General

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.

Read the March edition of the Flame here

“We’ve got two goals in the G20", US President Barack Obama said of the approaching London summit of finance ministers and central bank governors from 19 of the world’s largest national economies plus the European Union. “The first is to revive the capitalist system and the second is to agree on new regulations to save capitalism from itself.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd likes to give the impression that he takes his mission very seriously.

Do you think this headline is too harsh? Do we still need to give these politicians time to act the way many hoped they would?

The 22 November 2008 edition of the Green Left Weekly (GLW #776) contained an article written by Margarita Windisch entitled “ALP, media targets militant ETU unionist”.

This column is usually devoted to an appeal for the Green left Weekly fighting fund but this week this space will be used to join in with the many trade unions, other groups and individuals who are rising in a huge display of solidarity to help the communities devastated by the unprecedented bushfires in Victoria.

Next month it’s likely many of us will receive a one-off cash payment of up to $950 from the Rudd government.

In a speech to a gathering of bosses and union leaders at Kirribilli House on January 19, PM K-Rudd called for national unity in the face of capitalism’s latest meltdown. “We are all in this together”, he said.

The massive public turnout in the US for the inaugural presidential address of Barack Obama underlines the incontestable fact that millions of people in the US and around the world invest great hope for change in him. But amid the bloody ruins of Gaza, the latest victims of US-backed imperialist war blinked uncomprehendingly at TV images of this spectacle of euphoria.

There can be no doubt that the great majority of the 55 million US citizens whose votes made Barack Obama president want change.

You must have noticed that the Christmas decorations are rapidly spreading all over the shopping malls, not so subtly signalling another season of extreme shopping and extreme credit card abuse.

I’ve lost count of how much bailout money governments have thrown at the global financial crisis. We all remember the US$700 billion that the US Congress recently approved, but in the months before that the US Reserve had already dished out nearly the same amount in bailouts, buyouts and guarantees for bad loans.

Bruno, a supporter of Green Left Weekly, said to me last week that the political situation today reminded him of a famous quote from a story about a Sicilian prince at the time Italy’s feudal principalities were being challenged by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts”:

Every now and then the mask slips and we see the true face of the corporate dictatorship that Every now and then the mask slips and we see the true face of the corporate dictatorship that pretends to be democratic Australia.to be democratic Australia.

There is good news and bad news. Let's have the bad news first.

Which bank? Umm, the whole lot of them, actually. But let’s start with “the bank”, the Commonwealth Bank, because its profit report came out last week.

Having raised a total of $129,040 for the 2008 Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund, we are now more than half-way to our $250,000 target. Our supporters raised $5440 over the last week through donations and several successful fundraising events around the country.

We could see this disappointment coming a mile off. First, Professor Ross Garnaut’s report tells us the global warming problem is dire and demands immediate response, but then, he comes to the diabolical conclusion that we should leave the solution to a dodgy market mechanism: carbon pollution permit trading. Now, the Rudd Labor government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme green paper on this all-important challenge offers to hand the biggest carbon polluting companies free permits to pollute.

We live in precarious times. Consider these two announcements over the last week:

1. The Bank for International Settlements (the international organisation of the world's central banks) warned that a severe global economic downturn seems

The current issue of Green Left Weekly is a two-week issue, so that GLW staff may participate in the "Turn anger into action" national Resistance conference in Sydney from June 27-29. (Visit http://resistance.org.au for full details.) The next issue

On June 5, I joined a suburban World Environment Day campaigning stall organised by Resistance, a socialist youth group in Australia.

“They must think we are all idiots”, said an exasperated Friend of Green Left last week in response to the parliamentary debate about rising petrol prices.

“Two things keep me sane”, wrote in a Green Left Weekly subscriber with her payment for renewal, “Green Left Weekly and Radio National”. She is just one of a large number of loyal readers and supporters of this important project for change.

“How many minutes to midnight, do you reckon it is?”, asked a Green Left Weekly buyer at a street stall last week.

The first new subscription to come in on May 1 was from Graeme, from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, who had read about the Climate Change — Social Change conference on the internet. He took out a one-year subscription to Green Left Weekly and sent us this note of appreciation:

For most of us here in wealthy and relatively insulated Australia, the word “crisis” sounds like an exaggeration. We hear about the global warming crisis, the world financial crisis and now the food crisis but these seem like abstractions to most of us. “Crisis, what crisis?” is a familiar rejoinder.

“It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

It has to be one of the most unbelievable stories of the century: New Idea, a magazine that trades on gossip about royals and other celebrities, is blamed for exposing Prince Harry’s deployment in the British military intervention in Afghanistan. It is about as believable as the plot of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which a young prince swaps places with a street lad to see what life is like in “Paupersville”.

Parliamentarians are grossly overpaid. A backbencher gets paid more than twice median income, and that’s before adding allowances, generous superannuation, free air travel for life, etc. The PM gets double that: $330,356 (before expenses and perks). Last year, and the year before, the pollies awarded themselves a 7% pay rise while average wages rose 3.8%, putting the recently announced parliamentarians’ one-year salary freeze into perspective.

“M” was born in a small town in Western Australia’s wheat belt. Around those parts, lads like M were called “Keller fellers”. They were wildly applauded when they performed for the local football team but they knew about certain lines that they could not cross. An outsider could not see those invisible fences, but to the locals, white and black alike, they may as well have been painted in fluoro paint.

This is an extract from an inspiring letter from Jim Knight, one of our loyal readers in northern NSW:

I became a grandfather last week. The much-anticipated first grandchild arrived at 11.42pm. That’s worse than it sounds because she was born in Perth and I live in Sydney — two hours ahead. I groggily answered the phone but my eldest daughter’s excited voice woke me up quickly and the memory of the birth of my younger daughter just 11 years ago came rushing back.

Come Saturday night, most political parties in Australia will be winding up their public campaigning until the next elections. The rank-and-file members who did their stint of letterboxing and polling booth duty will mostly retreat into inactivity, leaving “politics” once again to the professional politicians. No wonder so many people are cynical about politics — in their experience, it’s about politicians doing it by themselves and largely for themselves.

The idea that we build something much better than capitalism had been around for generations but, 90 years ago in Russia, for the first time an alliance of workers and peasants made a revolution that was to frame the course of history ever since.

Thousands of people will read Green Left Weekly for the first time this week. You may be one of these first-time readers. If so, chances are you will have picked up a copy at one of the large Walk Against Warming marches being held all around Australia on the weekend of November 10-11.

It was when they played Kermit the Frog singing The Rainbow Connection at Gail Lord’s funeral that I started crying.

Berlin-based Transparency International’s latest corruption perceptions report listed Burma and Somalia as the two most corrupt countries in the world. Then comes Iraq, Haiti, Tonga, Uzbekistan, Chad and Afghanistan. The three least corrupt countries were New Zealand, Denmark and Finland. Australia came in 11th, just after Canada but ahead of the US, which was 20th on the list.

Saturday September 8 was another red banner day for people’s power.

Debra Jopson is an investigative reporter with a conscience and a very good record for exposing the crimes that continue to be committed against Indigenous people of Australia. Her latest expose, in a series of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald on August 21-22, was of a multi-million dollar robbery of funds allocated to address the Third World-like conditions of Indigenous Australians. And who was the robber? The Howard government.

On August 8, I attended a noisy demonstration by trade unionists in Malaysia who were demanding that the government bring in a minimum wage of 900 ringgit (A$300) a month. I had come to the picket with a group of some of the country’s lowest-paid workers — rubber-plantation workers whose ancestors had been brought from India generations ago by the former British colonial rulers as indentured labourers.

It has been 37 years since the Vietnam War ended, but you don’t have to look far to see the scars of that war — people who have lost limbs, people suffering deformities from the extensive use of chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange by the US military.

I am sure readers would agree that the real swindlers were exposed in the discussion after the much-watched screening of Martin Durkin’s Great Global Warming Swindle on ABC TV last week.

Ker-ching! $2.5 million from the Business Council of Australia. Ker-ching! $3 million from the Australian Chamber of Commerce. Ker-ching! $1-2 million from the Minerals Council (they’ve got a few billion in spare change). Ker-ching! $3 million from the Master Builders (they swear they don’t swear like those thuggish unionists in the building industry). Ker-ching! $1 million from the National Farmers Federation (“Sorry John, we’re still bleeding from the Patricks’ fiasco and there’s the drought …”). Ker-ching!

OK, I admit this idea to boost the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund was inspired (to be honest, stolen) from the recent adventures of one Canape Crusader from Kirribilli: we get 225 people to donate $8000 each to the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund and, in return, I have them over to my place for drinks and canapes. That should raise enough money to make this column redundant for seven years!

When the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest national accounts last week it was revealed that the corporate profit share of all Australian income had risen to 28.1%, well above the long-term average of 20%.

The good news this week is that the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund has reached a third of the way to its $250,000 target for 2007!

Tom Lewis, 83, is a long-time Green Left Weekly subscriber in a small town between Bundaberg and Gin Gin, Queensland. His eyesight is rapidly failing and he can no longer read. But last week he renewed his subscription to the paper and made a $100 donation to our fighting fund.

Australia’s top silk and civil rights advocate Julian Burnside QC has suggested introducing a law that makes it an offence for politicians to lie. I don’t know how practical this would be, but imagine if politicians could be forced to tell the truth and ’fess up like the makers of Ribena?

It’s like having one of those nightmares that seems to grow more horrible as it drags on. We’ve been looking forward to the next federal election for a chance to get rid of John Howard, but with each day federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd sounds more and more like Howard.

Last week, right-wing Sydney Radio 2GB “shock jock” Alan Jones was let off with a ticking-off from Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for inciting on air the infamous anti-Lebanese bashing spree in Cronulla in 2005.