This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Lauren Pullen reports on two outbreaks of the Delta variant of COVID-19 within a Calgary hospital. Emily Mertz reports on a push by Alberta doctors to have the province's major cities retain mask mandates until more people are fully vaccinated after the provincial government has abandoned the fight against COVID-19.
- Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel report on newly-released documents showing how the wealthy in the U.S. pay lower tax rates than the people who have made them rich. And Noah Smith points out that the U.S. is facing multiple forms of self-induced scarcity to the detriment of people's well-being.
- Paul Taylor argues that we shouldn't sweep inequality and injustice under the rug in order to return to an unacceptable pre-pandemic "normal". And Jack Trovato discusses how trickle-down economics have been a failure for everybody but the luckiest few looking to concentrate their own wealth and power.
- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the conviction of an industrial bakery for safety violations resulting in the death of two temporary workers.
- Adam Radwanski highlights how the Trudeau Libs have ended any pretense of mapping out a just transition to a clean economy. And Naveena Sadasivam writes that the oil industry itself has been meticulous in planning its own escape from any responsibility for the wreckage it's leaving behind.
- Finally, Raisa Patel reports on the Libs' continued insistence on fighting against residential school survivors and Indigenous children in court - even after the House of Commons' participating MPs have unanimously passed an NDP motion for an end to the obstruction.
On the Sadasivam piece . . . I sometimes think that the core nature of capitalism is precisely the push for power to be divorced from responsibility. Under feudalism, the lord is the government, has some responsibility for the serfs. Slaveholders own the workers, have some responsibility for them--which they abuse horribly, but they can't duck their causal relationship with all the horror that happens. Capitalists aren't the government (they just tell it what to do) and pretend the employment relationship is some kind of free contractor thing. Whatever happens to the countries or their workers they can wash their hands of--nothing to do with them, as far as they're concerned. They get to take the money and run.
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