Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Joseph Heath discusses how the Volkswagen emission cheating scandal fits into a particular type of corporate culture:

(W)hen the Deepwater Horizon tragedy occurred, or now the VW scandal, it was hardly surprising to people who follow these things. Certain industries essentially harbour and reproducing deviant subcultures. This is one of the reasons that much of the best work on white collar crime has been inspired by, and draws upon, work in juvenile delinquency. Whereas delinquents tend to exist in subcultures that reproduce deviant attitudes toward authority, many corporations reproduce subcultures that promote organized resistance to regulation.

This is a well-known feature of the automobile industry, and apparently this is what was happening at VW as well. One executive, speaking anonymously, blamed “the company’s isolation, its clannish board and a deep-rooted hostility to environmental regulations among its engineers. “
...
What can be said about this? Perhaps a few lessons: First, it serves as a helpful reminder that white collar crime remains a very serious social problem, one that attracts far too little public concern. This is partly because of an almost entirely supine business press – it remains that case that while the “news” section of newspapers focuses very heavily on criticizing the government, the “business” section almost never criticizes business, and does almost no investigative reporting or muckracking. (Notice that while political scandals are almost always uncovered by political reporters, the VW story was not broken by an “automotive” reporter.) Second, it is important to be aware that these criminogenic business subcultures, once developed, can be extremely difficult to eliminate. Thus it is a very important responsibility of management to set the right tone, to keep a careful eye on the corporate culture, and to take hard line when things start to get out of hand. Finally, there are many people who, for reasons of political ideology, are strongly critical of environmental law, health and safety regulation, financial regulation, the FDA, etc. These political ideologies are often appealed to by corporate criminals, as a way of legitimating their law-breaking activities. It seems to me, therefore, that those who express an ideological hostility to regulation bear a special responsibility for ensuring that their views are not misused in this way. This can be achieved, in part, by emphasizing the very significant difference between claiming that a law should be repealed and claiming that a law need not be obeyed.

- And on the subject of cultures where lawbreaking is seen as normal if not outright desirable, Andrew Nikiforuk reminds us of the multiple scandals surrounding Bruce Carson - involving both illegal lobbying and publicly-funded shilling for the oil industry.

- Meanwhile, Joseph Stiglitz sees the Trans-Pacific Partnership as nothing more than a means of entrenching corporate abuses into law around the globe. But Michael Harris notes that plenty of voters and activist groups will be fighting that choice in Canada. 

- Edward Keenan makes clear that the Cons' campaign of discrimination is intended to foment hatred against Muslims in general, while Sean Fine reports that the Cons' target voters are taking up the invitation to do violence against fellow Canadians. And Paula Simons highlights the arrogance involved in claiming to tell women what they may and may not wear.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui discusses the domestic damage being done by the Cons' politically-obsessed foreign policy.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Robert Reich writes that the most important source of growing inequality in the U.S. is a political system torqued to further enrich those who already had the most:

The underlying problem, then, is not just globalization and technological changes that have made most American workers less competitive. Nor is it that they lack enough education to be sufficiently productive.

The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it, while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power -- both economic and political -- to receive as large a portion of the economy's gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II.

Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward pre-distributions within the rules of the market, and giving average people the bargaining power they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth.

The answer to this problem is not found in economics. It is found in politics. Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority join together to demand fundamental change.

The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left, or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground, and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to its growing distress.

- Alexander Kaufman interviews Gabriel Zucman about the role of tax havens in entrenching a new aristocracy. And in a related (if dated) story, Rajeev Syal reports on how the Cons' hired gun Lynton Crosby sheltered income through an offshore trust even while running the campaign of a party which feigned concern about exactly that type of abuse.

- Michael Harris slams the Cons for a foreign policy oriented toward war, profiteering and political gain rather than any principle worth pursuing. And Haroon Siddiqui highlights what we've lost in becoming associated with that mindset around the globe, while Steven Chase and Shawn McCarthy report that the Department of Foreign Affairs is well aware of Canada's fading reputation.

- Shannon Gormley writes that contrary to the Cons' spin, the only bogus element of Canada's relationship with refugees is the mindset used to attack people in need of a home.

- And finally, Aaron Wherry takes the Cons to task for their politicking around the niqab as a threat to the very idea of individual rights.

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.
...
(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.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Haroon Siddiqui comments on the Cons' tall economic tales. And Steven Chase and Greg Keenan note that workers are rightly fighting back against the Cons' plan to sell out Canada's auto parts industry and its 80,000 jobs.

- Canadian Doctors for Medicare weighs in with its approval of the NDP's plan for a national pharmacare program. And to remind us why we need to deal with prescription drug costs as a matter of public policy rather than hoping they'll take care of themselves, Andrew Pollack reports on the appalling price tags being applied even to long-available drugs being taken over by new profiteers.

- Max Ehrenfruend points out some of the symptoms of the U.S.' economic inequality - as the less well-off are facing shorter life spans on both a relative and an absolute basis.

- Mychalo Prystupa reports on the Cons' continued contempt for the media (along with anybody else who might dare to hold them accountable for their actions). And Cory Doctorow offers his take on the Cons' war on knowledge.

- Finally, Michael Hollett responds to a misplaced "anybody but Conservative" message by pointing out that there's a clear best option for Canadian voters - as the NDP offers both the most progressive government in the short term, and the prospect of a more fair electoral system which will help the Greens and other parties to play a larger role in the future.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Ryan Meili reminds us of the harmful health impacts of inequality. And Susan Perry discusses the effect of inequality on health in the workplace in particular:

The rise in income inequality over the past three decades or so is taking a major toll on the general health of American workers — and not just because stagnant or falling wages have made it increasingly difficult for many workers to afford high-quality health care.

For, as a commentary published recently in the American Journal of Public Health points out, income inequality has also been accompanied by changes in the workplace that increase workers’ stress in ways that negatively affect their health.

Those changes include a less stable job market, work weeks that repeatedly exceed 40 hours (for individuals working full time as well as for those working two or more part-time jobs), work schedules with unpredictable or irregular hours, greater “job intensification” (employers requiring workers to take on more tasks and responsibilities with less pay), lack of paid sick leave and higher out-of-pocket health costs (which erode discretionary income).

- Meanwhile, Andrew Dobson and Rupert Read write that it's time to stop pretending that growth for its own sake in a developed economy serves any useful purpose - especially when a top-heavy approach exacerbates inequality. But then, Chuk Plante points out that inequality acts as a barrier to development in any event. And Naomi Klein reviews Steve Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence as nicely describing the need for concerted public action to overcome the concentration of wealth and power.

- Matthew Ingram rightly argues that we shouldn't be willing to accept unfettered Internet surveillance as the new normal, while Christopher Parsons reminds us that we're already subject to monitoring and disruption without a law authorizing anything of the sort.

- Haroon Siddiqui makes the case that we should be far more scared of the Cons than of the phantoms they're trying to invent for political purpose. And Joseph Heath discusses Stephen Harper's warmongering under circumstances where it makes no sense at all to obsess over military buildup:

Canada does not need a fighting military. Americans often accuse other Western nations, particularly some European states, of free-riding on U.S. military power. And while this may not be true of some nations, it is certainly true of Canada. Part of what’s nice about having the world’s largest undefended border with the U.S. is that they would never tolerate the invasion of Canada by a hostile power. As a result, we have to be prepared for minor border skirmishes, but we don’t really need to have a full-scale military, sufficient to defend the country from attack.

The fact that the Canadian military is essentially otiose provides one way of understanding our past enthusiasm for peacekeeping – at least it provided some rationale for maintaining something like an able fighting force. Take away the peacekeeping, and what becomes the new raison d’être for the Canadian military? The Conservative government has yet to provide one — indeed, it seems not to be even aware of the need to. The boyish enthusiasm for the military that you find in the current government is essentially a matter of personal temperament and political ideology, but it lacks any underlying national or geopolitical rationale.

- Finally, Michael Harris weighs in on the reemergence of Reform's most irresponsible elements. Susan Delacourt wonders whether early-career Stephen Harper would recognize what he's since become. And Jeremy Nuttall reports on Harry Smith's work to ensure that the Harper Cons don't stay in power any longer than we can avoid.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Alan Rusbridger explains the Guardian's much-appreciated effort to provide both space and analysis of the need to fight climate change. And Naomi Klein makes the case for a Marshall plan-style response to transition the world to a sustainable society, while highlighting the need for a public push to make that happen.

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford discusses the fallout from the Cons' single-minded obsession with oil development. And Thomas Walkom calls out their blatant attempt to avoid discusses the economy now that they've left it sputtering.

- On that front, Edward Keenan writes that Stephen Harper's fearmongering seems more like a parody of over-top-top rhetoric than anything which could possibly be taken seriously:

On occasion, the Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shown an inclination to take on the role of the press — by producing and distributing its own approved news items to print and broadcast media through the PR agency News Canada Ltd., for example. It now appears it has decided to do the work of satirists, too. How else to explain the transparent layers of irony running through the Conservatives’ public communications, the ham-fisted illustrations of doublespeak that so effectively lay bare the cynical, hollow heart and totalitarian inclinations of their new legislation?

One imagines the frustrated novelists and comedians in the Conservative StratCom writers room shaking their heads at the efforts of editorial cartoonists and TV sketch troupes: You call that parody? Let us show you how this is done.

“They hate us because we love freedom and tolerance.”

See, the devastating self-skewering element of this line is that it is nominally intended to serve as the justification for a proposed law, Bill C-51, that will restrict freedom. And it is offered at a time when members of the government are using the bill as a means of whipping up intolerance against Muslims to score cheap political points. Here we have a piece of legislation that would, among other things, curtail freedom of speech fairly broadly on matters related to terrorism and give an espionage agency domestic policing powers that allow it, in secret, to be specifically exempted from honouring the Charter of Rights.

An extra-constitutional secret police and surveillance agency, and criminal penalties for expressions of dissent. If “we love freedom and tolerance” isn’t the perfect punchline to explain that, what is?

- But the spin has had real-world consequences, as Chris Selley laments the fact that the Cons' scare tactics have managed to interfere with a a cheerleading competition scheduled for the West Edmonton Mall. And Humberto Dasilva comments on how the terror push both relies on and encourages xenophobia, while Haroon Siddiqui exposes the McCarthyite hearings being held by the Con-dominated Senate.

- Finally, CBC examines how the millionaire investors being prioritized for immigration purposes actually contribute less tax revenue than the refugees the Cons want to shut out.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson link inequality and climate change as massive problems which are generated by political choices (and thus amenable to correction through the political system):

Rising inequality is no more natural than global warming. And just as with global warming, our biggest fear should be that it becomes increasingly self-reinforcing — not because of some “natural” economic process, but because economic power begets political power, which can be used to further increase economic advantage. Look around, and the evidence that this is a real threat abounds. To cite just one example of many, the Koch brothers network, led by businessmen who are committed libertarians opposed to any effort to reduce inequality, are planning to spend almost $1 billion in next year’s election.

In other words, read beneath the headline of Leonhardt’s article and you have an argument for greater alarm about the toxic relationship between rising inequality and the dysfunction of the federal government — a message exactly opposite of the one that the inequality deniers want to hear.

- Frances Woolley writes that tax-free savings accounts - and particular the expanded version which the Cons are planning to push soon - represent both a deliberate choice to exacerbate inequality, and one of the most devastating attacks yet on Canada's federal revenue system:

RRSPs leave a legacy of tax revenue to future governments. Increasing TFSA contribution limits does just the opposite – it creates an investment vehicle that is ripe for abuse, whether by generating super-normal returns, or by sheltering income in a TFSA while claiming government benefits. At the same time, it deprives future governments of the opportunity to tax investment income.
...
There’s a saying in policy circles: “the costs are the benefits.” For some, the revenue foregone by expanding TFSAs is a cost. For others, it’s a benefit. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on the record as believing in small government. One sure-fire way to shrink governments is to deprive them of revenue. Doubling the TFSA limit will do that. Not now, and not in a year from now. But in 10, 20, or 30 years’ time, the doubling of the TFSA limit will gradually erode the ability of Canadian governments to raise revenue, redistribute income, and pay for public services.

- But then, individual savings likely aren't the best means of ensuring retirement security in any event, as David MacDonald finds that a retirement system based on mutual funds diverts massive amounts of savings toward financial sector compared to the alternative of effective pension plans. 

- Michal Rozworski notes that while Canada's wage picture isn't quite as bad as the U.S.' over the past two decades, it's most certainly nothing to celebrate - particularly since any gains were tied up almost entirely in since-deflated oil prices.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui laments the Cons' wilful stupidity in dealing with the Middle East. And Paul Adams calls out the tantrum-based foreign policy which includes pulling funding from friendly service providers for having the nerve to question John Baird.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.

- Al Engler argues that it's long past time to start raising taxes on the wealthy to make sure that Canada can fund the level of social development we deserve.

- Kevin Drum writes that we shouldn't be satisfied with a temporary dip in inequality caused by the 2008 recession when longer-term trends suggest matters will get worse. And Lynn Parramore interviews Lance Taylor about the demand-side implications of exacerbated inequality:

LP: Thomas Piketty’s work on inequality has generated enormous interest.  How does your analysis of how the rich grow richer differ from his?

LT: To judge from his writing, Piketty is well aware that social relations and power strongly influence income inequality. But there are problems with the way he thinks economies work in the long run. He’s using the standard supply-driven growth model, assuming that there is always full employment and investment is determined by saving.

But there’s another way of looking at growth, with less than full employment and investment driving demand.  From this view, economies grow when people spend their money on goods and services.
Luigi Pasinetti, a Cambridge economist, has looked at the economy in terms of two classes – “capitalists” who collect profits on the capital they own and “workers” who get the rest of income. Extending his work shows that when the wage share falls over time, workers will not only have less wealth, but economic growth will slow because people don’t have as much money to buy goods and services. In other words, wage repression (and excess capital gains, too) create stagnation in the long run.  You can think of the top one percent as Pasinetti’s capitalists and the middle class as his workers. (Poor households don’t figure into the story of wealth because they don’t have any, although they do have an impact on the economy when they spend money on goods and services).

Our preliminary simulations show that the top one percent’s share of wealth might stabilize in the range of fifty percent (half the total pie), and the growth rate might settle down at less than two percent per year, which would be a less vibrant economy than we’re used to. One bit of good news for middle class families is that in the long run, they do retain the power to save from wages, which to an extent protects their wealth. Piketty does not take this linkage into account.  But overall, a falling wage share will hurt the entire economy and hold back everyone, even, eventually, those at the top.

- Meanwhile, Elise Gould points out that U.S. wages are stagnating or declining for all kinds of workers, confirming that it's futile to pretend that education or retraining will address the growing wealth gap. And Anna Mehler Paperny discusses the difficulties facing precarious workers in Canada.

- Paul Krugman notes that no matter how obviously counterproductive the ideology of further enriching the already-wealthy proves in practice, Republican presidential contenders - and indeed far too many other politicians - see themselves as obliged to keep pitching it. And Brent Patterson writes about the Cons' similar plan to go all-in on a failing economic strategy, handing a massive tax break to gas exporters even as we see the consequences of relying unduly on volatile commodities.

- Finally, Andrew Mitrovica reminds us that Stephen Harper's fearmongering about fabricated threats can't hide his own personal cowardice. And Haroon Siddiqui warns us of the dangers of stigmatizing and profiling large swaths of people for political purposes, while Stephen Lautens notes that the Cons' attempt to stoke public anger over the mere act of wearing a niqab can't be explained any other way.

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.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Mark Gongloff takes a look at social mobility research from multiple countries, and finds that there's every reason for concern that inheritance is far outweighing individual attributes in determining social status. And Left Futures notes that the problem may only get worse as our corporate overlords become more and more sophisticated at cannibalizing our commonwealth for profit.

- Speaking of which, Jake MacDonald offers an insightful (if maddening) review of how farmers are suffering from the demolition of the single-desk Canadian Wheat Board.

- Andrew Jackson comments on the Cons' glaring failure to do anything to combat child poverty. And Cameron Dearlove discusses why we shouldn't pretend that child welfare is merely a family matter:

Child poverty should be of concern not only to parents and those who work with children, it must be of concern to the whole community. The experience of poverty has detrimental impacts on any individual, but when it's experienced through childhood development, the impacts are even more acute. 

Not having enough to eat, or not being able to afford healthy foods, impacts a child's concentration in school and can lead to lower academic achievement, along with negative effects on physical health. The stresses of poverty affect psychosocial development, with higher rates of behavioural problems and emotional and mental health challenges. 

The connection between a poorer diet and poorer health are obvious, but research has shown an even larger association with poverty's impact on cognitive development. One study of children entering kindergarten found 72 per cent of the non-poor children were proficient in recognizing words, compared to only 19 per cent of children experiencing poverty. These differences are shown to compound throughout life into adulthood. 

The impacts of poverty on development are not equal across ages. The detrimental effects of poverty are most severe in early childhood brain development, when future cognitive, social, and emotional functions are being shaped. This makes early intervention in childhood poverty even more pressing.

- Theophilas Argitas reports on new polling showing that while the tar sands may be the Cons' one and only priority, Canadians on the balance would prefer that we not focus on developing them further. Bruce Johnstone links that public concern with the inherent dangers of resource reliance as reason for concern about our economic direction. And Jon Queally writes about Kinder Morgan's failed injunction against the people seeking to defend Burnaby Mountain.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui points out how the Cons' exploitative mindset fits with Canada's historic colonial attitude toward First Nations and the environment they rely on. And while Diane Francis is a bit too focused on profits, she too recognizes that it's long past time to stop shirking our responsibilities.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Andrew Jackson takes a look at some dire predictions about the continued spread of inequality, and notes that we need to act now in order to reverse the trend. And UN Special Rapporteur Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona discusses how more progressive tax policies - including a focus on maximizing revenue - are needed to support both greater equality and the effective exercise of human rights:

States must realize the full potential of tax collection as a tool to generate revenue for the fulfilment of human rights obligations and to redress discrimination and inequality. Human rights principles regarding participation, transparency, accountability and non-discrimination should be followed throughout the whole revenue-raising cycle. For this purpose, States should:

(a) Seek to increase tax revenue in a manner compatible with their human rights obligations of non-discrimination and equality, and increase the allocation of revenues collected to budget areas that contribute to the enjoyment of human rights;
...
(i) Take strict measures to tackle tax abuse, in particular by corporations and high net-worth individuals;
...
(l) Ensure that extractive industries are subject to appropriate tax rates and export duties, and that the human rights of affected communities and future generations are protected in the exploitation of natural resources;
...
(n) Ensure the public revenue raised from the financial sector is commensurate to the sector’s profitability and the risks it generates; implement a financial transaction tax, and consider allocating the revenues specifically to expenditure that can contribute to the realization of human rights;

(o) Implement regulations that prevent the role played by the financial sector in aiding tax evasion and profit-shifting.

- Meanwhile, Tom Sandborn highlights the role of unions in pushing us toward greater equality and social health. Sherri Torjman and Ken Battle criticize the Cons' determination to go in exactly the wrong direction by dumping piles of free money on wealthy, one-income households while ignoring social needs.

- Nicholas Keung exposes the policy of "medical repatriation" under which employers exploit migrant workers in Canada until they become ill or injured, then fire them and send them home to be somebody else's problem. In related news, Lord Everyman Conrad Black is convinced that every worker is protected to the point where there's no need for organized labour.

- Mariana Mazzucato discusses how public investment is needed to support economic progress based on research and development rather than exploitation and rent-seeking:

Silicon Valley is a result of massive direct public investments (not subsidies) along the entire innovation chain—from basic and applied research to late stage commercialization. While venture capitalists, mythologized by Renzi, pursue short-run profits, focusing on an early ‘exit’ through either an IPO or a buyout, the US government has proved to be the patient public financier, providing (through a decentralized network of state agencies) patient high risk finance to companies like Compaq, Intel and Apple. And today is supplying the same kind of finance to green companies like successful Tesla, which recently received a $465 million guaranteed loan, and less successful Solyndra which received a $500 million loan: in the innovation game you win some lose some.
...
Pretending instead that innovation will come to Italy by simply lowering tax, and reducing regulations—especially around the labor market of course (the usual easy target)— ignores this history. Ironically Renzi is selectively copying only one thing from the US: the much criticized 2012 Jumpstart Our Businesses Act (JOBS Act). And it is no surprise he got such a welcome in the City this week given that it is precisely these kind of policies that create one of the most dysfunctional aspects of modern day capitalism: socialization of risks, privatization of rewards. The US JOBS Act attempted to provide risk averse venture capitalists with even less investment risk, by relaxing financial disclosure requirements for smaller firms (those with less than $1 billion in annual revenue). It also legalized ‘crowd funding’, meaning that VCs can recruit a wider range of investors (and individuals) when taking firms public. How this can generate actual job growth – when it seems tailored to ensure that VC investors can reap massive returns on small firms touting government technologies – is difficult to know.   Indeed there is an increasing army of small firms that complain about how they lose out from VC’s speculation and short-termism.

If Renzi wants to bring innovation and dynamism to Italy he must yes make Italy more efficient, but also move beyond the sole focus on ‘rigidities’. The discussion should move towards a debate on the types of long-term investments that are needed, by the public and private sector alike, and to crucially ask Italian business and finance to step up to the game. Don’t suck up to the City (and Italian finance) but ask the financial sector to stop lobbying for lower capital gains, which is only making them more short-term, and to actually co-invest with you in the long-term areas that smart innovation led growth requires. Ask Italian business to stop asking for subsidies and handouts, stop complaining about red tape and decide to co-invest alongside government in the opportunities which will shape Italy’s innovative future. And when told by conservative economists that all he needs to do is to cut tax, he should be picky and focus on reducing taxes on hiring labor—not on capital gains—and then remind them that the tax rate paid by the top earners was close to 90% under President Eisenhower, a US Republican and ex military general—hardly a communist—who reigned in the USA in an era in which some of the most important investments in innovation were made

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui recognizes that Stephen Harper is always up for whatever war is on offer, making it impossible to believe his claim that every single time the push for military action is based on a unique or genuine threate. Boris points out that the best-case scenario in getting involved in Iraq now is to be stuck in an indefinite containment and suppression mission. And Peggy Mason argues that the consistent choice to pursue war over engagement in the Middle East only figures to make matters worse.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Mark Taliano highlights the distinction between corporate and public interests (while pointing out that both military and economic policy are all too often based on the former). And Jamie Doward discusses how the perception that government is either unwilling or unable to serve anybody besides corporate masters is turning the next generation of UK youth away from politics:

The picture that emerges from an Ipsos MORI questionnaire completed by almost 2,800 pupils aged 11 to 16 is of a generation that expects little help from politicians and which resolutely believes that it will not have the same life prospects as those enjoyed by the one before.

The poll, conducted for the National Children's Bureau and which will be published this week, is the first of its kind carried out by Ipsos MORI, and suggests that today's young people are turning away from conventional politics. Only two in five (39%) agreed with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, that the voting age should be lowered to 16. And only 13% would be certain to vote in a general election if they had the chance, a figure that rises to 15% among 15- to 16-year-olds.

Of those who would be eligible to vote in next year's general election if the voting age were reduced, 17% say they associate themselves with Labour while 9% opt for the Tories.
...

Growing disillusionment with Westminster politics may be linked to how Generation Next see their future. Fewer than two in five expect their lives to be better than it was for their parents (37%). In contrast, 70% of baby boomers believe they have had a better life than their parents. Ipsos MORI said the findings were consistent with a general downward shift in the proportion of people who feel their generation will have a better quality of life compared with their parents' generation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this trend, only 14% of Generation Next believes the government will do a good job in running the country in the year ahead. They also have a pessimistic view of how they are treated by the government, with less than half believing they are treated fairly.

- Meanwhile, Michael Geist sees the negotiation of the TPP (like so many other trade agreements) behind closed doors as compelling evidence that it wouldn't hold up to public scrutiny. And Emily Atkin discusses the latest example of the oil industry buying silence when it comes to any questioning of its activities, as the price for TransCanada's donation of a single rescue truck to the town of Mattawa included the town's agreement never to publicly question or comment on any of its operations.

- Haroon Siddiqui points out that the very nature of the temporary foreign worker program is anathema to Canada's proud legacy of welcoming immigrants to build futures as part of our culture:

It hit me on Canada Day that even the name, temporary foreign worker program, is un-Canadian. “Temporary” and “foreign” are the antithesis of long-standing Canadian immigration policy, the bedrock principle of which is that immigrants are selected to be permanent residents and future fellow-citizens.

The formula has served us well by minimizing the “us vs. them” undercurrent that charges relations between new arrivals and the rest of society. In our native and adopted land, the old and the new are in it together.

Canada studiously avoided Europe’s guest worker program, under which hundreds of thousands were imported in the expectation that they’d leave at the end of their work. Few did, creating a permanent underclass in Germany, France and elsewhere — and all the resentments that go with it.

We were never like the oil-rich Persian Gulf nations that allow employers to import temporary foreign workers, but not their families, pay dirt-poor wages and hold them hostage as indentured labour tethered to their master.

Now our temporary foreign worker program allows employers to import cheap foreign labour, without families, mostly for low-end jobs for short periods. The temps are tied to their employer who may mistreat them.

- And Andrew Longhurst points out that the "temporary" element of work applies to an increasingly large proportion of Canadian jobs in general - and proposes a few policy ideas to give workers a better chance of moving part precarious employment.

- Finally, Partnership for Strong Communities takes a look at yet more research showing that the availability of affordable and accessible housing has a significant effect on spreading opportunity - in this case for the cognitive growth of children.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Chris Dillow discusses how a shredded social safety net may turn into a vicious cycle - as voters are more prepared to cast ballots based on resentment when their own livelihood is less secure:

Marko Pitesa and Stefan Thau first manipulated subjects' perceptions of their income by inviting some to compare themselves to high incomes ($500,000 per month) and others to low incomes ($500 per month). They found that people primed to believe they had low incomes then expressed harsher judgments about violent acts than those who were primed to think themselves rich.

This, they say, supports the idea that when people feel themselves to be poor, they feel more vulnerable to others' harmful acts, and this caises (sic) them to make harsher judgments about them. If you can afford to replace your iPod you'll be less censorious of muggers than if you can't. If you're driving your children around all the time, you'll be less hysterical about paedophiles than if your kids have to walk everywhere. And so on.

...

I say all this to make two points.

First, moral judgments are influenced by our economic positions. Marx was right to say that "the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life." For more evidence of this, consider Matteo Cervellati and Paolo Vanin's discussion of how moral norms are shaped by family wealth.

Secondly, when liberal leftists complain about working class illiberalism, they should remember that the failing here lies not (just) with the working class themselves, but in social democracy itself. This has - so far - failed to sufficiently reduce the sense of vulnerability among the poor which produces illiberal attitudes.

But of course, the "so far" in the final sentence carries plenty of weight. And the flip side of Dillow's point may well make for a reasonable summary of the goals of progressive politics: to ensure that all citizens enjoy enough security (in terms of both income and protection from social harm) to be able to participate in public life based on positive goals rather than aversion to the type of vulnerability exploited by the right.

- Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt comments on the massive income gap within Toronto Centre (which is being exposed to light by the federal by-election). And Alice discusses how the current set of by-elections seems to reflect the Libs' final step toward realigning themselves as Mulroney-style PCs - even if Chrystia Freeland can't afford to admit it when it comes to Keystone XL.

- Huffington Post takes a look at the drastic gap between Canada's energy exports, and its massive trade deficit covering everything else. And Brent Patterson notes that imbalances in production will exacerbate the added prescription drug costs the Cons want to impose under CETA.

- The Mound of Sound points out that Boeing offers one prime example of a business built on exploiting public-sector connections. But Digby (citing Colin Crouch) looks at the problem more generally:

Outsourcing is … justified on the grounds that private firms bring new expertise, but an examination of the expertise base of the main private contractors shows that the same firms keep appearing in different sectors … The expertise of these corporations, their core business, lies in knowing how to win government contracts, not in the substantive knowledge of the services they provide. … This explains how and why they extend across such a sprawl of activities, the only link among which is the government contract-winning process. Typically, these firms will have former politicians and senior civil servants on their boards of directors, and will often be generous funders of political parties. This, too is part of their core business. It is very difficult to see how ultimate service users gain anything from this kind of managed competition.

...
To me, it seems obvious that the "contractor state" cannot be defended on democratic or capitalistic grounds. It certainly shows that simply outsourcing various necessary functions inevitably leads to corruption --- as any 7th grader should be able to predict.  That this concept of "reinventing government" was pushed by certain New Democrats on the basis of gibberish makes it even more astonishing that it's taken so long to be exposed for what it is: patronage for rich (mostly) white guys who all know each other. How sad that health care reform had to be the ultimate guinea pig.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui muses that "fraud politics" may be the undoing of Rob Ford and Stephen Harper alike.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Stephany Griffith-Jones points out the lack of any coherent argument against a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions - and the public support when political parties actually raise it for debate:

Major financial sectors such as the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea already have FTTs which together raise tens of billions in revenue annually without causing economic damage. In the UK we have the very successful stamp duty, an FTT on share transactions that raises more than £3bn a year, of which 40% is paid by foreign-based investors and banks. It too rightly taxes all those trading UK shares, wherever they are based. This is the same principle on which the European FTT will be based.

Fortunately, the European commission is clearly supportive of the proposal, as is the European parliament. Eleven European countries, representing 66% of European GDP, remain committed to implementing the tax.

It is encouraging that in coalition talks between the German SPD and CDU, they achieved clear consensus on the FTT. This is not surprising, as in Germany 82% of citizens, according to Euro-barometer, support a European FTT. In France this figure reaches 72%, and the EU average is 64%. Let's hope politicians elsewhere will listen to their voters and fully implement the tax soon.

- Brian Topp draws a connection (as I've done before) between the caucus fraud scandal of the Grant Devine PCs and the Harper Cons' Senate abuses. And Haroon Siddiqui finds a disturbing number of similarities between Harper and Rob Ford in their common demonization of anybody who would question their laughable claims to infallibility.

- Meanwhile, Chantal Hebert sees the Cons' convention as a missed opportunity to propose and push a national Senate referendum.

- Finally, Bruce Livesey writes that the NSA's surveillance has little to do with security, and almost everything to do with the pursuit of economic advantage:

During the Cold War, signals intelligence agencies focused mostly on the Soviet Union and its satellites and allies. But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, these agencies needed a new raison d’etre. In my 1998 Financial Post piece, I detailed how these agencies were now focusing on economic targets, such as spying on countries to glean information that would give them an advantage in trade talks, or allow multinationals to garner business deals to the detriment of their foreign competitors. “We were all looking at other ways of earning our living other than military and political intelligence,” Mike Frost, a former CSE operative who spent 18 years with the agency, told me when I was researching the Post story. “It was just a given we would be looking at economic things. We thought there was nothing wrong with this.”

For example, the CSE spied on South Korea while Canada was attempting to sell $6 billion worth of CANDU nuclear reactors to that country (presumably to ensure the deal went through). And it spied on Mexico during the 1992-93 NAFTA talks, again to garner advantages in those discussions.

In the current scandal over the NSA, it’s clear that the real intention of the agency’s spying on America’s so-called allies like Germany, Brazil, France and Spain, is solely for economic purposes. After all, these are not countries that are hotbeds of Islamic or al Qaeda terrorism that would justify this level of espionage.
...
Today, intelligence agencies can pretend that all of their spying is to hunt down “terrorists” in our midst. In reality, their entire function is to further the interests of capital, even if it means trampling our privacy and civil rights in the process.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Peter Buffett rightly questions the trend toward making the provision of basic necessities subordinate to a corporate mindset, rather than putting human needs first:

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism. 

- And Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses the inherent and destructive stress involved in living in poverty:

Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.
...
A nurturing bond with a caregiver in a stimulating environment appears essential for proper brain development and healthy maturation of the stress response. That sounds easy enough, except that such bonds, and the broader social networks that support them, are precisely what poverty disrupts. If you’re an underpaid, overworked parent — worried, behind on rent, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood — your parental skills are more likely to be compromised. That’s worrisome given the trends in the United States. About one in five children now lives below the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in a decade. Unicef recently ranked the United States No. 26 in childhood well-being, out of 29 developed countries. When considering just childhood poverty, only Romania fares worse.

-Vanessa Brcic calls for British Columbia to restore the Therapeutics Initiative as a sorely-needed fair arbiter of drug effectiveness. The Star pleads for somebody to take on long-term responsibility for the Experimental Lakes Area. And Stephen LaRose points to Winnipeg as a prime example of the (nonexistent) returns when a civic government prioritizes big-money sports and entertainment over actual needs.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui holds out some hope that Chris Alexander might revisit some of Jason Kenney's most damaging moves as Minister of Immigration (though I'd add "employer-driven" to his overall freeze proposal):

Kenney’s changes have not been popular, have not worked, have not reduced backlogs and have not improved the system — indeed, have made a mess of it.

We are bringing 250,000 immigrants a year and tens of thousands of guest workers when 1.3 million Canadians don’t have jobs, another million are underemployed or have given up looking for work, and the unemployment rate for both the young as well as new immigrants is twice the national average. Of the immigrants who do have jobs, three in four are not using the education and skills for which they were picked as immigrants.

Perversely, the temporary foreign workers program (which brought in at least 500,000 workers) grew even as the economy slowed down. Kenney’s mantra of “skills shortages” has been shown to be a bit of a fraud. As the Star’s Nicholas Keung reported Tuesday, for example, Canada imported more than 6,000 temps as chefs and cooks in 2011, when Canadian colleges are churning out culinary graduates in record numbers.
...
All this brings me, Mr. Alexander, to ask you this:

Tell us why you should not freeze immigration until the job picture improves, both for them and Canadians; axe the temporary foreign workers program; restore health benefits to refugees; stop the shameful treatment of the Roma; and why your government that emphasizes family values is being so punitive toward the family reunification of immigrant families.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- To the extent corporatist voices are pushing increased private involvement in funding Canadian health care, their main argument generally involves the claim that private insurers will be more willing to fund expensive courses of treatment which might be rationed out of public plans. But Don Butler reports that at least one of the major private insurers is taking exactly the opposite view in describing the future of private prescription drug insurance:

Private drug plans that provide coverage to 19 million Canadians are not sustainable in their current form, according to an executive at Great West Life Assurance, one of Canada’s largest insurance companies.
...
While the cost of “maintenance drugs” to control such things as blood pressure and cholesterol levels has risen by 58 per cent since 2005, Martinez said the biggest threat is the skyrocketing cost of new biologic and specialty drugs.
...
Traditionally, employers have responded by raising premiums or copayments for employees. “But that’s not sustainable, either,” Martinez said in an interview. New management techniques are essential, she said.

For example, Great West Life has begun to use case management in cases involving high-cost drug claims, Martinez said. “If you are taking a very high-cost drug, we are going to appoint a case manager to your case who’s going to monitor your use of the drug and your physician’s prescribing of the drug.”
...
Other conference participants said the best solution would be the creation of a government-run program of universal pharmacare that would cover all Canadians.

“Every developed country in the world with a universal health care system provides universal coverage for drugs, except Canada,” said Steve Morgan, associate director of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia.

Those countries all spend far less on prescription drugs than Canadians spend, and their citizens have better access to essential drugs than Canadians do, Morgan said.

- Haroon Siddiqui rightly approves of Barack Obama's work to eliminate the perpetual fear and panic pushed by Republicans over the past decade-plus, while contrasting it against Stephen Harper's fear-building in Canada.

- Frances Russell writes about the folly of the Northern Gateway pipeline.

- Finally, I'll second PLG's take on the lesson the NDP should draw about narrative from British Columbia's recent provincial election. But I'll expand on it slightly by pointing out the ultimate failure of a branding effort built around genuine comparative fiscal prudence.

After all, the B.C. NDP publicly pointed out the implausibility of Christy Clark's budget numbers and thus offered less than it could have as to the shape of an NDP government - presumably based on the theory that it would fit with a "responsible managers" message. But the choice looks to have been almost entirely forgotten through the course of the campaign - meaning that the Libs won by simultaneously scaremongering about deficits, and promising to maintain higher deficits and debt levels through their platform.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- George Monbiot writes about the absurdity of the right-wing choice to promote inequality in the name of competition among the wealthy when the ultimate results are worse for everybody:

The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, the competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago: "Money is just a way of keeping score."

The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable. In March Forbes magazine published an article about Prince Alwaleed, who, like other Saudi princes, doubtless owes his fortune to nothing more than hard work and enterprise. According to one of the prince's former employees, the Forbes magazine global rich list "is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature".

The result is "a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing". In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, "when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. 'What do you want?' he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. 'Tell me what you need.'"

Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne during flights. Never mind that his "main palace" has 420 rooms. Never mind that he possesses his own private amusement park and zoo – and, he claims, $700m worth of jewels. Never mind that he's the richest man in the Arab world, valued by Forbes at $20bn, and has watched his wealth increase by $2bn in the past year. None of this is enough. There is no place of arrival, no happy landing, even in a private jumbo jet. The politics of envy are never keener than among the very rich.
...
In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.
...
Can we not rise above this? To seek satisfactions that don't cost the earth and might be achievable? The principal aim of any wealthy nation should now be to say: "Enough already".

- Meanwhile, Andrew O'Hagan writes about Margaret Thatcher ultimate legacy in leaving the U.K. a "greedier and seedier place". And Frances Russell points out the futility of a race to the bottom on taxes.

- Haroon Siddiqui and Stephen Gordon discuss the damage the Harper Cons have done to Canada's census. And Jennifer Ditchburn writes that rural Canada will be particularly hard hit by a lack of reportable data to allow for evidence-based policy.

- But then, Jonathon Gatehouse reminds us that Harper is generally eager to make sure that facts don't find their way into public debate - as evidence by his muzzling of federal scientists. And Andrew Coyne notes that the Cons' abhorrence of pure research makes little sense even from the most restrictive of libertarian viewpoints.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Helene Leblanc argues that we should make sure the Internet is treated as a commons accessible to all, rather than a privilege denied to many (particularly in rural areas):

Many Canadians living outside urban centres do not have access to high speed broadband Internet and a significant number connect at speeds of 1.5 megabits per second — only marginally faster than dial-up.

In the year 2000 Estonia declared Internet access a fundamental human right, something essential for life in the 21st century, and launched a program to expand rural access. Finland has declared that by 2015, access to a 100 megabits-per-second connection will be a legal right. The U.S.’s National Broadband Plan has set a similar target of Internet service speed of 100 megabits-per-second in at least 100 million homes by 2020.
...
It is essential that residents of Canada’s Arctic region have access to reliable, affordable communication networks — not only to protect our nation’s sovereignty and for emergency response, but to benefit from the many opportunities living in the 21st century can afford. Emergency responders also need the means to communicate rapidly in the event of disasters in the Arctic and elsewhere.
...
As government, it is the Conservatives’ responsibility to do more than repeat mindless rhetoric on the economy; they must take action to promote Canadians’ long-term prosperity. Canada needs to be strategic in securing broadband infrastructure for rural and remote regions. A lack of equitable access to high‐speed broadband will leave businesses in rural and remote regions behind in a global economy.

- Ishmael Daro reports that the Cons are already planning for three more years of publicly-funded economic propaganda, while Mike de Souza confirms that the Cons plan to spend yet more money claiming credit for past programs as a substitute for doing anything about climate change. All of which is to confirm that we should be far more concerned about the hundreds of millions of dollars being burned by Stephen Harper's central command than the comparatively trifling cost of MP communications.

- Angella MacEwen points out why we shouldn't simply assume away the problem of unemployment. And Haroon Siddiqui confirms that the Cons are still pushing to use temporary foreign workers to drive down Canadian wages and opportunities.

- Finally, Adam Radwanski recognizes that the Ontario NDP has been effective enough to force Kathleen Wynne to at least give some substance to her party's rhetoric about a "fair society". But Trish Hennessy and Hugh Mackenzie rightly note that Libs' overarching plan still involves long-term austerity rather than social progress.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.

- Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction - while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And Shaun Thomas discusses the no-knowledge zone set up around the Northern Gateway pipeline, as Nathan Cullen's questions within the review process revealed that the federal government hadn't so much as talked to First Nations or affected industries about the possible impact of an oil spill.

- But then, the Cons can at least claim consistency in their general preference for ignorance. And the sudden elimination of a low-cost, high-use library program from Prince Albert's federal penitentiary certainly fits into that worldview. Meanwhile, Frances Woolley asks some questions as to how economists should deal with the first data set from the National Household Survey since the Cons scrapped the long-form census.

- And in case there was any doubt why the Cons and the facts tend to end up on opposite sides of any issue, Randeep Ramesh points out that the numbers being thrown around by the U.K. Conservatives as the basis for attacks on social programs aren't any more plausible than the since-debunked ones used to justify austerity for austerity's sake.

- Haroon Siddiqui continues his criticism of the Cons' push toward temporary and disposable foreign workers, this time labelling Jason Kenney as the headhunter-in-chief for employers looking to drive wages down.

- Finally, Tabatha Southey nicely lampoons Fox News North's attempt to strongarm the CRTC into handing it mandatory subscriber funding:

(A)n ideologically right-wing news organization is asking a governmental regulatory body to force private businesses, in the form of television providers, to carry it in their basic packages – thus demanding that cable subscribers pay for a channel whether they want to watch it or not.

“And why does Sun News Network believe the CRTC should do this?” you might ask.
“Is this not the same Sun News Network whose vice-president, Kory Teneycke, complained in a 2010 commentary in the Sun chain’s newspapers that mandatory carriage was ‘tantamount to a tax on everyone’ with cable or satellite service?” You wonder, because you are very well read.

“Is it not a bit surreal that we should be forced to pay for a television station that devotes much of its airtime to complaining that we are forced to pay for another television channel, the CBC, which we watch in far greater numbers?” You demand to know, because you spend a lot of time thinking about Canadian broadcasting regulation.

Well, the Sun News representatives explained, the CRTC should grant them increasingly difficult-to-obtain mandatory carriage status because, without this government assistance, the network cannot survive as a business, and also because Canadian content is inherently good for us.

Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are apparently no free-market capitalists in a financial black hole, and the people at Sun News cannot spread the blame for their poor ratings thin enough.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Andrew Simms and Stephen Reid note that the corporatist dogma that everything is done more efficiently in the private sector has no apparent basis in reality:

The myth of private sector superiority says that the private sector is efficient and dynamic, the public sector wasteful and slow; that the more we can get the private sector to run things the better. That the head of a massive public enterprise like the Olympics can so blithely discount what underpins it demonstrates its reach. In fact, while billboard adverts said we had commercial sponsors to thank for every minute of pulsating Olympic action, as little as 6% of costs were met from sponsorship.

The myth is effectively government policy. In 2010 David Cameron spelled out his priorities for government which were to use, "all available policy levers," to make it easier for the private sector to "create a new economic dynamism". The following year Cameron announced that he was "taking on the enemies of enterprise", which included the "bureaucrats in government departments" and the "town hall officials". The chancellor, George Osborne, claimed it wasn't just that the one sphere was generally better than the other. He argued that the public sector was "crowding out" the private sector and needed cutting back.

But, what of the evidence of private sector efficiency? Public subsidy to Britain's railways rose dramatically following privatisation. Famously, the failure of Metronet Rail's contract to work on the infrastructure of London Underground was estimated to have cost the public purse more than £400m. Meanwhile, it was recently revealed that the single remaining state-run mainline rail service requires less public subsidy than any of the 15 privately run rail franchises in Britain.

Healthcare is typically much more expensive in countries with heavily privatised systems. As the figure below demonstrates, in 2008, the United States, with predominantly private healthcare, spent around $7,000 per person on health. The NHS spent around half that sum per person, yet, judging by outcomes such as life expectancy at birth, the NHS did just as well.
...
Private sector dynamism versus public sector inefficiency has been the dominant political narrative of the last few decades. It has supplied the excuse for repeated, one-directional upheaval in many of the services that we rely on, and which are essential to our quality of life. At best, evidence of private sector superiority is missing. At worst, such lazy assumptions can cost lives as well as money. The public sphere in its broadest sense can be more efficient, more effective and better for human dignity. That is not to argue against innovation. On the contrary, innovation is desperately needed to reintroduce the human element to how things are run.

And lest there be any doubt, the anti-public-sector dogma is also the official public policy of both the Harper Cons and many provincial governments.

- Haroon Siddiqui continues his call for a moratorium on temporary foreign workers lest we end up with a two-tier society. Mark Carney issues his own warning about importing temporary workers for the purpose of driving down Canadian wages. And Karl Fiecker goes into detail about the Cons’ TFW pipeline:

The latest estimates suggest close to 500,000 people are in Canada with temporary work permits, the vast majority of whom have little prospect of becoming permanent residents. This is equivalent to the entire paid labour force of Nova Scotia.

Much attention has focused on the government’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which under the Harper government has doubled in size since 2006. This program alone accounts for the nearly 340,000 temporary workers present in the country at the end of 2012.

Most surprising has been the tremendous growth in the pipeline called the Intra-Company Transfer (ICT) visa option, which is likely what RBC/iGate used in trying to displace Dave Moreau and his colleagues.

The ICT visa option allows employers to avoid the oversight of the Labour Market Opinion (LMO) process, which requires employers to meet just six rules. Two of the rules are to assess if the employer attempted to hire or train available workers within Canada and to require assurances any imported worker will receive substantially the same wages and benefits.

Since coming to power, the Harper government has boosted the use of these LMO-exempt visas from 70,000 in 2006 to 120,000 in 2011.

How did this happen and why did we know so little about it?

For one thing, the temporary worker pipeline is not mentioned in the government’s ubiquitous "Canada's Economic Action Plan" ads, even though it is clearly one of the cornerstones of a policy to drive down wages and working conditions and make the country an even "friendlier" place for business. In fact, 30 per cent of all net new jobs created in Canada between 2007 and 2011 were filled with temporary workers from outside the country.

Curiously, the day after CBC told Moreau's story to the country, detailed information on the number of approved passes granted to employers to import temporary workers was pulled off a government website. At a moment when the national media was paying attention to the issue, it was difficult to document the trends in the use of the program.

But make no mistake: the rise in the use of this program has relied on systematic changes to increase the pipeline of temporary workers into all areas of the economy, starting with the inclusion, in Budget 2007, of these few words: "Employers may recruit workers for any legally recognized occupation from any country."

- Dave Coles documents the regressive policy included in the Saskatchewan Party’s Bill 85.

- Finally, Kathleen Monk catches the Fraser Institute trying to set Canadian progress back 50 years, and reminds us just what that would entail:

(I)f you and I were to jump into the DeLorean piloted by Dr. Emmett Brown and travel back to 1961 Canada, here’s what we would find:

• No Medicare
• No Canada Pension Plan
• Meagre Old Age Security benefits that gave us high levels of poverty for seniors
• A post-secondary education system that was open only to the rich and the very, very, talented
• And, significantly for my gender, the pay gap between men and women was wider than the James Bay.

On top of that, back in the Fraser Institute’s version of the good old days, the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter consumed 56.5% of the family budget compared to 36.9% today with most of the difference going to taxes.

Somehow the Fraser Institute have turned falling food and clothing prices (over time) into a bad thing.