Michele Moody-Adams Making Space for Justice Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope Columbia University Press, 2022.
Thank you NetGalley for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
This book is so enlightening, beginning with its title, through its chapter headings to the clear way in which Michele Moody-Adams explains the beginnings of her work in the detailed acknowledgements. Here she refers to her long-term interest in moral progress – ‘towards producing a more just social world’. This is a wonderful introduction to a subject with so many complexities!
Moody-Adams has written and presented papers from 1999, providing a well-considered background to a book that argues that of philosophical theory should not supplant progressive social movements as the catalyst to developing understanding and the development of moral progress. I feel as though Moody-Adams is bringing the way in which social reform takes place back to a solid beginning. So often the work of activists has been neglected in favour of theory in so many areas of social reform. The value of people, their actions and beliefs, together with recognition of the immeasurable value of hope burgeons under Moody-Adams’ hand. This book is an invaluable asset in achieving an understanding of achieving social justice. Books: Reviews
Covid in Canberra since Lockdown Ended
There were 420 new cases of covid recorded this week, with 11 active cases in hospital. No patients are in ICU, and none is ventilated. However, contrary to these improving figures it is very sad to record that five lives have been lost this week.
Tom Moore at the Canberra Museum and Gallery
I was so pleased to catch this fantastic travelling exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Galley before it continues to Geelong. It was absolute fun, and I went twice. I had visited the Jam Factory as part of the Indian Pacific trip I embarked upon last year, so was unsurprised at the energy and imaginative nature of this exhibition.
I also had lunch at the CMAG Cafe which is a very good experience too. More of that in another blog. Also, in another week I shall cover the Covid Exhbition that was also showing at CMAG.
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Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek blocks Clive Palmer’s Central Queensland coal mine 4h ago 
Tanya Plibersek initially proposed blocking the coal project back in August. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)© Provided by ABC News (AU)
The federal environment minister has officially blocked mining magnate Clive Palmer’s bid for a new Central Queensland coal mine.
Tanya Plibersek said she rejected the project because of the risks it posed to the Great Barrier Reef, freshwater creeks and groundwater.
Last year, the newly installed minister made an initial decision to reject the project and sought public consultation.
Her department received more than 9,000 public comments, with 98 per cent in favour of blocking the project.
Ms Plibersek’s decision is the first time in Australian history that a coal mine has been refused under national environmental laws.
The planned mining site was just 10 kilometres from the edge of the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area near Rockhampton.
“I have decided not to approve the Central Queensland Coal Project because the risks to the Great Barrier Reef, freshwater creeks and groundwater are too great,” Ms Plibersek said in a statement.
“Freshwater creeks run into the Great Barrier Reef and onto seagrass meadows that feed dugongs and provide breeding grounds for fish.”
The project would have involved the construction of two open-cut pits to extract up to 10 million tonnes of coal each year.
It was expected to operate for twenty years, with the coal exported overseas for steel production.
Although it is the first time a federal environment minister has rejected an application to develop a coal mine, the Queensland government had also recommended the rejection.
Queensland Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon said in a statement that Ms Plibersek’s decision was in line with findings made by the state’s independent regulator.
“The regulator and Independent Expert Scientific Committee found the project posed an unacceptable risk to the Great Barrier Reef,” Ms Scanlon said.
“All projects are assessed on their merits and it is clear that this one doesn’t stack up.”
Local federal LNP MP Michelle Landry said she was “very disappointed”.
The Member for Capricornia said the area has a high unemployment rate and could have benefited from new employment opportunities.
“Those people were really looking forward [to the jobs] so I think it’s unfortunate that it’s been canned,” Ms Landry said.
“The new environment minister has got 18 coal mines and gas projects under review, and we need to have a good think about what got us through COVID … it was the resource sector.
“There was a process to go through, obviously, and when you look at it, it is quite close to the ocean but … the proponents had done a lot of work in what they were going to do … the water wasn’t going to be going into the ocean.”
Labor MP Nita Green, who is the federal government’s special envoy for the Great Barrier Reef, said reports had found the project was unsuitable and rejecting the mine was in the best interests of the reef.
“They are under a lot of stress already from a water quality issues [standpoint], which we are working on, but I think the location of this mine was key and the community campaign that we saw,” she said.
“It is a matter of a process that we have gone through methodically and remains to be seen if there is an appeal or anything like that.”
The penny’s dropped, conservationists say
Opponents of the mine celebrated the decision, labelling it the “final nail in the coffin” for the project.
The move has been welcomed by the Capricorn Conservation Council, which has been lobbying against the mine for years.
President Paul Brambrick said the community was elated.
“[It’s] something we’ve fought for a long time and that the community is actually right behind as well,” Mr Brambrick said.
“Sometimes you wonder why you do this, but it makes sense in moments like this.
“An open-cut mine 10 kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef … it’s a short-term idea … we can’t just be digging up the country anymore and not considering the environment.”
Mr Brambrick said the decision “sends a death-knell warning” to coal mine investors.
“The penny’s dropped, I think,” he said.
“The disadvantages of mining coal and the damage to the Great Barrier Reef … just far outweighs any organisation trying to open a coal mine in central Queensland.”
Dr Coral Rowston, from Environmental Advocacy in Central Queensland, said the mine posed too great a risk to the nearby reef.
“This is a victory for the reef, for tourism, for communities that depend on the reef for their livelihoods, and for all those who cherish this natural wonder,” she said.
Central Queensland Coal has been contacted for a response.
State of the Union Address by President Joe Biden
I was able to watch the introductory discussion presented by Rachel Maddow with a panel of MSNBC presenters. I then watched the speech and was interested to see how different my experience was from that of the news.com coverage (probably based on Fox News?). I waited to hear President Biden’s problems with articulating the ideas, but of course was more interested in the ideas themselves. I was happy on both counts. The content was excellent (even winning Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s approval) and three at most glitches. And excellent use of the heckling – was he really able to negotiate social security and Medicare out of the debate about raising the debt ceiling during this address? Thanks to Marjorie Taylor- Greene it seems he did! The post speech discussion on MSNBC was also valuable.
February 7, 2023
Heather Cox Richardson – State of the Union Address
And then there was President Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address.
This is the annual event in our politics that gets the most viewers. Last year, 38.2 million people watched it on television and streaming services.
What viewers saw tonight was a president repeatedly offering to work across the aisle as he outlined a moderate plan for the nation with a wide range of popular programs. He sounded calm, reasonable, and upbeat, while Republicans refused to clap for his successes—800,000 new manufacturing jobs, 20,000 new infrastructure projects, lower drug prices—or his call to strengthen the middle class.
And then, when he began to talk about future areas of potential cooperation, Republicans went feral. They heckled, catcalled, and booed, ignoring House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) attempts to shush them. At the State of the Union, in the U.S. Capitol, our lawmakers repeatedly interrupted the president with insults, yelling “liar” and “bullsh*t.” And cameras caught it all.
Extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), her hands cupping her wide open mouth to scream at the president, became the face of the Republican Party.
Biden began with gracious remarks toward a number of Republicans as well as Democrats, then emphasized how Republicans and Democrats came together over the past two years to pass consequential legislation. Speaker McCarthy had asked him to take this tone, and he urged Republicans to continue to work along bipartisan lines, noting that the American people have made it clear they disapprove of “fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict.”
For the next hour the president laid out a promise to continue to rebuild the middle class, hollowed out by 40 years of policies based on the idea that cutting taxes and concentrating wealth among the “job creators” would feed the economy and create widespread prosperity. He listed the accomplishments of his administration so far: unemployment at a 50-year low, 800,000 good manufacturing jobs, lower inflation, 10 million new small businesses, the return of the chip industry to the United States, more than $300 billion in private investment in manufacturing, more than 20,000 new infrastructure projects, lower health care costs, Medicare negotiations over drug prices, investment in new technologies to combat climate change. He promised to continue to invest in the places and people who have been forgotten.
Biden described a national vision that includes everyone. It is a modernized version of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and he very clearly invited non-MAGA Republicans to embrace it. He thanked those Republicans who voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, then tweaked those who had voted against it but claimed credit for funding. He told them not to worry: “I promised to be the president for all Americans. We’ll fund your projects. And I’ll see you at the ground-breaking.”
But then he hit the key point for Republicans: taxes. To pay for this investment in the future, Biden called for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. He noted that “in 2020, 55 of the biggest companies in America made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes.” “That’s simply not fair,” he said. He signed into law the requirement that billion-dollar companies have to pay a minimum of 15%—less than a nurse pays, he pointed out—and he called for a billionaire minimum tax. While he reiterated his promise that no one making less than $400,000 a year would pay additional taxes, he said “no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter.” He also called for quadrupling the tax on corporate stock buybacks.
Republicans consider these proposals nonstarters because their whole vision is based on the idea of cutting taxes to free up capital. By committing to higher taxes on the wealthy, Biden was laying out a vision that is very much like that from the time before Reagan. It is a rejection of his policies and instead a full-throated defense of the idea that the government should work for ordinary Americans, rather than the rich.
And then he got into the specifics of legislation going forward, and Republicans lost it. The minority party has occasionally been vocal about its dislike of the State of the Union since Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted “You lie!” at President Obama in 2009 (Obama was telling the truth); a Democrat yelled “That’s not true” at Trump in 2018 as he, in fact, lied about immigration policy. But tonight was a whole new kind of performance.
Biden noted that he has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion (in part because pandemic programs are expiring) and that Trump increased the deficit every year of his presidency, even before the pandemic hit. And yet, Congress responded to the rising debt under Trump by raising the debt limit, cleanly, three times.
Biden asked Congress to “commit here tonight that the full faith and credit of the United States of America will never, ever be questioned.” This, of course, is an issue that has bitterly divided Republicans, many of whom want to hold the country hostage until they get what they want. But they can’t agree on what they want, so they are now trying to insist that Biden is refusing to negotiate the budget when, in fact, he has simply said he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling. Budget negotiations are a normal part of legislating, and he has said he welcomes such talks. Tonight, once again, he asked the Republicans to tell the American people what, exactly, they propose.
And then Biden did something astonishing. He tricked the Republicans into a public declaration of support for protecting Social Security and Medicare. He noted that a number of Republicans have called for cutting, or even getting rid of, Social Security and Medicare. This is simply a fact—it is in Senator Rick Scott’s (R-FL) pre-election plan; the Republican Study Committee’s budget; statements by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Ron Johnson (R-WI); and so on—but Republicans booed Biden and called him a liar for suggesting they would make those cuts, and they did so in public.
Seeming to enjoy himself, Biden jumped on their assertion, forcing them to agree that there would be no cuts to Social Security or Medicare. It was budget negotiation in real time, and it left Biden holding all the cards.
From then on, Republican heckling got worse, especially as Biden talked about banning assault weapons. Biden led the fight to get them banned in 1994, but when Republicans refused to reauthorize that law, it expired and mass shootings tripled. Gun safety is popular in the U.S., and Republicans, many of whom have been wearing AR-15 pins on their lapels, booed him. When he talked about more work to stop fentanyl production, one of the Republican lawmakers yelled, “It’s your fault.”
In the midst of the heckling, Biden praised Republican president George W. Bush’s bipartisan $100 billion investment in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.
And then, in this atmosphere, Biden talked about protecting democracy. “For the last few years our democracy has been threatened, attacked, and put at risk,” he said. “Put to the test here, in this very room, on January 6th.”
With lawmakers demonstrating the dangerous behavior he was warning against, he said: “We must all speak out. There is no place for political violence in America. In America, we must protect the right to vote, not suppress that fundamental right. We honor the results of our elections, not subvert the will of the people. We must uphold the rule of the law and restore trust in our institutions of democracy. And we must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor.”
“Democracy must not be a partisan issue. It must be an American issue.”
With Republicans scoffing at him, he ended with a vision of the nation as one of possibility, hope, and goodness. “We must be the nation we have always been at our best. Optimistic. Hopeful. Forward-looking. A nation that embraces light over darkness, hope over fear, unity over division. Stability over chaos.”
“We must see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans. We are a good people.”
Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave the Republican rebuttal. Full of references to the culture wars and scathing of Biden, she reinforced the Republican stance during the speech. “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left,” she said. “The choice is between normal or crazy.”
She is probably not the only one who is thinking along those lines after tonight’s events, but many are likely drawing a different conclusion than she intended.
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Notes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/democrats-boo-trump-on-immigration-state-of-the-union-2018-1
“We are not by-standers to history”, President Joe Biden, State of the Union Address, 7 February 2023.
This time last year Russia invaded Ukraine.
Robin's Room 