That was the shameful federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005--and it should be kept in mind if you hear White House officials criticizing the military junta in Myanmar for its failure to prepare for, or recover from, Cyclone Nargis.
April was a busy month for Kevin Rudd. He made his grand debut on the global political stage with a whirlwind 17 day-tour of Europe, the US and China, wining and dining dictators, warmongers and billionaires along the way. Rudd quickly dispelled any illusions that the new Labor government would be significantly different from the Liberals. In fact the point of the tour was to prove to the global and corporate superpowers that Rudd was eager to play ball. On April 6 the Egyptian industrial city of Mahalla al-Kobra erupted in rioting, as around 25,000 workers and others took to the streets, fighting running battles with police and other security forces. Chanting "Down with Mubarak, the US-backed dictator" they tore down and burnt the huge canvas portraits of Mubarak that hung in the central town square. One of the facts that most clearly demonstrates the truth of The Centralian Advocate's pithy headline, "‘Intervention failing' - Elder visits Sydney to protest" is that Darwin now has a backlog of Aboriginal people waiting to be buried because their relatives can't afford funerals. It's one of the unpublicised effects of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities. If you thought racist hysteria about the "yellow peril" was a thing of the past, think again. The reaction to the Olympic torch protests in Canberra reflected all the odious anti-Chinese racism that has been part of Australian culture for a century and a half. NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa face the most significant opposition from within the ALP of any NSW Labor government for decades. It seems certain that the upcoming NSW ALP conference will vote against the government's power sell-off bill by a huge margin of around 650 to 150, meaning that Iemma will be defying party policy if he pushes ahead. We've all heard it sometime: a long, dreary list of reasons why workers supposedly can't fight and win. We're too bought off to want to fight, we're told, and globalisation means we can't anyway. The big corporations always win, and with the industrial relations laws the way they are, maybe we should just shut up and keep working. The revolt of French workers and students in May 1968 was the high-water mark of the sixties radicalisation. | |||||||||
|
A DEVASTATING storm leaving death and
homelessness in its wake. The nation's powerful military, with troops stationed
nearby, does almost nothing to help, despite scenes of helpless
survivors broadcast around the world. Offers of assistance from neighboring countries are spurned by the
incompetent leadership cabal in the capital.
No matter how hard you
search the 2020 Summit documents, you just can't find it. Among all the Big Ideas
there's no reference to our rights at work, nor is there anything
about getting the troops out of Iraq (let alone Afghanistan). Yet everyone (even the
Liberals) now acknowledges that hostility to WorkChoices and a desire
for decent wages and conditions, job security and union rights were
the key reasons Labor won the election. A majority has always opposed
the war in Iraq, and the most recent poll about Afghanistan had half
the population now opposed to war there too.
