Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

When I first arrived at Princeton University almost fifty years ago, I felt pretty green — far from home and familiar landmarks, physical and intellectual. One of my fellow grad students, simultaneously friendly and intimidating, was Phil Green, a leftie who would go on to be a member of The Nation magazine’s board and also to write a number of weighty tomes (including Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence, a classic on the irrationalities of the nuclear balance of terror). (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes. In North America and Europe, skyrocketing food prices, combined with stagnant wages, home evictions and debt payments threaten incumbent regimes and increase pressures on all governments to take urgent action. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism by Marion Nestle University of California Press, 2007 (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health by Marion Nestle University of California Press, 2007 (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System by Jim Harding Fernwood, 2007 (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

The Dope Poet Society’s front man, Professor D, strides on stage with a rapper’s typically confident air. Snatching the mic with one hand, he thrusts the other straight up, V-shaped fingers projecting peace to the thousands gathered at Metro Hall Square for the Global Day of Protest. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world — which now literally does encompass the whole world — has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally, as well. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Soy consumption in North America and Europe is increasing exponentially, these days, for reasons ranging from health consciousness to animal rights to a more mainstream acceptance of tofu. The incredible landmass devoted to soy, however, won’t make the hippies happy. While soy is increasingly promoted as a healthy alternative to animal products in the North, the soy industry is destroying homes, livelihoods, health and the environment across South America. In the context of a global food crisis, in both the North and South large-scale agribusinesses are tightening their grip and local alternatives are espoused as the only saving grace. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world’s poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), recently likened the scale and suddenness of this humanitarian crisis to the 2004 tsunami in Asia, while noting that it is a crisis in which poor people still can often see “food on shelves, but … are priced out of the market.” (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, May/June 2008 issue

by Bryan D. Palmer
University of Illinois Press, 2007

The extraordinary British radical historian Edward Thompson described one of his goals as being to spare those whose lives and dreams are lost to history from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In writing the first half of the life of James P. Cannon, Bryan Palmer takes up an even more ambitious task. Given that Cannon later became the central figure in U.S. Trotskyism, Palmer’s task was both to spare Cannon the condescension of the mainstream and to save him from the uncritical adulation of revolutionaries who regard him as the very embodiment of “revolutionary continuity.” (Keep reading…)