On December 1 headlines everywhere proclaimed: "It's official. The US economy has been in a recession for the past year." That means that when George Bush and the Federal Reserve declared that "the economic fundamentals are sound" in July, the economy had in fact already been in recession for eight months!

Julia Gillard introduced Labor's industrial relations laws into Parliament in late November. She declared that the new laws represented the victory of "fairness" over Howard's hated WorkChoices. She proclaimed that "people's democratic rights don't cease when they step onto the factory, shop or office floor". But recent events on a Canberra building site reveal the truth about the sort of industrial relations system that Labor is happy to preside over.

There is now no doubt that the global financial crisis has spread to the real economy in almost the entire developed world.

Growth forecasts are being continually revised downwards. The world's three largest economies are now officially in recession and more are on the way. The scale of the bailouts being undertaken is unlike anything seen in the last century, eclipsing the US government expenditure on the New Deal of the 1930s, the Second World War and the Marshall Plan combined.

When some pundits in the US Congress and Senate came out as less than enthusiastic about supporting a bailout of the bankruptcy-bound General Motors (GM), one voice of indignation made itself heard above all others. In an opinion piece in the New York Times headed "What's Good for GM Is Good for the Army", retired General and former supreme allied commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, demanded action.

The Australian National Accounts figures released in early December confirmed many commentators' worst fears: economic growth over the September quarter was just 0.06 per cent, half of the anticipated figure. The apparent gravity of the situation had me preparing for candlelit dinners of raw turnips and lattes made from dried acorns. But what does 0.06 per cent growth actually mean?

The idea of a world free from the domination of Wall Street bankers and the heads of huge corporations, their politicians and their lies, their armies and their wars, is an appealing one. But the idea of socialism from below - the billions of ordinary, working class people who create society's wealth actually governing the world through a system of mass democracy - can seem like an impossible dream.

TENS OF thousands of people gathered in 300 cities across the country November 15 in support of equal marriage rights for all, as the national spotlight settled on a new--and newly invigorated--civil rights movement.

On November 15, Somali pirates seized a Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil and demanded a $25 million ransom for its release. The international press and Western leaders united in a predictably hysterical and racist response, with outraged cries at the "lawless Somali coast" besieged by "pirates' growing audacity" as The Age put it.

Thailand's Constitutional Courts dissolved the country's democratically elected governing party for the second time on 2 December, forcing the government to resign. This follows the refusal of the armed forces and the police to follow government instructions to clear the two international airports blocked by armed People's Alliance for Democracy fascists.

The blackness of the Gazan sky throws candlelight into stark relief. Children and their parents gather round to have their candles lit before moving off. Voices murmur. Wax drips.

An early Palestinian Christian Carols by Candlelight?

Far from it: this gathering is the beginning of a march organised by the Gazan Popular Committee Against the Siege to protest the continued Israeli occupation authority's closure of crossings and stoppage of fuel supplies necessary to operate Gaza's sole electricity generation station.