En Passant

Internal Department of Immigration reports have confirmed what refugee activists and advocates have been saying for months: Nauru is a torturous hell hole that is destroying the lives of the refugees sent there writes Socialist Alternative.

Socialist Worker UK looks at how the growing threat of fascism across Europe can be challenged as Unite Against Fascism holds its annual conference in London

We need to organise now in our unions to beat Labor’s attacks and by doing that strengthen our muscles for the battles ahead.

Julia Gillard can have all the stunts she wants. It shows the contempt Labor has for working class people that they think a few days among the proles will change our votes. The more people in Western Sydney see of Gillard the less her vote and that of the Party’s will be. Fight back now.

The Oscars are the revolutionary guards of US film gathering to award themselves prizes for the defence of the revolution, in this case US imperialism, or the idea of US imperialism, translated to the screen.

The Greens’ push for reforms imagines that in a time of global economic crisis, a crisis of low profit rates arising out of the way production is organised under capitalism, capital will willingly divert some of the surplus value we workers create back to us or the poor. That is fairy land stuff.

Going to university should be a liberating experience. It should train us to critique rigorously all orthodoxies and dogmas. It should be about unlocking intellectual and practical abilities, giving us the tools to help transform society for the better writes Jordan Humphreys in Socialist Alternative.

However, universities, like all other major institutions, are shaped by the needs of the capitalist system – an authoritarian order run in the interests of the rich and powerful, who put profit above everything else. Going to university is an alienating experience because educational institutions take on the authoritarian, profit-driven dynamic of the system as a whole.

Last week the mining companies sent a shot across the bows of the Labor Party government with advertisements purporting to show how they really do pay a lot of tax. According to the ATO statistics for 2009/10 73% of mining companies were non-taxable. The mining industry has the highest percentage of non-taxpayers of any industry – about 12% higher than the average.

Tell me again Labor why we can’t tax these corporate bludgers as they plunder our resources?

The seemingly good Australian economy means that the fascism, the politics that dare not speak its name, has found no large following here, yet. However the enthusiastic response to Wilders’ lies about ‘Islamification’ and the rest of the vile filth this man spews forth show that the seeds are there for a re-birth of fascism in Australia built around anti-Muslim vitriol and a fear and hate campaign against Islam.

We have a responsibility to see that Wilders’ racist and extreme right wing views do not pass unchallenged. Public protests make it clear that anti-racists will have our views heard. We ask all anti-racists to support and attend protests wherever he is organised to appear. He is speaking at the Roma Function Centre, 167 Northumberland St, Liverpool at 7 pm tonight (Friday 22 February). The protest against this racist is there from 6 pm to 8 pm.

So have you noticed any letters in the Australian critical of the racist Wilders? Any articles attacking him for what he is – a member of the extreme right? No. I tried. I sent 3 letters to the editor, not in any expectation of publication because when it comes to free speech Rupert holds all the cards, not me. Free speech in Australia is for the billionaires and those who agree with them or fit into their agenda.