Now, as the world teeters on the brink of what might turn out to be the most profound economic crisis since the depression of 1929, a reappraisal is necessary in the face of neo-liberal shibboleths.
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Emergency rally for Gaza, 5pm, Tuesday, 30th December, Victorian State Library, Cnr La Trobe and Swanston St, Melbourne.
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A couple of weeks ago, Louis Proyect posted a press release from Wikileaks which in turn linked to the just released US Human terrain team handbook, along with David Price’s Counterpunch article and an editorial in Nature.
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It’s a fairly minor news story but it struck a few discordant chords with me. Mission Australia and the Salvos have announced redundancies from their Job Network operations – 73 from Mission and 100-120 from the Salvos. When I escaped from the Job Network in 2001 one of the few quibbles I had with my decision to abandon a demoralising (even repellent) job, was that I was abandoning a gig that was, by definition, recession proof. The point was that helping the unemployed was a great job to have because the only way to become redundant was for unemployment to disappear, in which case one could easily get another job. Clearly that isn’t the case. What then has happened? How have the chill winds of impending recession delivered a jobs crisis to the jobs crisis merchants?
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Socialist Alternative proudly presents:

Former Guantanamo Detainee, Mamdouh Habib, speaking in Melbourne
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The intellectual Shelby Steele’s book about Barack Obama ‘A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win’ is now sure to be the basis of a bit of renewed debate.
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...and so on.  The US Election may have changed the public face of their government in the eyes of foreign countries, but there have been several tranches of other elections in the US today.  The Daily Kos has it right headlining the homophobic propositions which have gotten up.
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Heaven help the Afghans, if people like Jim Molan are in charge. Major-General Molan is the author of the modestly titled Running the War in Iraq; he knows how that war was “won”, and it seems he knows how to run the Afghan war as well. Don’t tell the Pentagon.
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Last week staff at Victoria University in Melbourne’s Western Suburbs received a bombshell in the form of an email from our esteemed Vice Chancellor, Elizabeth Harman. Having assured the University Council a few months ago that the finances of the university were sound, she now told us that the university was in crisis and that it was all our fault; consequently she had no choice but, more in sorrow than in anger, to let 250 staff go (over half from the academic staff).
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Across the world, political leaders are stepping forward, wringing hands, brows furrowed, declaring the end of extreme capitalism. Laissez-faire is finished, proclaimed French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Newspaper cartoonists are raising the spectre of socialism. Ratbag Republican politicians in the US are waving the white flag, declaring defeat in the face of a resurrected socialism.
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The Australian Federal election of 2007 brought to an end what many people have come to consider a dark chapter in our country’s history.
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The simultaneous destruction of the natural conditions for human life and economic conditions for capital accumulation opens the possibility that the disaster which we could have expected to follow from either collapse taken separately could lead to a happy outcome.
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If children could decide they would be voting.  (Well, perhaps a few.)  They’d probably be driving.  Certainly I was smoking at the age of nine and apparently quite a lot of young teenagers drink alcohol regularly.  We feed our children refined sugar.
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Lex Wotton is facing 10 years in jail for "riot with destruction" in relation to actions taken by the Palm Island community on November 24th 2004, a week after the death in police custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee.
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In the debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin got one thing right despite herself. “There is a toxic mess on Main Street," she said, referring to the economic crisis. “and it’s affecting Wall Street.” Of course, she meant it the other way round. We tend to think of this crisis as centred on financial markets. All the more so with the complications of sliced-and-diced financial instruments, and weird terms like naked short selling. The incomprehensible tends to be threatening.
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