In the light of recent debates about whether we are back in the 1970s, where the only ostensible similarity is that inflation has accelerated over the last year or so, I dug into my data archives to remind myself of a few things. One of the problems with dealing with official data is that it gets revised from time to time and time series become discontinuous. So the labour market data for Australia tends to start in February 1978 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics moved to a monthly labour force survey. Researchers who desire to study historical data have to have been around a while and have saved their earlier data collections (such as me). But it is often impossible to match them with the newer publicly available data. You will see in what follows how that plays out. But, I was also interested to return to the past today after the ABS released their latest – Industrial Disputes, Australia – data (released March 9, 2023), which shows that disputes remain at record lows.
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In the Iran-Iraq war, both sides refused to back down despite a long, bloody stalemate. The same thing could happen to Russia and Ukraine.
The post The War in Ukraine Is Just Getting Started appeared first on The Intercept.
The following text tells the whole story of what pro-Palestinian communities around the world are fighting for, and what pro-Israelis are fighting against: “We are delighted to report that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has removed a display of artwork designed by children from Gaza.” That was the summary of a news report published on the […]
The post Victory is Defeat: Palestinian Children’s Art Exposes Israel’s Cultural Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Conservatives do not own freedom. It is a contested value. Or it would be if the left did more contesting. Time to start. George Packer considers Freedom’s dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a Vanderbilt historian, in the context of what Packer calls “the new fatalism.” It is the notion that America is trapped in the past and cannot change. Recent, less white-centric histories replace old, self-serving myths but perhaps lead to disillusionment. Part of the stuckness results from historical white appropriation not only of African bodies but of what white dominance views as an unassailable narrative: Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County [Alabama], white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people.
by Rosalie Bull
I’m having an ongoing conversation with a friend about the merits and drawbacks of degrowth as a climate action strategy. She is easily the most astute climate thinker I know, with insights available only to those deeply immersed in the nuances of climate finance and decarbonization. She’s wary of the degrowth movement, as are many prominent players in the climate transition. She views it as an unhelpful distraction from humanity’s efforts to grapple with the climate crisis.
The post Degrowth in a Green-Growth World appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
If feminists support this Bush-era neocon simply because she is a woman, Victoria Nuland might just burn down the world in a nuclear fire.
Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.” Putin himself, however, has a longer memory. In the speech that launched his “special operation,” he pointedly denounced the U.S. for “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” Then he added, “We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high U.N. rostrum. As a result, we see a... Read more
Can urban Democrats? Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state won a seat last November in her rural, working-class Third Congressional District. She shouldn’t have. Wasn’t expected to. National Democrats wrote her off. Her victory was “widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022,” the New York Times reminds Thursday readers. We’ll come back to her. Q: When is majority rule not majority rule? A: When it’s washed through the legacy of the country’s slave-era constitution. That constitution, combined with a) political parties’ (one in particular) urge to gerrymander and/or legislate their way into permanent power, and b) left- and right-leaning people’s tendency to sort themselves into urban and rural areas of the country, means that in many statewide and local races, a majority of citizens do not get to elect candidates who reflect their views. Call this democracy-lite. There is no need to rehash how that’s played out in 21st century presidential outcomes.
A gulf in public understanding prevents us from seeing how and why our food supply is at risk. By George Monbiot. This is my written submission to the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry on Environmental Change and Food Security, 3rd March 2023 References are numbered and appended to the bottom of the document. 1. Food security […]
A self-perpetuating political spiral is blocking the easier ways of preventing environmental collapse. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 9th December 2022 There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 […]
Dear March,
Listen, I get that you, like all aging singles on OkCupid, have commitment issues. But I’m gonna need you to get some help. Go to therapy like the rest of us. Dig into your childhood issues. Journal. Join July as it works through his insistence on being a wet blanket and hotter than balls simultaneously.
Do whatever it takes.
Last week it was seventy-four degrees. I wore Crocs. So pleasant. A couple days ago it snowed. WTF, March. And this was not the good kind of snow that flirty February offers, but sleet and hail and rain and fog too. There was an icon on my weather app that I had never seen before. That’s how off the rails you are, March. Tim Cook is having to invent new graphics to predict what mayhem you’ll be bringing us next.
Polish people don’t eat white bread. That’s for Americans. We only eat rye—Polish rye. But not this week. This week there was a Polish problem. The deli ran out of the rye that Mom and I usually get. When we walked in and heard the news, Mom reacted as if she’d just witnessed a double homicide.
“Oh my god. No!”
We would have to try a new brand of bread, and the only thing on the shelf was Turano Rustic Rye.
“Turano?” Mom said, getting heated. “Is that Italian for ‘rip-off’?” She scrutinized the package. “And rustic? What do they know about rustic? You don’t know rustic until you’ve crapped in an outhouse for the first ten years of your life.”
Mom had a difficult childhood.
I told her we needed to be open-minded about the bread. But it was too much to ask.
“The deli is scamming us, mark my words.” Mom poked the loaf. “These slices look small.”
Mom held the package up to her face and declared that the loaf looked small, didn’t it? I shrugged. It looked appropriately loaf sized to me. Maybe her head was big.
Thomas Perrett looks at the Whitehall changes over environmental policy, and sees a lot of deckchairs being re-arranged which fail to address the climate emergency
When Dr Ella Cockbain complained to the broadcast regulator that the GBNews channel encourages violent hatred, she was subjected to it on social media. Brian Cathcart reports
Transport is at the heart of our environmental crises. In the UK, traffic is responsible for about 25 percent of air pollution. As the climate crisis intensifies, transport (excluding aviation and shipping) contributes to 23 percent of the country’s emissions. In this context, initiatives promoting alternative modes of travel are on the rise: low-traffic neighbourhoods […]
Martin Wolf's musings about what lies in store for Europe has a huge blind spot as far as the US is concerned.
Brad Blitz looks at the storm of controversy over Gary Lineker's comments on the Illegal Migration Bill, and while he finds no evidence of Nazi policy, does hear echoes of fascist rhetoric
There is much that the global feminist movement can learn from the current women’s struggle in Iran and their vision.
The post This International Women’s Day, Iranian Feminists Are at the Front Lines appeared first on scheerpost.com.
John Thune embodies the rail industry’s Washington influence machine that could now kill bipartisan safety legislation.
Prominent right-wingers at the BBC have long been given the sort of leeway for their views that those on the left never will, writes Adam Bienkov
- by Aeon Video