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Kristian S. Blickle, Evan Perry, and João A.C. Santos

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg explains the Productivity Commission’s proposals for corporate tax and why Trump fired his labour statistics chief, and Elinor discovers people actually like economics.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available to pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 7 August 2025.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

‘Donald Trump’s war on statistics is an authoritarian attack on democracy and countries like Australia should call it out’ by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (August 2025)

It assumes that all political disagreements are really a zero-sum conflict among various kinds of people. As soon as politics is imagined that way, then we’re in a conflict about dominance—which group should be in power?

It’s also wildly ahistorical, and simultaneously false and non-falsifiable.

Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.

Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?

The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism provides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:

“An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.

The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.

I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.

It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.

I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.

In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss how Trump is normalising the idea that he might not leave the White House once his second term is up. Then, Helen Haines MP, independent member for Indi, joins Emma to discuss her community’s concerns about Israel’s actions in Gaza and the growing push for more transparency and accountability in Australian foreign policy.

Emma’s discussion with Helen was recorded on Tuesday 29 July. Her discussion with Angus was recorded on Thursday 7 August.

After America will be back on Tuesday 19 August.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Helen Haines MP, Independent Member for Indi // @‪helenhainesindi

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

To coincide with the visit of Ilias Alami at the University of Sydney and a series of presentations on raced finance and state capitalism, we are re-blogging his feature on mutations in state capitalism that was first published at the Law & Political Economy Project. 

Global capitalism is undergoing turbulent mutations, including the seemingly unstoppable rise of Big Tech and the aggressive reengineering of globalization to intensifying geopolitical rivalries. The supercharged business and political news cycle is moving at an ever more dizzying pace. In this context, many of us are seeking intellectual resources to help us understand the specificity and significance of the present moment, particularly in light of the long historical development of global capitalism.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Hardball and Big Balls | The Roundtable Ep. 279

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history. The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism. The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a CIA-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalen government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Zohran Mamdani’s recent conversation with Sadiq Khan should instill fear in the hearts of the average New York City voter. In the weeks since he defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani has reportedly “been in touch with a number of progressive mayors,” including London’s.

During a “warm and collegial” phone call, Khan reportedly advised the young socialist from Queens to shift to the center. After winning the primary by pledging rent freezes and free buses, he urged Mamdani to reassure moderates in the same way that Khan himself did in 2016, after routing his fellow left-wing opponents before defeating the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral race.

Although Khan is not a leftist in the same sense as Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his tenure in London shows his alleged “centrism” can be just as damaging.

Keeping people safe is a basic responsibility of an elected leader—a test Khan is failing. London has a terrible knife problem. Almost one-third of the 50,000 violent and sexual crimes with knives reported in England and Wales last year occurred in the capital.

From multiple press conferences with parliamentarians, to dicussions around how to fix the GST, to our new research into Australian gun laws, we had a lot to talk about.

Watch a select highlight of content and media from the Australia Institute in July 2025.

The post July Media Highlights 2025 appeared first on The Australia Institute.

My brother told me he’s been watching Mr. Beast videos. “Don’t judge me,” he says, “but you know, you could win money, because you’re basically doing what they do on his shows but for free.” After further probing, I discover that Mr. Beast is paying people to do things like “survive 100 days trapped inside a private jet- then keep it!” I laugh. He’s right. I, and many of us homebound and bedbound folks, could breeze through a certain type of Mr. Beast challenge.

I’ve been mostly homebound since last June, and fully homebound since last September (other than doctor’s visits). I’ve spent nearly a year in my one-bedroom apartment, watching people walk past on the sidewalk far below, blithely running their errands, remembering how it was once so easy. Sometimes I pick a stranger and track them as they trudge up the street, following them until they’re out of sight. I don’t feel resentful, just curious. What are they doing? Where are they going? How does it feel to be in such a powerful body? Do they know how lucky they are?

My brother shares some wisdom he’s gained from watching people on the Mr. Beast isolation challenges. “It would be good if you had a little outdoor area,” he muses. “As soon as they give people a little outdoor area, they spend a lot of time out there.”

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Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan

Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States toward China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military buildup close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat. 

China’s rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it.

The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world-system.  Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the “Global North”, depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called “Global South”.

This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. The systematic price disparity between the core and periphery also enables the core to achieve a large net-appropriation of value from the periphery through unequal exchange in international trade.

At the 2025 Panamerican Congress in Mexico City, held August 1st to 3rd, hosted by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her Morena Parliamentary Group, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein gave remarks at the Esperanza Iris theatre.

The author of The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and most recently the memoir Doppelganger, presented remarks to delegations at the Panamerican Congress, an annual conference of progressive legislators from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, entitled: The Rise of End-of-the-World Fascism and Resistance from the Global South.

Click here to watch other political speeches from Álvaro García Linera, Clara Brugada, Ilhan Omar, Andrés Arauz, and Gerardo Pisarello at the 2025 Panamerican Congress, CDMX.

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published July 28, 2025.

Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Jonathan Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.

But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.

Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.

The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.

On this special crossover episode of Follow the Money and After America, Dr Emma Shortis joins Glenn Connley to discuss the Australian protests calling for more action to protect Palestinians, the momentum against the troubled AUKUS submarine pact, and Trump’s decision to fire his chief of labour statistics after job growth slowed.

This discussion was recorded on Monday 4 August 2025.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley

Show notes: