Rick Salutin: If people prevail ... Syriza and Greece

Greek flag - Wikimedia

"Where was the coverage? I expected wall-to-wall news about Sunday's Greek election. Monday morning it was almost nowhere. We got the blizzard in the U.S. and the red carpet at the SAG awards. CBC had the usual arrests and traffic jams. Yet this was the first successful electoral challenge to 30-plus years of a dominant political mentality. And it happened, as it were, here. Such challenges have been mounted in Latin America, they've become normal there. But Greece is First World (or almost, it's also pretty Middle Eastern). I think what's lacking is the mere vocabulary to think in new, non-neoliberal terms. When you don't have the language, it doesn't really exist. Not yet anyway."  Rick Salutin, Rabble.ca

Murray Dobbins - a prophet for our times

I really appreciate the way Murray Dobbins observes and analyses what is happening in Canada.

He reveals how the neo-liberal market ideologies have diminished our democracy through corporate funded think tanks.  We have had " four decades of systematic assaults on the liberal/social democratic state". This began with a series of complaints of an “excess of democracy”.

Now we live in a time of  "democratic deficit" and "a decline and erosion of democracy that should be the most important focus of critics and citizens alike".

A major study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre reports that this erosion of democracy "has put western civilization on a track to irreversible collapse. The study focused on population, climate, water, agriculture and energy as the interrelated factors that determine the collapse or survival of civilizations going back 5000 years."

You can find many more on Dobbins blog here: Murray Dobbins' Blog

Peggy Mason on Saudi Arms Deal

Since the 9/11 attacks, Western democracies, in the name of fighting terrorism, have enacted countless anti-democratic measures to curtail free speech, free assembly, peaceful political dissent and most especially due process and the rule of  law. At the same time, we have partnered with anti-democratic regimes abroad to counter the illegal use of force by violent extremists with our own military “reign of terror.”

Nothing can illustrate this Orwellian approach more clearly than Canada’s unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia. It is one of three countries, along with the United States and Israel, that not only violent jihadists but the vast majority of moderate Islam (with much justification) hold largely responsible for preventing Muslim countries in the Middle East from taking their rightful place in the world community.

Peggy Mason, Embassy New, Wednesday January 21, 2015

Creating the Next War

"If the world learned one thing from George W Bush, it was that it is a terrible mistake to confuse a crime, however monstrous, for war. After 9/11, the belligerent rhetoric of the war on terror fostered deluded ideas of a “victory”, legitimised the torture that still stains America’s moral standing and licensed ruinous misadventures overseas. In this difficult hour for France, and Europe more widely, a calmer fury must prevail." The Guardian



"Today, after many years of a failed "war on terror," numerous scandals about abuse of political power, torture and indefinite detention, people have come to realize that this dichotomy is false and that security for all can't be achieved without respect of human dignity for all." Monia Mazigh


"Yet the violence is an inevitable consequence of a world which systematically dehumanizes so many people who are made to feel powerless and despairing and deeply depressed about the possibility of finding the milk of human kindness anywhere. The representation of evil dominates the media, and becomes the justification for our own evil acts. And that evil is made possible because so many among us avert our eyes and shut our ears to the cries of the oppressed." Rabbi Michael Lerner


"That's the nature of journalism, you can't wait till you get it perfect. You have to keep pushing it out and hope at least some of it will be redemptive." Rick Salutin