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Every year, well-meaning donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into America’s most prestigious universities. They do so out of sentiment, prestige, or the vague hope that their alma mater will preserve the civilization it once championed. But in 2025, this is delusion. The modern university—especially the Ivy League—is a machine built to erase the memory of the old world, not preserve it. Donors aren’t saving the institutions they love: they’re financing their own irrelevance.

To understand what was lost, one need only look back to the Ivy League of the 1940s, an era in which fraternal culture was not simply an appendage of undergraduate life, but a central organ of elite formation in America.

In those years, the great colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia—still retained the trappings of their founding: small, WASP-dominated, semi-clerical institutions filled with the Yankee elite. But the real crucibles of influence were not the classrooms. They were the clubs, the societies, and the houses.

The great final clubs of Harvard, the eating clubs of Princeton, the secret societies of Yale—these were more than social diversions. They were incubators of elite consensus. Membership in such circles conferred a kind of spiritual citizenship in the American governing class. Men were trained to speak in a certain tone, carry themselves in a certain way, and, above all, recognize one another across institutions and borders. It was a culture that, for better or worse, assumed the right to rule.

The Wrap with Amy Remeikis

In just a few short days the 48th Parliament will sit for the first time and we will start to see the answer to the question we have been asking become clear; what will Labor do with power?

In many ways, we already have the answer, at least when it comes to climate.  The second term Albanese government wasted no time in approving the carbon bomb that is the Woodside North West Shelf extension and is tripling down on the delusion that more fossil fuel gas fields need to be opened up to service not just the domestic market, but to ensure the success of the Future Made in Australia manufacturing push.

Albanese made headlines in March by slipping in the line ‘delulul with no solulu’ during question time, as a tongue-in-cheek shout out to the hosts of the Happy Hour podcast, but it could also sum up Labor’s attitude to gas.

That was made clear in the Jubilee Australia Research Centre report: How to Build a Gas Empire, which was released this week and all but ignored by Australia’s mainstream media outlets.

The report, co-published with the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Fossil Free Japan Coalition lays out exactly how hollow many of the claims Australia is told about its gas industry are.

Japan and Korea have contributed $20.5bn USD of public finance into Australian LNG projects between 2008 and 2024.

The Oregon Department of Transportation finds itself in serious financial trouble, aggravated by an increasing dependence on borrowing.

In the last two fiscal years, the agency has added about $700 million in new debt, chiefly to finance freeway widening mega-project (and their hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns).

In the past two weeks, the Oregon Department of Transportation has heaped blame on the Legislature for failing to vote to approve a major increase in gas taxes, vehicle registration costs and other fees.  It is in the process of laying off hundreds of employees, because of the financial shortfall.  But as we’ve seen at City Observatory, ODOT’s revenues haven’t actually decreased, and much of the problem is related to expensive megaprojects and their cost overruns.  All of this has been amplified by the agency’s decision to take on greater amounts of debt, which reduces funds available to pay current staff and support operations.

Moving from pay as you go to debt financing

1/ Giving business billions of dollars in tax cuts means starving schools, hospitals and other services.

Giving business billions of dollars in tax cuts means billions of dollars less for services like schools and hospitals.

If Australia cut company tax from 30% to 25% this would give business about $20 billion in its first year, or $83 billion over four years. This would cost the budget at least $57 billion over four years, accounting for reduced franking credits (which are effectively a tax refund for company tax paid).

2/ Vital public services and infrastructure will be the first to go.

The United Nations has pointed out that after corporate taxed were cuts in America, welfare benefits and access to health insurance were slashed. The ‘financial windfalls’ for the very rich were funded by cutting public services.

3/ The big four banks would get billions of dollars. Really.

Australia’s big four banks are some of the most profitable banks in the world, and they have been making record profits.

‘Making the Good Society’ is a new video series from the Broadbent Institute and Perspectives Journal that asks progressive leaders and thinkers about their vision for a good society that is humane, just and democratic.

Matthias Ecke, a German Social Democrat and Member of the European Parliament, knows what it takes to counter extremism and defend democratic rights. His advocacy is deeply personal: while campaigning in Dresden in May 2024, he was violently attacked by far-right extremists, an incident German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned as a “threat to democracy.” Despite this, he refuses to back down, continuing to push for a society based on justice and equality.

Reflections on IIPP’s Applied Learning Programme from the Rethinking the State Forum 2025 by Bridget Gildea, Simangaliso Mpofu, Barbara Chesi and Manuel Acosta Maldonado.

At the recent Rethinking the State Forum, the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) brought together international collaborators, public sector practitioners, and learning partners for a lively, practice-led session on applied learning in government. Hosted by IIPP’s Applied Learning team, the design sprint focused on how governments around the world are using applied learning as a tool for institutional change and what that means for the UK context.

The conversation began with a simple but important question posed by Bridget Gildea, IIPP’s Applied Learning Lead: ‘What can we learn from our global partners in their experience of this work so far, and how can we bring those lessons home?’

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt and Elinor discuss the Prime Minister’s China trip, why spending more on defence doesn’t necessarily make us safer, and the unusual situation whereby our biggest bank thinks we should tax wealth better.

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.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 17 July 2025.

Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

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

Show notes:

Australia already spends a huge amount on defence by Matt Grudnoff, the Australia Institute (April 2025)

Though he has the pedigree, Elbridge Colby is not a man for the cocktail circuit. As the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the widely read book The Strategy of Denial, he could easily have settled into elite foreign policy circles. But he does not flatter diplomats, nor does he shield allies from hard truths, which in Washington inevitably provokes friction. In a recent Politico “exposé,” a chorus of disgruntled former officials bemoans the under secretary of defense for policy’s alleged impoliteness and strategic indelicacy. His crime? Speaking too bluntly. Acting too decisively.

But behind the theatrics of bureaucratic grievance is the truth that Colby is precisely the kind of strategist our moment demands. His critics may fixate on style, but the real discomfort he inspires stems from substance. Many of the former officials I’ve encountered aren’t scandalized because Colby is failing—they’re unsettled because he is, unlike many before him, trying to execute the platform Americans voted for.

Colby is being pilloried by the Washington establishment for being effective. He has advanced the logic of strategic prioritization with a seriousness that rankles them and unsettles allies long accustomed to American indulgence. The problem, it turns out, is that he is right, and unapologetic about it.

Whether you’re for or against the stadium, it looms as a huge strain on a Tasmanian budget which is already deep in the red.

But the cost of the stadium is small when compared to the amount of money Tasmanians have been missing out on due to shrinking GST revenue.

The GST was set up as the states’ own revenue source … a source which would grow with the economy.

It was pitched as a way of helping to solve states’ financial problems.

But the GST hasn’t been the growth tax that Australia’s states and territories were promised.

Recently released Australia Institute research shows that if the GST had kept up with growth in the economy, it would have collected an extra $22bn last year.

Tasmania’s share of that would have been $877m.

Let’s put $877m into context. The most recent estimate for the cost of the proposed stadium is almost $1bn, with the Tasmanian government picking up the tab for the lion’s share of that – $675m, which would include about $300m of borrowing.

So, an extra $877m wouldn’t just pay for a stadium; it would pay for a stadium every year.

Of course, Tasmanians might not want all that money spent on a stadium. There are plenty of other areas in desperate need of funding, like hospitals, schools, roads, and public housing, to name a few. The cost of all of these has also raced ahead of the growth in GST revenue.

So, why hasn’t the GST kept up with the rest of the economy?

In May, Environment Minister Murray Watt gave provisional approval to a 45-year extension of the oil and gas giant’s liquid natural gas export hub on the Burrup and an associated gas power plant.

This was controversial, and not just because the project is a carbon bomb that will create a huge volume of greenhouse gas emissions.

Woodside’s gas facilities are also adjacent to what many experts consider the most significant Indigenous rock art site in the world: The Murujuga Cultural Landscape.

It contains a huge concentration of images, known as petroglyphs, etched into the rocks. Some date back up to 50,000 years, depicting ancient megafauna and the oldest known image of a human face.

Murujuga has just been listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage Register. But don’t assume that means it is safe.

The trouble is that burning gas releases pollutants that can damage the rock art.

When Watt announced the provisional go-ahead for Woodside’s gas extension, he said he would put “strict conditions” on the project to protect the petroglyphs. He refused to disclose what those conditions were.

Supposedly, the secrecy was about giving Woodside Energy “procedural fairness”.

Woodside was given 10 days to respond but failed to meet the deadline. Watt, it seems, has been happy to give it an indefinite extension.

Today’s June labour force figures were bad news for everyone except those in the Reserve Bank, who would be celebrating the unemployment rate rising from 4.1% to 4.3%. Last week the RBA monetary policy board had the opportunity to cut interest rates and help keep unemployment low and the economy growing. Instead it chose to keep rates at a level that they know would actually slow the economy.

To an extent, the RBA’s choice was unsurprising. The RBA actually wants more people to lose their jobs. They desire this due to a misguided and cruel belief that there needs to be more people unemployed in order to keep inflation around 2.5%.

Well today the RBA got its wish. Unemployment in June rose from 4.1% to 4.3% – the biggest jump for 14 months and the second biggest increase since the end of 2021.

The labour force figures highlight that not only has the RBA monetary policy board pursed a nonsensical monetary policy, they have also completely misread the economy in a manner that calls into question the board’s competence.

In its statement last week the board noted that “the March quarter national accounts confirmed that domestic demand has been picking up over the past six months.” This was completely wrong.

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.

Art of the Arms Deal | The Roundtable Ep. 276

As Joe Biden shuffled toward the finish line of his presidency, he and his staff let off a final volley of pardons—but who was really holding the (virtual) pen? This week, the guys sit down to weigh in on the renewed discussion of autopens as the New York Times reports on a cache of emails that may reveal the truth. Trump, meanwhile, caused a stir by agreeing to sell military supplies to NATO, which will then be passed to Ukraine. In the U.K. and Europe, technocrats crack down as triple crises fester: unchecked immigration, rampant crime, and youth radicalization. Plus: book and movie recommendations!

53% of Australians say the government should block the sale.

28% of respondents believe the decision should be delayed until the impact of the sale on Australian gas prices is investigated. 16% are unsure.

A group of foreign investors, led by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, is seeking to buy Santos. The purchase requires approval from Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

“Foreign-owned corporations already control almost all of Australia’s gas,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor to The Australia Institute.

“Foreign gas companies have a history of prioritising exports over domestic customers, price-gouging Australians for our own gas, and contributing little to public finances. It is not surprising that Australians would reject further foreign ownership.

“Given the high level of foreign ownership of Australia’s gas resources, it’s hard to see how giving more control to foreign-owned corporations fits with the Prime Minister’s philosophy of progressive patriotism.

“The survey shows strong support for an investigation into the impact of any deal on Australian gas prices, suggesting ordinary Australians have a better grasp of the issues than many of our policy makers who didn’t consider the price impact of allowing foreign-owned corporations to export almost all of our gas in the first place.”

What is the economy? It's a question a lot of us shy away from.

The post Community Economists: What is the Economy? appeared first on Equality Trust.

Of all the course corrections Donald Trump has pursued since his now-famous escalator ride, the one with the most lasting implications—perhaps barring immigration enforcement—may be his war against the unelected bureaucracy that has anti-democratically governed America for decades.

What the Trump Administration has undertaken in the past few months, and what is only beginning to bear fruit with cases like Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, is nothing less than the opening salvos in a war to dismantle the blatantly unconstitutional technocracy that has defined American governance for at least the last half century. Contra the usual “end of democracy” hysterics from critics, if Trump is successful in these efforts he will be the greatest restorer of constitutional norms in the United States in more than 100 years.

The vision of the American system from Schoolhouse Rock!—a legislature that makes the laws, a president who enforces them, and a judiciary that faithfully interprets the law—hasn’t described how our government actually functions for quite some time. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Congress has behaved largely as a vestigial organ, transferring the legislative powers the American people originally delegated to Congress to a multitude of agencies.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of American politics is the existence of a pedophilic blackmail network that involves some of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Despite efforts to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of children, justice continues to be evaded and the cabal associated with Epstein — President Donald Trump notwithstanding — continues its conspiracy.

“Artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is typically defined as any computer system that can match or surpass human intelligence in performing any task a human can perform. No such program yet exists, but if one were to arise it could instantly begin improving its own capabilities. The result might be a kind of superintelligence, as far beyond our own intelligence as ours is beyond that of snails There exists no natural limit to this process. The only guardrails would be those we construct now, before the avalanche begins.

The timeline remains uncertain, yet the “San Francisco consensus” among AI researchers predicts superintelligence by decade’s end. Skeptics raise legitimate concerns about decades of failed predictions. But when Nobel laureates warn of extinction and industry leaders purchase remote bunkers or speak of “summoning the demon,” prudence demands attention. These are not Luddites but AI’s very architects sounding the alarm.

Kinda Hachem

On this episode of Follow the Money, Amy Remeikis and Matt Grudnoff join Ebony Bennett discuss the political relevance of the housing crisis, the storm-in-a-teacup over some Treasury subheadings, and #NotAllEconomists.

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: Amy Remeikis, Chief Political Analyst, the Australia Institute // @amyremeikis

Guest: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

Australia’s rental crisis has reached unprecedented levels with new data showing rents have increased by an average of 57 per cent across capital cities over the past decade.
 
The new report, titled Out of Reach, by national housing campaign Everybody’s Home has revealed that once-affordable cities have been hit the hardest.
 
It also shows that social housing has slipped to the lowest share on record, remaining stagnant at 4.1 per cent of all dwellings since the Labor government was elected in 2022. This is a further drop from 4.7 per cent a decade ago, putting even further strain on the rental market.
 
Key findings:

The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”

Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.

Dr Ruth Mitchell, neurosurgeon and Nobel Peace Prize winner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss why a growing number of Australians want an AUKUS review, Trump’s pharmaceuticals tariffs, and what the US President can learn from Jane Fonda.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 11 July 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: Ruth Mitchell, Board Chair, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War // @drruthmitchell

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

Show notes:

Polling – AUKUS, the Australia Institute (July 2025)

Is neoliberalism dead or alive? The latest big beautiful tax cuts fought through by Trump are in hard contrast with his arm wrestling of other states by imposing tariffs. While the tax cuts are conceived as hyper-neoliberalism, many people perceive tariffs as a complete contradiction with neoliberal doctrine. The seemingly contradictory policy mix of Trump and his extreme right companions around the world makes many people call this the end of the neoliberal era. And it is not only the seemingly erratic behaviour of Trump that posed this problem: both Biden and Obama were described as neoliberal, and so were George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. At this point, the labelling appears so broad that it might seem futile to talk about neoliberalism – it functions as little more than a leftist buzz word.

We should not retire the term neoliberalism too soon, though. The problem is that neoliberalism gets too quickly identified with a very specific set of policies – tax cuts, trade liberalisation, privatisations and so on – or, alternatively, with the abstract quest for individual freedom. Both of these perspectives fail to capture what neoliberalism is actually about: the privatisation of power. As long as we are not paying attention to this underlying tendency of capitalism’s latest (if not last) stage, we are unable to really understand economic and social policies, as well as what glues political formations together. And so, we are incapable of effectively critiquing contemporary capitalism and fighting the rise of the extreme right.

Nina Boyarchenko and Leonardo Elias

California generally—and Claremont in particular—has produced some of the most profound and revolutionary conservative thinkers of the last half-century.

And for a great many of them, it’s because they understood what’s at stake if we abandon our American identity.

And we’re lucky enough to have a few of them, like Michael Anton, now working in the administration with us.

Now, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams asked me to speak a little bit about statesmanship and, more to the point, about how to respond to some of the challenges our movement will need to confront in the years to come.

It’s an interesting question.

And I think it’s useful to reflect on the state of the Left in 2025’s America.

Last week, a 33-year-old Communist running an insurgent campaign beat a multimillion-dollar establishment machine in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

I don’t want to harp on a municipal election, but there were two interesting threads. The first is that it drives home how much the voters in each party have changed.

If our victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad, working- and middle-class coalition, Mamdani’s coalition is the inverse.

On Independence Day, nearly a dozen black-garbed individuals, some equipped with body armor and firearms, allegedly orchestrated a premeditated ambush on law enforcement outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. According to the federal criminal complaint, the group began firing on the center with fireworks and spray-painting anti-ICE and pro-Antifa slogans on vehicles until law enforcement moved to secure the area. Once law enforcement came out of the building, two assailants opened fire with AR-15s, firing 20-30 rounds and wounding at least one officer.

The attack was entirely foreseeable. Antifa militants motivated by virulent rhetoric have repeatedly doxxed and targeted ICE, going all the way back to Antifa member Willem Van Spronsen’s 2019 attack on a Tacoma, Washington, ICE detention facility. Van Spronsen was killed by responding officers and became a popular anarchist martyr.

The ancient Indigenous rock art on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula has been deservedly listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Register.

But the spectacular Murujuga petroglyphs remain under threat.

Extensive scientific evidence reveals that pollution from the adjacent Woodside gas export terminal has seriously damaged the engravings.

Scientists warn that unless the acid gas emissions from the terminal are curtailed, the rock art will be destroyed, regardless of the World Heritage listing.

“The tragedy is that Woodside’s gas development does not need to be at Murujuga,” said Stephen Long, Senior Fellow at The Australia Institute, who produced The Fight to Save Murujuga documentary.

“The gas from the proposed extension will be shipped in from offshore gas fields hundreds of kilometres away.”

Despite the warnings from scientists, in late May, Environment Minister Murray Watt provisionally approved a 50-year expansion of the gas project, claiming the approval was subject to strict conditions to protect Murujuga.

However, those conditions remain a secret. The Australia Institute last week wrote to Minister Watt requesting the conditions be made public.

“Keeping the conditions secret prevents public scrutiny and undermines public trust and accountability,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

He wore what he wanted, and if a lounge suit didn’t suit then the event didn’t suit him.

When being sworn into the Privy Council, he simply refused to partake in the elaborate ceremony and in response to the exasperated Lord Chamberlain, just calmly said “I’ll bet you two bob I’m still allowed in”.

He won the bet.

Chifley was an engine driver before he was a parliamentarian, and he made sure he would wear his working-class blue shirt in rooms where the worker should be represented.

It was a political signal – he was a union man, for the worker, and he made sure his dress, when necessary, represented his origins.

Curtin had workers at the heart of his sartorial signals as well. He was, as Stuart Macintyre wrote in Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, “determined to make the Labor Party respectable” and dressed in a three-piece suit.

For him, he wanted the worker to be respected when Labor MPs were in the sorts of rooms that workers at the time would be barred entry.

Greg Combet would make a point of rolling up his sleeves when in meetings, which once helped mark the difference between unionists and the capital class.

Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t the first war-time leader to wear military garb as a link to his people – Winston Churchill spent much of World War II in the nautical uniform of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

These signals matter. They’re a public display of a politician’s values and priorities.