If you want to know the state of the relationship between democratically elected governments of the West and the multinational corporations, all you have to do is look at the case of the Parliament of Westminster and News International. The British par…
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Politics, Re-Spun: Austerity Leads to Suicide Rate Increase
Friday’s Vancouver Sun had a short item that you might have missed, “Suicides up, road deaths down due to recession.” It’s in the bottom corner of page B5: Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Greece at a Crossroads
Now that the Greek government has survived a confidence vote in Parliament, the stage is set in Greece for further confrontations ahead of next week’s decision on the new “austerity” plan demanded by the “troika” – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Union (EU). While the origins of […]
Continue readingNow here’s a death penalty I can support
Former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, now secretary of Homeland Security for the U.S. government, is a staunch supporter of the death penalty. This is not a position I would normally agree with. However, when Ms. Napolitano refers to the Arizona Wo…
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Built to crash: the coming economic tsunami
`Would you rather have a perfectly efficient system that, if hit by a pebble, would shatter? Or, would you rather have an adaptable system that may not give you the exact output you want, but can handle anything? According to Barry Lynn of the New Am…
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Social Determinants of Health
(Note: This post contains a portion of the talk that I gave last month at the 16th International Conference of the Association of Psychology and Psychiatry for Adults and Children in Athens). Research has now clearly established that economic, and social variables – more than individual or family behavior – are the most salient factors […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Once upon a time on the bald prairie
In 1935 a group of farmers in Regina, Saskatchewan pooled their savings, re-mortgaged their farms and build the Consumer Co-operative Refinery Limited (CCRL). CCRL is the oldest and largest co-operative in the energy sector in Canada, controlled by Canadian members, and is one of the oldest energy co-operatives in the world. Who knew? This story […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Corporate Personhood Alert!
We have to spend some time this week carefully watching BC business playing good cop and bad cop. The good cop is opposing the idea of a corporate tax rate of zero, while the bad cop says that corporations should be able to vote, like real human beings. British Columbia Chamber of Commerce president John […]
Continue readingExcited Delirium: Corporate Death Penalty Enacted in the US?
Could a US Supreme Court decision set precedent for corporate ‘death sentences’?
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The system is broken: strategic voting, coalitions, and the political regime under which we live
While I can of course see the rationale for strategic voting, there is much to be said for voting with one’s conscience. When we consistently choose the lesser of two evils, our choices are reduced to evil, and the results are evil. When everyone hol…
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Anonymous: The Commons and the Last of the Outlaws?
The ongoing attacks on net neutrality constitute a new round of enclosures of the modern commons. If the original enclosure movements during 16th and 17th centuries in England signified the opening overture of capitalism, then the contemporary attacks on the electronic commons are certainly part of its fully formed fruition. Taking what was once common, […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Nestlé’s War on Breastfeeding Mothers Takes Shameful New Turn
Infant formula is a medical necessity for those who are unable to breastfeed their infants. There are a host of medically sound reasons why a mother, in conjunction with her physician would choose to utilize infant formula in lieu of breast milk. The regulated manufacturing of infant feeding products has come a long way in […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: How Can We Get Better Public Schools?
Well, the first thing we can do is carve out some time to ponder, imagine, dream, inhale, exhale, chat, brainstorm, breathe some more, and forget for a minute that we’ve had a decade of hard-core privatizing, de-funding of the public education system. It’s hard to imagine a better future when we’re constantly fighting the latest […]
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Political Economy of Professional Wrestling: Capital, Unions and Spandex
Wage Labour on the Fringes For all the attention it received, to my knowledge, no one provided much of a political analysis of Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 award-winning motion picture The Wrestler. I suspect this is largely a function of the subject matter of the film: professional wrestling has been a long standing punch-line, after all. […]
Continue readingCo2 Art: Brazilian-Owned Multinational Vale Magnanimously Agrees to Preserve Piece of ‘Group of Seven’ Country
This after an energetic one-person local campaign to save the area, near Ontario’s Willisville Mountain received over 1000 signatures on a petition and plenty of response to a Willisville Mountain Facebook page.
The area is historically, culturally an…
Continue readingVermonters tackle corporations-as-citizens issue
According to a poll by ABC News, 76 per cent of Americans oppose their Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to grant corporations the same rights as individuals when it comes to political speech and can therefore freely use their profits to support or oppose…
Continue readingpunditman: When Corporations Choose Despots Over Democracy
Obama and corporations desperately want the status quo. Even when the status quo means supporting a vicious tyrant. Egypt of course has been the country that has done much of the torturing for Obama. And this is what has Obama and corporations befuddled. The uprisings in Egypt are spontaneous. The
Continue readingpunditman: When Corporations Choose Despots Over Democracy
Obama and corporations desperately want the status quo. Even when the status quo means supporting a vicious tyrant. Egypt of course has been the country that has done much of the torturing for Obama. And this is what has Obama and corporations befuddled. The uprisings in Egypt are spontaneous. The spark that set off the uprising was the self immolation of a vegetable vendor in Tunisia about a month ago. Who’da thunk it. A vegetable vendor joins Arch Duke Ferdinand. The outcome of the revolution in Egypt is unknown and uncontrollable. So far, other than Anderson Cooper getting a boo boo, there hasn’t been much anti-americanism visible. So Obama and the corporations wait and watch. Hoping that whoever emerges as a leader is willing to accept their corrupt and criminal support. Peacenik.
by Amy Goodman
“People holding a sign ‘To: America. From: the Egyptian People. Stop supporting Mubarak. It’s over!” so tweeted my brave colleague, “Democracy Now!” senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, from the streets of Cairo.
More than 2 million people rallied throughout Egypt on Tuesday, most of them crowded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Tahrir, which means liberation in Arabic, has become the epicenter of what appears to be a largely spontaneous, leaderless and peaceful revolution in this, the most populous nation in the Middle East. Defying a military curfew, this incredible uprising has been driven by young Egyptians, who compose a majority of the 80 million citizens. Twitter and Facebook, and SMS text messaging on cell phones, have helped this new generation to link up and organize, despite living under a U.S.-supported dictatorship for the past three decades. In response, the Mubarak regime, with the help of U.S. and European corporations, has shut down the Internet and curtailed cellular service, plunging Egypt into digital darkness. Despite the shutdown, as media activist and professor of communications C.W. Anderson told me, “people make revolutions, not technology.”
The demands are chanted through the streets for democracy, for self-determination. Sharif headed to Egypt Friday night, into uncertain terrain. The hated Interior Ministry security forces, the black-shirted police loyal to President Hosni Mubarak, were beating and killing people, arresting journalists, and smashing and confiscating cameras.
punditman: When Corporations Choose Despots Over Democracy
Obama and corporations desperately want the status quo. Even when the status quo means supporting a vicious tyrant. Egypt of course has been the country that has done much of the torturing for Obama. And this is what has Obama and corporations befuddled. The uprisings in Egypt are spontaneous. The
Continue readingThe Church Of Mothra - Home Of The Breakfast Mojito! ©: Hasbro: Taking Scrabulous Away May Not Be Enough
Once, a long time ago, I was in a Labatt’s Beer focus group. I got twenty bucks and a free beer out of the deal. I doubt that Labatt’s took my answers to heart (“which of these abstract blue splashes makes you want beer more?”) but I understood the pro…
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