Despite the spectacular vaporisation of trillions of dollars of financial assets, and the collapse of more than a score of banks around the world, we haven’t seen a single banker jump out of a window in Wall Street or its equivalents around the world.
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Having “free” and “fair” multi-party elections is the United States’ main claim to democracy. But just how democratic is US capitalism?
On October 24, Palm Island community leader Lex Wotton was found guilty of “riot with destruction” in a trial where police were accused by the defence counsel of “lying through their teeth”. Wotton is due to be sentenced on November 7.
The October 23 acquittal of Jack Thomas from a terrorism charge highlights what is wrong with Australia’s anti-terror laws and the way they are being applied.
On September 29, Harry Nelson, former Yuendumu (Northern Territory) council president, presented Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin with a statement, written in Warlpiri and English, signed by 236 residents. Macklin was in the community to officially open a new pool, the funding of which predates the NT intervention. An abridged version of the statement is reprinted below.
A new documentary, A Well-Founded Fear, to be broadcast on SBS on November 19, documents the deaths of nine Afghan refugees who were returned to Afghanistan after having their asylum applications rejected.
With its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news internationally. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa.
In early September, residents of the Brookland Greens estate, about 50 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, were advised by the Country Fire Authority that methane from the landfill nearby had reached potentially explosive levels and they should get out of there as soon as they could. No emergency housing was offered to them.
The following statement was written by Bree Blakeman (Djawulanganing) on behalf of the Gumatj clan nation, MataMata Homeland, North-East Arnhem Land.
The United States Socialist Worker is maintaining an online election journal and analysis of the November 4 vote. Below is the account posted by SW journalist Alan Maas at 11pm on November 4 on the impact of the victory for Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who has become the first African American head of state in a nation founded on slavery and where, only a few decades ago, many African Americans were denied the vote in a number of southern states.
The world is going through difficult times and right now there seems no end to the downward spiral of the global economy. Fears of economic depression on the scale of the 1930s are widespread.
Turan Ertekin, an activist in the Turkish community and Socialist Alliance member, came to Australia in 1980.
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