Perth protest by sole parents and supporters against the cuts to parenting payment in which 84000 sole parents have been forced onto Newstart at a rate more than $130 per week below the poverty line! Speakers included: Rachel Siewert, Mary O'Brien and Sam Wainwright and others.
Economy
In the week leading up to Venezuela’s April 14 presidential elections, whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published a classified cable indicating that US-based aid organisations were working to overthrow the government and defend US corporate interests in the Andean country.
Nicolas Maduro, the candidate for the Unitede Socialist Party of Venezuela, has won the Venezuelan presidential election with 50.66 percent of the vote against 49.07 percent for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski.
Maduro gave a victory speech immediately after, while Capriles initially refused to recognize the results.
The “first bulletin” results were announced by the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Tibisay Lucena, at around 11:20 p.m. Venezuelan time, with 99.12 percent of the votes totaled, enough to give Maduro an irreversible victory.
In a quirk of history, Margaret Thatcher died a little more than one month after Hugo Chavez. Thatcher was a figurehead for the global class war in the 1980s and '90s known as “neoliberalism”. Chavez was a figurehead for the struggle against it and the alternative starting to be built in Latin America over the past decade.
With the death of another “controversial” world leader, what the media should have done was go back to their editorials that threw around terms like “authoritarian” and “tyrant”, and were filled with tales of a legacy of economic destruction and class hatred and support for dictators, and just used a simple find/replace to remove “Hugo Chavez” and insert “Margaret Thatcher”.
Costas Isychos, is the defence and foreign policy spokesperson of the broad left SYRIZA party in Greece. This is an edited version of comments he made at a forum in Melbourne on April 8.
***
I want to give you some idea of what has been happening in Greece since the world economic crisis started in 2008. This is a nightmare that started for humanity when the true identity of the banking and financial system appeared to the world.
A strong gust of wind in Melbourne’s CBD caused a brick wall to collapse onto passing pedestrians, killing three people, on March 28.
The wall fronted the site of the former Carlton United Brewery on Swanston Street, which has been under redevelopment by the Grocon company for the past seven years.
Grocon is a household name, but for all the wrong reasons.
Thousands of construction workers protested against the company at another Grocon site on Lonsdale Street, just up the road from the collapsed wall, in September last year.
When a political leader dies, it becomes compulsory to lie about their record.
While much of Britain openly rejoiced at the death of Margaret Thatcher, the media snapped into reverential mode, giving over hours of airtime and several thousand miles of column inches to representatives of the ruling class to solemnly recite myths about her achievements.
This wouldn’t matter so much if, like Thatcher, these myths were dead. But they are still shaping our policies.
No ‘economic miracle’
In recent weeks, there has been a dramatic wave of violence and repression in Guatemala that has led to the deaths of many human rights activists. Among them are peasant leaders, trade unionists, journalists and indigenous peoples.
In light of this, the Guatemala Peace and Development Network (RPDG) has sent out an urgent request for support and solidarity from around the world to bring pressure to bear on the Guatemalan government to halt this repression.
In a move that shows how little has changed since Ernesto “Che” Guevara famously observed the maltreatment of Chile’s copper miners by foreign capitalists in The Motorcycle Diaries, more than 500 mineworkers have been summarily sacked by the Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton.
Their offence was to participate in strike action for improved pay and conditions at Escondida, an open-cut mine located in the arid Antofagasta region of northern Chile.
Chile may have dispensed with military dictatorship, but agitating for workers’ rights can still get you assassinated.
Juan Pablo Jimenez, 35, was the president of the union representing workers at Azeta, one of Chile’s largest electrical engineering companies. On February 21, he was found dead in a pool of blood at his workplace, minutes after finishing a shift, a bullet lodged in his cranium.
The initial police report said it was a “bala loca” that killed Jimenez — a random stray bullet that supposedly made its way into Jimenez’s enclosed workshop.
Never have I witnessed a gap between the mainstream media and public opinion quite like the first 24 hours since the death of Margaret Thatcher.
While both the press and President Barack Obama were uttering tearful remembrances, thousands took to the streets of the UK and beyond to celebrate. Immediately, there were strong condemnations of what were called "death parties," described as "tasteless", "horrible," and "beneath all human decency""
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