Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Katrina vanden Heuvel criticizes the U.S. Democrats' move away from discussing inequality by in favour of platitudes about opportunity for the middle class. And while Matthew Yglesias may be correct in responding that the messaging change hasn't resulted in much difference in Democratic policy proposals, it's certainly significant when a political party makes the choice to take poverty and inequality off the table as a vital part of the argument for its policy consensus.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Elliott-Buckley reminds us that the 1% tends to get its way in policy debates in no small part because it exhibits solidarity often missing among other groups:

For centuries, the 1% were the nobility, the aristocrats, the old money, the patriarchy. Then Adam Smith pitched capitalism in his 1776 book Wealth of Nations, and liberated the entrepreneurs to join the blue bloods. Today, every January, corporate and government leaders from around the world – the people who literally rule the world – meet in the winter-wonderland of Davos, Switzerland, to launch the annual World Economic Forum. There, they plan the global agenda. This year’s sexy new idea was advancing “social entrepreneurialism.” That sounds so kumbaya, just like public-private partnerships, but it’s just spin for privatizing social services.

The World Economic Forum is just one of the most recent venues where the global elite show their solidarity with each other, and plan how to maximize shareholder wealth and minimize global social, economic and political equality. Beyond Davos, our rulers have also created a roadmap for undermining the democracy of nations through secret trade agreements like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and CETA (the Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement). These agreements are designed to give right-wing governments the excuse to deregulate industries, privatize public services, and elevate shareholders’ and investors’ “right” to profit above the needs of society.
...
The member groups of progressive coalitions need to find ways of connecting their individual members to better support each other. And the coalitions themselves need to support each other. I believe such an effort at deepening and broadening solidarity has, so far, been lacking. Meanwhile, the 1% are deeply well-connected, from community chambers of commerce right up to the World Trade Organization. They’re all spouting the same spin and rhetoric on their members’ behalf, while we, the 99%, can often not get past “letterhead coalitions,” a term introduced to me by Amanda Tattersall, one of the founders of the Sydney Alliance in Australia. What good is it to have a coalition when the extent of union, or faith, or community organization activity is merely a letter of support?

- David Ball reports on this summer's Peoples' Social Forum - which looks like one promising effort to build connections and lay the foundation for ongoing activism.

- And in case there was much doubt there's still plenty to organize against, the CCCE lays bare its trade agenda - featuring its demand that the TPP be negotiated and implemented without public input in order to ensure closed-door "enforcement" of corporate priorities and at most "dialogue" for labour, the environment and anything else not profit-related.

- Finally, Jonathan Kay rightly criticizes the Cons' "punitive moral absolutism" when it comes to withholding needed health care from refugees. But as Emmett MacFarlane notes, the Cons always seem to find some way to sink even lower than their past precedents for callous inhumanity - and Robert Goguen did just that in lecturing a sex worker about her own gang rape.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Michael Den Tandt and Jonathan Kay both point out the willingness of conservative (and Conservative) supporters to brush off the obvious misdeeds of their political leaders. And Glen Pearson rightly concludes that the responsibility to elect deserving leaders ultimately lies with voters:

We are guilty of asking to little of ourselves. We find it remarkably easy, natural even, to blame our representatives and yet we put them there. They have no real answers to our unemployment situation, but we either continue to support them because of the party we serve or because we have just given up altogether. We turn away in disgust at all the corruption trials, the hanging around with nefarious types, and the constant role-playing to populist politics, and in that very act of walking away we poison the wells for our children’s future. We will continue to dote on our kids at Christmas, providing what they require, but we won’t fight for their cheaper post-secondary tuitions, their future healthcare requirements, their ability to purchase their own homes or to have meaningful jobs. Our children will be entrusted with billions of dollars in public infrastructure deficits and our way of dealing with it is to walk away from the public space instead of fighting for it – for them.

Apathy is a kind of public trap, with no challenges and therefore no rewards. It just is and the consequences are inevitably bone chilling. Most of us care, just not enough, and if we maintain that attitude then we need to prepare ourselves for more mini-tyrants overrunning our public space. This isn’t about Left or Right, is it? It’s about competence and our ability as a people to overcome our challenges and build on our past successes.

The simple reality is this: it’s not really about Rob Ford and his ilk; it’s about us, and how much incompetence we are willing to endure. We got what we voted for and now we’re paying for it. We need better politicians, but our only way of achieving that target is to be better citizens.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell writes that any attempt to hand more power to the Senate only figures to render the federal government ineffective in responding to Canadians' needs.

- Josh Eidelson discusses McDonald's instructions to employees to break their food into pieces and stop complaining (as an apparent alternative to being paid enough to avoid hunger and stress). And Jillian Berman finds Walmart going a step further - holding a food drive for its own employees who plainly aren't paid enough to feed themselves.

- Which leads nicely to Alexandre Boulerice's view of the proper role of government in allowing workers some recourse in dealing with employers whose strategy includes grinding them into poverty:

But how do you better advocate for those people who are working at Walmart?
I think as legislators our responsibility is to let the workers decide by themselves. I’m not saying that it’s the role of the government to create unions but it’s the role of government to create an environment where it's possible to create a union when you want it -- you can have legal capacities to fight back if you are against an employer like Walmart or McDonalds that clearly doesn’t accept a union in their workplaces.

- CAUT studies how corporate funding is warping Canadian university research projects.

- Finally, Paul Adams contrasts the NDP's clear position on referendum standards against the Libs' well-practiced ignorance.

Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Susan Delacourt writes that laughable conspiracy theories look to be the Cons' stock in trade as they fight against any accountability for electoral fraud:

(I)t may be true that Ford has left-wing opponents on council and that the Council of Canadians, which has launched the legal challenge on so-called robocalls, would prefer that Harper had not win the last election.

But these are not illegal views in this country — at least not yet. Demonization of your adversaries is a spin tactic, not a legal defence.

Besides, Hamilton knows that the concern over misleading calls in the last election doesn’t start or end with the “left-wing” Council of Canadians.

Elections Canada was in touch with Hamilton a few days before the May 2, 2011, vote, according to recently released documents, asking why the organization was receiving multiple complaints of misleading, voter-misdirection phone calls coming from Conservative campaign headquarters.

Moreover, a criminal investigation is underway in Guelph, Ont., as well as dozens of other ridings across the country where voters have reported waves of fraudulent calls, trying to divert them from proper polling locations.

If this is just some crazy left-wing scheme, it’s a remarkably large one, mapped out and executed in advance of voting. With that many resources at its disposal, you’d wonder why the left wing didn’t go to the extra trouble of winning the election 18 months ago.

- Robert Macdonald and Tracy Shildrick report that right-wing attempts to moralize about a loss of work ethic based on existence of bare-bones social programs have about as much basis in reality as "tax cuts for rich = win!!!" (which is to say none whatsoever):

(W)e managed to recruit 20 families where there was long-term worklessness across two generations and interviewed family members in depth. It was clear that these families did not inhabit of "a culture of worklessness". People told us that they deplored "the miserable existence" of a life on benefits. Families experiencing long-term worklessness remained committed to the value of work. Workless parents were unanimous in not wanting their children to end up in the same situation as themselves.

They actively tried to help their children find jobs (for example, by accompanying them to job interviews to provide moral support). As one 50-year-old father said: "What I want is for my family to have jobs. They're not asking for anything big, that's the thing, they are not, like, being greedy." Unemployed young adults in these families were strongly committed to conventional values about work as part of a normal transition to adulthood. They were keen to avoid the poverty, worklessness and other problems experienced by their parents.

The long-term worklessness of parents in these families was a result of the impact of complex, multiple problems associated with living in deep poverty over years (particularly related to ill health). In an already tight labour market, these problems combined to place them at the back of a long queue for jobs.

- Meanwhile, Jonathan Kay recognizes that Canada's relative equality compared to the U.S. has long offered an economic advantage - and that we only stand to lose out as the Cons try to push us toward a less fair distribution of income and tax obligations:

Applying social-justice arguments, many leftists have seized on this data to make the case that American capitalism, in its current state, is fundamentally immoral. But even die-hard laissez-faire types should be concerned by America’s increasingly U-shaped income profile. The very poor don’t buy much. And the very rich spend a relatively small amount of their money on consumer goods. A mass-retail capitalist economy cannot function if it is not being fuelled by a prosperous middle class that’s too rich for Family Dollar, but too poor for Saks.

Income polarization also gives rise to all sorts of more intangible losses for a society — including in the areas of trust and social mobility. A society of haves and have-nots is a society of gated communities side-by-side with trailer parks, the sort of scene one witnesses in Latin America. The polarization of wealth also has a corrosive effect on democratic politics, because it encourages plutocrats and entrenched corporate interests to funnel billions into whatever corps of political ideologues are willing to robotically defend the status quo — a phenomenon that was on display in the recent U.S. election campaign.

- Finally, it isn't only opinion columnists making the case that greater equality is an essential goal for Canada, as Aaron Wherry's year-end interview with Tom Mulcair includes this on intergenerational equity as an emerging question of equality:

When we see 330,000 temporary foreign workers brought into this country, deprived of their rights, bringing down working conditions for Canadians, when we see the loss of hundreds of thousands of good manufacturing jobs that had enough of a salary for a family to live on and a pension, people are worried. You know, for the first time we’re being told by a government that you have to settle for less, that your kids are going to have to settle for less. We think that we can still continue to grow and to have a greater country and a better place for the greater good. So we want prosperity, but the difference between us is we want prosperity for everyone.

In the past 35 years, the top 20% only have seen their revenues increase, the other 80% have seen actually seen their revenues drop. So we’re on the verge of becoming the first generation in Canadian history to leave less to our kids than what we got. And we find that unacceptable. That’s why we have this theme of sustainable development. If I could dial it back, the base of a social democratic approach is to remove inequalities in society. The big battle of generations ago was working people, making sure they had their rights and that they had a decent standard of living. One of the basic inequalities in our society today is an inequality between generations, it’s intergenerational equity that we’re talking about.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Vaughn Palmer discusses the unfortunate gap between the outrages that may lead to a government being pushed out of power, and a new government's ability to actually reverse what's been done. Which, a propos of nothing, makes it rather important to push lame-duck incumbents to respect the democratic will of citizens rather than pushing through controversial plans without even the bare pretense of public consultation.

- I don't have any problem with the idea of "hardheaded socialism" as a successful economic and political model, particularly as it fits the NDP's historical pairing of fiscal responsibility and social generosity. But I'm rather wary of any attempt to claim Canada has actually enjoyed a genuinely thick safety net under a series of federal governments who have consistently undermined it.

- Am Johal interviews Ryan Meili about A Healthy Society, including this on First Nations health:

AJ: Policies and programs directed towards the Aboriginal community too often are not culturally sensitive nor are they delivered by Aboriginal organizations. Do you see a shift in health care delivery related to Aboriginal communities. What changes would you like to see?

RM: The transfer of control of health services to First Nations communities has been a mixed blessing. The ability to make decisions about health services offered and to be directly involved in identifying community health needs is a necessary and important step. We can and should involve communities even more in determining the best means to address the health issues they face. Unfortunately, this policy has too often also served as a means for governments to wash their hands of responsibility, including the key responsibility of adequately funding health services. Many bands have seen their health funding frozen at 1990s levels, despite populations that have grown quickly and despite new health challenges that have emerged. This results in an underfunding of key services and worse health outcomes.

A responsible approach to health transfer needs to include transparency not only around decision-making in service provision and human resources, but also around the availability of sufficient funds to provide services.

- Embassy reports on what looks like the latest evidence that the Cons are going full-on Republican wingnut - as the Harper government is actually pushing to weaken an international arms treaty (including any tracking of ammunition or technology, as well as "high volume transfers") because of a laughable claim that they'll somehow affect individual hunters.

- Finally, Dan Gardner points out that the Cons' consistent mistreatment of Omar Khadr - with their breaking an agreement to process his readmission to Canada serving as just the latest outrage - actually speaks volumes about how little they value citizenship in general.

Persuadable

It's always easy to assume that an individual even remotely identified with a particular ideology will be utterly unwilling to be convinced by opposing positions. But Jonathan Kay's remarkably positive review of Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks' The Trouble With Billionaires should serve as Exhibit A that a sufficiently compelling argument can indeed have a powerful effect on somebody on the opposite side of the political spectrum - and should serve as motivation to make sure the case to deal with inequality gets heard in circles which may have shut it out for far too long.

For the sake of consistency...

...it's surely only a matter of time before Jonathan Kay comments that the "day Ezra Levant had anything defensible to say about politics and world events seems to have come to an end", while a National Post headline writer describes Levant as "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's one-man fan club". Right?

On talent pools

Shorter Jonathan Kay:
Maxime Bernier is living proof that our current elected government includes utterly unqualified and incompetent ministers. And as far as I'm concerned, the obvious solution is a wholesale transfer of responsibility to unelected appointees, rather than electing a government which actually considers intelligence and competence to be important.