Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Adam Hunter points out the stark gap between public health officials emphasizing the need for protections against community transmission of COVID-19, and Scott Moe's stubborn refusal to apply them. Alexander Quon writes about the hundreds of Saskatchewan patients missing out on surgeries every day. And Jacqueline Howard reports on the new research confirming that children face no less risk of infection than adults.

- Rhitu Chatterjee points out the large number of people in the U.S. losing essential caregivers to COVID-19. And Matt Sedensky discusses how nursing homes are losing staff - and the ability to care for residents - as a result of the ongoing pandemic.

- Umair Haque warns that the supply chain breakdowns seen in the course of the pandemic are just the beginning of a state of perma-crisis.

- Bob Weber reports on the UCP's pathetic - if perhaps not surprising - announcement that oil companies won't be contributing a dime of their massive windfall profits to cleaning up their messes. And Isabella Kaminsky highlights how fossil fuel giants have put massive chunks of the legal industry to work in attempting to avoid responsibility for the damage they've done to people and our natural environment.

- Meanwhile, Christian Schimpf et al. find that confidence in the long-term future of fossil fuels (however misplaced) translates into a refusal to accept climate action. 

- Finally, the Guardian's editorial board discusses the connection between the UK Cons' pay-to-play political schemes and the tax loopholes shown to be exploited in the Pandora Papers.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- The Economist examines the latest research showing the amount of money stashed in tax havens is even higher than previously estimated. And the Guardian calls for action on the IMF's conclusion that we'll all end up better off if the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes:

The IMF’s analysis does something to redress the balance, making two important points.

First, it says that tax systems should have become more progressive in recent years in order to help offset growing inequality but rather have been becoming less progressive. Second, it finds no evidence for the argument that attempts to make the rich pay more tax would lead to lower growth. There is nothing especially surprising about either of the conclusions: in fact, the real surprise is that it has taken so long for the penny to drop. Growth rates have not picked up as taxes have been cut for the top 1%. On the contrary, they are much weaker than they were in the immediate postwar decades when the rich could expect to pay at least half their incomes – and often substantially more than half – to the taxman. If trickle-down theory worked, there would be a strong correlation between countries with low marginal tax rates for the rich and growth. There is no such correlation and, as the IMF rightly concludes, “there would appear to be scope for increasing the progressivity of income taxation without significantly hurting growth for countries wishing to enhance income redistribution”.

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With a nod to the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, the fiscal monitor also says countries should consider wealth taxes for the rich, to be levied on land and property. The IMF’s findings on tax provide ample and welcome political cover for Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, as they seek to convince voters that Labour’s tax plans are not just equitable but also economically workable. By contrast, the study challenges Donald Trump to rethink tax plans that would give an average tax cut of more than $200,000 a year for someone earning more than $900,000. The response from the US administration was predictable: mind your own business. The IMF is not naive. It knows it is one thing to make the case for higher taxes on the rich but another thing altogether to get governments to implement them, because better-off individuals have more political clout. The IMF has demolished the argument that what is good for the super-rich is good for the rest of us, but don’t expect the top 1% to give up without a fight.

- Bernie Sanders highlights the contrast between the greater equality Americans want, and the government by and for the few they're instead stuck with. And Rachel West and Harry Stein find that the Republicans are managing to overrun their own farcical talking points about the uses of government revenue - as they could in fact buy and maintain a pony for every small American child with the money they instead plan to funnel to the wealthy.

- Meanwhile, Tom Parkin writes that a distorted tax system is contributing to the erosion of Canada's middle class. Andrew Coyne discusses how the Libs' already-pathetic excuse for closing some loopholes has turned into another giveaway to corporations. And Chantal Hebert comments on the comedy of errors surrounding the Libs' tax policy.

- Kamal Ahmed points out that younger workers in the UK are increasingly having to borrow just to cover basic expenses. And Barbara Ellen writes about the patent unfairness resulting from people living in poverty having to pay more for the necessities of life.

- Finally, the Mound of Sound blasts the Libs for insisting on new pipelines rather than taking any meaningful steps toward a green transition (or even an honest accounting of the costs of fossil fuels). And Nike Block comments on Canada's longstanding and shameful history of prioritizing exploitative mining over people around the globe.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- The Guardian's editorial board comments on the role public entrepreneurship should play in fostering economic development and avoiding bust cycles:

The state’s only legitimate economic role is often seen as patching up discrete failures in particular markets. But Ms Mazzucato stresses how proactive policy is often required to create the markets in the first place. She stresses the role of public agencies in advancing industry’s frontiers. The iPhone may be an archetypal example of entrepreneurial brilliance, but it draws on numerous government-funded technologies including the internet, GPS, touch-screen displays and even Siri, the voice-activated operating system-cum-butler. From Nasa to the BBC, public organisations have created private opportunities. The entrepreneurial state should embrace its unsung role as a venture capitalist, be bullish about the need to run risks to secure returns. New institutions, such as national investment banks, might need to be part of the mix.

Ms Mazzucato points out that the crisis-hit states in Euroland were also all countries where the pre-crisis state failed to innovate. That fostered a frail prosperity, depending less on progress in industry than on booming house prices. When the emergency cures look inadequate, economists interested in fending off future slumps should reconsider the preventative role the state can play.

- Michal Rozworski's proposed solutions to Canada's housing crisis include a strong dose of public investment. And Chelsea Vowel duly criticizes Scott Gilmore's attempt to force First Nations and residents of remote areas into cities, rather than working on building existing communities.

- Chris Malsano draws a sharp distinction between socialism and statism. And Greg Sargent notes that Donald Trump's presidential candidacy may be exposing the large number of Republican voters who aren't inclined toward austerity or corporatist economics. 

- Teuila Fuatai documents the gap between the low wages paid to many Canadian workers and the cost of living.

- Finally, the New York Times' editorial board slams corporate tax evasion.

New column day

Here, featuring my take on the IMF's recent report (PDF) on the relationship between equality, redistribution and growth.

I've already linked to other responses to the report from the Guardian and the Economist. But the column raises a point left largely unaddressed in those pieces - and which seems particularly important given some of the advice regularly dispensed to Canadian progressives.

I'll sum up that advice as being "don't worry about market inequality - instead, address poverty and inequality through taxation and redistribution". Which makes for a neat enough recommendation on its face - and has led me to see a guaranteed annual income as the single policy with the greatest potential to ensure broad equality and security.

But Ostry, Berg and Tsangarides find that while an equal initial distribution of income doesn't harm an economy's growth (and indeed contributes a small positive effect), particularly high levels of after-market redistribution give rise to some negative effect on growth. And those naturally arise only where pre-market distributions are so unequal to give rise to a need for exceptionally high transfers.

In other words, the study shows no drag on growth arising out of policies which encourage pre-market equality (though I'll note that it doesn't break down the policies and social factors supporting those more equal market distributions). But it does identify some perceptible drag on growth arising out of policies which settle for redistribution after the fact - which suggests to me that we should be focusing relatively more attention on the former than the latter.

Naturally, I'll invite any questions or comments about that line of reasoning. And I certainly don't see it as ruling out transfers as an important means of ensuring equality. But it does seem to me to suggest that a singular focus on after-market redistribution may have harmful economic effects (in addition to being politically implausible) - which confirming that broadly-shared high wages and effective worker bargaining power are necessary elements of a fair and prosperous economy.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Emily Badger discusses how poverty affects people who are forced to use their physical and mental resources on bare survival:

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.

We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It's a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.
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Solutions that make financial life easier for poor people don’t simply change their financial prospects. When a poor person receives a regular direct-deposited paycheck every Friday, that does more than simply relieve the worry over when money will come in next.

 “When we do that, we liberate some bandwidth,” Shafir says. Policymakers tend to evaluate the success of financial programs aimed at the poor by measuring how they do financially. “The interesting thing about this perspective is that it says if I make your financial life easier, if I give you more bandwidth, what I really ought to look at is how you’re doing in your life. You might be doing better parenting. You might be adhering to your medication better.”

The limited bandwidth created by poverty directly impacts the cognitive control and fluid intelligence that we need for all kinds of everyday tasks.

- And Patricia O'Campo examines some tragic real-life applications of the principle - noting that while poverty is linked to a number of health problems in new mothers, it's especially closely correlated with the simultaneous development of multiple health problems.

- But then, a place at the top of the income spectrum doesn't insulate a person from other sets of problems - as Joshua Holland discusses new research linking upper-class status to unethical behaviour, narcissism and a sense of entitlement. And in an entirely unrelated commentary, Livia Gershon contrasts the real world against the one in which Thomas Friedman and others think that high-skilled jobs are available for everybody.

- Finally, Matthew Yglesias and the Guardian highlight the need to recognize the limitations of outside intervention, while pogge is rightly skeptical of the case for military action without any apparent plan or end goal. Rick Salutin comments on the double standard applied to foreign regimes whenever foreign policy insiders decide it's time for another war. And mistermix suggests it's possible to do much more good helping refugees of the Syrian civil war instead of dropping bombs.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Lest anybody think the Harper Cons' combination of dishonesty and secrecy is limited to political payoffs, Blacklock's reveals (PDF) that they subsidized the shipment of corporate jobs out of Canada - and didn't deign to inform the public that the program existed until seven years after the fact.

- And APTN reports on the Cons' suppression of tens of thousands of pages of documents detailing the causes and effects of underfunding of First Nations child welfare.

- But then, both stories also serve as important examples of the value of detailed research into government activity. And Nicky Woolf credits the Guardian for taking up that cause around the globe - making it an increasingly valuable journalistic resource even in the U.S.:

Figures given exclusively to The Atlantic show that -- according to internal analytics -- June 10, the day after Snowden revealed his identity on The Guardian's website, was the biggest traffic day in their history, with an astonishing 6.97 million unique browsers. Within a week of publishing the NSA files, The Guardian website has seen a 41 percent increase in U.S. desktop unique visitors (IP addresses loading the desktop site) and a 66 percent rise in mobile traffic. On June 10, for the first time in the paper's history, their U.S. traffic was higher than their UK traffic.
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The Guardian also has a reputation for solid investigative journalism. The NSA story isn't their first rodeo. They were one of three publications to work closely with WikiLeaks to process the mountains of data leaed by Bradley Manning in 2010. When Rupert Murdoch's vast tabloid the News of the World was finally caught phone-hacking, it was The Guardian that brought it down, doggedly fighting for the story for two years against a storm of legal threats and denials from News International. Before that, the paper was known for having faced down a storm of litigation to prove that the former MP Jonathan Aitken had lied before a court, giving them probably their best-known front page, featuring the headline "He Lied And Lied And Lied".

I ask Gibson what's coming up for Guardian US, when the Snowden dust finally settles. "We will add commentators, we will add reporting, we will add verticals, we will continue to grow, and we'll work with commercial partners and do tech and business and all the things that we want to be," she says. The publication is doubling down on its investigative presence in the States as well: Investigative journalist Paul Lewis is joining the paper's Washington bureau from the London office this month, and Nick Davies, the reporter whose two years of digging brought about the phone-hacking scandal, is joining the New York team later in the year.

- John Ahni Schertow offers a look at the process being used to push a nuclear waste depository on the community of Pinehouse - and the rightful response from community members.

- Finally, Kathleen Rodgers and Darcy Ingram criticize the Cons' lack of interest in any youth involvement in politics other than as paid flacks and trained seals.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Damian Carrington reports on the Harper Cons' sad efforts to prevent the European Union from accurately accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands, offering in particular a look at how Canada's actions look to our global neighbours who don't operate from the Cons' petro-state starting point:

Darek Urbaniak, at Friends of the Earth Europe, which obtained the new documents, said: "These letters are further evidence of Canadian government and industry lobbying, which continuously undermines efforts to combat climate change. We find it unacceptable that the Canadian government now openly uses direct threats at the highest political levels to derail crucial EU climate legislation."

The unveiling of Canada's threats is the latest in a series of recent embarrassing revelations. On 12 February, the occurrence of a secret strategy "retreat" in London in 2011 was discovered. High-level officials discussed the "critical" issue of winning the tar sands argument in the EU, to "mitigate the impact on the Canadian brand" and to protect the "huge investments from the likes of Shell, BP, Total and Statoil". Representatives of Shell, Total and Statoil attended the meeting alongside the UK's state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

In December, the Guardian revealed the secret high-level help given to the Canada by the UK government, which included David Cameron discussing the issue with his counterpart Stephen Harper during a visit to Canada, and stating privately that the UK wanted "to work with Canada on finding a way forward". Canada's minister for natural resources, Joe Oliver, stated: "[The British] have been very, very helpful."

The UK proposed an alternative "banded" approach to ascribing carbon emissions to different fuel types, which does not single out tar sands. But environmentalists dismiss it as a delaying tactic and the Guardian understands that the UK has failed to present its proposal formally or provide supporting evidence.

- Meanwhile, Greg Weston notes that the Cons' pathetic excuse for a mining complaint agency (designed to do absolutely nothing without the consent of the corporations whose actions might be challenged) has burned over a million public dollars while proving as useless as expected.

- Erin points out Ontario's corporate capital tax giveaway - which slashed public revenue without having any positive economic impact.

- Kennedy Stewart's motion to allow public petitions to require a response in Parliament looks like a great step in promoting direct democracy.

- Finally, T.C. Norris rightly questions how media outlets often misreport on polling by both cutting out the multiple sides to the story actually told by poll results, and misinterpreting the context of a given set of results.

On surprising standards

I'm sure Terence Corcoran thinks he's making a brilliant sarcastic point of some sort. But ideology aside, is there actually any reason to disagree in the slightest with his portrayal of the Guardian's take on the NotW scandal?

And we have The Guardian, revered organ of the British left, leading the charge against News of the World, reviled organ of the Murdochian right, for breach of journalistic ethics — the same Guardian that became the British home of WikiLeaks’ illegal dump of U.S. diplomatic communications. Clearly a large double-standard reigns at The Guardian. It is good and just for the media to engage in illegal activity to wage ideological war on causes and political powers those same media have determined in their wisdom to be wrong or immoral, but it is reprehensible and immoral to engage in illegal activity to probe the private affairs of celebrities, royalty or common people.

Or put in simpler terms: is Corcoran honestly arguing that the media should be just as vigilant and ready to toss aside the formalities of the law in "(probing) the private affairs...of common people" as it is in holding policymakers (who may themselves have ordered information suppressed on questionable grounds) to account for their decisions?

Because if so, I can't believe he hasn't yet found his way to Sun Media.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Mother's Day reading...

- Orwell's Bastard issues a call to action for the next four years:

Liberal friends, it's time for some tough love. Those of you who want to stay all Bay Street friendly and do what you did for most of the the last four years and not alienate the corporate media, there's a party for you. It's called the Conservative Party. Those of you who want to embrace progressive principles, preserve what's left of the social safety net, and keep people who think like Charles McVety from criminalizing abortion and gay sex might want to work with Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Like it or not, for the next four years that's the NDP.

And once again, lest anyone think this little corner's gone all orange, that goes for New Democrats too. I'm willing to cut the rookies in your parliamentary caucus as much slack as reasonably practicable, as long as you remember an overarching strategic principle: effective opposition to the Harper government will have to have extra-parliamentary roots and focus. It's not pleasant, but it's a fact of life. Steve doesn't need your help or your consent. He's got a majority now.
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We've got a lot of work ahead of us. It's going to be a long four years of engaging our fellow citizens and working to build bridges. We're going to have to reach out to our neighbours, including those who voted Conservative and those who stayed home, and we're going to have to talk to them without being condescending or retreating into truisms or lecturing them about civic duty.

- And it isn't just Canadian bloggers looking for that outcome, as the Guardian describes the role of the NDP in similar terms:

(H)aving conquered Quebec, the NPD is a true national party and Layton's rise is being compared to the journey of Aesop's tortoise. "I'll never forget in 2008 when Mr Layton started talking about applying for the job of prime minister," said his campaign architect, Brad Lavigne. "People said that is not credible, and we didn't care if the media thought it was credible. What we wanted to do was establish among the electorate that you have a leader here that you preferred. And you could vote for him locally to get him to that job."

Layton has an immediate agenda to start making trouble: a deal between the provincial government of Ontario and its public sector workers for a 3% pay rise – to the astonishment of the rest of the country, across which other groups will now demand parity, and probably back their claim with industrial action. As recession bites, Layton can flex his constituency's muscles.

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford points out that the Cons' reassurances about a majority government somehow resulting in an instant economic boost have proven entirely false so far.

- Finally, Don Braid fleshes out the story of the largest Canadian oil spill in decades which was covered up until after Stephen Harper's PetroParty had been elected as a majority government:

(W)e certainly didn't hear the whole story Friday. The initial release said the leak involved "an undetermined volume of crude oil." It added that the oil was 300 metres from any flowing water or runoff, and that pipeline leaks are very rare in Alberta.

All very reassuring, you'll agree. We didn't learn the rest until 3: 07 p.m. Tuesday, when the ERCB issued another release saying, rather causally, that 28,000 barrels of oil had leaked.

That's the biggest oil spill in Alberta in 35 years. It's larger by nearly 10,000 barrels than the Enbridge pipeline spill in Michigan last July. That spill, you'll recall, was damaging enough to turn hostile American eyes on Alberta just after the mammoth BP Gulf blowout was capped.
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New Democrat MLA Rachel Notley, who grew up in the area when her late dad, Grant Notley, was a local MLA, says she quickly started getting text messages from natives who were deeply concerned.

"I'm quite suspicious about the timing of all this," she says. "This was something significant enough to have a whole school shuttered Friday. It's really hard to imagine it took them four days to take somebody up there to assess what's going on.

"Either there's an unforgivable level of incompetence among the people responsible for regulation and health, or there were some political considerations about the timing, about when they would come clean about the extent of the breach."