Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Neil Irwin writes that many progressive policies - including child care and income tax credits - serve the goal of facilitating economic participation far better than their right-wing "supply side" counterparts.

- Ann Pettifor examines the future of globalization, and warns that a failure to properly regulate financial markets may be stoking public resentment toward the flow of people and goods.

- Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo study the effects of automation in cutting into both available employment and wage levels. And Vili Lehdonvirta writes about the role a basic income could play in countering the problems with the gig economy.

- Poppy Noor suggests that we treat housing as a human right rather than primarily a market good - and discusses the far more fair society that would result. And Gary Younge points out how austerian politics lead to a direct humanitarian toll.

- Ezra Klein discusses new research showing that the U.S.' political polarization is worse among older people (who make less use of social media, and rely more on television or radio echo chambers) than younger ones who are exposed to at least some different viewpoints.

- Finally, Linda McQuaig calls out Justin Trudeau's refusal to participate in talks on unclear disarmament, taking Canada well outside its self-perceived role as a leader in multilateral peacemaking.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Shannon Gormley points out that human rights are meaningless in the face of a government which claims the entitlement to strip people of their humanity - which is exactly what the Cons are setting out to do:

(W)hen Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander announced this year that, “Citizenship is not a right, it is a privilege,” most human rights advocates couldn’t take him seriously. He may as well have declared that the curvature of the earth is merely an optical illusion and the world is indeed flat, or that the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to his government, which can perpetually stay in power whether or not its ministers fuel it with statements deserving serious consideration.

But while remarks such as the minister’s may not be worth taking seriously as statements of fact, they’re worth remembering as philosophical beliefs that determine policy directions. 
...
(T)o make simple policy changes, the government must make serious philosophical changes. It has to reverse its absurd and dangerous position that “the right to have rights” isn’t a right at all.

- Rick Salutin highlights the amount of work young Canadians already put into their efforts to break into a hostile job market. And Aaron Wherry points out that there's no reason for workers to have any confidence in a government which will proudly trumpet the funnelling of hundreds of millions of dollars to employers in the name of a jobs program without even considering whether they'll actually create any jobs in the process.

- Jen St. Denis discusses the negative effects income-splitting would have on women's earning power even in the few families who would enjoy some surface benefit. And Angella MacEwen exposes Andrew Coyne's blind spot in valuing the contributions of a stay-at-home spouse at zero (resulting in tax benefits based solely on the actual income of the other spouse).

- Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew reports on the widespread food bank use among people with full-time jobs which don't provide enough income to put food on the table. And Jordon Cooper discusses how Saskatchewan governments have come to see increasing reliance on food banks as a solution rather than a problem.

- Finally, Michael Harris writes about the Cons' exploitative relationship with Canada's veterans. And Ryan Meili comments on the connection between peace and health:

War brings injury and death by definition, but the impact of war is not limited to wartime. Long after the bullets stop flying, the destructive effects on a country continue: on its economy, its infrastructure, its psychology, its soul. War leaves behind land mines literal and metaphorical. Unexploded ordinances claim the lives and limbs of civilians. The spread of illnesses like HIV increases with the transience of wartime life. Violence and disease kill the young, the healthy backbone of the nation's families and economy. Those left behind often struggle with the emotional and psychological echoes of the trauma they survived. All of this damage leads to the perpetuation of poverty on numerous levels and, all too often, to a return to conflict and a repetition of the destructive cycle.

The road from peace to health is not a one-way street; a healthy society is less likely to find itself fighting. The same conditions that lead to higher levels of illness -- economic inequality, food insecurity, labour unrest -- can also lead to dangerous political instability. Since the early 1990s a series of global initiatives known as Peace through Health have been actively looking at the ways in which humanitarian health efforts can serve as a bridge to peaceful resolution of conflict. Well-resourced universal health systems can be a stabilizing element in both preventing and responding to violence. In this context, recent cuts to health services (including the drastic cuts to refugee health, many of whom have come to Canada to flee conflict) present a real threat to our health and security.

At this time of remembrance we are moved to think of those who sacrificed their lives in times of war so that others might live in peace. But to say "never again" to the horrors of the past means to work for peace today. A successful peace movement must recognize how injustice and inequality promote and perpetuate conflict. The world is suffering from a disease, with most gruesome symptom. As we continue to learn in health care, the most effective way to combat disease is to move upstream, to prevent sickness from starting.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Thom Hartmann discusses how Reaganomics were designed to crush the U.S.' middle class - and have succeeded in that goal:

Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America’s middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

...

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you’ll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich – the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations – was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You’ll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
...
Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two...

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights.

- Meanwhile, Robert Solow reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with a particular focus on the "rich-get-richer dynamic". Lynn Stuart Parramore comments on the corporatist right's fear of Piketty's analysis. And Geoff Davies (via Yves Smith) proposes some policy options which would reduce pre-market inequality.

- Molly Ball writes that some U.S. governments are starting to learn their lesson about the dangers of privatization - but only after having forfeited vital public institutions to the private sector.

- David Green discusses how the temporary foreign worker program is designed to make sure that employers can avoid the market forces which would otherwise lead prosperity to be shared with workers. And PressProgress highlights the fact that Jason Kenney was warned that he lacked accurate jobs data - but kept on spouting talking points with gross disregard for their accuracy rather than looking into how his government has attacked the evidence-gathering process.

- Finally, Linda McQuaig writes about Stephen Harper's fetishization of war even as the public moves past any desire to funnel resources into destruction.

Parliament in Review: November 30, 2011

After the previous day's debacle in which government-sponsored amendments to the Cons' dumb-on-crime bill were ruled out of order, one might have expected at least some acknowledgment of fallibility on the part of the Harper Cons.

The Big Issue

But Wednesday, November 30 saw nothing of the sort, even when the Cons were questioned directly. Instead, Rob Nicholson responded to entirely valid questions by claiming that his party still supported "every measure in this bill" even after it had tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill. But Nicholson's general grasp on reality seemed to be lacking generally, as he railed against "(e)very time the opposition parties, in the last five years, got together and forced an election on the Government of Canada" - by which he presumably meant exactly once.

Meanwhile, Andrew Cash reminded Nicholson that there were plenty of non-contentious parts of the bill which the opposition would have been happy to have passed already if the Cons didn't insist on tying them to poison pills, while Alexandre Boulerice noted in particular that provisions to address worker exploitation shouldn't be lashed to evidence-free policy on drugs and other justice issues. And Cash and Megan Leslie discussed the racialization of both poverty and crime.

But in the end Peter Van Loan pushed ahead in yet again cutting off debate, with the Cons again forcing through both the cloture motion and the unamended bill.

In Brief

Nycole Turmel and Charlie Angus returned from Attawapiskat to demand that the Cons declare a state of emergency (or at least show their faces in the community). Don Davies listed off many more Con-connected appointments to the Immigration and Refugee Board than Jason Kenney was willing to admit the previous day. Christine Moore pointed out the latest Con misadventure in acronyms, as the Air Force's French acronym following the Cons' re-insertion of "royal" matched that of a Colombian terrorist group until somebody pointed out the association. Davies introduced a private member's bill to lower the voting age to 16, Chris Charlton proposed to allow Parliamentary staff to unionize, and Alex Atamanenko presented a bill to establish a Department of Peace. Olivia Chow noted that the imposed vote on C-10 was cutting into promised time for committee questioning on infrastructure. Jamie Nicholls polished his futurist credentials by successfully predicting that an adjournment question on G8 patronage would be answered with mindless talking points. And Guy Caron followed up on issues of corruption in corporate tax enforcement at the Canada Revenue Agency.

Leadership 2012 Roundup

No, I won't claim to have entirely comprehensive coverage of the NDP's leadership race. But I do try to catch the developments that strike me as significant for each candidate and the race as a whole...so let's take a look at what's new over the past few days.

To start off with, the Laurier–Sainte-Marie debate on Sunday received one major media story as well as being live-tweeted by Alice and Justin among others. The main storylines look to have been another strong performance by Nathan Cullen and a call by Thomas Mulcair to emphasize asymmetric federalism - but I'll reserve judgment until I have a chance to watch the debate for myself, particularly since the in-debate commentary included conflicting takes on a couple of key points.

Meanwhile...

- Niki Ashton made a push for peace, highlighting the Harper Cons' attacks on Islam in particular being ill-advised. But more broadly, the use of military force may actually make for an issue to watch if the leadership contenders are pressed as to when they'd see fit to use Canada's armed forces to meet foreign policy goals.

- Paul Dewar expanded on the "Next 70" theme introduced last week while earning a supportive column from Peter Thurley.

- Mulcair became the first candidate to receive the full-on Sun Media treatment - though we can expect that there's plenty more where that came from. (And for the record, here's my take from last time the citizenship question came up.)

- Peggy Nash answered questions from CBC viewers, including one on what the NDP can do for western Canada.

- And finally, Romeo Saganash's Ontario tour featured both a new blog post on how the Cons value corporate profits over taking care of people, and some positive press from the Star.

Parliament In Review: September 21, 2011

Despite a typically short sitting day on Wednesday, we nonetheless saw an important preview of how one of the most contentious issues on the Canadian political scene will be dealt with over the next few years.

The Big Issue

The main point of discussion was the Cons' new omnibus crime bill, with various opposition speakers trying to introduce some rational analysis to the discussion in a number of ways. Those included Don Davies, who went out of his way to start his speech with a set of principles that all parties could agree on; Elizabeth May, who tried to convince the Cons to allow the various parts of the bill to actually be studied separately rather than being rammed through in a single, take-it-or-leave-it package; and Sean Casey, who went a step further in saying there were parts of the bill he'd support if they were dealt with separately.

Of course, those entreaties were met with the usual wall of Con accusations that any concern about cost or effectiveness meant the speaker was on the side of thugs against victims. Which is why the most important opposition intervention was likely Joe Comartin's inaugural response, nicely framing the battle of persuasion that figures to play out of the next few years. And the points raised on that front included Peter Stoffer's appeal to recognize the harm a lock-'em-all-up approach may have on mentally ill offenders, and Jasbir Sandhu's prime example as to how the Cons' posturing has nothing to do with a principled approach to which offences deserve more severe penalties.

Message Tracks

Two NDP MPs celebrated the International Day of Peace with actual approval of the concept. But since peace isn't such a great fit for the Cons' foreign policy message, Shelley Glover elected to celebrate the occasion by changing the subject.

In Brief

Charlie Angus kept up the heat on the Cons' G8 patronage and subsequent cover-up. And Randall Garrison reintroduced a private member's bill to provide for gender identity rights.

Thursday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your amusement.

- Dr. Robert Evans nicely demolishes the argument for privatized health care based on pretending that services paid for or delivered by the private sector somehow don't count as expenses:

There's a central fallacy in the privatize medicare crusade. "Unsustainable" public health spending will magically become sustainable simply by shifting costs from the taxpayer to the patient and from the wealthy to the sick.

"Bluntly, this is a lie," says Canada's pre-eminent health economist, Dr. Robert Evans.
...
The 92 per cent of Canadians who know they're better off financially with medicare can take solace in Evans' evisceration of the privatizers' "myths:"

Myth One: Canada's aging population will make health care unaffordable. Private health-care services, not an aging population, are driving health-care spending, says Evans. "The key cost-drivers in health-care services are the private, for-profit parts -- pharmaceuticals, dental, diagnostic tests and other non-insured services. Population aging increases health-care costs at only 0.8 per cent annually."

Myth Two: Health-care costs are eating up all the provincial budgets and crowding out other services. Medicare spending takes up about the same share of provincial revenues as it did 20 years ago, says Evans. "However, between 1997 and 2004, cuts in personal and corporate taxes removed about $170.8 billion from government revenues." An additional $35 billion annually has been lost to tax cuts every year since. "As a result, other non-health-care programs were cut, making it appear that the share of the budget for health care was increasing."

Myth Three: Public health-care spending is skyrocketing out of control. Not only is Canada's public health-care spending not skyrocketing, it is stable and below the OECD average, says Evans. It's spending on private care that is driving cost increases. Between 1975 and 2009, medicare spending -- on doctors and hospitals -- has remained steady at between four and five per cent of Canada's GDP. When private spending on services not covered by medicare is included, the cost escalation shoots up to 12 per cent per year. "Clearly a public, single-payer system is the way to control costs," Evans says.

Myth Four: Privatization of health services will control health costs. "Privatization is a way to avoid cost containment and provides greater income opportunities for providers of care and private insurers outside public control," says Evans.

- Jim Stanford expands on his analysis of the Canada-EU trade negotiations by pointing out the utter implausibility of the assumptions involved in the Cons' justification for it:

There is no historical basis to conclude that free trade agreements are good for either Canadian exports, or for Canadian trade balances. In the real world, free trade agreements (not surprisingly) tend to make existing trade imbalances even worse: this is true throughout economics, where deregulation generally tends to exacerbate the imbalances and unevenness of market outcomes. Despite this observed failure, pursuing free trade agreements seems to be the default, one-note policy response from Ottawa to Canada’s worsening global trade performance - which is currently delivering us the biggest current account deficits in our history.

- In the department of no surprises, corporate social responsibility has joined peace as extreme ideas which won't be tolerated by the Harper government.

- Finally, Jeffrey Simpson is absolutely right to note the willingness of roughly 30% of Canada's population to accept even the most blatantly obvious nonsense out of the Harper Cons - with polling on the census and Canada's bid for a Security Council seat serving as the latest examples. But it's worth noting the flip side to that number: the 30% must have awfully limited capacity to influence the rest of Canada's electorate if the Cons' general party numbers are stuck just barely above the number of people who will accept their word without question.

Order received

Just when you thought we'd made some progress on trying to actually end conflicts, Vic Toews has felt the need to clarify that promoting peace is considered an unacceptable extremist viewpoint. Perpetual war forever!