Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Harry Leslie Smith reiterates his determination to make sure that new generations don't face the poverty and deprivation that marked his childhood. And Beverly Gologorsky discusses the rise of extreme poverty in the U.S. and its lasting effects on its victims:

In the psyche, poverty begets fear, anxiety, tension, and worry, constant worry. In the soul, poverty, which feels like the loss of you know not what, is always there like a cold fist to remind you that tomorrow will be the same as today. Such effects are not outgrown like a child’s dress but linger for a lifetime in a country where the severest kinds of poverty are again on the rise (and was just scathingly denounced by the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights), where each tax bill, each favor to the 1 percent, passes a kind of life sentence on the poor. And that is the definition of hopelessness.

Americans who barely made it through the recent recession now find themselves in conditions (in supposed good times) that seem to be worsening. In poor neighborhoods and rural areas, even when people listen to the pundits of cable TV chatter on about economic inequality, the words bleed together, because without the means to make real change, the present is forever. At best, such discussions feel like a teardrop in an ocean of words. Among professionals, pundits, and academics barely hidden contempt for those defined as lower or working class often tinges such discussions.
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During the past few decades, however, with huge sums being poured into this country’s never-ending wars, unions weakening or collapsing, wages being pushed down, and workers losing jobs, then homes, so much of that safety net is gone. If Donald Trump and his crew of millionaires and billionaires continue with their evisceration of the rest of the safety net, then food stamps, welfare aid directed at children’s health, and women’s reproductive rights, among other things, will disappear as well. Add to that the utter disregard the Trump administration has shown for people of color and its special mean-spiritedness toward immigrants, whether Mexican or Muslim—and for growing numbers of non-millionaires and non-billionaires the future is already starting to look like the worst, not the best, of times. 

- Janet McFarland writes that executive pay has been skyrocketing even as the public's concern about inequality has grown in recent years. And Prem Sikka discusses how just a decade after the most recent financial meltdown, regulators have resumed catering to corporate interests rather than protecting the public from them.

- Mike De Souza looks at the details of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain environmental violations, featuring internal calculation errors, faulty equipment and a failure to report to regulators. And Bill McKibben notes that the fossil fuel industry is being recognized as a particularly irresponsible actor even in the corporate world.

- Finally, Doug Saunders offers a reminder that contrary to the fearmongering by right-wing demagogues, there's no rational basis to treat the presence of immigrants of any type or background as a problem.

Leadership 2018 Links

The latest from the Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign.

- Devin Tasa reported on the Nipawin debate, while the Estevan Mercury covered Ryan Meili's visit. Adam Hunter reported on Trent Wotherspoon's mistaken province-wide television ad. And Alex MacPherson and D.C. Fraser's notebook continues to offer some coverage, including the latest on the candidates' fund-raising totals.

- Phil Tank compared the candidates from both provincial leadership campaigns in their plans for the Meewasin Valley Authority. And the Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation likewise took note of the candidates' education plans across party lines.

- While I haven't focused much on endorsements, the most prominent recent ones include an interesting divide between Wotherspoon's support from familiar Saskatchewan NDP figures including Anne Blakeney and Cam Broten, and Meili's from the broader progressive movement including Thomas Mulcair and Harry Leslie Smith.

- Finally, Ryan Meili has released a membership pitch connecting his farm background to the importance of community support for people:

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Joseph Parilla examines how entrenched inequality serves as a barrier to economic development for everybody. 

- Heather Long highlights how the U.S.' last round of corporate tax cuts led to lower wages for all but the lucky few. And Stuart Bailey writes about the need for public policy to improve wages and employment standards after the promise of businesses passing along their increased profits has proven false once again.

- David Adler comments on the UK's divide between an owning class whose wealth is growing, and a renting class facing nothing but precarious living. And Daphne Bramham discusses the added danger of poverty facing elderly women. 

- Rebecca Leber interviews one employee of the Environmental Protection Agency who's willing to speak out about how its purpose is being undermined by a Trump administration bent on nothing but maximizing the profits that can be extracted. 

- Finally, Tim Fenton reviews Harry Leslie Smith's Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future, including its call to fight to defend social progress which had been taken for granted:

But, you may say, we do have a benefits system and the NHS. There is no chance of a cancer sufferer being denied end-of-life care and stripped of their dignity. But that is to misunderstand what HLS is telling his readers. He is showing the inevitable conclusion from the direction of travel on which successive Governments have embarked.

Unemployment benefit, payments to the sick and disabled, even in-work and universal benefits, all have been under sustained attack for years. Hardly a day goes by without comfortably off pundits being given a platform by yet more comfortably off newspaper proprietors and their editors to accuse the less well-off of being “scroungers”.
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Health and safety is also under attack. To remove this protection is also said to be “fair”. Supposedly sensible pundits rail at the legislation, demanding “are we not grown up enough to be able to make our own decisions?” That road leads to deaths and injuries in the workplace. The latter blighted HLS’ family when his father was badly injured working down the pit. Industrial injury used to be a killer. Some would have that era come back.
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Anyone not persuaded of the risks of believing the siren voices of selfishness and intolerance should read HLS’ book. It is about a world we may have left behind, but are in danger of seeing all over again.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sam Gindin discusses the future of labour organizing in the course of reviewing Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Guilded Age:

(W)e have been struggling with how to combine building the union with raising larger, more political questions. One modest element of this, especially but not only in the public sector, is to confront the apparent constraint of fiscal budgets on what is possible and run educationals for workers on how to read budgets technically and how to understand them politically.

But the larger point is that even the best and most community-rooted unions cannot change the world by themselves and so are confined to the limits of operating under capitalism. Unions can educate about elite and local power but focusing their education on capitalism as a system rarely occurs. They can create organic leaders but not necessarily lead them to the next step of becoming organic socialist leaders. They can support political parties but do not ask what role workers and unions might have in transforming capital states to socialist states. Such things — all vital to dealing with working-class power — can only be tackled within or alongside an institution with a broader and longer-term perspective: a coherent socialist tendency or party.

- Andrew Mitrovica laments the spread of right-wing populism over the past year. And Keman Dervis warns about the dangers of corporate short-term thinking, while Frank Clemente points out the futility of relying on corporate handouts as a basis for economic development.

- But on the brighter side, Harry Leslie Smith offers a hopeful perspective that collective decency will win out over anti-social impulses in the end.

- Peter Goffin reports on the urgent need to make mental health supports available to Canadians without a price tag. And Trevor Young sets out a few suggestions from doctors to improve our current health care system.

- Finally, Idealistic Pragmatist makes a welcome (if brief) return to highlight the need to take people's public contributions seriously regardless of whether they need to use a pseudonym in offering them.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Harry Leslie Smith writes about how an increasingly polarized city such as London excludes a large number of its citizens from meaningful social participation:

(A)usterity has diminished the opportunity of the young and shortened the lives of the old. Even libraries – the life blood of any community – have been savagely cut in many London boroughs leaving senior citizens with one less free space to gather, learn and socialise. London may be a great city to live in if you are an elderly member of the elite. But for everyone else it is a trap where upon retirement you must sell your home, if you are lucky enough to own, and move on to greener pastures – or if you are a renter with few options and many connections to this city, you must remain like the poor of yesteryear, watching a pension that might do you well in Halifax only stretched to the third week of the month.
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London may become a city shorn of any diversity because extreme wealth will drive all those out but the rich and those who serve them. It would be a great tragedy if London lost its elderly not through the natural passage of time but through the brute ugliness of a one-sided economy. We have to remember that London without old people isn’t a city, it’s just a factory floor, a place where you work and shop, with no history, no past or future, just an endless present tense in pursuit of money.

- Meanwhile, the Economist discusses how austerity inevitably imposes far greater burdens on the poor than on the wealthy. And Truthout notes that those additional stressors lead to a measurable increase in suicides - meaning that lives are on the line when governments choose to stop doing their job of protecting the public.

- Eman Bare writes about the impact of ballooning student debt in delaying young workers' independence.

- Charlie Smith reports on the CCPA's study (PDF) showing the health and service risks of corporate medicine. And Lizanne Foster sets out the typical plan to turn public education into a profit centre at the expense of students and the public.

- Finally, Michal Rozworski and Louis-Phillipe Rochon offer some cautionary notes about a basic income as a solution to inequality. And Andrew Flowers surveys what we know - and don't know - from past and developing trials of the idea.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Harry Leslie Smith writes about the problems with a U.K. budget and economic plan designed to avoid any moral compass:

Nothing better illustrates to me that Osborne is sailing us back to the harsh and socially unsustainable cruelty of the 1930s than his removal of substantial benefits from over 200k disabled citizens to pay for middle class tax relief. We cannot grow or sustain our middle class by starving our poorest members of society.

When he strips our most vulnerable of living a dignified existence through cuts to their benefits it doesn't make our economy stronger, it makes Britain a weaker nation because we have repudiated our greatest national asset: our belief in fair play.

No matter how much Osborne crows about saving the next generation from the vicissitudes of financial uncertainty, it won't happen through tax cuts or increasing the amount one can stash in an ISA, because the real threat to Britain's next generation is low wages and an economy that has become skewered to reward only our most affluent citizens.
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Britain can't save its next generation if it doesn't invest in infrastructure all across this country.

Britain can't save its next generation unless it builds affordable homes on a a scale not seen since the days of Attlee and Harold Macmillian in the 1960s.

Britain can't save it's next generation if it doesn't introduce a real living wage instead of topping up the minimum wage.

And Britain most certainly can't save the next generation unless it reduces the cost of education and produces a viable action plan to put our young in gainful employment rather than stocking shelves on zero-hour contracts.

Sadly my fear is that George Osborne has condemned the next generation to the horrors my generation thought we had put to an end. We supported a Britain that believed in fair taxation, fair wages, fair benefits and the rights to all citizens – whether they be rich, poor or in-between – to a life that had both comfort and purpose.

- Meanwhile, Jeremy van Loon reports that the oil sector is still sitting on massive piles of unused cash - even as it demands handouts to clean up its messes. And Matt McClure points out Alberta's pile of unpaid corporate taxes which the NDP government is working on bringing into the province's public coffers.

- Anne Jarvis highlights the recent controversy over French's ketchup as a prime example of the importance of fighting for local jobs rather than allowing corporations to dictate the terms of economic development.

- And Ann Hui reports on the dangers to public health from a lack of CFIA food inspectors. 

- Finally, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is taking a much-needed look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, including Jacqueline Wilson's analysis of its false environmental promises and Alexandre Maltais' review of its impact on cultural policy. But Jeremy Nuttall notes that the Libs are going out of their way to avoid allowing the public any real input into the deal.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Joseph Stiglitz writes that inequality is killing the American middle class. And Crawford Kilian examines the direct connection between inequality and midlife mortality:

For some white Americans born between 1961 and 1970, however, something has gone wrong. They grew up in what should have been a wonderful time: the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of China as the world's economic powerhouse, the fading of the threat of a global nuclear war.

In 1998, however, some members of this age cohort began to sicken and die...
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...(T)his cohort's mortality began to rise at half a per cent a year. Not much, but it has continued year after year. By 2013, that meant 488,500 white Americans were dead when they should have lived...
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As discouraging as these studies are, they largely vindicate a century of public health research that shows your very life depends on the class you're born into. Every social class is healthier and less stressed than the class below it, and sicker and more stressed than the class above it. Mobility between classes is far easier downward than upward.

It's not that poor, uneducated people don't know how to eat properly or keep themselves clean. They usually do; they're just too stressed to take care of themselves. As researchers like Dr. Richard Wilkinson have shown in book after book, income inequality within nations creates stressors on the relatively poor (even if they're far better off than the proverbial Bangladeshi peasant).
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Canada's mortality rates may be consolingly low, but for some Canadians they have always been high -- especially for aboriginal Canadians. Their incomes are a fraction of other Canadians', and their incarceration rates are much higher than others'.

In both countries, far more research needs to be done to understand -- and remedy -- the deadly consequences of inequality.

- Meanwhile, Harry Leslie Smith contrasts the welcoming humanitarian attitude toward refugees following World War II to the inclination toward denial and isolation across much of Europe today.

- David Macdonald studies the soaring cost of child care across Canada. And the Star follows up by arguing for a national program to make child care affordable for all parents - to replace the status quo in which child care can carry the same cost as an additional mortgage.

- Philip Preville takes a look at Canada's shadow lending industry - and how it drives up both housing prices and stressors on the people who rely on it to fund house purchases. 

- Finally, Stuart Basden discusses how Canada remained part of the problem in Paris - even if its obstruction was targeted toward specific issues rather than the general principle of agreeing on reining in climate change at all. George Monbiot highlights the flaws and retrenchment in the final Paris agreement. And Brad Plumer charts how the emission reduction commitments made so far would take us less than halfway to the supposed goal.

Friday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Friday reading.

- Matthew Melmed examines how poverty early in life is both disturbingly widespread, and likely to severely affect a child's future prospects.

- Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis track the extreme gap in wage growth for CEOs as opposed to workers. Robert Skidelsky argues that we can't rely on employment relationships to fully address poverty and inequality given the number of current jobs that will be mechanized out of existence before long. But on the bright side, Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on Unifor's success in achieving significant improvements in wages and schedule predictability for retail workers.

- Robyn Benson discusses the need to put an end to the Cons' plan of cutting public services merely for the sake of cutting, no matter how much social and economic damage results. But Bill Curry reports on the Cons' refusal to even cooperate with provinces trying to ensure some basic level of security and dignity for their citizens, while Evan Webster discusses Harry Leslie Smith's observation that the corporate right is challenging and threatening the underpinnings of civilized society.

- Faces of Health Care offers a look at just a few of the stories as to how one of our most treasured social programs - which is of course under attack by the Cons and the corporate sector - can make all the difference in a patient's life. And Kenneth Davis points out how improved social services can ease the burden on health care providers.

- Finally, CBC reports on just the latest Alberta oil spill. And Warren Bell discusses the connection between Christy Clark's wild promises about natural gas production and its questionable deal with Petronas.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Sheila Block points out the problems with the spread of low-paying, precarious jobs. And PressProgress fact-checks the CFIB's attempt to make as many workers' lives as precarious as possible by suppressing minimum wages and standards.

- But Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports that Ontario's provincial government is making matters worse by handing millions of dollars to the same temp agencies who are most aggressively flouting employment standards laws. And the Star warns of the need to ensure that Toronto's plan to fight poverty actually leads to action.

- Meanwhile, Ezra Klein points out the importance of how we label life without stable work in discussing the radically different perception of involuntary unemployment compared to early retirement:

Saying "I'm unemployed" is very different than saying "I retired at 32, and it's amazing." The question is, can someone who doesn't start with much social status — Ferriss is a Princeton graduate, Mr. Money Mustache an ex-software engineer — manage the same trick?

This is one of the questions that will decide whether a post-work world becomes a dystopia. Does whatever replaces work get branded more like unemployment or more like extreme retirement? What happens when you tell someone you just met on Tinder that you don't have a full-time job, but you really love hiking?

I am not worried that a post-work world can't be a good world. I am just worried that it won't be — that guilt-free early retirement will be a luxury reserved for people who can get good jobs, and denied to people who can't.

- Finally, Heather Mallick writes that we should all learn from Harry Leslie Smith's experience about the importance of a functioning society. And Duncan Cameron reminds us that it's only a tiny group of financial elites who stand to profit from the austerity that does so much damage to the vast majority of citizens.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Sean Illing writes about the utterly misplaced view of the privileged few that they can or should be treated as immune from the environmental realities facing everybody:

I see the decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to pilfer with impunity. These people are prepared to endanger an entire ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is what true entitlement looks like.

The wealthiest Americans – and their apostles in government – tell us that it’s the poor people who are entitled, who take and exploit and keep more than they deserve. But that’s a half-truth, and a dangerous one at that. Entitlement has many faces, the most destructive of which is on display in Rancho Santa Fe. These adolescent upper-crusters are entitled because they believe they have a right to everything they can get hold of – regardless of the costs. They believe living with others carries no obligations. Anyone who places their right to pristine golf courses above their responsibility to respect communal resources is a social toxin, a privileged parasite eating away at the foundations of society. It’s important that their actions be seen in this context.

There’s a lesson in Rancho Santa Fe and in California more generally. What’s happening there foreshadows our future. We’re confronted with crises on a number of fronts. From climate change to economic inequality, our institutions – and the people controlling them – are failing us. Changes are necessary, but a segment of society (the 1 percent, we’ll call them) is unwilling to sacrifice; they’re too invested in power, in comfort. Whether it’s oil profiteers distorting climate science or Wall Street banks undermining efforts to regulate the financial industry, entrenched interests are doing everything possible to preserve the status quo, even when so doing threatens to upend the whole system – just like the people of Rancho Santa Fe.

- Meanwhile, Jan Zalasiewizc reports on new research showing that even without accounting for the effects of climate change, humanity has managed to cause mass extinctions on a planetary scale.

- Cathy Crowe makes the case for a national housing program as a necessary step toward a healthier and more secure society, while the Star backs a plan to provide housing to 20,000 homeless Canadians over the next three years. And Marco Chown Oved reports on the types of abuses private landlords can carry out by imposing arbitrary fees while evicting a tenant, then permanently trashing the tenant's credit rating if that blackmail doesn't succeed.

- Paul Seesequasis writes that the Cons' terror bill is a serious obstacle to reconciliation as it stands to prevent aboriginal people from seeking both sovereignty and respect. And Fram Dinshaw reports that Canada's Muslim community - which figures to be one of the first targets of covert attacks - has already been intimidated into silence about the dangers of C-51.

- Finally, Elizabeth Renzetti interviews Harry Leslie Smith about his fight to build on the hard-won social gains people have made over the course of his life.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Elias Isquith talks to David Madland about the connection between increasing inequality and the breakdown of trust in the U.S. political system. CBC and Larry Elliott follow up on the IMF's findings about the economic damage done by income and wealth disparities. And Philip Longman thoroughly examines the cross-generational inequality which is putting every generation after the Baby Boomers at a severe disadvantage:

Start, for example, with the twentysomethings of 1979. They had a lower real income in 1979 than twentysomethings did in 1969. And as fiftysomethings now, they not only make less money than they did when they were fortysomething, they are also far worse off as a whole than were the fiftysomethings of 2005. This generalization applies to white members of this cohort and even more so to those who are African American or Hispanic.

Today’s fiftysomethings may be part of the first generation in American history to experience this kind of lifetime downward mobility, in which at every stage of adult life, they have had less income and less net wealth than did people who were their age ten years before. Yet these mid-wave Baby Boomers shouldn’t feel too sorry for themselves. That’s because, as we shall see, they were far better off as twentysomethings than were subsequent cohorts of Generation X twentysomethings, and especially better off than today’s Millennials.

These vastly different economic trajectories experienced by today’s living generations are basically unprecedented. Throughout most of our history, inequality between generations was large and usually increasing, to be sure, but for the happy reason that most members of each new generation far surpassed their parents’ material standard of living. Today, inequality between generations is increasing for the opposite reason. Though much more productive and generally better educated, most of today’s workers are falling farther and farther behind their parents’ generation in most measures of economic well-being.

If it were just a matter of the old getting richer while the young get poorer, it would not necessarily be so bad. Under that scenario, most of us might struggle financially until we grew old, but we could at least look forward to realizing a variant of the American Dream in retirement. But that’s not how these trends are playing out. The downward mobility of today’s younger Americans leads to the downward mobility of tomorrow’s older Americans, making the problem of growing generational inequality truly dire. It’s time to get clear about just what’s been going on and what we can do about it.

- Meanwhile, Adnan Al-Daini comments on the futility of pretending that government budgeting is comparable to that of a household.

- Ryan Meili interviews Harry Leslie Smith about the realities of life without a universal health care system, and the importance of preserving and improving the one we now enjoy.

- Katie Valentine looks at research showing a connection between environmental consciousness by legislators and cleaner air. And Geoff Dembicki notes that the Cons' environmental negligence is leading Canadian civil society to start taking action.

- Finally, Frances Russell writes that the Cons are looking to block Canadians' votes in the upcoming federal election. And Evan Leeson makes the case for voting for what we want, rather than allowing "strategic" arguments to push us toward the world of all possible worlds:

In the Canadian context strategic voting is anachronistic because it seeks to STOP HARPER. Again, we didn’t. You can’t stop a train after it has left the station and arrived at the destination. The opportunity is gone and strategic voting in this sense is living in the past and refusing to come to terms with where we have arrived.

Strategic voting creates a negative frame because it takes the seed of positive creative energy in people who want change and plants it in negativity and fear. It says: “If we don’t vote together to stop Harper he will do bad stuff”. That’s negative and fearful. Plus, he already did.

In fact, the Unstoppable One has now turned his attention to making sure that he can stop us. He wants to ensure the things he did cannot be undone aka retroactively stopped. Bill C-51 is a big part of that. C-51 is about locking it in.

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Here’s the thing about strategic voting. Things are different now. We can’t stop Harper. We can’t stop him because he’s accomplished his goals. Stick a fork in us. He’s done.

So, enough with defining our future in the negative. What we need now is a new Prime Minister and new governing party with a plan and a mandate to build Canada anew.

So what is the new approach?

It’s simple, really. I believe hope is better than fear. I’m voting from the heart. I’m voting for what I believe in. I’m voting for the Canada I want. I hope you will too.