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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 21 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Fight Or Die 

David Sirota, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]

In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.

If you want to see all the highlights, you can see them at @atrupar on twitter. If you just want to read through a succinct recap, here’s a handy one from @artcandee:

Trump is not being cared for by a licensed physician but rather by his former “gentleman of the stool.” (Ronny “Johnson” is no longer a licensed physician.) Here is a letter that rivals his former Dr. Feelgood who distributed a dictated statement from Trump himself: He is not a real Dr and It appears he wasn’t one even when he was licensed. He was a pill pusher. It’s a shocking fact that he was ever the White House doctor. We have not heard from any legitimate doctor about Trump’s “wound.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neuro-surgeon, has said that we need to know if there was any neurological damage which could have happened if that was, in fact, a bullet wound. It appears they have no intention of doing that. And it also appears that the press has no intention of pushing for “transparency” on the issue. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that they have held Joe Biden to a very different standard. The Parkinson’s “debate” is recent. Remember this one?

A stopped clock Not a big Bill Maher fan, but this week’s show had some moments. Digby noted a big one. Here are some others. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

The Republican platform is embracing guns even after Trump’s assassination attempt, and more from The Lever this week.

But not if the beatings continue One may find polls to support about any position out there. A set of polls that consistently tilt one way are those reporting that conservatives are happier than liberals. These findings date back years. Contra that, Rachel Bitecofer cites data from the World Happiness Report—a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the United Nations—that suggests people who live in red states are, by and large, less happy than those who live in bluer states. European countries, you have heard, report greater hapoiness than the U.S., however. This too is a consistent result. Indeed, “the U.S. fell eight spots to number 23 in the global rankings between 2023 and 2024,” dropping out of the top 20 for the first time in the survey’s history. But not so fast. Polling of individiuals still more consistently shows that conservatives report being happier than liberals. Real Clear Science from August 2022: Social psychologist Jaime Napier, Program Head of Psychology at NYU-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.

Così come la macroeconomia tradizionale del dopoguerra è stata criticata per essere fondata su una metodologia matematica assiomatico-deduttiva, ritengo che il nucleo del neo-ricardianismo sia basato sulla stessa metodologia. Per risolvere il problema di trovare una misura del valore che non sia influenzata dai cambiamenti nella distribuzione del reddito, Sraffa — in “Produzione di merci […]

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Dee: Jane, do you ever feel like you are just this far from being completely hysterical twenty-four hours a day? Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day. — from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. — from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy! — from Tootsie, screenplay by Murray Schisgal I’ll be honest. This has been a particularly rough week for news junkies and/or anyone who cares about the future of our democracy. As Howard Beale once said, I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. Of course, we’ve “been here before”, seemingly on the brink of sociopolitical collapse (I’m old enough to remember 1968).

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Very much worth seeing if you missed it. You really cannot overstate just how bizarre he was, and I’ve seen a lot of Trump speeches. I liked David Frump’s description in The Atlantic: At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller. Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.

SIX-YEAR-OLD Grace from Coffs Harbour is asking the community to help spread the word about a gold ring she’s found and is hoping to return to its owner. Grace and her parents were walking with visiting family, taking them over Muttonbird Island to see the migrating whales, on Thursday 11 June at around noon. Advertise...

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PASSIONATE about promoting awareness around the precariousness of our oceans, the Gowings events team has created the EcoART Challenge competition. The challenge was set to local schools to create eco-friendly masterpieces to the theme of ‘The Ocean and its Marine Life’. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message...

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Interestingly I started writing this article on the Friday afternoon the global CrowdStrike outage occurred. It is amazing to reflect on the similarities between the two outages. Both occurred because of a rogue software update and both showing our lack of resilience and ICT diversity. Issues like this need to be addressed in our underlying Continue reading »

Unlike the US and Israel, Australia is a signatory of the Rome Statute. It has no option but to comply with the latest ICJ decision on 19 July that the UN Security Council, the General Assembly and all states have an obligation not to recognise Israel’s occupation as legal and not to give aid or Continue reading »

The living, not our forebears, have put most of the CO2 into the atmosphere. Substituting wood for coal in power stations doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions. A little warmth helps bell frogs fight chytrid fungus. Wood for coal trick The national delegates at the Glasgow COP meeting in late 2022 agreed to ‘phase down unabated coal Continue reading »

Australia and New Zealand’s populations must now wake up to the fact that our countries have been drawn into what ForeignPolicy.com called the knitting together of “the United States’ patchwork of different regional security systems into a global security architecture of networked alliances and par Continue reading »

It’s official: the royals are returning down under. King Charles and Queen Camilla are scheduled to visit Australia and Samoa in October, attending events in Canberra and New South Wales (with more details to come). Royal visits are designed to communicate a curated vision of imperial loyalty, but have always been a flashpoint for tension. In fact, Continue reading »

A poem from Roger Chao When twilight cloaks the city’s restless streets, And fear whispers through the cracks in our resolve, A siren’s call, like venom, softly seeps, Luring hearts towards shadows that evolve.   When storms of change rage fierce and unrestrained, And the unknown stretches vast and deep, The weary heart, in search Continue reading »

Based on the response to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) proposed change to the religion question for the 2026 census, religious groups are singing from the same misprinted hymn sheet. Paul Collins’ recent article, “Religion and the census” (Pearls and Irritations, 8 June 2024), serves as a faithful echo of the article published by Continue reading »

Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era Continue reading »

VANDALS have caused damage to property of the Coffs Harbour branch of the Country Women Association (CWA). Members were saddened to arrive at their rooms in Dalley Street to find a sign and brand-new fence had been vandalised. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us...

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