Wednesday Morning Links

This and that for your mid-week reading.

- Erin Weir posts the statement of a 70-strong (and growing) list of Canadian economists opposed to austerity. Heather Mallick frames the latest Con budget as yet another example of their using personal cruelty as a governing philosophy, while the Star's editorial board goes into detail about the dangers of yet another round of politically-motivated attacks on environmental and public interest charities.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell slams the Cons' efforts to rig the 2015 election. And Jordon Cooper discusses how voting is already too difficult for marginalized people without the Cons going out of their way to add further roadblocks.

Canada has a long tradition of denying some groups the vote. At various points in its history it has discriminated against women, aboriginals, persons without property and even certain religious groups, and denied them the right to vote. We have learned from those mistakes and taken steps to make it easier for people to vote.

Now, much of that good work is being undone, and the government is making it harder for already marginalized and forgotten people to be heard.
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There are many groups in Canada that are not targeted voters, don't have access to decision makers, can't afford to attend fundraising events and don't have a cadre of lobbyists to plead their case. All they have is their vote.

I'd rather spend more to make a process work so that everyone can vote, rather than suppress those votes in the name of efficiency. Improve the process of vouching if that's what is needed, but don't take away the ability of people to vote when that often is their only voice.

- Chris Selley highlights the importance of the right of citizenship (which the Cons are determined to relabel as an easily-removed privilege).

- Alex Hunsberger offers some historical perspective on the origins of "right-to-work" laws as a means to enforce racial segregation by attacking the labour and civil rights movements alike.

- Finally, David Climenhaga writes that the destruction of the single-desk Wheat Board has had the predictable effect of driving down the prices farmers can earn for their crops - due to both logistical problems arising out of a poorly-planned policy and the greater power of purchasers in the absence of a strong voice for producers.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Mouthy cats.

Deep thought

I've written before about the dangers of government by manufactured crisis - which is all too familiar under the Harper Cons and the Wall Sask Party alike.

But in light of recent events, I feel compelled to add that an inexplicable "you must accept our plan NOW! NOW! NOW!" only gets worse when followed by a gleeful "MWAHAHAHAHA!!!".

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Donovan Vincent reports on the Institute for Social Research's study showing Canadians are highly concerned about income inequality:

“People think the income gap has gotten worse. What was surprising to me was the universality of this belief. Younger people, older, higher levels of education, lower, men and women. The fact is, a wide cross-section of Canadian society believes that the income gap has gotten bigger, or much bigger in the last five years,” survey author David Northrup said in an interview.

“Usually we see a lot more variation in opinion in social ideas like this,” added Northrup, director of survey research at York who co-authored the report with York professor Lesley Jacobs.

“One of the fundamental bedrocks of being a Canadian is thinking we have a fair society. This survey is going against that grain.”

When it came to explaining the income gap, 70 per cent of respondents said there just aren’t enough jobs that pay a decent wage, while 60 per cent said the flight of jobs to countries that pay low wages is a major reason for the expanding income gap. About two-thirds of Canadians, 65 per cent, blamed “increasing salaries to business leaders” as a major reason for the widening income gap.

- Meanwhile, the CCPA's alternative federal budget offers plenty of means to address Canada's burgeoning inequality and lack of social progress. And Bill Moyers points out that a substantial number of businesses stand to do better if they can appeal to a strong middle class.

- Claire McIlveen writes that the Cons' elections legislation falls far short of what was promised, while Chantal Hebert and Steven Chase both note that it fits the Cons' pattern of suppressing voter turnout and other public participation at every available opportunity. And in case there was any doubt about elections legislation receiving more scrutiny than anything else the Cons are pushing, they're are following their usual pattern of shutting down debate (and presumably amendments as well) to ensure the truth doesn't come out until after the legislation is forced through Parliament.

- Alex Boutilier writes that the PBO has called out the Cons' compulsive dishonesty about sick leave taken by federal public servants. And John Nicol and Dave Seglins report that in the lead up to the Lac-Mégantic disaster, Lisa Raitt was receiving - and granting - a steady stream of requests for exemptions from rail safety rules.

- Finally, Thomas Walkom recognizes an important distinction between the NDP and its federal competitors:

What would the New Democrats do if they won power? In an open letter to Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Toronto MP Peggy Nash, the party’s finance critic, provides a few hints.

Her letter marks a welcome respite from the usual political bromides about the horrors of fiscal deficits. Putting government spending and revenue into balance is a worthy abstract goal. But in the real world, it can cause more harm than good.

Nash gets this. She warns Flaherty that in his rush to balance the books, he risks prolonging a slump that has already lasted six years.

She notes — correctly — that unemployment remains stubbornly high and that the savants of the International Monetary Fund predict more trouble for the Canadian economy.

Indeed, IMF economists have gently suggested to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that it delay its budget balancing plans should the economy turn particularly sour.
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Still, (Tom Mulcair's) New Democrats are on the right track. They understand that Canada’s economic priority should be jobs and incomes. They understand government has a role to play in this. They are not quite as terrified of breaking away from the orthodoxy of balanced budgets as they used to be.

They may not be saying much. But unlike, say, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, they are saying something.

New column day

Here, taking a closer look at the City of Regina's 2014 budget - which offers a clear demonstration that the perpetual promise of growth doesn't do anything to fund the municipal services citizens count on, resulting in current residents paying for the poor decisions of the city administration.

For further reading...
- The City's budget documents can be found here. 
- Both CBC's initial report and the Leader-Post's editorial focus on the mill rate increase (which seems to me to hide more than it reveals). And Paul Dechene starts the Prairie Dog's work in digging somewhat deeper.

Light blogging ahead

There'll be little if any blogging in this space for the next week. (Since we should probably test once and for all whether readers are happier avoiding political talk during the Olympics.)

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.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Justin Fox questions whether traditional studies tracking the distribution of wealth by quintiles do much good when the most obvious economic faultline is between the (give or take) 1% and everybody else:

Something really dramatic is going on up there in the top 5%, the top 1%, the top 0.01%. But while economists know some things about the impact of increasing overall income inequality, they still don’t know all that much about what this 1% stuff means. In their new paper, Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, and Turner write that their finding of steady intergenerational income mobility “may be surprising in light of the well-known negative correlation between inequality and mobility across countries.” A possible explanation, they continue, is that

[M]uch of the increase in inequality has been driven by the extreme upper tail … [and] there is little or no correlation between mobility and extreme upper tail inequality — as measured e.g. by top 1% income shares — both across countries and across areas within the U.S. Instead, the correlation between inequality and mobility is driven primarily by “middle class” inequality.

That’s the thing about this rise in “extreme upper tail inequality” — most pronounced in the U.S. but by now a clearly global phenomenon. It is one of the most dramatic economic developments of the past quarter century. And it seems like it might be bad thing. But conclusive economic evidence for its badness is hard to find.

Yes, there are theories: All that wealth sloshing around in the top 1% leads to more bubbles and crashes. Extreme wealth corrupts the political process.  Income inequality may be slowing overall economic growth. And, as my colleague Walter Frick put it in an email when I brought this up, “given the diminishing marginal utility of income, it’s hugely wasteful for the super rich to have so much income.”
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I think we’re eventually going to have to figure out what if anything to do about exploding high-end incomes without clear guidance from the economists. This is a discussion where political and moral considerations may end up predominating. And as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw made clear in his maddeningly inconclusive Journal of Economic Perspectives essay on inequality last summer, these are areas in which economists possess no comparative advantage.

- Meanwhile, Michael Rozworski notes that spin about increased "average real wages" is based largely on upper-end gains - missing both the stagnation of Canada's median wage, and the number of workers left out of the workforce altogether. And Gary Bloch highlights how a meager minimum wage leads to worse health outcomes for everybody. 

- PressProgress rightly mocks the CFIB for pointing to the temporary foreign worker program - the most obvious Con effort to prioritize the constant supply of cheap, powerless and disposable labour for even the most abusive of employers over the well-being of Canadian workers - as an example of businesses being hard done by.

- Peter O'Neil reports on the respective efforts of Kennedy Stewart and Brad Trost to facilitate public participation through petitions and MP authority to vote on their own committee chairs. And it's for the best that Stewart's bill has already passed second reading with multipartisan support.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt questions the wisdom of political choices which cut seniors adrift in the name of a perpetual youth movement. But particularly when it comes to the Cons' attacks on pensions and services, I'd think the issue is less one of age than ideology: it's to be expected that people past their peak earning stage may need more public services and supports to compensate, meaning that a party determined to render government useless will inevitably operate contrary to their interests.

Musical interlude

Econoline Crush - You Don't Know What It's Like

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Ian Welsh discusses the nature of prosperity - and the illusion that it means nothing more than increased economic activity:

All other things being equal more productive capacity is better. The more stuff we can make, in theory, the better off we’ll be. But in practice, it doesn’t always work that way.

Part of the problem is due to hierarchies and inequality. Inequality is undeniably bad for us. The more unequal your society is, the lower the median lifespan. The more unequal the society, the sicker, in general. More heart attacks, much more stress. The more unequal, the more crime. These links are robust.

The links run two ways. On the one hand, humans find inequality stressful. The human body, if subject to long term stress, becomes unhealthy and far more likely to be sick. People who feel unequal act less capable than those who feel equal. This is true for the rich and powerful in unequal societies and the poor. Everyone suffers. Though the poor and weak do suffer more, even the rich and powerful would be healthier and live longer in equal societies, most likely simply due to the stress effect.

The second part is distribution, or rather, the question of who gets to decide the distribution. The more unequal a society, the less stuff the poor and middle class have, comparatively. Some technologies tend to lead to more inequality, some tend to lead to more equality.  ...
Increases in productive capacity and technological advancement do not always lead to welfare and when they do, it do not have to do so immediately. The industrial revolution certainly did lead to increased human welfare, but if you were of the generations thrown off the land and made to work in the early factories, often 6 1/2 days a week, in horrible conditions, you would not have thought so. You were in virtually every way worse off than before being thrown off the land, and so were your children. A few industrialists and the people around them certainly did very well, but that is not prosperity, nor is it affluence.

Prosperity, in the end, is as much about power and politics as it is about technology and productive ability. The ability to make more does not ensure we are making the right things, or that the people who need them, get them. Productive capacity which is not shared is not prosperity.

- Meanwhile, PressProgress highlights the Cons' latest efforts to make sure workers don't share in any benefit from corporate operations.

- Keith Stewart writes that the oil sector's interest in fostering dependence on its product runs contrary to the social interest in generating clean and renewable energy, while Andrew Gage explains the NEB's choice not to take seriously the most obvious risks involved in the Gateway pipeline and tanker project. And Erin Weir offers up PCS' minimal royalty projections as the latest example of how Saskatchewan's dependence on corporate potash production is producing little return for the province's resources.

- Finally, Greg Weston reports on CSEC's illegal intrusion into the online activity of travellers at Canadian airports:

The latest Snowden document indicates the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period.

Experts say that probably included many Canadians whose smartphone and laptop signals were intercepted without their knowledge as they passed through the terminal.

The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports.

That included people visiting other airports, hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, libraries, ground transportation hubs, and any number of places among the literally thousands with public wireless internet access.

The document shows CSEC had so much data it could even track the travellers back in time through the days leading up to their arrival at the airport, these experts say.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Ken Georgetti discusses how the corporate tax giveaways of the past 15 years have hurt most Canadians:

The Conservative government and special interest groups claim incessantly that cutting corporate income taxes is good for the economy and for individual Canadians. We have been led to believe that tax giveaways to corporations would lead companies to reinvest in research and development as well as machinery and staff training to boost productivity. This is supposed to stimulate economic growth and create better paying and more secure jobs. But that is not what has happened in Canada during the past decade.

Let's look at the record since 2000, when the drive to slash corporate taxes began.  The average annual economic growth between 2000 and 2012 was 1.14 per cent, one of the longest periods of low economic growth in decades. Business investment in research and development has fallen from 1.13 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 0.88 per cent of GDP in 2012. Investment in employee training and skills development is down by 40 per cent since the 1990s. The amount spent on training per employee in Canada in 2010 was $688; in the U.S it was $1,071. And now, taxpayers will get the privilege of subsidizing companies for employee training, with the federal government's proposed Canada Jobs Grant.
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The years of tax giveaways have, indeed, been good for business. Their after tax profit margins rose from 6.9 per cent in 2000 to 8.1 per cent in 2012, and now we know what they have been doing with the money. Between 2000 and 2012, the total cash reserves of private, non-financial private corporations in Canada grew from $182 to $541 billion, an increase of over 300 per cent. During the same period, CEO pay went sky-high. The average CEO compensation at Canada's largest non-financial corporations averaged $7.96 million in 2012.

Corporate tax giveaways mean that the federal government has foregone billions of dollars in revenues. To pay for the tax breaks, Ottawa has borrowed billions of dollars and driven up the national debt. Now, the government has chosen to make big cuts to public services essential to Canadians in order to pay the bill for its tax giveaways.

We hold Corporate Tax Freedom Day to draw attention to the failure of business to deliver on its promises to Canadians. Clearly, slashing corporate tax rates did not produce the expected outcomes. No strings attached corporate tax cuts are a cruel and very expensive hoax and we should demand our money back.

- Meanwhile, Linda Nguyen reports that while the same Con/corporate grouping tries to minimize public pensions in favour of private schemes which allow the financial sector to skim massive rents off the top, the vast majority of Canadians expect to rely on the CPP and provincial equivalents to support their retirement.

- Trish Hennessy writes that Ontario should try to get on the right side of history by setting its minimum wage at a level which will keep full-time workers out of poverty. And the Wellesley Institute concurs while discussing the importance of also indexing it to inflation.

- Kev and Dan Tan are both rightly skeptical about the Libs' sudden Senate announcement (followed by almost immediate backtracking about what it actually means). But Paul Wells sums it up best:

The last two acts of Richard II are about sorting out the effects of Bolingbroke’s rash act, and I won’t spoil it for you but it gets a little messy. Similarly, it’s hard to know where the Liberal Party as a whole goes from here. Terry Mercer gave his life to this party. Dozens of other senators and their staffers, same deal. Percy Downe was Chrétien’s chief of staff; he got told this morning he has no further function as a Liberal. An NDP staffer this morning was gleeful, because with only 34 MPs and zero Senators, the Liberals may no longer qualify for a caucus room in the Centre Block. It’s not entirely clear how all this will work.

Nor is it clear it is a permanent state of affairs. The old Reform Party was dead-set against MPs’ pensions until its members started to qualify for some. Stephen Harper did not appoint a single senator until he realized Stéphane Dion had planned to appoint plenty if the coalition crisis had gone the other way. Among a thousand other backtrack scenarios, it’s possible to imagine a future Liberal prime minister — perhaps his name would be Trudeau — watching as a coherent Conservative Senate caucus blocks Liberal legislation that has gone orphan in the Senate. In the nearer term, every time a fellow or lady who still collects a Senate paycheque shows up at a gathering of Liberals, the sincerity of this divorce will be open to question.

- Finally, Matthew McKean discusses how public confidence in politics may be the most important factor in improving voter turnout (and presumably public participation in many forms as well). And the Cons' consistent attempts to weasel their way out of responsibility for their actions surely can't be helping matters.

New column day

Here, questioning the Saskatchewan Party's belief that meeting the province's constitutional duty to provide correctional centre inmates with the basic necessities of life isn't a "core" government function.

For further reading:
- CTV reports on the label the Sask Party has applied to correctional food services (and the resulting privatization process) here. 
- And once again, CBC reports here on the cautionary tale of Ontario's highway maintenance - where public safety has been compromised in the name of outsourcing provincial services.

Deep thought

The Liberals, at their self-perceived best, lag many years behind the principled curve set by the NDP.

(Meanwhile, who's taking odds as to the number of formerly-Lib Senators who will be recruited by the we'll-take-anybody Greens?)

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Cassidy offers ten options to reduce income inequality. And Andrew Coyne concurs with the first and most important suggestion that income supports sufficient to provide a stable living to everybody would make for the ideal solution.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell is the latest to write that the Cons' income-splitting scheme is only designed to exacerbate the gap between the rich and the rest of us. Miles Corak notes that even Republicans can't avoid recognizing that equality of opportunity is fading in the U.S. - though he recognizes their inclination to avoid acknowledging the role of inequality as a cause. Logan Sachon interviews a few members of the precariat about about the extreme obstacles facing people who have to juggle part-time and temporary jobs for lack of full-time opportunities. And in an interview with Josh Eidelson, John Schmitt discusses how the U.S. has chosen inequality and worker suppression as the basis for its economic policy over the past several decades:

Workers today are a lot older than they were in the 1960s or the 1970s, and they are enormously better-educated than they were in the 1960s or 1970s. The fact that most workers are doing barely better, and some workers are doing worse than their counterparts from 40 or 50 years ago … suggest that the problem is that the way the economy converts people’s skills, people’s experience, people’s education and their training, into good jobs is what has deteriorated over this period. Not people’s underlying skills, or work experience, or education.

And I think it points to something completely different — and I think it’s absent from a lot of the discussion as [to] the reasons why we have economic inequality, and the reasons why we have these continuous problems with mobility and opportunity. And that has to do with bargaining power of workers. And you know, that I think is a piece that’s unfortunately missing from the president’s discussion of economic inequality, and it’s absent from his discussion of mobility and opportunity.

The way the economy has been restructured over the last three or four decades has removed the bargaining power of workers at the middle and the bottom. And it’s done that in a very systematic way.
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It doesn’t stop there … Immigrant workers have almost no rights under our labor law … Because their position is so weak, it undermines the power of low-wage workers who were born here and have — barely — more rights … It creates a perfect set of circumstances for low-wage employers, because they can play immigrant workers against U.S.-born workers, in an environment where neither of them has very many rights. So businesses don’t have a big incentive to try and fix that situation …

We’ve had trade deals such as [the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership], which we’re discussing right now, which are basically organized to increase the power, economic power of corporations, and to undermine the power of their workers and consumers.

You know, we privatized state and local government functions at quite an alarming rate … The main advantage that the private sector has over the public sector is not that they’re more efficient at organizing school buses. It’s that they pay their workers less and they don’t give them benefits …

That discussion of bargaining power, and the politics and the policies around it, is firstly what’s going to be missing from the State of the Union address.

- Speaking of privatization, Travis Homenuk criticizes the Sask Party's plan to privatize food services in correctional centres. CBC reports that Ontario's highways are suffering from the poor performance of private maintenance operations - though it's far from clear that the imposition of contractual fines makes up for the injuries suffered by citizens due to contractor neglect. And Sean Shaw discusses how P3s are at best a matter of accounting and budgeting trickery rather than value for public money.

- But Matthew Taylor reports that the trend toward privatization is far from universal - as a cross-party group of UK MPs is working on legislation to keep public services public.

- Finally, the CP reports that the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has understandably given up on a federal environmental monitoring program. And while it's understandable that nobody would trust, say, a government which puts oil lobbyists on the public payroll to stop environmental research, there's all the more work to be done in ensuring that First Nations with much to lose (or gain) from tar sands development can engage in meaningful discussions with the next federal government.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Joined cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David MacDonald studies the effect of the Cons' income-splitting scheme, and finds that it's oriented purely toward funnelling money toward the top of the income scale:

“Income splitting creates a tax loophole big enough to drive a Rolls Royce through. It’s pitched as a program for the middle class but in reality it’s an expensive tax gift for the rich,” says Macdonald. “The upper third of Canada’s richest families would receive $3 of every $4 spent on income splitting.”

The study finds seven out of ten senior families get no benefit at all from pension income splitting and the richest 10% of senior families receive more than the bottom 70% combined. The cost of pension income splitting for senior couples in 2015 is estimated at $1.7 billion ($1.2 billion federally and $500 million provincially). In contrast, it would cost $1.5 billion a year to lift all Canadian seniors out of poverty.

The study examines the Conservative plan to extend income splitting to families with children under 18 and finds:

• 86% of all families would gain no benefit whatsoever from this tax loophole.
• The richest 5% of families would see more benefit than the bottom 60% of families combined.
• The bottom 60% of families would receive, on average, $50. The richest 5% of Canadian families — those making over $147,000 — would see an average benefit of $1,100.
• This loophole would cost the federal government $3 billion in lost revenue and an additional $1.9 billion provincially — for a total revenue loss of $4.9 billion in 2015 alone.

- Ian Welsh offers up his four principles necessary for genuine prosperity - featuring fairness, kindness, generosity and a focus on the future as an antidote to the corporate attempt to make a virtue out of greed. Which leads to my further observation that we'd be better off with more Ian Welsh.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman observes that U.S. voters are starting to recognize their country's class structure (and to develop due skepticism about policies intended to further the concentration of wealth at the top). And Tim Hudak may be facing the same lesson, as his attacks on workers run into the reality that organized labour produces better outcomes for the population as a whole.

- But David Atkins notes that there's a long way to go in protecting workers' rights and well-being - and that the focus may need to include global treaties which remove any opportunity for employers to seek out havens for employee abuse:

The lesson should be obvious: the more international and legally binding the agreement, the more helpful it will be to workers in developing nations. The more expansive and multi-party the treaties are, the less competitive labor arbitrage risk will entail for any nation that improves factory conditions. Voluntary commitments from multinational corporations will do little to prevent the next tragedy.

Labor and worker protection agreements are in their infancy at the highest international levels. But with multinational corporations increasingly able to use labor arbitrage to manufacture products in nations with the weakest worker protections, the international community must take a stand in creating legally binding, global treaties that are proactive in nature, and carry negative trade consequences for those nations that choose to flout or ignore them.

- Finally, Jennifer Hollett talks about her political experience so far:

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Angelina Chapin highlights the drastic impact a guaranteed annual income would have on Canadians currently living in poverty:

To set and meet goals, you have to think long-term. When you’re poor, you can’t focus on the future (and Bill Gates wasn’t raised poor, by the way). You worry about finding boots, not pulling up your straps. The best way to “motivate” poor people is with programs that help lift their gaze from the ground to the horizon. A guaranteed annual income program would do that.

The idea is simple: in place of a complicated welfare system, give people enough money to live above the poverty line in their region (Ontario’s Low Income Cut-Off was $22,229 for a single person in 2011). No strings attached. The less you make, the more guaranteed income you receive.
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Just getting on social assistance is a commitment to poverty. To receive it in Ontario, you can’t have more than $1,657 in liquid assets, which could mean selling a car or giving up savings to qualify. There are at least five administrative steps to continually get welfare. Once you’re in the social assistance system, there’s not much incentive to leave.
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As soon as a welfare recipient starts making any real income, social assistance benefits, subsidized housing and prescription drug money are all cut to some degree. The GAI program would still guarantee any employed person below the poverty line a top-up to, you know, encourage rather than punish their progress.

Many critics of the GAI, ironically, suffer from their own inability to think long-term. They complain about the initial costs, which in Canada could be anywhere from $30-to-$50 billion per year, according to Basic Income Pilot founder Jesse Helmer. But over time, the recipients’ lifestyle changes drive the price down. Citizens for Public Justice estimates that a GAI income could reduce crime costs by $1-2 billion and health-care costs by $7-8 billion annually.

If we could just accept the mound of data showing poor people aren’t degenerates who don’t set their alarm clocks early enough, there would be more support for programs that give people enough money to think ahead.

- But as Paul Krugman notes, the need for more thought about the bigger picture is as much a problem at the top of the income distribution as at the bottom:

Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.

But there’s more. Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.

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But every group finds itself facing criticism, and ends up on the losing side of policy disputes, somewhere along the way; that’s democracy. The question is what happens next. Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.

And yes, that’s partly because they have more money, and the power that goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish. They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.

- In a similar vein, Carol Goar criticizes Chris Alexander as the latest Con to try to win political points by attacking the health of some of the most vulnerable people in Canada:

“There was hope that the government might decide to change the discourse,” said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council of Refugees.

It gradually dissipated. The last thread snapped a week ago when Alexander lambasted Ontario for its “scandalous” decision to provide medical care to “bogus” asylum seekers.

“It’s irresponsible,” he railed. “It’s also unfair to for taxpayers.”

His tirade set a new low in intergovernmental relations. It signalled that any Canadian office-holder who showed compassion, tried to mitigate the harm Ottawa is doing or defended the values jettisoned by Stephen Harper’s regime was open to attack.
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In the short term, (Dench) and her colleagues will continue to stand up for refugees, reach out to sympathetic Canadians and do what they can to soften public opinion. Their hope is that the 2015 election will bring a change of government and a change of heart.

They’ve given up on Alexander. He had the talent, the knowledge, the international experience and the diplomatic skill to be an exemplary minister of citizenship and immigration. He chose instead to use his power to crack down on sick, vulnerable people.

- Meanwhile, Robert Reich points out that the more successful the privileged are in suppressing the well-being of those below them in the short term, the more likely we are to see wrenching changes in the longer term.

- Finally, Stanley Tromp reports on the findings of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about the transportation of tar sands products - featuring much-needed recognition that the Cons and their oil-sector cronies have done nothing to evaluate the new and real risks of shipping dangerous products through sensitive areas. And Transportation Safety Board chair Wendy Tadros confirms that outdated tanker cars create a risk of more Lac-Mégantic-style disasters, while Greg Gormick calls for a combination of public investment and better regulation to ensure rail safety.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Jeremy Nuttall discusses why the Cons' temporary foreign worker program is ripe for abuse, as it ensures workers have every incentive to avoid reporting employer wrongdoing since the employer can singlehandedly ship the employee out of Canada in retaliation.

- But the good news is that workers who aren't quite so easily sent away are making efforts to fight back against the Cons' anti-labour plans - as Kathryn May reports on a pledge among public service unions not to give in to attacks on sick leave and disability benefits. And on the provincial level, SOS Crowns exposes and questions the Saskatchewan Party's privatization of essential infrastructre.

- John Geddes discusses what the Cons want to eliminate in order to make way for subsidies tied to specific employers:

Schemes to place hard-to-employ young people in jobs tend to come and go. BladeRunners is the exception. The British Columbia program has been around since 1994, long enough that even its managers aren’t entirely clear on how it got its name—and for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to single it out as a proven model. BladeRunners helps unemployed 15- to 30-year-olds—mostly Aboriginal, sometimes homeless, often with histories of substance abuse—learn basic skills and land several key weeks of job experience. Counsellors are on call around the clock when participants run into the inevitable problems.

It sounds like the sort of feel-good program any politician might rush to line up behind. But the B.C. provincial government cites BladeRunners as a prime example of the kind of training that the federal Conservatives are out to cut. At issue is the so-called Canada Job Grant (CJG), announced by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty with considerable fanfare in last year’s federal budget. Under the CJG, Flaherty proposed that the federal government, the provinces and employers each pay a third of up to $15,000 a year for every employee enrolled for training at an eligible institution. But there was a catch: The federal government’s $300-million share was to be taken out of the $500 million a year Ottawa transfers to provinces under existing labour-market agreements—the main source of BladeRunners’ $6-million budget.

- Finally, Ketaki Gohale reports on the level of social responsibility we can expect from big pharma (which we should keep in mind the next time it claims that giveaways are needed to support the development and commercialization of medication):

Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license “essentially theft.”

“We did not develop this medicine for Indians,” Dekkers said Dec. 3. “We developed it for western patients who can afford it.”

Fortunately, Médecins Sans Frontières offers up the appropriate response.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne calls out Stephen Harper's hypocrisy in paying lip service to the problems with the use of disposable temporary foreign labour while expanding exactly that policy throughout his stay in power:

The program was supposed to be a last resort for employers dealing with skills shortages and used in a truly temporary fashion to fill high skill gaps until Canadians could be trained for those jobs.

That has not been the case under the current federal Conservative government. Not only has the program been used as a source of cheap labour, it has been riddled with abuses and has undermined the need for real immigration.

The result has been what is fast becoming a permanent underclass of workers who have little to no rights, who are especially vulnerable as their conditions of employment and entry into the country are completely tied to their boss and who are quite hesitant to complain about any problems out of fear of losing their employment and being sent back to their home country. They are ripe for exploitation.
...
At this point, it appears as if the prime minister is trying to play both sides off against the middle. While he may sound surprised, the fact remains that actions speak louder than words. And his government’s actions have been to allow the very real problems with the program to continue while knowing their merely cosmetic changes would have little impact.

The prime minister went on to say that companies have used the TFWP in ways that were not in the interest of Canadians. “That kind of abuse cannot go on,” he said.

Well, Mr. Harper, in case you need a reminder: you are the prime minister. It is certainly within your power to make sure the conditions for the abuses to occur are eliminated. Better yet, eliminate the program and start from scratch.

- Stuart Trew wonders why the TPP - like so many trade agreements - would be sealed behind closed doors with no public input or knowledge of its contents if it were intended to serve the interests of anybody but the privileged few in the room:

In Canada, we have a permanent ‘fast track’ situation in which MPs only ever get to vote yes or no to trade deals. There’s no option to say ‘yes’ to the tariff package and ‘no’ to longer drug patents or copyright terms. Harper won’t even release a cost-benefit assessment of the TPP to trade committee MPs — the people who are supposed to be studying the deal. The only information we have about Canada’s negotiating positions comes from leaks, which Canadian negotiators refuse to talk about.

Pipeline opponents have every right to demand to see environmental assessments of proposed routes and a voice on approval hearings. This is permanent energy infrastructure with often greater risks to the environment than the economic rewards can cover. Modern trade deals like the TPP, which are about much more than tariffs, create a legal infrastructure with permanent and potentially harmful effects on our economy and communities. The process for approving them should be no less transparent.

- Boris discusses the inevitable result of putting the state's secret surveillance mechanisms in the hands of the oil sector. PressProgress highlights the connections between the Con-approved CNOOC and shady offshore tax evasion. And having been publicly confronted with the conflict between the interests of Enbridge and those of the public, Chuck Strahl has made his choice.

- Meanwhile, just another (TransCanada) pipeline explosion. Nothing to see here.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk rightly notes that the continued structural disadvantages facing First Nations Canadians should be our greatest shame as a country.

Musical interlude

Beth Orton - Yesterday's Gone

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich confirms the seemingly obvious reality that poverty and inequality are in fact major obstacle facing the poor. And Paul Krugman explains why any successful progressive movement in the U.S. will need to discuss inequality and the hoarding of wealth to challenge the entrenched (and expanding) influence of those who already have the most:

(J)obs and inequality are closely linked if not identical issues. There’s a pretty good although not ironclad case that soaring inequality helped set the stage for our economic crisis, and that the highly unequal distribution of income since the crisis has perpetuated the slump, especially by making it hard for families in debt to work their way out.

Moreover, there’s an even stronger case to be made that high unemployment — by destroying workers’ bargaining power — has become a major source of rising inequality and stagnating incomes even for those lucky enough to have jobs.

Beyond that, as a political matter, inequality and macroeconomic policy are already inseparably linked. It has been obvious for a long time that the deficit obsession that has exerted such a destructive effect on policy these past few years isn’t really driven by worries about the federal debt. It is, instead, mainly an effort to use debt fears to scare and bully the nation into slashing social programs — especially programs that help the poor. 

- And Jordan Weissman offers a reminder that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy includes a commitment to a guaranteed income:

King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967's Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington's previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been "piecemeal and pygmy." The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, "the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.

- Meanwhile, Chris Bowers shows that a genuinely progressive take on politics can be a political winner by looking at past U.S. partisan support. And Thomas Mulcair is likewise demonstrating that a challenge to corporate control can resonate with the general public in Canada.

- Finally, following up on the theme of yesterday's column, Matthew Robinson and Mike de Souza report that the shipment of oil by rail is actually increasing even in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic explosion. And Adam Gamble highlights Regina's SomerSet development as a prime example of warnings being utterly ignored in the name of immediate gratification.

On official business

It's no surprise that the Cons' idea of accountability for themselves is to provide nothing but blank pages when faced with a request for information about their dealings with Senate reimbursements. But one of the reasons for the secrecy looks like a noteworthy story in itself.

Here's the exemption being applied to several pages of the record:

21. The head of a government institution may refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains
...

(b) an account of consultations or deliberations in which directors, officers or employees of a government institution, a minister of the Crown or the staff of a minister participate, 

While the provision isn't as explicit as it could be, the exemption generally refers to consultations or deliberations involving government policy (Canadian Council of Christian Charities v. Canada (Minister of Finance), [1999] 4 FC 245 at para. 30, 32):

Despite the importance of governmental openness as a safeguard against the abuse of power, and as a necessary condition for democratic accountability, it is equally clear that governments must be allowed a measure of confidentiality in the policy-making process. To permit or to require the disclosure of advice given by officials, either to other officials or to ministers, and the disclosure of confidential deliberations within the public service on policy options, would erode government's ability to formulate and to justify its policies.
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On the other hand, of course, democratic principles require that the public, and this often means the representatives of sectional interests, are enabled to participate as widely as possible in influencing policy development. Without a degree of openness on the part of government about its thinking on public policy issues, and without access to relevant information in the possession of government, the effectiveness of public participation will inevitably be curbed.

In contrast, personal matters are covered by the separate exemption under section 19 (also applied to much of the Senate document request).

In other words, by the Privy Council's own account, communications between some combination of Harper, the PCO and Duffy about the Senate expense scandal were dealt with as a matter of government policy rather than mere personal (or indeed partisan) discussions. Which further discredits the "Nigel Wright acted alone" and "I couldn't have known" lines of spin from Harper - while raising all the more need for an accurate account of Harper's own participation.

New column day

Here, on how the reactions of the federal government and the rail industry six months after the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion only seem to reinforce the risk of more disasters to come.

For further reading...
- Monique Beaudin reports on the finger-pointing and other attempts to avoid responsibility on the part of the corporations linked to the explosion. And I'll especially highlight the chutzpah of the group of oil services companies in arguing that as U.S. companies, they're entitled to ship oil through Canada while being above the law when it comes to cleanup of a spill.
- Meanwhile, David Sharp reports on the sale of MMA.
- Today's news of some additional review of the dangers of shipping by rail by the Transportation Safety Board represents some improvement - at least compared to last week's report about the elimination of the federal government's emergency directive following lobbying by CN and other railways.
- But it remains to be seen whether the Cons will follow through on the recommendations. And in light of TransCanada's declaration that it wants to set up a massive set of new infrastructure to ship oil by rail, there's a real possibility that the Cons will include shipment by rail in their list of oil-industry actions which must never be questioned no matter how explosive the consequences.
- Don Braid at least recognizes the need for more credibility in talking about the effects of tar sands development, but also implies the problem is one of branding rather than substance.
- And finally, David Climenhaga discusses the backlash against Neil Young's modest effort to draw attention to the health and rights of First Nations:

Refusal to bend to the will of this nearly omnipotent and omnipresent industry, with its vast wealth and numberless retainers, hirelings and toadies in government and media can be a risky proposition -- as we have all seen with the hysterical and unremitting national campaign against rocker Neil Young throughout the past few days.

Young's crime? Publicly supporting a northern Alberta First Nation that's fighting Bitumen Sands expansion on its traditional land. That Young has given as good as he got, and held his own against this tide of rage and fury, has given this story a David-and-Goliath quality that has many ordinary Canadians shaking their heads and wondering, "What are they afraid of?"

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Pierre Brochu and David Green study the effect of minimum wage rates, and find a connection between a higher minimum wage and greater employment stability. But if there's a choice between stable, well-paying work and precarious employment where job churn and wage reductions are seen as the norm, far too many policy-makers are choosing the latter - as Annie Lowrey notes that U.S. states are actively slashing benefits for unemployed workers to force them to grab desperately at whatever is available.

- Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar offer reason to doubt the theory that corporate tax giveaways have any redeeming social value. And Toby Sanger calls out Gwyn Morgan for attacking workers' pensions as being too lavish while collecting millions each year himself (plus enjoying preferential tax treatment on his stock options).

- Martha Rosenberg looks at six examples of drugs which were approved and mass-marketed in the face of massive risks and side effects - as big pharma chased down immediate profits at the expense of unwitting patients. And Scott Stelmaschuk highlights the lack of real choice for consumers - not to mention the lack of investment in the public interest - where a few well-connected corporate entities control most of the major goods and services people need.

- Sticking to the subject of illusions of choice, Thomas Walkom reminds us of the Libs' track record in federal government - featuring their simultaneously taking credit for both introducing and slashing the public programs which once did more to mitigate against corporate domination.

- Finally, Deborah Campbell interviews Ron Diebert about the dangers of mass surveillance. And Nafeez Ahmed provides a prime example of the type of excuse being used to brand large numbers of citizens as potential threats, noting that mere opposition to fracking has resulted in activists being labeled as terrorists.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Splayed cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Erika Shaker rightly questions why government policy toward business is based on a level of permissiveness which we'd recognize as utter madness in dealing with a child:

Sure, all parents make mistakes, and all kids have meltdowns (some of which might have, admittedly, been handled better).

But it seems to me that even the worst examples of permissive parenting pale in comparison to the way politicians and pundits coddle, make excuses, and encourage double standards for questionable (even deplorable) behaviour from corporations and their representatives.

And perhaps it’s the post-holiday sugar-and-excessive-consumerism hangover talking, but I’m tired of being held hostage by self-indulgent, narcissistic tyrants, whose endless “gimmes” and “I want that…or elses” seem so utterly pervasive that I feel as though I’m trapped at a Toys “R” Us outlet sale (whereupon, after my third coffee, I discover the washrooms are out of order).

These days it seems the capitulation-impulse is so hair-trigger that often the actual demands (“Cut your salaries in half or I’m running away to Indiana where they just approved Right-to-Work!”) aren’t even necessary. It’s the anticipation of the demands—or fear of the consequences to be suffered if the unvoiced demands aren’t met—that results in a smorgasbord of pre-emptive tax-cut-esque goodies in an attempt to avoid the surely inevitable breath-holding tantrum. (Or reneging on job commitments—am I right, U.S. Steel?)
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It’s the steadfast refusal to acknowledge that bad behaviour should have consequences; that corporations are required to negotiate fairly and should not expect governments—like doting helicopter parents—to constantly remove all obstacles in the path of profit; that ultimately by allowing rules to be bent or broken with near-impunity we are setting very dangerous precedents and ensuring that the cycle of toddler-like consequence-free behaviour will continue.

- Meanwhile, the CLC highlights the temporary foreign worker program as a prime example of that tendency to grease the skids toward higher profits. Mitchell Anderson contrasts Norway's strategy of saving resource wealth for the benefit of its citizens against Alberta's willingness to pile up debt to hand money to oil barons. And Alex Andreou discusses the broken promises underlying trickle-down economics:

If one subscribes to the charitable view that neoliberal philosophy was simply naive or misguided in thinking that "trickle down" would work infinitely, then evidence that it doesn't, should be cause for concern. It is a fundamental building block of supply-side economic theory – the tool of choice these past few decades for those in charge to make adjustments. The realisation that governments have been pulling at economic levers which, for some time, have been attached to nothing, should be a wake-up call to the deepest sleepers.
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It is not so much that the supply-side principle "if you build it, they will come" is no longer true. It is more that we appear to have passed a tipping point, where so much wealth has been concentrated at the top, they no longer need bother to "build" anything. In short, it has become more economically efficient to buy countries' economic policy than to create value in order to sell it on. If one can control government to favour the richest, while raising barriers for new entrants, thus increasing their share of the pie exponentially, what is the incentive to grow the pie?
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We have come to measure, to an increasing extent, individuals' success by their wealth, spending power and other assorted trappings. We do the same with the economic success of governments; measure it by an aggregated data set that fails to take into account wealth distribution, educational achievement, innovation, or even the welfare and health of the population they claim to represent. We must shift this perspective. It will be the hardest, simplest thing we have ever had to do as a species.

- Justin Ling offers his ideas to reform Canada's political system in response to Kevin Page's previous op-ed. But I'd argue that Ling's second and third points can be readily improved: I'd rather see the reinstatement of general funding for parties than Ling's proposed support only for specific activities, and would think it's possible to be far more ambitious about the expansion of information and privacy laws to include both government (including ministers' offices) and political parties alike.

- Finally, the WoodGreen Community Services' skewering of celebrity culture is well worth a look (and a share):

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Graeme Wearden reports on Oxfam's latest study on inequality and the outsized political influence of the wealthy few:

The Oxfam report found that over the past few decades, the rich have successfully wielded political influence to skew policies in their favour on issues ranging from financial deregulation, tax havens, anti-competitive business practices to lower tax rates on high incomes and cuts in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available, said the report.

This "capture of opportunities" by the rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes has led to a situation where 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70tn.

Opinion polls in Spain, Brazil, India, South Africa, the US, UK and Netherlands found that a majority in each country believe that wealthy people exert too much influence. Concern was strongest in Spain, followed by Brazil and India and least marked in the Netherlands.
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Oxfam is calling on those gathered at WEF to pledge: to support progressive taxation and not dodge their own taxes; refrain from using their wealth to seek political favours that undermine the democratic will of their fellow citizens; make public all investments in companies and trusts for which they are the ultimate beneficial owners; challenge governments to use tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection; demand a living wage in all companies they own or control; and challenge other members of the economic elite to join them in these pledges.

- Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute is assembling support among economists for an increase in the U.S.' minimum wage. And Rob Rainer discusses why Canada should ensure a basic income guarantee as a matter of values and conscience.

- Bloomberg reports on the latest Enbridge oil spill just outside Regina. But Sheila Pratt points out why we probably can't expect even another incident close to home to lead to any meaningful public discussion - noting that the atmosphere of tar sands intimidation in Alberta has reached the point where doctors are refusing to treat patients who observe a connection between their illnesses and oil development.

- Finally, Gerald Caplan discusses the reality Stephen Harper should try to see during the course of his trip to Israel - while acknowledging the certainty that Harper will avoid it at all costs.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Leo Panitch reminds us that the term "reform" was once understood to represent efforts to bolster the public interest against unbridled market forces - and suggests it's well past time to take the word back from the business interests who have turned it into just the opposite. 

- Paul Krugman comments on the twin myths of the undeserving poor and the deserving rich. And Sam Polk writes from experience about the mindset that drives money addicts to demand that others' basic needs give way to their desire to accumulate:

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

- Susan Delacourt theorizes that Twitter is becoming the defining communication mechanism for political leaders. And Konrad Yakabuski writes about the dark side of detailed political data collection - as the same information which can help parties reach supporters may also be used to target non-supporters for punishment and exclusion if there's no mechanism to test how it's used.

- Finally, Kevin Page suggests that we won't be able to make any progress in dealing with economic and social issues without first ensuring that our political system functions to serve the public interest rather than its own:

Income inequality is increasing in Canada and international comparisons put us well behind many European countries. The richest 1 per cent in Canada earns about 10.5 per cent of income, up from about 7 per cent some 30 years ago. About 9 per cent of our population lives in poverty, including some 570,000 of our children. Without aggressive action, these numbers are bound to get worse, not better.

Canadians have also added a lot of debt to our balance sheets. The ratio of household financial liabilities to household disposable income now sits at a record high 166 per cent, compared to 110 per cent in 2000. And as Canadians try to pay off this increased debt, inevitably consumption will further decrease, adding to more economic drift or stagnation.

So how do we get out of this dangerous spiral? One thing is clear: we cannot overcome the pressing economic challenges before us without the concerted effort of our government institutions. And yet in the wake of a year of scandal, those institutions are more distracted and less able to help than ever before.

The Prime Minister will not stand accountable for the actions of his own office. The Senate has lost trust over a spending scandal. The House of Commons has lost its power of the purse. Members of Parliament are forced to vote on appropriations without the information they need. The public service has become dangerously good at avoiding transparency and accountability.

Without rebuilding — and rebuilding trust in — the bodies charged with protecting our prosperity and democracy, we will continue to drift aimlessly, to put off the thinking we must put off no longer.