Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Jay Bryan weighs in on dangers of increasing inequality and corporate greed:

Of course, the corporate mantra is that top executives are making millions because they're possessed of a unique genius that enriches their companies, and thereby all of society.

But are they really 10 or 20 times smarter than the corporate leaders of past generations?

And excuse the indelicate question, but what of the huge incomes earned by lousy corporate bosses who actually run their firms into the ground?

Beyond this, is it really fair to keep cutting taxes on the very richest, which has been a theme for the past decade or more?

It will be hard to rein in the corporate greediest, but we might want to look to the countries that have figured out how to create high standards of living without such corrosively huge inequality.

If Denmark, Sweden and Austria can be rich societies that remain much more fair, surely Canadians aren't so dumb that we can't learn from their successes.

At least, as long as politicians don't make a virtue out of ignorance and uncompetence.

- Andrew Coyne points out what may be the most frightening part of the News of the World scandal, as the habit of illegally funneling personal information to the paper seems to have been accepted by a wide range of individuals in media, government and other sectors alike:

This behaviour involved not only reporters at the News of the World, but at least in the Brown example, also the Sun and Sunday Times, sister papers in Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire. (The Sun denies it used Brown’s son’s medical records for its story.) In the fullness of time we shall learn whether it extended to other news organizations, though it is already established that some have hired the same private investigators.

If that were all, it would be shocking enough: the famously slipshod ethics of the British tabloid press spilling over into outright criminality. But it is the intersection with other pillars of British society that takes this story to the outer limits. Much of the confidential material sought by Murdoch’s spooks was supplied to them by police officers, often on the payment of bribes. Other police officers turned a blind eye to the News of the World’s phone-hacking activities, including those explicitly assigned the task of investigating how widespread the practice was, after the first cases came to light—in part, it seems, because their own phones had been hacked, and the evidence of professional and personal misconduct thus obtained. Even after it was revealed that News International had paid huge sums of money to other victims to settle their claims out of court, Scotland Yard somehow concluded there was no story here.

And overseeing all this, the political class of Britain: all of it, it seems, or nearly so. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, leaders of both major parties have courted Murdoch with lickspittle zeal, in hopes of his papers’ endorsement. The current prime minister, David Cameron, employed one former editor of the News of the World as his communications director, and is close friends with another.

It wasn’t only political or personal connections that moved so many politicians to play nice with Murdoch. It was, as we are now learning, fear. Politicians who crossed him or his minions were openly threatened with the publication of embarrassing personal information. Only now that he is on the run, so to speak, are many daring to speak up. This was not so much a news organization as a bribery and blackmail racket.

The culture of corruption, then, did not just infect the Murdoch empire, but much of the British establishment.

- Matt Gurney duly mocks the Ontario Libs' attempt to tar anybody who opposes them - even from the left - as a Mike Harris clone. But it's worth noting the serious side of the Libs' pathetic campaign as well: by using Harris' name as a shorthand with no regard for which of his actions and beliefs actually harmed Ontario, they're only encouraging the public to forget what was wrong with the real one.

- Finally, Alison points out the willingness of the Harper Cons' cabinet to do what it's told by the oil sector. And while there's perhaps nothing surprising about that fact, it's still deserving of far more attention than the media has bothered to pay.