Wellington: Solidarity with Gaza
Around 35 people joined an emergency picket in solidarity with the people of Gaza here in Wellington at lunch-time on Friday. The action had been called at less than 24 hours’ notice as news came through of Israel’s latest murderous assault. Israel is threatening a new slaughter, and the prospects for more death and destruction […]
Israel wages war on Gaza
At least twenty people in Gaza are dead after Israel unleashed a new wave of bombings reminiscent of the 2009 war. Once again, pictures of mutilated bodies are spreading across the internet, while Israeli officials do their usual schtick about “self-defenc”e and “Palestinian rocket fire”, calling their assault “Operation Pillar of Defence”. Lies. The 4 […]
China’s leaders have no solutions
The 18th congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closes in Beijing this week. Its main purpose was to demonstrate an orderly transition of power at the heart of China’s ruling class. Under Mao Zedong such meetings were rare—just two took place between 1949 and 1969. Leadership and policy issues were settled by brute force. […]
Too much pressure: exam stress worse than ever
A young man in his early twenties fell to his death from the 6th floor of the University of Auckland OGGB business building during the exam period recently. Not long after it had happened, news about the death spread throughout the student body at the university along with other shocking stories of two other deaths […]
Obama victory: We don’t want “four more-of-the-same years”
The following is an editorial piece that appeared at SocialistWorker.org in the US. Barack Obama has won re-election, thanks to a strong turnout by the Democratic Party’s core supporters in every place the president needed to win. Obama was only barely ahead of Mitt Romney in the national popular vote as this article was being written, with […]
Defending State Housing
While the world was focused on the outcome of the US election, some 100 residents from Glen Innes (Auckland), Maraenui (Hawkes Bay) and Pomare (Lower Hutt) marched in protest to Parliament to present a petition for immediate action on the housing crisis affecting low-income families in these areas. Angry residents protested the government’s housing policies, […]
The Tragedy at Pike River: an Indictment of Capitalism
It’s just sickening to read reports of the royal commission’s findings on the Pike River disaster. 29 men lost their lives – and have left behind grieving families and friends – in what was an entirely preventable, and predictable, tragedy. The lawyer for some of the families involved calls it an “unrelenting picture of failure […]
How the 1 Percent conjured a monster storm
Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, examines the man-made factors contributing to the disaster of Hurricane Sandy. “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that […]
Review: We Will Work With You!
This is a wonderful exhibition, and is bound to fascinate every left-wing person interested in art and design, or just curious to see some of the history of the many social and political struggles from the past decades in Wellington. Some of the work and originality that the work building activist campaigns demands – in […]
What’s wrong with lesser evilism
Those who advocate a vote for the “lesser evil” hope to defeat the “greater evil” of the right wing–but they enable the Democrats to shift further right themselves. ————————————————————— DOES BARACK Obama deserve your vote? That’s the question people on the left should be asking as Election Day approaches. When you consider Obama’s record after four years […]
