Politics, Re-Spun |
De-Spinning the Political and Re-Spinning it for Social, Economic and Political Justice
Updated: 5 hours 53 min ago
Back to School Activism: Wake Up, Parents!
I’ve already begun with A Back-To-School Wishlist for Society and now that school is finally starting this morning it’s time to talk about parental advocacy and activism. Parents: you are the most fundamental advocate for your students. The BC Minister of Education, for instance, is not. Do not forget that this year, and not just [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Politics, Re-Spun on Coop Radio, Labour Day 2010
Imtiaz Popat and I celebrated Labour Day on “The Rational” last night. The video podcast is below. We discussed: Labour Day my Labour Day article today: “Labour Day, Dignity and Doubling the CPP” volunteer labour dignity for seniors doubling the CPP because $11,000/year is unacceptable BC’s pathetic minimum wage a fall federal election could lead [...]
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The National Post’s Delusion and Hyperbole
We already know the National Post is aimed at the right wing, American republican-loving, conservative, anti-progressive markets in Canada. On the weekend we saw a shining example of the kind of delusion and hyperbole that is fit for the front page [albeit, below the fold] in a story about pregnant “illegal” Mexicans invading the USA: [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Labour Day, Dignity and Doubling the CPP
This Labour Day, working people once again reflect upon our standing in society. Wealth continues to concentrate among the hyper-rich. The middle class is under attack, the proportion of Canadians living one paycheque away from homelessness is daunting, and the National Post noted Labour Day with an unhinged anti-union editorial. Meanwhile, this weekend’s Labour Day [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Making the Liberals Eat their HST Lies
Before we explore how the BC Liberals are going to spin their extended lie about not having the HST on their radar before the 2009 election, based on FOI records released Wednesday, let’s first take a look at how the National Post bungled its BC reporting today. In this piece, they pick up the Jordan [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Worker Bashing 101
For those people on your Christmas list who think you’re full of hot air when you complain that there has been a concerted attack on workers in the last few decades, here are a few examples of demonizing rhetoric to introduce them to, courtesy of Adrian MacNair: We don’t need no stinkin’ unions | National [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
A Back-To-School Wishlist for Society
Simply, two things. Let’s make sure our public school system recognizes two things: Our children are priceless individuals with immense capacity to excel, not standardized, interchangeable commodities who can be warehoused in assembly line learning factories. Thinking matters, not just filling up heads with data. A week before the new school year starts is a [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Harper Ignores Positive Trade Opportunity: ALBA
Trade has occurred for thousands of years, not just in the capitalist context of the last few hundred years, and not just in the current neoliberal, free trade context of the last 30 years. For over five years I have been tracking Latin America’s ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, as an alternative model [...]
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Terrorism + Child Abuse Joke = National Post
What do obsessive coverage of terrorism and a joke about how to beat children have in common? As it turns out, it’s today’s National Post. Firstly, everything in the first 5 pages was devoted to the terror suspect arrests, except for one article stoking the idea of staying in Afghanistan, so that’s related. 5 pages. [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Bjork is Our Green, Anti-Privatization Ally
It was a bittersweet day yesterday in the fight against neoliberal globalization. Bjork is helping fight green energy privatization in Iceland while Canada supports global neoliberal resource rape. Prime Minister Harper is sending $130m of our money to AbitibiBowater after Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams nationalized their assets after the company threatened to bail [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
The New Normal and the End of the World?
“This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T.S. Eliot An Apocalyptical Cliché Large swaths of Pakistan are in ruins. The same is still true of Haiti, to say nothing of the long-standing devastation [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
Respinning Unsound Tamil Presumptions in the National Post
It’s time to respin the National Post. So much so, that I’ve signed up for their 90-day free trial subscription. Mainly, I’m looking to get a stack of newsprint for lining our garden this fall for next spring. And it’s not just because the CanWest zombie has rebranded itself as PostMedia [whatever they intend that [...]
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Might Makes Right: The Reality of International Politics & Why States Cause Wars
“If you kill one person, you’re prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you’re a celebrity; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you’re invited to a peace conference.” – Haris Silajdžić Patient readers will bear with me as I sink into the quagmire of Balkan and, specifically, post-Yugoslav politics to make a broader point about states [...]
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Save the Earth and Vote
There is no environmental crisis, and global warming is just “a socialist plot” – at least according to Prime Minister Harper, when he was denouncing the Kyoto Accord. But while Harper’s many sins are serious – ignoring child poverty, sending Canadians to fight in Afghanistan, attacking women’s rights – the worst one is his minority [...]
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Politics, Re-Spun on Coop Radio, 8.16.10: The HST, Tamil Ship, Haiti…
Last night it was Imtiaz Popat and I on “The Rational” talking about the HST, HST petition oddities, recall of MLAs, a fall legislative session, the BC Conservatives and the NDP on the HST, a new BC Liberal leader, Kim Campbell and Rita Johnson, a fall federal election, direct democracy, Vic Toews being an immigrant [...]
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A Voice from Haiti, Who We Are Further Victimizing
This morning I wrote about how we and the French are continuing to rip off Haiti 7 months after their earthquake. Today I read about one woman’s experiences. She sounds so much like us. Getting to the human level during these kind of existential events, we always see that “they” are just like “us”. I [...]
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How We [and the French] Keep Ripping Off Haiti
It was so nice to see so many billions pledged to help Haiti after its earthquake where the planet kicked the country after it was down from centuries of racist, imperial and neoliberal exploitation. But how much money pledged has shown up? And worse, did you know that Haiti spent more than a century paying [...]
Categories: All, Blogs By Labour
The Tamils’ Gift: Some Needed National Values Exploration
I think one of the key issues in all my questions about the Tamil ship the other day is what kind of Canada do we want. Are we really open to visitors, immigrants, refugees? If there is a federal election this fall, the G20, the long-form census and how we ought to treat “visitors” like [...]
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Only 1.5 Tenured Women in SFU’s PoliSci Department
Yes. There are only 1.5 tenured women who work full-time in SFU’s Political Science Department out of 21 profs. Soon there will be 0.5. What century is this? Behold the list of faculty in the department: Of the 21 people on that list, only 6 are women. Whoops, that’s pretty low to start with. Of [...]
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A Basic Primer on the Tamil Ship
Before anyone starts talking about the Tamils who will arrive in Canadian territorial waters today, make sure you understand more than just a 50-word summary of what is going on. For instance, we have this statement in a news report: The Tamil Tigers have been outlawed in Canada as a terrorist group since 2006. via [...]
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