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How Those Who Kill Can Enter Canada While Those Who Save Lives Are Barred
World renowned, award winning journalist John Pilger commented on George Galloway’s autobiography: “Galloway’s work has saved countless lives, particularly in Iraq”. This is an accurate statement about the record of the five-times elected British MP who was described by Canadian Minister for Immigration Jason Kenny as “a threat to Canada’s security” and subsequently banned from entering Canada during March of this year. Juxtaposing the blood-soaked records of George W Bush and Bill Clinton - especially in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia and elsewhere - with the unimpeachable record of George Galloway MP, the patent rudderless and deceptive nature of the current Canadian government and its media accomplices becomes transparent. The Canadian government evidently embraces the inane ethos: “if your going to kill, make sure you kill millions.” In other words, the tin pot tyrants like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are to be demonized, subjected to show trials and marketed as a ‘threat’, while those who massacre and torture millions like Bush, Clinton, Rice and Cheney are to be venerated, ingratiated and granted VIP treatment if they choose to come to Canada at any time during their lucrative speaking tours.
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Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures
President Obama’s greatest foreign policy successes are found in the reports of the mass media. His greatest failures go unreported, but are of great consequence. A survey of the major foreign policy priorities of the White House reveals a continuous series of major setbacks, which call into question the principal objectives and methods pursued by the Obama regime.
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Media as insurgent art
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” —Bertolt Brecht
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Tough union, tough lessons
Over the last three decades in Canada, governments’ neoliberal policies have created a crisis of under-funding in post-secondary education. With steep funding cuts, universities and colleges have looked to other measures to balance their books: increasing tuition and ancillary fees, soliciting greater private funding and implementing cost-reduction measures like increased reliance on contract faculty to teach courses. The present economic crisis has further exacerbated the financial situation at many universities, as cash-strained investors restrict their donations, universities’ sizable endowment funds bleed with investment losses, and deficit-laden governments balk at increasing education funding.
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York University’s get of jail free card
The longest university strike in English Canada came to an unhappy end on January 29, 2009, in a manner that should send a wake-up call to an entire labour movement already on the defensive. After 85 days on the picket line in an effort to reverse the trend towards casualized teaching in post-secondary institutions, the contract professors and graduate-student workers of CUPE 3903 were legislated back to work by a Liberal-Conservative coalition. One by one, MPPs stood up to vote for Bill 145, as picketers outside could be heard singing the words, “we’ll not stand for this.” Within days, there were reports of imminent legislation forcing Ottawa transit workers back on the job. Within a week, 70,000 elementary school teachers accepted a tentative agreement after being told to “watch the situation at York very closely.”
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Thinking through the York University strike
The recent strike by CUPE 3903, which represents the contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate assistants at York University, has left deep divisions in the union and on campus. In a heated discussion about the merits of the two articles we commissioned, the Dimension collective generated a number of questions over which no agreement emerged. We thought it would be useful to share these questions with our readers.
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Hughesgate: The Ugly Truth
Does it surprise us that some blogger deliberately distorted a column Lesley Hughes wrote in 2002 in his zealous efforts to embarrass her by proving that she is an anti-Semite? Hardly. Bloggers can lie. Some are desperate to be noticed. And they are unaccountable to any publication or organization.
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The Fight for the Open Internet
Since its inception the Internet has promised an extraordinary opportunity for a huge array of communicative activity. People have new ways of communicating directly with one another and independent media producers can distribute their content cheaply. More information seems to be more available to more people every day.
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Why Media Reform Should Be a Democratic Priority
Media are the institutional space that concentrates society’s symbolic power, a concentration that the Internet has only somewhat ameliorated. Yes, the Internet is an invaluable organizing tool for activism — but it’s also a foremost means of neoliberal globalization. Besides, as Steve Anderson discusses elsewhere in this issue, its most democratic aspects are under threat from the logic of enclosure, one backed by powerful corporate and commercial forces.
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Taking On Big Media in Canada
Progressive-minded Canadians have long been concerned that private media concentration threatens democratic values. In June, 2006, even the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications Report on the Canadian News Media warned that there are “areas where the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable.”
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