The fate of Dr. Hassan Diab is being determined by scapegoating and by an absolutist moral belief that law is engraved in stone. This undeveloped form of morality reduces justice to rules in which the state’s role is limited to examining compliance with the law. In Dr. Diab’s case, appeals were rejected and ultimately blamed for preventing the efficient processing of his extradition.

Clearly and starkly, the “progressive” climate proposals Max Ajl critiques in his new book, A People’s Green New Deal, are frighteningly inadequate. Dire human threats and the meeting of human needs require an informed, people-collaborative implementation in varied regulatory jurisdictions worldwide. The current system is steeply regressed and must be changed utterly to provide basic human needs.

This masterful exegesis tells of a group of thinkers who formulated the assumptions and prescriptions of global neoliberalism. This intellectual history tells of their underlying nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War when beliefs about the smooth functioning of the old order ignored its exploitation of the majority of the people and of the resources in the world.

Hassan Diab’s defenders include Amnesty International, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the BC Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Independent Jewish Voices, Union Juive Francaise pour La Paix (France). Counted among his many supporters are Noam Chomsky, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, and Monia Mazigh.

This book covers so much and ought to be read in its entirety. Much originally came from Reproductive Justice, first organized by African American feminists in 1994. They transformed the singular focus on abortion rights to include the right to become a mother and the “right to parent our children in safe and healthy environments.

How does one cost the killing of a human being, as if military budgets can compare with the cost of providing food and water, homes and healthcare? This brief exploration suggests that among the salient regressive individual pulls are militarism and nationalism. Violence is preventable and is not hard-wired in human nature. At issue is survival, necessitating responsible human relationships as articulated by revolutionary mothers.

Radicals including our own founding editor Cy Gonick, legal theorist Ummni Khan, author Gary Kinsman and musicians Geoff Berner and Todd Kowalski recount the early experiences that shaped their political lives, galvanized their spirit for activism and ultimately defined their diverse creative work.

This very different kind of economy based on providing for everyone’s basic needs and protecting people from life-threatening impoverishment can draw on previous work that calls for a liveable international guaranteed income. There is enough wealth to expeditiously bail out banks and launch wars – without a “transition”.

The book is of interest to Canadians in at least three ways: Canada’s longstanding involvement with Zionism; Butler’s analysis of ethics particularly in relation to violence and the nation-state and the possibilities of cohabitation; her implicit critique of liberal individualism in that she starts with the fact that people are inherently interconnected with each other.

Ian Angus and Simon Butler ’s new book about population control, or “populationism” in the widest sense, is invaluable for people concerned about climate change, climate justice, environmental racism, and system change.