Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Frank Addario asks how any politician can claim to be a leader while taking a mulligan on the COVID-19 pandemic. Amy Kaler writes that Jason Kenney's decision to pay off non-vaccinated people while doing virtually nothing to limit community spread has only made matters worse in trying to make any case for collective action. And Adam Hunter points out Scott Moe's choice to do nothing and point fingers while Saskatchewan careens into disaster.  

- Meanwhile, Greg Sargent points out the potential for a strong political response to the "Jonestown Republicans" (and similarly destructive Conservatives in Canada) encouraging an antisocial response to a social crisis. 

- Paul Krugman welcomes us to to autumn of anxiety as a COVID wave driven by the most dangerous variant yet is accompanied by the removal of the supports which enabled people to survive its earlier incarnations. Hayes Brown warns that one of the virtually certain results is an escalation in poverty levels which dipped when somewhat better income supports were available. And the Houston Chronicle's editorial board notes that it's entirely understandable that workers aren't eager to endanger themselves and their families for precarious and low-paying work. 

- Sarah Zhang notes that the ventilation improvements which are being demanded by forward-looking people as a means of reducing the spread of COVID would carry the side benefit of stopping all kinds of respiratory viruses. 

- Nick Toscano writes that temporary price hikes aren't fooling most investors into thinking there's any real future in fossil fuels. But Carlos Joly points out that in the midst of its election, Norway (like Canada) is seeing most of its political parties continue to push carbon pollution exports rather than transitioning to a clean economy. 

- Jasmine Banks documents how the Koch brothers' dark money empire is behind the contrived U.S. uproar over "critical race theory" - making for a particularly stark example of how capital stokes racism in order to preserve its position of privilege. And John Tattrie reports on the the apparently race-motivated killing of Truro taxi driver Prabhjot Singh Katri as an ugly example of the consequences of letting racism fester.

- Finally, Arwa Madhawi writes that it's long past time to start paying attention to the people accurately warning of the dangerous consequences of anti-social neglect, rather than allowing the people who benefit from maintaining it to tell us there's nothing to worry about.