Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Emily Dee takes a first look at what may be a highly important story about the Cons' use of the notorious right-wing push-poller Responsive Media Group:

I had been conducting some research into the last federal election campaign, which was probably the most bizarre on record.

Many of the strange occurrences, especially the phone calls, could all be matched to similar strategies used by Karl Rove and company.
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I then looked at the first few ridings where those prank phone calls took place and examined the Conservative candidate's financial reports and darn if they all didn't have a similar entry for RMG, most for the same amount of $15,000.00

If they were conducting phone surveys, why would it cost Block, in a riding of 69,547; the same amount as Peter Braid of Kitchener-Waterloo with 126,742?

Or Rodney Weston of Saint John, population 82,078, the same as Marty Burke running in Guelph, with 114,943?

Or Tilly Oneill-Gordon of Miramachi with 53,844, the same as John Carmichael of Don Valley West with 117,083?

The "In and Out" immediately came to mind. Was this actually an expenditure of the national campaign, broken up into smaller invoices so they could again spend more than the legal limit? And remember by passing these expenses off to local campaigns, the candidates are eligible for rebates from Elections Canada on behalf of Canadian citizens. Our money.

I spent several hours yesterday combing reports and found 66 Conservatives claiming amounts paid to RMG, totalling almost a million dollars. So far everything is speculative, but it's amazing how well it fits with earlier research.

- Gary Mason profiles Leadnow as one of the key voices of Canada's emerging progressive movement, while Sixth Estate documents a few of the funders of right-wing causes who figure to put roadblocks in the way of change at every possible turn.

- Thomas Walkom points out a couple of key myths in our health care debate:

First, medicare isn’t about to be bankrupted by the elderly. That’s a common misconception, spurred by the fact that baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — are nearing retirement.

In both political and media arenas, this particular myth is treated as unshakeable truth, creating fears that doddering boomers will monopolize virtually all health-care dollars.

But as figures released this month by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) demonstrate, such fears are grossly exaggerated.

The government-funded agency calculates that the aging population has only a “modest” effect on medicare spending — in large part because, thanks to social programs like old age security, Canadians over 65 are healthier than they used to be.
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Second, medicare costs in general aren’t spinning out of control.

This is an even more pervasive media myth, spurred on by doomsayers who argue that health-care spending, if unchecked, will soon consume entire provincial budgets.

In part, this misconception results from the fallacy of extrapolation — the assumption that past trends must inevitably continue.

It reminds me of a prediction, made before the invention of the rotary dial phone, that by 1960 all North American women would be working as switchboard operators.

That turned out to be false. As physician and consultant Michael Rachlis pointed out in this newspaper, so has the myth of the voracious health budget.

- But of course, the privatizers always have new myths waiting to replace the ones which are debunked - and on that front, the push for privatized health care in Saskatchewan and elsewhere has often been justified by a supposed focus on the needs of patients or users of the system. Which means that it's well worth considering whether corporate care actually makes matters worse on that front.

And it shouldn't come as much surprise that in a direct comparison, for-profit care homes generate significantly more resident complaints than public and non-profit counterparts.

Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- In case we didn't already have enough examples of the Wall government's contempt for voting, James Wood notes that it's dragging its heels on authorizing any enumeration before the official writ period. That figures to work wonders in making it more difficult to accurately identify voters - but raises the question of why a government which is supposed to be able to coast to re-election feels the need to throw as many wrenches into the works as possible.

- We shouldn't be surprised to find out that most corporatist spin is based on blind belief in mythical concepts ranging from confidence fairies to magical wealth creators. But Sixth Estate highlights a particularly egregious example, as Stephane Dion's newest buddies are declaring that we can wish natural resources into existence.

- Meanwhile, in the real world, the consequences of that type of blind faith in markets can be readily observed - even as the Cons double down in their fervour:

As in many other countries, Canada is witnessing a phenomenon in which the most wealthy are enjoying stunning increases in their income while the rest of society stagnates. It’s something that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is likely to hear about in no uncertain terms in the parliamentary debate following the tabling of the budget on June 6.

The trend (long summarized as “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”) is so pronounced globally that Angel Gurria, head of the industrialized world’s main think tank, is warning that income equality is becoming a “serious threat.”
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In a 2008 study of 30 OECD countries, Canada was singled out as one of the member nations that has witnessed the worst widening of the wealth gap.

Inequality and poverty declined in Canada for 20 years before the late 1990s, the OECD study said, but since have gotten much worse.
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And some analysts say the economic strategies being pursued by a re-elected Harper will only make matters worse, leading to a further expansion of the income gap between the very rich and others in Canada.

The crux of the issue concerns the Conservatives’ plan to continue implementing corporate income tax cuts and to eventually bring in other tax breaks, such as expanding deposits in Tax-Free Savings Accounts and allowing two-income couples with children younger than 18 to split their income for federal tax purposes.

While these measures have been promoted as ways of creating jobs or helping average Canadians, some economists say the benefits to the rich from these tax breaks will far outweigh anything seen by other members of society.

- Finally, Don Martin points out one noteworthy consequences of the NDP's surge:

Funny thing, but the more...under-30 MPs you meet, all of them unexpectedly elected in the orange wave of the NDP surge, the more you sense they will be a future asset, not a long-term liability, to leader Jack Layton.

They talk beyond their years, think quickly and most have an academic grounding in what federal politics is all about.
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I'm only met half a dozen or so, but I suspect it'll be great fun watching them spring in parliamentary action next week.

Thanks to them, the average age of Canada's 308 MPs has dipped below 50 for the first time in history.

Granted, that still leaves the average age in the House of Commons somewhat higher than in the general population. But as with other measures such as womens' representation, the NDP can at least claim proudly to have made Parliament more representative of Canada's population than ever - and hopefully the result will be a political conversation that better reflects the concerns of the general public.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- As part of her look at what lies ahead for the NDP, Barbara Yaffe recognizes why it figures to make for a tougher opponent than the Libs have over the past few years:

How will Conservatives react to Layton leading the main opposition party in Parliament?

It remains to be seen whether they will mount an advertising campaign against him as they did against Liberal leaders Paul Martin, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

Conservatives may have met their match, though. After all, Layton has led his party since 2003 and may be too much of a known quantity to be successfully attacked by government backroomers.

- All those who predicted that Newfoundland and Labrador would be the first province to see any effort to call Stephen Harper's Senate bluff (even if based only in the province's opposition parties), please collect your winnings.

- While plenty of people have pointed to Stephane Dion's paper for the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, I'm not sure anybody else has noticed what looks like a major part of the story.

Namely, when did Stephane Dion start writing for a Con-promoted and funded special interest group which mostly serves as a front for Con spin? And if the likes of Dion are lending their names and opinions to the greater glory of the Cons' cronies, what does that say about the Libs' hopes of building any competing institutions?

- Finally, Benjamin Wallace-Wells' feature on Paul Krugman includes this noteworthy tidbit on how economic gains have been divided in the U.S.:

From 1979 to 2004, the income of the richest one percent of Americans grew by 176 percent, that of the richest one fifth of the country by 69 percent, and that of everyone else by less than 25 percent. Working through the numbers, Krugman came to believe that “only a fraction” of the change was compelled by global forces, which had been the standard explanation. The rest, he concluded, was political.

It was Krugman’s Princeton colleague Larry Bartels who made the critical connection, in research Krugman devoured and still cites. Perhaps the most important influence on income inequality, Bartels argued, was something economists had not ­emphasized: whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House. Since World War II, Bartels found, wealthy families in the 95th percentile in income had seen identical income growth under both parties. But for families in the 20th percentile, the difference was astonishing: Under Democratic presidents, their income grew at six times the rate it did under Republican ones. There was, for Krugman, a kind of radicalization implied in this.

And I'd have to wonder whether the observations can be applied elsewhere: is there reason to doubt that the wealthy will tend to see relatively consistent gains in income, while the main distinction between different governments and societies is whether anybody else also benefits? And if so, wouldn't that seem like a rather compelling reason to focus all the more on redistribution rather than hoping that policies which obvious favour the wealthy on their face will somehow have trickle-down effects?

At public expense

It's no great surprise that there's more to Jim Flaherty's use of public resources to direct money toward a right-wing think tank than meets the eye. But Joe Kuchta has uncovered a few details that I wouldn't have seen coming.

In particular, there's the fact that Crowley was getting paid out of federal coffers at exactly the time when he was founding the propaganda machine which Flaherty is now pushing:

On November 7, 2006, Rob Wright, Deputy Minister of Finance, announced that Crowley had been appointed the 2006-2007 Clifford Clark Visiting Economist in the Department of Finance.

And in case there was any doubt that Crowley was in the position for the balance of 2007, Crowley's own current think tank proudly proclaims that he held the post until 2008:

Dated: 20/3/08

Halifax – Brian Lee Crowley, the founding president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), has returned to head the public policy think tank.

Crowley was seconded a year and a half ago to the country’s most prestigious economic policy advisory post in Ottawa: the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist in the federal Department of Finance.

Which makes it highly significant that he was working for the Cons' government at public expense at the time the Macdonald-Laurier Institute was officially founded:

Corporations Canada records show that the Macdonald-Laurier Institute was incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act - Part II on March 12, 2007. The directors at the time of incorporation or as indicated on the last annual summary as of March 31 of the year of filing were: Brian Lee Crowley, David McD. Mann, and Allan Gotlieb.

So to the extent Flaherty is now using his office to shill for the Institute, it wouldn't appear to be the first time public resources found their way into backing the group. Instead, Crowley set up the group while he was personally paid to work for the public.

Not surprisingly, Joe also digs up details about contracts directed toward another Crowley company, as well as donations from Crowley to the Cons. But it seems most damning that the the public isn't just paying for Flaherty to promote the Macdonald-Laurier Institute now, but apparently bore the cost of getting Crowley to set it up in the first place.