Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
News that three different vaccines with high rates of efficacy in preventing COVID-19 are on their way has raised hopes. We can all use some cheerful news right about now. But the best medical evidence suggests we should temper our optimism.
Don’t throw away that mask or expect a short sprint to a world free of the pandemic, say experts. Nor will the vaccination of the Canadian general public really begin in earnest till the summer of 2021.
In our latest national survey, we asked how Canadians felt about two different tax ideas that have been discussed as part of an approach to helping pay for the costs of the pandemic. Here’s what we found.
Researchers warn land inequality is rising with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies
One per cent of the world’s farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches and orchards, according to a report that highlights the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises.
Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings.
More than two-thirds of the world’s fields, ranches and orchards are owned by one per cent of its farmers, according to a report released Tuesday.
Land inequality — the concentrated ownership of land — is skyrocketing globally, including in Canada and the U.S. It’s a trend driven by large-scale industrial farming and export-oriented agricultural policies with wide-ranging impacts on everything from food security to climate change.
‘No Vaccine For Climate Change’, Red Cross Warns, As Disasters Kill 410,000 In 10 Years
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There’s “no vaccine for climate change” in a world that has seen more than 100 climate disasters since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, and where 410,000 people have lost their lives to extreme weather and other climate impacts in the last decade, the International Red Cross warned in a report last week.
Canada once had a publicly owned pharmaceutical company that could have made a difference in the current coronavirus crisis — except that we sold it.
Connaught Labs was a superstar in global medicine. For seven decades, this publicly owned Canadian company performed brilliantly on the national and international stage, contributing to medical breakthroughs and developing affordable treatments and vaccines for deadly diseases.
Pandemic-struck New York City is pleading for emergency transit funding, with tens of billions in local GDP, hundreds of thousands of transit-dependent jobs, and the ongoing struggle for social justice all hanging in the balance. And with former commuters continuing to shun their service in droves, transit districts across the U.S. are facing the same crisis.
