Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Owen Jones discusses the UK's experience with privatized rail as yet another example of how vital services become more costly and worse-run when put in corporate hands.

- Sean McElwee highlights still more research showing that right-wing government tends to fail even on its own terms, with Republican governments producing less economic growth than Democratic ones. But PressProgress offers one answer to McElwee's question as to why people believe otherwise by pointing to the complete lack of media pushback against the Fraser Institute's usual pattern of anti-tax misdirection.

- Hardian Mertins-Kirkwood comments on a Russian oligarch's extraction of over a billion dollars from an impoverished Venezuela (with the help of a Canadian trade agreement) as just the latest example as to how "free trade" serves mostly to enrich the wealthy at everybody else's expense. Cory Doctorow notes that real-world experience strongly supports Thomas Piketty's argument that extreme wealth tends primarily to be self-perpetuating, rather than arising or growing out of personal merit. And Ben Popken writes about EpiPen price-gouging as the latest - and perhaps the most egregious - example of rent-seeking by the pharmaceutical sector at the expense of public health.

- Eric Holthaus observes that some of the feared long-term effects of climate change are already materializing. And Elizabeth McSheffrey points out that Husky's post-spill spin campaign looks to be just the latest example of the oil industry trying to cover up the direct consequences of its choices.

- Finally, Rank and File points out the need for Ontario to move past Harris-era attacks on workers.