In the 1980s Australian unions pursued a retirement income strategy that centered on the inclusion of superannuation in agreements with employers.
From Freidrich Hayek to Ron Paul & Rick Santorum
How are we understand divisions in American conservatism? Of the top three candidates in the Iowa caucuses two, Ron Paul & Rick Santorum, have expressed dissent with aspects of contemporary American conservatism. The key to understanding conservative politics is that conservatism is a disposition, conservatives know what they are against rather than what they are […]
Fascism: why in Europe why not in America?
New Years resolution a blog post a week so starting early and building on the political analysis in my Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper American liberalism and capitalism from William Jennings Bryan to Barack Obama: Is there a new fascism on the march? Observers point to the far-right terrorism in Europe, how Islamophobia repeats […]
Indigenous claims and the Constitution
Discussion of the proposed amendment of the Constitution to acknowledge aboriginal occupancy prior to 1788 occasionally evokes the memory of the high support for the 1967 referendum to enable aboriginal people to be counted in the census and to include them in the race power. Legislation for the Constitutional amendment was not opposed in Parliament […]
The Democrats’ defeat
How to evaluate the Democrats’ midterm defeat? It is a bad result at the upper range of expectations. It marks the almost complete collapse of the southern Congressional Democrats outside of African-American and some Hispanic districts.
Populism from Bryan to Obama
Barack Obama’s current political woes are slightly overstated, the current Democrat slump has been worsened by a panic reaction to bad economic news, even although the economic evidence viewed overall points to a continuation of the slow recovery.
The Afghan war and the American right
Public discontent with the Afghanistan war is growing in the United States, I suggest that this is linked to the sudden upsurge in conservative preoccupation with the imagined internal Islamic threat to the United States, a threat defined not in terms of terrorism but much more unclear goals. So we have Newt Gingrich:
Would bank nationalization have made a difference?
In November Americans will vote in Congressional elections that will probably deliver a major rebuff to the Democrats. Is there any way the Democrats could have prevented this outcome? From an Australian viewpoint the American discussion of Congressional elections is curious as relatively little attention is given to overall voting intention, it is true that […]
50 foot Pelosi tramples Republicans
Republicans couldn’t win today the only district to vote for John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. Maybe the Democrats do have a chance of holding the House in November after all. Their chances would improve with more Republican ads like this…the inspiration is the 1958 film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
Conservatism and economic crisis
Many on the left hope that economic crises will radicalize voters to the left. Doug Henwood and Paul Krugman disagree. There is evidence from American history in their support, the first American presidential election at which the Democrats were clearly to the left of the Republicans on economic issues was 1896, but at this election […]