Economy

"How do you exaggerate the greatest bleaching event on the planet? How do you exaggerate that one quarter of the world's largest reef is dead? You don't," Tony Fontes, a prominent Great Barrier Reef diver and tourism operator, told a crowd of up to 2000 at Steyne Park, Double Bay, in the heart of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's electorate of Wentworth on June 26. The rally was organised by a coalition of groups, including GetUp, Greenpeace, the Wilderness Society and the Nature Conservation Council.

Ten thousand people rallied in support of Labour's left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn — elected leader last year in a landslide vote that marked a rejection of pro-austerity politics — outside of Westminster on June 27, as right-wing Labour Party MPs took advantage of the fallout from the Brexit vote to move against the party leader.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right Jane Mayer Doubleday, 2016 449 pages Like “dark matter” — the vast amount of invisible mass that holds the cosmos together — “dark money” is the astronomical quantity of hidden corporate money that holds the conservative US political universe together.

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

Speaking to his supporters in a live web video address on June 17, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that despite his campaign failing to defeat Democrat establishment figure Hillary Clinton, the struggle for a political revolution must continue.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left 50 dead (including the shooter) and more than 50 injured was the largest single violent attack on LGBTI people in US history. It claimed more victims than the 1973 arson at another nightclub in New Orleans that killed 32 people. This massacre punctuated the daily instances of violence, including murder, against LGBTI people that occur frequently in the US.

The Australian government's refusal to negotiate a fair deal according to international law with East Timor over the oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea is not appreciated by the people of one of the world's poorest nations.

The statement below was published on June 24 by Momentum, a grassroots group within the Labour Party that seeks to organise in support of the left platform of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. *** Yesterday, the British people voted to leave the European Union. Momentum, which campaigned to remain in the EU in order to transform the EU, respects the decision taken by the electorate.

Campaigners in Lambeth against LIbrary closures. The area voted overwhelmingly for 'remain'. Socialist Resistance, an English socialist group that is part of Left Unity, released this statement on June 24 on the result of the EU referendum ***

"The NSW state budget brought down by the Mike Baird government on June 21, which was trumpeted by Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian as 'the strongest in the country,' is a scam, based on stamp duty from overpriced housing sales and the sell-off of the state's electricity assets," Peter Boyle, Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Sydney in the federal election, said on June 23.

The executive committee of Left Unity, a socialist group in England, issued the following statement on the outcome of Britain's referendum on leaving the European Union. *** Left Unity deplores the Leave outcome of the EU Referendum. This referendum came from pressure from the far right — driven by anti-immigration sentiment, fuelled by racism. This has been the most reactionary national campaign in British political history, resulting in an open emergence of the extreme right.

The Benigno Aquino administration is down to its final days till it makes way for the new presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected in May. You could make the case that we are also seeing the curtain fall on the 30-year-old liberal democratic state that came to existence with the February 1986 EDSA Uprising that overthrew the military dictatorship of Marcos.