During the course of his sermon, King quoted this sentence from the statement of a group that called itself the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Regarding race, it appears that the great majority of Americans have now rejected such silence. This is good. It remains an open question, however, when their silent acceptance of militarism, materialism, and the abuse of Planet Earth will end.
via Martin Luther King’s Giant Triplets: Racism, Yes, But What About Militarism and Materialism?
Taking over the judiciary is the GOP’s neverending exercise (ODT)
When pleading guilty twice means nothing in America if Yellow Baby POTUS Says No. Bye, Bye American Pie the Separation of Powers and Democracy. Drive your Chevy into the levy or just get drunk!! (ODT)
Trump still has several months to fill more court vacancies, and McConnell will definitely make this a top priority ― especially in the lame duck, if Trump loses reelection in November. But at the moment, there are no more appeals court seats to fill. McConnell has responded by personally reaching out to Republican-appointed judges and encouraging them to retire so he and Trump can fill their seats this year.
via Trump Notches His 200th Lifetime Federal Judge | HuffPost Australia
This was Tony Abbott’s doing Turnbull just handed the poison chalice. The NBN was fucked before it began with Abbott rejecting the ALP’s carbon fibre FTTH scheme for his cheaper MXT option (ODT)
Voter suppression, Trump’s all over it;
The US president seems to be preparing to contest a defeat in November by railing against ‘rigged’ mail-in ballots – but his party is the one attempting to suppress voters
Trump’s suing his niece soon it will be the rest of his family he’s been running a Sue-a-thon all of his life. (ODT)
Donald Trump’s family has gone to court to try to block publication of a tell-all book by the US president’s niece, Mary Trump, the New York Times reported.
According to her publisher, New York-based Simon & Schuster, Mary Trump’s book will describe “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse” within the Trump clan.
Americans Not Welcome
The European Union is preparing to allow travelers from dozens of countries into the 27-member nation bloc starting July 1—but Americans are unlikely to be welcome for the foreseeable future due to the Trump administration’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic.
A new paper finds that for white Americans, socioeconomic status is a major determining factor in susceptibility to fatal police violence, while for black Americans, class is critical but not decisive. The findings underscore the need to build a movement that stands against both racist police brutality and brutal class stratification.
via We’re Learning More About the Relationships Between Race, Class, and Police Brutality
The people who live here are settlers on a land soaked in the blood of colonisation.
We have been building lives and communities on the DNA of white supremacy for centuries.
The pain we, the Muslim community of New Zealand, feel today is the same that our tangata whenua – the Maori term for “people of the land” – have felt for decades and continue to feel today.
One year on, Christchurch could happen again. Not just in the United States. Not just in Australia.
via Centuries of white supremacism to blame for Christchurch shooting | New Zealand | Al Jazeera
Coincidentally – or perhaps not – one of the most valuable skills taught in the humanities is that of critical thinking.
Ideally, critical thinkers learn to question everything, including existing social norms and traditions. They learn to think systemically. They look beyond the obvious. They use evidence, logic and reason in their arguments. They avoid making assumptions. They consider different perspectives and they use all those skills and more to arrive at judgements. These skills are invaluable in personal and working life. Indeed, critical thinking is taught in some schools with a view to equipping students for life post-school, no matter what direction that takes.
via The Morrison Government’s assault on critical thinking — and dissent
Trump’s Racism (ODT)
Dividing working people is a tried and true strategy of our upper economic group and their collaborators. Think president Lyndon Johnson. He opined on the politics of racism to Bill Moyers a young staffer in 1960:
“if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pocket for you.”
Either way, focusing on these efforts glosses over the actual likely takeaways from the event.
Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States. Police live in the cities they patrol. They generally treat citizens with respect. As I documented in my book Dateline Havana, police beatings of criminals are rare and police murders are nonexistent. Cuba has one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.
My thought for the day
Meritocracy is a term used to imply that those at the top of the social scale have merit and a slur against those at the bottom. John Lord
via Two deceptions. One done, and one to come. – » The Australian Independent Media Network
In December 2019, the high court heard its first fast-track applicant (CNY17), and declared that the IAA review of his protection claim had been “infected by apprehended bias” because of what Justice James Edelman called “irrelevant and prejudicial material involving prejudicial opinion, innuendo and tacit suggestion” shared by Dutton’s Department of Home Affairs.
This issue of bias is highly relevant to Australia’s lopsided assessment of refugees, where the mere fact of arriving by boat has destroyed the lives of people like our client and more than 500 others, many of whom are entering their eighth year in detention.
Dutton’s confidence in ignoring the judiciary makes a mockery of Australia’s system of government, which rests on the separation of powers enshrined in our constitution, between the judiciary, executive and legislature. Unless each respects the role of the other, the very foundations of our democracy are at risk.
“Poverty and racism are systemic problems that need systemic solutions. We are that solution,” said Jamilla Allen of Durham, North Carolina, one of the testifiers who spoke Saturday at the online event.
Entitled the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington, the event—moved online in light of the coronaviurs pandemic—was sponsored by The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
When Truth is a slower process than spin (ODT)
via Now We Know of Two More Impeachable Offenses by Trump and Barr | The Smirking Chimp
This fixation with balancing the Budget – the very thing which they deemed so critical in managing the economy – was the very thing which has been damaging the economy.
There are two ways to balance a budget: cut spending or raise taxes. The latter ran counter to party ideology, so Josh Frydenberg cut spending. Cutting spending withdraws money from the community. It is deflationary. So it was that lower spending meant lower economic activity. Growth drifted lower, so did inflation, so did interest rates. Lending criteria got tighter. Then the housing market got an attack of the wobbles.
The Libs are fond of talking about their Shopkeeper Theory; that is, that every shopkeeper must balance the books. Or they go out of business. So it is that the Government too must balance its books, they say, and the idea of balanced budgets is deployed as a weapon to bash political opponents.
The fact is that shopkeepers don’t issue their own currency. Shopkeepers don’t have a banking system to buy their bonds. Shopkeepers can’t create money.
The consummate paradox is that, while they deny the efficacy of what central banks are doing, what MMT describes – and espouse ShopKeeper Theory, the world’s central banks are actually creating new money anyway via QE. They are watching it happen while denying they can see it.
Death to critical thinking it’s too progressive and leads to people from the bottom have second thoughts (ODT)
The top four search results for the term “ABC left-wing” on Google produce articles from News Corp media institutions.
The first three come from Sky News commentary and the fourth result is an article by The Australian.
The emotion-laden headlines read:
The notion that “the ABC is too left-wing” seems to be gaining momentum. It appears that News Corp has played a significant role in furthering this narrative.
Unrelenting attacks: News Corp alleges the ABC is ‘too left-wing’
Did Murdoch build a show around him or slot him into a new show? We don’t have to left-wingers to state the obvious. The contract would tell but the advertisers even more. (ODT)
Retired radio shock-jock Alan Jones to host new show on Sky News | Alan Jones | The Guardian
Yes, I would argue that the total extermination of Australia’s Indigenous people was deliberately intended. If not by the bullet, then by the policies of those governments that saw them as a stain on white purity. God favoured the white man and they set out to do His work.
For those who missed the link to Hancock’s vile proposal …
via “They’re going to die out anyway” – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Empty seats and Social Distancing at Trump’s 1 Million are coming rally, (ODT)
via After Weeks Of Anticipation, Trump Rally Crowd Underwhelms | HuffPost Australia
In both of these cases though, from grad students and college athletes to prisoners and welfare recipients, workers are being told that they aren’t workers, and don’t get the rights of workers, and to shut up and work.
These are not the only examples of this type of coercive work. For example, the proliferation of noncompete clauses is giving employers expansive, punitive power over even more traditional workers. And then you have for example undocumented immigrants who are typically under contacts with one employer, and if they leave that job for any reason, they can be deported. As with the other examples I’ve identified, this gives employers an unusual degree of power, and that power often leads to a great deal of abuse.
When the Prime Minister made the bold assertion that there was no slavery in Australia, many were quick to point out his poor knowledge of our history forcing Morrison to correct himself. Of course, many people would have left it as that, but not our leader.
No, we can’t have all these elites telling the PM that he’s wrong, so he sprung into action and doubled the price of doing a Humanities course at university. That’ll teach those smart-arises to correct him.
SUNDAY’S EDITORIAL
THE LIBERALS FLOCK TO EDEN MONARO
As the by election draws near Morrison and some of his ministers are prancing around the Eden Monaro electorate trying to win over the voters.
… See More
![Screenshot_2020-06-24 The government is making ‘job-ready’ degrees cheaper for students – but cutting funding to the same c[...]](https://olddogthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/screenshot_2020-06-24-the-government-is-making-e28098job-readye28099-degrees-cheaper-for-students-e28093-but-cutting-funding-to-the-same-c....png?w=845)
![Cuban doctors attend a farewell ceremony before departing to Kuwait to assist the country's ongoing fight against COVID-19, Havana, Cuba on June 4, 2020 [Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/6/10/4e91afd0cab04c8a84f2470b99020438_18.jpg "Cuba's two pandemics: The coronavirus and the US embargo")
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