General

Michael Arnold was born in country Victoria. He became politically active in Perth when he was 15. This was when he joined the socialist youth organisation Resistance and the Democratic Socialist Party.

When he was in his twenties, Arnold became active in the Harm Reduction Movement. He set up Rave Safe in Melbourne in the 1990s and produced a magazine called Flying Frequencies for the Harm Reduction Movement.

Arnold was also active in community radio, producing a program for Harm Reduction on 3CR Community Radio, and being a DJ on PBS.

Green Left Weekly issue #864 will be our final issue for 2010 as we take a break in production of the hard copy of GLW over the holiday period. The next hard copy edition of GLW will be dated January 26. However, we aim to continue updating this site with news and analysis where possible and necessary over this period. We thank all our readers for your support and wish you the best for holiday season.

BP abolishes safety ombudsman

“BP is disbanding the external safety ombudsman it set up after a fatal explosion at a company refinery in Texas in 2005 despite a growing number of concerns raised by the oil company’s employees.

“More than half the issues raised since the office was established in 2006 relate to BP’s operations in Alaska.

“BP said it would not extend the office’s tenure beyond June.

“The move comes less than a fortnight after the company announced it was setting up a new internal safety function, led by its head of safety and operations, Mark Bly.

Report: unions key to wellbeing

A new report has found that trade unions improve the general well-being for union and non-union citizens in several industrialised countries, an October 7 InTheseTimes.com article said.

The findings, which appear in the September issue of Social Indicators Research, “highlight a link between union density and life satisfaction based on data from fourteen developed nations”, the article said.

Over-fishing threatens caviar

“Lovers of fine food face a shortage of Beluga caviar that may last more than a decade. Eurasian states are discussing a ban on catching sturgeon in the Caspian Sea.

“Over-fishing has reduced the population of the fish that produces the delicacy by 90 per cent.

“It has pushed the price up nearly sevenfold to $14,340 per kilogram, or $1434 for enough to make a sandwich.

“The Caspian Sea is home to four-fifths of the sturgeon bearing the most sought after varieties of caviar ...

Financial crisis? Rich get richer

“The rich grew richer last year, even as the world endured the worst recession in decades.

“A stock market rebound helped the world's ranks of millionaires climb 17 percent to 10 million, while their collective wealth surged 19 percent to $US 39 trillion, nearly recouping losses from the financial crisis, according to the latest Merrill Lynch-Capgemini world wealth report.

“In North America, the ranks of the rich rose 17 percent and their wealth grew 18 percent to $US 10.7 trillion.”

— June 23 Reuters article.

It is with great sadness that Green Left Weekly reports the death of human rights activist Rosemarie Waratah Gillespie, 69, who unexpectedly died in Melbourne on June 21 from a stroke.

An activist for more than 40 years, she was a human rights lawyer, activist, author, filmmaker, anti-capitalist, Indigenous activist and mother.

Waratah lived in Port Kembla and frequently travelled to Sydney to attend meetings at Humanist House, where she was vice president of the Humanist Society. The society was just one of her many passions.

Green Left Weekly — Australia’s leading non-corporate newspaper — has an ambitious target to raise $300,000 for it’s fighting fund this year. This is the amount needed to ensure we can cover all the costs associated with research, production and distribution. It’s no small thing to produce such a quality publication.

United States President — and Nobel Peace Laureate — Barack Obama will spend nearly US$1 trillion on war this year.

James and Erica Packer have just had a baby. Luckily this time it's a boy.

In a rally organised by the Socialist Alliance during its January 2-5 national conference, pledges totalling $125,057 were made to support the Green Left Weekly 2010 fighting fund.

Our Spring Offensive, which ended on October 31, took the total raised for the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund this year to more than $200,000, and $8003 came in the last week.

Every time capitalist politicians play with racist prejudice against asylum seekers, there are violent consequences. I'm not just referring to the threatened forceful disembarkation of the Tamil refugees from the Oceanic Viking, which is outrageous. The bipartisan anti-asylum seeker rhetoric in Canberra is also very likely provoking more racist violence across Australia.

Green Left Weekly is highly valued by its many international readers.
Every week, Farooq Tariq and his comrades in the Labour Party Pakistan “eagerly await” the arrival of this particular newspaper from far-off Australia. Pakistan is now a “hot-spot” in the US-led war against Afghanistan.

A fearsome maelstrom of tsunamis, earthquakes and huge floods have suddenly ended or shattered the lives of many people in the Asia-Pacific region over the past two weeks.

We are letting the readers and supporters of Green Left Weekly explain why you should make a special donation for the Spring Offensive to help make our $250,000 fighting fund target.

“We are lucky in Australia to have a national newspaper, Green Left Weekly, not beholden or shackled to big business or multinational corporations, whether they be church or state. Over many years it has remained a newspaper free to critique the capitalist system, which continues to reward those with capital and exploit those without.

Green Left Weekly is launching a “spring offensive” to help us reach our 2009 fighting fund target of $250,000. By the end of August, we had raised $147,550 — about 60%. We need a push to get to 100% or more.

Since its launch in February 1991, the content of Green Left Weekly has been available on the internet free of charge. A full archive of every published article is available on its website www.greenleft.org.au

A chill wind was blowing early last Thursday outside my local train station. Commuters had their collars turned up and their arms folded as they hurried into the station. Dave, the suburb's iconic Big Issue seller in his red wheelchair, and I with the latest Green Left Weekly, were trying to attract those with windproof consciences.

“If you are still in the Labor Party today, you should be ashamed of yourself”, 71-year-old Aboriginal activist Pat Eatock called out to delegates entering the stage-managed proceedings of the first day of the ALP national conference.

The heroic act of resisting an order to serve in a war that is wrong has shaped the political views of many people. I remember the powerful impression draft resisters made on me as a young student during the tail-end of Australia's military involvement in the war on Vietnam.

In a fortnight when the world's wealthiest countries escalated their war on one of the world's poorest, Afghanistan, and when Peter Sold-His-Soul-To-The-Devil Garrett gave the nod to a new uranium mine to be run by a company controlled by a billionaire US arms merchant and former contra gunrunner, you'd be keen to get some good news.

In his notorious Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler explained the political device of the big lie:

Below are extracts from a June 18 email from Tehran, Iran. It was posted on the Socialist Pakistan News e-list by Farooq Sulehria, a comrade from the Labour Party Pakistan. Sulehria is a regular contributor to Green Left Weekly.

A visitor from Mars would have scratched their head raw about what big business is allowed to get away with in this country — especially by so-called Labor governments.

Recent protests by Indian students in Australia have drawn global attention to a resurgence of racist violence in Australian cities. An Indian student lies in a Melbourne hospital recovering from serious stab wounds to his abdomen, while others live in terror.

On May 14, the Senate upheld the parliamentary remuneration tribunal’s decision to raise electoral allowances for federal politicians by $90 a week ($4700 a year). The vote was 38 votes to 7.

On May 13, a team of three British adventurers measuring ice conditions in the Canadian Arctic found themselves on thin ice and asked to be airlifted out weeks before they had planned.

Famous Cuban singer/songwriter Silvio Rodriguez has been banned by the US State Department from attending folk singer Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebrations in New York.

Ironically, it was the first of May — workers’ day — and we were protesting against privatisation outside the NSW Labor Party offices.

For the annual May Day march in Wollongong this year, workers and the community will march under the banner, “Put jobs before profits”. Now that our PM has finally admitted Australia faces a recession, these four words sum up nicely a just response to the crisis.

Green Left Weekly is proud to have sponsored the hugely successful World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century conference, held over the Easter weekend in Sydney.

Christine, a stalwart of the anti-war movement in Australia, shakes her head at the gross double standards of the mainstream media in Australia when it reports the casualties in the war on Afghanistan. She shakes her fists in anger and then gets on with organising the next anti-war protest.

There’s an odd mood in the streets as the global recession begins to bite in Australia. Many people seem to have their heads down, worrying about their own problems.