Issue 761

The campaign to throw out all charges against Palm Island Aboriginal leader Lex Wotton is gaining momentum. The Indigenous Social Justice Association, Melbourne (ISJA) is organising a Victorian speaking tour with him from August 6-10.

Two radical events marked July 26, the date in 1953 when Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada Barracks that failed militarily, but inspired the ultimately successful Cuban Revolution.

A 150-strong community meeting on July 29 called on the NSW government to urgently re-open the region’s only maternity unit, at Blue Mountains Hospital in Katoomba.

An estimated 1500 shop stewards and union delegates met at Dallas Brookes Hall on July 30 to discuss the campaign against the charging of Noel Washington, the construction worker facing a jail term for refusing to hand over information to the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). The meeting also discussed the ongoing Your Rights at Work campaign. It was called by the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC).

The Australian Workers Union has many members in the aluminium refining and smelting industry, which accounted for 45.3 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2006 (7.9% of Australia’s total). Obviously, such a major greenhouse polluter — the dirtiest for every dollar of value added — has to be radically restructured if carbon emissions are to be cut to sustainable levels.

The July 24 Sydney Morning Herald reported Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing that rents across Sydney had increased by 8% over the 2007-08 financial year, almost twice the rate of inflation.

Former PM John Howard’s blandly named Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) remains under PM Kevin Rudd. It is prosecuting Victorian vice-president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), Noel Washington, who faces six months’ jail for not answering questions about a union meeting.

With the August 10 recall referendum on Bolivian President Evo Morales and eight out of nine prefects (governors) approaching, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government, together with the social movements, has launched an offensive against attempts by the right-wing opposition to prevent the electoral process going ahead.

On July 19-20, the latest negotiations over Iran’s uranium enrichment program were held in Geneva between the five UN Security Council members (the US, Britain, France China and Russia) and Germany on one side and Iran on the other.

Below is a July 30 statement by the Residents Action Movement.

From the first day it appeared online, the masthead of the Climate and Capitalism blog has carried the slogan “Ecosocialism or Barbarism: there is no third way”.

While some, including US presidential hopeful Barack Obama and the Australian government of PM Kevin Rudd, attempt to present the US-led occupation of Afghanistan as a “good war” counterposed to the disastrous occupation of Iraq — seen as a distraction from the “war on terrorism” — the bloodshed and repression in the service of the US-installed warlords in Kabul continues.

His hair has grown, his voice sounds a little deeper and his wounds appear to have healed somewhat. But what isn’t clear from the first ever Guantanamo Bay interrogation video to be released for public consumption is that Omar Khadr is blind in one eye.