Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- George Monbiot discusses the dark money behind much of the political turmoil in the UK and elsewhere, while questioning why the secretive and self-interested funding of astroturf groups should receive favourable tax treatment:

A mere two millennia after Roman politicians paid mobs to riot on their behalf, we are beginning to understand the role of dark money in politics, and its perennial threat to democracy. Dark money is cash whose source is not made public, and which is spent to change political outcomes. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, unearthed by Carole Cadwalladr, and the mysterious funds channelled through Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party to the leave campaign in England and Scotland have helped to bring the concept to public attention. But these examples hint at a much wider problem. Dark money can be seen as the underlying corruption from which our immediate crises emerge: the collapse of public trust in politics, the rise of a demagogic anti-politics, and assaults on the living world, public health and civic society. Democracy is meaningless without transparency.

The techniques now being used to throw elections and referendums were developed by the tobacco industry, and refined by biotechnology, fossil fuel and junk food companies. Some of us have spent years exposing the fake grassroots campaigns they established, the false identities and bogus scientific controversies they created, and the way in which media outlets have been played by them. Our warnings went unheeded, while the ultra-rich learned how to buy the political system.
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While dark money has been used to influence elections, the role of groups such as the IEA is to reach much deeper into political life. As its current director, Mark Littlewood, explains, “We want to totally reframe the debate about the proper role of the state and civil society in our country … Our true mission is to change the climate of opinion.”

Astonishingly, the IEA is registered as an educational charity, with the official purpose of helping “the general public/mankind”. As a result it is exempted from the kind of taxes about which it complains so bitterly.

- William Barber offers a needed reminder that the war on poverty in the U.S. is far from over - and indeed needs far more people committed to the fight. And CBC News reports on Angus Reid's findings about the state of poverty and precarity in Canada.

- Meanwhile, Arjumand Siddiqi and Odmaa Sod-Erdene point out that the minimal and conditional social assistance available in Canada and other peer countries doesn't appear to correlate with any improvement in personal health.

- Eleanor Ainge Roy examines research into a four-day work week offered by one New Zealand employer, and finds it to have been a complete success in improving both work and personal outcomes.

- Finally, David Moscrop makes the case for mass pardons as a necessary corollary to the legalization of marijuana and the disproportionate punishment of minoritie for the past use of a soon-to-be-legalized substance.