Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Laura Flanders interviews Naomi Klein about the connection between the climate crisis and inequality - including her recognition that any attempt to address the former without simultaneously responding to the latter is doomed to fail:

But there are a lot of people who say, “Got it, we understand. We have to deal with racism and homelessness and health care, but right now we have a pollution, environmental recycling, consumer problems. Let’s just focus with that, with plastics or with the supply chain.”

Right. And frankly, I think that that has been the approach of the mainstream green movement for a long time. Sometimes said explicitly, sometimes sort of sotto voce, which is like, “Look, let’s just save the planet first and then we’ll deal with, you know, racism and inequality and gender exclusion and sort of just wait your turn.” And that doesn’t go over very well because for people who are on the front lines of all of those other crises, they’re all existential. I mean, if you can’t feed your kids, if you’re losing your house, if you are facing violence, all of it is existential.

And so, we just have to accept that we live in a time of multiple overlapping intersecting crises and we have to figure out how to multitask, which means we need to figure out how to lower emissions in line with what scientists are telling us, which is really fast. And we need to do it in a way that builds a fair economy in the process. Because if we don’t, people are so overstressed and overburdened because of 40 years of neoliberal policy, that when you introduce the kinds of carbon-centric policies that try to pry this crisis apart from all the others, what that actually looks like is you’re going to pay more for gas, you’re going to pay more for electricity. We’re just going to have a market-based response. And so, it’s perceived as just one more thing that is making life impossible.

- James Purtill writes about the lack of trust people throughout the developed world have in the likelihood that the efforts of workers will be rewarded - and the frustration they've developed with the capitalist system which has produced that disconnect. And Nicole Aschoff highlights how corporations are downright eager to sacrifice people's lives in the name of maximizing their short-term profits.

- Doug Cuthand writes that the increasingly disproportionate share of Indigenous people within Canada's prison population reflects ongoing discrimination within a colonial society. And Justin Brake reports on the RCMP's treatment of public support for Indigenous land protection as a threat to be beaten back through the power of the state.

- Finally, Max Fawcett points out that the UCP's plans to tie university funding to post-graduation income are particularly ill-suited for a boom-and-bust economy where the degrees which seemed most valuable a decade ago are turning into dead ends now.