It's easy to get demoralized these days with so much going wrong around the world. So it is incredibly encouraging to see a campaign for justice and workers' health and safety prevail against supposedly insurmountable odds.
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The SPP is dead. Let's keep it that way
The SPP is dead. Let's keep in that way.
With virtually no fanfare or media analysis, one of the most transformative agreements ever signed by Canada and the US (and Mexico) is officially dead. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), the formal expression of a corporate lobbying campaign called deep integration, is no more. Its official US government website declared last month: "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is no longer an active initiative. There will not be any updates to this site." (It's been edited since to be a little less brutal).
We should celebrate. It seems the economic crisis had a silver lining.
Was the NDP right to delay an election?
The political story in the capital is that the Bloc and the NDP will sustain the Harper government, at least for several weeks. The commentators have not been kind and have characterized the NDP particularly as weak and vacillating, nothing short of turncoats on their record of 79 votes against the Conservatives.
Stephen Harper: Unfit to govern
Anticipating another federal election feels like being in the movie Groundhog Day with the same players (save one) going through the same routines, everyone stuck in the same place, doing the same thing.
The two major parties are tied (according to the most reliable polls) at levels that are a long way off from majority territory. The NDP has learned nothing from the last two elections and the Greens are stuck at levels that mean they cannot possibly elect even one MP. Quebec will show its contempt for the whole mess by electing more Bloc members.
The most mean-spirited PM in history
Why the outcome of the Afghan election doesn't matter
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." -Karl Marx
The Afghan presidential election will prove to be simply irrelevant. The U.S., whose imperial hubris renders it willfully ignorant of all other cultures and societies, invaded Afghanistan with the stated purpose of eliminating Al-Qaeda (remember them -- the few hundred armed followers of Osama bin what's-his-name?).
In doing so they repeated the same blind arrogance of their imperial predecessors, the British and the Soviets. Getting in was easy; getting out on their own terms -- with a credible pro-Western government in place -- is proving almost impossible.
The politics of meaning: Soul searching for the left
If progressives, whether in unions, activist groups or political parties, don’t soon begin doing politics differently -- radically differently -- they will fail to show that “a better world is possible.”
And the price of failure will be catastrophic.
We have known for years that our consumer culture is out of control and our obsession with having more and more stuff has reached the status of a virus. Our consumer-driven global economy is a lethal threat to the planet and every one of its eco-systems.
Free Trade is Pretty Pricey
Last weekend, while crossing the border back to Ontario from Buffalo, our car was stopped by a customs officer. “What were you guys doing in the States?” he asked. “Do any shopping?” “Okay, have a great day.”
Nothing strange here, except for one detail: this man had a U.S. flag on his sleeve. He stopped every car before waving them on to Canadian border guards who repeated the process all over again. It felt like a glimpse into Fortress North America, a not-so-distant future in which U.S. security officers are the gatekeepers, not just of the U.S.