- by Evan Thompson
Reading
- by Lisa Mueller
The favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative party leader plans to launch an "air war" with younger voters
Join a panel of experts for a conversation that tackles the moral and ethical obligations integral to research and investing priorities.
When: 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm, October 14, 2014
Where: Eastern Avenue Lecture Theatre 315, University of Sydney
Registrations: https://events.humanitix.com/weapons-climate-justice-and-investing-ethically
We are living in an era of overlapping crises: from climate catastrophe to devastating wars, alongside the age-old ravages of inequality at home and across the globe. As these struggles escalate, many ordinary people are questioning their own responsibility, and possibility of their complicity, in these disasters. What prospects are there for responding? What avenues for meaningful action?
With the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, these concerns have come into sharper focus. This panel of experts will examine some of these uncomfortable questions, and our moral and ethical obligations to address adverse human rights and climate justice impacts.
Panellists:
Double book launch for:
False Profits of Ethical Capital: Finance, Labour and the Politics of Risk by Claire Parfitt
Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations by Lian Sinclair
When: 630pm, Tuesday 29 October, 2024
Where: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Registration: https://gleebooks.com.au/event/claire-parfitt-and-lian-sinclair-double-launch/
In mainstream economics nowadays there seems to be a broad consensus that one somehow can establish general truths about things by simply generalizing from lots of individual RCTs. But as is well-known among philosophers of science, this kind of inference, based on induction by simple enumeration, is highly flawed. And there are alternatives: The striking […]
The celebratory headlines in Australia today are about how the Federal government has just recorded two consecutive financial year fiscal surpluses, which the Treasurer lauded as an example of “responsible economic management” as the government removes from the economy a cumulative sum of $A172.3 billion since it was elected in May 2022. The headlines should…
And yet most voters say they think that corrupt, orange, imbecile, con artist is the better choice to run it If that freak wins I don’t want to hear another word about economic determinism, “deliverism” or “fundamentals.” It will have been proven to be utter nonsense.
It’s true: In 1980, under pressure to begin construction on what would become his signature project, Donald J. Trump employed a crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers who worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the 58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands. The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all. Their treatment led to years of litigation over Mr. Trump’s labor practices, and in 1998, despite frequent claims that he never settles lawsuits, Mr. Trump quietly reached an agreement to end a class-action suit over the Bonwit Teller demolition in which he was a defendant. For almost 20 years, the terms of that settlement have remained a secret. But last week, the settlement documents were unsealed by Loretta A. Preska, a United States District Court judge for the Southern District, in response to a 2016 motion filed by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight. Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research. And now, Pentagon-funded research... Read more
I don’t know if this guy is on the level but if so, this is pretty damning: Kyle Rittenhouse’s former bodyguard and spokesperson feels the 17-year-old might never have been acquitted of killing two people and seriously injuring another if the jury knew then what he knows now. “When the world finds out everything that happened in this case and with Kyle, it’ll be shocking. It’s breathtaking,” Dave Hancock said in an interview for a documentary that sheds new light on what happened that fateful night in August 2020, on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Hancock said that he learned during the trial that Rittenhouse had allegedly used racial slurs in messages sent to his friends and appeared to be looking for an opportunity to use a weapon. “There was a history of things he was doing prior to Kenosha, specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a gunfight,” Hancock claimed. “I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts.
The man who runs our judicial system has devised yet another depraved plot to destroy the planet: A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned. The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (Eli)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to Eli’s website. The American Energy Institute (AEI), a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank, has been attacking Eli and their climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying Eli was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 29 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America — EXCERPTS
Mehrsa Baradaran (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)
Introduction
I heard from Tom Sullivan and it is a real mess in Asheville, NC. No power, lines for water, grocery stores all closed. I thought I’d put up some links to places to donate if you are of a mind to help out: The full picture of devastation is emerging from Hurricane Helene’s disastrous path through Western North Carolina. Homes, businesses, roads, infrastructure, cell towers, and anything else in Helene’s path were washed away or severely damaged by raging flood waters and strong winds. For so many of the nearly 1 million residents in Western North Carolina’s beautiful mountains, the recovery process has barely begun. Neighbors are trying to help one another and relief programs, both national and local, are mobilizing. To assist the public in looking for ways to contribute, volunteer, or donate, BPR has compiled the list of resources below. We’ll keep this updated. For local listeners and readers, the BPR News team has worked nearly around the clock since the start of the storm to provide critical information and updates. More information specific to local resources (such as shelters and supplies) is available on our website.
JD Vance is on quite the weirdo extremist tour right now. I honestly won’t be surprised to see him appear before a legit Nazi rally replete with swastikas at this point JD Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict. The campaign announced earlier this week that the Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival, during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Wallnau, who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show – drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually – is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business and government.
The New Yorker endorsement of Harris is really great. Read it if you can. They lay out the full indictment of Trump and the full case for Harris. This is the conclusion: Four years ago, in our endorsement of Joe Biden, we said that, while he was leading in the polls, we hoped he would displace Trump “by a margin that prevents prolonged dispute or the kind of civil unrest that Trump appears to relish.” We know what happened: the margins, in four decisive states, were extremely narrow, and Trump refused to concede. Instead, he levelled wild accusations and filed dozens of lawsuits. When those failed, he called on his MAGA believers to march on the Capitol. This time around, the Trump campaign and various right-wing groups have already deployed deny-the-vote efforts around the country, particularly in swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. There is every likelihood that, if Trump loses, the drama could go on for weeks or months after Election Day. He has made no secret of the fact that he is willing to use every lever, deploy every dirty trick, political and rhetorical, to bring the country to the brink once more.
You’re going to be hearing a lot about this from Trump and his minions. They’ll be lying through their teeth, of course: Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences. “Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona.
Wall Street wants to regulate itself, and more from The Lever this week.