News compilation on A Socialist In Canada, April 3, 2016
Jill Stein, candidate for U.S. presidential nomination of the Green Party
Interview with Dr. Jill Stein of the U.S. Green Party, by Cory Collins, published onRicochet.ca, March 14, 2016. [Weblinks to further interviews with Jill Stein are listed below: on CBC Radio One (April 3); NBC News (April 1); and on Frontline [India] (March 31)]
We are living through an unprecedented crisis, in a world beset by massive social problems – the obscene poverty and inequality that neoliberal capitalist globalization has wreaked on at least two-thirds of humanity, the immobility of the political elite almost everywhere, and cultures of violence that poison our lives from the most intimate relations to the mass murder of the world’s wars.
A worker-owned factory in Argentina. The Working World / Flickr
[Webpage editor: Yes, ecosocialists need to take up the issues about the state and the party that are raised in this sympathetic critique of the limits to workers' ownership and cooperatives.]
The world is in crisis. Capitalism, currently the only economic system in existence, is the cause of this crisis. It is a crisis that impoverishes millions more every year while enhancing the wealth of the rarefied few who conspire with politicians to make it so. It is a crisis that manifests itself in endless and meaningless wars. It is a crisis that dismantles schools, hospitals, roads, and other infrastructure in the name of private profit.
Michael Löwy is a militant of the French section of the Fourth International. His wide-ranging interests include, in part, the connection between the Romantic movement and Marxism, ecosocialism, Liberation Theology and questions of art and culture.
Agriculture
The problem
Since the introduction of modern agriculture, the quality of Australia’s soils has dropped
dramatically. Inappropriate agricultural practices and methods have led to ongoing soil loss, salinity
and soil structure collapse across the country, threatening the viability of many rural communities,
and endanger Australia’s future food security.
In many areas, irrigation water is dangerously over-allocated, frequently wasteful and used on
Green illusions: The dirty secrets of clean energy and the future of environmentalism,
by Ozzie Zehner
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012
437 pages, $29.95 ISBN-978-0-8032-3775-9 (paper)
The Climate Summit in Paris has once again reminded us of how vulnerable we are on planet earth. However, humanity is faced with a number of deep and challenging crises: economic, social, political, over food – and, of course, over climate change, which is threatening the very existence of millions of people. These crises have many of the same root causes, going to the core of our economic system.
Bernie Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls.
This is an odd time for those on the Canadian left who are used to Americans looking longingly north of the border. For now, as long as the Bernie Sanders campaign continues to mobilize thousands of new supporters each week, the tables have turned.
