For most of us here in wealthy and relatively insulated Australia, the word crisis sounds like an exaggeration. We hear about the global warming crisis, the world financial crisis and now the food crisis but these seem like abstractions to most of us. Crisis, what crisis? is a familiar rejoinder.
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Ruth Coleman, veteran ALP senator and feisty leftist died peacefully of cancer in her home in Bassendean, Perth, on March 27. She was the last of a generation of left-wing ALP members whose example shames the current neoliberal crop of Laborites.
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Green Left Weekly caught up with some of the Climate Change — Social Change conference participants. Here’s what they had to say.
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Glenn Stevens, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, has argued that working people should be forced to absorb the cost of higher power bills when a carbon emissions trading scheme is introduced in 2010. Speaking to the April 5 Sydney Morning Herald, Stevens argued that “the policy would need to be well explained to consumers to head off calls for higher wages”.
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'Holocaust' Jirri Booth's arguments (Write On, GLW #745) regarding the impermissibility of using the word "holocaust" to describe anything other than "the victims of Nazi genocide" are spurious. On February 29, Israeli deputy defence minister
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Where in the world could a jury find in favour of someone, only to have a judge deliver a decision opposite to the jury’s finding? Well, this has happened in NSW and the victim is Mamdouh Habib, best known for being imprisoned by the US military without charges at its Guantanamo Bay naval base, before being released and flown home to Australia in January 2005.
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In 2007, the 90th anniversary of the New South Wales general strike was ignored by mainstream politicians and media sources — a silence that contrasted markedly with the extensive coverage allotted to the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing in 2005.
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Ben Bernanke is the chairperson of the US Federal Reserve Bank. If he sneezes at the wrong time, the world’s sharemarkets take another dive and currency speculators rush for their global roulette table. So when he addressed the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on April 3 he was choosing his words very carefully. And there was one word he was wary about using: “recession”.
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At 11pm on April 7, 1998, Patrick Stevedores locked 2000 waterside workers out of their jobs. Following months of speculation, the “leasing” of Webb dock in Melbourne to the National Farmers Federation in late January and the abortive “Dubai affair” — where former soldiers were trained in secret in Dubai as strike-breaking scabs — Patrick opted for a frontal assault on the workers and their union.
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Overwhelmed by the greenhouse debate? Bamboozled by all the competing claims that renewable energy sources cannot supply 24-hours-a-day power (“base load”)? Depressed by the unending vastness of “the literature” on global warming and renewables?
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Dave Holmes is a veteran leader of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance. He co-wrote the pamphlet Change the System Not the Climate (Resistance Books, 2007) and will be participating in the upcoming Climate Change — Social Change Conference. Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle spoke to him about the key issues the conference needs to address.
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The World Bank’s long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a “knowledge bank” didn’t work, it devised a new identity as a “green bank”. Yes, it’s true.