Saturday Evening Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Nick Charity reports on the observations of the UN's envoy on poverty and human rights that callous and cruel austerian political choices have caused harm to millions of UK residents.

- Tess Kalinowski reports on the reality that Doug Ford's move to remove rent controls won't do anything to make housing available to the people who need it most. And Rick McGinnis writes that even leaving aside the importance of dealing with poverty and homelessness generally, suburban residents can't pretend they're somehow contained in core urban areas only.

- Meanwhile, Mike Crawley points out that a first set of cuts to important services won't even put a dent in Ontario's provincial debt - especially since it's being used to fund giveaways to polluters and the wealthy. And Robert Benzie notes that those handouts to the rich and their businesses are being paired with a loophole to allow corporations to funnel political donations through employees.

- Bill McKibben discusses how climate breakdown is shrinking the habitable space on our planet. Climate Transparency's Brown to Green study (PDF) highlights how Canada has both the highest emissions per capita of any G20 country, and the fourth-highest proportion of public financing for the fossil fuel sector as a proportion of GDP. And Charlie Smith interviews Donald Gutstein about the Libs' "grand bargain" (at the request of the oil industry) to keep allowing unsustainable emissions as long as they're attached to modest prices. 

- Finally, Malone Mullin reports on the Husky oil spill off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador which can't even be examined (let alone cleaned up).

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Frank Graves writes that we're seeing the end of progress for all but the wealthiest few - and that we all stand to lose out if we come to believe that progress for the rest of us is impossible:

There is a virtual consensus that a growing and optimistic middle class is a precondition for societal health and economic prosperity. This consensus position reflects the historical record of when nations succeed. Yet if this consensus is correct, we note with alarm that almost nobody thinks that these conditions are in place in Canada. To the contrary, the consensus view is that the middle class is shrinking and pessimistic.
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There are important barometers of confidence and we have tested these the same way in repeated measures for twenty years or so; the trajectories are clear and revealing. Never in our tracking has Canada had such a gloomy outlook on the economic future. Never in our tracking has the sense of progress from the past been so meager.

- Meanwhile, Spiegel interviews Naomi Klein about the choice between ever-increasing resource consumption and a sustainable planet:

SPIEGEL: So you're saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?
Klein: Exactly. And it was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism. Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.
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SPIEGEL: Let's go back to our first question: Why have people been unable to stop this development?
Klein: We have systematically given away the tools. Regulations of any kind are now scorned. Governments no longer create tough rules that limit oil companies and other corporations. This crisis fell into our laps in a disastrous way at the worst possible moment. Now we're out of time. Where we are right now is a do-or-die moment. If we don't act as a species, our future is in peril. We need to cut emissions radically.
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SPIEGEL: You're saying that all the small steps -- green technologies and CO2 taxation and the eco-behavior of individuals -- are meaningless?
Klein: No. We should all do what we can, of course. But we can't delude ourselves that it's enough. What I'm saying is that the small steps will remain too small if they don't become a mass movement. We need an economic and political transformation, one based on stronger communities, sustainable jobs, greater regulation and a departure from this obsession with growth. That's the good news. We have a real opportunity to solve many problems at once.
SPIEGEL: You don't appear to be counting on the collective reason of politicians and entrepreneurs.
Klein: Because the system can't think. The system rewards short-term gain, meaning quick profits. Take Michael Bloomberg, for example ...
SPIEGEL: … the businessman and former New York City mayor …
Klein: … who understood the depths of the climate crisis as a politician. As a businessman, however, he chooses to invest in a fund that specializes in oil and gas assets. If a person like Bloomberg cannot resist the temptation, then you can assume that the system's self-preservation capacity isn't that great.

- Naturally, the Cons are going out of their way to make sure nobody's able to talk about either growth or sustainability. On that front, Kristie Smith reports on the Cons' refusal to allow our elected representatives to assess their woeful economic record. And Carol Linnitt talks to Donald Gutstein about their determination to silence anybody trying to make the case to save our planet.

- Of course, the most prominent current example of that is their terror bill. On that front, the Ottawa Citizen rightly questions the Cons' rush to impose massive new powers with as little study as possible. Louise Elliott reports on how C-51 ignores the Supreme Court's past decisions about security certificates, while upwards of 100 professors in law and related disciplines have released a letter calling for the bill to be amended or scrapped. And both Don Martin and Michael Harris call out the Cons for their selective definition of a threat (at least before universal surveillance powers are put in place).

- Finally, Health Poverty Action examines the global cost of the war on drugs. Anna Mehler Paperny discusses the social and economic consequences of a lack of accessible child care. And the Guardian reminds us that ignoring homelessness doesn't make its human costs disappear.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Jim Stanford highlights the fact that a deficit obsession may have little to do with economic development - and calls out the B.C. Libs for pretending that the former is the same as the latter:

I found especially objectionable the article’s uncritical cheerleading for expenditure restraint, praising the government for below-average per capita spending on health care and education, and for welfare rates that are “frozen in time.”  Why are these things assumed to be “good”? To the contrary, the lasting debts that B.C. is accumulating by underinvesting so badly in its people, its infrastructure, and its environment belie the government’s phony claims about living within its means and protecting future generations.  The article included just one critical quote (from the NDP finance critic) versus seven bullish quotes from Mr. de Jong (along with a gratuitous depiction of his “famously thrifty” personal habits).

B.C.’s relative economic performance has in fact been slowly fading throughout the Liberal government’s tenure.  It turns out that just balancing a budget does not imply automatic prosperity after all (and if deficit elimination is achieved through austerity, it hurts prosperity, not helps it).

Maximizing GDP per capita is not the goal of economic policy, and perhaps I shouldn’t worry so much about one article that so objectionably internalizes the ideology of austerity (accentuated by a wildly inaccurate headline).  But I do think this article constitutes an extreme and cautionary example of how the assumptions of deficit elimination have been so deeply swallowed in our national economic discourse, that people actually think “deficit reduction” and “prosperity” are synonymous.  Remember: a government can eliminate its deficit, or even shut down entirely, but that hardly implies that society is richer.

- Scott Clark and Peter DeVries criticize the Harper Cons for lacking either a budgetary or an economic Plan B other than to count on high oil prices to cover up for mismanagement. Barrie McKenna discusses Canada's largest-ever Ponzi scheme - which predictably fed off of investors who believed they couldn't lose in an Alberta oil bubble. And Donald Gutstein writes that the Fraser Institute is going out of its way to train the media to substitute laissez-faire dogmatism for actual economics.

- Geordan Omand reports on the work of B.C.'s labour movement in pursuing a $15 minimum wage. But Iglika Ivanova rightly argues that we also need social protections in place to address the shift toward on-demand work rather than stable employment relationships:

(W)orkers’ compensation, pensions, extended health benefits, paid sick time, parental leave, etc. — these are all employer-provided benefits in Canada too. If you are a contractor, or you recently changed employers you often aren’t eligible (with some exceptions like CPP but that’s currently not large enough be a sufficient pension on its own; it was meant supplement workplace pension plans).

The job market has changed and it’s time for our social policy models to change with it. In my view, Reich’s proposal of trying to force today’s job market relationships into the old employer-provided benefits model is a bit like forcing a square peg into a round hole. It doesn’t quite fit.

Here’s a better idea: let’s shift to providing labour protections by the state. This way every worker would be eligible, regardless of who they work for.

And while we’re at it, it’s time to move to European-style sectoral bargaining, where workers are able to collectively organize by industry (instead of workplace by workplace) and bargain with major employers together.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui highlights the Cons' politics of hate against Muslims. And Haaretz offers a case in point as to terror politics can overtake democratic choices, as a candidate is set to be barred from running in Israel's general election merely for having failed to buy into jingoistic war-on-terror language.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Charlie Smith discusses - and then follows up on - Donald Gutstein's work in tracing the connections between the Harper Cons and the shadowy, U.S.-based network of right-wing propaganda mills:

In Harperism: How Stephen Har­per and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada (James Lorimer & Company Ltd.), Gutstein makes the case that neoliberalism is far more sinister than simply having a desire for smaller government. A central tenet of his new book is that Harper is undermining democracy by marshalling the power of government to create and enforce markets where they’ve never existed before.

“He’s gradually moving the country from one that’s based on democracy to one that’s based on the market, which means that the decisions are not made by our duly elected representatives through the laws that they pass and the regulations that they enact,” Gutstein says.
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With astonishing intellectual dexterity, Gutstein demonstrates in his book how Harper’s overarching mission to promote economic freedom through the imposition of markets is reflected in Conservative government policies.

This explains the zealous desire to dismantle environmental regulations, muzzle government scientists, and scrap the long-form census. The faith in markets also underlies Harper’s blindness to rising income inequality and his eagerness to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board.

In addition, it provides a theoretical framework behind efforts to persuade First Nations to abandon collective ownership of their land in favour of a fee-simple system. Neoliberal ideology also manifests itself in Harper galloping around the world to sign free-trade agreements, which limit municipal and provincial governments’ ability to introduce regulations or procure locally produced goods and services.

- And on that front, Arielle Mayer points out that the FIPA may severely limit Canada's ability to do anything to rein in climate change for upwards of a generation.

- Meanwhile, Kevin Campbell reminds us that inequality is bad for business as well as being socially corrosive:

The moral case for reducing inequality is well known, and compelling. But there's little discussion of the economic case. Competition and free markets will always result in some doing better than others, but when growth accrues overwhelmingly to the top 10 per cent, it threatens the health of our society and the sustainability of the economy. If the majority of our population is unable to spend on more than merely the basics, money won't circulate through the economy. If money doesn't circulate, economic growth slows. When economic growth slows, businesses fail, jobs disappear and key programs providing health, education and safety to our citizens begin to fail. It is true that we manage inequality better than many other countries, but since when is B.C. satisfied with measuring itself against the worst instead of by our proximity to the best?
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In 2011, the top 10 per cent earned 34.4 per cent of all after-tax income in this province. But income only tells us half the story. A recent report has estimated that the top 10 per cent owns 56.2 per cent of the wealth in our province -- well above the national average.

At this point some might suggest this line of inquiry is motivated by a disdain for the economically mobile. Wrong. I believe these numbers show how income inequality is bad for business. Let me put it this way: if an individual earns 10 times as much as her neighbour, she does not buy 10 times as many bottles of Okanagan wine or make 10 times as many trips to Science World. We can measure this effect: the 'velocity' of money in Canada -- the measure of how many times the money supply circulates in a year -- is now at a 35 year low.
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There's no shortage of ideas about how to address inequality without threatening our ability to do business, but few have talked about how much the future of our economy depends on reconciling this. Let's dare to end the false choice between growth and equality. Let's make our province more prosperous by making it more fair.

- And as one example of a policy choice which could help improve the position of workers within a stronger economy, Dr. Dawg makes the case for free university tuition as an important step in encouraging economic development and social equality alike.

- Tavia Grant discusses how workers lose out when employers offer only precarious and inconsistent work in order to pad their own profit margins:

The tilt to unstable work – temp jobs, shift work or erratic part-time positions – shows “these are not the 1970s jobs any more. There’s no sense of permanence to them. That’s the area that’s really changing – the lack of commitment by employers to employees in the long term,” says Wayne Lewchuk, professor at McMaster University’s economics and labour studies departments.

In prior decades, workers were seen as investments for companies, an asset to be developed over the long term. Now, he says, they’re often viewed as a liability or a cost to be minimized whenever possible.

“The reality is, our economy is much more competitive now than it was 40 or 50 years ago. It’s a brutal world out there if you’re a firm, and so they are looking for ways to cut costs. … So we’ve seen a movement of firms to protect a core [of employees] and surrounding that with a periphery of less permanent employees or tasks that are contracted out,” Prof. Lewchuk says.

He has surveyed 4,000 people in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area and found that nearly half now work in jobs with some degree of insecurity – from short-term contracts to self-employed, working for temp agencies or without benefits.

That has clear consequences for finances, his research has found, but the impact also spills into family, health and community involvement.

- Finally, Kim Stanton both argues for an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, and describes what we'd need for that inquiry to lead to real progress. And Doug Cuthand is duly appalled by the Cons' push to undermine indigenous rights at the UN level.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Michael Hiltzik points out new research showing that business-focused policies do nothing at all to encourage any positive economic outcomes: in fact, a higher rating from ALEC for low-tax, low-regulation government correlates to less economic growth. But Kevin Drum highlights what the corporate agenda is really intended to accomplish:

(A)lthough a high ALEC-Laffer ranking may not stimulate any actual growth,...it does correspond to reduced taxes on the wealthy and slashed spending on state services that benefit the poor and working class. In other words, it may not affect growth, but it sure is a good deal for the rich. And that's what counts, isn't it?

- Meanwhile, the corporate lobby seems to have long since decided that truth and falsehood are irrelevant as long as one can afford to drown out competing voices. On that front, Donald Gutstein discusses how former tobacco shills are now being funded by the Fraser Institute to shout down any effort to encourage healthy eating and combat obesity - and receiving nothing but free, unquestioning publicity from the media for their efforts. Similarly, Barrie McKenna dutifully transcribes the request of the big three telecoms to avoid the type of competition which provides consumers with a fair deal in selecting phone and wireless service.

- Fortunately, at least one media outlet is a bit more questioning of corporate choices, as CBC's Don Pittis lists a few of the reasons why business interests are standing in the way of meaningful action on climate change.

- Richard Eskow wonders why more political voices aren't fighting to protect public services and the workers who provide them:

The facts are these: Given the growth of the population, stagnating wages, persistent long-term unemployment, and a host of other factors, we should be adding twice as many jobs per month as we are currently seeing. Instead, government – the one area of our economic life over which politicians have direct control – is shedding jobs instead of adding them. This worsens the overall economy while depriving the public of much-needed government services.

What’s more, the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that it will take $3.6 trillion to restore our nation’s infrastructure. We need the jobs, and the infrastructure needs repair. The president and his party should be hammering the message home every day: we need government jobs, and we need them now.

President Obama should be fighting to preserve current public-sector jobs and create new ones. Instead he’s given to repeatedly boasting, as he does in his latest budget proposal, about the fact that under his proposal “discretionary spending will fall to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years.”

That’s nothing to brag about – and it’s the wrong message at the wrong time.

- Carol Goar writes that a higher-cost, lower-service Canada Post is receiving a chilly reception from businesses and citizens alike - again raising the question of why the Cons insisted on that approach rather than allowing a postal bank to provide more for less.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne writes that debates should be given a far more prominent - and legally-entrenched - place in election campaigns.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Laura Ryckewaert looks in more detail at the continued lack of any privacy protection in the Unfair Elections Act. And Murray Dobbin is hopeful that the Cons' blatant attempt to suppress voting rights will instead lead to a backlash among those who are intended to be excluded:

(W)hatever the outcome, perhaps the best possible response of democracy activists would be to treat this loathsome piece of legislation as a useful crisis. This is exactly what leaders of the African-American and Latino communities have done in their fight against the blatant voter suppression efforts in the U.S. -- where individual states determine voting procedures for federal elections. "A Center for Social Inclusion report entitled "Citizens Denied: The Impact of Photo ID Laws on Senior Citizens of Color" warned that nearly half of black voters over age 65 and one in three Latino senior voters would have a more difficult time registering and voting on election day due to photo ID laws passed in some 33 states."

In at least some cases efforts at voter suppression in the U.S. have backfired because the attack on black and Latino communities has galvanized them to get out the vote. The government of Florida reduced the early voting period which prompted black churches "to conduct a two-day 'souls to the polls' marathon. And even as election day turned into a late election night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democrat counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008."

Efforts to suppress the vote in civic elections in North Carolina and Texas also backfired, resulting in record turn-outs of the people targeted by Republican party controlled board of elections.

With young people, the homeless and First Nations voters at the low end of the turn-out numbers, the Harper government's crude effort to suppress their votes even more can and should be used to galvanize the vote from those communities.

Student organizations, anti-poverty groups, the Idle No More movement and senior's groups are well placed to take up the challenge, with help from groups like Democracy Watch and perhaps the NDP.

While many in those communities have found little reason to go to the polls given the slim likelihood of any change in their lives, no one likes to be told what they can and can't do -- especially when it comes to rights. For the people targeted by Harper for disenfranchisement, the 2015 election could be purely about democracy itself.

- Dave Seglins reports on even more rail safety incidents which were left unreported by the railways involved. And Wendy Gillis notes that Transport Canada and MMA are refusing to release the details of the safety plan whose failure caused the Lac-Mégantic disaster - effectively declaring that so far as they're concerned, the plans approved by the government as being sufficient to keep the public safe are none of the public's business.

- Don Lenihan looks at the military procurement process, and highlights the problem with governments allowing contractors to dictate public procurement goals.

- Donald Gutstein tests Andrew Coyne's fudged numbers used to argue against the need for public revenue. But Coyne's figures look downright healthy compared to those being spun by the CCCE - who are trying to claim income taxes and other taxes merely remitted by big business on behalf of others as part of their calculation of what the corporate sector contributes.

- Finally, Barrie McKenna comments on Thomas Piketty's observations about the link between growing inequality, and the corporatist goal of promoting capital returns over broad-based growth:

Prof. Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies – namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one. With hard work and education, conventional thinking goes, anyone can achieve upward mobility, and live the Canadian (or American) dream.

Prof. Piketty warns instead that global economic growth will limp along at just 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent for the rest of this century – roughly half the pace of the past century. The spoils will flow increasingly to the wealthy – entrepreneurs, owners of capital and those fortunate enough to inherit wealth, he argues. Workers will fall further behind.

Think of Prof. Piketty’s world as the antithesis of free-market champion Milton Friedman’s mantra that capitalism spreads the “fruits of economic progress among all people.”

Without radical intervention, the result will be growing inequality and social strife, Prof. Piketty argues.
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Just as controversial as his dissection of the problem is his recommended solution – a global tax on wealth. Prof. Piketty would slap an annual graduated tax on stocks, bonds and property, which are typically not taxed until they are sold (capital gains). The tax would thwart the concentration of wealth and limit the flow of income to capital.

To be effective, it would have to be applied not just in one country, but virtually everywhere.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Seth Klein somewhat jokingly offers up 10 reasons for upper-class tax increases. But particularly paired with the Cons' fixation with tax-free savings accounts to further hand free money to the rich, this part looks like it's worth some further focus:

#4: The maximum RRSP deduction for 2011 is a whopping $22,450.

That’s the ceiling for an annual contribution (for which people receive an extremely generous tax deduction — comes right off one’s taxable income) and does not include any unused room from previous years. Who the hell has $22K in extra income to tuck into this highly publicly-subsidized savings plan? A minimum-wage earner working full-time all year would have an entire annual income of only $19,798. The RRSP is one of the most expensive and inequitable social programs in Canada. The program costs the public treasury about $10 billion a year in foregone revenues. Yet, according to the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget, while more than two-thirds of those making over $100,000 a year contribute to RRSPs, less than a quarter of those making less than $50,000 find themselves able to contribute.

- Donald Gutstein points out the inevitable consequences of the Cons' corporations-first economic policy:

Is Stephen Harper's goal for Canada the United States of today?

That would mean a nation in which somewhere between a half and a third of its citizens have fallen into poverty or are hovering just above, in low income. This according to latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, 400 Americans are worth more than $1 billion.

And the divide will likely worsen, as Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures continue slashing programs and benefits, firing workers, and further weakening health, safety and environmental protections to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, if that is even possible.
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(At a Fraser Institute lunch, Peter Van Loan) reminded his audience of the "fierce debates about North American free trade and the voices from the fringe telling us that it would somehow erode our sovereignty." Van Loan declared that "we need to continue building a broad base of support for the importance of a competitive, globally engaged Canadian economy of the future." He ended with an invitation: "So let's work together to continue convincing Canadians... of the importance of economic freedom."

And as Canada's standing on the economic freedom index rises, so do the number of billionaires and the ranks of the poor and struggling.

- Dan Gardner discusses the Libs' identity crisis:

The Liberals had a core identity once: “The party that governs.”

There was no fixed ideological content. There didn’t need to be. Political beliefs came and went but the Liberals were always in the centre, espousing the conventional wisdom of the day, and governing the country. “The Liberal party should be understood not as a centre-left party,” Tom Flanagan and a certain Stephen Harper wrote in 1996. “Rather, it is a true centre party. ... It avoids definite ideological commitments and brings together people simply interested in exercising power and dispensing patronage.” That last bit is too harsh. But generally, Flanagan and Harper were right.

So what happens when “the party that governs” no longer governs? It no longer has an identity.

Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae frankly acknowledges that he hears this all the time. But he insists there is a Liberal identity.

“We are who we are,” he declared in a speech to the Liberal caucus last week. Rae was passionate. The speech was masterful. But “we are who we are” comes uncomfortably close to Popeye’s “I yam what I yam,” and is about as meaningful.

- And TC Norris notes that Libs pointing to past periods when they held Official Opposition status are missing the real significance of their current position - since the "default alternative" status that's normally worked to the party's advantage no longer applies.

- Finally, Paul Hanley suggests that an obsession with developing the tar sands at maximum speed reflects "uneconomic growth".