Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Michal Rozworski writes that the bidding war surrounding Amazon's second headquarters is just a symptom of a grossly dysfunctional relationship between governments and businesses:

We shouldn’t be surprised that Amazon can get away with using a few billion dollars of private investment as bait for public billions in return. Investment in the US, both private and public, is in a sorry state. Taken as a proportion of overall economic activity, businesses and governments are investing a fraction of what they did in the postwar years or even a few decades ago.

The business sector does not lack for means — profits margins, while down from record highs, are no longer in the doldrums. But rather than invest in new production facilities and new technology, corporations, under pressure from shareholders, are spending big on dividends and share buybacks or letting cash lay idle. Amazon is in fact one of the few major outliers to this trend, refusing to pay dividends and aggressively using profits to fund continuous expansion.

While private investment has given way to shareholders gorging themselves on profits, public investment has simply given way to rot. Last year, civilian net public investment in the United States amounted to a paltry 0.5 percent of GDP.

Exaggerated worries about debt and deficits and a pervasive ideology that the private sector can do everything better leave the public sector doing the minimum, barely keeping up as things fall apart.
...
(C)apital needs the public sector as much as the other way around. For all its glorification of enterprise and entrepreneurship, there is much that the private sector will not do: whenever the risks are too big or the benefits too diffuse to capture, the public sector has stepped in. From antibiotics to hydroelectric dams, from public buses to sewage plants, much of the infrastructure that makes life under contemporary capitalism possible is public or publicly funded.
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Capital may be the force that ultimately socializes production and distribution, but it needs the state all along the way. Today’s public extortion racket is only the tip of the iceberg.

- And Linda McQuaig argues that the corporate raiders who strip money out of corporations such as Sears should be on the hook for the pensions earned by employees. 

- Toby Sanger examines the federal fiscal update and notes that there's plenty of room to expand public services. The CCPA offers a mid-term report card comparing the Libs' big progressive promises to their minimal action. And Seth Klein and Iglika Ivanova offer some suggestions as to how British Columbia's NDP government can take immediate action to reduce poverty while conducting its wider review of the problem.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports that the Wynne Libs are falling far short of their promises of addressing precarious work - including by watering down equal pay provisions to exclude the workers who need them most, and failing to address the use of temp agencies to avoid employment standards. Stefani Langenegger highlights PATHS' report on the lack of employment protection in Saskatchewan for workers trying to escape domestic abuse. And Nicholas Keung reports on a push to ensure that migrant farm workers have an opportunity to pursue permanent residency.

- Finally, Matthew Taylor takes note of the Environmental Justice Foundation's study on the imminent surge of climate change refugees. And Mia Rabson reports on the massive gap between the goals set in the Paris climate accord, and the plans actually being made to address greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and elsewhere.