US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.  

Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.

These pivotal interests or issues that should concern the nominal or ideological left, at least in the Anglosphere, are antipathy towards the EU, liberal democracy, open society, human rights etc. while supporting Brexit, Trump, fossil fuels, climate/Covid science denial, doubts and delays to transition; and attacks on civil society through dog whistling of women’s, men’s, LGBT, etc. rights and ridiculing the ‘left’ for ‘wokeness’, ‘cancel culture’ etc.

‘Fox News deals in Kremlin propaganda. So why not freeze Rupert Murdoch’s assets?

Nick Cohen

If NewsCorp’s owner were Russian, there would be no hesitation in applying sanctions

If the west could find the courage, it would order an immediate freeze of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. His Fox News presenters and Russia’s propagandists are so intermeshed that separating the two is as impossible as unbaking a cake.

On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the 40 countries supporting Ukraine were “today’s collective Hitler”, viewers were told last week – to the apocalyptic delirium of the boss of RT (Russia Today) Margarita Simonyan. Nuclear war is my “horror”, she shuddered, “but we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak”.

Russia would never give genuine western journalists airtime. But it can always find a slot for its favourite quisling: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He pushes out Russian propaganda lines or perhaps creates his own lies for Russia to use. Ukraine, not Russia, is the real tyranny. Nato provoked poor Vladimir Putin. The west is plotting to use biological weapons. Last week, he floated the theory that the war was not the result of an unprovoked invasion by a colonialist dictatorship but of the Biden administration’s desire to avenge Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

It was a big hit in Moscow, reported BuzzFeed’s Julia Davis. “State TV propagandists loved it so much, Russia’s 60 Minutes included it not once, but twice in their evening broadcast – neatly bookended by the Kremlin’s war propaganda.”

Putin’s appeal to both the far right and the Chomskyan wing of the far left in Europe and North America is worthy of a study in itself. He was a dream for ultra-reactionaries: a white, Christian strongman, who was anti-liberal and anti-EU. His victories heralded a world in which might was right and morality was for losers.

In Europe, Russia’s atrocities have forced everyone from Arron Banks and Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini to find urgent reasons to change the subject. In the US, there remains a market for Putinism among a large minority of Republican voters. Their yearning for dictatorship, as evidenced by the support given to denying legitimate election results and to the fascistic forces that stormed Congress, is greater. The hatred of liberals in power is deeper.

Murdoch is boosting Russian morale and, conversely, undermining Ukrainian resolve by supplying a dictatorship with foreign validation. Do not underestimate its importance. Russians who suspect their TV anchors are state-sponsored bootlickers are more likely to believe foreign commentators who assure them that the lies they are hearing are true. 

Reporters risk their lives but Putin cannot fire or imprison Fox News presenters, steal their wealth or poison them with Novichok. Russian forces will not reduce their towns to rubble, rape them, torture them, burn them alive in theatres or shoot them in the head by the side of forest roads. Murdoch and his employees have nothing to fear from Putin. Their endorsement of Kremlin war propaganda carries conviction because it is freely given.

Murdoch boosts Russian morale and undermines Ukrainian resolve by supplying a dictatorship with foreign validation.

As useful to Russia is the wider chilling effect. I have seen journalists start off making eloquent and plausible critiques of the left’s hatred of free speech, for instance, or its tolerance of regressive religion, only to find that careers in the worst of the rightwing media come with a price tag. To succeed on Fox News in the US, they don’t have to agree with banning abortion or denying climate change but they must never make their objections public.

The UK’s sanctions regulations include among the reasons for freezing an oligarch’s assets “obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”. The Biden White House promises to punish those “responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putin’s war on Ukraine”. On both interpretations, there is a plausible prosecution case for freezing the assets of Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

Because it is a media conglomerate, sanctions would be an attack on free speech. I say this plainly because so many writers and political actors pretend that they are not demanding censorship when that is precisely what they are doing. Nevertheless, in this case the threat to freedom is minimal. Murdoch would not be punished for revealing embarrassing truths about the west but for spreading demonstrable lies for a hostile foreign power.

If you still feel queasy, imagine if Murdoch’s media organisation were exactly as it is today and producing the same arguments the Kremlin uses to justify its crimes. The one difference is that Murdoch is Russian rather than Australian. I don’t believe there would be the slightest hesitation in removing him and his family from control of their businesses. Indeed, the UK, EU and US have already announced sanctions against Russian broadcasters and individual journalists. I have not heard anyone claim that they are attacking press freedom, rather than trying to cripple the propaganda capacity of a warmongering state.

The Murdoch empire contains the Times and Wall Street Journal, whose Russian coverage has been admirable, and HarperCollins, which with a bravery few other publishers would match, fought off a vicious legal assault by the Russian oligarchy and their pet London lawyers against a critical study of Putin’s power.

But good deeds count for nothing in assessing the desirability of sanctions. The tycoon Oleg Tinkov spoke for many rich Russians when he denounced the “massacre” in Ukraine and called for an end to the “crazy war”. The oligarchs the west has sanctioned are losing their fortunes and what little influence they had. Of course they hate Putin’s strategy. Western governments don’t care because, as Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institute explains it to me, they know that a large portion of oligarchical wealth is at Putin’s disposal. Their private thoughts and, when they dare risk assassination attempts, public protests are irrelevant. The need to end war in Europe comes first.

Tender-hearted readers may object that Murdoch is now 90 and may well not be in full control of his organisation. But surely this is an argument for removing him? If in his dotage he is allowing himself to become a cross between Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, it would be a kindness for western governments to save him from himself.

For related articles on EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Media, Political Strategy, Russia and White Nationalism click through:

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

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Neo Conservative Rasputins? Putin and Dugin – Trump and Bannon – Johnson, Brexit and Cummings

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.

Madison Grant was born in the 19th century and is still influential from his work in early 20th century round eugenics, conservation and issues of liberal democracy; Grant actually though that ‘non-experts’ should not be involved in democracy and education should not be encouraged (Grant 1919) .

‘Grant was among the most vocal and strident supporters of a eugenic approach to social control, and virtually every historian who has dealt with the eugenics movement mentions or discusses Grant’s work to some extent.’ (Regal 2004).

It has been suggested that Grant’s selective views round eugenics and humanity were developed by changing demographics in north east US with increasing numbers of non WASP or non Nordic immigrants, claiming a ‘great replacement’ (Hoff 2020).

Around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, after the ‘melting pot’ era, is when more focus appeared on the supposed need for immigration restrictions and the realisation from WWI that WASPs were being outnumbered by immigrants; again the ‘great replacement’ (Grant 1924).

Themes or areas Grant explored, researched, wrote and promoted, included politics, class, environment, heredity, ‘intellectual’ racism, reproduction, race betterment and that of families, AER American Eugenics Research, Birth Control League & Planned Parenthood, AES American Eugenics Society, immigration restrictions, population control and ‘the great replacement’ leading onto extremism (Grant 1919).

Further, Grant uses the expression ‘internationalisation’ versus nowadays ‘globalisation’ which is used as a pejorative term by the right and left in politics, but for Grant possibly suggested miscegenation too? Grant went further, highlighting the importance of race by claiming Nordic bourgeoisie are being ruined by Alpine peasants, and also challenges valuable ethnic elements of Russia, versus Europe (Ibid.).

Eugenics Organisations

Grant was known for his book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” of ideas masquerading as science, antipathy towards non Nordic versus Nordic, who were being overtaken by Alpine or Mediterranean types. Was this an example of the emerging ‘great replacement’ trope that has returned of late (Purdy 2015)?

Interest in eugenics brought the ‘Embryo Project’ along with ‘Experimental Evolution’, ‘Race Betterment Foundation’ and the ERO Eugenics Records Office. (Gur-Arie 2014). A collaborator Grant’s was Charles Davenport who was influential in founding the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 which acted as a research laboratory and repository for genealogical data in Cold Spring Harbour New York (Regal 2004).

Grant founded or was involved in many organisations, but the ongoing theme was always related to eugenics. These organisations included AES American Eugenics Society established by Grant, Laughlin, Crampton, Fisher and Osborn to manage reproduction, in 1924 (Gur-Arie 2014). AES presented at fairs promoting contests round ‘Fitter Families’ and statistical analysis of ‘able bodied’ compared to ‘degenerates’. Gur-Arie, R. (Ibid.). Perkins founded the ‘Birth Control League’, founded by Margaret Sanger, the precursor of ‘Planned Parenthood’ (Ibid.).

AES Under Huntington 1934-8 moved from promoting positive eugenics to negative eugenics whereby the latter need to be discouraged from breeding (Gur-Arie 2014). In 1939, Eugenical News moved to the Eugenics Research Association to the AES and till the mid 1950s was the primary source of eugenics news (Ibid.).

Before Grant established the Galton Society in 1918 he was already a member, and President 1918 to 1919 of the Eugenics Research Association, plus member of American Defense League and the Immigration Restriction League. He was also involved in Second (‘21) and Third (‘32) International Eugenics Congresses hosted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that gave Harry H. Laughlin and Ernst Rüdin, some infamy (Hoff 2020).

Influencers & Influence

In 1905 Thomas Dixon’s novel ‘The Clansman’ appeared and had an account of the Ku Klux Klan as people became aware of Negro migration to the north. (McDaniel 1997). Grant also related conservation of nature and wildlife to racial science; still apparent today under the guise of population growth (Ibid.).

Around the time of Theodore Roosevelt pre WWI, Grant developed the “racialist moment” emerging with eugenics and intellectual racism till the Great Depression. ‘Conservationists’ like Grant and others were criticised for having more moral concern for the environment and non-human life than they did for human beings in general, who they wished to avoid; suggesting a class system (Purdy 2015).

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 also drew upon Grant’s support and legal expertise in drafting and lobbying for immigration restrictions (Hoff 2020). According to Grant the Nordic people were superior, his book ‘The Passing of the Great Race’ was described by Hitler as his ‘bible’ and was produced by the defence as evidence of eugenics not being a German phenomenon at Nuremberg trials, but introduced by the US (Ibid). The same also allegedly influenced immigration policies in the British Empire or Anglosphere and the need to screen for ‘hereditary fitness’ to exclude ‘mentally defective’ (McDaniel 1997).

Kühl demonstrated that the impact of American eugenics was also strongly felt in Nazi Germany, where the works of Grant, Stoddard, and other American eugenicists were standard citations (Whitman 2018). After 1933 the glory days of eugenics were threatened by Nazism favouring ‘negative eugenics’ (McDaniel 1997).

Eugenics Post WWI and later 20th Century

During the ‘60s at Princeton a crossover between geneticists and population or demographic specialists emerged whereby scientists linked social/physical environment factors with heredity and human development. (Gur-Arie 2014)

While growth or interest in the Sierra Club on conservation emerged in the ‘70s, William Vogt encouraged eugenics to alleviate what was viewed, unscientifically, as overpopulation. This then led onto ZPG Zero Population Growth with Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich who seemed affected on environment by a revelatory visit to Delhi in India where he was confronted with humanity, poverty and slum, blaming overpopulation (Purdy 2015).

Grant has had strong influence over time from his own writing, efforts round eugenics research, informing immigration policies, in addition to influencing both Britain and Nazi Germany, then for eugenics to be submerged within other manifestations including immigration and population growth.

References

Grant, M., (1919). DISCUSSION OF ARTICLE ON DEMOCRACY AND HEREDITY Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-abstract/10/4/164/818813 by University of California Santa Barbara/Davidson Library user on 24 March 2018

Grant, M., (1924). The Racial Transformation of America. The North American Review. Mar., 1924, Vol. 219, No. 820 (Mar., 1924), pp. 343- 352 Published by: University of Northern Iowa Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25113246

Gur-Arie, R., (2014). “American Eugenics Society (1926-1972)”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2014-11-22). ISSN: 1940-5030 http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/8241.

Hoff, A., (2020). “Madison Grant (1865–1937)”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2021-06-20). ISSN: 1940-5030 http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/13278. Show full item record (https://hpsrepository.asu.edu/handle/10776/13278)

McDaniel, G., (1997). Madison Grant and the Racialist Movement – The distinguished origins of racial activism. American Renaissance. Vol. 8, No. 12 December 1997

Purdy, J., (2015). New Yorker Environmentalism’s Racist History. August 13, 2015 [Viewed 2 May 2022]. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history

Regal, B., (2004). Madison Grant, Maxwell Perkins, and Eugenics Publishing at Scribner’s, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 317- 342 Published by: Princeton University Library Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.65.2.0317

Whitman, J (2018). Hitler’s American Model The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 33, Issue 2, Fall 2019, Pages 277–279, Princeton University Press https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcz039

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Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine many commentators, journalists, academic and political activists, of both left and right, who have seem to have acted in the interests of Putin’s Russia, why?

Many within or influenced by the US radical right libertarian Koch Network of think tanks and related organisations e.g. Fox News, which have promoted views that seem to support Putin e.g. claims of fake news on Ukraine civilian deaths, blaming NATO, appeasing Putin and demanding no economic sanctions.

US journalist and researcher Judd Legum of Popular Information has published several articles including those relevant to Putin’s Russia and influence of Koch Network on others e.g. Professor John Mearsheimer, who has been directing blame at NATO, then Russian Foreign Ministry citing his statements in support of their ‘special operation’ in UKraine.

This is in addition to a previous article titled ‘EXCLUSIVE: Koch group says U.S. should deliver partial “victory” to Russia in Ukraine’

‘In an internal email obtained exclusively by Popular Information, Stand Together, the influential non-profit group run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, argues that the United States should seek to deliver a partial “victory” to Russia in Ukraine.‘

The main article for this blog follows:

‘Koch-funded analyst raises doubts about Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians

Judd Legum  Apr 18

A foreign policy analyst with extensive ties to the non-profit network operated by Charles Koch publicly cast doubt about whether Russian forces are attacking civilians in Ukraine. The analyst, Professor John Mearsheimer, also suggested that, if Russian forces have attacked civilians, such attacks would be justified. While offering excuses for Russia, Mearsheimer appeared to pin the blame for civilian deaths on the actions of the American government. 

Mearsheimer’s claims — which mirror those from the Russian Defense Ministry — are contradicted by photographic, videographic, and testimonial evidence of what has occurred in Bucha and other areas of Ukraine. 

Mearsheimer statements about Ukrainian civilians came during an April 7 discussion hosted by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation. Toward the end of the hour-long event Mearsheimer said the following as part of his closing remarks (emphasis added):

‘You talked about Putin targeting civilians, or the Russians targeting civilians. It’s obviously very hard to tell what’s exactly happened here. But with that caveat in mind, you want to remember that the Americans have been pushing to arm civilians in Ukraine and to tell those civilians to fight against the Russians. So by definition, in lots of the firefights that have taken place and will take place. Russians are going to be fighting against civilians because those civilians are fighting against the Russians. So just remember, this is a very complicated business.’   

Mearsheimer was responding to French historian Marlene Laruelle who, much earlier in the event, had described the Russian operation as “a full-scale invasion targeting civilians.” At no point did Mearsheimer acknowledge that unarmed Ukrainian civilians were being targeted and killed by Russian forces. (You can watch Mearsheimer’s comments, and the full event, here.) 

Mearsheimer’s comments on Ukrainian civilians are consistent with his broader views on the war, blaming the United States while excusing or justifying Russian aggression. Writing in The Economist on March 11, Mearsheimer asserted that “The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis.” A similar article, published by Mearsheimer after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, was promoted on February 28, by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In an television appearance on April 14, Mearsheimer said the United States should end assistance to the Ukranians and work to create “some sort of alliance with the Russians.” 

He made a similar argument in a March 1 interview with the New Yorker: “[W]e should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians.” In the same interview, Mearsheimer said that it was “not feasible” for the Ukranians “to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.” Instead, Mearsheimer says, Ukraine must “accommodate the Russians.”

Mearsheimer has been an outspoken opponent of economic sanctions against Russia, suggesting in a recent interview that economic sanctions against Russia increase the chances of a nuclear war. 

How Charles Koch supports John Mearsheimer

Mearsheimer is supported by Stand Together, the non-profit network run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, in numerous ways. Mearsheimer received direct funding from the Koch network for his latest book, The Great Delusion, which was published in 2018. “I want to thank the Charles Koch Foundation for helping to fund my research and book workshop,” Mearsheimer writes in the acknowledgements section. 

Mearsheimer also currently holds positions at two institutions that receive substantial support from the Koch network. He is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, which was started with $500,000 donations from both the Charles Koch Institute and the Open Societies Foundation, the non-profit vehicle of liberal billionaire George Soros. Mearsheimer is also on the advisory board of The National Interest, which received a $900,000, two-year grant from the Charles Koch Institute in 2020.

Mearsheimer is featured regularly at Koch network events. In November 2021, he was billed at a Stand Together foreign policy event as one “of the sharpest thinkers in foreign policy.” He was a featured speaker at the 2021 John Quincy Adams Society conference, another Stand Together event. Mearsheimer has been speaking at Koch network events since at least 2016.

At an “emergency” conference on Ukraine, held on March 31, 2022, Dan Caldwell, the Vice President for Foreign Policy at Stand Together, reportedly “denounced the fierceness of the ongoing attacks on Mearsheimer.”

Caldwell did not respond to a request for comment about what attacks on Mearsheimer he believed were unwarranted. Caldwell and Stand Together also did not respond to inquiries about whether the organizations had any objections to Mearsheimer’s recent comments about Ukraine, including Ukrainian civilians. 

Mearsheimer’s ongoing affiliation with the Koch network raises further questions about the network’s positions on Russia and its relationship to Charles Koch’s for-profit business, Koch Industries, one of a handful of American companies that continues full operations in Russia. 

The overwhelming evidence that Russian forces are committing atrocities against Ukrainian civilians

Mearsheimer’s claims belie extensive evidence of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. On April 4, for example, the New York Times published satellite photographs showing “the bodies of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha — some with their hands bound, some with gunshot wounds to the head.” The Associated Press “published images of at least six dead men lying together in the rear of an office building, some with hands tied behind their backs.” The fact that some of the dead were found with their hands bound is not consistent with the notion that these civilians were killed in battle. A video published April 5 by the New York Times shows a Russian armored vehicle gunning down a civilian in Bucha walking alongside his bicycle. 

Jake Sullivan, the White House National Security advisor, said on April 4, that the images from Bucha constitute evidence of “atrocities” and “war crimes.”

The issues are not limited to Bucha. On April 4, Amnesty International said it “has gathered evidence of civilians in Ukraine killed by indiscriminate attacks in Kharkiv and Sumy Oblast, documented an airstrike that killed civilians queueing for food in Chernihiv, and gathered evidence from civilians living under siege in Kharkiv, Izium and Mariupol.” The group published extensive testimonial and photographic evidence on April 1. 

Mearsheimer’s views are consistent with those of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which claimed that “not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action” in Bucha. Russia said that the photographs and videos were “another hoax, a staged production and provocation by the Kiev regime for the Western media.” Russia claimed that the bodies emerged only after Russian forces left Bucha, a timeline that has been conclusively debunked. 

Mearsheimer and the denial of historical atrocities

In 2011, Mearsheimer provided an effusive blurb for a book by Gilad Atzmon, who has questioned the reality of the Holocaust. “Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world… The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike,” Mearsheimer wrote. 

In a 2010 article, Atzmon raised doubts about the Holocaust, saying that people should “ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments” rather than “follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.” In the same article, Atzmon asserted that the “Holocaust became the new Western religion… it is the most sinister religion known to man.” Neither the content of the book nor Atzmon’s prior comments stopped Mearsheimer from endorsing Atzmon’s work. 

Popular Information asked Mearsheimer if he was aware of Atzmon’s questioning of the Holocaust prior to endorsing his book. Mearsheimer did not respond to that inquiry or questions about his recent comments on Ukraine.’

For more Koch, Putin, Russia and Ukraine related articles and blogs click through below:

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Putin’s Russia – Dugin – Alt Right – White Christian Nationalism – the Anglosphere and Europe

Neo Conservative Rasputins? Putin and Dugin – Trump and Bannon – Johnson, Brexit and Cummings

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

GOP Republicans’ Future – Democracy or Autocracy?

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism

We have observed the rise of neo authoritarian conservative leaders using nativism and sociocultural issues with media PR support to inform the public, especially voters, suboptimally, including east and west.

However, there are pitfalls for democracy in manipulating access to information by the public or electorate, not just feeding the needs of narcissistic leaders (see article below ‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons’), but developing societal collective narcissism for populism and electoral advantage aka Brexit, also observed in Hungary, Turkey and Russia.

Often the target are older cohorts of voters who are less educated and diverse but dominate electoral rolls, hence, the descriptor ‘pensioner populism’ based on sociocultural issues and the same voters being praised and real or imagined threats inflated; according to Campanella see ‘Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism’. 

This can lead to permanent changes and dilution of liberal democracy for the 1% e.g. oligarchs, politicians and supporters, with friendly legislation that doesn’t attract media nor public attention, leading to ‘owned democracy’ and corruption.

Added to increasing evidence of narcissism in society has been the commensurate rise in cognitive dissonance witnessed when observing supporters, sympathisers, willing dupes and useful idiots, of left and right, unable to criticise Putin’s invasion of Ukraine due to implicit support for Putin or Russia, which can lead to the following and promoting of conspiracy theories.

Cognitive dissonance is described by Festinger in Scientific American as:

‘According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.’

‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons

by Michael Maccoby   From the HBR Magazine (January 2004)

Summary

In the winter of 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, business leaders posed for the covers of Time, BusinessWeek, and the Economist with the aplomb and confidence of rock stars. These were a different breed from their counterparts of just ten or 20 years before, who shunned the press and whose comments were carefully crafted by corporate PR departments.

Such love of the limelight often stems from what Freud called a narcissistic personality, says psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby in this HBR classic first published in the January–February 2000 issue.

Narcissists are good for companies in extraordinary times, those that need people with the passion and daring to take them in new directions. But narcissists can also lead companies into disaster by refusing to listen to the advice and warnings of their managers. It’s not always true, as Andy Grove famously put it, that only the paranoid survive.

Most business advice is focused on the more analytic personality that Freud labeled obsessive. But recommendations about creating teamwork and being more receptive to subordinates will not resonate with narcissists. They didn’t get where they are by listening to others, so why should they listen to anyone when they’re at the top of their game?

Narcissists who want to overcome the limits of their personalities must work as hard at that as they do at business success. One solution is to find a trusted sidekick, who can point out the operational requirements of the narcissistic leader’s often overly grandiose vision and keep him rooted in reality. Another is to take a leap of faith and go into psychoanalysis, which can give these leaders the tools to overcome their sometimes fatal character flaws.

Weaknesses of the Narcissistic Leader

Despite the warm feelings their charisma can evoke, narcissists are typically not comfortable with their own emotions. They listen only for the kind of information they seek. They don’t learn easily from others. They don’t like to teach but prefer to indoctrinate and make speeches. They dominate meetings with subordinates. The result for the organization is greater internal competitiveness at a time when everyone is already under as much pressure as they can possibly stand. Perhaps the main problem is that the narcissist’s faults tend to become even more pronounced as he becomes more successful.’

For more related articles click through Ageing Democracy, Demography, Political Strategy, Populist Policies & Russia, plus blogs following:

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World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

An excellent article from Hélène Barthélemy for SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center titled ‘How the World Congress of Families serves Russian Orthodox political interests’ highlighting issues in Russia and links to others through World Congress of Families across Europe, the Anglosphere or US especially and elsewhere, influencing political influencers and impacting electoral politics.

Most would be familiar with the issues cited round the WCF World Congress of Families i.e. Orthodox anti-LGBT hate agitprop, family values, claiming persecution if western Christians, gay marriage, Alliance Defending Freedom ADF, nostalgia for the strong Russia of old, Anti EU and cosying up to befriend neo-Nazis and the far-right.

How the World Congress of Families serves Russian Orthodox political interests

May 16, 2018

Hélène Barthélemy

Hacked emails show how the American-run World Congress of Families advanced Russian political interests in Europe while offering Russian Orthodox oligarchs an entry point into U.S.-based Christian evangelical networks. 

In September 2014, the World Congress of Families representative in Russia, Alexey Komov, was contacted by a young woman who had spoken at a congress in Moscow on “Large Families: The Future of Humanity” a week earlier. Upon her return, she wrote, she had been harassed by American authorities. She was worried:

Since I returned to the USA, I have been living a nightmare in terms of finding myself—to my surprise—intimidated and harassed by the local authorities (first Homeland security in Houston, then Houston Police Department, EMS!) trailed by numerous cars when I leave my house and when I return, even at night, under surveillance elsewhere, and otherwise having my personal space bizarrely impinged upon, not only when I drive my car, but when I ride my bicycle. Absurd. I have reason to believe my Internet and cell phone use have also became the object of scrutiny. I realize the seriousness of what I am reporting and am scandalized and horrified to think what all this may imply.

The “Large Families” forum had already led to diplomatic conflict. The forum was initially organized by the influential World Congress of Families (WCF), an American-based Christian evangelical organization. An SPLC-designated anti-LGBT hate group, the WCF is dedicated to halting the spread of LGBT rights overseas in the name of the defense of the “natural family,” which they define as a husband and wife and their biological children. Since increasing its presence in Russia around 2011 after hiring Komov as a regional representative, in 2014 the WCF was planning its annual congress in Moscow. Like every year, the congress would unite anti-LGBT activists and politicians from all over the world.

But in February 2014, Russia’s invasion of Crimean territory in eastern Ukraine put a damper on those plans. The country was torn by protests in response to then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yakunovych’s decision to withdraw from an agreement with the European Union (E.U.) and move closer to Russia economically and politically. The situation eventually devolved into a full-blown civil war. The E.U. and the United States faced off against Russia’s desire to expand its influence and territory in Ukraine. As retaliation after the Crimean invasion, the U.S. and E.U. decided to sanction the high-level individuals who had been involved in the invasion, in which many WCF allies and backers soon found themselves embroiled.

For fear of American sanctions, the WCF’s American leadership publicly dropped its affiliation to the congress. Despite WCF officially pulling out, behind closed doors, a nearly identical conference was held the same day with a similar program, similar attendees, and — initially — the WCF listed as organizers. It was even attended by WCF communications director Don Feder and late managing director Larry Jacobs. Though Komov mentioned the WCF were organizers in the media, Jacobs maintained it was not.

As a new look at a trove of emails released in 2014 by the Russian hacker collective Shaltai Boltai (Humpty Dumpty) reveals, the 2014 Moscow Congress was just the tip of the iceberg. WCF’s involvement in Russian geopolitics runs deep and led to a collaboration that gave Russian Orthodox oligarchs apparent access to the powerful American Christian evangelical political machine. 

“Persecutions against Christians in the West will soon begin”

Komov has been the WCF’s representative in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (formed by 10 former Soviet Republics) for close to two decades. An influential man, he is deeply intertwined with various key figures within the Russian Orthodox Church. The young woman who wrote him was hoping he could help her with some advice, despite “the delicate situation in which our countries, quite unfortunately, find themselves.” 

After speaking to her, Komov emailed Konstantin Malofeev, one of the Russian Orthodox oligarch who bankrolled the “Large Families” forum in Moscow. As the founder of the investment company Marshall Capital, Malofeev heads the largest Orthodox charity in Russia, St. Basil the Great, which has a budget of over $40 million. Komov leads one of its charities. Both Komov and Malofeev are intimately tied to various facets of Russian politics, and Malofeev has a hand in everything from media to technology to security.

In his email to Malofeev, Komov suggested they bring the young woman’s case to trial in the U.S., fearing that her story revealed that “open persecutions against Christians in the West will soon begin.” To do so they could put the powerful American Christian evangelical apparatus in motion:

“Can discuss the plan of action with Brian [presumably, Brian Brown, who would become the president of the WCF but was then head of WCF ally National Organization for Marriage] to start? We can attract our best lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom or HLSDA, start collecting signatures under the appropriate petition all over the world through CitizenGO and launch a large-scale campaign in the press about this egregious case. It can turn out to be an excellent nationwide campaign, the guys from Personhood deal with such cases. If you do not answer with dignity, then they will break down and terrorize the entire American movement. What do you think?” 

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is the most powerful Christian Right legal group in the U.S. and known for its recent case before the Supreme Court representing a baker who refused to provide service for a gay couple. The SPLC designates the ADF as a hate group. 

After Malofeev expressed skepticism at the authenticity of the young woman’s story, the men decided to run a background check on her. Based on the results, Komov abandoned the idea of a legal case, believing the young woman to be a plant. “Having carefully studied the profile of our martyr I am almost sure that she is sent to us,” he wrote Malofeev. 

Though the case itself never left the brainstorming stage, the email provides a rare look into how the U.S.-based WCF network operates and how its Russian representatives seek to impact American political and judicial discourse. It is only a small example of how the WCF network has been appropriated to serve as a soft power platform for the strategic interests of a small group of Russian Orthodox oligarchs.

A global alliance between Orthodox and Catholics

In 2013, Austin Ruse, who heads the U.S.-based Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam is also an SPLC-designated anti-LGBT hate group and part of the WCF network) recalledafter meeting Malofeev: “[Malofeev] wonders if some sort of grand global alliance between the Orthodox and Catholics can be achieved and what effect that might have on the global culture war advanced by the sexual left. I wonder, too.” 

An interfaith but overwhelmingly Christian network of global anti-LGBT “pro-family” allies, the WCF is an ideal platform to unify otherwise disparate groups. Anti-LGBT sentiment is the linchpin of opposition to the human-rights driven “liberalism” of the United Nations, the E.U. and, until recently, the U.S. While vehemently opposed to American cultural expansionism (equated to “the sexual left”), the WCF has become increasingly linked to some of the most prominent advocates for Russian expansionism.

Since the start of Putin’s third presidency in 2012, contemporary Russia has been defined by a “muscular, politically tinged Orthodox Christianity,” as Russian expert Charles Clover writes in Black Wind, White Snow. One feature of this Orthodoxy is “pro-family” values. Another is nostalgia for the strong Russia of old, united by Russian Orthodox values with its influence rippling across Europe, advanced by cultural, political or military means. Malofeev is a perfect embodiment of this duality, and one of Orthodox Russia’s most powerful figureheads. 

A longtime funder of anti-LGBT “pro-family values” in Russia through his foundation, Malofeev told The Financial Times, “I want the Russian Empire back. I don’t want to be head of it.” Malofeev is such a dedicated monarchist that he recently started a school to prepare the Russian elite’s youth for a future Russian monarchy. As he told the Guardian, he hopes Putin could be crowned tsar: “Everyone wants Putin to carry on forever.”

True to his expansionist ideals, Malofeev reportedly funded Russia’s 2014 Crimean invasion and is inextricably tied to it. Two of the leaders of the new pro-Russian Crimean Republic were his employees and also held short-lived minister positions in the rebel government of the self-declared Donetsk Republic, a Russian-backed separatist region in Ukraine. For his role in Crimea’s annexation and subsequent referendum, Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S.and the E.U.

Using anti-LGBT sentiment as a wedge in Eastern Europe

Besides Malofeev’s role, the 2014 “Large Families” congress was inseparable from the invasion. A number of congress attendees or supporters were eventually sanctioned by the U.S. and/or E.U. for their support of it. 

One, for instance, was Russia’s hard-right parliamentarian Elena Mizulina, author of the infamous 2013 law banning “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations” which led to a doubling of hate crimes against LGBT people in the five years since the law’s passage. At the “Large Families” congress, Mizulina led a legislative session in Russia’s lower chamber of parliament, the Duma, to teach attendees how to pass anti-LGBT legislation.

At the congress, Malofeev spoke on a topic dear to him during a panel on “Family Policy in Ukraine: Conclusions and Warnings for Russia.” He pointed out that the battle over LGBT issues was instrumental to the struggle over whether or not the country would join the E.U., which forbids discrimination against LGBT people for employment:

In Ukraine, which is our fraternal country, association with European Union was not signed last year because, in this case, the Ukrainians learned that they had to allow propagation of homosexuality and gay parades.

At this stage, the WCF had already placed pressure on some groups in Ukraine to move away from the E.U. by raising the specter of E.U.-imposed LGBT rights. Under Komov’s leadership, the WCF sent a delegation to Ukraine in October 2013 (only a few months before the Crimean annexation) and declared in its subsequent press release that:

The Ukrainian leaders expressed concern about the pressure brought to bear on their nation to accede to the homosexual agenda (including ‘gay marriage’) as a condition for membership in the European Union.

In fact, the E.U. does not require the legalization of same-sex marriage from its member states. One of the groups that the WCF met with in Ukraine, the All Ukrainians’ Parents Committee, declared: “We oppose the signing of the association agreement with the E.U., because it will lead to the inevitable homosexualizing of Ukraine.”  WCF leaders also met with some members of the Ukrainian parliament.

WCF’s involvement in the campaign to push Ukraine not to join the E.U. — and into the Russian fold — is not a coincidence. By all accounts, people shuttling through the WCF advocate for the same kind of agenda that Russian orthodox oligarchs have been pushing for. 

In April 2017, the former French WCF representative, Fabrice Sorlin, organized the first WCF regional conference in Paris. The list of events seemed oddly skewed towards the Balkans and Caucasus, featuring the following panels:

• Tactics and strategies of the gay lobby at the European Union
• Georgia’s Liberal Experience
• Russian Revival in the 21st century

• Europe or European Union – which way for Serbia?
• The aggressive anti-family policy of the European Union as a factor in destruction of Ukrainian statehood 

Sorlin is the former head of a brutal Catholic militia Dies Irae, whose mission was to prepare white French Catholic youth for a civil war against immigrants, black people and Muslims. He became the WCF French representative in 2013, during which time he traveled with the WCF leadership across Eastern Europe. Before his sudden death on April 30th, 2018, Larry Jacobs, the managing director of the International Organization for the Family, which oversees the WCF, denied that Sorlin was still employed when reached by Hatewatch. Sorlin, however, still lists his WCF position on his LinkedIn account.

The use of anti-LGBT politics by Russia to influence Eastern European countries to return to its fold and away from the E.U. has been well documented. This is a strategy that Putin has also used. For this, the WCF is a crucial platform.

In France, Sorlin was a non-negligible Russian ally: before his time at the WCF, Sorlin presided over the French group, Alliance France Europe Russia (AAFER). As historians Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg suggest, the AAFER was key in pushing the French far-right party, the National Front, toward Russia. 

In turn, Malofeev facilitated a loan of 2 million euros to the party from a Russian bank in 2014, when approached by National Front member Aymeric Chauprade, also a speaker at the “Large Families” congress. The WCF’s overseas allies, it turns out, are enmeshed in a network of extreme-right activists and politicians in Europe.

Eurasian networks: WCF members befriend neo-Nazis and the far-right 

In a piece written while serving as the WCF’s French representative, Sorlin supported the idea of an expanded Russia:

This Europe of the people and of nations would substitute technocratic Europe with a more traditional European civilization; it would promote Christianity within Europe, which has until now been dominated by the LGBT lobby. It must ally with Vladimir Putin’s Russia in order to create a version of Europe that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

This vision of a Europe led by Russia, also called Eurasianism, is one that is closely tied to the Russian Orthodox vision of the world. Its father, the influential ultra-nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, serves as the editorial director of Malofeev’s far-right Tsargrad TV channel. 

At its core, “Eurasia” is shorthand for Russian dominance of the Eurasian continent, though it is presented as a utopian vision for a unified but diverse civilizational bloc. For Dugin, who is fascinated with Nazi Germany, Eurasia would be a federation of countries led spiritually by Russia but Russia would be “the empire’s constitutive nation” and “the only national community within a supranational imperial complex.” 

Popular in white supremacist circles in Europe and the U.S., Dugin has identified white nationalists as potential allies for the Eurasian project insofar as they are traditionalists. Dugin was sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in the Crimean conflict. Since then, he and Malofeev have been involved in a plethora of influential foreign policy moves, seemingly not on behalf of the Russian state, though their reach leaves much to wonder. 

Dugin has been at the helm of a new strategic soft-power initiative, in which the WCF is also embroiled: a Eurasian conference, planned by Dugin alongside Emmanuel Leroy, the co-leader of the AAFER with Fabrice Sorlin. Leroy, who spoke at the same racist “White Forum” conference as white supremacist David Duke in 2007, has been involved with a shady pro-Russian “humanitarian” group in Ukraine.

A second installment of Dugin’s Eurasian conference was held in Chisinau, Moldova, in December 2017, and hosted by pro-Russian Moldovan president Igor Dodon. The WCF was present, with Alexey Komov attending. So did the Georgian WCF organizer and anti-LGBT activist, Levan Vasadze. Speakers and attendees included far-right figures, neo-Nazis and identitarians. 

The WCF ties to the Eurasian efforts seemed strengthened when it was announced that Moldova would also be the location of the next WCF congress, slated for September 2018. Moldova is currently in the midst of a tussle between pro-E.U. factions in the country, and pro-Russians, led by president Dodon. 

In August 2017, Dodon met with Malofeev to ask him to finance the upcoming congress according to Balkan Insight, which also alleges that Yakunin and Malofeev are the WCF’s main sponsors. Though WCF funding is hard to trace, as Christopher Stroop, a scholar focusing on Russia and the U.S. Christian Right, tells Hatewatch, “obviously [WCF] have a bigger budget than they let on.” 

Komov, though not directly involved in the Eurasian project despite being closely tied to its networks, might share its ideological vision. Emails released by the hacker collective Shaltai Boltai (Humpty Dumpty) show Komov emailing Dugin and Malofeev a picture of Serbia preparing for Putin’s visit with the caption “Our Serbs decorated the city for the arrival of Putin (the king of the Orthodox.)”

The emails also show Komov facilitating meetings between Malofeev and far-right and far-left European political figures. One email from November 2014 shows Komov emailing Roberto Fiore, the co-founder of the neo-fascist and violent Italian far-right party Forza Nuova. Fiore put Komov in touch with the far-right ELAM party in Cyprus, a Greek-only party that has ties to the neo-Nazi Greek party Golden Dawn.

In the email, Fiore, who seems to be planning on visiting Greece, also asks Komov to send a lawyer to a jail where leaders of the Greek Golden Dawn were being held: “can you send a lawyer for the 12 of December. We need name (sic) also to allow him, together with MEP and MP to enter the jail where the leaders of Golden Dawn are.”

Komov, referring to Fiore as “our pro-Russian Italian friend” then forwarded the email to the owner of the hacked account, Georgyi Gavrish. At the time, Gavrish was an employee at the Russian Embassy in Athens who, the emails show, is close to Dugin. He seems to have been running background checks on behalf of Komov and Malofeev. Komov wrote Gavrish:

“He [Fiore] asks if we can recommend lawyers and journalists in Athens – see below…”

What happened to the request is unclear. What is clearer is that the WCF’s Russian arm, through Komov, is intertwined with violent far-right political actors in Europe. More publicly, the WCF Russian representative is close to the Lega Nord (since renamed the Lega), the far-right anti-immigrant party that arrived at the top of the right-wing coalition in the recent Italian elections, which is a pro-Russian voice in Europe. Komov serves as the honorary president of the Associazione Culturale Lombardia Russia, ACLR, which orbits around Lega, and was essential to its formation.

As the cache of emails showed, Malofeev has also been a key agent in spreading Russian influence in various European countries. Malofeev sponsored a secret meeting for far-right parties in early March 2014 in Vienna through his Saint Basil the Great foundation, which he attended alongside Alexander Dugin. The meeting included Heinz-Christian Strache of the far-right Austrian party the FPÖ and presently Austria’s vice-chancellor; the National Front’s Aymeric Chauprade and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen; as well as far-right groups ranging from Bulgaria’s Ataka party to Spain’s monarchist and radical Catholic Carlist movement. It was meant to commemorate the alliance of Russia with Prussia and Austro-Hungary. At the meeting Dugin said: “We must conquer and join Europe. We are supported by a pro-Russian fifth column in Europe.” 

Malofeev, a WCF funder, Komov, the WCF’s Russian representative, and Sorlin, formerly the WCF’s French representative, seem to be working to advance a coherent geopolitical vision, which is not far from Dugin’s own Eurasian vision. 

It is unclear how enthusiastically the American leadership of the WCF is backing this civilizational project. The head of the International Organization for the Family and of WCF, Brian Brown, has been traveling to Moscow often, seemingly to promote his organization and to push for anti-LGBT legislation. The American leadership has made sympathetic statements about Russia and Hungary’s “illiberal” political regimes, with the late managing director of the WCF Larry Jacobs declaring that “the Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”

In choosing who to save, the alliance between WCF and Russian Orthodox oligarchs might be more selective than Noah putting together his ark, with its ferocious anti-LGBT sentiment and exclusive focus on heterosexual married unions. Nonetheless, Malofeev sees it as equally redemptive:

Civilization is on the verge of destruction, and only Russia can become a center of consolidation of all the healthy forces and resistance to the sodomization of the world, that is why the whole of Europe is looking at it with hope.’

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Recent events in Ukraine have increased scrutiny and highlighted influences upon President Putin in an autocratic regime, following on from the Czars with Orthodoxy, Nationalism and Rasputin, the Soviets could always claim Marx, Engels, Lenin, The Party et al., but for present day Russia, and Putin, Alexander Dugin is cited as a key influencer (who is manipulating whom?).

Further is there evidence of any relationship with the key influencers round Brexit UK or Trump’s America or Europe?

According to Dunlop (2004) via Stanford’s The Europe Center in ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics’, claimed that Dugin, a ‘a neo-fascist ideologue’ with other intellectuals is ‘interested in mysticism, paganism, and fascism’, ‘conservative revolution’, National Bolshevik Party, his theories partly adopted by the military, Russia as Eurasian, and backed up with some hierarchical views: ‘“Russians should realize that they are Orthodox in the first place; [ethnic] Russians in the second place; and only in the third place, people”. 

Further Dugin on America, echoes of Capitol Hill: ‘”It is especially important,” Dugin adds, “to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements– extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics“.

Martin Lee’s excellent (1997) ‘The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups & Right-wing Extremists‘ was prescient in highlighting movement of far right ideology post WWII including former Soviet Union, cited Dugin and also that a Putin like figure would emerge to take advantage of new expanded Presidential powers (plus e.g. funding far right in both Europe and US).

The Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin highlighted by Teitelbaum in New Statesman (8 Oct ’20) ‘The rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the right Steve Bannon, Russia’s Alexander Dugin and Brazil’s Olavo de Carvalho are united by their affinity with a spiritual movement that fundamentally rejects modernity…

…Repudiating the Enlightenment, traditionalists instead celebrate what they regard as timeless values. They honour precedence rather than progress, emphasise the spiritual over the material, and advocate surrender to the fundamental disparities – as opposed to equality – between humans and human destinies‘

In addition to Putin’s ‘project’, related is the UK oligarchs and (not limited to) Tory scandals, the US fossil fueled nativist libertarian ‘project’ which is being challenged; especially with the benefit of hindsight and scrutiny of Brexit and Trump.

Central in these nativist and/or conservative libertarian ‘projects’ were European and Anglo seers, with the former including far right politicians in Europe, funded by Putin including Le Pen or strongly influenced e.g. Hungary’s PM Orban.

However, in the Anglosphere of UK, US and Australia, eccentric figures have been promoted by the right also, often in the late John Tanton’s nativist Tanton Network, who had been an ideological muse of Steve Bannon, while in the UK central round Brexit and subsequent PM Johnson, was Dominic Cummings. 

While Bannon can be easily linked to the influence of Dugin in his ramblings masquerading as analysis and philosophy as New Statesman has done, Cummings can too,  This is reflected in his Russian connections, his writings and Brexit campaign; Gordon of the North East Bylines UK has stated as much in (3 August 2020)  ‘Cummings, Brexit and Russia: Part 1‘ highlighting Cumming’s attitude towards immigration and the EU, in attempts by Cummings to justify his antipathy.

Finally China and Russia, and although there is an agreement for cooperation on the old ‘Silk Road’ or the Belt & Road Initiative with China, one assumes the Chinese security services and academia have studied Dugun closely; if not they should, why?

Not only did he state that Ukraine needed to be part of Russia, and assumed unity in the Orthdox Church in regional states (absolutely untrue as ‘2021 schism between Greek and Russian Churches showed) he stated:

‘China, which represents a danger to Russia, “must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled”. Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia–Manchuria as a security belt.  Russia should offer China help “in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia” as geopolitical compensation.’ (Johnson, 2004).

What do President Xi and The Party think of that?

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A recent Open Democracy UK article by Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on foreign affairs ‘If the UK wants to push back against Russia, it should follow the money’, warning of what is well known in the UK and elsewhere, City of London especially, and Britain (of course lack of clarity round the Trump campaign and Russian influence). 

They have become magnets for hot or dark money of oligarchs including Russian, Ukrainian, African, Asian etc. to be laundered by British enablers and/or donate in support of more imported radical right libertarian policies of the Tories including climate denial or delays on substantive action.

This has been doubled down on by CEE & Russia security & energy expert Edward Lucas, and it also contradicts the messaging of the Tories and Brexit. They were claiming that Brexit was for ‘sovereignty’, but whose sovereignty? Certainly not about ‘sovereignty’ of British institutions, and neither Russian nor Ukrainian citizens who are law abiding? 

Seems more like the acceptance by the Anglosphere and globally of authoritarianism, dictatorship, fossil fuels/mining, climate science denial, few if any robust environmental policies, libertarian socioeconomics, white exceptionalism, kleptocracy and freedom for the 0.1%, but the majority of citizens are not empowered and need to be quiet?

The Open Democracy article follows:  

‘If the UK wants to push back against Russia, it should follow the money

Britain’s lax approach to dirty money makes it a target for Russian interference, but the government has done nothing about it. Now is the time to take action.

Layla Moran

26 January 2022, 1.01pm

The severity of the crisis currently playing out on the borders of Ukraine cannot be underestimated. This is the closest Europe has come to war in almost three decades.

At this moment of danger, it is vital that Britain plays its part and shows Putin that aggression comes at a high price – one not worth paying. But I am hugely concerned that, while our rhetoric might be tough, our actions are febrile.

It is not just worrying diplomatic missteps, like the foreign secretary’s decision to chase the sun in Australia rather than attend a vital meeting regarding the crisis in Berlin. The UK government has signalled time and again that it does not take Russian meddling in the UK seriously. If we do not take action to stop Putin from interfering in our country, how on earth are we meant to convince anyone that we will act robustly when he violates the integrity and sovereignty of other nations?

Successive reports from the foreign affairs and intelligence committees have warned of interference in the UK by Putin’s cronies. Successive Conservative governments have ignored them.

The 2018 Foreign Affairs Committee report, ‘Moscow’s Gold’, warned: “Turning a blind eye to London’s role in hiding the proceeds of Kremlin-connected corruption risks signalling that the UK is not serious about confronting the full spectrum of President Putin’s offensive measures”.

Until ministers take action on this front, our response to Russian aggression towards Ukraine will be toothless. Yet what has the government done in response? Absolutely nothing.

Similarly, the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report, published in 2020, warns that there are “lots of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene”. Two years on not a single one of the recommendations made to the UK government have been implemented. Concerns about Russian interference extend into UK politics too – in particular, the well-documented close links between Russian money and the Conservative Party.

One easy way the UK government could take action to prevent Putin’s cronies meddling in our country would be to introduce legislation to ensure Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs can’t flood dirty money into the UK property market. Buying a property in the UK is, as it turns out, an incredibly easy way to launder money. You don’t need to declare who the ultimate, or beneficial, owner of that property is. So if it’s one of Putin’s corrupt cronies, all they would need to do is set up a holding company, often in a tax haven, and appoint someone else as director. It has been estimated that more than £1bn of suspicious Russian wealth rests in UK property.

The UK government does – in theory – admit this is not a sensible way to run things. Back in 2016, David Cameron promised to take action so that the ultimate owner of a property would have to declare who they were. But more than five years on, no such law exists. It hasn’t been introduced to Parliament. In 2018, the government took a draft version of this bill through the advance scrutiny stages that often take place before legislation is formally passed through Parliament. But these efforts went no further. The draft bill remains on the shelf, gathering dust. The UK government could sort this out in a matter of weeks, if not days, if it wanted to.

The government won’t take action to stop Russian interference in the UK. So I did. Last week, I introduced a bill to Parliament that would bring that transparency and help stamp out Russian corruption in the UK property market, using the text of the draft bill that the government shelved. It would send a signal to Putin that we will tackle him head on. And it had wide cross-party support – because this isn’t about party politics. It’s about national security.

The measures the UK government can and should take do not stop there. We must go further: making our democracy a national security priority and implementing the remainder of the Russia Report recommendations are two obvious next steps.

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The Beast Reawakens 1997 – Review – Radical Right Populism in Europe and the Anglosphere

Following there is a brief article or review by Mark Potok in 2016, formerly of SPLC the Southern Poverty Law Center, why?  Because it is relevant when populist fascism, nationalism, eugenics tropes etc. have been reintroduced, evidenced by Helmut Kohl’s in ‘80s, Australia from 2001 and later Brexit, then Trump.

Of course the review was inspired by the latter i.e. Trump’s regime, but identifies key aspects i.e. middle class populism (of ageing white Christians) encouraged to rise up while othering outliers e.g. immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Asians, educated people, unions, ‘the left’ etc; though one would argue this is coordinated by, and for, empowered white middle class?

Other contemporary aspects include Brexit, a radical right libertarian coup to implement neoliberal policies e.g. to withdraw from EU to avoid regulatory etc. constraints, but needed dog whistling of immigrants, Farage and Tanton Network to get the vote over the line (after decades of dog whistling).  In the US context this means power through nativism for neoliberal policies round fossil fuels, finance and related, i.e. avoid constraints of climate science and related measures e.g. carbon pricing.

The review also cites issues of white working or middle class in the US feeling that they are missing out, but it’s unclear if this is grounded in reality versus constant negative media agitprop via Fox etc.; many may find they have more in common with ‘immigrants’ than their own leaders….. However, like many in the media who follow the old eugenics trope or myth that immigration causes downward pressure on income, but no evidence?

This leads onto ‘the great replacement’ and impacts on working age, but many protagonists, as witnessed at Capitol Hill riot or the Tea Party astroturfing appear dominated by middle aged, retirees and older white types for whom low level jobs are not important? 

One would posit that it’s more about the success of and inroads made into public narratives and opinion, via media, by white nativists or nationalists promoting ‘the great replacement’ but through an ‘environmental’ or ‘economics’ lens.  

In the Anglosphere this is due to the long game of Tanton Network development of PR architecture of influence to make refugees, borders, immigration and population growth as proxy issues; ‘deceased white nationalist’ John Tanton, of German parentage, was known as the ‘puppeteer’ of the immigration restriction movement, muse of Steve Bannon and the alt right.

Behind the nativism, populism and noise, unpalatable neoliberal economic policies can be enacted, that are neither in the interests of the protagonists, coming generations nor the specific nation; Brexit is the most compelling example of both Koch and Tanton Network think tanks, with media support achieving a revolution i.e. wall to wall negative agitprop.

Further, we know there were corporate links between US plutocrats and Nazi Germany, with support for eugenics research, then post WWII many old relationship continued under various guises, includes in the USA.  To this day with the digital world, the alt right, white nationalism and neo Nazism has gone global in both the Anglosphere, Central Eastern Europe and even shared ideology in the Middle East i.e. outcome of the pre & post WWII distribution, of the anti semitic hoax ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’; the latter has now been adapted then morphed into the enduring myth i.e. the ‘Soros Conspiracy’.

From SPLC Intelligence Report  a review by Mark Potok of ‘The Beast Reawakens’ August 3, 2016

‘From the candidacy of Donald Trump to the British decision to leave the European Union (EU), from the rise of a radical movement of anti government county sheriffs to a metastasizing rage aimed at political and economic elites, something important and incredibly dangerous is happening in the Western world.

The beast of right-wing populism is reawakening.

When author Martin Lee titled his 1997 book The Beast Reawakens, the phrase he coined referred to the resurgence of Nazism in Europe. Today, it describes a far larger and far more dangerous set of movements that threaten to tear apart societies in both the United States and Europe. Their ideology is populist — the idea that “pits a virtuous and homogenous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are depicted as depriving the sovereign people” of their prosperity and rights, according to scholars Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell.

In the United States, Trump is appealing directly to working- and lower middle-class whites and suggesting that their very real problems and insecurities are the fault of self-interested social elites — traditional politicians of both parties and media leaders — and of “dangerous others,” particularly Mexicans and Muslims. And, in typical populist manner, Trump offers himself up as the strongman who can solve seemingly intractable problems with bold, simple strokes.

In Europe, the leaders of the “Brexit” campaign managed to convince some 52% of voters that the cause of their economic and cultural malaise was a refugee and immigrant crisis enabled by the leaders of the European bloc. Those who voted to quit the EU were overwhelmingly older whites, many of them from the British equivalent of Rust Belt states in America. The sad irony is that those are the very areas that have been subsidized with huge amounts of money from the EU.

In the United States, the disaffection is helping drive a radical movement that seeks to delegitimize government, something seen in the “constitutional sheriffs” movement and the Bundy standoffs examined in this issue. In Europe, beyond the United Kingdom, it is reflected in the rise of populist, and often anti-Semitic and racist, political parties in places like France, Germany, Poland and Hungary.

The causes are complex. Globalization has increasingly knit nations together in a world economy, spurring huge movements of both workers and capital and causing enormous dislocations as a result. Manufacturing wages have been declining across the West for decades, income inequality is at historic levels, and the digital revolution has left those without university-level education far behind.

At the same time, major cultural changes — the rise of large immigrant communities, for instance, and the advance of same-sex marriage — increasingly are making many whites feel that the world they grew up in is disappearing. The idea that the future holds better things is under assault in both America and Europe.

Anne Marie Slaughter, who heads the New America Foundation, compares the present moment to the upheavals seen at the beginning of the 20th century, another period of brutal change. “What we are seeing,” she told The Atlantic in July, “is anger at the disruption of our economy and, really, our social order — of the magnitude we saw when the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age.”

“The digital revolution … is completely upending how we work,” she said, “what the sources of value are, how people can support their families, if they can at all, and creates tremendous fear and rage in the sense that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control.”

In an essay for the History News Network, scholar Stephen W. Campbell analyzed the roots of Trump voters’ anger but also pointed out that the white working class still has long had it better than American minorities. “Part of [their] anger stems from economic inequality, but a major part, whether they will admit it or not, stems from the fear of rapid demographic change,” he wrote. “They are losing the privilege that has accumulated and redounded to their advantage over generations and almost no one willingly gives up privilege without a fight.”

This kind of rage, nurtured by opportunistic politicians and pundits riding the wave of political discontent, can be hard to quell. In the past, it has led to historic horrors like the rise of populism and racial nationalism that very nearly destroyed Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

In the wake of the Brexit vote — which was preceded days earlier by the assassination of a pro-EU legislator by a neo-Nazi — Britain experienced a major wave of hate crimes against a whole array of minorities. On our side of the ocean, anti-Muslim violence and terrorist plots against government agencies reflect the rise of populist fury.

To suggest that the West is headed into the kind of social turmoil that led to fascism in Italy and Spain and Nazism in Germany is, hopefully, going too far. But to put the beast of populism back to sleep will require the best efforts of wise leaders, thoughtful voters, and effective government programs — all of which have been in short supply in recent years.’

See below for more blogs or articles related to Demography, Environment, Immigration, Populist Politics & White Nationalism: 

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

The Bell Curve – Eugenics – IQ – Libertarian Levelling Up of Minorities and Society?

GOP Republicans’ Future – Democracy or Autocracy?

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

NOM Net Overseas Migration – Immigration – Population Growth

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Of late UK investigative journalists especially centred round The ByLine Times and The New European have discovered the ‘architecture of influence’ at 55 Tufton Street, used to keep the Conservative Party in power, and achieving Brexit. This has been done by using US linked Koch and Tanton Network think tanks to produce ‘research’ and responses that support radical right libertarian ideology and white nativism (mutually inclusive relationship), whether eugenics or Anglo exceptionalism.

Of course it’s no coincidence that many similar think tanks, also under the influence or auspices of Koch and Tanton Networks, plus the Koch influenced Atlas Network; have very influential presence in the Anglosphere especially, i.e. the US, UK and Australia.

From The New European:

‘55 Tufton Street, SW1: The most influential address you’ve never heard of

It’s home to pro-Brexit groups and climate change sceptics. But just how much power over this government is wielded by the tenants of 55 Tufton Street?

James Ball 13th January 2021

There is, at most, a very short list of political addresses familiar to a UK audience. The most famous, of course, is 10 Downing Street, the cramped office, official residence and party venue of the prime minister.

A British audience will probably also be familiar with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is Washington DC, the address of the White House.

Far fewer will be able to name a third political address. If they can, it’s almost certainly 55 Tufton Street, which is strange as it has no official role in government life and isn’t home to any departments.

Instead, as the spiritual home (and often the physical base) of a loose coalition of nine think tanks and campaign groups – plus as a shorthand for a wider network less connected to that physical address – it has, through soft power and indirect influence, had perhaps more influence on the course of UK politics over the past decade than many departments and most political parties.

Now, as we look to the next decade, and several parts of the machine seem to be turning their attention towards climate change and the path to (or away from) net zero, is a good time to look at the history of the network, its tactical approach, and what it’s doing – if for no reason other than to try to make sure its future efforts are less successful than those in the past.

The first of the Tufton Street groups to really come to public attention was the cleverly named TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), which brands itself as a “non-partisan” and “grassroots” organisation. Its modus operandi was to consistently highlight apparent government waste, often picking issues with relatively small sums of money at hand, but which would attract clear public scorn and media coverage.

Unlike other think tanks which would conduct detailed policy research aimed at informing actual government policy, the TPA would aim squarely at the media, producing easy-to-digest briefings for which the stories would write themselves. Journalists, through a combination of time pressure and laziness, would find it incredibly easy to transfer TPA research onto front pages.

This media-friendly approach extended further: any reporter who has needed to get a reaction quote for a story on a Saturday knows that many press officers won’t bother to answer the phone.

This was never the case with the TPA – not only would someone always pick up the phone, but they’d also have a quote tailored to the exact story within 15 minutes.

People would look for reasons of chumminess, ideology, or the old school tie as to why some places get quoted more than others. The reality often comes down to who will reliably pick up the phone and deliver the goods. These media-savvy tactics were soon transferred more directly into changing British politics.

As one of their conditions for forming a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats secured a referendum on whether the UK should switch to the Alternative Vote system.

TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive Matthew Elliott became the director of the cross-party NOtoAV campaign, and adopted a playbook that became very, very familiar in an even higher-profile referendum a few years later. The campaign came up with a highly dubious figure as to the cost of switching to AV, settling on £250m, a total debunked by numerous fact-checkers as highly inflated.

This inflated number was then deployed against a series of emotional images, including veterans and even premature babies in a neonatal ward. The latter had the slogan “She needs a maternity unit, not an alternative voting system.”

The high-minded but hapless Yes campaign, faced with the task of both explaining a new voting system and persuading the public to care about it, was outgunned entirely: AV was defeated in a 68-32 landslide.

This success and the growing profile of the TPA encouraged the Tufton Street think tanks – which included a broader network of like-minded organisations not based there but who would regularly meet to swap ideas, tactics and generally to socialise – and led to more financial support and to more success.

Tenants of No.55 have included Leave Means Leave, the climate change sceptics of the Global Warming Policy Forum and Net Zero Watch, the “anti-woke” New Culture Forum, the anti-surveillance group Big Brother Watch and Migration Watch, which led the charge for lower net immigration.

Down the street are the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

A key source of ire for Tufton Street opponents is that none of the organisations in the network disclose their funders – and on the few occasions where details have leaked out, these organisations have shared donors, and have taken money from some with clear agendas of their own, co-producing events with tobacco or alcohol industry groups, for example.

Where these detractors misstep, however, is that they assume this means those donors then need to order these think-tankers as to what they should say in their subsequent reports or research.

The reality is more subtle: there is no need to give any instruction of this sort, because the companies already know these organisations are on-side.

It is akin to the old Humbert Wolfe rhyme: “You cannot hope to bribe or twist/thank God! the British journalist/ But, seeing what the man will do/ unbribed, there’s no occasion to.’’

There need not be some backroom deal or secret set of orders – the organisation is funded because its staffers sincerely believe in deregulation, and donors feel free to commission work on topic areas that suit them, knowing in advance the recommendations will line up.

It should be noted that this is not unique to the right of politics, or to the Leave side of the argument.

A pro-EU donor commissioning an internationalist think tank staffed by trained and sane economists could commission research on, say, trade with the EU and be confident in getting a report they like.

Tufton Street’s splashy tactics and closeness with those in power came to the fore through the Brexit referendum and its aftermath – a set of actions so covered and so familiar that to retread them all here would be tedious in the extreme.

Tufton Street alum ran the campaign, became Number 10 staff, and held huge sway over the eventual deal that was shaped.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was how little the tactics needed to change: £350m a week for the NHS was nothing different from the NOtoAV £250m tactic, albeit with a larger number and on a larger stage.

Neither the left nor the centre of the British political world have come up with anything to trouble the longstanding playbook of the Tufton Street network.

Popular threads on Twitter – and pub talk among the animated Remain camp – paints the above network as something akin to a deliberate conspiracy, a concerted effort to infiltrate politics and create hidden networks of influence.

The people involved laugh at this as a deranged conspiracy theory.

And yet it isn’t wrong on the actual facts: Tufton Street serves as a nexus of political influence, and does work to tie up corporate and other undisclosed interests into the political process.

But it doesn’t do it in a way that feels malign to those involved: it is a network of people who agree with each other on most issues, have been colleagues and often friends, and who obviously have sought employment in organisations aligned with those they’ve worked at in the past. Who wouldn’t agree to have a drink with an old friend they used to work with?

Who wouldn’t consider a talented former colleague for a job in their new workplace? Who wouldn’t pick up the phone to pick the brains of their old boss when they’re stuck on a problem?

These all feel very normal and natural to any of us. It’s just very, very different when, almost without you noticing, your friendship group has become the group of people effectively running the country – or at least a decent chunk of it.

This is not a case of the banality of evil, but of the banality of influence.

It’s also why a fairly accurate set of accusations can be made to sound ridiculous to the people targeted by them – there isn’t one person or a small cabal deliberately directing all of this. But that should hardly matter.

The Tufton Street network is moving on from Brexit and deregulation (although not leaving them behind) and increasingly becoming active on climate.

Their playbook still hasn’t changed. Nothing has forced it to do so.

What’s needed is something that counters it – instead of what we keep doing, time and again, which is merely publicly complaining that it keeps on working.’

Blogs and articles regarding Koch Network, Tanton and related architecture of influence: 

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

Ecosystem of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere 

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Good article posted following from John Menadue of Pears & Irritations on White Man’s Media: Legacy media in the US and UK frames and conditions our thinking and actions the first of three articles.

One is shocked at the social narratives and sub-optimal communication in Australia, possibly due to media influence, exemplified by slogans, 20 second sound bites and closed questions round Anglo conservative ‘values’, identity or immigration (avoiding environment), property or FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate), sport, trivia/entertainment, culture and libertarian cost of living or need to avoid taxes;  Australian legacy media no longer informs but manipulates how voters think, or not which includes avoidance of serious issues e.g. environment.

Menadue highlights how legacy media in the Anglosphere of US, UK and Australia is being used to promote and reinforce nativist and conservative libertarian policies, against Australia’s interests, while our media and politics of the centre through right lacks diversity i.e. ‘skip’, still predominantly Anglo-Irish with some European heritage. 

Australia’s legacy media landscape is also being scrutinised for monopoly behaviour, proximity to the LNP, IPA etc., dog whistling, opaque regulatory benefits, promoting the ‘great replacement’; and authoritarians’ preferred tactic of SLAPPs or shutting down tricky narratives with defamation suits.

While we have closer and more lucrative trading relationships with the Asia-Pacific region, and also significant with the EU, many Australians using legacy media have significant antipathy towards both Europe and/or EU and Asia (except for trip), while deferring to the ‘Anglosphere’ or old white Australia attitudes.  

The Asian region now accounts for most immigration, temporary churn over, international education, tourism etc. and with ongoing post WWII European immigration, ‘Eurasian’, but viewed as an environmental hygiene issue through the prism of unexplained ‘population growth’ (imported via white nationalist Tanton Networks). 

This part of electoral or political focus groups, promoting (negative) policy, polling, campaigning and media PR favouring the nativist conservative libertarian LNP coalition is being helped by ageing citizens, regions, less education, less diverse and ‘white’ in the now dominant upper median age voter cohort.

The concern or question is, same for the GOP in the US and UK Tories, how do you win and maintain power with more diverse and empowered citizens emerging, versus declining demographics of the LNP’s key target cohort but expressing Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Irish values and identity?

From Pearls & Irritations:

‘White Man’s Media: Legacy media in the US and UK frames and conditions our thinking and actions

By John Menadue     Jan 11, 2022

The US Department of Defence maintains, in its own words ‘full spectrum dominance’ throughout the world.  Legacy media in the US and the UK has the same dominance. It frames and  influences how we think and particularly how governments act.

US legacy media – CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Fox News  and Western news agencies- in association with drivers of US power and privilege, the military, business, think-tanks and security agencies  exert dangerous and destructive influence that has contributed to the killing of millions of people.  Add to that the way legacy media has helped excuse the way in which the US has attempted and often successfully, to overthrow numerous governments around the world.  The ‘indispensable state’ regards it as quite natural that US hegemony should be enforced everywhere.

Just as the British East India Company effectively ran Britain and its empire, so the US military and business complex, along with its elite supporters particularly in the media supports Western hegemony.  No US president, and certainly no Australian prime minister or Leader of the Opposition is prepared to challenge the US Imperium.

Australian media tugs the forelock to the Imperium. A person from Mars who reads and listens to Australian media would conclude that we are an island parked off New York or London.

Our media is dominated by the domestic events and issues of interest to UK and US readers – the latest antics of the British royal family, Donald Trump, the Governor of New York or vaccination rates in Alabama.

Much worse the ‘world view’ we get in Australia is a view of the world as seen from London, New York and Washington.

Most of the news we get in Australia about China, Indonesia, India and Vietnam is via Western news agencies. These media snapshots  are usually about the exotic and dangerous- a coup here, a flood there. Not surprisingly we remain ignorant and fearful of Asia.

Our ‘colonial’ media structure was laid down long ago.  It remains today.

We talk glibly about our future in Asia, but we are stuck in a US and UK media cul de sac.

With the active encouragement of our media, we have been drawn into countless US military disasters not just for the US but overwhelmingly for the people that are attacked.  On top of that, we had the war on terror.  Now we have the vilification of China, perhaps even a war.

It is not that Chinese behaviour and its human rights record has worsened. What has changed and what is feared is the growing power and influence of China. It is successful. That is seen as a threat to US full-spectrum dominance.  That fear of China is reflected in our legacy media in the US and the UK spewing out an endless daily campaign of anti-China stories. And other media follow.

Led by the US, our media showed no interest in ‘democracy’ in Hong Kong throughout over a century of British rule.  But now that Hong Kong is properly recognised as part of China, the US government, supported by its media, suddenly became concerned about democracy and independence for Hong Kong. They encouraged the 2019 insurrection.

The US has rained death, destruction and displacement on tens of millions of Muslims in the Middle East over the past 20 years.  Now the US media shows a remarkable and belated concern about the persecution of Muslims in China. The US record, like Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people, is a blemish for all time. But who seems to care? Certainly not our own media, who waste no opportunity to attack China. We cherry-pick human rights abuses that suit our agenda.

The association of legacy media with the powerful is everywhere. As  Alex Lo wrote in August ‘It has long been known that the Department of Defense in the US and other governments such as the CIA, not only support film and cable production in Hollywood but also actively intervene and manipulate their content.’

And in June, Lo described how a long list of former US security chiefs e.g. John Brennan and James Clapper, joined US media — NBC, MSNBC and CNN.

Australian security heads have been leading the demonisation of China with help from the Five Eyes.  But we get a double whammy when our derivative media draws heavily on US legacy media that in turn is heavily influenced by former US security chiefs with their ‘expert opinions’.

But Australian media does not have a problem just being dominated by legacy US and UK media.  We have a particular problem. Its name is Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen who owns two-thirds of Australia’s metropolitan dailies and more.

News Corp was a key supporter of the Iraq War — the Murdoch War. Of the 173 Murdoch papers worldwide only one, The Hobart Mercury opposed the war. Murdoch told us in 2003:

‘I think Bush acted very morally, very correctly. US troops will soon be welcomed as liberators’. His foreign editor on The Australian, Greg Sheridan, could not contain himself. ‘The bold eagle of American power is aloft, high above the humble earth. For as it soars and sweeps it sees victory, power and opportunity’. He is still in his job. Murdoch prefers loyalty to competence in all those around him, including his family.

Even some of the legacy media apologised for their support of the illegal war in Iraq. But never Murdoch nor for that matter John Howard.

News Corp in Australia for over a decade has also led the campaign of denial on climate change.

The US military/business/security complex exercises destructive and pervasive power.  Legacy media supplies a favourable frame for that complex.

Our derivative media ties us to the white legacy media of the North Atlantic. It frames our view of the world.

This is the first article in a series on White Man’s Media which we will be running over the next 2 to 3 weeks. Articles in the series can be found here.’

For more related blogs and articles on the Anglosphere and media click through:

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

Eco-System of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere 

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Anglosphere Libertarianism in US, Australia and UK Tories with Dominic Cummings

Why are Vaccinated GOP Republicans and Fox Media Killing their Constituents through Covid Denial?

Abortion Reproductive Rights for Conservatives or GOP Evangelical Christian Support

Abortion and reproductive rights have been constantly presented by parties of the right, influenced first by Catholic Church, now more by protestant Evangelicals, why?

Influenced by deeply cynical exercise in US GOP conservative coalition building from the time of Paul Weyrich at Heritage Foundation to garner more Christian votes, while masking deep seated nativist or eugenic and libertarian socio-economic issues or policies; also been used in Central Eastern Europe’s Catholic regimes. 

This has been address by Katherine Stewart in ‘The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism’ (2020) described by Good Reads as:

‘For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. But in her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: America’s Religious Right has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement. It seeks to gain political power and impose its vision on society. It isn’t fighting a culture war; it is waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart shows that the real power of the movement lies in a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations, embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances with like-minded, anti-democratic religious nationalists around the world, including Russia. She follows the money behind the movement and traces much of it to a group of super-wealthy, ultra-conservative donors and family foundations. The Christian nationalist movement is far more organized and better funded than most people realize.’

Further, in Australia, Lucy Hamilton has article in Pearls & Irritations related, titled ‘Culture war over religious freedom normalises fascist politics’

‘Australian conservatives’ obsession with religious freedom is just another US import, and part of a worldwide surge in fascist identity politics.’ 

The strategy is to divide the broader electorate and wedging the Democrats or ‘liberals’, yet those proposing such policies had neither ethical nor moral issues with abortion including Trump?

Following is a recent Guardian US article parsing through several related issues:

‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical anger

A short history of the Roe decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.

Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.

This schism played out in the US supreme court on Wednesday, when the new conservative-dominated bench heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion rights case since Roe….

…. The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics for the last five decades, from segregation to welfare reform to campaign finance.

The conservative anti-abortion movement “was a kind of historical accident”, said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth University and author of the recently released book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.

AdvertisementIt wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative”, which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the fetus”, that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.

Although the supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education called for an end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, many schools continued de facto segregation 14 years later….

…..In Balmer’s view, revoking the non-profit status of segregated private schools catalyzed evangelical Christian leaders, but even in the early 1970s defense of racial segregation was not a populist message. However, defense of the fetus could be.

Republican operations began to test abortion as a vessel for the collective anxieties of evangelical Christians, and Roe as a shorthand for government intrusion into the family after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Eventually, abortion became the reason for evangelicals to deny the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, a second term…..

…..By the 1978 midterm congressional elections, Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of modern conservatism, was testing abortion as a campaign issue with evangelical Christians with a small fund from the Republican National Committee. Roman Catholic volunteers distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets in church parking lots in Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, and their efforts prevailed. Four anti-abortion Republicans ousted Democrats.

The groundwork laid by Schlafly and Weyrich made “Roe shorthand for a host of worries about sex equality and sexuality”, wrote Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.

“Even as late as August 1980, the Reagan-Bush campaign wasn’t certain abortion would work for them as a political issue,” said Balmer. However, as Reagan sailed to victory, he was carried in part by religious voters hooked on the promise of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. When a constitutional amendment failed, a new strategy took hold: control the supreme court…..

By the 1990s, anti-abortion activists had professionalized. So called “right to life” organizations rallied the base, and religious law firms dedicated themselves to fighting abortion in courts. The supreme court weighed in on abortion again in 1992, in another watershed case called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. The case allowed states to restrict abortion, as long as such restrictions did not create an “undue burden” on the right to abortion and served the purpose of either protecting the woman’s health or unborn life.

States hostile to abortion passed “Trap” laws, or targeted regulations of abortion providers, which required abortion clinics to become the “functional equivalents of hospitals”, according to legal scholars. States instituted 24-hour waiting periods for abortion, state-mandated inaccurate information and invasive sonograms….

…..The politics of reproduction spurred new debates on acceptable restrictions on birth control, stem cell research and sex education during the George W Bush administration. But it was the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, that supercharged Republican opposition.

In 2010, the Tea Party swept the midterm elections. More extreme candidates entered Congress and statehouses through the practice of challenging incumbents in districts gerrymandered to be reliably Republican…..

…. By the time Donald Trump ran for president, evangelical Protestants had become more anti-abortion than the Catholic voters who were once the bedrock of anti-abortion advocacy. Seventy-seven per cent of white evangelical Christians say the procedure should be illegal, compared with just 43% of Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump harnessed the anger of white evangelicals for a victory in 2016, with a mix of hardline anti-abortion politicsand xenophobic nativism. Trump abandoned his 1999 stance as “very pro-choice”, saying there should be “punishment” for women who have abortions, and promised to nominate conservative supreme court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v Wade.

Today, overwhelmingly white “Christian nationalist” voters believe their religion should be privileged in public life, a goal to be attained “by any means necessary”, according to social researchers such as Indiana University associate professor Andrew Whitehead.

Supreme court decisions are notoriously difficult to predict, but abortion rights activists believe Wednesday’s hearing shows that conservative justices are ready to significantly weaken or perhaps overturn Roe v Wade.

If that happens, young, poor people of color will disproportionately suffer, forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Such an outcome is so severe human rights advocates have said state abortion bans would violate United Nations conventions against torture and place the US in the company of a shrinking number of countries with abortion bans.

On Wednesday, the court’s three outnumbered liberal justices argued neither the science, the enormous consequences of pregnancy nor the American polity had changed since the court last decided a watershed abortion rights case. But, because of the work of anti-abortion politicians, the makeup of the court’s bench had.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?” asked the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “I don’t see how it is possible.”

For more blogs and articles related to abortion rights and Evangelical Christianity, click through below:

GOP Republicans’ Future – Democracy or Autocracy?

GOP Republicans, Conservative White and Christian Nationalists Face Demographic Headwinds

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Past Literature & Ideas on Roots of Radical Right, Nativism & the Great Replacement Today

Revisiting an old article from over fifteen years ago by Guardian journalist John Sutherland on the required reading for the far right and related. It helps highlight the old literature and words we hear nowadays in the context of Brexit, Trump and white nationalist policies or regimes with a focus upon refugees, immigration, NOM net overseas migration and population growth; the ‘great replacement’ aka the Soros conspiracy.

Sutherland also includes the infamous ‘Camp of the Saints’ from French writer Jean Raspail which influenced Steve Bannon, and inspired Renaud Camus’ ‘great replacement’ ideas, though the latter expression is also implicit in the old and new eugenics movement.

In fact one interview had been conducted by Australian researcher Dr. Katherine Betts with an article based upon the interview published in John Tanton’s The Social Contract Press; colleague of Paul Ehrlich’s at ZPG.  Tanton himself wrote an article in 

‘The Camp of the Saints Revisited’. By John Tanton Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 1994-1995)

The Social Contract Press (stopped publishing 2019 after the death of Tanton), parent of The Social Contract journal, is honored to bring back into print Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. We do so just as the immigration policy debate has risen to new heights in the United States-indeed, across the world. We began negotiating for the rights to publish this edition long before several recent seminal events helped focus attention on the wider issues involved.

The first was the passage in California of Proposition 187, a citizen’s initiative calling for an end to most social services and welfare benefits, including schooling, for illegal aliens. Fought out in the context of California’s gubernatorial and U.S. senate races, this was the first time in recent decades that immigration policy played a role in actually electing or defeating political candidates….

……To support the reissuance of The Camp of the Saints we adopt its title as the theme for this issue of The Social Contract. Articles include a review of the book by our Australian correspondent, Denis McCormack; a report on an interview with Raspail by our editorial advisory board member Katharine Betts,….’

According to SPLC:

‘The Social Contract, a long-running quarterly journal founded by John Tanton, ran its final issue in Fall 2019.

For nearly 30 years, the journal was a clearinghouse for anti-immigrant and white nationalist writers. From its launch in 1990, the quarterly provided space for established anti-immigrant figures with mainstream clout as well as notorious racist thinkers. Over the years, it churned out articles, fear mongering about demographic shifts, hyping the supposed criminality of immigrants, stoking population alarmism and smearing migrants as being disease-ridden.

The Social Contract was founded by John Tanton, a eugenics advocate and the architect of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement. Tanton died in July 2019, but his legacy lives on through a constellation of groups he helped pave the way for. Tanton served as editor from 1990 to 1998 before moving to a publisher role.’

From The Guardian:

‘Far Right far wrong? 

John Sutherland Mon 24 May 2004 02.33 BST 

The bestseller list was invented in 1895. Nowadays (so many novels, so little time) we couldn’t live without them. Most tastes are catered for, but I don’t recall a neonazi chart, or “these you have loved, skinhead”. 

Chaps with stubble hair, big boots and swastika tattoos tend not to be bookish. But, on the shelf with the Wehrmacht memorabilia, Did Six Million Die? and the collected works of David Irving, you may find the odd example of light reading. 

Still popular in far-right reading groups is William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, the novel the FBI called “The Bible of the Racist Right” and which gave Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh his big idea. Pierce’s other novel, Hunter (Aryan vigilante cleans up Washington), ranks at No 2 in the “all-time favourites” list. That thriller inspired Larry Shoemake to gun down eight black Mississippians in 1996. “Hunter was like an eye-opener for him,” Mrs Shoemake fondly recalled. “There was a distinct difference in him.” Jeanette Winterson should be so lucky…. 

….. The book currently generating the most chatter is Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints. First published in 1973, in France, no British publisher (a gutless crew) has been brave enough to take it on. In America, publication was sponsored, in 1985, by the ultra-right (ultra-wrong), anti-immigration Laurel Foundation, under whose aegis it now sells like hot cakes. 

Camp of Saints foretells an imminent “swamping” of Europe by illegals from the orient. 

Forget passports or border controls: they just hijack tankers and come, an armada of subcontinental sub-humanity: a brown tsunami. Europe is so enervated by liberalism and postcolonial guilt and depopulated by “family planning” that the alien tide (“with a stench of latrines”) just laps over the continent. A small resistance band (the “Saints”) is liquidated – by the French government. The immigrants come, they settle, they rape, they steal. Above all, they breed. Raspail calls it “the Calcutta solution” – genocide by stealth. Europe becomes a Dark Continent. 

Raspail’s loathsome novel has recently achieved something like respectability. The author has a website and has been hailed “the Frantz Fanon of the White Race”. Camp of Saints articulates a western nightmare fashionable among neoconservatives. Civilisations won’t “clash”. The developed world (and in the Middle East, Israel) will simply be outspawned into extinction. 

This thesis does have some crude, sub-Malthusian, demographic support. “Yes,” the last paragraph of Midnight’s Children prophesies, “they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six.” The population of India, 20 years after Rushdie wrote those words, is a billion. And in 2024? Where will they go? Raspail knows – the Cote d’Azur, of course. 

Jean-Marie Le Pen nowadays peppers his speeches with references to “Jean Raspail’s famous work”. The book has also found a powerful advocate in Daniel Pipes. A leading neo-conservative and Middle East expert, he was appointed last August to the US Institute of Peace (a “non-partisan federal institution” dedicated to the “prevention, management and resolution of international conflicts”) by George Bush. 

Pipes sees “post-Christian” Europe as “hollowed out” by “anaemic birth rate”, ageing population and ineffective immigration laws. In a widely syndicated article two weeks ago, Pipes proclaimed the Camp of Saints to be true prophecy. Chartres, Westminster and Cologne cathedrals, he foresees, will, in the not too distant future, become mosques. Or possibly, he muses, a “Taliban-style regime will blow them up”. 

He (like Raspail) has seen the future, and it is brown. Someone should tell the Daily Express – the serial rights are up for grabs.’

For more related blogs and article click through links below:

Afghan and Islamic Refugees – ADL – The Great Replacement Theory – Nativist Conservative Media, Politics and Public Discourse

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

White Nationalist Extremism – Mainstreamed by Politicians and Media

Australian Brexit?

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

GOP Republicans, Conservative White and Christian Nationalists Face Demographic Headwinds

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

‘As Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians’

We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded.  This is not organic, but political strategists, ideologues and media have been gaming ageing electorates through platforming them and their concerns, then using PR techniques and messaging to reinforce and spread further via related negative proxy issues, for power.  

As New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of ‘Dark Money’ fame explained, it’s not just manipulating ‘what’ we think about issues but ‘how’ we think (or not, just reflex)’.  The latter follows the playbook in the US used to inform conservatives of both left and right who are also catered to, while other cohorts and issues are avoided. For example, youth, working age and immigrants are becoming irrelevant, especially in regions, while middle aged and older have been empowered to kick down and lash out at mostly imagined cultural issues.

The Conversation in Australia had a related article titled:

‘More grey tsunami than youthquake: despite record youth enrolments, Australia’s voter base is ageing (29 April 2019). The 2019 election has been heralded as a “generational election” or an “age war”. Labor goes to the election with a series of policies on climate change, housing affordability, wages and budget sustainability clearly designed to appeal to young and middle-aged Australians concerned about their future’.

But while the record numbers of enrolled young voters may make this look like a political masterstroke, the fact remains that Australia’s voter base, like its population, is ageing. Baby boomers will remain a political force in this country for some time to come.’

A good example exemplifying the array of forces and dynamics has been the nativist libertarian obsessions with immigration and population growth as drivers of environmental degradation and carbon emissions, while deflecting from fossil fuels and need for robust environmental regulation; ‘libertarain trap’ informed by fossil fuels, eugenics and supported by ageing voters. 

Another example via research from Goldsmiths London also explained Brexit in terms of ‘collective narcissism’ by Golec de Zavala, Guerra and Simão (27 Nov 2017) in ‘The Relationship between the Brexit Vote and Individual Predictors of Prejudice: Collective Narcissism, Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation’ stated:

‘The Leave campaign in the U.K., which advocated exiting the European Union, emphasized anxiety over immigration and the need to take control of the U.K.’s borders. Citizens who expressed concerns about immigration to the U.K. were more likely to vote to leave. Two correlational studies examined the previously unexplored question of whether the Brexit vote and support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum were linked to individual predictors of prejudice toward foreigners: British collective narcissism (a belief in national greatness), right wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. The results converged to indicate that all three variables were independently related to the perceived threat of immigrants and, via this variable, to the Brexit vote and a support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum’

Further, in 2018 similar dynamics were identified by Campanella in ‘Is Pensioner Populism Here to Stay?’ stating:

‘The right-wing populism that has emerged in many Western democracies in recent years could turn out to be much more than a blip on the political landscape. Beyond the Great Recession and the migration crisis, both of which created fertile ground for populist parties, the ageing of the West’s population will continue to alter political power dynamics in populists’ favour….…Most likely, a growing sense of insecurity is pushing the elderly into the populists’ arms. Leaving aside country-specific peculiarities, nationalist parties all promise to stem global forces that will affect older people disproportionately.’

Of course other nations also learn, one suspects armies of Republican GOP related ‘grifters’ masquerading as election and campaign consultants advise many conservative right wing governments in Europe, especially Central Eastern Europe, applying similar tactics.  

The most infamous has been the ‘Soros conspiracy’ from former (deceased) GOP pollster Arthur Finkelstein, introduced by Netanyahu and advised the Orban government in Hungary, understanding which ‘buttons to push’ then using old conspiracies based round ‘blood libel’, anti-semitism (although Jewish himself) and old eugenics movement tropes exemplified by ‘the great replacement’ and ‘demographic suicide’.

According to Balogh in Hungarian Spectrum in ‘The Genesis of Orban’s Anti-Soros Campaign’:

‘They worked for Romanian, Bulgarian, and Czech politicians before, on Netanyahu’s recommendation, Viktor Orbán hired them. This was in early 2008, after two lost elections, and Fidesz was in search of new ideas that could lead to victory. According to the Finkelstein formula, Orbán needed an enemy.’ (15 Jan 2019).

Following is a recent academic article on the Hungarian experience of ‘collective narcissism’, shared by other nations unwittingly:

‘The role of collective narcissism in populist attitudes and the collapse of democracy in Hungary

Dorottya Lantos, Joseph P. Forgas

First published: 18 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.80

Abstract

What are the psychological processes responsible for the recent spread of populist political systems and movements? All political systems essentially reflect the mental representations of their populations, and collective narcissism has recently emerged as a contributing factor in the rise of populism. This article presents two studies examining the role of collective narcissism in predicting populist attitudes and voting intentions in Hungary. Hungary offers a particularly important case study of state-sponsored populism and illiberalism in Europe, as this country has gone furthest in undermining democratic principles and practices within the EU…. 

The emergence in the past few years of populist, anti-liberal political movements in a number of countries presents an important challenge for psychologists (Albright, 2018; Pinker, 2018). While millions of would-be migrants see Western liberal democracies as their best hope for a better future, many voters in the very same countries are now turning their backs on their successful and well-tried political model. The rise of populism occurred in both highly developed Western countries (e.g., USA, Britain, France, and Austria) and in nations with weak democratic traditions (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Russia). 

This paper explores the role of psychological factors, such as collective narcissism, in the rise of populism in Hungary. Hungary is now arguably the most “populist” and illiberal nation within the EU (Garton Ash, 2019) and the first member state in the history of the EU to be categorized as not a democracy (Freedom House, 2020). Specifically, we seek to explain how endemic feelings of betrayal and inferiority as reflected in the quote above by Mr. Orbán can lead to the spread of authoritarian nationalism and populism as identified in the second quote above.

This paper reports the first empirical evidence indicating that collective narcissism is a significant, albeit perhaps indirect predictor of populist attitudes in Hungary, the most illiberal country within the EU. We found that conservatism influences the effects of collective narcissism, an important finding in understanding how mental representations shape political attitudes. As Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. 

Evolutionary psychological research on the fundamental characteristics of human cognition now confirms that humans are indeed highly predisposed to embrace fictitious symbolic belief systems as a means of enhancing group cohesion and coordination (Harari, 2014; von Hippel, 2018). We believe that collective narcissism is a promising construct in our quest to fully understand the psychological variables responsible for the recent historical rise of populist and illiberal political movements worldwide.’

For more related article click through following links:

Population Ageing – Populist Politics

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Radical Right Libertarian Economics or Social Populism?

Eco-System of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere

Interesting and well researched investigative article ‘Think Tanks Have Put British Democracy at Risk. We Have the Same Problem‘ from Lucy Hamilton published in John Menadue’s ‘Pearls & Irritation’ comparing the ‘architecture’ of influence and power of radical right libertarian think tanks in the Anglosphere i.e. USA, UK and Australia; the focus in this piece is the U.K.

Many of the same groups, charities or think tanks were not simply metaphorical Atlantic Bridge or US influences on e.g. Brexit relying upon libertarian economic arguments, but also white nativism or anti-immigration sentiment. However, literally or physically many of these groups are found to at the same London address i.e. 55 Tufton Street as identified by Open Democracy U.K. in 2018.

There is an interesting feature of this ‘architecture’ is to not just promote radical right libertarian ideology but often appears along with white nationalism or eugenics of far or alt right ideas, masked by environmental concerns e.g. the ‘great replacement’; protection of future fossil fuel income streams appear central by using media and clever PR to delay any constraints.

Both a metaphor and a literal example of the relationship between radical libertarian socioeconomic policies and eugenics was the Capitol Hill insurrection, preceded by the Tea Party ‘movement’ where far right, white nationalist, evangelical Christians, libertarians and QAnon presence was used to both intimidate and degrade liberal democracy, institutions, laws, norms and protocols.

Further, this is not to forget that many libertarian socioeconomic policies would neither be accepted by the mainstream nor survive critical evaluation unless falsely presented or sold as ‘freedom & liberty’, ‘sovereignty’ etc. according to New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

The UK also has several libertarian think tanks in the Koch influenced Atlas Network, which like the US and Australia, promote and produce policies for conservative and other governments to adopt round lower tax, lower budgets, smaller government and ‘wedge’ social issues focused negatively upon those outside the upper middle class i.e. workers, the poor, asylum seekers, refugees, students, unions, less educated and immigrants.

The latter agitprop or even ‘hate speech’ is leveraged mostly through a purported liberal environmental prism, but implicitly promoting and dog whistling the old eugenics trope of population growth or the ‘great replacement’ through media informed by NGOs or think tanks in the USA, UK and Australia. The same are all contemporarily influenced by the original ‘70s ZPG Zero Population Growth, supported by fossil fuels (Rockefeller Bros, Standard Oil/Exxon), auto (Ford) and industry (Carnegie) foundations or oligarchs; described decades ago as ‘greenwashing’ of both fossil fuels and bigotry, while now it also appears to be about destabilising liberal democracy for an illiberal autocracy?

ZPG was originally led by, the muse of Steve Bannon, deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton, Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich and Paul ‘Sea Shepherd’ Watson. In the USA ZPG later transformed into NumbersUSA, FAIR Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform and CIS Center for Immigration Studies. The intellectual fulcrum being Tanton’s journal TSCP The Social Contract Press and some key donors especially Cordelia Scaife May and her Colcom Foundation according to NYT 2019 in ‘Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out’; the same groups informed Trump White House immigration policy and are still deferred to by US mainstream media as immigration ‘experts’.

In Australia both more complicated and successful, through media influence, in having the whole nation obsessed about borders, refugees, NOM net overseas migration, international students, permanent migration and population growth; dynamic understood by nobody but helps to deflect from any meaningful environmental measures? SPA Sustainable Population Australia has a retinue of well known public figures as patrons listed, who are respected and presented in media (generally not challenged), but have unclear expertise in climate science, environmental science and demographics.

The UK situation also mirrors the US and Australia ‘architecture’ with think tanks, NGOs and charities including IEA Institute of Economic Affairs, Taxpayers’ Alliance, Global Warming Policy Foundation, Migration Watch* (linked with Population Matters, both linked to Tanton); all of these seemingly disparate groups for different causes are located at 55 Tufton Street**, London, allegedly owned by a Tory businessman.

*Migration Watch can be linked to John Tanton via their links page which includes his US based CIS Center for Immigration Studies and another, to Population Matters where Paul Ehrlich (formerly ZPG) is a patron along with David Attenborough, Lionel Shriver, Jane Goodall et al. (where Sustainable Population Australia’s Jane O’Sullivan who is on the Advisory Board, while SPA is listed under global organisations).

Migration Watch focuses on lobbying against refugees, asylum seekers, ‘illegal’ immigrants and open borders with conservative tabloid support to influence ageing Labour and other voters. Meanwhile Population Matters focuses on generic issues due to ‘population growth’ and presents itself as educational using Tory broadsheet and other media, to appear more intellectual and upmarket, or credible (patrons sometimes appear on ABC Australia’s Q&A to discuss social or environmental issues e.g. climate change but as beliefs not science).

**55 Tufton Street consequently has its own DeSmog Blog listing, click through, description:

‘The Westminster building located at 55 Tufton Street is home to a small but influential network of libertarian, pro-Brexit think tanks and lobby groups, including the UK‘s principal climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.’

From several years ago DeSmog article ‘Mapped: The Cosy Climate-Euro Sceptic Bubble Pushing for Brexit and Less Climate Action’ By Kyla Mandel on Jun 13, 2016 exemplified by

this quote:

‘There is a deep-rooted connection between UK climate science deniers and those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, new mapping by DeSmogUK can reveal‘

Also features the map below outlining links between groups and individuals which revolve round 55 Tufton Street.

Relationships Mapped by DeSmog US (Image copyright 2016)

Further, from Open Democracy UK in 2018 Adam Ramsay and Peter Geoghegan researched related article: ‘Revealed: how the UK’s powerful right-wing think tanks and Conservative MPs work together (at 55 Tufton). The Institute of Economic Affairs, accused of offering US donors access to government ministers, is among right-wing think tanks meeting monthly. Conservative MPs have attended, too‘.

From Pearls & Irritations:

‘Think tanks have put British democracy at risk. We have the same problem.

By Lucy Hamilton Sep 17, 2021

It’s arguable that Britain’s path to this point — where it is at risk of decaying into a ‘competitive authoritarian’ regime — can be traced back to the first of the ‘conservative’ think tanks.

Britain’s democracy is in a perilous state. While 100 scholars of democracy recently posted a letter expressing their fears about the imminent threat to America’s political tradition — echoing many voices — the awareness of the threat to Britain’s Westminster system is less prominent, drowned out by the shambolic handling of the Covid crisis.

Like America and Australia, Britain’s government is at risk of decaying into a “competitive authoritarian” regime.

Arguably, Britain’s path to this moment of authoritarian threat began in World War II. Economist Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society provided an inspiration for the emerging libertarian thinkers. His ideas underpinned their resistance to the threat of totalitarian regimes in general, and Keynesian interventionist government in the UK in particular.

Ironically, the libertarian think tanks that proliferated in the following years have become a phenomenon that argues strenuously for freedom for the richest but have produced a political group that is attempting to impose growing authoritarian control of resistance in the populace more broadly….

…..After establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1955, Fisher went on to found

the US-based Atlas Network in 1981, which has promoted a metastasising international web of 500 of these bodies that have worked to foster “ultra free market” ideas. The Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is one of those Atlas affiliates.

The “shells” of ideas took explosive effect under Margaret Thatcher after Tory minister Keith Joseph introduced her to the IEA and then set up his own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, in 1974. These groups created the body of ideas that constitute Thatcherism.

The European Research Group (ERG) was founded in 1993 as a Eurosceptic force in conservatism. The urgent crisis in Britain’s democratic tradition began in the culmination of the ERG’s work during the lead up to the Brexit referendum.

It was clear during the campaign in 2016 that the work of private funders, shady internet forces such as Cambridge Analytica and the might of the radicalising tabloids was working to distort Britons’ ability to vote on the facts. The anger of the populace at the government’s austerity measures following 2008’s financial crash fuelled the fire.

The fostering of ethno-nationalist bigotries and fears was a key factor in the Vote Leave campaign. It is uncertain how much of this was driven by genuine jingoism amongst the leaders, and how much was a move to capture Nigel Farage’s UKIP voters….

…A series of laws are under discussion in the UK in mid 2021 that political journalist Ian Dunt describes as “some of the most draconian authoritarian legislation” for decades.

Priti Patel’s Home Office has proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act to remove a “public interest defence” that would see journalists relabelled as spies and jailed for up to 14 years.

Whistleblowers, sources and publishers would face similar risks. This is on top of the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, that instituted a chilling surveillance power over citizens even those not suspected of any crime….

….The Tories have been working for a year to neuter their electoral commission, aiming to make it subject to the government of the day. The Elections Bill of July 2021 also introduces a voter ID bill that Labour argues threatens to “lock millions of people out of democracy”. Like America, voting is not compulsory in the UK which opens up voter suppression strategies not available to those chipping away at Australian democracy…..

…Patel has also brought forward the Nationality and Borders Bill which will make asylum seekers entering the UK “illegally” liable to be jailed for four years. Sentences for people smugglers will be increased to life behind bars. The clause that limited this category to “for gain” will be removed, suggesting that charities and rescuers helping asylum seekers will be caught up in the Bill’s remit.’

For more related blogs and articles click through below:

Australian Brexit?

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

EU European Union Model for Future Global Standards and Regulation

Libertarian Economic Policy Promotion and Think Tanks

Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories and Radical Right Libertarians

GOP Republicans, Conservative White and Christian Nationalists Face Demographic Headwinds

Anglosphere Libertarianism in US, Australia and UK Tories with Dominic Cummings

Adam Smith – Classical Liberal Economics or Conservative Calvinist Christianity or White Christian Nationalism?

We observe many governments, especially Anglosphere and conservative, following the ideology of Adam Smith, promoted through Koch linked think tanks, assiduously. The outcomes include less Keynesian influence on government policy and more Smith, or Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan.

The latter cite ‘freedom and liberty’ for society, and economic policies based round ‘public choice theory’, monetarism and small government. Related there is also much emphasis or attention paid to elections, taxes, government budgets and many sociocultural issues including impairment of workers and unions rights, interfering on university campuses, demanding immigration restrictions, ‘freedom of speech’ and using Christianity as a divisive issue to create an ageing conservative voter coalition, especially in the USA.

What is Smith about and are his theories or principles valid today?

Following are a few summaries from selected sources to compare common points which include deep seated Christianity e.g. ‘balance’ or the ‘invisible hand’ based on belief or the ‘laws of nature’, ‘natural liberty’, self interest, small state and government, low taxes and class system, but seems less fit for the present and future. Coincidentally with Covid conservative governments have returned to Keynesian spending to support economies as Smith’s ‘classical liberalism’ is not fit for purpose in a modern democracy.

From Investopedia – Sharma

Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776 promoted the idea of ‘balance’ in the economy e.g. ‘steady-state theory’, due to self interest or the ‘invisible hand’ of the markets except for when the state is essential on borders, law and public works.

He goes further to then link the ‘invisible hand’ with free markets and free will of people for prosperity, which also justifies no state regulatory constraints, except for some govt. intervention on shortages or surpluses.

Smith’s ‘elements of prosperity’ has at its centre self interest, small government and currency with a free market, but lacks evidence, while it seems to justify the existence of elites whether landed, industrial, Christian or otherwise, especially wealthy.

From The Secret, Natural Theological Foundation of Adam Smith’s Work – Journal of Markets & Morality – Alvey

Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ is based on the unsupported principle or phenomenon of balance seemingly from God. His use of teleological views came from apportioning, through guess work, that outcomes were divine inspiration, ‘laws of nature’ or attributable to God. Smith also cited three essential elements of ‘order’ i.e. class system, external and internal security; backgrounded by human instinct which can be helpful, or not.

Smith’s understanding of nature, moral philosophy and political economy were couched in theological framework, covertly, while not being totally positive about humanity and its future. 

From 240 years of The Wealth of Nations – 240 anos de A Riqueza das Nações – Maria Pia Paganelli

Wealth of Nation is dated and has been superseded by significant events of change whether economic, political or social.

A 18th C economy does not compare with a 21st C economy, nor do we have aristocracy but democracy with state health and social security systems vs. basic subsistence charity for the poor, forced into labour.

Smith had been accused of not being libertarian nor pro-capitalism enough by modern day economic ideologues.

WofN has been compared with the Bible where it can be used for relevant inspiration but not literal truth. Along with James Buchanan, Smith seemed to believe in ‘natural liberty’ and its ‘efficiency’ along with economic theory; focus on efficiency but is it effective?

WofN had no new ideas, unsupported theories and hypotheses masquerading as grounded science; many others have also criticised his work as mixed up, misguided, confused, crude and biased.

On the hand many protagonists of Smith or libertarian economics complain that he gives encouragement to anti-capitalists, while Buchanan claims he was sensibly not an anarchist like the latter.

From Does classical liberalism imply democracy? David Ellerman*

Democratic and non-democratic forms are promoted in the US, with James Buchanan as a ‘representative of the democratic strain of classical liberalism’

According to Buchanan, social or societal structures are important for people to choose their participation to representatives of their authority and that government is based upon agreement or consent.

References:

Alvey J. 2004 ‘The Secret, Natural Theological Foundation of Adam Smith’s Work’, Journal of Markets & Morality, Volume 7, Number 2 (Fall 2004): 335–361

Blenman J. 2020 ‘Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations’ Investopedia, Retrieved https://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-nations/ (6 March 2021).

Ellerman D. 2015 ‘Does classical liberalism imply democracy?’, Ethics & Global Politics, 8:1, 29310, DOI: 10.3402/egp.v8.29310

Paganelli M. 2017 ‘240 years of The Wealth of Nations – 240 anos de A Riqueza das Nações’ Nova Economia https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-6351/3743

This blog will continue in future with related updates and additions. For more related blogs and articles on Conservative, Economics, Global Trade, Government Budgets, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy and Populist Politics click through.

Population Pyramids, Economics, Ageing, Pensions, Demography and Misunderstanding Data Sets

Interesting article ‘The end of the population pyramid’  but one would suggest that it’s no longer a ‘population pyramid’ inverted or otherwise, while ‘pro-natal’ or positive eugenics policies and working age population data require more scrutiny, especially when backgrounded by antipathy in Australian (UK and US ) media and politics towards post 1970s ‘immigration’, influencing older monocultural voters (ditto Hungary etc. to avoid ‘immigration’ central to conservative political messaging, even to the point of conspiracy theories like round ‘Soros’).  

For example, constantly conflating increased temporary churn over via the NOM (since 2006) from students etc. with permanent migration yet there is no strong if any correlation, then worse, blaming the same ‘population growth’ for environmental degradation (allowing fossil fuels and regulation off the hook AKA strategy of  ZPG supported by Rockefeller Bros, Ford and Carnegie Foundations in the ’70s, and with the mantle passing to Kochs and similar groups).

The world, especially including more educated and empowered women in the developing world, have already decided to have fewer children reflected in sliding fertility rates to below replacement; not aware of any research showing substantive outcomes from pro-natal policies except bringing plans forward on having children, to be followed by a fertility dip?

Population data cannot be compared easily in a global context due to different definitions, collection methods and presentation, while demographers use multiple types of population data sets to base their e.g. workforce analysis on, related to dependency ratios and pensions.  

For example, in some cases economists are using some dubious methods in arguing the case against offering an increase in the SCG super contribution guarantee by claiming a binary i.e. would preclude any wage rises; also claiming increased sustainability of the state pension by claiming a low(er) dependency ratio by falsely presenting plenty of workers to support a future of pensions only (no need for super).

However, ‘statistics 101’, it appears that the forecasts or projections of the general or ‘estimated resident population’ counting 15-64 year olds of ‘working age’, but not parsing through or filtering out the significant numbers of ‘temporary residents’ caught up in the NOM who have limited and/or no work rights vs. citizens and permanent residents with no restrictions.

If the latter is presented well, then the ‘population pyramid’ is not just inverted, but without temporary ‘churn over’ it would look more like an upright arrow with a very chunky head and slim body below it to support….. which portrays the issues ahead for working age in supporting the tax base and increasing numbers of aged dependents, how? 

Australia’s retirement income system generally comes up in the top 5-10 globally, due to superannuation and pension means testing.  However, many in Australia including both conservative MPs and those of the left, are being led into a cul de sac in both denying the benefits of industry super funds looking after members’ interests and for reduced or more restricted immigration hence access to Australia for temporary residents.

Worse, younger Australians’ futures are and will be thrown under the bus due to LNP and lesser extent the Labor Party, catering to ageing electorates with middle class welfare, low or no taxes and for now, a more nativist and insular view of the world due to Covid and our nativist conservative media oligopoly favouring the LNP and radical right libertarian policies.

From Inside Story Australia:

‘The end of the population pyramid: Fears about a declining birthrate reflect a twentieth-century view of how the economy works

1 June 2021 John Quiggin 

News of a sharp fall in births during 2020 has provoked a fresh wave of hand wringing about the implications of an ageing population. The decline can’t be attributed solely to the pandemic — most of the babies born in 2020 were conceived before the virus took hold — but it appears to have accelerated as the impact of the pandemic has been felt.

Some of the worries are prompted by old-fashioned, not to say primitive, concerns about birthrates as an indicator of “national vitality.” But they mainly reflect a twentieth-century view of the economy that is deeply embedded in our ways of thinking and economic measurement, even though it is now almost completely obsolete.

Underlying this view is the notion that “a surplus of young people” is needed to “drive economies and help pay for the old,” as the New York Times put it in its report on the 2020 figures. But this model of the economy only emerged in the twentieth century, and it looks likely to end in the twenty-first.

For most of human history, old people were expected to work as long as they could, just as children were put to work as soon as they were able. The very young and the very old depended on their families to support them.

That changed radically with the emergence of the welfare state at the end of the nineteenth century. Children were excluded from the workforce and required to attend school until the official leaving age, typically around fourteen. Governments paid for schools but generally required parents to support their children in other ways, as they’d done in the past.

At the other end of life, the new system of age pensions meant that old people (most commonly those over sixty-five) became entitled to public support, sometimes subject to a means test. Pensions were paid out of taxes or contributions to social security schemes.

Either way, the cost was borne by the “working-age” population, generally defined as fifteen to sixty-four. With a high birthrate, the age distribution of the population was shaped like a pyramid, with a large working-age population at the bottom supporting a small group of retirees at the top.

Underlying the pyramid was the idea that physical work predominated. Young, strong and needing only on-the-job training, workers would leave school at fourteen and immediately start contributing to the economy. By sixty-five, they would be worn out and ready for retirement. The more young people the better.

To see what’s happened to that assumption, we need only look at the US data on employment by age. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the pyramid concept looked reasonable enough. Around 60 per cent of young people aged sixteen to twenty-four were employed, compared with barely 30 per cent of those aged fifty-five and over.

By 2019, though, before the pandemic, the gap had largely closed. Just over 50 per cent of people aged sixteen to twenty-four were employed, compared with 39 per cent of those over fifty-five. While many of the jobs held by young people are now part-time and low-waged, older workers are typically earning just below the peak they reached at around age fifty. The figures suggest that average earnings per person are already higher among the old than among the young.

The modern economy is quite different from the one assumed by the conventional population pyramid. To become a productive member of the community, young people need academic or vocational post-school education, and that requires large-scale spending by government or parents, or through loan schemes like HECS. Even as the proportion of young people in the population has declined, developed countries like Australia and the United States have been able to maintain or even increase the proportion of national income allocated to education.

A return to high birthrates over the next few years would create the need for a large increase in education spending. The pay-off in terms of a more productive workforce would not be fully realised until the second half of this century, when the expanded age cohort entered the prime-age workforce in their late twenties and early thirties.

At the other end of the age distribution, official retirement ages have been abolished, and the eligibility age for the pension has been pushed to sixty-seven, with further increases in prospect. For a significant group of manual workers, physical exhaustion still makes retirement a relief. The undervaluing of older workers persists, pushing many into retirement whether they want it or not. But working past sixty-five is an increasingly attractive economic option for a large group of white-collar workers.

A realistic model of the future workforce is one in which productive workers are mostly aged between twenty-five and seventy. Given that life expectancy will never be much above ninety-five, the typical person will spend about half their life in the working-age population and the other half evenly divided between education and retirement.

In other words, despite the concerns expressed since the 2020 population figures were released, the age distribution associated with a lower birthrate is unlikely to cause major problems in how people in countries like Australia are supported during the years they spend out of the workforce.

Meanwhile, a lower birthrate is having an unambiguously beneficial impact on the size of the world’s population. The world is already overcrowded, and the growing population is straining the capacity of the planet. Even with falling birthrates, the world’s population is certain to rise between now and 2050.

By 2100, the total figure might return to the current level of eight billion, or perhaps a little fewer. The idea that we should push people to have more children in order to lift this number, rather than make marginal adjustments to the economic institutions we have inherited from the twentieth century, is simply nonsensical.’

For more articles about Ageing Democracy, Demography, Economics, Government Budgets, Immigration, Pensions, Statistical Analysis, Superannuation, Taxation and Younger Generations click through.

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction.  Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Koch, Murdoch, DeVos, Scaife, Mellon, Mercer et al.

Although changing, the latter have leverage amongst more baby boomers and older who are no longer in the workforce, have retirement income, less educated, lack of critical literacies, access legacy media and now seem swayed by existential socio-cultural threats via (pensioner) populism; has been observed in Europe too.  Part of the pro Brexit agitprop was informing older ‘working class’ voters that yes, there would be some economic deterioration in leaving the EU, Customs Zone etc.; the same cohort’s with short term horizons, will not pay the price nor deal with future consequences of their own ‘working class’ children of working age…..

Unfortunately, a symptom of this new politics, riding on the last of the less diverse age cohorts, is how to remain in power, hence, we observe voter suppression, intimidation or silencing of alternative voices, most media is right wing or conservative, while younger generations facing higher taxes and fewer state benefits or services.

From CARR The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right:

‘After Serving Corporations For Decades, GOP Pivots To Fake Populism

Leonard Weinberg May 5 2021

For many years its liberal and Democratic critics depicted the Republican Party as the party of ‘big business.’ These critics claimed that the GOP’s principal role at both the national and state levels of partisan political activity was to advance the material interests of the country’s large corporate sector.

GOP spokespeople often sought to obscure this reality by appealing to voters based on a defense of American ‘individualism’ (i.e. do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it), by extolling patriotism, especially the country’s military prowess, and by condemning Democratic rivals as ‘soft on communism’ and enemies of traditional American values. Such electoral appeals were successful for much of the last century and well into the present.

For many liberal critics, the linkage between the Republican Party and business, especially large-scale enterprise, was presumptively based on a patron/client relationship. Business leaders were patrons who called the shots, and GOP politicians were clients, ready to do the bidding of captains of business and commerce, with some quibbling now and then, in exchange for a steady stream of financial support.

The relationship between these two key forces in American public life may not be broken, but certainly seems to have become attenuated.  Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), issued a threat: If America’s business leaders don’t stop publicly opposing the Party’s new Georgia election law (restricting access to the polls by the state’s sizeable Black population), they will have to face the consequences.

McConnell and other congressional Republicans went on to criticize ‘big business’ for supporting environmental protection policies and the Democrats’ social agenda, including women’s rights.

McConnell later tried to clarify his remarks but Republican Governor Ron DeSantis doubled down on this sentiment and appeared to issue another threat.

What’s going on? And why at this time?

First, consider the socio-political situation of the GOP. One long-time base of voter support appears to be eroding. Not all that long ago, the GOP tended to attract better-educated segments of the population, including so-called ‘country club’ Republicans. Outside the South, this is no longer so, or much less so than it once was. College-educated young voters (18 to 34 year-olds), women especially, are far more liberal on a host of issues (e.g. gay marriage, environmental protection) than older, more judgmental age cohorts.

Linked to this shift in the outlook of better-educated voters is a profound change in the organization of the American economy. During the century that followed the end of the Civil War (1865), the strongest and most influential sectors of the economy were either extractive (coal mining, oil refining) or industrial (steel-making, automobile manufacture). Today the economy tends to be dominated by high tech firms (Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) and by business firms whose corporate headquarters are located outside the United States (Toyota, Volkswagen, Sony) and whose executives have a more cosmopolitan outlook than their American-based predecessors.

To a significant extent, the world in which the linkage between ‘big business’ and the Republican Party developed no longer exists. That linkage belongs to an earlier age and so does the rhetoric of its long-standing liberal critics.

Second, the GOP’s electoral base seems to have shifted and aged. Thanks in part to former President Trump’s ability to win the support of ‘low information’ voters–individuals with less than a college education who are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories– the Republican Party is now shaped by politicians able to give voice to the biases and grievances of this substantial constituency.

This electoral ‘base’ is strongly skewed towards aging white males, particularly those living in small towns and rural areas, whose social values and economic circumstances appear frozen in time. From the point of view of GOP decision-makers, the concern is that over time this ‘base’ will continue to shrink in size, making it progressively more difficult for the Party to win national elections. How then can the GOP appeal to a wider spectrum of voters without alienating its current core constituency? The GOP seeks to resolve this dilemma via voter suppression, using state laws to discourage young university students and people of color away from the polls.

This tactic, apparently triggered by the Party’s 2020 fiasco in Georgia, may bring temporary success, assuming the legislation is upheld by the courts. But it also represents a declaration of independence from the Party’s traditional support within the country’s business and social elite.

We are witnessing the vulgarization of the GOP, achieved at the cost of weakening the Party’s long-standing patron/client relationship with the country’s corporate leadership. As a substitute, the GOP has developed sophisticated ways of raising money from small contributors via the internet, stoking fears of impending doom if money is not forthcoming. At the same time, the Party continues to strengthen its links with idiosyncratic billionaires, e.g. the Koch Brothers, and the Mellon and DeVos families, families with strong ideological commitments to shrinking government (except for the military) and the public sector in general.

Under these changing conditions, it should not come as a complete surprise to note the appearance of “Biden Republicans”– traditional Republican supporters, alienated by Trump and his base who have chosen to switch their commitments. The fact that Bill and Melinda Gates have become favorite targets of right-wing attacks and conspiratorial inventions should tell us something about the GOP’s direction.’

Professor Leonard Weinberg is a Senior Fellow at CARR and an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada. 

For more related blogs and articles click through Australian Politics, Conservative, Demography, Economics, Evangelical Christianity, Government Budgets, Libertarian Economics, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian, White Nationalism and Younger Generations.

Radical Right Libertarian Economics or Social Populism?

Radical right libertarian policies are often grounded in Christianity and nativism, appealing to populist instincts to win elections, especially with ageing constituencies.  Interesting analysis of the US Republican Party or the GOP post Trump Administration moving away from support for corporates i.e. radical right libertarian policies, and moving more towards ‘fake populism’ to entice voters on social issues.

This is not unusual and has been observed elsewhere, more subtly, e.g. Australia under the tutelage of Koch linked Atlas Network think tanks and Fox/NewsCorp, where former Liberal National coalition Prime Minister John Howard was in power from the late ‘90s.   

Howard now says Covid19 is not the time for ideology, but not only were non LNP Conservative states responsible, with agreement of the present LNP government for health and quarantine,  but the national LNP government was able to avoid responsibility, while NewsCorp and related media went on the attack against lockdowns and state leaders.

Begs the question, when is radical right libertarian ideology fit for purpose, if it cannot deal with an epidemic? Why are libertarian policies joined at the hip with populism, white nativism or nationalism, and many confected social issues?

According to Jane Mayer and/or Nancy MacLean it’s because the radical right libertarian policies are so unpalatable that conservative voter coalitions round social issues are needed to allow (quiet) implementation of policy in the background.

‘After Serving Corporations For Decades, GOP Pivots To Fake Populism

Leonard Weinberg 5 May 2021

For many years its liberal and Democratic critics depicted the Republican Party as the party of ‘big business.’ These critics claimed that the GOP’s principal role at both the national and state levels of partisan political activity was to advance the material interests of the country’s large corporate sector.

GOP spokespeople often sought to obscure this reality by appealing to voters based on a defense of American ‘individualism’ (i.e. do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it), by extolling patriotism, especially the country’s military prowess, and by condemning Democratic rivals as ‘soft on communism’ and enemies of traditional American values. Such electoral appeals were successful for much of the last century and well into the present.

For many liberal critics, the linkage between the Republican Party and business, especially large-scale enterprise, was presumptively based on a patron/client relationship. Business leaders were patrons who called the shots, and GOP politicians were clients, ready to do the bidding of captains of business and commerce, with some quibbling now and then, in exchange for a steady stream of financial support.

The relationship between these two key forces in American public life may not be broken, but certainly seems to have become attenuated.  Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), issued a threat: If America’s business leaders don’t stop publicly opposing the Party’s new Georgia election law (restricting access to the polls by the state’s sizeable Black population), they will have to face the consequences.

McConnell and other congressional Republicans went on to criticize ‘big business’ for supporting environmental protection policies and the Democrats’ social agenda, including women’s rights.

What’s going on? And why at this time?

First, consider the socio-political situation of the GOP. One long-time base of voter support appears to be eroding.

Linked to this shift in the outlook of better-educated voters is a profound change in the organization of the American economy.

To a significant extent, the world in which the linkage between ‘big business’ and the Republican Party developed no longer exists. That linkage belongs to an earlier age and so does the rhetoric of its long-standing liberal critics.

Second, the GOP’s electoral base seems to have shifted and aged. Thanks in part to former President Trump’s ability to win the support of ‘low information’ voters–individuals with less than a college education who are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories– the Republican Party is now shaped by politicians able to give voice to the biases and grievances of this substantial constituency.

This electoral ‘base’ is strongly skewed towards aging white males, particularly those living in small towns and rural areas, whose social values and economic circumstances appear frozen in time. From the point of view of GOP decision-makers, the concern is that over time this ‘base’ will continue to shrink in size, making it progressively more difficult for the Party to win national elections. 

How then can the GOP appeal to a wider spectrum of voters without alienating its current core constituency? The GOP seeks to resolve this dilemma via voter suppression, using state laws to discourage young university students and people of color away from the polls.’

For more blogs about Ageing Democracy, Australian Politics, Conservative, Demography, Libertarian Economics and Populist Politics.

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.

However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.

This article shows that Malthusian population principles are neither valid nor reliable when analysed through science and data, according to credible research, but have become central to political and corporate media messaging, especially the population – environment nexus, as opposed to fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Firstly we will explore the background on Malthus, his theory, impacts now upon politics and society, followed by critique from demographers, science journalists and related, based upon valid research; then future directions.

Malthus Background

Malthus was from an English family of means and although his father was a proponent of the enlightenment, not his son Malthus, who was pessimistic when it came to fertility and economic growth. Malthus released his first edition of ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1798) then followed by a second version using data in 1803, with more focus upon Europe and data that was available (Avery, 2013 & Dunn, 1998)

The second version also focused less on philosophy and more on politics or the economy, based upon the available data which not only linked population growth with economic growth but with poverty too e.g. insufficient food supply; concurrently Adam Smith and the ‘invisible hand’ of the markets emerged via ‘Wealth of Nations’ (Ibid.).

Later Keynes claimed that economic growth ameliorated negative effects of population growth, to be followed from the seventies by Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ highlighting dangers, recommending population control, extrapolated from high population growth in the 1930s; replicating Malthus’ pessimism, but with catastrophic predictions (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020).

Malthus was influenced by his upbringing and environment leading to his pessimism on humanity i.e. population growth and the ability to support larger numbers in a less developed world. Whether his theories or principles are valid or reliable have been over shadowed by repackaging of Malthusian ideology in recent times by e.g. Ehrlich via ZPG Zero Population Growth, and presented as liberal, environmental and grounded in valid research theory.

What was Malthus’ Theory?

Malthus presented his findings, as others do to this day, but hypotheses presented as tested theory, are still not supported by science. While Malthus saw (high) population growth amongst his own community without means, he cited the need for ‘preventative checks’ including marriage and contraception leading to lower birth rates, but also supported by ‘positive checks’ including famine, war and epidemics (Avery, 2013).

Malthus also linked population with subsistence and presented as direct balanced relationship, possibly influencing Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, but using U.S. data, claimed population doubling every generation versus agriculture and related technological innovations, the latter being only linear or much slower. Hence, no balance or difficult to maintain balance between population growth and accessible resources, while claiming a correlation between the two factors as the ‘first principle of population dynamics’. (Avery, 2013 & Dunn, 1998).

This led onto Malthus developing the ‘EFP Equal Fitness Paradigm’ for a ‘steady state population’ with each parent producing one child, hence two per couple (Dunn, 1998), which is less than the current recommended replacement fertility rates. Not only was population growth correlated with resources including food and subsistence, but also claiming growing supply of workers would mean lower wages (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020).

Malthus’ theory cited both preventative and positive checks with unclear evidence of correlations for either, then extended further into EFP ‘steady-state population’ to avoid future issues round food supply, wages etc. correlated with population growth. In addition to history of population analysis and demography, what has happened and what will happen according to Malthus?

The Future According to Malthus?

According to Malthus, war was caused by population growth but it also reduces the latter; nowadays Malthus may state that stable global population and no war are imperative (Avery, 2013). On the other hand this was countered by Marx who disagreed with Malthusian analysis, versus supporting science, technological progress and speeding up these supporting factors for human health and the economy (to counter population growth issues) (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020)

Of related interest was how Malthus also influenced Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ based round good genetic variations being preserved, and unfavourable being destroyed, leading onto formation of new species. However, the same adaptation or evolution has allowed human population to become healthier and grow; resulting in higher birth rates and population growth, over death rates (Dunn, 1998).

Meanwhile, to this day we have observed an unwitting return to Malthusian constructs related to fertility, population growth, immigration, resource limits and the natural environment; presenting politically as being of the centre or left. This is exemplified by the founding of ZPG Zero Population Growth by Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and Paul ‘Sea Shepherd’ Watson in the seventies alongside ‘Limits to Growth’ and the ‘Steady-State Economy’ economy ‘theories’, promoted through the influential Club of Rome, with same ideas and organisational offshoots in the UK and Australia (Ibid.).

This has led to rivalry between Malthisian school and those described as ‘Cornucopians’ supporting science, technology and related innovations, to lessen the impact of Malthusian or natural constraints through the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market or ‘natural balance’ (Ibid.).

Although science does not support Malthusian population principles they have become central via Ehrlich et al. in promoting control of population growth through opposing undefined ‘immigration’ in the first world, and fertility in the developing world; as causes of environmental degradation and sustainability.

The Reality of Population and Malthus Now?

With the benefits of modern science, technology and research methods Malthusian population principles can be tested on more substantial and diverse data. Malthus population predictions of doubing every generation or 25 years have not come true i.e. from 800 million to only 7.8 billion in 2020 with fertilty on a continuous decline, annual population increase has continued to slow, now 1%, and population numbers are qualified as estimates by most sources (Worldometers.info, 2021), are often not comparable due to differences in definitions, methodology and data collection.

Malthus’ formula from two centuries ago would have had current population at 100+ billion, and related, none of Ehrlich’s Malthusian predictions have come true either.

Other proxy issues are often claimed or correlated without compelling evidence e.g. increasing migration to cities is claimed to increase per capita resource use and meat consumption, requiring more fossil fuel use (Dunn, 1998); this seems to preclude ‘preventative measures’ through legislation and personal responsiblity or lifestyle changes.

Related and significant ideas were also promoted by The Club of Rome, which commissioned the Malthusian influenced ‘Limits to Growth’ and the ‘Steady-State Economy’ which helped promote the supposed negatives of human population through proxy issues of resource depletion and environmental degradation (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020).

There have been more nuanced attempts to relate economic growth in a negative sense with population growth, but while Malthus lived through the fossil resource dependent industrial revolution, this has declined as a share of GDP (Dunn, 1998). However, Malthusian school to this day views increases in GDP or economic growth as negative due to supposed dependence upon industrial use and linking of fossil fuels, population growth and environmental degradation; ignoring the positive impacts of science, technology and innovation plus the desire of poorer people or working classes to improve their economic situation (Ibid.).

Related is how Malthusian principles also influenced Darwin on ‘natural selection and the theory of evolution’ which was then extended further by the eugenics movement e.g. worker versus immigrant nexus when it is about all workers knowing their place in societal and industrial hierarchy, blaming poor for famine, ‘survival of the fittest’ and for example describing the Irish famine as positive (Montano & Garcia – Lopez, 2020 & Shermer, 2016). Again, when this is added to supposed outcomes or dynamic of population growth leading to economic growth, resource depletion and environmental degradation e.g. carbon emisisons, but ignoring increase in service industries not using same resources (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020)

Later research into eugenics was conducted in the U.K., Germany and U.S. with support of U.S. oligarchs such as Rockefeller (Standard Oil, later Exxon Mobil/Chevron) and Ford, not only operating in Germany through World War Two, but supporting eugenics research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (Shermer, 2016).

The Malthusian population movement has been accused of promoting eugenics versus poor or lower classes, non European minorities and immigrants i.e. dog wistled, to deflect blame and responsibility from governments, and the fossil fuel sectors for global warming, carbon emissions and environmental degradation.

Critics & Criticism

Many if not all the issues viewed through and correlated with the population principles of Malthus have not come to pass. Nowadays scientists and media have access to more related research into population, economics, society and environment through better data analysis following science process. Issues to emerge through this have been inconsistent methodologies in data collection, analysis and presentation precluding many comparisons. Meanwhile, forecasts of Malthus proven incorrect e.g. improved food production has increased faster than population, lower fertility and birth rates leading to population stabilisation while economic growth has increased without significant population growth (Montano & Garcia-Lopez, 2020).

According to Vollset et al. (2020) regarding demographic impacts, that while variances in population, structure and growth are factors for nations, governments and society to consider, it should not resort to comparing humans with animals when green revolution, irrigation and fertiliser, i.e. science and technology have found solutions.

Shermer (2016) adds that as opposed to Malthusian principles still being promoted, the solutions are and have been education, empowerment of women, birth control, economic growth to bring the poor out of poverty supported by democracy, globalisation and free trade.

We have had an over view of Malthus’ early life, population theory, future according to Malthus, then based upon science, the reality and criticisms. Much of the negativity round population and growth from past two centuries to now, especially in the Anglo world, is unwarranted when not only have catastrophic predictions not occurred, it is being used tactically to deny progress on environmental regulations, transition from fossil fuels and blaming any perceived negative on undefined immigrants responsible for population growth.

The latter allows political, government, business and societal elites to avoid future issues, responsibilities and short medium term costs to maintain an optimum environment versus leaving it for future generations to clean up for a higher cost.

References:

Avery J. S. (2013). Malthus. Cadmus Journal [online]. 1(6). [Viewed 15 January 2021]. Available from: https://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/issue-6/malthus

Dunn P. M. (1998). Thomas Malthus (1766–1834): population growth and birth control. Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal [online]. 78(1), F76–F77. [Viewed 15 January 2021]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1720745/pdf/v078p00F76.pdf

Montano B. & García-Lopez M. (2020). Malthusianism of the 21st century. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators. [online]. 6(100032). [Viewed 15 January 2021] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2020.100032.

Shermer M. (2016). Why Malthus Is Still Wrong Why Malthus makes for bad science policy. Scientific American. [online] [Viewed 15 January 2021] Available from:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/?print=true 2/4

Vollset S., Goren E., Yuan Chun-Wei, Cao, J., Smith A., Hsiao T., Bisignano C., Azhar G., Castro E., Chalek J., Dolgert A., Frank T., Fukutaki K., Hay S., Lozano R., Mokdad A., Nandakumar V., Pierce M., Pletcher M., Robalik T., Steuben K., Yong Wunrow H., Zlavog B., Murray C. (2020). Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study. Lancet [online] 396, pp. 1285–306. [Viewed 15 January 2021] Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(20)30677-2

NewsCorp Legacy Media vs. Digital Platforms Facebook and Google in Australia

While many nations and trade groupings have or are developing ways to protect personal data and constrain digital giants in Facebook and Google, traditional media groups are also looking for assistance.

 

NewsCorp and other media groups in Australia first demanded an ACCC Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigation of digital platforms use of media snippets and content, then demand that the same platforms should pay for this service.

 

However, many in traditional media, the ACCC and government do not seem to understand how digital works, the reliance elsewhere too on digital click throughs, that advertising has migrated from printed etc. to digital and middle aged down to youth have also migrated…..

 

‘Australia to make Facebook, Google pay for news in world first

 

Colin Packham

 

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia will force U.S. tech giants Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google to pay Australian media outlets for news content in a landmark move to protect independent journalism that will be watched around the world.

 

Australia will become the first country to require Facebook and Google to pay for news content provided by media companies under a royalty-style system that will become law this year, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.

 

“It’s about a fair go for Australian news media businesses. It’s about ensuring that we have increased competition, increased consumer protection, and a sustainable media landscape,” Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne.

 

“Nothing less than the future of the Australian media landscape is at stake.”

 

The move comes as the tech giants fend off calls around the world for greater regulation, and a day after Google and Facebook took a battering for alleged abuse of market power from U.S. lawmakers in a congressional hearing.

 

Following an inquiry into the state of the media market and the power of the U.S. platforms, the Australian government late last year told Facebook and Google to negotiate a voluntary deal with media companies to use their content.

 

Those talks went nowhere and Canberra now says if an agreement cannot reached through arbitration within 45 days the Australian Communications and Media Authority would set legally binding terms on behalf of the government.

 

Google said the regulation ignores “billions of clicks” that it sends to Australian news publishers each year.

 

“It sends a concerning message to businesses and investors that the Australian government will intervene instead of letting the market work,” Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.

 

“It does nothing to solve the fundamental challenges of creating a business model fit for the digital age.”

 

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

“UNFAIR AND DAMAGING”

 

Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.

 

“While other countries are talking about the tech giants’ unfair and damaging behaviour, the Australian government … (is) taking world-first action,” News Corp Australia Executive Chairman Michael Miller said in a statement.

 

A 2019 study estimated about 3,000 journalism jobs have been lost in Australia in the past 10 years, as traditional media companies bled advertising revenue to Google and Facebook which paid nothing for news content.

 

For every A$100 spent on online advertising in Australia, excluding classifieds, nearly a third goes to Google and Facebook, according to Frydenberg.

 

Other countries have tried and failed to force the hands of the tech giants.

 

Publishers in Germany, France and Spain have pushed to pass national copyright laws that force Google pay licensing fees when it publishes snippets of their news articles.

 

In 2019, Google stopped showing news snippets from European publishers on search results for its French users, while Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, allowed the search engine to run snippets of its articles after traffic to its sites to plunged.’

 

For more blogs and articles about ageing democracy, Australian politics, business strategy, CGM customer generated media, conservative, consumer behaviour, digital literacy, digital marketing, media, populist politics, SEO search engine optimisation, social media marketing and younger generations, click through.

 

GOP Republicans, Conservative White and Christian Nationalists Face Demographic Headwinds

Political parties, governments and media in the Anglo world including Trump’s GOP, Australia (with proxy white Australia narratives) and the UK (with immigration becoming the deciding Brexit issue), influenced by US libertarians and/or bigots in politics, may be approaching their tactical ‘use by date’ or demographic ‘blow back’?  

 

They have been highlighting and reinforcing round population growth, immigration (need for restrictions), Anglo exceptionalism, globalisation, non Christians, supranational bodies, white nationalism and great replacement theory, to ageing monocultural non urban electorates.

 

However, for the GOP Republicans may end up with electoral ‘blow back’ from youth, minorities, women and immigrants giving the Democrats long term advantage for power due to changing demographics i.e. more diverse citizens in electorates whom are attacked by GOP politicians, supporters, ideologues and media.
From The Boston Globe:

 

‘The Republicans’ demographic trap

Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making, and it could send them into a tailspin.

By Thomas E. Patterson

Republicans were in office and were widely blamed when the Great Depression struck in 1929. The Grand Old Party lost the next three presidential elections by wide margins. But it was a related development during the period that ruined the GOP‘s long-term prospects. First-time voters backed the Democratic Party by nearly 2 to 1 and stayed loyal to it. Election after election until the late 1960s, their votes carried the Democrats to victory.

In only one period since then have young voters sided heavily with one party in a series of elections. Voters under 30 have backed the Democratic presidential nominee by a 3-to-2 margin over the past four contests. And as they’ve aged, these voters have leaned more heavily Democratic while also turning out to vote in higher numbers. They now include everyone between the ages of 21 and 45 — more than 40 percent of the nation’s adults.

Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making, and it could send them into a tailspin. Although the politics of division that Republicans have pursued since Richard Nixon launched his “Southern strategy” in the late 1960s — a blueprint to shore up the vote of white Southerners by appealing to racial bias — has brought new groups into their ranks, including conservative Southerners, evangelical Christians, and working-class whites, it has antagonized other groups.

Republicans are paying a stiff price for defaming immigrants. If they hadn’t, they could have made inroads with the Latinx population. Although most Latinx have conservative views on issues like abortion and national security, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic. A 2019 poll found that 51 percent of Latinx believe that the GOP is “hostile” toward them, with an additional 29 percent believing that the GOP “doesn’t care” about them…..‘

There was a warning from The Cafe con leche Republicans in 2012 of the dangers in following the white nationalists agitprop promoted by John Tanton’s network of think tanks, lobbyists and grass roots ‘astro turfing’ also crossing paths with Koch’s ALEC.

 

In 2012 (published in the TexasGOPVote) Cafe con leche Republicans warned of think tanks (they mistakenly described as ‘left’) arguing for immigration restrictions, promoting white nationalism and focusing upon bogus demographics i.e. ‘great replacement theory’; attacking potential and future constituents for the GOP is not good long term policy:

 

‘John Tanton Networks like FAIR, NumbersUSA and CIS – Leftist Groups Manipulating Republicans

Groups like FAIR, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) have long worked to deepen and widen a wedge between conservative Hispanic citizens and the Republican Party. Looking at the boards of these organization provides insight into their true agenda: That being a pro-choice, zero population growth, anti immigrant, radical environmentalist agenda from about as far left as can be seen.  

“Smoking Gun” Memo Proves Tanton Network Manipulates Republicans

By Bob Quasius

John Tanton is infamous for founding numerous anti-immigrant groups, which not only seek strict enforcement of immigration laws, but also drastic reductions in LEGAL immigration. Tanton also founded U.S. English and Pro-English, which decry changes in culture and misrepresent immigrants’ willingness to learn English and assimilate, and pursue “official English” policies designed to make America less welcoming to New Americans who are going through the process of assimilation.

Among the papers that John Tanton donated to the University of Michigan, is a 2001 ‘smoking gun’ memo that shows how Tanton has manipulated the Republican Party with the bogus argument that immigrants invariably become Democrats and so immigration is contrary to the interests of the Republican Party….

….Tanton is infamous for numerous comments disparaging Latinos in particular, such as a statement in a 1993 memo, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” Tanton is also a big fan of eugenics, for example this statement from a 1996 letter: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”…

…Conservatives should take note that Tanton’s first attempts to co-opt other organizations for his radical population control agenda were of progressive organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club. These groups eventually realized they were being co-opted and rejected Tanton’s agenda, and so too should conservative organizations. Tanton himself founded Planned Parenthood of Northern Michigan and served as president. His resume shows a long list of leadership roles, not in conservative groups but progressive organizations. The Tanton network can best be described as an unholy alliance of population control progressives, environmentalists, and white nationalists.’

 

For more blogs and articles about ageing democracy, Australian politics, Conservative, demography, immigration, political strategy, population growth, populist politics, white nationalism and younger generations click through.

 

Libertarian Conservative Propaganda Promoted in US and Anglo Media

With Coronavirus or Covid-19 different governments and parts of the world have had different degrees of success in handling the spread and containing the virus but not parts of the Anglo world namely the US, UK and Australia.

 

All three have experienced aggressive neo-liberalism or radical right libertarian ideology applied to government agencies, budgets, planning and potential responses; now it’s right wing media attacking critics and creating confusion, or inappropriate responses.  

 

The following article in The Week US highlights and blames both the Trump administration and conservatism including mainstream media outlets.  However, it could also be blamed upon long term pressure on taxes, budgets, investment, government services and government being fit for purpose in ‘black swan’ events; from The Week:

 

Conservative propaganda has crippled the U.S. coronavirus response

 

Ryan Cooper

 

Why does the United States have the worst coronavirus outbreak in the developed world?

 

Part of the answer is surely that our basic state functions have been allowed to rot, or been deliberately destroyed, over the years. State capacity and competence have been shown around the world to be a key factor in whether nations can get a handle on the pandemic.

 

But another reason is conservative media. A small but nevertheless very loud and angry minority of Americans have had their ability to reason dissolved in a corrosive bath of crack-brained propaganda.

 

The flood tide of conservative lunacy is so overwhelming that it can be hard to process or even notice. A dozen things that would be a major scandal in any other rich country, or the U.S. itself in previous ages, fly by practically every day……

 

….Most of those other factors, however, would also be true in other rich countries. While there are fringe websites and various conspiracy loons in all of them, none have this problem to nearly the same degree, much less a full-blown crackpot as the leader of the country. 

 

Our ultra-consolidated media industry, which gives enormous sway to a handful of right-wing media barons like Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Ripley, probably enables it. The structure of behemoth social media companies, which have little incentive to police dangerous misinformation, and are so large that they probably couldn’t do it well even if they tried, probably enables it further.

 

Whatever the reason, the conservative propaganda machine is going to make this country very difficult to govern so long as it continues to operate in its current fashion. Just as economic markets do not work when they are under the thumb of monopolist robber barons, perhaps it is time to bring some regulation back to the marketplace of ideas.

 

Nations like Australia have even more consolidated media dominated by Murdoch and NewsCorp, small coterie of corporate players have undue influence, and conservative libertarian ideology, including cuts to taxes, health and education, is aggressively promoted by Koch linked think tanks through the same media and directly to politicians.

 

For more blogs and articles about Australian politics, climate change, conservative, COVID-19, critical thinking, government budgets, libertarian economics, media, political strategy, populist politics, science literacy and taxation.

 

UNPD Global Population Growth Forecasts Debunked

For generations and especially the past decades the Anglo world along with UN Population Division, ZPG Zero Population Growth, Club of Rome, FAIR/CIS, Population Matters UK and Sustainable Population Australia, have highlighted and stressed population growth as the issue of the times, even to the point of describing it as ‘exponential’.  However, the movement has too many links with the eugenics movement or white nationalism and misrepresents research and data e.g. claiming overly high fertility rates, focusing upon now and ignoring future (lower) forecasts based on good analysis.

 

The following articles touch on how The Lancet has debunked the UN Population Division’s alarmism on fertility rates and global population, then followed with Abul Rizvi comparing the impacts of population, low fertility and immigration on Australia, with Japan.

 

‘World population growth set to fall by 2100, as new dominant powers emerge

 

• An international study in The Lancet predicted a world population of 8.8 billion by the end of the century as fertility rates decline
• China’s population is expected to fall to 780 million. Geopolitical power will shift to China, India, Nigeria and the United States

 

Earth will be home to 8.8 billion souls in 2100, 2 billion fewer than current UN projections, according to a major study published on Wednesday that foresees new global power alignments shaped by declining fertility rates and greying populations.

 

By century’s end, 183 of 195 countries – barring an influx of immigrants – will have fallen below the replacement threshold needed to maintain population levels, an international team of researchers reported in The Lancet.

 

More than 20 countries – including Japan, Spain, Italy, Thailand, Portugal, South Korea and Poland – will see their numbers diminish by at least half.

 

China’s will fall nearly that much, from 1.4 billion people today to 730 million in 80 years.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, will triple in size to some 3 billion people, with Nigeria alone expanding to almost 800 million in 2100, second only to India’s 1.1 billion.

 

“These forecasts suggest good news for the environment, with less stress on food production systems and lower carbon emissions, as well as significant economic opportunity for parts of Sub-Saharan Africa,” said lead author Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

 

“However, most countries outside of Africa will see shrinking workforces and inverting population pyramids, which will have profound negative consequences for the economy.”

 

‘Population ageing in Australia and Japan

 

Abul Rizvi 19 June 2020

 

Australia and Japan are demographic polar opposites.

 

While Australia boosted immigration to slow its rate of ageing from around the Year 2000, Japan maintained very low levels of immigration. Combined with lower fertility, low immigration has led to Japan ageing quickly. Its working age to population (WAP) ratio has fallen almost 10 percentage points since this peaked around 1990. Australia’s WAP ratio over the same period declined only marginally (see Chart 1).

 

Japan’s working age population fell by 10.5 million between 1990 and 2018 while Australia’s working age population increased 4.9 million.

 

The last available estimate of the portion of foreign born in Japan was 1.02% in 2001, one of the lowest in the developed world. That compared to Australia at 23.0% in 2001 and 29.6% in 2019, one of the highest in the developed world.

 

The median age in Japan in 2017 had increased to 46.7, one of the highest in the developed world, compared to Australia’s 37.5, one of the lowest in the developed world.

 

In 1990, the 65+ population in Japan was 12.1% while Australia’s was 11.1%, a difference of 2%. By 2018, Japan’s 65+ population had increased to 28.1% while Australia’s was 15.7%, a staggering difference of 12.4%.

 

While there are many factors impacting different economies, the extent of demographic difference between Japan and Australia will tend to highlight any differential impact from population ageing.

 

Japan entered its demographic burden phase (ie WAP ratio in decline) almost two decades earlier than Australia which entered its demographic burden phase from 2009. All things equal, Australia’s economy should have performed more strongly than Japan’s from 1990 onwards. As Australia has aged much less since 2009, it should have maintained that advantage, including in per capita terms….

 

……The pressure for Japan to get its immigration settings right will continue to grow as its rate of ageing again accelerates after 2030 and its rate of population decline continues accelerating.

 

While Australia moved early to use immigration to slow the rate of ageing, Japan is moving very late – perhaps too late to prevent a rapid decline in living standards associated with resumption of rapid ageing and decline.

 

But Australia will also now age rapidly over the next 10-20 years with the likelihood of further decline in its fertility rate as well as lower net overseas migration under current policy settings after international borders are opened. This is projected at almost 100,000 per annum less than forecast in the 2019 Budget.’

 

For more articles and blogs about Australian politics, demography, immigration, NOM net overseas migration, population growth, populist politics and white nationalism click through.

 

Anglosphere Libertarianism in US, Australia and UK Tories with Dominic Cummings

We have observed Anglospehere conservative politics being taken over by radical right libertarianism in the US, UK and Australia, entwined with eugenics or xenophobia manifested by white nationalists and neo liberal policies; the Conservative Party in the UK suffers the same presently with Dominic Cummings in the limelight.

 

Facilitated by key individuals such as Dominic Cummings, Steve Bannon, et al. via media, PR and strategists including or via Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Crosby Textor, Cambridge Analytica et al., informed by libertarian think tanks like Koch Atlas Network influenced by Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, behind the Austrian and Chicago Schools (along with Hayek, Friedman, Rand et al.).

 

For example there are Atlas links between ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council, IPA Institute of Public Affairs (Australia) and IEA Institute of Economic Affairs (UK) promoting strong neo-liberal ideas including smaller government and lower taxes.

 

This is in parallel with promotion of immigration restrictions linked to ideas and tactics of the late John Tanton e.g. ZPG Zero Population Growth, TSCP The Social Contract Press, FAIR Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, Sustainable Australia, Population Matters and Migration Watch UK; maybe coincidence but only one or no degree of separation between them (privately or publicly)?

 

Brexit may have been about antipathy towards Europe, immigrants and nostalgia for a greater Britain but for many, mostly in the background, it was radical right libertarianism avoiding trade and other regulations, helped along by the Leave campaign:

 

The real reason we should fear the work of Dominic Cummings

 

Carole Cadwalladr
Downing Street’s controversial top adviser faces new accusations of poisoning politics, but his true nature was clear during Vote Leave’s Brexit triumph.

 

On 2 March 2017, shortly after my first major article on Cambridge Analytica was published, a furious tweeter appeared in my timeline: “1/ big @Guardian by @carolecadwalla on Mercer/Cambridge Analytica = full of errors & itself spreads disinformation.”

 

It marked the moment that Dominic Cummings entered my life – though at the time I had no idea who he was. At that time few people did. Cummings was the dark horse, known to just a few Westminster insiders, who had stealthily steered Vote Leave to victory in June 2016 while the rest of us were looking the other way.

 

But that is no longer the case. In the past two weeks, he has emerged from the shadows and burned himself on to the nation’s consciousness. As Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, he’s helped mastermind some of the most audacious – and outrageous – moves ever committed by a British prime minister: an attempt to suspend parliament, and the expulsion of 21 moderate MPs from the Conservative party. Moves that led the mild man of British politics, the former prime minister John Major, to call him a “political anarchist” who was “poisoning politics”.

 

From Politico

 

British PM’s special adviser inspires greater loyalty among many key officials than Johnson does.

 

By CHARLIE COOPER AND EMILIO CASALICCHIO 5/26/20, 9:45 PM CET Updated 5/31/20, 1:04 AM CET

 

LONDON — Never mind whether Boris Johnson should get rid of Dominic Cummings, the real question is whether he can.

 

To the U.K. prime minister, his top aide — whose lockdown journey from London to Durham has dominated headlines for days — is more than just an effective political adviser. He is the lynchpin of the Downing Street operation; someone who — according to several people who have worked with the two men in and out of government — gives Johnson policy direction and operational grip, while commanding more loyalty among a number of key officials and ministers than the prime minister does himself.

 

From The New Yorker

 

New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit

 

By Jane Mayer

 

The possibility that Brexit and the Trump campaign relied on some of the same advisers to further far-right nationalist campaigns has set off alarm bells on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did. Newly surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time, were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015……

 

There are direct links between the political movements behind Brexit and Trump. We’ve got to recognise the bigger picture here. This is being coordinated across national borders by very wealthy people in a way we haven’t seen before.”

 

Bannon has been strongly influenced by Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel ‘Camp of the Saints’, from The Huffington Post:

 

‘This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World.

 

“The Camp of the Saints” tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization.

 

The same author Raspail had been interviewed by Australian academic Dr. Katherine Betts (collaborator with Dr. Robert Birrell deemed ‘Australia’s best demographer’ by Sustainable Population Australia patron Dick Smith and cited frequently by mainstream media in Australia as an expert on immigration) in John Tanton’s TSCP:

‘A Conversation With Jean Raspail‘ reprint from original 1994-95

Not only is Tanton intimately linked with founding TSCP but had also crossed paths with others of note at the Koch’s ‘bill mill’ ALEC including Heritage Foundation’s Weyrich, Falwell of the Christian Nationalist right and the deep pocketed Mercers, along with others,’wheels within wheels’?

 

‘Three right-wing organizations founded nearly forty years ago by conservative activist Paul Weyrich are rediscovering their shared origins. The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of 169 right-wing Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, is establishing a partnership with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial “corporate bill mill” for state legislators

 

‘ALEC & SLLI – “Bipartisan” Bigotry. There appears to be a dirty little secret lurking in the halls and cocktail parties of the of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meetings – overt racism…..The John Tanton Network and the Anti-Immigrant Movement in America.
One man is at the heart of the most influential network of anti-immigrant groups in the country. This man, John H. Tanton, has created an empire of organizations populated by lobbyists, lawyers, legislators, and “experts” that have permeated the very depths of America’s social and political debate on immigration.

 

What appears to the public as myriad separate voices all advocating for one cause, i.e. severe immigration enforcement, is nothing more than a facade, a collection of craftily constructed front groups, faux-”coalitions,” and spin-offs that are collectively unified in their goal to overwhelm any reasonable debate on immigration with their branded worldview of bigotry.

 

This collective is known as the John Tanton Network.’

 

‘The Alt-Right and the 1%.  When President Trump equated white supremacists with anti-racism protesters, he was sending a message to the thugs in the streets and to some in executive suites…. ….Mercer, the co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, is also one of three owners of Breitbart News, the outlet Trump strategist (and former Breitbart editor) Steve Bannon has described as a “platform for the alt-right.”

 

With Mercer’s financial support, Breitbart has become a significant media force. While readership is down from its peak during the election campaign, the site attracted 11 million unique visitors in May of this year.

 

‘Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled White Nationalism Into The Mainstream. A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.” In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

 

But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.’

 

One Man Created a Bunch of Hate Groups. Now, Those Hate Groups Are Dug in With the Trump Administration….Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President, was the CEO of Breitbart, which frequently reports on the Tanton network’s “research” and gives column space to Tanton allies. Bannon’s favorite book, a racist French novel, was published in English by another of Tanton’s organizations.

 

The deep connections that Tanton’s anti-immigrant network has in the Trump Administration is concerning in its own right; but the immediate and long term effects of its influence on policy will continue to be devastating for the lives of countless immigrants. Under the Trump Administration, CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA, and the rest of the Tanton network have more power than ever — and they’re using it to reshape American immigration policy, possible for decades to come.’

 

‘Britain’s Steve Bannon Is Tearing Boris Johnson’s Tories Apart…….Just six weeks later, Cummings is in the limelight as the new hate figure in British politics and the man many Conservatives blame for wrecking their party and pushing the country into chaos all in the name of delivering Brexit.’

 

Conservatives in the USA, UK and Australian politics should be concerned as their respective parties are being torn apart by radical right libertarian driven white nationalism and populist politics.

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Article titled ‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism’ summarises ZPG Zero Population Growth in Australia, US white nationalist links, citing Paul Ehrlich and John Tanton. A symptom of US based radical right libertarianism and eugenics, presented as liberal, environmental and science based, but in fact supported by oligarchs.

 

The clearest signals emerged in the US in the ’70s when simultaneously fossil fuel companies became aware of global warming due to carbon emissions (and threatened by Nixon’s EPA), ZPG was established with Ehrlich, Tanton et al., supported by Rockefeller Bros. (Standard Oil then Exxon), Ford and Carnegie Foundations (according to the Washington Post), Club of Rome promoting Limits to Growth PR construct (including carrying capacity, Herman Daly’s steady-state economy suggesting protectionism to preclude global competition etc.) hosted on Rockefeller estate, sponsored by VW and Fiat, while James Buchanan and later Koch’s et al. started promoting libertarian economics (also Friedman, Hayek, Rand and Chicago School), nativism and developing think tanks for influence in politics, academia and media (according to MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ and Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’), including ALEC, Heritage Foundation etc..

 

‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism

 

Tony Goodfellow | 22nd February, 2019

 

With the backdrop of dramatic decrease in migration to Australia in 2018 to a 10 year low, the population debate has reared its ugly head. In recent months Dick Smith has run an advertising blitz with the title ‘overpopulation will destroy Australia’ that compares population growth to cancer and recently took stage at Dark + Dangerous Thoughts at Mona arguing “no” for the proposition “Do We Let Them In?”. Dick Smith’s intervention comes as members of the far right continue to focus on immigration as a major issue. For example, the newly minted Katter’s Australian Party senator, Fraser Anning, praised the White Australia Policy in his inaugural speech and echoed Nazi rhetoric saying “the final solution to the immigration problem of course is a popular vote”. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also recently spoken about reducing Australia’s immigration intake.

 

The two views, although, coming from different perspectives, one nominally in the name of “sustainability” and the other a throwback to colonialism steeped in racism and xenophobia, arrive at the same destination, a hermetical view of the world projecting fear onto an outsider. In Dick Smith’s view the outsider is coming to destroy the environment and it Anning’s version they threaten the “European-Christian” ethno-white state.

 

The environmental rhetoric of the population debate might be alluring to progressives. Who would argue against clean air and clean water? Who wouldn’t agree that the current paradigm of growth is unsustainable? The problem is that an analysis based solely in population is superficial, creating solutions that end up marrying with the worst parts of Australian politics – far-right populism. If unchecked environmentalists focused solely on population threaten to be co-opted and driving a wedge in the environmental movement – because on the surface the arguments sound appealing.
Debate about population within the environment movement has played out many times, with many of the arguments not being new. Dick Smith’s manifesto proclaims “The prime reason for the decline in living standards for many Australian workers is our population growth.”

 

However, whose environment is he trying to protect?

 

Background to the environmental population debate

 

In the late 1960’s and onward a debate raged in environmental groups that threatened to tear them apart. The hotly debated issue was about population, spurned on by the publication of the neo-Malthusian The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich.

 

The Population Bomb is an easy-to-read polemic written for a popular audience and a guide for organising. In Ehrlich’s view over-population is leading to societal and environmental collapse and the issue needs immediate policy action. It thus begun with the famous lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and the pace continues:

 

“Overpopulation is now the dominant problem.

 

Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values.

 

…regardless of changes in technology or resource consumption and distribution, current rates of population growth guarantee an environmental crisis which will persist until the final collapse.

 

There are some professional optimists around who like to greet every sign of dropping birth rates with wild pronouncements about the end of the population explosion.

 

Many of these countries, some of which are the poorest, most undernourished, and most overpopulated in the world, are prime candidates for a death-rate solution to the Population explosion

 

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

 

He argues that population is a geometrical ratio:

 

“If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the earth…Unfortunately, even 900 years is much too far in the future for those of us concerned with the population explosion. As you will· see, the next nine years will probably tell the story.”

 

He graphically compares population growth to cancer, just like Dick Smith:

 

“We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.”

 

In “Chapter 1 The Problem” Ehrlich writes that “I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago.”

 

It would be hard not to be terror-stricken after reading The Population Bomb and it inspired many to action – perhaps prematurely. One argument, coming from a milieu of a white middle-class that some scholars have called an “apartheid ecology”, could be characterised as the “Green anti-immigrant” position. This position argued that there needed to be a national population policy in the United States that centred on radically reducing immigration.

 

This debate had echoes of the 18th century where many often turned to population control to solve social ills. This movement was famously satirised by Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ or its longer title ‘A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick’. It also had echoes of Thomas Malthus who posited in An Essay on the Principle of Population that population would exceed food supply:

 

“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race

 

Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and subsistence as — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable, though the produce in that time would have increased to an immense extent.”

 

An Essay on the Principle of Population expressed a view where empathy to certain groups, such as the poor, would spell disaster. His ideas led those in power to look at famine as good for society and that support for those not well off as creating “the poor which they maintain” . Marx famously argued against Malthus:

 

“The hatred of the English working class for Malthus—the ‘mountebank-parson,’ as Cobbett rudely called him…—was thus fully justified and the people’s instinct was correct here, in that they felt that he was no man of science, but a bought advocate of their opponents, a shameless sycophant of the ruling classes.”

 

This account was pretty accurate considering Malthus has been used to wage war on the poor. “Over the last 200 years” according to eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster “Malthusianism has thus always served the interests of those who represented the most barbaric tendencies within bourgeois society.”

 

Malthus’ view would end up marrying with Eugenics to form an ideological base for the Nazis. From early on Hitler fetishised the idea that population was the problem:

 

“The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger.”

 

Tragically his solution to his manufactured population problem was to violently enlarge the borders of the state, encourage higher fertility of anyone who was in Arthur de Gobineau’s ahistorical category of the true Germans or Aryan race while offsetting this by genocide of certain populations he deemed too foreign, not nationalistic enough or inferior.

 

Brief History of the rise of concern for population to be anti-immigration.

 

After The Population Bomb was released the new wave of the population debate played out in the one the largest and oldest conservation groups, the Sierra Club, leading to a decades old internecine struggle. The publication solidified for many that overpopulation was the most important issue for environmentalists. The polemic had a forward by David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club. He tied the Sierra Club’s mission to the call to action of the The Population Bomb, writing:

 

“The roots of the new brutality, it will become clear from The Population Bomb, are in the lack of population control. There is, we must hope and predict, a chance to exert control in time. We would like to predict that organizations which, like the Sierra Club, have been much too calm about the ultimate threat to mankind, will awaken themselves and others, and awaken them with an urgency that will be necessary to fulfillment of the prediction that mankind will survive. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”

 

One scholar writes that the Ehrlich’s polemic “convinced many people that population expansion would eventually transcend the earth’s carrying capacity, leading to ecological disaster”. In doing so population became the pre-eminent concern for many environmentalists. It wasn’t long before environmental groups split on the issue. Population policy brought up many difficult questions that advocates could not address. On the question of scale, for example, should population be addressed globally or nationally? How do you address it nationally when the fertility rate is so low? Some proponents of addressing overpopulation decided the most politically acceptable way was to address it nationally, primarily through drastically reducing immigration. This focus on immigration somewhat overlook the arbitrary nature of both the new population goal and narrowly focusing on national population instead of consumption. There was no evidence that immigration size was related to ecological damage but the fear of population getting out of control was an overriding logic, and immigration provided a useful political tool……. continues……

 

Further reading

 

I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. – Here’s why: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question

 

Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism and the Hypocrisy of Hate: https://www.splcenter.org/20100630/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-hypocrisy-hate

 

Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it: https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224

 

Here’s what a population policy for Australia could look like: https://theconversation.com/heres-what-a-population-policy-for-australia-could-look-like-101458

 

Other related sources:

 

Betts K, Ideology and Immigration, Volume 1, Number 4 (Summer 1991), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0104/article_56.shtml

 

Betts K, Population Policy Issues, Volume 8, Number 2 (Winter 1997-1998), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0802/article_698.shtml

 

Betts K, A Conversation With Jean Raspail*, (Reprint) Volume 15, Number 4 (Summer 2005), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1504/article_1340.shtml (* Steve Bannon’s favourite)

 

Birrell R, Australian Nation-State, Volume 7, Number 2 (Winter 1996-1997), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0702/article_615.shtml

 

Bricker D & Ibbitson J, 2019, Empty Planet, Signal Books, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet

 

Haney-Lopez I, 2014, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, Oxford University Press USA, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17847530-dog-whistle-politics

 

Jaco S, Anti-Immigration campaign has begun Washington Post May 8 1977 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/05/08/anti-immigration-campaign-begun/

 

MacLean N, 2017, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-chains

 

Mayer J, 2016, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Doubleday, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money

 

Pearce F, 2010, The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future, Beacon Press, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7788578-the-coming-population-crash

 

van Onselen L, MacroBusiness (Australia) many articles about immigration, NOM net overseas migration, international education and population growth using research of Birrell and Betts https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/author/leith/

 

For more articles and blogs about Australian politics, demography, population growth and white nationalism click through.

Anglo Radical Right Libertarianism and Economics

The Anglo world especially including the US, UK and Australia, and elsewhere, have been subjected to neo classical economics, monetarist etc. theories exemplified by demands for small government, low taxation, cuts to state services, low regulation etc., with unwitting support from conservative and other voters.

 

Nancy MacLean in ‘Democracy in Chains’ stumbled across odd bedfellows and links to discover this movement promoting nineteenth century economic ideology and eugenics.

 

‘Radical Right Libertarians – MacLean

Misinforming the Majority: A Deliberate Strategy of Right-Wing Libertarians
BY
Mark Karlin, Truthout
PUBLISHED
July 9, 2017

When and how were the seeds sown for the modern far-right’s takeover of American politics? Nancy MacLean reveals the deep and troubling roots of this secretive political establishment — and its decades-long plan to change the rules of democratic governance — in her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Get your copy by making a donation to Truthout now!

 

Many individuals who follow politics and journalists think that the right-wing playbook began with the Koch brothers. However, in her groundbreaking book, Nancy MacLean traces their political strategy to a Southern economist who created the foundation for today’s libertarian oligarchy in the 1950s.

 

Mark Karlin: Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States?

 

Nancy MacLean: The modern extreme right wing I’m talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President Eisenhower called them “stupid” and fashioned his approach — calling it modern Republicanism — as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda. He didn’t. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state.

 

Buchanan studied economics at the University of Chicago and belonged to the same milieu as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, but he used his training to analyze public life. And he supplied what no one else had: an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades — and prevent it from being recreated. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained.

 

Buchanan was a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life’s work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state’s leaders were goading the white South to fight the court’s ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people — white and Black — the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back.

 

Why, until your book, has his importance to the right wing been largely overlooked?

 

There are a few reasons Buchanan has been overlooked. One is that the Koch cause does not advertise his work, preferring to tout the sunnier primers of Hayek, Friedman and even Ayn Rand when recruiting. Buchanan is the advanced course, as it were, for the already committed. Another is that Buchanan did not seek the limelight like Friedman, so few on the left have even heard of him. I myself learned of him only by serendipity, in a footnote about the Virginia schools fight.

 

How would you draw a line connecting Buchanan to the Koch brothers?

 

Charles Koch supplied the money, but it was James Buchanan who supplied the ideas that made the money effective. An MIT-trained engineer, Koch in the 1960s began to read political-economic theory based on the notion that free-reign capitalism (what others might call Dickensian capitalism) would justly reward the smart and hardworking and rightly punish those who failed to take responsibility for themselves or had lesser ability. He believed then and believes now that the market is the wisest and fairest form of governance, and one that, after a bitter era of adjustment, will produce untold prosperity, even peace. But after several failures, Koch came to realize that if the majority of Americans ever truly understood the full implications of his vision of the good society and were let in on what was in store for them, they would never support it. Indeed, they would actively oppose it.

 

So, Koch went in search of an operational strategy — what he has called a “technology” — of revolution that could get around this hurdle. He hunted for 30 years until he found that technology in Buchanan’s thought. From Buchanan, Koch learned that for the agenda to succeed, it had to be put in place in incremental steps, what Koch calls “interrelated plays”: many distinct yet mutually reinforcing changes of the rules that govern our nation. Koch’s team used Buchanan’s ideas to devise a roadmap for a radical transformation that could be carried out largely below the radar of the people, yet legally. The plan was (and is) to act on so many ostensibly separate fronts at once that those outside the cause would not realize the revolution underway until it was too late to undo it. Examples include laws to destroy unions without saying that is the true purpose, suppressing the votes of those most likely to support active government, using privatization to alter power relations — and, to lock it all in, Buchanan’s ultimate recommendation: a “constitutional revolution.”

 

Today, operatives funded by the Koch donor network operate through dozens upon dozens of organizations (hundreds, if you count the state and international groups), creating the impression that they are unconnected when they are really working together — the state ones are forced to share materials as a condition of their grants. For example, here are the names of 15 of the most important Koch-funded, Buchanan-savvy organizations each with its own assignment in the division of labor: There’s Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Mercatus Center, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Veterans of America, the Leadership Institute, Generation Opportunity, the Institute for Justice, the Independent Institute, the Club for Growth, the Donors Trust, Freedom Partners, Judicial Watch — whoops, that’s more than 15, and it’s not counting the over 60 other organizations in the State Policy Network. This cause operates through so many ostensibly separate organizations that its architects expect the rest of us will ignore all the small but extremely significant changes that cumulatively add up to revolutionary transformation. Gesturing to this, Tyler Cowen, Buchanan’s successor at George Mason University, even titled his blog “Marginal Revolution.”

 

In what way was Buchanan connected to white oligarchical racism?

 

Buchanan came up with his approach in the crucible of the civil rights era, as the most oligarchic state elite in the South faced the loss of its accustomed power. Interestingly, he almost never wrote explicitly about racial matters, but he did identify as a proud southern “country boy” and his center gave aid to Virginia’s reactionaries on both class and race matters. His heirs at George Mason University, his last home, have noted that Buchanan’s political economy is quite like that of John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina US Senator who, until Buchanan, was America’s most original theorist of how to constrict democracy so as to safeguard the wealth and power of an elite economic minority (in Calhoun’s case, large slaveholders). Buchanan arrived in Virginia just as Calhoun’s ideas were being excavated to stop the implementation of Brown, so the kinship was more than a coincidence. His vision of the right economic constitution owes much to Calhoun, whose ideas horrified James Madison, among others……

 

…..Having said that, though, I also believe that panic is the last thing we need. There is great strength to be found in the simple truth that Buchanan and Koch came up with the kind of strategy now in play precisely because they knew that the majority, if fully informed, would never support what they seek. So, the best thing that those who support a robust, non-plutocratic society can do is focus on patiently informing and activating that majority. And reminding all Americans that democracy is not something you can just assume will survive: It has to be fought for time and again. This is one of those moments.’

 

For more blogs and articles about economics, populist politics and white nationalism click through.

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Liberal democracies in western world need to make sure they do not become populist gerontocracies with changing demographics creating elderly ‘Gerrymandering’ where influence and numbers of older voters (with short term horizons) increasing proportionally over younger generations with longer term interests but less voice and influence.

Ageing Demographics, Democracy and Populism (Image copyright Pexels)

From Alan Stokes of Fairfax round 2016 elections:

It’s on for old and old: younger voters don’t stand a chance

One startling statistic shows why 65+ voters hold all the power at this election – and it will only get worse for the young’uns.

This election will not be decided by modern issues or fashionable personalities. It will not be aimed at the nation’s future. It will be about living in the past.

The 2016 election will be decided more than any other by Australia’s elderly.

We have seen a surge in the share of voters aged 65 and over – wartime children and now baby boomers, many of whom once burnt bras, voted for Whitlam, had a day off work when Alan Bond won the America’s Cup in 1983 but then backed John Howard, pocketed huge superannuation tax breaks from the mining boom, banked capital gains from home ownership and negative gearing, and can afford to say now that 70 is the new 50……

…One startling statistic defines this reversal of the 1960s-70s-80s generation gap.

Since Kevin07 rode youthful exuberance to victory nine years ago, the number of enrolled voters aged 18-24 has increased 7.9 per cent, reflecting some improvement in encouraging younger people to enrol.

But the number of enrolled voters aged 65 and over has increased 34 per cent.

Yes, oldies are out-growing young’uns by a ratio of more than four to one….

…As I wrote last week, the youth have good reason to be revolting. The 65+ voter demographic makes up 22 per cent of the vote this time – more than twice the 10.6 per cent for 18- to 24-year-olds….

…..These revelations are not intended to deny the elderly their voice. Rather, they raise questions about the morality of voting for self-interest when you will not be around to carry the burden of your decisions.

The median projection from the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggest the numbers of Australians aged 65+ will have increased by 84.8 per cent between 2011 and 2031. The proportion of the population 65+ will have increased from 13.8 per cent to 18.7 per cent….

….And what if parties realise they can win elections by kow-towing to the older demographic and downplaying issues that matter to younger Australians? We have seen this already on same-sex marriage, a republic, climate change and housing affordability….

….Expect to see more youthful candidates revolting against the demographic demons. We can only hope they can get through to older voters because the future belongs to the children, not the parents and grandparents.

Such is life …

 

Meanwhile in Europe:

Is Pensioner Populism Here to Stay?

Oct 10, 2018 | EDOARDO CAMPANELLA
MILAN – The right-wing populism that has emerged in many Western
democracies in recent years could turn out to be much more than a blip on the
political landscape. Beyond the Great Recession and the migration crisis, both of
which created fertile ground for populist parties, the aging of the West’s
population will continue to alter political power dynamics in populists’ favor.

It turns out that older voters are rather sympathetic to nationalist movements.
Older Britons voted disproportionately in favor of leaving the European Union,
and older Americans delivered the US presidency to Donald Trump. Neither the
Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland nor Fidesz in Hungary would be in power
without the enthusiastic support of the elderly. And in Italy, the League has
succeeded in large part by exploiting the discontent of Northern Italy’s seniors.
Among today’s populists, only Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (formerly
the National Front) – and possibly Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – relies on younger
voters…

…Most likely, a growing sense of insecurity is pushing the elderly into the populists’
arms. Leaving aside country-specific peculiarities, nationalist parties all promise
to stem global forces that will affect older people disproportionately.
For example, immigration tends to instill more fear in older voters, because they
are usually more attached to traditional values and self-contained communities.
Likewise, globalization and technological progress often disrupt traditional or
legacy industries, where older workers are more likely to be employed.

At best we are observing very cynical politics, influencers and media endeavouring to confuse, create fear and anxiety amongst older demographics round populist themes such as immigration, globalisation, nativism and identity.

For more blog articles about nativism, NOM net overseas migration, and demography, Click through.

 

 

 

 

Skills of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking and related literacies are viewed as essential soft, work or life skills to be taught and learnt by school students, apprentices, trainees, university students, employees and broader society, but how?

Teaching Skills of Critical Thinking in Students (Image copyright Pexels)

Following is parts of an article from The Conversation focusing upon argumentation, logic, psychology and the nature of science to help people understand and analyse the world round us in an age of fake news, conspiracy theories, anti-science and anti-education sentiments.

‘How to teach all students to think critically

December 18, 2014 2.27pm AEDT

All first year students at the University of Technology Sydney could soon be required to take a compulsory maths course in an attempt to give them some numerical thinking skills.

The new course would be an elective next year and mandatory in 2016 with the university’s deputy vice-chancellor for education and students Shirley Alexander saying the aim is to give students some maths “critical thinking” skills.

This is a worthwhile goal, but what about critical thinking in general?

Most tertiary institutions have listed among their graduate attributes the ability to think critically. This seems a desirable outcome, but what exactly does it mean to think critically and how do you get students to do it?

So what should any mandatory first year course in critical thinking look like? There is no single answer to that, but let me suggest a structure with four key areas:

 

Argumentation

The most powerful framework for learning to think well in a manner that is transferable across contexts is argumentation.  Arguing, as opposed to simply disagreeing, is the process of intellectual engagement with an issue and an opponent with the intention of developing a position justified by rational analysis and inference.

 

Logic

Logic is fundamental to rationality. It is difficult to see how you could value critical thinking without also embracing logic.  People generally speak of formal logic – basically the logic of deduction – and informal logic – also called induction.  Deduction is most of what goes on in mathematics or Suduko puzzles and induction is usually about generalising or analogising and is integral to the processes of science.

 

Psychology

One of the great insights of psychology over the past few decades is the realisation that thinking is not so much something we do, as something that happens to us. We are not as in control of our decision-making as we think we are.  We are masses of cognitive biases as much as we are rational beings. This does not mean we are flawed, it just means we don’t think in the nice, linear way that educators often like to think we do.

 

The Nature of Science

Learning about what the differences are between hypotheses, theories and laws, for example, can help people understand why science has credibility without having to teach them what a molecule is, or about Newton’s laws of motion.  Understanding some basic statistics also goes a long way to making students feel more empowered to tackle difficult or complex issues. It’s not about mastering the content, but about understanding the process.’

 

This article is from 2014, however it is unclear what Federal and State Education Departments are doing to include the explicit teaching and learning of critical thinking skills to students via curricula and syllabi?

For more articles about university teaching and learning skills click through.

 

 

 

 

Hans Rosling – The facts and ignorance about population growth

Don’t Panic – Hans Rosling Showing the Facts About Population

The world might not be as bad as you might believe!

“Don’t Panic” is a one-hour long documentary produced by Wingspan Productions and broadcasted on BBC on the 7th of November 2013.

‘With the world’s population at 7 billion and still growing we often look at the future with dread. In Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population, world famous Swedish statistical showman Professor Hans Rosling presents a different view…

… We face huge challenges in terms of food, resources and climate change but at the heart of Rosling’s statistical tour-de-force is the message that the world of tomorrow is a much better place than we might imagine.

Population Growth Decline (Image copyright World Bank).

 

Professor Rosling reveals that the global challenge of rapid population growth, the so-called population explosion, has already been overcome. In just 50 years the average number of children born per woman has plummeted from 5 to just 2.5 and is still falling fast. This means that in a few generations’ time, world population growth will level off completely. And in what Rosling calls his ‘Great British Ignorance Survey’ he discovers that people’s perceptions of the world often seem decades out of date.

Highlights from Ignorance survey in the UK

Highlights from the first UK survey re ignorance of global trends. A preliminary summary by Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation, 3 Nov, 2013

Gapminder’s mission is to fight devastating ignorance about the world with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We started the Ignorance Project to measure what people know and don´t know about major global trends.

The results indicate that the UK population severely underestimates the progress in education, health and fertility reduction in the world as a whole and in countries like Bangladesh, whereas they severely overestimate how much the richest countries have changed to renewable energy. It is noteworthy that the results from those with university degrees are not better than the average results, if anything they are worse. The results from UK are similar to those obtained by a 2013 survey in Sweden.

The aim of these surveys is to understand how deep and how widespread the public ignorance of major global development trends is in different countries. We are investigating the knowledge about the order of magnitude and speed of change of the most important aspects of the life conditions of the total world population. The first survey covered some major trends in demography, health, education and energy.

1. In the year 2000 the total number of children (age 0-14) in the world reached 2 billion. How many do UN experts estimate there will be by the year 2100?
2. What % of adults in the world today are literate, i.e. can read and write?
3. What is the life expectancy in the world as a whole today?
4. In the last 30 years the proportion of the World population living in extreme poverty has…
5. What % of total world energy generated comes from solar and wind power? Is it approximately
6. What is the life expectancy in Bangladesh today?
7. How many babies do women have on average in Bangladesh?

 

Conclusions

Question 1: The answers reveal very deep ignorance about population growth. Only 7% know that the total number of children (below age 15) already has stopped increasing. Almost half of the respondents think there will be twice as many children in the world by the end of the century compared to the forecast of the UN experts.

Questions 2 and 3: Answers show that the respondents think the literacy rate and the life expectancy of the world population is around 50% and 60 years (median values), respectively. But these figures correspond to the how the world was more than 30 years ago.

Question 4: The results show that just 10% are aware of that the United Nations’ first Millennium Development Goal, to halve the world poverty rate, has already been met, even before the target year 2015. More than half think the poverty rate has increased. It is important to understand that random guessing would have yielded 33% correct answers. The result is therefore not due to lack of knowledge, rather it must be due to preconceived ideas. The results strongly indicate that the UK public has failed to be informed about the progress towards the first of the UN´s Millennium Development Goals.

Question 5: Two thirds of the respondents severely overestimate the present role of new renewable sources of energy in world energy production. The present proportion is close to 1%.

Questions 6 and 7: The respondents reveal a deep ignorance about the progress of Bangladesh during the last two to three decades. Only about one in ten know that life expectancy in Bangladesh today is 70 years and that women on average have 2.5 babies.

 

For more articles about population growth and immigration click through.

International Education Market Research

Recently there have been articles about international students’ motivations and well-being on their journey of discovery through international education, a significant industry.

Such articles are relevant in that they do not criticise or dog whistle international students by describing them as ‘immigrants’ or suggesting they purposely short visa and immigration systems for long term or permanent residency.

In addition to reflecting increased international mobility and prosperity in developing nations, such insights should be imperative for all service-based marketing, especially digital carrying word of mouth or WOM.

Word of mouth is the most influential marketing channel as it is based upon experience of friends, family and peers with a product or service, the most trusted channel.

The message for marketers in any industry, especially services, is never make assumptions or rely upon headline or indirect data, but your customers too.  Marketing brand, reputation etc. requires constant feedback, monitoring of well-being and word of mouth while leveraging the same authentic feedback via social media, couched within a digital marketing strategy.

 

‘What we know about why Chinese students come to Australia to study

Hannah Song in The Conversation:

In 2016-17 Australia’s third largest export, international education, leapt from A$23.6 billion to a record high of A$28 billion. Within the higher education sector, the highest intake of international students is of Chinese origin.

Behind these statistics are the individual stories and aspirations of Chinese students’ parents who provide them the financial resources and emotional support. Yet, we know so little about why it matters so much to their parents, and what long-term impacts overseas study has on them and their families when they return home…

….Focusing on a shifting landscape of education in Shanghai, I undertook a longitudinal pilot case-study of four bilingual kindergarten-secondary schools to investigate the aspirations Chinese middle-class parents have for their children’s education.

….If Australia is to remain a destination for world-class education, we need to be far more self-reflective and long-sighted about what Australian international education offers: global citizenship and transnational mobility. We need to listen to the voices of an increasing middle-class in China.’

International Students (Image copyright Pexels)

‘’It’s stressful being an other’: The mental health woes of international students

Emily Baker in The Conversation:

Moving to Australia has, in Daniel Kang’s words, been a mix of challenges and little blessings. The Australian National University student has found room to breathe and develop. Walks through the abundant bush help clear his head. Generally, the experience has exceeded his expectations.

But moving from Singapore to Canberra has also carried difficulties. It can be stressful being an “other”, he said. The 22-year-old has at times been very lonely…

…The most recent student experience survey from the federal government’s Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching found undergraduate international students rated their experience at Australian universities 75 out of 100 per cent – slightly below the 79 per cent awarded by domestic students.

But separately, many international students report stress. They report social isolation. The very fact of being an international student in Australia – the experience of being alone in a new country, subject to financial pressures, navigating a new culture, and adjusting to a new academic system – is considered to make an individual at greater risk of mental ill-health.’

 

Any institution, business or organisation that neglects its existing customers to inform quality and marketing strategy development, maybe asking for trouble while relying upon PR and sales?

In the case of international education the most valuable resources are accessible onshore and on campus, i.e. enrolled students and their networks.

International Education Marketing – Conventional versus Digital

Traditional International Education Marketing

 

There have been criticisms for some decades regarding the effectiveness of universities’ and related education institutions’ international marketing and their ability to identity what the market needs and communicating effectively (Nicholls et al., 1995).

 

Anecdotal complaints from within larger institutions, whether faculty or administration, is that even with high enrolment numbers, there is little understanding of ‘how’ students came to be enrolled, let alone those prospective students who did not, with indirect or invalid KPIs (key performance indicators).

 

This is compounded further in large entities by organisational structures on large campuses, leading to potentially sub-optimal co-ordination between international marketing, admissions, web marketing team, suppliers or agents and students; resulting in silos impacting analysis of communication and information sharing.

International Education Digital Marketing

(Image copyright Pexels)

Conventional Marketing or Sales?

 

Marketing strategy emerging in the 1980s relied upon travel to physical recruitment events, distribution of brochures or ‘marketing materials’ by hand, appointment of agents; mostly short-term sales and ROI model or basic ‘4Ps’.

 

This latter financial and physical ROI method of evaluation e.g. numbers of brochures distributed, and students recruited, may not be highlighting the important factors or process leading to enrolments, or missing many factors altogether e.g. WOM (word of mouth)?

 

The assumed positive outcomes from such strategies may be correlated with other factors such as ongoing WOM with peers, suitable course availability or online visibility.  Previous research had already highlighted critical factors of significance including need for innovation, quality staff and image, service culture, good use of information technology (IT), healthy financials, technical excellence and broad range of courses (Mazzarol, 1998). There is focus upon internal human and technical resource factors required as inputs for good marketing and communication, but not behaviour of those seeking relevant information.

 

Meanwhile, over ten years ago formal research recognised and confirmed in decision making of a student sample, it’s course first, over reputation and destination, along with creating awareness through search engine optimised (SEO) visible websites to be found directly and easily (Gomes & Murphy, 2003).

 

This latter study is one of the few formal research articles related to international student purchasing behaviour available in the public domain, yet emphasising the importance of SEO and digital over ten years ago.  However, Australia’s pre-eminent and university owned student marketing and recruitment vehicle IDP, like most and according to formal job description, does not view analysis of enrolled students or other prospective students as important or essential (IDP, 2016)?

 

There has been little if any related or formal research on how students find information except some industry groups, mostly in Europe about ‘how’ prospective students behave and interact.

 

For more articles or blogs on education, training, marketing and society, click through to Academia profile of Andrew J. Smith.

Property Market – Real Estate Investment – Gross Returns on Price vs. Net Returns on Value

Interesting article re-published by Graham Hand who is Managing Editor of Firstlinks on real estate or property investment, and some lessons for owner occupiers too, on expenses and value e.g. an empty property has expenses lowering net income vs. shares with mostly net income i.e. very low costs, plus franking credits or dividend imputations, increasing income further.

Additionally, while the real estate market in Australia is more about PR public relations, indirect metrics and sentiments, reinforced daily by legacy media, focus is upon headline prices i.e. not value, assuming population growth in a working age decline.

Two value metrics for valuation are simply calculating long term market rental price for the area, annualising, then converting to total via benchmark of 5%, 7% (standard) or 10%; the 7% benchmark equates to the price doubling every ten years.

On the other hand one can use the final metric to calculate the value of one’s home from the time of purchase; if it hasn’t doubled every decade then it’s losing value, i.e. at best ‘treading water’. 

In the background are ageing demographics in the permanent population, the working age has passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, to be followed by lower fertility generations and potential permanent population decline; OECD data parses through and shows the future trends:

OECD working age data comparing Australia with Anglosphere and OECD.

The First Links article follows from here:

‘What real estate agents don’t tell you (redux)

Introduction. This article was originally published in 2015, and is reproduced here after a friend told me he was looking to buy an apartment in a holiday resort. One of the attractions is the ability to stay in the apartment when it is not rented out for short-term holidays. He said there was no point leaving money in the bank earning nothing and shares are too risky. This sounds like a scenario many readers contemplate as they look for income in new places.

I’m sure he thought I would smile pleasantly and he would drive off to buy his dream with a view. I sent him this article and he’s definitely having second thoughts. I have not changed any of the numbers so please read it knowing it is seven years old. The arguments remain valid. These resorts are a crap shoot.

Coincidentally, I stayed on the Gold Coast last week, this time further south than usual in an apartment at Bilinga, near Coolangatta. From there, the thousands of towers of Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach loom large on the horizon, a mass of short-let apartments ranging from the luxury to the downright trashy. The experience of owners no doubt covers the full range from wonderful to woeful, but anyone buying into a resort for short-term let should know what they are going into … mainly financing the holidays of other people. 

Explore the rear entrance of an apartment hotel or resort that is more than five years old and take a look at the contents of the skips in the lane outside. They are often full of sofas, dining chairs, mattresses and televisions. Seven years earlier, when the proposal for a shiny new building was just a model in a display apartment for off-the-plan sales, hundreds of dreamers signed up to buy apartments. They also agreed to a furniture package for $40,000 to allow the building to operate as a hotel or resort. After years of people on holidays staying in the rooms, jumping on the sofas and leaning back on the chairs, the furniture needs replacing. Over the five years, that’s another $8,000 a year of costs to write off for each owner. It’s not such a dream now.

A few years later, the apartment will probably need a new bathroom and kitchen. How many years of income will that cost?

If you don’t believe a sofa lasts only five years, you’ve probably never owned one of these short-let apartments. Hundreds of kids and honeymooners and party animals have enjoyed themselves on the furniture while on holiday. Have you ever watched coverage of schoolies week?

Gross yields the most misleading number in investing

Real estate agents quoting gross yields on residential property are using the most misleading number in investing. The costs associated with residential property consume most of the income, leaving uninformed investors blind to the actual returns until the expenses start to come in. In an era where the professionalism of financial advisers is slammed daily in the media, many property agents get away with poor disclosure without comment.

Obviously, this is not a marginal asset class few people care about. Residential real estate in Australia is worth $5.8 trillion, and it dwarfs listed equities of $1.6 trillion and superannuation of $2 trillion. It accounts for over half of Australia’s wealth (see CoreLogic Housing and Economic Market Update, April 2015).

Why are gross versus net yields so important for real estate?

Invest in a term deposit at 3% and you will earn 3%. There are no other costs involved. In equities, the effective yield earned can be better than the quoted dividend rate when imputation credits are added back. But residential property is the opposite. Net yields should be the main focus because expenses are high and unavoidable, even if the property is left empty.

A typical commentary on a real estate ‘entertainment’ programme goes like this:

“Is this a buy or a sell? It’s a one-bedder only 10 kilometres from the centre of Sydney, close to buses, 65 square metres, asking $750,000, would rent for $650 a week.”

“Well, the starting point is you don’t want to be out of this market,” replies the agent confidently. “This place will be worth $50,000 more in a year – that’s $1,000 every week. And look, $650 a week is about $35,000 a year, that’s a yield of 4.5%. Where can you get that today?”

Can you imagine what ASIC would do to a licensed adviser who spoke like that, or included it in an offer document? Prices do not always rise, and that yield is not available by buying that apartment.

CoreLogic quotes rental rates of 3.7% for ‘combined capitals’ across Australia, but this number is gross rental yields (for example, see page 7 of above-linked report). It’s the number the industry loves to talk about. But even if we put aside stamp duty, legal costs, borrowing costs and vacancies, what about the regular costs of owning a property? These are the ongoing drains on income that are often overlooked. According to a Reserve Bank of Australia Research Paper, ‘Is Housing Overvalued’ (June 2014), the running costs of long term rental properties are 1.5% per annum, and transaction costs of 7.3% averaged over ten years are 0.7%, giving costs of 2.2% per annum.

That takes the net yield to 1.5% before allowing for repairs and maintenance. Reality is completely different than the real estate brochures and entertainment programmes convey.

How do management rights work?

When a large apartment building is constructed, the lots or units are purchased either by people who want to live in them (owner occupiers) or let them (investors). The ‘management rights’ to the building are sold by the developer, which gives the manager the right to charge a fee to look after the building and in some circumstances, run a letting scheme. The manager estimates how much income the building can generate when deciding how much to pay for the rights.

Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of different schemes in Australia, ranging from small premises run by mum and dad to professional managers (including listed companies) who may pay up to $15 million to manage a large, prestigious building by the beach with great views. The management rights might include running a restaurant, a reception centre, housekeeping, a real estate business as well as the letting and maintenance. Income includes payments from the body corporate, plus owners who enter a letting agreement pay a percentage of the letting charges, say 8% for long term letting and 12% for short term. The vast majority of apartment buyers in a hotel or resort sign up with the manager because there are efficiencies in one person managing the whole building. But what the buyer does not realise is that every change of a light bulb, every adjustment of the remote control, and every time the room is cleaned is a money-making opportunity to recover that $15 million.

Higher income, higher expenses

An apartment costing say $500,000 might rent permanently for $500 a week, but as part of a hotel, $250 night in high season. How can this not be a better deal? Consider these actual examples of well-established apartments in hotel or resort schemes targeted at short-term letting:

Table 1: Extracts from tax returns for typical short-term letting apartments

The expenses from short-term letting are far more than permanent, especially costs such as cleaning and replacing equipment. Owning an apartment for short-term letting can be an annoying experience of monthly expenses to maintain the apartment to the standard required by the hotel or resort manager. Here is more detail from the tax returns of these apartments:

Table 2: Detailed income and expense returns

It’s hard to believe a small apartment can incur $47,000 in costs a year. People who put their apartments into these letting pools are probably prepared for some of the same costs as long term rentals, such as strata fees and council rates, but who expects regular costs such as these:

Table 3: Examples of specific expenses in short term letting

It’s a monthly crap shoot. The owner pays $360 a year for the phone system, and could buy the television for a year of hiring fees. The dry cleaning can be $100 a month. The cost of cleaning a one-bedroom apartment after one night is an unbelievable $73. How long does it take to clean a small apartment in a building with 200 such apartments? If you think the management fee should cover the quick visits to the apartment and complaints by guests, read the fine print. There is no way of knowing how often a light bulb is replaced or a bed cover dry cleaned. Who dry cleans a shower curtain every month? That $1 light bulb costs $23 to replace. This is a big money earner for the manager. A guest might stay for one night and after expenses such as booking agent fees, advertising levy, housekeeping and repairs, little is left for the owner. It’s not worth the wear and tear on the apartment.

Who cares, capital gains and tax deductions are more important than income

Many investors may consider the income to be a minor part of the expected return, especially if they realise it’s only likely to be 1.5%. Residential property prices in Sydney were up 14% in the year to March 2015, so a few dollars in expenses is tolerable (although it was less than 5% per annum for the decade before 2015).

There’s a problem here as well with short term letting. Most owner occupiers do not want to live in a building where the majority of other tenants are holiday-makers. These visitors are out to have a good time. They party late at night, crash their suitcases into the lifts and walls, drag their wheels across the floorboards or carpets, return from the beach in their towels and drip on the furniture. The kitchen benches get scratched, the carpet must be cleaned regularly and equipment is stolen. People who assume guests look after the room in the same way they look after their own home don’t know how some people live. A permanent resident living in a building does not want to battle a lift full of suitcases every time they leave their apartment.

So the secondary market sales of these apartments are usually not to owner occupiers, and the building gradually becomes dominated by short term lets. The major buying force that pushes up the price of real estate, the person buying their dream home, is not in the market. 

The premises are also subject to intense wear and tear, and the foyers are full of holiday brochures and bags and screaming children and people waiting to check in or out. So these apartments are worth less than in owner occupied buildings. Investors ask to see the net return after five years, the tired furniture and dirty carpet, and the income yield is not enough to create demand unless the price is relatively low. In many locations, these apartments in hotel schemes are the cheapest in town. It’s no surprise the two-bedder listed above made a large capital loss after expenses (stamp duty, agent’s fees, legal fees) despite seven years of ownership.

At least the loss is a tax deduction, able to be offset against other income. But buying an asset to create a loss and a tax deduction is a strange way to build wealth. Many investors talk about the ‘tax deduction benefits’ as if that is a good aim in itself. The only reason it’s a tax deduction is because it’s a loss.

OK, but at least I can holiday there

How about justifying the purchase by using the apartment once a year for a holiday? Forget it. The time of the year when the rent is the best is also when the owner wants to use it. Don’t confuse an investment with a lifestyle decision such as a holiday. Anyone who wants a week in a resort should pay for a week in a resort, not a year of problems owning the place.’

For more blogs and article click through Consumer Behaviour, Demography, Economics, Finance, Statistical Analysis & Taxation:

Economic Business Risk – Property – Real Estate – Australia – Core Logic

Property – Kylie Sells House in Melbourne – Nominal Profit or Treading Water in Real Terms?

Population Decline in Asia is Near with Africa to Follow

Economic Growth of Transactions vs. Consumption of Resources