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When these streets talk, do we listen?
Canadian PoliticsWhether through the blood rinsed down sidewalks and into our sewers, or through organized protest, the streets have spoken many times over. They have told us that Toronto, like so many other cities in this land we call Canada, is a place of grotesque violence, abuse, and shame. As I wait for the streetcar, I picture a young Black man, not yet grown into his adolescent body, being pinned down to the ground. The officers kneel on the boy’s spine as his lips and teeth gnash against the ground below. “I didn’t do anything!” he yells. “You’re hurting me!”
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“If Bernie Runs?” Wrong Question
USA PoliticsSanders did better than I expected, pushing the Clinton machine to the wall with essentially no support from Big Business – no small accomplishment in America’s money-drenched political system. Still, even after the Clinton machine and the corporate-/Clinton-captive Democratic National Committee had treated him with elitist abuse and clearly rigged the primary races and the Democratic National Convention against him, Bernie dutifully campaigned for her (as he promised to do from the outset) right up until the terrible Trump victory day.
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NAFTA renewed. Now what?
GlobalizationWas the push to renegotiate NAFTA only about Trump playing to his base? Was Trump reacting to a decline in the American empire? Was it about moving away from multilateral agreements to bilateral ones where U.S. strength weighs heavier? Is the narrowing of options that the renegotiation of NAFTA exposed just about free-trade agreements, or does it point to a more general characteristic of capitalism today?
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For a grieving optimism
EnvironmentOrganizing out of our grief for this planet and all of us on it rests on the certain knowledge that, for the vast majority of us who are not rich, most of the problems facing us now are at a scale beyond our individual capacity to solve. The way to be a grieving optimist is to band together with others who care about this world, and to struggle. We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.
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JNF Canada Has Supported Israeli Army, Settlements
Human RightsA comprehensive complaint has been filed with the Canada Revenue Agency regarding the Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNF Canada). The complaint, submitted in October 2017 with the support of Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), presents detailed evidence that JNF Canada works in violation of the Income Tax Act and in contravention of Canadian foreign policy in various ways.
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The Canadian Carceral State: What is to be done? Ask prisoners!
Human RightsTo borrow a concept from the critical criminologist Michelle Brown, we live in a culture of punishment, a milieu where public understandings of how punishment impacts the lives of the punished is more often than not consumed through cultural representations that are sensational and stereotypically mediated, making penal spectators out of the public and a spectacle out of the punished.
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The criminalized lives of others
Canadian PoliticsThe Stanley verdict drew attention to a system marked by hypocrisy that results in unfair treatment. It was a harsh reminder that the criminal justice system has been deployed ever since Canada’s inception to protect the use of the land for European settlement, to maintain and promote business ventures and private investments, and to control people living in poverty, especially in urban areas.
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Resistance Is the Supreme Act of Faith
Social MovementsThe struggle against the monstrous radical evil that dominates our lives—an evil that is swiftly despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction, stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms, waging endless war and solidifying the obscene wealth of an oligarchic elite at our expense—will be fought only with the belief that resistance, however futile, insignificant and even self-defeating it may appear, can set in motion moral and spiritual forces that radiate outward to inspire others, including those who come after us.
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Exploitation and Expropriation, or Why Capitalism Must be Attacked with Equal Force on Every Front
Economic CrisisIf we want a social system that is not alienating—one in which production is more decentralized, controlled by workers and communities, with meaningful labor, with smaller-scale agriculture, with human-centered technology, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive democracy, with poisons removed for our soil, air, and water—then we must look at what we have now as a whole, as an interconnected set or processes and institutions that are utterly alienating. They must be rejected root and branch, attacked all at once and all the time.
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Want Better Sex? Consider Moving to a Socialist Country
SocialismIt could be the deprioritization of female pleasure, resulting in fewer orgasms for women. Or it might be capitalism. Kristen Ghodsee, author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, argues that the economic system contributes not only to women’s sexual dissatisfaction, but to their ability to find satisfying romantic partners and any semblance of work-life balance.
