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.
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.
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.
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.
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Remembering a magic year like 1968 is
bitter-sweet. Where has the magic gone?
We demanded "the immediate
recognition, and complete gratification, of all needs and desires".
Yet today the planet is stalked by hunger.
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Marxists, like those of us in Socialist
Alternative, who argue instead for the building of a clearly defined
revolutionary socialist party to lead the struggle against
capitalism, are dismissed by broad party advocates as dogmatic
sectarians who only want to build a "simon pure sect" and who
leave the national political arena as a preserve of the right.
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I'm sure we'll all be
fascinated to know that evidently everyone's favourite son of the
idle super-rich, James Packer, is no longer Australia's wealthiest
person - proving once and for all that one does not acquire
stupendous amounts of money by attending golf tournaments and
cocktail parties. So while we're all composing our letters of
commiseration to poor old Jamie, let's acquaint ourselves with
Australia's new greatest success story.
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It is a commonly held myth that humans
have always held prejudices towards others based on race. This in
turn implies that there is no hope of getting rid of this innate
feature of human interaction. But racism has not always existed.
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In 1949 Mao's Red Army
marched into Beijing, promising a new socialist order, free and
democratic. The People's Republic of China, however, quickly
revealed itself as a brutal society, ruled by a new class of
exploiters. But these modern emperors
haven't had everything their way. Resistance regularly erupts, and
to this day China is home to one of the most heroic traditions of
genuine revolutionary socialism that the world has known - the
Chinese Trotskyists.
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The image of workers as a mindless mass,
brainwashed by the media into accepting whatever capitalism dishes
up, reflects the elitist attitudes of the academic world or the
fantasies of the capitalist class, more than the reality.
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The
long-running dispute between Victoria's teachers and the state
Labor government seems set to continue, even escalate. Already there
have been two 24-hour statewide strikes and a series of rolling
regional half-day stoppages, accompanied on each occasion by loud and
angry marches.
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It's a worry when, in one of the most
democratic countries in the world, claims to dancing ability are
subject to more democratic scrutiny than are decisions made in
Parliament. The mere thought of So You Think You Can Run The
Country, with weekly accountability for the government,
would be enough to send most politicians into a cold sweat.
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In August 1917, in the
midst of the Russian revolution and while in hiding from the police
of the reactionary Provisional Government, Lenin found the time to
write The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State
and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. It remains
the best single work on these vital questions.
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