Friday, February 17, 2023

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich discusses how the concentration of power in the hands of the U.S.' capitalist class has reached levels not see since the gilded age - and how improvements in general access to consumer goods (driven in part by increased work participation and debt) doesn't justify or ameliorate the harm from that top-down control. And Josh Rubin reports on the abuse of the CEWS "blank cheque" by major corporations who used public pandemic funding to inflate profits and share prices. 

- David Macdonald highlights the track record showing that no-strings-attached money demanded by the provinces for health care is highly likely to be diverted toward tax giveaways and other ends. And Annie Waldman reports on the evidence of how the world's largest medical device company Medtronic has pushed for the overuse of its products with little regard for anybody's health. 

- Emma McIntosh offers an explainer on induced demand in pointing out the folly of building more highways rather than developing transit plans which actually help people get where they need to go. And Oliver Wainwright discusses how anybody outside of the alt-right fever swamps should see 15-minute cities as an eminently reasonable planning principle. 

- Finally, Robin Abcarian writes that the bigoted attack on pronouns (and other simple elements of basic recognition for trans people) are the result of the deliberate sacrifice of human dignity to political opportunism. 

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