Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Annie Lowrey discusses how essential workers have been consistently undervalued due to political choices. And Patty Coates, Jan Simpson and Pablo Godoy discuss the need to ensure legal protections for workers' rights in the wake of Foodora fleeing the country after its attempt to find a loophole in employment law failed.

- Meanwhile, Vanessa Brcic argues that we have a much-needed opportunity to better apply principles of equity and public health to the design of our social supports. Rutger Bregman implores us to take advantage of the opening to change the world for the better. And Laura Spinney interviews Thomas Piketty about the prospect that the response to COVID-19 will result in fairer societies.

- Gregory Beatty notes that social programs and safety regulations have been under neoliberal attack for decades. And Nam Kiwanuka highlights the dishonesty and inhumanity underlying the right-wing assumption that people receiving needed income support must be gaming the system.

- Susan Delacourt offers a reminder that Stephen Harper's last call for austerity and corporatism in the wake of a global crisis produced little benefit for anybody but the wealthy and well-connected. And Bruce Arthur notes that while Harper tries to deliver right-wing messages to an American audience, Canada faces the need to protect itself from the U.S.' reckless choice to let the coronavirus run wild in the name of Trump and profits.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi writes that the COVID-19 corporate bailout has once again offered the wealthiest Americans the opportunity to avoid any losses from their financial gambling. And Sharon Riley reports on Alberta's use of the pandemic to let oil companies off the hook for the environmental damage done by abandoned wells, while Lawrie McFarlane notes that Alberta is facing the consequences of its own disdain for the rest of Canada.

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Damian Carrington reports on the connection between air pollution and more severe death rates caused by the coronavirus. Clyde Russell writes that there's every reason to expect clean energy to win out over fossil fuels as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, while Bob Weber reports on the path for Canada in particular. Wal van Lierop argues that what's been treated as a normal expectation of windfall profits for the oil industry will likely never return. And even the Globe and Mail's editorial board notes that Jason Kenney's willingness to dump billions of Alberta's dollars into the U.S. construction of Keystone XL is a reckless bet.

- Gil McGowan discusses how Kenney's austerity - including mass layoffs of education workers in the midst of the crisis - figures to prove disastrous for Alberta's economy. And Kyle Bakx reports on the tech employers fleeing Alberta due to the UCP's fixation on a dying industry.

- Matt Taibbi warns against providing yet another set of corporate bailouts that further incentivizes and institutionalized the reckless extraction of wealth by the richest few. And Grace Blakely discusses how to break the stranglehold of the financial sector while reviewing Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan's Sabotage.

- Marc Lee examines the coronavirus relief package offered by British Columbia's provincial government. Angella MacEwen and Armine Yalnizyan (PDF) each point out who's included - and particularly who's left out - in the federal government's response so far. And Jacob Lorinc reports on the plight of students facing a locked-down economy and a lack of income supports.

- Finally, Anna Fifield reports on New Zealand's success in eliminating - rather than merely containing - the spread of COVID-19.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Larry Elliott reports on Oxfam's latest study on wealth inequality, showing that 26 extremely rich people now own as much as half of the world's population. And Ronald Quaroni notes that half of Saskatchewan families are on the brink of insolvency - the highest level of any province in an already-bleak national survey.

- Given that inequality and individual insecurity, it should be little surprise that trust in government and social institutions is eroding (as Louis Putterman points out). And Matt Taibbi highlights how the U.S.' political establishment fails to understand the public's understandable frustration:

I have no idea if Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician. But it’s abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital.

Moreover, she’s laying bare the long-concealed fact that many of their core policies are wildly unpopular, and would be overturned in a heartbeat if we could somehow put them all to direct national referendum.

Take the tax proposal offered by Ocasio-Cortez, which would ding the top bracket for 70 percent taxes on all income above $10 million.

The idea inspired howls of outrage, with wrongest-human-in-history Alan Greenspan peeking out of his crypt to call it a “terrible idea,” Wisconsin’s ex-somebody Walker saying a 5^th grader would know it was “unfair,” and human anti-weathervane Harry Reid saying “you have to be careful” because voters don’t want “radical change quickly.”

Except polls show the exact opposite. Almost everyone wants to soak the rich. A joint survey by The Hill and Harris X showed 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Independents, and even 45 percent of Republicans endorse the Ocasio-Cortez plan.

Is it feasible? It turns out it might very well be, as even Paul Krugman, who admits AOC’s rise makes him “uneasy,” said in a recent column. He noted the head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated the top rate should be even higher, perhaps even 80 percent.

We’ve been living for decades in a universe where the basic tenets of supply-side economics — that there’s a massive and obvious benefit for all in dumping piles of money in the hands of very rich people — have gone more or less unquestioned.

Now we see: once a popular, media-savvy politician who doesn’t owe rich donors starts asking such questions, the Potemkin justifications for these policies can tumble quickly.

- Andrea Janus reports on the widespread food waste in Canada - particularly within the food industry rather than at the consumer level. And Daniel Tencer examines how Canada's housing market has become thoroughly unaffordable for far too many.

- Finally, any Saskatchewan readers are encouraged to participate in what little public consultation the Moe government is offering when it comes to the province's library system - and particularly to point out that libraries do far more than merely lending materials.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Matt Taibbi interviews Bernie Sanders about the concentration of wealth in a few large financial institutions - and the importance of regulating them in the public interest before they once again crash the economy as a whole.

- John Stapleton argues that there's no reason why inheritances should be the most reliable path toward financial security when we can afford a basic income for everybody. And CBC talks to Evelyn Forget about her push for a basic income based on her research into Manitoba's experience with one. 

- Leonid Bershidsky points out why employment statistics which fail to account for underemployment are misleading as a measure of precarity. And Michael Hicks writes that any complaints about a labour shortage reflect the refusal of employers to offer wages and working conditions capable of attracting workers. And Christopher Hope reports that a four-day work week may form part of UK Labour's plan to ensure that workers benefit from increased productivity and corporate wealth. 

- Matt McGrath points out a few of the important takeaways from the IPCC's latest climate change report (PDF summary). Stephen Leahy notes that in addition to highlighting the risk of slipping toward multiple degrees of temperature increases, the IPCC recognizes that we're seeing more severe results than anticipated even from smaller increases. Bloomberg's editorial board weighs in on the need for far more ambition in fighting climate change. And Justin Worland points out that the pathetic lack of concerted action to reduce the damage we're doing to our planet can't be blamed on any shortage of options.

- Finally, Alex Boutilier reports on the rise of far-right extremism online in Canada.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David Sirota talks to Naomi Klein about the push by right-wing politicians and corporate media outlets alike to stifle any discussion of how fossil fuels contribute to the climate change fuelling Hurricane Harvey. Matt Taibbi laments how the media contributed to the development of a public so poorly informed as to elect Donald Trump. And George Monbiot highlights a few of the questions we should be asking about the devastating effects of climate change-related disasters:

To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system.

It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present, that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are dominated by a system that cannot be sustained – a system that is destined, if it is not replaced, to destroy everything.
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We were warned about this. In June, for instance, Robert Kopp, a professor of Earth sciences, predicted: “In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit. Its exposure to sea-level rise – made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes – poses a major risk to its communities.”

To raise this issue, I’ve been told on social media, is to politicise Hurricane Harvey. It is an insult to the victims and a distraction from their urgent need. The proper time to discuss it is when people have rebuilt their homes, and scientists have been able to conduct an analysis of just how great the contribution from climate breakdown might have been. In other words, talk about it only when it’s out of the news. When researchers determined, nine years on, that human activity had made a significant contribution to Hurricane Katrina, the information scarcely registered.

I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if it were an entirely natural phenomenon, like last week’s eclipse of the sun, is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe.

- But to be fair, a few observers have raised important points about how political choices have contributed to the damage caused by Harvey - including Michael Mann on the role of climate change,  Natasha Geiling on the lack of planning for foreseeable events, and Steve Russell on how a lack of regulations exacerbated the damage in Houston in particular.

- Meanwhile, in an observation made well in advance of the latest headline-grabbing storm, Leah Platt Boustan, Maria Lucia Yanguas, Matthew Kahn and Paul Rhode highlight how catastrophic events exacerbate inequality. And James Cook talks to some of the people who couldn't afford to flee from a hurricane.

- Amanda Ghazale Aziz offers perspectives from four women trying to get by on less than a living wage. And Rajiv Prabhakar studies how women disproportionately tend to opt out of pension plans due to immediate affordability concerns.

- Finally, the Economic Policy Institute studies the effect unions have in improving workers' lives. But Nora Loreto comments on the need for labour to lead the way in building social movements which do more than just protect limited workplace gains.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Ellen Gould comments on how the CETA and other trade deals constrain democratic governance - and the fact that corporate bigwigs are threatening any government which considers giving effect to popular opposition doesn't exactly provide any comfort. Meanwhile, Scott Sinclair points out the dangerous effects of the CETA on Canadian public services and water security.

- In a column from September, Robbie Nelson points out the need for our political system to rein in corporate excesses (particularly in the financial sector). And Sebastien Malo points out the World Bank's observation that nowhere near enough investment is going into planning for the effect of climate change on people living in poverty and precarity. 

- Fran Boait writes that capital-focused quantitative easing has done far more to increase inequality than to boost growth - signalling the need for fiscal and economic policy to be used to benefit workers. Jordan Brennan studies the value of investing in people rather than imposing austerity in Nova Scotia. And Armine Yalnizyan discusses how an improved minimum wage leads to bottom-up development. 

- Nicholas Keung reports that a federal fee grab is severely reducing the number of applicants for Canadian citizenship.

- Finally, Lana Payne discusses the challenges that reality-averse candidates like Donald Trump pose for the media. And Matt Taibbi notes that Trump has exploited and amplified the absolute worst elements of the U.S' aristocratic political system. But I wouldn't take that commentary as reason to buy into Jeffrey Tucker's repudiation of politics in general when it can instead offer us a basis to build a political environment that actually builds community.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- PressProgress notes that the Cons' economic track record is one of eliminating well-paying jobs in favour of lower-wage, more-precarious work. And Jim Stanford follows up on why we shouldn't believe the Cons' spin about deficits:

I think that a more fruitful and principled line of attack on the government’s approach would focus on these obvious fiscal and economic errors by the government:

• The October tax cuts were premature; it is tax cuts, not oil prices, which have jeopardized the attainment of a balanced budget.  The Conservatives broke their own promise in implementing tax cuts before the budget was even balanced.  (Breaking their promise, not running a small deficit per se, is their key point of vulnerability.)  In fact, as I show in the Globe and Mail column, the federal budget would be balanced right now, even with lower oil prices, were it not for the accelerated first-year tax cuts which the government was so anxious to rush out the door before the election.
• The October tax cuts are socially and economically damaging.  The CCPA’s fabulous analysis of the perverse distributional effects of income splitting (here and here) is already making this case in spades.
• The government’s response to falling oil prices has revealed confusion and internal division.  Joe Oliver delayed his budget to some unspecified future date (April or even later); perhaps he will actually “table”the budget on the hustings .  Oliver has said that there will be no further spending cuts to offset the loss in revenue, and that the government can use its (phony) $3 billion contingency fund to protect the balanced budget.  Employment Minister Jason Kenney, in contrast, said the exact opposite in public: suggesting that incremental spending cuts might be required, and that the $3 billion cushion would not be drawn down (since it is intended, he argued, for true “emergencies”).  Treasury Board President Tony Clement, meanwhile, also hinted at surprise reductions in spending — channeling Pierre Trudeau in saying “Just watch us” reduce spending.  Clement’s record in consistently underspending authorized operational budgets (part of the government’s “austerity by stealth” strategy).  These mixed messages indicate a breakdown of discipline within Conservative ranks, and send confusing signals to consumers and investors alike.
• Most fundamentally, the government’s macroeconomic and industrial emphasis on making Canada an “energy superpower,” investing so much fiscal and political capital to facilitate energy megaprojects (including fruitless pipeline proposals), vilifying critical voices, and inadequately responding to the negative side-effects of the oil boom on other sectors, has left Canada’s economy unduly vulnerable to an oil price decline that was always inevitable.

My response, therefore, to the question “Will low oil prices push Ottawa into a deficit,” is therefore: “Who cares? The real issue is the government’s failure to use its fiscal and other tools to strengthen the recovery and create jobs. That’s the real mismanagement.

- Jordan Press exposes the Cons' waste of tens of millions of dollars to suppress information from the Canadian public. And Paul Withers reports that while the National Energy Board has stopped allowing citizens to participate in actual assessment hearings in the name of efficiency, it has no qualms about using public money to cheerlead for the pipelines it's supposed to be regulating.

- Meanwhile, Charlie Samuda discusses the need to crack down on tax evasion to ensure the privileged few pay their fair share. And Matt Taibbi writes that the financial sector is back to its old habit of exploiting the public, while fighting the suggestion that advisers face an obligation to put clients' interests first.

- Jeffrey Simpson rightly wonders why our political debates involve little discussion about people living in poverty who have the most to gain or lose from government policy choices. And Natasha Pel comments on how Canada's wealthiest province is doing little to deal with poverty.

- Finally, Rick Salutin points to Syriza's victory in Greece as an example of how the public can overcome the supposedly-inevitable prioritization of profits over people:

Why Syriza won. The short answer is: they put people first. I know all parties say that but (a) they only say it and (b) they only say it at elections. Syriza said and did it. Because they're not just a party but a coalition of parties, groups and movements, they naturally extended into communities and helped people with real needs. This in turn proved they weren't like other parties, just in it for power. That near cliché translated into real policies.

The EU/Germany clearly put numbers (of euros owed) first, as Greece's new finance minister says. So the debate was over priorities. If people prevail, austerity fails. It turns out austerity wasn't inevitable, like a law of nature; it was a question of values.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Elias Isquith interviews Matt Taibbi about the complete lack of morality underlying Wall Street and the regulators who are supposed to protect the public interest from banksters run amok. Paul Buchheit reviews some compelling evidence that poorer people are more ethical than the wealthy - suggesting that extreme wealth and inequality may themselves serve as an indicator of social dysfunction. And Charles Blow writes about the absurdity of blaming poor people for forces beyond their control:

That construct, that the poor are in some way deficient, is a particularly poisonous and unsupportable position. And, by extension, the proposition that people can simply love and marry — traditionally only — their way out of poverty is supremely condescending.

This position, cloaked in an air of benevolence and good will, is in fact lacking in understanding of the lives of poor people and compassion for their plight.
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Poverty is a demanding, stressful, depressive and often violent state. No one seeks it; they are born or thrust into it. In poverty, the whole of your life becomes an exercise in coping and correcting, searching for a way up and out, while focusing today on filling the pots and the plates, maintaining a roof and some warmth, and dreading the new challenge tomorrow may bring.

We should extend the conversation about tackling poverty, but that conversation should not be governed by the belief that poverty in resources is synonymous with poverty of values.

- But as the Observer notes, workers (and particularly the most vulnerable ones) have come to be seen as prey rather than people by the corporate lobby and right-wing political leaders alike:

For the past 30 years, one of the big aims of policy has been to make the labour market more flexible. Trade unions have been curbed, industries have been privatised, welfare reformed and employment protection reduced. The balance of power between labour and capital has been tilted decisively in favour of the latter.

The evidence of this is all around. There are 1.3m jobs on zero-hour contracts; wages can barely keep pace with price increases, even with unemployment coming down at a fair lick. Around 80% of the jobs created in the past year have been for the self-employed, with the suspicion that many of those "running their own business" are doing so involuntarily.

This is the flexible labour market in action. It is what has distinguished the UK economy from some of the more heavily regulated economies in the rest of Europe. Supporters of the reforms of the past three decades say the flexible labour market is the reason the jobless rate is around half the average for the eurozone. Critics say that the smashing of organised labour and the triumph of management is bad for workers, bad for growth and ultimately bad for employers.
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(I)n the long term there is a clear choice. Either the power of labour will be increased by full employment, stronger trade unions and collective bargaining or the flexible labour market will arrive at its ultimate destination: a form of capitalism that cannot function without excessive debt; is marked by low wages, low investment and low productivity; and which eventually ends up eating itself.

- On the subject of workers being used as prey, Kathy Tomlinson reports on the use of Canada's temporary foreign worker program as an extortion racket - and the complete lack of regulatory action even after that flagrant abuse of employer authority was reported to federal officials. And Alison duly mocks the attempt of business groups to pretend that Canadian workers somehow stand to benefit from being pushed aside in favour of more pliable replacements.

- Kaylie Tiessen and Kayle Hatt write about Tim Hudak's desire to turn Ontario into a low-wage profit haven by slashing public services and the jobs that go with them. 

- Finally, Murray Dobbin highlights how Stephen Harper has put Canada on the road to ruin. And Carol Goar notes that the Cons have gone out of their way to prevent the public from knowing exactly what damage they've wrought:

Two things are noteworthy about [the Cons'] pattern of disinformation.

One is that it has lasted so long. Until recently there was no systematic questioning of the “facts” dispensed by Harper and his associates.

The other is that it is locked in. The Tories have downsized Statistics Canada, the country’s chief information gathering agency, so severely that future governments will have to rely on blunt — and sometimes unreliable — tools to monitor socio-economic developments.

Half of the agency’s workforce is gone. Hundreds of its programs have been dropped. The mandatory long-form census has given way to a voluntary household survey. It would cost tens of millions of dollars to reverse these changes — and any government that tried would face resistance from taxpayers conditioned to regard number-crunchers as a needless public expense.
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StatsCan is shrinking from a public information agency into an in-house research bureau for the government. It has curtailed its consultations with entrepreneurs, academics and non-government organizations. It has narrowed its focus. “We found the agency primarily consults with the federal, provincial and territorial governments” the auditor said. “In order to ensure the continued relevance of its data, Statistics Canada should obtain, document and analyze ongoing feedback from the full range of its users.”

StatsCan disconsolately agreed and said it would broaden its future consultations.

What emerged was a picture of a highly professional agency forced to cut corners and lower its standards.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Frances Russell writes about the corrosive effects of inequality. And Robert Reich points out one creative option California is considering to address inequality at the firm level: tying corporate tax levels to wage parity, under the theory that shareholders will then have an incentive to push for a fair distribution of wages.

- Peter Richardson reviews Matt Taibbi's The Divide:

 Taibbi explores why Wall Street bankers are seemingly exempt from criminal prosecution, even as New York City targets petty crime — much of it manufactured by police in minority neighborhoods — more aggressively than ever. He cites statistics to make his argument, but mostly he reports on specific cases. One involves a working-class black man who finally decided to fight a misdemeanor charge for blocking pedestrian traffic — that is, standing on the sidewalk in front of his home. Taibbi also considers the zeal with which government agencies investigate and humiliate welfare recipients and undocumented residents for trying to provide for their families during hard times — times made all the harder because of unprosecuted crimes at the top of the economic food chain.

Everyone knows the rich receive special treatment in this country, especially in court. But Taibbi concludes that the government now offers a sliding scale of civil and criminal protection to U.S. residents. At one end of the spectrum, the very rich are virtually beyond accountability, no matter how massive and destructive their crimes may be. At the other end, the nation’s most vulnerable residents face unremitting investigation and prosecution by bureaucracies determined to find them guilty of something.

Taibbi also surfaces a new set of targets: Justice Department prosecutors who seek settlements for even the most outrageous white-collar scams. Many of them are recruited from law firms whose clients include the largest Wall Street banks. Lanny Breuer, who headed the department’s criminal division when the financial meltdown occurred, is Taibbi’s poster boy for this conflict of interest. Both he and Attorney General Eric Holder were partners at Covington & Burling, which represents JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. All too often, Taibbi argues, the prosecutors have continued to behave like defense attorneys. When Holder was a Clinton administration official, for example, he wrote a memo arguing that prosecutors should consider “collateral consequences” when determining whether to charge persons or corporations. If a criminal prosecution would unduly harm innocent shareholders and employees, the logic went, it made more sense to settle. But once bankers realized they were beyond criminal prosecution, the incentives to transgress increased dramatically.
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“The Divide” marks a shift in Taibbi’s tone. More Lincoln Steffens than Hunter Thompson, Taibbi drops most of the histrionics to reveal the corruption and injustice at hand. He even goes out of his way to be reasonable. He acknowledges that prosecuting financial cases can be expensive and risky, especially when the alleged crimes are complex and the defendants have vast legal resources at their disposal. That fact motivates prosecutors to settle such cases rather than try them in criminal court. He also concedes that many disadvantaged neighborhoods may benefit from tough policing. But he maintains that when combined, the two law-enforcement strategies add up to a glaring injustice. He also notes that it’s far too easy to introduce jurisdictional complications in financial cases that would never be allowed in less consequential cases. To make that point, he recounts a horrific case in which high-profile Wall Street financiers escaped punishment after trying to destroy a company they bet against as well as harassing its executives and their family members. 

- And David Dayen also discusses the consequences of a culture of impunity for the financial sector, with a particular focus on a home-seizure complex which has neither any incentive nor any apparent means to figure out whether a given claim to enforce a mortgage has any basis in fact:

(D)espite the fact that the nation’s courtrooms remain active crime scenes, with backdated, forged and fabricated documents still sloshing around them, state and federal regulators have not filed new charges of misconduct against Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank, U.S. Bank or any other mortgage industry participant, since the round of national settlements over foreclosure fraud effectively closed the issue.

Many focus on how the failure to prosecute financial crimes, by Attorney General Eric Holder and colleagues, create a lack of deterrent for the perpetrators, who will surely sin again. But there’s something else that happens when these crimes go unpunished; the root problem, the legacy of fraud, never gets fixed. In this instance, the underlying ownership on potentially millions of loans has been permanently confused, and the resulting disarray will cause chaos for decades into the future, harming homeowners, investors and the broader economy. Holder’s corrupt bargain, to let Wall Street walk, comes at the cost of permanent damage to the largest market in the world, the U.S. residential housing market.

By now we know the details: During the run-up to the housing bubble, banks bought up millions of mortgages, packaged them into securities and sold them around the world. Amid the frenzy, lenders failed to follow basic property laws, which ensure legitimate transfers of mortgages from one legal owner to another. When mass foreclosures resulted from the bubble’s collapse, banks who could not demonstrate they owned the loans got caught trying to cover up the irregularities with false documents. Federal authorities made the offenders pay fines, much of which banks paid with other people’s money. But the settlements put a Band-Aid over the misconduct. Nobody went in, loan by loan, to try to equitably confirm who owns what.

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There was another solution available here, if Holder’s Justice Department didn’t throw up its hands and settle. Judges could have disassembled the broken mortgage system, and appointed a special master to handle all loans in question. It may have taken years, but the preservation of the public property system makes the time and expense worth it. Unless you would rather kneel to the wishes of the financial industry to keep everything rolling, and let the wound fester.

If you or I pick the lock on a house and try to steal everything in it, we’d probably go to jail. But if I were a bank, and I wrote down on a piece of paper that I simply owned that house, I’d get away with it. That’s the sad legacy of trying to cover up massive fraud instead of dealing with it.

- Don Lenihan responds to Lawrence Martin's suggestion that key PMO staffers be elected by Parliament by pointing out that there's more to democratic accountability than intermittent elections.

- And one of the more important factors needed to hold governments to account is accurate information about what they're doing. Which means there's all the more reason for concern about the Cons' pattern of refusing to release public data and covering up their own actions. But on the bright side, the NDP's push to make government information public by default offers a much-needed contrast.

- Finally, Tim Harper suggests that the temporary foreign worker program is beyond fixing. And
the CP discusses the obvious alternative: rather than binding helpless temporary workers to a single employer for the sole purpose of suppressing their wages and working conditions, we should look to fill with immigrants who can hope to make a future in Canada.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Friday reading.

- Robert Kuttner discusses Karl Polanyi's increasingly important critique of unregulated markets and corporatist states. Sarah Kendzior writes about the latest cycle of workers stuck in poverty who are striking back against a system designed to suppress their standard of living. And Michael Rozworski examines the effect of the Cons' temporary foreign worker focus on Canadian workers:

(W)hile food attendants made up 9% of all TFW Labour Market Opinions (LMOs) issued in Canada in 2012, they comprised 17%, or almost double, of TFW LMOs in Alberta, the province that has the tightest labour market. Indeed, in Alberta the top five occupations filled by TFWs are all in services. For a program that is meant to help employers find workers for otherwise impossible-to-fill positions, it seems to be doing quite the opposite: helping employers staff low-wage service occupations that are relatively always in demand. Government documents show as much – Alberta employers were applying for low-level service LMOs in the same jurisdictions where unemployed workers with skills for those occupations were on EI.

Employers are using TFWs to enforce discipline especially at the lower end of the job market. Increasing bifurcation between low- and high-wage jobs means that the effect is potentially all the greater.
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Bringing in more TFWs is one more means of ensuring that a tighter labour market does not lead to increased agitation for better pay and better conditions. When unemployment (and the even greater underemployment) starts to fall, the increased use of temporary foreign workers is a means of securing continued economic power. The cruel irony is that temporary foreign workers hoping to counteract the effects of an unequal global distribution of goods and power on their families are being used to help safeguard and enlarge disparities in their new home.

The different rules for temporary foreign workers – their institutionalized precarity – help spread a lighter but still increasing precarity throughout the rest of the lower-wage workforce. This is enough to condemn the TFWP as a policy tool that stacks the hand of employers in broader labour relations.

The particular genius of the TFWP, especially as applied to low-wage work, goes further. The TFWP is not only a labour policy tool but, at the same time, an immigration program and, as such, interacts with existing prejudices that limit solidarity along the axis of immigration and race. These work to counteract the potential for solidarity that arises from shared experiences of deteriorating labour conditions. The function of the TFWP on the labour market and on immigration should not be analyzed in isolation. The program lies at a problematic but potentially fruitful intersection of class and immigration – by and large meaning at the intersection of class and race.

- Ben Casselman points out that the timing of a job loss has far more to do with one's future prospects than education, occupation or any other factor which could plausibly be tied to merit. And Lisa Wright reports on the trend toward highly unstable work - which can only increase the odds of a single job loss coming at just the wrong time.

- Claudia Calderon Machicado makes a strong business case for fair paid leave and sick leave programs.

- The CCPA offers a series of papers on the role unions can and should play in ensuring economic fairness - and the steps the Cons and similar governments are taking to prevent them from acting.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi highlights the fact that inequality by design isn't limited to income or wealth - as the same justice system which readily throws people in jail for extended periods of time for relatively minor offences has done nothing to address gross criminal behaviour in financial markets.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- David Dayen discusses how prepaid debit cards are turning into the latest means for the financial sector to extract artificial fees from consumers. And Matt Taibbi reports on the looting of public pension funds in the U.S.:

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year.

The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves.
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Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.

Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they're also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be's like Loeb or scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital are put in charge of their retirement savings.

...

(T)he "unfunded liability" crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive.

In a way, this was a repeat of a shell game with retirement finance that had been going on at the federal level since the Reagan years. The supposed impending collapse of Social Security, which actually should be running a surplus of trillions of dollars, is now repeated as a simple truth. But Social Security wouldn't be "collapsing" at all had not three decades of presidents continually burgled the cash in the Social Security trust fund to pay for tax cuts, wars and God knows what else. Same with the alleged insolvencies of state pension programs. The money may not be there, but that's not because the program is unsustainable: It's because bankers and politicians stole the money.

[Update: And just in time for the C.D. Howe Institute to sell the same kind of snake oil in Canada.]

- And on the subject of the value of public services being gifted to corporate cronies, Simon Enoch highlights the Wall government's broken promise not to privatize Saskatchewan's Crowns - most obvious lately in their elimination of rural liquor stores in favour of corporate-owned replacements.

- Meanwhile, Karen Kamp points out the dangers of allowing for massive corporate funding of political messages to go undisclosed until it's too late.

- Jason Koblovsky catches Con insider Geoff Norquay admitting that the Unfair Elections Act is intended as "vengeance" against Elections Canada for doing its job in investigating the Cons' in-and-out scandal. And Frances Russell takes a look at some of the ways undue restrictions on voting rights may be unconstitutional.

- Finally, Duncan Cameron and Chantal Hebert weigh in on the results of this week's Quebec election. Paul Wells muses about the illusory attraction of the "star candidate". And John Conway focuses on how the PQ's shift in focus from progressive economic policies to reactionary social ones earned it a miserable defeat.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Murray Dobbin points to the oil sector's utter domination of Canada's federal political scene. And Dr. Dawg sums up the problem:

Briefly, the Harperium has now taken to grossly misusing the state apparatus to spy upon and intimidate citizens who dare to disagree with the Prime Minister. The RCMP and CSIS have been improperly deployed against perfectly non-violent folks who happen to oppose the development of the filthy, polluting Alberta Tar Sands—including a story-telling seniors’ group.

The cop-and-spook brigade have, as it turns out, been meeting in cabal with oil company execs, the Department of National Defence and National Energy Board honchos: the last meeting was sponsored by energy heavies Enbridge, Brookfield, and Bruce Power. (Meanwhile, our ultra-secret spy agency, CSEC, has been busy keeping tabs on ordinary folks in airports, perhaps just because they can. They, too, have been attending these top-level meetings.)
...
The Harper regime is now doubling down. In response to a question on the anything-but-random audits, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty attempted to connect these organizations to international terrorism. And the new budget contains monies to be used to counter this alleged threat to national security.

It’s not hard to connect the dots here. The audits are a deliberate form of harassment. Much of this can be traced back to Environment Minister Joe Oliver’s outlandish claim that environmentalism is a plot by foreign radicals to destabilize Canada. And we now know that Harper will pass legislation on request: all Big Oil need do is send a nice letter.

This is, to put it bluntly, exactly how corporatist regimes operate. Coercive state apparatuses are used to squelch dissent. Political opponents are demonized as traitors, amid grave talk of foreign influences and terrorism. And business and government operate as one to get the job done.

- Meanwhile, Bruce Cheadle reports on the consequences of the Harper regime's view of itself as a fully-owned subsidiary of the tar sands, as climate change and the environment have been wiped out of any government plans.

- Matt Taibbi writes about the financial industry's latest scheme to extract massive profits by effectively placing bets on industries which they control directly - when the result is to favour that extraction rather than productive economic development:

(B)anks aren't just buying stuff, they're buying whole industrial processes. They're buying oil that's still in the ground, the tankers that move it across the sea, the refineries that turn it into fuel, and the pipelines that bring it to your home. Then, just for kicks, they're also betting on the timing and efficiency of these same industrial processes in the financial markets – buying and selling oil stocks on the stock exchange, oil futures on the futures market, swaps on the swaps market, etc.

Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass manipulation. It's something akin to letting casino owners who take book on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.

The situation has opened a Pandora's box of horrifying new corruption possibilities, but it's been hard for the public to notice, since regulators have struggled to put even the slightest dent in Wall Street's older, more familiar scams. In just the past few years we've seen an explosion of scandals – from the multitrillion-dollar Libor saga (major international banks gaming world interest rates), to the more recent foreign-currency-exchange fiasco (many of the same banks suspected of rigging prices in the $5.3-trillion-a-day currency markets), to lesser scandals involving manipulation of interest-rate swaps, and gold and silver prices.

But those are purely financial schemes. In these new, even scarier kinds of manipulations, banks that own whole chains of physical business interests have been caught rigging prices in those industries. For instance, in just the past two years, fines in excess of $400 million have been levied against both JPMorgan Chase and Barclays for allegedly manipulating the delivery of electricity in several states, including California. In the case of Barclays, which is contesting the fine, regulators claim prices were manipulated to help the bank win financial bets it had made on those same energy markets.

- Finally, Laura Payton finds that the Cons' excuses for eliminating anything resembling voter turnout from Elections Canada's mandate lack any basis in fact - as motivation, not information, is the main current obstacle to voting (though of course the Cons want to make accessibility a problem for more voters as well). And Bruce Anderson wonders whether voters will rightly punish the Cons for rigging the electoral system for partisan gain rather than the public good.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Matt Taibbi discusses how public pension funds are being looted for the benefit of a few well-connected banksters:

Hedge funds have good reason to want to keep their fees hidden: They're insanely expensive. The typical fee structure for private hedge-fund management is a formula called "two and twenty," meaning the hedge fund collects a two percent fee just for showing up, then gets 20 percent of any profits it earns with your money. Some hedge funds also charge a mysterious third fee, called "fund expenses," that can run as high as half a percent – Loeb's Third Point, for instance, charged Rhode Island just more than half a percent for "fund expenses" last year, or about $350,000. Hedge funds will also pass on their trading costs to their clients, a huge additional line item that can come to an extra percent or more and is seldom disclosed. There are even fees states pay for withdrawing from certain hedge funds.

In public finance, hedge funds will sometimes give slight discounts, but the numbers are still enormous. In Rhode Island, over the course of 20 years, Siedle projects that the state will pay $2.1 billion in fees to hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Why is that number interesting? Because it very nearly matches the savings the state will be taking from workers by freezing their Cost of Living Adjustments – $2.3 billion over 20 years.

"That's some 'reform,'" says Siedle.

"They pretty much took the COLA and gave it to a bunch of billionaires," hisses Day, Providence's retired firefighter union chief.

- The Star's editorial board weighs in on the lack of job opportunities for young workers.

- CBC reports on Alberta's order that a lake be drained in an attempt to contain an ongoing bitumen spill. But of course, it would make more sense to identify and mitigate the risk of that kind of disaster before it materializes - even as the Cons have taken steps to make sure that their oil-industry benefactors don't have to bother carrying out any environmental assessment before putting our land and water at risk.

- Which is to say that the tar sands represent possibly the most important example of a lack of upstream thinking in our current governments. But the new Upstream think tank is working on questioning the short-sighted thinking that leads to harmful (and avoidable) consequences in the long run.

- Finally, Peter Loewen discusses why nomination elections are so valuable within our democratic process:

Hard data on contested versus uncontested nominations are hard to come by, but some do exist. In a recent academic article, Royce Koop and Amanda Bittner document the trend of appointments. In each election from 1993 to 2008, approximately five per cent of Liberal candidates were appointed. This may seem a modest number, but the cumulative effect is a cause for concern. By 2008, a fifth of Liberal MPs were originally appointed candidates. Most have never contested a nomination.

Appointed candidates and those who win nomination battles have different careers. Those who enter politics via a secure candidacy are more likely to find themselves taking up cabinet positions and other high-profile sinecures. They eschew the lower-profile tasks of representation and constituency work.
...Insisting on open local nominations requires candidates to do two things. First, to establish that they are willing to solicit the support of local party members, just as they will have to soon request the support of all local voters. Second, to demonstrate that they can.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Scott Sinclair discusses how CETA could create extreme and unnecessary risk in Canada's banking and financial system:

The failure of a single company (such as Lehman Brothers in October 2008) or unchecked growth in markets for high-risk financial products (such as sub-prime mortgages) can quickly cascade out of control, threatening the integrity of the entire system. Especially during a crisis, financial regulators need to act decisively, without worrying about expensive lawsuits from disgruntled foreign investors. But that’s precisely the toxic ingredient the CETA negotiations have introduced into the mix.

The EU insists that foreign investors must have unimpeded rights to challenge banking and other financial regulations through investor-state dispute settlement. The Canadian Department of Finance is arguing that financial sector regulation is of such critical importance to the economy that regulatory measures must be shielded from direct challenge by foreign investors.

Negotiators reportedly are at an impasse and this issue is now on the list to be resolved by politicians. Given the intense pressure to close a deal, politicians could overrule Finance officials and undermine the ability of regulators to avert or stem future financial crises.
...
Ironically, Europeans are learning the folly of this approach the hard way. Foreign investors have turned to investor-state arbitration to try to recover losses from Europe’s seemingly interminable financial crisis. In the first investor-state case ever by a Chinese mainland investor, a Chinese financial services company is suing Belgium under a 2005 Belgium-China investment protection treaty. Ping An, the largest single shareholder in the Belgian-Dutch bank Fortis, allegedly lost $2.3 billion USD when government authorities, who stepped in to rescue the financial giant, subsequently sold off assets over the objections of minority shareholders. Foreign investors have also filed investor-state claims against both Greece and Cyprus to recover losses incurred under financial restructuring programs.

While the risk of an investor-state dispute is highest during a crisis, under Europe’s proposed CETA approach, more routine financial regulations could also be vulnerable. For example, the Canadian government has tightened mortgage regulations four times since 2008. Canadian officials have publicly confirmed that these are just the sort of regulations that the Europeans want to see exposed to challenge.

- And Matt Taibbi exposes the dirty truth behind the ratings agencies whose word has been relied upon as the basis for far too many economic decisions:

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle.

Their primary function is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression."

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

- Mike de Souza reports on the latest revelations about the Cons using public money to do PR work for the oil sector - explicitly working to "support" the Northern Gateway pipeline even as they claim to be carrying out an unbiased regulatory process. But Barbara Yaffe notes that British Columbians aren't buying the spin - and yet another Enbridge spill won't do much to help the impression that the Cons' oil-industry funders are far more concerned with papering over serious concerns about health and the environment than actually operating safely. 

- Meanwhile, in the department of policies the public actually wants to see Canada's government working on, Steve Morgan discusses EKOS' polling showing 78% popular support for public funding for needed prescription drugs:

Canadians have good reasons to want such reform. Every developed country with a universal healthcare system provides universal coverage of prescription drugs… except Canada.

Drug coverage is provided in all comparable healthcare systems because, when prescribed and used appropriately, prescription drugs can be among the most cost-effective forms of providing healthcare. The architects of these other systems know that charging patients for prescriptions will impede the use of essential medicines – which can cost the healthcare system in other ways, such as increased hospitalizations.

In Canada, many patients cannot afford to take medicines prescribed by their doctors. The recent poll by EKOS suggests that, in the past five years, about one in five Canadians (23%) have chosen not to fill a prescription because of out-of-pocket costs. That’s a lot of missed prescriptions.

Such access problems are prevented when medically necessary prescriptions are covered as part of the healthcare system. Countries with such access – every other developed country with universal healthcare – also spend considerably less on pharmaceuticals than Canada does. This is because healthcare systems that purchase medicines on behalf of entire populations have significant bargaining power in price negotiations with drug manufacturers.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne offers a handy guide to the rights and wrongs involved in Justin Trudeau's massive speaking fees and the Cons' publicly-funded response.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sadly (if perhaps unsurprisingly), the Trudeau Libs' vote with the Harper Cons against civil rights has received relatively little notice compared to the two parties' attack ad posturing. But there's still plenty worth reading on the subject - including another post from pogge, a discussion led by David Ball, and Michael Harris' assessment as to the likely targets of Con-fueled hysteria in the years to come:

(W)ith S-7 the law of the land, some dark possibilities present themselves in this country.

The federal government already has established five Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams across Canada, most recently in Alberta. Those teams, made up of officers from the RCMP, CSIS and the Canada Border Services Agency, have identified Greenpeace as a group that might attack critical infrastructure.

Harper cabinet ministers have described environmentalists as radical extremists controlled by foreign elements. Add into the mix the fact that former First Nations chiefs like Terry Nelson and Dennis Pashe have appeared on Iranian television in a bid for closer relations with that country and a chance to describe their plight and ask yourself — what would happen if either group disrupted Canadian commerce in a peaceful protest?
...
When a prime minister’s favourite part of the justice system is the police, it is a proclivity that bears watching.

- But it should be obvious that anybody genuinely concerned about amoral actors interfering with a functional society should be focused elsewhere. For example, Matt Taibbi finds yet another example of jaw-dropping amounts of money being manipulated by bank insiders for their own personal advantage. Jason Fekete notes that the Cons’ perpetual cuts to the Canada Revenue Agency have allowed tax cheats to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars - while the "good news" in the story consists in part of debts being written off rather than collected. Terry Milewski exposes the latest effort by the Cons to turn the RCMP into a partisan political body, reporting to and protecting the governing party rather than the public. And Jason Markusoff reports on the Manning Centre’s attempts to strong-arm municipal representatives into serving as puppets for the developers who funded Manning in the first place.

- Meanwhile, Sheila Block proposes a public service budget (in contrast to the corporatist tomes we tend to see instead). And Tzeporah Berman and Steven Guilbeault point the way toward what we should be looking to develop as an alternative to market worship, noting that there’s plenty of room for agreement between the environmental and labour movements:

What we’ve realized is pretty simple – no one wins a race to the bottom, not workers, not wild species, and not communities. So cutting down every last tree, shipping out every last barrel of bitumen, catching every last fish in the ocean may fatten some offshore bank account, but it isn’t going to leave us with good jobs for our kids, healthy communities, or a productive environment.

Looking back, it may have all started in the woods, with a few furtive glances and a chance encounter or two, but unionists and environmentalists eventually came to understand that “environment” includes people too. So we sat down and broke bread (and a few other things) together and figured out a way forward in places like the Great Bear Rain Forest, northeast B.C. and the whole vast green boreal forest stretching across Canada. Despite our differences, we knew that the end result of successfully balancing ecosystem protection and economic development would be much more mutually satisfying than another photo op in a clearcut. 

Then another light went on. We looked at the colossal collective challenges facing our world -- like climate change -- and saw that this big black cloud could have a silver lining – if we were smart. Good jobs could be built out of new ways to make energy, new ways to conserve it, new ways to move people, and new ways to meet their need – in fact, all species’ need -- for clean air and clean water. Studies and real-world experience have shown that this approach has much stronger jobs potential than simply putting all our eggs in the export-raw-resources basket – in fact, as many as seven times more jobs for every dollar invested in things like developing renewable energy or improving energy efficiency instead of simply digging more sticky tar out of Alberta.

Together, we’ve been strategizing on how to put Canada out in front in developing and deploying these clean, green solutions. Some unions are investing directly in green solutions, such as through Cycle Capital Management, a venture capital firm supported in part by union dollars that is investing in cutting-edge products and services that help our environment. More broadly, we’re advancing a “jobs of the future are green” agenda through the Blue Green Alliance, which has become a powerful voice trumpeting the connection between action on a healthy environment and action on jobs. 

Now, to some folks in Ottawa, this may actually be seen as something of an unholy alliance. These folks haven’t quite got the message about where the world is heading when it comes to getting serious about sustainability. They hail more from the old “pillage and plunder” school and see anything that gets in the way of all-out exploitation of raw resources – and workers -- as weak-kneed. “You have to be tough,” they bark from the windows of their limos, “What’s a few caribou when jobs are at stake?” Except they don’t mean good pay-the-bills-and-buy-a-home-in-your-community jobs – they mean jobs at oil refineries in China and in bank executive suites in Toronto.

We’re on to them, though. We’ve seen how working wages – and working conditions -- fall where union membership declines. And we’ve seen how one environmental protection law after another is stripped away when governments decide that only the “invisible hand” of the market should pull the strings, leaving whole communities – human and natural – dangling by a thread. 

- And finally, Murray Mandryk writes that the profits flowing from Saskatchewan’s successful Crowns have forced even the Saskatchewan Party to acknowledge the useful contribution made by the public sector (even as try to sell off anything that isn’t tied down). But it would be all the better if Mandryk and others would recognize the obvious corollary of that reality: if our current Crowns are in fact serving the province well, then shouldn’t we be open to considering whether new ones might also serve a valuable purpose, rather than sneering at the mere mention of new proposals?

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Matt Taibbi provides what may be the definitive take on Mitt Romney - as the plutocrat running as a deficit nag made his own personal fortune loading up businesses with debt and charging millions for the privilege:

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

- Meanwhile, Diane Roberts discusses how Romney and his ticket-mate see religion as an excuse for neglecting anybody who doesn't share their luck in life. And Joseph Stiglitz sees Romney's tax avoidance - along with Ryan's plans to virtually eliminate any taxes the likes of Romney would otherwise pay - as contrary to fundamental fairness.

- Mark Sumner comments on how the Republicans (like their Conservative cousins) are perfectly happy to trash their own government in order to serve their long-term plans to get it out of the governing business altogether:

Mitch McConnell told you the goals for this season from the outset. There's no mystery here, not even more than a token attempt to misdirect. The Republican aim -- the announced, undisputed goal -- is simply to see that the economy does not recover. Not to pass legislation, or promote any plan, but to just make sure that things stayed as bad as possible. To that end, they took every opportunity to crush anything that might help.

Why? Not just because it would help President Obama, but because any recovery that could be connected to government action might show that government can be an effective, helpful force. That's what Republicans can't allow.

The One True Narrative, forged when the land was young and Mitt Romney just an abusive son of privilege living off a portfolio of stocks, is this: government is the problem.

Everything that Republicans have done in the last thirty years is meant to serve that theme.

Government agencies, whether they are FEMA or MSHA, must be weak and ineffective. Government regulations, such as those that guard markets and protect workers, must be harmful. No government action can be seen as competent, much less exceptional. And absolutely nothing the government does can possibly be beneficial to the economy.

To that end, Republicans only have to gum up the works. Democrats have to show results. Republicans, despite appearances, aren't so stupid that they don't understand the advantage this gives them.

- Finally, Ian Welsh offers up a depressing but all-too-plausible view of where our economy stands now, as well as where it looks to be headed in the decades to come.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Chantal Hebert wonders whether the Libs have reached the point of no return, while Stephen Maher also points out that the NDP is in a historically strong position across Canada.

- Donald Lenihan muses about what better gender balance in politics might figure to accomplish:

If women are poised to play a bigger role in politics, I believe there will be a gender effect, but I don't think left vs. right is the best way of framing it. I agree that women will make politics more progressive, but this is not necessarily the same as more left-wing.
...
Eventually, I concluded that some kind of selection effect was at work here and that women were more naturally disposed to work collaboratively than men. They seemed more comfortable with sharing recognition, resources and leadership. They were less territorial and had less need for individual praise and recognition. If women are poised to play a bigger role in politics, something similar may start showing up in our politics.
...
I think women tend to be at least as concerned about how government works as they are about the tilt of its policies. As a cohort, they will lean to a style of governance that is less monolithic, less authoritative, more flexible, and more open. In a phrase, their approach to government and governance is more bottom-up.

I would also argue that bottom-up government is more progressive, in the sense that it is more likely to promote equality and inclusion, which, after all, is what it the term originally meant in politics. On the other hand, if "left wing" means assigning government an even greater share of the responsibility for solving problems, it is not at all clear that collaboration edges us toward the left.

- Marc Lee highlights the glaring disparity between profit and wage growth in British Columbia over the past 20 years.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi lists a few demands which could help the Occupy movement to bring about much-needed political and economic change.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Graham Thomson notes that for all the permutations and combinations that have developed among Alberta's opposition parties over the past few years, the NDP's strong principles have positioned it nicely in the lead up to a possible fall election:

Even though they might not admit it, New Democrats wouldn't mind a fall election. The provincial party is still basking in the afterglow of the Orange Wave that saw federal leader Jack Layton take the party to Official Opposition status for the first time.

The Environics poll of Alberta politics put the New Democrats into a statistical three-way tie for second place with the Wildrose and Liberals. All of a sudden, New Democrats are no longer in fourth place. Also giving the Alberta New Democrats a confidence boost are the federal election results where more than 230,000 Albertans supported the party.

Almost half that support is in Edmonton where the party is focusing its attention on a fall election. And narrowing the focus even more, the NDP won its one Alberta seat in Edmonton-Strathcona with the reelection of Linda Duncan.

It's all good news for Alberta New Democrats, especially Notley who represents the provincial riding of Edmonton-Strathcona and who, thanks to the federal campaign, already has targeted more than 12,000 supporters.
...
Alberta's New Democrats have such a long uphill climb they should equip their candidates with crampons and rope. But they are also among the most optimistic of Alberta's political parties, realizing they are staking out a unique position as the only politicians talking about increasing royalties on oil and gas companies and cracking down more forcefully on the environmental impact of the oilsands.

- Simon Enoch discusses Saskatchewan's highly unusual and distortionary electoral boundaries - just in time for the boundary review process which looks likely to change them.

- Andrew Steele offers some common-sense advice to political parties: for all the promise of online citizen engagement, knocking on doors is still the #1 priority in trying to win over voters.

- I'm not sure we can accurately say that Terence Corcoran is leading Canada's intellectual retreat when politicians like the Ford brothers and the bulk of the federal Cons receive so much more attention. But Erin is right to call out his Tea Party-esque nonsense.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi points out one of the many outrageous possibilities on the U.S. political scene, as it seems entirely possible that corporations who have sent money offshore will once again be rewarded for their manipulation of the law with a tax holiday.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- About the only caveat I'll add to Jesse McLaren's election analysis is that the NDP's almost universally-improved position benefitted at least somewhat from the party starting behind the Cons who turned out to be the ultimate competition. But it's otherwise hard to disagree with McLaren's take:

The electoral map represents Parliamentary elections, but the main source of change happens between elections, driven by what happens outside Parliament. So to truly understand what has happened to people's consciousness between the past two elections we need to look at the shift in vote. From 2008-2011 the NDP gained votes in 293 of 308 ridings, had the same vote in 10 ridings, and only lost votes in five ridings (one in Newfoundland & Labrador, three in Nova Scotia and one in Ontario). This is better than any other party, and shows that the "orange wave" was truly pan-Canadian.
...
(T)he Harper majority is not based on a surge to the right, but a Liberal collapse. The corporate vote became concentrated in the Tories (who were endorsed by nearly every mainstream newspaper), while the real surge across the country was towards the NDP. This is an important step forward in quality as well as quantity. The aspirations of Quebec previously rooted in the corporate Bloc Quebecois, the "strategic voting" for the corporate Liberals to stop the corporate Tories, and the isolated "neither left nor right" politics of the Green Party have shifted to a pan-Canadian labour party with links to the antiwar and other social movements.

- Niki Ashton offers some good advice to the NDP MPs who have taken her place as the youngest representatives in Parliament:

Ashton said the NDP caucus is a welcoming place for young people, with colleagues often asking her what she thinks on a given issue — if she has not already told them. That is not always the case for the broader political sphere, especially Question Period, so Ashton advises her new caucus colleagues to stand their ground. “Absolutely you’re going to come up against a wall of discrimination or condescension or paternalism and you’ve got to push back,” said Ashton, who hopes the influx of youth to politics changes the tone. “You’ve got to call it for what it is and you’ve got to raise your voice a little louder and make sure they don’t silence you.”

- It shouldn't come as much surprise that the B.C. Liberals are once again looking to pull a fast one on their province when it comes to the HST. But it's much more shocking that this time they gave some advance warning - and I'd fully expect the latest bait and switch to ensure that an issue which has animated B.C. voters for the past two years remains live whenever the next provincial election takes place.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi has a must-read article on how the complete lack of accountability for Goldman Sachs' financial manipulations looks to be a test case as to whether or not the U.S. can be said to be even slightly governed by the rule of law as opposed to the rule of the wealthy.