Category Archives: Liberal

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to reporters from the roof of the Canadian Embassy in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

With the presentation Tuesday of the Speech from the Throne that inaugurates a new session of Canadas parliament, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his minority Liberal government laid out their agenda at the start of their third term in office. Whilst there was much media hype over it being delivered by Canadas first indigenous Governor General and it abounded with vapid election rhetoric, the throne speech made clear the government is moving sharply right. The main thrusts of its program will be austerity and mass infection for workers at home, coupled with militarism and war abroad.

The cutting edge of the Trudeau governments stepped up onslaught on working people is its elimination of the limited pandemic relief provided workers. Late last month, Trudeau announced that the Canada Recovery Benefit, which paid workers a miserly $400 per week if they were unable to work due to COVID-19 restrictions, would be immediately abolished.

In its place, a new benefit is to be introduced that will be available to workers only in the event of an anti-COVID-19 lockdown and limited to just $300 per week. Given that all of Canadas provincial governments have ruled out future lockdowns even as they let the virus run rampant, this effectively means an end to all financial support for workers.

To underscore its determination to deny further financial aid to working people, the Liberal government unveiled even more stringent requirements for the new lockdown benefit this week. According to the bill introduced in parliament Wednesday, the Liberal cabinet will have the power to determine what constitutes a lockdown. As a minimum, workers must be ordered to stay home for 14 straight days by their employer. In addition, the government intends to bar any financial support to unvaccinated workers.

The best way to get the pandemic under control is vaccination, declared the Throne speech. In fact, the Liberal governments reliance on vaccines alone, with virtually all non-pharmaceutical anti-COVID-19 public health measures now withdrawn, has facilitated widespread transmission of the virus.

Reports of the emergence of a new (Omicron) variant in southern Africa that potentially is resistant to existing vaccines underscores just how dangerous is the ruling elites rush to reopen the economy and its class-based opposition to implementing a science-based strategy to eliminate the deadly virus.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal governments spending cutter-in-chief, summed up the ruling elites callous indifference to the lives and well-being of working people, declaring that the bill establishing the bogus new Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit is the last step in our COVID support programs. It is what I hope and truly believe is the final pivot.

In other words, as a winter wave of infections and death gathers pace, which current developments in Europe suggest could prove to be the worst yet, Trudeaus Liberal government is telling workers, Youre on your own. This is no different from the fascistic let-it-rip pandemic policy pursued by the German establishment, whose political representatives voted this week to declare the COVID-19 emergency over. Freeland and Trudeau would no doubt agree with German Health Minister Jens Spahn, who asserted chillingly that by the end of this winter, people would either be vaccinated, recovered, or dead.

While the Liberal government strips workers of any financial aid so they are forced to return to the labour market to generate profits for big business, the governments support for corporate Canada continues to know no bounds. After transferring over $650 billion to the banks and corporate elite virtually overnight in the early stages of the pandemic, the Liberals made clear that wage and rent subsidies for a wide range of businesses will continue at least until May 2022. These programs have largely functioned throughout the pandemic as slush funds for corporate executives and super-rich shareholders. Canadas 48 billionaires saw their combined wealth shoot up by $78 billion during the pandemics first year.

Under conditions where British Columbia is being devastated by floods in the latest in a series of climate change-driven extreme weather events that have ravaged the countrys West Coast province since June, the Liberals throne speech again made clear that any action they take to mitigate global warming will be entirely subordinate to the profit and geo-political interests of the Canadian elite. It called for Canadian capitalism to seize on the climate change crisis to become a leader in clean tech. By focusing on innovation and good, green jobs, and by working with like-minded countrieswe will build a more resilient, sustainable, and competitive economy, stated the speech. As a country, we want to be leaders in producing the worlds cleanest steel, aluminum, building products, cars, and planes.

The Throne speech underscored that the Trudeau government intends to heed the demands drummed home by Canadas corporate elite in recent months for a pivot to austerity and will dramatically curtail social spending. [W]ith one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the world, and employment back to pre-pandemic levels, the Government is moving to more targeted support, while prudently managing spending, the speech declared.

Tellingly the government has dropped all talk of incorporating the millions of gig economy and other involuntarily self-employed workers into the Employment Insurance system, meaning they will continue to have no protection against a sudden loss of income.

The main area to which fiscal responsibility and prudence do not apply is military spending. The Trudeau government remains committed to hike military spending by over 70 percent compared to 2017 levels by 2026. But even this vast increase, which amounts to the allocation of more than $12 billion in additional spending each year on weapons of destruction and death, is a mere down payment.

The Throne speech referred to comprehensive plans for an aggressive militarist foreign policy across wide swaths of the globe. A changing world requires adapting and expanding diplomatic engagement, stated the speech. Canada will continue working with key allies and partners, while making deliberate efforts to deepen partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and across the Arctic. Discussions are reportedly ongoing about an expanded deployment of Canadian troops to Ukraine, justified with lurid claims of Russian aggression, although it is NATO that has systematically encircled Russia and ratcheted up tensions.

Coming just five days after Trudeau met with US President Joe Biden and pledged his governments firm support for Washingtons diplomatic, economic, and military offensive against China, the Throne speechs reference to the Indo-Pacific is highly significant. It underlines that Canadas foreign and military policy is being adjusted to conform even more closely with the Pentagons aggressive plans for an all-out conflict with Beijing, which top military commanders have asserted is only a few years off.

Senior foreign policy experts speaking to the right-wing National Post described the Throne speech as offering a new foreign policy direction. Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, told the newspaper, This is not only about bringing India and the Indian Ocean into perhaps greater emphasis in Canadian activities, but Indo-Pacific as a frame is essentially a response to the rise of Chinese influence and power.

On the eve of the federal election campaign, the Trudeau government signed an agreement with the Biden administration to modernize NORAD, the Canada-US aerospace and maritime defence command. This Cold War-era bilateral alliance for continental defence is to be upgraded with the aim of providing Washington and Ottawa first-strike capabilities against rivals like Russia and China and enabling the North American imperialist powers to wage a winnable nuclear war .

The fact that no party, apart from the Socialist Equality Party, raised Canadas NORAD modernization commitment during the election campaign was tacit admission that they all unreservedly support this provocative move. The multibillion-dollar bill for upgrading NORAD is not included in Canadas planned defence spending increases.

To enforce this deeply unpopular agenda of austerity at home and militarism and war abroad, the minority Liberal government can rely on an effective all-party coalition in parliament. Over recent weeks, Jagmeet Singhs New Democrats held secret, high-level talks with the Liberals on concluding a formal confidence-and-supply agreement, under which the social democrats would be committed to propping up the Liberals in parliament for two or more years. Singh bluntly explained why this plan was shelved last week, telling the media that Trudeau could rely on the Conservatives or the Bloc Qubcoisa close ally of Quebecs chauvinist, unabashedly pro-big business CAQ governmentto impose the elimination of COVID-19 supports for workers, and the NDP to secure a majority for other policy items, like the Throne speech.

Outside of parliament, the Trudeau government will rely on an even closer corporatist alliance between government, big business and the trade unions to suppress working-class opposition. As the speech noted with respect to the governments climate change policy, which is in reality a massive government subsidy program to make corporate Canada profitable in the emerging clean energy economy, The Government will bring together provinces, territories, municipalities, and Indigenous communities, as well as labour and the private sector, to tap into global capital and attract investors.

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An online discussion with leading international scientists and workers involved in the fight against COVID-19.

The two-day summit consisted of 22 different sessions on the pandemic, including on airborne transmission, inequities in global vaccine distribution, the effects of Long COVID and the development of new variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Amid the ongoing wave of mass death, governments worldwide are scrapping all remaining measures to contain or slow the spread of COVID-19, with the grotesque mantra that society must learn to live with the virus.

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Justin Trudeau and Liberals inaugurate third term in officeausterity and mass infection at home, militarism and war abroad - WSWS

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A left-wing dark money juggernaut hauled in a jaw-dropping $1.6 billion in cash from anonymous donors to bankroll groups and causes in 2020, tax forms reveal.

The forms further show that the secret money network, managed byWashington, D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors, pushed an astounding $896 million in contributions and grants to liberal groups last year.

The Arabella-managed network has solidified howDemocratsquietly benefit from massive amounts of anonymous donations as they simultaneously rail against the influence of dark money in the political sphere.

The network's web of groups sits under four Arabella-managed nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund and Hopewell Fund.

DEMOCRATS' HR1 ELECTION BILL BOOSTED BY LIBERAL DARK MONEY GROUP FINANCED BY FOREIGN NATIONAL

Each of the funds acts as a fiscal sponsor to other liberal nonprofits, meaning they provide their tax and legal status to the nonprofits housed beneath the funds. This arrangement allows the fiscally sponsored groups to avoid filing tax forms to theIRS, which would shed light on their financials.

The funds do not disclose donors on their tax forms.

"Arabella is proud to work for these nonprofits, providing HR, legal, payroll, and other administrative services," Steve Sampson, spokesperson for Arabella Advisors, told Fox News. "They make their own decisions on their strategy, programmatic work, and fundraising."

The New Venture Fund is the network's largest nonprofit incubator in terms of sheer cash. In 2020, the fund raised $965 million in anonymous contributions, itstax formsshow.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund hauled in$388 million, the Windward Fund raised$158 millionand the Hopewell Fund facilitated$150 millionin secret donations, their respective tax forms show.

The funds funneled a combined $1.6 billion from secret donors in 2020 - a drastic increase of $885 million over what the fundshad raked inthroughout 2019.

The Capital Research Center found the four funds have implemented more than 300 "pop-up" projects to boost Democratic causes and attack Republican initiatives since their inception.

The groups push efforts ranging fromhealth careto climate initiatives, work on state-level advocacy and ballot measures, and spent big last year to defeat formerPresident Trump.

As the Arabella-managed funds garnered astronomical donations last year, they passed large sums of cash to nonprofits in and outside its network.

The New Venture Fund disbursed $447 million in 2020, itstax formsshow. The contributions include $44 million to America Votes, $25 million to the election reform group Center for Tech and Civic Life and $1 million to the Center for American Progress, which has produced dozens ofBiden White Housestaffers.

RON KLAIN, BIDEN'S POWERFUL CHIEF OF STAFF, LEADS WHITE HOUSE RIFE WITH DARK MONEY TIES

"In response to the urgent global and nationwide challenges of 2020, we were proud to work on all major issues in philanthropy last year, including addressing climate change, election security, racial justice, youth empowerment and education, and global health and international development," Lee Bodner, president of the New Venture Fund, told Fox News.

Bodner said the New Venture Fund does not engage in partisan activities or support any political campaigns.

Meanwhile, the Sixteen Thirty Fund provided$325 millionto liberal endeavors, according to tax forms. Its lucrative grants went to groups such as America Votes ($128 million), Defending Democracy Together ($10 million), a Bill Krystol-directed group, and American Bridge 21st Century Foundation ($2.1 million), led by liberal operative David Brock.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund also financed attack ads against President Trump and other Republicans,Politicoreported.

Amy Kurtz, president of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, told Fox News that last year the group "helped progressive changemakers quickly and efficiently launch new initiatives to address existential threats of historic proportion: a global pandemic, a long-overdue reconning with racial justice, and a climate crisis that we are now living month after month."

Kurtz said the fund is dedicated to "reducing the influence of special interest money in politics" and "leveling the playing field for progressives." She added that they support the For the People Act, which calls for tackling dark money.

The Windward Fund, which primarily focuses onenvironmentalinitiatives, pushed$44 millioninto causes, its tax forms show. Despite their primary focus, the fund moved money to voter engagement groups such as the Missouri Organizing and Voter Engagement Collaborative and the National Vote at Home Institute.

"As the effects of climate change continue to impact communities across the United States and world, the Windward Fund incubated and supported a range of water, climate, and environmental initiatives last year," the group told Fox News in a statement.

"We are proud that we connected and supported groups across diverse geographies, sectors, and communities like never before in 2020, enabling them to mobilize efficiently and elevate the voices of those impacted most by the environmental crisis," the Windward Fund said.

The Hopewell Fund funneled$80 millionto Democratic causes in 2020, its tax forms show. Its most significant contribution was $8 million to ACRONYM, a progressive-media group.

Tara McGowan, who led ACRONYM, launcheda new project this year called Good Information, Inc. to counter "fake news" and disinformation. ACRONYM funded Courier Newsroom, which has been called a "fake news" site by watchdogs. Good Information acquired Courier Newsroom as part of its operations.

"The Hopewell Fund is proud of the work we did in 2020 to help make the world a more equitable place through fiscal sponsorship, charitable initiatives, and grant making," the group wrote in a statement to Fox News. "Our work last year helped nonprofit projects address some of the most pressing issues our society is experiencing, including income inequality, civic engagement, and health care access."

LIBERAL DARK MONEY GROUPS DRIVE EFFORTS TO PACK THE SUPREME COURT

Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the watchdog group Americans for Public Trust, attempted to gather the fund's tax forms in person last week but was escorted out by security.

"No wonder Arabella Advisorscalled securityon Americans for Public Trust when we requested these tax returns," Sutherland told Fox News. "They were delaying the release of documents that would show they funneled over $1 billion to liberal and left wing causes."

"After years of railing on the evils of dark money, all while being bankrolled by a Swiss billionaire, it is clear liberals are the main beneficiary of undisclosed donations," Sutherland said.

A host of influential Democratic donors use the Arabella-managed funds as a conduit to funnel cash to projects, including billionairesGeorge Sorosand Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss national who said in 2014 he did not hold American citizenship.

The Open Society Policy Center, Soros' advocacy nonprofit, was anearly funderof the judicial advocacy group Demand Justice, which the Sixteen Thirty Fund fiscally sponsored until this year.

Demand Justice has been at the forefront of Republican judicial fights, including pushing back against the nomination of now-Supreme CourtJustice Brett Kavanaugh.

FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2015, file photo, George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, talks during a television interview for CNN at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. (AP)

Shortly before Demand Justice publicly launched in 2018, Brian Fallon, the group's leader, mingled at an Atlanta Democracy Alliance donor club gathering, which counts Soros as a member. Hewas in attendanceto promote his group, and Soros' donation flowed to the group around that time.

The Democracy Alliance has alsorecommendedthat its members, who largely remain hidden, provide donations to initiatives housed at the Arabella-managed funds in its internal documents.

Sorosaddedmillions more to projects housed at the Sixteen Thirty Fund last year, including the Governing for Impact Action Fund and Trusted Elections Action Fund, an Open Society Foundations database shows.

The Sixteen Thirty Fundalso paidthe Democracy Alliance hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting services in the past.

At least one Arabella Advisors employee, Scott Nielson, its managing director of advocacy,workedwith Soros' nonprofits and the Democracy Alliance before joining the consulting firm.

Meanwhile, Wyss, theSwissbillionaire, is also connected to the Democracy Alliance and is a significant financial backer of the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

Between 2016 and early 2020, Wyss directed $135 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund through the Wyss Foundation's advocacy arm, the Berger Action Fund, the New York Times reported.

LIBERAL DARK MONEY GROUP 1630 FUND'S ELECTION WISHLIST BOOSTED BY SWISS BILLIONAIRE

Another group closely related to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Wyss is the Hub Project, a behind-the-scenes group that has received millions of dollars from the Wyss Foundation. The Wyss Foundation is one of the top donors to the Hub Project, which has a history of distributing funds from the Sixteen Thirty Fund to state-level groups.

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 01: Former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg (L) and philanthropist Hansjorg Wyss attend Oceana's 2015 New York City benefit at Four Seasons Restaurant on April 1, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Oceana) (Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Oceana)

One of the state-level groups was Floridians for a Fair Democracy, which received $3.95 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund to help restore voting rights for more than a million felons through a ballot initiative in 2018.

Another billionaire, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, disclosed giving $45 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund for a group called the Civic Action Fund last year,Politicoreported.

Arabella Advisors collected large sums from the four funds for administrative, operations and management services in 2020, making it a highly lucrative business.

The tax forms show the New Venture Fund paid nearly$27 millionto Arabella, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund disbursed$9 millionto the firm. The Windward Fund doled out almost$3 millionfor its services, while the Hopewell Fund added$6.6 million to Arabella.

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Arabella was paid $45 million between the funds for their management services.

Eric Kessler, a formerBill Clintonappointee and member of the Clinton Global Initiative, is the founder and head of Arabella Advisors.

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Liberal dark money juggernaut raises $1.6 billion to flood left-wing groups with cash, tax forms reveal - Fox News

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For a Liberal government that has made climate change one of its top priorities, its policies on disaster mitigation have been nothing short of negligent

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Justin Trudeau saw for himself the impact of the atmospheric river that broke rainfall records in British Columbia, leaving dikes breached, homes submerged, highways washed out and livestock drowned.

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Another pulse of storms is forecast for this weekend. Well see what God has in store, one resident told Global TV, stoically.

But as distressing as the flooding has been, the lack of preparation for extreme weather in the province has been just as shocking.

Ed Fast, the MP for Abbotsford, one of the worst affected cities, said all levels of government have been aware for years about the potential for flooding but didnt act. We should have seen it coming but nothing substantive was ever done about it, he said.

As a minister in the Harper government, Fast bears his share of the blame for that inertia.

But the Liberals have been in power for the past six years and for a government that has made climate change one of its top priorities, its policies on disaster mitigation have been nothing short of negligent.

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This weeks throne speech committed the Liberals to develop Canadas first ever National Adaptation Strategy, prompting a question that begs an answer: Why wasnt such a strategy commissioned after the Fort McMurray fire in 2016 or the spring flooding in Ontario and Quebec in 2017?

What is apparent is that the Liberal government has been almost entirely focused on addressing the politically virtuous battle of reducing emissions, at the expense of the less sexy alleviation of climate changes ramifications.

Resilience has been a victim of ideology. The country has been fractured by debates about carbon pricing, while the far less contentious issue of preparing for floods and fires has been neglected.

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Take the update to the governments climate plan in December 2020, which allocated $2.6 billion over seven years to make homes more energy efficient but ignored the issue of flood proofing.

There was a strong push by the Insurance Bureau of Canada to have some of the money directed toward a flood resilience subsidy for sump pumps, window wells and so on which would, in turn, have yielded insurance discounts for homeowners.

However, then Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson did not want to dilute emissions-reduction efforts.

The Insurance Bureau dismissed the resulting strategy as half a plan, arguing it did little to protect Canadians from floods, fires, windstorms and hail.

With 2021 set to be the most expensive year on record for insured damage (surpassing 2016s $5.2 billion), it is in the industrys interests to call on Ottawa to do more. But that doesnt mean its wrong.

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When then Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna requested money for a disaster mitigation fund, she was allocated $1.4 billion over 12 years a fraction of what she asked for. (The Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimates the country should be spending $5.3 billion a year on adaptive infrastructure.)

Belatedly, the government has shifted course.

A damning new report by the environment commissioner, Jerry DeMarco, said that Canada has been the worst performer in the G7 since the Paris Agreement when it comes to emissions reduction. But he also condemned the governments record on climate resilience, pointing out that 10 per cent of households are at risk of flooding. He said the Liberals should centralize the responsibility for adaptation and other functions from the Environment Department to the Privy Council Office and Finance Canada. It appears that change will now take place, along with the adoption of other Liberal campaign commitments such as funding for the retrofitting of homes to protect against extreme weather, the development of flood maps, and the creation of a national flood insurance program for homeowners at high risk. A taskforce on flood insurance was struck in 2020 by then Public Safety Minister, Bill Blair, and is set to report back next May.

A more serious approach to adaptation is long overdue.

When it comes to global emissions, Canada should live up to its international commitments but it cannot control the amount of greenhouse gases being discharged by China and others.

However, it can do more to help Canadians protect themselves from the depredations of extreme climate.

It is too bad that it has taken Old Testament-style tumults of rain to expunge the misplaced belief that adaptation is a distraction from achieving net-zero emissions.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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John Ivison: Liberals so focused on carbon taxes, they missed the flood coming in the back door - National Post

If you follow The Guardian Australias overexcited live politics blog and dip in and out of Twitter, this weeks parliamentary sitting have been for the Morrison government what the storming of the Winter Palace was to the Romanovs.

True, things have looked ragged with members of the right rump and today a grandstander from the left crossing the floor and abstaining from voting, not to mention Pauline Hansons bastardry in letting the motion for a Senate inquiry into the ABC get voted down by Labor and the Greens, but the government isnt about to fall on the floor of the House.

No, voters are going to deliver its defeat or so the polls tell us.

And one largely overlooked poll in the News Corp state-based titles suggests that the electorate will not bring down the Morrison government by moving to the populist parties of the right, but by swinging to the ALP.

One reason the poll has been overlooked is that its a first-time outing for a Sydney group called Ergo Strategy, which described itself as a boutique consumer insights consultancy.

So boutique is it that none of the poll wonk community have ever heard of them, but this doesnt mean we should dismiss their findings.

Reliability and credibility is vital to both pollsters and the media outlets that pay for their research.

Good polling doesnt come cheaply. A company the size of News Corp doesnt want to invest in dud work. Being associated with a name poll is good advertising for any market research business. They dont want to stuff up because if it all ends in tears, it ends very badly indeed.

The story of how Kerry Packer personally rang Gary Morgan to tell him he was sacked and to give him a good bollocking after the final Morgan poll in The Bulletin ahead of the 2001 election gave it to Labor is legendary in political circles.

But back to the poll itself. Its pretty clear. Close to a fifth of voters who supported the Coalition at the last election now intend to vote for another party. Another seven per cent dont know.

Ergo Strategy/News Corp Australia

But as the graphic shows, an overwhelming number of those people planning to switch are moving to the ALP, not One Nation or the UAP. The Liberal Democrats dont even rate a mention. And we dont know what sort of independents that two per cent are going to. They could well be the Voices Of types funded by green rich listers.

Its one poll, of course, so all the usual qualifiers apply. And there are two matters that also need pointing out.

First, the polling was carried out between September 10 and 23. Since then, of course, weve seen the anti-vaccine mandate movement grow. That might might have changed more votes.

Secondly, the polling overall shows one in three voters say they are planning to switch parties at the next election.

That indicates were in for a hotly contested and unpredictable time indeed.

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Liberal support is disintegrating but barely going to Hanson, Palmer or the LDP - The Spectator Australia

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Next Thursday, possibly Friday if debate over religious freedom drags on in the Senate, is probably the last opportunity the federal Liberal Party has to rid itself of a leader in Scott Morrison, increasingly looking like a liability without a road to victory that he is capable of describing. After that, parliament rises for Christmas, then the January holidays, and even if extraordinary measures were taken to reconvene parliament, there would simply not be time enough for a new regime to prepare itself for election. It's not going to happen of course, especially if the so-called incumbency rule, by which a popularly elected prime minister cannot be deposed other than by a two-thirds caucus vote, is treated as the formal requirement. There are party constitutionalists doubtful whether the parliamentary party can bind future meetings of the party, and who observe that a prime minister determined to carry on after losing a majority in caucus would be in an impossible position out in the electorate. Be that as it may, there are no obvious challengers on the horizon, even if a significant number of members, possibly a majority, have little faith in the capacity of Morrison to pull off another election win, with or without the direct intervention of God. Their problem is the fear that any replacement, perhaps Peter Dutton or Josh Frydenberg, would be unlikely to be able to retrieve the party's position, and might well make it worse. Particularly if the deposed Morrison rump - bound to insist even after any sort of defeat - both that they had a winning strategy, and were robbed - were in full-scale revolt, leaking and undermining, and doing their best, in tried and true modern Liberal fashion, to fail to turn the other cheek. It's not simply a matter of now being too late for anything in the nature of a revolt. The party, as much as Morrison himself, committed itself to the sorts of strategies it is now following, even if some now regret it. The personality and style of Morrison has infected the whole government - including most ministers. The sclerosis and the lack of flexibility on general positions is now built-in. Morrison and a number of other ministers are more than ruthless enough to be able to ditch whole areas of policy or practice, and without regard to anything they have said or done in the past about the folly of going by the new path. They have been trashing a perfectly serviceable brand for far too long to be able to simply deploy it again. Scott Morrison, who pitched himself as a salesman, and who seems to be able to convince himself of anything, can't seem to sell a thing anymore. His retainers may have little choice but to nod wisely at whatever he says, but they are finding it increasingly difficult to display conviction, faith, or personal endorsement of what's on offer. They retreat to their constituencies gloomy of the government's chances of galvanising the community, or half of it, around any campaign idea. It may be that Morrison has, with some policies, or recent policy shifts, neutralised some issues which might have actively gone against the government. Let's imagine, for example, that he has done this in vital constituencies with his efforts to establish freedom of religion in legislation - perhaps whether or not he can get the support of parliament and the measures put into law. But his proposals were in any event watered down, and if they received some endorsement from some religious lobbies, they created no great enthusiasm. They may well have mobilised some fresh enemies, particularly among those who - though not hostile to religion - simply do not understand what the threat to it was, where it was coming from, and how freedom of thought is likely to be enhanced by the proposed measures. It has, after all, been the Liberal Party which has long counselled suspicion of entrenched rights, or of legislative efforts to put a hand on the scales when it has come time to balance different rights. It has, after all, been the party which has characterised Labor enthusiasm for the declaration, definition and weaponising of new rights and duties as proof of its addiction to coercion, controls, legislative solutions and intrinsic bossiness. The skirmishes of the past few weeks are not the campaign proper, nor do they necessarily point at the issues around which the electorate will divide. Morrison is rehearsing a few approaches, and a few areas in which, he or his strategists believe, ground could be gained. But he is carefully watching the media, and the public response, and one can be sure that he will drop ideas that do not seem to take. A good example might be with his new-found fondness for electric cars, his initiatives to establish charging points, and his insistence that technological developments in only the past two years had completely transformed the economic equations about the use of the car and the truck. It didn't work. Partly because Morrison is incapable of taking a backward step, or of ever admitting that he was once wrong. Instead, in the usual Morrison style he begins by denying that he ever said anything negative about electric vehicles at all, then, when confronted with clear records showing that he had, he attempts to redefine what he said, to change the emphasis, and to insist that circumstances had radically changed. A bigger man presiding over a U-turn - a John Howard perhaps - might say, "I used to think that. But I have had a closer look at it and changed my mind." And he might even win some professional admiration, either for his willingness to cut and run, or flexibility, or even ruthlessness once it was clear circumstances had changed. He often did, if never with the style or panache of Peter Beattie, then premier of Queensland. Not Morrison. By now, as ever, he has convinced himself that there is no contradiction whatever with anything he has said before, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is calumniating, petty, nit-picking, and seeking to disguise her own moral infirmities. This capacity to examine his own conscience and to acquit himself of misleading conduct because he believed in all of his statements at the time he made them might, in his own mind, persuade him of the purity of his intentions. That does not stop its being a self-delusion, and its exposition a deceit. Here in this vale of tears, it would be called perjury in a court of law, at the very least for not being "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;" as well as for being calculated to deceive. Labor spent a good deal of the parliamentary week seeming to demonstrate that for Morrison, the lie is not the exception but the rule, a practice, presumably learnt from what he would call the Evil One, which is entirely ingrained in his character, particularly when in a campaigning mode with pretences both about where he is coming from and where his opponents are going. The examples Labor chose were well known ones - for example about the staff in Morrison's office lying and misleading about Morrison's whereabouts and presence in Hawaii during the 2019 bushfire crisis. If Morrison stumbled here - and he did, big time, simply because he has not "adjusted" his story to explain facts now generally known - one might have thought him on notice about the tactic, and re-briefing himself for the cases that the opposition was certain to bowl up. Perhaps he is so certain of, and so adamant about his own honesty that his staff were scared. Perhaps he had convinced himself, as he had with other parts of his explanations, that his explanations were credible, and had been accepted as such, at the time they had come to notice. In any event, his performance was cringeworthy. He tried to recover ground, or turn the tables, by purporting to see in the attack Labor's general absence of policies, and its determination to go the low route by tiny semantic quibbles. One only had to see the agony and embarrassment on the faces of his ministers and colleagues that he was doing himself further political self-harm. Scott Morrison is by no means the only chronic liar in politics. He may not even be the worst. There are quite a number, and on the Labor side of politics as well. But what distinguishes his line of bullshit is the way his refusal to admit error, to look back, or to see matters as others see them, is that he insists on digging himself further in, even as he is doing himself further damage. Journalist Sean Kelly, in his book A portrait of Scott Morrison, does a masterly job of attempting to explain this from Morrison's point of view. Twenty years ago, John Howard began to acquire a serious reputation for misleading the public, not least by the exposure of his prevarications in the children overboard affair. His capacity to do it was much enhanced by the immunity of his private office from any external accountability, and by the way Howard so organised his office and style of management that it was almost always impossible to prove that he knew of anything, or had been (orally) briefed. By 2004, opinion polls indicated that the general attack on his credibility - even his honesty - was working. Put bluntly, many people did not believe a word he was saying. MORE JACK WATERFORD: It was thus quite a surprise when Howard announced the 2004 election that he declared that it was about "trust" - about whom the electorate trusted during the term ahead. Surely, some thought, this put his credibility, his honesty with the facts, and the record of his misleading the public right to the fore. But while Labor continued to hammer Howard as an unreliable witness to anything, it did not seem to see the difference between "trust" and "truth-telling". The public had decided that it did not much believe anything Howard said. (They did not much trust most Labor spokespeople either). But they felt that they "knew" Howard. He was a "known quantity" - both in his virtues and his deficits. By contrast the Howard attack on Latham over "trust" was that Latham was an unknown quantity - even, on the basis of what was known, a somewhat broody, unsettled and erratic figure. People had no instinct for what he might do. They should not trust him to do the right thing. The campaign worked, in the sense that Howard won the election with an increased majority. With Scott Morrison this time, Labor is trying not to make the same mistake. They are using evidence of misleading conduct, followed by general slipperiness with the facts and the truth, not only as evidence that he is a chronic liar, but as evidence that he cannot be trusted. That his instincts - and, often, his motives - are wrong. Many of his lies are not so much about objective facts - facts independent of Morrison's existence - but about Morrison spin, explanation, or account of what has occurred. They go, in short, to his moral character, his personality, and a certain narcissistic desire to be at the centre of everything. When his lies unravel, he becomes agitated, not so much as a salesman ruefully recognising that his pitch did not work, but as someone forced to confront some blemish or imperfection. Morrison's weaknesses are by now ingrained, but Labor will ignore, at its peril, his opportunism, his willingness to seize on some sudden Labor stumble - or lie of its own. So far, however, he is searching for a theme. He still has time, unless Labor overwhelms his defences. It is not doing so yet. The opportunity for Labor comes from continued working on the trust angle. This is because Morrison's trust problem is a function of his studied refusal to have an agenda, a vision, a general strategy, or a comprehensive explanation of how things are happening and how events fit in with each other. It's a hole Labor can fill. Morrison has described his political approach as transactional. But he only rarely relates his style of government to broad philosophies of government, unless by reference to simplistic slogans. By contrast, Howard was an explainer, with a generally coherent program. He was agile enough to drop policies which became unpopular; he was often frank about that. But he would immediately attempt to create a fresh narrative that incorporated his new itinerary, still, he would insist, going in the same direction. Morrison's seeming incapacity to describe his favoured destination, his plans, or even his aims - other than in vague terms suggesting that all he wants is the restoration of things to the way they were, mean that persistence with many of his deceptions lacks any point. It bolsters his compulsive secrecy, general refusal to explain, or gives any account. It adds to the perception some have that he believes himself anointed rather than elected, responsible to his deity rather than voters at large. It also reinforces views that he is more about announcements than actual performance, and that his interventions in the body politic are generally late and in reaction to circumstances, rather than in taking charge of events. Down the track, indeed, some will trace the Morrison malaise not to his general untrustworthiness but to his letting events take charge of him, rather than the other way around. Increasingly, the salesman has nothing much to sell but himself, and that, it is becoming evident, is nothing much at all.

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SUBSCRIBER | OPINION

November 26 2021 - 12:00PM

Next Thursday, possibly Friday if debate over religious freedom drags on in the Senate, is probably the last opportunity the federal Liberal Party has to rid itself of a leader in Scott Morrison, increasingly looking like a liability without a road to victory that he is capable of describing. After that, parliament rises for Christmas, then the January holidays, and even if extraordinary measures were taken to reconvene parliament, there would simply not be time enough for a new regime to prepare itself for election.

It's not going to happen of course, especially if the so-called incumbency rule, by which a popularly elected prime minister cannot be deposed other than by a two-thirds caucus vote, is treated as the formal requirement. There are party constitutionalists doubtful whether the parliamentary party can bind future meetings of the party, and who observe that a prime minister determined to carry on after losing a majority in caucus would be in an impossible position out in the electorate.

Be that as it may, there are no obvious challengers on the horizon, even if a significant number of members, possibly a majority, have little faith in the capacity of Morrison to pull off another election win, with or without the direct intervention of God. Their problem is the fear that any replacement, perhaps Peter Dutton or Josh Frydenberg, would be unlikely to be able to retrieve the party's position, and might well make it worse. Particularly if the deposed Morrison rump - bound to insist even after any sort of defeat - both that they had a winning strategy, and were robbed - were in full-scale revolt, leaking and undermining, and doing their best, in tried and true modern Liberal fashion, to fail to turn the other cheek.

It's not simply a matter of now being too late for anything in the nature of a revolt. The party, as much as Morrison himself, committed itself to the sorts of strategies it is now following, even if some now regret it. The personality and style of Morrison has infected the whole government - including most ministers. The sclerosis and the lack of flexibility on general positions is now built-in. Morrison and a number of other ministers are more than ruthless enough to be able to ditch whole areas of policy or practice, and without regard to anything they have said or done in the past about the folly of going by the new path. They have been trashing a perfectly serviceable brand for far too long to be able to simply deploy it again.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Picture: Dion Georgopoulos

Scott Morrison, who pitched himself as a salesman, and who seems to be able to convince himself of anything, can't seem to sell a thing anymore. His retainers may have little choice but to nod wisely at whatever he says, but they are finding it increasingly difficult to display conviction, faith, or personal endorsement of what's on offer.

They retreat to their constituencies gloomy of the government's chances of galvanising the community, or half of it, around any campaign idea. It may be that Morrison has, with some policies, or recent policy shifts, neutralised some issues which might have actively gone against the government. Let's imagine, for example, that he has done this in vital constituencies with his efforts to establish freedom of religion in legislation - perhaps whether or not he can get the support of parliament and the measures put into law. But his proposals were in any event watered down, and if they received some endorsement from some religious lobbies, they created no great enthusiasm. They may well have mobilised some fresh enemies, particularly among those who - though not hostile to religion - simply do not understand what the threat to it was, where it was coming from, and how freedom of thought is likely to be enhanced by the proposed measures.

It has, after all, been the Liberal Party which has long counselled suspicion of entrenched rights, or of legislative efforts to put a hand on the scales when it has come time to balance different rights. It has, after all, been the party which has characterised Labor enthusiasm for the declaration, definition and weaponising of new rights and duties as proof of its addiction to coercion, controls, legislative solutions and intrinsic bossiness.

The skirmishes of the past few weeks are not the campaign proper, nor do they necessarily point at the issues around which the electorate will divide. Morrison is rehearsing a few approaches, and a few areas in which, he or his strategists believe, ground could be gained. But he is carefully watching the media, and the public response, and one can be sure that he will drop ideas that do not seem to take. A good example might be with his new-found fondness for electric cars, his initiatives to establish charging points, and his insistence that technological developments in only the past two years had completely transformed the economic equations about the use of the car and the truck. It didn't work. Partly because Morrison is incapable of taking a backward step, or of ever admitting that he was once wrong.

Could Peter Dutton do a better job of leading the Liberal Party? Picture: Keegan Carroll

Instead, in the usual Morrison style he begins by denying that he ever said anything negative about electric vehicles at all, then, when confronted with clear records showing that he had, he attempts to redefine what he said, to change the emphasis, and to insist that circumstances had radically changed. A bigger man presiding over a U-turn - a John Howard perhaps - might say, "I used to think that. But I have had a closer look at it and changed my mind." And he might even win some professional admiration, either for his willingness to cut and run, or flexibility, or even ruthlessness once it was clear circumstances had changed. He often did, if never with the style or panache of Peter Beattie, then premier of Queensland.

Not Morrison. By now, as ever, he has convinced himself that there is no contradiction whatever with anything he has said before, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is calumniating, petty, nit-picking, and seeking to disguise her own moral infirmities. This capacity to examine his own conscience and to acquit himself of misleading conduct because he believed in all of his statements at the time he made them might, in his own mind, persuade him of the purity of his intentions. That does not stop its being a self-delusion, and its exposition a deceit. Here in this vale of tears, it would be called perjury in a court of law, at the very least for not being "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;" as well as for being calculated to deceive.

Labor spent a good deal of the parliamentary week seeming to demonstrate that for Morrison, the lie is not the exception but the rule, a practice, presumably learnt from what he would call the Evil One, which is entirely ingrained in his character, particularly when in a campaigning mode with pretences both about where he is coming from and where his opponents are going. The examples Labor chose were well known ones - for example about the staff in Morrison's office lying and misleading about Morrison's whereabouts and presence in Hawaii during the 2019 bushfire crisis. If Morrison stumbled here - and he did, big time, simply because he has not "adjusted" his story to explain facts now generally known - one might have thought him on notice about the tactic, and re-briefing himself for the cases that the opposition was certain to bowl up. Perhaps he is so certain of, and so adamant about his own honesty that his staff were scared. Perhaps he had convinced himself, as he had with other parts of his explanations, that his explanations were credible, and had been accepted as such, at the time they had come to notice. In any event, his performance was cringeworthy. He tried to recover ground, or turn the tables, by purporting to see in the attack Labor's general absence of policies, and its determination to go the low route by tiny semantic quibbles. One only had to see the agony and embarrassment on the faces of his ministers and colleagues that he was doing himself further political self-harm.

Scott Morrison is by no means the only chronic liar in politics. He may not even be the worst. There are quite a number, and on the Labor side of politics as well. But what distinguishes his line of bullshit is the way his refusal to admit error, to look back, or to see matters as others see them, is that he insists on digging himself further in, even as he is doing himself further damage. Journalist Sean Kelly, in his book A portrait of Scott Morrison, does a masterly job of attempting to explain this from Morrison's point of view.

Twenty years ago, John Howard began to acquire a serious reputation for misleading the public, not least by the exposure of his prevarications in the children overboard affair. His capacity to do it was much enhanced by the immunity of his private office from any external accountability, and by the way Howard so organised his office and style of management that it was almost always impossible to prove that he knew of anything, or had been (orally) briefed. By 2004, opinion polls indicated that the general attack on his credibility - even his honesty - was working. Put bluntly, many people did not believe a word he was saying.

It was thus quite a surprise when Howard announced the 2004 election that he declared that it was about "trust" - about whom the electorate trusted during the term ahead. Surely, some thought, this put his credibility, his honesty with the facts, and the record of his misleading the public right to the fore.

But while Labor continued to hammer Howard as an unreliable witness to anything, it did not seem to see the difference between "trust" and "truth-telling". The public had decided that it did not much believe anything Howard said. (They did not much trust most Labor spokespeople either). But they felt that they "knew" Howard. He was a "known quantity" - both in his virtues and his deficits. By contrast the Howard attack on Latham over "trust" was that Latham was an unknown quantity - even, on the basis of what was known, a somewhat broody, unsettled and erratic figure. People had no instinct for what he might do. They should not trust him to do the right thing.

The campaign worked, in the sense that Howard won the election with an increased majority.

With Scott Morrison this time, Labor is trying not to make the same mistake. They are using evidence of misleading conduct, followed by general slipperiness with the facts and the truth, not only as evidence that he is a chronic liar, but as evidence that he cannot be trusted. That his instincts - and, often, his motives - are wrong. Many of his lies are not so much about objective facts - facts independent of Morrison's existence - but about Morrison spin, explanation, or account of what has occurred. They go, in short, to his moral character, his personality, and a certain narcissistic desire to be at the centre of everything. When his lies unravel, he becomes agitated, not so much as a salesman ruefully recognising that his pitch did not work, but as someone forced to confront some blemish or imperfection.

Morrison's weaknesses are by now ingrained, but Labor will ignore, at its peril, his opportunism, his willingness to seize on some sudden Labor stumble - or lie of its own. So far, however, he is searching for a theme. He still has time, unless Labor overwhelms his defences. It is not doing so yet.

The opportunity for Labor comes from continued working on the trust angle. This is because Morrison's trust problem is a function of his studied refusal to have an agenda, a vision, a general strategy, or a comprehensive explanation of how things are happening and how events fit in with each other. It's a hole Labor can fill.

Morrison has described his political approach as transactional. But he only rarely relates his style of government to broad philosophies of government, unless by reference to simplistic slogans. By contrast, Howard was an explainer, with a generally coherent program. He was agile enough to drop policies which became unpopular; he was often frank about that. But he would immediately attempt to create a fresh narrative that incorporated his new itinerary, still, he would insist, going in the same direction.

Morrison's seeming incapacity to describe his favoured destination, his plans, or even his aims - other than in vague terms suggesting that all he wants is the restoration of things to the way they were, mean that persistence with many of his deceptions lacks any point. It bolsters his compulsive secrecy, general refusal to explain, or gives any account. It adds to the perception some have that he believes himself anointed rather than elected, responsible to his deity rather than voters at large. It also reinforces views that he is more about announcements than actual performance, and that his interventions in the body politic are generally late and in reaction to circumstances, rather than in taking charge of events.

Down the track, indeed, some will trace the Morrison malaise not to his general untrustworthiness but to his letting events take charge of him, rather than the other way around. Increasingly, the salesman has nothing much to sell but himself, and that, it is becoming evident, is nothing much at all.

Follow this link:

How Scott Morrison is trashing the Liberal brand - The Canberra Times

Prankster Rob Dobi (who is an illustrator IRL) called into conservative talk show "Life with Liz" in Nashua, New Hampshire to "punk" her and her posse. Although they never caught on, Dobi "slammed" the left with a bit of poetry that included as many punk band names as he could fit in. By the end, Liz and crew, although oblivious to his shenanigans, are laughing hard as they say goodbye to their "Republican" caller. Good times were had by all.

See how many punk bands you can catch by listening. (Or read the transcription below.)

"One of my main problems is I'm a Republican in a fairly liberal area and I feel like everyone is just, like, Against me, so I feel like what we need to do is listen to what our Descendents told us. Because in the past, we Refused to live, like, a Life of Agony. I'm Sick Of It All. Im sick of people thinking we're just aMinor Threat. Enough of that Fugazi. Alot of these people just got Bad Brains, that are Misfits that wave Black Flag and they're practically Anti-Flag. Ithink we need to Converge and help the Youth Of Today because every time you Blink-182 Kids, they goMissing, so I don't think we should be Exploited anymore. We need to Rise Against, or they're going to have to deal with the Fall Out, Boy. I'll let you guys go. I'm going to head out and Catch some Reel Big Fish. [but] not if it tastes Rancid."

[Updated at 8:52am after rereading my transcription and finding a few more bands in there to capitalize! Hope I caught them all this time.]

Via Digg

More here:

Man pranks conservative radio show by naming a ton of punk bands in his liberal bash - Boing Boing

Two of the three main political parties in the Niagara Falls riding now have their candidates set for the 2022 provincial election, while the other is closing in on selecting who will represent them in the June 2 vote.

On Thursday night, New Democrats chose incumbent MPP Wayne Gates to wave the orange banner. He has represented Niagara Falls, Fort Erie, and Niagara-on-the-Lake at Queens Park since 2014. Gates currently serves as the NDPs critic for Workplace Health and Safety, Training, Trades and Apprenticeships, and Auto Strategy.

Gates nominators included Burdett Sisler, a 106-year-old Second World War veteran living in Fort Erie.

Im very proud to represent the people of Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Fort Erie at Queens Park, and Im grateful for the trust families in the riding have placed in me, said Gates.

Niagara has seen some tough times over the past two years, and as we move forward and recover, well need to tackle the big challenges like affordability, getting our hospital built, and fixing long-term care so our parents and grandparents get the care they deserve. Under the tireless leadership of (Leader) Andrea Horwath, the NDP can form government in 2022 and invest in making Niagara an even better place to live.

Gates first won his seat in 2014 in a byelection after Liberal Kim Craitor resigned before the end of his term. In the byelection, Gates defeated Progressive Conservative runner-up Bart Maves by 1,025 votes. In the general election in June four months later, Gates defeated Maves again by almost 7,500 votes. Gates won the seat for the third time in 2018, defeating Tory candidate Chuck McShane by more than 9,000 votes.

Gates is a former Niagara Falls city councillor and served as a local union president for more than a decade.

Horwath said from the union hall to Queens Park, Gates has always fought to make the lives of working people better.

Wayne has been fighting, throughout the pandemic, to make sure the voices of workers, families and small businesses in Niagara Falls were heard loud and clear, she said.

In 2022, were going to work together to make life better for Niagara families. That means fixing our broken health and long-term care system, investing in public education, and making homes and the cost of living in Niagara more affordable.

In March, the Progressive Conservatives chose Niagara Falls regional Coun. Bob Gale as their candidate.

Gale is serving his second term on regional council. A businessperson, he also served as a Niagara Parks commissioner, when he came to political prominence during a battle to modernize some of the commissions procurement and board policies.

Meanwhile, the Liberals are scheduled to select their candidate Dec. 11.

There are two candidates vying to become the partys representative former Niagara-on-the-Lake town councillor Terry Flynn, and Ashley Waters of Niagara Falls.

Read the original here:

NDP, Progressive Conservatives have provincial candidates for Niagara Falls; Liberal candidate to be announced soon - NiagaraFallsReview.ca

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The Liberal Party of Canada is seeking an Executive Assistant to the National Director to work at the Partys National Office in Ottawa, joining a dedicated team of staff to support Justin Trudeau and our Liberal team.

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The Liberal Party of Canada is seeking a Manager, Fundraising and Direct Response for an opportunity to join a dedicated team of staff and volunteers to help achieve the Liberal Party of Canadas mission and support our work together to deliver real change.

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For many of us teaching in the liberal arts colleges and universities that have opened in recent years across Asia, the Yale-NUS split came as a shock.

On 27 August, the National University of Singapore announced that Yale-NUS College a 10-year collaboration with Yale University would close and be merged into a new interdisciplinary honours college within NUS called New College. From 2025, Yale will have only an advisory role.

The announcement, which waswidely reportedaround the world,brought a jolt of historical irony. Back in 2015, Id heard Peter Salovey, then the president of Yale, speak on liberal arts education in Asia. At the time, I was in the process of moving from California to Delhi, to be part of the early cohort of faculty at the new Ashoka University and to set up a department of creative writing. After Saloveys talk, hosted in Delhi by Ashoka, I asked him why Singapore, a state not particularly known for free thought, was collaborating on the American model of liberal education. His response struck me as prescient: the government of Singapore knew that a messy kind of democracy was coming to the country soon and that a liberal arts education was the best way to prepare its citizens for it. There was a new excitement for innovative liberal arts education in Asia, and I felt a part of it myself.

More specifically, I recognised a culture of interdisciplinary creativity such as Id seen in my previous institution, Stanford University, translated into a new Asian demand for innovative, multidisciplinary education. At the heart of this demand were the professional needs of rapidly evolving knowledge economies. It was the kind of interdisciplinarity that went beyond the narrowly technocratic or financial aptitude that is the core mandate of specialised schools of business or technology. It entered a broader domain of human thought, behaviour and knowledge. It evoked the human-centred business models of Peter Drucker, who, back in 1959, coined the term knowledge worker, predicting that the future corporation would have to balance significant social, economic and human dimensions.

This liberal arts model, with obvious corporate enthusiasm behind it, was inevitably elite and expensive. It was generously supported by philanthropic entrepreneurs from Asias new digital economy. It evoked suspicion as well as differing levels of enthusiasm within the larger Asian landscapes of colonially structured, government-directed higher education systems of raggedly uneven quality. But it was fairly clear why an economically ambitious and technologically progressive state such as Singapore was interested in it and why it also appealed to the forms of private philanthropic higher education emerging around some of the major cities of India.

To understand the contradictions that have begun to disrupt this trajectory and to examine the sustainability of liberal arts in Asia today, it helps to take a quick look at how this form of education developed across different nations over the past few decades.

The most striking success story comes from South Korea. In a significant discussion published in the New Republic in 2010, Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, argues that the foundation of this success lies in the countrys long-held Confucian tradition of humanistic education.Japanese domination in the 1940s represented a violent onslaught against this tradition, when Koreans were limited to low-level vocational education and schools were only allowed to use Japanese. The crucial recovery of national identity involved an invocation of Confucian humanistic education, but in a newly democratised form that made space for women and the working classes. American missionaries played a deeply constructive role in helping this modernising process.

Although the educational success story of South Korea is also driven by government initiatives, such as universal secondary education, Nussbaum ascribes significant credit to what she calls a productive synergy between Confucian nationalism and American progressive education. The result, she writes, has been the widely democratized, pluralistic, and market-driven education system that obtains today.

This, however, has been a rare instance of creative synergy; nothing like it has quite happened in other major Asian countries.

Take Hong Kong. Since the handover in 1997, the city has been moving away from the British system of single-subject degrees towards a more broad-based liberal education. The most obvious reasons were those I have already described: the countrys projection of itself as a service- and knowledge-based economy and an economic mediator between the East and the West, which called for a population with a more well-rounded education. This was what attracted the support of business figures such as Po Chung, the co-founder of the Asia-Pacific branch of the shipping giant DHL.

But the introduction in 2009 of liberal studies as a mandatory subject in Hong Kongs secondary education, with the specific aim of promoting critical thinking, has been intensely controversial. While some have lauded it as an exemplary curriculum which broke away from the rote learning of the mainland, pro-China leaders have criticised it as an instigator of student unrest especially since the pro-democracy protests of 2014.It is interesting that liberal studies was introduced by a Beijing-controlled regime, but as Robert Spires, now anassistant professor of education at the University of Richmond,has pointed out, it may have been intended as a minor concession to deflect attention from larger forms of administrative authoritarianism.

Last November, it was announced thatliberal studies at school would be renamed and recastto include more content about mainland China and less about current affairs. Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam blamed the education system for fuelling the 2019 pro-democracy protests by teaching children false and biased information.

If we look at Asia more generally, it is clear that the liberally educated graduate, as opposed to one professionally cast in a single direction, has great appeal for employers in the 21st century, in which many skills and careers seem to be ephemeral. But, as the Hong Kong situation aptly demonstrates, liberal is a troublingly expansive word that refuses to stay within an apolitically conceived disciplinary framework.

We can see some of the contradictions when authoritarian regimes seek to institute liberal arts education for various reasons of their own. In a 2019 article for Indian newspaperThe Print, Anushka Prasad, an MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania,describes a conversation with Gan Yang, a dean at Tsinghua University, who pointed out that the Chinese governments investment in liberal arts education was not intended so much to produce active citizens or independent critical thinkers in the Western sense as to cultivate and promote traditional Chinese culture and thought in the Confucian tradition.

That view is endorsed byWalter Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker distinguished professor of Romance studies at Duke University, which has a campus in Kunshan, near Shanghai.China wants to know what the West already knows and to take advantage not to be converted to liberal education but to appropriate Western liberal education in order to set up their own system of education," he says.It is clear that the government is not westernising.

Ethnic chauvinism is also obvious in the Indian BJP-led governmentsinvocation of a tradition of liberal arts rooted in classical Hinduism in its 2020 National Education Policy. Indeed, debates about the meaning of free speech and the right to dissent on university campuses were exploding just at the time when disciplines were opening up to another kind of freedom in elite higher education spaces. While student protests and brutal state suppression raged through the public Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi in 2016, I could not help wondering, in the pages of this magazine, what right there would be to such dissent on the new private campuses. Little did I know that Ashoka, that very summer, would be bitterly split over a petition about military activities in Kashmir, leading to the resignation of some of those involved.

The stark opposition between economic openness and political restriction in parts of East and South-east Asia and now, increasingly, in South Asia explains the contradictions experienced by the project of liberal arts education in these countries. Looking further west, the Gulf countries have also seen substantial investment in liberal arts education and collaboration with American universities. There, we find not so much the direct suppression of free thought and speech against which at least the American overseas campuses are more or less protected but various other kinds of unfreedom which reflect the political climate, as well as a certain traditional and bureaucratic mindset about education.

In these countries, too, access to liberal arts education in the newly opened universities is largely limited to the elite. They are, according to Shafeeq Ghabra, professor of political science at Kuwait University, colleges for the privileged, partly because profit-based universities have limited scholarship opportunities and do not offer student loans. A significant insulation from life outside their rarefied campuses a consistent feature of the new liberal arts universities across Asia is possibly also what maintains a certain freedom within these institutions and protects them from social prejudices and governmental restrictions.

Ian Almond, professor of world literature at Georgetown University, has taught at Georgetown Qatar for the past eight years.

Were really in a Washington bubble, he tells me, our VPN [virtual private computer network] on campus is set to Washington! And Im not sure Ive had any interference that Ive noticed. Once, he recalls, the university planned a debate on whether God is a woman, which the dean had to cancel as he got a lot of heat. But the cancellation annoyed even the conservative students since the Georgetown brand is sold in Qatar on the basis of a free-speech campus.

But while government interference in his teaching has been almost non-existent, Almond feels that self-censorship might be a bigger issue. I still try to show films which have sex scenes without editing them, he says, although I realise that now, if a film has too much sex, I would probably choose judiciously which sections to show. I know many of my colleagues experience some version of this.

If the bulk of higher education in the Gulf, as Gabra writes, remains highly centralised, with the government controlling curriculums, admissions, and recruitment, the socio-political climate inside a campus such as Georgetown Qatar (where about only half the students are Qatari) speaks of a very different world.It is strange, Almond wrote to me, the extent to which the woke vibes in the US reappear on our Qatar campus here, on the other end of the planet, there are very similar arguments amongst our students about Black Lives Matter, trans rights, colonialism and all the issues that get discussed on American campuses. He feels that one certainly wouldnt find this outside of the campus in Qatar which is part of the appeal of GUQ. Yet it also means that the campus has a reputation, amongst local Qataris, of robbing students of their Islamic beliefs and making them cynical about everything.

In any event, the alienation of the American campus from the local socio-political climate is very stark.

In some contexts, systemic, structural and social factors all present a challenge to the new liberal arts model. Writing in 2013 about her experience of setting up Effat College (later University) for women at the request of Princess Lolowah al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the now-retired academic Marcia Grant outlines the barriers to allowing students to gain a broad, cross-disciplinary education. Since students in Saudi Arabia are streamed into either the sciences or the humanities before high school, it was very difficult for them to experience knowledge and practice across the disciplinary divide, as Effat had intended, following the liberal arts model.

The segregation of disciplines, reports Grant, went with the segregation of sexes, which decreed that no men could enter the campus while students were at the school. (This vigilance extended to ensuring that the buildings were constructed in such a way that men could perform repairs to the overhead air conditioning system without walking on the campus.) The hiring of male professors in the womens college was initially impossible, although this problem was later circumvented by obtaining permission from the students families and using closed-circuit television to deliver lectures on screen in the classrooms.

Although neither students nor their parents wanted this kind of segregated experience, as Grant points out, Islamist members of parliament and the university council continued to insist on it. Mixed with these deadening effects, she goes on, are fundamental flaws in a tertiary education system that depends upon an ill-suited consultant army; a dearth of locally generated, relevant learning material; and a myopic educational focus.

It is clear that across Asia there are deeply entrenched obstacles to a mode of higher education that is liberal in multiple senses disciplinary and epistemological but also social and political.

Smaller bureaucratic restrictions about curricula are sometimes symptoms of larger ideological resistances. The Gulf campuses, Yale-NUS and the private universities in India have so far only been able to exist as islands. This is a serious limitation in itself, but it gets aggravated beyond repair when resentment about their insulated existence deepens in the world outside and in the government and begins to corrode their protected status. This is partly what happened at Yale-NUS, and it has been happening to my own institution, Ashoka, from the uproar over the Kashmir petition in 2016 to the controversial resignation of two senior faculty members earlier this year. The genuine enthusiasm for multidisciplinary universities in Indias National Education Policy 2020 is poorly matched with the states consistent suppression of student dissent on campuses across the nation.

American liberal arts education developed as humble, local and provincial. While closely linked to the church, it was free from the larger structures of government. Without the cosmopolitan ambitions of the medieval European university, the American college in the nineteenth century was a hometown entity, writes education historian David Larabee in his 2017 book A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. In a land of competing churches, founding a college was an effective way to plant the flag and promote the faith. A college put a sleepy country town on the map, so that it could demand a railway stop and pitch to be the county seat (or even the state capital), and thus raise the value of local real estate. This possibly explains the remote and provincial locations of so many liberal arts colleges in the US.

Later in the century, two very different elements were imported from Europe that would blend surprisingly well with the institutions foundation in the local community: the German research university and the British undergraduate college. This was an unexpected, even accidental development: three very contradictory forces populist, elite and practical, as Larabee calls them coming together to shape one of the most formidable institutional forces of the 20th centuryalthough one currently facing aggravating challenges of its own. Except perhaps in South Korea, such a harmonious combination of local and global forces has been largely absent in Asia.

The liberal arts model requires significant freedom and a certain amount of decentralisation institutions and faculty must have the liberty to choose their own curricula and adapt them to local needs. But with freedom comes responsibility. Im not sure many institutions and their faculty want that responsibility. I have seen colleges in India gain autonomy and yet change practically nothing in their curricula or pedagogy. And many governments remain keen to centralise higher education and unwilling to grant significant liberties to institutions.

I think its fair to say that the honeymoon period for the liberal arts in Asia is over. Such educational initiatives are still very sustainable, if only for historical reasons the rising youth population (compared with a declining college-age population in the US), significant student talent sharpened by the traditional Asian attention to education, the expanding middle class and its increasingly ambitious vision for higher education. The needs of business and corporate interests in the new global economy also point to employees shaped by a broad, multidisciplinary education.

But its clear that liberal arts institutions are likely to encounter much envy, suspicion and even hostility within their own societies. In nations with histories of state-sponsored, socialist education, institutional models based on private philanthropy are unwelcome to the leftist intelligentsia. To some degree, this suspicion is justified. The very nature of liberal arts education makes it resource-intensive; the perpetual challenge is whether it can be both intellectually exclusive and socially inclusive at the same time.

As it is currently conceived, Asian liberal arts education is likely to continue in institutions that exist as islands. Yet if the mistrust between the islands and the oceans surrounding them stretches beyond a certain point, the compact, whether tacit or explicit, will break. That is what seems to have driven the disintegration of Yale-NUS.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He is grateful for research input from Harshita Tripathi.

Continued here:

Is the honeymoon period over for liberal arts in Asia? - Times Higher Education (THE)

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has accused critics of wanting a kangaroo court to oversee federal parliament after he faced an internal revolt over the Coalitions failure to establish a commonwealth integrity commission.

On Thursday morning, the Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer crossed the floor to support independent MP Helen Haines push to establish a federal integrity commission. Archer had told Guardian Australia she was frustrated with the governments inertia on the issue.

Archers decision she was the seventh government MP or senator to cross the floor this week gave Haines majority support for her bill. But because MPs are paired and absent from Canberra because of Covid-19, she could not secure the absolute majority required.

The move thrust the governments failure to fulfil its election commitment back into the spotlight, putting Morrison on the back foot over the issue.

When asked why he had refused to act for more than 1,000 days to establish the commission, which was promised before the last election, Morrison pointed to the governments draft bill which was released in February this year.

He also took aim at the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) and its inquiry into the former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, indicating the Coalition would not support a federal integrity commission that allowed public hearings.

These matters should be looking at criminal conduct, not who your boyfriend is, Morrison said.

The premier of NSW was done over by a bad process, an abuse Im not going to have a kangaroo court taken into this parliament.

Morrison suggested the Labor party could support the governments proposed bill that has drawn criticism for the softness of its approach and is yet to be introduced into parliament.

The legislation is there for all to see and if the opposition wishes to support that legislation, they should do so and we can legislate it, Morrison said.

But those opposite do not support our laws to introduce a commonwealth integrity commission. Instead, those opposite want to support the sort of show in NSW, which has seen the most shameful, the most shameful attacks on the former premier.

What was done to Gladys Berejiklian, the people of NSW know, was an absolute disgrace, and Im not going to allow that sort of a process, which seeks to publicly humiliate people on matters that have nothing to do with the issues before such a commission, to see those powers abused [and] seek to reduce the integrity of people like Gladys Berejiklian.

Icac is investigating whether Berejiklian failed to declare a conflict of interest due to her secret relationship with Maguire when she awarded lucrative grants to Maguires electorate as treasurer and later as premier.

Morrisons remarks were seen as further encouragement to Berejiklian to run for the Liberal party in the next federal election, with the former premier being courted to run in Warringah to try to unseat independent MP Zali Steggall.

Polling published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday suggested that Berejiklians approval rating has rebounded since the Icac hearings concluded.

Steggall has been a vocal advocate for the establishment of a federal integrity commission and, along with the rest of the crossbench, she voted in support of Hainess bill on Thursday.

After the vote, which was mired in confusion as a result of the Covid changes that were being managed by the new Speaker, Haines hailed Archer as the lioness of the 46th parliament for taking a principled stance.

She also pledged to continue working with government MPs to try to bring the bill on for debate.

This is far from over, she said. The nation can take some comfort in knowing that despite what the prime minister is doing the majority want an integrity commission.

Archer previously told Guardian Australia she was considering crossing the floor over her concerns the government had not progressed the bill, saying she was perplexed by the delay given consultations had been undertaken over the past year.

I really have a strong view that this is the most important thing we need to do, Archer said.

The new attorney general, Michaelia Cash, has been consulting on the bill over the past six months, and as recently as mid-October said the government intends for the legislation to be introduced into parliament in 2021.

Moderate MPs have been pushing for the government to toughen up its proposed model, pushing for public hearings and reports, and for the anti-corruption body to have a broader remit.

Haines has accused the government of breaking its election commitment saying it is now a near impossibility to introduce and pass it before the 2022 election, which is due by mid-May.

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Morrison accuses critics of wanting kangaroo court as Liberal MP crosses floor over integrity bill - The Guardian