Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Agence France-Presse reports that even the IMF has reached the conclusion that higher taxes on wealthy citizens are a necessary part of competent economic management - even as the Harper Cons and other right-wing governments keep trying to peddle trickle-down economics to everybody's detriment.

- Susan Delacourt writes that political campaigns may have managed to jump ahead of corporate marketing in targeting messages to individual voters. But Stephen Maher is rightly concerned that both parties and governments alike are being run primarily based on a desire to create political fund-raising messages, rather than any coherent sense of achieving some common good.

- And speaking of parties who have completely lost the plot as to right and wrong, Mohammed Adam tears into the Cons for their callous disregard for war rape victims:

According to Save the Children, which has documented the atrocity across continents, the most vulnerable are adolescent girls, and pregnancy has become a leading cause of death among girls aged 15 to 19 because of unsafe abortions and complications from giving birth.

This is why safe abortions, which are recognized as a right by the Geneva Convention, are a necessary part of the range of services war rape victims need. It is not an ideological issue, but a life-and-death issue for many of the young girls, and clinics have been set up for those who need the service.

But this is what the Canadian government refuses to help fund.

- Colin Horgan worries that the unchecked spread of the security state will force Canadians to silence themselves for fear of having their personal opinions and preferences misused by the powers that be. But Tony Burman reminds us that there's already a watchdog in place to monitor CSEC's activities - and that the security state might not have spread unchecked if it had received the resources to do its job.

- Finally, Brendan Haley writes about Canada's "staples trap" as a severe restriction on policy choices - with the Cons' continued refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (or even accept the reality of climate change) where environmental sustainability and the oil industry's immediate profits are at odds serving as a particularly stark example.

[Edit: fixed wording.]