Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Jim Stanford discusses how Canada's COVID response has been slanted toward handouts to corporations and demands of workers - and increasingly so as the pandemic has continued. Alison Pennington calls out the cruelty by design in Australia's similar move toward eliminating pandemic leave as the worst wave yet crests. And Joe Vipond, Malgorzata Gasperowicz, Wing Kar Li and Michelle Brandenburg discuss what people can do to help protect their community against the Omicron variant even as political leaders refuse to lift a finger.
- Adam King writes that CEOs have made out like bandits throughout the pandemic. And Leticia Miranda reports on the call from retail workers for at least a modicum of the respect and concern which was offered in early 2020 but withdrawn as soon as bosses figured they could get away with it.
- Justin Ling notes that the worsening national health care crisis could have been averted even if promises from earlier in the pandemic had been kept. And Moira Wyton discusses the precarious state of Vancouver's hospitals even before the Omicron wave hits at its worst, while Jeremy Simes reports on the collapsing health care system in rural Saskatchewan.
- Meanwhile, Adam Hunter talks to Nazeem Muhajarine about the complete lack of any scientific basis for Scott Moe's aversion to public health protections. And Phil Tank reports on the Saskatchewan Party MLAs embedding themselves in the anti-vaxx movement - even as they're too cowardly to acknowledge it.
- Finally, the Tyee offers space for people to comment on their experiences and views on the return to school in the midst of the Omicron wave.
Thinking of the Stanford piece, I have noticed repeatedly during this pandemic, and indeed during the 2008 financial crisis, that when politicians panic, even fairly right wing ones, they will very often reach for fairly interventionist, left wing solutions--which I am convinced is because they know perfectly well that those are the solutions that work and when they're scared enough doing something that will work becomes temporarily more important than dishing out more to the rich.
ReplyDeleteBut as soon as they start to calm down, feel like they understand what's going on and feel that the system can hold together even if the crisis is handled poorly, they go back to right wing approaches and start figuring out how to use the crisis to make the rich still richer and everyone else poorer.
That's about as accurate and concise a summary as I've seen of Canada's pandemic response at all levels of government.
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