As Australias most important federal election in decades approaches, we urgently need a new vision for this countrys future.
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The Socialist Alliances New South Wales state conference, held in Newcastle on July 21, emphasised the struggle against global warming and against the Howard governments hated Work Choices legislation.
In weighing how to deal with the al Qaeda threat in Pakistan, American officials have been meeting in recent weeks to discuss what some said was emerging as an aggressive new strategy, one that would include both public and covert elements, the July 18 New York Times reported following the release the previous day of the public version of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Islamist terrorist threats to the US.
In the lead-up to Indonesias 2009 elections, a new left party has been formed. The National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) was founded on the basis of three main demands: the cancellation of Indonesias foreign debt, the nationalisation of the minerals sector, including oil and gas, and national industrialisation.
On July 23, the Australian published extracts from a leaked internal Australian Council of Trade Unions report that described unionisation in the private sector as being at crisis levels. The report, authored by ACTU assistant secretary Chris Walton, warns unions against any expectation of a golden age should Labor be elected at the forthcoming federal election, and proposes continuation of a levy on all members to build a war chest with which to rebuild the movement.
Michael Moores Sicko, released in the US on June 22, has already become one of the five highest grossing documentaries of all time. Predictably, the films withering attack on the USs profit-driven health-care system has elicited a strong response from apologists for neoliberalism. The following article on the reaction to Moores film originally appeared as an editorial in the US Socialist Worker.
Psychologists call this 'projection'
"If we were to allow them to gain control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves — which they could use to fund new attacks and exhort economic blackmail on those who didn't
A representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was welcomed by a large crowd packed into a Sydney University lecture theatre on July 26.
On July 26, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) issued a call for their affiliates to join an international day of action on August 9 to protest the imprisonment of two trade union leaders in Iran. Mansour Osanloo, president of the Tehran bus workers union, Sandikaye Kargarane Sherkate Vahed, has for the third time over the past year-and-a-half found himself in detention. The latest arrest took place after he was abducted while travelling on a Tehran bus on July 10. He is being held in Evin prison, charged with conspiring against national security.
Shortly after midnight on July 29, Indian Muslim doctor Mohamed Haneef boarded a flight in Brisbane to be reunited with his wife in Bangalore and meet his newly born daughter for the first time, as he was trying to do at the time of his arrest at Brisbane Airport on July 2. The previous evening, he had been released from jail, after federal Director of Public Prosecutions Damien Bugg announced he was dropping all charges, conceding that the “anti-terrorism” case against the Gold Coast Hospital registrar had collapsed. “On my view of this matter a mistake has been made”, Bugg told a media conference.
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