Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Fran Quigley interviews Joanne Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox about the entirely feasible steps which could be taken to eliminate poverty in the U.S.:

FQ

You devote a good deal of the book to reviewing the data and the stories that describe US poverty, but you always circle back to solutions, refuting the idea we often hear that “the poor will always be with us.” Why do you think we can, as your subtitle promises, end poverty in the United States?

JG

Because poverty is simply not having enough money to meet your needs. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. And we live in the richest nation in the world, where there is plenty of money. So if we have the political will, we could end poverty.

There are lots of different ways to do it. A living wage is necessary, and a universal basic income can help. We talk in the book about universal health care, housing supports, about making water and electricity and heat a public good. Other countries do all this, and there is no reason we could not do so as well. If we just tax people appropriately, we can have the money to do all this.

CS

We write about challenges in affording car insurance in places where you need a car to get to work, the difficulty in keeping the lights on, not being able to afford medicines. Being in poverty is like walking across a rotted floor — there are so many ways you can fall through. And it all comes down to money.

- Meanwhile, Amanpreet Brar, Maria Daniel and Gurbaaz Sra point out how Amazon's warehouse workers have been put at additional risk by COVID while being silenced in efforts to protect their health and safety. 

- Don Braid points out that racists are attaching themselves to the antisocial principles behind anti-public health rallies to try to recruit adherents and claim legitimacy. And Georgina Alonso discusses the importance of Black Lives Matter - and the harm done by systemic racism it seeks to challenge - in rural Canada.

- Burgess Langshaw-Power writes about the folly of relying on a new generation of false promises and pipe dreams from nuclear power proponents. 

- Michael Barnard calculates how planned increases in the federal carbon price figure to clean up Alberta's power grid by incentivizing the replacement of natural gas power with renewable energy. But Lisa Schick reports on the Moe government's evisceration of Saskatchewan's residential solar sector even as it leaves no stone unturned in pushing further fossil fuel development.

- Finally, Kendall Latimer reports on the "quiet revolution" which has followed the more prominent initial discussion of #metoo in Regina.