Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Bill Moyers writes about the conflict between the wealthy few seeking to preserve their privilege, and the balance of society seeking fairness for everybody:

I keep in my files a warning published in [The Economist] a dozen years ago, on the eve of George W. Bush’s second term. The editors concluded back then that, with income inequality in the United States reaching levels not seen since the first Gilded Age and social mobility diminishing, “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

And mind you, that was before the financial meltdown of 2007–08, before the bailout of Wall Street, before the recession that only widened the gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Ever since then, the great sucking sound we’ve been hearing is wealth heading upwards. The United States now has a level of income inequality unprecedented in our history and so dramatic it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around.

Contrary to what the president said at Rutgers, this is not the way the world works; it’s the way the world is made to work by those with the money and power. The movers and shakers—the big winners—keep repeating the mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world. Those are part of the story, but only part. As G.K. Chesterton wrote a century ago, “In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality.”
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...The winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the system. And when the fix was in, they turned our economy into a feast for the predators, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers, investors, and taxpayers.” The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is that the United States is looking more and more like the capitalist oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by. 

- Chris Lehmann reviews Brooke Harrington's Capital Without Borders as a useful look at how "wealth management" serves to sever wealth from social responsibility. But Canadians for Tax Fairness point out some good news in the CRA's response to the Panama Papers - including audits of 60 individuals and corporations caught in the offshoring scheme.

- Unfortunately, John Ivison suspects that the Libs are gearing up to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership to further the trend toward corporate control.

- Phillip Inman reports on the latest study from Global Justice Now showing that corporations are pushing further up the list of the world's largest economic entities, leaving an increasing number of countries behind. But there may be some opportunity to direct that news toward positive ends: if we're going to need some outlet for Canadian national pride, surely staying ahead of Wal-Mart should be a reasonable minimum standard for global relevance.

- Finally, Kendall Worth offers some suggestions as to how to teach students about poverty in order to better understand the lives of people in their communities. Alana Semuels points out how the U.S. in particular has gone in the opposite direction by setting up institutional barriers to any serious economic study of inequality. And Peter Armstrong discusses how traditional economic policy is failing to produce the growth that would normally be expected - with a top-heavy distribution of wealth and power looming as the prime culprit.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Ronald Inglehart discusses the political roots of inequality - and the likelihood that the forces that have allowed it to fester for decades will eventually be reversed:

New political alignments, in short, might once again readjust the balance of power between elites and masses in the developed world, with the emerging struggle being between a tiny group at the top and a heterogeneous majority below. For the industrial society’s working-class coalition to become effective, lengthy processes of social and cognitive mobilization had to be completed. In today’s postindustrial society, however, a large share of the population is already highly educated, well informed, and in possession of political skills; all it needs to become politically effective is the development of an awareness of common interest.
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The essence of modernization is the linkages among economic, social, ideational, and political trends. As changes ripple through the system, developments in one sphere can drive developments in the others. But the process doesn’t work in just one direction, with economic trends driving everything else, for example. Social forces and ideas can drive political actions that reshape the economic landscape. Will that happen once again, with popular majorities mobilizing to reverse the trend toward economic inequality? In the long run, probably: publics around the world increasingly favor reducing inequality, and the societies that survive are the ones that successfully adapt to changing conditions and pressures. Despite current signs of paralysis, democracies still have the vitality to do so. 

- Bill Moyers also weighs in on the need to take back our political system from the plutocrats who have managed a hostile takeover. And Deirdre Fulton reports on the GMO industry's appalling attempts to silence a single teenaged critic as an example of corporatism run amok.

- Meanwhile, Tom Bergin reports on the barely-existent taxes paid by the UK's big banks as just one example of the corporate sector trying to avoid any responsibility to the society which makes its profits possible.

- The Canadian Labour Congress answers a few of the false talking points being used to attack any effort to strengthen the Canada Pension Plan. But the most important myth about the CPP may be any remaining belief that the Libs can be trusted to follow through on improving public pensions - as Thomas Walkom points out.

- Finally, it's well and good that Justin Trudeau is telling others to welcome the refugees arriving in Canada. But Lee Berthiaume observes that our refugee system is currently designed to saddle new Canadians with debt from day one.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Bill Moyers interviews Richard Wolff about inequality - featuring Wolff's observation that anybody trying to justify inequality as an inevitable byproduct of unregulated markets manages only to make those markets indefensible:

Bill Moyers: When you say that there's no economic argument that people should be kept at the-- should not share in the gains of economic growth, the response is, "Well, that's what the market bears."

Richard Wolff: Well, you know, in the history of economics, which is my profession, it's a standard play on words. Instead of talking about how the economy is shaped by the actions of consumers in one way, workers in another way, corporate executives in another way, we abstract from all of that and we create a myth or a mystique. It's called the market.

That way you're absolving everybody from responsibility. It isn't that you're doing this, making that decision in this way, it's rather this thing called the market that makes things happen. Well, every corporate executive I know, knows that half of his or her job is to tweak, manipulate, shift, and change the market.

No corporate executive takes the market as given. That may happen in the classroom, but not in the world of real business. That's what advertising is. You try to create the demand, if there isn't enough of it to make money without doing that. You change everything you can. So the reference to a market, I think, is an evasion.

It's an attempt to make abstract the real workings of the economy so nobody can question what this one or that one is doing. But let me take it another way. To say that it's the market is another way of saying, "It's our economic system that works that way." That is a very dangerous defense move to take.

Bill Moyers: Why?

Richard Wolff: Because it plays into the hands of those like me who are critical of the system. If indeed it isn't this one or that one, it isn't this company's strategy or that product's maneuver, but it is the market, the totality of the system, that is producing unconscionable results, multi-million-dollar apartments next door to abject poverty, then you're saying that the system is at fault for these results.

I agree with that. But I'm not sure that those who push this notion of "the market makes it happen," have thought through where the logic of that defense makes them very vulnerable to a much more profound critique than they will be comfortable with.

- Meanwhile, Lana Payne tears into Tim Hudak for his job-killing agenda and long-discredited policy prescriptions, while Alan Pyke discusses how corporate freebies have failed in Kansas. And David Olive singles out Hudak for well-justified scorn in his claim (contrary to all evidence) that another round of handouts to the corporate sector will help Ontario's economic prospects - though Olive is also right to note that there's significant room for greater long-term investment on all sides in the Ontario election.

- Upstream makes the case for a focus on youth homelessness as an area where public investment could radically improve lives. And the NDP is pushing (and petitioning) for a renewed federal role in funding social housing as a means of alleviating poverty.

- The Star takes a look at the Cons' cuts to refugee health care, and confirms the suspicion that the effect of withdrawing funding for needed services would be to inflate costs for the provinces who are left to deal with diseases left untreated for too long.

- Finally, Kady O'Malley points out that the NDP has received a substantial boost from former House of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh in its effort to stop the abuse of parliamentary resources to attack opposition parties. But it's hard to see the Cons being persuaded to change course given that Walsh's warning against "the use of House proceedings for any purpose whatsoever...to license parliamentary tyranny by a governing majority over the minority parties sitting in opposition if not also over outside third parties" would fit neatly as a mission statement for Stephen Harper and his minions.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Bill Moyers offers up a superb summary and reading list on inequality:

Inequality in America: How bad is it? In 2011, Mother Jones published a series of charts capturing the depth of inequality in the US, which remains one of the best big-picture looks at the problem out there. We have greater inequality of accumulated wealth than income, and University of California sociologist William Domhoff’s “Who Rules America” provided the details. In The Atlantic, Max Fisher offered a map of global inequality that named the US among the most unequal wealthy countries, and Mark Gongloff reported in the Huffington Post about a study that found that we have the fastest growth in inequality in the developed world. Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede and Sam Osoro wrote a brief on the black/ white wealth gap at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, and Brookings’ Benjamin Harris and Melissa Kearny offered 12 facts about America’s struggling lower middle class.

I’m not poor. Why should I care? Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argued in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better that greater inequality correlates with, and may cause, all sorts of social harms – from crime to obesity to alcoholism. John Crace interviewed the authors for The Guardian, and Wilkinson penned an article for CNN. A study conducted by Sir Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology at University College London, found that high levels of inequality cause stress and harm the health of both rich and poor. Justin Wolfers noted that higher inequality correlates with less upward mobility. A report by the UN found that higher levels of inequality were accompanied by slower overall growth. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic found that it’s more “fun” to live in more equal societies.

- Justine Hunter writes about the litigation expected to follow from the Cons' rubber-stamp for the Northern Gateway pipeline.

- Sheila Pratt reports that 75 officers from Alberta's already non-functional environmental regulator have been lured into an industry-funded group doesn't offer much reason for confidence that public interests are going to be represented any better in the near future. And Douglas Fischer takes a look at the massive amounts of private money being used to fund climate denialism with less and less donor transparency.

- Michael Byers critiques the Cons' obsession with the North Pole. And Matthew Fisher writes that the Cons' posturing has taken away from efforts to present a sound scientific position - which may result on Canada losing out on claims it might otherwise have been able to win.

- Finally, Joel Harden reviews Brad Lavigne's Building the Orange Wave - and it's well worth noting his take on what's often left out of Lavigne's otherwise strong account:

This, as some have said, wasn’t the NDP our grandparents built. Gone were any pretensions to socialism in the party’s constitution. Absent were genuine efforts to row against the tide of established thinking.

Present instead was "social-ism," an approach Tony Blair championed (using the ideas of Anthony Giddens) to move the British Labour Party "beyond left and right." Layton’s adoption of this mantra involved repeated claims to make "Parliament work for people."

Lavigne claims the party did this at several crucial moments: during budget wrangles with Liberals in 2004 and 2005, and the parliamentary dispute of 2008-2009. I’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of those claims.

My issue is with Lavigne's view that the NDP’s rise came from a shift "beyond politics," and embrace of populist messaging, neither of which rings true for me. Lavigne’s focus on high-level strategy undermines his assessment of Layton’s strengths, and why many activists and movements held him in such high regard.

For me, the Orange Wave started with Layton’s courting of Quebec voters and reputation as an activist politician.

Unlike most NDP leaders, he didn’t antagonize Quebec on constitutional questions, was proudly green and opposed to war in Afghanistan. This made the NDP, as Lavigne explains, a magnet for public animosity in Quebec against Harper, and a rallying point for those seeking to oust him.
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There’s a real difference between strategy to seek a political vision, and strategy as a political vision -- we need more of the former and less of the latter.

As Lavigne notes, the Conservatives have built a solid infrastructure to communicate their ideas and mobilize grassroots supporters. A recent study insists that the left needs a similar infrastructure to challenge corporate power and its dissemination of fend-for-yourself, neoliberal ideas. Strategists like Lavigne have an important role to play in that process, but not without the energy, and commitment, of social movements.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Paul Krugman highlights why inequality is indeed an issue which demands action - both for its own sake, and for its impact on other goals such as economic sustainability. And Bill Moyers discusses the difference between a government responsive to its people and one completely controlled by elites:

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. "The abuse of buying and selling votes," he wrote of Rome, "crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors."
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Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.
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I should make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

 - Andrew Sullivan makes a similar point in commenting on the impact of Pope Francis' discussion of market zealotry (h/t to Cathie):

(T)he way in which market capitalism has become a good in itself on the American right is, well, perniciously wrong. As soon as a system ceases to be a means to a human good, and becomes an end in itself, it has become a false idol. Perhaps the apotheosis of that idol worship was the belief – brandished on the degenerate right in the past decade or two – that markets are self-regulating. Of course they’re not, as Adam Smith would have been the first to inform you. Another assumption embedded on the American right is that more wealth is always a good thing. The Church must say no. This is a lie. Wealth is a neutral thing above a certain basic level of non-drudgery. Above that, it can be an absolutely evil, deceptive thing, distorting human souls, warping their dignity, vulgarizing their character. An American right that worships at the altar of both free markets and material wealth, and that takes these two idols as their primary goods, is not just non-Catholic. It is anathema to Catholicism and to the Gospels.

- Michael Valpy writes about the connection between extractive economics, inequality and social exclusion - while observing that those exact factors are serving to reinforce each other in Canada.

- Meanwhile, Matthew Hays offers a devastating look at how Canada is beginning to look from abroad - with Rob Ford serving only as the most prominent example of a crude, selfish and thoughtless persona. And Scott Reid points out the systematic elimination of any sense of shame from right-wing politics as a substantial part of the problem.

- Finally, John Geddes writes that the Cons' patently absurd attacks on improvements to the Canada Pension Plan are making it needlessly difficult to discuss how to ensure retirement security for Canadians. And Tammy Schirle and Kevin Milligan offer their own proposal to bolster the CPP.