Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- David Olive chimes in on the toxic effects of inequality:

Many of us did not engage in “excess,” yet are struggling to make ends meet. The real story is where did all the money go that has been generated by a North American economy that has greatly expanded since 1980?

And the answer is to be found in decades of outsourcing, offshoring, declining union membership and bargaining power, and productivity gains that have enabled employers to generate ever more revenue with steadily fewer employees.

What grates in this transformation is the sense of entitlement among the sole, conspicuous CEO beneficiaries of our New-and-Not-Improved-Economy.

In the erosion of the “social contract” between capital and labour dating from the end of World War II, we are not suffering equally. Indeed, we now reward failure in high places.
...
(The) dangerous imbalance could easily be corrected simply by restoring the system of progressive taxation to where it was in the booming 1950s and 1960s. That’s when leadership meant responsibility, not a hurried grasp for the brass ring, with the little guy paying for the consequences. That, history teaches us, is a lousy business plan.

- And Joshua Holland points out that the right's dogmatic focus on handing ever more money to those who already have the most is actually an excellent way of destroying jobs across the income spectrum:

Sure, the wealthy create a few jobs – people who offer exclusive services or sell them high-end goods. But the overwhelming majority of jobs in this country are “created” by ordinary Americans when they spend their paychecks.

Consumer demand accounts for around 70 percent of our economic output. And with so much wealth having been redistributed upward through a 40-year class-war from above, American consumers are too tapped out to spend as they once did. This remains the core issue in this sluggish, largely jobless recovery. The wealthy, in their voracious appetite for a bigger piece of the national pie, are the real job-killers in this economic climate.
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In 1978, the top 1 percent of the ladder took in just under 9 percent of the nation's income, leaving a bit more than 91 percent for the rest of us. In 2007, the year before the crash, they took in 23.5 percent, leaving just 76.5 percent for the rest of the population to split up.

They banked most of that income, whereas we would have spent it. The fact that we're broke means that businesses are facing less demand for their goods and services than they otherwise would, and have less need to hire a bunch of employees. And that dynamic explains why it's the wealthiest Americans who are the real “job killers.”

- Luiza Ch. Savage notes another area where corporate-friendly free trade agreements lead to greater costs for mere citizens, as it's individual travellers who are now facing a U.S. surcharge to make up for the cost of eliminating tariffs.

- Finally, plenty of commentators have already pointed out the absurdity of the Cons embarrassing Canada on the world stage to defend an industry that's on the verge of dying off anyway. But let's at least grant the Cons this much: surely their determination to wring every possible gram of asbestos out of the last couple of existing mines fits nicely with the usual right-wing worldview that nothing matters more than exploiting all available resources whatever the cost.