On September 29, the Rudd government announced that it would give a 2-week extension to the review board and panel of experts handpicked to look at the federal government’s intervention into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

San Francisco, September 25 – Today there are spontaneous demonstrations occurring on Wall Street and over 200 other places across the country denouncing the plan to bail out the Wall Street financiers to the tune of US$700 billion. One journalist sent out an email proposing such demonstrations and then support for it exploded on the internet.

Peter Camejo, a Venezuelan-American and life-long revolutionary, died on September 13 in the San Francisco Bay area. The cause was cancer.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Starring John Cho, Kal Penn, and Neil Patrick Harris
Directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
Runtime 102 minutes

Over 80% of people in Australia support a woman’s right to choose abortion – a significant gain of the women’s liberation movement. Having lost the debate on a woman’s right to choose, the anti-abortion movement has adopted a new tactic – posing as being “pro-woman”. At the forefront of this maneuver in Australia is Women’s Forum Australia.

La Paz – On the eve of the 35th anniversary of the September 11, 1973, CIA-backed military coup that overthrew the elected social-democratic government of Chilean president Salvador Allende, Washington was again attempting to orchestrate a coup against a left-wing government in South America.

[The following is the address given by Cuban Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado to the UN General Assembly on September 24. It has been slightly abridged.]

[The following article is based upon a Direct Action forum held in Melbourne on September 26.]

On September 17, former Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vicente reported to the country’s National Assembly that the US government was at the centre of a foiled coup plot planned for October 15 to violently overthrow the elected government of President Hugo Chavez that is leading a socialist revolution in Venezuela.

On October 7, the upper house of the Victorian state parliament will vote on the Victorian Abortion Reform Bill, which was passed in the lower house on September 11 by 48 votes to 35.

Contrary to what some ideologues would like us to believe, the economic arrangements we know as capitalism are not of long standing. Capitalism arose fairly recently in history (in the late mediaeval period), in a particular place (western Europe, mainly in Flanders and England).

In December and January, the 26th annual Southern Cross Work-Study Brigade will visit Cuba and take part in celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the triumph of Cuba’s revolution against US domination. The brigade is organized by the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society.

Protest actions are being planned for Brisbane in October when Lex Wotton faces court. Wotton has been portrayed by the Queensland police, government and establishment media as the leader of the “riot” that occurred on Palm Island on November 26, 2004.

Forty-six human rights activists from 17 countries broke the Israeli siege of Gaza on August 23. The SS Free Gaza and SS Liberty, two refitted Greek boats carrying 40 people, some food and medical supplies, left Cyprus on August 21 to make the 350-kilometre, 32-hour journey to Gaza.

It’s not surprising that we tend to associate Cuba with the word “dictatorship” rather than, say, “democracy”. This is not because Cuba really is a dictatorship, but because most Australians form an opinion of socialist Cuba based on how Cuba is portrayed in the corporate media.

On August 10, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and his vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, secured a resounding victory in an opposition party-initiated recall referendum with a popular vote of 67.4%, an increase of 14 percentage points on the vote that brought Morales to office in December 2005.

September 7 marks the 40th anniversary of the event that put on the front pages of the world’s press the feminist movement, or more precisely its “second wave” (following the long lapse since the strong campaigns of the early 20th century for women’s suffrage and emancipation).

He moves in mysterious ways

“This is why God made banks, for this kind of transaction.” – A surprised US factory owner, whose bank unexpectedly refused him a loan to expand his business.

Issy Wyner, one of the pioneers of revolutionary socialism in Australia, died in Sydney in August, aged 92. Issy was an early member of the Workers Party, the first Trotskyist group in Australia, formed in May 1933.

In a July 29 speech, Labor immigration minister Chris Evans announced an end to the previous Howard Coalition government’s costly “Pacific Solution” to “illegal” asylum seekers – closing the offshore processing centres on Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island.

Telling the truth or fostering false hopes

Kieran Latty (Letters, DA #3) claims there are two problems with my article “NSW Labor’s electricity privatisation plans” in DA #2.

In 1964, a 22-year-old Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish shared the struggle of his people with the world, writing: “Record!/ I am an Arab/ And my identity card is number fifty thousand/ I have eight children/ And the ninth is coming after a summer/ Will you be angry? … Record! I am an Arab/ I have a name without a title/ ...

San Francisco – The nomination of Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is historic. He is the first African American presidential candidate of one of the two major capitalist parties. He may win the election and become the first black president, something inconceivable even only two years ago.

In the months preceding the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq, the French government’s opposition received a great deal of publicity. This led to illusions among some anti-war activists that the French rulers represented a progressive alternative to the “Anglo-Saxon” imperialists.

The Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN) will be organising its eighth solidarity brigade to Venezuela later this year to coincide with the elections for governors and mayors on November 23. Roberto Jorquera is one of the organisers of the AVSN brigade and a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.