Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Thomas Frank asks how we've allowed billionaires to escape any responsibility for the maintenance of civilization by moving their wealth offshore:

I know that what the billionaires and the celebrities have done is legal. They merely took advantage of the system. It’s the system itself, and the way it was deliberately constructed to achieve these awful ends, that should be the target of our fury.

For decades Americans have lashed out against taxation because they were told that cutting taxes would give people an incentive to work harder and thus make the American economy flourish. Our populist leaders told us this – they’re telling us this still, as they reform taxes in Washington – and they rolled back the income tax, they crusaded against the estate tax, and they worked to keep our government from taking action against offshore tax havens.

In reality, though, it was never about us and our economy at all. Today it is obvious that all of this had only one rationale: to raise up a class of supermen above us. It had nothing to do with jobs or growth. Or freedom either. The only person’s freedom to be enhanced by these tax havens was the billionaire’s freedom. It was all to make his life even better, not ours.

Think, for a moment, of how this country has been starved so the holders of these offshore accounts might enjoy their private jets in peace. Think of what we might have done with the sums we have lost to these tax strategies over the decades. All the crumbling infrastructure that politicians love to complain about: it should have – and could have - been fixed long ago.

Think of all the young people saddled with catastrophic student-loan debt: we should have – could have – made that unnecessary. Think of all the decayed small towns, and the dying rust belt cities, and the drug-addicted hopeless: all of them should have – could have – been helped.

But no. Instead America chose a different project. Our leaders raised up a tiny class of otherworldly individuals and built a paradise for them, made their lives supremely delicious. Today they hold unimaginable and unaccountable power.

- Matti Kohonen discusses how tax-avoiding businesses have stayed ahead of regulators and governments. And James King highlights the consequence that only the privileged few are seeing any gains in wealth.

- Jerry Dias rightly argues that Canada shouldn't be wasting time on trade deals like the TPP which serve only to further the grip of the corporate sector at the expense of citizens. But needless to say, the Trudeau Libs couldn't be less concerned about that prospect.

- Voices-Voix offers a report card on the Libs' time in office to date. And Laurin Liu comments on the dog-whistle politics Jagmeet Singh will need to fight in order to offer a governing alternative.

- Finally, the Star's editorial board weighs in on the need for improved parental leave for everybody - not merely the wealthier families who can take advantage of a longer leave period without extra income.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- David Sirota interviews Thomas Frank about the U.S. Democrats' obsession with educational achievement as a cure-all - and their consequent loss of touch with the large numbers of citizens suffering from economic policies which left them behind:

Sirota: What do you think that the Democrats didn't do right in the election, and even more importantly, what are they not doing right right now?

Frank: Look, you can talk about the tactical blunders and the things that brought them down: email scandal, or the premium increase in Obamacare, and all that stuff matters. The way I look at it is that this is a long-term problem. This is a culmination of a very long-term problem with the Democrats very gradually, but definitely, abandoning the interests of working-class voters, identifying themselves instead with a more affluent group, with the affluent white-collar professionals.

It starts in the 1970s with the Democrats removing organized labor from its structural position in the Democratic party, and then it goes up through Bill Clinton getting NAFTA done, the free trade deals that the Democrats have ... By the way, in my opinion, free trade or the trade agreements, I should say, was probably the issue that if there was one issue that really did Hillary in, I think that's what it was: the trade deals under the Clinton administration, Obama sort of dropping the ball on labor's various issues, doing these incredible favors for Wall Street while he blew off the concerns of union.

The ultimate evidence is what's happening with inequality. It gets worse and worse and worse every year. It's very easy to show how the Democrats have forgotten about organized labor, but what is really striking is the passion that they show for the knowledge industries, which includes Wall Street, Silicon Valley, big pharma, that sort of thing.

- Carole Cadwalladr interviews Al Gore about the connection between worsening climate change and big-money oil-sector propaganda. And Patrick Radden Keefe discusses the lack of consequences for financial elites even when caught in corrupt activities.

- Norman Farrell examines how B.C. policy under Christy Clark's Libs was designed solely to enrich her corporate benefactors - to the point where the natural gas industry was paid hundreds of millions of public dollars to extract resources for its own profit. But Martyn Brown points out how a Lib-friendly media is trying to saddle John Horgan with the blame both for Clark's failings, and economic realities far beyond provincial control. 

- Upstream's submission on a national strategy to fight poverty emphasizes the importance of prevention - both in addressing poverty and its health consequences.

- Finally, Noah Smith discusses how the payday lending industry serves only to make matters worse for the people already facing the most precarious financial circumstances. And Faiza Shaheen notes that in food as in financial services, sustainable options are becoming increasingly unavailable to residents of poorer neighbourhoods while unhealthy ones are proliferating.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Thomas Frank writes that a progressive party can only expect to succeed if it places principles of equality and workers' interests at the core of everything it does - rather than serving mostly as the voice of a wealthy professional class:

Somewhere in a sunny corner of the country, either right now or very shortly, a group of tech tycoons or well-meaning private equity investors will meet to discuss what went wrong in this election cycle. They will consider many things: the sexism and racism of Trump voters, the fundamental foreignness of the flyover, the problems one encounters when dealing with evangelicals. They will celebrate some activist they learned about from NPR, they will enjoy some certified artisanal cuisine, they will hand out prizes to the same people that got prizes at the last event they attended, and they will go back to their comfortable rooms at the resort and sleep ever so soundly.

These people think they know what liberalism includes and what it doesn’t include. And in the latter category fall the concerns that made up the heart and soul of liberal politics a few decades ago: labor and work and exploitation and economic equality.

To dedicate your life to concerns like these today is to sign up for obscurity and frustration. It’s to enter a world without foundation grants, without appearances on MSNBC, and without much job security. Nothing about this sphere of liberal activism is fashionable or attractive. Books on its subjects go unreviewed and unread. Strikes drag on for weeks before they are noticed by the national media. Labor organizers are some of the hardest-working but least-thanked people I know. Labor reporters are just about extinct. Promises to labor unions are voided almost as soon as they leave a politician’s lips.

- Meanwhile, Tom Parkin discusses how the NDP - and Jagmeet Singh in particular - may serve as Canada's antidote to the Trump brand of politics.

- Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery and Josh Hoxie examine the toxic effects of relying on gilded giving from a small number of extremely wealthy individuals to support services, rather than being able to build a base of broader funding (whether public or charitable). And Cathy Crowe makes the case for a push toward building affordable housing.

- Daniel Leblanc reports on the CRA's long-awaited progress in cracking down on offshore tax havens.

- Kevin Metcalf discusses how the new surveillance state established by C-51 is only criminalizing and isolating youth while offering no real security benefit. And Justin Ling notes that the RCMP's response to the repeated rejection of "lawful access" legislation is to push for the same powers under a different name - with Ralph Goodale and the Libs only enabling them in the cause.

- Finally, John Doyle writes about the blatant elitism behind Kellie Leitch's drive to destroy Canada's only major media outlet which isn't ultimately answerable to corporate interests.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Thomas Frank reviews Zephyr Teachout's Corruption in America, and finds there's even more reason to worry about gross wealth buying power than we could identify before:

We think of all the laws passed over the years to restrict money in politics — and of all the ways the money has flowed under and around those restrictions. And finally, it seems to me, we just gave up out of sheer exhaustion.

According to Teachout, however, it’s much worse than this. Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Let me pause here to take note of another recurring peculiarity in corruption literature: an eerie overlap between theory and practice. If you go back to that “censorship” quotation from Kennedy, you will notice he quotes someone else: his colleague Antonin Scalia, in an opinion from 2003. Google the quote and one place you’ll find it is in a book of Scalia’s opinions that was edited in 2004 by none other than the lobbyist Kevin Ring, an associate of Jack Abramoff who would later be convicted of corrupting public officials.

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State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

- Matt O'Brien highlights Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill's research into the gross inequality of opportunity in the U.S. by comparing the income levels of college graduates from poor families to those of high-school dropouts from wealthy ones. And Patricia Kozicka reports that Edmonton schools are putting their thumbs on the scale against the poor even further - withholding such basic aspects of social participation as lunch breaks from students whose families can't afford extra fees.

- Meanwhile, Ellie Mae O'Hagan examines Bolivia's experience as an example of a more fair distribution of wealth leading to economic and social improvements:

According to a report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, “Bolivia has grown much faster over the last eight years than in any period over the past three and a half decades.” The benefits of such growth have been felt by the Bolivian people: under Morales, poverty has declined by 25% and extreme poverty has declined by 43%; social spending has increased by more than 45%; the real minimum wage has increased by 87.7%; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean has praised Bolivia for being “one of the few countries that has reduced inequality”. In this respect, the re-election of Morales is really very simple: people like to be economically secure – so if you reduce poverty, they’ll probably vote for you.

- Meanwhile, Tony Burman notes that ill-advised austerity is exacerbating the spread of ebola in all kinds of countries - including the ones who wrongly presumed they didn't need to prepare for it.

- Glen McGregor reports on how Canada's opposition parties are increasing their use of data analytics in the lead up to the 2015 election.

- But of course, changes in party voting will only translate into policy improvement if people are willing to demand that it be followed up with real change. On that front, Thomas Walkom challenges the opposition parties to make clear which of the Cons' destructive policies they'll reverse. And Jim Coyle's review of Michael Harris' Party of One reminds us why we need a new government to restore a commitment to democracy in the face of Stephen Harper's contempt for the idea.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Thomas Frank interviews Barry Lynn about the U.S.' alarming concentration of wealth and power. Henry Blodget thoroughly rebuts the myth that "rich people create jobs". And David Atkins goes a step further in discussing how hoarded wealth hurts the economy in general - with a particularly apt observation about how inequality erodes our social connections:

It is not an accident that trust in major institutions has declined on a linear track with rising inequality. Study after study has shown that trust in our fellow citizens and in institutions at large are dependent on the level of inequality and corruption in society. This stands to reason: people know when they're getting the short end of the stick, even if they can't agree on why. Conservatives wrongly blame government spending and regulation. Liberals rightly blame disproportionate rewards going to the very wealthy. Not surprisingly, then, high levels of inequality also create strong partisanship within society as politicians and pundits alike ratchet up the rhetoric of blame. As both secular and religious institutions seem equally powerless to address increasing economic and social insecurity, the social fabric begins to fray and people tend to self-segregate in many ways, including politically. Economic tension and social tension tend to go hand in hand.

- And David Sirota writes about the effect of corruption on policy-making - with some all-too-familiar priorities looking like the more sure sign that political decisions are being made based on cronyism rather than the public interest:

One analysis comes from researchers at Indiana University and University of Hong Kong. They compared data from 25,000 convictions in public corruption cases with state spending data. As Governing magazine reports, the researchers document that the most corrupt states like Tennessee “tended to spend money on construction, highways, and police protection programs, which provide more opportunity for corrupt officials to use public money for their own gain.” Governing adds that those “states spend less on health, education, and welfare, which provide less opportunity for officials to collect bribes.”

- Meanwhile, Eric Bombicino wonders whether we're letting our public sector get slashed precisely because it does its job effectively:

(A)pathy, like happiness or love or suicide, is a complex thing with many sources, but based on my highly scientific process of talking to people at parties and coffee shops over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a particular sort of apathy emerge:

 

I call it, “things are working” apathy.

 

“Look man, democracy is working for me, my garbage gets picked up, roads are in decent repair, and I can walk into a hospital and get an operation in a relatively short period of time: things are working.” Fair point, and an interesting one: the success of democracy has afforded some the luxury of apathy.

...

Over the weekend, an old high school buddy, after notifying me of his apathy because “things are working,” took me through a lengthy diatribe on the one political viewpoint he does hold: how much his small business pays in taxes. After this riveting session on payroll taxes and deductibles explained in mind-numbingly unnecessary detail, I asked him what level of taxation he would find fair. 

 

He repeated his earlier point: it needs to be lower, the government “takes” (read: confiscates) too much of his money. I then pointed out that since he wanted lower taxation across the board, he would want less government and government services. A perfectly defensible position…if you want less government.

 

He said he loves those things the Canadian government provides: healthcare, education, infrastructure, the social safety net. (In fact, they all play a role in the foundation of his apathy: that “things are working.”) 

 

We then stared at each other for a long time. He took a sip of his drink. And then repeated he was paying too much in taxes.

 

I found this fascinating. He didn’t want less government; he didn’t see small government as equaling a bigger economy. He simply wanted lower taxes. Full stop. No belief system or ideology is at play here; just a void of ignorance.

 

The irony here is plainly cruel. This void of ignorance created by his contentment with how “things are working” motivates him to want to destroy those very things.

- But Stephen Pimpare notes that upwards of a third of U.S. households have faced poverty in just a three-year span from 2009 to 2011, meaning that there isn't much distance between a large number of people and the worst effects of corporatist policy. Which makes it all the more inexplicable that policy based on hatred of the poor still seems to be the norm - as Kim Redigan points out in response to Detroit's mass disconnections of people from their municipal water source.

- Finally, Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob rightly lambaste the Harper Cons for their nonsensical crime and justice policies. And Hannah Spray's story on Trevor Machiskinic offers a compelling example where mandatory punishments and inflexible precedents lead to an obviously flawed result based on the background to an offence.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Thomas Frank discusses the corporate takeover of U.S. politics - and how even nominally left-oriented parties are willing to go along with the corporate position even as voters regularly demand something else:

One of the reasons the phrase appealed to me, 17 years ago, was my belief back then that there was something essentially brutal about raw capitalism; if the nation was to suppress the regulations and the workers’ organizations that had tamed the beast over the years—even if we did so with the best of intentions—the economy would return quite naturally to its savage, Gilded Age habits. Mainstream opinion of the 1990s held the exact opposite, however: That those regulations and those workers’ organizations were no longer needed because we had entered a “New Economy” in which the old rules no longer applied. Perfect information was building perfect markets wherever you turned. The Dow and the NASDAQ were mounting toward unbelievable highs, and our leaders assured us that it was all because history had turned a corner and the common people had been financially enlightened in some miraculous way.

Has there ever been an episode of economic mania so delusional and, ultimately, so destructive? In those days, CEO salaries were smashing every precedent in living memory and yet here were our thought leaders, telling us that what was really happening was a consummation of the nation’s democratic promise. For me, meanwhile, Mark Twain’s phrase seemed exact, almost clinical: What everyone thought to be a golden age was in fact merely gilded.
...
In 1992, one might conclude, the nation chose to reverse the plutocratizing effects of neoliberalism. What we got was something else—a soft Reaganism that admitted, “the era of big government is over.” And that’s why, in the months and years to come, we will see Clinton loyalists do all they can to delete that New Gilded Age from memory even as they rail against the current New Gilded Age. Were we to judge Bill Clinton by the standards of 1992, his presidency was something of a failure, eight years of deregulation and New Economy platitudes. If we judge him by the rich rewards that his booming stock market showered on the wealthy, however, his term in the White House was a towering success.

The original Gilded Age ended when Democrats and Republicans came together around the old populist program of financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, income tax, and legitimacy for organized labor. This time around there is no end in sight, because Republicans and Democrats have come together on a program that is almost the opposite—dismantling the regulatory state at the behest of the One Percent while assuring an ever angrier public that they feel our pain, that they’re Putting People First, that they’d be great to have a beer with, that Yes We Can. The heart sickens at the thought of these many long years of fake populism, and the stomach turns to imagine how little time there is before we are swept up in it all over again.

- Alan Pyke notes that greater unemployment benefits - of the type so often slashed in the name of forcing workers to lower their expectations - work wonders in reducing suicide rates, while the CBC points out that social assistance in Canada falls far short of what people need to meet even basic nutritional requirements. And the Broadbent Institute expands on the idea of a youth job guarantee to give young workers a fair chance to build a career.

- Roxanne Dubois discusses the move toward community unionism designed to make sure workers can be engaged with the labour movement - and protected by some collective strength - even without working in certified workplaces.

- Alison highlights how the Cons are continuing to encourage the use of temporary foreign workers to fill the few jobs promised as the result of the pipeline construction they so consistently demand. And Dan Leger skewers the Cons' wilful blindness to the costs of a single-minded obsession with resource extraction.

- Shorter Naomi Lakritz: In Peter MacKay's defence, isn't he at least as factually wrong as he is sexist?

- The Star calls for a functional access-to-information regime to replace the Cons' tendency toward total secrecy. But Michael Harris observes that the Cons seem perfectly happy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars fabricating an ad-based reality, while making no effort to inform either themselves or the public of what's actually happening.

- Finally, Will Hutton looks at the UK's National Health Service as another highly-valued public service which is being undermined in preparation for a fire sale:

Over the last six months, I've got to know the interior workings of UCH's leukaemia wards better than I, or any reader, would ever want. You just offer thanks that there is such a system on hand for the crisis my family and others are going through. And that the leukaemia wards are embedded in a general hospital with such depth of expertise and range of resource. Whatever cruel side-effects that emerge, there are experts and teams on hand to take charge as the needs arise. It is integrated 21st-century healthcare. It saves lives.

It is also value-driven, as is the case with all great organisations. Curing leukaemia often culminates in a bone marrow transplant, with the molecular structure of the donor's bone marrow carefully matched with that of the recipient. Only healthy new bone marrow will prevent the cancer from reappearing. But that needs donors. The Anthony Nolan Trust has more than half-a-million volunteers who give their bone marrow and blood for free; the bigger the pool, the better the chance of a match, and thus of survival. They are unsung heroes and heroines, the best of humanity.

These donors are animated by the same value system as the NHS. The nurses who inspect stools and the consultants who mastermind the cocktail of drugs are united by the drive to cure, to give health and life. They are givers and sharers. They know humanity demands solidarity, empathy and looking out for each other – or else, who are you?

Of course they are imperfect and sometimes make mistakes. The sums have to add up, as they do in any organisation, but they add up to serve this larger purpose. You give your bone marrow for free to a service that provides health for free, funded by commonly created resources. Life-threatening disease is a lottery. Before this existential truth we stand together. Profit maximisation cannot be the value system at the heart of our healthcare system.