Other Voices

The Connexions Newsletter
2014


Other Voices is a digest of new and archival content from the Connexions website and other progressive websites. Regular features include a digest of new articles, news about grassroots archives and people’s history internationally, website of the week, book of the week, film of the week, and other news and resources.

To receive Others Voices please send an email headed “Subscribe” to mailroom [at] connexions [dot] org.


This page lists the issues of Other Voices published in 2014 and 2015. For issues published from 2016 to 2021, click here


Current and past issues


Other Voices
December 19, 2015
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “is not even worth glancing at.” Utopian visions, be they practical or not, free our imaginations, if only for a little while, from the daily grind of struggle and worry, and allow us to dream about the kind of world we would hope to live in. Such dreams can inspire us and guide us, even if they are not always quite practical. This issue of Other Voices peers into the world of utopian visions, practical or otherwise: our topic of the week is Utopias. You’ll also find a potpourri of other articles, books, resources and songs to stimulate your thinking and your imagination.


Other Voices
December 5, 2015
This issue of Other Voices covers a wide range of issues, from the climate crisis and the ecosocialist response, to terrorism and the struggle against religious fundamentalism, as well as items on urban gardening, the destruction of olive trees, and how the police are able to use Google's timeline feature to track you every move, now and years into the past. Another article challenges the role of big NGOs in legitimizing the status quo and blocking working-class and grassroots self-organizing.


Other Voices
November 21, 2015
This issue spotlights climate change, the escalating crisis that the upcoming Paris climate conference is supposed to address. Climate change is not a single problem: it is a product of an economic system whose driving force is the need to grow and accumulate. Nor does it affect everyone equally: those with wealth and power can buy themselves what they need to continue living comfortably for years to come – everything from air conditioning to food to police and soldiers to protect their secure bubbles – while those who are poor and powerless find their lives increasingly impossible. A serious effort to address climate change therefore means social change and economic change.


Other Voices
November 7, 2015
Our focus is on the corporate rights treaties that are misleadingly sold as trade agreements. In particular, the spotlight is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated in secret, and now scheduled to be rubber-stamped by national governments on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The TPP is best understood as a major milestone in the long-term war waged by the corporate elite against any form of democracy. It gives corporations the power to block any environmental protections or health and safety legislation that could be interpreted as interfering with a corporation’s ‘right’ to make a profit by doing whatever it wants.


Other Voices
October 24, 2015
This issue sheds light whistleblowers and the murky world of national security. Governments and corporations may often pay lip service to the importance of protecting whistleblowers, but in reality they are almost always persecuted. Repercussions can range from being fired to being imprisoned. Whistleblowers - people like Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden – play a vital role in letting the public know what governments are really doing. At great risk to themselves, they tell the truth which governments seek to hide.


Other Voices
October 8, 2015
The focus is Elections, with information and ideas on getting out the anti-Harper vote in the October 2015 Canadian election. Election resources also include articles and books which argue that western parliamentary democracies are anything but democratic, in how they operate, and because the most important decisions are not subject to democratic decision-making. Articles on the newly signed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement ’ and on the use of finance and debt to take over countries and to attack working people, explore this theme in detail. On a more positive note, a discussion of James Hansen’s fossil fuel exit program, which suggests an approach for getting our economies off fossil fuels in the near future. .


Other Voices
September 25, 2015
Focus on the Canadian election and the importance of stopping Stephen Harper, and on the increasing prevalence of voter suppression. Voter suppression is an immediate concern in the current federal election in Canada, and, more generally, an important but little-discussed feature of politics in most countries that use elections to legitimate power. In countries with a supposedly universal franchise, certain kinds of voters – typically, those most likely to vote against the ruling party(ies) – are discouraged, obstructed, and prevented from voting in various ways.


Other Voices
September 10, 2015
The Labour Day issue. Working people confront overwork, anti-union legislation, and austerity. In Greece, Syriza’s betrayal leaves ordinary people searching for other alternatives. Union organizers and Zapatistas explore how to work for change. Plus: Contest: Guess the date of Harper's next ‘terrorist plot’ a win a Stop Harper button!


Other Voices
August 21, 2015
Spotlighting the abuses of power and democratic principles Canada’s Harper government has been guilty of since it took office. Analysis of the capitulation of Greece’s Syriza government to the international financial institutions, and what it means to the Greek people, who are now being hit with vicious ‘austerity’ measures so that the banks can be bailed out. Consideration of alternative strategies for the left, now that Syriza and similar European parties like Podemos have admitted that they have no plans and no hope for bringing about positive change. Topic of the week is Mining and the Environment.


Other Voices
July 3, 2015
Our spotlight this issue is on the debt crisis facing Greece. To understand the crisis, one has to look beyond the mainstream media to alternative sources of information. We’ve done that, with articles that set out to analyze the nature of the debt burden that has been imposed on the citizens of so many countries, not just Greece. Also: celebrating Grace Lee Bogg’s 100th birthday.


Other Voices
June 18, 2015
Corruption and power. Corruption – or at least some types of corruption – are much in the news, with the ongoing scandals in the Canadian Senate and the recent U.S. targeting of the Swiss-based football federation FIFA for alleged bribery. Other Voices looks at these and other forms of corruption, and the double standards which result in some corruption being prosecuted, while the most corrupt institutions are allowed to flourish. Also: contorversies about identity choices, racism, and the Magna Carta.


Other Voices
June 5, 2015
Residential schools and abuses of power. Reports and background on the just-released report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Residential schools in Canada and other countries residential schools were set up to forcibly ‘assimilate’ children by taking them away from their parents and communities, and depriving them of their language, culture, history, and emotional supports.


Other Voices
May 21, 2015
With the start of the growing season in much of the Northern hemisphere, Other Voices digs up articles and resources related to urban agriculture and local food production. Urban agriculture – growing food in and around cities – is a response to the problems created by industrial agriculture, a chemical-dependent industry shipping food thousands of miles from where it is produced to where it will be consumed. .


Other Voices
May 7, 2015
This issue of Other Voices ranges widely, from increasing worker activism and strikes in China, to advances in battery technology that make it much easier and cheaper to store solar and wind energy for future use, to testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the war crimes they committed routinely and as a matter of policy in last summer's attack on Gaza. .


Other Voices
April 23, 2015
In this issue of Other Voices, we mark the death of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano by featuring two of his books, as well as an article about his life and work. We also commemorate the 40th anniversary of the final victory of the Vietnamese resistance against American invasion and occupation. These articles, and others in this issue, about indigenous women in Chiapas, efforts to transform Venezuela, and job hunting in China, look at the world from below, from the perspective of those who work and struggle, and those who worked and struggled before them.


Other Voices
April 9, 2015
Resisting Neoliberalism ‐ The version of capitalism which became dominant by the 1980s has been given the name neoliberalism. The term refers to the global economic restructuring which has taken place, and to the accompanying shifts in the structures of power under which local and national governments have seen their ability to act independently curtailed by international treaties and by institutions which owe their allegiance to corporate capital. The essence of neoliberalism has been an unending campaign of class struggle by the rich against the rest. Yet resistance continues, and indeed continues to grow. In this edition of Other Voices, and more extensively on the Connexions website, we look at both neoliberalism and the resistance to it.


Other Voices
March 26, 2015
This issue features items related to sustainability, ecology, and agriculture, including Vandana Shiva’s article “Small is the New Big,” the Council of Canadians’ new report on water issues, “Blue Betrayal,” the film “The Future of Food,”, and the memoir “Journey of an Unrepentant Socialist” by Brewster Kneen, a former farmer and long-time critic of corporate agriculture. Seeds of Fire for March 26 recalls the birth of the Chipko movement in India in 1974, when a group of rural women, the original “tree-huggers”, surrounded and held onto their trees to prevent them from being cut down by a lumber company.


Other Voices
March 12, 2015
The focus of this issue is organizing. How can we challenge and overcome entrenched structures of economic and political power? Our own source of power is our latent ability to join together and work toward common goals, collectively. That requires organizing, Power gives way only when it is challenged by powerful movements for change, and movements grow out of organizing. In this newsletter, we feature a number of articles, books, and other organizing resources.


Other Voices
February 26, 2015
Ukraine is spotlighted in this issue of Other Voices, with several articles on the events of the past year, from the overthrow of the government, to the rise of the far right, the armed conflict in the east, and aggressive US/NATO moves setting the stage for a possible nuclear war between the US and Russia. Also in this issue, #DomesticExtremists ridicule police state legislation in the UK, world inequality in one simple graphic, and people’s history items about mass strikes in the First World War, and the new People’s Archive of Rural India.


Other Voices
February 12, 2015
This week we’re featuring the 40-point program which SYRIZA, the Greek coalition of the radical left, put forward to win the Greek election. Oliver Tickell writes about the mass media’s latest campaign of pro-war propaganda, this time revolving around supposed ‘Russian aggression’ in Ukraine, while Paul Edwards looks at another form of war propaganda, Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’. The Topic of the Week is Water Rights. Related items include the film “Blue Gold: World Water Wars,” the featured website International Rivers, and articles on water-related struggles, past and present, including articles on the Walkerton water disaster and the Cochabamba water war.


Other Voices
January 29, 2015
This issue of Other Voices focuses on the issue of land seizures and land take-overs. Also included: Greece’s solidarity movement, and the challenges and opportunities it faces after the election of a Syriza government. From the archives, there are interviews about the 1974 occupation of Anicinabe Park, an article about anti-discrimination fighter Viola Desmond, and the publication, in 1929, of All Quiet on the Western Front.


Other Voices
January 15, 2015
The topic of the week is Workers’ Health and Safety. Articles on why environmentalists should support working class struggles; whistleblowers; the appalling death rate from U.S. drone strikes; the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris; and what humanity could learn from Bonobos. The feature from the archives is Traces of Magma. The International Labor Rights Forum is the group of the week, and Silkwood is the film of the week.


Other Voices
December 18, 2014
From its beginnings, one of capitalism’s prime imperatives has been an all-out and never-ceasing assault on the Commons in all its manifestations. Common land, common water, public ownership - anything rooted in the ancient human traditions of sharing and cooperation is anathema to an economic system that seeks to turn everything that exists into private property that can be exploited for profit. This issue of the Connexions Newsletter focuses on the Commons.


Other Voices
November 27, 2014
The theme for this issue, and the topic of the week, is Climate Change. Groups and websites engaged in the fight for action on global warming and climate justice are featured. Book of the week is Magdoff and Foster's What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism. In addition to articles on climate change, there are articles on Ebola, corporate tax evasion, and state terrorism, as well as a 1971 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.


Other Voices
November 13, 2014
The topic of the week is Libertarian Socialism. Articles on no-state solutions in Kurdistan; right-wing dirty tricks used to attack labour and environmental groups; scientists unravelling the risks of new pesticides; the terrors faced by fishermen in Gaza; and bringing books and seeking peace in Colombia. Film of the week is Even the Rain, and book of the week is Adolph Reed’s Class Notes.


Other Voices
October 30, 2014
Topic of the week is Refugees. Featured articles look at migration, counter-surveillance resources, farmers in Ghana fighting to retain the freedom to save their own seeds, and rebuilding communities faced with mining companies in Ecuador. The website of the week is Mediamatters. From the archives we’ve got Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement.


Other Voices
October 16, 2014
Topic of the week is the Arms Trade. Featured resources include The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade, an article on Israel’s War Business, and the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade. A new feature in Other Voices is the Film of the Week: to start off, we spotlight The Corporation, an exploration of the dominant institution of our time. Plus: Lying to ourselves about the air war, Karl Marx’s critique of modern agriculture, and a challenge to Montreal’s anti-protest bylaw.


Other Voices
October 2, 2014
This issue of Other Voices looks at why so many people deny or ignore the very real and very near threat of climate change. We also look into the ways on how NGOs tame and undermine grassroots movements. Other Voices also shares an article detailing how a $182 billion bail-out of tax-payer money was not enough for one bank. Finally, in this issue, we look into the horrors of American slavery and how it shaped the United States into the economic power it is today.


Other Voices
September 19, 2014
Coverage of spying, terrorism, and protest. Articles on how the ISIS (Islamic State group) comes to be using American weapons; the U.S. government’s secret plans to spy for American corporations; the insidious power of propaganda; how to spot and defeat disruption on the Internet, and steps to sustainable livestock production. Topic of the week is War Crimes; book for the week is Berkeley: The New Student Revolt, and website of the week is LabourStart.


Other Voices
September 4, 2014
Information about the Connexions Alternative Media List and the Labor Film Archive. Articles on corporations spying on non-profits, workplace deaths, Monsanto and Ukraine, and liberal environmentalism. Topic of the week is Violence Against Journalists. Book of the week is Michael Riordon’s Bold Scientists.


Other Voices
August 21, 2014
Topic of the week is Killings by Police. Articles on the way the Ebola crisis illuminates the moral bankruptcy of capitalism; Responding the capitalist crisis, in 1914 and 2014; Globalizng Gaza: Israel’s leading role in undermining international law; and Marinaleda, a town in Spain attempting to create alternatives based on democracy, co-operation, and mutual aid. Group of the Week is Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.


Other Voices
July 31, 2014
Articles on truth, justice and reconciliation efforts in countries affected by civil war or internal conflict; Bone Collectors: the fate of the remains of Australian aboriginal people stolen from their burial grounds and dispersed to museums; the Galway children’s mass grave; and Which came first: Palestinian rockets or Israeli violence? The topic of the week is the Israeli military.


Other Voices
July 17, 2014
Topic of the week is Gaza, which was under attack by Israel as this issue appeared. Articles on surveillance capitalism, the tactics and successes of the movement for same-sex marriage in the United States, and profiles of alternative archives. Website of the week is Democracy Now!


Other Voices
July 3, 2014
The first issue of Other Voices, the Connexions newsletter. Topic of the week is Surveillance. Articles on climate politics, 21st-century land grabs, and the destruction of Canada’s science libraries. Plus items from the Connexions Calendar and Seeds of Fire.


Interested in current information and news about social justice resources, people’s history, and grassroots archives? Want it in one convenient package, sent directly into your inbox? Then subscribe to Connexions’ bi-weekly newsletter, Other Voices. With recent articles about issues affecting you and the world around you, updates on what new on Connexions.org and other social justice archives, Other Voices is a great source for finding out about social justice news and events.

To receive Others Voices please send an email headed “Subscribe” to mailroom [at] connexions [dot] org.

This page lists the issues of Other Voices published in 2014 and 2015. For issues published from 2016 to 2021, click here

For issues of the print publications published by Connexions (Connexions Digest, Connexions Annual, Canadian Information Sharing Service) see The Connexions Digest.