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When a new system is on the rise, it needs more people to join. Maybe it doesn’t need everyone, there may be an “out” group which is either the enemy or the scapegrace or both, but basically they want people inside their new system. Capitalists want wage workers; communists want everything collectivized and so on.

But when you’ve won, when your system, your ideology, is the only one available to most people, well then, you want people out because if you push them out the benefits for those who remain are greater and because being pushed out is such a huge punishment. If there is more than one system easily accessible to people, a person kicked out of one can usually go to another.

Multistakeholder partnerships are characterized by institutional elements such as informality, voluntarism, and corporate partnerships which some commentators, like Nick Buxton, consider the "default mode of global decision-making." The rapid expansion and influence of multi-stakeholder partnerships have led some activists to argue that we are witnessing "The Great Takeover," in which elites promote multistakeholderism as a replacement for traditional intergovernmental multilateralism.

But how did multistakeholderism emerge within global governance? And is the future of multistakeholder global governance so certain?

In a recent article in the Review of International Political Economy, we approach this question historically by exploring the origins, development, and future of multi-stakeholderism in global governance.

The post Norms in a Post-Hegemonic World Order appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The combined effect of the Force Posture Agreement and other defence agreements with the United States is to nullify Australia’s capacity to make independent decisions about war avoidance and war fighting. Together they lock us into providing the United States first with secured areas under its control from which it may conduct a war, and Continue reading »

There are parallels between Indonesia’s Aceh where an Ozzie surfer faced a flogging, and Papua where a Kiwi pilot is facing death. Both provinces have fought brutal guerrilla wars for independence. One has been settled through foreign peacekeepers. The other still rages as outsiders fear intervention. There were ten stories in a Google Alert media feed Continue reading »

There is growing support for a government-owned “people’s bank”, like the original Commonwealth Bank, operating through post offices, which could provide full banking services to every community and force the Big Four private banks to truly compete. At dramatic hearings of the Senate inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia in Queensland last week, more Continue reading »

The idea of sending the PriceWaterhouseCoopers scandal off for criminal investigation by the Australian Federal Police is such a thoroughly bad idea that one might imagine that it had been recommended by one of the major consultancies, perhaps PwC itself. Or that it was the recommendation of some public servant or public servants keen to Continue reading »

This is a brief, unhappy yarn about the struggle for accountability and integrity in a Commonwealth government organisation. The yarn’s principal character is the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), now headed by Dr Glyn Davis, the de facto leader of the Australian Public Service (APS). The Department is at the forefront of Continue reading »

It was a shock but no real surprise to read that the multi-national company Inspired Education, which owns Reddam House school in the Sydney’s eastern suburbs, now plans to set up more fully for-profit schools in other areas (Sydney Morning Herald, 27/5). Who thought it would come to this? Where the inexorable march of the Continue reading »

For the past few years, I’ve worked as the social media producer for a high-profile show, one that has made headlines the past couple of weeks after our beloved presenter had to take a break. During my time at Q+A, I can tell you one thing: If you’re surprised by the conversations about racism, then Continue reading »

YET ANOTHER G-7 meeting has passed with yet another embarrassing show of insecurity by a group that is well past its sell-by date. The G-7 is such an anachronism, a relic of the past clinging on to a crumbling façade of make-believe power in a rapidly changing world. The images and the narrative all speak Continue reading »

One question for Laura Weidinger and Iason Gabriel, research scientists at Google DeepMind.

The post Who Should Make the Rules That Govern AI? appeared first on Nautilus.

… about truth and democracy anyway Liz Cheney says they told her to lie if she wanted to keep her seat. Of course they did: Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told Colorado College graduates in a commencement speech Sunday the U.S. “cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth,” as she took aim at fellow Republicans and former President Trump. “My fellow Republicans wanted me to lie. They wanted me to say the 2020 election was stolen, the attack of Jan. 6th wasn’t a big deal, and Donald Trump wasn’t dangerous,” said the former vice chair of the Jan. 6 panel that investigated the Capitol riot, who hasn’t ruled out running for president in the 2024. “I had to choose between lying and losing my position in House leadership,” continued Cheney, who was ousted as the No. 3 House Republican after she called out Trump’s false election claims.

All you need to know about 2024 A president: A sociopath: A robot:

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) contacted The Grayzone to dispute our characterization of their organization as a CIA cutout. Listen to our highly revealing conversation with the NED’s communications director. On April 4, 2023, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement Leslie Aun contacted me, Alex Rubinstein, to request a phone conversation about an article I published at The Grayzone a day before. My report detailed the open justification of the terrorist bombing of […]

The post The Grayzone debates National Endowment for Democracy VP on group’s CIA ties appeared first on The Grayzone.

This is an excuse to show you a really good tunnel

And Mankind’s folly Ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, a book arrived unexpectedly from an old friend. John Nation writes about his exploration of WWI battlefields in France in “A Nomad in No Man’s Land.” It began with a simple road sign, Ligne du Front–“Front Line.” The Somme battlefield. Brian Klaas reflects today on his recent visit to Normandy cemeteries. “From the beginning, then, there was a tension” in memorials to the Confederate war dead, Klaas writes, “between paying respects to those who had died—the sons and fathers and brothers—and a debate over whether you could ever separate out the injustice of a war’s cause from those who fought in it. For some, the answer was absolutely not. After all, Confederate soldiers fought to keep others enslaved, one of the great stains on human history.” Above the WWII beaches in Normandy stand memorials to the “sheer scale of that human tragedy” that occurred there marked by row upon row of white marble headstones: 9,387 in the Allied cemetery. The Nazi cemetary, Klaas expplains, “is dark and black.

The front lines are not inside the Beltway, says David Pepper “The battle for democracy is a long battle,” says David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic chair. It is harder for Democrats to win with election-cycle thinking, I’d argue, and because they always seem to be fighting the last war with the wrong weapons. More on that later. Paul Rosenberg provides a Salon interview with David Pepper following the release of “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American.” (It’s on my to-do list.) Pepper wrote it as a follow-up to “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines” because so many readers (as I did) skipped to the end to look for answers to Pepper’s all-too-familiar diagnosis of where the reactionary right is taking the country. “Team D” and “Team A” are fighting different battles, Pepper argues. Small-d democrats still believe the answer to pushing back on the autocrats is about electoral victories at the federal level. Then they win them they discover “that they weren’t really victories.” Why not?

On this week’s Lever Time Premium, David Sirota sits down with political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. to discuss his new book.

Two filmmakers, awaiting the result of a pregnancy test, take turns recording their experiences in this honest, intimate short

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

- by Sherri Irvin

Read at Aeon

In an age before photos or audio recordings, people found other ways to stay sensorially connected to their deceased

- by Nicola Laneri

Read at Psyche

There are a lot of legal cases against Trump pending right now and you would think that a billionaire front runner for the Republican nomination would have the very best legal talent that money can buy. But, as we know, he is the worst client in the world because he doesn’t pay and won’t shut his pie hole so his legal bench is D-list at best. Here’s a rundown: [Y]ou would think a client facing that amount of legal peril would have a top-notch team of lawyers in place to defend him. But when you have a client like Trump, normal expectations don’t apply. Just recently attorney Tim Parlatore announced — very publicly, via voluntarily testifying for the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation — that he was resigning from the Trump legal team, allegedly because of his inability to provide the right kind of counsel to Trump due to obstacles created by fellow Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn. Parlatore claims that Epshteyn was keeping him and other lawyers from being able to speak to Trump and that Epshteyn was not being honest with their client.