The illegal referendum held on Sunday to declare autonomy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia‚s richest province, is backed by the Bush administration in an attempt to halt the leftward drift of South America. While the US embassy in La Paz blandly declares its support for “unity and democracy” in Bolivia, the government’s Interior Minister Alfredo Raba states what is widely known, that the United States “has an agenda more political than diplomatic in Bolivia, and this agenda is linked to opponents of the current government.” Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of the country, bluntly declares: “The imperialist project is to try to carve up Bolivia, and with that to carve up South America because it is the epicenter of great changes that are advancing on a world scale.” (more…)

Last year, peace activist Mordecai Briemberg was served with a lawsuit by CanWest. The charge? Producing a fake edition of CanWest’s Vancouver Sun, and infringing upon the company’s trademark related rights in the process. The four-page parody, produced by a group calling itself the “Palestine Media Collective,” focused on what they perceived to be biased media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict in the Vancouver newspaper. (more…)

Feel like you’re just treading water economically? Well, join the club. Most working Canadians are in the same boat, according to the latest Statistics Canada analysis of the 2006 census. (more…)

Introduction From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale: One predominantly based on military conquests, involving direct invasions, proxy invading armies and subsidized separatist military forces; and the other predominantly based on large-scale, long-term economic penetration via a combination of investments, loans, credits and trade in which ‘market’ power and the superiority (greater productivity) in the means of production led to the construction of a virtual empire. (more…)

May 2, 2008

On Thursday, May 1, the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) staged a one-day (one shift, actually) walkout as a protest against the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The shutdown affected ports up and down the West Coast, from San Pedro, California, to Seattle, Washington. (more…)

A storm swept the world in 1968. It arose in Vietnam, and then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. The signs and portents had been there for some years, but the speed with which it spread was not foreseen. A brutal war waged by the United States against a poor South East Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts never seen on this scale before or since. Solidarity with the communist-led Vietnamese resistance intermingled with numerous local contradictions. If the Vietnamese were defeating the world’s most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers. That was the dominant mood amongst the more radicalised segments of the Sixties generation. (more…)

“Bolivia is on the verge of exploding”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned on April 21. (more…)

In periods of changing climate, winners can quickly become losers — and vice-versa, especially when it comes to the ready availability of fresh water. In that regard, Alberta is emerging as the province to watch as the effects of anthropogenic global heating play out across Canada. (more…)