Sunday Morning Links

For those looking to pass the time until the Grey Cup...

- Remember the Cons' glossy, big-money emergency preparedness campaign last year? Just wondering, since we now have confirmation that the much-trumpeted "get prepared" slogan indeed includes the explanation "because we can't be bothered":

(W)hen the magnitude-5.0 earthquake actually happened on June 23, those best laid plans fell apart.

The Earthquakes Canada website crashed within minutes. So did phone lines to the government seismologists. The Government Operations Centre, a federal nerve centre for disasters, was reduced to regurgitating news lifted from media websites.

Natural Resources Canada media staff saw their buildings evacuated — a sensible step, but one that slowed their ability to answer questions.

Worse, the chain of command snarled. Media staffers were forbidden to answer questions. When they set up a conference call for media hours later, it had to be approved by the Privy Council Office, effectively stalling the flow of information into the evening.

About 2,500 pages of emails from the 24 hours after the quake show that the experts, trying to get the message out, were hamstrung by dead technology and the demands of senior management.

- The Star weighs in on the findings of the Special Investigations Unit which reviewed police abuses at the G20:

The SIU can’t be blamed for failing to collect enough evidence to lay charges. The officers involved in the incidents it investigated wore dark helmets and indistinguishable uniforms. The protesters couldn’t see their faces. Their fellow officers chose not to reveal their identities. Investigators were thwarted.

To prevent this from happening again, it would be useful to emblazon officers’ badge numbers on their helmets.

But that is a poor answer to demonstrators who sought to hold police officers accountable for their injuries and Torontonians who watched the ugly spectacle on their streets in shocked dismay.

- I'm sure the suspicions of bribery in Quebec's health care system will be spun to death to the effect that fully privatized medicine is inevitable. But if there is indeed a widespread recognition that (a) the current system is short of capacity and (b) it's worth putting in more money to alleviate the effects of that shortage, then I'd think it should also serve as reason to question just how true it is that we have no choice but to pare back public health budgets.

- Finally, Paul Krugman nicely sums up how free-market dogmatism led to the 2008 crash - and seems certain to do the same again absent some significant changes:

(Monetarism) worked for a while – roughly speaking from 1985 to 2007, the era of the Great Moderation. It worked in part because the political insulation of central banks also gave them more than a bit of intellectual insulation, too. If we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, central banks have been its monasteries, hoarding and studying the ancient texts lost to the rest of the world. Even as the real business cycle people took over the professional journals, to the point where it became very hard to publish models in which monetary policy, let alone fiscal policy, matters, the research departments of the Fed system continued to study counter-cyclical policy in a relatively realistic way.

But this, too, was unstable. For one thing, there was bound to be a shock, sooner or later, too big for the central bankers to handle without help from broader fiscal policy. Also, sooner or later the barbarians were going to go after the monasteries too; and as the current furor over quantitative easing shows, the invading hordes have arrived.

Last but not least, the very success of central-bank-led stabilization, combined with financial deregulation – itself a by-product of the revival of free-market fundamentalism – set the stage for a crisis too big for the central bankers to handle. This is Minskyism: the long period of relative stability led to greater risk-taking, greater leverage, and, finally, a huge deleveraging shock. And Milton Friedman was wrong: in the face of a really big shock, which pushes the economy into a liquidity trap, the central bank can’t prevent a depression.

And by the time that big shock arrived, the descent into an intellectual Dark Age combined with the rejection of policy activism on political grounds had left us unable to agree on a wider response.