Smash this rotten borough

In the State of Victoria, local democracy is no longer local or particularly democratic. It is the plaything of soft-money politics and corporate control – where even the pretense of truly democratic values are no legally enshrined. It’s kind of like a Lilliputian version of America Votes 2012, where less charismatic versions of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama do battle but which ever candidate wins corporate control is victorious. And so voting closed on Friday October 26 2012 over an election campaign that history is likely to recycle again in four years.

An Indestructible Union (Part 5)

If you’re like me the stinking mess wafting up from the HSU East Branch makes you want to vomit. What pains me most is the gap between the reality of that Branch and what it could be. Their membership base is a range of allied health professionals and blue collar workers in the wider sector, i.e. a membership base intrinsically working around a key anchor institution in our society that cannot be either outsourced or shut down; hospitals. This should be a fighting union that wages huge campaigns and inspires other workers around Australia. But then again the strategic nature of the membership in building genuine people power in this country combined with what immediate difficulties that might cause for State (read Labor) governments probably provides a potent push for an (un)representative swill to take over to keep things ticking along (so to speak). The whole putrid affair shows up the mortality and limitations of the representative  Union. The tale of the credit card and the prostitutes provides the media fodder but the wider story really is what appears to be the systemic fraud and large salaries of a few key operators combined with the lack of meaningful results/power that the membership exercised.

The people powered fightback has begun…

Striking Indian workers on Feb. 28

It’s been raining all week in Melbourne. As summer’s heat is dampened, it’s easy to lose sight of all the good news about how people are fighting back against corporate power. Especially so because it goes largely unnoticed and unreported in the mainstream press. You might have missed it but something truly historic and monumental happened. On February 28, Indian workers across the entire nation staged the largest ever general strike – over 100 million workers stopped work, downed tools, and took to the streets.