Ezra Klein takes up the subject of Biden’s age and makes a good point, with which I have to agree. One reason for my hesitance to declare Biden too old to run in 2024 is that I thought his age was a problem in 2020, too. Everything people say about his age now was true then. He was halting on the stump. He fumbled words and phrases. But I’d argue the problem was worse then. The linguistic stumbles were paired with an aging outlook. Biden reminisced fondly about his relationships with segregationist senators and seemed to think the bipartisanship of yesteryear was recoverable in the present. He wielded his connection to Barack Obama as both spear and shield — it was the case for his candidacy and his all-purpose defense against attacks. But Biden wasn’t Obama and the Senate of the 1970s is long gone. Biden’s problem in 2020, in other words, wasn’t just his age. It was that he seemed stuck in the past. But Biden proved — and keeps proving — doubters like me wrong. He won the Democratic primary, even though voters had no shortage of fresher faces to choose from.
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The Scottish First Minister's exit makes the possibility of a new referendum even less likely, writes Jonathan Lis
⅔ cup cottage cheese½ cup evaporated skimmed milk½ cup sliced mushrooms¾ cup chicken bouillon¾ cup tomato juice2 tablespoons chives½ teaspoon paprika⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper⅛ teaspoon nutmeg4 ounces cooked chicken, diced2 tablespoons chopped pimento Combine cottage cheese, milk, and mushrooms in blender container; process at low speed until mixture is smooth. Add bouillon, tomato juice, chives, […]
~ Today's Water Cooler ~
Capital has identified water as an important opportunity for profitable investment. Whether it is the privatisation of public water infrastructure, the expansion of the bottled water industry, the construction of dams for energy generation or the free expropriation of water for mineral extractivism or large-scale agriculture, private capital has poured into water in large quantities. And yet, water is also an area where resistance to capitalist exploitation has been most successful as reflected in a wave of re-municipalisations of water services across the world (Kishimoto, Lobina and Petitjean 2015). How can we make sense of these struggles against water commodification? In our recent article Water Grabbing, Capitalist Accumulation and Resistance in the Global Labour Journal, we develop a conceptual-methodological approach to this question.
The post Conceptualising struggles over water grabbing appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Isn’t that special? In late 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene briefly referenced “a National Divorce scenario” that seemed to allude to the dissolution of the United States. About a year later, the Georgia Republican seemed to predict a “national divorce” in response to the CDC adding Covid shots to its list of recommended vaccine schedules. This morning, as some elected officials released statements recognizing the Presidents’ Day holiday, the right-wing congresswoman published a message to Twitter that steered clear of traditional American patriotism. .. At face value, this isn’t especially surprising. Greene has earned a reputation as one of the most radical members of Congress in recent memory. She’s expressed support for violence against Democratic elected officials, and a year ago, the Georgia Republican appeared at a white-nationalist event. The fact that the congresswoman has endorsed a vision in which Americans “separate by red states and blue states” is entirely in line with everything we know about her.
In January the far-right website Townhall began publishing a four-part series on a so-called “Suburban...
China continues to lead the world in trust, according to the influential Edelman Trust Barometer. The 2023 latest survey repeats similar previous rankings and gives the lie to commentators who continually maintain that the Communist Party of China is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. One may and should question the assumptions Continue reading »
If Australia sleepwalks into a war with China, as many analysts fear is happening right now, then amid our strategic slumber we should at least ask one question: what would war with China mean for Australia? Put bluntly, the repercussions of Australia joining the US in any war with China over the status of Taiwan Continue reading »
On Tuesday, General Mark Milley, chair of the American joint chiefs of staff declared, in effect, that Russian had been militarily defeated in Ukraine. Russia, he said, was now a global pariah, and the world remained inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience. “In short, Russia has lost,” he told a press conference after a NATO Continue reading »
Opening up access to permanent residence for long stay refugees on temporary visas is right and inevitable. The decision will not set off a major new surge of maritime asylum seekers. The Coalition and their supporters have selective memories. Temporary protection visas were never a deterrent anyway. The government’s decision to allow access to permanent Continue reading »
The continuing debate in Pearls and Irritations about economic growth and sustainability has largely ignored a critical dimension: the role of human subjectivity. The debate has focused on the interactions between economic growth and environmental impacts. There has been some mention of living standards, wellbeing and quality of life, but little consideration of how what Continue reading »
Richard Cullen’s article, ‘Why Japan is not an acceptable military ally’, published in Pearls and Irritations (5 Jan. 2023) is an unfortunate piece of historical muck-raking. The core of his argument is that Japan’s record as a brutal imperialist power in the years 1895 to 1945 disqualifies it now, and presumably until further notice, from Continue reading »
But is the Arab country’s pioneering gender parity laws and the ‘State Feminism’ introduced in the 1950s by Habib Bourguiba under threat from President Kaîs Saïed’s new electoral law? The new Tunisian electoral law drops parity in a disastrous political and economic situation. While the old electoral law enshrined gender parity among candidates by obliging Continue reading »
At the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, February 19th, on the anniversary of the Ukraine War, protestors from the Right and the Left gathered to demand an end to the American funding of the war in Ukraine and an end to the War State.
The post Rage Against the War Machine Speeches appeared first on scheerpost.com.
On Feb. 19, 2023, Chris Hedges spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC at a bipartisan anti-war rally called “Rage Against the War Machine.” Hedges was joined by prominent anti-war figures on the political left and right, drawing ire from some on both sides and making apparent the ever-growing schism that has come to characterize modern Americana. Here is the text of his speech in its entirety.
The post Chris Hedges: Rage Against The War Machine Speech appeared first on MintPress News.
This is in the …. National Review? President Biden’s secret visit to wartime Kyiv is an example of America in its finest tradition. The New York Times reports that after a “trans-Atlantic flight to Poland, Mr. Biden crossed the border by train, traveling for nearly 10 hours to Kyiv as other American officials have in recent months.” This trip took guts. The Times reports that Biden “slipped out of Washington in the dark of night without notice” in the early hours of Sunday morning on the East Coast: “Just a few reporters sworn to secrecy and deprived of their telephones were brought with him, along with Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser; Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy chief of staff; and Annie Tomasini, the director of Oval Office operations.” The moment reminds me not so much of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump flying unannounced to Iraq or Afghanistan, but of President Roosevelt’s wartime travels across the Atlantic. Make no mistake, there was risk involved in this trip. Traveling to the capital of a nation fighting a shooting war with a great power, the U.S.
I’ll be at confoo.ca this week, representing Open Earth Foundation. This is my first Open Source event representing OEF, and the first time I’ve been to any event in quite a few years. What are your best tips for a good conference?
It is likely that I will be participating (remotely) in an academic panel about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), with a “pro” and “con” side at a Canadian academic conference. This article is my initial thinking, and is a way of soliciting feedback. The “story” behind the panel is whether we learned anything from the pandemic shock....Bond Economics
MMT After The Pandemic Shock
Brian Romanchuk
I marinated the steak over night, but when it was time to cook dinner, I failed to read the entire recipe card (which is apparently a problem of mine as of late. Much like Alexia on the Real Housewives of Miami when she kept insisting that Adriana’s boyfriend is married because she didn’t scroll downContinue reading 131. Zippy Sirloin Strips
This café sends food through pneumatic tubes
Truthiness must not prevail Adam Serwer considers the implications of Fox fending off the Dominion voting machine defamation lawsuit (The Atlantic): Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it. Isn’t that an authoritarian’s wet dream? SLAPP suits would proliferate. Investigative journalism would dry up. The Biggest Brother could shape what the public knows. The network may ultimately prevail; that’s what all those fancy lawyers get paid for.
Andy Lee Roth joins Lee Camp to cover Project Censored's annual Top 25 Most Censored Stories of the past year that are underreported or neglected by mainstream media.
The post The Most Censored Stories of The Year, with Andy Lee Roth appeared first on MintPress News.
It’s axiomatic that any system preying upon the vulnerabilities of the many, to profit the few, is both a moral and ethical atrocity. Capitalism embodies such a system. As originally conceived by Adam Smith “selfish interest” would theoretically extend “that universal opulence … to the lowest ranks of people.” But at some historical point his creation escaped. It turned malignant. Today, it serves only to increase the opulence of the opulent, while recruiting the rest of us to wage perpetual war against each other for survival. When, and why, did this occur? I’ll begin with a brief technical digression.