Tone
I really wanted to write a good review of this book, but this was not the book to do it. Abbott is a conviction politician, no matter how angry certain commenter may be when I say that. He wants power, yes, and he is ruthless in his pursuit of it. But he wants power for a reason, not just for its own sake. I just hope that the debate this book sparked gets people talking about what those reasons are.
A Word about Welfare
Am I the only person who is thoroughly sick of the neoliberals and right-wingers carping on about the evils of the welfare state? It was, after all, they who invented it.
Must read link: #liz_beths on class, culture and ‘humour’
Cultural disdain is about more than humour. It’s the new politics.
Quick link: Sparrow on the cultural contradictions of the right
I’ve rarely seen the culture wars explained better than by Jeff Sparrow in this piece at The Drum.
So, does that make Obama Sauron?
Titanic battles between good and evil are fantasies, and the debt ceiling crisis illustrates what can happen when the fantastic power of ideology prevails.
Obama, class politics and the debt ceiling crisis
The tortuous negotiations over the US sovereign debt ceiling probably feature in our minds as a threat to our economic well being. Or for American politics junkies, the maneouvring could be uppermost. It’s worth putting the negotiations in a different perspective.
Labour market myth busting
As we all slouch back towards work in the new year, a hardy perennial has been dominating the business pages and the Bosses’ Bible, the Australian Financial Review. Spurred on, this time, by the release of 1980 Cabinet papers (resources [...]
On feeling sympathy with Stephen Conroy
We really must be in a new paradigm when some people on Twitter end up thinking Sophie Mirabella speaks truly and I find myself feeling some sympathy with Stephen Conroy. But that’s perhaps by the by. I think one of [...]
Guest post by Tad Tietze: Doomed to repetition? The Left and the social democratic inheritance
Originally published at Overland and reproduced with their kind permission. As he battled terminal illness in late 2009, acclaimed historian Tony Judt delivered a lecture at NYU that would become the basis for his final book. But rather than be [...]
The Left, the independents and “new politics”
There was an interesting micro-debate on Twitter the other night between me, Tad Tietze and Jason Wilson, riffing off Dr_Tad’s scepticism about the “independents are our saviours” meme. That’s expanded on at much greater length at Left Flank. I’d thoroughly [...]
The contest between Gillardism and Abbottism
Early this month, I contested the idea that this campaign was a boring race. It didn’t take long for that notion to be junked. But the perception that there’s no salient difference between the two parties has had a stronger [...]
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