Capitalism

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.

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.