Up a flight of stairs, behind double-enforced bulletproof glass and a large, silent bodyguard sits the office of Francisco Ramirez, a mining-policy researcher and president of a small Colombian trade union.

Mining policy really isn’t sexy stuff and researching it usually isn’t a dangerous occupation, but some of Mr. Ramirez’s conclusions can mean life or death literally and figuratively. “Once they tried to kill me right here in this office,” said the researcher, who has survived seven assassination attempts.

In December, 2005, indigenous Asian communities from the most marginalized scapes took to the streets to reclaim their livelihoods and eco-culture, redefining food sovereignty and environmental space for themselves. The resistance from the peripheral grounds against the Sixth Ministerial Conference (MC6) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the essence of decentralized grassroots small movements.

In your recent book, New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex, you state, “Never, in the almost three decades that I have been campaigning against the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power have I felt that the world is in so much danger.” What kind of risks are we currently facing?

Six years ago in 1999, at the Battle of Seattle, we heard for the first time the chant, “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! The WTO’s got to go!” It’s a chant we’re likely to be refamilarizing ourselves with when the World Trade Organization hold its fifth ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, China, this coming December.

The left fulminates against capitalism, against corporations. It rarely names names. It is time to do so. Capitalism is a system, an evil system. It is right to rage against it. But, if we want to change the system, let us pick better targets than the system itself. The corporation is the principal mechanism through which capitalism’s evil goals are pursued.

To the long list of wearying apocalyptic scenarios facing the future of humankind must, unfortunately, be appended yet another. One which, nonetheless, at least has the merit of focusing attention by virtue of its sheer immediacy.

According, then, to many of the world’s most prestigious (independent) oil geologists and institutions, not only is the era of cheap oil now almost certainly at an end, but by the end of this decade – and likely before – the price of a barrel of oil will rise well past $100, and will continue to climb quickly and inexorably thereafter.

Canada could stand to learn from Germany’s example. The emergence of big-box enterprise marks an important turn in Canadian capitalist expansion, and, if Canadians are going to maintain control of their urban space and labour conditions, they’re going to have to take a lesson from the big guy. In dealing with the non-negotiable culture of Wal-Mart, Canadians could stand to develop a little non-negotiability of their own.

U.S. President William McKinley’s words should echo with President Bush and his evangelical zealots. Like the Republican who initiated U.S. overseas military expansion, the current president also talks to God and hears His words. Like McKinley, Bush understands that the stars and stripes stand for inseparable U.S. commercial interests and pious purposes.

After McKinley was assassinated in 1900, subsequent presidents sent troops back to Cuba three times in the next two decades, until finally “losing” the island in the 1959 revolution. Until 1933, 120,000 U.S. troops occupied the Philippines. “Pacifying” those “heathens” took longer than McKinley thought and brought out the brute in the soul of U.S. Christian soldiers. Long before troops destroyed the Vietnamese village “to save it,” and a century-plus before GIs decimated Falluja and killed thousands of its residents to bring democracy to Iraq, their predecessors committed atrocities in the Philippines.

International economic power is increasingly dispersed between the competing major power blocs. However, one power centre – the U.S. – has greater domination over more sectors than the other power blocs.

The barrier to popular resistance today is neither that people think the world is fine, nor that people are passive; rather, it is that, with no reason to believe that real change is on the agenda, people actively pursue other survival options.