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One of the big constant news stories recently has been about UK water utilities constantly flushing untreated sewage into the rivers and oceans near the UK, while raising prices, paying huge salaries to their executives and massive dividends. One solution is to take them back into public ownership.

But another possibility is to make the mutual companies. I worked for a mutual insurance company for a while, and helped it de-mutualize, at which point its prices went up, employees were treated worse, executives made more money and so on.

Irrelevant Senator Pauline Hanson has promised the World that she will mail her essay against an Indigenous Voice to parliament to every Australian, just as soon as she gets a new pack of crayons. ”The people of Australia will have... Read More ›

It’s a super great idea to crack down on immigrant labor during a time of full employment and a building boom in a big agriculture state. So smart. And that’s what Ron DeSantis has done so that he can pretend he’s a tough hombre in a border state (which he isn’t.) He’s already getting some great results: Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state. The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ unauthorized workers could have their licenses suspended, and those with 25 or more employees that repeatedly fail to use the E-Verify system to check their immigration status can face daily fines.  Business owners and workers alike say the ranks of laborers in Florida have grown noticeably thinner.

They’re not all magical and entangled. These fungi will kill you.

The post The Dark Side of Fungi appeared first on Nautilus.

MMT strips way the veil of neo-liberal ideology that mainstream macroeconomists use to restrict government spending. We learn that these constraints are purely voluntary and have no intrinsic status. This …

The post While opposing political parties play the fiscal credibility game, people get hurt. appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.

A new era of antagonism between the US and China has emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is seen in the mounting rhetoric of "strategic competition" escalating military expenditures and efforts at alliance building such as AUKUS. Increasingly important are the US's efforts to contain China economically, as seen in the US CHIPS Act that restricts exports of US and Taiwanese semiconductors and advanced technological components. However, at the heart of worsening relations between the US and China is a paradox: the US and China are integrated into global capitalism and deeply interdependent in processes of accumulation. The major fault line of international antagonism no longer lies between the capitalist world and its external enemies as in the last Cold War, rather it is between the two major capitalist powers.

It was this puzzle of antagonism amidst integration, that I sought to unknot in my Honours thesis in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

DKos’s Laura Clawson reports on a Washington Post story about the very lame House “moderates” (who have just as much power as the MAGA winguts): The far-right House Freedom Caucus’s antics have gotten so bad that Republicans who represent districts won by President Joe Biden have actually started trying to affect what legislation comes to the House floor. They’re not trying very hard, mind you—whining to the media remains their main weapon, and they’ll get outsized credit for anything they accomplish, including the whining, but doing slightly more than nothing is a change. The Washington Post reports, “In recent weeks, these lawmakers have kept some abortion-related measures from being put to a vote and sunk an amendment that would have derailed a government oversight bill.” Okay, that’s a start, as is the successful effort by some first-term New York Republicans to sink anti-union amendments.

BARBECUE PLANNING TIPS Make sure the menu you plan fits the occasion. Consider the time of year, whether it’s to be in the backyard or at the beach and the type of equipment available before deciding on the food to be served. CHEESEBURGERS – Mixed Up Burgers CHEESEBURGERS 1 pound ground beef1 teaspoon salt1 to […]

The containment policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War years is back with a vengeance. Much has been made of the creation of AUKUS and the agreement to provide Australia with eight nuclear powered submarines. Many have rightly decried Australia’s loss of independence. AUKUS, however, is part of a bigger story, a Continue reading »

The recent visit to China by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken seemed promising, until we learned what he really had in mind: a long war with no finish line. This was not how the Australian media reported what happened during more than seven hours which Blinken spent with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Continue reading »

Australia should do all it can to foster a long-term, peaceful resolution of the acute, multi-decade dispute spanning the Taiwan Strait. But Chey and Keating are unmistakeably correct on this issue: Australia should never become involved in any war over Taiwan. The former senior Australian diplomat, Jocelyn Chey, concluded a recent open letter to the Continue reading »

Before he left for a brief trip to Sydney, Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo took a stab at reconciliation. It’s unlikely to succeed. It’s a truism of politics: Leaders whose time is up sometimes get an itch to tidy up wrongs unmentioned when pitching for power. The Indonesian Constitution restricts presidents to two five-year terms. Continue reading »

As the National Anti-Corruption Commission is opening for business, some ministers tend to believe that the mere fact of winning government gives them an unlimited licence to distribute public loot to their friends, constituents and major donors. The silence and complicity of senior public servants in response to such misgovernment is one of the great Continue reading »

Last week, English cricket was hit by a bombshell in the form of a report entitled ‘Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket’. Commissioned by the England and Wales Cricket Board, the report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) found that the game in the land of its origin was riven by racism, Continue reading »

‘Weaponise’ is the word de jour in America. Aside from the crude partisan employment of the term by Trump and other American politicians, it has subtly found its way into mainstream publications.  Such loaded terms corrupt analysis by imposing implicit judgements that obviate the need for serious thought. Once condemned for weaponising, it cannot then Continue reading »

I should hope so The Wall St Journal reports: Special counsel Jack Smith’s team in recent weeks has taken a growing interest in the role of lawyers and other figures involved in legal efforts aimed at reversing Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter said. Prosecutors from Smith’s team have issued subpoenas and asked questions centered on several key figures in those postelection efforts, including Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who spread baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. The subpoenas have also requested communications with Emily Newman, a lawyer who worked with Powell, and Mike Roman, a Republican operative who headed Election Day operations for the Trump campaign and dispatched lawyers to swing states before November 2020. Federal prosecutors also recently interviewed Rudy Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, for roughly eight hours on topics including Powell, people familiar with the testimony said. They were interested, among other things, in a December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, during which Powell pitched a plan to have the U.S.

When I wrote about Vilém Flusser earlier, some commenters here at Crooked Timber weren’t happy: why am I spouting off about this obscure Czech-Brazilian media theorist? At first I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity, but then I realized that they were right: Vilém Flusser isn’t famous enough to write about, given the inexorable […]

Nobody likes him Former president Donald Trump held his first big rally over the weekend in a little town called Pickens, South Carolina. Reports of the crowd size vary, with Trump claiming 75,000 which is absurd, but it was a large and very enthusiastic crowd. He gave his usual spiel, whining “I am being indicted for you” and he once again delivered his creepy new mission statement, declaring that this 2024 election is the “Final Battle” against the “Communists,,” “globalists” “warmongers” and the “sick people” and “degenerates” who “hate our country.” It was the usual cheery, positive vision of the future we’ve come to expect from him and it was especially uplifting on the 4th of July weekend. It makes you proud to be an American. He was very well received which isn’t surprising since the district went for him in big numbers in both 2016 and 2020. The weather was very hot but they were ready to party: Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared as well, and was her usual ray of sunshine as well.

Dear Fellow Signers of the Declaration of Independence:

Now that our noble document is complete, it is time to address the elephant in the room: my name is much bigger than everyone else’s. I’ll be the first to admit that it is absolutely massive. Yet I must also speak this self-evident truth: it is not entirely my fault.

The fact is I thought we were all doing big signatures. That’s what I was told. Do none of you remember Thomas Jefferson—hopped up on parchment fumes and cheap barleywine—running around telling everyone our “sigs” had to be “freakin’ huge”? Then I go first, and everybody bursts out laughing like I did something foolish.

I hereby call on my brethren of the Second Continental Congress—those who I know to be defenders of liberty, progress, and the values of the Enlightenment, to which we are all fan-boyishly devoted for some reason—to publicly stand up and say everybody told John Hancock we were doing big sigs.

In 2012, as the health service was being subjected to another round of disastrous reform, a think tank was founded which aimed to push back against this effort ‘to dismantle many of the founding principles of the NHS’. In the years since, the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) has become one of […]

The levels of overload on the NHS and the increased mortality of patients and health workers experienced during the peak moments of the pandemic offered an uncannily familiar experience to those of us who grew up with classic BBC sci-fi series such as The Day of the Triffids (1981) or Survivors (1975–7, 2008–9). In my […]

The National Health Service (NHS) and many public healthcare systems around the world are in a state of crisis. For years they’ve been allowed to deteriorate — for long enough, in fact, that plenty of powerful forces now see an opportunity to pursue profitable reforms. When people think of private healthcare, their minds naturally turn to […]