If we are to build solidarity among the many different anti-capitalist causes, we need both a critique and a positive mission shared by Reds and Greens; people of First World, Third World, and Fourth world societies; men and women, and members of both mainstream and minority groups in all societies. The Earth charter may provide this shared positive vision.

In many of the advanced economies, unions are in serious trouble. This crisis for unions is in part the result of changing workplaces and labour markets compounded by the hostility of employers and governments to unions.

In one corner of the village, the sun shines through the dusty and cracked windows of the village’s one-room assembly hall. Sitting on the building’s cement floor are 60 girls and young women, the reason for today’s celebration. The day is a chance to teach the young women an important lesson that may one day save their lives.

This is a war waged against Palestinian refugees by the government of Lebanon. It is not waged through military campaigns and guerrilla battles as in the Lebanese civil war, but through policies and laws which are slowly choking the life from Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.

Before the invasion of Iraq a group of students and community members occupied Lockheed’s office in an action of non-violent civil disobedience–one of the most important and underreported actions of the anti-war movement.

Each 24 hours the news cycle groans these days with an overload of content. The stories laid out daily alternate between themes of menace and hope, import and emptiness, meaning and futility.

Bush’s “State of the Union” speech was not in praise of “America” as he claimed–it was about fascism at home and imperialism abroad. It was a surreal vision that placed the U.S. in the center of a divine universe, in which the Chosen People would exterminate its enemies and forcibly enlighten its reluctant allies.

Excuse me, may I have your cell phone? I see you’re wearing a pager; may I have that too? Your lap top computer, if you don’t mind? And I’ll take the palm pilot I see in your shirt pocket.

Feel like somebody’s bewildered, possibly hostile naked lunch without your high tech toys?

Welcome to the wrong side of the Digital Divide, the developing world in which hundreds of millions of poor people in the south are left behind the more prosperous people of the north at the lightning speed of the latest computer chip.

For many of us, it’s hard to get excited about another review of NAFTA’s economic successes or failures. It’s not that such an economic review is irrelevant – coping with the economic implications of NAFTA obviously remains central to anyone concerned with social change. But in itself, the economic debate is unlikely to move us much ahead. There are just too many Œwhat-ifs’ involved for any numbers to convince skeptics. (Would business investment in Canada have slowed down if the corporate sector were defeated on NAFTA? Would Canadian companies have been less productive if they didn’t face the pressures of free trade? Would U.S. retaliation against Canadian exports into the U.S. been worse?)