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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 09:00
Will it work? An interesting thought experiment from Brian Beutler in his newsletter today: President Biden has been buffeted by attacks on his Middle East policy for the past two weeks, but enjoyed a brief reprieve on Thursday in the form of welcome criticism from Ari Fleischer, an immense cynic and warmonger who gained infamy as chief spokesman for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  “When [President Biden] said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage? Who the hell does he think he is?” Fleischer cried bitterly on Fox News. “I sat in on every summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the U.S. after 9/11 and met with President [George W.] Bush—not one said to Bush the Americans shouldn’t be consumed with rage.
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 07:30
Don’t kid yourself At least they aren’t blaming the Democrats anymore. (For now anyway.) Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him. His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.” That might be an understatement. In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 06:00

Marxists tend to like the labor theory of value because it provides a vivid account of exploitation and highlights a basic antagonism at the core of capitalism: capitalists and workers are locked in a battle over the appropriation of the surplus that workers produce. But many commentators assume it is either internally inconsistent or hopelessly outdated. The theory is thus hotly contested, but arguably poorly understood by both critics and advocates alike. The debate has also sometimes been mired in arcane mathematical issues. As a consequence, interesting philosophical and empirical questions have received less attention. We put a number of these questions to Duncan Foley, author of Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory.

The post Reconstructing the Labour Theory of Value: An Interview with Duncan Foley (Part 1: The Commodity Law of Exchange) appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 06:00
Look for him to start blowing everything up They’re serious this time: Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a “standby” position in NATO, in Trump’s own words. When the former president has privately discussed the United States’ role in the transatlantic military alliance this year, Trump has made clear that he doesn’t want the upper ranks of a second administration to be staffed by “NATO lovers,” according to two sources who’ve heard him make such comments. The ex-president has made these kinds of jabs at the longstanding alliance during conversations related to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.  Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S.
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:59
 Australia’s relationship with the United States is fine. What is not fine is the Austral-Americans in this country conducting themselves as though Australia is some branch office of the United States or worse than that, its lickspittle. The Hayden Oration  by Paul Keating University of Southern Queensland, Ipswich Campus 29 September 2017 It is a Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:57
Leaders of the US, Britain, Australia and Western countries, instead of learning from history, are failing to bear their responsibility for the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people. Despite the massacres, ethnic cleansing, aggression, wars, occupation and gross violations of international law committed by Israel since Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:56
Australia is our country. We accept that the majority of non-Indigenous voting Australians have rejected recognition in the Australian Constitution. We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:55
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will have plenty to talk about when he meets with US President Joe Biden this week. The Middle East, China, AUKUS and submarines will no doubt dominate the agenda. But there is one matter in respect of which Mr Albanese should insist on a quick resolution. That is the case of Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:54
Blame for what has and will unfold in Gaza will be shared with Israel by those States, all acting with presumed impunity, which blindly support Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. Since 2017, Australia and Israel have expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security. We have a resident Defence Attaché to the Embassy Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:52
Not long before his untimely death, Malcolm Fraser was canvassing possibilities for a new political party. He was absolutely right to note that the existing parties had lost their way. It’s time to take up Malcolm Fraser’s cudgels, to think again–and seriously – about creating a new political party. A new party would need to Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:51
An aside to what is happening in Gaza is events occurring in the West Bank, where there has been little focus. Reports in recent days have drawn attention to attempts by settlers – read the Israeli government – to “Judaise” Area C and to push Bedouins out of the West Bank. Some 98 families, numbering Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:50
No attempt to “explain”, rationalise, find some counter-“equivalence” for, nor any attempt to see matters through the eyes and the experiences of the murderers rather than the immediate victims can justify or forgive the barbaric massacre of Israeli children, women and men by Hamas warriors after they broke out of Gaza. It does not forgive Continue reading »
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Tue, 24/10/2023 - 04:40
“Well right now, [the House] can’t govern, and I think that the eight people who betrayed the conference and joined the Democrats to defeat the 96 percent of the conference unleashed furies that I don’t think they’d even dreamed of, because it gave every person the right to be equally destructive and equally angry. Hahahaha. No, Newt, those furies were unleashed decades ago by you. Recall Newt’s first big power play against his own party: On the evening of Oct. 4, 1990, Newt Gingrich and his then-wife, Marianne, were enjoying a VIP reception at a Republican fundraiser when they were suddenly hustled over to have their picture taken with President George H.W. Bush. “I thought it was a bad idea,” Gingrich said in a series of interviews in 1992 that have not been previously published. Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties — including, they thought, Gingrich — had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations.