One of the most useful qualities of labor unions is their ability to force Good Liberals to actually demonstrate their principles in a tangible way. It is easy for a self-proclaimed progressive business owner to say all the nice things about how they believe in equality and fair wages and worker rights but when their employees unionize and come to claim those rights, those nice bosses must stop talking about how nice they are, and prove it. For limousine liberals, dealing with unions is where the rubber hits the road.

Needless to say, many Good Liberals turn out to be charlatans. There is a saying in the union world: A boss is a boss. This is a more pithy way of saying: A boss is kind of a greedy jerk, no matter how many Nevertheless, she persisted bumper stickers they have plastered on their Volvos.

The New York Times is one of Americas most vital totems of mainstream liberalism, right up there with expensive coffee and defensive explanations for sending your kids to private school. The New York Times is also, it turns out, one of Americas very best examples of how a boss is a boss. Because even as the paper pontificates about the dangers of inequality and gives sympathetic coverage to major union drives, the leaders of the companys business side are busily trying to undermine their own unions.

Last April, 650 tech employees at the New York Times announced that they were unionizing. Rather than applauding them and proceeding to negotiate a contract, the company instead refused to voluntarily recognize the union. This is despite its own editorial board supporting a bill that would have made it legally binding for employers to voluntarily accept union requests when they are backed by a majority of the staff.

As the papers own editorial explained: Under current law, an employer can reject the majoritys signatures and insist on a secret ballot. But in a disturbingly high number of cases, the employer uses the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionize. Now, this is what the New York Times company is accused of doing to its own employees.

Since last year, the Times has been accused of trying to scare workers into changing their minds to sow division among the employees, divide the unit, and erode support for organized labor. Last week, federal labor regulators claimed that the company had broken the law by telling large swaths of employees that they were actually managers, and that they were therefore prohibited from publicly supporting the union. (A hearing is scheduled for this March. A spokesperson for the Times said they strongly disagree with the unions allegations.)

If you find this sort of anti-union behavior from the New York Times surprising, remember that another unit of unionized workers at the paper, those who worked for the product review section Wirecutter, had to go on strike during the busy Black Friday shopping weekend in order to secure a minimally fair contract. So while most of the editorial employees at the Times have been unionized for decades, the company is still exhibiting a chesty commitment to doing everything possible to keep any more of its workers from securing the same sort of benefits.

I dont want to get caught up here in the details of labor regulations and lose sight of the big picture. Which is this: the New York Times Company, which makes its money by branding itself as the foremost defender of liberal American values, is fighting against its own workers pursuing their right to organize a union and bargain collectively.

To me, that makes the New York Times an anti-union company. I can say this with no qualms. Companies that are not anti-union will honor a formal request from their employees for voluntary union recognition; they will bargain fair contracts that include pay equity for all; and they will certainly not run internal messaging campaigns trying to convince their employees that unionizing is a bad idea.

The New York Times has done all of these things, quite recently. This means that it can stand proudly with its dishonorable peers across corporate America in that regard. While its writers editorialize against the deep political and economic problems plaguing our country, its management is very much a part of those problems.

The New York Times gets away with a lot. They are the journalism equivalent of the supreme court. They offer prestige, big budgets and job stability at a time when those things are in short supply in this industry. The half of our country terrified by Trump sees them as an army of truth, and everyone in media wants to work there. (Call me!) But lets be honest: the people who control the New York Times company are acting like real weasels.

Its not just that they are hypocritical, yammering about the public good while acting from pure selfishness its that they want to have it both ways. While more outwardly evil media bosses like Rupert Murdoch may be proud to embrace their Ayn Randian reputation, those who lead the Times want to be accepted as good people on the Brooklyn-brownstone cocktail party circuit, even as they quietly try to stop those who work for them from having an equal seat at their tastefully appointed table. Screw that.

I have covered hundreds of anti-union campaigns. No matter where they happen, they are all based on lies and fear. Whether they happen at an Amazon warehouse or at the New York Times, they are a demonstration of contempt for the idea that an employee may deserve to be treated as someone whose humanity is just as real as that of an employer.

Respectable people dont engage in union-busting. People who run anti-union campaigns are not Good Liberals. Hundreds of workers raising their voices have not been enough to convince the New York Times executives to act right. Maybe its time to stop inviting them to the cocktail parties.

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The New York Times is a reminder: good liberals often oppose unions - The Guardian

When, after 9/11, the neocons agitated for regime change in the Middle East, they believed that history was on their side: so they conjured up the existential threat ofweapons of mass destruction, just in case history had other ideas. More than a decade later, this tactic has found favour with a wholly different tribe: Americas liberal establishment.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesnt live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to mobilise at every level. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: Jan. 6 is not in the past, were warned. It is every day.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had beenrightall along: that Trumps hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their livesmeaning. There were now Right-winginsurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wantedthe Capitol siege to happen.

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clintons marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was ablowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of sexual relations, as Clinton had sought toclaim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amissexpression, the Age of Vanished Normalcy: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, aclash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need topre-emptivelyact to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, asChristopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. Hitchens, who confided that he felt exhilarated at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principlefor the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was theprudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchenss metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of therioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was existential: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amassWMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based onunreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever foundand Saddams relationship with al Qaeda wasoverblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Todays liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patentlydoesnt exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, likecomparingthe storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest thatfar-Right terrorismin America has increasedmarkedlyover the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of aperpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophicto a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk ones life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. Such nostalgia, henoted, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.

So whenThe New York Timespublishes an editorial on how every day is Jan. 6 now, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology.Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In hismemoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for animpending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isnt their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue even if it means engaging inirresponsible fear-mongeringand flagrant exaggeration.

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The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup - UnHerd

Beset by a seemingly never-ending pandemic, soaring economic insecurity and inequality, widespread distrust of government, and Trumpist efforts to subvert election boards and amass power locally, the US is hurtling towards catastrophe.

Joe Bidens election victory bought time. Given Barack Obamas 2016 assessment that Donald Trump was a fascist, Hillary Clintons recent warning that Trump is an aspiring tyrant, and Bidens declaration that the 2020 election was a battle for the soul of the nation, you might have imagined that, upon achieving a congressional majority and the presidency, Democrats would have seized the opportunity to pass an emergency package of reforms to protect American democracy. Sadly, you would have been wrong.

A year on from the 6 January Capitol riots, the US seems to be further than ever from resolving its political crises. Neo-Nazi extremists are regrouping and continuing to organize. The archaic, anti-democratic filibuster stymies progress by effectively requiring a 60-vote Senate supermajority for most legislation. Rather than jettisoning the filibuster posthaste, the Democrats equivocate. As late as July 2021, Biden nonsensically defended the filibuster. It took until October for the president to cautiously support a limited exception for voting rights reforms. Only now are the Democrats inching towards rule changes that might allow them to actually get things done.

Then there was the episode with Elizabeth MacDonough, an unelected Senate parliamentarian, who torpedoed a minimum wage increase that would have materially improved millions of peoples lives, and the Democrats kowtowed to her rather than firing her. Most critically, they have failed to enact the For the People Act, a desperately needed overhaul to the creaky machinery of American politics which would enhance election security; strengthen ethics requirements for officials; and introduce voluntary public campaign financing, same-day voter registration, and automatic voter registration.

If enough of us speak up, we'll be able to protect honesty in public life.

Trumps election was devastating. I knew his administration would be disastrous. But I was skeptical of centrist hand-wringing about Trump being a wannabe Mussolini, despite reports that Trump kept a copy of Hitlers speeches by his bed and allegedly praised Hitler in 2018, as well as repeated accusations that various Trump advisers had ties to neo-Nazis. Ive studied Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno extensively. Ive read It Cant Happen Here and The Plot Against America. Ive watched The Man in the High Castle. Im largely immune to the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. I even analyzed political violence in Trumps speeches. Despite all this, it was hard to imagine the US succumbing to authoritarianism. The banality of evil is easy to pay lip service to; fully internalizing the idea that evil may masquerade as buffoonery is challenging.

See the original post here:

Liberal fecklessness: The US is on a precipice and time is running out - Open Democracy

TORONTO Ontario Liberal Leader, Steven Del Duca has invited healthcare and political leaders to a nonpartisan virtual summit on addressing the hospital staffing crisis, and to discuss a unified plan on how to immediately shore up capacity.

The crisis in our hospitals requires an all-hands-on-deck approach, stated Ontario Liberal Leader, Steven Del Duca. I sincerely hope all political leaders will attend this summit to hear from those on the frontline of our hospitals. Our vaccine certificate summit in August helped guide the province in the right direction on that issue, so its time to put partisanship aside and work together.

Hospitals have never been as full and staff have never been stretched as thin, added Del Duca. We need to listen to Ontarios best and brightest doctors and nurses, and those with healthcare expertise, who understand whats happening on the frontlines.

Ontario is currently suspending 8,000 to 10,000 surgeries every week due to the crisis. Ontario Liberals recently called for a number of constructive emergency measures to address the staffing shortage, and hope to build on that list using suggestions from the healthcare leaders in attendance.

This is about being collaborative and constructive to get us out of this crisis. I have written to each of the three other party leaders and I sincerely hope they attend on Monday. Ontario families need us to work together during these difficult moments.

-30-

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Ontario Liberal Leader Invites Health and Political Leaders to a Virtual Summit on the Escalating Hospital Crisis - Ontario Liberal Party

Party encourages Progressive Conservatives not to contest election either out of respect for the late NDP MLA Danielle Adams.

Manitobas Liberal party says it will not run a candidate in an upcoming Thompson byelection resulting from the death of Thompson NDP MLA Danielle Adams in December.

Out of respect for the memory of Danielle Adams, the Manitoba Liberal Party will be standing down in the upcoming Thompson byelection, said party leader Dougald Lamont in a Jan. 6 statement. If it were not for this tragic accident, Danielle would have held the seat until the next election. Given the tragic circumstances of Danielles passing, we believe that this is the right and honourable thing to do. We encourage the PCsto consider doing the same.

The Liberals finished fourth in the Thompson electoral division in the 2019 general election with less than 200 votes. The party says it is committed to running strong candidates and strong campaigns in every Manitoba constituency in the next general election.

A date for the Thompson byelection has not yet been set.

Under the Legislative Assembly Act, a byelection must be held to fill a vacancy in the Manitoba legislature within 180 days of the vacancy starting, which means the first week of June would be the latest that a Thompson electoral division byelection could be held.

The only circumstances in which a byelection does not have to be held within six months of the vacancy occurring is if a set date general election is less than a year away.

The byelection will be the 10th in Manitoba resulting from the death of a sitting MLA. The vast majority of the other 163 byelections dating back to 1870, the year Manitoba became a province, were brought about by resignations.

The byelection will be the first for the Thompson electoral district, which was created in 1968. Adams is the third person who served as Thompson MLA to die, along with Joe Borowski and Ken Dillen, each of whom died decades after leaving office, with Dillens death the most recent, having occurred in 2020.

The last Manitoba byelection resulting from the death of an MLA was in 2009, when The Pas MLA Oscar Lathlin died. Prior to that, there had not been a byelection resulting from the death of an MLA in the province since 1985.

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Manitoba Liberals say they won't field candidate in Thompson byelection - Thompson Citizen

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The Pacific may well be the part of the world most likely to see "strategic surprise," the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell says, apparently referring to China's ambitions to expand its influence and establish bases there. Campbell told an event hosted by Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies the Pacific was a region where the United States has "enormous moral, strategic, historical interests" and where it had not done enough, unlike countries such as Australia and New Zealand. "If you look and if you ask me, where are the places where we are most likely to see certain kinds of strategic surprise - basing or certain kinds of agreements or arrangements, it may well be in the Pacific," he told an Australia-focused panel on Monday. "And we have a very short amount of time, working with partners like Australia, like New Zealand, like Japan, like France, who have an interest in the Pacific, to step up our game across the board," Campbell added. Campbell did not elaborate on what he meant by bases, but lawmakers from the Pacific island republic of Kiribati told Reuters last year China has drawn up plans to upgrade an airstrip and bridge on one its remote islands about 3000km southwest of the US state of Hawaii. Campbell said ways the United States and its allies needed to step up their game in the Pacific included in countering COVID-19, over the issue of fishing, and in investment in clean energy. Campbell also followed up on remarks he made last week in which he said the US needs to "step up its game" on economic engagement in Asia. He said Australia had privately urged the United States to understand that as part of its strategic approach, "we have to have a comprehensive, engaged, optimistic, commercial and trade role". Australian Associated Press

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January 11 2022 - 11:49AM

The Pacific may well be the part of the world most likely to see "strategic surprise," the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell says, apparently referring to China's ambitions to expand its influence and establish bases there.

Campbell told an event hosted by Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies the Pacific was a region where the United States has "enormous moral, strategic, historical interests" and where it had not done enough, unlike countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

"If you look and if you ask me, where are the places where we are most likely to see certain kinds of strategic surprise - basing or certain kinds of agreements or arrangements, it may well be in the Pacific," he told an Australia-focused panel on Monday.

"And we have a very short amount of time, working with partners like Australia, like New Zealand, like Japan, like France, who have an interest in the Pacific, to step up our game across the board," Campbell added.

Campbell did not elaborate on what he meant by bases, but lawmakers from the Pacific island republic of Kiribati told Reuters last year China has drawn up plans to upgrade an airstrip and bridge on one its remote islands about 3000km southwest of the US state of Hawaii.

Campbell said ways the United States and its allies needed to step up their game in the Pacific included in countering COVID-19, over the issue of fishing, and in investment in clean energy.

Campbell also followed up on remarks he made last week in which he said the US needs to "step up its game" on economic engagement in Asia.

He said Australia had privately urged the United States to understand that as part of its strategic approach, "we have to have a comprehensive, engaged, optimistic, commercial and trade role".

Australian Associated Press

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US call for allies to lift game in Pacific - Daily Liberal

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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

As Americans prepare to gather with relatives and enjoy a Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, far-left pundits, columnists and news organizations have set their sights on the holiday.

Woke critics have labeled Thanksgiving "a celebration of racist genocide," frowned upon eating turkey when "manyvegan turkeyalternatives" are available and even credited White supremacy for the holidays popularity.

NBC SUGGESTS NOT HAVING THANKSGIVING TURKEY THIS YEAR TO DEAL WITH INFLATION COSTS

"You there, fellow American! Were you under the impression that Thanksgiving is the uniquely American holiday that celebrates how English settlers and Native Americans peacefully crossed linguistic, cultural and racial barriers to share a meal together and create a model for gratitude and tolerance that would be the envy of the world? Wrong! Says Woke America," New York Post columnist Kyle Smith recently observed.

"Thanksgiving is about murder, plunder and hate. Invite your relatives over to spread love and gravy? No, if you really want to honor the spirit of Thanksgiving, you should whip yourself with barbed wire all day," Smith continued.

A liberal website urged Americans to eat vegan turkey alternatives on Thanksgiving. (iStock)

Here are some of the most egregious examples:

MSNBC segment declares genocide is "still on the menu" in America

An MSNBC segment aired on Saturday that accused White people of not accurately telling the story of Thanksgiving and blaming the pilgrims for the "White supremacy" affecting the nation today.

"Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence. That genocide and violence is still on the menu," guest essayist Gyasi Ross said on "The Cross Connection."

"State-sponsored violence against Native and Black Americans is still commonplace and violent, private White supremacy is celebrated and subsidized," Ross continued. "Indigenous and Black people are still being murdered by those paid to protect us."

Americans scolded for consuming turkey with "so manyvegan turkeyalternatives on the market"

Green Matters, a website dedicated to fighting climate change and environmental justice, published an article looking at the history of Thanksgiving. It details a variety of reasons why the holiday is "bad" and eventually lands on the tradition of eating turkey as the centerpiece of the annual feast. The article notes "there is actually no written evidence that turkeys were eaten at the 1621 Thanksgiving" and scolds Americans for sticking with the tradition modern despite vegan options.

"Every year, Americans breed,kill, and eat around 46 million turkeys on Thanksgiving and there's really no reason for this cruel and unsustainable tradition. These days, there are so manyvegan turkeyalternatives on the market, which are all more compassionate and environmentally-friendly choices," Green Matters writer Sophie Hirsch wrote.

"If you are hosting or attending a Thanksgiving dinner this year, remember the true origins of the holiday and consider sharing the true story with your friends and family," Hirsch continued in the piece headlined, "Thanksgiving Glorifies the Abhorrent Colonization of Indigenous Peoples."

THANKSGIVING TRAVEL: BEST AND WORST TIMES TO GO

As Americans prepare to gather with relatives and enjoy a Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, far-left pundits, columnists and news organizations have set their sights on the holiday. (iStock)

NBC suggests not having Thanksgiving turkey this year to deal with inflation costs

A segment on NBC's "Today" on Saturday suggested American families could drop the traditional Thanksgiving turkey from their tables this year to deal withinflation.

"With inflation on the rise, prices are going up on everything from your Thanksgiving meal to your gifts for the holidays," anchor Kristen Welker said to introduce the segment.

NBC News correspondent Vicky Nguyen noted the 6.2% rise in prices in October from a year ago a three-decade high calling it "real money." Nguyen then said something she admitted may be controversial.

"Perhaps forgo the turkey," she said. "Bear with me. I know that is the staple of the Thanksgiving meal. However, some people think turkey is overrated. It tends to be the most expensive thing on the table. Maybe you do an Italian feast instead."

Nguyen added that if you tell people you're ditching the turkey, "some guests may drop off the list, and that's a way to cut costs too."

While the segment was light-hearted, it was swiftly mocked on social media

USA Today reports holiday is "a day of mourning" for Indigenous people

USA Today published a story Tuesday headlined, "What is Thanksgiving to Indigenous people? 'A day of mourning," which focuses on what certain Native Americans feel about the holiday. The story is reported, not an opinion piece, so it comes across as more serious and thoughtful than bold hot takes by American pundits, but it remains an example of liberal media pooh-poohing Thanksgiving nonetheless.

"For many, rather than a celebration of peace and shared prosperity between Native Americans and Pilgrims, Thanksgiving represents the dark shadow of genocide and the resilience of Native people," reporter Michelle Shen wrote.

Shen spoke with tribal citizens Dennis W. Zotigh and Julie Garreau, who both explained the holiday isnt a happy time for them and they consider it a day of mourning.

"This year, Julie is not celebrating Thanksgiving and is instead organizing an event onNative American Heritage Day called Thanks for Kids, which celebrates Native children," Shen wrote.

Many liberals dont think Thanksgiving is a reason to celebrate. (iStock)

WALL STREET JOURNAL REFUSES TO BOW TO LEFT'S DEMANDS TO CANCEL THANKSGIVING EDITORIALS: 'WE WON'T BEND'

Critics of Wall Street Journal want to cancel Thanksgiving editorials

The Wall Street Journal editorial board was forced to announce that the paper will continue with the publishing of its annualThanksgivingeditorials despite efforts by the left to cancel them.

Ina Monday op-ed, the board declared that efforts by progressives to stop the publishing of the "racist"1620 accountof the first Thanksgiving, as well as a mid-20th century "contemporary contrast" of American progress, would not succeed and that The Journal wouldn't "bend to political demands for censorship."

"No doubt it was only a matter of time. The progressives have come for our annual Thanksgiving editorials. They wont succeed, but we thought wed share the tale with readers for an insight into the politicization of everything, even Thanksgiving," the board wrote.

It noted that the pair of editorials had been run every year since 1961 without complaint.

"But we live in a new era when the left sees nearly everything through the reductive lens of identity politics. It sees much of American history as a racist project that should be erased," the board wrote, before noting that the motivation to censor the Pilgrim editorial was being driven by a petition on left-wing site Change.org.

The author of the petition, which has garnered around 50,000 signatures, claims that "it's time to stop publishing 17th century racism" in 2021. It also complains that the editorial refers to Native Americans as "wilde men" and says that the Pilgrims were separate from "all the civil parts of the world."

CRITICS PAN THANKSGIVING ADVICE IN NEW YORK TIMES THAT KIDS WHO AREN'T FULLY VACCINATED SHOULD EAT QUICKLY

New York Times suggests kids "eat quickly" to avoid infecting vaccinated Americans with coronavirus

The New York Times published a guest essay last week in which a Virginia Tech professor suggested semi-vaccinated children "eat quickly" on Thanksgiving to avoid spreading COVID to vaccinated adults.

"If our child, 9, and a cousin, 10, have each received one dose of the vaccine two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, is it safe for us to eat indoors? There will be about 20 guests, all vaccinated, and the 65 and older crowd have all received boosters," one reader from San Francisco asked in the essay.

"Im glad to hear that the children and all guests are vaccinated. As the kids will not be fully vaccinated until two weeks after their second shot, I think some care is warranted, especially because some attendees are 65 and older and thus at greater risk of more serious breakthrough infections. You could have the kids wear masks, eat quickly and stay away from the older adults when eating," Virginia Tech engineering professor Linsey Marr wrote in response.

4 SMART TIPS FOR THANKSGIVING TRAVEL

Philadelphia Tribune declares Thanksgiving to be a celebration of racist genocide, mass land robbery

The Philadelphia Tribune published a column Saturday by correspondent Michael Coard headlined, "Celebrating Thanksgiving is celebrating racist genocide."

"When the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, they didnt bring thanks. They didnt even give thanks. Instead, they brought racist genocide and gave nothing," Coard wrote.

"And they eventually succeeded in mass killing and mass land robbery not because they were smarter or stronger but because they were sadistically evil racists who initiated the use of a weapon of mass destruction that previously had been unheard of on this land," Coard continued. "Thanksgiving, as an American holiday, is a celebration of that racist genocide and massive land robber."

Coard then listed "five indisputable facts you must know about Thanksgiving so you wont make the mistake of celebrating racist genocide" on Thursday.

Washington Post examines why Native Americans regret helping Pilgrims

The Washington Post started early, publishing a Nov. 4 piece headlined, "This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later," which examines how members of the Wampanoag Nation wish their relatives didnt participate.

"Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal ofChristopher Columbus statuesand pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of hisbrutality toward Indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving," Post reporter Dana Hedgpeth wrote.

Hedgpeth dove into a lengthy explanation of why the Mashpee Wampanoag doesnt celebrate the holiday, noting that American children are often taught "fiction" in school pertaining to Thanksgiving.

"This year some Wampanoags will go to Plymouth for the National Day of Mourning. Others will gather at the old Indian Meeting House, built in 1684 and one of the oldest American Indian churches in the eastern United States, to pay their respects to their ancestors, many of whom are buried in the surrounding cemetery," Hedgpeth wrote. "Plenty of Wampanoags will gather with their families for a meal to give thanks not for the survival of the Pilgrims but for the survival of their tribe."

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Fox News Andrew Mark Miller, David Rutz and Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report.

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8 times liberal media tried to ruin Thanksgiving, from ditching turkey to declaring genocide remains on menu - Fox News

Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer has crossed the floor to support an independent bill for a federal integrity commission, after accusing the government of inertia over the issue.

Telling parliament it was a difficult decision to second the motion by independent MP Helen Haines to suspend standing orders to allow her federal integrity commission bill to be debated, Archer said that the time has gone on long enough and progress on the issue was needed.

I dont take this decision lightly at all. I take this decision very seriously to stand here. And its a difficult decision. This is one of the most important things that we come to this place to do, Archer said.

The MP for the marginal Tasmanian seat of Bass said she believed all sides of politics wanted to see a robust federal integrity commission, but the legislation had stalled because it was too politicised.

There is a place for politics, theres a place for the partisan point-scoring, but on something as important as trust and confidence in elected officials, that is not it.

The move to suspend standing orders sparked confusion in the House of Representatives under the management of the newly-elected speaker, Andrew Wallace.

As a result of changes made to Parliamentary procedure to prevent the spread of Covid, questions are framed in the negative so that MPs dont have to unnecessarily cross the chamber. This meant the vote had to be taken a second time, but was lost because an absolute majority was required.

Guardian Australia reported on Thursday that Archer was considering the dramatic move, criticising the coalitions inertia over the legislation.

Archer said she was perplexed at the Morrison governments failure to release a revised bill to establish a commonwealth integrity commission, almost three years after it was promised before the last election.

The government has been under pressure from within its ranks and from crossbench MPs to finalise the bill, with the attorney general, Michaelia Cash, undertaking consultations after a draft of the bill released last November was criticised for being too soft.

I really have a strong view that this is the most important thing we need to do, Archer told Guardian Australia on Wednesday.

I am a bit perplexed at one level as to why we havent brought something forward, I accept there was a draft bill, there was extensive consultation, there were a number of submissions and it would have been my expectation that some work would have been going on to draft it, given the feedback.

I am a bit offended, in a way, that we are prioritising in a rush I might add the religious discrimination bill over an integrity commission.

Archer had warned earlier she was absolutely prepared to cross the floor to support the legislation.

To be perfectly clear, I always reserve my right to cross the floor, that is one of the reasons I sit on this side [in the Liberal party], Archer said.

It has certainly been my view that the government and the opposition ought to be working together constructively with Helen Haines on her bill. Whats in there that we think is good? What is in there that we could amend?

There is a real tribalism to politics at the moment and I think that is sometimes at the expense of governance, and what I think we end up with is inertia. That is probably why the government hasnt brought it forward, because it is so politically contested now and it just creates a vacuum, and there is inertia.

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Archer said that she believed the integrity commission bill should be above politics. She said without a multi-partisan approach to the development and implementation of such a body no one is going to have trust in it anyway.

Archers call for the bill to be introduced to parliament swiftly was echoed by the Liberal MP for the seat of Curtin, Celia Hammond, who said the establishment of a federal integrity agency was an issue that had been raised by her constituents since she was first elected in 2019.

It is something I support and have advocated for over the past two years and I continue to do so, Hammond told Guardian Australia.

I recognise there are many different bodies and models across Australia and many different views on what should or should not be included and covered.

I know that the attorney general has undertaken significant consultation and work on this matter with a goal of producing an appropriate model and legislation for the federal context. I appreciate that there may be further consultation required, but personally I would like to see the legislation introduced as soon as possible.

Haines has been lobbying MPs to support her bill, with the proposed model including all of the robust features of an integrity commission with teeth, and safeguards that means we dont see vexatious and frivolous referrals.

The legislation also includes an exoneration clause, that would see anyone whose reputation was unfairly tarnished by an Australian federal integrity commission hearing to be the subject of a report to parliament exonerating them.

In question time on Wednesday, in response to a question from Haines, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, defended the delay in releasing the legislation for the integrity commission, saying the government was returning to priority legislation after being diverted by the pandemic response.

The attorney general has been working steadily away and been working with cabinet on our draft legislation for an integrity commission, and that also soon will be available for people to give their responses to, and we will see whether that has support, Morrison said.

Haines said that if the government truly want to pass a bill they would have written it, tabled it and brought it on for debate.

Thats what I have done, but youve shut down debate on my bill in the House, youve shut down debate in the Senate and youve muzzled the attorney general, who is missing in action on this, Haines said.

Come clean with the Australian people. Prime minister, do you honestly expect Australians to believe you truly want a robust integrity commission?

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Liberal MP crosses the floor to support independent bill for federal integrity commission - The Guardian

The Liberal government has introduced legislation to provide workers in federally regulated sectors with 10 days of sick pay while also making it an offence to intimidate or preventpatients from seeking care, orto interfere with healthprofessionals trying to deliver it.

Bill C-3, which amends the Criminal Code and the Canada Labour Code, was unveiled today by Labour Minister Seamus O'Regan and Justice Minister David Lametti.

O'Regan said the pandemic showedhow a lack of sick days left many workers at risk. He saidthat now is the "time to close the gap that the pandemic exposed in our social safety net."

"It is important for our well being, important for health and safety and important for our economic recovery," O'Regan said. "It is crucial to finishing our fight against COVID-19."

According to government officials speaking on background, about 950,000 people workin the federally regulated private sector. About583,000 of those workershave less than ten days of paid sick leaveand would stand to benefit from the legislation.

O'Regan said that while the federally regulated workforcemakes up only about five per cent of workers in Canada,the law could set a standard for provinces to follow.

"We know that the only way we are going to get through this pandemic is [that] when people are sick ...they stay at homeand [don't have to be] afraid about losing compensation," Unifor's national president Jerry Dias said Friday.

WATCH| Labour minister discusses new bill on CBC's Power & Politics

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who had been calling on the federal government to make this change throughout the pandemic, welcomed the announcement.

"Today's announcement is very long overdue. Justin Trudeau owes frontline workers an explanation about why he couldn't help them when they needed this over a year ago," Singh said in a media statement.

Lametti said the pandemicalso revealed the abuse and intimidation inflicted onhealth-care professionals and patientsat vaccination centres, abortion clinicsand hospitals.

Protests against vaccine mandates and other COVID-19-related public health measuresheld outside hospitals in September were condemned by politicians and health-care organizations as unacceptable and unfair to staff and patients.

The changes to the Criminal Code create two new offences meant to protect patients and health-care workers from abuse.

The first offence makes it illegal to intimidate health-care workers and patients to prevent them from accessing health-care services, or to prevent health-care workers from administering care.The second change to the Criminal Code makes it an offence to bar anyone from accessing health services.

Those convicted of either offence could face up to 10 years in prison.

Lametti said the government is also drafting new sentencing provisions that will require courts to consider serious penalties for anyone targeting a health-care provider at work.

Lametti said he'sdisappointed that such a law is necessary.

"Even this week, COVID deniers were trying to stop children from receiving vaccinations," hesaid."Every day, health-care workers are coming forward and speaking out. They are exhausted, they are discouraged and they are fearful, and the sad reality is that these sorts of threats predate the pandemic."

Linda Silas ispresident of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, which represents some 200,000 nurses across the country. She welcomed the announcement, calling it a first step in recognizing the threats facing health-care workers.

Silas said that before the pandemic, 90 per cent of nurses reported beingexposed to physical violence on the job. During the pandemic, 60 per cent of those nurses reported that the level of violence had increased.

Lametti said he hopes Bill C-3 moves swiftly through Parliament. Silas said she wants to see all federal parties jump behind the initiative.

"In the previous Parliament both the NDP and the Conservatives proposed private members bills to do something similar here,"Silas said."So I would be stunned and very disappointed if there's not unanimous consensus to protect health-care workers."

In an interview airing Saturday, criminal defence lawyer Ian Runkle told Chris Hall, host of CBC Radio's The House, that it's already a criminal offence to block access to a hospital. He said that if those cases are not being prosecuted, it's because of a lack of will, not a lack of legal authority.

"Police have more than enough tools in their toolbox here in terms of offences like mischief, which makes it an offence to obstruct, interrupt or interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property," Rundle said. "That covers blocking off infrastructure."

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Liberals introduce bill to provide sick pay, ban intimidation of patients and health-care workers - CBC.ca

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.

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

Democrats are on a mission to dispel any notion that massive new government spending in their Build Back Better (BBB) bill will let roaring inflation out of its decades-old cage. And right on que, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighs in: History Says Dont Panic About Inflation."

Actually, history doesnt say that, just Krugmans headline.

Its a hard sell, though. Krugman makes his case based on a July 6 article from the White House Council of Economic Advisors entitled, Historical Parallels to Todays Inflationary Episode.

Note that the Biden White House published this article more than four months ago, when inflation may not have been out of its cage yet but certainly seemed to be on a long leash. Inflation numbers have steadily increased and will likely go even higher.

But with BBB headed to the Senate for mangling, or even rejection, all the big-spenders, including Krugman, are trying to convince those understandably concerned about raging inflation both senators and the public that the beast will be back in its cage soon.

Maybe, but there is at least one important point that Krugman and the White House ignore.

The Councils paper says that since World War II, there have been six periods in which inflation as measured by the CPI [Consumer Price Index] was 5 percent or higher. The Council and Krugman both argue the period most closely resembling todays inflation was the one immediately following the war, 1946-48.

And its easy to see why. Rationing and price controls during the war constrained consumption, so pent-up demand was high at the wars end just as pent-up demand has been high coming out of the pandemic.

But supplies were limited after the war because manufacturers were transitioning away from war-time products to making products for consumers similar to the way supply chain problems are limiting supplies now.

But, Krugman informs us, the inflation didnt last. Inflation plunged in 1948, and by 1949 had turned into deflation, where prices were falling. [T]he biggest mistake policymakers made in response to that inflation surge was failing to appreciate its transitory nature.

Krugmans advice: Dont worry about the price surges youre seeing. Theyre a result of a special set of circumstances coming out of the pandemic, not Bidens spending spree. The current inflation problem will resolve itself relatively soon, as it did in 1948.

We should note that some prominent Democratic economists have raised inflation concerns. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been warning since February, before Bidens $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed, that the White House was ignoring inflationary pressures.

Obama administration economist Jason FurmanJason FurmanLiberal economists got the memo: Build Back Better couldn't possibly worsen inflation Biden should signal to the Fed that it's okay to raise rates next year The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by ExxonMobil - Biden hails infrastructure law, talks with China's Xi MORE was blunter in a recent interview with the Associated Press: They poured kerosene on the fire!

And yet both have more recently claimed that all the spending in the BBB would add little or nothing to todays inflationary pressures.

One difference in Krugmans then-vs.-now comparison is the wealth effect, where people feel much more financially secure and are willing to spend more when assets like their home or stock prices rise.

A falling stock market can have the opposite effect. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked in April 1946 and started heading downward quickly. By the beginning of the recession in November 1948, the Dow had lost a third of its value.

A steadily declining Dow may have depressed demand for more goods, taking the pressure off inflation.

Today, just the opposite is happening. Stock indexes are creating new highs. And a much larger percentage of the public is investing in the market. Moreover, the personal savings rate hit record highs during the pandemic. The wealth effect is still having an impact, at least for now, and may encourage people to buy more goods, even at the higher prices.

Bidens Build Back Better bill is a huge and costly political and economic gamble. His big spending isnt the only cause of inflation, but it has poured kerosene on the fire, as Furman said. Now Biden wants to double down on that spending.

If inflation continues, it could mean an even tougher drubbing for Democrats at the polls next year. Because the only beast more dangerous to political careers than raging inflation is an angry voter.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews.

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Liberal economists got the memo: Build Back Better couldn't possibly worsen inflation | TheHill - The Hill

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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

Heath Krevesky is a self-confessed political junkie and a bit of a nerd.

That's his way of explaining why he's been tracking his weekly grocery bill for years now. And why he's worried that inflation is taking a bigger and bigger bite out of his food budget.

"In 2019, it cost me $9,826 to feed myself. In 2020, that cost of feeding myself went to $11,994,an increase of 22 per cent," he said.

"I can't wait to find out how this year wraps itself out. It appears as though it's going to be close to $14,000 for a single individual to feed themselves."

Food prices. Gasoline. A meal out. The cost ofmanyeveryday items is going up after inflation hit 4.7 per cent last month the highest rate in nearly twenty years.

For Krevesky, higher prices means scaling back the menu and adjusting his tastes.

The resident of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island said he buysless meat these days, and when he does, he leans to beef ribs rather than steak.

"It's sort of like your poor man's choice of beef, if you will," he said during an interview for a special segment on inflation airing on this weekend's edition of CBC's The House.

"Everybody would like to be able to afford a prime rib, you know, on a semi-regular basis, I cannot afford that ... Ideally, I like to eat a little bit of beef or chicken, fish, throughout the week, so I get a balanced diet, but it's becoming increasingly more [expensive]."

16:57Whats causing Canadas inflation woes?

It's hard to point to a singlefactor behind rising prices.

Droughts in Canada and other countries reduced crop yields. The pandemic reduced production in manufacturing plants as consumers emerged fromlockdowns with money they're both willing and able to spend.

"What we're seeing around the world is supply chain bottlenecks," Finance Minister Chrystia Freelandsaidthis week when asked by a reporter if the Liberals' plan to spend another $100 billion on post-pandemic programs is to blame forthe jump in inflation.

"We are seeing higher energy prices. Energy is a global commodity. When those prices are higher in one country, they are higher around the world. We're seeing a basic challenge that shutting down the world's economy turned out to be a much simpler process than turning the global economy back on."

But for a government that remains relentlessly focused onwhat it likes to call "the middle class and those working hard to join it," inflation isn't some abstract economic concept. It's making life less affordable for those very same people.

Kathy Wainberg is the owner of Pita Ikram. She has two locations,strictly take-out, in the northwest corner of Toronto. Like many small restaurateurs, she struggles to hire staff andserve asteady stream of customers.

A few months ago, she put up a noticeletting customers know the prices of their favourite shawarma meals were going up by about 20 per cent.

"Things like oil that we use for frying food have, like, tripled in price," she told The House. "We waited to raise prices for as long as we possibly could but in the restaurant industry, the margins are razor thin, so we were unable to absorb maybe as much of the costs as the customer would have liked to have seen."

It's stories like these that makeinflation a convenient target for any opposition politician intent on linking government policy to rising prices.

Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre led the opposition charge this week. He accusedthe Liberal government of wanton spending, saying inflation is worse in this country than most other democratic countries because, like the United States, the Liberals have been "printing money to pay their bills" instead of controlling spending.

"The cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Almost a half a trillion dollars of inflationistLiberal deficits mean more dollars chasing fewer goods, driving higher prices," he said.

Poilievre is one of those politicians who can boil down complicated issues like fiscal policy into easily-understood soundbites, packaged with claims that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is entirely out of touch with Canadians' lives.

"The prime minister says he doesn't think much about monetary policy," he said."That's no surprise. After all, it's 'Justin-flation.'"

But economist Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary said Poilievre is stretching the data by suggesting inflation is worse in Canada than in places like Switzerland.

"I can cherry-pick countries, too. Israel has among the highest rates of money supply growth in the developed world, but among the lowest rates of inflation," he said.

"So overall, across all developed economies, there really isn't a strong relationship between the money supply growth and observed inflation."

Economist Armine Yalnizian acknowledges the Liberals aren't immune to the political impact of rising prices, even if the inflation rate now is more of a short-term spike than a long-term trend.

"Of course the Liberals are vulnerable to people feeling like they're losing purchasing power," she said.

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A 20-year spike in inflation could put the bite on the Trudeau Liberals - CBC.ca

In December of 1944, on the Philippine island of Leyte, the soldiers of F Company of the 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, dug in. Stationed just outside the town of Limon, they were attempting to take a strategic ridge overlooking the town. In the face of fierce Japanese resistance, it was all they could do to hold their position. A first lieutenant who was also a Lutheran pastor addressed the company and gave words of encouragement by means of a brief sermon. God guides the US Armys bullets toward the Japanese, the lieutenant assured his fellow soldiers, while protecting us from theirs. Books in Review

These words failed to lift the spirits of at least one young soldier in F Company; instead, they infuriated him. Years later, he described this incident as one of the experiences that best explained why he eventually abandoned his faith. Whatever Gods will actually was, he decided, it would have to accord with the most basic ideas of justice that we havethereby ruling out the lieutenants assertion that God had selective concerns for one side in a clearly godless war. What else could the will of an all-just God be? By that same token, what else could justice be? If absolutely nothing else, any true God would have to be fair.

Katrina Forresters In the Shadow of Justice provides a detailed account of the intellectual development of this young soldier, John Rawls, who eventually became the celebrated philosopher. The question of fairness would remain with Rawls for the rest of his life. In 1971, his 600-page magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, debuted to critical acclaim and cemented his position as one of the most famous political philosophers in the English-speaking world by insisting that justice was fairnessthat the kind of objective standards for human society and individual action capable of replacing God required an ability to view the world from a distance and assess what allocations of duties and wealth were fair. In the book, Rawls argued that basic liberties and the equality of citizens were essential to this idea of fairness. Societies could deviate from an equal distribution of benefits and burdens only in cases governed by the difference principlewhich includes a requirement that inequalities should provide the most benefits to the least advantaged. Otherwise, a just society would have to be governed by the fair distribution of responsibility, work, hardship, and the wealth produced by a communitya distribution whose fairness, he insisted, could be determined from behind a veil of ignorance that prevented a hypothetical person from knowing exactly where he or she would end up in the social hierarchy.

With its doctrine of fairness, A Theory of Justice transformed political philosophy. The English historian Peter Laslett had described the field as dead in 1956; with Rawlss book that changed almost overnight. Now philosophers were arguing about the nature of Rawlsian principles and their implicationsand for that matter were once again interested in matters of political and economic justice. Rawlss terms became lingua franca: Many considered how his arguments, focused mostly on domestic or national issues of justice, might be applied to questions of international justice as well. Others sought to extend his theorys set of political principles, while still others probed the limits of Rawlss epistemology and the narrowness of his focus on individuals. A decade after A Theory of Justice appeared, Forrester notes, 2,512 books and articles had been published engaging with its central claims.

Rawlss liberal theory of justice as fairness has continued to define the shape and trajectory of political philosophy and liberalism writ large to this day. In this sense, In the Shadow of Justice is aptly named. But as Forrester shows, the limits of Rawlss theory and the political philosophy that it helped birth remain with us as well. By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawlss book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice.

Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, the second of five sons in an affluent Episcopalian family. He had a privileged and mostly happy childhood; the kinds of calamities and hardships suffered by many during the Depression were sharply attenuated by his familys wealth and status in the city. After attending private schools, Rawls quickly rose through some of the most prestigious universities in the world: He received his doctorate from Princeton and studied at Oxford, after which he taught at MIT and Harvard.

Yet Forrester reminds us that not everything was as rosy as it might seem on the surface. Two of Rawlss siblings died in childhood from diseases they had contracted from him; such tragedies likely influenced his later interest in questions of fairness and luck and how both formed the basis of a just political system. His native Baltimore was a deeply segregated city and had cultivated social norms and mores to match. (Rawls later recounted his mothers fury when she learned that he had struck up a friendship with a Black boy and had even visited his house.) But Rawls knew from an early age that the luck of being born into an affluent white family entirely explained the difference between his opportunities and those of his Black friend. As well, Rawlss graduate studies at Princeton were interrupted by the trauma and violence of his three years in the infantry in the Pacific theater during World War II, and his experiences with luck during the war likewise shaped his view of justice. At one point, he was passed over for a mission because he had the right blood type to donate to a wounded soldier; the man who went in his place was killed in an ambush. This was only one of the countless examples of bad luck and unfairness found in any warbut in particular in the wars that had become commonplace in the first half of the 20th century. When Rawls returned to Princeton, his wartime trauma and disillusionment led him to abandon his interest in theology and to turn instead to political philosophy in his search for a system that would ground political decision-making in an objective morality rather than in God or fealty to the state. Current Issue

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Rawlss highly abstract and intricate philosophical system was not a flight from the real worlds effects on him, Forrester argues, but rather a direct response to the harrowing experiences, personal and political, that had shaped much of the first three decades of his life. Rawls was trying to find something to stand in place of the God that had abandoned him and his enemies alike on the battlefield as well as the two siblings who had died when he was growing upbut it also had to be something that did not involve simply trusting in the state. Neither the God he had lost faith in nor the military he had served in could be fair, Rawls contendedbut perhaps, if we relied on the kinds of rules that could emerge from rational decision-making processes, society could be.

Forresters book next turns to the real-world politics of the 1950s and 60s, which made Rawlss pursuit of a tidy, fairness-preserving system of justice so difficult. The postwar years were an era of social upheaval, defined by the struggles against Jim Crow at home and the Vietnam War abroad, and to develop his system in these uncertain years, Rawls began to publish a series of essays reckoning with the times that would eventually become A Theory of Justice.

Rawls advanced his view of justice as fairness in these years, but with certain qualifications. A fair and just society, he argued, would be one with a basic structure of democracy: The societys major institutions would endow everyone with a fundamental set of political liberties and divide the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in a broadly egalitarian way. Social inequalities could be tolerated only if they met two conditions: They needed to be attached to offices open to all under the conditions of fair and equal opportunity, and they needed to work to the greatest benefit of the societys least advantaged members.

Rawlss view of justice as fairness would apply in a society free of racial segregation. But since he was convinced that Jim Crow was so clearly unjust, he addressed it only indirectly: The philosophical questions he regarded as worth asking were exclusively implementation ones about how to dismantle it. At the same time, for Rawls, the questions concerning Vietnam and the draft in particular were harder to engage. In one sense, being conscripted into the military was a matter of luck, as some young men received draft cards and others did not. But college men, predominantly from privileged class and racial backgrounds, were able to escape military service when other men could not: 2-S deferments exempted some university students from conscription. If distributive justice was at the center of Rawlss overall theory of justice, then he had to reckon with how the deferments that many of his students received gave them an unfair advantage at the expense of othersand this meant not only pondering his political arguments in the abstract but also in terms of the institution where he actually worked. To remedy this situation, Rawls helped organize Harvards faculty to oppose the deferments.

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The civil disobedience tactics that various youth movements used to challenge the war posed another problem for Rawlss theory of justice. His own and his contemporaries commitment to liberalism and its attendant values, such as stability and the rule of law, needed to reckon with the fact that civil disobedience was a response to an unjust war that the countrys citizens had every right to protest and oppose. Could breaking the law be justified, Rawls wondered, if the law itself was conceptualized as a fair agreementthe outcome of a process of rational deliberation among the people subject to it? How could political philosophers account for the kind of moral exception being claimed by those breaking from this overall cooperative scheme to conduct sit-ins or burn their draft cards?

Rawls finally published his answer at the end of the 1960s. Civil disobedience could be justified as an occasional escape hatch, he maintained in a 1969 essay, when the majority overreached and placed too heavy a burden on others. But individual conscience could not reign supreme: Even if would-be protesters had a serious moral objection to some decisions of the majority, this was not enough to justify breaking the law, as it would result in an unstable scheme of society. In coming to this view, Rawls made a telling shift from his earlier fair play view of social cooperation, in which obligations were voluntarily acquired, to a stronger one that regarded stability as a natural duty binding all citizens within a society. Thus, civil disobedience could be tolerated, but only within strict limits. Such protest had to be aimed at changing a societys laws, and its participants had to accept punishment and arrest without resistance.

Rawlss evolving views on obligation and civil disobedience, Forrester notes, helped shape A Theory of Justice. In general, Rawls believed that the aim of political philosophy was to find a reliable method built on noncoercive procedures to justify ethical beliefs and judgmentsand that included acting according to ones political duty (such as military service) and also according to ones moral conscience (such as opposing an unjust war). Rather than try to generate freestanding moral principles to guide human conduct, Rawls argued, or uncover hidden truths that were separate from life as it was actually lived, philosophers needed to study the ethical principles already implicit in peoples intuitions and actions and then develop a system through which these could be judged and assessed.

Mining the nascent field of game theory, Rawls contended that this system could be built on the rational procedures that follow from someone acting in their economic and material interests. To decipher a moral approach to real-world problems required a system that could, in effect, step outside the real worldone that was bound not by history or sociology but by human rationality alone. Rawls described a hypothetical procedure, conducted from behind a veil of ignorance about ones status in society, for deciding on its basic rules. Heads of households, he argued, should be placed in an original position that allowed them general facts about psychology and economic life but denied them information about the past history of their society as well as where they would themselves end up in the society they were designing. This disinterested position, Rawls argued, would allow these heads of households to formulate rules that would benefit people in a range of social positions, since they would have no clue which one they might fall into, and these rules would then form the basis for a fair and well-ordered society.

Of the many things that Rawls proposed in his 600-page opus, the original position is among the most hotly debated and sharply criticized. It is indeed a move that prominently displays many of the shortcomings of his approach to philosophy. Populating the original position with heads of households involved a seemingly uncritical nod toward patriarchal social relations, and the related organization of family life drew serious and sustained criticism from feminist political philosophers like Susan Muller Okin and Iris Marion Young. Philosophers attentive to race and colonialism, like Charles Mills, likewise criticized the original positions abstraction from the history of society, which Mills argued would serve to obscure issues like racism and other forms of injustice that a theory of justice ought to respond to directly.

While many of these criticisms have teeth, they also demonstrate the profound success of Rawlss thought. The Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby noted as much in his high-profile debate with Mills: While the latter offered strident objections to Rawlss racial amnesia, he stopped short of providing alternative principles or procedures or suggesting that the liberalism undergirding so much of Rawlss thought should be fully abandoned. And while Mills would later offer his own principles of corrective justice, they were explicitly presented as additions and revisions to Rawlss set. Whether this effort succeeds or not, it was literally proposed on Rawlss terms.

If anything, Mills was ahead of many of Rawlss critics in having a comprehensive and positive position on what constitutes a just society. While there were examples of alternative systems of distributive justiceespecially from the so-called communitariansmost of the writing on the subject was dedicated to critiquing Rawlss system and offering suggestions on what to avoid when theorizing on such questions in the future, whether the objection was to the patterns of abstraction (heads of households instead of past injustice), or to abstracting too much or too freely (e.g., criticisms of ideal theory and of systematic moral philosophy), or even to the purported objectivity or universalism undergirding the abstractions in the first place. But proffered alternatives to the Rawlsian approach were few and far between, and their authors often found it difficult to match the scale and systematic nature of A Theory of Justice, tending instead to offer ad hoc, incomplete, and overly specific moral systems instead of all-encompassing ones.

Forrester tracks in exacting detail the responses that Rawlss elaborate system of thought prompted. But if theres a criticism to be made about her book, it is that this meticulous tracking of key figures and concepts risks overwhelming readers with unnecessary detail. At times, Forrester seems to take the challenges posed by the historical moment more seriously than the subjects of her investigations did. As a result, the abundance of detail about how Rawls and his contemporaries did change their political commitments in response to their times can risk obscuring the fact that they mostly did not. Indeed, they were often selective about which of the many philosophical questions posed by their tumultuous times they deigned to answer, and it is this selective conscience that is the most assailable aspect of Rawlss legacy. He may have been speaking on laudable principle when he insisted that Jim Crow was obviously unjust, but in the same breath he also excluded it from philosophical discussion.

Rawlss leadership in the faculty opposition to 2-S deferments marked another principled stand against the consequences disproportionately suffered by others because of race, class, or perceived mental ability. But even here, selective conscience ruled the day. The decades of the Cold War were punctuated by intense levels of violence. The Vietnam War killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians, injured over 5 million more, and displaced some 11 million people. This violence included known massacres like the infamous My Lai incident and untold numbers of unknown ones; as recently as 2001, the results of internal war-crimes investigations lay rotting and forgotten in a nondescript case of records in the National Archives. And yet the body count for this war piled up largely outside the United Statesand thus mostly outside the sphere of domestic justice that Rawls was willing to consider at the time. The barbarity and injustice of the war itself went neglected in his discussions of military conscription and its opponents.

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So too did the violent footprint of the American empire as a whole. Vietnam, after all, was but one theater in a hot war waged by the United States and its allies for control of the global economic and political system. In Indonesia, for instance, nearly 1 million civilians were murdered by a US-backed anti-communist dictatorship. Indonesia was simply one of 22 third world countries in which the United States facilitated mass murder between the end of World War II and the 1990sat which point, Forrester observes, international politics finally attracted Rawlss consideration. Throughout the period of the Vietnam War, liberation movements confronted US-supported apartheid regimes in wars of national liberation: in Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa. What differentiated Vietnam from these struggles? I can hazard a guess: their lack of major deployments of US troops, and thus a link for a domestically focused philosopher like Rawls to consider.

To his credit, Rawls was a vocal and public opponent of the Vietnam War from the beginning. But amid all the global carnage, it was the draft deferments that he chose to organize against. The primacy of domestic justice and the natural duty of social stability directed his political action toward fighting the unjust distribution of draft cards in the United States rather than the unjust distribution of napalm and Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. One would be on principled grounds to insist, contra Rawlss own theory and pattern of political action, that addressing the latter injustice ought to have far outweighed addressing the former. Such an approach might acknowledgeas a younger and perhaps wiser Rawls had clearly been willing to dothat neither God nor justice should care whether you were American or Vietnamese.

Rawlss selective concentration on the homeland has parallels in the basic tenets of his political theory. He developed what has been called a two-tiered approach: Domestic politics constituted one tier and international politics the other, with the former taking precedence. Meanwhile, waves of national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia upended the map of the world. Through it all, the Cold War stamped the domestic politics of these new nations and the old ones alike with the indelible mark of geopolitical maneuvering. Rawlss theory gave so much primacy to domestic justice that Forrester describes him as having set aside the international realm altogether until the 1990s.

Despite Rawlss relative inattention to supposedly secondary global matters, prominent philosophers in the 1970s began to bring his insights to bear on the international realm. The fit was odd and unwieldy: Rawlss theory makes the basic structure the target of domestic justice, which he takes to be the institutions that primarily distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Under the highly theoretical conditions of A Theory of Justice (including a society that is closed to external intervention), the basic structure can reasonably be assumed to refer to a given country. But in the context of an international system, the central Rawlsian assumption of a closed society does not apply. The United Nations debated a New International Economic Orderone predicated on economic sovereignty for every countryunder pressure from many of its new member-states. The most dynamic political movements of the time were attempting to literally remake the world, and Rawls and his colleagues were content merely to add the occasional epicycle to their existing theories of ideally just practice.

None of this is to say that they were politically unserious or responding cynically to the events of their day. In Rawlss case especially, the point is exactly the opposite: At the end of the day, he was genuinely committed to the project of liberal philosophy as he understood it. As such, he was also committed to the fundamental intellectual tenets that sustained it: trust in liberal political principles and in the basic common-sense arguments of the state system that had spread them (even though he was less interested in the historical particulars of how that spreading was done).

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response. These challenges were, in the main, the same radical challenges that liberalism has faced since its inception. That inception did not take place in a hypothetical state of nature but rather in a real era of slave states and imperial conquest on a planetary scale, and it was these forces that spread its putatively universalist tenets around the world as it developed ever more incisive criticisms of injustice and inequality. That liberal vision had long been wedded to theories of property and popular sovereignty formed in response far more to imagined histories of political and economic inheritance than to the actual history that explained the distributions of income, rights, and privileges that liberalism and liberals promised to equitably manage. By every indication, Rawls really meant what he said about equality, fairness, and justice in his personal and intellectual life, though he came to a partial and selective understanding of what those things required of him and the structures around him.

Of course, things could be worse. Many of liberalisms cousins to its political right could not manage to sustain even a pretense of interest in equality and justice for all. Perhaps this lack of even a pretense is what irked the young Rawls as he listened to that first lieutenant insist that God was on their sideand their side alonein their deadly struggle with the Japanese. Whats so godly, after all, about a selective conscience?

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John Rawls and Liberalism's Selective Conscience - The Nation

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The NSW Liberal Party does not endorse candidates in some council areas, including North Sydney, Kiama and Shoalhaven.

Local Liberals who wish to run for office in those councils are not allowed, under Liberal Party rules and the NSW Electoral Act, to use Liberal Party branding, even if they openly identify as Liberals.

Elle Prevost, a first-time candidate who is running as an independent for North Sydney council, said she was a proud Liberal party member.

North Sydney candidate Elle Prevost.Credit:ellefornorthsydney.com

I am a Liberal, but we are not endorsed in the North Sydney area, she said. Maybe its me being naive, but because I am not endorsed by the Liberal Party, my understanding is Im an independent.

Ms Prevosts ticket is called Team Elle. Its website announces her as an Independent for North Sydney council and her Liberal Party membership is not mentioned. The membership is disclosed in Ms Prevosts candidate nomination form, filed under a subheading in a PDF document on the NSW Electoral Commission website.

This is a really Liberal area, so I should be screaming it from the rooftops because it would win me more votes, she said.

Retired naval officer Mark Croxford is a member of the executive of the NSW Liberal Party, and a Liberal Party member. But his connection to the Liberal Party is not mentioned on the promotional materials for his run at the Kiama council in the upcoming elections on December 4.

Mark Croxford is standing for election in the Kiama LGA elections.Credit:Janie Barrett

Mr Croxford is at the top of the Your Community Candidates ticket, which pledges to form a council free from party political agendas. The groups website urges voters not to risk a council influenced by party politics and says that party politics has no place in local government.

Mr Croxfords bio on the Your Community Candidates website lists his background as a lobbyist and a senior ministerial adviser in the Howard government, but not his position as a country representative on the NSW Liberal Party executive, or his party membership.

The membership is declared on his nomination form on the Electoral Commission website.

I hide in the open, Mr Croxford said. I am in the Liberal Party for the purpose of federal and state politics. I personally dont believe there is any room for party politics in local politics.

He said he always discloses his Liberal Party roots when he is speaking to constituents.

I am happy to say I am a Liberal member but as a councillor I want to be a representative of my community, he said.

The Declaration of Independents Local Government, created by the Voices of North Sydney group, has been signed by 56 candidates in the Lane Cove, North Sydney, Willoughby, Hunters Hill and Georges River councils.

Rod Simpson, the co-convener of the Voices of North Sydney group, says the intention of the declaration is to get some transparency into local government.

Its asking people what their political status is and whether they have been [a member of a political party] in the past and whether they have made political donations or been a staffer, says Mr Simpson, who is a former environment commissioner with the Greater Sydney Commission.

Its really hard for people to untangle this and we are just trying to bring it up to the surface and make it easy for people to see what on earth is going on.

The Declarations stated intention is to differentiate community-minded independents from independents who are affiliated with political parties. A community minded independent is defined as a candidate who is not currently a member of a political party, and will vote as an individual.

At the Shoalhaven Council, Serena Copley is billed as an independent on the ballot form, but the NSW Electoral Commission records show she is also a Liberal Party member.

Serena Copley is a candidate for Shoalhaven City Council.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

The same goes for the other candidates on her ticket, Fred Campbell, Leonard White and Francoise Sikora.

Ms Copleys team is called A Fresh Approach and does not mention any connection with the Liberal Party in its promotional materials.

Council candidates Fred Campbell OAM and Leonard White.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

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In response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Copley said she had been a member of the Shoalhaven community for more than 30 years.

They know me and what I stand for, she said. I am running as an independent so I can represent my community and only my community, not any party or their agenda.

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Liberal Party members running as independents, community candidates in local elections - The Sydney Morning Herald

The site is bounded by busy roads and opposite the Waverley Bus Depot, which in the past has been speculated as a target for property development.

Ms Glass said the apartment towers would destroy a local heritage area and overshadow Oxford Street, creating wind tunnels like the ones further east on the street.

Ms Glass also criticised the planning process under which changes were made to local planning rules to accommodate the development.

The state government in 2019 approved an increase in maximum height and floor space ratio controls for the site to support urban renewal, a Planning Department spokesman said.

More than 570,000 new homes have been approved in NSW in the past decade, with 194,000 more homes planned for delivery by 2026.

Planning alone cant solve housing affordability, but were driving the biggest reforms to the planning system in decades to unlock more housing supply, the spokesman said.

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Waverley Liberal councillor Angela Burrill said the apartment towers were an overdevelopment and would breach height limits, which were more than doubled to 36 metres over the opposition of residents and the council.

The site is in a high traffic area and can only increase congestion already experienced locally, she said.

Cr Burrill said a huge amount of apartments had been built in Waverley Council in the past five years, meeting housing targets so there was no need for the overdevelopment of this site.

Certainly residents voices, impacts on congestion and density as well as heritage should factor into decisions on increasing heights that allow these large apartment blocks, she said.

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Waverley Labor councillor Paula Masselos said overdevelopment, affordable housing and population growth were major concerns for voters who will elect a new council on December 4.

She said the proposal showed a total lack of concern about its negative impacts on the community and stress it places on already overtaxed infrastructure.

Feeder schools have already said they are full and cannot take any more students, while Oxford Street is already gridlocked, she said.

Cr Masselos said the apartment towers would also undo efforts by local mayors to protect Centennial Park from the impact of private developments.

This building is visible from the centre of the park, which goes against the charter of the park that promotes views of the sky to the horizon not high-rise buildings, she said.

But Mr Leis said the project did not directly impact on any neighbouring residents or encroach on the heritage area or Centennial Park.

Mr Leis said Bondi Junction was an established town centre with good public transport links, access to park and beaches as well as shops, schools and medical services.

The site was presented to us by a local agent who highlighted the merits of the location for residential housing and held the view that this end of Oxford Street was also in need of some revitalisation, he said.

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No need for overdevelopment: Labor, Liberal councillors united in opposition to apartment towers - The Sydney Morning Herald

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Ana Pateman has run for council in the past and she is hoping this time things are a bit different when Dubbo votes on Saturday. Ms Pateman is running as an independent, solo candidate in the Dubbo Regional Council election and believes the new group of councillors should refocus on the task at hand. "I did nominate last time for east ward," she said. "I decided to nominate again because I think the council needs some very stable governance in this next term. "I'm in a position to offer that to the community of Dubbo." Ms Pateman returned to Dubbo two decades ago and will run in east ward for the election after having a long history with that part of the city throughout her life. "I actually was born in Dubbo and grew up in Dubbo," she said. "I came back to Dubbo 20 years ago and I've lived in east ward the whole time I've been back." Like many council candidates in the running at the election, Ms Pateman said she had kept a keen eye on how things have been going during the last term of council and knows how vital local government is to supporting the community. READ ALSO: "I've always I guess aware of local government," she said. "It doesn't matter where I live, I've always been very conscious of what happens with the local government and how they support the community." Ms Pateman has worked as a teacher around the state but is currently the chief executive officer of Western Student Connections and feels she is in a great position to be able to actively contribute should she be elected. "I have felt that I wanted to be able to contribute for quite a few years now," she said. "Last time I was in a position to do so and I just thought this time I will do it again. "I think we need a lot of variety amongst the candidates. "We need lots of candidates to provide people with a choice." Ms Pateman also admitted she was against having the current ward system and believes the residents of Dubbo need to have their confidence restored in leadership and management moving forward. Ms Pateman and her fellow candidates will have their fate decided on Saturday when the local government elections are held. Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

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COUNCIL ELECTIONS

November 29 2021 - 8:36AM

CONFIDENCE: Ana Pateman is running in east ward at the local government elections on Saturday. Picture: CONTRIBUTED

Ana Pateman has run for council in the past and she is hoping this time things are a bit different when Dubbo votes on Saturday.

Ms Pateman is running as an independent, solo candidate in the Dubbo Regional Council election and believes the new group of councillors should refocus on the task at hand.

"I did nominate last time for east ward," she said.

"I decided to nominate again because I think the council needs some very stable governance in this next term.

"I'm in a position to offer that to the community of Dubbo."

Ms Pateman returned to Dubbo two decades ago and will run in east ward for the election after having a long history with that part of the city throughout her life.

"I actually was born in Dubbo and grew up in Dubbo," she said.

"I came back to Dubbo 20 years ago and I've lived in east ward the whole time I've been back."

Like many council candidates in the running at the election, Ms Pateman said she had kept a keen eye on how things have been going during the last term of council and knows how vital local government is to supporting the community.

"I've always I guess aware of local government," she said.

"It doesn't matter where I live, I've always been very conscious of what happens with the local government and how they support the community."

Ms Pateman has worked as a teacher around the state but is currently the chief executive officer of Western Student Connections and feels she is in a great position to be able to actively contribute should she be elected.

"I have felt that I wanted to be able to contribute for quite a few years now," she said.

"Last time I was in a position to do so and I just thought this time I will do it again.

"I think we need a lot of variety amongst the candidates.

"We need lots of candidates to provide people with a choice."

Ms Pateman also admitted she was against having the current ward system and believes the residents of Dubbo need to have their confidence restored in leadership and management moving forward.

Ms Pateman and her fellow candidates will have their fate decided on Saturday when the local government elections are held.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

Excerpt from:

Ana Pateman will run for council in the east ward - Daily Liberal

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Toongi is set to be home to Australia's first Critical Minerals Hub as the NSW government continues its push to become a major global supplier of critical minerals and high-tech metals. Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW Paul Toole announced the hub at the Toongi property where the facility will be constructed on Monday morning along with Member for Dubbo Dugald Saunders. "This is a working property and it's a pretty unique site," Mr Saunders said. "The strategy itself is about delivering economic growth and also delivering advanced manufacturing jobs in the future. "There is global demand and we will be at the forefront of the demand." Mr Toole believes the construction of the minerals hub will be a big investment in the future of regional NSW and the central west. "This is important because as the deputy premier I want to make our state the number one investment when it comes to mining and advanced manufacturing," he said. "They are going to be future." READ ALSO: Mr Toole is confident once the minerals hub is finished, NSW will have to ability to provide high-tech metals and minerals to organisations around the world. "We want to be a global supplier," he said. "But we also want to lead the world. "When you have a look at regional NSW this is the place where we are going to make the investment. "It means now that we will see billions of dollars being invested in regional NSW." Four high-tech metals will be mined at the facility which are cobalt, tungsten, titanium and copper along with other rare earths. Mr Toole is confident the hub will set NSW apart from other locations as the demand for critical minerals increases in the next 40 years. The state government's Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy will also have room for further geological surveys to deliver data for explorers. There is hope that the minerals hub will adequately help fulfil the supply chain link between mines and manufacturing. Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) chief executive officer Warren Pearce knows the minerals will be useful for a range of different products whilst providing skilled jobs to local workers. "Critical and high-tech minerals are the minerals of the future," he said. "These are the minerals that will be needed to manufacture batteries, power electric vehicles and construct wind turbines and solar panels that will support a low carbon future. "The Critical Minerals Strategy will support NSW in a new era for the industry." Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

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SUBSCRIBER

November 29 2021 - 1:14PM

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Toongi is set to be home to Australia's first Critical Minerals Hub as the NSW government continues its push to become a major global supplier of critical minerals and high-tech metals.

Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW Paul Toole announced the hub at the Toongi property where the facility will be constructed on Monday morning along with Member for Dubbo Dugald Saunders.

"This is a working property and it's a pretty unique site," Mr Saunders said.

"The strategy itself is about delivering economic growth and also delivering advanced manufacturing jobs in the future.

"There is global demand and we will be at the forefront of the demand."

Mr Toole believes the construction of the minerals hub will be a big investment in the future of regional NSW and the central west.

"This is important because as the deputy premier I want to make our state the number one investment when it comes to mining and advanced manufacturing," he said.

"They are going to be future."

Mr Toole is confident once the minerals hub is finished, NSW will have to ability to provide high-tech metals and minerals to organisations around the world.

"We want to be a global supplier," he said.

"But we also want to lead the world.

"When you have a look at regional NSW this is the place where we are going to make the investment.

"It means now that we will see billions of dollars being invested in regional NSW."

Four high-tech metals will be mined at the facility which are cobalt, tungsten, titanium and copper along with other rare earths.

Mr Toole is confident the hub will set NSW apart from other locations as the demand for critical minerals increases in the next 40 years.

The state government's Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy will also have room for further geological surveys to deliver data for explorers.

There is hope that the minerals hub will adequately help fulfil the supply chain link between mines and manufacturing.

Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) chief executive officer Warren Pearce knows the minerals will be useful for a range of different products whilst providing skilled jobs to local workers.

"Critical and high-tech minerals are the minerals of the future," he said.

"These are the minerals that will be needed to manufacture batteries, power electric vehicles and construct wind turbines and solar panels that will support a low carbon future.

"The Critical Minerals Strategy will support NSW in a new era for the industry."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

Read more:

Toongi will be home to a new Critical Minerals Hub - Daily Liberal

The first probable case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Switzerland as the country tightens entry restrictions to check the spread. The case relates to a person who returned to Switzerland from South Africa around a week ago, the Federal Office for Public Health said on Twitter. Testing will clarify the situation in the coming days, it added. Switzerland has ordered travellers from 19 countries to present a negative test when boarding a flight to the country, and must quarantine for 10 days on arrival. The list includes Australia, Denmark, Britain, Czech Republic, South Africa and Israel. Swiss voters on Sunday backed the government's pandemic response plan by a bigger than expected majority in a referendum, paving the way for the continuation of exceptional measures to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases. Some 62.01 per cent voted in favour of a law passed earlier this year to provide financial aid to people hit by the COVID-19 crisis and laying the foundation for certificates giving proof of COVID-19 vaccination, recovery or a negative test. These are currently required to enter bars, restaurants and certain events. Australian Associated Press

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November 29 2021 - 5:44PM

The first probable case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Switzerland as the country tightens entry restrictions to check the spread.

The case relates to a person who returned to Switzerland from South Africa around a week ago, the Federal Office for Public Health said on Twitter.

Testing will clarify the situation in the coming days, it added.

Switzerland has ordered travellers from 19 countries to present a negative test when boarding a flight to the country, and must quarantine for 10 days on arrival.

The list includes Australia, Denmark, Britain, Czech Republic, South Africa and Israel.

Swiss voters on Sunday backed the government's pandemic response plan by a bigger than expected majority in a referendum, paving the way for the continuation of exceptional measures to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases.

Some 62.01 per cent voted in favour of a law passed earlier this year to provide financial aid to people hit by the COVID-19 crisis and laying the foundation for certificates giving proof of COVID-19 vaccination, recovery or a negative test.

These are currently required to enter bars, restaurants and certain events.

Australian Associated Press

Continue reading here:

Suspected Omicron case in Switzerland - Daily Liberal