Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Kathleen Geier makes the case for greater progressive activism at lower levels of government - and the point applies with equal force in Canada:

(T)hose of us who want to build a more progressive America would be well-advised to pay relatively less attention to presidential races and more attention to politics at the state and local level. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Because state and local races tend to have lower turnout, you get more bang for your activist buck. A relatively small but well-organized and committed group of activists can make a big difference in a low-turnout election. And because local campaigns are cheaper than national ones, your donations can be more powerful. Think about it: to whom was your marginal political dollar worth more in 2012, Barack Obama in his campaign for president, or Wendy Davis in her campaign for the Texas state senate?

2. Mass political movements with the most staying power and popular support often are enacted first at the grassroots level. Only later do they work their way up the political food chain. Case in point: the modern American conservative movement. In the 50s and 60s, conservative activists tended to focus on local issues, such as school board elections, as this and other histories of that movement document. Only after over 20 years of intense activism did the conservatives finally get their dream president, Ronald Reagan.

3. One way to ensure you’ll have strong progressive candidates for national office (the presidency and the U.S. House and Senate) is by electing strong progressive candidates at the state and local level. That’s where those national candidates are recruited from, after all.

- The Washington Post updates how the U.S.' security apparatus collects and compares personal information from a number of websites to carry out online surveillance. And Timothy Ash writes that plenty of familiar IT businesses have been entirely happy to play along with state surveillance requests.

- Meanwhile, leftdog notes that the vulture capitalists are circling SaskTel among other Saskatchewan Crowns.

- Finally, Stephanie Levitz reports on the Cons' deliberate choice to underfund Canadian culture - and it's not for lack of available projects to be funded:

Figures from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration suggest at least $5 million a year hasn't been disbursed since 2007, and the department's marquee funding program has seen nearly 40 per cent of available funds go unused.

So the department is scaling back the amount of money it sets aside for community multiculturalism projects, despite the fact that an internal government audit suggests demand for the cash remains high and that the government itself is partly to blame for the fact it isn't being spent.
...
In 2010-2011, about $14 million was spent under the program to fund 140 projects and events.
But that money represented only 63 per cent of what was set aside, according to documents from the department obtained via the Access to Information Act.

That year, 751 proposals were received, with the total value of requested funds being nine times the available cash, a 2011 audit found.

Though 567 projects were considered eligible, only 39 were recommended to the minister for approval and only 25 per cent were funded.

"The approval process for projects and events was identified by many stakeholders as the single biggest impediment to the effective operation of the program," the audit said.

"The lack of transparency and lengthy timelines associated with this process made it very difficult for program staff to manage their clients or expend their budgets."

But when it came to spending seven figures to rebrand the military based purely on their own whims, the Cons couldn't burn through public money fast enough. 

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Chris Lehmann discusses the destructive impetus behind the ever-present austerity scolds:

In their new book The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Stuckler and Basu show distressingly consistent increases in such key public-health indicators as suicides, heart disease, alcoholism and HIV infection in societies embarking on steep reductions in social spending. Correspondingly, societies (such as Iceland, Sweden and Finland) that have refused to pare back their welfare states in hard times exhibit steady—and, in some case, increasing—signs of public health. Oh, and more straightforward economic indicators, such as low unemployment and broad middle-class prosperity, also strangely adhere to political economies that continue to spend robustly on social services and healthcare—again, contrary to every single theory in the austerity playbook.

Yet when a practiced faux-contrarian pundit like The New Republic’s Michael Kinsley alighted on Stuckler and Basu’s findings, he stepped forward bravely to report that they were all part of a “misguided moral crusade against austerity” captained by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Sure, Kinsley writes, the life chances of ordinary working citizens diminish steeply under conditions of austerity: They “get depressed and commit suicide. They drink and ruin their livers. They don’t buy their prescription drugs or see their doctor when they should in order to save money. They lose their jobs, come home, and murder their spouses.”

But that, you see, is just the iron law of economic comeuppance, as Kinsley divines it. “I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins,” he writes, “and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be. …[T]he austerians deserve credit: They at least are talking about the spinach, while the Krugmanites are only talking about dessert.”

Where to begin? There is, first off, something delusional, and indeed vicious, in shifting the costs of the particular “past sins” of our Great Recession—which were the exclusive handiwork of the stupendously overcompensated investment class—onto the vulnerable subjects of Stuckler and Basu’s research. More fundamentally, however, Kinsley has conceded that mass suffering is the confirmed and predictable outcome of hardline austerity policies—and he thinks they are somehow better for us, anyway. People of the Kinsleyan persuasion seem to sincerely believe that there is, in fact, no organized bloc of financiers, policymakers and intellectuals that benefits from the four-decadeslong-and-counting war on the public sphere—that the reluctant prophets of austerity are, like him, only doling out hard paternal truths about the way the real world works for the touchingly “misguided” citizen-children who clamor for dessert after dessert, all day long.

- And Paul Krugman notes that even as many of the original backers of slash-and-burn have come to recognize that the end result tends to be counterproductive, the Bank for International Settlements is pretending that years of needless suffering never happened.

- Philip Caper looks longingly at Canada's universal public health care system from a U.S. perspective.

- Bruce Cheadle reports on the Cons' ever-growing publicly-funded communications staff, with the number meaning anything but more transparency:

Sandborn suggested that it requires extra bodies to send communications staff to scientific conferences to shadow government researchers and run interference on media interviews — a practice that was documented as part of his group's complaint.

Their report also detailed how 11 different civil servants exchanged 50 emails to determine whether a reporter inquiring about a snow study was friendly or not before granting an interview.

"Sometimes it takes a whole lot more people to make sure information doesn't get out than to get it out," said Sandborn.

- And Shannon Rupp comments on the Harper PMO's misuse of public money to play news editor.

- Finally, leftdog writes about the forces exerting the most pressure on Canadian politics - and the need for progressives to push back rather than merely hoping to ride out the wave of corporate-funded attacks:

(C)orporate interests, primarily those of the oil and financial industries, have decided that they simply are not prepared to compromise their positions of power within the Canadian economy and they will open their wallets to ensure that political victory goes only to those who serve their vested interests.

To achieve this, Stephen Harper has nearly perfected an approach that is intended to bring ‘perpetual Conservative government' to the nation ... a model for Canada based on the Alberta Conservative Party's 42 year hold on provincial power. That's the goal. Wake up and realize it.

The oil industry is simply not prepared to listen to anyone who will diminish their ability to make profit from the tar sands by even one dollar. They have no interest in the environment. They have no interest in the plight of working Canadians and their families. They are going to maximize the profit potential of their resource holdings and they are prepared to bankroll any political party that will advance this cause. 

Harper's Conservatives have demonstrated that they are prepared to cheat electorally in order to win. Robcalls, illegal expenditures and donations ... they will do whatever they have to in order to win. When challenged, they deny and delay. Their war chest allows them to afford the best legal distraction and defence that money can buy. The rule of thumb for the Right in Canada has become ‘delay delay delay' as well as ‘deny deny deny'.

 [Edit: fixed attribution on Cheadle story.]