News, Events & Comments

As Amazon workers in Brampton Canada and other cities worldwide stuggle to get breaks and appropriate social distance the COVID-19 pandemic rages with the poor and the racialized the most victimized of all. Greening the economy is a good thing but green consumption is still consumption and consumption depeletes nature. As animals that are part of the natural world we humans ultimately pay the price for this in waste and pandemics. Until the relentless drive for consumption based profit is abandoned in favour of a social economy the consequences in sickness and environmental degradation will continue. As more and more is bought and processed online buyers have less and less contact with, or even awareness of, those who work "facelessly" to send them the consumables they select, "green" or not. Green the economy yes, but for real change socialize it too. TorontotheBetter asks, "when will the government of Ontario get the message?" Our Toronto includes the GTA.

For all the talk by Canada's leading political party about the absence of contradiction between the environment and the economy the facts show otherwise and Canada's leading bank RBC. aka the Royal Bank of Canada has recently been reported - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/big-banks-trillion-dollar-finance-for-fossil-fuels-shocking-says-report - in the top 5 of banks globally for fossil fuel investment. It may also come as a surprise to many Canadians that Canada has the world's largest top mining industry. This will not change until canadian governments get serious about intervention in private sector environmental explotation.

There can be no satisfaction in early spotting of the political implications of the world's grisly COVID-19 pandemic.But the official facts reported by this Wikipedia post of March 21,2021 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID - do not lie. The three countries leading cumulative monthly death tolls - the USA, Brazil and India - were all led by the neoliberal nationalist right wing governments of Donald #Trump, Narendra #Modi and Jair #Bolsonaro since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact noted in TorontotheBetter's Aug.11,2020 blogpost reported the same correlation and the same conclusion:Inequality Kills.

Thanks are due to to Ahamad Naeni for pointing out in his March 12 TorontotheBetter blog post that the rhetorical "anti-Imperialism" of some voices may actually undermine genuine anti-imperialist movements. Though superficially appealing, supporting agents simply because of they share our own enmities can land such a proponent in some very problematic ideological places. We should probably not invite any vegetarian to dinner just because they reject meat. There have been vegetarian fascists, including Adolf Hitler at the end of his life.

We invite you to check out Toronto hospital whistle-blower Nancy Olivieri's recent Twitter post on some sciences racist and misigynist histories.Nothing in public exists without built-in value assumptions, explicit or buried. We invite readers to suggest other examples and to sign-up to colleague Tirna Nog's "Social Media for Information Professionals" group on Facebook.There are multiple sciences within Science, some scientific but still reprehensible.

There is nothing worse than an anti-communist, communist! 

We must not be deceived by US imperialism and the corrupt regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran's apparent and superficial differences and superficial contradictions.

The Iranian government is not anti-imperialist! They have diverted anti-imperialist struggles and they've soured public opinion towards anti-Imperialist movements in the world as well.

The brutal sanctions that kill the Iranian working class come not only from US imperialism but also from the corrupt regime of the Islamic Republic. Before the brutal sanctions of US imperialism, the Iranian working class was killed by the corrupt and tyrannical regime of the Islamic Republic. In the tens of thousands, socialists, communists, intellectuals, Freedom-loving people etc. have been executed by this fascist regime after they stole the revolution in 1979. Together with western countries they called their new regime the “Islamic Republic”.

What truly anti-imperialist countries can you find in the world where their union leaders, progressive workers, human rights activists, and women’s rights activist are in prison? Iran has one of the highest rates of corruption and money laundering in the world at the moment. Unfortunately, there are corrupt officials, politically connected businessmen, and human rights violators from Iran who are able to use Canada as a money-laundering base and safe haven. As soon as they arrive in Canada, they begin buying many properties. It's been a smorgasbord!

Furthermore, Iran’s reactionary Anti-Zionism has diverted attention from the struggles of Palestinians and has mostly benefitted the Zionist regime itself. The Zionists have been using the existence of the Islamic Republic in the region as an excuse to sell billions of dollars of weapons to nearby countries.

Unfortunately, some old fashion pro-Soviet parties worldwide strongly believe that the Iranian government is anti-imperialist. According to one theory of old antagonists to imperialism - the enemy of my enemy, is my friend - in fact the Islamic regime is populist and reactionary.

Old-fashioned pro-Soviet parties should not have cowardly illusions about the populist Islamic regime and its so-called anti-imperialism. Instead, they should support the struggle of the Iranian working class against the Islamic Republic’s fascist regime as a struggle against imperialist exploitation.

There are no contradictions or conflicts of interest between US imperialists and the authoritarian regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran; they are both negative forces that remind us of the need for a dialectical transformation of capitalist economies, whether they be owned privately or by the state.

While both have superficial and apparent contradictions with each other the best way we can describe them is as unified negative forces in advancing the goals of neoliberalism. This is a trigger reminder for us of the dialectic, “unity and difference".

For details see https://www.workers.org/2021/03/54895