#coalition politics

[pebblegalaxy]

Exploring Indian Prime Ministerial Evolution: From Nehru to the Nineties by James Manor – A Comprehensive Review #TBRChallenge #bookchatter #BookReview

“Nehru to the Nineties: The Changing Office of Prime Minister in India,” edited by James Manor, is a profound exploration of the evolution of India’s prime ministerial office, tracing its trajectory from the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, through to the political dynamics of the 1990s. The collection of essays within the book, contributed by prominent scholars and political…

[townpostin]

New Jharkhand Cabinet: CM Soren Allocates Portfolios

Key Departments Redistributed Among 11 New Ministers Chief Minister Hemant Soren has swiftly assigned portfolios to the 11 newly inducted ministers in his cabinet, reshaping Jharkhand’s governance structure with significant changes in key departments. RANCHI – In a strategic move, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren has redistributed ministerial portfolios following the inclusion of 11 new…

[signode-blog]

"Political Pundits Predict: Lok Sabha Elections 2024 in India Set to Shake NDA's Majority"

As the anticipation builds for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections in 2024, political analysts and pundits are scrutinizing every indicator, from public sentiment to the betting trends in places like Phalodi Satta Bazar. While the outcome remains uncertain, one prevailing sentiment emerges: the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) might face challenges in securing a resounding victory. Contrary to…

[kesarijournal]

The INDIA Alliance: A Political Potpourri or a Recipe for Disaster?

The INDIA alliance, a coalition that’s as diverse as a college brochure cover. From the leftists to the centrists, from the regionalists to the nationalists, it’s a smorgasbord of ideologies that makes you wonder: Is this a political alliance or a social experiment gone awry?## The Centre-State TangoLet’s start with the Centre-State relationship, shall we? The INC wants “cooperative federalism,”…

[lesamis]

If you're up for it could you explain what is making the Germany government stuff so funny? I can find news articles about it (a coalition is dissolving? There's been tension for a while?) but they're all fairly serious. Thx!

ohhh, sure thing! i'll do my best!

i'll say upfront: this is a pretty serious thing to happen. our chancellor fired our minister of finance, Lindner, which definitively breaks up the governing coalition. germany will likely have snap elections at a moment in which far-right parties are polling extremely well. if news coverage about it seems like people are Worried, that's because, well, they are.

however. the reason it's funny is because our minister of finance was fired. ministers aren't really... ever fired. like, it's not a done thing. i'll fully admit i didn't even know it was an option until yesterday. and our minister of finance wasn't just anyone, he was one of the most mocked and hated figures in politics to germans who vote anywhere left of center.

the coalition that governed until yesterday was made up of the green party, the social democrats, and the neoliberal party (FDP). the FDP is infamous (and i mean, my parents already raised me to hate them for that) for playing kingmaker in coalition governments: they never get all that many votes, but they get just enough that whoever they agree to form a government with will probably succeed. they then tend to force extreme concessions from their coalition partners, because hey, if we walk off, you can't govern at all! so you better play along!

for the past three years, this behaviour has been extremely frustrating for germans who voted for greens or social democrats, because policy from their faction was constantly being blocked by the FDP and often by Lindner personally. the FDP received 11,5% of votes in 2021, but to many of us, it felt as if they were the only party who really had any say in the governing coalition. it made the green and social democratic coalition partners look spineless and passive.

and now, i invite you to imagine how on the day of the US election results, the day the whole world rolled their eyes at the sheer fucking stupidity and pointlessness of it all, at NINE IN THE EVENING, just as germans are getting ready to settle in to bed to dream of nightmare global politics -

the news suddenly breaks that our notoriously invisible chancellor just decided to fire Lindner for that exact behaviour. this chancellor comes out and says, on camera, to the entire sleepy nation, that acting the way Lindner did - blocking necessary policies, refusing to approve budgets unless his party's interests were met - was childish, selfish, irresponsible, and unfit for government, so, whoops, he had to go. shame. coalition over, i guess.

so, politically, that was a long-needed but never-expected moment of triumph for those of us who think the FDP is a clown show made up of human TESLA shares, and it came at a hysterically funny moment.

on a personal level, i can barely explain how uniquely hateable Lindner has always been. he's what would happen if a stock index graph came to life. he hates poor people with a relish; he mocks welfare recipients and would ax minimum wages in a second. he's everyone's business major roommate who shows up in boat shoes fresh off a yacht to discuss NFTs with you. throughout the entire time that he's used his rich boy policy blackmail strategy, he's been smug about it, and he was never taken to task for it, and millions of germans have been longing to throw rotten fruit in his face since 2017. and now we finally get to do it. via memes. on the day of trump's election win.

so that's why it's funny.

[mayasaura]

did you see te pati maori declared independence??

I DID NOT! Holy shit! Thanks for the news!

Okay, now reporting back from one research deep-dive, the recent context as I understand it is this:

Last November, a conservative right-wing Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, assumed office. He's got a lot of less than stellar right-wing policies, and that includes making cuts to the Ministry of Social Development and opposing co-governance with the Waitangi Tribunal and other Māori leadership organisations over the administering of public services such as education, health, and infrastructure. He's been openly critical of Māori seats in Parliament, though he hasn't (yet) opposed them. Over the course of his administration, there's been an initiative to omit or cut mentions of the Treaty of Waitangi, the foundational document of New Zealand that forms the basis of arguments for Māori protections, from official language.

Which brings us to yesterday, May 30th. Budget Day. The day the new administration would announce their first budget and a day of mass action for supporters of te Pāti Māori protesting the treatment of Māori under the new government. I don't have any concrete numbers, but RNZ reports thousands of protestors, while the NZ Herald estimates "tens of thousands" turning out nation-wide, and a walking protest that delayed rush-hour traffic in Auckland for hours.

You may have already guessed that the budget was Bad. As I understand it, the budget effectively cut any kind of targeted funding for Māori health or education, and decreased funding for Māori cultural festivals and celebrations. And again, I cannot stress enough how much I am not an expert on this topic, so there's probably a lot more in there I don't know about.

In response to the new budget, Māori Party MP Rawiri Waititi issued a Declaration of Independence to the New Zealand Parliament, (video of his speech in link) with the support of his fellow te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

There doesn't seem to be any concrete plan in place yet for the organisation of the new Māori parliament, but MPs Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer met with protestors to collect signatures for the Declaration, which they plan to bring to a hui taumata (meeting of congress) today, Friday, May 31st. The text of the Declaration can be found on te Pāti Māori website, in the form of a petition. You do not have to be Māori to sign, but I believe you do have to be kiwi.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trumpism’s healthcare fracture-lines

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

There was never any question as to whether Trump would implement Project 2025, the 900-page brick of terrifying and unhinged policy prescriptions edited by the Heritage Foundation. He would not implement it, because he could not implement it. No one could. It's impossible.

This isn't a statement about constitutional limits on executive authority or the realpolitik of getting bizarre and stupid policies past judges or through a hair-thin Congressional majority. This is a statement about the incoherence of Project 2025 itself. You probably haven't read it. Few have. Realistically, few people are going to read a 900-page group work of neofeudalist fanfic shit out by the most esoteric Fedsoc weirdos the world has ever seen.

But one person who did read Project 2025 was the leftist historian Rick Perlstein, who was the first person to really dig into what a fucking mess that thing is:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein's excellent analysis doesn't claim that Project 2025's authors aren't sincere in their intentions to wreak great harm upon the nation and its people; rather, his point is that Project 2025 is filled with contradictory, mutually exclusive proposals written by people who fundamentally disagree with one another, and who each have enough power within the Trump coalition that all of thier proposals have to be included in a document like this:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

Project 2025 isn't just a guide to the masturbatory fantasies of the worst people in American politics – far more importantly, it is a detailed map of the fracture lines in the GOP coalition, the places where it is liable to split and shatter. This is an important point if you want to do more about Trumpism than run around feeling miserable and scared. If you want to fight, Project 2025 is a guide to the weak spots where an attack will do the most damage.

Perlstein's insight continues to be borne out as the Trump regime makes ready to take power. In a new story for KFF News, Stephanie Armour and Julie Rovner describe the irreconcilable differences among Trump's picks for the country's top public health authorities:

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/trump-rfk-kennedy-health-hhs-fda-cdc-vaccines-covid-weldon/

The brain-worm-infected-elephant in the room is, of course, RFK Jr, who has been announced as Trump's head of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr is a notorious antivaxer, chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a notorious anti-vaccine group. Kennedy's view is shared by Trump's chosen CDC boss, Dave Weldon, a physician who has repeated the dangerous lie that vaccinations cause autism. Mehmet "Dr Oz" Oz, the TV "physician" Trump wants to put in charge of Medicare/Medicaid, calls vaccines "oversold" and advocates for treating covid with hydroxychloroquine, another thoroughly debunked hoax:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/17/hydroxychloroquine-study-covid-19-retracted-trump/77051671007/

However, other top Trump public health picks emphatically support vaccines. Marty Makary is Trump's choice for FDA commissioner; he's a Johns Hopkins trained surgeon who says vaccines "save lives" (but he peddles the lethal, unscientific hoax that childhood vaccines should be "spread out"). Jay Bhattacharya, the economist/MD whom Trump wants to put in charge of the NIH, supports vaccines (he is also one of the country's leading proponents of the eugenicist idea of accepting the mass death of elderly, sick and disabled people rather than imposing quarantines during epidemics). Then there's Janette Nesheiwat, whom Trump has asked to serve as the nation's surgeon general; she calls vaccines "a gift from God."

Like "Bidenism," Trumpism is a fragile coalition of people who thoroughly and irreconcilably disagree with one another. During the Biden administration, this resulted in self-inflicted injuries like appointing the brilliant trustbuster Lina Khan to run the FTC, but also appointing the pro-monopoly corporate lawyer Jacqueline Scott Corley to a lifetime seat as a federal judge, from which perch she ruled against Khan's no-brainer suit to block the Microsoft-Activision merger:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

The Trump coalition is even broader than the Biden coalition. That's how he won the 2024 election. But that also means that Trumpism is more fractious and off-balance, and hence will be easier to disrupt, because it is riven by people in senior positions who hate one another and are actively working for each others' political demise.

The Trump coalition is a coalition of *cranks*. I'm using "crank" here in a technical, non-pejorative sense. I am a crank, after all. A crank is someone who is overwhelmingly passionate about a single issue, whose uncrossable bright lines are not broadly shared. Cranks can be right or they can be wrong, but we're hard to be in coalition with, because we are uncompromisingly passionate about things that other people largely don't even notice, let alone care about. You can be a crank whose single issue is eliminating water fluoridation, even though this is very, very stupid and dangerous:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-fluoride-debate

Or you can be a crank about digital rights, a subject that, for decades, was viewed as by turns either unserious or as a sneaky way of shilling for Big Tech (thankfully, that's changing):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

Cranks make hard coalition partners. Trump's cranks are cranked up about different things - vaccines, culture war trans panics, eugenics - and are total normies about other things. The eugenicist MD/economist who wants to "let 'er rip" rather than engage in nonpharmaceutical pandemic interventions is gonna be horrified by total abortion bans and antivax. These cranks are on a collision course with one another.

This is on prominent display in these public health appointments, and we're very likely about to get a test of the cohesiveness and capability of the second Trump administration, thanks to bird flu. Now that bird flu has infected humans in multiple US states, there is every chance that we will have to confront a public health emergency in the coming weeks. If that happens, the Trump public health divisions over masking, quarantine and (especially) vaccines (Kennedy called the covid vaccine the "deadliest" ever made, without any evidence) will become the most important issue in the country, under constant and pitiless scrutiny, and criticism.

Trump's public health shambles is by no means unique. The lesson of Project 2025 is that the entire Trump project is one factional squabble away from collapse at all times.

[nonbinary-vents]

This has been an absolutely horrible couple weeks for the Jewish and Israeli community, so I want to throw in at least a tiny bit of hope in here. Amina Hassouna, the Bedouin girl who was severely hurt in Iran’s missile attacks, has been recovering well and seems to be in good condition! She is described as being ‘fully conscious’ and ‘communicating and smiling’. Two bomb shelters have been placed in Al-Fura, the town that she and her family are from, as well.

[ramblingaro]

looking at the nbc exit poll demographic data and it’s not surprising but still a bit soul crushing to see that Black people, queer people, and Jewish people all had votes over 75% cast for Harris but Harris still lost, because the rest of the country did not back her in the same way, and almost every white demographic voted in favor of Trump. We cannot do this shit alone.

[dead-salmon]

400 STUNDEN DISKUSSION ÜBER EIN THEMA??

dude i wouldve fucking killed christian lindner right there

[inconclusionray]

It does matter who is in the white house. It fucking does. "Two state solution" versus "wipe them off the face of the earth." Not as much as we need on climate policy to be *sure* we'll survive, versus burn baby burn and we are surely cooked. Protect access to abortion versus dead pregnant parents and teens. Someone who CAN be persuaded left versus someone who will make it nigh impossible to protest. It fucking matters. Please ignore the polls, please ignore the vibes, please ignore everyone saying it doesn't matter: it matters. Does your one individual specific vote all by itself matter? Maybe not, but that's an American Individualist bullshit line of thought. Together, our voices do make a difference.

Vote. Please, please vote.

[pebblegalaxy]

Exploring Indian Prime Ministerial Evolution: From Nehru to the Nineties by James Manor – A Comprehensive Review #TBRChallenge #bookchatter #BookReview

“Nehru to the Nineties: The Changing Office of Prime Minister in India,” edited by James Manor, is a profound exploration of the evolution of India’s prime ministerial office, tracing its trajectory from the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, through to the political dynamics of the 1990s. The collection of essays within the book, contributed by prominent scholars and political…

[decadelongsummer]

Americans, may I offer you some empathy in our trying time? The German Minister of Finance Christian Lindner, after going rogue by publishing a scathing pamphlet against his administration a few days ago, suggested new elections. Chancellor Scholz fired him in retaliation and will be speaking to the nation in minutes.

Given current polling results, we may have our own Trump by Christmas should there be new elections. We're all in this shitshow together.

[centrally-unplanned]

Hot take but the sweep of super-rich donors coming into Trump's court recently isn't actually all of them going "yeah I hate Trump but I want those tax cuts". At least not primarily, like sure lower taxes is part of why they have Republican leanings to begin with. But billionaires are pretty price insensitive, it doesn't really matter to them all that much if they are paying 20% or 25% on their capital gains, they aren't spending it either way.

Instead its that they think he is gonna win. The Republican primary is over, he is the nom, Biden is set as the opponent, and the polling numbers are pretty clear on that contest. Might change of course, no one is sure, but you gotta back some horse if you are in this game. They don't need to donate to Trump to make him lower taxes on the rich, Republicans will do literally anything to lower taxes on the rich, its their most sacred principle. Like I'm not mocking them there, its objectively true, its nearly the only active agenda item they have consistently pursued in every single administration over the past several decades. You do not need to donate to them to make them do that, and you also don't think your donation is gonna make that much of a different on the win odds. Those donations probably won't pay for themselves vis a vis tax cuts.

What it does do is buy you influence for other agenda items the Republicans don't care about, but might sell to you. And Trump is infamously willing to sell an awful lot of the policy space to the highest bidder, even if he is quite mercurial when it comes to the execution on that. Its not about "lowering taxes", its about getting an exemption for The One Product Your Business Needs on the the tariff policy, or a specific deregulation of biotech rules at the FDA, or w/e. Many of which wont even be directly about making money! Some will be but again price insensitive, its about ideology and vision for projects and other stuff. And the majority (not all ofc) would in fact be quite happy to buy that from Biden, if he was A: selling so openly, and B: likely to win. Since neither is true, they are taking the deal on hand.

[kesarijournal]

The INDIA Alliance: A Political Potpourri or a Recipe for Disaster?

The INDIA alliance, a coalition that’s as diverse as a college brochure cover. From the leftists to the centrists, from the regionalists to the nationalists, it’s a smorgasbord of ideologies that makes you wonder: Is this a political alliance or a social experiment gone awry?## The Centre-State TangoLet’s start with the Centre-State relationship, shall we? The INC wants “cooperative federalism,”…

[iasirene]

Missing Fred Hampton extra 🙏🏼🙏🏼 now that was a man who could truly unite the people