En Passant

Was Malthus right? Is there overpopulation?  At first blush it seems sensible to say so.  But commonsense flows from and may be a cover (deliberate or not) for the status quo, in this case the existing capitalist social structures and relations. The overpopulation catch cry used to be: “People are poor because there are too [...]

Israel is a terrorist state.  It was founded on the genocide of the Palestinian people, dividing their land into two States. The Zionists then drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the artificially created state. The present attacks on Gaza represent but another chapter in the 60 years of genocide against Palestinians. Genocide? The [...]

Is this a boom bust business cycle or are we headed for a depression? Gwynne Dyer, writing in the Canberra Times, (‘Old problems in a new era’ CT Monday December 29 Opinion p 15) says that until some genius discovers a way to abolish the business cycle, recessions are bound to occur. Marx was the [...]

The Labor Government’s Fair Work Australia is just another version of Work Choices.  Rather than ripping up Howard’s anti-worker laws, Rudd and Gillard have kept major parts of it. None of this is surprising. The Labor Party is the second eleven of capital and governs in the interests of the bosses while giving some tidbits [...]

Jack Waterford is the editor in chief of the Canberra Times and a fine writer. In an article in Saturday’s Canberra Times (“Newspapers still click with the web’s instant news users” B2 CT Forum Saturday December 27) he says that the thing that newspapers can do better than other mediums is analyse, explain, put in [...]

Stop the slaughter, Israel.  Lift your blockade.

I was talking with a friend recently about great thinkers and he reminded me that a BBC online survey in 2000 had rated Marx the thinker of the millennium with Einstein second.  The top two thinkers were socialists.  So I searched for Einstein’s famous Why Socialism? article in Monthly Review in 1949.  The magazine reprinted [...]

Commander in Terror George W Bush is a fur ball in the gut of history.  Thankfully the American body politic will vomit him out on 20 January 2009. Bush came to power with the support of the powerful conservative and Christian right in US politics.  These fruitcakes include creationists and rapturists.  But while they supported [...]

Project Wickenby is Australia’s international anti-tax evasion operation. It is a failure. After almost five years and with about $200 m of the proposed $300 m of taxpayer money already spent, the sum total of successful prosecutions for international tax evasion coming out of the multi agency Wickenby task force to date is now 3. [...]

Israel is a state founded on terror, driving 750,000 Palestinians off their land. The state has developed since its establishment into the watchdog for Western (in particular US) interests in the region. That’s why the US supports it with military and economic aid; so much so that without that economic support (let alone military support) [...]