This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Ian Welsh discusses how austerity doesn't offer a roadmap to economic development, but instead serves as a means of ensuring that the burden of economic failure is borne by the working class in the form of service and wage reductions, rather than the ownership class through the devaluation of capital. And Tannara Yelland highlights how it's investors rather than immigrants who are responsible for Canada's housing crisis.
- Alex Himelfarb writes that the only defence against authoritarian demagoguery is a plausible path to ensure our public institutions actually work for people's benefit.
- Keith Stewart juxtaposes Pierre Poilievre's anti-lobbyist rhetoric with his eagerness to convert oil industry donations into even more extreme forms of petropolitics. And Andrew Nikiforuk notes that British Columbia's election may have produced the only result which doesn't result in a full term of absolute capture by the fossil gas industry.
- Drew Anderson examines the respective platforms of the Saskatchewan NDP and Sask Party on the environment - again with little indication that either is prepared to wrestle with the scope of the climate crisis, but with the former recognizing the need to build clean energy and maintain healthy land and water where the latter offers nothing but destruction.
- Finally, Saniya Ghaledhar writes about the dangers of bigoted populism focused on punishing minority groups. Aastha Shetty reports on sentencing submissions indicating that a stabbing rampage at the University of Waterloo was based on a deliberate intention to instil fear which right-wing purveyors of "tough on crime" spin seem to have no interest in counteracting. And Peter Smith warns that post-truth conspiracism no longer seems to be even a hindrance - let alone a disqualifying factor - for conservative political leaders in Canada.
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