A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out. One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away. John Pilger was always on the side of the oppressed. He denounced Empire and all its violent predations–war, genocide, exploitation–as well as its endless lies and propaganda. Till his death, he fought tirelessly for Continue reading »
Reading
Dispatch from the Trump cult Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them. Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him. Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real. This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 31, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Oligarchy
Jeffrey A. Winters [The American Interest, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]
Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of Oligarchy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
We’d better hope not Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire: Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.” The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office. If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.
Three days before Christmas, Treasury’s Centre for Population has without much fanfare issued its 2023 Population Statement. As this is only weeks after the ABS issued its population estimates for 2022-23 and its long-term population projections, and a week after the Government issued its new migration strategy (in conjunction with the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Continue reading »
Why Gaza urgently needs a plan B. (A repost from December 2023). War will drag on… It’s now clear that the Gaza War is far from over. Hamas refuses to surrender. Israel has rejected the UN General Assembly’s call for a cease fire and American pressure to lower the intensity of the war because it Continue reading »
An Israel supporter walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts eating it. Israel supporter: [Walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts eating it.] Guy: Hey! Israel supporter: What? Guy: That’s my sandwich! Israel supporter [still eating]: Sandwich? What sandwich? Guy: Right there! You’re eating it right now! Israel supporter: No I’m not. Guy: Oh Continue reading »
The African country, one journalist noted, “fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the U.S.” “No one knows apartheid like those who fought it before,” said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to the news that South Africa has taken a “historic” new step to hold Israel accountable for its Continue reading »
The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world. I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts: Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a […]
Genom att utbilda mig skulle jag få ett bättre jobb än pappa, tjäna mer pengar än vad han giorde och slippa slita ut min kropp medan jag gorde det. Helt enkelt kunna leva ett godare liv än vad han hade gjort. l en rent objektiv och materiell mening har jag också lyckats bättre med det […]
This time last year, Britain was in the midst of the largest wave of strikes in decades. Workers had experienced the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars, and with the cost of living crisis biting harder in the colder months, many were taking to the picket line for the first time. From […]
Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies is already looking to NEXT holiday season, posting a teaser image for the 2024 Christmas Special.
Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared. There’s a lot to do between now and then. You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers: [T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.” That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014.
The new first principle of politics The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea. Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block. Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy. States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!
Our 11th most-read article of 2023.
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Originally published August 25, 2023.
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Colleagues, friends, and adjuncts —
As many of you know, the university is facing unprecedented budget shortfalls. These shortfalls aren’t directly your fault, but to be honest, it is you who will absorb the consequences of our lack of funds. That said, please know we think you’re doing a fantastic job. (Except for the English department, which persists in assigning long books that our market research has decisively concluded students do not find cool.)
Instead, the budget shortfall is primarily due to changes in demographics. There are fewer college-aged students now than before, and of the remaining college-aged people, fewer than before are choosing our kind of institution. Thank you to Frank, our Executive Vice President of Reading Inside Higher Ed and Telling Us What It Says, for that insight.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Rick and Morty, Jeremy Renner, What If...?, Bleeding Cool's 2023 Top 5 New TV Series/100 Most-Read & more!
I only had an oldish iPhone on me, unfortunately
This is one of the most surprising articles I’ve read in the NY Times in a long while. It’s about the Israeli military’s total lack of preparation for the October 7th attacks. I can’t really believe how bad it was. This was just not something most people ever thought could happen. They’re supposed to be the best military with the best intelligence in the whole region. My God. Here is a gift link for you to read the whole thing which I highly recommend you do. The administration just approved a$147.5 million emergency shipment of military aid. Wherever you come out on this issue, I think everyone can agree that the US should be very concerned about its ongoing military support for the country. And I would hope that it would convince even the hawks in both countries that Netanyahu has got to go. The buck stops with him. A short excerpt: The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry.
This isn’t the first time he’s said this, of course. He claims he actually won the popular vote in 2016 because of all the undocumented immigrants who voted for Clinton. He even created a commission to investigate it and, of course, they came up with nothing because it’s utter nonsense. But today this actually refers to the Great Replacement Theory, which is much more pernicious. Sure, he’s laying the groundwork to claim he actually won again. And his people will be convinced of it, of course. But the Republican Party has now adopted this white supremacist theory and it’s inspiring people to take matters into their own hands. Example: The Tree of Life and El Paso mass murders, which were clearly inspired by this grotesque, racist propaganda. Trump may be doing it for his personal purposes, but a whole lot of people are absorbing this idea as a major threat to their way of life. It’s bad.
Her name is Marge The Hill interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene who has obviously feeling irrelevant since she bet on the wrong horse in MyKev. She’s loaded for bear: In an extensive interview with The Hill, Greene did not hold back when asked about Johnson’s early Speakership record — “terrible” — or his need to earn her trust. “He went from having a voting record to literally a month later … going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House,” Greene later added. “Literally all of a sudden talking about doing things that he had literally voted against only a month before that. And, you know, that was unacceptable to me, and it still is.” In the first two months of the Johnson era, Greene moved to force votes on a pair of politically prickly issues that split the Republican conference, hurled sometimes explicit insults at GOP colleagues who opposed those efforts, and frequently criticized the Speaker’s strategy on major issues including government funding, Ukraine aid and the annual defense policy bill.
Nikki Haley finally gets some scrutiny Over the holiday I heard a few people saying that we liberals really should get behind Haley and help her beat Trump because even though she polls better than Biden we should do what we can to defeat him even if it means losing the general election. My response (in my head) was “wtf are you smoking? Haley is horrible!” Sure, maybe she’s not as bad as Trump in some ways but we don’t really know that because she is an empty vessel and nobody knows what she really thinks about anything. Politico took a look at the flap and what it says about her: After evading attacks for weeks from her Republican rivals, it was a town hall question about the origins of the Civil War that finally seemed to stick. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time. With weeks to go before voting starts, Haley is now facing the first major test of her ability to withstand a maelstrom in the presidential campaign. It is a significant moment not only for the former South Carolina governor, but for the broader effort among Republicans hoping to stop Donald Trump from steamrolling to the nomination.