Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your New Year's reading.

- Bartley Kives reports on the most deadly year of the COVID-19 pandemic yet. And the BBC reports on the admonition that vulnerable people in Wales should avoid going to hospitals due to the lack of measures in place to avert the spread of COVID-19.

- Meanwhile, Rowan Williams writes that we should take the principle of "nobody is safe unless everybody is safe" and apply it to economic decision-making - though the most plausible interpretation is that exactly that message has been cut out of pandemic decision-making to prevent it from being considered elsewhere as well. N.J. Hagens points out (in a March 2020 piece) that we need to see the economy as a subset of a sustainable living environment, rather than treating the environment as a luxury within an economy built to maximize the immediate extraction and concentration of wealth. And James Meadway warns that anybody expecting 2023 to be better for personal budgets than the previous year may be in for a rude surprise.

- Brian Osgood examines the state of the U.S. labour movement at the end of 2022 - with overall unionization rates still looking grim, but with some reason for hope in new forms of organization and widespread public support which could change the bigger picture in short order.

- Finally, Chuka Ejeckam highlights how the far right is trying to capitalize on socio-economic disruption. But John Burn-Murdoch discusses how millennial voters are shattering the expectation that voters will become more conservative with age.