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 […]
Why You Should Join and Help to Build the ISO
The world today has a wide range of obvious problems. These include a widening gap between rich and poor within the advanced capitalist countries, widespread malnutrition and starvation in the so-called ‘third world’, mass unemployment in many countries, the oppression of women, blacks, gays and lesbians, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the destruction […]
ANZUS? No going back
There was a flurry of news recently about the US and NZ building “better relations” as Leon Panetta, the US secretary of Defence, visited the country. There hasn’t been such a visit since NZ was suspended from the ANZUS military agreement because of the ban on nuclear warships docking in NZ ports. Panetta wants to station […]
National’s war on the poor
This article will be focusing on cutbacks to Welfare and what they mean in the context of the social, political and economic environment of New Zealand. Firstly I will talk briefly about recent benefit history. Then I will talk about what the current welfare reforms are and some of the ruling classes myths to justify […]
Film Review: American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein
“Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.” It is […]
Book Review: The Lacuna
How do you write a history of revolutionary lives and activity in the mid 20th century and sell it to the public? A tough order, certainly, but Barbara Kingsolver nails it with The Lacuna. The book follows the life of a young man, Harrison Shephard, who finds himself living between the worlds of his Mexican mother and American […]
