Category Archives: Liberal

The reports sparked a political storm into whether Mr Sukkar used his taxpayer-funded electorate budget to pay staff who designed smear files to take down opponents, in a potential breach of parliamentary rules.

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One person familiar with the affair emailed the Department of Finance on September 3 and again on September 9 but was not asked any questions about the matter and was not told how to give testimony to the inquiry.

The department told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald it had engaged law firm Ashurst to conduct two reviews, one into each office, but did not say whether electorate staff were asked any questions.

"Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews participated voluntarily and provided written responses and other relevant documentation when requested by Ashurst," the department said.

"The independent reviewer determined that there was not a sufficient basis to form a view that there was serious misuse of Commonwealth resources under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 or the Parliamentary Business Resources Act 2017."

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Asked if the inquiry interviewed current and former staff of Mr Andrews and Mr Sukkar, the department said it "would not be appropriate" to comment.

Asked if the inquiry had access to correspondence between the MPs and their staff, the department did not answer.

Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews referred themselves to the department the day after the allegations were raised. Mr Sukkar's office said the inquiry was independent and any questions about its conduct was a matter for the department.

"I've always maintained that I've done nothing wrong and whilst I was obviously pleased with the outcome of the review, I wasn't surprised by it," Mr Sukkar told radio station 2GB on Wednesday.

"So we draw a line through that. My focus is on Australians, getting them back to work and doing everything we need to do to ensure that we can get back to a prosperous society that we had pre-pandemic."

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg welcomed the outcome on Wednesday after The Australian reported the department had cleared the two senior Liberals.

"I've obviously read those reports, that's all that I have seen, and of course that is an important statement from the Finance Department," Mr Frydenberg said.

"They won't be making further references on those matters and that, for me and no doubt for those involved, is the end of that."

It is a breach of federal and state law for an electorate officer to work for the benefit of other MPs or engage in party political activity, but Mr Bastiaan dismissed that restraint in secretly taped conversations.

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"Who gives a shit," he responded to one electorate officer in a call to discuss allegations taxpayer funds were being misused. "We are trying to win a f---ing seat mate."

Mr Bastiaan resigned from the party in the wake of the reports.

One document revealed in the August reports was a memo created by Mr Bastiaan that set out ways to build power with Mr Sukkar by giving taxpayer-funded jobs to Bastiaan's operatives to undertake political work.

Labor shadow special minister of state, Don Farrell, expressed concern the inquiry had ended without trying to interview all the key people or see the memo.

"Only by conducting rigorous interviews of all those involved, and this key document, is it possible to get to the truth of this matter," he said.

Senator Farrell wrote to the Secretary of the Department of Finance, Rosemary Huxtable, on September 18 to ask her to make sure the inquiry interviewed all current and former staff relevant to the allegations.

Ms Huxtable responded without any mention of staff being asked questions about any political work at taxpayer expense.

"Each review is examining internal records submitted to and held within Finance, as well as additional information," she wrote on September 22.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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Inquiry that cleared Liberal MPs did not hear from key witnesses - The Age

The Texas County Republican Party invites you to be a part of a patriotic event in support of President Donald Trumps re-election with an event scheduled for Saturday, October 17. Those wishing to participate will meet up on Gladyas Street in Hooker OK, for a Trump Train drag at 4:00. The Trump Train will lead everyone to the Hooker City Park to have a Trump Rally with elected officials, local personalities and people with a story to tell. Tim and Diane Ekkel will have their electric Trump Train for rides at the park in Hooker.

Prior to the event a 5 axle Trump/Pence wrapped semi will make appearances in Guymon on Thursday at 10:00am and in Liberal at 12:00 noon. On Friday, the semi will drive down Kansas Avenue before making its way to Hooker. Everyone is invited everyone to participate and show their support by decorating your vehicles and wearing patriotic apparels/ costumes.

For more information call:Linda Ridley 580-523-1058Dallas Mayer 580-651-9089

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Red Giant Trump Semi Coming to Guymon, Liberal, and Hooker - KSCB News.net

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I place you on notice that I will not accept the publication of further false imputations about me.

The McArthur email, as well as other information gathered by an investigation by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald potentially gives Victorias anti-corruption watchdog, the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) jurisdiction to examine the alleged misuse of taxpayer resources in the Liberal Party, expanding a similar investigation already underway into the Adem Somyurek branch-stacking operation in the ALP.

IBAC has been unable to probe allegations aired in August of taxpayer rorting involving Commonwealth public servants in the offices of Mr Sukkar and federal MP Kevin Andrews because it can only investigate state officials and the misuse of state government resources. Both Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews have denied knowing about the alleged misuse of staffers.

The allegations about Mr Sukkars office and Mr Andrews office were examined by the federal finance department, which, unlike IBAC, cannot compel interviews with witnesses or issue warrants to obtain evidence. The department on Tuesday found there is not a sufficient basis to form a view that there was serious misuse of Commonwealth resources. But the department also revealed it had interviewed no witnesses outside of Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews.

In the email, which Ms McArthur sent in 2017 to then Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger and recently disgraced powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan, she asked: Exactly what has [Mr Dalla-Riva] & his taxpayer office been doing since the last state election [in 2014] that would differ from the Labor office rorts we are campaigning on ...?

Ms McArthur is a close ally of Mr Bastiaan and a key member of the conservative faction led by Mr Sukkar and until he quit the party in August Mr Bastiaan.

Richard Dalla-Riva when he was in Victorian State Parliament.Credit:Jason South

The scheme referred to in Ms McArthurs email involves the conduct of Mr Dalla-Riva and his former electorate officers, including Tom Ma and Beau Dreux. The allegations have not been investigated or proven. In the 2017 email, Ms McArthur also urged the Liberal Party to avoid using Mr Dalla-Riva, who stepped down from State Parliament at the 2018 election, as a campaign manager.

Michael we do not need the services of this fellow, she wrote.

In his maiden speech to Parliament, Mr Sukkar thanked Mr Dalla-Riva for acting as his campaign manager during the 2013 election. Mr Dalla-Riva was a state MP from 2002-2018.

The email was leaked to The Age and Herald by a Liberal insider and the concerns it raises have been corroborated by four Liberal party sources with direct knowledge of the campaigns operations and his office staff when they helped Mr Sukkar retain his federal seat of Deakin in 2016.

Liberal MP Bev McArthur.

The sources said that in 2016, Mr Dalla-Riva and his electorate officers Mr Dreux and Mr Ma, worked on Mr Sukkars successful bid to hold his marginal eastern suburbs seat of Deakin.

While a serving MP, Mr Dalla-Riva worked as Mr Sukkars campaign manager, running a sophisticated 12-month field campaign out of a campaign office in Maroondah Highway, Ringwood, opposite the sprawling Eastland shopping centre. The Liberal sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr Dalla-Rivas electorate office was often closed as he and his staff worked in the Deakin campaign office.

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The Sukkar campaign focused on winning votes by using digital town hall meetings and the Chinese social media platform WeChat, but the key mission was direct voter calls. The Deakin campaign office made more than 10,000 calls in the final three weeks of the campaign.

Mr Dalla-Riva is now the chair of Mr Sukkars local Deakin party branch. Mr Dalla-Riva hung up the phone when called by The Age and did not respond to text messages and follow up calls. Mr Dreux said to the best of his recollection, he worked as a full time electorate officer for Mr Dalla-Riva in the electorate office and that his work on the Sukkar campaign was as a volunteer.

[There is] nothing to my recollection where I was working on the Sukkar campaign during work hours, he said.

Asked if Mr Dalla-Riva was working during office hours on the Sukkar campaign, Mr Dreux said, It is not my job to answer these questions, because I was only a junior staffer.

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Mr Ma said he only worked 10 hours a week for Mr Dalla-Riva and that his work for Mr Sukkar was as a volunteer.

The allegations that Mr Sukkars faction was involved in branch stacking and misusing office staff were aired in August by The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes. The evidence included a secret recording in which disgraced factional operative Marcus Bastiaan rubbished the rules disallowing taxpayer-funded staff doing party campaign work.

"Who gives a shit we are trying to win a f---ing seat mate, he said. It sparked an ongoing branch stacking investigation by the Liberal Party and the resignations from the party of Mr Bastiaan and other factional operatives.

Nick McKenzie is an investigative reporter for The Age. He's won nine Walkley awards and covers politics, business, foreign affairs and defence, human rights issues, the criminal justice system and social affairs.

Paul is a reporter for The Age.

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Victorian Liberal Party involved in 'rorts' like red shirts says conservative MP - The Age

9News understands momentum is growing among party members for a challenge to Ms Harvey's leadership ahead of the planned caucus meeting tomorrow.

Nine's Political Editor Gary Adshead was told by a Liberal Party insider that at least 13 of 22 party MPs would support a change to the leadership, with some refusing to rule out that the spill could happen tomorrow.

Others, however, have suggested that if any challenge was to happen, it would be later in the year with November 10 tipped as another possible spill date.

The talk of a possible change has come amid MPs fearing the loss of their seats at the upcoming state election in March, and a significant shift in voter support away from the WA Liberal Party.

A spill motion would still need to be raised and supported by a challenger to Ms Harvey's leadership, with insiders suggesting that Shadow Treasurer and Bateman MP Dean Nalder could be that person.

9News was told by Ms Harvey's office today that there is no truth in any talk of a spill motion.

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WA Liberal Party's Liza Harvey could face leadership spill from MPs fearful of losing seats at election - 9News

Its what the public demands. Thats always been the governments alibi for tough immigration rules. Polls, though, have suggested that the public is more nuanced and liberal than given credit for. The latest British Social Attitudes report, on post-Brexit policy, confirms this.

Most headlines about the report have focused on the fact that two-thirds of Britons oppose freedom of movement for EU nationals. What the survey asked, however, was whether EU nationals should be treated the same as everyone else. Most people agreed they should. Two-thirds also thought that EU countries should not favour Britons over other non-EU migrants. This is, in other words, as much a demand for equal treatment as for ending freedom of movement.

When asked how difficult it should be for immigrants to come to Britain, just 13% thought it should be relatively difficult for French people to migrate. For Poles and Australians, the figures were 18% and 12%, respectively. Inevitably, people were less welcoming of Pakistani immigrants, yet, just 29% thought it should be relatively difficult for Pakistanis to enter Britain.

The government has made much of its desire to welcome high-skilled workers and to restrict low-skilled ones. While the vast majority of the public want priority given to doctors, they also favour prioritising care workers, deemed low skilled by the government. Fewer than one in five want more high-skilled bankers. There is much opposition, too, to salary thresholds for prospective immigrants.

Public opinion is not as liberal as I would like. But its certainly far more so than youd imagine from much of the debate about immigration. Or from government policy.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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On immigration, the public is far more liberal than UK government - The Guardian

Register-Guard

This is a strange moment for racial politics in America. Many liberals regard the Trump era as a turning point akin to Reconstruction or the civil rights era, in which the country is choosing between the entrenchment of white privilege and the possibility of a truly anti-racist future.

Donald Trump himself often seems intent on confirming that analysis. He began his rise to the presidency stoking racial paranoia via birtherism, and hes trying to hold the presidency by stoking racial paranoia about voting, portraying votes cast in Democratic cities as fraudulent and illegitimate, and litigating against the franchise in ways that would hurt minority voters more than most.

But at the very same time, the pandemic-era policies of many progressive jurisdictions are sabotaging basic civic goods, with anti-Trump zeal as an accelerant and with effects on minority communities that are likely to far outlast the Trump era. This means that for many African Americans and Hispanics, a key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them, and the deepening of Americas racial inequalities even if Trumpism goes down to defeat.

The most important part of this sabotage, which is the subject of an essential Alec MacGillis article for The New Yorker and ProPublica, is the failure to reopen public schools in many liberal cities, which is consigning a heavily minority and low-income school-age population to a far-inferior virtual experience or (for many kids) no real education at all.

This failure has many causes including, yes, the Trump administrations inability to develop a national strategy for school safety. But in MacGillis account its clear that anti-Trumpism, and particularly a partisan impulse to resist the White Houses push for reopening, created a permission structure for teachers unions that already opposed in-person school to force a continued shutdown.

Without minimizing the real uncertainties around reopening and student health, he suggests that advocates of closure ended up cherry-picking studies to exaggerate the dangers and ignoring the evidence that a reasonably safe reopening was possible including not only European case studies but more local examples like Baltimore, where MacGillis lives and where in-person summer schooling produced zero new known cases.

The result of this urban shutdown is an autumn in which schools have successfully reopened for much more of white America than minority America: Approximately half of white kids have access to in-person school, compared with just about a quarter of African American and Hispanic students, according to a recent survey MacGillis cites.

This is definitely bad news for the students themselves: MacGillis notes that losing time in school tends to negatively affect subsequent educational attainment, literacy rates and employment. At the same time, the shutdown threatens to undermine public education more generally, by undercutting parental faith and commitment to the public system and pushing more families into private education (including the varied pods and home-school startups the coronavirus has encouraged).

In interviews, MacGillis quotes union officials expressing a confidence that after the pandemic, families and their kids will simply come back to public schools. No doubt most will; most parents, after all, dont have the resources to go elsewhere. But the entire challenge of education and integration in America turns on the challenge of keeping a subset of affluent, engaged parents involved in public education and not just involved but also willing to send their kids to racially diverse schools that arent set up as incubators of privilege.

If this is a big challenge in the best of times you can listen to a recent New York Times podcast, Nice White Parents, for a specific portrait of that challenge then its hard to imagine a policy more likely to permanently break these parents ties with public education than a mass closure of urban schools.

One striking detail in the MacGillis piece is that even though school closures plainly have a disparate impact on minority students, the case for closures is often phrased in the language of anti-racism, with the frequent suggestion that reopeners dont care about putting minorities at risk. This makes the schools issue the most conspicuous example of a larger pattern, in which the invocation of anti-racism and the reality of racial impacts can sharply diverge.

Part of this pattern reflects the impulse among Trump-era liberals to have no enemies to the left, lest they vindicate the presidents flailing attacks in any way. This is politically understandable, but the consequence has been that various forms of navet, utopianism and outright idiocy have hijacked liberal politics, marching under the banner of anti-racism while leading progressive policy astray.

This happened with the push for police reform, which was often diverted from reasonable proposals into unreasonable abolish-the-police fantasies, creating public paralysis in cities like Minneapolis even as public order deteriorated.

It happened with some of the George Floyd protests, which were redirected toward futile insurrectionary violence by a network of mostly white anarchists, whose very existence was hard for liberals to acknowledge even as their depredations did particular damage to minority and immigrant neighborhoods.

And its happening within the educational bureaucracy, where theres a Trump-era vogue for attacks on whiteness that often seem to double as attacks on standards, discipline and rigor with urban schools as the most likely laboratory for whatever educational alternatives the new progressivism dreams up.

How far any of this goes will depend on what happens after after (as seems quite likely this year) Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump, after we reach the post-pandemic era, after the current sense of wild abnormalcy recedes. But right now, the same anti-Trump progressivism thats crusading against presidential racism is also presiding over a mix of policy choices and abdications thats worsening life for racial minorities across multiple dimensions, making their school systems less stable, their streets less safe, their kids less likely to succeed.

I have written previously about the possibility of a center-right politics that appeals successfully to African Americans and Hispanics, and that might answer some of these liberal failures with a conservative alternative. But that kind of hypothetical feels very far away this week, and its mostly irrelevant to the immediate fate of public safety in Minneapolis or Chicago or public education in Baltimore or New York.

What matters there is what happens within liberalism itself. And if 2020 is to be remembered as a turning point for the better in our racial history, liberals need to rediscover the reality that the material interests of racial minorities can indeed have enemies, however well-intentioned, on the left.

Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.

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Douthat: Sabotage in the liberal city - The Register-Guard

An array of liberal Jewish groups signeda letterwith other faith-based organizations appealing to senators not to confirm President Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, citing her past opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

The letter, signed by 41 groups in all and spearheaded by the National Council of Jewish Women notes a case upcomingon the Supreme Court docketthat could dismantle the act, also known as Obamacare.

President Donald Trump, who wants the legislation dismantled, has said he will replace some of its provisions, including guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting conditions, but he has not yet advanced legislation that would do so.

Should the ACA be struck down, tens of millions of Americans will immediately lose access to coverage as an unprecedented health crisis rages on, plunging our entire health care system into confusion and chaos, said the letter sent Friday to all 100 senators. People of faith refuse to remain idle while the health, safety, and lives of countless individuals are on the line and believe that our next Supreme Court justice must commit to upholding precedent affirming the constitutionality of the ACA.

The letter concludes by saying that Barrett would run counter to the example set by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Jewish justice who died last month and whom Barrett would replace.

In addition to NCJW, the17 Jewish groupssigning the letter include a number of Reform and Reconstructionist movement bodies, in addition to Jewish human rights advocacy groups.

In a separate statement this week, the Reform movement said it opposed Barretts nomination because of what it described as her stated opposition to the ACA, the right to an abortion and LGBTQ rights. The Reform movement has rarely opposed Supreme Court nominees in the past.

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Liberal Jewish groups sign letter with other religious orgs opposing Amy Coney Barretts nomination - Haaretz.com

Politics Insider for Sept. 17: Canada's former ambassador in Washington gets a wrist slap, COVID testing capacity is a nightmare in Ottawa and the feds are selling an electric guitar

Welcome to a sneak peek of theMacleansPolitics Insidernewsletter.Sign up to get it deliveredstraight to your inbox.

The federal ethics commissioner, Mario Dion, has ordered nine Liberal politicians, senior staffers and top public servants notto conduct any official dealings with David MacNaughton, Canadas former ambassador to the U.S. and a longtime Trudeau government insider, for one year. The order applies to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland andIndustry Minister Navdeep Bains, as well as two ministerial chiefs of staff andthree deputy ministers. Rick Theis, the PMs director of policy and cabinet affairs, is on the list. So is General Jonathan Vance, the outgoing chief of defence staff.

The commissioner found that in the pandemics early days, MacNaughton pitched thepro bono services of Palantir Technologies Canada, the software company he now heads up in Ottawa. Dion ruled that the former ambassador had broken the rule against taking improper advantage of a previous government gig, but also concluded that Palantir did not benefit from the meetings. Back in April,The Logic first reported on MacNaughtons claimsduring a private event that hed lined up meetings with top federal officials(Read the full report.)

Erin OToole and his family got tested yesterday for COVID-19. One of OTooles staffers had come back positive, so the Tory leader and his brood took no chances. It wasnt a banner day for testing capacity in the nations capital. Families eager to get tested faced hours-long outdoor lines.Macleans own Ottawa bureau chief, Shannon Proudfoot, endured a logistical testing nightmare. She gave up on a suburban testing centre when a security guard warned of a six-hour wait. After a wasted trip to a testing centre in Winchester, an hours drive away, she ended up lucking into an appointment at the citys drive-in centre tonight. These ordeals may, she writes, foreshadow a frightening fall. Either well all muddle along, missing work and school

or average, well-intentioned people with busy families and lives that need living are going to start fudging their answers to screening questions, sending kids off to school or daycare or themselves off to their workplaces even when they know symptoms have cropped up in their households, because they cant handle the hassle or outright impossibility of getting tested. After the nightmare I experienced today, I cant say I blame them.

What is Ontarios testing capacity?Every premier sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that outlined how theyd spend their share of the $19-billion federal-provincial Safe Restart Agreement. Premier Doug Fords letter boasted about Ontarios increased capacity, per capita testing rate and overall tests administeredall the highest in Canada. Ford also committed to future capacity well beyond the near-term goal of 50,000 tests a day, and surge testing capacity of up to 78,000 tests per day. Theyll use $1.28 billion in federal payola to make it happen in the coming months. Meanwhile, in the real world, lines grow longer.

The Canadian Press scored an interview with Peter MacKay, the Tory leadership runner-up whos contemplating his next move back home in Nova Scotia. MacKay identified his campaigns fatal flaw:The plan was in retrospect too much focused on the next steps and not enough on winning the party. As he tried to win over soft Liberals and lapsed Tories, his rivals were shoring up their core voteand chipping away at MacKays lead.

Did the WE scandal make charitable Canadians think twice about donating? Yes, says a new Angus Reid Institute poll. Charitable giving was already trending down before the scandal, says the pollster: 37 per cent of respondents have donated less in the past six months (49 per cent remain unchanged and only 9 per cent have increased donations). Fifty-five per cent of Canadians say the scandal is seriousand a similar majority say its raised questions about the whole sector. While most Canadians say WEs troubles havent had an impact on their donations, a solid 38 per cent still say theyre rethinking their giving.

Parks Canada has declared a caribou herd in Jasper National Park locally extinct. On Sept. 3, the agency snuck an update on the population of the maligne herd onto its website. That declining herd was last observed in 2018 and is considered extirpated. Two other herds, the tonquin and brazeau, do not have enough female caribouto be able to grow the herds. That update marked a stark change to the same webpage earlier this year. The Rocky Mountain Outlook quotedthe Alberta Wilderness Association saying the extirpation was a tragic, predictable result of decades-long habitat and wildlife errors.

Need an electric guitar? The federal government would be happy to sell one to you. The federal surplus website is auctioning off a used Dean Hollywood axethe closing date is today at 2 pm ETthats replete with scratches, and comes with no strings, no power cable and a damaged case. Full functionality, reads a description, is unknown. That hasnt stopped bidders, whove ratcheted up the price from $75 to, at this writing, a cool $89.70. Theres still time.

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The ethics czar rules on another Liberal conflict of interest of interest - Maclean's

In the real world, where successful businesses are operated somewhere in the broad range between break-even and absolute-maximum profitability, there was and is always leeway for being a bit unnecessarily fair and responsible to accept slightly smaller profit margins to fulfill implicit obligations to employees, customers, communities, society at large, decency itself. But while economists still argue over Friedmans theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists the Friedman doctrine turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in Its a Wonderful Life, the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that theyd been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

As for government regulation, Friedmans doctrine included a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose Catch-22. Any virtuous act by businesses beyond what the law requires is simpering folly, he insists, yet according to him too almost any government attempt to regulate business is the beginning of the end of freedom and democracy. Friedmans was a reductio ad absurdum purification of what had become a well-tempered, successful, increasingly fair free-market system. His vision was to revert to a fundamentalist capitalism from which a century of systemic interventions and buffers by democratic government and norms would be removed.

Friedman was horrified by the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to capitalism, profits, the soulless corporation and so on. Indeed, a survey-research firm that had been asking people every year if they thought business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interests of the public found the number who agreed had dropped to 33 percent in 1970 from 70 percent in 1968. (By the late 70s it had bottomed out at 15 percent.) The very same month that The New Yorker filled a whole issue with excerpts from a liberal professors hurrah-for-revolution best seller, The Greening of America, Friedman delivered his counterrevolutionary economic manifesto to 1.5 million Times subscribers. Yet its self-righteous, hyperbolic, screw-the-Establishment confrontationalism is also a product of that 1970 moment: While Friedman was reacting against the surging support for social justice, he did so in the spirit of the late 1960s. Two ascendant countercultures, the hippies and the economic libertarians, in 1970 one large and one still tiny, shared a new ultraindividualism as a prime directive: If it feels good, do it; follow your bliss; find your own truth; and do your own thing were just nice utopian flip sides of every man for himself. For businessmen who felt demonized by public opinion and besieged by tougher government regulation for the last few years, the militancy of the Friedman doctrine in The New York freaking Times a year after Woodstock was thrilling. And then, as now, to get what they were mainly after politically superlow taxes, minimized regulation they exploited the voter backlash against street protests by aggrieved, angry younger Americans.

Just as America reached Peak Left, the Friedman doctrine and, a year later, a battle plan commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, drafted by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, quoting Friedman, just before he joined the Supreme Court became founding scripture for an economic crusade to discredit the New Deal consensus and rewrite the social contract. Democratic and liberal leaders, alas, didnt put up much of a fight. At the end of the 1970s, for instance, PBS commissioned a 10-episode series, Free to Choose, starring Friedman and funded by General Motors, General Mills and PepsiCo. A spokesperson for the show promised it would explain to viewers like you how weve become puppets of big government. And indeed, in that four-TV-channel era, Friedman used his noncommercial government-subsidized PBS platform to argue that the Food and Drug Administration, public schools, labor unions and federal taxes, among other btes noires, were bad for America. The series premiered in January 1980, just before the first Republican primaries, in which Ronald Reagan was a candidate. Of course, Reagan won the nomination and the presidency, after which Friedman patted himself on the back for his work with Goldwater and the epochal move away from New Deal ideas. As Friedman put it in 1982, you need ideas that are lying around his ideas as ready alternatives to existing policies, and then at a ripe moment the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Throughout big business and finance and much of conventional wisdom, the Friedman doctrine came to mean that the pursuit of absolutely maximum profit for your company and yourself trumped every other value or motive, greed-is-good definitively replacing concern for the common good. A result was an American economy and culture driven by selfishness, callousness and recklessness. Before long, a big Hollywood movies most memorable scene was a kind of dramatization of the Friedman doctrine, Libertarian Economics for Dummies. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, sexy Gordon Gekko told his ecstatic fellow stockholders, that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works. And greed, he promised, would make America great again.

In 1976, Friedman became the first Chicago school economist to win a Nobel Prize. That same year, two members of the University of Rochester business-school faculty published a 55-page paper conceived as an operational elaboration of the Friedman doctrine. Theory of the Firm made righteous greed seem scientific, with equations and language of the managers indifference curve is tangent to a line with slope equal to u kind. Its big point was that if corporate executives are mere salarymen rather than owners of company stock, theyll overspend on charitable contributions, get lax on employee discipline, concern themselves too much about personal relations (love, respect, etc.) with employees and the attractiveness of the secretarial staff. It is one of the most-cited economics papers ever. The professors also wrote a shorter, more accessible follow-up that ditched the math and the pretense of scholarly neutrality: big business has been cast in the role of villain by consumer advocates, environmentalists and the like, who want to spread the clich that corporations have too much power.

The modern understanding of how corporate managers should run companies, an article in The Harvard Business Review declared in 2012, has been defined to a large extent by that original Friedman-doctrine-inspired paper from 1976. It went beyond doctrinal Friedmania that companies must absolutely maximize profit, now positing as a kind of mathematical fact that stock price, a much less objective measure, was the only meaningful corporate metric. Soon a Reagan-administration S.E.C. rule change effectively gave free rein to public companies, for the first time since the New Deal, to buy up shares of their own stock on the open market in order to jack up the price. U.S. executive pay, meanwhile, shifted from consisting mainly of salary and bonus to mainly stock and stock options. Astonishingly, stock buybacks eventually consumed most of the earnings of S&P 500 companies, as they still do. So here we are with a re-engineered system in which just the richest 10th of us have 84 percent of all stock shares owned by Americans, and a ravaged economy in which the stock market is close to an all-time high.

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How Liberals Opened the Door to Libertarian Economics - The New York Times

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) on Friday responded to a tweet about a segment on gender reveal parties from Trevor NoahTrevor NoahTed Cruz: 'Many liberal males never grow balls' Overnight Defense: House chair announces contempt proceeding against Pompeo | Top general says military has no role in election disputes | Appeal court rejects due process rights for Gitmo detainees Top general: Military will play no role in resolving any electoral dispute MOREs The Daily Show, saying many liberal males never grow balls.

Cruz wrote his comment in a retweet of an article from conservative news website The Daily Wire, which critiqued Noah for railing against gender reveal parties.

A fair point. Many liberal males never grow balls.... https://t.co/FhHmIPFUpJ

In Tuesdays episode of the Comedy Central show, Noah referenced the fact that one of the three major wildfires currently burning in California was sparked by a gender reveal party.Noah said he believed the practice of celebrating a babys gender was outdated.

"Celebrating a babys genitalia is starting to feel very outdated," Noah said. "Like, given everything were learning about gender, gender reveal parties should only happen when the child is old enough to know their actual gender."

The Daily Wire article criticizes Noah for separating biological sex from gender, arguing instead that the two are inextricably connected. Gender identity has become increasingly accepted by many in recent years to include the gender characteristics one uses to identify themselves, which may differ from their biological sex at birth.

Cruz has previously used gender identity as a means to criticize Democrats, with a March tweet from the senatorjoking that Bernie identifies as every gender, simultaneously.

Mark, thats not fair. Bernie identifies as every gender, simultaneously. https://t.co/EQsCCld7Mu

In the past, Cruz has been particularly vocal about his conservative views on gender, including through his support for laws that do not allow gender-neutral bathrooms. The senator also tweeted in 2019 that parents allowing young children to undergo a gender transition is child abuse.

Originally posted here:

Ted Cruz: 'Many liberal males never grow balls' | TheHill - thehill.com