Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- David Roberts sets out the big picture surrounding the Green New Deal, as essentially nobody other than the activists supporting it has made any effort to deal with the reality of impending climate breakdown:

(T)hat’s the context here: a world tipping over into catastrophe, a political system under siege by reactionary plutocrats, a rare wave of well-organized grassroots enthusiasm, and a guiding document that does nothing but articulate goals that any climate-informed progressive ought to share.

Given all that, for those who acknowledge the importance of decarbonizing the economy and recognize how cosmically difficult it is going to be, maybe nitpicking and scolding isn’t the way to go. Maybe the moment calls for a constructive and additive spirit.

The GND remains a statement of aspirations. All the concrete work of policymaking lies ahead. There will be room for carbon prices and R&D spending and performance standards and housing density and all the rest of the vast menu of options for reducing emissions. None of those policy debates have been preempted or silenced. 

And yes, there are any number of ways it could go off the rails, politically or substantively. Everyone is free, nay, encouraged to use their critical judgment. 

But the circumstances we find ourselves in are extraordinary and desperate. Above all, they call upon all of us to put aside our egos and our personal brands and strive for solidarity, to build the biggest and most powerful social force possible behind the only kind of rapid transition that can hope to inspire other countries and forestall the worst of climate change.

- Meanwhile, Ban Ki-moon highlights why the UK needs to stop subsidizing the extraction and burning of fossil fuels in developing countries.

- Adam Johnson calls out the lack of any scrutiny of an obvious scheme by the same people who have pushed wars and humanitarian atrocities on the U.S.' behalf for three decades to continue that pattern in Venezuela. And Kevin Tillman argues against yet another illegal U.S. invasion.

- Steve May comments on the willingness of Andrew Scheer and the Cons to join forces with avowed racists. labour

- Finally, Derek Thompson writes about the obsession with "workism" that pushes workers to accept perpetually deteriorating job conditions and lives based on the social expectation they'll see work as its own reward.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Eric Holthaus writes that the Green New Deal which looks to be at the centre of Democratic policy development offers an important opportunity for the U.S. to make amends with a world bearing the brunt of its past pollution. But Rick Salutin discusses how the coup on behalf of the resource sector in Venezuela (with the U.S. and Canada playing major roles) is all about inflating corporate profits, rather than protecting human rights or democracy.

- Fatima Syed reports on Doug Ford's plan to stop tracking carbon pollution to paper over the inevitable effects of his elimination of any climate change plan. And the Globe and Mail's editorial board calls Ford out - albeit too late - for promising that slashing services will do anything but harm the public.

- Luke Savage highlights why any plan for vital public services needs to be aimed toward universal access, rather than stopping at "affordability":

The word “affordable” appeared some thirty-one times in the 2016 Democratic Party platform, in reference to policy areas ranging from housing and college tuition to childcare and finance (for comparison, “middle class,” that hallowed floating signifier, appeared only sixteen times).

Its omnipresence in political language makes a certain intuitive sense. Life for many Americans is, after all, dominated by institutions that make things more expensive by design: health insurers offering pricey packages for even the most basic coverage; telecom and energy giants imposing inscrutable new rates and fees on customers trying to maintain their cell service, keep the lights on, or not freeze to death in the winter; schools making themselves ever more exclusive through higher tuition; landlords raising the rents at each and every opportunity.
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Pushes to make vital public goods such as health care or education “affordable” — whether well-intentioned or deliberately misleading — still invariably imply a transaction taking place between a seller and a consumer: the dynamic of the market in its most elemental form. Even if the good in question does become cheaper (and therefore easier for more people to access), the basic dynamic is maintained and the good remains a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a universal right to be guaranteed and enjoyed.

This is what makes the incrementalist attitude to health care (and innumerable other policy areas) favored by some Democrats so flawed: the Left’s push for universality isn’t just a more holistic version of liberal efforts that aspire to make things more “affordable.” Its ultimate goal is to democratize social goods, removing the market altogether and extinguishing the need for anyone to worry about whether they have the requisite funds to see a doctor, acquire education, put their children in a safe and caring environment during working hours, or sleep with a roof over their heads.

- Finally, Paul Wells discusses the need for a public inquiry into Justin Trudeau's interference in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and its executives for illegal donations largely directed toward the Libs' own coffers.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Josh Mound opines that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' call for a 70 per cent tax rate on ultra-high incomes is just the beginning of a needed conversation about the morality of the extreme concentration of wealth. And Vanessa Williamson writes that beyond raising public revenue, we should also value the improvement in equality generated by a more progressive tax system:

Progressive taxation should work as a corrective tax, like tobacco taxes or a carbon tax. Sure, tobacco taxes raise some revenue for the states. But their primary purpose is to curb smoking. While a carbon tax could produce a lot of government revenue, the real point is to limit global warming pollution. In essence, corrective taxes try to put themselves out of business; if tobacco tax revenues decline because people quit smoking, or if carbon taxes stop rolling in because the economy becomes fossil-free, that is victory, not defeat.

Taxes on the wealthy discourage a different societal ill: exploitative capitalism. Progressive tax policy is a powerful corrective to economic inequality and wealth concentration. As economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez concluded in their seminal paper on U.S. income inequality, “steep progressive income and estate taxation” helped prevent the accumulation of immense fortunes in the middle of the 20th century. In cross-national data, moreover, there is a “strong negative correlation between top tax rates and top 1% income share.” In other words, where top tax rates are higher, the income distribution is more egalitarian – not just post-tax, but even before taxes are taken out.

That’s because progressive taxes blunt the incentives for wealthy people to overpay one another and exploit the less privileged. For instance, contemporary CEOs are often financially rewarded for what is in essence good luck: changes in market conditions that have nothing to do with their individual performance. High tax rates discourage these CEO windfalls, leaving more money available for companies to invest productively. That means higher marginal tax rates make the economy fairer and more productive — and have no negative effect on growth, no matter what billionaires at the World Economic Forum prefer to believe.
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Early proponents of progressive tax policy knew that it was not just a revenue source. In our contemporary Gilded Age, and as our political institutions feel pushed to the breaking point, we would do well to remember that progressive taxation is a democratic reform.

- Meanwhile, Liz McCormick, Saleha Mohsin and Alexandre Tanzi report on the U.S.' trillion-dollar borrowing to fund the Trump tax giveaway to the rich. And Richard Partington writes that the UK's corporate tax handouts have likewise proven far more harmful to the public treasury than promised.

- Oscar Guardiola-Rivera highlights why the corporate-driven push for a coup in Venezuela is dangerous for all concerned. But Joshua Goodman, Luis Alonso Lugo and Rob Gillies report that Canada has been at the centre of a secret push to install an unelected leader in order to facilitate resource-sector profit-taking.

- Chris Tollefson reviews three books documenting how Canada's petro-state is blocking climate progress. And Elizabeth Aguilera points out how environmental damage is inflicted on people who can't afford to leave polluted areas due to structural inequalities.

- Finally, Eric Andrew-Gee and Tavia Grant examine some of the gaps in publicly-available data about Canada and its citizens.