The Guardian • Graham Holton
Issue #2064
Why the US is a Fascist State
Anyone who has been to Washington DC and visited the Capitol, looking up at the Dome, the viewer is treated to an imposing sight. On...
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Issue #1954
The Lowy Institute and a review of Xi Jinping: the backlash
Australia has forty-two think tanks, of which the Lowy Institute for International Policy was ranked 64th in the world by the Think Tank and Civil Societies Program of 2018.
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Issue #2061
50th anniversary of the last Australian troops in Vietnam
The 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of the last Australian troops, on 1st July 1973, marks the end of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War....
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Issue #2036
Three months in Detroit: capitalism & racism in a “segregated” city
I lived for three months in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan. The house on Tyler Street was not far from Eight Mile Road. One side of...
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Issue #2063
Space War?
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) between the United States and the Soviet Union sought all nations to avoid any future “land grab” leading to...
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Issue #2016
The real threat of the United States’ 800 foreign bases
Under the heading “Australia Faces Massive Existential Threat from China,” Christopher Joye writes that: “The spectre of Chinese nuclear submarines, destroyers, fighters and bombers based...
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Issue #2058
Costly friendship: Australia and the US Civil War
With the AUKUS agreement, the United States military build-up in Australia and the upcoming Exercise Talisman Sabre war games, between the Australian Defence Force (ADF)...
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Issue #2059 03-07-2023
Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg, once known as “the most dangerous man in America,” died on 16th June 2023 at the age of 92. In 1969 he was...
Read moreAfghanistan, India and the Tapi Gas Pipeline
Since 9/11 the US has used the pretext of its “Global War on Terrorism” to develop a military position within GUAM ...
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Issue #2061
Tereshkova first woman in space
On 16th June 1963, at the age of 26, Valentina V Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, a major Soviet engineering and...
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Issue #1982
AUKUS is a direct threat to North Korea
While much has been said that AUKUS is a direct threat to China, little has been said that it is also a direct threat to North Korea.
Read moreKim Jong Un and nuclear weapons
Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and touted as an Asia-Pacific region expert.
Read moreThe UN must end sanctions against the DPRK
On 29th October 2021, China and Russia circulated a draft resolution to fifteen council members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to ease sanctions on the DPRK.
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Issue #2017
Marx’s vampire capitalism and the present economic crisis
Friedrich Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) refers to “the vampire property-holding class.” Twenty years later, Karl Marx uses...
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Issue #2030
The politics of Ukraine’s Holodomor “famine”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the 12th October offered a package of military assistance to help Ukraine repel Russian troops from the east of the...
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Issue #2001
WASHINGTON BULLETS by Vijay Prashad
The present war between Russia and Ukraine reveals the heavy hand of US imperialist intervention behind the scenes, making this a timely and important book....
Read moreAustralia’s military deal with South Korea: a hidden past
On 13th December 2021, Australia signed an unprecedented billion-dollar defence contract with the Republic of South Korea (ROK).
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Issue #1998
Brisbane Branch Education class on Sharkey’s History of the Communist Party
Lawrence (Lance) L Sharkey (1898-1967) joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1922 and was later elected to the executive of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers’...
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Issue #1975
The morals of the market: human rights and the rise of neoliberalism
With the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, Russia attacked the hypocrisy of the US and what it saw as its lack of Human Rights.
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Issue #2062
Korean war armistice: 70 years on
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War (1951-1953). The war remains a humiliation for the US. On the 27th...
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Issue #2054
Five months of industrial action
While the nightly news broadcasts cover the strikes and violent clashes in France, the five months of continuing union industrial actions across Scotland have gone...
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Issue #2015
Chile’s new constitution recognises Indigenous rights
Chile’s new constitution will make it the third plurinational country in South America, after Ecuador and Bolivia. It is part of the sweeping reforms of...
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Issue #2020
Mass shootings in the USA and Australia
On 24th May 2022 an eighteen-year-old gunman, equipped with an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle, murdered nineteen students and two teachers at a primary school in...
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Issue #2021
Chile after the coup
It has been nearly fifty years since the infamous coup in Chile on 11th September 1973. The world became aware of the heinous birth of...
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Issue #2034
The Belize-Guatemala conflict and the role of Cuba
In September 2022 the Belize Defence Force and Coast Guard encountered five maritime vessels belonging to the Guatemalan Armed Forces, near Sarstoon Island in the...
Read moreThe Menzies years
The Liberal Party has created an image of 1950s Australia as a golden age of order and prosperity under the government of Robert Menzies (1949–1966)....
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Issue #2050
Sugar and blackbirding
The Queensland sugar industry annually generates $2 billion, and this industry began with indentured labour. In July 2021 the mayor of Bundaberg, Jack Dempsey, made...
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Issue #2000
The far-right in Ukraine and the Australian connection
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia’s military operation aims to “demilitarise” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine. He was referring to the Azov Battalion and other Extreme...
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Issue #2060
4th July: land of the un-free
Americans love to celebrate the 4th of July, commemorating their independence from Britain in 1776. School children and adults are taught that the United States...
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Issue #2008
The Washington consensus and growing World poverty
According to the recent World Bank report, From Crisis to Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Recovery (2021), the Third World is facing great hardships with increasing...
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Issue #1989
A system of political mendacity – perpetuating deceit against the DPRK
I met Michael Palin in Melbourne in the early 1990s, while he was promoting his most recent travel book.
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Issue #2046
Call to end Cuban embargo: 63 years of suffering
On 10th February 2023, local councillors in Washington DC put up resolution PR25-0113 calling for the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors...
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Issue #2066
Capitalism’s Global Food Crisis
The world is suffering from a dire food crisis. On 20 July India, the world’s leading rice exporter, supplying 40 per cent of the global...
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Issue #2067
Marx and Robinson Crusoe: British Imperialism and the slave trade
Marxist literary criticism explains a literary work, a novel, through an analysis of the human-social relationships which reflect the economic base of the story, rather...
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Issue #2068
Angela Y. Davis – ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’ revisited
In 1969 Dr Angela Y. Davis was fired from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for being a member of the Communist Party USA...
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Issue #2061
Sky News
On 29th June Alexander Voltz of Sky News attacked the Palaszczuk government for wanting to change the name of Brisbane and its main streets to...
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Issue #2006
Weaponising culture: the CIA’s use of art, literature and music in the cold war
Today the CIA has illegal operations around the world, from gathering information on Americans to developing new forms of torture. What is little known is...
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Issue #2009
Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise
Moissaye Joseph Olgin (1878–1939) was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist, and translator. In 1922, he founded The Morning Freiheit, which he edited until his death in...
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Issue #2054
Angela Davis and the importance of Malcolm X today
On 19th May 2023, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed Angela Davis, author, feminist political activist and distinguished academic to mark Malcolm X’s birth on...
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Issue #1978
From the Accord to the IR Omnibus Bill
Over the past forty years, since the implementation of the Accord agreement between the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Australian Labor Party (ALP), wages and salaries have not progressed.
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Issue #2015
“Inspiration and hope”
The morning of 23rd June came with a blustery cold wind to the town of Childers in Queensland. Particularly felt by myself and my fellow...
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Issue #2045
President Biden’s new discriminatory immigration policy
On 2nd February 2023, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that of the 998 children detained at the US-Mexico, border under the President...
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Issue #2064
The US Prison in film: A Marxist View
In the “land of the free,” millions languish in prisons in the name of law and order. The prison, as an institution, is used by...
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Issue #2046
Queensland police under fire
The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has begun to restructure the Queensland Police Service (QPS) in an attempt to eradicate the “significant problem” of sexism, racism,...
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Issue #2069
The Kerguelen Islands sale to China
On 15th July 2023 France offered to sell the Kerguelen Islands to China for 60 billion Euros. The sale would make China Australia’s newest neighbour....
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Issue #1996
Brisbane branch campaign against AUKUS, casualisation, and climate change
There is no rest for the Brisbane Branch of the CPA as we continue our campaign against the IR omnibus Bill, the AUKUS nuclear submarine...
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Issue #2069
50 years after the coup in Chile: The struggle continues
On 11th September 1973, the coup d’état under General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the president of Chile, Salvador Allende Gossens, the world’s first democratically elected socialist...
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Issue #2053
US school shootings and gun manufacturing capitalism
On 29th January 1979 Brenda Spencer, a 16-year-old girl, shot and killed the principal and a custodian, and wounded eight children and a police officer...
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Issue #2013
Queensland comrades organise! – The CPA and the lower-Northern Qld tour
On Thursday the 23rd June, we arrived in Childers, the day commemorating the Childers Backpacker Tragedy. Sixteen young people were burnt to death at the...
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Issue #2054
Queensland’s forensic debacle
On 16th May 2023, the Queensland Health Minister, Yvette D’Ath, announced that Queensland’s Health Forensic and Scientific Services (QFSS) have a backlog of more than...
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Issue #2056
A history of US debt
The US Congress has approved a bill to lift the country’s US$31.4 trillion debt ceiling days before its default. The day after it passed the...
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Issue #2043
African slaves in colonial Australia
The Melbourne Gaol is famous for being the place where the bushranger, Ned Kelly, was hanged in 1880. In the early 1970s I saw a...
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Issue #2065
USA: Hunger and food insecurity
The United States is a net exporter of food, yet hunger is a worsening phenomenon with many Americans unable to buy basic foods, due to...
Read moreUnions join to give voice on job casualisation and COVID-19
It was great to see so many people joining together to listen and give voice to the major problems of casualisation and the pandemic that...
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Issue #2040
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism
The recent fighting in the Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of 47 Palestinians, including 17 children, as Israeli forces targeted leaders of the Palestinian...
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Issue #2058
US Police Violence
On 16th June the US Justice Department announced that the Minneapolis Police Department needed to be reformed. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division had launched...
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Issue #2050
63 years: A call to end the Cuban blockade
On 10th February 2023, local councillors in Washington DC put up resolution PR25-0113 calling for the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors...
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Issue #2035
CPA National School – Brisbane
In November, the Brisbane Branch held its CPA National Party School. It began with a Trivia night on Friday, at the Labour Trades Hall in...
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Issue #2059 03-07-2023
Slaughter House Juneteenth
Across the US multiple shootings marred the Juneteenth weekend, leaving thirteen dead and more than 100 wounded. In Chicago at least 70 people were shot,...
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Issue #2039
US imperialism and the gangs of LA
By November 2022 over 58,000 people, accused of having gang affiliations had been arrested in El Salvador, filling up its already overcrowded prisons. Most arrests...
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Issue #2070
DPRK celebrates 75 years of independence, self-reliance and peace
On 9th September the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) celebrated 75 years since its founding under Kim Il Sung, the general secretary of the...
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Issue #2064
The Police-Industrial-Complex
US citizens believe they have the right to representative democracy, freedom of speech, religious worship, a free press, and equality before the law with a...
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Issue #2044
US Congress passes the “Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism” Bill
On 7th February, 2023, the US House of Representatives passed the “Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism” Bill, with 219 Republicans and 109 Democrats voting for...
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Issue #2047
Queensland police corruption report
In 1987 the Fitzgerald Inquiry, The Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct, began investigations into the corruption by the Queensland...
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Issue #2004
Education class on the Constitution of the Communist Party Of Australia
The Brisbane Branch of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) recently held its second education class, with branches from across Australia joining in via Zoom....
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Issue #2053
De-Sovietisation and the rise of the far right
This year’s Victory Day celebrations in Germany were held on 9th May at the Soviet Memorial Tiergarten in Berlin. Two men dressed in Soviet Union...
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Issue #2070
Centre-left win in Guatemala
Nearly seventy years after the CIA-backed coup in 1954, the Left has finally won the presidency in Guatemala. Bernardo Arévalo, of the centre-left Movimiento Semilla...
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Issue #2043
Book Banning American Style
For anyone who is a book lover what is happening across the USA will be shocking. Over the past year, a nationwide campaign has removed...
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Issue #2044
Bird vagrancy: an indicator of global climatic changes
In October 2022 a young Bar-Tailed Godwit broke a world record by flying non-stop from Alaska to Ansons Bay, Tasmania, 13,560 km in 11 days....
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Issue #2065
The failure of the far right in the Spanish elections
The recent Spanish general election is a turning point in the rise of the far right. Polls had predicted that the ultra-nationalist VOX party would...
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Issue #2044
Black troops killed by white US soldiers
There has long been a rumour in Queensland that dozens of African American troops were killed by their white officers during World War II, but...
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Issue #2047
US maternal death rate highest in developed world
According to a recent report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maternal mortality rose by 40 per cent at the height...
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Issue #2051
Guatemala’s Indigenous communities take on the mining TNCs
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, announced in 2020, that the production of Tesla electric car batteries required an exponential need for nickel, cobalt, lithium,...
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Issue #2055
US Military Build-up in Australia
In the upcoming Exercise Talisman Sabre war games, between the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and United States military, an expected 30,000 military personnel will participate...
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Issue #2051
Harry Belafonte: Civil Rights and the United Fruit Company
Harry Belafonte (Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.) died on 25th March, aged 96. He is remembered not only as a Black singer and actor, but also...
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Issue #2071
Waving for the Voice
Queensland: on 16th September, fellow Sunshine Coast Branch member and frequent Guardian writer Graham Holton and I embarked on a series of unorthodox but effective...
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Issue #2041
US Health Care – A failure at every level
In Michigan, a man falling off his bicycle had obvious injuries and I offered to drive him to a public hospital for treatment. He refused,...
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Issue #2057
Half million march against Poland’s far-right PiS
On 5th June half a million people waving Polish and European Union flags marched through central Warsaw. It was the largest political rally in Poland...
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Issue #2069
Engels and pizza: Sunshine Coast Branch gets educated
In July the Sunshine Coast Branch of Queensland had its first education class, examining Friedrich Engels’ Principles of Communism. Written in 1847 it was the...
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Issue #2052
Australia-USA exercise Talisman Sabre: Preparing for war in Taiwan
According to the Australian Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, Exercise Talisman Sabre is the largest war game ever held between the Australian Defence Force (ADF)...
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Issue #2071
Poverty and homelessness on the Sunshine Coast
The Sunshine Coast is two hours drive north of Brisbane. It is a collection of towns and farms extending from its famous beaches to the...
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Issue #2055
US$45 trillion looted
The meeting of the Quad leaders, on 20th May 2023, has given special political influence to Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi of India, and his...
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Issue #2057
RBA: technically Insolvent, morally bankrupt
According to its website, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) determines the policy of the Central Bank and undertakes the actions necessary to ensure that...
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Issue #2066
Sunshine Coast Branch – YES Campaign
The Sunshine Coast Branch was very active in July with our YES campaign flier and banner drop. The region north of Brisbane covers a diverse...
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