Thursday Evening Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Peter Goodman observes that any meaningful action to build a more equal economy needs to involve bolstering wages and workers' rights - meaning that the elites-only musings in Davos miss the point entirely:

Davos is — at least rhetorically — consumed with worries about the shortcomings of globalization. About the deepening anxieties of the middle class in many developed economies. About the threat of trade protectionism and its attendant hit to economic growth. About the fear that robots are on the verge of sowing mass unemployment.

It is a conversation fueled in part by fear: If the world is indeed in the throes of a populist insurrection, the pitchforks could do worse than to point here. The Davos elites have enjoyed outsize influence over economic policies in recent decades as a growing share of wealth has, perhaps not coincidentally, landed in the coffers of people with a need for bank accounts in the British Virgin Islands, while poor and middle-class households have seen their earnings stagnate and decline.

Yet the solutions that have currency seem calculated to spare corporations and the wealthiest people from having to make any sacrifices at all, as if there is a way to be found to tilt the balance of inequality while those at the top hang on to everything they have.

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“People talk about inequality, how it’s a major problem, the greatest threat to globalization and the global economy,” Mr. Stiglitz said. “You have to recognize that the way we have managed globalization has contributed significantly to inequality. But I have not yet heard a good conversation about what changes in globalization would address inequality.”

That is not an accident, he surmised. Any sincere list would have to include items that involve transferring wealth and power from the sorts of people who come to Davos to ordinary workers via more progressive taxation, increased bargaining rights for labor unions, and greater protections for labor in general.

Same as every other year, Davos is again plastered with the slogan of the World Economic Forum: “Committed to Improving the State of the World.” But whatever improvements are supposed to be made, one can safely assume they will not conflict with those in attendance continuing to enjoy the state of the world as it is now, with canapés and aged Bordeaux and private jets at the ready.

- Meanwhile, David Ball reports on a reminder from UNICEF's David Morley that Canada is backsliding even compared to other countries in our growing inequality.

- Desmond Cole laments Toronto's decision to take social housing away from people who desperately need it in order to throw more money at expressways and subways.

- Jorge Barrera reports on how Health Canada's callous refusal to fund mental health services in the face of urgent First Nations needs contributed to the suicides of two young girls at Wapekeka First Nation. And Mike De Souza and Riley Sparks note that Justin Trudeau is now explicitly breaking his promise to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by deciding to suppress the federal government's legal opinions about indigenous rights.

- Finally, Jessica Botelho-Urbanski reports on Niki Ashton's findings in consulting with millenials across Canada - including the glaring need to reverse a sense of hopelessness.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Andre Picard writes about the widespread poverty faced by indigenous children in Canada - and the obvious need for political action to set things right:

The focus of the [CCPA's] report, rightly, is on the children among the more than 1.4 million people in Canada who identify as indigenous, about 4 per cent of the population. Half of that total are “registered Indians,” 30 per cent are Métis, 15 per cent are non-status Indians and 4 per cent are Inuit. More than half of indigenous people live in urban centres.

These figures are a lot to digest, but they should, nonetheless, be the object of much reflection for our politicians and policy makers.

They are, among other things, an eloquent illustration of the fact that Canadian society is stratified by class, by race and by income, a direct challenge to our comfy belief that we are an egalitarian, socially progressive and colour-blind country.

What we look like and where we came from have an inarguable impact on our opportunities, our income and our health. So does where we live.

- Meanwhile, the Star highlights the desperate need for more affordable housing in Ontario (as in many other places). And Bruce Johnstone notes that the Wall government is going out of its way to hide deliberate choices to raise basic utility costs.

- Angella MacEwen reminds us of the wide range of workers who earn less than a reasonable minimum wage.

- Ivan Semeniuk reports on the dangerous air pollution emanating from the tar sands even beyond their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. And Judith Lavoie takes a look at the price the public has to pay in dealing with abandoned mine sites.

- Finally, Maxwell Cameron comments on the widespread perception that the B.C. Liberal government is thoroughly corrupted. And Desmond Cole writes that the replacement of Rob Ford with John Tory hasn't changed Toronto's basic focus on favouring the wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Peter Mazereeuw reports on the growing opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership which may result in it never coming into force. And Jerry Dias reminds us why we should be glad if that movement wins out over the corporate forces who assembled it behind closed doors:

(T)he far more insidious part of the deal has nothing to do with trade or tariffs at all.

It is the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system that would give corporations the right to sue governments for passing laws that hurt their ability to earn a profit -- even if those laws are in the public interest.

Think about that. A government gets elected to pass the laws that its citizens want -- and then gets sued under an international trade agreement for doing exactly what it was elected to do.

Think that won't happen? It already has.
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Testifying before hearings into the TPP in New Zealand last week, Osgoode Hall law professor Gus Van Harten said that while ISDS provisions have existed in trade deals before, the TPP marks a watershed. That's because the TPP, along with a proposed trade deal between Europe and the United States, would expand coverage of ISDS provisions from 20 per cent of the world economy to up to 90 per cent .

That means that virtually the entire world economy would be ruled by these undemocratic ISDS tribunals, which put corporate profits ahead of public policy, the environment or labour rights. In fact, ISDS is a one-way street, with only private industries given the right to sue, while protecting them against state or citizen lawsuits.

The TPP, in other words, is a lop-sided deal that favours the rights of corporations over the people, a reflection of the blind faith placed in so-called free trade by our former Conservative government.

- Fernando Arce reports on the plight of migrant workers lacking any protection from Canada's federal government. And Desmond Cole sees the issue as one of the most stark examples of our seeing workers as disposable.

- Meanwhile, Anna Mehler Paperny reports on a continued pattern of immigrants being shut away in solitary confinement for years at a time due to the belief that option is easier than providing treatment.

- Chantal Hebert writes that Maryam Monsef's utterly senseless talking points on electoral reform are burning bridges to people who were more than willing to work with the Libs on a fair electoral system. And Jeremy Nuttall talks to Nathan Cullen about the obvious problems with the Libs' self-serving committee design.

- Finally, Eric Pineault comments on the trend toward extreme oil extraction - and the need to start building our economy on a more stable and less dangerous foundation.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- George Monbiot discusses how neoliberal ideology has managed to take over as the default assumption in global governance - despite its disastrous and readily visible effects:

(T)he past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

- And Mike Small highlights how privatization schemes are predictably enriching private contractors at the expense of the general public without delivering the promised services. 

- Steven Chase reports on the Libs' deceptive attempt to dodge responsibility for approving the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia. Alison succinctly links the sale to its known consequences, while Neil MacDonald points out that there's no difference at all between the Cons and Libs in their determination to push military exports at the expense of human rights. And both Michael Harris and the Globe and Mail's editorial board tear into the Libs for their hypocrisy and dishonesty.

- Meanwhile, Desmond Cole reminds us that Canadian torture victims are being met with utter contempt by the Trudeau Libs.

- Finally, Bruce Campbell writes that there's been virtually no progress on rail safety since the Lac-Mégantic disaster. And Mike De Souza notes that contrary to the spin of pipeline proponents, there's reason for concern that similar regulatory neglect and corporate greed connected to pipelines can result in damage on an equally large scale.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Tim Harford discusses John Maynard Keynes' failed prediction that workers would continue to win increased leisure time over the past few decades:

(I)t is worth teasing out the nature and extent of Keynes’s error. He was right to predict that we would be working less. We enter the workforce later, after long and not-always-arduous courses of study. We enjoy longer retirements. The work week itself is getting shorter. In non-agricultural employment in the US, the week was 69 hours in 1830 — the equivalent of working 11 hours a day but only three hours on Sundays. By 1930, a full-time work week was 47 hours; each decade, American workers were working two hours less every week.

But Keynes overestimated how rapidly and for how long that trend would continue. By 1970 the work week was down to 39 hours. If the work week had continued to shrink, we would be working 30-hour weeks by now, and perhaps 25-hour weeks by 2030. But by around 1970, the slacking-off stopped. Why?
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The gap between the growth of the economy and the growth of median household incomes is explained by a patchwork of factors, including a change in the nature of households themselves, with more income being diverted to healthcare costs, and an increasing share of income accruing to the highest earners. In short, perhaps progress towards the 15-hour work week has stalled because the typical US household’s income has stalled too. Household incomes started to stagnate at the same time as the work week stopped shrinking.

This idea makes good sense but it does not explain what is happening to higher earners. Since their incomes have not stagnated — far from it — one might expect them to be taking some of the benefits of very high hourly earnings in the form of shorter days and longer weekends. Not so. According to research published by economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst in 2006 — a nice snapshot of life before the great recession — higher earners were enjoying less leisure.

So the puzzle has taken a different shape. Ordinary people have been enjoying some measure of both the income gains and the leisure gains that Keynes predicted — but rather less of both than we might have hoped.

The economic elites, meanwhile, continue to embody a paradox: all the income gains that Keynes expected and more, but limited leisure.

- Carol Goar laments the Libs' lack of action to build a national child care system. And Alex Steffen observes that the movement toward social progress has run into a well-funded but deeply destructive corporate effort to proclaim that change for the better is impossible.

- In a particularly stark example of the gap between the progress which can obviously be made and the excuses for refusing to make it, Tim Fontaine reports on the connection between poverty, inequality and alarming suicide rates among First Nations children - even as Jorge Barrera exposes the Libs' false claim that there's no money available to keep a promise to better fund education.

- David Roberts examines how solar power is rapidly becoming the cheapest option even compared to subsidized fossil fuels.

- And finally, Desmond Cole questions the indefinite detention of migrants to Canada.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Desmond Cole rightly slams the stinginess of Ontario's government in taking support away from parents based on child support which isn't actually received. And Karl Nerenberg laments Bill Morneau's decision to let the Scrooges among Canada's finance ministers dictate the future of the Canada Pension Plan.

- Meanwhile, Tom Cooper writes that the payday loan industry is profiting off the vulnerability of people facing a precarious financial situation. And Michael Geist notes that the phamaceutical sector is also raking in massive amounts of money thanks to governments willing to put its interests over those of the public.

- Angella MacEwen examines Canada's job trends over the past year (and worries that the high-demand areas of health care and social services might not serve as the sources of jobs they should due to public-sector austerity).

- But on the bright side, Duncan Cameron is optimistic that renewed interest in democratic socialism will carry over into 2016 and beyond. And Corey Hogan looks at Calgary as a prime example of a city with a far stronger progressive base than conventional wisdom may have assumed.

- Finally, Kelly Carmichael calls for the Trudeau Libs to implement a fair, proportional electoral system for once and for all.

On balancing acts

For those wondering, I'm indeed following up on these posts and working my way through some of the factors in the NDP's federal election result. (For more on the subject, see the latest from Lawrence Martin, and Desmond Cole talking to Cheri DiNovo.)

I'll turn now to what's often been labeled the most important turning point of the campaign - that being the NDP's promise to balance the federal budget, in contrast to the Libs' commitment to run deficits. But the problem looks to me to have been less that the NDP took an unreasonable position, than that it didn't do enough otherwise to win what's come to be labeled the "progressive primary".

While I don't see DiNovo's comments in particular as accurately presenting the NDP's message (no, "austerity" was never on the table), they do reflect how the Libs managed to spin the NDP's position. And that's largely because the NDP's messaging early in the campaign was aimed at maintaining the party's consideration set with warm-and-fuzzy messages about Tom Mulcair and challenges to the Cons, sometimes at the expense of appealing to a progressive base which was apparently waiting to decide on its direction.

To be fair, the NDP may have expected its past messaging and policy work to have accomplished that task already. After all, both other major parties took the opposite side of issues including C-51, child care, and the minimum wage among others, while the Libs had seemed to run right more than left until the campaign began.

What's more, the NDP did plenty to earn the support of people who were paying attention to positions on specific issues. And while its platform didn't receive the attention it deserved (due in no small part to the party's choice to release it late and with little fanfare), it included plenty worth promoting.

Ultimately, I don't see the Libs as actually having earned the title of "more progressive" among any but a narrow subset of voters. But they did manage to confuse matters enough to ensure that values-based positioning wasn't a significant advantage for the NDP, particularly in terms of motivating its base supporters along with unaligned progressives. And that helped the Libs immensely when it came time for voters to settle on a choice based on affinity and electability.

To the extent the problem was one of muddied waters rather than clear distinctions, I have my doubts that following the Libs and announcing a willingness to run deficits would have radically changed the campaign, particularly if it seemed to be the result of calculation rather than commitment.

Instead, the problem seems to have been a single-minded focus on keeping remote connections to soft voters at the expense of motivating progressives - particularly when the primary goal should arguably have been a focus on the latter in order to facilitate the former closer to election day. And in my next post, I'll tie that choice to what looks like the core lesson to be taken from the NDP's successes and failures alike over the past few years.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- The Equality Trust reminds us that economic inequality leads to harmful health consequences even for the lucky few at the top of the income scale. And Matt Bruenig observes that a basic income would provide workers with far more scope to avoid employer abuses and other stressors.

- The Council of Canadians points out how the Trans-Pacific Partnership could block any path toward a national pharmacare plan and more fair prescription drug prices. And Andy Blatchford highlights the secrecy surrounding the agreement even as it should be the subject of electoral scrutiny.

- Following up on yesterday's column, Andrew Coyne, Naheed Nenshi and Peter Wheeland just a few of the many voices pointing out how appalled Canadians should be by the Cons' attempt to win votes by denying basic rights to minorities. And the Montreal Gazette reports on the expected consequences when politicians decide to start declaring groups to be something less than full participants in society. But BJ Siekerski reports that the Cons are hinting at making matters worse by looking for new areas in which to discriminate, including employment in the public service.

- Meanwhile, Desmond Cole writes that the Cons' Unfair Elections Act likewise strips Canadians of basic rights (in this case the right to vote) without serving any purpose whatsoever.

- Finally, Scott Gilmore points out that people are suffering unconscionable poverty and deprivation daily in an area of federal jurisdiction - and thus calls for leaders and voters alike to pay far more attention to the plight of Canada's First Nations in the election and beyond.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Angella MacEwen comments on the fight for universal child care, along with the lessons we can learn from Quebec's experience. And Claire Cain Miller notes that inequality in the workplace extends to benefits as well as wages - with child care included alongside other supports which are currently treated as employer-specific perks rather than needed programs.

- Meanwhile, as Elliot Berkman notes, the failure to win the employer lottery only creates additional hardships for the working poor who are then forced into short-term survival mode:

The very definition of self-control is choosing behaviors that favor long-term outcomes over short-term rewards, but poverty can force people to live in a permanent now. Worrying about tomorrow can be a luxury if you don’t know how you’ll survive today.

Research supports this idea by showing that poor people understandably have an increased focus on the present. People who are among the poorest one-fifth of Americans tend to spend their money on immediate needs such as food, utilities and housing, all of which have gotten more expensive. In this situation, the traditional definition of self-control doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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(P)overty has powerful harmful effects on people, and helps explain why it’s so hard to escape. Their choices are much more a product of their situation, rather than a lack of self-control.

The way we scientists define self-control is part of the problem, too. We tend to think that focusing on long-term goals is always a good thing and satisfying short-term needs is always a bad thing; we say that “self-control failure” is equivalent to focusing on the near term. This definition works well for people who have the luxury of time and money to meet their basic needs and have resources left over to plan for the future. But self-control as currently defined might not even apply to people living in the permanent now.

- And Tim Sale likewise notes the importance of stable and affordable housing as a precondition to improved health, education and economic outcomes.

- Finally, Ali Hamandi discusses the Harper Cons' damage to Canadian women in general, while Kate Heartfield focuses on the lack of action to address violence against women in particular. Desmond Cole rightly recognizes the need to ensure first-hand perspectives on women's issues. And Haroon Siddiqui slams the Cons for their phony war against the niqab and the women who wear it.