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So, Macron has dissolved his government and a French legislative election is on. The Harris Interactive June 9/10 poll shows La Pen with the highest support at 34%, with the left wing Nantes coalition at 22% and Macron’s ENS coalition at 19%. Macron is not on the ballot, but if his party loses power, the Prime Minister of whatever group has the majority will be in control of French domestic policy, leaving Macron to foreign affairs.

Macron has been a terrible President. He got in only because of strategic voting. In the second round, people were too scared to give Le Pen a chance, so they went for him. During his tenure France has been rocked by repeated and massive protests. Economic performance has been bad and his signature move was to increase the age at which people can retire.

In our recent article, “Gaslighting Australia: The Instrumental Power of Australia's Mining and Energy Industries”, we look back on the last decade of Australia’s climate policy inaction. Based on our research, it seems likely that the current strategy, like former strategies, may have more to do with industry-government links than economic realities.

The post Gaslighting Australia: the Australian Government’s Commitment to Expanded Gas Production appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has delivered a speech over the weekend where he pledged to take Australia back to the good old days by abolishing the metric system. ”People are confused and it’s time the Government acted and abolished this... Read More ›

From George Lakoff and Gil Duran at the FrameLab Newsletter: Moderate and centrist are political weasel words. Their definitions vary widely because there is no such thing as a moderate or centrist ideology. There is no united “middle” or “center” in politics, no single set of ideas on which all moderates or centrists agree. Some […]

Renée Bergland’s 3 greatest revelations while writing Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science.

The post Magic Died When Art and Science Split appeared first on Nautilus.

After all that he now figures he has them in the bag and doesn’t have to brag about it anymore. They love him more than Jesus, after all: Hours before Donald Trump was expected to make a virtual address to a Christian advocacy organization that wants to ban all abortions and calls the procedure “child sacrifice,” the former president’s campaign said Monday that he would only give a pre-recorded welcome message lasting less than two minutes — in which he does not say the word “abortion” at all. Trump was scheduled to make a virtual “address” Monday at an event hosted by the Danbury Institute, an organization that also seeks to ban same-sex marriage and use the Bible to guide public policy, according to its website. The organizers, who promoted Trump as a speaker, noted on X the event sold out.

Celebrations on Tel Aviv beaches followed news of the rescue of four Israeli hostages. As part of an alleged clinical, precise military exercise, as many as 300 Palestinians were killed and 700 injured, but in Israeli revellers’ eyes, this latest slaughter of Palestinians is of no consequence, even welcomed. This massacre of Palestinian men, women Continue reading »

Let me be the last to tell you the economy has almost ground to a halt and is teetering on the edge of recession. This has happened by design, not accident. But it doesn’t seem to be working properly. So, what happens now? Until we think of something better, more of the same. Since May Continue reading »

The title of “Empire” is not ascribed to the United States by observers but revealed by astute journalists as indeed what the powers that be in the US think of itself. The recent P&I article by Noel Turnbull (02/06/2024) titled “We’re an empire now, and we create our own reality…” attest to the statement above. Continue reading »

In World War III the enemy is not an array of tanks, shells and soldiers, but a collection of beliefs damaging to the earth’s future. The enemies are the minds and actions of those with the cult of neo-liberalism and greed acting through the power of huge industries, the enemy within. In 2006 “Why we Continue reading »

As the political hegemony of the ANC has frayed, elite forces have increasingly funded an array of opposition parties to shift power more in their favour, writes Eugene Puryear. Thirty years after the first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa finds itself at a political inflection point. The 2024 election [on May 29 for the Continue reading »

Somalia, Syria, Myanmar, Boko Haram – and Israel. Together, and not by coincidence. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ decision to add Israel to the blacklist of countries that harm children insulted and shocked Israel. We and Syria? Yes, we and Syria. In Israel, everyone went on the attack, but no one asked: What did we think Continue reading »

President Biden’s bellicose nationalism was again on display during the D-Day commemorations. In a pair of addresses, Biden not only sacralised war and exalted the virtues of ‘the American’. In the finest populist tradition, he misrepresented the history of the Second World War to rally Europeans to never-ending-war. It all passed with little real deconstruction Continue reading »

I am 93 years old and come from a large Jewish family; My mother’s mother being one of 13 children I had dozens of Jewish uncles and cousins while growing up and through my maternal connection claim Jewishness. Being old enough my memory covers the whole history of the formation of modern Israel and the Continue reading »

It hasn’t even finished its first year of operations, but those who were hoping for big things from the National Anti-Corruption Commission and its chair, Justice Paul Brereton would be wise to temper mightily their hopes and expectations of what it might achieve. An indicator, if only one of them, came on June 6 when Continue reading »

Primary school students learn in their early days that accountability is a keystone of democracy. Not far into secondary school that reassuring notion is tempered as schoolies get to appreciate that for governments accountability equals political risk. It’s a pain in ministerial necks and should be kept within bounds sufficient to minimise electoral discomfort. These Continue reading »

I can’t say that I’m surprised the Republicans are working hard to undermine and rig the vote in every swing state. I am a little bit surprised they are openly admitting it: THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION this year will come down to seven states — but there’s one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia. The Peach State is unique — it’s the sole battleground state in which the Republican Party has total control over the levers of power: a trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governorship. Over the past four years, Trump-loving elements of the Georgia GOP have wielded that advantage in a crusade to convert discredited election-conspiracy theories into policies well ahead of Election Day 2024. It is an alarmingly anti-democratic experiment that Trumpland and much of the GOP hope to take national.  “Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to the former president tells Rolling Stone.

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