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FM 88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 pm Mountain Time In the Global North, chocolate is a major part of our lives. We give it as the generic token of affection at Christmas. On Valentine’s Day we send it as a sign of romantic love. When we need a mood booster or something to staunch our hunger, we grab a chocolate bar. In recent years, it’s become a staple of corporate journalism to report on the supposed health benefits of consuming chocolate, or on the alleged debate over chocolate’s power as an aphrodisiac, or how the effects of chocolate on brain chemistry mimic those of post-orgasmic flush. But what almost no one in the Global North realises is that chocolate is not simply big flavour or even big business, but a big, gaping wound in the body of human rights. The world’s number one supplier of cocoa beans, the central ingredient in chocolate, is Ivory Coast, a country whose cocoa farmers routinely employ child labourers who aren’t paid. That means they’re enslaved . These same children are

Many thanks to Br. James Ainsworth for letting me know about this article. Johann Hari of The Huffington Post writes in a piece called "You Are Being Lied to About Pirates": "Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? "As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. "They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as 'one of the great menace of our times' have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.... "In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million p

FM 88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 pm Mountain Time Years ago when I was a university student, one of my Political Science professors quipped, “Nobody is more qualified than economists to be wrong about the economy.” My prof's comment got me thinking: if economists really do know what they're talking about, shouldn’t they all be rich? Jim Stanford has no plans to become a millionaire, but he wants you to understand why some people get and stay rich, while literally billions of others struggle--and millions fail--to escape death-by-poverty. Stanford’s an economist with one of Canada’s most prominent unions, the Canadian Auto Workers, and the author of Economics for Everyone. It’s less “Business for Dummies” than “Everything You Deserve to Know About Capitalism But Were Never Told,” and he’ll be launching it April 23 in Edmonton at an event sponsored by the Parkland Institute titled “Beyond the Meltdown: Why the Current Economic Crisis Forces Us to Re-Think Economics.” As a c

FM88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com Worldwide 6 pm Mountain Time In an April 10th article on Truthdig.com, Nigerian journalist Gbemisola Olujobi asked the question, “Who is Mogae?” And why, we might ask, has he received a five million dollar bonus? Is it because he’s a corrupt politician, a stereotypical African despot swindling his own people? As Olujobi writes, “Almost everyone ... knows about Zimbabwe’s sit-tight president, Robert Mugabe. But who is Mogae? Who is Chissano? Who is Kikwete? And who is Kufuor? Sadly, very few people outside Africa recognize these names. “Festus Gontebanye Mogae is Botswana’s former president [and an Oxford-trained economist].... Botswana, acclaimed as Africa’s brightest star, rose from the ashes of grinding poverty to middle-income status in a generation. It s ele ctions are peaceful, its politicians retire voluntarily, its civil society is vibrant and its natural resources are not a curse but a blessing shared by all. “Mogae recently attracted meager attention