Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Robert Reich argues that the spread of inequality and corporate abuses is the result of deteriorating public morality and the expectation that self-interest will override any social goals:

At a time many Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality – what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage – America is experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality.

CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Insider trading is endemic on Wall Street, where hedge-fund and private-equity moguls are taking home hundreds of millions.

A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people are investing unprecedented sums in the upcoming election, seeking to rig the economy for their benefit even more than it’s already rigged.

Yet the wages of average working people continue to languish as jobs are off-shored or off-loaded onto “independent contractors.”
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Public morality can’t be legislated but it can be encouraged. 
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None of this is possible without a broadly based citizen movement to rescue our democracy, take back our economy, and restore a minimal standard of public morality.

America’s problems have nothing to do with what happens [in] bedrooms, or whether women are allowed to end their pregnancies.

Our problems have everything to do with what occurs in boardrooms, and whether corporations and wealthy individuals are allowed to undermine our democracy.

- Randeep Ramesh reports on Sir Michael Marmot's findings about the devastating effects of inequality - with upwards of 200,000 people dying in the UK every year as a result, and life spans being reduced by seven to eight years.

- Bertrand Marotte reports on the latest study showing half of all Canadian workers are living paycheque to paycheque. Duncan Cameron asks what Canada's next government will do to reverse the effects of another Harper recession. And the CCPA's latest Monitor offers plenty of worthwhile material on the election and beyond.

- Noam Scheiber notes that there's at least one step workers can take that's wholly within their control to chart a better future by pointing out the connection between unionization rates and social advancement.

- Finally, Carey Doberstein and Alison Smith write about the stagnation of housing in Canada while the Cons have been at the helm.