The Australia China Joint Communique of December 1972 is the foundational document underpinning bilateral relations ever since. It is not a long document, and at a cursory glance appears quite simple. Recently, however, some commentators have questioned its language and suggested it is ambiguous, particularly concerning our government’s position on the status of Taiwan. A Continue reading »
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Friday’s findings of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s conduct must be at the forefront of our legislator’s minds when they are pushed by the Israel lobby to enact the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The attempt by Zionist lobbyists to silence criticism of Israel is running in top gear to try to counter the Continue reading »
Twenty years’ ago the then leader of the conservative New Zealand National Party, Don Brash, got into hot water when a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) official reported that he had assured a visiting delegation from the US Senate that if his party were elected to office NZ’s ‘nuclear-free policy’ would be ‘gone Continue reading »
In the West the claim is often made that Palestine is an issue that Arab or Muslim governments manipulate to stay in power by appealing to a populist cause. The deeper truth is that Palestine has become a subversive issue in the Middle East: the liberation of Palestinians through a South Africa-style dismantling of an Continue reading »
With just a few more stories farmers in the south of Israel would have been granted as much air time as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia put together. Continue reading »
Governments and politicians should be investing in community initiatives and addressing the social determinants of crime, and health, instead of focusing on “tough on crime” policies, according to two members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy. Tough on youth crime policies are short sighted Continue reading »
One of the characteristic features of modern western democracies is, as John Ralston Saul has pointed out, that it has focused on the development of narrow forms of expertise and then used reason to apply that narrow expertise to addressing specific social, cultural, economic and political issues. This is particularly true of the proliferating management Continue reading »
The trans–Atlantic alliance’s true purpose of global dominance is too objectionable to profess. Instead, it operates on the basis of fantastic conjurings, which no member questions. It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently Continue reading »
If leading central banks can grow their balance sheets by billions of dollars during the pandemic, they can do the same to fight global warming. Last year was the hottest summer on record and, while this summer is not over yet, it feels like it will break last year’s record. My air-conditioning bill has gone up because Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 21 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
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 […]
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).
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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