Economy

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17) was held in Durban from November 28 to December 11. The statement below was published on December 11 in response to the conference's outcomes by Climate Justice Now!, a network of organisations and movements from across the globe committed to the fight for social, ecological and gender justice.

Police violence has been increasing against the Occupy Melbourne camp, now located at Flagstaff Gardens. There have been a number of extremely questionable police actions in recent days against Occupy Melbourne.

What's striking about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement and its popular slogan “We are the 99%” is how much the central demand of the movement resonates with the Black community. African Americans, with few exceptions, are in the bottom 20% of income and wealth. Double digit unemployment is the norm in “good” economic times. Yet the social composition of most OWS occupations (some 10,000 including college campuses) has had few Black faces including in urban areas with large Black populations.

The savage austerity in Greece has affected people’s lives in many different ways. The hardship faced by Greek people has been directly reflected in their psychological condition.

A group of 14 Occupy Sydney activists faced charges at Downing St District Court in Sydney on December 5. The charges arose out of the police eviction of Occupy Sydney's camp in Martin Place on October 23. The cases were "stood over", allowing human rights lawyer Stuart Littlemore to take some of these cases to the High Court in the new year. Occupy activist Tim Davis-Frank quipped "It looks like we'll be occupying the court system for a while!" A solidarity demonstration outside the court involved a few rogue Occupy tents on legs, who were refused admission into court.

Cuadrilla Resources, which is exploring for natural shale gas in north-west England, has admitted its use of the notorious process of “fracking” was responsible for earthquakes in the region this year, BusinessInsider.com said on November 7. Fracking is a dangerous process involving fracturing rock with pressurised liquid. Some of the health and environmental dangers of the process were revealed by the film Gasland, about the impact of the practice in the United States.

The Occupy protests are part of a global movement that is questioning the basic structures of the political and economic system to an extent not seen since 1968. Whether it will succeed in changing these structures is unclear. But, Roger Burbach says, it has already created something far more powerful: a global shift in consciousness. * * * “Shut It Down”, “No More Shipping for the 1%” and “Death to Capitalism” proclaimed some of the banners near me as I joined thousands of demonstrators who converged on the Port of Oakland on a sunny afternoon in November.

“Preliminary results from Congo’s presidential election show incumbent Joseph Kabila leading,” Associated Press reported on December 3. For several reasons, this is not surprising news from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Britain's High Pay Commission has just published a report about the trend in salaries paid to the highest 0.1% of earners, and it seems that someone must have made a terrible mistake. Because, in this time of unprecedented debt and sacrifice, the government's making daily statements such as "in order to keep old age pensions viable, we are insisting from now on that the elderly contribute towards their upkeep, by going on the game for just two days a week”.

The Occupy movement in the United States continues to gain strength, despite wide-scale repression. The article below is abridged from a US Socialist Worker editorial. * * * The raids, arrests and police violence against the Occupy movement that has been occurring across the United States are about trying to silence a movement giving voice to the accumulated discontent of the working-class majority. They're also about showing who's the boss ― the political and business establishment.

The World Bank Out of Climate Finance coalition issued the statement below on December 1 from Durban, South Africa. * * * Today, 163 civil society organisations from 39 countries released a letter exposing an attempt led by the US, Britain and Japan to turn the Green Climate Fund into a “Greedy Corporate Fund” at UN climate talks in South Africa. The Green Climate Fund was created to support people in developing countries — people who are the most affected by the climate crisis but are the least responsible for it.

“There is money.” That was the major election campaign slogan of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in October 2009.