Capitalism

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.

Karl Marx is on fire right now. More than a century after his death, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” still has the honor of being the first smear against ideas slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton. (See: Thomas Piketty.) Marx also graced the cover of the National Review as recently ast last month. Few other thinkers, and certainly few non-religious figures, can claim the honor of being so widely misappropriated by the political rearguard.

Sam Gindin's recent contributions to the The Bullet  and Jacobin explore the lost potential of the working class in revolutionary politics. On the economic and ecological fronts, he argues, working-class politics has been incapable of catalyzing widespread and consequential societal mobilization, or becoming vital sites of theoretical and practical struggle.

. . . After explaining the results of Ian Wood’s review, Baroness Kramer revealed that the government had accepted his recommendations in full. Then she dropped her bombshell. The government now plans

“to introduce measures in the Bill to put the principle of maximising economic recovery of petroleum in the UK into statute.”

Into statute. Maximising the production of crude oil will, if the bill is passed, become a legal requirement.

Continuously declaring that a decisive crisis is around the corner may generate attention, but as an organizing tactic it is counterproductive. An economic crisis may scare people and bring out their most conservative instincts. It may lower expectations and make people long for the pre-crisis period (no matter how much they had previously criticized it), desperately hoping to just fix, not transform or even significantly modify capitalism. We cannot depend on crises to do our political work for us.

Fifty years ago, great leaders raised the flags of the anticolonial struggle and decided to join with their peoples in a march along the path of sovereignty and independence.

The world superpowers and transnationals were competing for control of territories and natural resources in order to continue expanding at the cost of impoverishing the peoples of the South.