Tuesday Morning Links

Tab-clearing time...

- Joe connects the dots between what the Wall government hasn't told Saskatchewan's citizens and what Northland Power is telling its investors - and the predictable result is that the province being kept in the dark is getting a raw deal:

According to Northland Power Income Fund’s annual information form, filed with securities regulators in March of this year, under the PPA’s the projects “will receive monthly payments that are designed to cover all fixed costs and investment returns.” The agreements also provide “protection against changes in the market price of natural gas, as fuel costs are passed through to SaskPower.” Furthermore, the contractual structure of the projects “is designed to ensure predictable, stable and sustainable cash flows over the entire” term of the PPA’s.

Or to put it another way, the one-sided deals guarantee a profit for Northland. What they ensure is a predictable, stable and sustainable cash flow from Saskatchewan to Ontario.

- Peter Wilby rightly points out that if the participants in the billionaires' "giving pledge" really want to make a positive difference in the world, the most important step would be to live up to their duties as citizens rather than looking to take credit for philanthropic largesse:

(W)e should welcome the Gates-Buffett initiative and applaud those who have joined it. Generous, public-spirited billionaires are preferable to mean ones. But remember that two-thirds of US corporations contrive to pay no federal income tax at all and that transfer pricing alone – a legal device, used, for instance, by Ellison's Oracle Corp, that converts sales in one country to profits in another where tax liabilities are low – deprives the US treasury of $60bn annually. Such sums, which pile more taxes on the poor and reduce funds for government projects that advance the public good, dwarf what the 40 billionaires propose to give away.

If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don't kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill. When they put their names to that, there will be occasion not just for applause but for street parties.

- While there's still plenty of need for answers and accountability about the Cons' G20 security fiasco (civil rights abuses and all), it's also worth looking forward to the next time we're likely to see similar strategies employed to selectively suppress public activism. And it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that the RCMP's otherwise laughable musings about a "coup d'etat" parallel the language that the Harper Cons have used to talk about democratic votes in the House of Commons - raising the spectre that any public dissent against the Con government could be a target for the RCMP.

- Finally, Barbara Yaffe gives undeserved attention to a number of Cons who bear direct responsibility for the dumbing-down and polarization of the federal political scene, but are now putting on a show of hand-wringing over what they've wrought. We'll have reason to take them remotely seriously just as soon as they actually do something which could possibly loosen the control of the autocrat in charge.