Saturday, March 10, 2012

Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- On the Robocon front, Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher's latest good work investigating the Cons' electoral fraud got Maher expelled from the Manning Centre's hive-mind-building exercise. And the robocalling firms themselves are being similarly aggressive in trying to shut down any discussion of their role - perhaps in large part due to the obscene amounts of money they've brought in from their Con benefactors. Lawrence Martin wonders what Stephen Harper knew about Robocon as it was set up and implemented. And the Guelph Mercury called out the Cons for their nonsensical spin, while Steven Chase added York Centre to the list of ridings which received false robocalls like the ones first identified in Guelph.

- Naturally, the Cons' brand of fiscal management includes nearly free stuff for war profiteers.

- Kemal Dervis points out a couple of highly important theories about the concentration of wealth: first, that wealth tends to become concentrated in the absence of public policy measures to ensure its redistribution; and second, that such concentration tends to result in overall economic stagnation. Which is to say that if voters have indeed bought into the Cons' spin that progress is either impossible or not the job of our only structural counterweight to corporate power, it's long past time to start reversing that trend.

- Finally, Joe Couture reports and Murray Mandryk opines on the shape of the Saskatchewan NDP's upcoming leadership campaign, while Ailsa Watkinson discusses the work the Sask Party and its hand-picked chief commissioner have put in to demolish human rights protections as long as it's in power.

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