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Especially when it comes to migrant workers I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.
The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them: Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote. As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
YOUTH Leading The World Coffs Harbour, an OzGREEN program, convened its 2023 congress at The Link, Toormina, on Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 July, with delegates aged 12-25 years. Hosted by co-founder of OzGREEN, Sue Lennox AM, who founded YLTW, the two-day event connects young people locally and globally to help mobilise the next generation...
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HISTORIC traditions will be celebrated at Timberfest next Saturday, 29 July, as the small village of Glenreagh opens its recreation grounds for one of the region’s most-popular community festivals. A first this year is the steam engine ‘whistle off’ with some traction engine vehicles moving around the festival area. Advertise with News of The Area...
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PETBARN Coffs Harbour is leading the fundraising tally board in the 10th annual Petbarn Foundation and Vision Australia Seeing Eye Dogs appeal. “The Coffs Coast area stands out in their dedication to supporting people who are blind or have low vision,” Janelle Bloxom, Petbarn Foundation manager, who lives in Coffs Harbour, told News Of The...
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SALTWATER Freshwater Arts Alliance Aboriginal Corporation has been granted $2.186 million funding to support the acquisition of their own premises, located in a prime position within the central business district of Coffs Harbour. It’s been a project two years in the making. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business....
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Gosh, I wonder why? Who could have guessed that would happen? Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves. A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump. In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.
There are over 400 fossil fuel projects each with the potential to release more than 1 Gt of CO2. Serious environmental and human rights problems associated with mining the energy transition’s essential metals. Barry Commoner described the problem and its cause 60 years ago. Carbon bombs There are 425 existing and proposed fossil fuel projects Continue reading »
Is our deepest yearning to be ‘Us’, together, on our islands of Australia? A reflection on the Voice referendum and life, after a conversation this week at a swimming pool. On Monday, changing after swimming, a bloke struck up a conversation. “I am voting ‘No’ at the Referendum”, he said. He then went into some Continue reading »
Whereas once upon a time Australia was regarded as a country of goodwill, tolerance and decency, it is now reputed, worldwide, to be the country with the most inhumane treatment towards refugees. When I moved to the U.S. in 1981 I carried the Australian flag with an immature and ignorant pride, totally oblivious to the Continue reading »
The human dynamic of subcultures was one of Anne Coombs’ preoccupations. She turned it into a skill that guided her activism and philanthropy. Both GetUp! and Rural Australians for Refugees, two of the causes for which she will be best remembered, relied for their success on mobilising people with shared values and beliefs. These movements Continue reading »
Graeme Johanson’s Searching for Elsewhere (Ginninderra Press, 2023) provides a compelling answer. His memoire, a gripping story from beginning to end, deals with the dangerous manipulation of young lives brought up in an extremely controlling sect with bizarre rules, destroyed families and strict separation from the World. The way out is painful. Graeme’s powerful story Continue reading »
For decades, the Indian state has suppressed the democratic rights of Kashmiris. Narendra Modi’s hard-right government is taking this pattern of repression to new extremes, with the complicity of Indian intellectuals who seek to toxify the cause of Kashmir. First published in JACOBIN July 16, 2023 India-controlled Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised zones Continue reading »
The United States left Afghanistan in a state of dangerous and monumental disorder in 2021. Soon after, it made matters still worse by confiscating the meagre foreign exchange reserves of one of the world’s most deprived countries — shamelessly claiming that it was advancing certain human rights while doing so. Therefore, it took the US Continue reading »
It’s going to get worse: A Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains. The teenager, Celeste Burgess, 19, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 42, were charged last year after the police obtained their private Facebook messages, which showed them discussing plans to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.” Prosecutors said the mother had ordered abortion pills online and had given them to her daughter in April 2022, when Celeste Burgess was 17 and in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy. The two then buried the fetal remains themselves, the police said. Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. She faces up to five years in prison at her sentencing on Sept. 22, according to Joseph Smith, the top prosecutor in Madison County, Neb. The police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Or is it the stupid contrarianism? Tim Miller has put his finger on it. That’s all there is to modern “conservatism” (and, frankly, a certain segment of leftism too.) Basically, the future of American politics is just a bunch of snotty little adolescent bitches saying whatever it takes to get a rise out of their enemies. Gosh I wonder if people with a more … serious agenda might take advantage of this moment?
It’s the GOP way If you hadn’t heard, cruelty is the point. Government deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed” is no longer operative for the GOP. Democracy is no barrier to America’s authoritarian right getting its way. Aside from insurrection, it does not get more blatant than this (NBC News): Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district. The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% Black. […] Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the redistricting map into law Friday night. A federal court will hold a hearing on the map Aug. 14. Oh, the GOP is not done yet: The Justice Department has notified Texas that it plans to file a lawsuit over Gov.
The Italian Edition of The New Economics: A Manifesto (Keen 2021) will be published in November by Meltemi, and I will attend the BookCity book fair in Milan to launch the book on November 18th. I owe a great intellectual debt to many great Italian economists, from Pierro Sraffa (Sraffa 1960, 1926) and Pierangelo Garegnani … Continue reading "Preface to the Italian Edition of The New Economics: A Manifesto"
Siendo en su corazón una subdisciplina dentro de las matemáticas puras, los teóricos de juegos no están demasiado preocupados por si la teoría de los juegos representa fenómenos del mundo real. Bien. Pero como la mayoría de los científicos sociales tienen una opinión diferente, los teóricos de juegos también deben aceptar que, para la mayoría […]
Also, stock-trading lawmakers are put on notice, the EPA cracks on lead, incarcerated students regain tuition aid, and some nepo babies lose priority status.
Biden quietly reverses decades of antitrust policy A schoolteacher friend from the Boston area once dismisssed the “Taxachusetts” smear. She liked the services Massachusetts provided for her and her child. She did not mind paying for them. Imagine that. Franklin Foer examines the fetish — for fetish it is — behind making efficiency the highest good in setting business policy and practice. There is more to life than low, low prices. Not that federal policy since the Reagan era recognizes that. Or the Chicago school of economics. The Joe Biden administration has been quietly resetting federal policy on mergers, on antitrust and economic concentration. Since the Reagan administration stopped enforcing antitrust laws, Foer explains, “the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference.” Readers don’t need this explained to them. They’ve lived it.