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Articles from non-mainstream as opposed to corporate for profit sources.

The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Exposing the Plague of Neoliberalism

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 23:28; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2062 ... April 18, 2020
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The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Exposing the Plague of Neoliberalism

Henry A. Giroux

The current coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis, it is also a political and ideological crisis. It is a crisis deeply rooted in years of neglect by neoliberal governments that denied the importance of public health and the public good while defunding the institutions that made them possible. At the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive inequalities in wealth, income and power. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of democratic values, education and environmental destruction.

The coronavirus pandemic is deeply interconnected with the politicization of the natural order through its destructive assaults waged by neoliberal globalization on the ecosystem. In addition, it cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultranationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities.

The plague has as one of its roots a politics of depoliticization, which makes clear that education is a...

You won -- No more Big Oil bailout

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 10:36; Written by editor

I have some incredible news for you. Today during his daily address, Trudeau backed out of the $15 billion Big Oil bailout that’s been on the books for the last month. Instead he is investing in things like oil well clean ups that will put people back to work in jobs that sustain the environment.

And it wouldn’t have happened without you, A.

When we found out about the bailout over 15,000 SumOfUs members signed the petition calling on an end to the Big Oil bailout and for a People’s bailout instead.

Not only that, you sent over 3.000 emails directly to Trudeau and Morneau calling on them to stop putting people and the planet before Big Oil profits.

And dozens of you, and our monthly donors, chipped in to get hard hitting ads in key papers that politicians read and fly a massive aerial banner over Trudeau’s daily address this past Tuesday.

We know that partners across the country were also doing the same, and we thank them and their members for all their efforts too.

Today is proof that when people work together, we can force governments to put the people and the planet first -- not the bottom lines of billion dollar...

No one left behind

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 10:02; Written by editor

This is a test r1

Dear BCCLA friends and supporters,

The COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting the structural inequities many of us have experienced, known and fought against for decades. Now more than ever, we need to stand in solidarity to ensure that government responses to COVID-19 leave no one behind.

Everyone deserves equal access to vital public health measures. That is why we are placing pressure on government officials to protect the human rights of the most vulnerable.

Learn more about how we’re making sure no one is left behind in our COVID-19 response.

We believe in the expansion of human rights and safety for all. The most vulnerable amongst us, including precarious workers, refugees, prisoners, seniors, homeless people, people with disabilities, and Indigenous people, are experiencing the brunt of this crisis.

In the last few weeks, we have also been mobilizing to ensure...

The latest on federal support for Big Oil

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 08:44; Written by editor

Friends,

Earlier today, we got two big pieces of breaking news.

The first was a leaked letter from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) to our government laying out a list of demands for a massive oil bailout.1 It includes outrageous calls for climate regulation rollbacks, delaying laws that protect Indigenous rights, and suspending environmental monitoring. It even includes a demand to give Big Oil complete freedom to lobby the government without any regulation, reporting, or public oversight.

Second, in his morning announcement, Justin Trudeau spoke about government support for the oil industry. Thankfully, this announcement fell far short of what Big Oil is demanding. Instead, the focus was on providing funds for putting people to work cleaning up the thousands of abandoned oil wells all across Alberta. Trudeau announced $1.7 billion for orphaned oil well clean up and $750 million to help with methane reduction.2

Taxpayers shouldn’t have to shoulder the paycheck for the oil industry’s neglect, but this announcement would have been a lot worse if tens of thousands of people, like you, didn’t speak up against a bailout for Big Oil. Our...

Keep Building Those Resilience Muscles!

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 08:22; Written by editor

Neighbour-to-Neighbour Activities to Keep Building Those Resilience Muscles At Building Resilient Neighbourhoods, we often talk about community resilience as a set of "muscles" we can intentionally develop that will help us pro-actively respond and adapt to different shocks and stressors that may come our way. We need those resilience muscles right now, and the good news is that the more we use them, the stronger they get! It's like physical training - by finding small ways to build community connections, we are actually helping our neighbourhoods and communities develop the "muscle memory" to be resilient right now, but also for other future challenges we may face together.

Helping Those Hit Hardest by COVID-19

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 07:38; Written by editor

Two women at the registers in a grocery store

© Stephanie Keith/Getty Dear Friends,

This week, George Soros highlighted the enormous economic damage being inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and centered on the disparities it has exposed as the leading open society challenge of this mushrooming crisis. Acknowledging a global failure to rethink the economic model in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, George has called on the U.S. government to follow the path of several European governments in guaranteeing the paychecks of all workers during this historic shutdown.

As someone who came to his activism through the struggles and the organized collective voice of low-wage workers, I am deeply aligned with our chair’s assessment of this moment. That appraisal propels our advocacy with political leaders and shapes our grant making to meet the moment. We have increasingly recognized the importance of joining our work on human rights with efforts to achieve economic justice. This pandemic requires us to lean forcefully into policy work on systems transformation, but there is a widening humanitarian crisis that we must also rise to with compassion and our well-known rigor.

I have been conferring with colleagues across the Foundations to redeploy our resources in a comprehensive intervention to address the COVID-19 crisis, which touches on virtually every aspect of our work. Now is a time to dig deep and to go big.

Today, I am announcing that the Open Society Foundations are making an investment of $130 million to combat the devastation in the wake of the coronavirus—focusing on communities too often left out and left back by government policy. The disease, which has upended assumptions in strategies we’ve been diligently composing for months, will require two distinct and large phased responses from us in 2020. The first phase detailed here is weighted toward the most intense current flash points. A second phase will be dominated by investments in the Global South that will focus on economic interventions and rule of law issues that are already surfacing.

Coronavirus, Crisis, and the End of Neoliberalism

Details: Published on Friday, 17 April 2020 02:54; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2061 ... April 17, 2020
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Coronavirus, Crisis, and the End of Neoliberalism

Alfredo Saad-Filho

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a transformed world. Empty streets, closed shops, unusually clear skies, and climbing death tolls: something unprecedented is unfolding before our eyes.

News about the economy are alarming almost everywhere: the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the sharpest and deepest economic contraction in the history of capitalism. To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto, all that was solid has melted into air: ‘globalization’ has gone into reverse; long supply chains, that were previously the only ‘rational’ way to organize production, have collapsed and hard borders are back; trade has declined drastically, and international travel has been severely constrained. In a matter of days, tens of millions of workers became unemployed, and millions of businesses lost their employees, customers, suppliers and credit lines.

Several economies expect contractions of GDP to be measured in double digits, and a long line of sectors begs governments for a bailout. In the UK alone, banks, railways, airlines, airports, the tourism sector, charities, the entertainment sector and universities are...

DOLLARAMA out in the cold

Details: Published on Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:18; Written by editor

Last week thousands of SumOfUs members said NO to DOLLARAMA's half-measures. You asked DOLLARAMA to protect workers and pay them adequately for the risk they take showing up to work for minimum wage during a pandemic.

And your action worked. It started trending on TWITTER and was retweeted by SO MANY PEOPLE. DOLLARAMA was forced to react and announced it will be providing all workers free gloves, masks and is shipping plexiglass shields to its 6000 check-out counters.

Now is the time to ramp up your action so that DOLLARAMA employees see a danger pay increase that is in line with other retailers.

Yes! DOLLARAMA stop short-changing your employees and increase their danger pay.

Some TOP TWEETS from the past week:

Workers at DOLLARAMA are being forced to restock shelves for a ridiculous wage and cashiers STILL don’t have protective glass partitions.

Tell DOLLARAMA to support its workers during this deadly pandemic by providing protective gear and paying an increased danger wage.

Rolling into the Wild Wild West

Details: Published on Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:02; Written by editor

Rolling into the Wild Wild West r1 ...

COVID-19 in Gaza

Details: Published on Thursday, 16 April 2020 10:34; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2060 ... April 16, 2020
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COVID-19 in Gaza

The Covid-19 pandemic is confronting governments around the world with an emergency health situation, requiring self-isolation, population lockdowns of many economic activities and households, mass virus testing, screening and hospitalizations, and much more. In areas of the world in the midst of armed conflict, military occupation, hosting refugee camps, or large pools of migrant workers, harsh living conditions are becoming spaces of extraordinary vulnerability to the pandemic and what Friedrich Engels once called "social murder."

In this context, Socialist Project reaffirms our commitment to the longstanding international demand that Israel end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and the brutal siege on Gaza. It is imperative that Israel work to restore access to water and electrical power, and immediately lift all restrictions on medicines and equipment necessary to deal with the pandemic.

The global health crisis makes these needs particularly acute. We insist that primary responsibility for the suffering Palestinians face is the neo-colonial occupation, in the form of the apartheid regime that Israel has constructed with the compliance, and indeed...

Liberals COVID-19 Support Measures Reveal Crisis in Canadas Low-Wage Job Market

Details: Published on Thursday, 16 April 2020 01:22; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2059 ... April 16, 2020
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Liberals’ COVID-19 Support Measures Reveal Crisis in Canada’s Low-Wage Job Market

Chris Roberts

Inequality and class disparity have been on full display in the devastating coronavirus outbreak. On the one hand, Canada’s dependence on the work of undervalued and underpaid healthcare workers, cleaners and retail employees has been clearer than ever. On the other, these workers are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In March, one-third of workers earning $14 an hour or less became jobless or lost most of their hours of work.

The emergency has also laid bare the limits and contradictions of the low-wage job market. Along with the United States, Canada has one of the highest share of low-paid workers in the OECD. In the name of ‘flexibility’, reforms in the 1990s and 2000s established a labour market in which a succession of McJobs was expected to serve as the primary shock absorber for working-class families. In turn, the role of Employment Insurance (EI) was to underwrite the low-wage economy.

While heartless and unjust, this vision might have...

We are Un-Frackable Recap: Youth, Climate Justice and Legal Strategy

Details: Published on Wednesday, 15 April 2020 16:10; Written by editor

We are Un-Frackable Recap: Youth, Climate Justice and Legal Strategy r1 ...

Transport and the Climate Crisis: Lessons for the Left

Details: Published on Wednesday, 15 April 2020 09:42; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2058 ... April 15, 2020
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Transport and the Climate Crisis: Lessons for the Left

On 11 December 2019, The EU Commission announced its Green Deal initiative. On the same day transform! europe and the GUE/NGL (European United Left--Nordic Green Left) conducted a conference on a socialist Green New Deal in the European Parliament. "New Deal" is meant to conjure up the spirit of Roosevelt’s famous plan of strengthening the social welfare state and, particularly, the power of trade unions. These two points are conspicuously absent in the EU’s Green Deal and were barely addressed by the Commission with only a few forced and reluctant suggestions for the ongoing protests by Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände (an alliance of anti-coal mining activists and climate activists) and other such social movements. It clearly falls to left-wing parties and radical social movements to actively pressure for a radical policy change. To put it bluntly, the Commission’s Green Deal has nothing to do with our vision of an ecological and feminist socialism. Nonetheless, the Green Deal does offer the Commission entry points toward...

Horrible news for the bees

Details: Published on Wednesday, 15 April 2020 03:24; Written by editor

A, I know there’s so much going on right now -- but do you have a minute or two for the bees?

Pesticide giant Dow is trying to overturn the French ban on bee-killing pesticides. This is bad news for the bees.

French beekeepers have come to us with an urgent cry for help: they lack the funds to pay for expert lawyers to fight Dow in court.

Can you chip in CA$97 to save the bees?

If you’ve saved your payment information with SumOfUs, your donation will go through immediately:

Donate CA$97 now Donate another amount

Thanks for all that you do,
Nabil and the team at SumOfUs

Here's my original email:

BREAKING: We just found out that Dow Chemical is appealing the ban on bee-killing pesticides. We’re taking legal action -- but we need your help to pay for lawyers.

Can you chip in to save the bees?

If you’ve saved your payment information with SumOfUs,...

Why Cant Everyone Get Free COVID-19 Treatment?

Details: Published on Wednesday, 15 April 2020 01:52; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2057 ... April 15, 2020
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Why Can’t Everyone Get Free COVID-19 Treatment?

Diane Archer

Access to COVID-19 treatment is key to helping Americans combat the disease, as well as containing its spread. To their credit, on March 29, Humana and CIGNA -- the fourth- and fifth-largest health insurers -- under massive public pressure, waived "all COVID-19 costs" for all of their members. But, tens of millions of other Americans continue to face powerful financial barriers to care. Our corporate healthcare system is not designed to ensure everyone gets needed care, much less to protect the public health.

Over the last month, as the novel coronavirus laid siege on the US, the largest health insurers did nothing to reduce barriers to COVID-19 care. Instead, their web sites advised their members to practice good hygiene and suggested they visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) online for more information. News reports revealed that Americans were loath to seek care for fear of the cost. And, that remains the case for most of the 87 million uninsured and underinsured in...

Global Capitalism, Global Pandemic, and the Struggle for Socialism

Details: Published on Tuesday, 14 April 2020 09:18; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2056 ... April 14, 2020
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Global Capitalism, Global Pandemic, and the Struggle for Socialism

Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian

We are now in the grip of one of the worst economic crises in the history of modern capitalism. As the Coronavirus pandemic forces people to stay home and businesses to remain shuttered, the St. Louis Federal Reserve has projected 30% of the workforce will become unemployed, significantly surpassing the level during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has forecasted a massive 24% drop in GDP -- more than twice as large as the previous postwar record.

In seeking to manage this unfolding catastrophe, the American state has once again taken radical steps to save the system. The Federal Reserve has not only pumped liquidity into the financial sector, but has also expanded its purview to buying "unlimited" corporate debt. Thus the $2-trillion "stimulus" bill that passed Congress, the largest in US history, is only one part of the picture. The true center of crisis management lies in agencies that have long been shielded from democratic oversight.

These events...

Southern Labour is the Key to Change in the United States, and hence Canada, and the World

Details: Published on Tuesday, 14 April 2020 03:44; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2055 ... April 14, 2020
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Southern Labour is the Key to Change in the United States, and hence Canada, and the World

Michael Goldfield

The South is today, as it always has been, the key to understanding American society: its politics, its constitutional anomalies and government structure, its culture, its social relations, its music and literature, its media focus and their blindspots, and virtually everything else. The South is a distinctive, atypical part of the United States; it is also, however, America writ large.

The bedrock of this understanding begins, not with the culture or social history of the South, but with its economy, and the racial/social relations that have sustained it. W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the most penetrating – and, in my opinion – greatest American social scientist of the 20th century, understood this well. Du Bois argues implicitly that the answer to the old question, originally posed by Werner Sombart of “Why no socialism in the United States?” (by which he meant, why the United States was unique among industrial countries in not having an electorally significant...

30,000 coronaviruses

Details: Published on Monday, 13 April 2020 23:20; Written by editor

In just 24 hours, the world’s leading finance ministers will consider the global COVID-19 economic recovery plan.

They could listen to corporations and choose business as usual. Or they could adopt a historic plan that cracks down on planet-destroying industry like fossil fuels and protects us all from future crises.

A group of scientists and economists is fighting hard for change, but need to show people are behind them. Demand a recovery plan for the planet:

Sign the petition

In 24 hours, the world’s most powerful finance ministers will discuss the global economic response to COVID-19 at the G20.

We can’t have it focus on business as usual, with mega-bailouts for planet-destroying industries like fossil fuels. But that’s exactly what corporate lobbyists are asking for.

That’s why a leading group of scientists and economists is pushing for a historic recovery package that would...

Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism

Details: Published on Monday, 13 April 2020 09:18; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2054 ... April 13, 2020
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Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism

Dimitris Fasfalis

How could Karl Marx (1818 -- 1883) help us interpret the current crisis? His theory of history offers critical resources to interpret the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the world today, while indicating at the same time that ‘the world after’ so much mentioned could only be anti-capitalist.

Before tackling the problem of links and multiple mediations between the capitalist world system and the Covid-19 pandemic, let us return first to Marx and the theoretical framework he proposed to grasp the great historical crises. In 1845-46, Marx, a political exile in Brussels, writes in The German Ideology these words which will later be taken up and will form a digest of what Friedrich Engels will call after Marx’s death "historical materialism":

"At a certain stage in the evolution of the productive forces, we see the emergence of productive forces and means of trade which, under existing conditions, only cause disasters. They are no longer productive forces, but forces of destruction (machinery and money)."
Read more: Marx in the Era of Pandemic Capitalism

Horrible news for the bees

Details: Published on Monday, 13 April 2020 04:12; Written by editor

BREAKING: We just found out that Dow Chemical is appealing the ban on bee-killing pesticides. We’re taking legal action -- but we need your help to pay for lawyers.

Can you chip in to save the bees?

If you’ve saved your payment information with SumOfUs, your donation will go through immediately:

Donate CA$98 now Donate CA$147 now Donate CA$197 now Donate another amount

While we worry about loved ones and try to come to terms with a terrifying global pandemic, Dow Chemical...

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