Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Luke Savage comments on Justin Trudeau's phony war against inequality:

His embrace of Keynesian economics has been equally ethereal. In 2015, apparently rebelling against the prevailing economic orthodoxy of austerity, the Liberal leader pledged to stimulate the economy through modest, deficit-financed social investment.

Upon implementation, however, some $15bn was channelled into an “infrastructure bank”, geared to attract private financing. The promises of “socially useful, non-commercial projects like childcare or affordable housing to cash-strapped cities” will take a back seat to those with “revenue-generating potential”. And while investors are likely to see big returns, it is the public who will shoulder much of the risk.

Trudeau has also remained ambivalent towards the kind of big programs that could actually redistribute wealth in a meaningful way. On childcare, for example, he favours a means-tested approach, rather than the universal, public provision of a desperately needed service. And in a 2016 conversation with a low-wage worker he dismissed the prospect of raising the minimum wage, echoing the talking points of the Canadian business lobby: “Maybe everything just gets more expensive or we have jobs leaving. We have to be very careful about that.” (A 2011 University of California, Berkeley study found the effects of raising the minimum wage on prices to be negligible at best. And the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has argued that service sector jobs that tend to pay the minimum wage are by their very nature immobile, which suggests the threat of mass job flight is a myth.)
...
(W)hile the prime minister calmly informs struggling workers that raising the minimum wage may have unintended consequences, the country’s wealthiest corporate executives get to keep their cushy tax advantages. The phony war rages on.

- Jennefer Laidley offers some suggestions to ensure income security in Ontario. And Eleanor Aigne Roy reports on Jacinda Ardern's push to find shelter for every homeless person in New Zealand before its winter hits - serving as a prime example as to what social policy can look like when it's actually aimed at meeting people's needs rather than putting off action.

- Ethan Trudeau comments on the value of organized labour and cooperative businesses in ensuring that prosperity is widely shared. And Jake Johnson offers a look at the regrets of workers who voted for Donald Trump based on the false promise of right-wing populism.

- Finally, Tabatha Southey writes about the real threat posed by the ignorant rage of the anti-woman alt-right.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Tom Parkin discusses the need for a new Tommy Douglas to start leading the way toward national social programs - and the hope that Andrea Horwath can earn that role in Ontario's provincial election:

Since Douglas’s time, Canadian health care has been defended from periodic rounds of cuts. But only the rare politician has picked up the threads of Douglas’s legacy in an attempt to extend health care. One of those rare times may be coming.

If she is elected premier next month, Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath vows to end the cuts causing the current bout of hallway medicine. But she’s also pledged to build on Douglas’s medicare legacy by adding pharmacare and dental care. And those plans—and her child care pledge—could set in motion a new era in co-operative federalism that takes those plans across Canada.
...

(W)ith 80 per cent of voters repeatedly telling pollsters they want change, between Horwath and Ford there couldn’t be a more stark contrast. If Horwath is the new Tommy Douglas, PC Leader Doug Ford is the exact opposite.

Horwath sees social programs as critical to our prosperity. Ford views them as costs to be cut. Horwath promises to add new drug and dental plans, paying for it with higher taxes on incomes over $220,000. If she can pull out a win, that’ll build on Douglas’s legacy. Ford offers more corporate tax cuts and a continuation of Wynne’s privatization schemes. His election would result in billions and billion in cuts—eroding what Douglas built.
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(W)ith provinces bickering and the Trudeau Liberals off course, a Ford win would bring even more confrontation and division to federal-provincial politics. But initiatives by a Premier Horwath could revive co-operative federalism and get Ottawa back on track. Her ideas offer the hope of a more co-operative federation and a stronger Canadian identity. Douglas’s efforts sure did.

- Meanwhile, Gary Mason is genuinely pleased to thrilled to see John Horgan's government making housing more affordable through a more fair property tax system. And David Camfield discusses the importance of building a stronger progressive movement on the prairies.

- Robert Cribb, Carolyn Jarvis and Andrew Bailey report on the embarrassing pollution from Canadian refineries compared to their southern counterparts nearly two decades after Canada was supposed to adopt U.S. standards.

- Doyle Rice reports on the unsurprising news that greenhouse gases are at their highest point in human history (and far beyond). James Wilt points out the credibility problems with the climate change data the Libs have recently unveiled. And Aaron Wherry figures there's now a consensus on the need to reduce emissions - though I'd think it's more likely the Cons' plan is once again merely to criticize any form of action which seems like it could possibly be implemented.

- Finally, Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan offer an important reminder about the criminalization of dissent - and particularly the Indigenous movement seeking to protect land and water.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Alex Himelfarb warns about the dangers of participating in Donald Trump's race to the bottom for public revenues - and the importance of highlighting the value of collective funding for social priorities:

Sure, our tax revenues as a share of the overall economy are lower than they’ve been in over five decades. Yes, government expenditures are lower than they have been since the days before we had public pensions, medicare and mass education. But more tax cuts are still offered up as the best—or even the only—option.

The failure of decades of tax-cutting to yield the promised increases in innovation and productivity has not constrained the willingness of some political parties and governments to treat ever-deeper cuts, especially for businesses and the rich, as indisputably good economic policy. If past cuts didn’t have quite the effect they were meant to, they say, perhaps the cuts just weren’t deep enough. Failed economic ideas don’t die easily.

Clearly, Canadian politicians cannot ignore the implications of tax cuts or other major economic policy changes in the United States. But they would be wise to ask what our neighbour may be giving up with these latest cuts, and where our comparative advantage might really lie. We oughtn’t to assume the benefits of tax cuts or to ignore their costs.
...
Tax cuts never pay for themselves. Invariably, they have real costs: public services are squeezed and opportunities to improve government programs lost, with the consequences falling most heavily on the most disadvantaged and vulnerable, and on future generations who of course don’t get to vote.

Ironically, as we weaken government and undermine public services, as wait times go up while access goes down and out-of-pocket costs rise, we increasingly question just what our taxes are buying. Austerity is self-perpetuating.
...
 Decades of austerity, during which we have been asked to view ourselves as primarily taxpayers and consumers rather than as citizens pursuing some common good, have no doubt reshaped our collective view of taxes. So long as taxes are viewed as a burden, or worse, a punishment, rather than as how we operationalize the common good, austerity will continue to blunt the political imagination and limit our sense of what’s possible.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who died just over a year ago, spent the latter part of his career documenting the decline of the collective, the loss of trust in one another and in our governments, the loss of confidence that we can together shape the future. He worried that our collective action problems—those things we can solve only together—have never been more challenging, but that our collective toolkit has been severely weakened by decades of austerity. Rethinking taxes, which are, after all, how we pay for those things we do together because we could never do them at all or as well on our own, will be essential to rebuilding the collective.

We cannot hope even to begin to achieve a just transition to a green economy, or to provide a measure of economic security in an increasingly precarious world, or to reverse growing inequality and persistent poverty if we don’t reconnect taxes to the common good.

- Frances Coppola challenges the mindset that would sacrifice human well-being in the pursuit of balanced government budgets. And Mathew Snow writes about the problems with reliance on the charity of the obscenely wealthy rather than a fair system of social revenue.

- Sophie Hardach examines Thomas Piketty's latest work on the reversal in political orientation based on education. And Branko Milanovic discusses the ongoing (and indeed increasing) relevance of Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism.

- Andrew Nikiforuk observes that government revenues from fossil fuels and other natural resources have been drying up over a period of decades. Stephen Leahy estimates the climate costs of a Trans Mountain expansion at $8.7 billion - without factoring in the added emissions from the end use of any fuel shipped through the pipeline. And Tom Rand notes that the Trans Mountain debate is highlighting the need for everybody to contribute to emission reductions, rather than demanding special dispensations based on the ongoing choice to prioritize oil over other economic options.

- Finally, Edgardo Sepulveda studies the public costs of decades of privatization and politicization of Ontario's power system.

Musical interlude

Kikagaku Moyo - Kodama

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Terry Schwadron writes about Donald Trump's war on the poor, while Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson highlight how U.S. businesses and their political pawns have undermined the labour movement. And David Climenhaga and PressProgress point out that we should expect exactly the same from Jason Kenney should he get the chance to make life worse for Albertans.

- Meanwhile, Matt Bruenig suggests that workers learn from the corporate consolidation of power to push for coordinated wage levels:

In theory, setting wages across the economy in a coordinated way through centralized labor agreements can solve both of these problems. It can make it to where you can employ everyone normally without risking inflation and can stop the wage suppression caused by low population and job-seeking frictions.

To understand why centralized labor agreements can solve the inflation problem that [a job guarantee] can’t, it is useful to conceptualize wage-price inflation as a classic collective action problem. Each individual, acting alone, has an incentive to maximize their wage, but if all individuals do it simultaneously and beyond a certain level, it sets off unsustainable wage-price inflation that ends up biting the workers one way or another. Coordinated wage-setting can solve this problem by ensuring that workers, and their representatives, hash out appropriate wage levels every few years. If the worker groups act responsibly, they will take note of what sort of wages productivity growth will permit and restrain their wage growth accordingly. In theory, this sort of wage price-fixing means that you can nip wage-price inflation in the bud and push unemployment all the way down without the need for jobseekers to bid down wages.

Centralized labor agreements also solve the employer market power problems that antitrust cannot. Rural workers will never have that many employers to choose from, but if those employers are forced to abide by the central wage agreements, the workers will be still be compensated fairly. Additionally, the diminished power that results from job-switching frictions need not suppress wages where strong unions can provide countervailing power that does not rely upon the threat of switching jobs.

- Neela Banerjee discusses how the U.S.' regulatory apparatus - and particularly the EPA under Scott Pruitt - has been turned into a servant of the corporate interests it should be regulating. And Carl Meyer reports on how the power of the state is being used to stifle reporting on public protests in Canada.

- Luke Savage reviews two new books on the causes and implications of increasingly authoritarian right-wing parties. 

- Finally, Sachin Jain comments on the role social interaction plays in individual health.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jake Johnson writes about the obscene amount of money handed to the wealthy in the U.S. by the Republicans' tax scam. And Robert Reich discusses how the spread of inequality and isolation helped to lay the groundwork for Donald Trump's destructive presidency.

- Meanwhile, Mel Rothenburger points out how the UCP-fueled attack on an honourary degree for David Suzuki should highlight the danger of universities seeing themselves as bound by corporate actors (or their political puppets). 

- Carl Meyer reports on a push from the chiefs of over a hundred First Nations in opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Bill Hafker acknowledges that the oil industry needs to come to terms with the fight against climate change. And Damien Gillis discusses Justin Trudeau's two-faced handling of environmental and energy issues.

- Nick Falvo laments Scott Moe's decision to make housing even more unaffordable for Saskatchewan's residents who already have the least. And Eli Day interviews Ryan Cooper about the importance of affordable public housing - along with the urgent need for far more (and far better) housing than is currently available.

- Finally, Jordan Pearson cautions against drawing too many conclusions from basic income pilot projects which are too small in scope to generate the benefits which have already been identified.

New column day

Here, on Regina's longstanding rail-freeway conflict as an example of the need to take the long view of infrastructure decisions - and the dangers of locking ourselves into dying and dirty industries with the choices we make on pipelines.

For further reading...
- CBC reported on the City of Regina's feasibility study into moving rail lines which currently cross the Ring Road. And Craig Baird has previously pointed out why options such as an overpass/underpass are likely off the table due to the disruption to existing traffic.
- Ryan McNally reported on the City's motion dealing with solar energy. And Paul Dechene offers a preliminary (and highly affordable) look at what we should expect to see reported back.
- Finally, I'll point again to David Roberts' observations as to how infrastructure lock-in may affect the fight against climate change.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Yanis Varoufakis discusses the loss of freedom when one's whole life needs to be planned around corporate wishes and sensitivities:

A capacity to fence off a part of one’s life, and to remain sovereign and self-driven within those boundaries, was paramount to the liberal conception of the free agent and his or her relationship with the public sphere. To exercise freedom, individuals needed a safe haven within which to develop as genuine persons before relating – and transacting – with others. Once constituted, our personhood was to be enhanced by commerce and industry – networks of collaboration across our personal havens, constructed and revised to satisfy our material and spiritual needs.

But the dividing line between personhood and the external world upon which liberal individualism based its concepts of autonomy, self-ownership, and, ultimately, freedom could not be maintained. The first breach appeared as industrial products became passé and were replaced by brands that captured the public’s attention, admiration, and desire. Before long, branding took a radical new turn, imparting “personality” to objects. 

Once brands acquired personalities (boosting consumer loyalty immensely and profits accordingly), individuals felt compelled to re-imagine themselves as brands. And today, with colleagues, employers, clients, detractors, and “friends” constantly surveying our online life, we are under incessant pressure to evolve into a bundle of activities, images, and dispositions that amounts to an attractive, sellable brand. The personal space essential to the autonomous development of an authentic self – the condition that makes inalienable self-ownership possible – is now almost gone. The habitat of liberalism is disappearing.
...

The irony is that liberal individualism seems to have been defeated by a totalitarianism that is neither fascist nor communist, but which grew out of its own success at legitimizing the encroachment of branding and commodification into our personal space. To defeat it, and thus rescue the liberal idea of freedom as self-ownership, may require a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly digitized instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication.

Would it not be a splendid paradox if, 200 years after the birth of Karl Marx, we decided that, in order to save liberalism, we must return to the idea that freedom demands the end of unfettered commodification and the socialization of property rights over capital goods?

- Meanwhile, Noah Smith points out that any dogma about "efficient markets" is rapidly being refuted by economic experience.

- D.C. Fraser reports on Scott Moe's insistence that Saskatchewan's low-income workers survive on the lowest minimum wage in Canada.

- David Roberts writes about the importance of supply-side policies as part of a full strategy to rein in climate change - with the particularly important advantage of avoiding infrastructure lock-in. And Michael Harris notes that Justin Trudeau's determination to instead tie Canada to a dying fossil fuel industry may represent his political undoing.

- Finally, the Globe and Mail's editorial board makes the case for Alberta to join the rest of the country in funding public services through a sales tax.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Contented cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Scott Gilmore discusses how Canada is actually backsliding in some crucial development goals. And Colin Gordon writes about the inequality growing on multiple fronts around the globe.

- Kathy Tomlinson uncovers a Vancouver real estate market rigged to benefit developers and speculators. And Ryan Cooper points out the importance of a meaningful social housing policy to ensure that development can benefit the people who actually need a home:

Upzoning advocates argue that if we simply went on a wild private building spree, we'd eventually burn through all the luxury demand and actually reduce the price of midrange and affordable units (as opposed to only slowing the rate of increase). But that could take easily take decades, if it even works at all.

Great big new social housing projects, by contrast — say, one million in California for starters — are a way to efficiently cram in tons and tons of housing supply directly where it is most socially necessary, not where it is most profitable. And unlike traditional American-style public housing which is means-tested for poor people only, social housing could be largely self-funding by including many tenants paying market or somewhat subsidized rents (though a good fraction would be reserved for poor and working-class people, of course). That would have the side benefit of making projects socioeconomically integrated, not poor-only ghettos.
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(B)ackers should abandon the neoliberal frame of this being a simple issue of free markets versus government over-regulation. Jonathan Chait, for instance, argues that while there may be complex sub-details, at bottom the housing crisis is explained by an "Econ 101 model of supply and demand." Gentrification is simply caused by "artificially constricted housing supply," and California progressives simply will have to choke down de-regulation and working with private developers if they want to solve the housing crisis. (It's a mark of how influential this frame is that both climate writer David Roberts and leftist Hamilton Nolan present the issue in much the same way.)

As we have seen, this is a terribly mistaken way of thinking about the issue. Neoliberal thinking is not just a highly sub-optimal way of addressing the problem, it is big source of the problem in the first place. NIMBY politics are bad, and often quite racist, but they are also in large part a natural outgrowth of the way the American housing market is structured. A great deal of NIMBYism is simply being a good capitalist by defending the value of one's major asset. (This raises the question of why so much American housing policy is dedicated to helping upper-middle class people put their money into a highly-leveraged, highly-illiquid speculative investment, but that's a subject for another post.)

Incoherent Republican-style notions about deregulation and the markets will be most convincing to the people dead-set against solving the housing crisis at all. Granting the reality that the state is inextricably part of all decisions about the ownership of property is more accurate, allows for better policies, and can then help create an anti-NIMBY coalition that might actually win.

- But if we needed another example of the Libs going in the opposite direction, Brent Patterson weighs in on their plans to turn public services into financial profit centres.

- Finally, Anna Mehler Paperny reports that Justin Trudeau has been trying to rewrite Canada's safe third country agreement with the U.S. - not to protect asylum seekers being denied a fair hearing under the Trump administration, but to further restrict when they're able to apply to be safe in Canada. And Brendan Kennedy and Michelle Shepard discuss how Canada is providing minimal aid to victims of war in Yemen while simultaneously arming the countries responsible.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Kady O'Malley writes that after years of delays on their promise to reassess Bill C-51, civil rights are just one more area where the Libs' proclamations about "open government" have given way to a closed-door process where only their plans are being given any meaningful consideration.

- Meagan Day makes the case for clinical pharmaceutical trials to be publicly funded (and their full results disclosed). But Jordan Press reports that rather than ensuring that matters of public interest are under public control, the Libs are bargaing ahead with to turn social services into opportunities for corporate profit extraction.

- David Climenhaga highlights the underreporting of workplace injuries in Alberta - and the importance of correcting that problem in order to ensure that safety rules can be effective:

Alberta government statistics for 2016 show that more than 45,500 workers suffered disabling injuries on the job. But because of underreporting, the researchers concluded, the real number was closer to 170,000, and that more than 400,000 experienced one workplace injury in 2016.

"The data suggest a breakdown in the internal responsibility system that is at the heart of the workplace health and safety system in the province," said Matsunaga-Turnbull, executive director of the Alberta Workers Health Centre.

Barnetson, an Athabasca University labour studies professor, acknowledged that Alberta's NDP Government legislated real improvements in worker health and safety when Labour Minister Christina Gray last year brought in the first major changes in occupation health and safety legislation in Alberta in more than 40 years.

However, Barnetson and Matsunaga-Turnbull suggested, the improvements legislated by the NDP won’t mean much without meaningful enforcement.

Accordingly, they called for more, and more vigorous, workplace inspections -- which, of course, would require the hiring of more inspectors. Other recommendations included publication of workplace safety orders, mandatory penalties that escalate for repeat offenders, public shaming of violators, prosecution of employers who retaliate against workers, and an end to the Tory blame-the-worker tactic of ticketing employees.

- Carl Meyer reports on the announcement of federal regulations addressing methane emissions - albeit only on the oil industry's preferred timetable. And Kate Lyons looks at some geoengineering possibilities to counter the effects of climate change.

- Finally, Tom Parkin writes that the Trans Mountain expansion may soon be going the same way as the Northern Gateway - and for the same reasons as the Trudeau Libs' neglect of Indigenous rights has become clear. 

[Edit: added link.]

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Martin Wolf reviews Mariana Mazzucato's The Value of Everything, including its distinction between value creation and value extraction. And Yvonne Roberts points out how millenial workers are being left with little but large debts as a result of inequality between classes and generations.

- Matthew Yglesias discusses the significance of a jobs guarantee as a matter of values, while noting that its goals may best be met indirectly. But Ian Welsh argues that we should instead work on ensuring a more fair allocation of resources by challenging the claim that people's worth is limited to what they can get paid through a job.

- Meanwhile, Hassan Yussuff writes that nobody should have to put up with harassment or violence as the price of keeping a job.

- The Council of Canadians, Sierra Club U.S. and Greenpeace Mexico jointly review the effects of NAFTA in limiting climate policy across North America. And Raisa Patel reports on the parliamentary budget officer's study showing that CETA's giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry will cost Canadians more than $500 million ever year.

- Finally, Joan Bryden reports on the warning of the acting chief electoral officer that the Libs have left any change to Stephen Harper's unfair election rules too late for matters to improve in time for the 2019 federal election.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne rightly criticizes the World Bank for trying to push discredited and inhumane trickle-down economics as a substitute for viable economic development.

- Gary Younge calls for some much-needed recognition of the toxic masculinity behind so many mass killings. And Nora Loreto examines the combination of atomization, insecurity and discrimination that leads to preventable violence.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman calls out the Republicans' war on the poor - which combines with their politics of bigotry to exacerbate all of those problems.

- Emma Gilchrist discusses the global shift toward cleaner energy - and the need to account for it in determining what to do with proposed fossil fuel infrastructure. Paul McKay laments the corporate media's lack of meaningful coverage of Canada's bitumen bubble. And Martin Patriquin comments on Justin Trudeau's cynicism in co-opting the language of the environmental movement while planning to ignore its concerns.

- Finally, APTN reports on the concept of Indigenous "support" for pipelines - which all too often results from the lack of anything close to sufficient resources to do anything but reluctantly accept whatever a corporate operator puts on the table.

Musical interlude

Big Sugar - Better Get Used To It

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Vanessa Williamson rebuts the myth that fair tax policy will drive away wealthy residents. And Mike Maciag notes that tax giveaways to the corporate sector and the wealthy serve only to exacerbate inequality within the population as a whole.

- Malika Sharma, Andrew Pinto and Arno Kumagai write that we should view the social determinants of health as factors which can and should be changed, rather than inevitabilities to be observed but not acted upon:

In our paper “Teaching the Social Determinants of Health: A Path to Equity or a Road to Nowhere?”, we explore how contemporary SDOH education does little to reduce health inequities, for two key reasons. First, most training fails to acknowledge that the social determinants of health are man-made results of social, economic, and political decisions in how money, power, and resources are (unequally) distributed in society. Second, emphasis is often placed on knowing rather than acting. Rattling off socioeconomic status, educational attainment, and food insecurity as contributors to poor health outcomes does little to change the situation of people actually living these realities.

As such, students do not gain skills to allow them to act at systemic or societal-levels. They may feel overwhelmed when faced with complex social circumstances, or may feel that addressing the social determinants of health is someone else’s problem. They may not recognize that failing to address the SDOH will limit any clinical intervention they suggest. In addition, covering the SDOH as a simply a list to be known allows medical institutions to say they have fulfilled their social responsibility mandate, without forcing a reckoning of how they may themselves perpetuate and benefit from the status quo.

- Catherine Colebrook discusses the need for better measuring sticks for economic and social development beyond GDP alone. And Ploy Achakulwisut points out the importance of accounting for the health effects of pollution in developing environmental policy.

- Finally, Larry Elliott comments on the exploitation inherent in the gig economy and other models of precarious work.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

New column day

Here, on the Trudeau Libs' biased approach to the Trans Mountain expansion - and the need to take a fair look now, rather than allowing Kinder Morgan to dictate timelines and play governments against each other and their constituents.

For further reading...
- Mike De Souza's report on the Libs' refusal to consider anything but approval of Trans Mountain is here. Thomas Sisk wrote about his experience trying to provide current science about the risks of a dilbit spill to the Trudeau government. And Andrew Nikiforuk offered needed background on the connection between Kinder Morgan and its origins in Enron.
- Trish Audette-Longo reports on the role of bots in manipulating the flow of information about Trans Mountain online.
- Both Sisk and Elan Global point out the utter incompatibility between any serious effort to rein in climate change and the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.
- Denise Balkissoon writes about the importance of a just transition for workers in the resource sector.
- Finally, while the column doesn't go into any detail about Indigenous rights as another crucial aspect of the federal government's responsibility, Eriel Deranger offers an important look at the continued colonialism involved in the approval of a pipeline over the protests of affected communities.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Sunil Johal and Armine Yalnizyan discuss the importance of building an economy based on a race to the top in labour and environmental standards, rather than the pursuit of the lowest common denominator.

- Kevin Corinth and Claire Rossi-de Vries examine the importance of social ties as a buffer against homelessness. Suzanne Fitzpatrick reports that even social housing is becoming unaffordable in the UK. And Brakkton Booker reports on the Republicans' plans to ensure the same result in the U.S.

- Meanwhile, Heather Timmons comments on Mick Mulvaney's determination to turn a consumer protection bureau into a servant of the financial sector. And Kate Aronoff notes that the most scandalous part of Scott Pruitt's role in Donald Trump's cabinet is his determination to turn the U.S. into a full-on petro state.

- The Star weighs in on the Ontario NDP's ambitious yet responsible election platform. And Duncan Cameron offers a preview of the federal Libs' plan to once again use progressive language to paper over a fundamentally conservative agenda. 

- Finally, Andrew Jackson maps out the road toward a needed national pharmacare program.

On unequal treatment

With the Trans Mountain pipeline dominating as much news coverage as it has, it's inevitable that we'd see the usual debate as to the relative desirability of different types of economic paths come to the surface. And I'll point out just a couple of the which look to signal a distortion of the actual impact of different economic options in favour of oil (and at the expense of the public interest).

Let's start with Kevin Milligan's Globe and Mail column which has been thrown around repeatedly as a definitive statement that oil is a solution to inequality.

Unfortunately, Milligan's assertion isn't founded in any data addressing inequality in particular, but instead treats overall income as a proxy for equality without apparent explanation. So let's take a look at some data on the point which is supposedly being addressed.

In fact, for the approximate time period used by Milligan, inequality increased slightly in Canada as a whole. And the most obvious increase in terms of both before-tax and after-tax inequality in the broader time period when we've shifted toward reliance on natural resources occurred in Alberta, which Milligan singles out as an example of resource revenue reducing inequality:

The relationship between economy type and inequality does look to be ambiguous. (In particular, Saskatchewan reduced its inequality while also seeing a resource-based boost in incomes in the 1990s and 2000s.)

But there's certainly no basis to suggest that Canada's shift toward a resource economy in recent decades actually reduced inequality as a rule, either on a national scale or within any particular province. And Milligan's position is particularly jaw-dropping in minimizing even the possible results of redistributing the unequal wealth normally found in resource-dependent jurisdictions (including the ones charted above), while instead asking us to assume that "oil = equality!!!".

Meanwhile, the usual foil for resource development is a focus on value-added manufacturing. So let's turn to Kevin Carmichael's admonition that we shouldn't focus unduly on manufacturing jobs when "only about five per cent of employed Canadians work at a factory".

On its own, that's a fair statement. And Carmichael does note that the real implication of the composition of Canada's economy is that we should be more focused on services.

But if we're going to apply that raw-job standard to manufacturing with no allowance for spinoff effects, surely we need to do the same for the resource sector - which leads us to Statistics Canada's data on employment by sector. And that shows manufacturing providing 1,508,942 jobs in 2017 - compared to 199,780 for "Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction" combined.

The effect of singling out manufacturing for minimization is to create more space for the even more obviously-flawed argument to prioritize resource extraction above both competing sectors and the public interest - at a time when we're seeing far too many governments eager to do exactly that.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Oleg Komlik takes note of Wade Cole's research showing how income inequality affects political dynamics. And Hannah Finnie recognizes that young people are joining unions (among other forms of social activism) in order to gain some much-needed influence on both fronts, while Paul Krugman weighs in on the Republicans' war on education in an attempt to hold onto power.

- Arjumand Siddiqi and Faraz Vahid Shahidi write about the potential for Ontario's next government to improve health and social outcomes through improved income supports and labour market conditions for workers. And Peter Baker writes about the history of the minimum wage, as well as its place in the broader power struggle between workers and employers.

- Adam Gaffney points out that the U.S.' health care system is increasingly designed to inflate profits rather than to achieve health outcomes, while Lee Camp zeroes in on Goldman Sachs' admission that it sees curing diseases as bad for business. And Andrew Coyne notes that similar problems apply to the availability of prescription drugs in Canada - even as the Libs appear likely to ignore the growing body of evidence as to how the public would benefit if it was given priority over entrenched corporate interests for once.

- Finally, Rick Smith discusses the increasing recognition of the persistent hazard posed by plastic particles. 

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Couched cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Louis Uchitelle discusses how the decline of organized labour in the U.S. has harmed not just workers' direct interests, but the economic sectors where unions previously thrived:

Want to make America great again and keep factories in the United States? Try strengthening labor unions.

That may seem counterintuitive, and certainly contrary to the direction the country has been moving in lately. But the reality is that when organized labor dug in its heels — as it did regularly in the United States until late in the 20th century — manufacturing companies thought twice about shutting a factory and transferring production to another country.
...
As union membership declines, labor has less leverage to intervene in the management of a corporation, or to galvanize the public into boycotting the products of manufacturers who put too many factories overseas while exporting less from the United States.

Strikes work when union membership is high enough to encourage the public to support the strikers, or at least feel a kinship with them. My parents, who lived comfortably on my father’s earnings as a textile broker in New York, never crossed a picket line thrown up by a labor union in pursuit of a favorable contract. They might not have agreed with a union’s demands, or even known what they were. But they respected a strike as an often-necessary tool in reaching a compromise acceptable to both sides.
...
The street demonstrations and marches so characteristic of today’s resistance can be immensely meaningful, but they don’t force the sort of permanent economic change that a union can achieve through a binding contract that emerges from a strike.

Or at least they haven’t yet. Perhaps in time new organizations will emerge — heirs to the old union movement — and one of their priorities will be to pressure manufacturers quite publicly to put more of their factories in the United States.

- Alex McKeen reports on a needed push for labour market indicators which recognize the reality of gig work and other forms of precarity. Julia Horowitz points out that WalMart represents a particularly egregious example of inequality between executives and workers. Chris Parsons offers a reminder that one of the greatest threats to free speech is employer suppression of workers' views - particularly where they involve asserting rights in the workplace. And UFCW points out one recent Alberta example of an employer's anti-union tactics leading to a remedial certification.

- Daniel Tencer examines the assumptions behind the sticker price of a basic income, and notes that the savings in social costs could make a secure income into a bargain for everybody.

- Marc Lee highlights the full cost-benefit analysis which shows a Trans Mountain expansion to be a poor deal for everybody but its corporate operators. And Tzeporah Berman writes about the importance of protest movements in ensuring that the people excluded from the Libs' decision-making are still able to influence the course of events.

- Finally, Brent Patterson reminds us of a few of Justin Trudeau's most important broken promises.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Robert Costanza reviews Mariana Mazzucato's The Value of Everything, and highlights its focus on attaching proper importance to priorities that aren't reflected in prices:

(T)he current mainstream ‘marginalist’ concept bases value on market exchanges: price, as revealed by the interaction of supply and demand in markets, determines value, and the only things that have value are those that fetch a price.

This has major implications for ideas about the distinction between value creation and value extraction, the nature of unearned income (‘rent’) and how value should be distributed. As Mazzucato notes, it stokes inequality because the market, simply by generating income, is seen to justify its level and distribution: “All income, according to this logic, is earned income: gone is any analysis of activities in terms of whether they are productive or unproductive.”

Mazzucato lays out disturbing implications of the marginalist approach. These include (mis)measuring national income and real wealth, confusing financial speculation with the production of value, perverting the patent system (which stifles, rather than rewards, innovation) and undervaluing government and public goods, including public infrastructure, ecosystems and social networks. Her engaging and insightful exploration reveals how embedded the marginalist approach has become, and how it distorts economies’ ability to foster innovation, equity and real progress.
...
Economics has been defined as the use of scarce resources to achieve desirable ends. In the Anthropocene epoch of human influence on the planet, we need to redefine those ends, and reevaluate which resources are truly scarce. Value should be viewed as contribution to the sustainable well-being of Earth and all its inhabitants...Mazzucato’s trenchant analysis is a compelling call to reinvent value as a key concept to help us achieve the world we all want. 

- Meanwhile, in a prime example of how reality is being warped to achieve surface financial goals, Matthew McClearn discusses how Ontario's Libs are condemning citizens to decades of avoidable interest payments in order to avoid answering for the costs of power privatization.

- Richard Florida examines the role housing prices play in the growth of inequality.

- Howard Mann views the Trudeau Libs' determination to put the resource sector and its foreign profiteers ahead of the public interest through backroom deals as a hallmark of third-world governance. Andrew Nikiforuk takes a look at the Enron roots of Kinder Morgan, the latest beneficiary of the Libs' largesse. And Ralph Surette offers kudos to John Horgan's NDP for being able to tell the difference between the "national interest" and the profit motive of the fossil fuel sector.

- Finally, Isabella Lovin discusses the need for countries to not only reach their modest climate change commitments in the short term, but to reach net zero carbon emissions in a matter of decades to avert a climate catastrophe.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Denise Balkissoon writes about the importance of ensuring a just transition for fossil fuel workers - rather than using their jobs as bargaining chips to preserve oil industry profits. And Andrea Olive, Emily Eaton and Randy Besco point out that there's plenty of public support for carbon pricing and other elements of a strong climate change policy in Saskatchewan.

- Meanwhile, Nick Falvo offers a list of takeaways from the Moe government's first provincial budget - including multiple choices which will make life even more precarious for people facing poverty and precarity:

6. Social assistance benefit levels in Saskatchewan remain very low. For example, a single employable adult on social assistance in Saskatchewan receives approximately $9,000 annually on which to live (and pay rent). A person with a disability gets between $12,000 and $16,000 annually, depending on the severity of the disability. Every year, the value of inflation erodes the value of these benefits. (All of these figures can be found here.) 

7. This budget announced the phasing out of a rental housing benefit for low-income households. The Saskatchewan Rental Housing Supplement provided some additional rent money for low-income households with either children or a disability; but this budget announced that no new applications will be accepted as of July 1. The provincial government expects this will save the provincial treasury $5 million in the first year (or 0.03% of the total budget). Without the rent supplement in place, I believe it’s likely we’ll see more people becoming homeless in Saskatchewan, which itself comes with added costs to the public treasury. 

8. The budget’s decision to extend the PST to used car sales may disproportionately impact low-income households. The budget removes the PST tax exemption on (light) used car sales, which may translate into almost $100 million in new annual revenue. This will make it slightly more expensive to purchase a used car in Saskatchewan. The budget also restores the trade-in allowance when determining the PST—so, when a car owner is trading in a vehicle, they will only pay the PST on the difference in price of the trade in and the selling price for the vehicle they’re buying. 

9. The budget fails to address on-reserve child poverty. According to Census data, Saskatchewan’s on-reserve rate of child poverty (as measured by the After Tax Low Income Measure) is nearly 70%, second highest in the country after Manitoba. Neither this year’s budget nor last year’s takes meaningful steps towards addressing that.

- Heather Stewart reports on UK Labour's push for genuinely affordable housing - rather than stretching the term to fit homes priced far beyond people's means.

- Michael Geist discusses the dangers of allowing - and even encouraging - corporate giants to monitor and control online content. And Murad Hemmadi talks to Charlie Angus about Facebook's influence over public policy (even as it fails to register to lobby government).

- Finally, Ruth Dreifuss and Richard Elliott make the case for the decriminalization of personal drug use and possession in order to reduce the social harms arising out of prohibition.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Quirks & Quarks examines the potentially devastating effects of a dilbit spill on British Columbia's coast. And David Climenhaga warns that Kinder Morgan is looking at NAFTA to provide it an alternate source of risk-free profits at public expense.

- Mia Rabson reports on Canada's continued failure to come anywhere close to our already-insufficient emission reduction commitments. And Laura Kusisto and Arian Campo-Flores examine how oceanfront properly is beginning to lose its value as buyers recognize the impending effects of climate change.

- Thomas Walkom offers his take as to why Canada needs a universal pharmacare system. But Andre Picard points out the need to be much more specific about what will be included and how it will be funded. 

- Hugh Segal argues that prosperous societies have a particular duty to eliminate poverty and insecurity - including by guaranteeing a basic income.

- Finally, Stop the Cuts weighs in on yet another austerity budget from the Saskatchewan Party. And Murray Mandryk criticizes the Moe government's belief that it's above any need for ethics.

Musical interlude

The Stills - Hands On Fire

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- PressProgress crunches the numbers on tax loopholes and finds that more and more revenue is being lost to the most glaring loopholes every year. And Andrew Jackson hopes for a sorely-needed response from the federal government to rein in tax avoidance by the wealthy.

- Sam Cooper reports on Vancouver's embarrassing status as a poster child for criminal money laundering.

- Wanda Wyporska highlights the importance of fighting for greater equality rather than allowing it to overtake social cohesion and individual well-being.

- Anna Patty reports on a new study showing how an improved minimum wage could create jobs in addition to boosting standards of living in Australia. And Scott Brown writes about the B.C. NDP's first steps toward including all workers in basic employment protections (including the right to a minimum wage).

- Mark Winfield warns of the risks of panicking about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, though Mike De Souza reveals that the Libs have made a habit of leaping into reckless action at Kinder Morgan's behest. And Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood writes that we should be focusing on a just transition for both resource sector workers and their communities, while Mitchell Anderson discusses how the Trans Mountain expansion would only exacerbate a trend seeing refinery jobs leaked south of the border.

- Finally, CBC reports on Justin Trudeau's lack of interest in following the UK's ban on single-use plastics.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Paul Constant discusses a new study showing that the positive effects of minimum wage increases for low-income workers actually grow over time. And Sheila Block highlights how a $15 increased minimum wage stands to offer far more to workers than Doug Ford's tax tinkering.

- Meanwhile, Pam Weintraub writes that anxiety and stress arising from traumatic experiences have repercussions spanning multiple generations.

- Natalie Appleyard points out the amount of work to be done to address the multiple forms of precarity and poverty faced by Canadians. But Andrew Coyne examines the Parliamentary Budget Office's report on the cost of a national basic income and concludes we could realistically end extreme poverty for an additional three percent on the existing GST.

- Kelly Grant reports on the conclusion of Parliament's Standing Committee on Health endorsing a true national pharmacare program (rather than the patchwork planned by the Trudeau government).

- Finally, Rachel Browne investigates the unconscionable racial divide in arrests for cannabis possession which systematically pushes minorities into the criminal justice system. And the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation examines the lack of housing resources for people trying to reintegrate after being incarcerated. 

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Ann Pettifor discusses the trend toward financialization which has led to regular economic disasters - and suggests the public is well aware it's getting left behind in the policy choices which have created it.

- ScienceDaily takes note of the strong connection between education levels and longevity.

- Sarah Jones calls out the U.S. Republicans' constant steps to withhold food from people who need it - including children who have to attend school hungry as a result. And Andrew Sniderman and Vincent Larochelle discuss the unfairness of mandatory surcharges which impose lasting debts on people with no ability to pay them.

- David Suzuki points out the regular occurrence of dangerous oil spills around the world while highlighting the risks of any Trans Mountain expansion. Martin Lukacs writes that it's Indigenous protestors against pipeline expansion who are actually defending the national interest. And Kai Nagata asks for suggestions as to how we could better use $8 billion of public money other than to subsidize a pipeline for the benefit of Enron alumni.

- Finally, Luke Savage comments on the contrast between Justin Trudeau's slogans and his actions while in power:

(I)t is the disparity between Trudeau’s rhetorical posturing and political execution that perhaps best illustrates the essential conservatism of his government. Social investment and Keynesianism, supposedly the defining pillars of Liberal economic strategy, have given way to corporatism and stealth privatisation.

Even as Trudeau performatively condemns corporate elites, his supposed war on inequality has amounted to tinkering with income tax brackets while opposing a $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal workers. The legalisation of marijuana looks increasingly like a cynical revenue-raiser for avaricious former politicians and ex-cops, rather than a deserved reprieve for those criminalised by the previous system. And while Trudeau’s government was talking up feminism and human rights abroad, it was also signing the export permits for $15bn-worth of armoured vehicles – including some labelled “heavy assault” – to Saudi Arabia.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Cuddling cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Paul Krugman writes that a transition to a clean energy economy is well within reach - as long as politicians don't put the interests of oil money over our economic and environmental future. But Gordon Laxer notes that NAFTA already limits Canada's ability to take the steps which would do most to rein in our harm to the planet.

- Meanwhile, Peter Martin makes the case for a sugar tax and other Pigovian taxes - as adaptations to avoid a tax may produce substantial benefits in important policy areas such as public health:

Announcing the sugar tax in the 2016 budget, Britain’s (Conservative) Treasurer George Osborne said five-year-olds were consuming their entire body weight in sugar every year.
...
His hope was that the drinks above each threshold would cut their sugar until they were below it. It’d cut their tax from 24 pence per litre to 18 pence, or from 18 pence to nothing. They had two years in which to do it.

Within months, Tesco said it would reformulate its entire range to escape the levy. Lucozade Ribena followed, also for its entire range. It meant halving the high sugar contents of Lucozade and Ribena.

Then Sprite halved its sugar content, Fanta fell from grams 7 to 4.5, and 7 Up from a scary 11 grams to 7 grams.

By the time the tax arrived last week, Britain had more than halved its initial estimate of what the tax would raise, cutting its estimate for takings in the first year from £520 million to £240 million ($439.6 million to $952.5 million).

The government-owned Behavioural Insights Team reckons around 750 million litres of drink has been reformatted, which would save a welcome 30,000 tonnes of sugar per year, all before day one.

There’ll be more change now the tax is in place. Retailers will more prominently display the cheaper drinks that are lower-taxed, producers will shift their marketing to products they are able to sell for less, and customers comparing prices will be more likely to pick the cheap ones. More manufacturers will cut their sugar content as a result, and even those that don’t will sell increasing amounts of their zero-sugar products and less of those with sugar.

After a while, the sugar tax might raise very little. Which was the idea. The universal truth about tax is that people don’t like paying it. It can be put to good use.

Australia did it with petrol. From 1994 we more heavily taxed leaded petrol, pushing up the price by 2 cents per litre to encourage drivers to switch to unleaded. We do it with tobacco, and, imperfectly, with alcohol.

What’s great about so-called sin taxes (or "Pigovian taxes") is the double pay-off. Taxing more the things we want less of, including things that kill people, allows us to tax less the things we want more of, such as jobs, income and savings.

- Matt Bruenig points out that the wage gap between women and men is substantially larger than usually assumed when part-time and unpaid work is taken into account, then examines the gap across the income spectrum.

- Robert Devet comments on the need for both fair laws which protect workers, and effective enforcement which prevents employers from flouting the rules.

- Finally, Adrienne Tanner argues that British Columbia needs a public inquiry to investigate the role of money laundering in driving up housing prices. And Christopher Cheung looks to Singapore for an example of a targeted property flipping tax.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Tom Parkin discusses the Libs' identity politics - and how they endanger people's substantive interests both in what the Libs fail to do, and in the predictable reaction from right-wing populists:

For Liberals, identity politics is a distraction from economic policies that are very hard on many people. Trudeau won’t increase the federal minimum wage. He sells off public assets through his Infrastructure Bank. Ignores looming personal debts. Weakens private pension plans. Lets Sears default on their promises to workers. Cuts Canadians’ healthcare funding. Spends billions on tax cuts that give the biggest benefit to incomes over $90,000.

There’s no solution to economic insecurity and inequality — it’s just extend old policies that don’t work and pretend everything’s alright.

So it should be no surprise if Canadians — especially poor and working class people who are most affected — now reject Trudeau and, with him, the empty identity politics he uses as cover.
...
The hollowness of liberal identity politics has Trudeau recognizing the wrongs of colonialism, sexism and racism — then letting the people who have all the power and money keep all the power and money. That’s the hijacking of the political left.

But liberal identity politics also empowers the most enduring form of identity politics — conservative identity politics.

If we are all essentially different and stranded on our little islands of identity, then the point of the alt-right is proven: we are all just tribes in a constant state of war. So every time Trudeau says it’s our differences that make us stronger, he sets the table for the alt-right to feed at. And they gorged.
...
Since the last economic recession there’ve been two great games — the economic game of extend and pretend and the distraction game of identity politics. Both urgently need credible replacements.

- Meanwhile, David Gray-Donald documents how the right-wing hate machine targeted Nora Loreto for daring to mention the disparity in public reactions between tragedies. 

- Mark Rank offers a reminder that immediate investments in eliminating child poverty produce dramatic returns over time. And Cherise Seucharan writes about the need to expand public health care, rather than allowing profiteers to take it over.

- Jeffrey Sachs writes that we should be investing in sustainable, clean infrastructure, not throwing public money into fossil fuels.

- Finally, Thomas Walkom points out Donald Trump's predictable decision to favour the wealthy over everybody else through the Trans-Pacific Partnership - and how it renders futile any attempt to rely on NAFTA to protect citizens from corporate control.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Nick Falvo offers a useful summary of the federal-provincial framework on housing - including its lack of any specific mention of homelessness and supportive housing among other deficiencies.

- Meanwhile, Justin McElroy reports on the Horgan government's plan to ensure more rights for tenants, including by applying significant penalties to landlords who evict tenants in bad faith to seek higher profits.

- The Journal of the American Medical Association studies the U.S.' severe health disparities (and the social factors which contribute to them). And Laura Donnelly reports on the NHS' recognition that a health care system which pushes seniors into unsuitable settings may cause lasting damage.

- Philip Newell reports that among his other attacks on the public interest, Scott Pruitt is ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to stop tracking the ancillary benefits of its work - including its effect on health and survival.

- Finally, Juan Manuel Herrera examines (PDF) the effects of Ontario's increased minimum wage, including improved wages for low-income workers with no substantial impact on employment. And Marilisa Racco discusses the continued pay equity gap between men and women.