Alex’s blog about strategy, campaigning, growth, politics and climate (among other things).
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Oil and gas war profiteering
The conflict in Iran and Middle East is a devastating geopolitical crisis caused by Trump and Netanyahu. It is also a massive, ongoing transfer of wealth from everyday citizens directly into the pockets of multinational fossil fuel companies and the billionaire elites that own them. This is petro-imperialism at work. Foreign imperial intervention in the… Read more
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Divide and rule: the billionaires behind the housing crisis
Many people are more worried about housing, jobs, and the supposed rise of Islamic influence than they are about the toxic impact of extreme wealth inequality. If you feel this way, you are right to be angry about your economic security. But you are directing that anger at the exact wrong people. Despite the mainstream… Read more
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Wealth taxes are critical to reducing toxic inequality
More than 3.7 million people currently live in poverty in Australia. That’s more than 13 percent of everyone that lives in the fifteenth richest nation on earth. Meanwhile the richest 200 households have increased their share of national wealth from 8 percent to 25 percent of Australia’s GDP. The crisis of inequality in Australia is… Read more
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What if big businesses don’t need social license?
Australia is a state functionally captured by foreign owned big businesses like fossil fuel corporations and global finance asset managers. Despite escalating climate disasters and massive public outcry for change, successive Australian governments have and will continue to relentlessly expands fossil fuel extraction. This is not an accident. Australia is structurally embedded into the global… Read more
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Why does the Productivity Commission want $7 billion tax cuts for big business?
Australian corporate profits just hit a three-year high, jumping 5.8 percent in a single quarter. Yet, the same people who took those profits are now asking you to pay for their office upgrades and new machinery. And the Productivity Commission is intent on laundering that big business demand through the media to the Treasurer. Here’s… Read more
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What if the AI job-apocalypse is a boardroom trick?
Is the AI-caused white-collar job-apocalypse here or are the mass-sackings just a boardroom trick designed to boost profits and discipline workers? More and more large tech firms are engaging in mass-sackings of software developers and other higher-paid, higher skilled workers. Fintech firm Block has sacked 40 percent of its workforce and crisis-ridden logistics software company… Read more
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What if capitalism wants you to be poor?
You’ve probably heard the analogy that government budgets are like a household — it cannot spend more than it earns. Almost every year, neoliberal politicians, economists and commentators admonish the public to “tighten our belts” to pay back government debt, cut services, sack public servants, increase tax breaks for corporations. This is austerity. This analogy… Read more
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What I’m reading (Feb 2026)
Stories and links that are of interest or relevance to leaders, strategists, campaigners and organisers. Inequality and the economy Global affairs Data, tech and privacy AI and the future of work Campaigning, communications and social media Society, media, news and culture Climate Change Read more
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What if we broke up Coles?
The ACCCβs has launched a case against Coles, credibly alleging that it made false claims about its “Down Down” discounts. The case shows how corporations exploit their monopoly power to extract wealth from everyday people and why we need to break them up. The evidence from the ACCC shows that Coles abused (and continues to… Read more
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Extreme bank profits and the housing affordability crisis
The earning season for the Commonwealth Bank and Macquarie is more evidence that commercial bank profiteering is worsening housing affordability. The return on equity of 13 percent and Commbank’s cash profit of $5.4 billion are the trophies of a money siphon that extracts wealth from renters and mortgage payers to asset owners and the billionaire… Read more
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Why the market wants you unemployed
The Reserve Bank of Australia must engineer the mass sacking of workers to protect corporate profit margins. That’s the misanthropic austerity ideology that currently passes for economic wisdom in the Australian Financial Review. A recent example is an article by Christian Baylis, a fund manager, who blames the “profligate youth” for “matcha inflation” and chastises… Read more
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What if centrism is a dead-end?
Centrist political strategy, especially in the US, is a failed, dead-end programme that benefits the billionaire status-quo. The “popularist” (poll-driven, “focus on popular issues”) pundits insist that the only way to save democracy is to turn politics into focus-grouped corporate marketing that treats voters like consumers of insurance or soup brands. Elite pundits like Ezra… Read more
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What I’m reading (January 2026)
Stories and links that are of interest or relevance to leaders, strategists, campaigners and organisers. Inequality and the economy Global affairs Unions Workers’ rights Data, tech and privacy AI and the future of work Campaigning, communications and social media Society, media, news and culture Climate Change Read more
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ICE executions and the American Dream
Something fundamental has changed in America. The protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd were not just about racial injustice. They exposed the truth that the US system relies on coercion, not consent. The murders by ICE of people in Minneapolis is the latest evidence of this move towards a more authoritarian, fascistic phase,… Read more
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How did we get to zombie capitalism?
How does the Suez Canal help us understand how we got the nightmare of zombie capitalism and the collapse of the global rules-based order? The Suez Canal and the Red Sea are the “jugular vein” of global capitalism and imperialism — in 2021 more than 12 percent of the entire world’s trade went through the… Read more
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The smug dismissal of the pop culture industrial complex
Do you roll your eyes at pop culture reporting and Tiktok videos about the latest drama with Taylor Swift or the Beckhams? Do you dismiss the deep interest that countless millions have for celebrity gossip as the “opiate of the masses”? Do you prefer reading New Left Review over New Idea? The gossip industry isn’t… Read more
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The old order is not coming back
The short era of US hyper-imperialism is rapidly crumbling. Trump and his white Christian nationalist allies are dismantling the decaying international rules-based order that underpinned Western exceptionalism for the past 80 years — replacing it with McKinley-era aggression, mercantilism and territorial expansion. US allies, like Canada and Europe, are grappling with this openly — most… Read more
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Crisis of the status quo
The converging crises of 2025 and 2026, political instability, economic fragility, and ecological disasters, are the logical, terminal endpoint of a forty-year political project. Since the 1980s, the ideology of neoliberalism, or market fundamentalism, has systematically dismantled the liberal-democratic state’s capacity to govern, transferring exorbitant power to a class of executive oligarchs. We now have,… Read more
