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Alberta had the tightest controls on spending in Canada during the very period when the Klein government has claimed costs were soaring out of control. Now, public programs in Alberta-including health care-have become the most poorly supported in Canada. (6 weeks on the Financial Post national best-seller list!)
From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? Shredding Paper unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry. Michael G. Hillard deconstructs the paper industry's unusual technological and economic histories. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests. Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, Hillard highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. Shredding Paper truthfully and transparently tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a "folk" version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, Hillard offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.
The Government of Alberta under Ralph Klein has asked a reasonable question: can health care be better provided partly as a private, for-profit product rather than as a not-for-profit public service? But-despite the claims of advocates for market-driven medicine-private hospitals are neither cheaper nor more efficient than public ones. Clear Answers summarizes the huge body of evidence showing that they are more expensive and less efficient.
The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.” From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code. “Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”
While governments assert that Canada is a world leader in sustainability, Unnatural Law provides extensive evidence to refute this claim. A comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian environmental law, the book provides a balanced, critical examination of Canada's record, focusing on laws and policies intended to protect water, air, land, and biodiversity. Three decades of environmental laws have produced progress in a number of important areas, such as ozone depletion, protected areas, and some kinds of air and water pollution. However, Canada's overall record remains poor. In this vital and timely study, David Boyd explores the reasons why some laws and policies foster progress while others fail. He ultimately concludes that the root cause of environmental degradation in industrialized nations is excessive consumption of resources. Unnatural Law outlines the innovative changes in laws and policies that Canada must implement in order to respond to the ecological imperative of living within the Earth's limits. The struggle for a sustainable future is one of the most daunting challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Everyone - academics, lawyers, students, policy-makers, and concerned citizens - interested in the health of the Canadian and global environments will find Unnatural Law an invaluable source of information and insight. For more information on Unnatural Law visit David Boyd's site, www.unnaturallaw.com.
Education has become a battlefield, the classroom the arena where the contest is fought. The 1997 Ontario teachers' strike, the federal government's Millennium Scholarship, and a wave of protests across the country are among the signals that the war is heating up. Alberta stands as a Canadian model of radical education reform, propelled by economic necessity. But is all reform necessarily right or good?-and who decides? A range of commentators-teachers, scholars, parents, and others-discuss the conflict in Alberta's schools.
An updated edition of the “penetrating study” examining how the current state of mass media puts our democracy at risk (Noam Chomsky). What happens when a few conglomerates dominate all major aspects of mass media, from newspapers and magazines to radio and broadcast television? After all the hype about the democratizing power of the internet, is this new technology living up to its promise? Since the publication of this prescient work, which won Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize and the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the concentration of media power and the resultant “hypercommercialization of media” has only intensified. Robert McChesney lays out his vision for what a truly democratic society might look like, offering compelling suggestions for how the media can be reformed as part of a broader program of democratic renewal. Rich Media, Poor Democracy remains as vital and insightful as ever and continues to serve as an important resource for researchers, students, and anyone who has a stake in the transformation of our digital commons. This new edition includes a major new preface by McChesney, where he offers both a history of the transformation in media since the book first appeared; a sweeping account of the organized efforts to reform the media system; and the ongoing threats to our democracy as journalism has continued its sharp decline. “Those who want to know about the relationship of media and democracy must read this book.” —Neil Postman “If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book.” —Bill Moyers
Why have democratic governments failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite dire warnings and compelling evidence of the profound and growing threat posed by global warming? Most of the writing on global warming is by scientists, academics, environmentalists, and journalists. Kevin Taft, a former leader of the opposition in Alberta, brings a fresh perspective through the insight he gained as an elected politician who had an insider's eyewitness view of the role of the oil industry. His answer, in brief: The oil industry has captured key democratic institutions in both Alberta and Ottawa. Taft begins his book with a perceptive observer's account of a recent court casein Ottawa which laid bare the tactics and techniques of the industry, its insiders and lobbyists. He casts dramatic new light on exactly how corporate lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, universities, and other organizations are working together to pursue the oil industry's agenda. He offers a brisk tour of the recent work of scholars who have developed the concepts of the deep state and institutional capture to understand how one rich industry can override the public interest. Taft views global warming and weakened democracy as two symptoms of the same problem — the loss of democratic institutions to corporate influence and control. He sees citizen engagement and direct action by the public as the only response that can unravel big oil's deep state.
This volume widens the perspective of the roles that records play in society. As opposed to most writings in the discipline of archives and records management which view records from cultural, historical, and economical efficiency dimensions, this volume highlights that one of the most salient features of records is the role they play as sources of accountability—a component that often brings them into daily headlines and into courtrooms. Struggles over control, access, preservation, destruction, authenticity, accuracy, and other issues demonstrate time and again that records are not mute observers and recordings of activity. Rather, they are frequently struggled over as objects of memory formation and erasure. The 14 powerful case studies focus around four closely related themes—explanation, secrecy, memory, and trust. They demonstrate how records compel, shape, distort, and recover social interactions across space and time. The diverse range of case studies includes the ownership of the Martin Luther King, Jr. papers, the destruction of records on Nazi war criminals in Canada, the politics of documents in the Iran-Contra affair, the failure of records management in the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the publication of tobacco company documents on the World Wide Web, access to records associated with the U.S. government's infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, the role of the U.S. National Archives in identifying assets looted by the Nazis in the wake of the Holocaust, the destruction of public records by the South African government during apartheid's final years, the construction of foreign relations of the U.S. documentary histories, the forgery corrupting recordkeeping systems, and the collapse of foreign indigenous commercial banks.
Analyzing over 100,000 industrial spills from Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Montana, and the Northwest Territories, this book takes the reader behind the firewall of disinformation to uncover scientific truths about crude oil and saline water spills and the cumulative impacts of the fossil fuel industry on ecosystems and society.