Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Mainly Macro offers a useful definition of neoliberalism, while highlighting its relationship to austerity. And Ed Finn writes that we shouldn't be too quick to presume neoliberalism is going to disappear just because it's proven to be harmful in practice - and that it will take a massive shift in our politics to actually create real change:

We should always keep in mind that neoliberalism is as much a methodology as it is an ideology. Perhaps more so. It is the deeply entrenched doctrine through and by which corporations exert and maintain their dominant economic system. Global capitalism could not survive without the prevalence of neoliberalism, or some equivalent belief system that rationalizes its brutally inequitable operations.

No matter how vigorous the upsurge of anti-establishment populism becomes, it will never on its own topple the titans of corporate rule. That could only happen when countries have genuinely democratic governments instead of governments that function mainly as the flunkeys of big business. We live in a world where nearly all governments (including Canada’s) have embraced and deployed neoliberalism as zealously as the corporations — and on behalf of the corporations.

As long as the corporations can rely on this powerful political support, neoliberalism will remain unassailable. Without the levers of reform that only governments can provide, the dissidents can never succeed in their crusade, no matter how large their numbers. This is the grim reality.
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There is some hope that, if a massive multitude of voters could be mobilized against the nabobs of neoliberalism, it could be concentrated into a powerful electoral force. What if every MP who favoured neoliberalism — or even a majority of them — were defeated in the next election and replaced by a candidate who wanted it scrapped? If duplicated in every large industrial country, could this international tsunami of anti-establishment populism sink global neoliberalism?

Simply to pose this fanciful scenario, however, exposes its improbability — if only because the destruction of neoliberalism also entails the destruction of capitalism.

Neoliberalism is the lifeblood, the very beating heart, of modern capitalism. So it will be fiercely defended by both corporations and their obsequious political allies, regardless of the social, economic, and environmental devastation it wreaks.

- Alison Grizwold discusses how the gig labour market looks disturbingly like the pre-industrial economy in its total lack of security or protection for workers.

- Aditya Chakrabortty writes that anti-social populism is a natural response to the spread of trade agreements as a substitute for democratic control over policy. Steven Shrybman analyzes (PDF) the utterly ineffective "interpretative declaration" which is supposed to offer some comfort against the obviously worrisome terms of the CETA. And Brent Patterson points out that Ontario is claiming it's bound by existing trade rules as an excuse for refusing to protect needed water sources from corporate exploitation.

- Finally, Elizabeth Goiten calls attention to the U.S. government's reliance on secret laws, while pointing out the obvious dangers of sidestepping both public review as to what laws are in place and the ability to know what legal burdens have been applied. Edward Snowden discusses the politics of fear behind C-51 and other surveillance legislation. And Matthew Behrens laments the fact that even CSIS' supposed watchdog is going out of its way to defend the use of information obtained by torture (however grossly that violates international law).

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Mike Konczal discusses the distribution of U.S. tax breaks and incentives, and finds that measures normally presented as offering breaks for everybody in fact serve mostly as giveaways to the wealthy:

(T)he government is very responsive to the interests of the top 20 to 40 percent of Americans, and so far it has been very difficult to approach scaling back the tax expenditures in deductions and exclusions. Again, since these benefits scale with income, these tax expenditures disproportionately benefit those up the income scale.  Obama’s signature proposal for raising taxes right now is limiting the value of these itemized deductions and expenditures for couples making more than $250,000 a year to just 28 percent.

This, then, is the fight in American politics. Democrats want to expand the tax break state for the poor and cut it for the rich. Republicans want to keep it for the rich, or possibly use it to lower tax rates on the rich, but they’re uncomfortable with the part of the tax break state that benefits the poor. Although shrouded in arcane tax terminology, this is one of the most important battles over who will benefit from our economic progress, and how.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Goodall writes that reining in offshore tax avoidance will require both better laws (reflecting a commitment by governments around the globe to eliminating loopholes) and more ethical corporate behaviour:

Vanessa Houlder of the Financial Times has pointed out: "Governments are complicit in the problems they are condemning. It is their tax systems that have created incentives for businesses to behave in this way."

Law journalist Edward Fennell wrote in The Times: "Recent tub-thumping by politicians over the alleged tax avoidance by the likes of Google and Amazon is creating a cacophony of vituperation. It may seem a neat way to claw back a few votes, but whether it actually addresses the underlying problems is less clear." 

He quoted Miles Dean, of Milestone International Tax Partners, as saying that companies are using the tax system in the way intended, and that the OECD model convention – on which most double taxation agreements are based – is designed to facilitate international trade by "allowing multinationals to trade internationally without necessarily creating a taxable presence in each country".

Pascal Saint-Amans told the OECD forum that big business was not to blame. "What we have seen is that the elimination of double taxation [by means of bilateral double tax agreements] may have [resulted in] double non-taxation, which is not politically or economically acceptable. You have some players who are not exposed to international transactions being taxed at the statutory rate." He added: "It's legal. If you don't like the outcome you need to change the law."

I am not sure he's right – business must take a share of the responsibility. But the priority now must be to fix the system, and international agreement is essential.

- Steven Shrybman weighs in on Judge Mosley's finding that the Cons' voter database was used to commit widespread election fraud in 2011. But the Cons have moved on from claiming vindication, to complaining that they're enveloped in a cloud of dishonesty caused by their own party's efforts to cover up the identities of those responsible.

- Mike de Souza reports on the Cons' petulant response to his earlier stories on how omnibus budgets were used to eliminate environmental assessments for the vast majority of tar sands development - as DFO scientists were prevented from discussing the story in retaliation.

- Finally, Tim Harper writes that the scandals surrounding the Senate have been caused by patronage enablers as well as by individual senators. Michael Harris explores how the Cons have used BS tactics in trying to hide from their responsibility for Clusterduff.  Joanna Smith documents a two-party culture of entitlement, with Con and Lib bagmen alike asserting that voters are somehow better served if unaccountable partisan hacks can use their cushy sinecures to win votes for their party. And Ralph Surette rightly notes that the only answer to abuses by a narrow privileged class is broader public participation.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- The Broadbent Institute has released a new set of polling (PDF) as to Canadians' values. And it's particularly worth noting that even on the Cons' signature issues such as tax cuts, austerity and crime - where millions upon millions of public dollars have been spent in a combined effort at branding and persuasion - 60% or more of respondents (including new immigrants) side with a more progressive option.

- But as Steven Shrybman notes in criticizing Jeffrey Simpson's blase view of universal public health care, we still have our own Village working to impose policies which favour profit over people even when the public strongly supports the status quo. And Dave Coles comments on Tim Hudak's attempt to bring Republican-style attacks on workers north of the border.

- If we need a reminder as to the disastrous results of corporate self-regulation, though, Leslie Young and Anna Mehler Paperny provide it:

The cracked pipe sleeve behind the second-biggest oil spill in Alberta’s history had been flagged as a hazard more than two decades earlier by the national regulator responsible for pipeline safety.

But this pipe fell under provincial jurisdiction, so the national regulator’s inspection edict didn’t apply at the time. And while the provincial regulator “assumed” prudent safety measures had been taken, it wrote in a post-incident report, it couldn’t be sure.
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Both the Energy Resources Conservation Board and its federal counterpart, the National Energy Board, rely on oil companies to let them know when something goes wrong. The regulators rarely follow up themselves, and usually only if they know of a series of problems.

Successive audits and reports have found that regulation isn’t keeping pace with industry growth, and that even when inspectors identify problems, they rarely follow up.

This has demonstrable consequences: On a spring evening in 2011, a leak on a Plains Midstream pipe in Northern Alberta released more than 28,000 barrels of sweet crude into rural muskeg before it was shut down – eight hours and several alarms after the leak was detected. According to the ERCB’s own investigation, it took nearly 14 hours after the first signs of a leak for Plains Midstream to report the incident to the energy regulator.
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[The National Energy Board] has been conducting fewer field inspections annually – and finding more cases of “high-risk noncompliance.” Inspectors found 437 such instances in 2011, up from 263 the year before. That year, 41 out of a total 362 of the drilling operations it inspected were deemed “high-risk noncompliant” – the highest proportion since 2006.

- Finally, Larry Elliott discusses Oxfam's conclusion that it would be possible to end extreme poverty on a global scale (and twice over) if not for tax avoidance and evasion:

According to Oxfam's estimates, almost $18.5tn is being held for individuals in tax havens, one third of it in British Overseas Territories and crown dependencies.

The charity said that even on conservative assumptions, the $18.5tn would yield $156bn to tax authorities around the world, whilst the cost of providing every person on earth with an income of $1.25 a day would be $66bn.

Emma Seery, Oxfam's Head of Development Finance and Public Services, said: "These figures put the UK at the centre of a global tax system that is a colossal betrayal of people here and in the poorest countries who are struggling to get by, and they put the government on the side of the privileged few. If they want to get on the right side of this debate, now is the time to take action.

"Britain's credibility is on the line; talking tough on tax, whilst continuing to usher a third of the world's wealth into UK tax havens, risks making a mockery of David Cameron's leadership at the G8 Summit in June."

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- As would-be frackers show us exactly why it's dangerous to give the corporate sector a veto over government action, Steven Shrybman suggests that corporations are mostly doing only what we'd expect in exploiting agreements designed to prioritize profits over people:

Canadian businesses are simply playing by the rules of free trade which encourages the outsourcing of everthing that isn't glued to the local Tim Hortons or the tar sands (to cite two prominent examples): that means value-added processing (where the jobs are) of natural resources that are simply ripped and shipped to the US or Asia, virtually all manufacturing, and an awful lot of services -- from accounting, and computer programming, to retail (online) sales.

And yet, nary a mention of so-called free trade from Enright -- which is really no more than domestic market de-regulation and the principal cause of our present predicament.

- But then, it's not as if corporatist policy has emerged without some massive business lobbying - and Alison documents some of the connections between outsourcing firms and governments which have fed into the temporary foreign worker fiasco. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post points out some of the effects of temporary foreign worker abuse in Alberta, while the Canadian Media Guild notes that the Cons have made sure the floodgates are still wide open.

- Pogge writes that in limiting access to future project review proceedings, the Cons seem to have succeeded in taking the "public" out of public policy. But Robyn Benson confirms that the labour movement isn't about to be silenced.

- Jason Fekete offers a few early caveats as Statistics Canada gets set to release the results of the Cons' census vandalism.

- Finally, Paul Adams notes that after Jason Collins' decision to come out publicly was met with broad support, the North American conservative movement may be the last place where gays and lesbians are uniformly forced to stay in the closet. But I'm not sure we can expect that to change for the better when the likes of Brad Wall won't so much as deign to say the words "gay" or "homophobia" (while defending a choice not to support gay-straight alliances).

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Ian Lovett reports on the use of "capital appreciation bonds" in California to ensure that future generations pay an inflated price to private-sector developers for infrastructure today.

- Justin Ling's review of Joyce Murray's message about electoral non-competition pacts is well worth a read - but I'll particularly highlight this part:

Do you want Stephen Harper to be defeated in the next federal election?

Alright, we’re already off to a rocky start.

Politics of negation is dangerous, ugly, and unfortunately rears its ugly head very often in leadership campaigns.

“Elect me and I’ll stop [gay marriage/abortion/separatists/Toronto elitists]” has long between a rhetorical sledgehammer that’s good at getting gut reaction from ignorant people. Nothing more.

So when Joyce Murray asks me if I want Stephen Harper to be defeated, my immediate answer is ‘no’ — I want a government that, if possible, is more competent than our current one. Everyone should want that. Murray, like Trudeau or Garneau, should be making a case that she can do that. Not offering an Ocean’s Eleven caper on how to dupe the prime minister.

- But of course, there's loads of room for improvement on the government we're currently stuck with. And on that front, Steven Shrybman points out just the latest example in commenting on Harper's dubious assertion that his party's misleading robocalls weren't in breach of CRTC regulations, while Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault laments the fact that the Cons are trampling on access to information more and more as their stay in office drags on.

- Herbert Gans discusses how the U.S. media can contribute to genuine democratic debate far better than it currently does. And Rick Salutin laments the state of the CBC in having fallen into the same infotainment format as other broadcasters:

The gold standard for anchors was the U.S.’s Walter Cronkite. He was ready to stand up against the state and the flow and was solid as the bronze statue of the American revolutionary minuteman who stood “by the rude bridge that spanned the flood/ His flag to April’s breeze unfurled.” He had rhetoric and a voice to accompany it: “All things are as they were then except — You Are There.” When president Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite turn against the Vietnam War, he said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” Compared to Cronkite, Mansbridge isn’t an icon, he’s a barometer.

He’s happily gone with the flow — and the pressure. CBC has become numero uno for crime stories, weather coverage (today’s snow), product launches, celebrities and awards gossip. None of this is new, or news, and CBC itself doesn’t contest the point. The penny story was another example but the one that probably propelled me into this anchor obit was their infinite overkill on the new BlackBerry. (To give CBC radio its due, Carol Off did an item about that on As It Happens.) Also, to be clear, the Z10 drowned in pseudo-journalism everywhere. That’s my point: why have a public broadcaster if it duplicates everybody else’s obsessions? Nor do I want to romanticize the old CBC news. It was pompous and often misleading. But at least it distorted stories I cared about.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk rightly recognizes the significance of Jack Mintz' report on Saskatchewan's incoherent potash royalty structure.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer theorize that we should discuss the economy as a garden rather than a machine:

A well-designed tax system — in which everyone contributes and benefits — ensures that nutrients are circulated widely to fertilize and foster growth. Reducing taxes on the very wealthiest on the idea that they are “job creators” is folly. Jobs are the consequence of an organic feedback loop between consumers and businesses, and it’s the demand from a thriving middle class that truly creates jobs. The problem with today’s severe concentration of wealth, then, isn’t that it’s unfair, though it might be; it’s that it kills middle-class demand. Lasting growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges from the middle out.

Lastly, consider spending. The word spending means literally “to use up or extinguish value,” and most Americans believe that’s exactly what government does with their tax dollars. But government spending is not a single-step transaction that burns money as an engine burns fuel; it’s part of a continuous feedback loop that circulates money. Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood. To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden.

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford thoroughly debunks the austerian claim that we can't afford to invest in needed public programs:

(D)ebt service has continued to decline despite the (modest) rebound in debt resulting from the recession.  Debt service costs for all levels of government fell below 4% of GDP since the recession.  How could debt service costs decline, even while the debt burden (modestly) grew?  Because average interest costs have declined.  Like home-owners, governments have been able to refinance their debt to take advantage of today’s ultra-low rates.  (Remember, even fiscally pressed provinces like Ontario can still borrow money today for 10 years at real interest rates not much above zero.)  As older bonds come due and are refinanced, governments reduce their interest costs dramatically.  Those savings have more than offset the incremental debt service costs associated wtih additional debt.  So the claim that rising debt service costs are squeezing out more useful forms of public expenditure (not that conservatives support those programs, either) is empirically false.

Running up public debt for the sake of running up debt makes no sense.   There are costs associated with debt, and limits to how much debt can rise.  But there are benefits associated with debt-financed spending, too.  That includes the productivity of long-lived public capital assets that can be financed with debt (just like companies or households prudently finance long-lived assets, from factory equipment to homes, with debt).  In a demand-constrained macroeconomic context, another benefit of debt-financed spending is the positive spillover effect on overall employment and income that results from that spending (even when it’s on current services rather than public capital).  Based on the preceding graphs, Canadian governments are far from any meaningful constraint on their ability to borrow.  Hence, we should make a rational decision as a country regarding how much new debt is optimal, rather than being dominated by an initial quasi-religious assumption that “all debt is bad.”

- I'll agree with Dan Gardner that at least a few of the recent criticisms of Stephen Harper - such as that based on his Calgary boosterism - take several steps across the line between reasonable concern and excessive contrarianism. And it's a shame that's the type of story receiving attention, since there are still plenty of entirely valid reasons to be genuinely outraged at Harper that remain to be fleshed out.

- Finally, for those with a bit more time on their hands, Steven Shrybman's legal opinion on the effects of CETA (PDF) makes for a rather worrisome read.