Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Umair Haque writes about the reasons why the COVID pandemic is far from over - and indeed the worst may be yet to come if we abandon the public health measures needed to reduce foreseeable harms. Smriti Mappalaty discusses the increasing proponderance of reinfections and breakthrough infections due to the Omicron variant. And Phil Tank calls out the conspiracy theorists looking to undermine what are already likely significant undercounts of the harm caused by COVID.

- Josh Keller offers a visual take on how long COVID wears out the human body. And David Mercer talks to Kelly Fearnley about her personal battle with the coronavirus as her government moves to "let 'er rip" among the general public.

- Meanwhile, CBC Radio discusses how single mothers have faced a particularly large and exhausting set of new burdens in the course of the pandemic.

- Ryan Broderick writes about Facebook's role in spreading propaganda on the part of the #FluTruxKlan, while Daniel Dale fact-checks the glaringly false claims that the occupation has more than fringe popular support. Todd Gordon notes that far-right uprisings are far from new or unusual in Canada's history. And Amnesty International weighs in on both the damage done by the convoy itself, and the authorities' conspicuously gentle response to an insurrection led by white supremacists.

- Finally, Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris report on the obsolescence of eye implants as an egregious example of the dangers of relying on private corporations to provide and support medically necessary aids.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Paul de Grauwe points out that the European push to force Greece into continued austerity is the most important factor holding back a recovery, as the country would be fully solvent if it were being allowed to borrow money on anything but the most draconian of terms. And Paul Mason criticizes the war that's been declared against the Greek public for trying to pursue democratic governance - while noting that the public's justified dissatisfaction isn't going away regardless of the result of the impending referendum.

- Sherif Alsayed-Ali responds to the news that the UK's intelligence agencies have been conducting illegal spying against Amnesty International - and it's worth noting that Bill C-51 will make Canada's sweeping powers and lack of oversight even worse than the UK's:

Our concerns about mass surveillance are not limited to human rights organizations, although this is already very worrying. Mass surveillance is invasive and a dangerous overreach of government power into our private lives and freedom of expression. In specific circumstances it can also put lives at risk, be used to discredit people or interfere with investigations into human rights violations by governments.

We have good reasons to believe that the British government is interested in our work. Over the past few years we have investigated possible war crimes by UK and US forces in Iraq, Western government involvement in the CIA's torture scheme known as the extraordinary rendition programme, and the callous killing of civilians in US drone strikes in Pakistan: it was recently revealed that GCHQ may have provided assistance for US drone attacks.

The obfuscation, secrecy and determination to avoid any meaningful oversight is worthy of a tin-pot dictatorship. It is time for serious public scrutiny of the behaviour of the British government. We need to know what surveillance programmes the government is operating, what spying they consider to be fair game, and why.

- Andrew Cohen sees the Cons' "Memorial to the Victims of Communism" as a monument to crass and destructive politics.

- Finally, Robin Sears highlights why the Cons' division and narrowcasting are doomed to fail as a strategy for building a natural governing party. And Thomas Walkom writes that the cult of personality around Stephen Harper is leading the Cons to shut out natural allies in the name of worshiping their leader.

Sunday Morning Links

Selected text for your weekend reading.

- Edmund Pries points out how the right sees wasted public money and gratuitous tax slashing as tools to force cuts to programs which actually serve a valuable purpose:

During the Reagan era, a friend and former colleague, a professor of American history, was invited to the deliberations of a Washington think-tank that provided policy direction for the Republican Party. As they discussed growing the debt and increasing the deficit, he was flabbergasted: “Are you not the party of balanced budgets and debt elimination?” The reply was unequivocal, “Our goal is to grow the deficit as much as possible in order to create political space to eliminate government-funded programming. Until then, we want high deficits while lobbying for a balanced budget — and promoting social program cuts as the only solution.”

To create this useful deficit, tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporate sectors would be dramatically increased, especially to the banking, energy and military segments. In short, one would implement a transfer of the state’s revenue supply obligations from the wealthiest to the poor and middle classes in order to permit an even greater transfer of wealth from the middle classes to the rich thereafter.

The only trick was to convince the poor and middle classes to “buy in” via a mixture of patriotism and structural necessity so that they would vote in favour of cutting the very programs that benefitted them.
...
Some have pretended that the budgetary crisis is real and not manufactured. Let us be clear: our relative wealth is greater than at any time in our history. Our collective ability to build a strong, caring and inclusive society in which everyone can participate has never been greater. This also holds true for the community of nations: we have the capacity to build a just global society.

Our preparedness to do so, however, seems utterly lacking, for an extreme individualism has taken over the mindset of many. We believe, falsely, that we are best served by hoarding as many resources as possible and letting others fend for themselves. The opposite is true. We are best served when we build a society together where all, including each reader of this article, can benefit through the building of community-wide programs.
...
Have we really lost our sense of the common good? Or is each person now on his or her own? There is no apocalyptic budgetary crisis other than of our own making. The crisis is in our orientation.

- Meanwhile, Sixth Estate notes that even the corporate-friendly Conference Board of Canada doesn't buy the right-wing spin that tax slashing pays for itself.

- I'm not sure she had any reason to defer to Jason Kenney when it came to doling out sarcasm. But Tabatha Southey's warning about Kenney's attacks on Amnesty International is still worth a read:

You're excused if your first reaction on reading of the minister's “joy” is, “Who died and made you the Minister of Sarcasm?”

The concerns cited by Amnesty International are that by using the immigration system to deal with suspected war criminals – deporting them instead of charging them – Canada may allow them to escape prosecution.

In addition, “Canada's international human rights obligations are clear,” Amnesty's letter said – “no person should be deported if he or she faces a serious risk of such grave human rights violations as torture, extrajudicial execution or enforced disappearance.”

In the mildest terms, it urged the minister to “reassess” the government's approach.

That's part of Amnesty's mandate. And far from “squandering the moral authority accrued” in campaigns that Mr. Kenney sees as legitimate, the group would more likely lose some credibility if it failed to raise this issue.
...
The tone of Mr. Kenney's letter to Amnesty, which was posted prominently on his ministerial website (yet is oddly signed only in his capacity as an MP, not as a minister), never gets less sarcastic. It feels personal. It reads like the kind of letter we sometimes write when we feel wronged, but then delete before sending. The tone makes sense only if Mr. Kenney recently broke up with Amnesty International. Prior drafts may well have contained the line, “And Violet Hill was never ‘our song' – it's my song.”
...
He could simply have said, as he sort of did – although not simply, never simply – that prosecuting these accused criminals in Canada would be too costly, complicated and likely ineffective (this may well be the case).

Instead, he called Amnesty's position “poppycock” and claimed that their professional, innocuous letter contained allegations that are “sloppy and irresponsible” and “precisely the slander you wrongly accuse the government of directing at the deportees.”

It doesn't. But what the letter does contain is a request that the government be tougher on war criminals. It's strange that this suggestion, made to a tough-on-crime minister, didn't merit a restrained, less caustic answer.

- Finally, with housing looming as a major issue in this fall's Saskatchewan provincial election, let's note that the Tyee has been going into detail on the issue from a Vancouver perspective - and coming up with some suggestions which the federal Cons unfortunately want to ignore:

Both the City of Vancouver and Dickie's CFAA expressed support for Bill C-304, a private member's bill introduced by NDP MP Libby Davies in 2009, calling for a national housing strategy. Such a strategy, the Vancouver MP says, would establish long-term funding for housing.

But while the last election may have advanced the NDP to Official Opposition status, the party that won a majority in Parliament seems to believe it already has a housing plan.
...
Groups like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities raised concerns that funding for AHI and RRAP expired on April 1, 2011. The federal, provincial, and territorial ministers responsible for housing officially announced continued funding for those programs on July 4, when they announced a $1.4 billion investment under a new Affordable Housing Framework for 2011 to 2014.*

To Davies, long-term, stable federal assistance is necessary when the private market fails to provide housing people can afford. "The reality is that the marketplace, even when it's operating at full tilt, even when it's doing everything that it's meant to be doing cannot meet 100 per cent of the need that there is for housing," she says.

Burning question

Since declaring themselves enemies of Amnesty International apparently wasn't enough villainy for one week, the Harper Cons have also decided to pick a fight with an asbestos widow. Can National Kick a Puppy Day be far behind?

[Edit: updated link to full story.]

Deep thought

Anybody who sees the need to treat Amnesty International as an "adversary" has every reason to take a much closer look at whether they're on the right side.

Wednesday Morning Links

The links just keep on coming...

- Paul Wells has expressed disbelief that John Geddes' report on the RCMP funding flawed anti-Insite research then suppressing its didn't result in more outcry. But the reason seems obvious to me - as while it might be slightly different to have such a crystal-clear example coming from an organization that we'd like to think of as independent, the same attitude toward information is so familiar from the political side of the Harper government that it hardly registers as newsworthy.

- In fairness, though, surely it's all worth it given how the Harper government is getting Canada noticed around the world.

- Barbara Yaffe is right to note that the litigation surrounding B.C.'s HST petition has helped to highlight the role of the Harper government in imposing the regressive tax scheme. But let's not forget that for all Jim Flaherty's efforts to distance himself from the HST after the fact, he was cheerleading for it long before anybody took the Cons up on their offer.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk atones for yesterday's press release by getting to the crux of the issue of how the provincial and federal governments should handle potash ownership:

(M)aybe now would be a good time for the potash companies to tell the real shareholders of this resource -- the Saskatchewan people -- what's in this takeover bid for them. Instead of settling for the usual easily-made, easily-broken pie crust promises of local corporate office jobs, maybe we should be demanding the next PotashCorp owner commit to a more fair and equitable royalty regime with less tax holidays for mine expansion and corporate jobs.

In fact, this current bidding war for our love and affection would seem to be the perfect time for the Saskatchewan government to insist on such commitments from the potash industry.

On recycled sources

The CP reports that the Cons are still doing their utmost to escape Canada's international obligation to avoid contributing to the torture of Afghan detainees. And they apparently don't care how much it costs - or who they have to do business with - in order to find even the smallest scrap of an argument for their position:

The Canadian government has hired a controversial international academic to argue that Canada's military has no obligation to accord Afghan detainees Canadian-style legal rights.

Christopher Greenwood, a professor of international law at the London School of Economics, submitted an opinion in mid-August to the Federal Court, which is hearing an application by Amnesty International to halt all prisoner transfers by Canadian soldiers to Afghan authorities.

Prof. Greenwood was the author of a 2002 legal opinion commissioned by the British government entitled The Legality of Using Force Against Iraq. He concluded that an invasion was justified on the grounds of a 1990 UN Security Council resolution, and also on the grounds of self defence if Britain could show the threat of an imminent Iraqi attack.

His opinion was reported to be at odds with that of lawyers in Britain's Foreign Office and many other international law experts. It was revealed in 2005 that the Blair government paid Prof. Greenwood £46,000 (about $100,000 Canadian) for legal advice on Iraq.

Prof. Greenwood's 34-page opinion for Canada's Federal Court, dated Aug. 14, says it was prepared at the request of General Rick Hillier, chief of the defence staff.

The Defence Department said late Friday that Prof. Greenwood was paid $50,000...

New Democrat MP Dawn Black, the party's defence critic, said Friday that in spite of all the international legal expertise available within Canada's Foreign Affairs Department or the broader Canadian legal community, the government clearly went shopping for what she called “a discredited, right-wing expert.”

What's perhaps most interesting about the story is the link between Greenwood's current opinion and the past one used to justify the Iraq invasion. After all, the Cons have been at pains to draw distinctions between the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have received plenty of advice that they're only hurting themselves by parroting the U.S.' Iraq language. Yet Hillier and the Cons still apparently don't have any concern about looking to one of the most dubious Iraq war proponents as their main source for an opinion on Afghanistan.

Which means that even if Amnesty International's application fails in court (and indeed I'd have to consider that the more likely outcome), it seems to have succeeded in showing some of the parallels between the Cons' mindset on Afghanistan and the one that managed to mire the U.S., U.K. and others in Iraq. And that attention can only help to make the Cons look ever more untrustworthy when it comes to both human rights and international responsibilities.