Critical Times

Source: Serve The People
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

South Australian members of the Australian Education Union have vented their anger at the state’s Labor government by holding a 24-hour strike.

The AEU covers Technical and Further Education (TAFE) lecturers, pre-school and school teachers, principals, school services officers (SSOs), early childhood workers (ECWs) and Aboriginal education workers (AEWs) in the public education sector.

Frustrated by months of stubborn rejection of their wage claim (21% over three years) and faced with the loss of protection for class sizes and working conditions, members voted by 85 percent in Electoral Commission-conducted secret ballots, to strike.

By Max Oz

To paraphrase – from the title of a children’s story Run! Rabbit Run! – Rann! Labor Rann! is a fitting description of the current Labor Government’s efforts in regards to workers in South Australia. Although the Labor Party ‘Rann’ away along time ago (well before the appearance of Rann) from its working class heartland, Media Mike has contributed splendidly to its pretensions as “business-friendly” and “investment-friendly” rather being ‘champions of working people’. History inevitably catches up with pretenders and they’re a plenty in the Labor Party.

Green Left Weekly Enviro Film Festival

Saturday June 21, 6-9pm

South West Community Centre, 171 Sturt Street, Adelaide.

Over 2 sessions, 2 films plus vignettes from historic environment protests plus the recent Climate Change/Social Change conference featuring John Bellamy Foster and Roberto Perez.

Tickets: Whole Festival $15, $10conc, or 1 Session: $9, $6conc

Vegetarian Dinner, hotdogs, popcorn and drinks available

Phone: 8231 6982, 0438 624744 | Email: adelaide@.

By Dean Mighell

IT’S ironic that Kevin Rudd comes from Queensland, the state where the Australian Labor Party was founded in the 1890s by striking unionists under the sacred Tree of Knowledge.

In 2008, it’s symbolic that the Tree of Knowledge is now dead. This irony must not be lost on Australian workers when they look at our industrial relations laws.

Dave Holmes

When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view.

Anna Pha

The price of crude oil more than doubled in 12 months and more than quadrupled in five yeas since May 2003. The big oil corporations empty people’s pockets and pump out record profits, while the government sits by and says there is little else it can do. Debates about reducing the GST or excise on petrol avoid the real issues and genuine solutions.

by Rob Gowland

What an ignominious spectacle the right wing of the Labor Party has made of the party the union movement originally set up. At the recent NSW Labor Party Conference, ministers spewed invective and abuse over the unions and the rank and file alike. Using the well-known “debating” tactics of Macquarie St, they made it explicitly clear that they had no intention of abiding by decisions of the Party.

Review by Phil Shannon

The Whale Warriors: On Board a Pirate Ship in the Battle to Save the World’s Largest Mammals
By Peter Heller
HarperCollins, 2007
303pages, $28 (pb)

“With James Bond, the President and Batman on my side, how can I lose?”, said Captain Paul Watson about Pierce Brosnan, Martin Sheen and Christian Bale, three of the prominent supporters of the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS).

Celebrities were not the only supporters of the the Farley Mowat, a converted North Sea trawler, docked in Melbourne in December 2005 en route to disrupt the 2006 Japanese whale hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary — “the union guys” from the Electrical Trades Union and other Victorian unions provided solid rubber, welding rods, steel plates and other materials to kit out the rusting, 50-year-old ship.

The National Geographic’s Peter Heller was one of the journalists among the Farley’s diverse crew of Buddhist bikers, ex-Marines, nurses, truckers, marine biologists, union shop stewards, punk rockers, semi-professional gamblers and others itching for direct action to stop the Japanese whaling fleet from breaking the international moratorium on open-sea commercial whaling by exploiting the International Whaling Commission’s “scientific research” loophole.

A speech by ARUNDHATI ROY

This article was delivered as a lecture in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos.

I NEVER met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago, I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying “We are all Armenians,” “We are all Hrant Dink.

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the United States, and Britain, to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the majority.

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world’s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent – Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America’s impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Public presentation by Georgia Miller. Hosted presented by Reclaim the Food Chain, the sustainable food campaign of Friends of the Earth Adelaide and The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, UniSA

Monday 5 May 2008, 6.30pm
UniSA City West Campus, Hawke Building, level 5, Bradley Forum

Georgia Miller is co-author of the report ‘Out of the Laboratory and on to our Plates: Nanotechnology in Food and Agriculture’

Get ready for the new high-tech intervention in our food system – after genetic engineering comes nanotechnology.

Bob Briton

From “The Guardian” 23 April, 2008

The warnings are dire: “Imminent wars will break out due to worsening living conditions in poor countries,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said recently. On top of the planet’s climate change crisis and oil resources crisis, we now have a food crisis that threatens the existing order. The world market price of staple foods has gone up 75 percent in the past two months.

Source: A Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) perspective

1. Introduction

In 2002 the Department of Treasury and Finance of the Government of South Australia released Partnerships SA. This document was a set of administrative instructions applicable to all government agencies in SA in relation to the development of infrastructure and the provision of services.

Renfrey Clarke

19 April 2008

John Bellamy Foster, author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and an editor of the prestigious US-based socialist journal Monthly Review (), was a featured speaker at Green Left Weekly’s April 11-13 Climate Change — Social Change conference in Sydney. He spoke to GLW’s Renfrey Clarke.

@question = Is humanity going to pull through this environmental crisis? If it is, what are the changes that are necessary?

Well, I think there are a couple of ways you could answer that question — one way would be that, as Noam Chomsky has answered it, it’s a question of optimism or pessimism, and in some way that’s a psychological issue.

Amongst the plethora of submissions to the Australia 2020 Summit the following was submitted by the SPIRIT OF EUREKA COMMITTEE. It grabbed Critical Times attention due to its far reaching proposals. If readers know of other submissions that really challenge the status quo please email them to us and we will consider them for an airing on our site.

Monday 7 April 2008 6pm

Photographic Exhibition Launch

When the world said NO to war

A photographic exhibition on the historic anti-war protests that took place around the world in February 2003. These 32 photographs from Australian and round the world. show that this war was opposed by men, women and children from all walks of life, all religions, political and socio-economic backgrounds.

What’s on the world’s supermarket shelves…

Whether you’re shopping in England or India, supermarkets are appearing on every horizon. The bigger they get, the greater is the break-down of community culture. Huge box-store shopping developments spring up on town-outskirts drawing petrol guzzling people-movers in like a magnet from suburbs that have long ago lost their local economies.

The World Bank is not the same institution, but there’s the same kind of conflicts and confrontations going on. In Bolivia, one of the major background events that led to the uprising of the majority indigenous population to finally take political power was an effort by the World Bank to privatize water. Take an economics course, they’ll tell you that you ought to pay the market price and so on.

Source: mike-servethepeople

Volatility in Australia’s financial markets continues with the collapse of stock-broking firm Opes Prime. This comes two months after margin lender Tricom Equities ran into trouble and got the big ticking off from its bankers.

These companies represent the parasitic face of finance capitalism.

By Barry Healy

Not many young authors can publish a work before they reach thirty years of age and have it remain in publication continuously for the following 160 years. Yet that is precisely the case with the Communist Manifesto, which was born in the middle of a Europe-wide revolutionary upsurge in February 1848.

Moreover, the Manifesto still rings through the years to today’s world with its promise of human liberty and fulfilment.