Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Clarke writes about the war on people living in poverty arising out of needless austerity:

The OCAP years have seen the abandonment of social housing by governments, the elimination of the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), Tory cutbacks that compare to those of Thatcher and Reagan and their consolidation by Liberal governments. When we began we never imagined that the state of homelessness would attain the grim proportions it exhibits today. The intensification of the war on the poor is the defining feature of the last three decades.

It has played a distinctive role in the broader neoliberal assault on the working class. At root, the dominant motivation has been to restore profitability through intensified exploitation. Technological innovation and class war have combined to reorganize the global workforce. The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research uses the example of the iPhone to demonstrate the brutal efficiency of the Global Supply Chain. As it accesses raw materials and component parts, such an operation takes advantage of egregiously exploited workforces across the planet.

Even in a rich country like Canada, the neoliberal decades have seen a huge intensification of the rate of exploitation. Industrial jobs have been moved offshore, unions have been weakened, low wage precarious work has proliferated and the social infrastructure has been battered. A key component of the attack on social programs and public services, has been the reduction of income support for unemployed, sick and disabled people.

- Meanwhile, May Warren discusses the less-than-surprising link between luxury vehicles, dangerous driving and "disagreeable" men focused on status. 

- AC Shilton reports on the toxic effects of pollution in the dying town of Minden, West Virginia. And Geoff Dembicki offers a reminder that aging fossil fuel infrastructure poses an imminent threat to the Great Lakes among other areas.

- Finally, Wyatt James Schierman makes the case for news coverage to focus far more on what actually matters, and far less on gossip and trivia. And David Moscrop writes that the proper response to contrived threats to national unity is to build unifying structures such as a national pharmacare program.