Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Joseph Parilla examines how entrenched inequality serves as a barrier to economic development for everybody. 

- Heather Long highlights how the U.S.' last round of corporate tax cuts led to lower wages for all but the lucky few. And Stuart Bailey writes about the need for public policy to improve wages and employment standards after the promise of businesses passing along their increased profits has proven false once again.

- David Adler comments on the UK's divide between an owning class whose wealth is growing, and a renting class facing nothing but precarious living. And Daphne Bramham discusses the added danger of poverty facing elderly women. 

- Rebecca Leber interviews one employee of the Environmental Protection Agency who's willing to speak out about how its purpose is being undermined by a Trump administration bent on nothing but maximizing the profits that can be extracted. 

- Finally, Tim Fenton reviews Harry Leslie Smith's Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future, including its call to fight to defend social progress which had been taken for granted:

But, you may say, we do have a benefits system and the NHS. There is no chance of a cancer sufferer being denied end-of-life care and stripped of their dignity. But that is to misunderstand what HLS is telling his readers. He is showing the inevitable conclusion from the direction of travel on which successive Governments have embarked.

Unemployment benefit, payments to the sick and disabled, even in-work and universal benefits, all have been under sustained attack for years. Hardly a day goes by without comfortably off pundits being given a platform by yet more comfortably off newspaper proprietors and their editors to accuse the less well-off of being “scroungers”.
...
Health and safety is also under attack. To remove this protection is also said to be “fair”. Supposedly sensible pundits rail at the legislation, demanding “are we not grown up enough to be able to make our own decisions?” That road leads to deaths and injuries in the workplace. The latter blighted HLS’ family when his father was badly injured working down the pit. Industrial injury used to be a killer. Some would have that era come back.
...
Anyone not persuaded of the risks of believing the siren voices of selfishness and intolerance should read HLS’ book. It is about a world we may have left behind, but are in danger of seeing all over again.