In this installment, Chris Webb debates the political capacity of Twitter, Facebook and open-source software but warns “this technology has a dark side…tech-empires are still in the hands of the privileged few”. And in Soderbergh’s film, Che, the director ultimately reinforces the commodity of “Che”, disregarding political context and cinematic creativity.

In an environment where working people in Ontario have suffered major setbacks, organized labour’s response has so far been disappointing. The May 7 coming together of over 1,600 stewards, staff, and other union reps in Toronto around the necessity of fighting against attacks by employers and governments was an unprecedented and impressive exception that brought some hope for forward motion.

The mark of the 4000 Mexican farm labourers that come to Leamington, Canada’s “Tomato Capital”, each year to harvest up to half a billion tomatoes a year is necessarily transient. Despite working and living in Leamington up to eight months of the year, some workers returning ten seasons in a row, their presence is often treated with suspicion. They are wanted as labourers only, not citizens.

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.

I am disappointed with the view of some knowledgeable commentators over Scotland’s release of the dying man who was convicted of the Lockerbie-airline bombing.

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

The jury is still out on participatory democracy in Canada. Even before questions of participatory government can be breached, however, there is a long way to go. The common refrain is that a functioning democracy requires an informed population. Instead, we have a population with parcels of information, often distorted and just as often outright falsified for political gain.

What were to happen if we were to challenge our existing social structure by demanding a shorter working day? With more time to pursue personal creative efforts and desires, society could move away from a state of near-constant fatigue and towards a more just society; a society that could focus on more grave concerns that the planet’s neglected majority face on a daily basis.

The most striking aspect of the prolonged and deepening world recession/depression is the relative and absolute passivity of the working and middle class in the face of massive job losses, big cuts in wages, health care and pension payments and mounting housing foreclosures. To explore some tentative hypotheses of why there is little organized protest, we need to examine the historical-structural antecedents to the world economic depression.

It’s now been just over six months since the new US Administration took office, enough time for the underlying ruse to have become crystal clear. In place of the old Bush-era bellicose vocabulary has been substituted the soothing rhetoric of conciliation, this whilst the actual substance of America’s foreign and domestic policies have been altered not one iota. Not one atom

“Why haven’t there been attempted coups in Washington DC? Because there’s no U.S. Embassy there.” (Joke told by Chilean journalist to President Obama during President Michelle Bachelet’s White House visit.)

In 1954, conservative Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s government, a coup modeled on a 1953 “regime change” in Iran. In 1964-65, liberal Lyndon Johnson authorized coup d’états in Brazil and the Dominican Republic. When Dominicans revolted, Johnson sent in troops.