Sunday Morning Links

Assorted weekend reading...

- Gerald Caplan delivers a stinging critique of military jingoism that's linked to deliberate attempts to avoid recognizing and sharing the real costs of war:

The truth is that for most of us, whether we support or oppose Canadian participation, the Afghan war is a remote abstraction. Except for the tiny number who have enlisted and their families, the war touches no Canadian directly. Despite the extra costs of waging war, no extra contributions are asked of us, including those among us who keep getting richer and richer even as the war and recession continue. Imagine the heartfelt sacrifice Defence Minister Peter MacKay seems about to make on behalf of his boys and girls if, following Jim Prentice, he too jumps to Bay Street.

Not a single business person has stood up and offered to share the sacrifices of those noble soldiers they all support so patriotically. None is offering to take home a less staggering amount in earnings. Those powerful lobbies representing business interests have not demanded higher taxes from their members to help the government provide jobs and training and scholarships and homes and proper treatment for returning troops. In fact, as everyone knows, they very publicly demand the very opposite.

Not only do our vets sacrifice alone, when they return home their sacrifices are somehow forgotten. Somehow, we’re more committed to honouring them than to helping them. A Progressive Conservative member of the Ontario Legislature wants to honour our troops even more by giving the rest of us a statutory holiday every Remembrance Day. Hey, more time for shopping! But how does it honour wounded or traumatized returnees if they can’t get the support they need and have earned?

- I don't entirely agree with Doug Saunders' efforts to downplay the effects of inequality at all income levels. But his concern about the dangers of social exclusion is definitely worth a look:

There is a terrible danger that the solutions to the financial crisis, whether domestic fiscal policies or international trade and currency measures, will create walls that will prevent people and nations from improving their lot when growth resumes.
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At core is a problem of inequality: While a minority of people, and countries, will have the wherewithal to get themselves going again, a much larger group are increasingly unable to participate.

I live in a country where there are 10 million working adults who earn less than $24,000 a year (and stuff is expensive here), but policies are aimed at the 400,000 who make more than $160,000. Postsecondary education has become prohibitively expensive, as has living in the regions where quality jobs and entrepreneurial activities exist.

This is what the economist Will Hutton – an adviser to the Cameron government on its public-sector wage policy – calls, in his new book Them and Us, “a disastrous social geography,” in which “the poor and disadvantaged live in ever more concentrated wards that are blighted by run-down social housing and over-stretched schools.” Indeed, life expectancy for Britain’s wealthy is 14 years more than for the poor. The economic bubble, he writes, “fostered social polarization” in many countries.
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If we manage to bring back growth at the expense of equal opportunity, it will be, as the mayor suggests, a time of social cleansing and lasting impoverishment and division. The consequences of that would be far more serious than a mere recession.

- Not that the Cons likely needed more excuses to throw a monkey wrench in the works at last year's Copenhagen climate change talks. But it shouldn't be much surprise if they were happy to accept the claim that if we just ignore what's actually happening, nobody will be able to ask for help in fixing it.

- Finally, Catherine Porter points out what's really at stake as we decide what to do about the treatment of G20 protesters (not to mention the unrelated civilians caught up in the security apparatus):

Twice, I heard the sad statement, “I wasn’t even protesting.” A businessman was so frightened by what he saw on the streets that weekend he didn’t want to be photographed at the hearing. He worried police were watching him.

It reminded me of that slippery slope and a line from Auden’s Refugee Blues: “Once we had a country and we thought it fair.”

First it was the anarchists, who deserved the draconian measures. Then the protesters. Then anyone wearing black. Then anyone on Queen Street. Then anyone in a cab who casually said something nice to a police officer.

Rights are not easily gained. Nor should they be easily withdrawn, for a weekend, for an evening, for a moment.

Our faith in our police was effortlessly broken. It will take careful effort and months of hard work to rebuild it.