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Moving Beyond Ford: The Transportation We Want
Canadian PoliticsIn Toronto and beyond, campaigns are underway to confront the Ford government’s initiative to take the Toronto subway system from the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in order to reorganize, further automobilize and possibly privatize transit and transportation across the Greater Toronto area (GTA). This and other Ford Government initiatives have put progressive transportation advocates as well as transit riders and workers on the defensive. Once more, proactive initiatives are forced onto the backburner.
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Islamophobia is practically enshrined as public policy in Australia
CultureAustralia now has a public collection of open white nationalists – from antisemitic podcasters to would-be infiltrators of mainstream conservative parties. They need to be understood in their proper context: the decades-long drumbeat of xenophobia and Muslim-hate, which has issued from some of the most powerful institutions in the country. This is the environment in which Muslims, refugees and immigrants have come to be understood as enemies of Australia. It may be an environment that has nurtured white supremacist terror.
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It’s the Green New Deal or Else
EnvironmentDo environmental calamity and the real risk of extinction count as “extravagantly high costs”? When might we be willing to achieve the not-so-fringe benefit of continued existence by confronting the totalitarian “command and control” imposed on all of us by big carbon capital’s social and economic preference for short-term private accumulation and profit over the longer-term common good.
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Students in 40 countries will go on strike this Friday to demand climate change action
EnvironmentIn schools across at least 40 countries, students are expected to walk out of their classrooms this Friday (March 15) to participate in what have become known as the “school strikes” against climate change inaction, according to Reuters. The climate advocacy group 350.org claims the count of countries joining the strike on Friday is even higher, with children from 72 countries committed to participating. The school strike movement was inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has been striking from school every Friday since last August.
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Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics
Middle EastThe Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an anti-Semitic trope.
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Liberals Are Digging Their Own Grave With Russiagate
USA PoliticsProfessor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and NYU, Stephen Cohen, has a new book out that addresses the possibility of a U.S.-Russia armed conflict in the near future. Part of the current rejection of the Kremlin that has brought the two nations to this dangerous brink, according to Cohen, is rooted in the U.S. political elites’ desire to maintain their ability to determine the world order. When Vladimir Putin was first elected, the professor explains, it became immediately obvious that he wanted Russia to take part in shaping “how the world is structured.”
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Outside Jasper National Park, a coal mine threatens an Indigenous community’s water supply
EnvironmentTeck Resources Ltd., a B.C.-based mining corporation, plans to expand its Cheviot Mine over the Cardinal Divide — a wide alpine ridge separating two major watersheds — to Redcap Mountain, just east of Jasper National Park, Alta. Expanding across this divide extends the risks of selenium and nitrate contamination to the headwaters of the Cardinal River.
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How Can We Prevent Climate Catastrophe?
EnvironmentThere are other demands that could and should be raised, including a huge expansion of mass transit and a state-of-the art high-speed-train network across the country. Demands like these begin to challenge the logic of the capitalist market and give the opportunity to build campaigns and movements that can go on to fight for more. The role of socialists is to participate in whatever struggles like this emerge while making an argument about why we need to go much further with the goal of building an ecosocialist alternative to capitalism.
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A Green New Deal of the North
EnvironmentBased on this blueprint above, we call for a coalition of allies and supporters to join a democratic and participatory roundtable — that we may create a common GND platform to give united momentum to our struggles, our organizing and our advocacy. From there we aim to coordinate our efforts as we take the message to all levels of government, the media sphere, the private sector, our civil society peers and the broader public. We can collectively overcome this crisis. And in the process, build each corner of that other world we all know is within reach.
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Canada’s corrupt foreign policy practices come home to roost on Parliament Hill
Canadian BusinessJustin Trudeau’s government is engulfed in a major political scandal that lays bare the role of corporate power in Ottawa. But SNC Lavalin’s important role in Canadian foreign policy has largely been ignored in discussion of the controversy. The PMO has been accused of interfering in the federal court case against the giant Canadian engineering and construction firm for bribing officials in Libya. Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould claims she was repeatedly pressured to defer prosecution of the company and instead negotiate a fine.
