Despite U.S. government claims, there is still no evidence that Plan Colombia has achieved its principal goal of dramatically reducing the flow of cocaine to the United States. On the other hand, Plan Colombia’s militarization of Putumayo has contributed significantly to increased oil exploration by multinational companies in this resource-rich region.

Activists use and consume art, and artists live in a real world which they must find ways to engage and transform. The video activist movement really has tried to bring the two spheres together. Nonetheless, we have yet to take the most important step toward a truly “useful” art movement: we must correct our wrong-headed tendency to subservience.

For 29 years, Co-op Radio has provided its listeners with an alternative source of current events, arts, multicultural and multilingual programming free of paid advertisements. In an age of media convergence and repetitive play lists, the station’s more than 2,000 members support an independent media outlet that airs diverse content.

There appears to be a grotesque hypocrisy between the government trying to de-list progressive feminist, environmental and animal rights groups while permitting so-called charities that have a right-wing, patriarchal and economistic ideology to engage in highly political activities. It’s time for the Canada Revenue Agency to keep up with the times and to provide a progressive, balanced, and fair voice in its implementation of Canada’s charity laws.

It is our view that the dilemmas facing cities in Canada, and around the world, are of staggering importance; that local politics and struggles are crucial to political organization today; and that confronting neoliberalism is also a confrontation with the political forces shaping today’s city of glittering towers, endless sprawl, shameful poverty, public wreckage.

For anyone who paid any attention to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), media coverage of his death on June 5, 2004 was nothing less than a crazy-making experience.Who was the man in that coffin? Certainly not the man on historical record.

Finally, it is finished. After spending six months in Argentina and shooting 350 hours of footage, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein have completed their first documentary film. “The Take” is a riveting story about a group of metal workers from Buenos Aires who form a worker co-operative and take over the abandoned auto-parts factory where they once earned a good living. In the background, presidential candidates Néstor Kirchner and Carlos Menem go head-to-head in the first major elections in Argentina since the devastating economic collapse of 2001. Argentina is polarized between those who support the nascent worker democracy movement, and those who want to see a return to the elitist politics of the Menem era. Meanwhile, Maty, a young trainee at the worker-controlled Zanon Ceramics Factory will boycott the election process under the slogan: “Our Dreams Won’t Fit on Your Ballots.”

ncert Properties is a big business. Between 1989 and 1999 it built 80 per cent of the rental housing constructed in Vancouver. With an asset base of $450 million in 2000, it’s now the largest developer of rental housing in Western Canada. Not bad for an enterprise completely controlled by the labour movement. Concert, and its companion enterprise Concert Real Estate Inc., constitute one of the more visible examples of “worker capitalism”, a phenomenon that had its inception in the 1980s and is now flourishing across Canada.

All over the world, the international Left – including the global social justice movement – is peering sceptically at Venezuela, unsure of what to make of President Hugo Chávez’ alleged democratic revolution. Is Chávez the next Allende? Is the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ really revolutionary? Is it anti-capitalist? Or does he merely represent another chimera in a long line of populists who rile up the masses with rousing condemnations of US Imperialism, only to quietly cut deals with international capital?

The first thing the young man sees as he emerges from The Corporation is the theatre’s bright, shiny Pepsi Machine. Where once he saw a harmless soft drink, he now sees a bloated and arrogant corporate product. He gives the machine a slap.

“So long, sucker. It’s over. I’m ready to give you up.”