Darkness at Noon

I must apologise for this post in advance. I just got home from Sydney and am exhausted but felt I better give the Forbes Protest some coverage. I’ll put some photos up tomorrow.

First, here’s a bit of a round up of the news:

• SMH
• SMH
• This video clearly shows the mounted police hitting people with batons
• Sydney Indymedia
• Sydney Indymedia
  
• NineMSN
• News Limited
• India!!
• United Arab Emirates!!
• ABC Lateline
• Wiki News (thanks Dave)

I’ve had a quick scan over a few blogs and I must say I’m a little surprised that I can’t find one mention in all the blogs I check regularly. I though there were some left-wing NSW-based bloggers out there that would have been at the protests but it appears I am wrong. This is a little disappointing and says a lot to me about the role of the media in Australia but that is not what this post is about.

So we all converged in Circular Key a little way away from the Opera House which looked more like Woomera detention centre than the people’s Opera House. I must say I was impressed with the production values of the 30A organisers and wonder if it’s indicative of other protests held in NSW. They had a huge PA system pumping out all your radical hits. The speakers were fantastic and there was a general ‘festival’ atmosphere.

We then marched over to the Opera House. We had already been informed that the dinner had been moved and taking to reporters much later in the night it turns out the dinner had been moved to the International but we decided to proceed with the protest anyway.

The crowd of at least 2000 people (not a bad turn out) danced its way to the 2 m gates that had been put up. It was interesting marching past a bunch of fairly well-to-do restaurants. Many looked on disgusted, some just looked bewildered, but every second one we went past the staff were loving it. It was fantastic.

We got to the fence and there seemed to be a feeling of ‘What now?’ So inevitably a few people climbed the fence and gestured to the police. Then a few people started rocking the fence. I’d looked at it earlier in the day and didn’t think it was going anywhere. It was held in place by a pretty solid bit of concert. To my surprise the bolts started to come undone and the whole fence started to move. Eventually it came down and the police stormed in. Now is pulling a fence down a violent act? It’s certainly a confrontational one but I didn’t see a protested throw a punch. I did however see the cops come out swinging. I thought they were heavy handed. Then the horses moved in. I hate that, it really bothers me. Why would you do that to a horse. It just seems horrible to me and by the time they got to the part of the fence that had been pulled down the other cops had pretty well secured it all. There’s also footage above of the mounted cops hitting people with batons. That is certainly heavy handed and unnecessary.

With a more confrontational mood established the party continued the drums started playing again and the Anarchists had an awesome set-up with a wheely bin that doubled as a sound system so out come the psy-trance and people started dancing. I love the celebration of resistance.

After a while the cops were just standing around talking to the protested. It’s important to note that a lot of the cops were actually great. Not aggressive, actually engaging people, explaining things to them and so on. I was really impressed by a few of them.

Eventually the numbers started to reduce. There was the decision made to move back to our original meeting place. The hope was to do it as a close group so that the cops couldn’t take advantage of a dispersed crowd. Unfortunately they got this opportunity. I’m not sure what happened but a major scuffle broke out and a protests had the living daylights beat out of him before he was handcuffed and taken off. Again, unnecessary.

About this time the cops decided that they wanted to go home so started to fan out and move us all away from there (what ever happened to public space?). The only group that stayed were the Christians Against Greed. I must say I was impressed by these guys. They just sat there and had a really peaceful vigil. They sang, prayed, broke bread etc. Now I was offered some bread and refused – I’m not Christian and I felt it would not be a good idea for me to do so. However they were the only group the cops couldn’t get rid of and it was just a really nice action.

So there you go. I’ll hopefully post the photos tomorrow. There’s probably more to say here but I’m just about to fall asleep.

As I said in my previous post I attended the Sydney Social Forum on the weekend. I thought the turnout was a little weak and I understand that the organising committee were a little stretched so not enough when into publicising the event. Apparently there were 300 people there at some point over the two days but they certainly we’re all there at once. None-the-less, this meant that some of the workshops were quite intimate and therefore highly productive. I also noticed plenty of interstate people there which is always a good sign.

The first session I went to was organised by a guy from Texans for Peace which was quite interesting. I guess the interesting fact that I learnt that I hadn’t heard before was that about 3,000 to 5,000 US soldier had disserted the army. That’s quite an alarming figure. It was also good to hear about the significant of “Cindy’s” protest outside Bush’s ranch. Charlie Jackson, the facilitator had also spent a lot of time in Iraq both before and after the war so he was a pretty impressive guy.

The next session I went to was one called “connecting struggles” or something like that. It was organised by a group called Subplot who I got the impression were an Anarchist group. This meant that the session was dominated by Anarchists – which is fine – I just felt that many of them weren’t as engage in the current debates as they could be. That said I did make a friend from Perth in this session who was really cool and we continued our conversation over lunch.

I also went to a “4 years after Tampa” session which was run by some excellent activist and one academic, Ghassan Hage, who was superb on the issue of racism and how to tackle racism.

The next day I attended an IndyMedia session which had people form Sydeny and Melbourne IndyMedia there. I’ve always known about IndyMedia but I think it is something I’ll use a lot more of now. See my previous post about their coverage of the 30A Forbes protest.

The next session I attended before lunch on the Sunday was called ‘Whose Trade Organisation?” which was run by AidWatch and AFTINET. They did an excellent job of covering some very difficult issues and certainly even gave me a bit of an update on where it is all at particularly with general meetings and ministerial meetings coming up in the next few months. It was also a chance for me to meet Jemma Bailey who I’d had a bit of email contact with and who turned out to be even nicer in person that she was over the email. Hopefully it was the start of a bit of a campaign around the WTO and the Aust-China FTA – watch this space for more details. I also meet James from ATTAC Australia. I knew that they had started up an ATTAC in Australia some time ago but I hadn’t heard anything since. However they are apparently reinvigorated and fired up again so they’ll be one to keep an eye on.

The final session of the day was a bit of a debrief which was started off by Chris Nineham from the Stop the War Coalition (UK). He spoke with a great amount of passion and managed to get the crowd a bit fired up which was great too see. The feedback was a mixture of positive and negative feedback but, frankly, I thought the negative feed back came from people who didn’t ‘get’ what a social forum was about and expected the revolution to start then and there.

So all in all it was a success. I certainly hope that the Melbourne Social Forum is as good and I’m sure it will be.

I’ve been in Sydney since Friday night. It’s a funny old town and I’m certainly one of these people that adore Melbourne too much to be able to really just relax and enjoy Sydney but I won’t bang on here about how much better Melbourne is – after all, the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is Australian, and therefore loves all cities, towns and everything else.

I always love coming to Sydney as it’s a chance to catch up with a few friends and family. I’ve been staying with a very dear friend and had a lovely lunch with my uncle yesterday. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here for some serious activist-type stuff. On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sydney Social Forum and later this afternoon I’m heading off to the Forbes CEO Conference Protest.

The protest will be at the Opera House and there seems to be a lot of excitement around it at the moment (the protest that is). I went and had a look at what was going on down at the opera hose yesterday. The place looks like a police state. There are cops in riot gear surrounding the place. When I get home I’ll post some photos (I’m lacking full computer capabilities here). I also managed to get a happy snap of our beloved Treasurer who was down at the Opera House for some publicity shots. As I walked around the Opera House I smiled pleasantly at all the cops who were staring at my “Democracy, We Deliver” t-shirt. As I walked past a particularly militant group of cops I over heard one say “when the attacks start tomorrow…” I stopped dead in my tracks obviously wanting to hear the end of that story but they noticed that I’d stopped right on queue so they also stopped.

I noticed this article on Media Watch last night. More here and here. A great bit of activism on behalf of the 30A organisers!

Via Technocratic and various new sources I also come across the following pieces about the Forbes Conference:

• Love Life Live Love
• Capitalism your friend: Forbes editor
• IT Heavies Gather In Sydney
• George Bush Sr to attend Sydney event (comedy!)
• Protests planned for Forbes conference
• Protesters warned over Forbes conference (we’re not anti-globalisation!)

Sydney’s IndyMedia also seem to be doing a really good job of keeping up to date with everything that is going on (I thought this was a nice little gesture).

Over at A Floating Life, Puck draws our attention to a report from Pitchfork about the use of Peer-to-peer networks by record companies. Having not read the report and basing my opinion on Pucks comments it seems to me that record labels are finally starting to realise that peer-to-peer networks actually work in their favour.

It challenges the myth that “piracy robs artists of their rightful income” and suggests that perhaps it can be used to their economic advantage. There are a couple of examples of bands that have released their material on peer to peer networks after a record label refused to release their song who have gone on to be particularly successful (Lessig has provided an example of this – i just don’t seem to be able to find it at the moment).

Secondly, I’d suggest that p2p is probably the most ‘liberating’ or democratic and significant technological advancements of recent times – particularly when you take into account 3rd generation p2p (or BitTorrent). It is a massively efficient and democratic way of disseminating information because it allows people to share bandwidth. So threats to make p2p illegal do worry me and it worries me that the debate is not framed in terms of the democratic potential of this technology.

I loaded up a recording of the first of our monthly forums this morning. You can find it here. I hate the sound of my own voice but it’s a pretty clear recording. Of course it’s licensed under a creative commons license so you’re free to use it as you see fit. Be warned though, it goes for an hour and is about 50 MB big so it might take a while to download and listen to. We will look into setting up some sort of streaming as soon as our tech-guy gets back from overseas. However, we’ve also discussed the possibility of disseminating the information using p2p software. I’m really not sure how to do that but if you do please drop us a line with your suggestions. I was thinking about setting it up so the file is on my computer at home and just leaving it running with Limewire or Sharezilla open but that’s not really feasible I don’t think.

In other news, I’m off to Sydney tonight for the Sydney Social Forum and 30A – Forbes CEO Conference protest. Hopefully the SSF will prove to be quite enlightening and I’ve already got a few Sydney siders I’ll be meeting up with, not to mention staying with a very dear friend of mine for my time up there. It will also probably be a little warmer than Melbourne.

The Age has reported that US evangelist Pat Robertson wants Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez assassinated.

It works on so many levels doesn’t it. Isn’t the first commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill (or murder?)’? It really is astounding.

My understanding is that Chavez probably runs the most democratic government in the world.

Anyway, like I say, it works on so many levels.

Ultimately it strikes me that this doesn’t happen because leaders don’t kill leaders for fear of being killed themselves.

I posted over at Goonanism some time ago about my concerns that the attacks on teaching methods by the liberal government were motivated by a deep concern of theirs that the teachers were essentially teaching in a more ‘liberal’ manner than what the Liberal government would like.

Peter Constello’s recent comments that teachers are teaching an anti-Americanism seems to back up that theory for me. Moreover, the absurdity of it is really hard to fathom.

Certainly my recollection of what we were taught in high school, even in senior years, was a relatively ’shallow’ interpretation of history which was very ‘text book’ based (I hope that makes sense). More importantly though, I hope that what our teachers are teaching our kids is to think critically and for themselves. If they come out with an anti-American bias then I hope that’s because they have a good understanding of any number of events – Vietnam and Iraq to name the obvious two. However more importantly again, I hope they realise that America has also given us so much be it through their belated involvement in WWII or their contribution to the Arts and Sciences in the19th and 20th Century.

Our teachers are one of, if not the, most significant bit of social capital any country has. Do we have bang on in this meaningless manner especially when we’re using government grants as a thinly veiled bit of Liberal Party Propaganda?

As Irant’s clearly very switched on ‘Beloved’ said “Costello is a fuck-wit and you can quote me on that!”

I hope it’s not just me that thinks that selling Telstra is a bad idea and more importantly if you must do it (for what appears to be largely ideological reasons) then surely it is even stupider to do it if it “shrinks the federal coffers“. Whilst I don’t condone the sale in anyway it seems to me that one of the main reasons to sell public assets is to reduce the debt burden.

(cross posted at Goonanism)

I’ve come across Geoism a few times before in a few different conversations with people involved in the Geoist movement. It’s an idea that really interests me but that I disagree with.

Geoism is an idea put forward by Henry George. He argued that we should not be taxed on our wage but on our resource use – specifically land. If land is part of the commons then why should people profit from land speculation. So you tax the increase in land value thereby reducing the cost of land and making it afordable for people to own but prohibitively expencive for land speculation to happen. Land is not the only resource that is taxed however, the idea being that we are much more efficient and concious of our resource use which has obvious ecological benefits. The hope it to create a fairly localised community which is based on small businesses. There is plenty of individual incentive but also plenty of support for the community.

It’s important to note that I have completely bastardised this idea in the previous paragraph so if you do want to know more about Geoism read something else. Moreover, I’m happy to accept critisims in the comments. Most importantly though, the ideas are a lot more complex than I have said. So if you want to know more a couple of good places to start are here and here.

So, keeping in mind that I’m particularly under schooled on the topic I have the following critisms of it. Firstly it concerns me that a resource based tax then makes these resources more expensive. There is the potential to make basic food stuffs unaffordable for low income households. I think its reasonable to say that if we actually paid the full cost of our food – taking into account the environmental cost then food would quickly become unaffordable. Moreover, there is then the issue of calculating that cost and I’d suggest that we couldn’t reasonably do this if we acnoledge the high level of interconnectivity of the environment. That’s not to say we don’t need to readdress the way we get our food and the increased localisation of our foods needs to be encourgaged.

I’d also suggest that the idea places too much faith in the market. The market can be a good distributor of resources in some instances but it is generally a rather poor distributor when it comes to environmental issues. Of course it’s also a poor distributor of health and education resourse as well but this is hopefully overcome in Geoist theory through the creation of a fairly large tax pool based on this new resource tax.

The next key critism is that it is a very resource-based understanding of the world. It’s simply too dualistic to me and views the environment as an exploitable resource for human consumption. This is understandable considering it’s a 19th Centrury idea but I can’t help feeling that Geoism’s environmental credentials are perhaps overstated. Along similar lines, it’s a dated concept of land and wealth generation.

The finally issue I’d like to mention here is that of economies of scale. In short, economies of scale are desirable because they allow for a high level of specialisation which in turn means that highly specialised needs can be catered for. Disability is always the example I think of here where the needs of the disable simply can’t be accomodated on a small highly localised scale.

From the Washington Post

At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades.

The money will be channeled through a new partnership called the Democracy Alliance, which was founded last spring — the latest in a series of liberal initiatives as the Democratic Party and its allies continue to struggle with the loss of the House and the Senate in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. Many influential Democratic contributors were left angry and despairing over the party’s poor showing in last year’s elections, and are looking for what they hope will be more effective ways to invest their support.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that kind of financial backing. If there’s anyone out there with this kind of money willing to fund the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice could you please let me know.

Blue Mountains for a Fairer Australia have started their own blog. Not too many organisations have blogs so I’m always intrigued when other organisations start up a blog that is specific to their organisation. Unfortunately on this blog my fellow directors of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice are yet to contribute to this blog so it’s not much of an organisational blog – although they continually assure me that this is not the case.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that if you’d like to do a guest post then just drop us a line.