Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Heather Mallick highlights the dangers of the permanent unemployment which regressive politicians around the globe are so vociferously demanding in the guise of austerity:

As we fend off a double-dip recession, we tend to forget about the collateral human damage. This is a great mistake and not just because our own jobs could be the next to go.

There’s a difference between unemployment that is relatively brief and perhaps driven by one industry, and the permanent unemployment that results from recessions, particularly in this global economy. People look for work until they utterly despair and give up. These people are tracked in “labour force participation” numbers but not in the unemployment numbers sent out each month.
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Permanent unemployment (as North American manufacturing erodes, never to repair itself) is known in economic terms as “hysteresis.” It kills health, marriages, stability and parents’ ability to send a child to university. It destroys cities and neighbourhoods, and sends young people into the workplace with mortgage-level debt. Those children, raised with self-esteem, will lose it in the most painful way possible.
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Relations between the sexes sour, between everyone. Status anxiety rules. So we lash out — against workers with pensions, for instance — and vote against our own long-term interests. Irrational thinking prevails.

I will leave you with Peck’s story of a senior financial analyst laid off at 59. After a year of humiliation, he found a part-time cashier’s job at Wal-Mart for $8.50 (U.S.) an hour. He rang up purchases for some neighbours recently, he said, people who had not lost jobs. “They didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything,” Peck wrote.

The man looked down at the table, paused, and then looked up again. “I know they knew me,” he said. “I’ve been in their home.” They had cut him dead.

- And not coincidentally, Abacus Data finds a stark division between Con supporters who want to see continued slashing even if the economy takes another nosedive, and Canadians in general who recognize that stimulus might be needed again.

- Boris recognizes yet more reason for hope in Jack Layton's farewell to Canada:

If Jack Layton's inheritors are smart, they will use (his) final quote as the party motto and set the country on fire. If they're wise, they will embody this in who they are and how they act.

It could work. The comment stands as white light against the darkness of today's politics. Just observe the contrast between the sentiments contained within the letter and expressed by well-wishers and the the impropriety coming from the other side of the aisle.

There is morality at work in Canadian politics now well beyond the simple ideological or technical differences over economics or social policy. Prisons, exported torture, tar sands, expeditionary wars, asbestos exports, are all built on unkindness by people who at best do not recognise shared humanity, or at worst find it uncomfortable.

This amorality and misanthropy cannot compete with the sentiment in Mr. Layton's farewell. There's a momentum in the emotion generated by his passing that must be put to good use in the coming years. I'm not sure I agree that Harper benefits most from Layton's passing. Harper's brand of attack politics works only on the living. and as the reaction the Blatchford column suggests, speaking ill of the dead earns you few votes.

The one-trick pony Conservatives may well find themselves facing a significantly empowered opposition operating from a clearly defined and incontestable moral position. And that, my friends, is reason to hope.

- And Paul Dewar writes about Layton's foreign policy legacy:

Jack's contribution to politics was never about mere opposition. He was in Ottawa to advance his propositions. In 2005 he was presented with a rare opportunity to rewrite a Liberal government budget. He cancelled billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts and invested the funds in priority areas including a major boost to Canada's official development assistance.

In fact, Jack's NDP is the only party in Canada that remains committed to former prime minister Lester Pearson's aspiration of dedicating 0.7 per cent of our gross national income to development funding.

Afghanistan was the primary foreign affairs file during Jack's leadership. One of his most courageous political propositions came in the summer of 2006 when he called for an end to the war in Afghanistan and recommended entering into negotiations for ceasefire and peace-building with the different warring factions in the country.

Today, his plan is accepted in capitals the world over as the only workable approach to the Afghan conflict. But in 2006 Jack faced a massive backlash from the conservative establishment in Ottawa. He was derided with accusations of naiveté at best and treason at worst. He was not deterred.
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We have lost, as Canadians and as social democrats globally, a man from a rare breed of political leaders who truly believed in the concept of the human family. He saw the suffering of a human being anywhere in the world as an equally important political problem. He understood the global nature of the threats against our collective existence and looked to global cooperation to address the immense challenges before us.