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Feature Editorials

Failure to Protect Female Teen Assault Victim

Friday, 26 April 2013 15:43 Roger Annis Feature Editorials
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Protests Erupt in Nova Scotia - There is anguish and anger across the province of Nova Scotia following the death by suicide of teenager Rehtaeh Parsons on April 7. The 17-year old hanged herself in the family home on April 4. Three days later, her parents consented to removing her from life support.

Rehtaeh Parsons death was provoked by institutional failure to deal with an alleged gang sexual assault she suffered in November 2011 at the hands of four teenage boys who were schoolmates at Cole Harbour District High School, in the Halifax region. The teens had been drinking alcohol in the parental home of one of the boys.

Adding to Parson's humiliation, and a criminal act in its own right, was the posting of a photo of the assault to social media several days later by one of the alleged assailants. The photo played a crucial role in the later suicide because it provoked an endless string of taunts and threats against Parsons, sometimes by former schoolmates, oft times by strangers.
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The World’s Debts Shall Not Be Repaid

Saturday, 30 March 2013 12:39 Ingo Schmidt Feature Editorials
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“On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.” - Capital, Karl Marx.

When bankers, industrialists and their lobbyists talk about debt, they have state debt in mind. When politicians of powerful states talk about debt, they have the debt of less powerful states in mind. This is how the concentrated power of money and politics push countries like Ireland, Greece, Italy, and now Cyprus, toward the precipice of collapse, force changes of government and the sale of public assets to foreign creditors.

That a debt problem exists in these countries is beyond doubt. Yet this is not just a problem of public, but also of private indebtedness. Indeed other countries, among them some of Italy's and Greece's creditors, are themselves even deeper in the red.
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Syria Between Revolution and Counterrevolution

Thursday, 17 January 2013 00:00 Sungur Savran Feature Editorials
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The struggle between the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad and the popular masses of the city and country in Syria that started on 15 March 2011 seems to have consumed both sides in its ferocity. It is promising imminent victory to a third force that has been carefully engineered, supported and armed by the international forces of counterrevolution.

This third force is a bourgeois coalition composed of different political tendencies, including opportunist pro-imperialist bourgeois politicians living in exile and waiting for their day to come, Sunni Muslim movements of various stripes, most saliently the Muslim Brotherhood, direct representatives of various sections of the Syrian bourgeoisie and defectors from the Syrian army.

The forces of international counterrevolution, consisting mainly of imperialism, first and foremost the U.S. of course, Sunni Arab reaction led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Turkey (Israel has kept an incredibly low profile) seem to be nearing success in their grand aim of deviating the uprising of the popular masses, an authentic part of the Arab revolution, into a ‘responsible,’ pro-imperalistic movement that can take Assad's place without a radical rupture with the existing bourgeois state.
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The Unraveling Occupation

Wednesday, 02 May 2012 00:00 Nicole Colson Feature Editorials
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The U.S. war and occupation of Afghanistan was supposed to bring stability and democracy. Instead, Afghanistan remains a country on the brink of disaster – one that has clearly been exacerbated by the U.S. presence. More than 10 years after the U.S. war began, in spite of the presence of about 2,000 international aid groups, at least $3.5-billion in humanitarian funds and $58-billion in development assistance, humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan remain abysmal.

This past winter, one of the harshest in recent years, compounded the suffering of those living in refugee camps – an estimated 35,000 people just in the capital of Kabul, and many more around the country. The camps, according to the New York Times, are euphemistically referred to as “informal settlements,” because labeling them as what they really are, camps full of war refugees, is “politically sensitive.” According to the Times, “The Afghan government insists that the residents should and could return to their original homes; the residents say it is too dangerous for them to do so.”
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Capitalist Life-Crises and The North American Left: Problems and Prospects

Wednesday, 04 April 2012 03:03 Jeff Noonan Feature Editorials
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The struggles across the Middle East and North Africa and on-going resistance to austerity in Europe catalysed a fightback in North America – the Occupy Movement – that no one saw coming. 

Together, all testify to the pervasive and deepening crisis of capitalism, not just as an economic system, but as a comprehensive way of living and valuing.

This civilizational crisis creates the opportunity for a renewal of socialist politics, but also poses hard questions to socialists: what does capitalist crisis mean on the deepest levels, what are the lessons of the Occupy movement, what ought our relationship to existing political and social institutions be, and how to do we go about building a broad democratic movement that has a plausible chance of overcoming capitalist life-crises? 

The following ten theses aim to be part of a conversation, not the conclusion to an argument.
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The War on Women: Abortion and Birth Control

Tuesday, 21 February 2012 00:00 Jack Random Feature Editorials
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A nation’s progress should be measured as much by its advancement of human rights as by its accumulation and equitable distribution of wealth.

Though conditioned on gender, race and property, we were the first nation on earth to embrace the fundamental principle of democracy. Had we remained as we were at our founding we would likely have dissolved as a nation but we changed. We progressed. We answered the challenges of human evolution.

With the adoption of a constitution replacing the Articles of Confederation, we announced to the world that we were one nation, united in principle and purpose. We became a union with a strong federal government that could defend our borders and guarantee the rights of our citizens enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

We reformed our democracy by empowering the people to elect not only our representatives in the lower house but also our senators in the upper chamber of congress. We expanded our franchise by eliminating property as a condition of voting. We survived a bloody civil war, abolishing slavery and eventually welcoming all races to the full rights of citizenship.
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