Since we will not learn in school the lessons about the 1% we ought to know, many of us rely on movies and TV, so that through images and sound we can form ideas of who the men were who screwed up our economy. In Arbitrage, we see how how Hollywood conceives of a cinematic grammar into which we can analyze the nature of the people who sparked the the financial crisis.

The Dark-Knight Rises is not simply an anti-Occupy commentary, but a profoundly reactionary film reinforcing the importance of benevolent capitalism and denouncing the possibility of revolution; the movie affirms a kind of bourgeois justice.

A lot has been said about The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises. However, there have been no reviews directly comparing the two films, their different conceptions of justice, and their subsequent messaging about politics and class struggle.

It has been a painfully long time since the opinion poll was fully assimilated into Canadian political life. In the arid and austere years of the 1980s, both federal parties began to outlay heaps of money to commission pollsters (an originally pejorative term) to not measure but control public opinion. Canadian politics has suffered accordingly. No stranger to this uninspired and faltering form of democracy, Judy Rebick, in her new book, sees the supple practices of Occupy Wall Street as the “deepest form of democracy I’ve ever seen.”

Published within a year of the historic protests in Madison against Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation, the essays collected in Wisconsin Uprising offer diverse, insightful perspectives on the events that took place in the winter and spring of 2011, as well as analyses of the protests’ implications for the labor movement.

Review of New Directions in Saskatchewan Public Policy.

The tumultuous back story to how the rapidly shifting grounds of the U.S. labour movement has continued to be rocked by internal divisions and contradictions, is masterfully examined by the veteran labour journalist and activist, Steve Early, in The Civil Wars in the U.S. Labour Movement: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?

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.

DGR dares environmental groups to focus on decisive tactics rather than mindless lobbying and silly stunts. “This book is about fighting back. And this book is about winning,” author Derrick Jensen declares in the preface to this three-way collaboration with Lierre Keith and Aric McBay.

Industrialized economies have grown most years since the mid-19th century. Globally, economic output per person increased tenfold between 1900 and 2000. Richard Heinberg says that this long run of economic growth is reaching an end owing to a number of factors: depletion of fossil fuels, minerals and fresh water; the escalating cost of industrial accidents and environmental disasters in the wake of global climate change; and financial disruptions due to the inability of our financial system to service “the enormous piles of government and private debt” generated over the past few decades.