In The Guardian

The massive programme of cuts and deregulation that Musk and Ramaswamy seek extends the sadomasochistic politics now ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Demagogues have found that it doesn’t matter how much their followers suffer, as long as their designated enemies are suffering more. If you can keep ramping up the pain for scapegoats (primarily immigrants), voters will thank you for it, regardless of their own pain. This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs, led by Musk himself: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they are doing in relation to designated out-groups.

[…]

Why has the class war been unleashed now, not just in the US, but in much of the rest of the world? Because the democratising, distributive effects of two world wars have worn off. We fondly imagine that the semi-democratic era (exemplified in rich nations by the years 1945–1975) is the normal state of politics. But it was highly atypical, and made possible only by the wars’ erosion of the power of the ruling classes. The default state of centralised societies, to which nations are now reverting, is oligarchy.

[…]

In nations that have not yet fully succumbed to oligarchy we need to recognise, and recognise fast, that democratic politics do not emerge spontaneously. Our systems achieve a quasi-democratic character only with an active citizenry, whose engagement is largely defined by protest, and an independent media. But, at the direct behest of capital, governments are criminalising peaceful protest, while many independent media, such as the BBC, shut out dissenting voices.

Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”

“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.

The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.

But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.

“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. […]  At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the “breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”.

So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, it’s not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banks’ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that don’t. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 – after the group was formed.

But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?

The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBA’s founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against “woke capital” and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.

[…]

In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing “any financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participate” and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to “mobilise” climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these “targets” and “disclosures” never meant much at all.

While the editor of this hallowed section and I do not always agree, he has conceded that it’s almost Christmas – which is all the excuse I need for a quiz. So let’s play What Did Nigel Say? Read these broadsides from Westminster’s biggest names, and guess: which are from Nigel Farage?

1) Rishi Sunak was “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”.

2) Mass immigration “happened by design, not accident”.

3) British government is “broken”.

4) The UK is a “one-nation experiment in open borders”.

5) The British state is wallowing in “the tepid bath of managed decline”.

[…]

Through his speeches, how he frames debates, and most of all in his shrugging acceptance of how limited and slow his political powers are, time and again the Labour leader makes Farage’s case for him.

Want an example? Go back to the five phrases at the top. A collection of nasties, I’m sure you agree. How many came from Nigel Farage?

None. Nor are they the work of Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss or any other horror you care to think of. Each was said by Keir Starmer, most within the past few days. Britain’s progressive-in-chief claims that politicians and civil servants have deliberately allowed immigration to run rampant, and that the country has “open borders” to the rest of the world. He did this in a speech at the end of last month, which made not one positive reference to immigrants or migration. During the election campaign, he accused Britain’s first Asian prime minister of being “the most liberal” on immigration, sounding a dog whistle that could be heard by any follower of Farage. As far as I can see, hardly any commentator has picked him up for using such rhetoric – but to talk about migrants as only a burden to this country, here on a scam, is the kind of language that people like me are used to catching after last orders on streets that suddenly don’t feel so safe. To hear them from our prime minister should shame him and his party.

“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”

The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed people’s responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race and disability.

The results were “surprising”, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

“Some people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,” she said. “The study doesn’t call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isn’t a choice, so diversifying choices is important.”

This is quite touching. If I had my time over, I'd be a librarian.

Part of the magic of a library, as I was reminded over and over again in the days I spent at Battle during winter and spring, is its capaciousness as social infrastructure. It is very important, Giles said to me that Thursday, that there is “somewhere where everybody can come”. In its disparity of needs and personalities and ages sharing a common space, its tolerance and resilience, the modern library has the potential to feel, as it did on that wintry morning of the quiz, like nothing so much as a big and rackety family.

The trouble comes when libraries – and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them – start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. “We risk becoming a social care safety net,” said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and “our staff are not clinical staff”.

[…]

Do you ever feel intimidated? I asked Giles one day. “Yeah – occasionally,” she said. Libraries have a largely female workforce. There is a policy at Central that no one should work alone, but female staff can still feel vulnerable. In his eye-opening 2017 memoir about working at a regional library, Reading Allowed, Chris Paling told the story of a reader, “the Thin Man”, who took to stalking a female library assistant home.

That Saturday, lunchtime was a challenge. Staff had 15 minutes, but Curran was struggling to give everyone a break while making sure no one was on a desk alone. “It hurts the head,” he said. Eventually he solved it by getting less than five minutes himself – which he used to make Giles a cup of tea. They passed each other in front of visas and Curran gave Giles a shoulder bump. Giles rolled her eyes, tolerantly, at me. She had a cold she could not shake, but had gone into work anyway. “I wish people knew,” Giles had said to me one day about Battle, “just how much effort we put in. I think we would like it to mean more to people.” It’s a point that comes up among library staff again and again.

The Australian Financial Review reported that NIB’s CEO has said that the insurer needs an increase of around that mark because “ultimately, we have to cover claims inflation like any insurer because if you don’t eventually you go out of business.”

While this might seem obvious, it ignores the reality that the main reason private health insurers might go out of business is because people hate the product they offer, and even with all the carrots and sticks designed to force people to take out health insurance, a majority of Australians do not want it.

Over six years ago I pondered if private health insurance was a con. In the time since, during which we have experienced the greatest health crisis in a century, nothing has really changed the answer.

Not only does it remain untrue that private health insurance takes stress off the public system, it also remains a fib to call it private – it’s a public system merely carried out in an inefficient manner to deliver a product most people don’t want and haven’t ever wanted.

In the late 1990s, after 15 or so years of Medicare, fewer than a third of Australians held private health insurance. Then John Howard decided that the private sector needed help from the public sector.

He introduced a surcharge to penalise higher income earners who did not have private health insurance.

The stick was not enough. Howard then tried the carrot: providing a rebate on your private health insurance. These rebates are quite pricey – the government this year will spend about $7.5bn on them.

It did bugger all – you literally could not pay people to buy it.

Slimy git.

Streeting acknowledged that the decision would not be welcomed by everyone but sought to reassure young trans people. He had met many of them since taking up his post in July, he said, and listened to their concerns, fears and anxieties.

In a message directly to them, and referencing having come out as gay, he said: “I know it’s not easy being a trans kid in our country today, the trans community is at the wrong end of all of the statistics for mental ill health, self-harm and suicide.

“I can’t pretend to know what that’s like, but I do know what it’s like to feel you have to bury a secret about yourself, to be afraid of who you are, to be bullied for it and then to experience the liberating experience of coming out.

“I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today, but I really do care about this and so does this government. I am determined to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare for all trans people.”

Decisions were being taken “based on the evidence and advice of clinicians, not politics or political pressure”, he added.

Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.

Tim, who is over 60, said he was pushed to improve his rating. He got it to more than 80%, then 90%, then 100%, he said, but in his effort to work harder, faster, he was injured.

“You might get someone that’s … 20 years old and goes to the gym every day. And someone like me. I’m getting the average between him and me,” Tim said. “Obviously, I can’t keep up with him.”

“We’re going down the same path as Amazon,” said another worker, Ross*. “We’re not robots, we’re humans.”

It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.