TONIGHT, Monday, at 8.30pm (ABC1) FOUR CORNERS is running a documentary "Iron and Dust" about the fight by Indigenous people in WA against racist mining billionaire Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest for a fair share of mining royalties in a $280 billion dollar iron ore deposit near Roebourne:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3270263.htm
Twiggy was aptly described by an SA comrade in a magazine article in 2008 as "a bigger bastard than James Packer":
http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=6365:a-bigger-bastard-than-james-packer?
And that was even before he put on his double act with the woman who has now succeeded him as the richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart, as they both cried poor when campaigning off the back of a gold plated ute against the piss-weak mining tax mooted by Kevin Rudd last year. Twiggy needn't have worried: the ALP collapsed in a heap when faced with a "people's revolt" of multi billionaires. But the Yindjibarndi people are made of sterner stuff. They've got to be - they're fighting against not just Forrest and his lawyers who are using every dirty trick to steal the resources, but they're doing so in a situation where rotten native title legislation basically allows the mining companies to ride roughshod over indigenous people. Let's hope that they take Forrest to the cleaners.
Campaigning against Israeli apartheid you still occasionally come up against the old chestnut that "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East". That was never true. It's even less true today with real democracy blossoming across the region and Israel setting its face squarely against the Arab Spring. "LIVE AND BECOME" (2005), a film screening on TUESDAY at 9pm on SBS2, shows the reality of Israeli "democracy". It's about Salomon, a young Ethiopian Christian boy who is airlifted out of a Sudanese refugee camp by pretending that he is part of the "Falasha" Jewish diaspora. He is taken to Israel and is adopted by a liberal middle class Jewish couple who do their best to help him fit in. But he can't. Because for the Zionist establishment, a black African cannot possibly be a "good Jew". So Salomon has to fight for his rights. An excellent movie that peels back the thin veneer of supposedly cosmopolitan Israeli society to reveal the racist underbelly.
Finally, the PBS documentary series "NEW YORK: THE POWER AND THE PEOPLE" (FRIDAY at 7.30pm on SBS2) could be worth viewing. This week it's looking at the crucial period 1898-1918 and tracks the influx of millions of European immigrants and their struggle against the awful sweatshop conditions that many face when they reach the Promised Land. These migrants brought socialist politics and trade unionism with them and after 146 women and girls were burned to death in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory by their bosses, who locked the fire exits "to prevent theft", pressure by the workers movement and its supporters saw the first serious efforts at protective legislation enacted. No doubt the bosses at the time wrung their hands at the onerous imposition on them, just as Twiggy Forrest and his parasitic ilk do today.
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