Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Ploy Achakulwisat writes about the health emergencies emanating from an ongoing climate breakdown. And Andy Kroll points out that even in the U.S., a concerted effort of corporate spinmeisters and anti-environment politicians hasn't been able to override the public's concern about climate change.

- Meanwhile, Mike de Souza exposes the National Energy Board's deliberate deletion of documents which would otherwise have proven embarrassing - showing once again how a regulator which is supposed to act in the public interest has instead flouted the law to serve the interests of the fossil fuel sector. Robyn Allan writes that Justin Trudeau and other enablers of unsustainable dependence on dirty energy are wilfully ignoring where our future society and economy are headed. And Owen Jones calls out the UK's willingness to hand massive amounts of money to the oil and gas sector while demanding that low-income individuals fend for themselves. 

- Jennifer Morgan and Sharan Burrow write about the need to combat both climate change and inequality. But while they try to make the case that the main task is to convince the Davos set to care about the planet and the majority of humanity, Shawn Gude interviews Evelyne Huber about the need for workers to drive democratic change. And George Monbiot examines the role of community spaces in creating the possibility of meaningful transformation.

- Barry Ritholtz discusses the latest research confirm that increased minimum wages tend to lift lower incomes without having any negative effect on the availability of work.

- Finally, Laura Macdonald and Nadia Ibrahim highlight how the abandoned promises surrounding the new iteration of NAFTA include the suggestion that a trade deal could reduce gender inequality rather than exacerbating it.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Lana Payne offers a reminder (with reference to Lars Osberg's new book) that extreme and growing inequality is a choice rather than an inevitability - but that it also represents a self-reinforcing trend:

“The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise Of Canada’s 1%” doesn’t merely detail years of data about how inequality has grown in Canada, but argues why ever-increasing equality is so harmful to our democracy.

Osberg has been saying that for some time. It is a predictable outcome. Those with money get more say and the more money they get, the more say they get. The rich also have no trouble exercising their unlimited access and influence over the political class and political decisions.

Osberg argues that Canada is at risk of instability because of rising wealth disparity. There is little doubt this is also at the root of the rise of populist politics across much of the world, including Canada.

The bottom half of Canada’s population is economically stuck. While the top half have improved somewhat over the past several decades, they find themselves further and further behind those at the very top, the 1 per cent.

That’s because the 1 per cent are taking an ever-growing share of income and wealth. This reinforces a sense of unfairness and insecurity as those at the top are so far ahead of everyone else.

- Meanwhile, Gauri Sreenivasan rightly argues that Canada should know better than to race the U.S. to the bottom when it comes to corporate tax rates and regulations.

- Doreen Nicoll reports on Doug Ford's closed-door meetings to sell off even more of Ontario's fresh water over the objections of affected municipalities. And Ed Finn discusses how corporatist politics are destroying natural forests.

- Finally, Aaron Saad comments on the tragi-comic state of carbon pricing politics in Canada. And Cameron Fenton is dubious that an already-compromised National Energy Board can carry out any meaningful review of a Trans Mountain pipeline expansion within the rushed timeline set by the Trudeau Libs.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Elizabeth Piper reports on Jeremy Corbyn's much-needed declaration that under a Labour government, the financial sector will serve the public rather than the other way around. And George Monbiot comments on the role the left needs to play in reversing the accumulation of wealth and power:

(O)nce you have money and property, you can use it to accumulate more money and property, taking an ever greater share of society’s wealth, through the harvesting of economic rent. By economic rent I mean charging people over the odds to use a non-reproducible resource over which you exercise exclusive control. Think, for example, of the ridiculous price we pay in the UK for train tickets, because the train companies have us over a barrel.

By this means, through no enterprise of their own, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. This process has no natural limits. Eventually, as we’ve seen in the past, the very rich can capture almost the entire production of society.

At this point, the debt, destitution and unemployment that results can cause economic collapse: the Great Depression is a good example.

This predicament is not a perversity of the system. It is an innate characteristic. It is bound to work this way, unless there is a political movement capable of breaking the vicious circle of wealth accumulation.
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The right will never break the power of patrimonial wealth, because the right exists to defend it. But the left, when it remembers what it’s for, exists to confront it.

During the 1940s, when the left was arguably at the peak of its power in mainstream politics, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. Economists today look back on these rates and describe them as irrational. They argue that the Laffer Curve suggests that governments raise no further revenue above a rate of about 70%. But this is to miss the point. The point of these taxes was not just to raise revenue, but to break the power of patrimonial capital, and the vicious circle of wealth accumulation and inequality.

- Meanwhile, Frances Ryan discusses how the UK's punitive system for social benefit recipients is doing nothing but adding gratuitous stress for people already struggling to get by.

- Mike de Souza reports on the National Energy Board's attempt to weed out staff for providing accurate information to the media. And Barry Saxifrage examines how continued expansion of the tar sands is utterly incompatible with any serious attempt to meet Canada's already-unambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets, while Marc Jaccard calls out Justin Trudeau's Orwellian attempt to claim we can only cut carbon pollution by increasing it.

- Finally, Daniel Leblanc reports on the parting message of retiring Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault - and particularly the reality that access to information isn't getting any better under the Libs than it was under the Cons. And de Souza notes that the Harper Cons' habit of muzzling federal scientists remains standard operating procedure under Trudeau.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Binyamin Appelbaum highlights the strong consensus view that Donald Trump's planned tax giveaways to the rich will do nothing for overall economic development. And John Buell points out that Trump's plan for privatized infrastructure - much like Justin Trudeau's - will serve only to enrich and empower corporations while undermining democratic decision-making:

Converting public things into private goods reinforces a trend toward corporate oligarchy. It also has consequences that move beyond economic inefficiency. And economic efficiency is unlikely to be an adequate defense of a robust infrastructure. Traditional fiscal conservatives appeal to metaphors of the home to attack government deficits.  Their stated concern is bankruptcy, but their real worry is the greater equality generous public things might foster and the coalitions across borders, ethnicities, and faiths it might encourage. There are good counterarguments, but the best approach touches the aesthetic and affective dimensions of our democratic experiment. Honig puts it eloquently: “The democratic experiment involves living cheek by jowl with others, sharing classrooms, roads, and buses, paying for them together, complaining about them together, and sometimes even praising and enjoying them together, as picnickers will do on a sunny afternoon in Central Park. But the neoliberal corrective absolves us of this necessity and responsibility. That Central Park—landscape architecture’s ode to the power of democratic beauty—is just a stone’s throw away from the barricaded Trump Tower is only one of the many sad ironies of the story to be told here.”

Public things and the democratic space they foster and are fostered by encourage both collective responses to common problems and an opportunity to address the injustices (remainders) that emerge from even the most egalitarian and idealistic processes. The physical state of our infrastructure reflects more than a conventional repudiation of purported governmental excess. It is an attack on democracy and must be resisted by appealing to and enhancing democracy itself.

- Meanwhile, Brent Patterson points out that there's ample demand for far stronger social supports, including over 91% of Canadians at least somewhat supportive of a national and universal pharmacare program.

- Elizabeth McSheffrey reports on the Auditor General's findings that the Harper Cons never bothered to produce any plan to meet their promised climate change targets, while James Wilt observes that the National Energy Board lost any public trust in serving as a rubber stamp for pipelines. And Molly Scott Cato writes that climate change is one area (of many) where Trudeau has betrayed the progressive voters who wanted meaningful change, rather than continued reliance on dirty industries. 

- Finally, the Star's editorial board calls for Ontario to take a leadership role in establishing and enforcing labour standards and wage requirements to protect people involved in new forms of work.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Naomi Klein writes about the racism and dehumanization behind climate change denialism and inaction. And George Monbiot reminds us of the dangers of overheating oceans, while Michael Wines interviews Todd Halihan about the earthquakes and other harms caused by fracking.

- Meanwhile, Chris Wood and Michael Beer note that due to the obvious industry capture of the National Energy Board, Canada doesn't have a federal regulator fit to evaluate the public interest when it comes to oil and gas projects - and of course a similar problem applies at the provincial level.

- Sarah O'Connor writes about the precarious circumstances of workers trying to make a living off of the gig economy. But lest anybody think that a traditional job necessarily equates to a secure paycheque, Kyle Duggan reports on the costs of fixing the failing Phoenix pay system which has been bleeding public servants ever since it was implemented.

- Ian Welsh proposes that we ensure a secure and affordable supply of needed drugs through public manufacturing and distribution. And Seth Klein and Patrick Leyland point out why privatized surgeries and other medical services only increase the burden on a public health care system.

- Finally, CBC reports on Laura Eggertson and Kirsten Patrick's call for a national suicide prevention strategy. 

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Erika Hayasaki surveys the developing body of research on how poverty and deprivation affect a child's long-term brain development:

Early results show a troubling trend: Kids who grow up with higher levels of violence as a backdrop in their lives, based on MRI scans, have weaker real-time neural connections and interaction in parts of the brain involved in awareness, judgment, and ethical and emotional processing.

...Though it’s still largely based on correlations between brain patterns and particular environments, the research points to a disturbing conclusion: Poverty and the conditions that often accompany it—violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs—can affect the interactions, formation and pruning of connections in the young brain.

Two recent influential reports cracked open a public conversation on the matter. In one, researchers found that impoverished children had less gray matter—brain tissue that supports information processing and executive behavior—in their hippocampus (involved in memory), frontal lobe (involved in decision making, problem solving, impulse control, judgment, and social and emotional behavior) and temporal lobe (involved in language, visual and auditory processing and self-awareness). Working together, these brain areas are crucial for following instructions, paying attention and overall learning—some of the keys to academic success.
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The second key study, published in Nature Neuroscience , also in 2015 , looked at 1,099 people between ages 3 and 20, and found that children with parents who had lower incomes had reduced brain surface areas in comparison to children from families bringing home $150,000 or more a year.

“We have [long] known about the social class differences in health and learning outcomes,” says Dr. Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. But neuroscience has now linked the environment, behavior and brain activity—and that could lead to a stunning overhaul of both educational and social policies, like rethinking Head Start–style programs that have traditionally emphasized early literacy. New approaches, he says, could focus on social and emotional development as well, since science now tells us that relationships and interactions with the environment sculpt the areas of the brain that control behavior (like the ability to concentrate), which also can affect academic achievement (like learning to read). 

- Adria Vasil discusses the worldwide trend of water being made available first (and for inexplicably low prices) to for-profit bottlers over citizens who need it. And Martin Regg Cohn examines how the story is playing out in Ontario in particular.

- Mike De Souza reports on how the National Energy Board, rather than acting as a neutral regulator, misled Denis Coderre to try to take free PR for both the NEB itself and fossil fuel development in general. And Carrie Tait points out how the Husky oil spill is raising questions about Saskatchewan's fully captured regulatory system. 

- Ian MacLeod reports on a sudden and unexplained increase in CSE interception of private communications.

- Finally, Andray Domise discusses what Colten Boushie's shooting and its aftermath say about the blight of racism in Canada.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on a new Ontario study recommending a strong investment in child care to reduce the gender wage gap.

- Allan Moscovitch, Nick Falvo and David Macdonald offer a useful primer on social supports for seniors in Canada. And Marybeth Shinn, Scott Brown, Michelle Wood and Daniel Gubits examine (PDF) several options to address homelessness, finding that permanent housing subsidies are most effective in promoting housing stability and other benefits.

- James Wilt makes the case for the Libs to put an end to fatally-flawed pipeline review processes, rather than pretending that the Cons' biased structures serve as anything but rubber stamps which do nothing to confer social license. But Travis Lupick notes that restrictive rules around supervised injection sites are just another area where the Libs' plan is to continue on with the policies they criticized while in opposition.

- Jeremy Deaton and Mina Lee chart the health effects of climate change. And Shayndi Raice points out that paid sick leave works wonders in reducing the spread of the flu.

- Finally, Guy Caron continues his series discussing tax evasion by pointing out the urgent need for government follow-up when tax avoidance schemes surface in the public eye.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Owen Jones interviews Ha-Joon Chang about the foreseeable harm caused by the UK's austerity, as well as the false claims used to push it.

- The Stoney Creek News rightly argues that Canada Post should move toward posting banking in large part due to the potential to improve the level of service available for vulnerable groups. But Dean Beeby notes that Employment Insurance administration is just one of the many areas where the idea of actually assisting the public has been lost in favour of automation and corporatization.

- The Canadian Labour Congress points out a few of the policies which could offer much-needed opportunities and security for younger workers. And Jared Bernstein writes that an improved minimum wage (one of the CLC's recommendations) has worked exactly as hoped in Seattle, increasing workers' pay and length of employment without any of the threatened side effects.

- Mound of Sound highlights how Justin Trudeau has chosen to make Stephen Harper's industry-dominated National Energy Board his own, while Kai Nagata points out Trudeau's broken promises to put a credible review system in place before ramming through more project approvals. And Christopher Adams examines CAUT's investigation into the dubiously cozy relationship between the University of Calgary and oil-sector funders. 

- Finally, Murray Brewster exposes a Canadian-owned firm's sale of troop carriers for use in the ongoing war in South Sudan. And Don Pittis rightly notes that we should be less concerned with the nationality of a corporation's official ownership than with its actual behaviour.

Faith no more

Shorter Catherine McKenna on the Libs' response to the National Energy Board misleading the public about its insider dealings with lobbyists on Energy East:

Clap sunnier! Clap sunnier!

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Rachel West charts how higher wages and improved social supports can reduce crime rates and their resulting costs.

- Lana Payne comments on the glass ceiling still limiting the wages and opportunities available to women in the workplace. And Stephanie Langton highlights how a combination of student loan rules and income support clawbacks can stand in the way of students seeking to improve their education and career prospects. 

- Pam Palmater discusses some of the more important areas where the Libs' planned inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women looks to fall short of what's needed. And Jonathan Sas recognizes that there's far more to be done to respond to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools and repair the damage from a legacy of discrimination against First Nations.

- Carol Linnitt writes that two years after the Mount Polley tailings pond spill, British Columbia is far behind where it should be both in making up for the damage, and in preventing similar disasters from happening again. And Tara Scurr wonders why the province doesn't have any interest in protecting people's rights against corporate contamination. 

- Meanwhile, D.C. Fraser reports that Saskatchewan's pattern of regular oil spills has continued this week - and that once again, a major operator's leak detection system did nothing to identify the problem. And Mike De Souza exposes the National Energy Board's undisclosed meetings with multiple corporate leaders to grease the skids for Energy East, while Jesse Feith notes that Montreal has no plans to deal with the aftermath of a major oil spill.

- Finally, Fran Quigley discusses the unconscionable prices being charged for prescription drugs which drive massive rents to big pharma for the product of research funded by the public.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Melisa Foster points out why millennials should be strongly interested in a national pharmacare program:

Today, young Canadians are searching for jobs in an economy with high levels of precarious employment, unemployment or underemployment. According to a recent Statistics Canada labour force survey, approximately 39% of workers 15 to 29 are precariously employed. That means that almost half of millennials between 15 and 29 are part-time, temporary or self-employed workers, and likely don’t have access to employer-run private health insurance plans. An estimated one out of every four Canadians who are uninsured cannot afford their prescriptions.

Canada’s patchwork pharmacare system compounds these obstacles further. Provinces, territories and the federal government each fund drug therapies for a distinct portion of the population. Your postal code and socioeconomic status continue to dictate your ability to access the medication you need, making drug coverage highly inequitable. Too many are forced to pay out of pocket for prescription drugs they can’t afford to go without.
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Understandably, prescription drug coverage only becomes a concern for many individuals when high costs limit their access. But if you haven’t personally experienced problems with drug coverage or the consequent poor health outcomes that far too many Canadians have, there is a high probability that your friend or loved one has.

Millennials must begin to understand who is involved in the decision making process and how we can work together to close the gaps in access. Parents and children have a responsibility to voice their concerns and demonstrate the struggles that arise as a result of the patchwork system.

- Bruce Sherman examines the role the health care system can play in addressing the social determininants of health. Owen Davis highlights the importance of addressing inequality in order to improve mental health. And Araz Rawshani, Ann-Marie Svensson, Björn Zethelius, Björn Eliasson, Annika Rosengren, and Soffia Gudbjörnsdottir study the connection between low incomes and mortality from diseases including diabetes and cancer.

- Linda McQuaig argues that the Ontario Libs' privatization of Hydro One is indefensible - particularly based on the excuse of "broadening" ownership in a utility shared in by every citizen of the province. David Bush points out that Canada Post's bargaining strategy seems to be intended to allow it to sell itself off for parts before a government review of its future is complete. And Duncan Kinney discusses how Alberta is trying to remedy the damage from a power purchasing scheme which allowed corporations to take easy profits then leave the province holding the bag during lean times.

- Finally, Paul Dechene examines the state of pipeline regulation in Saskatchewan, featuring Emily Eaton's observation that "almost no oil and gas infrastructure in the province undergoes an environmental impact assessment". Julie Dermansky points out that Saskatchewan is far from the only jurisdiction with an epidemic of spills arising out of lax regulation, as a single Louisiana parish has been hit by three in ten days. Robyn Allan notes that British Columbia is picking up much of the tab for the cleanup from the Mount Polley mine disaster. And Mike De Souza reports on the National Energy Board's deception about its meeting with Jean Charest while he was under contract with TransCanada.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Lucy Shaddock offers a response to the Institute for Fiscal Studies' report on poverty and inequality in the UK, while McKinsey finds that hundreds of millions of people in advanced economies are seeing their real incomes stagnate or decline. And Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Jacobs provide their take on what the UK needs to reduce inequality:

Can May succeed in building an economy of broadly shared prosperity? Only if she is willing to govern with the revolutionary zeal seen in that speech. To address the problems she identified will require a complete departure from Osborne’s failed plans. But more than that, it will require a departure the orthodox economics that shaped them.

Policymaking over the past half-century has relied on a narrow school of economic thought, dominated by a simplistic idea of “markets” and “market failures”, of “competition” and “shareholder value”. May’s new agenda will need to draw on a much richer palette.

...(M)arkets are not external forces that bind firms to inevitable choices. They are created by the decisions made inside private and public institutions, as well as pressures from civil society. So not only can policymakers fix “market failures”, but they can also actively reshape and create markets for better ends.

- Andre Picard rightly argues that global targets to reduce the spread of AIDS can't be met without a thorough effort to fight poverty and prejudice.
 
- Chris Hatch weighs in on the need to revamp how Canada evaluates and regulates pipelines and other environmental risks. Will Horter notes that there's no reason for optimism based on the Libs' attempt to paper over the National Energy Board's failings. And the Toronto Star criticizes the Libs' lack of follow-up on a loud announcement about removing and banning asbestos.

- Jim Bronskill reports on the Communications Security Establishmen's newfound refusal to provide even statistical data about the sharing of information which may lead to torture.

- Finally, Marc-André Miron, Marie-Claude Bertrand and Cym Gomery point out that the typical talking points against proportional representation lack any basis in reality.