Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Michael Harris offers some lessons about the U.S.' values based on this week's election results. Rebecca Solnit opines that the largest failing of American progressives was to presume that the U.S. is a better country than it actually is, while Geoffrey Deihl writes that Donald Trump's election represents a descent into madness. Harrison Mooney discusses what it means about the dangers of majority rule - though it's worth a reminder that the U.S.' political system is warped so as to allow his party to exercise unchecked power even with minority levels of support. And Michael Mann notes that the U.S. figures to become even more of a petrostate under Trump.

- Meanwhile, Martin Lukacs, Lucy Uprichard, Tannara Yelland and Amanda Siino highlight some of the threats that Trump's ascent will pose to progressive politics in Canada. 

- Gabriela Calugay-Casuga discusses how the Bank of Canada's undue obsession with inflation resulted in an increasingly glaring wealth gap. And Alex Hemingway warns that tax giveaways are just as corrosive to public services when they originate with the NDP as when they're offered by the right. 

- Carl Meyer offers some takeaways from the long-delayed proposal for a federal oil and gas emission cap - with the predictable result being that a modest policy is being met with shrieks of contrived outrage by those who believe the only purpose of government is to ensure fossil fuel giants can rake in profits with no regard for our planet. And the Canadian Press reports on the Parliamentary Budget Office's finding that the Trans Mountain pipeline (which was bought and completed by the Trudeau Libs while emission regulations were held not to be a priority) isn't worth its cost of construction, leaving the public to take a loss on it. 

- Finally, Meyer parallels the current spin from the oil sector against its precedent from tobacco companies who likewise denied and buried their own scientific knowledge in order to maximize the harm their products inflicted on the public.