Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Paul Krugman calls out the U.S.' deficit scolds for continuing to invent a crisis to distract from the real problems with middling growth and high unemployment. And Bruce Johnstone singles out a few of the Cons' talking points which have somehow become conventional wisdom without having an iota of truth to them. But in case there was any doubt why the Cons aren't being exposed to their own patent wrongness, William Watson's (hardly people-friendly) column explains why - as Jack Mintz manages to qualify as the least corporate-biased member of a hand-picked budget advisory group.

- David Cay Johnston discusses how California is thoroughly disproving the claim that high-end tax increases have any negative impact on growth, as the state is actually thriving after passing significant tax increases through a referendum. And David Climenhaga points to the astroturf groups lobbying for increased exploitation of temporary foreign workers as a prime example of how zombie lies are kept undead:

(I)t cannot be mere coincidence that in almost every case the main groups calling for more TFWs turn out to have a long history of anti-union advocacy. In some cases, before the TFW issue came along, their sole purpose was attacking the right of working people to bargain collectively.

This web of anti-union advocacy groups includes the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Restaurants Canada, the Workplace Democracy Institute of Canada, the Merit Contractors Association, “Working Canadians,” and the Canadian Labour Watch Association.

Even the mysterious National Citizens Coalition, the granddaddy of all Canadian far-right AstroTurf groups, once headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, puts in a cameo appearance in this convoluted tale!

Each of these groups is not forthcoming about its finances and, it is reasonable to conclude given their purported mandates to represent to represent a different segment of the Canadian economy from “taxpayers,” to restaurant owners, to ordinary working stiffs who just want a little “freedom” in their workplace, is deceptive about its true objectives.
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The links among this well-established network of anti-union agitators have been obvious for many years.

That the same players who hold the most virulently anti-union views and the most offensive opinions about the supposed shortcomings of Canadian workers should turn out to be the loudest advocates, and in some places the only advocates, for the TFW Program suggests the true agenda behind the vociferous TFW lobby.

It is quite apparent the goals of the Canadian Taxpayers Association, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, and the various trade associations involved are to weaken the bargaining power of Canadian families (including many of their own naïve members), keep wages low, keep all workers vulnerable and re-elect the Harper Government.

- Meanwhile, Bill Tieleman discusses how the B.C. Liberals are using their latest deliberately-provoked confrontation with teachers to try to push a for-profit education model.

- Abrahm Lustgarten reports that after being told that there are no risks whatsoever to fracking, U.S. residents are learning otherwise the hard way:

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.
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The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth's geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
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A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.

Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.

- Finally, USA Today rightly questions why we allow big pharma to name its price for needed medications (even as we set up byzantine legal structures to protect the resulting profits).

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Ian Welsh discusses the connection between one's view of human nature and one's preferred social and economic policies - while noting that policies themselves serve to shape behaviour:

The fact is this: incentives work.

The second fact is this: using strong incentives is usually idiocy, because they do work.

What happens with incentives is that people’s behaviour is warped by them.  A normal doctor who does not get paid more per test he orders, orders less tests.  A doctor who owns the facility which does the testing, does more tests.  Management has a saying “what gets measured, gets managed”.  Yeah—and nothing else does.

Paying people enough, and trusting their own judgment about what is important tends to produce better results, because people don’t ignore everything else to leap for the incentives and to meet the measurements some doofus is managing.  And they don’t go out of their way to manipulate the measurements, which is what happens when reward and punishment are linked to metrics.
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[Humans] have multiple drives, and how much of what drive is expressed in each of us is different and changes based on the context.  Put people in a world where people are cruel to them, and they will become cruel.  Put them in a world where people are kind, and most of them will become kind.

None of us is just one thing; each of us changes and changes quickly, from day to day; year to year; sometimes even minute to minute.  We are capable of expressing cruelty sufficient to make demons weep; and kindness that would awe an angel but which we will do and when, depends so much on what who we believe we are, how we are treated and what we are told our nature is.

If we want the better angels of our nature to soar, we have to admit that they exist.  If we insist that we are all devils, all selfish bastards, we will build our societies based on that expectation, and we will make our prophecies come true.

- Meanwhile, William Watson suggests that it's long past time to stop feeding corporate sharks at the expense of the public - though of course his argument that we should instead give the sharks as much leeway as possible to hunt for themselves raises its own questions. Jared Milne writes about the costs of tax slashing. And the Broadbent Institute's latest polling suggests that inequality and job insecurity - the inevitable consequences of a corporatist mindset - represent for a price few Canadians want to pay.

- Josh Eidelson writes that the corporate right in the U.S. - like that in Canada - has no interest in allowing free speech where workers seek to speak out. And PressProgress notes that Canada's own Museum for Human Rights apparently won't allow free speech where it might prove inconvenient for Stephen Harper.

- Finally, Ryan Meili writes about the need to improve the social determinants of health - rather than using them as an excuse to deny access to care as Nova Scotia's Libs proposed. And Frances Russell reminds us that even the health care we have now is under attack - and that the Cons have had plenty of Lib assistance in chipping away at a functional national health care system.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Stephen Maher points out the type of government that we've come to count on under the ultra-controlling Harper political model:

This presidentialization of the Canadian system is worrying, not because of some fetishistic attachment to the trappings of Parliament, but because it allows for greater centralization than is found in other democracies.

In the United States, Obama can't act without Congress. In Britain, prime ministers can never impose iron discipline on their huge, leaky caucuses.

A better comparison to the current Canadian situation might be Russia, where Vladimir Putin is able to act without concern for the formal role of institutions, although in Canada there are a series of extra-governmental actors — the premiers, the courts and the media — that would prevent any government from going too far.

And we have watchdogs — the auditor general, the parliamentary budget officer and the like — but according a count by Queen's University Professor Ned Franks, Harper has fired or forced out 10 watchdogs, which tends to cow the others.

- And Harper's total control over his ministers - with people who theoretically hold authority over a department prevented from saying a word that isn't pre-approved by the PMO - figures to have plenty to do with Saskboy's observation that lies simply don't matter when it comes to the Cons.

- Liisa Schofield and John Clarke point out how the McGuinty Liberals have not only embraced the Harris PCs' cuts to Ontario's social spending, but also made matters worse with a decade of erosion of the province's already-low social assistance levels.

- Finally, William Watson presents a typical faith-in-corporatism-based attack on any discussion of reasonable tax levels. So let's throw the question back at Watson: does he actually have any evidence (other than free-market dogma dressed up as "common sense") to counter the argument that the optimal level of taxation on high-income individuals is the one which maximizes revenue?

[Edit: fixed wording.]