Demands for a living wage must be seen as barely the beginning of what needs to be a comprehensive campaign for better paying jobs and greater income equality. We need to shift from a minimum wage to a minimum program.

In our latest editorial, we arguel that the Left in Toronto can rise to the occasion and prove Rob Ford not only an idiot, but a useful one.

On April 22, a mass international assembly in Cochabamba, Bolivia, adopted a charter for action to protect our planet from ecological devastation. Together, they drafted a People’s Agreement that places responsibility for the climate crisis on the capitalist system and on the rich countries that “have a carbon footprint five times larger than the planet can bear.”

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With the G20 political leaders preparing to gather in Toronto this June, the outcome of the palaver can already be predicted with certainty: failure to resolve either the global economic or environmental crisis.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Haitians bore the afflictions of foreign exploitation, deforestation, and their own corrupt leaders. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Haitian government was so ill-prepared to deal with the calamitous January 12 earthquake.

A climate emergency threatens mass extinctions this century. Species are already disappearing at one thousand times the normal rate. Ample evidence points to the need for zero emissions plus more and further negative reductions of atmospheric carbon as soon as possible. Yet most “leaders” parade their gossamer fabrics of pseudo proposals, concealing the naked greed and criminality of the non-renewable energy (carbon and nuclear)- military-agricultural extraction privatized water-pharmaceutical banking-media business elites.

The climate change threat presents at least four unique difficulties. The time frame: Unlike other dire threats to human existence, such as nuclear war or military-industrial dictatorships, climate change has a finite time frame. Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cannot wait for innumerable agreements, accords, and conventions that minimize the problem, and it cannot wait for the entrenched wheels of bureaucracies to budge.

An important legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is the perpetrator’s defense “I didn’t know” at the Nuremberg tribunal hearings. More recently law challenges this “ostrich defense” by both perpetrators and bystanders, implying that there is an obligation to know. With regard to Israel/Palestine, there is little reason not to know about the horrific realities, for despite massive pro-Israeli advocacy there is ample documentation from within and without pointing to the clear culpability of the State of Israel in a number of international crimes against the Palestinian people.