautilus.
It literally doesn’t get any dumber than this Terri Otten at TNR: She’s a Barbie comrade, in a Communist Barbie world—or so say Republicans, who are doubling down on accusations that the upcoming Barbie movie is Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea. Senator Ted Cruz was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to weigh in, sarcastically tweeting, “I guess Barbie is made in China…” Fox News commentators speculated outright whether Barbie was Communist or not. More Republicans have joined them.