Stop Signs

Part 1 – opening remarks: Jordy Cummings is a writer, organizer and doctoral student at York University. He is a member of the Coordinating Committee and Free and Accessible Transit Campaign of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly. Rick Salutin is a novelist, playwright and columnist for the Toronto Star.

Part 2: co-author Bianca Mugyenyi was born in Uganda and spent parts of her youth in Swaziland, Kenya and England. She is the former chair of the Canadian Federation of Students – Quebec and has been heavily involved in campaigns ranging from the struggle for accessible education and reproductive rights to justice for missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. She currently coordinates campaigns and programming at Concordia’s Centre for Gender Advocacy.

Part 3: co-author Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch magazine) and “in the mould of I. F. Stone” (Globe and Mail). His four previous books have been praised by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, William Blum and many others.

In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them; communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled; songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them.

Drawing on their new book Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler describe how the automobile’s ascendance is inextricably linked to capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue, backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption, third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war.

For more information about the book: fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/stop-signs.

Recorded in Toronto, 12 May 2011.