Blogs

It should be clear that Australia's housing system is in a broken state, and this much was pointed out for years. The increase in housing prices is now 20 percentage points higher than the increase in wages in 2021. Housing has become increasingly unaffordable and renters are punished by a system that concentrates more and more housing stock in fewer hands.

There are 14,000 nuclear weapons on Earth. The US has about 5.8K, Russia 6.3K, and the rest are distributed between France, China, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea*.

There are about 4,500 cities with at least 100,000 people. Even if you assume 3 bombs per city (as some are bigger than others), every city on Earth would be destroyed in an all-out global nuclear conflict.

The Adam Smith Insitute has recently released a report where they argue that the moon should be privitised in order to combat global poverty.

For many years, Colombia has been recognised as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for activists and trade unionists. The Colombian state confirms that 145 social movement leaders were murdered in 2021 alone.

When Colombian trade union leaders are threatened, they take it very seriously.

Julian Parra and Claudia López are both Quironsalud (Fresenius subsidiary) workers who received death threats. Claudia reported the details of these threats to local police. Julian has fled Colombia.

A month ago, workers at NagaWorld casino hotel in Cambodia went on strike. They demanded that the management engage in good faith negotiations over the forced mass redundancy of over 1,300 workers. Many of those workers were left destitute.

Instead of talking to the union, police began arresting workers and union leaders.

Two weeks ago, the union president was violently arrested on the picket line by plainclothes police.

Other union leaders were also arrested.

Our world now writhes like a wounded worm, helpless
to escape its torment, blind
to the cause but blaming
a bug: “Stop it, stomp it, strangle it!
Too late – inside us, breeding into billions of bugs!
Kill them, poison them!
But our poisons don’t work – oh no!
Swarming with new bugs! Hopeless! Dying!”
All the while Shiva whispers:
“Beneath your terror and turmoil lies the tranquility of the transcendent.
You’re trapped on the surface mind, tossed by the waves.
Now dive to the depths and merge with me.

In order to determine that we need to take the textbook criteria for various economic systems, and look at whether North Korea meets any of those.

COMMUNISM
Marxist Definition - “communism is a stateless classless moneyless society.”

The state was defined by sociologist Max Webber as being “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

A couple of times in the past I've written on the topic of "lying in politics". Influenced by Hannah Arendt's essay with regards to Vietnam, more than ten years ago I found it interesting to do a comparison with the Iraq war. More recently, I took a hard look at Matthew Guy's comments about crime rates in Victoria.

In partnership with IndustriALL which represents 50 million workers in 140 countries in the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors and is a force in global solidarity taking up the fight for better working conditions and trade union rights around the world.

Iran does not allow independent unions to operate, and trade union activists are frequently detained when they defend workers' rights. LabourStart has run many campaigns in defence of imprisoned trade unionists in Iran.

In partnership with Building and Wood Worker's International (BWI), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), IndustriALL global union, the Education International, the International Union of Foodworkers, and Public Services International.