Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Melody Schrieber reports on new data showing that more Americans missed work due to illness in 2022 than in any other year on record even as the pandemic causing widespread sickness was declared to be over. And Madison Stoddard et al. study the difficulty individuals have trying to shield from an infectious disease when public policy is stacking the deck against them.

- Jon Schwarz examines the assumptions underlying the use of monetary policy to prevent workers from ever sharing in increased nominal values arising out of their work. And Jim Stanford discusses the need for workers to act collectively - including funding their own unions - in order to push back against having the value of their work extracted by employers.

 - Meanwhile, Umair Haque comments on the connection between advantanges being handed to can't-fail nepo babies and the lack of any meaningful opportunity for nearly anybody else.

- Nesrine Malik laments that it's now standard operating procedure in the UK (and elsewhere) for people to be expected to pay for their own basic services due to wanton cuts to the public sector. And John Clarke discusses how the Libs are using the specter of foreign ownership as an excuse for their own glaring failure to invest in accessible and affordable housing which will never be provided by a capitalist market.

- Finally, Konrad Yakabuski writes that the approval of Rogers' takeover of Shaw Communication represents both a prime example of the oligopoly in telecommunications across most of Canada, and a step toward further entrenching that reality.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Anna Leventhal warns against the danger that even the best-intentioned of charity drives might be seen as replacing the need for social supports:

Now campaigns are ubiquitous, and range from book tours to pet surgeries to basic subsistence for marginalized people in crisis. But with crowdfunding increasingly called on to plug the holes left by funding cuts (consider that in 2014 Canadians pledged over $27 million to Kickstarter alone, and that from 2013 to 2014 the amount crowdfunded globally jumped from US$6.1 billion to US$16.2 billion), the stakes are getting higher and the trouble with putting this support to the free market is becoming clear.

Do we back campaigns based on the perceived worthiness or importance of the project? The neediness of the asker? How well we know the asker and how bad we're likely to feel if their project can't be realized? Is it OK that we're being given the right, and the responsibility, to make these kinds of calls? Should the artist with the most Facebook friends win? Should the person to get support for a disability be the one with the best Twitter game? Letting the invisible hand guide these decisions seems not only flawed but dangerous.
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Frustrated citizens who care about the community's well-being can skip the arduous process of engaging with the federal government and trying to convince it that First Nations communities are worth caring about, and just give directly to the cause. Such a move seems part resourceful community-mindedness and part Band-Aid-over-metastasized-cancer. As Chief Edwin Resky is quoted as saying on the campaign's page, “While we appreciate your intentions, at the same time we wonder what kind of country Canada is when safe access to essential services, when our right to clean drinking water, when access to basic economic opportunity, must depend on the kindness of strangers?”

- Meanwhile, Ryan Meili reminds us of the dangers posed by a growing income gap. PressProgress exposes a few of the most appalling right-wing excuses for the continued underpayment of women in the workplace, while Tom Boggioni tells the story of how Laura Browder's attempt to find work as a single mother (in the absence of reasonable social supports and child care options) led to her arrest.

- Steve Barnes discusses the Wellesley Institute's latest study on the connection between insufficient incomes and a lack of access to prescription drugs. 

- Mychalo Prystupa reports that First Nations are rightly concerned that Nexen's recent oil spill is just a small part of a larger pattern of environmental degradation. And Gemma Karstens-Smith notes that long after the English Bay oil spill was proclaimed to have been fully contained, evidence is surfacing of contamination in areas up to 12 kilometres from the site of the spill.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone asks what comes next now that Canada is facing a recession. And Konrad Yakabuski writes that the response to the latest downturn represents a rare point of contrast between Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - as even the Cons' Australian cousins aren't so blinkered as to push through more cuts as the economy falters.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Michael Babad writes that we should be glad to see jobs being created in the public sector since the private sector is doing nothing to offer opportunities for Canadians. And Andrew Jackson discusses how Quebec's progressive economic model has served it well, while offering an example which other provinces should be eager to follow.

- Konrad Yakabuski weighs in on the need for pharmacare to make an essential element of health care universally accessible. But while Brent Patterson agrees that we should be pursuing pharmacare, he also warns that ill-advised trade agreements may complicate its implementation.

- BJ Siekierski points out that two top Statistics Canada officials see our economic problems as revolving primarily around the working class rather than the middle class, while PressProgress finds even Harper loyalists questioning an income splitting scheme designed to benefit those who need its least. And Paul Rosenberg discusses the challenges of fighting back against voodoo economics:

“The problem with our politics is President Obama and the people who surround him, don’t represent an alternative to trickle down economics, they are trickle-down-lite,” Hanauer told me. “They’re sort of kinder-and-gentler trickle-down economics. They can talk a little bit about the importance of the middle class, but, in my opinion, they haven’t quite seen clearly that they’ve gotten cause-and-effect reversed. They still think that a thriving middle class is an effect of growth, a consequence of growth, and the truth is in a technological, modern economy, a thriving middle class is the cause of growth…. The middle class creates rich people, not the other way around.”

This used to be well-understood by everyone. During America’s long post-World War II boom, the incomes of all levels growing approximately equally—though slightly slower at the very top. “That’s how you sustain virtuous cycle of increasing returns which capitalism can be. Capitalism can be constructed in a way so that everyone does better all the time. It’s a beautiful thing,” Hanauer said. “But if the power dynamics change in really extreme ways, as they have in the last 30 years, and all of the value of enterprise is sucked out by a few owners and the senior managers, then you basically killed the goose that layed the golden egg.” That’s what stock buybacks are all about.

- The CP reports that even the Calgary Chamber of Commerce is concerned about the vast amounts of resource wealth wasted by the province of Alberta.

- Finally, Chris Chambers reports on Amnesty International's polling into the effects of mass surveillance - which show both relatively little support for a Big Brother state, and a high risk that people will be reluctant to access needed information when it's in place. And Nora Lamontagne and Justin Ling offer a must-read on the massive waste of time and resources poured into infiltrating and investigating a small group of Quebec leftists.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Leo Panitch reminds us that the term "reform" was once understood to represent efforts to bolster the public interest against unbridled market forces - and suggests it's well past time to take the word back from the business interests who have turned it into just the opposite. 

- Paul Krugman comments on the twin myths of the undeserving poor and the deserving rich. And Sam Polk writes from experience about the mindset that drives money addicts to demand that others' basic needs give way to their desire to accumulate:

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

- Susan Delacourt theorizes that Twitter is becoming the defining communication mechanism for political leaders. And Konrad Yakabuski writes about the dark side of detailed political data collection - as the same information which can help parties reach supporters may also be used to target non-supporters for punishment and exclusion if there's no mechanism to test how it's used.

- Finally, Kevin Page suggests that we won't be able to make any progress in dealing with economic and social issues without first ensuring that our political system functions to serve the public interest rather than its own:

Income inequality is increasing in Canada and international comparisons put us well behind many European countries. The richest 1 per cent in Canada earns about 10.5 per cent of income, up from about 7 per cent some 30 years ago. About 9 per cent of our population lives in poverty, including some 570,000 of our children. Without aggressive action, these numbers are bound to get worse, not better.

Canadians have also added a lot of debt to our balance sheets. The ratio of household financial liabilities to household disposable income now sits at a record high 166 per cent, compared to 110 per cent in 2000. And as Canadians try to pay off this increased debt, inevitably consumption will further decrease, adding to more economic drift or stagnation.

So how do we get out of this dangerous spiral? One thing is clear: we cannot overcome the pressing economic challenges before us without the concerted effort of our government institutions. And yet in the wake of a year of scandal, those institutions are more distracted and less able to help than ever before.

The Prime Minister will not stand accountable for the actions of his own office. The Senate has lost trust over a spending scandal. The House of Commons has lost its power of the purse. Members of Parliament are forced to vote on appropriations without the information they need. The public service has become dangerously good at avoiding transparency and accountability.

Without rebuilding — and rebuilding trust in — the bodies charged with protecting our prosperity and democracy, we will continue to drift aimlessly, to put off the thinking we must put off no longer.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- David Simon laments the division of the U.S. into the few who are rewarded by market forces and the many who are constantly under siege - while also pointing out that concentration of wealth may prevent democratic forces from offering a counterweight:

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
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So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
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The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

 - Meanwhile, the Star provides both an article and an infographic on the public services slashed by the Harper Cons.

- And Bill Hatanaka, Jim Keohane, Jim Leech and Michael Nobrega highlight the value of defined-benefit pensions as a means of ensuring a secure retirement for workers. (And Konrad Yakabuski's apparent preference for letting individuals rather than social pension plans address the consequences of a "declining real rates of return on pension investments" doesn't serve as much of an argument against stronger public pensions.)

- Finally, Susan Delacourt proposes a few fixes to the current rules (or lack thereof) governing political and government advertising:

What could we do right now? Three steps are available to us, each as easy to embrace as Chong’s reforms:

- We need to have a conversation about whether we should continue to allow political advertising in between elections.
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- If we’re stuck with advertising between elections, it seems we’re recognizing that political parties are just another consumer marketer. How about subjecting them to the same standards?
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- Speaking of disparaging firms and commercial activity, how about those new ads this fall from your federal government, taking a poke at the wireless and telecom providers? We learned this week that the Conservative government is spending $9 million on its new ad campaign against Canadian cellphone providers. “More Choice. Better Service. Lower Prices,” the ads state, as though the government was the chief competitor, not the regulator, of a wireless industry that employs hundreds of thousands.

The federal government has since 2006 spent an estimated half-billion dollars or more on advertising, including $100 million on those ever-present Economic Action Plan ads.

Is this political advertising? Or, as the government claims, simply money spent to “inform” Canadians?

Ontario solved this problem almost a decade ago when it passed a law requiring the Auditor-General to review all government ads for political content. 

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Thomas Walkom notes that the CETA isn't particularly about trade, but instead serves to enshrine yet again the principle that investors come before citizens.

- Lana Payne highlights the contradiction between the promise that giveaways to the corporate sector will lead to good jobs, and the reality that employers are looking more and more toward exploitative structures such as unpaid internships and temporary foreign workers.

- Meanwhile, Konrad Yakabuski sees the Cons' set of minor consumer baubles as a poor substitute for economic development which would actually help working Canadians.

- Finally, Cameron Dearlove writes about the impact of income and social supports on overall well-being:

The study of the social determinants of health provides us with the best opportunity for reining in long-term health costs. The social determinants are the economic and social conditions that determine the health of individuals and communities. Research has shown that economic and social conditions are more important factors in determining health than individual and family behaviour.

Put simply, your income has a greater impact on your health than lifestyle choices. One oft-cited study revealed an astonishing 21-year life expectancy gap between two Hamilton neighbourhoods — one affluent, one with entrenched poverty. That poorer neighbourhood's life expectancy of 65.5 years isn't close to Canada's average. If it were a country, it would rank 165th in the world.

We find equally striking numbers when looking beyond communities to the health costs of individuals experiencing poverty. A study in Vancouver determined that the costs to the health system of one homeless individual accessing emergency services can reach $55,000 a year, a figure well beyond what it would have cost to house this person. 

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What about the social determinants of childhood development and education? Poverty can actually leave a mark on a child's brain development. A Berkeley study identified differences in prefrontal cortex development based on a child's socioeconomic background, a part of the brain responsible for problem solving and creativity.

Studies across age groups show that the stressful reality of poverty takes up so much mental energy that it can negatively impact an individual's pursuit of education. 

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People like to believe that our individual efforts and decisions determine our fates, but the social determinants expose the naiveté of this view. Pulling oneself up from one's bootstraps isn't impossible. But systemically, the dice are loaded. 

It's time we put to rest the assumption that cuts to social and health spending save money. Let's judge spending decisions instead on the social determinants of everything.

On misdirection

Shorter Konrad Yakabuski:

If only unions had let themselves be brow-beaten into accepting less wages and security for their members, then surely our corporate overlords would have granted greater wages and security to everybody!