The Chicago teachers’ strike entered its third day on September 12. This strike is of national significance for a number of reasons:
* It is a militant fightback against the ruling class onslaught to destroy public education being carried out by Democrats and Republicans across the country.
* It is aimed at the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party machine in Chicago headed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, longtime aide, advisor and fundraiser for Obama.
*It is being organised by a new rank-and file-leaders with a class-struggle perspective.
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Billionaires and Ballot Bandits
Greg Palast
Out September 18
www.gregpalast.com
If you really want to understand the forthcoming US presidential election, read this book.
Former corporate fraud investigator Greg Palast previously showed how the 2000 US election was rigged through "purging" black voters off the electoral rolls. He showed how the 2004 election was rigged the same way. In 2008, the same thing happened again, yet Barack Obama still managed enough votes to get in.
The Indigenous Social Justice Association (ISJA) and the Support Assange and WikiLeaks Coalition released the statement below on September 9.
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Pressure from trade unions and human rights groups has stopped plans by South African authorities to charge striking mine workers with the massacre of 34 of their own comrades. Those killed had been shot by police on August 16.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) have been competing for members at the Lomin mining corporation's platinum mine at Marikana in South Africa.
Greek opposition leader Alexis Tsipras, from the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), launched an explosive attack on the government on September 7. Tsipras accused it of paying bailout officials fat-cat wages while working people face endless cuts and rock-bottom wages.
The Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF) bailout fund manages the recapitalisation of Greece's banks as part of the country's €130 billion ($160 billion) bailout. HFSF managers are earning up to €22,000 a month compared with a minimum wage below €600, Tsipras said.
Significant regional integration efforts, independent from the United States, have been among the most striking developments in Latin America and the Caribbean this century.
The most ambitious of these projects is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), founded at a summit in Caracas, Venezuela in December last year.
September marks the arrival of a defining name of the 1980s British anarcho-punk scene, Subhumans, to Australia. This will be the band’s first Australasian tour and features the 1981 line-up that recorded their debut EP Demolition War and classic albums such as The Day The Country Died.
Green Left Weekly's Chris Peterson spoke to frontman Dick Lucas.
Bruno Walter ― The Early Recordings
EMI 679 0262 (Nine-CD set)
Bruno Walter Conducts Mahler
Sony 88691 920102 (Five-CD set)
Mahler ― Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5
Naxos 8.110876 & 8.110896
“My time is yet to come!” Austrian composer, conductor and pianist Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) famously declared in response to the mixture of incomprehension and hostility that greeted his musical compositions.
Mahler's greatness as a conductor was never seriously disputed, but his standing as a composer certainly was.
Quebec’s student movement has claimed a victory with the toppling of the right-wing Liberal government in the September 4 election.
The opposition Parti Quebecois (PQ) looks set to form government, winning the most seats ahead of the right-wing Liberal Party who had governed for the past nine years. Quebec's largest pro-independence party, the PQ has, in government, also implemented neoliberal policies.
What is the world's most powerful and violent “ism”?
The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged”, because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.
In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire.
Shorten 'shamed' over Centrelink job cuts
Workplace relations minister Bill Shorten faced cries of “shame” from union delegates on August 29, when he tried to score political points by praising workers his government had just sacked.
At the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) annual leaders conference in Sydney, Shorten commended Centrelink social workers for supporting grieving families following the 2009 Victorian bushfires and last year's Queensland floods.
Raz Mohammad Khan and his adult son Abdul Jalil were shot dead in their home in the village of Sola, Oruzgan province, by Australian troops on August 31.
Claims by the Australian government and the US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan that the two men were insurgents have been refuted by villagers and US-appointed Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Occupation forces spokesperson US Air Force Captain Dan Einert described them as “military-aged”, the September 3 Sydney Morning Herald reported. Mohammad Khan was 70 years old.
The Grocon dispute with the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) at the Myer Emporium site in Melbourne’s CBD ended on September 6 so that talks could resume in the coming week.
Grocon owner Daniel Grollo approached the CFMEU about lifting the protests outside Myer and five other Grocon sites so there could be a return to talks under the conditions of a settlement reached with Fair Work Australia.
Since police first attacked the protest on August 28, there have been daily mobilisations of 600 to 3000 building workers at the site each morning.
The Liberal-National Party government announced a swathe of new job cuts on September 7 before its first budget on September 11. Queensland Health has been the latest victim, with 2700 jobs set to be dusted.
This has again outed Premier Campbell Newman as a fraud and cheat. His previous claims that regional centres would not bear the brunt of his public sector pruning and that front line services would be off limits have been rendered meaningless.
The September 3 Townsville Bulletin said the city had suffered 550 job losses since Newman came to power.
The election rallies of the mis-named “conventions” of the twin parties of Wall Street are over.
The Tea Party-dominated Republicans have gone sharply to the right. Is supporting the Democrats the way to fight the rightward shift in US capitalist politics?
Many who consider themselves leftists or even socialists reply “yes”. Let us look at the record.
In a remote part of Western Australia, on the Burrup peninsula near Karratha, is one of the world’s oldest and most important cultural sites.
It is the world’s largest collection of rock art, dotted over an area covering 42 adjacent islands, and it is under threat from unchecked industrial development.
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