Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous midweek material...

- Thomas Walkom rightly notes that at least some of the progressive disappointment with Barack Obama's administration can be traced to the gap between his words even while campaigning and his supporters' expectations.

But the broader lesson (which Walkom hints at) looks to be a need to put greater emphasis on the fact that winning power is a means rather than an end: rather than tying our hopes and goals to a single individual, we should evaluate political leaders based on what they can actually accomplish for the greater good. And no progressive on either side of the border should be satisfied with "winning" an election if it doesn't result in meaningful positive change.

- Which includes you, Duncan Cameron. That isn't to say we shouldn't be looking at ways to bring about a coalition government - but a panicked electoral scheme which gives the Libs more credit than they deserve as an alternative (and thus disempoers the parties fighting for real change) could easily be expected to lead to our own set of disappointments in short order.

- The Globe and Mail's editorial on skyrocketing consumer spending that the real problem is that not enough money is being borrowed in the corporate sector:

One of the weirdnesses of the recent recession was that Canadian consumer credit kept expanding from the low point, rising by 7 per cent. In this period, home equity has had a strange inverse relationship to personal net worth in Canada, the former being quite high during the slump while investment portfolios crashed. This pattern continues: Statistics Canada figures on Monday showed household net worth up 2.7 per cent in the third quarter, while home resales lessened, and residential mortgages decelerated.

The dependence of the major banks on consumers is shown in a chart in the central bank’s report. For half a dozen years, household credit’s share of their loan portfolios have ranged from 55 to 60 per cent – a departure from most of their history.

The world has moved far away from words that Shakespeare attributed to the sententious Polonius: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But Canadian householders should work on borrowing less, and banks should seriously consider shifting more of their lending from households back to business.

But it's worth asking the question: is that necessarily because the banks have preferred to target consumers, or might it have something to do with businesses just not having a reason to borrow?

- Finally, it's well and good to Bev Oda's latest spin on KAIROS as an affront to ministerial responsibility. But I'd prefer to see it as a golden opportunity: doesn't it mean we can reverse all of the Cons' flawed decisions simply by planting somebody to add "not" to the relevant documentation after it's been rubber-stamped?