Environmentalists around the country are gearing up to protest the worlds biggest climate criminals US President George Bush and PM John Howard who will be pushing their environmentally disastrous agenda at the September 8-9 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney.
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Many working-class people in Western Australia are suffering the consequences of a two-tier society despite the states booming economy, the Socialist Alliance candidate for Pearce, Annolies Truman, told the partys state conference on August 11.
East Timor: Beyond Independence
Edited by Damien Kingsbury and Michael Leach
Monash University Press, 2007
302pages, $36.95
Edited by Damien Kingsbury and Michael Leach
Monash University Press, 2007
302pages, $36.95
Showing them the red card
"I want America to go out. Today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but out. I wish the American people didn't invade Iraq and, hopefully, it will be over soon." — Iraqi soccer team captain Younis Mahmoud, speaking
On August 6, East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta appointed his predecessor, Xanana Gusmao, prime minister and asked him to form a government without Fretilin, the largest party in the parliament elected on June 30. Despite the constitutional legitimacy of this being unclear, Gusmaos government was sworn in on August 8. Since Ramos Hortas decision there have been outbreaks of rioting and arson, as well as protests that were tear-gassed by UN police and the Australian-led International Stabilisation Force (ISF).
Shakedown: Australias grab for Timor oil
By Paul Cleary
Allen & Unwin, 2007
336 pages, $29.95
By Paul Cleary
Allen & Unwin, 2007
336 pages, $29.95
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.
In a new initiative for a political party in Australia, the Socialist Alliance is using the web to open up the organisation of its federal election campaign. Mainstream parties have generated a lot of media attention with their self-promotion on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, but the alliance is enabling open access to the way its campaign is run.
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.
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.