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Rethinking some dominant approaches to climate change
EnvironmentAlso, we need to center the working class in a just transition: Decommodify survival by guaranteeing living wages, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, water, energy, public transit etc. Demilitarize, decolonize and strive for a future of international solidarity and cooperation. Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition.
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A Future Without Fossil Fuels?
EnvironmentImagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren’t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change—the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry—had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
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The War on AMLO
Latin America and the CaribbeanDelegitimation, after all, is a gradual process of erosion, and when it comes to progressive governments, with their reduced margin for error, missteps that in themselves seem minor can prove fatal. It is imperative, then, that the radicalized political base that elected AMLO does not allow itself to become lulled into complacency by the false belief that winning office is the same as conquering power.
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1919: A Powerful Interpretation of Canada’s Most Famous Strike
Crucially, the book perceptively roots the origins of the Strike in the systematic dispossession and genocide of the Indigenous peoples who called these lands home. Capital’s dominance of the city and its environs would have been impossible without it. Along this line, the book does well to connect the events in Winnipeg to working-class protest across Canada and the globe.
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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.”
