Golinger gives a passionate and meticulous presentation of a few recent years, which historians may one day see as the pivotal period of Latin American history – a time when U.S. power throughout the hemisphere began to crack and when Canadians have many concerns about “deep integration” with the U.S.

We are shown Moore’s self-serving career beginning with his days in Davison and Flint, Michigan, working for the Flint Voice, from where he moved to Mother Jones magazine, promising “to return Mother Jones to its hell-raising roots.” His tenure there was brief, and his firing is widely (but erroneously, we are told) understood as a genuine case of the Left eating its own.

We Don’t Play Golf Here!, directed by Saul Landau, is a series of vignettes exposing the impact of globalization on working-class people on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border. The opening story documents the struggle between the people of Tepoztlán and the golf-crazy elites and their developers, who planned to construct an eighteen-hole course, chalets and country club.

They came by the hundreds, packing the Commodore, Vancouver’s big-band-era ballroom, with leopard-print leggings and neon arm bands to see the socially conscious rapper, M.I.A. Known for her political lyrics, her eclectic personal style and her culture-mashing sound – a raw fusion of dancehall reggae, favela funk and electro – M.I.A. has recently taken up the role of brash envoy for the Third World.

In early June, 2007, I was one of seven Saskatchewan women who made their way to Boston to record the vocal tracks for an ecofeminist recording project, My Heart Is Moved. In all, 85 women from ten different bio-regions of North America – many of whom had never before met – gathered to sing songs based on the Earth Charter, a global peoples’ document on sustainable living.

Since its inception the Internet has promised an extraordinary opportunity for a huge array of communicative activity. People have new ways of communicating directly with one another and independent media producers can distribute their content cheaply. More information seems to be more available to more people every day.

First, a confession. Whenever I come across Brian Mulroney’s photograph in the newspaper, I amuse myself by blackening his teeth. It’s therapeutic. I tell myself: Somebody’s got to do it – for all the life-threatening wounds the man inflicted on this country, its media has never raised a hand to him. Not until November of 2007, that is.

Media are the institutional space that concentrates society’s symbolic power, a concentration that the Internet has only somewhat ameliorated. Yes, the Internet is an invaluable organizing tool for activism – but it’s also a foremost means of neoliberal globalization. Besides, as Steve Anderson discusses elsewhere in this issue, its most democratic aspects are under threat from the logic of enclosure, one backed by powerful corporate and commercial forces.

To live under external ownership and control has been the common fate of Canadians, and has powerfully conditioned our lives and our politics. Aboriginal people were so treated from early on by the settlers who, in turn, embraced their own lot as imperial subjects.

The debate in Quebec over reasonable accommodations is, in reality, one of national identity and how to both construct and integrate this young, still-evolving nation. Never before – at least in recent history – has the tension between the Canadian model of multiculturalism and Quebec’s pursuit of the intercultural model been as strong.