"Turns out Harry was pretty posh"
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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines. “He simply chuckled,” Crowley wrote of […]
The post Patrick Lawrence: Munich as Propaganda Fest appeared first on scheerpost.com.
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar legions of rifle-toting troops did the same after World War I ended with the defeat of Germany and its allies in 1918. And Sherman tanks rolling through the urban canyons of midtown Manhattan? That followed the triumph over the Axis in 1945. That’s what winning used to look like in America — star-spangled, soldier-clogged streets and victory parades. Enthralled by a martial Bastille Day celebration... Read more
Last Monday, I wrote about the global need for us to abandon meat production for food, and, instead take up plant-based diets. Many people interpreted that argument as a personal attack on their dietary freedom, which indicates they fell into a fallacy of composition trap and declined to see the global issue. As part of…
"She's had no-one to turn to. Other than the world's largest news media organisation"
Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging […]
Between 1993 and 2011 the Department of Justice Antitrust Division issued a trio of policy statements (two during the Clinton administration and one under Obama) regarding the sharing of information in the healthcare industry. These rules provided wiggle room around the Sherman Antitrust Act, which “sets forth the basic antitrust prohibition against contracts, combinations, and conspiracies in restraint of trade or commerce.”
And it wasn’t just in healthcare. The rules were interpreted to apply to all industries. To say it has been a disaster would be an understatement. Companies increasingly turned to data firms offering software that “exchanges information” at lightning speed with competitors in order to keep wages low and prices high – effectively creating national cartels....
Naked Capitalism
Reversing 30 Years of Damage from the Clintons, the DOJ Closes A Price-Fixing Loophole Wide Enough to Drive a Truck Through Conor Gallagher
What???? Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said he is not sure if President Donald Trump installed him to slow the response to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. During a Sunday discussion on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program, a caller confronted Miller about his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “What do you say to all the people that believe that you, Kash Patel, Chad Wolf, Charles Lamb all were installed for one reason, and that’s to delay the response on Jan. 6?” a caller named David asked. “They were only deployed after the coup had failed. They failed because [then-Vice President Mike Pence] wouldn’t leave the building.” “I think it’s complete bull—you know what,” Miller shot back.
That’s from a twitter thread by Seth Cotler: A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.” That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns. The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian. The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher. Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front.
A court decision last week green lights bold defamation action against the English-speaking world’s most powerful media empire. read now...Dress up loving NSW premier Dom Perrotet is tipped today to announce that he will be running a trash fire as his lead candidate in the Upper House at the upcoming election. ”It’s a no lose situation for the Premier... Read More ›
It looks like they’re going to try… Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy: Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 19, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
War
“The Sy Hersh effect: killing the messenger, ignoring the message”
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-16-2023]
On one side, we have Elon Musk as a critic of fiat money. On the other, we have Ford and Edison—the tech-billionaires of their time—as fans of fiat money. Who do you trust? Neither: you work it out for yourself from first principles. And this is much harder that just ranting about “fiat money” on … Continue reading "When Billionaires Collide"
There was some polling done in Arizona recently and it’s very interesting: Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) leads Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a series of other Republicans in potential match-ups for Arizona’s 2024 Senate race, according to a new poll. The poll from OH Predictive Insights released Thursday showed Gallego leading in eight hypothetical match-ups, four of which against Sinema running independently and four with Gallego facing a Republican in a head-to-head race. The four Republicans included in the poll was former Gov. Doug Ducey, former gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, former gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and former Senate nominee Blake Masters. In a three-person race, Gallego leads by as little as 5 points in a race with Ducey and as much as 9 points in a race with Masters. He leads by 7 points in the race with Taylor Robson and by 8 points in the race with Lake. He also leads in the two-person match-ups, but the margin varies significantly based on who the Republican candidate is.
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in Continue reading »
The child’s face in the Smith Family ad sums up all that is wrong with Australia. In this rich, first world nation, the Smith Family call us to sponsor a child so that she might go to school. A basic human right is being denied and in that denial our state and government stands condemned. Continue reading »
On the 28th November 2023 the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 (NSW) (the NSW VAD Act) will come into force. NSW Health, has a massive program of work to develop a coherent transition to the new system. As the last State to introduce legislation (absent the Territories) information is already available through published papers in Continue reading »
The good news for the Murdoch media is that it’s not the most distrusted brand in Australia – despite the efforts of its journalists. The bad news is that – according to the Roy Morgan Research Most Trusted and Distrusted Brands research – it is the fifth most distrusted behind Facebook, Optus, Telstra and Amazon. Continue reading »
“Lifters” and “leaners”; “makers” vs “takers”; “strivers” and the “skivers”. The language may be different but the pejorative sentiment around the welfare state is similar, be it in Australia, the United States or the United Kingdom. However, it is highly misleading. Government payments to people who are unemployed are a fraction of the spending on Continue reading »
In 2007, at age forty-four, I stood as a Senate candidate for Victoria in the federal election. In 2011, I moved into a shared support accommodation facility, where I suffered a severe loss of choice and control. Disability can be progressive. Supportive regimes for those subjected to physiological deterioration need to be progressive too. They Continue reading »
Ganderbal, India – The sun has just come out on a grey wintery afternoon and the snow-clad peaks of Harmukh are shining in the distance, casting sharp reflections over the horizon. When some rays fall on Rahila’s* face, sitting on the verandah of her home, she turns around and giggles. “It is too bright!” Winter Continue reading »
Difference is intrinsically good, a vital force behind creativity and innovation, and an essential ingredient for international competition. It becomes a negative force only when people or governments try to impose those differences on others, and this is not something China has done. I have a chronic, deep-seated discomfort with US President Joe Biden’s call for Continue reading »
This is a Skwawkbox edit of a guest post submitted by a Labour figure who asked to remain anonymous. Asked by journalists last week whether he would proscribe – outlaw – Momentum, Keir Starmer responded equivocally: That one is not for me. Of course, that is neither a denial nor an indicator that it’s not […]
From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting: Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so. “In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.” What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal.