Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Katha Pollitt reviews Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, and identifies the problem that profiteers have a vested interest in perpetuating poverty:

What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging duplexes, fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be wrong. Tobin Charney makes $400,000 a year out of his 131 trailers, some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her numerous properties – some presentable, others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate.
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Desmond lays out the crucial role housing plays in creating and reinforcing white privilege. In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the US, all black people suffer from housing discrimination and all white people benefit at least a little from the racial dividend – a landlord who will rent to them but not to black people, for instance, or offer them a nicer apartment. Black people have the worst housing in the worst neighbourhoods – the great fear of the trailer-park people, who are all white, is that they will end up on the black side of town. Eviction hits black women hardest of all, and the bleak benches of housing courts, which deal with disputes between landlords and tenants, are full of black women and their children: “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighbourhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

What are the social costs of eviction? It puts incredible stress on families. It prevents people from saving the comparatively small sums that would let them stabilise their situation. They are always starting over from scratch, losing their possessions in the chaos of removal, or putting them in storage and losing them when they can’t pay the fees. An eviction on your record makes the next apartment harder to get. Eviction damages children, who are always changing schools, giving up friends and toys and pets – and living with the exhaustion and depression of their parents. We watch Jori go from a sweet, protective older brother to an angry, sullen boy subject to violent outbursts who is falling way behind in school.

Eviction makes it hard to keep up with the many appointments required by the courts and the byzantine welfare system: several characters have their benefits cut because notices are sent to the wrong address. Eviction destroys communities: when people move frequently, they don’t form the social bonds and pride in place that encourage them to care for their block and look out for their neighbours.

- Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom examine the relationship between fairness and inequality, and find that people's more intuitions are aimed more toward the former than the latter.

- Frank Fear discusses how "progressive neoliberalism" is undermining the progressive movement by opening up even more space for neoliberal management theories to dominate politics. And Jared Bernstein argues that we'll achieve better policy results by directly providing for the outcomes we want, rather than hoping for market mechanisms or other complex structures to achieve them indirectly. 

- Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen points out that trade over long distances as a proportion of total trade hasn't changed over the past three decades - meaning that the growing dominance of capital in that time can't be explained solely by globalization as a value-neutral principle. 

- Finally, Steve Lambert reports on Wab Kinew's entry into the Manitoba NDP's leadership race.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Robert Reich points out how perpetually more severe corporate rights agreements are destroying the U.S.' middle class. And Michael Geist concludes his must-read series by summarizing the dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (and making the case against ratifying it).

- Jeremy Runnalls writes about the growing movement toward a basic income to combat poverty. And Carter Vance makes the case for a wealth tax to start narrowing the chasm between the wealthy few and the rest of Canada:

(I)ncome statistics from one year may not fully capture the financial state of an individual or household. One might appear "wealthy" according to year-end income, but have far less net wealth due to high debts or high living costs. Wealth measures have their flaws as well, in particular that they take into account non-liquid assets (such as a primary residence), but they are often a better guide when it comes to inequality.

Statistics Canada does not have full data prior to 1999 in terms of its Survey of Financial Security (SFS), which tracks and measures financial assets and debts within Canadian households. That said, the statistics we do have paint a rather alarming picture.

Median net worth (that is, household assets minus debts), actually dropped in absolute terms from 1999 to 2012 for the bottom 20 per cent of earners, while nearly doubling in the upper 20 per cent This means that the median net worth of the upper 20 per cent of income earners is now 25 times that of the lower-middle 20 per cent and nearly 1250 times (no, that is not a typo) the lowest 20 per cent. Commentators can deny the reality of income inequality all they want, but there's no fiddling with the hard numbers here.
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Wealth inequality, then, affects everything it can touch and therefore demands a policy response all its own. Unlike many of our OECD brethren, Canada does not currently levy an inheritance, estate or wealth tax of any sort. Where they do exist, wealth taxes are increasingly under both rhetorical and technocratic threat.

Since governmental tax and transfer powers remain the only things that have taken some of the sting out of increased income inequality, it's well past time to put a similar dent in inequalities of wealth. Wealth taxes are one of strongest tools to combat the surfeit of economic and political power on the side of capital.

- Jody Porter reports on the ongoing gap in educational funding for First Nations students compared to other Canadian children. And the CP highlights the millions of dollars the federal government has spent fighting to get out of paying benefits to employees who get sick while on parental leave.

- Kathryn May notes that the Trudeau Libs are merely following the Harper Cons' plan to gut the sick leave program for federal public servants. And Elizabeth Thompson points out that there's been no change whatsoever from the Cons' push to hand hundreds of thousands of Canadians' bank records to the IRS.

- But on the side of progress, Zosia Bielski discusses the Manitoba NDP's move to ensure that paid leave is available for people fleeing domestic abuse. And Selina Chignall reports on Niki Ashton's new campaign to give a voice to young workers entering a precarious labour market.

Wednesday Evening Links

Miscellaneous material for your midweek reading.

- Erin compares the stimulative effects of Ontario's election platforms:

A multiplier is the amount by which a dollar of budgetary outlay increases Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The federal Department of Finance estimates multipliers of 1.3 for public expenditure, 0.9 for personal tax cuts and 0.2 for corporate tax cuts in the year after their enactment.

Applying these multipliers to Ontario’s election platforms suggests a GDP boost of $1.3 billion from the Conservatives, $1.4 billion from the Liberals and $1.8 billion from the NDP if corporate tax credits are treated as corporate tax cuts. Counting these credits as public spending brings the NDP’s stimulus to $2.3 billion.

Of course, all of the above multipliers would be lower in Ontario because it is smaller than the national economy. Proportionally more spending would flow outside the province than outside the country as a whole. The NDP’s Buy Ontario policy would limit this outflow by keeping a larger share of procurement spending inside the province.

Given higher outflows and lower multipliers at the provincial level, the federal government should take primary responsibility for using fiscal policy to manage economic demand. However, to the extent that Ontario provincial platforms can be evaluated as stimulus packages, the NDP proposal is strongest.

New Democrats would deliver the most stimulus and job creation at the lowest fiscal cost by focussing on measures with the biggest bang per buck: direct public investment and targeted tax credits. By contrast, Liberals and Conservatives have prioritized slashing tax rates on corporate profits, the least effective way to stimulate the economy.

- Andrew Steele is right to point out the need to treat voter suppression as the crime that it is. But it's equally important that those of us who value widespread participation call out attempts to suppress the vote through legislation and other means as well, rather than buying into the spin that we should value evidence-free assertions about a need to crack down over real access to the polls.

- CUPE notes that the Sask Party's rhetoric about privatizing surgical functions to increase the number of procedures performed has proven entirely false in practice, as millions of dollars in added funding (contingent on the money being siphoned into the private sector) have actually led to less surgeries being performed.

- Finally, I'm guessing most readers will already know about the Manitoba NDP's fourth straight mandate. But it's still a huge plus to see that the efforts to build a right-wing western bloc have hit a barrier at the Manitoba border - and hopefully we'll see even more pushback as the fall's election season progresses.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jeffrey Simpson laments the Cons' evidence-averse crime policies. But it's worth noting that Simpson is off base on one point: much as he assumes that years of spin from the Cons and the media alike have pushed the public to fear for their safety at every turn and thus vote for dumb-on-crime rhetoric at any cost, it just ain't so.

- Gerald Caplan is right to note that for as much damage as they're doing at home, the Harper Cons seem downright moderate compared to some of their right-wing counterparts around the globe. But it's worth recognizing that he forms part of the same global movement - meaning that the disastrous examples abroad serve more as portents of what's to come than as evidence that Harper isn't so bad after all.

- And indeed, some small-c conservatives are coming to see the errors in their ways:

The credit crunch has exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked. The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people. A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different.

And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.

- Dan Gardner treats like things alike. Mayhem ensues.

- Finally, Shauna MacKinnon highlights Manitoba's Poverty Reduction Strategy Act, even while recognizing that it's only one step toward ending poverty in the province.

Thursday Night Link Blast

Clearing out a few random links currently taking up much-needed browser tab space...

- Yes, the Libs deserve to be mocked more than any one post can handle. Fortunately, Greg, NBC Dipper, pogge and Cameron are all up to the task.

- One piece of Gary Doer's announcement that he'll be stepping down as Manitoba's premier which doesn't seem to have received any attention yet is the question of whether he sees his legacy as set already, or whether there will be anything big to come this fall. Though it's probably true that Doer's previous governing style suggests he'll go out quietly rather than even considering any major initiatives as he steps down.

- For those who haven't seen it yet, Kent Peterson's Humble Opinion is the latest addition to a growing stable of Saskatchewan NDP blogs - and worth a read particularly for his youth-oriented perspective on politics.

- Finally, Michael Geist's post on federal copyright consultations this morning focused largely on the fact that submissions from some activist sites may have been wrongly lumped together. But it's interesting as well to take a look at the compiled numbers of submissions - particularly since in addition to an expected number of mainstream pro-user perspectives, they show more submissions backing outright "open copyright" than supporting stronger penalties for infringement, more support for eliminating copyright altogether than for halting "illegal file sharing", and more respondents endorsing the status quo without changes than backing the industry-driven bill which the Cons tried to foist on Canadians.

Deep thought

Surely it's entirely coincidental that the two provinces performing above all expectations through a global recession are the one with a longtime NDP government, and the one where the work of a longtime NDP government hasn't been completely dismantled.