This list covers the week of December 11 - 18. It is in order of date of the article's release.
1) Canada doesn't deserve a black woman on its money
CBC Radio
Canada has a long way to go in its relationship with black communities before it should put Viola Desmond on its currency.
Desmond — a successful black businesswoman known for courageously refusing to leave a whites-only area of a Nova Scotia movie theatre in 1946 — will replace Sir John A. Macdonald on the $10 bill in 2018.
But according to Toronto writer Septembre Anderson, putting Desmond on Canadian money perpetuates the myth that the country is closer to racial equity than it actually is.
Read the full article.
2) Half the world's species failing to cope with global warming as Earth races towards its sixth mass extinction
Ian Johnston, The Independent
Nearly half the species on the planet are failing to cope with the global warming the world has already experienced, according to an alarming new study that suggests the sixth mass extinction of animal life in the Earth’s history could take place in as little as 50 years.
Read the full article.
3) Pipeline Spills 176,000 Gallons of Oil Into Creek 150 Miles From Dakota Access Protests
Tom Dichristopher, CNBC
A pipeline leak has spilled tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil into a North Dakota creek roughly two and a half hours from Cannon Ball, where protesters are camped out in opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline.
Read the full article.
4) David Suzuki says economy cannot trump environment
David Suzuki is not hiding his displeasure with the federal approval of the Trans Mountain and Line 3 pipeline expansion projects.
The renowned environmentalist told CBC's The Early Edition the economic arguments for the projects don't make sense.
Read the full article.
5) Anti-poverty activist says action needed on welfare, not more study
CBC Radio
Meetings are underway in Sudbury as the province begins looking at establishing a guaranteed basic income for the region's poorest. But Gary Kinsman, with the Raise The Rates advocacy group in Sudbury, says action is needed now to raise welfare rates.
Hear the full interview.
6) Men’s-Rights Activists Are Finding a New Home With the Alt-Right
Claire Landsbaum, NYMag.com
Back in May, while addressing a crowd of supporters in Spokane, Washington, Donald Trump took time to lament the current state of gender relations. “All of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore,” he said. “We may raise our voice — you know what, the women get it better than we do, folks, they get it better than we do.”
Read the full article.
7) Arctic shatters heat records, triggers massive ice melt
Olivier Moon, AFP
The Arctic shattered heat records in the past year as unusually warm air triggered massive melting of ice and snow and a late fall freeze, U.S. government scientists said Tuesday.
The grim assessment came in the Arctic Report Card 2016, a peer-reviewed document by 61 scientists around the globe issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Read the full article.
8) The impact of porn culture on girls is too big to ignore
Laurie Oliva, Feminist Current
If we were to plot events that have significantly altered the female experience, one of them would have to be the arrival of porn culture and the role of technology in this advancing phenomenon.
Last month a 12-year-old boy was sentenced for repeatedly raping his sister after “becoming fascinated with hardcore porn.” The boy had typed in search terms online in order to find incest porn. The prosecutor in the case said, “Cases of this nature will increasingly come before the court because of the access young people now have to hard core pornography.”
Read the full article.
9) The year as we saw it: 10 charts that defined Ontario in 2016
Trish Hennessy and Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, Behind the Numbers
The experts at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Ontario office have been tracking economic developments in Ontario throughout the year. Some problems persist: the gender pay gap, social assistance poverty, the use of expensive payday loans as a last resort because traditional banks fail to serve low-income customers as well as they should.
Read the full article.
10) How Patrick Brown retracts, recants, renounces
Martin Regg Cohn, Toronto Star
We all harbour secret fantasies. Especially politicians.
Some dream of power and glory. Others fantasize about running a marathon in under three hours.
And some dream of doing God’s will in Ontario as it is in heaven. Without anyone knowing their glorious secret in advance.
Read the article.
11) Trump’s 17 cabinet-level picks have more money than a third of American households combined
Dan Kopf, Quartz
The 17 people who US president-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.
Read the full article.
12) Federal cabinet secretly approved Cold War wiretaps on anyone deemed 'subversive,' historian finds
Dave Seglins & Rachel Houlihan, CBC
A Canadian historian has found top secret documents from the dawn of the Cold War that show the federal government secretly approved an RCMP surveillance program to wiretap suspected spies, communist sympathizers and others deemed "disloyal" or "subversive."
Read the full article.
13) Russia Today and the post-truth virus
Idrees, Pulse
A video is circulating of a woman revealing “the truth” on Syria that is being withheld from us by “the mainstream media”. The woman is introduced as an “independent Canadian journalist”. She is said to be speaking “at the UN”. The date is December 9, 2016. The video has become viral.
Read the full article.
14) Petition: Open the armouries for shelter
Cathy Crowe, change.org
Toronto's shelter system is full and people are routinely turned away. The overflow, volunteer-run Out of the Cold program is similarly full. Last winter, the two 24-hour warming centres were overcrowded, sleeping people inches away from each other on mats on the floor. A serious Strep A outbreak has resulted in a loss of over 100 shelter beds. Hundreds of people are abandoned, forced to sleep outside in parks, ravines, under bridges and on sidewalks.
Read and sign the petition.
15) New map reveals shattering effect of roads on nature
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed.
Read the full article.
16) ‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter.’ Interview with Leila al-Shami for Open Left
LeftEast
Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on the social and geopolitical situation which has rendered the Allepo crisis so severe in these past weeks. It is also, however, part of an emerging transnational conversation between anti-war activists in Russia and Syrian activists, spearheaded by portals such as OpenLeft, where the interview will soon appear in Russian.
Read the full article.
17) "To Call it the Liberation of Aleppo is an Insult to our Dignity”
Arash Azizi, IranWire
On December 15, as buses were getting ready to evacuate people from East Aleppo, which had just fallen to the forces of Bashar al-Assad, IranWire spoke to a local resident of the city, a young woman who was born in Aleppo and has lived there most of her life. She gave us her take on the tumultuous events of the last few days.
Read the full article
18) How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election
Edward-Issac Dovere
Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.
Read the full article.
19) On Toronto Tolls, Marxists Align with Auto Industrial Complex
Yves Engler, Dissident Voice
What’s left and what’s right? Usually it is obvious, but sometimes you have to take a step back and consider the bigger picture.
For example, the Toronto toll debate has exposed a lack of scrutiny of the leading source of corporate profit over the past century by many supposed leftists. Absent a political economy of the auto industrial complex, many Marxists have objectively allied themselves with the private car’s awesome political, cultural and ideological power.
Read the full article.
20) The shameful fascism of The Walking Dead
Sean T. Collins
As 2016 stumbles to a close, the acceptable pathways for talking about the politics of pop culture are as well-beaten as the skull of one of Negan's enemies. "Talk Show Host EVISCERATES Politician." "Show X Has a Y Problem." Discussions of cast, character, and creator diversity. But one of television's most prominent franchises has a fundamental and frightening ethical flaw that has been left to fester.
The show is The Walking Dead. The flaw is fascism.
Read the full article.
See also: Last Tango in Paris, the TDSB, Duterte & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List December 4 - 11
See also: Fidel Castro, Justin Trudeau, Cornel West & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List November 27 - December 4
No comments:
Post a Comment