Sunday, August 02, 2020

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Jen Gerson rightly argues that we should be closing bars - and otherwise limiting dangerous contacts within our communities - in order to ensure safer school environments for students this fall. And Jana Pruden discusses how the coronavirus pandemic has forced people to rethink what's most important - even as corporations and governments try to push us back toward a profit-focused status quo ante.

- Doug Nesbitt highlights how WE fits into a pattern of charities which substitute upper-class noblesse oblige for solidarity, while Shree Paradkar calls out its white saviourism complex. And PressProgress looks into the connections between WE, Scott Moe, and one of the Saskatchewan Party's largest donors.

- Meanwhile, Paul Wells and Marie-Danielle Smith discuss how WE fits into the Libs' culture - including both a restrictive inner circle, and a focus on showmanship over substance. And the Globe and Mail's editorial board argues that if Justin Trudeau was actually told he had no other options but to let WE handle a student volunteer program, he should have insisted on testing that implausible claim.

- Meanwhile, Jolson Lim reports that the Libs' other most prominent attempt to outsource COVID operations has met a similar end, as the much-questioned deal with Amazon to distribute supplies has fallen apart due to its inability to do the job.

- Finally, Tom Blackburn writes that neoliberalism has no answers for an increasingly unequal economic system which can only be fixed through structural change. And Ian Welsh writes that we can't understand the U.S.' elites without recognizing their predatory nature.

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