Last Sunday there were dueling diaries that reached the recommended list on DailyKos: History Tells Us The Extreme Left Cannot Beat Trump and What History Really Tells Us About Defeating Trump.

I did not agree with either one.

I am not a historian, but I have read a lot of American history. I am, after all, a frigging book dealer, so I should read a lot of books, right? And I don’t think it is conceit on my part, as I shuffle past the three-score mark in this mortal veil, to assert that I know a bit more about American history than a lot of other people appear to know.

For example, neither one of the two dueling diaries mentioned what, to my mind, is the obvious role played in American history by the leftist populist movements of the late 1800s. Nor did either of the diarists discuss the crucial role of the radical left in shaping the New Deal.

I was going to write a comment outlining some of what I knew, mostly by cutting and pasting from a diary I posted in December 2015, but realized there was not enough detail there about what I wanted to write about. So I went traipsing down various corridors of The Tubez, and came upon a truly wonderful article by Van Gosse, a history professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn. Professor Gosse co-founded Historians Against the War in 2003, and focuses on the African American struggle for full citizenship since the American Revolution, the New Left as a "movement of movements," and the Cold War in Latin America. The article by Gosse I found is entitled, What the New Deal Accomplished, and I will excerpt liberally (ha-ha) from it.

Even better, Professor Gosse has agreed to be my first subject of an interview-by-email, an approach I’ve been cogitating for quite a while now.

In What the New Deal Accomplished, Professor Gosse writes:

Three movements stand out as directly influencing the key New Deal programs. First was the radical movement of the unemployed which surfaced in early 1930. Through "hunger marches," constant lobbying and local protest, it forced the issue of relief for the unemployed onto the national policy agenda. Second was the movement to provide pensions for the aged, led by a California doctor named Townsend, which made the idea of universally-available government pensions so popular that Democrats adopted it. Finally, and most important, was the movement for industrial unionism embodied in a new labor federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Professor Gosse then proceeds to examine each of these three movements, beginning with the unemployed.


I asked Professor Gosse to supply some more background on these 1930s radicals. How spontaneous were these protest activities? In other words, would they have occurred without the organizing of groups like the Young Communist League ? And are there any historical connections between these groups of the 1920s and 1930s, and the various populist organizations of the late 1800s, such as the Grange, the Farmers Alliances, the Greenback Party, the People’s Party, and the Non-Partisan League? Professor Gosse's reply is immediately below. Note that this radical organizing only became effective when it began to include women.

The Unemployed Councils tapped into a great deal of spontaneous, urgent anger and outrage, but they were an organized and directed effort by the CPUSA. My article "`To Organize in Every Neighborhood, In Every Home': The Gender Politics of American Communists Between the Wars," Radical History Review (Spring 1991), 109-141, explains how the Party changed its strategy in early 1930 because of bottom-up pressure to stop focusing just on the (male) workers and look at families.  They took off like a rocket because the party had all these dedicated cadres in place, including women, who finally found the right thing to do (as in fighting evictions, demanding more “relief”).  I would not say there were many connections to the populists of various sorts you have named, because those were based in the rural heartland, whereas the Unemployed Councils were rooted in dense urban ethnic neighborhoods in places like Detroit, Chicago, the Bronx etc.  They did draw on existing traditions of working-class activism that predated the CP, especially among Jewish women.  The IWW also had developed what I would call a “familist” practice during its big strikes in the early ‘Teens, which may have influenced the CP.

I do not know much about Townsend. Was he a leftist radical? I do not know. Judging from the brief profile in Wikipedia, I doubt it. He and his employer, Robert Clements, just appear to have come up with the right idea, with the right pitch, at the right time.

I do not think it matters much, because as Professor Gosse notes, the influence of the unemployed movement, and the Townsend movement, were easily dwarfed by the massive increase in labor activism that a forgotten section of New Deal legislation set in motion.

…. the original NRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] legislation pushed through Congress in the famous "100 days" of Roosevelt's first term contained an obscure provision that acted as a catalyst for an unprecedented grassroots awakening of America's workers. Clause "7A" of the legislation establishing the NRA specifically guaranteed employees the right to organize. Never before had Congress taken such an unequivocal stance in favor of labor. Across the country desperate workers took this not as a vague sop to the AFL [American Federation of Labor]—as originally intended
—but as an explicit endorsement of unionization. The phrase "the President wants you to join a union" was taken up and repeated by organizers, and even found its way onto posters.

Spurred by the NRA, workers flooded into the AFL from 1933 on. In many cases, the Federation had nowhere to put them. The AFL only recognized workers who possessed a specific craft or recognized job title (like boilermakers, machinists or brewery truck drivers). Unskilled or semiskilled employees in large factories had to be grouped into temporary "federal locals," while the Federation tried to figure out which craft union could take them. But this institutional roadblock did not matter in the end, as workers kept striking and forming ad-hoc union locals in textile mills and steel factories, assuming that the labor movement wanted them, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. 

By 1934, this bottom-up insurgency assumed a scope that to some suggested revolutionary possibilities. Workers seemed almost anxious to walk out, and refused to back down in the face of massive repression. 1.5 million struck that year, despite the fact that unemployment in some urban centers approached half of the workforce. Though labor battles took place in all parts of the country, three local strikes served to underline the new dynamic--the "general strikes" led by unabashed radicals in three industrial centers, Toledo, San Francisco, and Minneapolis.

First, what is a general strike? A strategy well-understood in Europe and Latin America, where it has sometimes been used to bring down governments, a general strike means that all workers in a city, region or even a whole country stop work. Obviously, this constitutes a great threat to authority in general, and has vast potency as a tactic. For a variety of reasons, however, there have been few general strikes in American history, and even those few (as in Seattle in 1919) did not last long.

Things were different in 1934. In Toledo, a key center of auto parts production where a walk-out could close down much of the industry, the strike began in the Auto-Lite factory and spread throughout the city when strikers were killed by National Guardsmen. Organizers from the socialist American Workers Party played a major role in making the strike general. In Minneapolis, an armed confrontation developed between the city's teamsters, under the leadership of dissident Marxists from the Communist League of America, and the city's businessmen and mayor. Again, street battles led not to the strike's collapse but to the shutdown of the city's business as a whole. Finally, in the most spectacular instance, San Francisco's longshoremen struck, led by an Australian named Harry Bridges, who was very close to the Communist Party. The dockworkers faced down machine guns along the Embarcadero, suffering many casualties, but won their point. In each of these cities, the workers and their unions won major victories—even if only the right to have a union, and attempt to bargain. The biggest effort of the year, however, was a brief general strike of more than 300,000 textile workers in mills stretching from New England to Georgia, which ended in a crushing defeat. The combined effect of this unprecedented militance demonstrated the potential of the most exploited employees and the great obstacles facing the trade union movement

I asked Professor Gosse to again expand a bit on the groups involved. Was there coordination between the general strikes? Why was the strike of the textile workers defeated, while the general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco, and Minneapolis succeeded? Is the lesson that, given the communications technology of the time, a nation-wide strike was vulnerable to repression, while large strikes confined to local areas were not? His reply is immediately below. Note how fractious the radical left was at that time—I don’t think the left in USA is any closer to unity today.

No, there was no coordination, and more’s the pity.  Each of these famous strikes was led by a different group of Marxists, and they did not get along.  The orthodox Trotskyists (who soon became the Socialist Workers Party) organized the Minneapolis teamsters.  A.J. Muste’s Workers Party had a concentration in Toledo, and led that.  The Communist Party (CP) was key to the San Francisco strike, and eventually to many of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)’s big strikes and organizing drives. But the level of sectarian rivalry and hatred was very intense between the CP and the others.  Once the CP adopted the “popular front” line in 1935, they were open to cooperation, so that Communists and old-line Socialists did ally in the CIO for a while but the general pattern is one of estrangement between “Stalinists” and “anti-Stalinists."  Very unfortunate, a history I hope we do not ever repeat.

Whether a nationwide coordinated effort was possible is an interesting question.  Certainly, once the CIO was formed, there was considerable national coordination, but even then, each union had its politics and internal tensions:  the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (later USW) was very different than the UAW which was in turn different than the Electrical Workers or the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and behind all of them was the United Mine Workers (which effectively founded the CIO), under the personal control of John L. Lewis.

I asked who wrote, inserted or lobbied for Clause "7A". Professor Gosse replied that “My presumption is that to the extent the existing hidebound AFL was attached to the Democratic Party, this was just a gift to them, no more, but with huge unanticipated consequences.”

The sudden labor militancy of 1934 had two important effects. First, it led directly to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, signed into law by President Roosevelt on July 5, 1935. This Act is also known as the Wagner Act, since its author was U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner, a New York Democrat who was born in the Rhineland-Palatinate of Prussia (now part of Germany) in 1877, and immigrated to the USA with his parents in 1885.

Was there any connection between the Wagner family, and the German revolutionaries of 1848? This question remains unanswered at this time.

The Wagner Act guaranteed the rights of workers to form and join labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, and engage in collective action including strikes and boycotts. Previously, these rights had been repeatedly denied by a number of court decisions, in a legal climate that has become known as the Lochner Era. The Wagner Act also created the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to conduct and enforce elections for unionization of a workplace or company, and require employers to engage in collective bargaining with any labor unions thus formed.

In early 1935, no serious observer could envision anything but prolonged, bitter and bloody class struggle, escalating in ways that most feared to imagine, unless something was done. That is what the general strikes, the spontaneous insurgency overwhelming the old-guard AFL, and the failed textile strike all implied. In that context, Senator Wagner (only reluctantly backed at the last minute by FDR) proposed a way out of a terrible impasse, a new social contract—not out of sentimental liberal idealism, and certainly not because of secret revolutionary tendencies, but simply because something had to be done. The Wagner Act, the NLRB and a new government-regulated and enforced right to collective bargaining was a compromise, then, but one that established not just organized labor—still very weak—but more importantly, America's immigrant-based working-class as a serious political actor.

That last sentence leads us to the second important effect. The strike wave of 1934 transformed the labor movement itself, by eclipsing the power and influence of the craft unions and the American Federation of Labor, which had dominated organized labor for decades, and which were generally amenable to laissez faire capitalism, and unwilling to organize workers at giant industrial companies such as the steel and auto makers. New, more militant labor organizations, most notably the Congress of Industrial Organizations, would come to the fore, and become the foundation of the new ruling political coalition being forged by Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.

In his article, Professor Gosse explains that before the 1934 strike wave,

…. the union movement was isolated from the majority of the working class, and largely represented a "labor aristocracy" of skilled workers with conservative tendencies. Until the 1930s, a very high proportion of union members (and most union leaders) were native-born craftsmen of Northwestern European, Protestant backgrounds, while the majority of working class people were unskilled factory workers--immigrants or the children of immigrants, mainly Catholics, Orthodox Christians or Jews. This deep cultural split, stretching from the shop floor to the local churches to taverns, had significant political ramifications. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was led by conservative "business unionists" who frankly stated that they did not believe the unskilled industrial workers could ever be unionized. Their attention was focused on protecting the privileges and jurisdictions of the exclusive crafts, which typically represented only a small minority of workers in a given workplace….

The AFL's approach to politics resembled its "business unionist" approach of defending practical gains by skilled workers, and ignoring the greater needs of the unskilled mass of factory operatives. Samuel Gompers, President of the AFL for nearly forty years, summed up the Federation's program in one word--"More," meaning more for his members, and little or no interest in anyone else, such as the women or blacks excluded by union bylaws and traditions. In national politics, the AFL tended to favor the Democrats, but its approach was cautious and its influence limited. At all times, it sought the mantle of respectability and legitimacy, rejecting any association with radical programs of social reform. During the 1920s, as American capitalism rode a business boom, organized labor stagnated. The AFL began to seem almost irrelevant under Gompers' unimaginative successor, William Green. By the Depression's beginning it was a minor force outside of major cities where craft locals exercised considerable control over the building trades, railroad yards and a few other jobs, and maintained some power in Democratic machines.

Understanding the quiescent attitude of the AFL, and its decline throughout the 1920s, helps explain why organized labor mounted no significant challenge in the early years of the Depression. It led no protests, nor did it organize any major national campaign for relief, leaving that ground almost entirely to Communists and other radicals. No historian credits the AFL with any significant place in Roosevelt's sweeping victory in 1932, or the even greater Democratic Party triumph in 1934. In fact, until 1933-34, organized labor is almost entirely absent from the various chronicles of the Depression. To most observers, it seemed merely one more interest group to be assuaged, and certainly less significant than the National Association of Manufacturers or the Chamber of Commerce. Other than a few intense local strikes led by breakaway radical unions from the Communist-led Trade Union Unity League, no major strike action took place until 1934

I asked Professor Gosse to provide more background on the Trade Union Unity League:

It was a “dual union” set up to oppose the AFL (keeping in mind that “dual unionism” has always been considered heretical and just plain wrong by most unionists), and I remember it as mainly a way-station before the CIO.  When leftists were kicked out of the regular internationals, or whatever local they were in, or got really frustrated by do-nothing leadership, they would create an alternative body, but even the top CP trade unionists like William Z. Foster had to know this was a stopgap.  Of course the CIO itself was the most dramatic expression of “dual unionism,” but it succeeded—in large part because some of the biggest unions in the AFL split to form it and brought their treasuries and staffs with them.

Professor Gosse’s reply nicely leads into the next excerpt from his article. Here he details how the radical leftists within the labor movement of the 1930s broke with the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The AFL and CIO merged in 1955. The membership of the AFL-CIO reached 20 million in 1979, before beginning its continuing decline under the hammer blows of Reagan, neo-liberalism, and deindustrialization.

…. the strikes of 1934 and the Wagner Act broke the dam within labor itself. At all levels, rebellion had been growing against the domination of "business unionists" and the extraordinarily cautious regime of President William Green. The demand for industrial unionism, uniting all workers regardless of craft, skill, ethnicity, religion, race or gender, had simmered for two generations, and now came to the fore. At the AFL' s [October] 1935 convention in Atlantic City,  John L. Lewis, the formerly conservative and autocratic president of the United Mine Workers, challenged the craft unionists physically, punching Carpenters Union President William Hutcheson in the mouth. Immediately afterwards, Lewis, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers formed the Committee on Industrial Organization (or CIO; the name was changed to "Congress on Industrial Organization" when they left the AFL formally a year later) to actively promote new unions in the mass production industries.

The new CIO rapidly became the center of the working-class social movement that had been growing from many different sources since 1930. In steel towns, auto plants, oil fields and on the killing floors of meatpacking houses, it became a magnet for a cohort of grassroots activists that had persisted since the failed union drives of the 'Teens. Many of them were middle-aged skilled workers from the British Isles, men with long years of shop floor militance behind them who were recognized as informal leaders by younger workers of different nationalities. Small left wing independent unions had existed outside of the AFL for years, and had mushroomed with new members since the NRA gave public sanction to unions. In effect, they were a movement waiting to happen, through the lean years of the 1920s and the chaos and desperation of the Depression's early years. Indeed, if the AFL had shown any willingness of its own, it could have rapidly have built national industrial unions. By 1936, however, the initiative had passed to the new CIO, which survived largely thanks to money and staff provided by John L. Lewis' Mine Workers…. 

These battles took place before, during and just after the crucial 1936 elections, when the Democratic Party's "New Deal Coalition" triumphantly came together, sweeping all but two states. During that election, the CIO threw all of its resources into securing FDR's re-election via a newly-created entity, Labor's Non-Partisan League. Though FDR had publicly condemned the Flint sit-down, he maintained a hands-off pose, and privately urged settlement on all parties. In light of past history, this was a marked advance: not since Theodore Roosevelt had the White House been officially neutral, effectively giving organized labor a co-belligerent status with corporate America.

The Democrats stance of guarded support, and sometimes open embrace, of a labor movement at the height of its militance, did not arrive in a vacuum. In fact, the Democrats actively feared serious electoral challenges from their left. To understand the significance of the historic alliance of the labor movement to the Democratic Party, which was locked in place in 1936 and persists to this day, we must look at the meteoric rise of radical third party efforts from 1934 on. Historians repeatedly cite Roosevelt's trepidation over a bid by Louisiana's eccentric populist Senator Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in late 1935. In fact, much more clear cut challenges to the Democrats came from bona fide radicals with established credentials. In the upper Midwest, a strong regional tradition of third-party progressivism revived. The Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota effectively took over the state, electing governors and Members of Congress. In Wisconsin, Robert LaFollette's old Progressive Party surfaced again, led by other members of his family. Perhaps most startling, however, was the effort in California led by the veteran radical novelist Upton Sinclair. In 1934, he organized a campaign called End Poverty in California (EPIC), won the Democratic primary for governor, and narrowly lost the general election after intense red baiting. Numerous other examples sent a very clear message to traditional Democrats like FDR that they needed to move quickly to secure their working class support, and at the right moment an alliance with the CIO sent that message.

It is instructive to review this history, and contrast it with how Democrats have reacted to mass movements more recently. To win election as President, Barack Obama and his campaign team attracted the grass roots support of over two million people whose small, individual donations and activism propelled team Obama to victory. But Obama was not really a populist at heart, and once actually in power, was unwilling to steer or otherwise use this grassroots movement to impose real change on the existing structure of the economy—despite the massive outrage over the depredations and arrogance of Wall Street. Micah Sifry, author of the 2014 book The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet), has recently called this wasted grassroots movement “Obama’s Lost Army.”

The response of many of these people team Obama had mobilized, then failed to use, was to join ranks with Occupy Wall Street. Again, Obama and the Democrats chose not to support or even identify with this mass movement. Instead, the Obama administration joined with the private security forces of large banks, and with local police forces, and coordinated a national para-military suppression of Occupy. In fact, 4,000 Obama administration documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice in June 2014 through a Freedom of Information Act filing, reveal that the Department of Homeland Security treated calls by Occupy Wall Street in 2011 for a boycott of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, as a potential terrorist threat!

Finally, of course, there was the opposition mounted against the Sanders presidential campaign by elements of the Democratic Party leadership.

So, it seems that the institutional instinct of the Democratic Party is to not just completely shun the radical left, but even forsake its New Deal alliance with organized labor. (There are also tight parallels between the formal neoliberal conceptual assault on organized labor. See, for example, Chapter 5, “The Neoliberals Confront the Trade Unions,” by Yves Steiner, in the 2009 book edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective), and the ongoing attempts by ALEC, Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians to legislatively cripple organized labor in the USA.) As Thomas Frank explains in his new book, Listen Liberal — Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Democratic Party leaders began to turn their backs on labor following the disastrous 1968 election (pages 45ff).  Frank argues this new direction was first pioneered by the Democratic equivalent of the 1971 Powell Memo (the Powell Memo laid out how corporations could begin to roll back the increasing public hostility to big business and what Powell called "the American free enterprise system"), the book of the same year by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s. This abandonment of labor allowed new Democratic Party leaders such as Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Tim Wirth, Al Gore, and the Clintons, to embrace free trade, deindustrialization, and financialization, and shift the base of the Party from the working class to the rising new “professional class.”

In summary, the picture that emerges from actual history is that the radical left in the USA played a very important role in creating the New Deal. Most of the major ideas that created the social safety net—which remains wildly popular—originated in the radical left, percolated up through the working class labor unions the radicals organized, and were finally accepted by the national leaders of the Democratic Party in power only with some reluctance and hesitation. As Professor Gosse concludes his article:

…. the Roosevelt Administration was in fact responding to popular pressure, attempting to mediate and control a genuine upsurge. Increasingly, as time went on, it sought to ride the force of the mass movement spawned by the Depression to build a new Democratic Party coalition, with considerable success.

More Warmist prophecy

Summer is already past its peak so where is the bleaching?

The Great Barrier Reef could be struck by its worst-ever blast of coral bleaching as early as this year, experts have warned.

Sea temperatures around the reef near Queensland, Australia, have reached a year-long high, putting coral at risk of extreme heat stress, according to a UN report.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority warned that the reef is more at risk now than it was just before its previous worst-ever bleaching last year, when a quarter of all coral was killed off.

It said a 'lack of planning' for climate change was to blame.

The report, which was presented to the UN on Friday, said that 'unprecedented severe bleaching and mortality of corals in 2016 in the Great Barrier Reef is a game changer'.

The vast coral reef is under pressure from agricultural run-off, the crown-of-thorns starfish, development and climate change.

Last year swathes of coral succumbed to devastating bleaching, due to warming sea temperatures, and the reef's caretakers have warned it faces a fresh onslaught in the coming months.

Canberra updated the UN's World Heritage committee on its 'Reef 2050' rescue plan in December, insisting the site was 'not dying' and laying out a strategy for incremental improvements to the site.

But an independent report commissioned by the committee concluded that the government had little chance of meeting its own targets in the coming years, adding that the 'unprecedented' bleaching and coral die-off in 2016 was 'a game changer'.

'Given the severity of the damage and the slow trajectory of recovery, the overarching vision of the 2050 Plan... is no longer attainable for at least the next two decades,' the report said.

Shallow-water corals in the north of the 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometre) long reef were affected, although central and southern areas escaped with less damage.

The government has pledged more than £1.2 billion (US$1.5 billion) to protect the reef over the next decade, but researchers noted a lack of available funding, with many of the plan's actions under-resourced.

The latest assessment comes after the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority warned the Queensland State government of an 'elevated and imminent risk' of mass-bleaching this year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

With heavy use of coal-fired power and a relatively small population of 24 million, Australia is considered one of the world's worst per capita greenhouse gas polluters.

Researchers highlighted that the government's rescue plan does not do enough to address climate change, noting that 'new coal mines pose a serious threat' to the reef's heritage area.

While the plan has a strong focus on improving water quality, environmental groups too have been critical of the government for inactivity on global warming.

'These independent experts have given UNESCO a far more accurate assessment of progress than the rose-coloured-glasses version released by the Australian and Queensland Governments late last year,' said World Wildlife Fund Australia head of oceans Richard Leck.

But Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg told the ABC the government had been 'very successful to date' in implementing the reef's 2050 plan.

'Climate change is the number one threat to the reef together with water quality issues,' he said, citing the government's ratification of the Paris agreement, the world's first universal climate pact, as part of the 'broader' efforts to reduce stress on the reef.

SOURCE






Australian universities ask students to respect Muslims by not shaking hands with the opposite sex

Top Australian universities are asking students to respect Muslims by understanding that shaking the hand of the opposite sex is not allowed for followers of Islam. 

Adelaide's Flinders University, Perth's Curtin University and the University of Western Australia (UWA) provide information to students aimed at giving them a better understanding of Islam.

This information hopes to further the understanding that 'shaking hands or touching members of the opposite sex who are not family is not permitted' for Muslims, The Australian reported.

It also says greeting Muslims with phrases such as or 'Happy Easter' or 'Merry Christmas' is not culturally appropriate.

National Union of Students ethno-cultural officer Lorena White told The Australian universities should not force students to participate in actions that do not respect their faith.

UWA and Flinders University do not have a formal handshake protocol, according to a spokesperson from each institution.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham said: 'We expect them [universities] to be ­accountable to their communities, students and the taxpayers who fund them and to reflect community expectations and standards.'

SOURCE






Tony Abbott plays his Trump card: Former leader unleashes on Malcolm Turnbull as 'Labor lite' - and calls for him to slash immigration and scrap climate change targets

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has called on his successor to wind back immigration, axe the Human Rights Commission and stop 'pandering' to climate science.

Mr Abbott said Malcolm Turnbull was losing votes to One Nation because he was running a 'Labor-lite' government, he told a book launch for 'Making Australia Right', edited by Jim Allan, in Sydney on Thursday night.

He said to win back votes before the next election, Mr Turnbull should scale back immigration to ease housing prices, axe funding to the Human Rights Commission to stop 'financial bullying', and cut the renewable energy target to stop 'pandering' to climate change 'theology'.

'The Coalition has become Labor-lite,' he said in his speech at the book launch, in a transcript supplied to The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Abbott, who was rolled by Mr Turnbull in September 2015, said there was disappointment with 'perhaps even despair' with the government.

'These criticisms aren't always fair. 'Still, unless we heed the message from people who think that we have let them down, a book like this can become the thinking person's justification for voting One Nation.'

The former prime minister said it was 'easy to see why' the major parties lost votes in last year's election. 'Our challenge is to be worth voting for,' Mr Abbott said.

Mr Abbott later told conservative columnist Andrew Bolt the government was losing its way.

'Plainly there are lots of people who are concerned about our direction and plainly the risk is we will drift to defeat if we don't lift our game,' Mr Abbott told Sky News on Thursday night.

'I have a duty to try and ensure that our party and our government stays on the right track and plainly there are some issues right now and it's incumbent upon me to raise these issues, to exercise if you like the freedom of the backbench.'

Mr Abbott's intervention is politically destabilising to Mr Turnbull, who governs with a bare one-seat majority.

The comments are reminiscent of former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd destabilising Julia Gillard in the years after she took his job in June 2010.

Now Mr Abbott, who like Mr Rudd was knifed as PM during his first term, said politics shouldn't be a clash of egos. 'It won't be easy but it must be possible or our country is doomed to a Shorten government that will make a bad situation immeasurably worse,' Mr Abbott told the book launch on Thursday night.

'In or out of government, political parties need a purpose. Our politics can't be just a contest of toxic egos or someone's vanity project.'

During his speech at the book launch, Mr Abbott also recommended the government consider taking senate reform to the next election.

'The Senate sabotage of the 2014 budget was blamed on poor salesmanship, but my successor's difficulties with far less sweeping measures show that the problem is less the salesman than the system.'

On The Bolt Report, Mr Abbott said Mr Turnbull needed to live at Kirribilli House, on Sydney Harbour, instead of having taxpayer foot a hefty security bill to live at his mansion across the water at Point Piper, in the eastern suburbs.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says she does not agree with Mr Abbott's assessment that the government risks a 'drift to defeat' if it fails to lift its performance.

Speaking to reporters in London on Thursday Ms Bishop said she had not seen Mr Abbott's 'so-called manifesto' to make the next election winnable for a coalition government.

She said the Liberal Party welcomed policy initiatives from ministers and backbenchers and as a former party leader Mr Abbott would have ideas. But she said she rejected Mr Abbott's 'drift to defeat' view. 'I don't accept that characterisation at all.'

Ms Bishop said the Turnbull government had been pursuing policies that were in the interests of the Australian people to grow the economy, create jobs and focus on national security.

She also rejected a suggestion in an Andrew Bolt interview with Mr Abbott on Sky News that she was not 'conservative, plain-speaking and loyal'.

Ms Bishop said she had been elected by the party to be deputy leader and she owed her loyalty to the party room.

'If there's a characterisation about being conservative and plain speaking and loyal I believe I fill that characterisation.'

On the West Australian election Ms Bishop said she expected the Liberal Party to win in its own right without One Nation support as Premier Colin Barnett was the only leader with a plan for the future prosperity of the state.

On Friday morning, Defence Minister Christopher Pyne said the government was 'getting on with the job' and would not be distracted by the speculation.

SOURCE







Has Bob Hawke lost his marbles?

Senile dementia?  He's 87

It is something of an event when a long-standing friend of Israel chooses to publicly criticize it and recommend recognising Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) (but not Hamas-controlled Gaza) as a sovereign ‘Palestine.’ In the case of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, writing recently in the Australian Financial Review (14 Feb.), this was always going to be newsworthy, given his long role in passionately standing up for Israel in the labor movement at home and abroad amidst the radical furies of the 1970s.

Accordingly, Mr Hawke’s views command attention and their provenance can have an impact on an ALP seeking to define its stance. In fact, it probably has: since his piece appeared, former Labor Foreign Ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have felt called upon renew their own calls for recognising ‘Palestine’ and they now been joined by former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Mr Hawke was once an eloquent proponent of the view that Israel could not relinquish territories to forces inimical to its existence. Yet his views began to alter, perhaps as early as the late 1970s, but certainly by the mid-1980s. It is not unreasonable to suppose that his Israeli Labor counterparts, who were increasingly adopting the view that a Palestinian state might defuse the conflict, exerted an influence on his thinking. Witnessing a seemingly unending sequence of bloodshed and uneasy respites over decades inclines people of goodwill to suppose that a bold initiative might break the tragic logjam. And indeed, the Israeli Labor Party did eventually embrace this point of view, chartering in 1993 the Oslo peace process with Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), upon whose probity its ultimate success depended.

It did not work out as intended, at least on the Israeli side. The PA regime established in Gaza and Jericho in 1994, later progressively extended to other major population centers in the West Bank, proved a corrupt and violent entity which, far from fostering a renovation of Palestinian society away from terrorism and conquest towards peace and accommodation, actually incubated the jihadist terror organizations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Children within the PA became hostage to an educational system replete with incitement to hatred and murder. One need only view a few video clips of Palestinian classrooms, with their pupils interviewed openly and proudly on PA television, extolling the religious and national duty of murdering Israelis, to see the bloodcurdling effectiveness of this sort of pedagogy.

None of this was altered or ameliorated by the transfer by Israel of territory, funds and, tragically, even arms, to Arafat’s forces, to say nothing of the vast inflow of foreign capital: in the Oslo era, Palestinians became the largest per capita recipients of international aid while, for example, tragically destitute Niger, with one doctor per 33,000 people, got peanuts.

Ambitious peace plans, going beyond what most Israelis before, then and since regarded as prudent, the first brokered by US President Bill Clinton in 2000-1, the second proposed by then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, were rebutted without counter-offer by the PA.

Indeed, Arafat’s response in 2000 was to launch a terror wave of suicide bombers against Israel that lasted four years and claimed the lives of over 1,100 Israelis. In the years since Oslo, more Israeli lives have been snuffed out by terrorists than had been in all 45 years of Israel’s national existence that preceded Oslo.

The wonder, then, is not that Hawke changed his view on dealing with the PLO –– many a friend of Israel, to say nothing of about half of Israelis, came to the view that the conflict was perpetuated by the absence of Palestinian self-determination, not continuing rejection of Israel’s legitimacy and permanence. Rather, the wonder is that many including Mr Hawke continue to subscribe to this viewpoint, long after the Oslo process had been tested to destruction and ruination. It is peculiar to read Mr Hawke today, thinking and arguing as though Oslo never happened, as if dealing with Arafat’s lieutenants and loyalists had never been tried.

Thus, he now writes,“I and the friends of Israel around the world are fearful that in a real sense we may be witnessing again after thousands of years a giant Eyeless in Gaza. Is there not emerging the danger of Israel being blinded to the threat to its very soul and the vision of its future?”

Other than one small change of phrase, Mr Hawke has lifted verbatim a passage from a speech he gave in May 1988 where he first voiced the view that Palestinian statelessness was the key issue. No-one who has spoken to Mr Hawke about Israel, as I have several times in the past, including on that night in May 1988, could doubt that he viewed negotiations with the PLO as the acme of far-sighted Israeli statesmanship. Far from being disabused by the carnage and tragedy that followed from Israel acting on such advice, and, ironically, eleven years since Israel evacuated every Jew, living and dead, from Gaza in return for exponentially increased rocket assaults, he seems entrenched in the view that he has been right all along.

Mr Hawke used to propound the view that, should Israel ever be assaulted from territories it had ceded for peace, it should reoccupy them in perpetuity, without any further “argy-bargy.”  Today, however, in the absence of argy-bargy –– the PA has persistently refused all but one week of talks with Israeli counterparts in the past eight years –– he thinks Australia should recognise as a sovereign state the PA that has served as the base for these assaults. Accordingly, he joins the ranks of those who urged Israel to take risks for peace and continue to do so, long after it has blown up in its face.

Why has he done so? With those who were always hostile to Israel, there is little mystery, but in the case of Mr Hawke it is difficult to diagnose the cause. A warm friend of the late Israeli Labor Prime Minister, Golda Meir, Mr Hawke, in his recent piece, recalls her telling him in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War that “there could be no peace for Israel until there was an honourable settlement of the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

Peculiarly, this recollection is not to be found in the detailed account of this meeting in Blanche D’Alpuget’s biography (Robert J. Hawke, pp. 259-60). But whenever Golda Meir communicated these views to him, it remains worth noting that she also said in 1976 that the “startling effrontery” of the PLO in seeking a Palestinian state, the better to assault Israel at a later date, made it ineligible for talks until its changed its eliminationist program.

The PLO has certainly since changed some of its statements (at least in English) –– and, as noted, was rewarded with recognition, territory and assets as a result –– but it only takes a moment’s checking of today’s scene to see that the change Mrs Meir hoped to see has yet to emerge.

In the last month alone, the PA has upbraided the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the “sin” of correctly stating that the Jewish biblical temples stood on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. An Al-Quds university academic, professing that Jews have no historical connection to the city, was just broadcast on PA TV.  Indeed, the PA, whom Mr Hawke wishes to recognise as a state, has called for such a state to be Jew-free.

Mr Hawke’s cri de cœur shows no flicker of recognition of the state of Palestinian society today and its majority support for terrorism against Israel. Of the PA-encouraged and applauded wave of ongoing stabbing attacks on Jews walking Israeli streets, or the call to preserve the mosques atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from wholly imaginary assault from what the PA’s Abbas called the Jews’ “filthy feet,’ not a word.

Indeed, Mr Hawke doesn’t seem to have noticed that the PA recently led a successful effort at the UN with the backing of the so-called ‘non-aligned’ bloc to have UNESCO authorize a flat-earth resolution rewriting history by declaring Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to be an exclusively Muslim site.

Mr Hawke used to oppose mightily the cynical manipulation and fostering of Jew-hatred, encoded as anti-Zionism, via international organizations. Today, however, when blatant denial of Jewish history and heritage is the order of the day and malevolent anti-Semitic fiction declared to be fact, he believes that Israel can obtain peace from those who deny Jews ever lived there.

Instead of conceding that Israel did as he urged and was rewarded with bloodshed, opprobrium and boycott, he lends his hand today to applauding December’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334, another flat-earth resolution, which has condemned as illegal all Jewish residence in the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem. (Actually, Jewish settlement in these territories has been something enshrined in international law since the 1920 San Remo settlement and never subsequently extinguished by any binding agreement).

Mr Hawke now urges Australia to recognise ‘Palestine,’ an international fabrication designed to circumvent the negotiations that he believed –– as he enthusiastically opined at the time of Oslo Accords –– he had been ahead of his time in urging upon the Israelis. He shows no sign of having thought whether Australian recognition of ‘Palestine’ might aid postponing indefinitely any prospect of a settled peace, as indeed it does: Israeli/Palestinian negotiations have less chance of convening, much less succeeding, if only because 2334 tells Palestinians that everything is theirs and that there is nothing to negotiate.

Indeed, even Mr Hawke seems to be thinking this way. Why else recycle, as he did in his piece, the old chestnut that the 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution recommending two states, which as he reminds us, emerged in good part due to the efforts of Australia’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. H.V. Evatt, gave 54% of “the Palestinians’ best cultivated land and cities” in British Mandate of Palestine to its Jewish third, who merely owned 6% of the country, while giving a mere 47% “of their own country” to the Palestinian two-thirds who owned the remaining 92%?

Not only is the mathematics shoddy, but the statistics absurd: in the territory that became Israel in 1948, Jews owned 8.6% of the land, Arabs owned 20.2%, and the remainder ––71.2% –– was Crown land. The greater part of the territory awarded to the Jews by the UN, far from being “the Palestinians’ best cultivated land and cities” was the almost uninhabited Negev desert. Major Arab cities and towns –– Jaffa, Ramleh, Lydda, Ramallah, Nazareth, Gaza –– were all awarded by the UN to the intended Arab state and would be part of one today, had the Palestinian and wider Arab leadership accepted the award.

How swallowing whole and regurgitating  a cynical fabrication routinely disseminated by Israel’s enemies honours Golda Meir, a plucky defender of her country, and her aspirations for peace is anyone’s guess. It is surely not saying too much to assert, at the least, that she would have been profoundly dismayed at this turn of argument from her passionately pro-Israel Australian friend.

Whatever brought Bob Hawke to this pass can only be guessed at. But one can certainly say of his current preoccupation with establishing a Palestinian state via international pressure on Israel is that it suffers from the undemocratic tendency of seeking to compel Israel, against the judgment of its government and electorate, to make self-defeating concessions to a unreconstructed, irredentist Palestinian regime.

It also partakes of the flawed tendency to believe that such a state will produce peace. Yet no perusal of Palestinian sermons, statements or publications suggests that Palestinians currently accept the idea of a peaceful state alongside Israel. If a Palestinian state won’t bring peace, why create it or urge its creation upon others? Surely, a policy that devises carrots and sticks to induce Palestinians to relinquish their war on Israel’s continued existence provides the best basis for future, fruitful negotiations.

In the meantime, Palestinians live under Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. Scarcely a happy outcome for Palestinians, who must contend with the despotism, brutality, corruption and capriciousness of their own regimes, even while sharing their political goals. But we can discard the cant about their being occupied by an Israel that stands to lose its soul.

As it stands, the PA lacks vital attributes of sovereignty required under international law, such as effective control of territory and undivided authority. Does Australia really wish to endorse a mischievous fiction by recognizing ‘Palestine,’ which additionally circumvents a negotiated settlement? Mr Hawke never asked this question, but those reading him should.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

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