The June 27-30 African National Congress (ANC) Policy Conference and the South African Communist Partys 12th Congress, held in July, confirmed what many political observers in South Africa have known for a long time: that the politics and practical work of the SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions have become umbilically tied to the intensifying personal and positional power struggles inside the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance. The result is the paralysis of the SACP and COSATUs ability to organise and mobilise on a genuinely practical, working class/poor-centred basis.
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If you cant stand up and say what you feel and believe, then youre a slave. And I aint no slave, said one of the building workers prosecuted by the Howard government for withdrawing labour after the unfair dismissal of his shop steward.
A specially commissioned federal government report and a one-sided Ord River Irrigation Area (ORIA) discussion paper are being used in a continued drive to force Australian states to introduce genetically modified crops, with dissenting voices shoved aside.
A court challenge brought by the Wilderness Society (TWS) against the federal government was rejected on all counts on August 9. TWS alleged that environment minister Malcolm Turnbull had not properly assessed the environmental implications of the proposed Gunns pulp mill development in the Tamar Valley.
Popular resistance to neoliberal “reform” was the underlying cause of Peru’s July general strike. On July 5, public schoolteachers walked off the job over government plans to privatise education. Within days, discontented workers from other industries joined the embattled teachers. Before long, schools, mines, factories and construction sites were shut down as tens of thousands of striking protesters took to the streets of every major city demanding higher pay, improved conditions and revisions to the US-Peru free-trade agreement. Peasant farmers joined the mass mobilisation, closing roads and paralysing transport networks.
Tony Carvalho, an Australian Manufacturing Workers Union metal division shop steward sacked from the Altona Toyota plant, says that in the three months since he has been sacked, the use of outside contractors to work at the plant has increased dramatically. Speaking to Green Left Weekly, Carvalho said the number of contractors who are being called in threatens full-time jobs at the plant.
On August 15, 25 of the 43 West Papuan refugees who sought asylum in Australia in 2006 joined a protest outside federal parliament to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1962 New York Agreement the US-brokered agreement to transfer West Papua from Dutch to Indonesian control that included the guarantee of an act of free choice for West Papuans to decide whether to be incorporated into the Republic of Indonesia. However, instead of a genuine act of self-determination being held, a group of hand-picked West Papuan representatives were coerced into voting for Indonesian rule.
The Worst Jobs in History
Presented by Tony Robinson
Sunday, ABC 7.30pm
Presented by Tony Robinson
Sunday, ABC 7.30pm
Peaceful protest
In response to Benjamen Standing (Write on, GLW #719): There is absolutely nothing sectarian about advertising a peaceful protest as "a peaceful protest". Further, there is no contradiction whatsoever between organising a peaceful
“The British have basically been defeated in the south [of Iraq]”, the August 8 Washington Post reported being told by a US intelligence official in Baghdad. In the first six months of this year, 37 British troops were killed in Iraq, the highest number for any six-month period of the war and 14 more than died in the whole of 2006.
More than 200 people gathered at the Arena on August 11 for the Justice for the Innocent benefit gig for the Doomadgee family of Palm Island. The gig raised funds for the civil case against the Queensland police and Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, who admitted that his actions caused the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in the Palm Island watchhouse in 2004.
Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography
By Nicholas Stuart
Scribe Publications, 2007
288 pages, $32.95
By Nicholas Stuart
Scribe Publications, 2007
288 pages, $32.95
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