The need to dethrone shareholders and boost worker power and some other news and views

Low Unemployment Doesn't Increase Wages Like It Used To - American Prospect

Full employment is still necessary, but rebuilding the middle class also requires dethroning shareholders and boosting worker power.

Getting American wages to rise, then, will take more than just reducing unemployment, or even moving close to a full-employment economy, important and necessary though that may be. ... It will take a wholesale rewriting of labor law so that it applies to workers in all manner of employment arrangements, that gives those workers the power to bargain for all the workers in entire sectors of the economy, and that provides some kind of tangible governmental incentive for workers to join unions. ...
For the key to boosting worker income has always been, and remains, boosting worker power. Regenerating the American middle class absent greatly enhanced worker power is simply magical thinking.
And there’s no “buts” about it.

Former Liberal premier Colin Barnett reveals the ‘personal humiliation’ of WA state election loss - The West Australian

Addressing for the first time the fallout from his loss, the former premier used a wide-ranging interview to defend his decision to stay in Parliament, saying he was determined to face the music because “I am not the sort of person to cut and run”.
He said former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett helped him through a dark time after the defeat and former WA premier and long-time political foe Richard Court had sent him a note applauding him for providing stability during a tumultuous period in Australian politics.

Why Johnson and Gove barely grasp the concept of compromise - New Statesman

As former journalists, they spent much of their lives mocking the faint-hearted.

Chinese Nationalism Jostles With Academic Freedom in Australia - New York Times

The challenge, educators and other experts say, is balancing professors’ academic freedoms with the need to avoid offending the Chinese students, while also giving them the right to voice their views.
Universities have struggled to figure out which students simply lack experience with Western ideas of critical debate; which are correct in demanding more sensitivity; and which are being manipulated by the Chinese government or Communist Party, or acting out of fear of Chinese censorship that is being exported as the nation exerts its soft power overseas.

Mugabe and Other Leftist Heroes - New York Times

The real mystery is why Western liberals and progressives so often fall for the Mugabes of the world, and why they seem to learn so little from successive and inevitable disenchantments.
When will they stop confusing national independence with individual freedom, liberation with liberty?

Trudeau's Liberals check their to-do list: 67 promises down, more than 200 still to go - CBC News

Newly launched government web site keeps track of promises kept, broken and 'modified'