On redemocratization

Adrian Morrow reports on Andrea Horwath's speech to the Ontario NDP's provincial council. And there's certainly plenty of reason for relative optimism about a message which both reflects a clear argument for big-picture progressive thinking, and recognizes at least part of the importance of the NDP's base. That said, I'll note that there's still one area which leaves something to be desired in Horwath's message:

Party sources say the election campaign was too undemocratic, run by a handful of people close to Ms. Horwath who decreed there would be no big picture pledges. The campaign also focused too strongly on winning Southwest Ontario – a region hard-hit with the decline of the manufacturing sector – at the expense of Toronto and the GTA, the sources said. The populist approach, they contend, made it harder for some in the party to feel they were fighting for anything important and consequently led to a lack of motivation.

Ms. Horwath made a bid to correct both problems Saturday.

In a speech that bordered on liturgy, she rhymed off example after example of progressive values – from universal health care to fighting poverty to better pensions to public transit – that she would embrace over the next four years. And she tugged at NDP heartstrings, at one point referencing the party’s revered late federal leader, Jack Layton.

“Love is better than anger, as a good friend reminded us a few years ago. We are the party of hope. We are the party of optimism,” she said. “In a time when the very, very few continue to amass so much for themselves while everyone else is falling behind, we have never been more relevant.”

She also promised to make the party more internally democratic.

“Every single New Democrat should be able to see themselves in our campaigns,” Ms. Horwath said. “We must reach out as broadly as possible, both within our party and to our allies in our movement, when crafting both our commitments and our campaigns.”

So what's wrong with that past passage in particular?

It's surely a must for any leader to be willing to speak to the values favoured by party supporters, and to design policy consistent with those values. But Horwath still appears to be taking the position that the crucial actor is "we" in the sense of the party leader and her (or his) closest advisers - reflecting a commitment to an increased baseline for consultation, but not necessarily an interest in true democratic decision-making at the party level.

Put another way, while we should be able to expect at least future campaigns and policy proposals (and hopefully general decision-making) from the Ontario NDP to better reflect members' values with Horwath as leader, her intention is still to decide personally where that commitment begins and ends.

That view of the relationship between a commanding leader and a subservient party is of course entirely consistent with the practices of the NDP's competitors. But unlike the Libs (who will generally follow their leader anywhere for lack of any coherent value structure) and the PCs/Cons (who count deference to authority as a key component of their actual value structure), the NDP actually has something to lose in settling for a top-down model.

In effect, the concession that politics must be practiced along the lines preferred by the other parties only helps the Libs and Cons to argue that the NDP doesn't live up to its own values, and thus doesn't offer an improvement on what we're stuck with now. And to avoid validating that line of attack, we should expect the NDP at all levels to advocate for - and offer - decision-making mechanisms which allow for grassroots debates and decision-making, rather than treating party members as just one more focus group to be taken into account by a leader who exercises sole control.

In making that observation about the need for the NDP's leadership to value something more than their own power, however, I'll also note that far too many political activists have been willing to reinforce the same dichotomy from the opposite side.

I've yet to hear anybody offer a reasonable explanation as to how frustration with a single leader justifies abandoning exactly the party system which should provide an alternate and more democratic source of policy ideas and strategic direction. In fact, a trigger-happy view of one's own membership based on dissatisfaction with a leader both diminishes the stability of a party's general value system, and further entrenches the view that the leader is solely responsible for defining the party.

And that's especially counterproductive within a party whose extensive (and growing) progressive network still offers by far the strongest opportunity for activists to shape both electoral results and governing priorities.

In sum, while Horwath has taken some important steps in speaking to core New Democratic values, there's still plenty of work to be done in better putting them into effect. And we'll only see the best possible results at all levels if both the leaders who have centralized power and the critics who have responded by turning their back on party involvement are willing to work toward that end.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rick Salutin discusses how corruption has become endemic in the global economy as an inevitable consequence of me-first values:

You wouldn't have those CEO pig-outs absent neo-liberalism's moral model: get rich not just quick but hugely. As Kevin O'Leary loves saying, and CBC plasters on its promos: God put us here to get rich. Note it's a public broadcaster where he barks that and no one contests it. (I consider Amanda Lang's ripostes pro forma.)

Since there's no counter model (excluding, maybe, the pope) it becomes almost embarrassing not to grab for all you can get, legality be damned. The mentality seeps into areas like pro sports and the World Cup, with PED corruption, game fixing -- and trickles down to kids. There's also a sort of pre-emptive political corruption, where leaders like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have their eye on the vast returns available after they leave office, through their own foundations, etc., as long as they don't offend the corporate titans who are the donors. But none of it would thrive without the grotesque, tantalizing wealth inequalities that equate with neoliberalism.

Why anyone thought privatizing huge chunks of public wealth and letting the profit motive slither all over them would mean less corruption evades me, along with thinking Ontario's Liberals are the beginning and end of the problem. Corruption may always be with us but it comes in different forms. We're currently driving the globalization-privatization model right off a cliff.

- Meanwhile, Jacques Leslie takes note of Gabriel Zucman's work on the widespread abuse of tax havens. And in a sign of just how thoroughly the service-to-the-rich is becoming entrenched, CBC reports on the latest WikiLeaks revelations - showing Canada among a group of countries negotiating an agreement to prevent governments from reining in financial-sector abuses.

- In case there was any doubt that fair tax increases can form part of a viable electoral strategy, Linda McQuaig argues that Ontario's recent experience - featuring both high-income surtaxes implemented in a minority provincial Parliament, and a decisive election defeat for the party insisting on cuts all around - should put that to rest.

- Stephen Maher reports on impending legal challenges to the Unfair Elections Act. But Leslie MacKinnon reminds us that the Cons will doggedly fight voting rights in any form and in the most intrusive way possible - most recently by waiting until four by-elections were in full swing before seeking a stay of a ruling extending voting rights to Canadians living abroad.

- James Hutt writes about the dangers of increasingly privatized health care. And Iglika Ivanova responds to some anti-teacher spin from B.C.'s Liberal government by pointing out that teachers - like most public servants - have been receiving far less than their fair share from economic growth.

- Finally, Wade Rowland makes the case that a stronger CBC would do wonders for all kinds of broadcasters in Canada.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Katie Allen discusses the Equality Trust's research into tax rates in the UK - which shows that the poor actually pay the highest share of their income in taxes, even as the public has been led to believe the opposite:

The poorest 10% of households pay eight percentage points more of their income in all taxes than the richest – 43% compared to 35%, according to a report from the Equality Trust.

The thinktank highlights what it sees as a gulf between perceptions of the tax system and reality. Its poll, conducted with Ipsos Mori found that nearly seven in ten people believe that households in the highest 10% income group pay more of their income in tax than those in the lowest 10%.

The survey of more than 1,000 people also found a strong majority – 96% – believe that the tax system should be more progressive than is currently the case.

- But then, the poor can hardly afford to match the constant PR offensive put on by the corporate elite to demand preferential treatment. Which leads to Maria Konnikova's observation that poverty presents far more obstacles that a lack of money alone:

When we think of poverty, we tend to think about money in isolation: How much does she earn? Is that above or below the poverty line? But the financial part of the equation may not be the single most important factor. “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at Harvard who is a co-author of the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” tells me, “is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.”

“There are three types of poverty,” he says. “There’s money poverty, there’s time poverty, and there’s bandwidth poverty.” The first is the type we typically associate with the word. The second occurs when the time debt of the sort I incurred starts to pile up.

And the third is the type of attention shortage that is fed by the other two: If I’m focused on the immediate deadline, I don’t have the cognitive resources to spend on mundane tasks or later deadlines. If I’m short on money, I can’t stop thinking about today’s expenses — never mind those in the future. In both cases, I end up making decisions that leave me worse off because I lack the ability to focus properly on anything other than what’s staring me in the face right now, at this exact moment.

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(T)he most unfair aspect of the whole thing is that the bandwidth tax doesn’t affect everyone equally. If you aren’t your fully strategic self all the time, so be it. If I miss one deadline — or even two — it’s far from the end of the world. But if I’m also poor in the traditional sense? Suddenly, the lack of time has a nonlinear, compounding effect: My bandwidth isn’t just a bit more taxed. The tax is completely off the charts, and I have little recourse to repair the damage.
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The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. If I am poor, I work or I churn until decisions like buying lottery tickets begin to seem like attractive alternatives. I lack the time to calculate the odds and think of alternative uses for my money.
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If poverty is about time and mental bandwidth as well as money, how does this change how we combat its effects? “When we think about programs for the poor, we don’t ever think, hey, let’s give them programs that don’t use a lot of bandwidth,” says Mr. Mullainathan. Instead, we fault people for failing to sign up for programs that are ostensibly available, even though we don’t factor in the time and cognitive capacity they need to get past even the first step.

- Conversely, an excess of concentrated money tends to beget brand-new ways of distorting the economy. And Janet McFarland reports on a study by Michael Wolfson, Mike Veall and Neil Brooks which finds that past measures likely underestimate inequality in Canada by failing to take into account money funneled through privately-held corporations:

Using data that includes CCPCs changes the picture of Canada’s top income earners because these are the people most likely to set them up. Only 5 per cent of people in the bottom half of income earners own a stake in a CCPC, and the study shows that, over the past decade, up to 80 per cent of those in the top 0.01 per cent of income earners owned a stake in a CCPC. Some people own stakes in four or more CCPCs, the report shows.

CCPCs are typically used to hold a private business, so they could be created by the owner of a store or restaurant to incorporate the business. Dr. Wolfson said they are also legally used by doctors, lawyers, accountants and other professionals as a way to incorporate their business activities, allowing the corporation to be paid income rather than having the individuals paid in the form of salaries.

There can be many advantages to having income go into a corporation rather than receiving it as a salary, including the ability to defer income, split income with a spouse, and reduce capital gains tax.

Researchers have long found it difficult to measure income for top earners and that has led to an inaccurate picture of the degree of income inequality between the rich and the poor. Including CCPCs has given a better portrait of high income earners and revealed the sizeable impact of these private holdings.

The report shows that income for the top 10 per cent of earners increased an average of 16 per cent when CCPCs were included in the income data. The increase was even more dramatic for those in the top 0.1 per cent. Their average income rose to $2.1-million when CCPCs were taken into account, compared with $1.3-million if CCPCs were excluded. That’s a difference of 55 per cent.

- Shannon Gormley comments on how the Harper Cons' paranoia is leading Canada toward a policy of citizenship-stripping normally applied by only the world's worst human-rights abusers.

- Finally, Alice Funke provides a thorough review of what actually happened in Ontario's provincial election.

Thursday Morning Links - #VoteOn Edition

This and that for your Thursday (and Ontario election day) reading...

- Joseph Heath makes the case against Tim Hudak's PCs in particular, and the shift from public to private goods in general:

(I)t’s fairly clear what the PCs are planning. They are proposing a general shift in Ontario away from consumption of public goods towards increased consumption of private goods. For example, they aren’t making any noises about privatizing things, shifting production out of the public sector into the private, but where the general profile of consumption would be the same. They are proposing that we actually produce and consume less of the sort of goods that are best produced by government: in particular, less primary education, less environment protection, less public transit, and no provincial pensions. This will be done in order to lower taxes, so that people will have more disposable income, to buy various private goods.

Now I guess it’s worth noting that the PCs have not even tried to make the case for this (nor has Coyne, really, although we did get into it a bit once). In other words, they haven’t said one thing about why they think that it would be good for us, as a society, to shift consumption away from public (or quasi-public, you know what I mean) toward private goods. And at first glance, I’m not sure what that case would be. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in middle-class suburban homes in Ontario, and when I look around there, I don’t usually say to myself “you know what these people really need?… more shit from Costco.”

So if you were to put it in the form of a debating club proposition: “be it resolved, that what the people of Ontario need is more private goods and fewer public goods” I would be more than happy to take the negative. In fact, when I hear people complaining about their various work-life/financial woes, I find that a large fraction of them can be traced back to a chronic undersupply of public goods.

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(O)ne of the central characteristics of the public goods whose level of supply is being debated (primary education, reduced congestion, better air quality & other environmental goods) is that they are not subject to competitive consumption. As a result, increasing the supply of these goods stands poised to generate real, sustained increases in individual welfare. This is a point that has been made most persuasively by Robert Frank (in various place, including here, here and here). The pervasive tendency in our society will be to underestimate the severity of negative externalities (precisely because they are not priced) and to overestimate the value of market goods (because we ignore positional effects). This is sufficient to license a general presumption that, whatever the politically achievable level of government spending, it is probably too low, relative to the actual consumption preferences of citizens. Further reducing it will do absolutely nothing to solve the problems that people hope to solve with it, and is likely to produce nothing but unnecessary suffering.

So that is why a Conservative government would be bad for Ontario — because their basic plan, if implemented, would make life worse for pretty much everyone.

- And Linda McQuaig points out that Hudak's obviously-flawed math is far from the only problem with his party's plans to crush Ontario's wages and working conditions:

This folksy persona has tended to obscure two key things about Hudak that have become evident in the current campaign: He remains committed to anti-union legislation aimed at making Ontario more like Arkansas, and he’s capable of a breathtaking level of cynical dishonesty.

His claim that he will create one million jobs isn’t just based on faulty arithmetic — it’s based on nothing, really.

And yet, even after his numbers were exposed as grossly inflated (multiplied erroneously by eight), Hudak simply shrugged, trotted out platitudes (“economists never agree”) and refused to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of his jobs claim.

Hudak is extremely anti-union. He used to be up-front about this, openly advocating that Ontario adopt so-called ‘right to work’ legislation — laws found primarily in the U.S. south which are aimed at curbing unions.

By preventing companies and unions from signing contracts with an automatic dues check-off, such laws make it difficult for unions to survive, leaving workers with little clout to push wages much above the U.S. federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. (In Arkansas, the state allows a lower minimum wage of $6.25 an hour.)
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It is this preposterous decision to multiple by eight which has captured most attention and caused Hudak to be ridiculed about his math.
But the whole package is riddled with ludicrous assumptions based on Zycher’s (and presumably Hudak’s) belief that by increasing “economic freedom” to the level of Arkansas and Mississippi, Ontario’s GDP per capita will grow — even though our GDP per capita is already higher than these economically “freer” states and Hudak has said he won’t introduce the anti-union laws that allegedly increase “economic freedom” anyway.

- David Reevely looks behind the surface of a "decline your vote" astroturf site, and predictably finds a right-winger trying to convince marginal voters they shouldn't bother with democracy. And Alison makes clear that it's the politicians least interested in serving the public - Hudak's PCs - who would benefit if citizens give up in the ridings targeted for voter demobilization.

- Which is naturally just fine with some of our corporate media overlords, as Jesse Brown offers an inside scoop on the owner-mandated orders to override the Globe and Mail's editorial board to hand Tim Hudak an endorsement - followed by a sad attempt to claim the endorsement actually reflected editorial judgment rather than orders from on high. But of course the real controversy is that a union representing media workers had the nerve to express its own opinion.

- In what's surely unrelated news, Canada's corporate class is corrupt even by its own account. 

- Finally, Johannes Wheeldon sets out the options available to Ontario's political parties after today's election - with a particular focus on the (seemingly likely) event that no party holds a majority. Bill Tieleman observes that strategic voting tends to benefit precisely the party one wants to stop. And for those looking for more reading material on the Ontario election, Ron Waller's blog is a great place to start - particularly in reminding us just which party actually offers an alternative to Hudak's corporatism.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Richard Shillington studies the Cons' income-splitting scheme for the Broadbent Institute, and finds that it's even more biased toward the wealthy than previously advertised:

• The average benefit of income splitting across all households is only $185, though nine out of 10 households will receive nothing. When one factors in the $3 billion cost in lost federal revenues that will result from this tax policy, income splitting stands to impose net costs on many Canadian households.

• To gain from income splitting, a family with children under 18 must have two parents in different tax brackets to share income. Thus single parent families (20.2%) and those with partners in the same tax bracket (28.9%) are automatically excluded from benefitting. The detailed calculations accounting for available refundable and non-refundable tax credits estimate that 54.1% of families would see no benefit.
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Where significant benefits do accrue, they are to higher-income families, particularly those in a traditional model. This policy, which benefits a higher proportion of families in some provinces than others, stands to increase income inequality in Canada.

Which leads in turn to Rick Smith's observation:

"If the government set out to specifically design a policy to make inequality worse, this would be it," Smith said.

"This policy is an inequality generating machine."

- But then, the Cons would hardly be alone in pursuing increased inequality as a policy goal, as Toby Sanger highlights the Hudak PCs' proposed handouts to millionaires at the expense of the general public:

The biggest beneficiaries of corporate tax cuts would be the most profitable of Ontario’s large corporations and, in particular, banks, insurance and other financial service companies. Almost 40 per cent of the tax benefit would go to Ontario’s finance, insurance, and real estate sector, which only employs one out of 13 Ontario workers. This industry would get a tax break estimated at $957 million a year, rising above $1 billion by 2019 and totaling $7.6 billion over eight years.

The other top four industry sectors that would gain the most are trade, with about $3 billion over eight years, manufacturing with an estimated $2.4 billion, and professional services with an estimated $2.2 billion. Almost 80 per cent would go to these four industry sectors: a total of over $15 billion over eight years.

Ontario and federal corporate income and capital tax cuts over the past decade have already reduced the taxes paid by these four sectors by about $7 billion annually. And how much has total employment increased in these four sectors in return for these massive corporate tax cuts over the past decade? A grand total of minus 8,000 jobs – and that’s during a decade when total employment of other sectors in Ontario increased by over 650,000.

If $7 billion in annual tax cuts provided by the McGuinty, Harper and Martin governments didn’t lead to any job growth, it’s hard to believe that Hudak’s additional corporate tax cuts of almost $2 billion a year will do any better.

- And Hudak is being particularly obvious about his distaste for those worse off by refusing to even discuss the idea of reducing poverty - even after his party was shamed into supporting anti-poverty legislation not long ago.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne looks at the prospect of another false majority in Ontario's election, and questions why Canadians still put up with first-past-the-post politics which can cause wild swings in governance based on small numbers of voters.

- Finally, Adam Riggio discusses the effect of creeping privatization and corporate funding on Canadian universities.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Buttonwood weighs in on the disproportionate influence of the ultra-rich when it comes to making policy choices which affect all of us:

But the analysis backs up earlier work by Larry Bartels of Princeton, author of a book called “Unequal Democracy”, and the general thesis of the late political scientist, Mancur Olson, that government can be in hock to special interests. This may be truer in America than elsewhere since its campaign-finance laws are so liberal: $6 billion was spent on the 2012 elections. This system forces candidates to spend much of their time raising money from the wealthy and from business. Even if no direct quid pro quos are involved, candidates may simply absorb the views of the better-off by osmosis.

The danger is of a vicious cycle in which politicians adopt policies that favour the better-off; this gives the wealthy more money with which to lobby politicians, which leads to more favourable legislation and so on. The surge in inequality over the last 30 years could perhaps be attributed, in part, to this process.

(Though of course I'd dissent from the column's conclusion that the most important problem with a concentration of wealth and power at the top is that it might cause people to start questioning their betters.)

- Joe Fantauzzi discusses how austerity has been used to attack social connections in Ontario and elsewhere. Kev reminds us of the disconnect between continued (though not enhanced) productivity gains and stagnating wages since the neoliberal revolution took hold. And Russell Jacoby contrasts Thomas Piketty's call for somewhat improved equality against Karl Marx's focus on a struggle over ownership:

(E)galitarianism as an idea and demand also contains an element of resignation; it accepts society, but wants to balance out the goods or privileges. Gays want equality, the right like everyone else to marry. Fine, but marriage is still marriage, the imperfect institution that society cannot give up or improve upon. R.H. Tawney, the British leftist historian, noted the limits of equality in his 1931 book Equality, a broad defense of egalitarianism. The working class movement, he writes, puts its faith in “the possibility of a society,” where a higher value is placed on people and a lower value on money. But that movement is liable to fall short. “When it does so, what it is apt to desire is not a social order of a different kind, in which money and economic power will no longer be the criterion of achievement, but a social order of the same kind, in which money and economic power will be somewhat differently distributed.” This straightforward sentence cuts to the heart of the matter. Equalizing pollution pollutes equally, but does not end pollution.
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Piketty anchors inequality in what he calls “the central contradiction of capitalism,” the disjuncture between the rate of return on capital and the rate of economic growth. Inasmuch as the former inevitably eclipses the latter, favoring existing wealth over existing labor, it leads to a “terrifying” unequal wealth distribution. Marx might not disagree, but again his focus is on work, which is where inequality originates and plays out. Marx argues that the accumulation of capital leads to partial, casual and permanent unemployment. It would be difficult to declare that these are not pressing realities in the world today, but they do not surface in Piketty.

Of course, Marx begins with a different proposition: labor as the source of wealth. Again, today this might seem quaint, but also signals something about capitalism that hardly is resolved. Capitalism both requires and dispenses with labor. In other words, capitalism both hires and, increasingly, unhires. It needs workers as it expands, but sheds workers as it cuts costs and automates, reducing its work force. Marx discusses at length how an advancing capitalism produces “a relatively redundant working population.” This takes two basic forms, releasing workers already hired and ceasing to add new workers. As a consequence capitalism produces “disposable” people or a reserve army of unemployed. As wealth and capital advance, so do the underemployed and unemployed, the truly unequal.

- Meanwhile, Brad Hornick examines the link between the resource economy and class politics in British Columbia:

It is not "the people" that are at the forefront of championing this fossil fuel economy against any alternatives. It is the corporate CEOs, the shareholders, the investment bankers, the marketing companies, the corporate lawyers, the conservative pundits that lock us in to this particular future against any substantive alternative.

That is why we can say that we are not in this together, that this great problem we are now facing is not "anthropogenic" climate change. All humans do not all equally contribute to the problem of climate change. Nor do we all equally invest in the system that leads to climate crisis. The crisis we presently face is "capitalist" climate change, driven by those who champion a certain kind of economy that serves the interests of a certain group of people.
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Fossil fuel capitalism operates within neo-liberal economics and politics where even the pretense of social solidarity and justice has been increasingly abandoned. But the climate crisis is opening up political and ideological space to discuss the entire system we live in (that is, the centrality of capitalism). There are signs that both economic crisis and ecological destruction are de-legitimizing political systems and helping people to question capitalist ideologies that ignore the social and ecological costs of fossil fuels.

It is because this system excludes populations from both economic activity and political participation that new antagonisms and struggles are developing. One only needs to observe among many other examples the plebiscite in Kitimat, the growing challenges to Kinder Morgan in Burnaby, or the intervention by the UN special rapporteur, James Anaya, over the concerns of proposed projects in First Nation territories.

There are political and activist forces coalescing today within British Columbia to challenge not just fossil fuel interests, but also the systemic forces that drive large capital. They are challenging fossil fuel capitalism at the point of production and extraction, and attempting to network allies amongst the traditional environmental forces.

- Ron Waller takes a look at the unrepresentative nature of first-past-the-post politics - but also rightly cautions Ontario voters against falling for "strategic voting" scams.

- Finally, Sean Holman offers a reminder that Daniel Therrien isn't the first federal Privacy Commissioner to represent a controversial appointment - though the Cons, like the Libs before them, have chosen not to make the selection process more palatable. And Robyn Benson argues that we have no reason at all to trust the Cons when it comes to our privacy.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Simon Enoch discusses the costs of turning over a profitable system of public liquor stores to corporate control - as Brad Wall has finally admitted to wanting to do:

A privatized liquor market is very likely to evolve into an 'oligopoly', where only a few corporations dominate and are able to exert monopoly-like power. Local, independent liquor retailers would likely find it difficult to compete. An oligopoly would have the supposed disadvantages of a monopoly, high prices and restricted supply, but lack the major advantage of public ownership, profits that flow in to public coffers...

Like any business, private liquor will seek to advance its economic interests through public policy. Indeed, Alberta-based private liquor companies have been consistently contributing financially to the Saskatchewan Party since its election. The reality is that the interests of the private liquor industry will almost certainly come into conflict with that of the public interest. Currently, under our public system, concerns such as public health can take priority in public policy. Will we be able to continue to make such issues a priority in the face of an economically powerful opposition determined to advance its own interests?

- Meanwhile, Joyce Nelson wonders why the combination of waste and scandal generated by massive privatization in Ontario isn't receiving more attention in the ongoing provincial election campaign. And the Globe and Mail reports on the Ford brothers' use of a privatization campaign supposedly based on efficiency to give publicly-funded handouts to their own personal business partners.

- Charles Pierce writes about the U.S. Democrats' quixotic efforts to restore some ability to regulate campaign finance in the wake of court rulings equating unlimited money with free speec

- David Dayen discusses how the roots of the 2008 crash run deeper than we often presume - and how consumer debt relief remains a necessary step in both boosting growth and reducing inequality:

By reviewing other economic downturns, Mian and Sufi discover two recurring features: a buildup of household debt before the crash, and an extreme decline in consumer spending afterward, as households cut back, hoarding money to pay off those scaled-up debts. The normal channels of fiscal and monetary policy have difficulty dealing with highly leveraged household balance sheets. House of Debt correlates these features of recessions, and really targets debt as the core problem, arguing that it needs to be restructured during crises and prevented during better times.

This critique — about the destructive power of debt and the need to forgive it — has in recent years come from far more radical circles, not from two economics professors trained in the classical tradition. “When we pitched the book, one publisher said, this is the intellectual justification for Occupy Wall Street,” said Professor Sufi in an interview. “We didn’t set out with that agenda. But one of the points we make is that the position we’re taking is not that radical if you look at history.”
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Sufi and Mian detail in the book how credit growth, particularly to low-income, high-risk households, fueled the housing bubble. Thanks to securitization, lenders could extend shaky credit and then pass off the risk to investors around the world, disconnecting themselves from any price drops. That’s before you get into how they ignored underwriting standards in a rush to lend, and fraudulently sold mortgage-backed securities without divulging the poor quality of the underlying loans. “Lenders should be held accountable for their actions,” Sufi said.

- And finally, Don Pittis writes about the need for a strong policy response to tax evasion techniques which are exacerbating inequality.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Bill Moyers interviews Richard Wolff about inequality - featuring Wolff's observation that anybody trying to justify inequality as an inevitable byproduct of unregulated markets manages only to make those markets indefensible:

Bill Moyers: When you say that there's no economic argument that people should be kept at the-- should not share in the gains of economic growth, the response is, "Well, that's what the market bears."

Richard Wolff: Well, you know, in the history of economics, which is my profession, it's a standard play on words. Instead of talking about how the economy is shaped by the actions of consumers in one way, workers in another way, corporate executives in another way, we abstract from all of that and we create a myth or a mystique. It's called the market.

That way you're absolving everybody from responsibility. It isn't that you're doing this, making that decision in this way, it's rather this thing called the market that makes things happen. Well, every corporate executive I know, knows that half of his or her job is to tweak, manipulate, shift, and change the market.

No corporate executive takes the market as given. That may happen in the classroom, but not in the world of real business. That's what advertising is. You try to create the demand, if there isn't enough of it to make money without doing that. You change everything you can. So the reference to a market, I think, is an evasion.

It's an attempt to make abstract the real workings of the economy so nobody can question what this one or that one is doing. But let me take it another way. To say that it's the market is another way of saying, "It's our economic system that works that way." That is a very dangerous defense move to take.

Bill Moyers: Why?

Richard Wolff: Because it plays into the hands of those like me who are critical of the system. If indeed it isn't this one or that one, it isn't this company's strategy or that product's maneuver, but it is the market, the totality of the system, that is producing unconscionable results, multi-million-dollar apartments next door to abject poverty, then you're saying that the system is at fault for these results.

I agree with that. But I'm not sure that those who push this notion of "the market makes it happen," have thought through where the logic of that defense makes them very vulnerable to a much more profound critique than they will be comfortable with.

- Meanwhile, Lana Payne tears into Tim Hudak for his job-killing agenda and long-discredited policy prescriptions, while Alan Pyke discusses how corporate freebies have failed in Kansas. And David Olive singles out Hudak for well-justified scorn in his claim (contrary to all evidence) that another round of handouts to the corporate sector will help Ontario's economic prospects - though Olive is also right to note that there's significant room for greater long-term investment on all sides in the Ontario election.

- Upstream makes the case for a focus on youth homelessness as an area where public investment could radically improve lives. And the NDP is pushing (and petitioning) for a renewed federal role in funding social housing as a means of alleviating poverty.

- The Star takes a look at the Cons' cuts to refugee health care, and confirms the suspicion that the effect of withdrawing funding for needed services would be to inflate costs for the provinces who are left to deal with diseases left untreated for too long.

- Finally, Kady O'Malley points out that the NDP has received a substantial boost from former House of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh in its effort to stop the abuse of parliamentary resources to attack opposition parties. But it's hard to see the Cons being persuaded to change course given that Walsh's warning against "the use of House proceedings for any purpose whatsoever...to license parliamentary tyranny by a governing majority over the minority parties sitting in opposition if not also over outside third parties" would fit neatly as a mission statement for Stephen Harper and his minions.