Back to the future in Sri Lanka

The standoff in Sri Lanka as a result of the ongoing crisis continues even though there have been some developments. The economic situation is dire and it was even announced last week that they had only enough petrol (gasoline) for just one day. That has eased very slightly. After the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa was sacrificed by his brother the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa in response to popular demands that both should leave office, a new prime minister and cabinet had to be appointed, since the cabinet automatically gets dissolved when a prime minister leaves office.

Gotabaya R picked as the new prime minister Ranil Wickremasinghe. To understand how bizarre this choice is, you need to know a little Sri Lankan political history. Wickremasinghe is the leader of the United National Party. This party was a dominant force before and after independence in 1948 and reached the pinnacle of power in 1977 when they were swept into power with a very large majority. The then party leader J. R. Jayawardene proceeded to institute massive changes that were designed to cement his party in power and keep their policies intact for decades to come, including changing the constitution to create the powerful post of executive president that he held and used to set in motion sweeping pro-business, pro-western, economic policies, as well as fanning anti-minority sentiment. It was during his presidency that the government-backed anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 took place that resulted in my decision to leave Sri Lanka and come to the US with my family.
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News Corp in Australia seems just like in the US

Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News network are pernicious influences in US politics, spreading hate, division, and outright lies. But we should not forget that Murdoch is an Australian and his media empire has tentacles in his native land and in the UK as well.

Leading up to the recent elections in Australia, his media outlets in that country did what they do here in the US but it turned out that despite using the same playbook, they were not successful in their efforts to eliminate all the parties that were neither Liberal nor Labor and have the Liberals retain power.

 At the centre of this extraordinary detachment of political coverage from reality are the Australian newspapers of News Corp, from the national daily the Australian to the popular tabloids in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in particular.

Only the Northern Territory News, among its most visible publications, editorialised for a Labor victory.
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The singular story of election night was how News Corp, with all its recourses and all its outlets, from newspapers to subscription TV news, couldn’t convince voters to follow its course, at least not in the numbers needed.

It is being seen as a demonstration of impotence in political affairs, and of absence of authority in the group’s claim to speak for the nation.

Academic and journalist Margaret Simons is no chum of News Corp but was not alone when she wrote this in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 May: “I am not sure News Corporation bothers to deny its bias these days. But could this be the election in which the impotence of its skewed reporting is exposed?”

The election result doesn’t mean the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald convinced voters to back Labor as their election editorials recommended, but it does mean they were alert to voter movement and ready to respond.

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Dog whistles? We don’t need no stinking dog whistles!

Right-wingers used to use coded language to signal bigoted views to their followers, since openly saying what they meant was seen as going too far and risk alienating the so-called moderates in their party who may still value accepted norms such as fidelity to truth and reality. That has changed. Republicans running for political office this year, taking their cue from Trump, seem to feel no hesitation in adopting extreme positions. Either they think that there are no moderates in the party anymore and that they have all shifted into full-blown MAGA acolytes or think that those voters have no choice to but to vote for them over their Democratic rival in the general election, even if they find the Republican candidates distasteful or even repugnant.

That old sense of the need for some restraint seems so quaint these days when Republicans feel little compunction about sharing a stage with flat-out racists, as can be seen at the latest gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) that is being held in Hungary. Why would a US political organization hold a major convention in a foreign country? That is because this is no ordinary foreign country. Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban is a hero to the US right because he is an authoritarian who openly espouses all the tropes of white nationalism that the Republican party and Fox News now espouse.
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Labor party wins Australian elections

In elections held on Sunday, the conservative coalition led by the Liberal party lost its majority after being in office for almost a decade. The new prime minister will be Labor party leader Anthony Albanese who will replace Scott Morrison.

Anthony Albanese will be Australia’s next prime minister, leaving the Coalition in disarray after it lost more than a dozen seats to Labor and independents in an election that has transformed the country’s political landscape.

Declaring victory shortly before midnight on Saturday, Albanese thanked voters for the “extraordinary honour” of becoming the nation’s 31st prime minister, and said he would work in government to bring Australians together.
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With 60% of the vote counted, Labor was ahead in 73 seats and on track to win enough seats to form majority government, with huge swings in Western Australia likely to flip at least three seats to Labor.

The Liberal party was also expected to lose six previously safe inner city seats to so-called teal independents, including Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong, with the Coalition’s numbers likely to fall to the low 60s in the 151 seat house of representatives. There could be as many as 16 MPs on the crossbench, a record number.

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Some good news from last Tuesday’s primaries

Ryan Grim writes that SuperPACs aligned with the Republican party and the Sinema-Manchin wing of the Democratic party leadership poured a lot of money in an attempt to defeat progressive Democratic candidates in last Tuesday’s primary elections but did not succeed as well as they might have hoped for, since Summer Lee and John Fetterman won in Pennsylvania while in Oregon Jamie McLeod-Skinner is in a close race while Andrea Salinas seems poised to win.

The stunning wins come as the party debates who is to blame for Biden’s sinking approval rating and increasingly dire forecasts of upcoming midterm losses. Party establishment figures have pointed the finger at the left for making unreasonable demands couched in slogans like “defund the police” that turn off voters. The progressive wing has countered that Biden’s popularity has sunk as centrist Democrats have slowly murdered his agenda, while the left has fought to enact it. 

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Watch out! Dark MAGA is coming for you!

When Madison Cawthorn was elected to Congress from North Carolina for the first time in 2020 at the age of 26, he was hailed as a future leader of the Republican party. But during his first term he has been involved in all manner of things that have generated negative publicity.

Those included intra-party blowback over his cocaine-orgy podcast comments, twice carrying a firearm while going through airport security, driving with a revoked license, and the various news reports featuring sexually-suggestive photos and videos of Cawthorn.

That claim that senior members of the Republican party were engaged in drug-fueled sex orgies was a bridge too far for the party establishment and they pulled out all the stops in favor of his opponent so that Cawthorn lost his primary race on Tuesday.

If the party leaders thought that they had got rid of a troublesome nuisance and that Cawthorn would simply go away, they were mistaken. He seems to be hopping mad at what he sees as a betrayal by the party and is vowing vengeance on those whom he feels stabbed him in the back, saying that he is going to unleash the ‘Dark MAGA’ on them.
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Cryptobust?

One of the things that was a big selling point of cryptocurrency was that it was supported by blockchain technology which supposedly meant that all the transactions were transparent and publicly available. I had thought that this would mean that frauds would be difficult to pull off since there is supposed to be a digital trail of all transactions that can be checked by anyone. That shows just how much I know and why I should never go anywhere near these things because as John Cassidy writes, recently there have been a spate of scams involving cryptocurrencies.
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The danger posed by a majority that sees itself as under threat

I have mentioned before how many negative trends that I observed in Sri Lanka over the decades, I now see playing out in the US. The mass killing in Buffalo illustrates one such situation that is rife for bigotry and that is when the majority community in a nation sees itself as under threat from the minority. This is because feeling threatened engenders a sense of grievance and a need to strike back in self-preservation while at the same time, being in the majority means that they have all the power and the means to attack members of the minority.

In Sri Lanka, politicians have long been able to whip up animosity against minority groups by saying that the majority Sinhala Buddhists were in danger of being eliminated. The fact that they constituted about 70% of the population and that this was highly unlikely to happen on simple statistical grounds did not prevent such fears from seizing the imagination of some people in the majority and we saw periodic acts of violence against the minorities. The targets varied over time suchas the minority Tamils who made up just about 20% of the population. But the chauvinists pointed to the fact that the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu shared ethnic features with Sri Lankan Tamils and thus, taken together, they constituted the larger group that, in their fevered imagination, would one day take over the country and suppress the Sinhala Buddhists. More recently, fears have been raised about Muslims, who make up just about 5% of the population, arguing that their relatively high birth rates were part of a long-term devious plot to become the majority. That both of these claims have not a shred of evidence in support and were preposterous purely on demographic grounds was dismissed.
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Can someone be too MAGA for Republican voters?

On the surface, one contest for the Republican party nomination for a US Senate seat reveals a surprising level of diversity among the top three candidates who are closely tied in the polls. While one is the standard-issue rich white man (a former hedge fund CEO), the other two consist of a Muslim child of immigrants and a Black woman. The contest is taking place in Pennsylvania and the CEO is David McCormick, the Muslim child of immigrants is TV personality Mehmet Oz, and the Black woman is Kathy Barnette. Donald Trump has endorsed Oz because he is impressed by his success as a TV personality and for Trump that is a huge factor. Once you look past those differences, what you see is a very depressing image of the party because all three candidates are awful.

The Republican party is now the party of the Trump MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult that emphasizes, among other things, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia. The question in this race is whether there is such a thing as being too MAGA for Republican voters. While all three are MAGA in some form, they can be distinguished as ‘not quite MAGA enough’ (McCormick), ‘MAGA acceptable’ (Oz), and ‘too MAGA’ (Barnette), with Donald Trump playing the role of Goldilocks and choosing Oz as having just the right level of MAGAness.
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What the hell is going though such people’s minds?

We now have yet another mass shooting.

A teenage gunman in military-style clothing opened fire with a rifle at a New York supermarket in what authorities called a “hate crime and racially motived violent extremism”, killing 10 people and wounding three others before surrendering to police on Saturday afternoon, authorities said.

Police officials said the 18-year-old gunman, who is white, was wearing body armor and military-style clothing when he pulled up and opened fire at people at a Tops Friendly Market about 2.30pm, with the shooting streamed via a camera affixed to the man’s helmet.
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