US Politics

January 9, 2021

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Let’s not hear any more moral lecturing from so-called conservatives. When the test came in the US (but here too) a clear choice between institutions and chaos, democracy and their own system-wrecking advantage, most either actively cheered, or stayed silent. Authority gone.

January 3, 2021

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Biden’s task

The election of Donald Trump and the behaviour of him, his family and his appointees have demonstrated the shortcomings of the democratic system of the United States. Their constitution was…

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.

George Packer

December 13, 2020

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305,000

By admin | US Politics | 2 Comments

Ever since Donald Trump lost the US presidential election by a margin, in electoral college terms, of 306 votes to 2321, that he described four years ago as a landslide,…

A lack of imagination

By admin | Australian Politics, Science, UK Politics, US Politics | 6 Comments

I read a piece in the New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb about the Cambridge mathematician Frank Ramsey1, a person of whom I had never heard. Reading about Ramsey makes one…

Republicans think that children being slaughtered in their classrooms with weapons of war is the cost of freedom but that wearing a mask to save lives during a pandemic is too high a price to pay.

Bradley Whitford

November 28, 2020

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Call me a radical lefty if you'd like, but I refuse to accept a system that enables Jeff Bezos to grow his wealth by $66,000,000,000 in 5 months — during a pandemic that's left 40,000,000 Americans on the brink of eviction.

Robert Reich

November 26, 2020

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Now that the stock market has reached an all time high, even as millions of Americans are in bread lines trying to fend off starvation during a plague, perhaps more people will finally get it that the stock market is not the economy.

Bill Palmer

October 31, 2020

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How can you witness billionaires accumulate $10,000,000,000,000 in wealth during an economically catastrophic pandemic and not conclude that the system needs to fundamentally change?

Robert Reich

October 27, 2020

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What we’re witnessing is a global phenomenon, something big has changed. The oligarchs have discovered the formula for persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich and that formula includes massive lying and cheating on an unprecedented scale. Mobilising social media particularly to generate mendacious, manipulative adverts and memes and conspiracy theories in order to swing people round or to turn them off from voting all together. Pushing forward killer clowns like Johnson, like Trump, like Modi, like Bolsonaro, who will do whatever the oligarchs want but present a sort of almost amusing face to the public and so we laugh along with them and then they learn from each other, they teach each other. In fact very often the same political operatives will hop from one campaign to another, constantly refining the model, refining the formula.

George Monbiot