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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 05:00
Their voters are very sensitive, you know Fox knows they are awful people… New text messages revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed a former Tucker Carlson producer trash the network’s audience. Newly revealed text messages show that Alex Pfeiffer, a former producer for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was uneasy about covering false election conspiracy theories purported by disgraced pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell. Powell claimed to have an affidavit showing that a large number of votes had been covertly flipped by Dominion “at the direction” of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died years earlier. Powell also said the voting software company had ties to the Clinton Foundation and Soros, claims which are also unfounded and untrue.  The Washington Post reported that Fox executive and former Trump aide Raj Shah tried to play both sides when it came to covering Powell’s lies. When former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with Powell, endorsed false election claims during a press conference on Nov 19, 2020, Carlson expressed doubts.
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:59
A Labor government has puts guns before butter… how extraordinary! Today, Pearls and Irritations has taken the unusual step of devoting our issue line up entirely to articles on the drive to war with China and the disastrous commitment of $368 billion dollars of Australia’s public funding to nuclear submarines. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Anthony Continue reading »
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:58
One of the best-known writers on public opinion, Walter Lippmann, tells us that every conflict is fought on two fronts: the battlefield and the minds of people via propaganda. ‘We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on Continue reading »
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:51
In their Red Alert for War, doom laden experts assembled by the Sydney Morning Herald forecast a war with China. Preoccupied with cybersecurity, biosecurity, with the weaponry available in military alliances, the experts speak the language of militarism and war but have nothing to say about peace. Yet the language of peace can inspire, not Continue reading »
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:50
Members of a key US House committee wanted anti-Beijing antagonism and that was what they got – together with the spectre of armed conflict. OK, I hope aspiring young reporters and journalism school students won’t be reading this column. That’s because I am going to say something I am not supposed to say out loud, Continue reading »
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:49
As part of Australian media’s relentless onslaught of war–with–China propaganda, the government-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation just aired a radio segment on RN Breakfast about the newly revealed details on the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal, featuring two guests who are enthusiastic supporters of the deal, and hosted by another enthusiastic supporter of the deal. One of Continue reading »
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:45
In an exclusive interview with The Cradle, Russia's top macroeconomics strategist criticizes Moscow's slow pace of financial reform and warns there will be no new global currency without Beijing.
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 04:00

“Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank on Friday, in the largest U.S. bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.” — The New York Times, 3/13/23

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Look, I get it, I’m a bank, and with that comes certain expectations. That I’m good with money. That I’ll protect your money. That I know what money is and how it works. But those are outdated stereotypes. Nowadays, banks can be anything, including bad with money.

When you have the last name Bank, your future is pretty much mapped out for you. You go into the family business and do your best. And my best was mismanaging funds so egregiously that it shattered Americans’ confidence in the entire US banking system.

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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 03:30
Jennifer Rubin on the latest Hunter Biden harassment: Right-wing House Republicans have left little doubt that they want to spend the bulk of their time and energy investigating phony conspiracies and made-up scandals. Their main obsession appears to be Hunter Biden, whose very name has become a buzzword in right-wing media. The contents of one of his laptops, revealed in 2020, have inspired a fantastical conspiracy theory that has been comprehensively debunked by, among others, Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and former FBI agent. She persuasively applies a “a basic three-part formula” employed by psychologists who study conspiracy theories “for disentangling truth from fiction, one that activates the rational, analytical side, rather than the lizard, fight-or-flight side, of the brain.” Her takeaway: The conspiracy theorists have reached the “temper tantrum” stage of the Hunter Biden “scandal.” […] Obviously, there is no legitimate basis for congressional “oversight” of the matter.
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 01:36

Vera Songwe, Chair of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, and former Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, on the multiple crises facing African countries.

Songwe is co-chair of the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Finance for Climate Action, a member of the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Songwe was previously Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Recognized as one of Africa’s 100 most influential people in 2022 and recipient of the All Africa Continental Leadership Award, Songwe was named one of the nominees for Forbes Africa 50 Top Women in 2023. She recently co-authored a book entitled Regional Integration in West Africa: Is There a Role for a Single Currency? She has spent the last three years championing the cause for additional liquidity for emerging markets and the need for a new global financial architecture fit for the 21st century’s development challenges.

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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 01:30
Short-term anxiety Watch this clip of Guy Cecil, the departing chair of Priorities USA PAC. He provides a pretty concise breakdown of where Democrats go wrong. The right takes a long view of politics, Cecil argues. They invest in long-term ideological change. It took the conservative movement 50 years to repeal Roe, but they retained that focus and worked at it until they did. Democrats’ think in election cycles. They need a broader, longer approach to building their coalition and infrastructure. “One of my concerns is that we have fetishized the use of data and analytics,” Cecil tells MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In so doing, Democrats reduce their electoral coalition to “a confederacy of caricatures.” This groups cares about this issue, and that group cares about another. In fact, people are people, and they care about many things. I wrote recently about the fixation on data: Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m.
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Wed, 15/03/2023 - 00:30

Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone — no sure thing — such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.   But what if the answer is “no,” which seems at least as likely? Wouldn’t that pave the way for the U.S. to work... Read more

Source: Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Imminent? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.