When my wife and I were in the supermarket the other day, we got chatting to a kindly white stranger. After a few seconds, the woman asked my wife, "And how long have you been here?"
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Socialist Alliance (SA) stallholders at today’s Newtown Festival were told today by a festival organiser that NSW Police had urged them to ban SA and Occupy Sydney from the festival.
The SA has paid for and run a stall every year at the festival. But this year police threatened organisers — the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre — with a $16,000 bill if they did not carry out the ban, saying that the presence of SA and/or Occupy Sydney might incite trouble.
In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary
By Ngo Van
AK Press, 2011
264 pages, $43.99
Australians know of the Vietnam War from the arrival of Australian troops in 1965 through to their withdrawal in 1973. People in the United States generally date it from the arrival of US advisors through to the inglorious departure of US helicopters in 1975.
However, for the Vietnamese the struggle began long before that, from their colonisation by the French in the 19th Century.
Debate about the Labor-Greens carbon price has dominated Australian politics for the past year. So it is little surprise that the passing of the carbon price laws through parliament on November 8 received widespread media attention.
But the media’s coverage overshadowed two shocking new reports on the climate emergency released in the past week.
The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus & the Affair that Divided France
By Ruth Harris
Allen Lane, 2011
542 pages, $26.95 (pb)
The Dreyfus Affair in France a century ago shows how little has changed. “National security” was on the lips of politicians and military officers as an innocent man from a vilified group was framed for treason in a rigged military court and sent to rot in a prison hell-hole to serve political ends amid war hysteria.
Make the name “Alfred Dreyfus” or “David Hicks” and the template fits.
Just four days after about 10,000 people circled the White House to protest a proposed 2700-kilometre tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, the Obama government announced it will postpone a decision on whether it will go ahead until 2013. Radical author and activist Naomi Klein addressed an October 10 public meeting at New York’s New School University, where she spoke about the Keystone XL pipeline.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Despite Fair Work Australia putting in place an injunction banning National Union of Workers (NUW) officials from taking part in the Baiada poultry workers’ picket line, workers and community supporters were able to hold off an attempt by riot police to break the picket late on November 11.
One man’s legs were crushed when about 80 police charged the picket. He was taken to hospital with a suspected broken leg.
NUW members at Baiada Poultry in Laverton North voted to begin indefinite strike action on November 9 and instigated a picket line around the chicken processing plant.
The strengthening links between unions and the US Occupy movement will be expressed in mobilisations across the US on November 17.
Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore made clear at a Sydney City Council meeting on November 6 that she supported the “principles” of the Occupy movement but did not support Occupy Sydney.
Greens councillor Irene Doutney put a motion to investigate the dawn police raid on the group in Martin Place and help find Occupy a site for the protest.
But Moore replied that she had to “balance the rights of residents, visitors, workers and others to have access to the public domain”.
On November 4, Israeli warships in international waters attacked and boarded the two vessels Tahrir and Saoirse that were trying to deliver medical aid the besieged territory of Gaza.
Over October 19-20 there was a general strike in Greece. The overwhelming majority of Greek workers took part in the strike with dynamic demonstrations and other forms of action. In that way, Greek people expressed their anger and despair over the devastating measures carried out in Greece in the past year and a half.
The relentless, vicious austerity measures have been imposed by the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government and the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Union.
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