Green Left Fighting Fund

In the very early morning of August 3, about 180 workers and volunteers from the City of Sydney’s Homelessness Unit will do a count of the “rough sleepers” in the city. The previous count in February, when the weather was much warmer, found 363 people sleeping on Sydney’s streets. Last winter’s count was 289.

If you are reading this column, then Green Left Weekly has successfully completed its move to its new home in Sydney. In the process, we have missed only a week of publication thanks to the volunteers who joined the ant army that carried all we needed down those flights of stairs in our old home, loaded the hire truck and emptied it into the new office — over and over again. Our sparkling new premises is wheelchair friendly and accessible through a lift. So moving in was a lot easier than moving out — and the latter is far from over.

Green Left Weekly is moving to a new office. Ever since it was founded in 1991, GLW has been produced in Sydney in our Chippendale office, on Abercrombie St. For years before that, GLW’s predecessor, Direct Action, was also produced in the Chippendale building. But the space no longer suits our needs and we are moving to an exciting new building on Mountain Street, Ultimo — just minutes from Abercrombie St.

Ten years of Western military occupation and war in Afghanistan has killed hundreds of thousands of people (mostly Afghan civilians), created millions of refugees and paid billions of dollars of “aid” into the hands of brutal warlords who serve as a puppet regime for the occupiers.

There's a huge anti-capitalist movement rocking Spain. If you're on Twitter the hashtag to follow is #spanishrevolution. We at Green Left Weekly have enthusiastically covered the events and the protesters known as “the indignants”. The movement has exploded into the streets; the central squares of cities and towns across the country have been taken over by a people crying out “the system is the problem”.

The richest person in Australia this year, according to the 2011 BRW Rich List, is mining magnate Gina Rhinehart. Her wealth, estimated at $10.3 billion, is more than twice the amount put shopping centre tycoon Frank Lowy in the top spot in last year’s BRW Rich List. Rhinehart’s wealth rose $5.55 billion from 2010.

Our society is heading in the wrong direction. According to a new “Australia’s Electricity Generation Mix 1960-2009” report commissioned by Environment Victoria, the proportion of Australia’s electricity generated by renewable energy has fallen from 19% in 1960 to 7% in 2008. Because Australia today generates 10 times the amount of electricity as it did in 1960, coal-fired electricity generation has increased by more than 1200%.

For many Australians, Fairfax Media is a benign alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. Well-meaning people buy Fairfax newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age because they believe they present a fairer picture of the news. But just how fair is Fairfax?

In his April 13 speech on his country’s $14.3 trillion government deficit, US President Barack Obama called on the US Congress to change the US tax system “so that the amount of taxes you pay isn’t determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.” He said: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is reputed to have said: “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” This sums up the problem we face from human-caused climate change. A “climate scoreboard” published by Climateinteractive.org calculates the impact of the current commitments by the world’s governments to cut carbon emissions. It estimates that if the promised emissions cuts are carried out in full, the earth would still warm by about 4°C by 2100 — far above the maximum warming of 1.5°C needed to maintain a safe planet.

I was having a conversation about the likely outcome of the NSW elections on Radio SkidRow, a Sydney community radio station, just days before the March 26 election. “We know what is going to happen after [the Liberals'] Barry O’Farrell wins the election, don’t we?” I said. “He’ll wait a couple of weeks then he will announce that Labor has left the cupboard bare so they’ll have to bring in an emergency budget.

I am sure we all shared similar reactions to last week’s earthquake-tsunami tragedy in Japan. First, we blinked at reports of a big earthquake. Perhaps for a moment our response was dulled —worn down by the string of recent disasters: the Christchurch earthquake, the Queensland floods and cyclones. Anyway, this was Japan, a rich country and probably the most earthquake-prepared nation in the world.