Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Edward Luce writes about the reckless greed of the U.S.' billionaire class which includes far too many people willing to see Donald Trump re-elected as the price of avoiding paying a fair share toward a civilized society. And Noah Smith compares a wealth tax to other alternatives in the effort to restore some sense of fairness and justice to the U.S.

- Meanwhile, David Macdonald studies the effect of exorbitant executive pay, and finds that it bears no meaningful positive relationship to stock performance:

It’s far more likely that, like so many traditions, old boys’ clubs die hard. Evidence that higher numbers of female executives produce better corporate results are just not sinking in.

Well, it turns out the same can be said for the evidence about excessive pay for CEOs, whatever their gender. Paying your CEO more has no relation to your company’s stock market performance. In fact, it could be worsening it.
...
...(T)here is statistically no relationship between executive pay and company stock price in Canada over this period. Put another way, other factors explain 99.8% of variations in executive pay. So, you can pay your execs more, but this will either have no effect on your share price or possibly it will drive the price down, not up.

And yet executive pay has been rising far faster than worker wages for decades, partly to buy the better stock performance that it clearly doesn’t buy. Moreover, all this bonus pay seems to flow to male and not female executives, driving the key component of the executive gender pay gap.

Power, not merit, is driving income and gender pay gaps.

- Political Potshots offers a reminder of the secretive funding structure behind Canada's right-wing astroturf groups.

- David Ljunggren and Anna Mehler Paperny reports on the Libs' plans to discard any possibility of universal pharmacare in favour of a scheme designed to cater to pharmaceutical corporations.

- George Monbiot discusses the environmental disaster being dumped onto less wealthy countries - and particularly the UK's practice of sending tires to India to be burned with no regard for the resulting health implications.

- Finally, Naomi Lakritz implores Albertans not to let Jason Kenney drag the province back to Ralph Klein's austerian governing agenda.