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Ontario NDP’s climate plan is too little, too late
Now is not the time for timidity. The NDP is ostensibly the only party willing to take on a Green New Deal and make it a part of its platform. Andrea Horwath and party insiders, however, are too afraid of the cries of populism from the Liberals and Tories to give the people what they are craving. Standing with the voters isn’t populism, it is how elections are won. And winning, well that’s good politics.
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Joe Biden and the new climate denialism
As Biden seems poised to move into a dominant position in the race for president, the progressives and socialists who vote for him can’t become complacent like they did after Obama’s victory in 2008. The only way to push the administration to take the kind of climate action necessary to avoid the worst warming scenarios will require an organizational effort not seen in the United States in many decades.
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Capitalism and the limits of greening
At a time when corporate behemoths are destroying the planet, “greening” programs like those envisioned by Klein and the Dems–no matter how urgently conceived–cannot offer durable solutions to climate change. No amount of policy, market, or technological measures can deter the headlong march toward global disaster. At present humanity has no choice but to find a path toward a post-capitalist ecological society.
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Labour a key partner in a Canadian Green New Deal
Well over a decade ago, we were involved in the creation of Blue Green Canada—an initiative that emerged to address historic mistrust between trade unions and environmentalists. In the years since, friends and allies on both sides of the equation have worked hard to strengthen relations. Once a novel idea, co-operation between union and environmental activists has entered the mainstream.
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Canada needs a Green New Deal
With every new decision to support fossil fuel infrastructure and corporate restructuring in the name of profit, the scale of the alternative plan to counter these actions needs to become more ambitious and far-reaching. A Green New Deal can put workers and the environment at the centre of economic policy and ensure that the necessary transformation reaches all areas of people’s lives.
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The New Deal is not enough
Look back to the southern aristocrats who owned plantations and held human beings as slaves. When confronted with a challenge to their slavery-based system, the slave-owning class was prepared to fight a civil war to save it. The capitalist class, which today rules the country and dominates the global economic system, will be just as intransigent.
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The Great Recession
Capitalism is currently enmeshed in its most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression. And, just as in that earlier historic conjuncture, while visiting enormous trauma and privation upon working people, this crisis pried open the seams of the system in a way that opened up possibilities – too soon foreclosed – for a different tomorrow. So, the current crisis is a watershed, heralding both pain and the prospect of change.
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Glen Murray’s Failed New Deal
When he was president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Jack Layton called for cities to be recognized constitutionally so as to be independent of the provinces and to be able to create their own forms of taxation. The Federation backed his argument that cities could not continue to finance themselves through property taxes alone. The media and federal governments chose to ignore the issue until Winnipeg’s then-mayor, Glen Murray, picked up on the idea and made it a national issue to the point that a cities agenda has become a declared top priority of Paul Martin’s new Liberal government.
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Cities and Imperialism
Armoured Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers tearing down neighbourhoods in Gaza; fierce battles raging in the winding streets of Fallujah; smart missiles blasting dense housing blocks in the West Bank – these recurrent images from the Middle East point to more than attacks on “terrorist” targets and “regrettable” collateral damage, as is often claimed by the Pentagon or the Israeli Defence Force. They also represent two examples of urbicide: a concerted and preemptive military strategy designed to undermine the urban foundations for independence; destroy networks of resistance; and separate settlers and occupiers from immobilized colonized populations while demolishing their infrastructures of survival.