Wednesday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Wednesday reading.

- Matt Bruenig discusses the many opportunities available to expand the reach of public ownership in the U.S.:

The state can very competently own retail and manufacturing companies by simply buying up their stock and acting like an institutional investor. For instance, a social wealth fund created by the federal government could gradually buy up stock in Amazon and Walmart to get into retail and buy up stock in US Steel and General Motors to get into manufacturing. The latter is not even a hypothetical because the government did recently buy up almost all of the GM stock during the financial crisis, though it subsequently sold off its stake.

The genius of modern finance has been to create corporate ownership arrangements that allow basically anyone, including the government, to own shares of any company in any sector while being as involved (or uninvolved) as they want to be in steering the company. A federal social wealth fund, like the one I advocate, should be able to take advantage of modern shareholding institutions to expand public ownership into every aspect of the US economy.

- The Globe and Mail's editorial board offers a reminder of the need for multi-generational thinking - not in the sense of the Cons' spin about deficits and debts, but in the sense of using our collective power to build a healthy society and sustainable economy. And Matthew Taylor reports on UK Labour's plans to transition to a clean energy economy, while Liliana Camacho calls for a similar green jobs strategy in Ontario.

- Davide Castro comments on the folly of austerity - and the narrowly-defined self-interest of a few wealthy individuals which keeps it in the policy mix despite its obvious flaws. And James Brokenshire reports on the growing recognition even among UK Cons that homelessness and other avoidable problems are the result of anti-social policies - though that's not stopping them from continuing their gratuitous cuts to public services.

- Finally, Daniel Tencer points out how wage stagnation and soaring real estate prices have made it impossible for younger workers to own homes in many Canadian cities.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Brad Delong writes that political choices - not a lack of resources - are responsible for the limited progress being made toward the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

- Matt Bruenig weighs in on the U.S.' unprecedented levels of wealth inequality. And Bill Moyers comments on the vulture capitalists looking to turn Puerto Rico's disaster into an opportunity to enrich themselves.

- Tim McDonnell highlights how much of the new fossil fuel development in the U.S. produces profits only because of massive public subsidies. 

- Kathleen Harris and Elizabeth McSheffrey each report on Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand's conclusion that Canada is falling far short of translating climate policy into meaningful action. And Dana Nuccitelli, John Cook, Sander van der Linden, Tony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach emphasize the importance of recognizing and acting on the scientific consensus around climate change.

- Finally, the Star's editorial board discusses the importance of a justice system which works on reintegrating prisoners into society, rather than setting people up to fail and reoffend.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Paul Buchheit discusses the U.S.' combination of increasing inequality, systematic tax evasion and false promises of social mobility. Michael Savage reports that even UK Cons are recognizing that a refusal to ensure that the rich pay their fair share makes for bad politics. And Steven Klees highlights how full funding for the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals is well within our means as long as the wealthy pay their fair share:

Wealthy countries need to honor the commitment, made in 1970 and repeated ever since, to allocate 0.7% of GDP toward ODA. While a few countries already do this, most fall far short. Just by keeping past promises, wealthy countries could close the education-funding gap – and cover all of the other SDGs’ financing needs, too. The Education Commission, by contrast, lets wealthy countries off the hook, by asking them to commit just 0.5% of GDP to ODA, and not until 2030.

Second, we need a global approach to taxation. As my colleague and I point out in a report for the Education Commission, corporate-tax reforms could eliminate tax avoidance and evasion, which are costing the global economy more than $600 billion every year. To achieve the needed reforms, we need to increase the UN’s capacity instead of relying on the OECD, which has proposed only minor changes. 

We also need to institute a global wealth tax, as economist Thomas Piketty has proposed. It is obscene that the world’s eight richest people hold as much wealth as the poorest 50%. Like corporate-tax reform and fulfilling past promises to fund ODA, a 1% global wealth tax could finance all of the SDGs combined.

- Meanwhile, Gillian Tett examines the close correlation between financial deregulation and outsized pay for bankers. Paul La Monica notes that workers generally are still seeing little benefit from increased economic activity due to sluggish wages. And Ben Doherty writes about the gross exploitation of migrant farm workers in Australia.

- Gabriel Yiu discusses how the B.C. Libs handed profitable parts of ICBC over the private sector while reducing revenue from luxury cars for their own political purposes - providing an indication of the road map the Wall government seems all too likely to follow in Saskatchewan.

- John Abraham reports on new research showing that dirty fossil fuels are being implicitly subsidized at a cost of trillions of dollars annually - or roughly 6.5% of global GDP.

- Finally, Kapil Khimdas and Danyaal Raza write that a focus on genuinely putting patients first - particularly through preventative care and a prioritization of needs - can lead to far better health outcomes.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Karen Foster and Tamara Krawchenko discuss how policy can - and should - be designed to improve intergenerational equity:

Canada trails far behind other industrialized nations in its attention to intergenerational equity. The country could do far more to report on a carefully defined intergenerational equity, track progress, and target it in policy development. Studies in this area are conducted in an ad hoc manner rather than being built into a systemic and ongoing review process, but they point to growing gaps between young and old. We agree with Paul Kershaw of the lobby group Generation Squeeze, who writes: “we risk fostering intergenerational inequity if our governments continue to show less urgency in responding to challenges facing younger generations than we do in responding to challenges facing older Canadians.”

We would take it one step further and urge policy-makers in Canada to take advantage of “generation’s” multiple meanings and dimensions. They should emphasize policies that mimic the relationships (kinship) that exist between different age groups, supporting the exchange of resources that occur between the old and the young over the course of their lives. This means carefully structuring the investments that people need at distinct points in their lives: public education, public pensions, parental leave, organized recreation, and so on.

Policy-makers should be careful to ensure that whatever policies are adopted under the banner of intergenerational equity are truly, equally targeted at supporting older and younger Canadians. Finally, although they should take care when forecasting and projecting into the future that they do not write cheques that future Canadians cannot cash, policy-makers also must resist the temptation to use intergenerational justice as an excuse for austerity.

- Patrick Butler reports on a U.N. inquiry concluding that the UK's needless austerity is infringing on the basic human rights of people living with disabilities.

- Scott Sinclair debunks the spin being used to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the public which will face worsening inequality, higher prices and deteriorating working conditions it if ever comes into effect.

- Yvette Brend reminds us how social conditions including geography and gender influence both opportunities and outcomes for children. And Tavia Grant reports on a massive increase in First Nation participation in Canada's census which will hopefully facilitate the development of evidence-based policy to improve living conditions, while the Ottawa Citizen weighs in on the need to stop delaying steps to end discrimination against indigenous peoples.

- Finally, Tanara Yelland outlines the recommendations of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness as to how to end homelessness in Canada.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Sean Illing writes about the utterly misplaced view of the privileged few that they can or should be treated as immune from the environmental realities facing everybody:

I see the decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to pilfer with impunity. These people are prepared to endanger an entire ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is what true entitlement looks like.

The wealthiest Americans – and their apostles in government – tell us that it’s the poor people who are entitled, who take and exploit and keep more than they deserve. But that’s a half-truth, and a dangerous one at that. Entitlement has many faces, the most destructive of which is on display in Rancho Santa Fe. These adolescent upper-crusters are entitled because they believe they have a right to everything they can get hold of – regardless of the costs. They believe living with others carries no obligations. Anyone who places their right to pristine golf courses above their responsibility to respect communal resources is a social toxin, a privileged parasite eating away at the foundations of society. It’s important that their actions be seen in this context.

There’s a lesson in Rancho Santa Fe and in California more generally. What’s happening there foreshadows our future. We’re confronted with crises on a number of fronts. From climate change to economic inequality, our institutions – and the people controlling them – are failing us. Changes are necessary, but a segment of society (the 1 percent, we’ll call them) is unwilling to sacrifice; they’re too invested in power, in comfort. Whether it’s oil profiteers distorting climate science or Wall Street banks undermining efforts to regulate the financial industry, entrenched interests are doing everything possible to preserve the status quo, even when so doing threatens to upend the whole system – just like the people of Rancho Santa Fe.

- Meanwhile, Jan Zalasiewizc reports on new research showing that even without accounting for the effects of climate change, humanity has managed to cause mass extinctions on a planetary scale.

- Cathy Crowe makes the case for a national housing program as a necessary step toward a healthier and more secure society, while the Star backs a plan to provide housing to 20,000 homeless Canadians over the next three years. And Marco Chown Oved reports on the types of abuses private landlords can carry out by imposing arbitrary fees while evicting a tenant, then permanently trashing the tenant's credit rating if that blackmail doesn't succeed.

- Paul Seesequasis writes that the Cons' terror bill is a serious obstacle to reconciliation as it stands to prevent aboriginal people from seeking both sovereignty and respect. And Fram Dinshaw reports that Canada's Muslim community - which figures to be one of the first targets of covert attacks - has already been intimidated into silence about the dangers of C-51.

- Finally, Elizabeth Renzetti interviews Harry Leslie Smith about his fight to build on the hard-won social gains people have made over the course of his life.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Nafeez Ahmed writes about the dangers of combining growing inequality and increased resource extraction:

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

...
Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

- Which fits nicely with Charles Blow's argument that we can't count on increased growth or resource use to address burgeoning inequality.

- Meanwhile, William Broad discusses how other publicly-funded research is all too often being privatized and directed toward corporate interests or even personal whims rather than scientific purposes. And the Economist takes note of the spread of crony capitalism, while observing that resource-dependent economies are particularly prone to corporate domination.

- Dom Pittis points out that many businesses fully recognize the importance of an effective (and properly-funded) public sector:

Like other urban business groups, Lieba's members would be willing to pay to solve problems like traffic congestion and gridlock, he says. But that's not all.

"Strategic investment of tax dollars that will help benefit economic prosperity, quality of life, is good for businesses equally as residents," said Lieba. "Businesses aren't averse to paying taxes, maybe even paying more taxes where they see value for it."

And it's not just business willing to pay more tax. Graves says that EKOS polling shows that Canadians in general are changing their views on government spending. When asked whether they would prefer spending on health and education or low taxes, they choose the spending.
...
"Problems in the economy, particularly in the younger portions of the economy, don't seem to have been solved by the pursuit of austerity and diminished government.," [Graves] said. "It may be, in fact, that it is having the opposite effect.

"I like to make profits and like to make really good profits, but I also feel that there's nothing wrong with paying your share and that, in fact, a healthy economy works best when it has a good balance of fairness and profits."

 - Finally, Michael Harris writes that the Cons have built their stay in office on little more than U.S.-style political venom - while questioning whether that strategy figures to work much longer.