TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP AND THE LEFT IN AUSTRALIA

One of the major issues confronting all of us in every country of the world is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership - TPP - scheme which the US government, through its president, Barack Obama, is trying to force on all of us.

If this scheme succeeds, the results will be disastrous for us in terms of those items of every-day life which many of us tend to take for granted.

Internet freedom, generic pharmaceuticals, political protests without arrests, media freedom - such as it is - and so much more such as whistle-blower protection - think Manning, Snowden, Assange and thousands of others - and we have just scraped the surface of what we will lose if Obama succeeds in Fast Track through the US Congress.

This is about to happen, and if it does, we will be in trouble.

In order to find out what TPP holds in store for you, look at some of what is on our web pages, and be afraid, be very afraid!:

Trans-Pacific Partnership - Part 1

Trans-Pacific Partnership - Part 2
Trans-Pacific Partnership - Part 3
Trans-Pacific Partnership - Part 4
Trans-Pacific Partnership - Part 5

We have posted some of the items on this blog as well.

Now try and find out what the Left in Australia is busy doing to get everybody aware of the trouble we are in, and what do you find? Very little if you look very hard!

John Passant has written something in Red Flag, the paper of Socialist Alternative.

Has this been followed up by any further discussion in that organization? It certainly doesn't seem like it and they have certainly not organised any street protests.

What about all the other Left groups? Not a word!

Where is the Left in Australia? Is there one and what is it doing?

Silence!

Oh, I forgot! We are told they are getting massive rallies for same-sex marriage!

The only issue in town?

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP UPDATE AND OVERLAND AND ARENA MAGAZINES

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) issue is causing more and more alarm as information about its secrecy and leaks about what it contains manage to emerge into the public consciousness.

In order to get left-wing journals involved in an issue with which they ought to have been leading and not lagging, I contacted the editors of both magazines and neither knew anything about the issues which would affect them rather deeply.

They invited me to give them more information and I gave them the names of writers and journalists who would be able to tell them a great deal more than I would have been able to.

The latest issues of Overland and arena have just been published and neither of them has anything about TPP in its contents.

If this is the best that left-wing journals can achieve then that says a lot about the state of left-wing politics in Australia.

The main-stream media have not had a great deal in their pages, but certainly more than nothing, and so far some of what has been written is not extreme in its right-wing views on the topic.

So, the only way to make TPP known better is to keep on publishing on my web pages all that we are able to gather from online journals and writers around the world.

To keep you up-to-date, look at our web pages:

Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 1
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 2
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 3
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 4

LEFT IS RIGHT? GREEN IS BLUE?

LEFT IS RIGHT? GREEN IS BLUE?

3 October 2013

Two articles examining the state of the left in Australian politics have recently been published, one shortly before the recent federal election and one immediately after.

The election was held on Saturday 7 September 2013 and Jeff Sparrow’s article, “The Day After the Night Before”, was published on Sunday 8 September in Overland online.

Tad Tietze’s article, “A Change in the Order of Things – the Fate of the Greens”, was published in the print edition of Overland, Issue 212 Spring 2013.

Tietze examines the state of the Greens and their role in the alliance which allowed the ALP Gillard government to govern with the assistance of a few other independents who became major players in the 3-year government.

He analyses the parts they played in a left agenda – left of the ALP – in providing a home for many voters disillusioned by the ALP’s massive swing to the right on issues such as the asylum seekers, and how their participation in a very unpopular government may have helped many people alter their support and seek alternative homes for their political beliefs.

It seems as if this problem affected the Greens’ support with the loss of support in some states, but strangely saw an increase in support in Victoria which seems to have bucked the national trend.

The Greens have one basic problem – they are trying to be too much like the 2 or 3 mainstream parties – for instance when Lee Rhiannon supported the Palestinians because she rightly sees Israel as being an apartheid state oppressing the people whose land they have stolen – and having been in the NSW state parliament when all hell broke out because of Marrickville Council’s support of the BDS movement which Rhiannon supported – when she entered federal parliament as a senator she was made to “toe the party line” and not show partisan support for Palestine as against Israel. WTF!!!

As for Sparrow and the left and looking forward and not backward, the left pathetically is not out there making the case for the major issues of the day being loudly in the public arena – where is the left’s response to the dictatorial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which promises –secretively – to destroy the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the Internet and much else besides – and these are only the dribs and drabs which have been leaked for people to just get an inkling of the goings-on behind closed doors by 12 countries – so far – with more to be added as and when required.

Australia and New Zealand are 2 of the 12 countries, but you wouldn’t know anything about this from our “left” groups. Fortunately, one of the left organisations in Australia is an offshoot of a US based radical socialist group which has a newspaper regularly sent to people in Australia, and their latest edition has a large article on the TPP.

Also in this edition of the paper is a large supportive article for Private Chelsea Manning (previously Private Bradley Manning) There should be major rallying events for Manning in Australia when supporters in the US ask for international support – and what do we get in Australia from the wimpy left? Nothing to record and no publicity to advise!

In the UK, left leaning people, frustrated by the left groups’ stagnation in their abilities to challenge the policies of government and opposition regarding urgent austerity measures, organised nationally and created the People’s Assembly to have meetings and branches around the country and to demonstrate where politicians were assembling to formulate their attacks on their citizens and grind the 99 percent even lower so that the 1 percent could continue making capital at the further expense of the unemployed workers.

The new Australian government, post 7 September 2013, will be attempting to do similarly to Australian workers what the UK government is doing, and, unless there are mass protest movements, they will of course succeed.

We should all be on the streets every week, protesting at the secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnerships’ unknown but leaked items which are going to affect us all in ways undreamt of by the unsuspecting citizens.

If we want to make any progress as leftists we also need to ensure that the Greens come out of their “conservative” closet and show they really are an organisation of the left, and for them to stop being scared of what the reactions of the major parties will be to their new-found activism.

One of the issues of the day, and the excuses government are using to wage their wars in the middle east, packs of lies as they all are, is the Israel/Palestine story which hasn’t gone away, despite the US and Israel doing their best to prove that the Palestinians are not capable of finding anyone to do their negotiating. It really is time for the left to concentrate on outing the lies and to get on with political education of people out there who need this information to be able to make informed decisions and understand what they are arguing about.

Where are the organisers of yesteryear to organise and teach new cohorts, why are there no fighters shouting from the rooftops? Have we lost the will to protest?

Sparrow says we must not be pessimistic, but look forward, but we need the current generations to be there to educate the next generations before all is lost – irrevocably!

MARXIST LEFT REVIEW - A NEW JOURNAL??

A new magazine has just been published by Socialist Alternative called "Marxist Left Review".

Number 1 - Spring 2010 informs the reader that the contents are about "Rebuilding the left."

The International Socialists (IS) were around in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s and, as is common with many of the socialist groups, internal policy and personality differences lead to expulsions and the formation of new groups.

One such expulsion and split in the 1980s led to the formation of Socialist Action which was much more of an activist group than the IS had been because the IS was so busy "building cadres who understood Marxist theory" that they lost sight of the real world around them.

However, by the early 1990s, Socialist Action admitted that over its period of existence it was not growing and getting new membership and activists, and the decision was made that Socialist Action would disband and re-absorb itself into the IS after lengthy negotiations. The outcome was a group which was now called the International Socialist Organisation (ISO)which continued operating under that name for much of the 1990s.

As happens on a regular basis with these left groups the ISO had some factional differences develop in its "executive" and people were expelled who had expelled members in the earlier incarnation as IS.

The people who were expelled formed a new group called Socialist Alternative and this group has grown sufficiently to have gained members from the ISO which was disintegrating fairly rapidly. In the end the ISO allied itself with another socialist group and the ISO as such no longer exists.

Now back to Socialist Alternative which claims to be the largest left group in the country and growing.

Those of us who have been involved with various incarnations of these groups but are no longer members of any of them watch with fascination as the spin put out by each incarnation mirrors the previous commentaries.

So the new journal is "Rebuilding the Left".

Then one looks at the contents and the articles and the authors and the conclusion has to be that what should be on the outside cover should read "Recycling the left!"

Other than one author of one article, all the other articles have been written by - you guessed it - all those people who were members of the IS - remember them?

Where are the new writers, the new activists, the new leftists? Are they too "young???" to be publishing articles about Marxist politics? Are they still on a learning curve and so no serious student of Marxism can read their writings and learn from them?

Somewhere along the line one can't help having feelings of deja vu - or, as the French expression has it "Plus ca change........."!