Reading

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 6 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Kamala Harris’s Wall Street charm offensive begins to pay off

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-04-2024]

“Two finance executives close to Harris said she had reassured them that she could appoint new officials to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission who would take a less aggressive stance than current respective chairs Gary Gensler and Lina Khan.”

“Who are you filming for?” What Israel is trying to hide. Gaza Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict.   October 7 Al Jazeera’s October 7  investigation. Warning: This is an 18 Continue reading »

October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was the result of decades long Israeli occupation, never ending violence and oppression of Palestinians. The pressure cooker exploded! A slightly updated post from December 19, 2023 Supporters of Zionism highlight the horrors of October 7 , ‘never again’ to divert attention from the continuing genocide  Continue reading »

If the government and Opposition think they will not be held accountable, they should think again. The government and Opposition are disregarding the year-long protests of millions of Australians against Israel’s war on Palestinians and now the Lebanese people. Moreover, they are completely disregarding numerous petitions signed by thousands of Australians, including current and former Continue reading »

In the current global turmoil of revenge and war, Australians want to see political leaders speaking about humanity and negotiation, not the old rhetoric which chooses winners and losers. In the following letter to party leaders in the House of Representatives and the Senate, we urge all parliamentarians to support their leaders by making their Continue reading »

While the Australian government encourages us to view the late leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, as a terrorist, very many Australians who abhor terrorism would have the highest regard for him. Why? This interview may provide some answers. Continue reading »

When Israel Defence Forces shelled the home of Quama, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl, and her family, the little girl was seriously injured. Because the IDF has been systematically devastating Gaza’s hospitals, her parents were unable to access a hospital with the necessary medical services. Quama was admitted to a maternity hospital which lacked both the Continue reading »

A few days after the Hamas breakout from Gaza last October 7, I raised the question of how far Israel might be permitted to advance along the road to moral turpitude. After almost a year now, there is no doubt that the answer is: a very long way indeed. With few exceptions Western countries, led Continue reading »

Large-scale immigration programs have contributed substantially to Australia since 1947, bringing much needed skills and demand into the economy. They have also helped make Australia a more culturally sophisticated country. In the 1970s, the oppressive policies of assimilation and integration were replaced by the policy idea of multiculturalism. Today, Australian politicians boast that Australia is Continue reading »

History teaches us that Palestine, as with East Timor, will be free. Given the history of the Israeli invasion of Palestine it is easy to believe that the 19 July ruling by the International Court of Justice, which rules that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and should end, will be Continue reading »

Elon Musk said at that rally that he’s saving the first amendment by backing Donald Trump. Shortly after assuming office in January 2017, President Donald Trump accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people.” Attacks on the media had been a hallmark of Trump’s presidential campaign, but this charge marked a dramatic turning point: language like this ventured into dangerous territory. Twentieth-century dictators—notably, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—had all denounced their critics, especially the press, as “enemies of the people.” Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press as “fake news” and create confusion in the public mind about what’s real and what isn’t; what can be trusted and what can’t be. That, it seems, is also Trump’s goal. Elon’s making that happen for him every single day. Twitter is a sewer of lies.

Trump dreams of The Gilded Age Trump is the dumbest rock of dumbest rocks with his tariff fetish. He’s invoking the ghost of William McKinley. Heather Cox Richardson this morning: By pointing to McKinley’s presidency to justify his economic plan, Trump gives away the game. The McKinley years were those of the Gilded Age, in which industrialists amassed fortunes that they spent in spectacular displays. Cornelius and Alva Vanderbilt’s home on New York’s Fifth Avenue cost more than $44 million in today’s dollars, with stables finished in black walnut, cherry, and ash, with sterling silver metalwork, and in cities across the country, the wealthy dressed their horses and coachmen in expensive livery, threw costly dinners, built seaside mansions they called “cottages,” and wore diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. When the daughter of a former senator married, she wore a $10,000 dress and a diamond tiara, and well-wishers sent “necklaces of diamonds [and] bracelets of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies.”  Americans believed those fortunes were possible because of the tariff walls the Republicans had begun to build in 1861.

Israel has bombed nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s schools in the past year, killing hundreds of children and displaced Palestinians.

The post Israel’s Bloody Record of Bombing Schools in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Don’t tolerate disinformation Got cases of bottled water here. Still without power and flushing/washing water (nine days so far); there’s power in three houses across the street. I’m fine here in the most accessible city in the region, just inconvenienced. Others are far worse off Many who have lost homes (here too) or jobs and businesses will need longer-term support. People need hazmat gear to do cleanup along the rivers. Rescuers are still getting to people still cut off in hundreds of isolated coves and by washed-out bridges. In some cases, it’s one home at a time. This woman lives in my county and works in the next county south. She addresses the uys for memalicious BS you’re seeing in social media. Screw those guys for me, please.

A fish story, a perfect storm, a toxic loophole, and more from The Lever this week.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

As it applies to vintage cinema, it could be argued that “forgotten” ain’t what it used to be. From the advent of video stores in the 1980s to the glut of streaming platforms available today, the idea of an “obscure film” has become, well…obscure to several generations of filmgoers now. However, for those of us of a certain age, there was a time when the options were more limited. As I wrote in a 2017 piece about the death of neighborhood theaters: Some of my fondest memories of the movie-going experience involve neighborhood theaters; particularly during a 3-year period of my life (1979-1982) when I was living in San Francisco. But I need to back up for a moment. I had moved to the Bay Area from Fairbanks, Alaska, which was not the ideal environment for a movie buff. At the time I moved from Fairbanks, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on first-run features (it took us nearly a year to even get Star Wars). Keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and VCRs were a still a few years down the road.

Probably not a good idea if you care about what’s happening in the Middle East. I appreciate him revealing his decision making process — “hit first and worry about the rest later.” What could go wrong? The Miller Center has an interesting overview of Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. It was all over the place. He is an isolationist who nonetheless built up the military and approved any number of military actions. He was heavily involved in Syria and his vaunted outreach to North Korea resulted in Kim Jong Un continuing his nuclear and ballistic missile program even as Trump boosted his prestige on the international stage. We all know what he did with Russia. His treatment of our allies was outrageous and completely gratuitous. In my opinion, he reversed as much of Obama’s policies as he could mainly because he didn’t know anything and that was an easy choice. (People around him were happy for him to do it because they genuinely disagreed with the policies like the Paris Accords and the Iran nuclear deal. If Obama had been against them, Trump would have been for them.) There was no coherence to his actions.

Dive and delve into these very interesting and enlightening readings and recorded talks on various topics in Economic Sociology and Political Economy: > The best 5 books on the Sociology of Inequality with the focus on higher education, recommended and discussed by Michèle Lamont: Durable Inequality by Charles Tilly, Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, […]

But it won’t be. The rest of the media has hardly mentioned it “Here is a true smoking gun. People that worked for Trump, speaking openly about what ought to be a truly impeachment-level offense: an American president refusing to sign off on disaster aid to people he thought weren’t sufficiently supportive of his political ambitions.” They literally had to bring him data showing Republican voters in Orange County before he would sign the emergency declaration for California’s devastating wildfires. We knew he’d threatened to do it. We didn’t know he actually did it and had to be talked out of it by staff. For people who think all this talk about how he was held back by the adults in the room in the first term is overblown, this should put that to rest. And guess what? There won’t be any adults in the room next time. .