Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Geoffrey Diehl wonders when we'll see a revolution - while noting that even as some of the challenges we already face demand systemic change which is being put off through corporate demurral, some of the plausible sources include people determined to impose even less plausible versions of reality. And Kalena Thomhave points out that corporate profiteering in the pricing of the necessities of life has been paired with similar exploitation by banks in cashing in on the price of credit to enable people to purchase them. 

- Jonathan Watts reports on a new study discussing how big banks are greenwashing their continued funneling of money to climate-destroying projects. Karine Péloffy and Leah Temper write that there's an obvious reason why the fossil fuel sector is demanding the right to lie to Canadians, as its entire business model is built on a foundation of deflection and deception. And John Woodside reminds us that manipulative petropolitics are the main obstacle to a rapid shift to clean, affordable renewable energy. 

- Hamilton Nolan writes that a lack of available and affordable housing is at the root of economic insecurity even when nominal numbers are going up. Jennifer Brown reports on Colorado's success providing homes to unhoused people (with resulting social benefits exceeding the up-front cost). And Leilani Farha and Julieta Perucca lament that Canada's National Housing Council has decided primarily to serve landlords rather than to recognize and give effect to the right to housing. 

- Meanwhile, Paul Willcocks examines the deceptive and overwrought campaign against even a modest step toward tax fairness which would merely reduce the artificial preference granted to rich people's capital gains over workers' wages. 

- Finally, Basema Al-Alami asks whether a few arrests of neo-Nazis are a sign of any meaningful commitment on the part of Canada's law enforcement apparatus to start taking far-right hate and violence seriously. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Maxwell Smith, Ross Upshur and James Downar warn us against mistaking a temporarily flattened curve for a final victory over the spread of COVID-19.

- Leilani Farha questions how it's possible for people to help fight the coronavirus by staying at home when they don't have a secure home to begin with. And Duncan Cameron suggests that we can provide needed community housing by repurposing spaces which no longer work for retail businesses.

- George Monbiot argues that we shouldn't be bailing out the fossil fuel sector (including airlines and the auto sector as currently structured) when it's based on a model which causes unconscionable damage to our planet. And in response to Jason Kenney's reactionary attacks on the concept of a Green New Deal, Bronwen Tucker highlights how Alberta would stand to benefit from a transition to clean energy.

- Finally, Ed Broadbent and Rick Smith set out a progressive framework for a COVID-19 recovery plan:

1. Prioritize the needs of people. We need to work with employers to save and create jobs, but the focus should be on bettering the lives of individual Canadians. Financial aid to corporations should be much more conditional than in past rescue packages. Any recovery must ensure by law that public dollars are not diverted into exorbitant executive compensation packages, stock buybacks or increased dividend pay-outs.
2. Reinforce people’s economic and social rights. Temporary fixes must be changed into longer term reforms, such as reconfigured income supports to supplement EI; extension of the scope of public health care to home care, long-term care homes and universal public pharmacare; and the implementation of a “decent work” agenda with paid sick days and liveable wages.
3. Public investment. With families and corporations deep in debt even before the crisis, and with some sectors (such as tourism and oil and gas) very unlikely to recover quickly, public investment will have to drive recovery. Such investment should be focused on job-rich areas that deliver on our collective goals, like green infrastructure (renewables, energy conservation, public infrastructure) and affordable housing.
4. Transition to greater national self-sufficiency in some sectors. The global economy is here to stay, but we need to rebuild Canadian productive capacity to meet key needs such as food security and medical supplies rather than rely exclusively on global markets.
5. Spend what it takes. The Bank of Canada is providing the resources we need short term to support Canadians. A longer-term public investment program intended to address income inequality will also require radical tax reform, including taxation of wealth.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Owen Jones asks why we're not treating the existential threat of a climate breakdown with anything close to the urgency applied to the coronavirus response. And Niklas Höhne, Michel den Elzen, Joeri Rogelj, Bert Metz, Taryn Fransen, Takeshi Kuramochi, Anne Olhoff, Joseph Alcamo, Harald Winkler, Sha Fu, Michiel Schaeffer, Roberto Schaeffer, Glen P. Peters, Simon Maxwell and Navroz K. Dubash highlight how a decade of delay on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has already made the task far more difficult.

- Norm Farrell offers a reminder that greenhouse gas emissions aren't any less damaging just because nobody bothers to measure them. And Sarah Cox reports on the massive liability attached to B.C.'s orphaned oil and gas wells.

- Sir Michael Marmot offers a reminder of the importance of the social determinants of health after a decade in which the UK has chosen to make itself a test case in the harm that can be done by austerity. And Laurie Monsebraaten notes that the results of Ontario's basic income pilot show that rather than disincentivizing work, a reliable source of income instead enabled people to find better-paying and more secure employment. 

- Simon Wilson writes about Leilani Farha's case to make evictions illegal as part of the recognition of housing as a human right.

- Finally, Jenna Moon offers some background on the use of facial recognition software - both as a matter of policing and of corporate profit-seeking. And Caitlin Taylor, Stephanie Matteis and David Common report on the design and manufacturing of consumer products to fail and require replacement.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Polly Toynbee and David Walker write about the brutal social consequences of a decade of austerity in the UK.

- Andrew Jackson reviews James Crotty's Keynes Against Capitalism with a strong emphasis on Keynes' recognition of the need for a democratically-planned economy.

- Justin Ling suspects that a political reckoning may be on its way as housing prices soar far beyond the means of Canada's working class. And Leilana Farha writes that the effect of setting housing policy based on the profit motive of developers is to deny people a human right to a safe place to live.

- Josh Dzieza discusses the dangers of putting algorithms in charge of workplaces (and treating workers' humanity as an inefficiency to be eliminated). And Jason Miller writes that the problem of far too many workers lacking social supports to make it possible to follow quarantine recommendations is no less prevalent in Canada than the U.S.

- Finally, Matthew Norris writes that the emergence of protests across Canada is a symptom of crumbling democratic legitimacy. And David Roberts notes that the U.S. allies of Canada's right-wing parties are going to ever greater lengths to stymie even the most basic of governance - with the party's minority in Oregon's legislature systematically denying quorum in order to make sure a Democratic majority is unable to pass anything at all.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Emilie Prattico comments on the need to move past an economy that generates billionaires and widespread precarity in order to ensure that collective problems can be meaningfully addressed:

While the public has never been as outspoken in its support of urgent and ambitious climate action, money talks, too—and that sound you’re hearing is the crushing din of an economy designed to further the interests of a capital-owning ruling class.
...
...(T)he kind of transformation we need to tackle climate change will require the overhaul of the entire economic system, not the incremental adjustments made by individual companies or countries. Shifting toward a net-zero carbon economy requires innovation in products and processes, the development of new business models, and new forms of cooperation across industries. It will unleash large amounts of investments into new, low-carbon plants and infrastructures. It will call for radically new legal, fiscal, and policy frameworks. It is highly unlikely to sustain the kinds of inequalities we witness today, nor support the existence of philanthropic billionaires.
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The climate is the rare problem billionaires can’t throw their money at. We don’t need donations. We need a fundamentally different kind of economy, and radical action to profoundly transform the capitalist system that allows for billionaires to exist in the first place.

- David Suzuki writes that we can't afford to fiddle while our planet burns. And Dennis Wamstead notes that even in the U.S., renewable electricity generation is now exceeding that from coal.

- Alicia Elliott questions why safe water supplies continue to be lacking for far too many Indigenous communities. And Emily Mathieu reports on Leilani Farha's work to point out the absurdity of a homelessness epidemic being allowed to fester in cities as wealthy as Toronto.

- John Michael McGrath points out that the Ford PCs have chosen to maximize how much damage they do to the province in the name of satisfying base impulses, rather than paying any attention to the importance of programs and funding they're slashing. And Glen Pearson discusses the distinction between conservatism based on the preservation of institutions and values, and the current version built around lashing out in anger.

- Finally, Hassan Yussuff rightly argues that nobody should die for their job - even as over 1,000 Canadians do just that every year.

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.
...
(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 Evening Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jennifer Wells reports on the CCPA's latest study of the continually-increasing chasm between corporate executives and the rest of the workforce. But the Guardian notes that disclosure of CEO pay hasn't done anything to close the gap - signalling that stronger and more direct public policy will be needed to get the job done.

- Noam Schieber discusses the downside of accepting a place outside normal employment structures in order to avoid taxes in then short term. And Andrew Khouri notes that Donald Trump's attacks on immigrants have predictably allowed employers to exploit workers under threat of deportation.

- But on the bright side, The Local reports on the next goal of a strong labour movement in Germany, where a 28-hour work week is now on the table.

- Jeffrey Sachs points out how corporate greed is damaging the health and life expectancy of Americans. And Danyaal Raza argues that Canada shouldn't let profit motives take precedence over a safe blood supply.

- Finally, Leilani Farha writes that this should be the year to finally address housing as a fundamental right:

Rights-based housing strategies are not one-size fits all, but there are some key requirements that can be shaped to fit national and local contexts. As a starting point, housing strategies must guarantee that no one is left behind, which, among other things, means they must commit to ending homelessness by 2030.

This also means housing strategies must go well beyond the provision of housing. Strategies must have structural change as their ambition. They must aim to transform societies where economic policies and housing systems create and sustain inequality and exclusion, into societies in which housing is a means to ensure security and inclusion.

There are fundamental shifts that rights-based strategies must effect in order to be successful.

Strategies must transform how governments, at all levels, interact with those who are homeless and inadequately housed. Instead of viewing them as needy beneficiaries, objectsof charity, or, worse, as criminals, they must instead recognise that people who are homeless also have rights – and are active citizens who should be involved in decisions affecting their lives. This would ensure that strategies respond to people’s own experiences.

Strategies must also transform the relationship between governments and the financial sector. Because most governments rely extensively on the private sector to meet housing needs, strategies must ensure that human rights implementation is the overriding goal of all investment in housing and residential real estate, and that the primacy of housing’s social function is never a subsidiary or neglected obligation.
...
(O)ur choice is to either be complacent and allow our cities to become the playgrounds of the rich while the rest of us are priced out of our homes; or to recognise the urgent need for action, and declare 2018 the year of the right to housing, and every year thereafter, until governments are held accountable, cities become inclusive, and our housing accessible, secure, and affordable.

I choose the latter.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Maia Szalavitz writes that the atmosphere of competition and status signalling which prevails in unequal societies is directly connected to increased homicide rates:

While on the surface, the disputes that triggered these deaths seem trivial – each involved apparently small disagreements and a sense of being seen as inferior and unworthy of respect – research suggests that inequality raises the stakes of fights for status among men.

The connection is so strong that, according to the World Bank, a simple measure of inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between American states and between countries around the world. When inequality is high and strips large numbers of men of the usual markers of status – like a good job and the ability to support a family – matters of respect and disrespect loom disproportionately.

Inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable”, says Martin Daly, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario and author of Killing the Competition: Economic Inequality and Homicide.
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Obviously, potential murderers don’t check the local Gini Index – the most commonly used measure of inequality that looks at how wealth is distributed – before deciding whether to get a gun. But they are keenly attuned to their own level of status in society and whether it allows them to get what they need to live a decent life. If they can’t, while others visibly bask in luxury that seems both impossible to attain and unfairly won, those far from the top often become desperate.

- Meanwhile, Dominic Rushe discusses how Donald Trump's giveaway to the rich looks to exacerbate inequality while producing the same economic devastation wrought by Sam Brownback in his failed Kansas experiment.

- Karl Nerenberg reports on the federal government's failure to budget anywhere enough money to even theoretically end boil-water advisories on First Nations reserves (let alone fund the operation of infrastructure after it's installed).

- Finally, Leilani Farha writes that we should push governments to fix the homelessness problems they've created by recognizing the right to housing. And the Star's editorial board discusses the importance of ensuring permanent homes for people facing homelessness, rather than limiting any policy response to temporary shelters.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your year.

- Michelle Chen writes that wealth inequality and social stratification are only getting worse in the U.S. And Edwin Rios and Dave Gilson chart the diverging fates of the top .01% which is seeing massive gains, and the rest of the U.S.' population facing continued income and wealth stagnation.

- Noah Smith offers his theory as to why low interest rates haven't resulted in promised corporate investment, noting that capital has effectively been rationed by entry barriers rather than going to new development where it might have served some useful purpose.

- Markham Hislop's wish for the new year is for Canada's fossil fuel industry to respect people enough to engage with political and environmental reality, rather than insulting the public by glossing over our changing energy options. Derek Leahy discusses how a modernized transportation system could make substantial progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

- Joan Bryden reports on the federal government's underfunding of First Nations mental health services which is forcing some families to give up their children in order to allow for access to needed treatment. And Monika Dutt comments on the dangers of federal health care funding being a matter of province-by-province fragmentation rather than national standards.

- Finally, Ben Kentish reports on the UK's increase in homelessness caused by a combination of austerian housing policy and soaring rental rates. And Leilani Farha discusses why housing should be treated as a matter of needs and rights rather than profit opportunities:

What animates those in the business of housing is the idea that housing is a matter for the financial elite: a place to park surplus capital to maximise wealth, with little concern or return for people struggling to live in dignity with a decent, affordable roof over their head. This engenders inequality and exclusion and takes out the social function of housing from the equation.

The virtual silence about this type of opportunism and its implications reflects the world in which we live. The more housing is dominated by corporate and financial elites who interact with it as an asset from which to reap a profit, with scant regulations, the more people who most need human rights protections are denied access: pushed to the peripheries because they cannot afford to live in cities, or removed from their homes and rendered homeless to make way for those with economic clout.

For those pushed out, housing is not about financial securitisation. It’s about securing the right to life. They describe their experiences in terms of their struggle for dignity; they articulate their circumstances as a denial of their humanity and their human rights.
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In so many ways housing is about human life, dignity and humanity. Fundamental human rights. How do we reconcile that with the dominant idea of housing as a commodity owned by faceless, nameless corporate elites who are left unaccountable to human rights obligations?

As we say goodbye to 2016 and look forward to a new year, we need to re-embrace housing for its fundamental dimensions – its social value as a place necessary for human wellbeing, where people raise families, build communities and participate in civic life. And we need to sell that notion of housing back to our governments to derail the collision course between human rights and investor interests.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Andrew Jackson discusses how large inheritance and accumulated capital lead to gross economic and social distortions:

Inheritances are quite heavily concentrated among the most affluent families and thus compound income and wealth inequality over time.

Inheritances continue to play a significant role in the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest Canadians. Forbes Magazine rankings of billionaires show that the ten richest Canadian families include at least four heads of families whose fortunes were at least partly inherited: those of David Thomson, James and Arthur Irving, and Galen Weston.

Wealth, especially financial wealth, is highly concentrated in Canada and produces a significant source of income and economic well-being for the rich which is not earned in the same sense as income from wages and salaries. At a minimum, inequality of financial wealth greatly reinforces inequality of income.

This is hard to justify on the normative grounds used by liberals to justify economic inequality, namely that individual rewards reflect the productive contributions of individuals. Accordingly, it is not “unfair” to consider taxation of inheritances and large accumulations of wealth.

- Leiliani Farha weighs in on the inescapable connection between inequality and homelessness of all types. And PressProgress highlights Derek Fildebrandt's attempt to minimize discussion of any social issues whatsoever.

- Marc Lee offers his take on what happened at the first ministers' meeting on climate change in Vancouver, while John Paul Tasker reports that the federal Libs' plan on making sure carbon pricing is in place regardless of any provincial obstruction. And Joseph Heath explains why Brad Wall's position to the contrary can only be explained by fealty to corporate backers over sound governance:

(W)e all know that the current price of carbon – zero – is too low. You don’t have to know how high it should be to know that $0 is not the correct price. (Actually, in practice it’s less that zero, because of the various ways in which fossil fuel production is subsidized.) So in order to get a properly structured market, and to eliminate the unfair competitive advantage that hydrocarbons enjoy over other energy sources in the current market, one needs to put a price on carbon. What will be the effects of raising the price? Who knows? The beauty of the market is that we don’t have to know. What we do know is that raising the price will improve the allocation of resources and increase welfare.
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Wall’s support of the “free market” is not the sort of ideological conviction that arises from a sober assessment of the virtues of private enterprise, but more like a set of ideas picked up on the golf course, from hobnobbing with CEOs. It is essentially class politics, not responsible governance.

- Meanwhile, Eric Holthaus points out that at least on a temporary basis, we've already reached the two-degree threshold seen as the point of no return for climate change.

- Finally, CUPW makes the case for postal banking as both an important social service and a source of public revenue.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- George Monbiot discusses the inherent conflict between consumption and conservation:

We can persuade ourselves that we are living on thin air, floating through a weightless economy, as gullible futurologists predicted in the 1990s. But it’s an illusion, created by the irrational accounting of our environmental impacts. This illusion permits an apparent reconciliation of incompatible policies.

Governments urge us both to consume more and to conserve more. We must extract more fossil fuel from the ground, but burn less of it. We should reduce, reuse and recycle the stuff that enters our homes, and at the same time increase, discard and replace it. How else can the consumer economy grow? We should eat less meat to protect the living planet, and eat more meat to boost the farming industry. These policies are irreconcilable. The new analyses suggest that economic growth is the problem, regardless of whether the word sustainable is bolted to the front of it.

- And David Roberts argues that Alberta's new climate change plan is well-designed precisely because it includes measures to cut down on consumption rather than aspiring to right-wing notions of revenue neutrality.

- Adrienne Montani makes the case for a plan to reduce child poverty in British Columbia. And Leilani Farha writes that the anticipated arrival of a new group of refugees should serve as an opportunity to evaluate and improve the plight of people already living in poverty.

- Meanwhile, Thomas Walkom points out that the Libs' pattern of walking back their most immediate post-election promise to help Syrian refugees bodes poorly for the rest of their campaign commitments.

- Finally, Don Lenihan comments on the psychology of the politics of fear:

Terrorism is effective not because groups like ISIS are so powerful, but because they are so good at turning our own psychology against us. Suicide bombings fool the brain into believing an evil empire is invading our shores.
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There is a vicious circle here that, ironically, turns us all into ISIS recruits, first, by getting us to agree to play the game by their rules; and then by drawing us deeper and deeper into its clutches. At the same time, talk of the need for ever-greater security and surveillance invades our public discourse. The politics of fear starts creeping in.

The moral is that the terrorist threat to our freedom and safety comes less from the thugs at ISIS than from ourselves. We hold ourselves hostage to a discourse of fear, then use it to sideline democracy in order to protect ourselves from the very threat we have manufactured.