Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction highlights the fundamentally flawed evaluation of risk which is resulting in our suffering from far more disasters than necessary. But while recognizing the problems with misplaced optimism and obliviousness to danger, Talia Lavin discusses the need to nonetheless hold out hope (and act toward its fulfilment). 

- Sam Pizzigati discusses the still-underestimated concentration of wealth as calling for the richest few to contribute far more to the common good (rather than using unimaginable riches to consolidate their own power). 

- Hannah Levintovia offers a thorough look at how private equity is taking over more and more of the U.S.' economy (and leaving less and less viable businesses in its wake while looting immediate wealth). And Matthew Cunningham-Cook warns that Wall Street is taking over more and more of the U.S.' health care system, with the goal of turning the increased denial of care into additional profits. 

- David Macdonald and Martha Friendly examine whether the child care infrastructure set up in the last couple of years actually figures to achieve the promised reductions in fees. 

- Dawn Paley writes that safe supply is the obvious answer to the epidemic of drug poisonings, even as the issue is mostly left unaddressed while countless Canadians die. 

- Finally, Monica Kidd notes the movement toward extended producer responsibility for plastic waste which is being introduced in Alberta among other provinces.