Australian mining company Kingsgate Consolidated has started the year with a spring in its step thanks to a clause buried in the Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Continue reading “Riches for Australian miner equals misery for Thai villagers”
To call for peace amidst perpetual war, to stand for equality against the deeply embedded norms of a patriarchal society, and to campaign for diversity within a homogenising nationalist state, these are the great causes for which Naw K’nyaw Paw has chosen to live. Continue reading “The “Karen Flower”: Naw K’nyaw Paw’s dream of peace and equality”
Faced with a construction boom in the 1970’s, front-line neighbourhoods and unionised construction workers in Sydney formed a radical coalition to protect their communities. Continue reading “Sydney’s Green Bans: the worker boycotts that saved the city”
In this still dawning twenty-first century, the sense of historical transformation is palpable. North, south, east and west the world convulses with conflict and change. Continue reading “There is a Crack in Everything… – Reviewing David Harvey’s “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism””
In Galicia, the conservative regional government has embarked upon a healthcare reform path which critics – organised around the platform SOS Sanidade Publica – condemn as a strategy for “turning healthcare into just another commodity“. Continue reading “News Report – Galicia Cries SOS for Public Health”
Often said to be a conservative city, Jerez de la Frontera took to the street on mass this weekend to defend a public, quality healthcare system. According to police estimates, around 5,000 people streamed into the central plaza to listen to the movement’s leader, Joaquín Fernández, decry the cuts and negligence which left his wife waiting injured on a footpath for some 45 minutes before being attended to after being hit by a motorcycle.
Continue reading “Photo Report: Thousands March in Jerez to Defend Public Healthcare”
‘Marinaleda!?’ we call out to the few cars rolling down the country road to an Andalusian utopia. Most drivers unwillingly decline – headed elsewhere, they indicate; no room in the scoop, a tractor-driver laughs – but soon enough one stops to help out two lost pilgrims. Francisco is his name, and he tells us that our promised land, though beautiful, has both its disciples and its dissidents; those who would call its mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, a prophet, and those who would call him a despot. Continue reading “The Power and the Passion of Marinaleda: A Vanguard Village”
In Jerez de la Frontera several hundred people took to the streets to demand the termination of the secretive TTIP Free Trade Agreement between the EU and the US, a deal which threatens to bolster the legal power of multi-nationals against democratically-accountable states. The act was part of hundreds of similar protests across Europe, with tens of thousands taking place across the continent. Thanks to the anti-TTIP protest movement, the TTIP agreement is now facing further delays, with many observers predicting that the deal will soon be scrapped entirely.
Continue reading “People Before Profit: An Anti-TTIP Rally Photographic Report”
The past twelve months or so in international politics has seen some dramatic events: the rise and crushing of Syriza in Greece, the emergence of a still-nascent North American left and the re-emergence of a British one, the ebbing of the South American ‘pink tide’, and the many crises facing the European Union. Continue reading “A Tale of Two Campaigns – Australian and Spanish 2016 Elections”
Lives and Times 