Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Jeffrey Simpson manages to write an entire column on important political developments he missed in 2011 without uttering the words "NDP" (or mentioning any member thereof). Which surely looks like an early nominee as a continued blind spot in 2012.

- Peter Thurley wishes for a national housing strategy in the new year. But judging from the Cons' insistence on casting blame rather than doing anything to address even the most glaring needs for which the federal government has the most direct responsibility, I don't see much reason for optimism.

- Meanwhile, more tax breaks for worker-busting figure to be on the table for a long time to come.

- Finally, Rick Salutin highlights the much-needed decline of deference to power and wealth. And on that front, Sixth Estate offers a preview of what's to come in the year ahead.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Purple Library Guy nicely sums up how the financial industry has become completely detached from anything that could be considered useful in generating real economic growth:

When you abstract something, it tends to make it possible to do it on a larger scale, with more complexity. And originally, that's what finance was for. With the abstraction of money as a fungible claim on wealth, there were a lot of games you could play to arrange for the stuff you wanted done to claim the wealth needed to do it, at the right time, on the right scale, in theoretically arbitrary places.

But if you can do that, you can play games for other purposes. Increasingly nowadays the financial sector does not operate to enhance investment in genuine production. Rather, it acts first as a rentier and second to create money and paper profits, out of nothing, that are re-invested in nothing but more paper profits.
...
(F)inance capital makes nothing. Rather, it steals. It makes up new money in the finance capitalists' hands, reducing the value of that held by traditional capitalists through a form of inflation in financial assets. In a way it's like a kind of really large scale counterfeiting. That's one reason why all the bubbles. One thing that almost makes it worse is that the tricks are mostly not very stable, as we've noticed; the apparent value is apt to disappear as soon as enough people lose confidence that it really exists.

Capitalism is a system I don't much like, but it is a system for doing real things that can generate real productivity gains, technological advance and so on. Its claims to be the only possible such system are specious. But finance capitalism isn't even a system. It's a method for cannibalizing an existing system, rendering it for its value until nothing but the bones are left. When finance capital becomes dominant, capitalism has serious crises. And finance capital has probably never been as dominant as it is today.

- Thomas Walkom offers up a few lessons for Stephen Harper based on his utter failure to sell the Keystone XL pipeline south of the border:

The first is that, politically, the environment still matters. Prime Minister Stephen Harper may have successfully ignored environmental critics at home. But, as the U.S. president’s abrupt reversal on the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates, such critics still wield considerable clout in countries that Canada is desperate to do business with.

The second is that continental energy integration — a long-standing dream of both the Conservative Party and its allies in the oil industry — is neither as simple nor advisable as it might seem.

- Peter Thurley points out who stands to suffer most from the Cons' crackdown on refugees.

- Finally, John Warnock notes that Saskatchewan's voter turnout - already unimpressive based on the numbers released by Elections Saskatchewan - looks much worse when taking into account unenumerated citizens of voting age.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading...

- Peter Thurley responds to Michael Ignatieff's appearance in Kitchener by pointing out that Lib MPs in the area's seats wouldn't have made a lick of difference thanks to the choices of Ignatieff and previous Lib leaders:

(I)f Ignatieff hopes to take back Kitchener, he’s going to have to account for the fact that his MPs voted alongside Stephen Harper’s Conservative government on 114 different confidence motions, effectively handing Mr. Harper carte blanche to impose his will on Canadians.

The partial privatization of Canada Post, cost thousands of postal workers their jobs. The siphoning of $57 billion from the Employment Insurance fund, away from Canadians when they needed it the most. One of the lowest corporate tax rates in the western world, in a time when the poorest Canadians need goods and services more than ever before.

That’s the Liberal record.

There is one question every voter must ask themselves before they go to the polls in the next election: If Karen Redman had been MP in Kitchener Centre since 2008, would her votes on matters of concern to Canadians have been any different than the votes that Mr. Woodworth cast? And if not, wouldn’t a vote for a New Democrat make more sense?

- And James Travers rightly notes that the trend of increasing inequality has been, and figures to remain, equally strong under Con and Lib governments alike:

Michael Veall, an economics professor at Hamilton’s McMaster University, makes the case this way. “Had the Liberals been in charge of the last few budgets, it’s arguable that the differences today would be very small.”

As Veall agrees, the single most significant point of departure was the politically popular, fiscally suspect Conservative decision to twice trim the GST. Savaged by most economists as regressive, those cuts, coupled with record spending, set the country’s return course for deficits long before the 2008 recession.

It’s also true Conservatives spread the loose change of small tax cuts more widely than program-oriented Liberals. But on the big buck stuff — stimulating the economy, bailing out the auto industry, rebuilding the military and lightening the corporate tax load — Liberals made or would have made similar choices.

Parallel courses lead to more or less the same destination. In Canada’s case, that’s a place where the wealth divide is widening and inequality, with its inherent threats to social cohesion and collective advancement, is rising.

- Which leads to Alex Himelfarb's question as to how increased awareness of inequality and a seldom-questioned free-market ideology can coexist. But given that the level of public focus on inequality is itself a fairly recent development, I'd see reason for hope that we're actually at a turning point when it comes to the economic assumptions that have led to our current gilded age.

- And finally, Eric Sager offers a reminder that the Cons' choice to gut long-form census doesn't need to be a done deal - and that it's well worth reversing:

If you think the fuss is over, think again. Far too many groups require the reliable data that only the long-form census provides. The "save-the-census" website lists more than 350 organizations that have condemned the prime minister's decision.

Those who use data from the long-form census include federal and provincial government departments, municipalities, city planners, health organizations, charities, non-government organizations, academics and many others.
...
There is another reason why the fuss isn't over.

The long-form census is required for other surveys. It provides the basis for sampling for the Labour Force Survey (which remains mandatory, by the way). The Labour Force Survey is used to calculate unemployment rates and other essential economic data, and is also the starting point for many other surveys.

This is why economists and business groups have argued that cancelling the long form census will have snowballing negative effects throughout society.

Sunday Afternoon Links

A few links to close out your summer weekend...

- Dr. Dawg points out another example of the Con-friendly noise machine being set up by the Harper government using public resources - this time in the promotion of a set of religious-right actors who are being treated as if they speak for all First Nations communities.

- And of course, that cultivation of lackeys willing to bow to the will of Big Daddy fits in all too well with Alex Himelfarb's post on the Harper government's transition from a welfare state to a security state.

- A couple of NDP podcasts worth a listen: MP Megan Leslie and candidate Peter Thurley on housing issues, and an introduction to Edmonton-Leduc candidate Artem Medvedev.

- Finally, for those following the Saskatchewan NDP's Regina Northeast nomination race, the vote has been set for September 30.

More and Better New Democrats: Peter Thurley for Kitchener Centre

As promised, let's kick off what I hope will be a successful More and Better New Democrats project with a prime example of a strong candidate whose voice can be significantly amplified with just a bit of support from across Canada. You may know Peter Thurley from his blog or from his active involvement on Twitter - but let's take some time for a closer look at what he's doing as the NDP's candidate for Kitchener Centre.

The Candidate

One of the keys to the "More and Better New Democrats" concept is to boost the campaigns of candidates who can bring strong progressive voices into play. And Peter offers an ideal track record on that point, having been named one of the Waterloo Region’s “40 Under 40” for his work in the community on poverty and housing issues - including both working to improve conditions directly through fund-raising and volunteering, and pushing to build awareness and support for Libby Davies' Bill C-304 to establish a national housing strategy.

But there's an added bonus for those of us looking at online organization as an integral means of building popular awareness, as Peter looks to be one of the strongest candidates in the country on that front. In addition to having an active website and Facebook page, he's also a prolific Twitterer - with his accomplishments there including getting the Con incumbent in his riding to agree that the effective goal in dealing with the Senate should be "as close to abolition as possible". (Needless to say, it may be worth pressing that point as the Senate Cons continue to hold up C-311 and other opposition bills.)

The Riding

From a strategic standpoint, the last few election cycles have seen the NDP running a moderately strong third in Kitchener Centre without putting in a lot of resources, with vote shares ranging from 18.1% to 19.3% since 2004. Which would seem to make the riding a prime testing ground to determine just how much better the NDP can do if it's able to raise and spend close to the riding limit. And there's plenty of reason for optimism there since the NDP has performed well in ridings in the area in the past, winning both Kitchener ridings provincially in 1990 and ranking a strong second both provincially and federally in elections before that.

But of course, Peter's focus on the riding is more than strategic:

Kitchener Centre is a very different riding from Kitchener Waterloo - everyone knows about the tech sector and higher learning in Waterloo, but Kitchener Centre has been hit hard with manufacturing job losses, increased overall unemployment, etc. One of the challenges of the riding is having a representative that will be able to ensure the City of Kitchener is seen as a good place for the Federal government to invest in re-education and job retraining, and that the city has a significant role to play in the Waterloo Region as a manufacturing and industry hub in Southwestern Ontario.

Needless to say, Kitchener Centre voters can't expect to see that kind of challenge met by an MP who's spent most of his time denying that there's any problem at all since that might mean taking some responsibility. Which brings us to...

The Opponents

The incumbent MP in Kitchener Centre is Con backbencher Stephen Woodworth, who won the riding with 36.7% of the vote while spending roughly the maximum in 2008. To his credit, Woodworth is a regular Twitterer himself - but like his partymates, he's used the medium and any other form of communication exclusively to worship Stephen Harper and spout the party line while making excuses for not acting on principle. And for added fun, check out his remarkable tweet that voters should prefer having an MP who disagrees with their values:

@RamaraMan Re next election,if I lose you might end up with an MP who always agrees w you, or who ignors you.Is tht wht you want?Or dialogue

Somehow, I suspect most Canadians would consider themselves better off with an MP who does actually agree with them, rather than one who offers only minimal "dialogue" to excuse a complete failure to meet the riding's needs. And I'm sure progressive voters would much rather be able to use Twitter to exchange ideas with Peter than to slam their heads against the wall trying to get through to one of Harper's cheerleaders.

The Libs' Karen Redman is also back in the Kitchener Centre race after holding the seat until 2008, when the combination of a fully-funded campaign, an incumbency advantage and a high profile as the Libs' whip wasn't enough for her to hold off Woodworth. Needless to say, there's little reason to think she'll be any stronger as a candidate in the next election.

The Plan

So what can we do to help Peter out? The obvious answers are of course:
Donate to the Kitchener Centre NDP - Contact the Kitchener Centre NDP to volunteer

But Peter recognizes that for a candidate going up against a current and a former MP, "the biggest thing people can do is spread the word" - which means reaching the widest possible audience in addition to making sure our own contacts in Kitchener Centre know about his merits as a candidate. So anybody interested in finding out more about Peter and getting the word out through their own medium of choice is encouraged to contact him.

(Edit: fixed typo.)