Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- The World Bank's latest World Development Report discusses how readily-avoidable scarcity in severely limit individual development. Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine write that poverty and a lack of social mobility tend to create a vicious cycle of despair. And James Ridgeway examines the deliberate interference aimed at preventing many of the U.S.' poor from ever building secure lives.

- Meanwhile, Mark Thoma reminds us of the role the labour movement needs to play in ensuring greater equality across the income spectrum. And Deirdre Fulton writes that the first tentative steps toward improving the minimum wage as a matter of public policy have proven highly successful (contrary to the warnings of the corporate sector).

- The CP reports on Canada's embarrassing international status as one of the main obstacles to progress when it comes to climate change. And Harsha Walia writes that we'll need an alliance between labour, First Nations and environmental activists to produce a sustainable economy.

- Jessica Desvarieux reports on the extreme secrecy surrounding the TPP, while Dean Baker highlights how the arguments being made to try to push it on unsuspecting citizens are getting ever less plausible. And Stuart Trew and Scott Sinclair comment on its disastrous implications for Canada.

- Sean McElwee writes about the U.S. media's bias both in how it talks about issues, and in its choices as to which topics to cover.

- And finally, Katrina vanden Heuvel discusses the importance of public libraries as an essential source of economic and social benefits:

While it would be wonderful to assume that all media are available to all New Yorkers at all times—and that the only thing standing between us and the world is a sticky connection or a malfunctioning server—this simply isn’t so. And if you spend a morning observing a job-search program at the public library—where recent immigrants, perhaps, and parolees and recovering addicts sign up for their first email addresses and struggle with a QWERTY keyboard for the first time—you recognize such a sentiment as woefully naïve. As The New York Times editorialized last month, “The libraries are where poor children learn to read and love literature, where immigrants learn English, where job-seekers hone résumés and cover letters, and where those who lack ready access to the Internet can cross the digital divide.” Imagine everything you did today that utilized the Internet—checked your checking-account balance, ordered a birthday present for a friend, read your hometown newspaper—and now imagine having to go to the library, during library hours, to do it. Can’t make it to your local branch between 10 and 6 (between 1 and 6 at many Queens locations)? Tough luck. Hop on the bus and try again tomorrow during your 20-minute lunch break.

Beyond mere fairness, there are viable economic reasons for sustaining New York City’s public libraries. In 2010, the City of Philadelphia spent $33 million on its public libraries; private donations contributed $12 million more. Subsequent to the funding, the value of an average home located within one quarter-mile of one of the city’s 54 public library branches rose $9,630. In the aggregate, the public libraries contributed $698 million to home values in Philadelphia, which translated into an additional $18.5 million in property taxes for the city and school district. Other studies have demonstrated that for every tax dollar that libraries take in, communities receive anywhere between $2.38 and $6.54 in return. Simply put, it’s not just cruel to starve our libraries—and the communities that utilize them. It’s bad for business, and bad for America.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Robert Reich offers a long-form look at the relationship between inequality and policies designed to extract riches for the wealthy at everybody else's expense:

The underlying problem, then, is not that most Americans are “worth” less in the market than they had been, or that they have been living beyond their means. 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. As a result, their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide them. To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to disregard the power of large corporations and the financial sector, which have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power. As their gains have continued to accumulate, so has their power to accumulate even more.
...
The answer to this conundrum is not found in economics. It is found in politics. The changes in the organization of the economy have been reinforcing and cumulative: As more of the nation’s income flows to large corporations and Wall Street and to those whose earnings and wealth derive directly from them, the greater is their political influence over the rules of the market, which in turn enlarges their share of total income. The more dependent politicians become on their financial favors, the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests. The weaker unions and other traditional sources of countervailing power become economically, the less able they are to exert political influence over the rules of the market, which causes the playing field to tilt even further against average workers and the poor.

Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority, whose incomes have stagnated and whose wealth has failed to increase, 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.

- Meanwhile, Katrina vanden Heuvel worries that the Trans-Pacific Partnership only stands to further entrench corporate domination over democratic politics. David Dayen observes that the Obama administration's arguments for the TPP are entirely recycled from broken promises surrounding NAFTA. And Dave Johnson observes that unenforceable token mentions of labour and environmental issues can't come close to making it worth handing further power to business.

- Julia Smith notes that the Cons have utterly abandoned any principles in their foreign policy as they chase profits through arms sales and human rights abuses.

- Don Curren writes that economists think Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz is being too optimistic in presuming Canada's economy will improve in the absence of any evidence. Which naturally means the Cons are spending every available opportunity trying to badger Poloz into declaring that all is rainbows and ice cream.

- Finally, Chris Hannay interviews Joseph Heath about the messaging challenge facing Canadian progressives. And Geoff Dembicki reports that there's plenty of work to be done in rallying young voters behind the best possible alternative.