The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology

Jason W. Moore

2017, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center

2,561 ViewsPaperRank: 2.349 Pages

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Critical Theory,

Environmental Sociology,

Social Theory,

Geography,

Political Economy

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Every civilization must decide what is, and what is not, valuable. The Marxist tradition makes occasional reference to a “law of value.” It is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongue, apparently. It sounds quaint, curiously out of step with our times. And yet, the tremors of systemic crisis—financial, climate, food, employment—are translating into a new ontological politics that challenge capitalism at its very core: its law of value. Today’s movements for climate justice, food sovereignty, de-growth, the right to the city—and much beyond—underscore a new set of challenges to capitalism’s value system, understood simultaneously in its ethico-political and political-economic dimensions. This new ontological politics has long been implicit in radical politics. But it seems to have reached a new stage today.

https://www.academia.edu/37450794/The_Value_of_Everything_Work_Capital_and_Historical_Nature_in_the_Capitalist_World_Ecology

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis (Published 2017)

Jason W. Moore

2,848 ViewsPaperRank: 10.338 Pages

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Economic History,

Sociology,

Environmental Sociology,

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Human Geography

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This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.

https://www.academia.edu/33119398/The_Capitalocene_Part_I_on_the_nature_and_origins_of_our_ecological_crisis_Published_2017_?pls=RWLSxnqyad

The Capitalocene, Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy (Published 2017)

Jason W. Moore

2,410 ViewsPaperRank: 9.744 Pages

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Economic History,

Environmental Sociology,

Geography,

Historical Geography,

Economic Geography

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Dualism, dialectics and the problem of value Nature, geopower and capitalogenic appropriation Unpaid work/energy and the accumulation of capital Historical natures: value, world-praxis and abstract social nature Value as project and process Abstract social nature and the rise of capitalism From Anthropocene to Capitalocene Capital, nature and work/energy in the twenty-first century References Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions PDF Abstract This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.

https://www.academia.edu/33317234/The_Capitalocene_Part_II_Accumulation_by_Appropriation_and_the_Centrality_of_Unpaid_Work_Energy_Published_2017_?pls=RWLSxnqyad

Marx, Machinery and Motive Power: the Thermodynamics of Class Struggle

Tom Keefer

38 Pages

Marxism,

Ecological Economics,

Capitalism,

Energy and Environment,

Historical Materialism

 .

The environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels have been the subject of numerous studies, international conferences and well-meaning declarations, but there nonetheless seems to be little substantive analysis of what the root causes are of our ‘addiction to fossil fuels’ and why dominant interests are so unwilling to undertake the transition to a new energy regime. The failure to adequately grapple with this question stems from the fact that two of the most important schools of thought that hold important components of the analytical framework necessary for this undertaking -- ecological economics and Marxism -- miss crucial insights that the other brings to the debate. What is manifestly absent from most ecological economist thought is a critique of capitalism as a historically specific economic system which is not only based on ever-increasing expansion but is also compelled to substitute machinery and raw material for human labor in its quest for higher margins of profit, increased productivity and to undercut working-class self-organization and power. Moreover, in failing to recognize commodified, alienated and exploited labor as lying at the root of the capitalist system, the ecological movement has not, for the most part, been able to see the project of ecological diversity and sustainability as representing a class project based upon the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by an alternative economic and political order.

https://www.academia.edu/23063447/Marx_Machinery_and_Motive_Power_the_Thermodynamics_of_Class_Struggle

Materialism and the Critique of Energy

Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti: Materialism and the Critique of Energy

MCM PRESS 2018  

Criti

cal Theory,

Feminist Theory,

Marxism,

Renewable Energy,

Ecology,

Value Theory,

Social Ecology,

Wertkritik

PDF
https://www.academia.edu/37204181/Materialism_and_the_Critique_of_Energy

Theories

Allan Stoekl: Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy 

Peter Hitchcock: “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink”:Accumulation and the Power over Hydro 

 Daniel Cunha: The Anthropocene as Fetishism 

Katherine Lawless: Mapping the Atomic Unconscious: PostcolonialCapital in Nuclear Glow 

George Caffentzis: Work or Energy or Work/Energy  On the Limits toCapitalist Accumulation 

Elmar Flatschart: Crisis, Energy, and the Value Form of Gender: Towards a Gender-Sensitive Materialist Understanding of Society-Nature Relations

Histories

Andreas Malm: Long Waves of Fossil Development: PeriodizingEnergy and Capital

Adam Broinowski: Nuclear Power and Oil Capital in the Long Twentieth Century 

David Tomas: Keeping the Lights On: Oil Shocks, Coal Strikes, andthe Rise of Electroculture

Gerry Canavan: Peak Oil afer HydroFracking

Daniel Worden: Oil and Corporate Personhood: Ida Tarbell’s The History of fhe Standard Oil Company and John D. Rockefeller 

Jasper Bernes: The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, andthe Future of Communism

Cultures

 Sheena Wilson: Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial

Futures

Amy Riddle: Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital

 Amanda Boetzkes: The Political Energies of the Archaeomodern Tool

 Alberto toscano: Antiphysis/Antipraxis: Universal Exhaustion and the Tragedy of Materiality

Politics

 Mathew T. Huber: Fossilized Liberation: Energy, Freedom, and the “Developmentof the Productive Forces”

Tomislav Medak: technologies for an Ecological transition: A Faustian Bargain?

 Jonathan Parsons: Anarchism and Unconventional Oil

 Warren Cariou: Oil Drums: Indigenous Labour and Visions of Compensation in the Tar Sands Zone

 Dominique Perron (trans. by Wafa Gaiech): Te Oil Bodies: Workers of FortMcMurray

 Contributors 

Selected Bibliography

 Index

Coming Home or Drifting Away: Magical Practice in the Twenty-First Century—Ways of Adopting Heterodox Beliefs and Religious Worldviews

GERHARD MAYER & RENE´ GRU NDER

Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 25, No. 3, October 2010, 395–418

ABSTRACT
This article examines the process-related dynamics of becoming a magical  practitioner and an adherent of a Neopagan group, respectively. It analyzes the relation of the thesis of Interpretive Drift (Luhrmann) and the concept of Coming Home Experience, which have a big impact on academic discussions and are often seen as mutually contradictory. Using empirical data from two German interview studies with   contemporary magicians and German heathen (Asatru´ ) groups, the article shows that the two dynamics can form complementary elements of the process. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of personal extraordinary experiences containing strong subjective evidence which are mostly neglected. Taking individual biographical aspects into account as well as different personal motivations, an immense variety of approaches to alternative worldviews might become possible. Thus we come to the conclusion that simple generalizations in characterizing the ‘pathway to magical beliefs and practices’ are misleading

PDF

https://www.academia.edu/48692677/Coming_home_or_drifting_away_Magical_practice_in_the_twenty_first_century_Ways_of_adopting_heterodox_beliefs_and_religious_worldviews

 

Bourdieu vs. Batman: Examining the Cultural Capital of the Dark Knight via Graphic Novels

Amy L Maynard

2016, Framescapes: Graphic Narrative Intertexts

559 Views6 Pages

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Media and Cultural Studies,

Comics Studies,

Comics and Graphic Novels,

Superhero Studies

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Bill Finger and Bob Kane's character of Batman is undoubtedly one of the most popular characters in the DC superhero-verse, instantly identifiable to a range of audiences. The chapter examines how the perception of Batman had changed since he has been the focus of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller, Batman: The Killing Joke (1988) by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth (1989) by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean. I discuss how the aforementioned graphic novels increased Batman's status in popular culture, his 'capital,' not only because the medium of the graphic novel at that time (1985-1990) was being heavily marketed as more literary than the comic book, but also because these graphic novels directly addressed socially-relevant and complex themes related to urban neuroses, psychological trauma, and class warfare. The public's perception of the 'idealised' superhero was also undergoing a fundamental change, superheroes increasingly being presented as morally-conflicted vigilantes rather than mythical saviours, Batman being the most prominent of this 'new' type of hero. By utilising Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Capital, I argue how different mediums, authors and audiences developed Batman's cultural capital, Bourdieu's Theory of Capital concerned with the ways in which consumers of cultural goods use said goods as markers of status, and how these ideological markers are constructed through social conditions. The chapter concludes with a depiction of how the world of Gotham has become embedded in Western popular culture via the aforementioned graphic novels, and the media inspired by them, such as Nolan's trilogy of films and the Arkham Asylum video games. Batman has become a symbol of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alike, representing our fears in regards to change, urbanisation and class.

PDF

https://www.academia.edu/24840783/Bourdieu_vs_Batman_Examining_the_Cultural_Capital_of_the_Dark_Knight_via_Graphic_Novels

On Palestine, the Media Is Allergic to the Truth

BYBRANKO MARCETIC

Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from “both sides” of an equally matched contest — the reality on the ground be damned.
Allergic to the Truth

Palestinians observe the site after Israeli air strikes collapsed a fourteen-story Palestinian building in Gaza City. (Mustafa Hassona / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

There are two ways you could report on the bloody conflict unfolding right now in Israel and Palestine.

One would be to put every new headline and story, whether that’s about Hamas’s rocket attacks or Israel’s wildly disproportionate airstrikes, in context.

That would mean explaining that the rockets came in the wake of a series of outrageous and criminal Israeli provocations in occupied East Jerusalem: a series of violent police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam during its holiest month, that have damaged the sacred structure and injured hundreds, including worshippers; that Israeli forces were attacking Palestinians who were occupying Aqsa both to pray and to protect it from bands of far-right Israeli extremists who have been marching through East Jerusalem, attacking Palestinians, and trying to break into the compound; and that all of this sits in the shadow of protests against Israel’s most recent attempt to steal land from Palestinians in the city, and the ramping up of Israel’s theft of Palestinian land more broadly under Trump.

While you’re at it, you might at least make clear that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have been far more vicious and deadly than the rockets they’re supposedly “retaliating” against, having killed forty-three people so far, including thirteen children, and leveled an entire residential building. You might make clear that Hamas’s rockets are, owing to their own cheapness and Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, at this point closer to the lashing-out-in-impotent-frustration part of the spectrum (which, of course, is not to say they don’t do damage or occasionally take lives — they’ve killed six Israelis thus far). All of this would help people understand why what they’re seeing unfold on their screens is happening, and what might be done to stop it.


Or there’s the more traditional way of reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict in Western media. That way involves boiling systemic injustice down to nondescript “rising tensions,” describing state violence and resistance to it as nebulous “clashes,” subtly presenting Israeli and Palestinian violence as roughly equivalent in scale and moral propriety, and generally making it impossible for casual consumers of news to do anything but throw their hands up in frustration and ask: “When will they learn to live together in peace?”

At the time of this writing, the second option is, yet again, the approach most mainstream US media has taken to reporting on the latest litany of Israeli government crimes and the Palestinian response to them. Back is the ever-present and much derided overreliance on “clash” to describe the violence, helpfully clouding some of those basic details reporters are, in theory, supposed to illuminate for readers: who did what to whom, for instance, and how it all started.

As media critics have pointed out for years, if you came in with little to no idea of what was going on and simply surveyed the headlines from the past few days about “clashes” between Israeli forces and Palestinians, you’d never know Palestinians were protesting an Israeli land grab. Nor would you know the “clashes” were happening because Israeli police had decided to attack Palestinian worshippers in one of Islam’s holiest sites. In fact, in one particularly egregious case, you might have been completely misled in the opposite direction, with the New York Post attributing to Hamas the killings Israel had carried out on Palestinians, who were in turn recast as Israelis (the Post later corrected the headline).

While the Post’s error here was a unique low point, news headlines consistently failed to provide readers with context for what was going on, and even actively obscured it. “Hamas fires rockets into Israel as tensions in Jerusalem boil over,” was a typical headline, from NBC. “Jerusalem violence leads to rockets, air strikes,” went another from Reuters. Such headlines not only strip the events of human agency and present Israeli state repression as more akin to a natural disaster — whose “violence”? “Tensions” from what? — but also present the vastly lopsided attacks from Israeli forces and Hamas as equal and proportionate.

This latter point was a theme of numerous headlines, for many people the only part of these stories they’ll actually read and absorb. “Israel Hits Gaza With Airstrike After Hamas Rocket Attacks,” went one Yahoo! News headline. “Gaza militants, Israel trade new rocket fire and airstrikes,” went a different Associated Press one, using a widely adopted construction. “Israel, Hamas escalate heavy fighting with no end in sight,” ABC told its readers. “Israel to ramp up deadly airstrikes on Gaza as rockets rain down and deaths mount on both sides,” went the CBS attempt.

It’s impossible to single any party out for blame here — after all, these appear to be simply two evenly matched foes trading blows, though for what reason, no one can say. Sometimes, it’s not even possible to work out who was responsible for which deaths or how many, as in this Axios headline (“Dozens dead as Israel and Hamas intensify aerial bombardments”), or this NBC one (“33 killed in Israeli airstrikes, Hamas rocket attacks as unrest spreads beyond Jerusalem”).

What might a good headline look like? You could do worse than this example from the Havana Times, an online magazine written by Cuban contributors and edited from Nicaragua: “Israeli Forces Attack Palestinians Protesting Expulsions” — six words that accurately sum up and put in context the events mainstream reporting tends to hazily describe as “clashes” and “tensions,” albeit at the price of abandoning the shrugging attempt at neutrality mainstream news is abiding by.

Sometimes a lamentable headline has been balanced out by the body of the report itself. Such was the case with the Financial Times’ “Hamas rocket attacks provoke Israeli retaliation in Gaza,” which, upon clicking through that headline, nonetheless did a decent job putting the fighting in context and explaining its causes without equivocating. But often, the flaws in the headlines have carried over into the reporting proper.

In its report, for instance, ABC only mentions the thirty-five Palestinians that Israel killed in its blitz on Gaza last, well after leading with Israel’s claim of “killing at least three militants,” and after first noting the Israeli death toll of five. We don’t learn the cause of the current conflict until halfway through, when we’re briskly informed that “critics say [emphasis mine] heavy-handed Israeli police measures in and around Jerusalem’s Old City helped stoke nightly unrest,” as well as about the attempt to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.

Over at NBC, the lede — meant to sum up the report for the reader by condensing it to its most important points — tells us that “Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets toward Jerusalem on Monday in a major escalation after hundreds of Palestinians were hurt during earlier clashes with Israeli forces.” In other words, Hamas militants fired rockets in what was a major escalation; but Palestinians were hurt in clashes (How and by who? Perhaps they all tripped), in an act that presumably wasn’t a major escalation, despite it involving sacrilegious police attacks that arguably constitute a war crime.

Particularly comical was the lede in this CNN piece: “Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have escalated further on Tuesday as Palestinian militants in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which in turn ramped up airstrikes on the coastal enclave.” Besides the vague reference to “tensions,” notice that the rocket attacks are both attributed to someone (Hamas) and quantified (hundreds), while Israel’s airstrikes are neither. Notice, too, that Israel’s airstrikes are cast as almost natural phenomena, “ramped up” — or in other words, caused — by the Palestinians themselves.

Special mention has to be made of the paper of record. One New York Times piece on the police raids on the Aqsa compound had its abstract serially edited, which at one point morphed from


The police entered the compound and fired rubber-tipped bullets. Anger was already building in response to the looming expulsion of several Palestinians from their homes in the city…

to the substantially worse and misleading


Gaza militants fired rockets toward Jerusalem and the Israeli police fought with Palestinian protesters in an escalation of violence after a week of increasing tensions.

A later, separate piece on the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza was substantially edited after the fact, some of the changes positive, some less so. (The original version doesn’t appear to have been archived anywhere, but was copied and pasted here).

Gone are the two paragraphs noting that the “immediate trigger” for the fighting was the police raid on the Aqsa compound, but added in is a reference to the attempt to evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Less advisedly, so is a paragraph clarifying that “Israeli airstrikes aim for strategic targets” in contrast to Hamas’s deliberate targeting of population centers, a highly dubious assertion. And while a paragraph describing the Israeli police raids is gone, three paragraphs describing how “Palestinians rampaged” in Israeli cities have been left in.


This is just a small sampling. One could spend dozens of hours and thousands of words going through the various reports produced on these same events and find countless more similar examples.

By bending over backward to appear fair and neutral, or at least not too critical of Israel, mainstream news is forced to serially violate some of the most basic no-no’s of journalistic writing and structure. The result is that its audience is delivered a confusing and even misleading picture of the Israel-Palestine conflict that reinforces what many of them already feel after years of being bombarded with similarly framed mainstream reporting: it’s all too complicated for a normal person to get their head around, so why bother?

But the reality is not all that complicated. Hamas’s rockets and Palestinians protesting, throwing rocks, or even rioting: these are all desperate responses to sustained, systematic, and brutal repression and land theft by Israel that has been going on for decades, and has sharply escalated over the last decade in particular. It is the “language of the unheard,” as Martin Luther King called the African-American riots of the 1960s, which, like their counterparts last year and in the decades between, are a similar howl of frustration from those who have been relentlessly dispossessed and brutalized with seemingly no recourse.

There are ways of putting an end to such things, whether rocket attacks or property destruction from rioters. But to do that requires first accurately describing the injustices that drive them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Statement from Family Planning 2030 on the Future of Family Planning

Publication Date: 05/14/2021

Every woman and girl, no matter where she lives, should have the freedom and ability to use lifesaving, life-changing modern contraception. This was our fundamental objective when Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) was launched in 2012 at the London Summit on Family Planning.

Since then, remarkable progress has been made. As of July 2020, 320 million women and girls were using a modern method of contraception in 69 of the world’s lowest-income countries, 60 million more than when FP2020 was created. In FP2020 countries in Africa, the number of modern contraceptive users has grown by 66% since 2012.

The UK has been steadfast in its commitment to family planning and, in 2019, was the world’s second-largest donor, making up 25% of total bilateral funding for family planning, its highest level since FP2020 was created. The UK’s leadership has helped demonstrate the importance of prioritizing family planning as a critical intervention for healthy communities and its benefits — including improvements in education, reductions of child marriage, and improved maternal and child health — to reach our shared global commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

It is deeply troubling, therefore, to see the UK make drastic cuts in its financial support for family planning, one of the best investments in global development. In April, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) learned that the UK would be cutting its support for its flagship program, the UNFPA Supplies Partnership by 85% and its core funding support by 60% in 2021. The UNFPA Supplies Partnership increases equitable access to high-quality modern contraceptives and life-saving maternal health medicines as a part of family planning programs in over 50 countries around the world. With these funds the UNFPA Supplies Partnership would have helped prevent around 14.6 million unintended pregnancies, 4.3 million unsafe abortions, and 250,000 maternal and child deaths."

UNFPA is not the only agency to have been affected by the UK’s cut in family planning assistance. The International Planned Parenthood Federation and MSI Reproductive Choices have reported deep cuts that will force them to close or severely curtail programs. In addition, we anticipate reductions in bilateral funding for country family planning programs, multiplying the impact of cuts to global institutions.

It is not only the UK cutting its financial support for family planning, however, that is worrisome. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to immense disruption across a range of health services. Around the world the economic impact of COVID-19 has already begun to present immense challenges to family planning programs. Many national governments are facing the prospects of reducing domestic funding for family planning programs in order to prioritize COVID-19 response. Households whose livelihoods have been affected may be unable to pay for services, and private sector family planning providers are facing revenue shortages, forcing closing of clinics and staff layoffs. 

"Tragically, disease outbreaks have always had a gendered impact, threatening women’s access to health services. We have witnessed this in the past with Zika and Ebola epidemics. Disrupting access to family planning needs has both short-term and long-term consequences for women’s health. We must learn from past experiences and ensure that essential services like family planning are not compromised at the expense of health emergencies." - Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, Population Foundation of India

Taken together, these cuts will create significant barriers to the millions of people who want and need access to vital contraceptive services. Family planning helps adolescents finish school, delay marriage, and avoid dangerous early pregnancies. When women and adolescents can determine whether and when to become pregnant, their pregnancies are safer and their children healthier. Without strong investments in family planning, there will be lasting consequences that will take months and years to fully comprehend.

As women and girls continue to suffer the worst impact of the pandemic, we must accelerate our efforts to strengthen and expand family planning programs. Our community has proven that when we work together, across borders and sectors, we can truly change the course of progress on family planning. Now more than ever, we need to invest in transformative access to modern contraceptives. 

As we look ahead to the Decade of Action on the SDGs and the Family Planning 2030 partnership, we cannot turn our backs on women and girls. The quest for a more peaceful, prosperous, and equitable world is inextricably linked with the rights of these individuals, and their ability to shape and make their own choices about family planning. As countries are planning their new family planning commitments, donor government funding, resources, and support are crucial to continuing this essential work. We can leave no one behind.

https://familyplanning2020.org/Building2030

 MAY 13, 2021 

Wolff Responds: Labor Shortage is Fake News

In this Wolff Responds, Prof. Wolff comments on the latest hype about shortages of labor in the US and explains what is really behind these headlines.

Wolff Responds is a @Democracy At Work  production. We provide these videos free of ads. Please consider supporting our work. Visit our website democracyatwork.info/donate or join our growing Patreon community and support Global Capitalism Live Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff at https://www.patreon.com/gcleu.

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We all have a role to play in ending the carnage in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

May 14, 2021

Peggy Mason
Blog

Israel chooses violence again

As the horrific carnage continues in Gaza, the following headlines tell the story:

A Nightmare of Terror Across the Landscape of Palestine: As Israeli lynch mobs roam the streets attacking Palestinians, and as Israeli war planes drop bombs on Gaza, it’s essential to understand how we arrived at this moment. – Yousef Munayyer (thenation.com, 13 May 2021).
US funds make Israel’s bombardment of Gaza possible. When will they be halted? – Joshua Leifer (theguardian.com, 13 May 2021).
Israel- Palestine is a State of Permanent Conflict Punctuated by Periodic Carnage. Only the Watching World Can Stop It – Mouin Rabbani (Time.com, 13 May 2021)
The Wars Will End When Palestinians Can Return – Peter Beinart.substack.com (12 May 2021).

Peter Beinart, in his commentary, provides a scathing criticism of the role the Biden administration has played in this ongoing nightmare as it continues significant military aid to Israel and acts to shield it from Security Council sanction:


Biden is avoiding the issue of Israel-Palestine in roughly the same way Donald Trump avoided the issue of climate change. He’s ignoring the problem and fueling it at the same time.

He continues:


the Biden administration spent its first few months pumping the political equivalent of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere with its unconditional support for Israel while hoping those gasses wouldn’t create a disaster.

Now they have.

For a thoughtful, informed discussion on the situation, listen to a podcast with Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. Click here. (Podcast access is free upon registration.)

Another important conversation, entitled Israel Chooses Violence Once Again (rethinkingsecurity.org.uk, 14 May 2021), reminds us of how horribly Israel has diminished itself as a nation through its decades-long repression of Palestinian human rights. Andrew Rigby recalls the following excerpt from Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation (2020), p. 155:


The country that occupied us half a century ago bears little resemblance to the Israel of today. By forcing them to justify the unjustifiable, that which is patently illegal, we have helped them destroy their legal system and, through their open discrimination, the rule of law and respect for international law.

We have certainly not won, but neither have they.

The Canadian response

The statement by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Marc Garneau, can be found here.

It professes “deep” concern over “continued expansion of settlements, and … the demolitions and evictions” without actually connecting those Israeli actions to the current horrific violence. It also condemns the “indiscriminate” bombing by Hamas but is utterly silent on repeated and ongoing Israeli tank and fighter jet bombardment of densely crowded civilian residential areas in Gaza.

However, that lack of balance pales in comparison with the statement by Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, released on twitter and reproduced in its entirety here:

Apparently the Conservatives believe that the only party responsible for the current carnage, and the only impediment to non-existent peace negotiations, is Hamas.

They also seem oblivious to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s outright rejection of Hamas requests to negotiate a ceasefire, not to mention the UN warning that forced evictions in East Jerusalem could amount to war crimes.

NDP: Stop Selling Arms Until Illegal Occupation Ends

In sharp and welcome contrast to the Liberals and Conservatives, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has not only condemned the escalating violence, but called for concrete and immediate action by Canada to help “ratchet down” the spiralling conflict in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank by ending all Canadian arms sales to Israel. He explains:


By arming one side of the conflict it is undermining the peace process and it is supporting illegal occupation….

For more information on Canada’s arms exports to Israel, see Canada’s 2019 Exports of Military Goods together with an explanation of the categories of munitions and an Israel-specific excerpt from the overall report.

Commentators arguing that a Canadian embargo would have “limited leverage” given our modest defence trade with Israel are entirely missing the point. Such a tangible and long-overdue gesture of disapproval by a self-described “close friend and ally” of Israel would have huge political and symbolic impact.

RI President Peggy Mason adds:


The UN warned back on 7 May that the forced evictions in East Jerusalem could amount to war crimes. That means Canada’s clear obligation, under international law and our national regulation of arms exports, is to cease arming Israel immediately.

Whither Canada?

We call on the Government of Canada to immediately suspend all arms exports to Israel, whether under existing or new permits, until the illegal occupation of Palestine ends.

JOIN THE NDP CALL TO END CANADIAN ARMS SALES TO ISRAEL

The NDP has set up a petition here calling for Canadians to Prioritize Peace by stopping Canadian arms sales to Israel.

The petition states in part:


Canada can play an active role in helping build a just and sustainable peace for Palestinians and Israelis.

Join Jagmeet Singh in calling on Justin Trudeau to stop the selling of arms to Israel until the end of the illegal occupation.

We need better CBC reporting on Israel-Palestine

For another important angle on this story, see Peter Larson’s 10 May 2021 Canada Talks Israel Palestine blog entitled OFIP Calls on CBC to Better Inform Canadians about Current Events in Israel/Palestine. The introduction to this blog reads:


OFIP Chair Peter Larson and OFIP Advisory Council member (and former senior CBC correspondent) David Halton, have written an open letter to CBC Chair Michael Goldbloom and CBC President Catherine Tait, questioning CBC’s reluctance to report on credible investigations critical of Israel. They argue that the national public broadcaster is not fulfilling its mandate to “inform” Canadians.

The text of the Open Letter is contained in the blog and can also be read here.

Since the publication of the blog, the CBC has responded to the Open Letter, and Peter Larson in turn has replied. The CBC response can be found here and Peter Larson’s reply here.

Update on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee study on Canada’s Arms Exports

Members of the Canadian Civil Society Coalition on Canada’s arms trade policy, including the Rideau Institute and Project Ploughshares, testified for a second time before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on 27 April. The transcript of those hearings can be found here, and the proceedings viewed here.





A copy of the written submission by RI President Peggy Mason can be found here. A copy of the Civil Society Coalition recommendations to the Standing Committee can be accessed here. The Committee has finished hearing testimony and is now in the report-writing stage.

Photo credit: Wikimedia images (war on Gaza)

China’s Development and Its Impact on Canada-China Relations

•May 7, 2021



Institute for Peace & Diplomacy

The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy (IPD) hosted a panel titled ‘China’s Development: Its Impact on the World and Canada-China Relations’ on May 6, 2021. In the first part of this panel, Chinese Ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu delivered opening remarks and responded to follow up questions from IPD executive director Bijan Ahmadi and our panel of experts. In the second part of the event, our four distinguished experts provided their analysis about China’s development and Canada-China relations. Panelists: Peggy Mason: President of Rideau Institute, she served as Canada’s Ambassador to UN for disarmament from 1989 to 1995.