Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rupert Neate reports on new research showing that the world's billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20% in 2017 alone.

- Pete Evans discusses the increasing debt facing most Canadians as ever more net wealth is diverted to the extremely privileged few. And Alex Hemingway comments on the role of a speculation tax in making housing more affordable while also funding social needs.

- Paul Summers reviews the UK's continued wage stagnation for most workers compared to soaring executive salaries. And Mike Crawley examines the evidence and finds that Doug Ford's excuse for repealing a minimum wage increase has no basis in reality, while Ricardo Tranjan points out that workers are nothing but worse off when fair wages are replaced with tax gimmicks.

- Meanwhile, Michael Coren writes that Ford's agenda is based on little more than punishing the poorest Ontarians:

(T)here is something deeper, darker, and more sinister going on. It’s an attack upon human dignity, a scapegoating of the “other,” which is a classic hard-right tactic. The ghost of capitalism past and the ghost of capitalism present, where decency and compassion are dismissed as mere humbug.

It’s surely no coincidence that the same week as the most powerless of workers were humiliated, the same government announced that plans to build three university campuses in the suburbs or outer towns of Toronto were cancelled. These are frontline colleges, providing young people with vocational training as much as academic excellence.

Because of the location of the central campuses, it’s expensive, extremely time-consuming, even impossible, for many to become students. These are often the less privileged and less wealthy kids, and as such it was a direct assault on equality of opportunity.

Earlier in the month, the Ford administration removed funding to the Roundtable on Violence Against Women, designed to help government support those escaping domestic violence. It also scrapped funding to a Toronto after-school program for at-risk young youth. And the list goes on.
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...(T)he rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the call for justice and fairness is dismissed as extreme and unreasonable. Remember that cruelty, and remember that we will be judged by how we treat those less fortunate than ourselves.

- Finally, Dorothy Woodend interviews Chris Hedges about the precarious state of the U.S.' global hegemony.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Matt Bruenig examines the multi-million-dollar increase in the household wealth of the U.S.' top 1% over the past decade. And Ian Welsh discusses how the extreme concentration of wealth bleeds into political choices:

The corruption of vast inequality is that it makes some people powerful enough to overthrow democracy: in general (Citizen’s United) and in particular cases.

Most rich people are not good people. It is well established now, in the academic literature, that rich people have an empathy deficit, that they give less as a percentage of their wealth and income, and that (to put it unscientifically) they tend to become assholes. They don’t need to care what other people think, or about their welfare.

But even when they do try to do good, well, they don’t need to go through normal democratic processes: they just buy the results.
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Money is power. When the government relies on rich individuals and corporations to do what should be done by government it takes longer and produces less welfare than it should, and it leads to capture by the rich of government.

A 90%+ top marginal tax rate and punitive capital and estate taxes aren’t necessary because “government needs the money”, they are necessary so that the rich don’t become so rich they buy the State.

And that includes the ones who try to do some good...

- Richard Partington writes about new OECD research on the threats to the UK's economy posed by household debt and stagnant wages. And Linda Nazareth discusses how retirement security is declining between generations in Canada.

- Makda Ghebreslassie points out that food banks and other band-aid solutions do nothing to address underlying insecurity and social deprivation.

- Andre Picard wonders whether Canada has forgotten the hard-learned lessons of the tainted blood scandal - particularly as to the dangers of cost-cutting and profit motives when health is at stake.

- Finally, amidst so many real problems in our midst, Michael Coren comments on the right's attempt to fabricate a campus free speech crisis which ultimately means little more than trying to ensure that only reactionary voices get heard.