Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Laurie Laybourn and James Dyke comment on the developing doom loop as fear, hardship and political instability created by a climate breakdown in progress make it harder to coordinate efforts to ameliorate it. And Gaby Hinsliff writes that Storm Darragh taught her family and community how poorly prepared they were for climate disaster, while Matthew Ballew et al. examine how psychological distress appears to be a spur toward climate activism. 

- Fiona Harvey warns that a COP29 outcome more attuned to Vladimir Putin's political ends than the preservation of a liveable environment may be only the beginning. David Suzuki laments how the oil industry undermined any effort to agree on a plastics treaty. Eamon Ryan discusses how the oil industry and other corporate forces poisoned public opinion against a successful push to reduce carbon pollution in Ireland. And Joe Vipond makes the case to treat the fossil fuel industry like big tobacco - i.e. as a dishonest and destructive actor impeding work which is necessary for the public good.  

- Dharna Noor reports on new NOAA data showing that the Arctic is now a net emitter of carbon pollution, rather than serving as a carbon sink. Max Fawcett discusses Kevin O'Leary's attempt to play Alberta for a fool by seeking out public money for a highly-polluting, zero-benefit AI project - and the danger that the UCP will be happy to play along. And Rewiring America studies the effects of converting to electrical power - finding that a shift to electric appliances produces demonstrable benefits to air quality both inside and outside the home. 

- The Angus Reid Institute finds that a strong majority of Canadians see corruption and tax evasion as a major cause of the affordability crisis - potentially signaling a strong appetite for a credible plan of attack against them. Paul Krugman (on his new site after his retirement from the New York Times) discusses how the right's anti-public sector rhetoric facilitates actual fraud and abuse by corporations and the righ. David Macdonald points out that a time-limited GST holiday isn't a particularly good use even of a temporary windfall, while glaringly failing to address the structural factors that are stressing people's finances. And Paul Kiel reports on a tax loophole which wealthy Americans are using to avoid contributing a cent of a Medicare tax paid by workers. 

- Jason Sattler writes that Donald Trump's main political skill is setting up an alternate reality for himself and a maddeningly large number of voters. Oliver Willis notes that he's been able to get away with denialism in large part due to the refusal of Democrats to engage in a meaningful fight as to the controlling narrative. And Simon Wren-Lewis rightly argues that progressives shouldn't fall into the trap of echoing and reinforcing the politics of stupid. 

- Finally, Ryan Romard writes that public sector strikes in Canada (spurred by years of relatively high inflation paired with pay freezes) are helping to set up opportunities for all kinds of workers to seek better wages and working conditions. 

[Edit: added link.]

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Michael Harris offers some lessons about the U.S.' values based on this week's election results. Rebecca Solnit opines that the largest failing of American progressives was to presume that the U.S. is a better country than it actually is, while Geoffrey Deihl writes that Donald Trump's election represents a descent into madness. Harrison Mooney discusses what it means about the dangers of majority rule - though it's worth a reminder that the U.S.' political system is warped so as to allow his party to exercise unchecked power even with minority levels of support. And Michael Mann notes that the U.S. figures to become even more of a petrostate under Trump.

- Meanwhile, Martin Lukacs, Lucy Uprichard, Tannara Yelland and Amanda Siino highlight some of the threats that Trump's ascent will pose to progressive politics in Canada. 

- Gabriela Calugay-Casuga discusses how the Bank of Canada's undue obsession with inflation resulted in an increasingly glaring wealth gap. And Alex Hemingway warns that tax giveaways are just as corrosive to public services when they originate with the NDP as when they're offered by the right. 

- Carl Meyer offers some takeaways from the long-delayed proposal for a federal oil and gas emission cap - with the predictable result being that a modest policy is being met with shrieks of contrived outrage by those who believe the only purpose of government is to ensure fossil fuel giants can rake in profits with no regard for our planet. And the Canadian Press reports on the Parliamentary Budget Office's finding that the Trans Mountain pipeline (which was bought and completed by the Trudeau Libs while emission regulations were held not to be a priority) isn't worth its cost of construction, leaving the public to take a loss on it. 

- Finally, Meyer parallels the current spin from the oil sector against its precedent from tobacco companies who likewise denied and buried their own scientific knowledge in order to maximize the harm their products inflicted on the public. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Shawn Gude comments on the choice Democratic primary voters will have between candidates seeking to regulate the economic system as it stands, and those pushing to fundamentally changing it. Ian Welsh points out the importance of supporting candidates such as Bernie Sanders with a genuine commitment to the more progressive policies on offer from many corners.

- John Horgan discusses the backlash against the extreme concentration of wealth amidst increased precarity in the U.S., while Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley report on new polling again showing strong support for higher tax rates on the extremely wealthy. And Jordan Weissmann highlights how Elizabeth Warren's child care plan would boost both the economy generally, and the cause of shared and equitable development in particular.

- Larry Elliott reports on a new study showing how austerity has devastated families in the UK. And James Sillars notes that the result is a country set to reach record levels of child poverty even before it shoots itself in the foot through an attempt to distance itself from the world.

- Mat Hope exposes the disinformation campaigns used jointly by big tobacco and the oil lobby to attack any action to promote public health where it might affect short-term profits. And the Canadian Press reports on the CRTC's findings of misleading and aggressive sales tactics by the telecoms who are already overcharging Canadian customers.

- Finally, the CP also reports on new research showing that Canadian governments need to do far more to try to reduce the harm resulting from alcohol abuse - rather than promoting that harm through deregulation and downward pressure on prices as so many right-wing governments have chosen to do in the name of populist appeal.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Barbara Ellen questions the positive spin the right tries to put on poverty and precarity, and writes that we're all worse off forcing people to just barely get by:

In recent times, there has been a lot said about those people who are “just managing”. They are neither rich nor poor, but usually working in low- to medium-income jobs, scratching a living, surviving from one month, week, day, or minute to another.

A narrative has emerged of plucky, cheerful sorts who soldier on, just about making ends meet, but “can’t complain, guv”, which has the effect of rebranding a permanent grinding state of poverty as something really plucky, gutsy and wonderfully, quintessentially British. Those just managing types, what sports they are about being poor. Gawd bless ’em! Back in the real world, maybe the just managing can and do complain, but nobody wants to listen?
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If people are regularly reduced to borrowing just to keep a roof over their head, then they’re evidently not managing. Since when was this defined by stacking up dangerous amounts of debt just to avoid being made homeless? At what point did it become normal for people to drown in repayments just to keep up with basic utilities?

It could be that a lot of these people are not remotely managing – they’re being ground down by debt in a way that’s either ignored, normalised or, increasingly, sanitised.

- Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan write about dental care as a glaring example of the disparity in treatment based on wealth. And Rory Carroll highlights LAX's new, exclusive terminal - featuring an opportunity for the rich to entertain themselves with the comparative discomfort of everybody else.

- Elizabeth McSheffrey points out how pipeline backers largely took over the Libs' much-trumpeted consultations with First Nations. Michael Geist discusses the PBO's conclusion that the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Europe will cost Canada hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty giveaways to big pharma. And Garfield Mahood and Brian Iler suggest that it's time to name and shame the individual executives behind tobacco-related diseases and deaths - which would seem a sensible plan for any corporation which puts the public's well-being at risk to serve its own ends.

- Marshall Steinbaum notes that Thomas Piketty's work in identifying and challenging inequality and economic unfairness is being papered over within the field of economics.

- Finally, Alan Freeman discusses the lack of long-term preparation and planning that results in floods (and other disasters) doing far more damage than they should. 

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Zoe Williams interviews George Lakoff about the need for progressive activists and parties to work on changing minds rather than merely pursuing an elusive (and illusory) middle ground:

(T)he left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year, it cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring everything closer to the centre. In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an authentic moral position, and appeal to voters' values. Liberals try to argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality. They think that if you can just demonstrate to voters how their self-interest is served by a socially egalitarian position, that will work, and everyone will vote for them and the debate will be over. In fact, Lakoff asserts, voters don't vote for bald self-interest; self-interest fails to ignite, it inspires nothing – progressives, of all people, ought to understand this.

When he talks about the collapse of the left, he clearly doesn't mean that those parties have disintegrated: they could be in government, as the Democrats are in the US. But their vision of progressive politics is compromised and weak. So in the UK there have been racist "Go home" vans and there is an immigration bill going through parliament, unopposed, that mandates doctors, the DVLA, banks and landlords to interrogate the immigration status of us all; Hungary has vigilante groups attacking Roma, and its government recently tried to criminalise homelessness; the leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece have only just been arrested, having been flirting with fascism since the collapse of the eurozone. We see, time and again, people in need being dehumanised, in a way that seems like a throwback to 60 or 70 years ago. Nobody could say the left was winning.
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Lakoff's work on the conceptual systems around morals and politics (and how they show up in language) has yielded two-dozen metaphors for morality, most of them universal across cultures. Of those, the two key frames informing political judgment involve the idea of government as a family: the strict-father model (conservative) versus the nurturant-parent model (progressive).
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If the two systems are poised in pure opposition, if they are each as moral, as metaphorical, as anciently rooted, as solidly grounded as the other, then why is one winning? "Progressives want to follow the polls … Conservatives don't follow the polls; they want to change them. Political ground is gained not when you successfully inhabit the middle ground, but when you successfully impose your framing as the 'common-sense' position."

- And Sean Holman highlights USA Today's challenge to its readers as to why they focus more on celebrity gossip than substantive news.

- The CCPA takes a look at the cost of living in Regina - and finds that a living wage for a family with two working adults would be $16.36 per hour.

- Alison cuts through some of CSEC's spin about its tracking travellers passing through Canadian airports. And Ron Diebert asks what we can do now that we know about CSEC's belief that it can spy on Canadians with impunity:

The CSEC presentation describes ubiquitous surveillance programs clearly directed at Canadians, involving data associated with Canadian airports, hotels, wi-fi cafes, enterprises and other domestic locations. The presentation outlines the challenges of discerning specific internet addresses and IDs associated with users within the universe of bulk data, paying special attention to challenges involving the movement of people through airports. It outlines results of experiments undertaken at a medium-sized city airport, which could possibly mean Calgary or Halifax, and which includes observations at “other domestic airports,” “hotels in many cities” and “mobile gateways in many cities.” Observations are made with detailed graphs of specific patterns of communications, noting differences as to how individuals communicate upon arrival and during departure, how long they spend in transit lounges, wi-fi cafes, hotel visits and even places of work. The objectives, the presentation says, are to separate the “needle from the haystack” – the haystack being, of course, all of us.

The presentation specifies that at least some of the bulk data from these locations was obtained through the cooperation of what’s only described as a “Canadian Special Source,” which is likely a Canadian telecommunications provider. If so, such revelations would make a mockery of Canadian carriers advertising their services as a “safe haven” from the snooping U.S. National Security Agency. From an accountability and oversight point of view, moving data hosting from the United States to Canada is like moving from a dimly lit cave to a pitch-black tunnel at the back of the cave.

What’s this mean for Canadians? When you go to the airport and flip open your phone to get your flight status, the government could have a record. When you check into your hotel and log on to the Internet, there’s another data point that could be collected. When you surf the Web at the local cafe hotspot, the spies could be watching. Even if you’re just going about your usual routine at your place of work, they may be following your communications trail.

Ingenious? Yes. Audacious? Yes. Unlawful? Time for the courts to decide...
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The revelations require an immediate response. They throw into sharp relief the obvious inadequacy of the existing “oversight” mechanism, which operates entirely within the security tent. They cast into doubt all government statements made about the limits of such programs. They raise the alarming prospect that Canada’s intelligence agencies may be routinely obtaining data on Canadian citizens from private companies – which includes revealing personal data – on the basis of a unilateral and highly dubious definition of “metadata” (the information sent by cellphones and mobile devices describing their location, numbers called and so on) as somehow not being “communications.” Such operations go well beyond invasions of privacy; the potential for the abuse of unchecked power contained here is practically limitless.

- Tabatha Southey suggests that the solution to Julian Fantino's contempt for Canadian veterans should be a fairly simple one if the Cons were willing to listen to reality. But then, the Cons and their provincial counterparts don't tend to fit that bill - as Murray Mandryk points out in discussing the Sask Party's vehement refusal to conduct a fair evaluation of P3s compared to public alternatives.

- Finally, Paul McLeod reports that the Cons have effectively eliminated federal anti-smoking programs in Canada - replacing the public health priority of reducing smoking with an industry-favoured push against contraband cigarettes alone.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Plenty more commentators are weighing in on the Harper Cons' enemy list, including the Star, the Globe and Mail, and Lawrence Martin. But Robyn Benson makes the most important comment about the Harper with-us-or-against-us mentality that's being applied to the federal government apparatus just as much as the Cons as a political party:

The common denominator here is a fundamental lack of trust in other people, approaching paranoia, combined with a mean authoritarian streak that defines anyone who thinks differently, not as a fellow-citizen, but as an enemy to be eliminated. Such people, once in power, display a cynical shrewdness and a fetish for secrecy. They instinctively prefer the dark to the light. And theirs is an iron rule, or at least as iron a rule as they are permitted to get away with.

Those of us who are fundamentally opposed to the values and philosophy of the current government, or even question them, are not “enemies.” We believe in the democratic process: spirited debate, the exercise of our Charter rights to dissent, strong and organized political opposition. A government that defines us as enemies is itself an enemy of democracy.

And democracy in Canada is fragile enough as it is. The Prime Minister is granted powers that a US President would envy—the unilateral right to appoint members of the Senate, judges, and members of various boards and commissions, for example. Or to shut down Parliament when it gets inconvenient. With the increasing concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, the consequent lack of democratic accountability to the electorate becomes more and more a fact of Canadian political life. And when it reaches the point that the PMO becomes more or less an arm of a specific political party, running dirty tricks against opposition leaders, a line has been crossed, and it will not be easy to walk that one back.

- Meanwhile, CTV reports on the latest in the Cons' Clusterduff - an apparent refusal to provide central records to the RCMP. (And no, "you didn't ask for exactly the right document in exactly the right way with exactly the right secret password" isn't a valid excuse, especially from a PMO shouting from the rooftops that it's cooperating with the investigation.)

- Andrew Livingstone reveals the use of impoverished and hungry First Nations Canadians as lab rats to determine what food and health services people could do without. And Dr. Dawg diagnoses part of the problem as being the perception of people as objects for experimental purposes.

- Rafe Mair notes that in trashing B.C. Hydro, the Clark Liberals are destroying what should be a proud part of that province's legacy of responsive right-wing government.

- And finally, George Monbiot discusses how the tobacco lobby is merely channeling money and PR into other forms to evade restrictions on direct advertising and warp the political system in its favour.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your midweek reading.

- Rachel Mendleson reports on research showing that inequality is correlated to mortality rates within a particular city - with the sole exception of communities with a high proportion of immigrants. Which makes it awfully tempting to suggest that based on their combination of inequality-exacerbating and immigration-limiting policies, the Harper Cons should be considered objectively pro-death.

- And needless to say, Leona Agglukaq's continued efforts to derail any effort to limit sodium in Canadian food would only play into that image. A handy hint: if the fundamental flaw with a regulatory scheme is that companies would be tempted to opt out, then don't make it optional.

- Sixth Estate points out the connections between Con spokesflack Jason Lietaer and the funding that looks to have funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into continued tobacco production in the name of ending it.

- Finally, Andrew Jackson points out a new study discussing tax evasion on a global scale.

Sad Answers to Rhetorical Questions

Who in the world could possibly be craven enough to fight for the tobacco lobby and against healthier food when public health is at stake?

Stephen Harper's Conservative government, that's who.