Alex Mitchell
Rinehart scores jackpot with US state bank loan
Happy New Year and welcome to the wonderful world of Tony Abbott and his richest supporter, mega-billionaire Gina Rinehart. In case you missed it in the Christmas rush, the world’s richest woman has pulled another jackpot to the tune of $784 million. That’s the amount she has been given by... Read More
Japan: Land of the Rising Gun
Prime Minister Shinto Abe’s right-wing government in Tokyo has announced military spending of $270 billion on drones, submarines, fighter jets and armed patrol boats. It is a military provocation against China at the instigation of militarists in the US State Department and the Pentagon. It forms part of their policy... Read More
Car making – it’s time to get real
The Australian car making industry was a complete misnomer. There was no such thing. It was always a foreign-owned car industry. Australia was merely a postal address for the auto behemoths when they were globalising their market share and their profits. Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Mitsubishi milked the generous subsidies... Read More
Judith White
Windows on the world
Translation, writes one of its outstanding practitioners, “helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight.” The words are Edith Grossman’s,... Read More
Class and culture
The black arts of marketing, Murdochism and right-wing academia have made the term “working class” almost as much of a taboo as the word “socialism” in mainstream public discourse. As Noam Chomsky says about the US, “you’re supposed to say ‘middle class’ because it diminishes the understanding that there’s a... Read More
A paradise lost, and a new start
We’ve left our dream home in the hills of the Tweed Valley after a five-year fight against a development project that we consider environmental lunacy. We’re making the best of our enforced migration from one end of the Tweed Shire to the other – an easier and healthier lifestyle, more... Read More