Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Linda McQuaig writes about the policies which were needed to sustain us through the COVID-19 crisis so far - but whose success can lay the groundwork for a fair and inclusive economy for the future:

For years, we’ve submitted to the economic orthodoxy dictated by Bay Street: that governments must deliver balanced budgets and low spending or economic disaster will follow — as surely as gravity will bring a heavy object plunging to the ground.

Then along came the pandemic. Suddenly the Bank of Canada is creating vast amounts of money, which the federal government is distributing to Canadians across the country. 

Nobody told us we could do that!

...

...Now that we see how it can be done, one is tempted to ask: could this be a way to pay for increased government spending on future things we truly need — like building hospitals and public transit and investing in renewable energy?

This is the sort of dangerous thinking that a phalanx of powerful interests — from the Fraser Institute to the financial press — are keen to crush, realizing it could spread more easily than coronavirus at a crowded, maskless beach party.

But, as economist Jim Stanford suggests, “the genie is out of the bottle.”

- Meanwhile, as part of Policy Response's comparison between the 2008 and 2020 crises, Angella MacEwen highlights the importance of investing in the care economy, David Macdonald emphasizes the work done to put money into people's pockets quickly, and Alex Himelfarb notes that we can deal with any fiscal impact by ensuring an increasingly wealthy elite pays its fair share.

- Joy Thomas writes that the pandemic offers a golden opportunity to ensure corporate transparency and crack down on money laundering.

- Sam Gindin points out the need to move beyond merely praising care workers to ensuring fair wages and working conditions, while CBC News reports on Scott Moe's continued failure to do anything of the sort. And Adam Carter reports on the mocking attitude of one private long-term care executive who carelessly let her contempt for residents and their families get heard by the people affected.

- Finally, Jim Storrie discusses how both the U.S. and Canada have been built on foundations of racial injustice. Peter Donolo calls out the Canadian leaders - including Justin Trudeau - who are unwilling to speak out against the U.S. deliberate violent repression of civil rights activists. And Rinaldo Walcott writes about the importance of fighting to abolish racial inequality once and for all.