13 November 2013 — RT
Details of a highly secretive, multi-national trade agreement in the works have been published by WikiLeaks, and the whistleblower group’s founder warns there will be vast implications for much of the modern world if the contract is approved.
14 August 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
An outstanding historical account of the “Green Bans” first introduced by the communist-led New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the 1970s in response to community demand to preserve inner-city parkland and historic buildings. One of the first women to be accepted as a builders labourer, filmmaker Pat Fiske in 1985 traced the development of a union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be. Continue reading
7 July 2013 — Falkvinge on Infopolicy
Earlier documents put in context with recent revelations show that Sweden has been systematically wiretapping Russia on behalf of the United States. This is clear after putting a number of previous questionable agreements and developments in context today. The question that remains is what Sweden gets in return.
20 November 1986 — williambowles.info
With all the furore over Assange, Manning and now Snowden, the US’s role in subverting foreign governments goes back decades. Here’s a long piece I’m republishing on the CIA’s role in overthrowing the Gough Whitlam’s Labour government back in the 1970s, an event reprised in 2010 when “Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd was removed from office in an inner-Labor Party coup orchestrated, literally overnight, by a tiny cabal of union and party factional bosses” with US assistance of course. — Three years since the US-backed coup against Australian Labor PM
19 June 2013 — Falkvinge on Infopolicy
There are still people warning us of sleepwalking into a Stasi or “1984” society. They missed the boat by a long shot: we are already far, far past the point of Stasi or “1984”. The apparatus that governments have built to trace, track, and record citizens is the stuff of nightmares.
9 May 2013 — John Pilger
The other day, I stood outside the strangely silent building where I began life as a journalist. It is no longer the human warren that was Consolidated Press in Sydney, though ghosts still drink at the King’s Head pub nearby. As a cadet reporter, I might have walked on to the set of Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page. Men in red braces did shout, “Hold the front page”, and tilt back their felt hats and talk rapidly with a roll-your-own attached indefinitely to their lower lip. You could feel the presses rumbling beneath and smell the ink.
29 April 2013 — John Pilger
Eleven miles by ferry from Perth is Western Australia’s “premier tourist destination”. This is Rottnest Island, whose scabrous wild beauty and isolation evoked for me Robben Island in South Africa. Empires are never short of devil’s islands; what makes Rottnest different, indeed what makes Australia different, is a silence and denial on an epic scale.
March 8, 2013 — Michael Hudson
Another in the series of interviews on the Renegade Economists radio show (Australia), a wide ranging analysis of the advantages to wealth that money printing and poor tax policy produce. Topics include land and housing policy, German gold repatriation, Occupy, Bradley Manning, Iran, Obama and Kruegar.
30 December 2012 — Radical Notes
8 August, 2012 — Global Research — John Pilger
The ferries that ply the river west of Sydney Harbour bear the names of Australia’s world champion sportswomen. They include the Olympic swimming gold-medalists Dawn Fraser and Shane Gould, and runners Betty Cuthbert and Majorie Jackson. As you board, there is a photograph of the athlete in her prime, and a record of her achievements. This is vintage Australia. Often shy and never rich, sporting heroes were nourished by a society that, long before most other countries, won victories for ordinary people: the first 35-hour working week, child benefits, pensions, secret ballots and, with New Zealand, the vote for women. By the 1960s, Australians had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. In modern-day corporate Australia, this is long forgotten. “We are the chosen ones,” sang a choir promoting the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
2 March 2012 — Stop NATO – Press Trust of India March 2, 2012
Worth exploring NATO partnership with India: Pentagon Edited by RR
“I would look first and foremost at building on the coalition in Afghanistan. Twenty eight NATO nations, but we have 22 other nations who are partnering with NATO in Afghanistan. This are many Pacific nations, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tonga. So I think that that coalition base gives us one set of potential partners looking forward.” Continue reading
22 January 2012 — Max Keiser
* Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
In October 2007, the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting ‘Internet distribution and information technology’.
