Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Paul Buchheit discusses the U.S.' combination of increasing inequality, systematic tax evasion and false promises of social mobility. Michael Savage reports that even UK Cons are recognizing that a refusal to ensure that the rich pay their fair share makes for bad politics. And Steven Klees highlights how full funding for the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals is well within our means as long as the wealthy pay their fair share:

Wealthy countries need to honor the commitment, made in 1970 and repeated ever since, to allocate 0.7% of GDP toward ODA. While a few countries already do this, most fall far short. Just by keeping past promises, wealthy countries could close the education-funding gap – and cover all of the other SDGs’ financing needs, too. The Education Commission, by contrast, lets wealthy countries off the hook, by asking them to commit just 0.5% of GDP to ODA, and not until 2030.

Second, we need a global approach to taxation. As my colleague and I point out in a report for the Education Commission, corporate-tax reforms could eliminate tax avoidance and evasion, which are costing the global economy more than $600 billion every year. To achieve the needed reforms, we need to increase the UN’s capacity instead of relying on the OECD, which has proposed only minor changes. 

We also need to institute a global wealth tax, as economist Thomas Piketty has proposed. It is obscene that the world’s eight richest people hold as much wealth as the poorest 50%. Like corporate-tax reform and fulfilling past promises to fund ODA, a 1% global wealth tax could finance all of the SDGs combined.

- Meanwhile, Gillian Tett examines the close correlation between financial deregulation and outsized pay for bankers. Paul La Monica notes that workers generally are still seeing little benefit from increased economic activity due to sluggish wages. And Ben Doherty writes about the gross exploitation of migrant farm workers in Australia.

- Gabriel Yiu discusses how the B.C. Libs handed profitable parts of ICBC over the private sector while reducing revenue from luxury cars for their own political purposes - providing an indication of the road map the Wall government seems all too likely to follow in Saskatchewan.

- John Abraham reports on new research showing that dirty fossil fuels are being implicitly subsidized at a cost of trillions of dollars annually - or roughly 6.5% of global GDP.

- Finally, Kapil Khimdas and Danyaal Raza write that a focus on genuinely putting patients first - particularly through preventative care and a prioritization of needs - can lead to far better health outcomes.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Martin Lukacs discusses the need for collective action to fight climate change - and the dangers of allowing ourselves to be distracted by calls to focus solely on individual choices:

These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.

While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
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Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
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If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.

Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.

- Tim Harford argues that part of the public response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy should be to act on the desperate need for more and better-maintained social housing. And Michael Laxer connects the mindset behind the media's dutiful praise of a slapdash set of stairs in Etobicoke to the themes of deregulation and antisocialism that lead to public safety catastrophes.

- Aaron Mate interviews Kerris Cooper about the role of family income in a child's development and future prospects, while also highlighting the potential gains from a more fair income distribution.

- Rob Shaw reports on the precarious state of ICBC after it was used as a cash cow by Christy Clark and her self-serving B.C. Liberals. And Jennifer Ackerman reports that Brad Wall and the Sask Party are determined to similarly suck all the value out of Saskatchewan's Crown Corporations as quickly as they can get away with it - even as the Crowns remain a bright spot both for economic development and public revenue.

- Finally, Anjuli Patil reports on Nova Scotia's move to reverse the privatization of 10 schools due to its belated recognition that P3 schemes did nothing but cost the province money.