The tens of thousands of cables released by WikiLeaks since August reveal a wide variety of lies told by the US government and crimes in which the US government is complicit or helped cover up. www.wlcentral.org provides a daily rundown, with links, to some of the key cables.
Below are three cables that depict the apparent covering-up of US military war crimes in Iraq; the riding rough-shod over the popular will of nation in Ireland; and the way the US government seeks to divert attention from its crimes with calculated media spin.
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Will the host city for the November-December United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17) clean up its act?
The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban, offers a chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate greenwashers.
Will they try to disguise high-carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric, as their predecessors did?
At the end of the night of Wollongong's council elections, September 3, it seemed likely voters had elected Gordon Bradbery, a progressive independent, as lord mayor.
Bradbery won 33.9% of the primary vote and is expected to win on preferences. The Liberals’ John Dorahy won 23.4% of the primary, Labor’s Chris Connor 19.7%, the Greens’ Jill Merrin 5.9% and Community Voice’s Michael Organ 4.1%.
Votes in the wards were still being counted as Green Left Weekly went to print, but it’s clear the once Labor dominated council will have a very different make up.
Black Swan
By Carolyn Landon & Eileen Harrison
238 pages
Allen & Unwin, June 2011
Bestselling author Carolyn Landon says the main revision she had to make in writing her latest book, Black Swan was editing all her anger out of it.
"I had difficulty with my own voice," she tells Green Left Weekly about the book, a memoir of Koori artist Eileen Harrison.
"Mainly, it was getting my own angry and ashamed responses to what Eileen was telling off my chest. After I let off steam in the drafts, I eliminated most of my reactions.
Last year, the Sydney Underground Film Festival hosted the Australian premier of Oliver Stone's documentary on Latin America's revolutions South of the Border. This year, the festival is taking place this year on September 8-11 at the The Factory Theatre in Marrickville.
Festival organisers have five double passes to giveaway for the film Better This World (see below) to Green Left Weekly readers. Be one of the first to email stefanie@suff.com.au with the subject line “911” to win.
The day after the Barry O’Farrell Coalition government was elected in NSW in March, NSW Business Chamber CEO Stephen Cartwright said he wanted action in the first 100 days of the new government.
He said business wanted O’Farrell to cut government spending, sign up to the weaker federal occupational health and safety laws (OH&S), appoint a Small Business Commissioner, establish Infrastructure NSW, and produce the first report card on the progress of the Pacific Highway upgrade.
An article, “Targeted chocolatier Max Brenner ‘a man of peace’”, in the August 13 Australian by Cameron Stewart purported to be an examination of issues around the targeting of Max Brenner by Palestine solidarity protesters as part of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign.
If you’ve even casually followed the climate debate in Australia over the past few years, it’s most likely you’ve heard a Labor or Liberal party politician utter the phrase: “Governments should not pick winners.” The idea is that governments’ role is not to give direct support to renewable energy such as wind power or solar power, but instead to create the market conditions where the best, most efficient technology can come to the fore. But the argument is always used as an excuse for why governments cannot pick clean, renewable energy.
The statement below is being circulated by Power to the People, a campaign group which formed during the fight against electricity privatisation in NSW and the newly formed NSW Union Activist Network, made up of left and green union activists.
The Orica chemicals plant at Kooragang, near Newcastle NSW, released hexavalent chromium (VI) into the atmosphere on August 8. Up to 20 workers were exposed in the accident.
The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) was not notified of the accident for 16 hours. Residents of nearby Stockton were not told that the toxic pollutant blew over their suburb for 54 hours.
The land around Muckaty Station, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, was nominated as a possible site for a nuclear waste dump by the Northern Land Council in May 2007. This was accepted by the federal government in September 2007.
Natalie Wasley from the Beyond Nuclear Initiative told Green Left Weekly: “A small group of traditional owners, hoping for cash for their impoverished community and improved services like roads, housing and education, agreed to the dump site. However, many other traditional owners remain opposed to the plan.
We’ve heard it all before — “the larger the cake, the larger each slice”. The bigger the economy gets, the more productive we are, the more we should expect to share in the wealth.
Trouble is it’s not true: while the economy grows and profits rise, bosses are cutting jobs and attacking our conditions. While they clean up, we lose out. And unless we fight to stop it, the imbalance will only get worse.
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