Riotously popular economist Umair Haque had a few interesting tweets about America, corporations and billionaires this week. [View the story “What’s Wrong with America, Corporations and Billionaires?” on Storify] December 30, 2013 How the Occupy Movement is Enriching People’s Lives (1) April 18, 2011 Embracing BC NDP Corporate Tax Increases
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Politics, Re-Spun: A Key Union Priority for 2014
Naomi Klein urges unions to join climate change fight Many groups are calling for significant and sufficient action to address climate change, which is fantastic. But unions have not been loud enough. This is significant because they often have more money than many other progressive groups to fight for the
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Ultimate New Year’s Resolution
It’s mostly us. Many of us have heard of the idea of planning policy to consider effects seven generations downline. We’re pretty smart. It shouldn’t be that hard. But we have many incentives to think short term. Sometimes so short that we are ignorantly and apathetically victimizing our descendants. But
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Greed + Government Cuts Erode Society [Bah, Humbug!]
The greedy and selfish among us are NOT on our side. Happy Christmas Eve! I hope you’re all giving lots of money to charities because ’tis the season and all that. But what happens if generally, as a society, we can’t or won’t give so much? Coupled with public sector
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Enbridge: What Now? We Escalate Our Fight
Some breaking news occurred yesterday, the Joint Review Panel of the National Energy Board approved the Enbridge pipeline, but with 209 conditions. To quote a teenager from 1994: “Big whoop.” Also, big whoop goes out to the awesome pictures of soon to be decimated pristine wilderness on the report cover.
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: ACTION: Illegal Israeli Settlement Goods Sold at London Drugs
SodaStream boycott informational picket Saturday, Dec. 21, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. London Drugs, Broadway @ Cambie, Vancouver Below is a notice of an important event happening on Saturday in Vancouver. If something is labelled as “Made in Israel” but is really made in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Fixing Cyncial Corporate Media
How to inoculate yourself against cynical corporate media. Corporate news media is not on our side. It is on the side of stoking fear, cynically eroding possibilities of a better, more robust democracy, and scaring us into obedience to corporations and government through sensational stories that undermine our happiness. But
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Facebook Is the New AOL/Compuserve Big Brother
The evolution of the decay of Facebook privacy. The late, great Neil Postman once wrote that we’d more likely voluntarily embrace the fascism of Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984. The corporate version of this is the crack-like addiction a billion people have to the Facebook. But it’s worse
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Fried Squirrels
It’s a crisp, foggy November Saturday morning in the south side of the city. Seventeen people sit in the large open area at the back end of an organic fair trade coffee shop run by a workers’ co-op inspired by the Mondragon movement in Spain. Meet-ups like this are quite
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Secret Weapon: Self-Esteem
It’s Monday. Have you contributed positively to a young girl’s self esteem yet today? If not, here is some inspiration and a place to get better resourced! “As a child, I never heard one woman say to me: ‘I love my body.’ Not my mother, my elder sister, my best
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The rise of Bitcoin: and the challenge to the global domination of big money
The following article was written on October 25. I wanted to read it over once more before publishing it, then got busy with other things and forgot about it. In the roughly six weeks that have passed since the writing of this article, the Bitcoin prices have gone from roughly
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Practice CrimeStop: You Are the New Terrorist
Balloons are a threat to civil order. The police must protect themselves from you with riot gear. You are a bad person. You. You enemy of the state. You radical environmentalist. Or worker rights advocate. Or whatever cause you are promoting. You. You are a threat to order. When you
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: IKEA: Swedish for Discrimination Against Workers
Values, discrimination, the Swedish way: all these ideas are in the mix as stakeholders of IKEA’s treatment of workers express how they feel about IKEA’s plan to break its union in Richmond, BC. We’ve been writing about this new front line in Canada’s war against workers for months now. But
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Why the Rich Want You to Hate Your Union
Greed is a powerful thing. It motivates the greedy to convince workers that they should hate any efforts to make their work better and reduce the level of abuse and oppression they suffer. If you’d like a list of why they want us to hate our unions, click through to
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Stop Saying Tax “Haven” and Tax “Burden”
The finance minister and his tax evasion buddy. The latest nonsense of the hyper-rich 1% and their political compradors has reminded us once again, that the rich hide their money from government to avoid paying taxes…because they’re rich and can get their way. Part of how they do that is
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: More CBC Privatization
The private sector is grinning at the stealth privatization of Hockey Night in Canada. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hockey Night in Canada, privatization version! Yes, the CBC is now in a privatization scheme called a public-private partnership [see below] to continue its mission to dump the most culturally significant
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: NAFTA, “Free Trade” and the TPP: Fast-Track To Full Corporate Rule
“Twenty years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law. At the time, advocates painted a rosy picture of booming U.S. exports creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and economic development in Mexico, which would bring the struggling country in line with its wealthier northern
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Canada-EU CETA trade agreement has “troubling” elements: Yves Engler [VIDEO]
Yves Engler, a Canadian activist and author of The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy, discusses the “troubling” elements in the Canada-EU CETA trade agreement. The post Canada-EU CETA trade agreement has “troubling” elements: Yves Engler [VIDEO] appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: US government shutdown, and other fairy tales and political theatre
I’m not sure what to make of the hoopla going on in the US right now. I’m inclined to think it’s all just political theatre, as Gerald Celente calls it, designed to distract the people from the real issues – the central one being, who controls the government and the
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The deeper reasons for the “war on drugs”
There is a deeper reason for the war on drugs, which is the central reason for the policy, even outweighing profits from private prisons and seizure of property by law enforcement officers, both of which no doubt are also significant and strong motivations for keeping the “war on drugs” going.
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