Friday Afternoon Links

This and that to start your weekend.

- Robert Reich discusses how the increasing concentration of corporate wealth and power is undermining the U.S.' democracy, while noting that there's only one effective response:

We entered a vicious cycle in which political power became more concentrated in monied interests that used the power to their advantage – getting tax cuts, expanding tax loopholes, benefiting from corporate welfare and free-trade agreements, slicing safety nets, enacting anti-union legislation, and reducing public investments.

These moves further concentrated economic gains at the top, while leaving out most of the rest of America.

No wonder Americans feel powerless. No surprise we’re sick of politics, and many of us aren’t even voting.

But if we give up on politics, we’re done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The only way back toward a democracy and economy that work for the majority is for most of us to get politically active once again, becoming organized and mobilized.

We have to establish a new countervailing power.

The monied interests are doing what they do best – making money. The rest of us need to do what we can do best – use our voices, our vigor, and our votes.

- Bryce Covert notes that service-sector jobs in particular have seen wages decline even since the 2008 crash, while Matthew Yglesias makes the case as to why there's plenty of room for employers to pay more than they've thus far bothered to do. And Freddie deBoer highlights the patent absurdity of blaming workers for acting on the promise that higher education would lead to economy opportunity:

So all the kids who heard the clarion call and rushed out to get CS degrees, or to drop out under the advice of Peter Thiel, and start coding in their basements– are they all chumps? Do they deserve scorn? Do they deserve to be unable to scratch out a living? Of course not. Like so many others, most of them did what their society told them to do to pursue the good life: work hard, go to school, and try to provide value for people so that you can earn a living. They were sold on a social contract that is failing them. No one can be reasonably expected to predict what skills the economy will value five, ten, twenty years in advance. The urge to call out others for what you perceive as their bad choices is destructive in a labor economy where, despite gains in overall unemployment rate, workers still have remarkably little bargaining power, thanks to underemployment, lack of benefits, low pay, and poor hours. Rather than succumbing to our petty insecurities by blaming others for their economic conditions, we need to look at the macroeconomic factors that are hurting our labor markets. We need to recognize that automation and artificial intelligence are pushing us towards a new era of work– one with tremendous potential productivity gains, but also tremendous uncertainty for labor, even educated labor. It’s time to stop calling people chumps and start building the kind of social system that can guarantee basic material security for all of our people, so that we can all share in the staggering gains of efficiency and productivity that technology is bringing about.

- Mariana Mazzucato observes that the answer to Europe's failed austerity drive should be greater movement toward long-term public investments - not more of the same cuts-at-all-costs attitude that's obviously done nothing but harm.

- And Andre Picard reports that the Canadian Medical Association isn't accepting the Cons' excuses for abandoning public health care.

- Finally, David Climenhaga rightly questions the theory that we should answer threat to political leaders by silencing voices online, rather than actually protecting the politicians affected. And Marva Burnett writes that in fact, there's still a significant digital divide facing lower-income Canadians which demands a strong policy response to encourage greater access to a world of information.