Thursday Evening Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Howard Mann discusses the World Bank's new model for public-private partnerships which deliberately avoids placing any real risk with the profiteers who participate only to make money off of necessary infrastructure.

- The New York Times takes an in-depth look at the environmental damage being wrought by the Trump administration. And Jeffrey Kucik comments on the glaring lack of any meaningful environmental standards in international trade agreements.

- Hina Alam discusses the rapid deterioration of Western Canadian glaciers as yet another obvious effect of climate breakdown. And Monica Wilson notes that the crucial solution to plastic accumulation is to avoid creating waste at all.

- Ben Beckett examines some of the key fights faced by the labour movement in 2018 - and argues that the unions prepared to fight have been able to achieve some important gains.

- Finally, Michael Spence comments on the connection between policies aimed at further enriching elites, and the spread of both economic weakness and social unrest.

Tuesday Evening Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Aditya Chakrabortty comments on the stunning turnaround experienced by the UK city of Preston after it started making a concerted effort to use public money to benefit citizens and local development.

- Meanwhile, CNN Wires notes that in contrast, massize Amazon warehouses don't do anything to add to net employment. The Hamilton Spectator laments the fact that Ontario's government has decided to hand Loblaws an effective monopoly on transit cards. And Landon Thomas Jr. writes about the World Bank's new role pushing P3s as an added means of extracting wealth from countries which are already short on resources of their own.

- Amina Zafar reports on some cuts to Canadian generic prescription drug prices arising out of an agreement not to pursue a tendering process for a few years. But Vik Adhopia notes that we'll still end up paying far more than in New Zealand among other jurisdictions where tendering processes are actually used - meaning that there's still every reason to push for a more fair deal for the public.

- Tom Parkin discusses the need for stronger protection against sexual harassment beyond what the Libs have introduced so far. And Nathan Heller points out that precarious and gig workers are particularly vulnerable.

- Finally, the Globe and Mail questions the Libs' decision to shield incumbents from any accountability in their ridings.

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Marco Chown Oved, Toby Heaps and Michael Yow discuss the long-term transition away from meaningful corporate tax contributions to Canada's public purse:

For every dollar corporations pay to the Canadian government in income tax, people pay $3.50. The proportion of the public budget funded by personal income taxes has never been greater.

At a time when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made tax fairness a centrepiece of his government, the Toronto Star and Corporate Knights magazine spent six months poring over tax data to determine how much income tax corporations are really paying.

We found the amount of tax most big companies pay has been dropping as a proportion of their profits for years, and not only because the corporate tax rate has been cut repeatedly. Canada’s largest corporations use complex techniques and tax loopholes to reduce their taxes significantly below the official corporate tax rate set by the government.
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The 2011-2016 audited financial statements of all large Canadian corporations (those worth more than $2 billion) reveal they paid an average of 17.7 per cent tax.

During that time, the average official corporate tax rate in Canada for this group of companies was 26.6 per cent.

That 8.9 per cent gap translates into tens of billions of dollars that could have been used to pay for the schools, roads, hospitals, police and paramedics we all rely on.

- And Chown Oved also reports on the strong public appetite to close tax loopholes and ensure that corporations pay their fair share.

- David Macdonald and Martha Friendly study the glaring gaps in cost and availability of child care across Canada, while Randy Shore reports on the CCPA's proposed path to $10 per day child care in British Columbia.

- Erin Anderssen reports on new research showing the desperate need for improved access to mental health care in Ontario.

- Mark Hancock offers his take on what progressive trade policy should include - including a focus on what's best for workers and citizens rather than businesses alone. And Stuart Trew and Scott Sinclair discuss the possibility of seriously evaluating the effects of the many trade deals already on the books, rather than rushing into more.

- Finally, Shawn McCarthy reports on the World Bank's decision to stop lending to oil and gas projects as part of the world's transition away from dirty energy. And the CP takes note of Alberta's massive wind power savings resulting from its concerted effort to make a quick shift to renewables.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Paul Krugman writes that the only real difference between the latest global crisis and past depressions is that we've moved further and further toward a rent-based economy - meaning that aggregated growth doesn't necessarily result in any benefit for the vast majority of people:

(T)here is at least one important respect in which the 21st-century economy is different in a way that ought to have a significant effect on macroeconomics: the much larger role of rents on intangible assets. This isn’t an original insight, but I haven’t been finding systematic analyses of the point.

What do I mean by the role of rents? Consider the changing identity of the most valuable company in America. For a long time, it was GM, then Exxon, then IBM. These were companies with huge visible production activities: GM had more than 400,000 employees, which was amazing when you consider that the overall national work force was much smaller than the one we have today, Exxon had oil refineries. IBM was an information technology company, but it still had many of the attributes of an old-style manufacturing giant, with many factories and a large, well-paid work force.

But now it’s Apple, which has hardly any employees and does hardly any manufacturing. The company tries, through fairly desperate PR efforts, to claim that it is indirectly responsible for lots of US jobs, but never mind. The reality is that the company is basically built around technology, design, and a brand identity.
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There are a couple of obvious implications from this change in the nature of corporate success. One is that profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural” aspect of the economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy, etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider output is “produced” at low or zero marginal cost.

- And the Huffington Post Canada reports on one obvious example of that effect - as Canada's millionaire class saw five times as much growth in the wealth as the average household.

- The Huffington Post also discusses the World Bank's link between poverty and climate change:

The World Bank says it will increasingly view its efforts to help developing countries fight poverty through a "climate lens."

In a report released Wednesday, the international lending institution warned that heat waves, rising seas, more severe storms and other impacts of climate change will trap millions of people in poverty.

As a result, the Washington-based bank said it is stepping up support for efforts to curb climate change and to help the world adapt to it.
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In a conference call, bank Vice President Rachel Kyte said the World Bank doubled its lending aimed at adaptation efforts to $4.6 billion in 2012.

She said that money was separate from the adaptation funds transferred from rich to poor countries in U.N. climate talks. The developed countries have pledged to ramp that financing up to $100 billion annually by 2020. Critics say that won't be enough, pointing to the New York's recently announced $20 billion plan – for that city alone – to stave off rising seas with flood gates, levees and other defenses.

- And Stephanie Levitz reports on the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness' study showing the cost of homelessness in Canada to be over $7 billion per year. 

- Finally, Dennis Howlett points out that the Cons' attempts to paper over tax evasion won't accomplish much without Canada also participating in a global push for corporate transparency.

Monday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- For anybody wondering whether the NDP is in a position to keep gaining seats for a fourth consecutive election, the answer looks to be an emphatic yes:

Speaking with QMI Agency in a year-end interview in his Parliament Hill office, Jack Layton said the party is better prepared than ever for an election.

It's booked its campaign plane already, and the party is debt-free, having paid off the last of the 2008 election loan recently.

This year, the NDP also set a new record for fundraising, according to the party's national director, Brad Lavigne, and will be in a position to spend the legal maximum and match the Conservatives dollar-for-dollar for only the second time in the party's history.

- Armine Yalnizyan's Globe and Mail chat on inequality is well worth a look for a survey of the issue. But I find it particularly interesting that the questions look to have been largely either supportive or informational rather than seriously challenging Yalnizyan's viewpoint: after all, can one imagine a chat topic more suited to an astroturfing effort?

- But maybe the corporate sector is more interested in larger institutions rather than one-time chats even in major media outlets. And Erin notes that the World Bank is issuing reports effectively calling for nonstop corporate tax cutting - even though it would seem to have a strong incentive to make sure countries have enough revenue to make payments to it.

- Finally, let's play "spot the flaw" with Andrew Coyne's latest conclusion:

In 2001, when Bush first proposed his tax cuts, the top one per cent of taxpayers earned 18 per cent of all income and paid 34 per cent of all federal income taxes. By 2008, they were earning 22 per cent of the income, and paying 38 per cent of the taxes. Would it be so bad if they went back to paying the same share they did in the Clinton years?

That's right: even leaving aside the lack of context as to how the income and tax levels relate to each other, Coyne happily ignores his own numbers on increased incomes among those making the most money in proposing that their share should never go up - meaning that his "would it be so bad?" appeal is for the other 99% of the population to pay the same share as before with 4% less of the income. And anybody looking for some means of moving the income levels as well as the tax levels back to Clinton-era levels will of course find nothing of the sort from Coyne.