Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- For those looking to paint foreign investment as a panacea for economic development, Paul Krugman offers up (via Kash Mansori) what should be a chilling correlation between capital imbalances and economic disaster in Europe. But of course, we know the actual response will merely be a declaration that the countries now suffering for buying into the corporatist mantra really just needed to go even further in that direction.

- The NDP is rightly focusing attention on the latest developments in Tony Clement's G8 scandal, as Clement looks to have influenced one of the mayors in the thick of the patronage into hiring a Clement acquaintance on request.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' claims not to have paid a ransom to kidnappers to free two diplomats in West Africa looks to have been entirely false. But have no fear: as far as Canadians are concerned, nothing happened which the Cons are prepared to discuss:

A spokesman for Mr. Harper’s office said on Friday that the government does not comment on leaked documents.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone questions why the Cons are in such a hurry to demolish the Canadian Wheat Board:

Another huge issue is the fate of producer car loading sites - railroad sidings where farmers can load their own grain into railcars, bypassing the grain companies. From 700 sites 10 years ago, there are only 300 today, but they handle 12,000 railcars a year - four times as many as a decade ago. For farmers, those producer cars mean savings of about $1,200 per railcar.

Without the CWB handling producer car logistics for farmers, who will? The grain companies? The railways? Not on your life.

There are a host of issues that hinge on the single desk: the fate of the Port of Churchill and the Canadian International Grains Institute, to name two. One farm group said "the elimination of the single desk may well be the biggest change to agriculture on the Prairies in over 100 years."

So why is the federal government rushing into such a momentous change with its ideological blinkers on?