I think all these unfair tribunals and all this unfairness have to be removed, Derek Belan, NSW state secretary of the National Union of Workers, told Green Left Weekly in response to Labors release of its Forward with Fairness Policy Implementation Plan in late August. If Labor is elected, people are voting that they dont want this stuff. There is a mandate to remove it. People are aware what this stuff means and people want it removed and Labor has to listen.
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Green Left Weeklys Graham Matthews asked a number of protesters at the Stop Bush rally in Sydney what motivated them to take part.
Throughout the week, some people in Cochabamba had worried about how September 13, a date expected to involve confrontation between the supporters of the government of left-wing, indigenous President Evo Morales and the right wing, would turn out. People at work talked of a coup. Others remembered the protest on January 11 when three people were killed and some buildings burnt, worrying that the same would happen again. Some of the most right wing spoke of a campesino “invasion”.
Mission accomplished!, boasted NSW Premier Morris Iemma at the end of one of the most aggressive policing operations in Australia for many years. The last public official to use that phrase was US President George Bush, who had just invaded Iraq. Did Iemma mean to link the thousands of protesters in Sydney with the enemy population of Iraq?
The United States government has almost perfected a method of intervention that is able to penetrate and infiltrate all sectors of civil society in countries that it deems to be of economic and strategic interest. In the case of oil-rich Venezuela in the middle of a process of transformation led by socialist President Hugo Chavez that is adversely affecting the interests of US corporations this strategy began to take form in 2002.
Alex Bainbridge, chairing the Stop Bush/Make Howard History anti-APEC rally told the massing crowd that there were at least 10,000 people gathered at 11am at Sydney’s Town Hall. Despite an intensive campaign aimed at keeping people away, and provocative policing on the day, up to 15,000 people come out on September 8, asserting their right to protest against US President George Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Protesters defiance of the APEC security crackdown was clear from early on the morning of September 8 when the NSW police drove their shiny new $600,000 black water cannon, with sirens blazing, past us at Sydney Town Hall. We whistled, gave it the finger, and continued preparing for the biggest anti-war protest in Sydney in more than a year.
The innovative offer by the government of Ecuador to refrain from exploiting its largest oil reserve, in exchange for international compensation for nature conservation, is attracting increasing support, according to an August 23 IPS article. The initiative relates to the untapped Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha (ITT) oil reserve, which is located in Yasuni National Park in the Amazon. According IPS, the park is one of the worlds most biodiverse regions. It was created in 1979 and covers 982,000 hectares.
Violent police repression mixed with President Michelle Bachelets bizarre assertion that the right to protest still exists in Chile has been the governments response to the national Unitary Workers Council (CUT) day of protest against neoliberalism, held on August 29. Claims by the governing Socialist-Christian Democrat alliance to be politically centre-left now look weaker than at any point in its 16-year reign, given its incapacity to address the underlying political and economic causes that lead to the CUT protest.
The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance, is now calling for the immediate withdrawal of the Australian troops from East Timor. A meeting of the DSP National Committee resolved to investigate the prospects for building a public campaign around this demand. Peter Boyle, the DSPs national secretary, explained the reasons for this decision to Green Left Weekly
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