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National housing campaign Everybody’s Home said the federal government must build public and community housing at scale and work with states to limit rent increases, as new analysis reveals essential workers are locked out of almost all rentals in the private market.

The Rental Affordability Snapshot: Essential Workers report, released by Anglicare Australia, found 10 of 16 essential occupations can afford fewer than 1% of rental listings, including cleaners (0.8%), hospitality workers (0.7%) and retail workers (0.9%).

Nurses could afford just 1.1% of rental listings and aged care workers 1.7%. The report found that rents rose 7.4% over the past year while wages rose just 3.2%.

Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said the government must step in and invest in homes working people can afford, because pay rises alone won’t help the rental crisis.

“It’s alarming that nurses, cleaners, aged care workers and the many others who keep our communities moving can barely find a single rental in the country they can afford,” Ms Azizie said.

“Rents are rising more than twice as fast as wages and even if they get a pay rise, these full-time workers are working harder every year just to watch rental affordability slip away.

Kevin Portteus’s essay, “Congress and the Collapse of Constitutional Republicanism in America,” is nominally a meditation on congressional dysfunction. But it’s much more than that. He offers a deep reflection on the administrative state and the breakdown of our institutions under its weight.

Portteus begins by accurately noting that Congress’s favorite activity is not legislating. Instead, it follows the other two branches of the federal government in governing by decidedly extra-constitutional means, including executive orders and actions, administrative rulemaking, and judicial meddling. As he says, “Through both positive action conferring legislative power on others, and the failure to address important issues through legislation, legislative power has steadily passed from its constitutionally-designated home to other actors.” Congress has voluntarily ceded its own authority. So much for James Madison’s argument in Federalist 51 that ambition will counteract ambition.

Legally speaking, any congressional delegation of power that articulates an “intelligible principle”—that is to say, anything that is not absurd—tends to be upheld by the courts. Portteus puts it forcefully: “As it is, there isn’t much reason for Congress to exist. They don’t legislate in the constitutional sense. [And] they lack the independence and expertise to serve as legislators in the Progressive sense.”

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 became law on September 18, ratcheting up the Trump Administration’s pressure to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and end the Russo-Ukrainian War. It also gives the president new tariff authority for the first time since the Trade Act of 1974 became law 52 years ago. This comes less than seven months after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to impose his tariff regime.

The Graham Act allows the president to impose sanctions on major entities and figures in Russia tied to its defense industrial base, as well as on any other nations that aid its defense sector or import Russian energy. It also enables the president to increase tariffs on imports of Russian energy by up to 500% ad valorem and levy tariffs of up to 100% ad valorem “on countries that purchase Russian-origin crude oil or natural gas or facilitate sanctions evasion.”

The prize committee is pleased to announce that Maria Tanyag’s article, ‘Who cares for the carers? Patriarchal contradictions and the reinvention of the global economy’, published in Review of International Political Economy, has won the 2026 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.

The committee recognises Maria Tanyag’s article for its meticulous and thought-provoking analysis of the crisis-driven, patriarchal reinvention of the global economy. It confronts a stark pandemic paradox: at a time when our collective need for care was most profound, care workers experienced severe depletion and mortality. Building on feminist political economy scholarship on the intensification of social reproductive crises, Tanyag illuminates how capitalism’s contradictions can be made generative for sustaining capital accumulation and the preservation of political power. Her deft engagement with ‘boundary struggles’ reveals the state’s reconfiguration of economic, cultural and security boundaries to compel the elasticity of social reproduction through authoritarian crisis management.

The committee also commends Tanyag for bringing together survey responses and first-hand interviews with care workers in the Philippines. This careful engagement of empirical material grounds the article’s compelling account of the pandemic’s effect on care workers along lines of gender, class and employment status.

This is the second of two debates on recrudescent socialism, hosted by the Institute of World Politics on November 15, 2019. Resolved: That socialism/communism, having failed repeatedly in the 20th century at the economic level, now seeks to achieve its social goals via cultural Marxism.

On the Left, the participants included Micah Uetricht, an assistant editor at Jacobin, as well as the author of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism and Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity; and Nicole Aschoff, the author of The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age and The New Prophets of Capital and an editor-at-large at Jacobin.

Hello Readers: A reminder that I’m still selling tickets for Thursday’s In-office Event with Paul Krugman and I’ve begun selling tickets to next week’s event with Phil Rocco (sorry they are so bunched up! That won’t happen in the future!). 

Renters should not be overlooked and forgotten in the discussion about interest rate hike pain, Everybody’s Home has said.

Today the RBA has lifted interest rates to 4.85 per cent, adding more strain to households that are already struggling under surging living costs. 

Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said many Australians will feel the weight of another interest rate rise, warning that renters remain unprotected against soaring rent hikes.

“Everyday Australians are being pushed to the brink and another interest rate hike is going to make life even harder,” Ms Azize said.

“Our recent survey shows three in four Australians would have to cut back if their rent or mortgage rose by just $20 a week. 

“Renters mustn’t be overlooked in the rate rise discussion. Higher interest rates price more renters out from buying a home, and some landlords and agents will take any excuse to increase rents.

“Renters have been forced to absorb rent increases for years that have left them making impossible sacrifices and no buffer as costs continue to climb.

On October 25, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as president of Brazil, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro by 51.8 to 48.2 percent. It is a real defeat for the far right and a deserved occasion for celebration. But it is not the end of Bolsonarismo. With its founder barred from office and sentenced to 27 years for his role in the coup plot, the movement still led the first round and carried nearly 60 million votes behind his son in the second, and Donald Trump was quick to call the result “another rigged election.” Within days, Flávio himself had reportedly left Brazil despite a court order to surrender his passports, and the Trump administration announced it would grant him and his family U.S. visas, making him the second Bolsonaro to seek refuge in the United States after defeat. What survived the loss of its leader is precisely what a structural account would predict: a mass base produced by the contradictions of dependent capitalism, which no single election resolves.

A dissent, Antonin Scalia once said, “is never a winner.” That’s a revealing line, not because Scalia disliked dissenting—no justice in modern memory did more to make dissent an art form—but because it reminds us how much of his Supreme Court career consisted of losing beautifully, usefully, and, in the end, not quite permanently.

James Rosen’s Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986–2001, the second installment of a projected three-volume biography, is thus largely not the story of Scalia triumphant but of Scalia frustrated: by colleagues who wouldn’t argue, conservatives who wouldn’t conserve, friends who wouldn’t follow, reporters who wouldn’t understand, and precedents that wouldn’t die. The first volume—which I also reviewed in these pages (“Nino the Great,” Fall 2023)—carried Nino from Queens to the Marble Temple. Volume two shows what happened when he got inside and discovered that the place was not, in fact, a seminar room.