Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Crawford Kilian writes that Donald Trump's presidency is merely a symptom of the wider disease of undue deference to wealth. And Matt Karp comments on the need for progressives to identify the problem rather than soft-peddling class divisions:

What distinguished the Bernie Sanders campaign more than any other issue — including his support for free college or Medicare for All — was that he named his enemy. Among his other objectives, Sanders’s attacks on “the 1 percent” were an attempt to reorder American politics around class lines: not with a stale disquisition on stratification, but by tapping into Americans’ anti-billionaire sentiment, religiously excluded from mainstream politics by both parties but thrumming powerfully just below the surface.

This bold gambit was not enough to defeat Hillary Clinton in a closed Democratic primary, but it did make Sanders the most popular active politician in the United States. If Americans truly hate class politics, and all prefer to see themselves as future CEOs, why is our favorite political leader a disheveled old man who spends most of his time yelling about rich people?

America’s anti-billionaire majority is still out there, waiting to be awakened again. But before that happens, the deal is going to have to get a whole lot better.

- Jarrett Walker discusses how elite projection results in the development of plans suited only for the benefit of a privileged few.

- Donna Swift is duly skeptical of the bluster emitted by Loblaws and other businesses who want to keep employees below a living wage in order to slightly boost their profit margins. And Paul Sonn points out how the apocalyptic predictions of minimum-wage alarmists have proven utterly wrong in practice.

- CBC identifies a few of the significant effects climate change is already having on British Columbia. And James Wilt suggests a few options for Alberta to rein in methane emissions quickly and efficiently.

- Finally, Anna Mehler Paperny highlights the disproportionate number of Canadian prisoners who die while legally innocent.