Latest articles

It began just after a news interview.  Time: a quarter past nine. Morning of September 22, and yet to take a sip from the brewed Turkish coffee, its light thin surface foam inviting.  The Australian city of Melbourne in its sixth lockdown, its residents fatigued and ravaged by regulations.  Rising COVID-19 numbers, seemingly inexorable.

Then, an initial, gentle movement of floors, a slight, barely detectable swaying of the walls of the apartment.  Across City Road in South Bank, one part of the beleaguered Crown Casino establishment seemed to be rippling, the glass forming gentle, shimmering waves across the surface.  Melbourne was …

Australia has just caused surprise among its friends, concern among its neighbours, and an overtly hostile reaction from the Chinese with its announcement that it was scrapping the submarine deal it had signed with France and replacing it with a scheme, cooked together with British and American allies, to buy 8 nuclear powered submarines.

The scheme as announced was extraordinarily short on details. There is apparently at least 18 months of negotiating ahead before the contract is even signed. After that there will be a lengthy delay, estimated being at least 10 years in length, before the first submarine is ever …

The recent outbreak of the Delta variant in China “shows that its strategy no longer fits. It is time for China to change tack.”

So declared a lead essay atop the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section on September  7 by Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Delta outbreak that “changed the game” in Huang’s words emerged after an outbreak at Nanjing international airport in July traced to a flight from Russia.  Did this outbreak change anything, in fact?

Let’s do the numbers.

Let’s do something that Huang did not; let’s look at the numbers from July …

The bad news is that taxes in America are tilted in favor of the rich. The best news is that we could be only weeks away from a tilt in favor of the middle class: the reforms President Biden is urging to help balance the Administration’s $3.5 trillion budget bill.

The changes won’t be going as far as the president first proposed. Congress writes the laws, and House Democrats have already dialed back on Biden’s wish list.  Even so, the bill will almost certainly reflect a sharp shift in America’s priorities.

As Biden himself puts it, …

When President Joe Biden won the White House, he promised, with a facility of unceasing boredom, that diplomacy was back.  “Diplomacy is back at the centre of our foreign policy,” he stated on February 4.  “As I said in my inaugural address, we will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again, not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s.”

The fact that such diplomacy had never gone away seemed to escape him.  In the simpleton’s view of politics, his predecessor had abandoned the jaw jaw approach to international relations for muscular and mindless US unilateralism.  Allies …

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have been around for 30 years  ((Minnesota established the nation’s first charter school law in 1991 and opened the nation’s first charter school in 1992.)) and are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. To date, five states have been able to fend off these segregated outsourced schools that siphon billions of public dollars a year from under-funded public schools.

About 3.3 million students are currently enrolled in approximately 7,400 charter schools across the country, which make up less than eight percent of …

In 2020, health care workers could do no harm.

We praised their vast medical skills and knowledge. We banged our pots and pans for them and hung signs to profess our eternal gratitude. Well… maybe not exactly eternal. In 2021, you see, we’re dismissing their medical knowledge and our pots and pans have been replaced with pitchforks and torches.

The message to our “health care heroes” is simple: get the jab or else. Never mind that …

Orientation

Patient questions and therapeutic answers

The therapist says to the client, “tell me about your dreams” and the client shakes their head slowly and says “I had this dream …”. A therapist says to a teenager, “who are you?” The teenager answers, “I don’t know”. The therapist says to the teenager, “that’s normal at your age”. A client tells their therapist, “I am very angry at my father”. The therapist says, “let’s do a role play. You be your father and I’ll be you. I’ll show you how to do it.” A …

In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and alternative media have been replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.

These critiques have ranged from mild to harsh, and have covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their …

I released a song called Rome is Burning to most streaming platforms on March 1, 2021. The next day the video of the song was posted on YouTube. The song and accompanying video are based on the mass protests that took place in 2020 against state organized racist violence and oppression triggered by a bystander’s filming of the brutal police killing of George Floyd.

To send the song/video to activists and organizations in the forefront of resistance, I signed up a Facebook account, which previously I did not have. My accompanying message on Facebook with the link to the video …

It does not get any messier or more chaotic than this.  Since 2009, when Australia’s Future Submarine Program (FSP) known as Project SEA 1000, began to take shape, strategists and policy makers have been keen to pursue the next big White Elephant of defence spending.  And few areas of an already wasteful area of public expenditure are more costly – often mindlessly so – than submarines.

The Australian effort here is particularly impressive.  Pick a real winner by signing a contract for a yet to be designed attack class submarine, supposedly necessary in an increasingly dangerous region.  Ensure that this design …

The United States has always been a bad loser. Whether it has viewed itself as an imperial power, a military superpower or, in today’s preferred terminology, the “world’s policeman”, the assumption is that everyone else must submit to its will.

All of which is the context for judging the outcry in western capitals over the US army’s hurried exit last month from Kabul, its final hold-out in Afghanistan.

There are lots of voices on both sides of the Atlantic lamenting that messy evacuation. And it is hard not to hear in them – even after a catastrophic and entirely …

I like to get down to brass tacks, into the muck, since I have been in on all aspects of academia and journalism, environmental activism, literary arts, and social work. I’m not pulling some trump card here, but in my more than six decades of confronting these amazingly dead-from-the-head-up members of the 80 percent, and those of the 20 percent, I have seen the complete shut down of discourse, critical thinking and shame.

They really do not care about their people. They really do not care …

The faux Damascene converts have been doing the rounds in the Murdoch empire of late, stirring interest in matters green and attempting to shift, if ever so slightly, discussions on climate change.  Known for being a stable of environmental vandals and fossil fuel standard bearers, News Corp has gone for a green turn of sorts.

Within the media imperium, harmony on the issue of how to report climate has not been one of accord.  The patriarch, Rupert Murdoch, was unable to keep younger son James and wife Kathryn from venting on the issue.  “Kathryn and James’ views on climate change are …

According to Reuters, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the city of Muzaffarnagar in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 5 September. Hundreds of thousands more turned out for other rallies in the state.

Rakesh Tikait, a prominent farmers’ leader, said this would breathe fresh life into the Indian farmers’ protest movement.

He added:

We will intensify our protest by going to every single city and town of Uttar Pradesh to convey the message that Modi’s government is anti-farmer.

Tikait is a leader of the protest movement and a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union).

Since November 2020, …