"Embedded" Occupy Sydney reporter John O' Driscoll describes the movement that has caught the world's attention — from the inside.
The small group who gathered on (2 Nov) at my first Occupy Sydney GA (General Assembly) at Town Hall, maybe 50 people, was dwarfed by the attendance at the Noam Chomsky screening inside, let alone the crush of commuters and shoppers.
The News of the World hacking scandal that I wrote about in April has become a worldwide phenomenon. The whole world knows how murder victims phones were hacked. More revelations will follow, with other tabloids, including News' other tabloid, the Sun, likely to be dragged in.
In recent times we have seen the debauch of the welfare state, the expansion of cartels, extortionate rent-taking from the financial sector, and the wholesale capture of regulators, the executive and most of parliament by an unholy marriage of corporate interests and secret police doublethink.
Spain, like many European countries, has been looted by the powerful, who now seek to foist their losses onto the public purse, and thereby onto the public.
Outgoing senator Guy Barnett chairs an inquiry into film and literature classification, and hopes to extend the scheme to all "artwork".
The News of the World phonehacking scandal is going ballistic in the UK. In 2006 a private investigator and a 'rogue journalist' from the paper (as NoW and News Ltd -and implicitly the police - insisted at the time) were jailed for hacking into the voicemails of people at Buckingham Palace.
For me what most illustrates the moribund nature of Sydney's administration is not the public transport(try Melbourne's).
While Japan is visited by cruel calamity(and the consequences of disastrous nuclear planning), in geopolitics too a great earthquake is underway. American, or western, hegemony, backed by Australia and New Zealand, is shaking.
Senator Mark Arbib of NSW (as well as Michael Danby, MP for Melbourne Ports, and the retiring Senator Bob McMullan) has been exposed as a ‘protected source’ of the US embassy.
John O'Driscoll examines the recently-revealed dangers of having a US-centric control freak recommending war against the Chinese.
As a child, in the 70s, I remember reading about the labour-saving devices that would make drudgery a historical curiosity. Whether in Omni magazine, or Sunday newspaper liftouts, robots and mechanisation promised that we all could join the chattering classes, with time available for political awareness and participation.
