Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and there was all this talk about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism? At the time, Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer that all of you know, said that they had invited us to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for. What happened in reality had little to do with the kind of society Marx and Engel envisaged would replace capitalism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.
The B.C. government says an independent investigation into the Mount Polley spill is needed, and the province is indicating there could also be new inspections at other mines.
The tailings pond at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine breached on Aug. 4, sending millions of cubic metres of waste into central B.C. waterways. The spill prompted days of water-use bans for hundreds of people, and the province has said there could be adverse effects on marine life.
Nine days into what’s going to be years of investigation, the provincial government is in a no-win position when it comes to dam safety. There is widespread suspicion at this point that cutbacks years ago set the tone for less stringent regulation which may have contributed to the catastrophic tailings-pond breach in the Cariboo.
If that proves true, the BC Liberals will pay a stiff price.
N. Murray Edwards, the controlling shareholder of Imperial Metals Corp. which owns the Mount Polley mine, helped organize a $1-million private fundraiser in Calgary last year to bolster B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s re-election bid.
Edwards, an oilpatch billionaire and chairman of Canadian Natural Resources, was among several Alberta power-brokers involved in the fundraiser, reportedly held to back the continuation of Clark’s “free-enterprise government.” According to polls at the time, the B.C. New Democrats were poised to win the May 13 election.
Mark Jaccard yesterday said he is "horribly let down" by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's failure to "competently" enact emissions regulations in 2007 which would have kept his Kyoto Protocol promises on track to 2020. Harper himself, Jaccard says, formally withdrew from the Kyoto processes while charging the previous Liberal government with "incompetence" in neglecting to set in motion adequate policies to reach Kyoto goals.
A complete water ban has been issued for the Interior community of Likely after a mining accident spilled waste materials into a nearby lake Monday morning.
The Cariboo Regional District enacted the ban following a breach in the earth-filled dam surrounding Mount Polley Mine’s tailings pond.
Debris and effluent flowed into Quesnel Lake from the tailings pond, where waste from the mine’s chemical and mechanical operations was being stored.
Among the many good points Thomas Piketty makes in Capital in the 21st Century – his world-changing but surprisingly mild book – is that extreme inequality can be sustained politically only through an “apparatus of justification.”(9) If voters can be persuaded that insane levels of inequality are sane, reasonable and even necessary, then the concentration of income can keep growing. If they can’t, then either states are forced to act, or revolutions happen.
VANCOUVER — The Canadian Press’s list of charities being audited for political activities by the Canada Revenue Agency reads suspiciously like a Who’s Who of the Canadian left.
. . . For more than 40 years, Canada has been a wellhead of Koch’s burgeoning fortune in oil, refineries, pipelines, petroleum products and financial trading as well as an expanding list of diverse interests — producing an estimated $115 billion in revenues last year, according to Forbes.
Three decades of rapid economic development in China has left a troubling legacy – widespread soil pollution that has contaminated food crops and jeopardized public health. Although they once labeled soil data a “state secret,” Chinese officials are slowly beginning to acknowledge this grave problem.
The first in a series.
