The extensive “Notes on the Crises Investigative Journalism Source Wish List” can be found here. The highest priority items on my “wish” list are currently Bureau of the Fiscal Service Parkersburg, West Virginia Budget Appropriations and current United States Treasury attorneys (including any Bureaus). All listed items are, however, important to me and I updated the list today. As always, Sources can contact me over email or over signal (a secure and encrypted text messaging app) at my Signal username “NathanTankus.01” or with the QR code below. I will speak to sources on whatever terms they require (i.e. Off the Record, Deep Background, On Background etc.)
The Reserve Bank of Australia today released its risk assessment into the payments industry’s proposed decommissioning of the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS).
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and detention by the Trump DHS/ICE is in the news and the courts. Today, his lawyers have filed a motion to have ICE return him to New York, asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to protect Khalil from disruption of the underlying habeas corpus proceedings begun before ICE transferred him to Louisiana. This motion shows how Trump’s treatment of Khalil is also a challenge to judicial authority. It lays out the frighteningly Kafkaesque details of his original detention by ICE. Upon the arrival of DHS at his apartment building, Khalil did have a chance to contact his attorney, who quickly fired a habeas petition, challenging his detention, arrest, and confinement by ICE/DHS. This habeas petition was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, giving that court jurisdiction - authority - over Khalil’s situation. Yet, notwithstanding the filed habeas petition, ICE transferred Khalil from New York to Louisiana, without notifying his attorney or the court.
On this episode of After America, His Excellency Vasyl Myroshnychenko joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the importance of upholding the international rule of law, the deterioration of relations between Ukraine and the Trump administration, and why Ukrainian security is important for the entire world.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 7 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
In 1955 Henri Lefebvre delivered an important lecture on Georg Lukács that was subsequently published in French over thirty years later as Henri Lefebvre, Lukács 1955. That volume also carried an interview between the historian and philosopher of science Patrick Tort and Henri Lefebvre, which revolved around the issues that were raised in the mid-twentieth century lecture. It also included a piece by Tort. As part of our research collaboration on Henri Lefebvre that led to the volume On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, our attention was cast to this material, so we asked Federico Testa to translate the interview. The interview is now published open access in Historical Materialism as ‘The Lukács Question’ and carries with it our introduction as well as important editorial commentary on the issues it contains.
An ACOSS report released today calls on all parties and candidates to support reforms to negative gearing and the 50% capital gains discount and invest the revenue raised in social and affordable housing after releasing analysis showing how the measures have supercharged inequality and contributed to the housing affordability crisis.
The report includes analysis showing that the wealthiest 10% of households hold two thirds of the value of investment property.
The ACOSS report also finds that competition for homes from investors increased dramatically following the introduction of the 50% capital gains tax discount in 1999. Investors led two surges in home prices – by 13% a year above inflation from 2001 to 2003 and by 6% a year from 2013 to 2017.
Since 1999, home prices have increased by 142%, while wages have only risen by 44%.
Contrary to the idea that encouraging investment is needed to generate new supply, 81% of investment loans are for existing properties.
There is a movement sweeping state legislatures, from Connecticut to Hawaii, to enact a “green” amendment that would enshrine a person’s “individual right” to a “safe and stable climate.” To be sure, clean air and drinking water are certainly laudable goals, necessary for life. But enshrining the “green” amendment into state and federal constitutions would have unintended—and disastrous—consequences.
The movement for an amendment began gathering momentum after the landmark decision in Robinson Township v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2013). In that ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared unconstitutional portions of Act 13, which expanded natural gas drilling from the Marcellus Shale reservoirs. Since then, activists such as those at For the Generations have argued that a federal amendment, modeled on Pennsylvania’s Constitution, would further strengthen the fight against climate change.
Years ago, in the winter of 2021-2022, parents began repeating an anti-vaxxer claim. “Infections,” they began to say, “build the immune system.”
Winter 2020-2021 had been the year of lockdowns and school closures, but by the next year, kids were sick. As 2022 progressed, the kids remained sick. As winter turned to spring, and summer, back to fall and winter again, the kids couldn’t seem to shake their seasonal and suddenly-not-so-seasonal bugs. RSV became a buzzword. Strep A seemed to be killing more children than usual. And this winter, flu and norovirus surged brutally high as the public was told to watch out for walking pneumonia.
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The ground is white and cracked and leads to undulating gray hills. The hills stretch for miles, but I know which one I want. I spot it like my own reflection and start walking its way.
There are times I pass a mirror and don’t recognize myself. I got old too fast and saw too much. People think I’m younger than I am until they catch the look in my eye.
The Black Place has seen too much. It absorbed its dark recollections into the soil and put them on display. It is an honest mirror, reflecting the things a person is taught to hide, and making them seem beautiful again.
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Working from home benefits employers and employees. Despite moves by some employers and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claims about the public service, the Fair Work Commission is working to develop a working-from-home clause for industrial awards.
Fiona says: “It’s unlikely there’ll be a widespread return to five days in the office in 2025. We’re also expecting a continued reduction in overwork and unpaid overtime in the first full year of right-to-disconnect laws, which are expanding in August.”
2. Gender pay gap
Following reforms to the Fair Work Act, a review of wage rates in female-dominated awards is underway. New cases to address gender undervaluation of work are before the Fair Work Commission.
Lisa says: “Hundreds of thousands of women and their families will benefit from the pay increases already awarded in care sectors. The Commonwealth Government’s preparedness to fund these pay increases has been critical. Continuing commitment will be essential to further narrow the gender pay gap in 2025.”
3. Economic security for young women
Young women are more stressed by the financial squeeze than men and they’re less able to raise money in an emergency. They’re also more likely to have buy-now, pay-later debt. 60% of Australians with an outstanding HECS debt are women – and the gender pay gap means it takes them longer to pay it off.
The next chapter of lawfare has already begun. A host of federal judges have issued orders to stop President Trump’s political appointees from implementing his policies. Judge Paul Engelmayer’s initial 4-page order against the administration temporarily prevented Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from accessing department records.
And worse still, the Supreme Court just allowed a lower court to command the federal government to disburse foreign aid before ruling whether the president’s attempt to withhold the funds was lawful. Justice Alito’s dissent excoriated the Court’s abdication of responsibility as “a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”
The ensuing struggle for executive power over the next few years will determine whether presidential elections have lasting consequences.
This latest round of chipping away at the executive power builds on the last century of judicial activism. What started in the 20th century with progressive darlings on the Supreme Court like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter reached full bloom during the infamous Warren Court.
The cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) is going up: But we won’t tell you how much . . . And we’re not going to tell you until after the 2025 Legislature adjourns
In January, 2024, IBR official publicly acknowledged that their 13 month-old cost estimate of up to $7.5 billion was wrong, and promised a new estimate “later this summer.”
It’s now a year later, and IBR officials have said their new estimate won’t be done until about June 2025.
IBR officials are keeping secret the new higher cost until after the Oregon and Washington Legislatures adjourn. ODOT has specifically excluded any mention of additional funding for the IBR project from its presentations to legislative committees contemplating a new finance plan for ODOT for the 2025 session.
ODOT is touting a Biden Administration announcement of a $1.5 billion federal grant for the project. But the project’s price tag is rising faster than it is finding money to pay for the bridge. And Oregon and Washington will be holding the bag for any cost increases or toll revenues shortfalls.
In 2024 we saw some welcome developments for working women, led by government reforms.
Benefits from these changes will continue in 2025. However, this year, technological, social and political changes may challenge working women’s economic security and threaten progress
towards gender equality at work Here’s our list of five areas we think will impact on women workers’ economic security in 2025.
1. AI and the digital transformation of workplaces
2024 was the year artificial intelligence really started making its presence felt in Australian workplaces. The take up of AI is likely to accelerate in 2025. Alongside benefits from innovation there are some significant risks for workers, including in sectors dominated by women.
Job displacement is likely. Some new jobs will be created but job loss and casualisation are big risks for workers unless active effort goes into planning, training and support. In numerical terms, the greatest displacements are expected to be in retail trade, administrative and support services, professional, scientific and technical services and health care and social assistance, all female-dominated sectors.
Other risks are to job quality, as algorithmic management spreads from app-driven gig work into traditional workplaces. Assisted by electronic surveillance, AI is being used in selection and recruitment of staff, allocation and direction of work, and evaluation of performance of workers.
The oil and gas industry loves to tell everyone they pay a lot of tax, but the evidence tells a very different story.
The oil and gas industry claim their tax pays for nurses and other public sector services, but new Australia Institute research shows that nurses pay more in income tax than the oil and gas industry pay in company tax and Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT).
Over the last 10 years, Australia’s nurses have paid $52 billion, or an average of $5.2 billion per year, in tax.
By contrast, the oil and gas industry, who can’t stop talking about how much tax they pay, has paid $45 billion or on average $4.5 billion per year.
It’s worth noting that almost all of the oil and gas industry’s payments have occurred in the last two years, since Russia invaded Ukraine and pushed energy prices to record levels.
While official ATO figures haven’t been released yet, the oil and gas lobby group Australian Energy Producers claims that its members paid $11.1 billion in 2022-23 and $13.9 billion in 2023-24. These lobby group figures are included in the above chart. If assessing the average annual tax payment of the oil and gas industry based on only ATO figures, that exclude the Russia war-linked windfalls, then the average is $2.8 billion per year over the ten years to 2020-21.
The American corporate coup d'état is almost complete as the first weeks of the Trump administration exemplify. If there has been one person who saw this coming, and has taken courageous action over the years to prevent it, it would be Ralph Nader. The former presidential candidate, consumer advocate and corporate critic joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle his life’s work battling the corporate takeover of the country and how Americans can still fight back today despite the growing repression from the White House.
“The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power, in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker,” Nader tells Hedges.
Well, those two weeks were quite the month, weren’t they?
The headlines could cause whiplash; from a focus on the alternative prime minister’s past, to election date scuttle, to Chinese military vessels niggling boundaries, to Donald Trump making it clear to the people in the back where his America stands, it’s easy to see how quickly news fatigue can set in.
Trump, who is doing exactly as intended, is following the well-worn path his once most trusted advisor described as ‘flooding the zone with shit’, which is a strategy that boils down to hacking the media’s inability to focus when there are so many shiny headlines around.
The leopards didn’t just tell people they would eat faces, they explained how they would do it. But we have a habit in modern democracies of prescribing good faith to people running in positions we have been taught to respect. Sure, Trump is enabling an unelected foreign billionaire to rampage through the country, and by association, the world, slashing foreign aid, backing in the far right, lie about allied leaders and abandoning the principles of democracy, but did you hear he’s bringing back plastic straws?
Outdated rules of thumb put a thumb on the scale: Many common land use and transportation planning “rules of thumb” produce harmful results by systematically biasing our built environment toward car dependency. Five problematic heuristics include prioritizing high “level of service” for cars, building unnecessarily wide streets, requiring excessive off-street parking, overestimating car trip generation, and creating hierarchical street networks that increase trip distances.
Jacob Conway, Natalia Fischl-Lanzoni, and Matthew Plosser
When households face budgetary constraints, they may encounter bills and debts that they cannot pay. Unlike corporate credit, which typically includes cross-default triggers, households can be delinquent on a specific debt without repercussions from their other lenders. Hence, households can choose which creditors are paid. Analyzing these choices helps economists and investors better understand the strategic incentives of households and the risks of certain classes of credit.
What do a windswept town on the plains of North Dakota and a sandy beach hamlet in Florida have in common? Aside from the fact they’re both in the U.S., they only require students to show proof of identification, residency, and an up-to-date vaccine card to enter their schools. With the exception of some states that allow for vaccination waivers, this policy has led to an unprecedented number of illegal migrant children gaining admittance to public schools across the country.
Though statistics on these demographic movements have been difficult to find, what is available suggests that the number of children of illegal immigrants attending publicly funded schools is staggering. The situation is becoming clearer with an uptick in deportation, and the Trump Administration’s stemming the tide of illegal entries into the U.S. The strain on public resources has been intensely felt—and in many school districts, the strain has become downright catastrophic.
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.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the end of Australia’s per capita recession, why the humble chickpea deserves some of the credit, and why DOGE is looking like a disaster for the American economy.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 6 March 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Independent Senator David Pocock and Tony Windsor AM, former independent parliamentarian who held the balance of power during the Gillard minority government, join Amy Remeikis to discuss how they negotiate with the major parties, the growth of the independent and minor party vote, and why there’s so much fearmongering about minority governments in Australia.
This discussion was recorded live on Wednesday 26 February 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
The grotesque banalization of Hitler and Hitlerism proceeds apace. The American Left’s discourse is replete with comparisons of President Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and constant evocations of a dangerous “fascist” threat to democracy supposedly coming from an altogether illiberal Right. Kamala Harris labeled Trump a fascist and Nazi sympathizer in a CNN town hall meeting in October, and she and the mainstream media continued to pile on until the November election.
When Trump held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, a little over a week before the election, many Democrats, and the increasingly hysterical talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, compared that rally to a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in that same venue in 1939. Completely disregarding the impressively multiracial character of the MAGA supporters gathered to hear Trump, as well as the large contingent of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews also in attendance, the media incessantly identified Trump with Hitler and “fascism.” Not only was the deep-seated evil that was National Socialism trivialized beyond recognition, and not only was fascism crudely (and absurdly) identified with any opposition to a hard Left agenda, but crucial distinctions between fascism, National Socialism, and democratic conservatism were elided in a deeply misleading manner.
Home to over 40% of Bangladesh’s urban population, Dhaka is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. After being voted the 7th most ‘unliveable’ city globally by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2023, public officials in Dhaka are under increasing pressure to improve quality of lives for the citizens they serve. At the same time, the city is facing a range of environmental, political and demographic challenges. And its population continues to grow, exacerbated by climate-displacement and uneven economic opportunities driving much of the country’s population to its capital.
Editors note: Since this post was published, we clarified language in the first paragraph about year-ahead expectations for manufacturing and service firms in the 2025 survey. We also corrected the y-axis range of Chart 2. (March 5, 11 a.m.)
On Super Bowl Sunday, President Trump announced that the penny, a coin that has been in circulation since 1792, will no longer be minted. For as long as America has had a penny, it has also had a national debt, and there has recently been a discussion of how much debt is too much.
The penny has become a microcosm of our financial issues. We collect a penny in revenue but incur three cents in costs. The penny-minting business runs a deficit, just like much else in Washington.
In order to keep our financial system operating smoothly, it is time for Washington to address the question of the debt limit.
Always a political minefield, Congress is supposed to set the credit limit on its own credit card. But for eight of the last ten years, it has given itself unlimited credit by suspending the limit altogether. Congress is now considering raising the debt limit beyond the existing $36 trillion.
But how far can Congress safely go?
In our personal lives, we are all aware that there is a limit to how much can be borrowed on a house or automobile. A banker will ask two questions before approving your loan: how much you earn and what you owe. He is seeking to determine if you have the capacity to handle a certain amount of debt.
Gentrification: Here’s your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what’s to blame
We first published this list in 2019, but the realm of suggested scapegoats has expanded, and now includes fire, gray paint, little libraries and microbreweries.
When bad things happen, we look around for someone to blame. And when it comes to gentrification, which is loosely defined as somebody not like you moving into your neighborhood, there’s no shortage of things to blame. We’ve compiled a long—but far from exhaustive—list of the things that people have blamed for causing gentrification. (This task has been made easier by the seemingly inexhaustible editorial/journalistic appetite for stories pitched as exploring the gentrification of “X”, although an essay at Jacobin branding graphic novels as the “gentrification of comic books” seems to represent the moment that this meme has jumped its shark.)
Protest is powerful! This guide connects you with resources about the impact of protest, how to organise protests, making protest strategic, and protecting the rights and safety of protesters.
I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept. – Angela Davis
Before you jump in we’d like to remind you that protest can take many forms. Gene Sharp defined 198 Methods of Noviolent Action and there are many more. All kinds of people engage in protest, for all sorts of reasons. Protests can channel outrage and anger as well as grief, compassion, solidarity, humour and more.
Protests are important for the messages they send to powerholders, but also for the connections between the people taking action. Feeling part of something bigger than ourselves, instead of being isolated individuals, can be empowering and life changing.
Prosper Australia today expressed deep disappointment at the Victorian Government’s continued failure to implement value capture mechanisms in its recent upzoning announcements. By allowing landowners to reap windfall gains without returning a fair share to the community, the government has missed a vital opportunity to fund essential infrastructure and public services.
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.
The Oval Office showdown between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance was perhaps one of the most consequential spectacles of modern political history. Now that the administration has announced an end to further aid to Ukraine, many believe that Zelensky’s outburst may go down as one of the worst diplomatic mistakes in recent memory.
The claim that Trump is simply adjusting America’s involvement in Ukraine because of one bad meeting, however, is an insult to the president’s capacity for statesmanship. The seemingly intransigent impasse that has been reached is a direct result of Trump intending to keep his campaign promise to achieve a realizable peace in Ukraine, while Zelensky continues to demand an unattainable victory.
Trump came to office recognizing that U.S. support for Ukraine was always intended as a relatively low-risk way to weaken Russia through an armed proxy. If the Putin regime did not collapse due to domestic pressures, then Moscow would have a pyrrhic victory forced upon it due to significant military losses, a weakened economy, and broader international ostracization.
