Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Joseph Stiglitz offers his suggestions (PDF) for a tax system which would encourage both growth and equality:

Tax reform...offers a path toward both resolving budgetary impasses and making the kinds of public investments that will strengthen the fundamentals of the economy. The most obvious reform is an increase in the top marginal income tax rates – this would both raise needed revenues and soften America’s extreme and harmful inequality. But there are also a variety of other effective possible reforms related to corporate taxation, the estate and inheritance tax, environmental taxes, and ensuring that the government gets full value when it sells public assets.

- PressProgress calls out Restaurants Canada for dishonestly claiming its members are abusing temporary foreign workers only because they can't find workers at any price. And Alison points out how the same group saying it doesn't matter how much workers are paid has gleefully pronounced its success in suppressing the minimum wage.

- Meanwhile, Carly Schwartz discusses the plight of the working poor in North America - or in other words, some of the same the employees the fast-food industry brags about having held to sub-poverty wages. And Lynn Stuart Parramore takes a look at the "gig economy" and its disastrous effect on workers:

Proponents of the gig economy, from the New York Times' Thomas Friedman to bright-eyed TED pundits, tout it as a welcome escape from the prison of the standard workweek and the strictures of corporate America. Working on a project-to-project basis will set you free, they tell us. Wired magazine has called it "the force that could save the American worker.”

But when you’re actually stuck in it, the gig economy looks quite different.

Consider the New York Freelancer’s Union: According to a report in the New York Times, 29 percent of the union’s New York City members earn less than $25,000 a year, and in 2010, 12 percent of members nationally received some type of public assistance. Turns out that life with no health benefits, vacation pay or retirement plan is not a rosy picture.
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What’s really going on is the desire of businesses to chop wages and benefit costs while also limiting their vulnerability to lawsuits, which can happen when salaried employees are mistreated. The burden of economic risk is shifted even further onto workers, who lose the security and protections of the New-Deal-era social insurance programs that were created when long-term employment was the norm. 

- Upstream points out Canada's poor ranking compared to international peers when it comes to children's well-being. Jon Land discusses Save the Children's research showing how the UK's austerity is driving millions of children into poverty. And Roger Cohen writes that the problem of capitalism eating its children applies globally:

[Mark Carney's] bluntness reflects the fact that, six years after the crisis, the core problem has not gone away: The deep unease and anger in developed countries about the ways globalization and technology magnify returns for the super-rich, operating in a world of low taxation and lax regulation where short-term gain becomes a guiding principle, even as societies become more unequal, offering diminished opportunities to the young, less community and a growing sense of unfairness.
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(H)uman beings matter. An age that has seen emergence from poverty on a massive scale in the developing world has been accompanied by the spread of a new poverty (of life and of expectations) in much of the developed world. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Interdependence is a reality, but the way it works is skewed. Clinton noted that ants, bees, termites and humans have all survived through an unusual shared characteristic: They are cooperative forms of life. But it is precisely the loss at all levels of community, of social capital, that most threatens the world’s stability and future prosperity.

- Finally, Marilla Stephenson writes about two Con patronage scandals arising out of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. But predictably, the Cons' response to news of their own corruption has merely been to slam the door on anybody trying to figure out what they're up to - as evidenced by their sudden and inexplicable decision to turn the publicly-funded Challenger fleet into Stephen Harper's personal and confidential private jet service.

The reviews are in

It's a shame it's taken until after the end of the sitting of Parliament for the Cons' dumb on crime legislation to receive the criticism it deserves. But at least we're seeing the right responses now. Here's Marilla Stephenson:

The truly frustrating aspect of the change in law is that it does nothing to speed already slow court dockets that are straining to accommodate cases in often inadequate and understaffed court facilities. The Conservatives, rather than doing something at the front end of the system that could have reduced the "time served before sentencing, have further back-end loaded an already groaning system by tying the hands of judges to prevent them from using their discretion.

And besides mirroring a heavy-handed American justice system, have the Conservatives done anything to demonstrate that eliminating "time served does anything to reduce crime in the first place?

The Leader-Post editorial board:

As he finished his term as Canada's first ombudsman for crime victims in April, Steve Sullivan said: "The tough-on-crime agenda will not meet the needs of victims of crime." Sullivan called for "balance" and questioned the 27-per- cent hike in prison spending at a time of falling crime rates.

Let's be clear: Those who are a menace to society must be removed from it -- and for long periods if necessary.

But one size -- jail -- does not fit all. Locking up thousands more people without offering any evidence that this will increase public safety is itself a miscarriage of justice.

And the Globe and Mail:

It is unfathomable that the Canadian government would be preparing to more than double annual spending on the country’s jails at a time when almost all other government departments are being held in check, or cut. Never mind deficit reduction. Never mind health care or education. Never mind the environment. Only one thing matters: to be seen as tough on crime.

If the Truth in Sentencing Act costs what Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, thinks it will, the act is reckless and ridiculous. Mr. Page’s estimate is that the costs to run the federal and provincial jails, now at $4.4-billion a year, will rise to $9.5-billion by 2015-16. Sixty per cent of the extra costs, or $3.1-billion a year, would be borne by the provinces. And that’s just one of many crime bills.

If the government didn’t know what the new law would cost, its managerial incompetence is inexcusable. If, as is more likely, it knew but didn’t say, its stealth is unjustifiable. Why would Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has been promoting government-wide restraint in the name of deficit control, allow jail budgets to go wild? Why would the government not tell the truth about the Truth in Sentencing Act?