Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Jo Davies points out the widespread recognition that Canadian corporations need to pay their fair share for a functional society. And Eric Levitz notes that Donald Trump and other right-wing pseudo-populists are ensuring the opposite, as the IRS has stopped any meaningful enforcement action against the wealthy since Trump and the Republicans have been in a position to direct its actions.

- Tom Parkin points out the profound impact activism can have in changing and saving lives. And Dave Meslin discusses the need to tear down our current political structures in order to build a sustainable society:

What if the greatest challenges of our time can’t be solved by our current political system at all? Indeed, what if the greatest challenges of our time are a direct result of our decaying political system? The symptoms are clear: Legislatures have descended into mob-driven battlegrounds. Centralized power within parties has transformed our elected representatives into trained seals who clap or jeer on cue, voting as they’re told. Growing cynicism and frustration among voters are leading to lower and lower levels of political participation. Corporate lobbyists continue to wield enormous influence. And we are constantly facing fishtail legislation: the absurd reality that each new government spends their first year in office undoing whatever the previous government had done.

None of this serves the public interest. In fact, all of it is holding us back from what we are capable of.

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The first step is to overcome our fear of using words such as “rigged” or "broken” to describe our political state. There’s a concern that attacking our democratic institutions only serves to empower extremist ideologues. But the opposite is true. When we turn a blind eye to the need for radical change, it’s those very extremist leaders who happily take advantage of the vacuum and use it for their own purposes. We’ve seen the electoral results of this.

It’s time to change course. Pretending that that we can use our current political ecosystem to bring about meaningful change is not only negligent, it’s a guaranteed recipe for environmental suicide.

We need a political uprising of passionate activists and leaders, prepared to prescribe and implement surgical interventions that will change the tone, shape and nature of power. Ours is a battle for inclusive governance, for deliberative and thoughtful decision-making and for elections that offer real choice and representative results. It’s a fight to inject some humanity into our democracy, for a new culture of political engagement and for decentralized and participatory local government, throwing open the doors to a system that is currently designed as an insider’s game.

- Joel French writes about the need for Alberta to pay attention to both its own youth and the rest of the world, rather than wrongly assuming that it can rely indefinitely on expiring industries without a plan to transition to a modern economy. And Carol Kroeger comments on the shortsightedness of ruling out - and demonizing - any carbon pricing as one of the means of averting a total climate breakdown. 

- Finally, Shael Polakow-Suransky writes about the need to ensure early childhood education in order to ensure that every child has a fair chance in life. And Sandra Black, Paul Devereux, Petter Lundborg and Kaveh Majlesi highlight how wealth disparities are passed on between generations. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Joel French discusses the need to move beyond merely preserving the public institutions Alberta has now, and to start building the new ones which will be needed in the future.

- But Eric Levitz observes that the U.S. is instead taking deliberate policy steps to ensure that workers don't benefit from nominal economic growth. And Douglas Rushkoff writes that the long-term plan of the capital class is to detach itself from the rest of humanity rather than working toward common benefits - while noting the futility of that worldview:

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.
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(W)hen the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

- Susan Dynarski discusses new research confirming the role unions play in the sharing of income and wealth. And Lana Payne highlights how the Trudeau Libs have traded away the possibility of stronger labour policy in order to enrich businesses through the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

- Finally, Leilani Farha points out how the corporate sector is capturing the housing desperately needed by residents of larger cities around the world. 

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Joel French discusses the need for Alberta to implement a more thorough and progressive tax system in order to ensure it has the revenue to support its residents. 

- Meagan Day highlights how Bernie Sanders' new labour bill would empower workers and enhance workplace democracy:

The bipartisan neoliberal attack on unions, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been enormously effective in undermining the power of the United States labor movement. As a result, the percentage of US workers who currently belong to a union is about 10 percent, down from its peak of nearly 28 percent in 1970.

Again this problem is fundamentally political, stemming from the balance of power in our society and not from a natural or inevitable economic process. The solution, too, has to be political — and it’s in that spirit that Bernie Sanders has introduced a new bill called the Workplace Democracy Act, which aims to clear obstacles to the labor movement’s growth, and ultimately increase collective worker control over the economy. The chances of such a bill passing in a GOP-controlled legislature (or even in a Democrat-controlled legislature; a weaker bill was opposed by moderate Democrats during the Obama administration) are basically nil, but Sanders’s bill is a strong political move anyway. It signals an uncompromising commitment to unions and invites other politicians to support an ambitious vision of a revitalized movement for worker power — or oppose that vision at their own risk.

The Workplace Democracy Act makes three crucial interventions. First, it would overturn a provision in the 1947 Taft-Hartley law that replaced card check — a system where employers have to recognize a union if more than 50 percent of employees in a particular bargaining unit say they want one — with an elaborate secret-ballot election process overseen by the National Labor Relations Board...A national card check system would allow workers to unionize by simple majority, avoiding the messy electioneering process that’s tilted in favor of employers, who inevitably have more resources.

Second, Sanders’s bill would repeal so-called “right to work.” Also a legacy of the Taft-Hartley Act, right to work prevents unions from negotiating contracts with employers that require all employees to join or pay a bargaining fee to the union...

Third, according to some reports, Sanders will seek to increase financial penalties on employers who fire workers for union organizing, a practice that is illegal but ubiquitous, due in part to the lack of consequences. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that “one-in-five union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their activities in a union election campaign.” The share of union drives that saw illegal firings of workplace activists rose steadily from the the mid-seventies to the mid-2000s. The paper’s authors note that employers “are unlikely to fire workers randomly, or simply for expressing pro-union views. Employers maximize the return to illegal firing by focusing on union activists.” The result is a climate of fear and a chilling effect on union activism, especially organic leadership among the rank-and-file, who are the least likely to take risks regarding their job security. Corporations are not currently forced to pay penalties when they’re caught retaliating against labor activists — all they need to do is make up lost income, which is not sufficient to distance them from the practice.

- Paul Barrett writes that contrary to the trumped-up complaints of the bigoted right, the only real threat to free speech on campus is the precarious work environment which prevents far too many part-time instructions from speaking up. And PressProgress notes that right-wing astroturf operations are still flouting Canada's income tax laws by pretending not to be involved in political activity.

- Finally, Robert Bea notes that Canada's environmental assessment process has approved BP to conduct offshore drilling based on the same assertions which were rejected by Australia. And Rob Antle reports on Husky's attempt to suppress information about a near-miss incident off of the coast of Newfoundland.