Economy

Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the global revolt against corporate greed, a diverse range of new and experienced people have gathered at several public assemblies, each of more than 40 people, to discuss building the movement in Adelaide. Following an October 15 action where 200 people gathered in Victoria Square, the collective has held a major working bee to make banners, signs, placards to help build awareness of Occupy Adelaide.

As the federal Labor government was forced to drop its maligned “Malaysia solution” and process all refugees arriving by boat in Australia, there was the hint that its inhumane detention of thousands of refugees would also be questioned.

Occupy Melbourne released the statement below on October 21 following a brutal police attack on protesters earlier that day. * * * Occupy Melbourne have called for a full inquiry into unlawful police behaviour amid scenes of police violence on the streets of Melbourne today. The call comes after riot police disrupted a peaceful demonstration in Melbourne’s CBD.

Occupy Sydney read out the statement below at an October 22 rally held at the occupy site in Sydney’s Martin Place. The statement was adopted unanimously by about 1000 rally attendees. Live blog: Occupy Melbourne, Sydney rallies * * * We are the workers. We are the indebted. We are the immigrants and the indigenous. We are the homeless. We are the students. We are the unemployed. We are the underrepresented people of the world. We are the 99%. We are Occupy Sydney.

Live blog of Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne protests.

Federal Greens MP for Melbourne has come out against the October 20 decision to send riot police to evict peaceful protesters from the occupy Melbourne site in City Square.

Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr says he is excited by the Occupy Wall Street protests against US corporations, which deserve “a roughing up … after the abuses that blighted the lives of ordinary families”. Yet he has decided the protest movement has no future.

More corporate managers are psychopaths than the general population, a detailed research project has discovered. The University of British Columbia study “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk”, published in Behavioural Sciences and the Law, March/April 2010, looked at professionals who had been spotted as potential management material, the people thought to have the skills that could get them to senior positions.

John Bellamy Foster is renowned Marxist economist and ecologist, and an editor of Monthly Review. He was a featured guest speaker at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change-Social Change conference, which Green Left Weekly co-organised in Melbourne over September 30-October 3.

The occupation of Sydney’s Martin Place continued into its fourth day with a kitchen, information desk, media centre and people’s library set-up, as protesters come and go from the now comfortably established rally site.

The huge number of transnational capitalist firms straddling the planet are effectively controlled by a very small group of centrally important players, says a ground-breaking survey conducted by Swiss researchers. Deploying statistical methods normally used in physics, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, data-mined information held by business intelligence firm Bureau van Dijk. The data, which included company ownership structures, allowed a new insight into the relationships between 43,060 corporations.

Ongoing occupations of public spaces were continuing on October 17 in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in opposition to corporate domination and exploitation.