Issue 71: 18 Nov to 24 Nov 2021
All Things Being Unequal
A pandemic of protests: how dissent over COVID-19 erupted across the globe
Amber Schultz | Crikey
People around the world are growing increasingly frustrated with government pandemic powers, limited economic support and ongoing restrictions.
The new far-right movement and how the left should respond
Louise O’Shea | Red Flag
Ultranationalists Are Seeing an Organizing Boom in Australia
Leo Crnogorcevic | Jacobin
Inequality in a time of pandemic
Tim Dunlop | Eureka Street
Framing the Crisis: COVID-19
Janet Roitman | Arena
We are in crisis. Nothing could be more self-evident: a global pandemic has ravaged the human species, and it is a crisis. Or is it?
Workers Struggles Intensify As ACTU Calls For New Industrial Laws
Ned K. | Vanguard
The graph that shows where your taxes are heading. Hint: it’s up!
Jessica Irvine | AgeSMH
Left alone, bracket creep will always automatically kick in to do the heavy lifting of returning the budget to balance by placing a higher burden on workers’ wages.
When governments defy the people: the authoritarian blueprint for oppression
Manal al-Sharif | Michael West Media
Digital rights and human rights are inextricably intertwined, and the absence of the former is the death knell of the latter.
When the Golden Calf of GDP becomes a monster
Michael Pascoe | The New Daily
Earlier this year the Reserve Bank governor dared to suggest the fall in migration could assist in boosting wages growth. He was immediately attacked for straying from the economic orthodoxy that, all things being equal, immigration overall lifts wages.
No-one is free until everyone is free: a thesis on prison labour
Jared Davidson | Overland
Putting prisoners and their unfree labour back into the historical picture not only tells a more realistic story of the past. It also tells us a lot about capital accumulation and its reproduction through related forms of labour—free and unfree, waged and unwaged.
Profits of punishment: the big business of Australia’s private prisons
Stephanie Tran | Michael West Media
Rental stress on the rise as low-income Australians priced out of market
Stephanie Convery | The Guardian
Climate boilovers
Australia turned Glasgow into fossil fuel ‘coffee shop’
Tim Flannery | The Saturday Paper
At ‘humanity’s last chance’ Australia was notorious for the prevalence of its talks and displays supporting fossil fuels.
Can-do people power can save the planet
Sam Wainwright | Green Left
Australia’s climate change interference
Mike Seccombe | The Saturday Paper
Beyond its efforts to frustrate action at the Glasgow climate summit, Australia has been using international forums to ensure there will still be foreign funding for fossil fuel projects.
The Australian Way of Delusion: The Prime Minister at COP26
Binoy Kampmark | Arena
The Australian Way meant ‘technology, not taxes’. The airy assumption here is based upon technology that has yet to bear fruit and upon a total absence of modelling and detail.
Green Prometheans and the Fossil Brown Right
Guy Rundle | Arena
The association between capital and fossil fuels was portrayed as a real and necessary one. It implicitly drew on the concrete human bias towards zero sum loss and gain—that something had to be burnt to transfer energy and the fact that most people were not ‘at home’ in the atomic and invisible world of solar power.
Flights of fancy
No dramas: superhero movies and their opening weekend cash cows crowd out realistic films
Greg Jericho | The Guardian
Fewer risks, fewer films that are original and say something about your life unless it is an undercurrent of a film involving people flying.
We don’t need a bill allowing churches to discriminate
Paul Bongiorno | The New Daily
Why religious freedom bill is a culture war sugar hit — and not much more
Guy Rundle | Crikey
Culture war over religious freedom normalises fascist politics
Lucy Hamilton | Pearls and Irritations
Reaching an imagined better world through urban play
Troy Innocent | Overland
Cities can be seen as contested zones, battlegrounds for competing worlds.
Other Affairs
Global campaign to be launched against listing of Kurdish freedom movement as ‘terrorist’
Peter Boyle | Green Left
India’s Farmers Win a Historic Victory
Liberation | Green Left
Fourteen months after the Narendra Modi government bulldozed the parliament to introduce the new farm laws, the Prime Minister had to bow down to the unprecedented farmers’ resistance to announce a repeal of all the three contentious laws, reports Liberation.
Corruption and Patronage Are the Norm in the Australian Labor Party
Harry Stratton | Jacobin