Friday Morning Links

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- In case there's any doubt whether public-sector alternatives are a must to avoid getting taken to the cleaners by the private sector, the answer is an unequivocal "yes". And the fact that corporate mouthpieces are actually objecting to more efficient public service should leave no doubt that the public interest is the further thing from their minds.

- Dimitri Pantazopoulos provides what may well be the worst advice I've ever heard for a political party:

Mr. Pantazopoulos, who is leaving Ottawa next month to work for Christy Clark’s government in British Columbia, says the NDP should broaden its focus and show how it can propel its working-class base to an upper-class position. “Rather than engaging in class warfare, the NDP should emphasize what every member of the working class wants – to rise out of the working class.”

Even leaving aside the logical impossibility of a call for everybody to be upper-class, does anybody really see "The NDP: Those Working Stiffs Can Eat Your Dust" as the message to appeal to the base and swing voters alike?

- Having been invited to unveil the federal government's open data pilot project, David Eaves points out where there's loads of room for improvement.

- Finally, while the book itself looks to be an absolute must-read, even Joan Baxter's review of Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World goes a long way in tracing the reasons why we're perpetually told to expect less and less from our public institutions:

Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes. That was in 1789. Mr. Franklin might be surprised to learn that today his axiom no longer holds, at least not for the rich and powerful among us. Truth be told -- as it is in British investigative journalist and author Nicholas Shaxson's meticulously researched and riveting book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World -- taxation is only certain for the ordinary law-abiding citizen, the non-rich. The wealthy and the ultra-wealthy can quite easily get by paying little or even no tax, thanks to the shadowy spider webs of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions that span the globe.

Shaxson's aims in the book, he says, are to challenge the common idea that it is acceptable for a place to get rich by undermining the laws of other places and to offer a lens through which to view the history of the modern world. "Offshore business," he writes, "is, at heart, about artificially manipulating paper trails of money across borders." It is not a "colourful outgrowth of the global economy, but instead lies right at its centre." It's not about efficiency or any genuine production or real economic growth -- it's about people and corporations making vast amounts of money through tax evasion.
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Way back in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to drive the tax havens "out of existence" and more recently Barack Obama co-sponsored the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act in 2008, before he came to power.

Shaxson writes that crucial reforms such as these are always blocked by lobbying from the rich and powerful. So the problem has only been getting worse, as globalization allows more and more shifting of wealth around the world in seconds from one secret place to another, out of sight of the public eye and out of reach of tax authorities. Hedge funds and private equity funds flourish in the secrecy afforded by the offshore, where tax authorities have few and sometimes no rights to tread. While the offshore financial industry didn't cause the financial crisis of 2007, Shaxson finds, it certainly enabled it.
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Shaxson ends the book with a list of potential solutions and on a note of hope. "The veil of silence and ignorance can be lifted and the message spread," he writes. " If we all work together to "contain and control financial secrecy," we can avert a future in which "A tiny few will have their boots washed in champagne while the rest of us struggle for our lives in conditions of steepening inequality." This is one of those extremely rare books that doesn't just change the reader, but could also change the world -- for the better.