Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Duncan Exley points out that the UK has nothing to be proud of when it comes to income inequality. And Bill Curry reports on the Cons' full awareness that the temporary foreign worker program was both taking jobs away from Canadian youth, and allowing employers to pay far less for foreign labour.

- DSWright highlights how Joseph Stiglitz appears to have been rejected by Republicans for a position advising on the U.S. financial system solely because he's dared to express the opinion that regulators shouldn't see their job as catering to the industry they're regulating.

- Meanwhile, Robert Reich discusses the dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, while Patrick Caldwell is the latest to highlight how Kansas' right-wing utopia is turning into a disaster for everybody involved.

- Jeremy Nuttall expands on the Cons' censorship of websites for federal public servants.

- Frances Russell wonders what Tommy Douglas would have thought of the federal government's decreasing role in building a healthy Canada. And Linda McQuaig worries that the Harper Cons are getting away with destroying our medicare system:

(T)he prime minister’s apparent contempt for the democratic process has been so outrageous it’s sucked all the political oxygen out of the room.

In our distraction, we’ve barely noticed something else important going on. In addition to sabotaging our democracy, Harper has been restructuring our country in a fundamental way — something that will be hard to reverse and, incidentally, very pleasing to Canada’s elite.
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The essence of the Harper makeover of Canada has been the deep slashing of taxes, putting serious constraints on what government is able to provide in public programs and services.
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(F)ew Canadians seem to realize that, as things stand, our medicare system — an institution cherished by millions — faces serious spending cuts starting in 2017.

At that point, we’ll be told we can no longer afford a public health care system. What we won’t be told is that the revenue to pay for a public health care system has been spent already — in tax cuts.

Harper appears to have figured out how to discreetly undermine and eventually end medicare. This shouldn’t surprise us, since he once headed up the National Citizens Coalition — an organization established in the 1960s with the goal of killing medicare.

- And finally, John Cartwright offers some suggestions as to what we need to talk about in order to take back our country from the Cons and the corporate lobby in 2015.