Musical interlude

Moguai - Mpire

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich calls out four fundamental lies used to push corporatist policies. But perhaps more interesting is the truth which no amount of concentrated wealth seems to be able to suppress:

But the more interesting thing here is the memo’s concession of a hurdle AFP faces: That people support the idea of “taking care of those in need and avoiding harm to the weak.” That this is seen as a messaging problem is telling.
...
As it happens, the AFP memo is right. Majorities of Americans do see the economy as rigged for the wealthy and don’t believe everyone has an equal shot at getting ahead. Majorities support a minimum wage hike. Though polling is admittedly mixed on the proper role of “government,” polls have shown majority support for the idea of policies that tax the wealthy to fund programs for the poor, and more Americans think government programs for the poor help rather than hurt. During the 2012 election — which the AFP memo cites as a teachable moment — polling showed strong support for preserving the safety net.

- Meanwhile, Duncan Cameron kicks off Rabble's UP! series with a look at the history of Canada's labour movement. But Tyler Cowen points out that Canada may be on a "super-unequal" trajectory - meaning that there's ample work to be done in shaping a country that looks for ways to serve anybody beyond the wealthy few. And Linda McQuaig also weighs in on the disproportionate growth of concentrated wealth:

Even Republican President Theodore Roosevelt argued in 1906 that the U.S. should place "a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate."

The slashing of those high tax rates in recent decades has contributed greatly, Piketty notes, to today's return to inequality.

Piketty also dispels the notion that today's fortunes are the result of talent, noting that 60 to 70 per cent of them are due to inherited wealth, and that we're on track to return to a world -- like late 19th-century Europe -- dominated by inherited wealth.

Stephen Harper is no doubt hoping we'll be distracted by sports, and by reports we're doing about as well as middle-class Americans, who've been crushed by the brutal, ongoing, Wall-Street-induced recession.

Meanwhile, an immensely rich and powerful class right here in Canada is quietly amassing ever greater wealth and power to hand down to their heirs, who will be still richer and more powerful. But, go Habs, go! Why would we care? 

- Joseph Heath writes about the apples-to-oranges comparison between defined-benefit pensions like the CPP which offer retirement security to all workers included in their scope, and the Cons' preferred message that retirees can expect not a dime more than they can buy through an individual annuity.

- And Danielle Martin, while pointing out that there's reason for pride in Canada's universal health care system, also highlights the room for improvement in our health policy:

I see three big ideas out there that could raise the bar for the health of Canadians in the next decade.

The first is to improve access to prescription medications. Public insurance, either provincial or national, should cover the 20 most effective medications for chronic disease for every single Canadian. If we purchased those 20 drugs in bulk for the whole country and bargained effectively on the price we pay, we could put this program in place without spending a single penny more of public money than we already spend.

The second big idea flows from a campaign called Choosing Wisely. It taps into the reality that today’s health care consumers are increasingly well prepared to have conversations about the risks of tests and treatments. Too many Canadians are harmed every year by inappropriate, wasteful and often harmful tests and prescriptions. Radiologists agree, for example, that 30 per cent of CT scans are unnecessary, and these scans involve radiation. And do we really need to be taking 80 per cent more drugs than we did 10 years ago? It’s time to challenge the belief that more is always better when it comes to health care, and start a conversation between patients and health care providers that is more honest about what good research tells us are the risks and benefits of our interventions.

Third, we need to acknowledge that health is about more than just health care. Rather than spending more and more at the repair shop, we need to attack the causes of ill health. Income is the most important predictor of health: the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have negative health outcomes. The Guaranteed Annual Income, a simple and powerful concept that is supported both by local and international evidence, could dramatically improve the health of all Canadians by reducing poverty.

- Finally, Don Lenihan discusses the stark distinction between academic and political commentary. But it's well worth using his analysis as a starting point to discuss how political can be made less war-like, and more open to actual discussion of public policy choices.

New column day

Here, on the conflict between Canadian values including a reasonable quality of life and freedom from an employer's total control, and the explicitly anti-Canadian message of employers seeking to expand and exploit a temporary foreign worker underclass.

For further reading...
- Once again, Dan Kelly's comments were caught by PressProgress, while Geoff Leo reported on the TFW recruiter's advice to keep distance between workers and Canadian values. And Cathie beat me to the punch in raising the recruiter's contempt for anything Canadian.
- Tim Harper writes about the layers upon layers of problems with the temporary foreign worker program.
- Murray Mandryk highlights the lack of protection for TFWs even in enforcing what should be their legal rights.
- And the CP reports that even some of Stephen Harper's Conservative minions are rightly raising concerns.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Michael Hiltzik points out new research showing that business-focused policies do nothing at all to encourage any positive economic outcomes: in fact, a higher rating from ALEC for low-tax, low-regulation government correlates to less economic growth. But Kevin Drum highlights what the corporate agenda is really intended to accomplish:

(A)lthough a high ALEC-Laffer ranking may not stimulate any actual growth,...it does correspond to reduced taxes on the wealthy and slashed spending on state services that benefit the poor and working class. In other words, it may not affect growth, but it sure is a good deal for the rich. And that's what counts, isn't it?

- Meanwhile, the corporate lobby seems to have long since decided that truth and falsehood are irrelevant as long as one can afford to drown out competing voices. On that front, Donald Gutstein discusses how former tobacco shills are now being funded by the Fraser Institute to shout down any effort to encourage healthy eating and combat obesity - and receiving nothing but free, unquestioning publicity from the media for their efforts. Similarly, Barrie McKenna dutifully transcribes the request of the big three telecoms to avoid the type of competition which provides consumers with a fair deal in selecting phone and wireless service.

- Fortunately, at least one media outlet is a bit more questioning of corporate choices, as CBC's Don Pittis lists a few of the reasons why business interests are standing in the way of meaningful action on climate change.

- Richard Eskow wonders why more political voices aren't fighting to protect public services and the workers who provide them:

The facts are these: Given the growth of the population, stagnating wages, persistent long-term unemployment, and a host of other factors, we should be adding twice as many jobs per month as we are currently seeing. Instead, government – the one area of our economic life over which politicians have direct control – is shedding jobs instead of adding them. This worsens the overall economy while depriving the public of much-needed government services.

What’s more, the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that it will take $3.6 trillion to restore our nation’s infrastructure. We need the jobs, and the infrastructure needs repair. The president and his party should be hammering the message home every day: we need government jobs, and we need them now.

President Obama should be fighting to preserve current public-sector jobs and create new ones. Instead he’s given to repeatedly boasting, as he does in his latest budget proposal, about the fact that under his proposal “discretionary spending will fall to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years.”

That’s nothing to brag about – and it’s the wrong message at the wrong time.

- Carol Goar writes that a higher-cost, lower-service Canada Post is receiving a chilly reception from businesses and citizens alike - again raising the question of why the Cons insisted on that approach rather than allowing a postal bank to provide more for less.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne writes that debates should be given a far more prominent - and legally-entrenched - place in election campaigns.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Jim Stanford writes that Tim Hudak's combination of austerity and indiscriminate tax slashing represents a recipe for less jobs rather than more:

Mr. Hudak’s initial policy agenda is mostly a recycled business wish list: cut taxes, cut regulations, pay for training, cut energy costs, free trade.  Its logic is 100% trickle-down economics: anything that’s good for business, must be good for jobs and for all of society.  There is no powerful stimulative or expansionary impetus coming from any of those 5 proposals (unlike some other policies being debated in this election, like infrastructure investments and transit programs, which have a logical and direct connection to employment).  And whatever positive employment gains were generated by any of those five measures would be massively swamped by the negative side-effects of the severe fiscal contraction required to achieve Mr. Hudak’s “biggest” job-creating goal: namely, simply balancing the budget.

There is a way in which balanced budgets and job-creation are logically connected — but the direction of causation is exactly the opposite of Mr. Hudak’s argument.  Ontario’s deficit today is overwhelmingly due to the downturn in employment that accompanied the 2008-09 financial crash and recession — recovery from which has been painfully slow and inadequate.  (Remember, for several years before the recession hit, Ontario’s budget was balanced.)  Restoring the employment rate to its 2008 level would mean 250,000 more jobs, and generate billions in additional revenues (through personal income taxes, HST revenues, growing spending, and other streams).  The deficit will take care of itself, if and when we put Ontarians back to work.

- Alex Boutilier reports on the Cons' latest laughable claim to secrecy - this time claiming cabinet confidence to withhold information about pensions from the Auditor General. And Larry Pynn highlights the frustration of one mayor with the Cons' insistence on providing total secrecy to shippers of dangerous goods - even as against the public who could be left with no warning of a potential disaster. 

- David Dayen responds to baseless criticisms of Seattle's new $15 minimum wage, while pointing out that the minimum should properly reflect a living wage. And Iglika Ivanova examines the need for a living wage to help combat child poverty in Vancouver.

- Sid Ryan discusses the role of unions in ensuring that the benefits of growth are shared across the population as a whole, while pointing out a few areas demanding immediate attention.

- Finally, Frances Russell argues that the Chief Justice of Canada was bound to make Stephen Harper's public enemies list at some point, while Jeffrey Simpson still sees the attack as a new low. And the CP reports on another case which figures to bring the judicial system into the Cons' cross-hairs, as the Ontario Superior Court has restored the constitutional right to vote to a million Canadians living abroad who were stripped of their say by the Harper government.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Covered cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Polly Toynbee writes about the continued spread of privatization based solely on corporatist dogma even in the face of obvious examples of its harm to the public:

In the Royal Mail debacle, shares sold at £1.7bn rose to £2.7bn. The 16 investors chosen as "long-term" custodians included the most wolfish hedge funds, who sold the shares at once. Let's hope that ends any pretence that shareholders look after companies. What's more, the investment arm of Lazards, key adviser to Vince Cable, was also given "priority" status. But Lazard Asset Management sold its entire stake within a week at a profit of £8m. Likewise Goldman Sachs, employed to facilitate the sale, told its investors share prices would hit 610p a month after advising the government to float at 330p. How well these companies deserved their tongue-lashing from Margaret Hodge: "You all know each other. You work together. You trade with each other. You are part of this little clique and we the ordinary taxpayer lose out on it." This is a case of caveat vendor.

We should beware the inherent asymmetry when the state sells contracts and assets. On the government side, this is negotiating with a political gun at the head, conducted by inexperienced civil servants told to secure complex objectives, unable to walk away from already announced sell-offs. On the market side is rat-like native cunning impelled by profit, willingness to give mendacious assurances with one easy objective – to make money. Governments will always need to deal with markets for procurement and regulation – but that needs a strong, experienced civil service with equal cunning, not one cut by 30%, losing memory of past errors.
...
There is no evidence about how well contracting and privatising work: the best experts can find is 1980s assessments of early contracts for simple local services. At the very least, there should always be a state comparator. NHS contracting is galloping ahead, with no centrally gathered monitoring for comparison. Other privatisations rush on – probation and the court fines collection service – while companies built by cashing in from the state, such as G4S, A4E and Serco, are in disgrace. While Serco is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office after overcharging on tagging, it emerges that its finance director sold £2.7m shares two months before the share price tanked on a profits warning.

This is the world David Cameron assumes always does better than public service, as a matter of unproven conviction. Laying out his Open Public Services policy, he said everything was up for sale, with "a new presumption" that "public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service". When he said: "The old narrow, closed state monopoly is dead," he forgot to say that services sold or contracted would become private monopolies making handsome profits at our expense. The dogma driving these privatisations wilfully ignores past experience.

- David Dayen contrasts the IRS' public message about cracking down on tax cheats against its actions in giving tax evaders two more years to keep free-riding.

- Amber Hildebrandt discusses how Canadian employers became addicted to temporary foreign workers - though as Tim Harper notes, the Cons' consistent pushing of cheap labour at the expense of Canadian youth has played a major role. And Mike Moffatt wonders why there's been an explosion of temporary foreign workers in southwestern Ontario (among other regions with plenty of available workers).

- Diana Ziomislic reports on the manifestation of inequality through differences in Ontario children's dental health - while pointing out that a universal dental care system would represent an obvious means of closing that particular health gap.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne muses about Stephen Harper's degeneration and lack of impulse control - visible most recently in his choice to gratuitously pick a fight with Chief Justice of Canada Beverley McLachlin. But Lawrence Martin observes that there's nothing new either in Harper focusing maniacally on his enemies list, and including public servants on that list for absolutely no justifiable reason:

(T)hese Conservatives constitute what might be called Ottawa’s first real wedge government. Other governments, including Tory ones, have sought to be more representative. With this one, it’s divide and conquer. It’s less about broadening the tent than hardening the attitudes of those within. Others are seen as enemies at the gate.

But the antagonism is fuelled by more than strategic political imperatives. I recall interviewing David Emerson, who had a unique perspective because he served in both the cabinets of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper. There were things he preferred about the Harper operation. But one difference that alarmed Mr. Emerson was the degree of visceral contempt he saw from Mr. Harper and his top lieutenants toward those opposed to their beliefs. He’d never seen anything like it. How could they harbour, he wondered, so much venom?

The combination – a wedge government driven by such a degree of animosity – makes for a potent mix. It’s why the enemies list has kept growing. It’s why a woman as honourable as the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court is now on it.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- David Atkins highlights how public policy and corporate strategy have both instead been directed toward squeezing every possible dime out of the public:

The less noticed but potentially more consequential way that policymakers across the industrialized world set about accomplishing this goal was to push their middle classes to invest their wealth into assets, especially stocks and real estate, then use the levers of public policy to inflate the values of those assets in order to disguise the inevitable declines in wages. There was also a concerted effort to hide wage losses by lowering the prices of non-perishable goods — even if doing so meant domestic job losses. These goals were accomplished in several ways...

All of these moves toward increasing the value of assets do directly benefit the wealthy. But more important, they have served to create a more purely capitalist society, hide the decline of the middle class and mitigate public discontent over stagnant wages. There are many problems with this, of course. The first is that the vast preponderance of wealth will accrue to the very top incomes in an economy where assets inflate while wages deflate. The second is that a purely asset-based economy is bubble-prone, deeply unstable and given to sharp and painful boom-bust cycles. The story of the last half-decade is in part the removal of the blindfold that has been hiding wage losses over the last half-century. Housing prices have skyrocketed beyond the ability of most people under 40 to afford, even as household debt nears record highs. Nearly half of Americans have no retirement savings at all, while much of the rest of the developed world faces a pension obligation crisis. 

The tools policymakers have used to distract the public from the raw deal of low wages are no longer working. And that may more than anything else help usher in a new era of populist progressivism in the U.S. — if, that is, the Democratic Party can shift itself away from reinforcing the asset-based economy toward rebuilding a sustainable model that encourages wage growth and a strong labor market.

- Of course, that proposed theme is utterly antithetical to the Cons and their corporate benefactors. Which means it's no surprise they're continuing to defend - and indeed try to further push - the temporary foreign worker model in the face of more and more stories of abuse.

On that front, Geoff Leo reports on a TFW broker's advice to employers that it use the threat of deportation to prevent new workers from developing expectations that they might be allowed to have some life outside of work; Kathy Tomlinson finds workers being subjected to death threats and coercion while effectively trapped in indentured servitude; and Claire Brownell exposes the use of the TWFP to create a massive, underground migrant economy in agricultural workers. But I'm sure the CFIB will be happy to tell us the real problem is that Canadian workers aren't willing to accept that type of abuse for themselves.

- Jacob Soll notes that a propensity to destroy impartial oversight (in the form of reliable and well-resourced auditing) is equally obvious in the U.S.' corporate and government establishments. And Jared Milne points out that there's plenty of reason for concern about the Cons' fiscal mismanagement even based on what's been revealed publicly.

- Michael Harris discusses Stephen Harper's attacks on the Supreme Court as just the latest example of a government bent on eliminating any possible checks on absolute power:

The train wreck of the Harper government continues to roll down the mountainside, crushing body after body, yet no one utters the right word. Allow me. Canada is a dictatorship in the making.

Did you ever know a person who just kept taking more and more from a relationship until you had to draw a line? A person for whom there are no rules, just a bottomless appetite to have it all their own way?

If so, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I give you our prime minister — a man who needs to be stopped before he starts appearing on the money. Either that, or we all better practise the curtsey.

- Finally, Stephen Maher weighs in on the Cons' continued refusal to do anything about the 1,186 missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada. 

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- D.L. Tice writes that it's becoming more and more difficult for the right to ignore the spread of income inequality - and the reality that only public policy, not faith in the market, can produce a more fair distribution of income. Which is particularly important in light of Doyle McManus' recognition that an overly high level of inequality is unsustainable.

- Simon Kiss and Peter Graefe discuss the connection - and in some cases the tension - between populism and progressive values:

Left populist campaigning around cost-of-living issues on significant non-discretionary (at least in the short-term) expenses like heating and auto insurance provide a way to speak to these voters. Yet this kind of pocketbook politicking, for all of its populist potential in taking on insurance companies and big natural resources firms, remains profoundly individualist in its potentials.  It closes down spaces to make a more collective argument, namely that paying for public services through taxes is the best deal going for working people. 

This presents a deep challenge for social democrats, who, at their core, are marked by their commitment to the notion that the state can be – and ought to be – a solution to pressing social problems, rather than being a source of problems.  This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for social democrats. On the one hand, tax increases on privileged groups can easily fit with a populist rhetoric.  This might be electorally viable and might even make fiscal sense and create the opening for Canadian social democracy to advance, rather than stand still. On the other hand, an argument for tax increases on the citizenry as a whole in order to finance public services for the citizenry is the opposite of populism. It caters to enlightened – not narrow – self-interest and avoids catering to desires for punishment of the enemies of the undivided “people”. 

- Lana Payne observes that the widespread abuse of temporary foreign workers shoud come as no surprise to anybody who's paid attention to the issue, while Michael Smyth tells the story of the 21-year-old whistleblower who exposed McDonalds' misuse of the program. Ishmael Daro notes that the exploitation of temporary workers represents just a small part of a meaner immigration policy. And Rick Salutin writes that the use of TFWs only serves to make matters worse for workers of any point of origin.

- Jesse Brown muses about the relative lack of outrage against online surveillance in Canada, while pointing out that the answer likely lies in what we don't yet know:

America’s outcry over the NSA’s overreach occurred in response to specific revelations. In Canada, we still don’t have the foggiest notion about the nature or extent of the surveillance state — we just know that we are, to some extent, living in one. Canadians have been criticized for not taking action against these intrusions. But how could we when we know so little?

Still, Canadians haven’t been totally complacent. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has been monitoring and reporting on information about CSEC as it breaks. The intrepid Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has attacked the problem from a different angle, demanding answers from Rogers, Telus, Bell and 16 other telecommunications companies as to what information they share with authorities and under what circumstances. Meanwhile, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has launched a class-action lawsuit against CSEC, on behalf of every Canadian who has used a wireless device since 2001. The idea is, if CSEC has not been spying on all of us, let them prove it.

If authorities refuse to answer reasonable questions based on legitimate concerns, we mustn’t stop there. We can go around CSEC and its masters, we can remind them constantly that they owe the public answers, and we can make ourselves available to anyone out there who, like Edward Snowden, possesses information that their consciences won’t allow them to conceal.

- And finally, Daniel Wilson notes that the Cons' cynical education legislation looks like just the latest example of a hostile federal government seeking to divide and conquer Canada's First Nations.

Musical interlude

Andain - Turn Up the Sound (Zetandel Mix)

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Linda McQuaig discusses how the interests of big banks ended the Cons' willingness to consider postal banking which would produce both better service and more profits for the public:

(C)ompetition is the last thing the banks want. And given their power (straddling the very heart of the Canadian establishment) and their wealth (record profits last year topping $30 billion), the banks tend to get what they want from the Harper government.

This could explain the government’s otherwise baffling decision last fall to reject an option that would have allowed a serious competitor to enter the banking sector, offering financial services to hundreds of thousands of Canadians who currently lack a bank account and often end up paying triple-digit interest rates to payday lenders (otherwise known as loan sharks).

Canada Post had put together a lengthy file supporting the case for “postal banking.” Under such a scheme, Canada Post would offer banking services through its 6,400 postal outlets — stepping into the vacuum left after the big banks closed more than 1,700 branches across the country in the last two decades, leaving hundreds of rural and remote communities without a bank.

What’s more, by entering the lucrative field of financial services, the publicly-owned postal service could have earned significant profits. A management report done for Canada Post concluded that postal banking was a “win-win” strategy.

...

The Harper government’s resistance to the idea is at least partly ideological. Postal banking would essentially create a public banking system — something that would be repugnant to hard-right Conservatives who have spent years dismantling Canada’s public systems and turning them over to the private sector.

- Meanwhile, the Winnipeg Free Press concludes that the CPP represents by far the best option to offer Canadians improved income security in retirement. Which naturally means that the Cons are instead planning to demolish any form of defined-benefit plan, to be replaced by more risky plans intended to be run - and exploited - by the private sector.

- Mathew Paterson debunks the Fraser Institute's sad attempt to pretend that unregulated corporate dominance is anything but a disaster for the environment. And Andrew Flowers tests the business lobby's attempts to demonize unions in the name of "competition" - and finds that countries with greater union density are actually better placed to compete internationally.

- Frances Russell laments how even Canada's elections rules (along with budgets and other policy decisions) are being developed based solely on the Cons' partisan calculations. And Althia Raj points out that the Unfair Elections Act is designed to give special advantages to wealthier candidates.

- Finally, Carol Goar discusses the total lack of accountability or morality among Canada's right-wing political leaders - and recognizes what's needed to end the culture of cult conservatism:

There is nothing new about scandal in Canadians politics. History is replete with tales of ministers on the take, greedy public officials and corrupt mayors.

What has changed is that wrongdoers are no longer required — or even expected — to take responsibility for their actions. They don’t offer to resign. They don’t acknowledge they forfeited the confidence of the public. What they do instead is lash out at the government watchdogs who caught them, the journalists who exposed their malfeasance and the judges who applied the brakes.

To maintain this state of affairs, three conditions are necessary:

The first is an unprecedented level of secrecy or obfuscation by public officials.

The second is a sizable bloc of voters that can be counted on to support a besmirched leader no matter what he or she does.

The third is an electorate so unconcerned — or jaded — that it does nothing.

All three of these conditions currently exist in Canada; not in every jurisdiction but in several of the most prominent centres of government.

The antidote to what ails the body politic is obvious: eradicate the conditions that allow it to thrive.

Demand straight answers from those who are paid to serve the public and make it clear their jobs are on the line. Summon up the will to outvote the “bedrock supporters” who keep discredited politicians in power. Care a little more about Canada.

New column day

Here, on how Canada's telecommunication providers and government agencies are each showing next to no regard for the privacy of consumers - and how the Cons want to make matters worse by allowing for far more sharing within the corporate sector.

For further reading...
- Again, reporting on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's investigation can be found here and here, with the response from the telecoms available in PDF here.
- Bruce Schneier discusses the U.S.' plan to privatize the surveillance state here.
- Finally, the Cons' amendments to the federal private-sector privacy legislation are here. Of particular note, see section 6(10) which significantly expands the scope of permitted disclosure for the purpose of commercial investigations.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Crawford Kilian discusses the growing influence of Thomas Piketty's observations about wealth inequality and the unfairness of a system which inherently perpetuates privilege:

What I take away is this: We are playing in a rigged game. The deck has always been stacked against us, and against our parents and grandparents, world without end. Why? Return on investment has always been higher than economic growth, and you can live well on just a fraction of that return while saving the rest for your offspring to inherit. They in turn will build the family wealth still more, Piketty explains. This is patrimonial capitalism, and it has nothing to do with education, skill or hard work -- only with whose legs you happen to have been born between.

For the bottom half of the population, he writes, "The very notions of wealth and capital are relatively abstract. For millions of people, 'wealth' amounts to little more than a few weeks' wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence."
...
Piketty sees a possible alternative: a worldwide universal, progressive tax regime. It would have to be worldwide to prevent the megarich from squirrelling their money away in the Cayman Islands or some other tax haven. (He suspects a lot more has already been hidden than anyone realizes.) This taxation wouldn't impoverish the one per cent, but it would give governments a better sense of just how rich everyone is -- and isn't. He suggests such a tax regime could begin regionally and eventually spread worldwide.

But that's just one economist's opinion. The rest of us, finally armed with Piketty's data, need to start debating what to do about the rich and the poor. We don't want a war to equalize matters, and revolutions tend to end badly.

But we need to make the one per cent understand that every dollar, pound and euro they make ultimately comes from the elaborate infrastructure the rest of us have created. They only exploit it. They are not the job creators; we are the wealth creators. They have no more right to a free lunch than we do, and high incomes warrant high taxes.

- Meanwhile, Tavia Grant reports on the OECD's finding that Canada is seeing income inequality spread even more quickly than other developed countries. Which means that there's a particularly obvious need for a policy response at home, while working out our options within the international community to address the global concentration of wealth and the abuse of tax havens.

- But of course, the Cons are more interested in exploring ever more exploitative practices to be inflicted on workers in Canada - such as the indentured servitude of temporary foreign workers examined by Andrew Stevens. And so Robyn Benson is right to note that there's reason for younger workers to worry about their future (while hopefully taking action to change it for the better):

Employer demands for a two-tier wage system is a fact of life in the present economy, condemning younger workers to a permanent low-wage existence. And abuses in the Temporary Foreign Workers program make even McJobs far less available to them. The Harper government’s expressions of shock when the abuses at come to light doesn’t hide the fact that it issued the permits in the first place—or that 75% of all new jobs over the past few years have gone to imported temporary workers.

Overall, workers in the 15-24 age group are facing high levels of unemployment, and employment prospects are getting worse. Despite popular accusations of “entitlement,” many young people have taken years to train for careers, and have the degrees to prove it, but now find themselves in low-skilled jobs because better work simply isn’t available.

It’s no surprise that many of these bright millennials are turning to unionization as a solution to the low-wage trap they have found themselves in. This is “bottom-up” pressure that is bound to pay dividends now and in the future for the workers who engage in it, and for society as a whole. Higher rates of unionization mean better, more secure employment, and the possibility of facing the future with confidence.

What is also badly needed in Canada, however—and what the new generation of workers isn’t getting from the present government—is a national jobs strategy that actually creates opportunities for young people to put their training, skills and intelligence to good use, in productive careers. Everyone would benefit from that, no matter what generation they are. But our youth, it seems, have a long way to go before that Spring arrives.

- PressProgress exposes Kinder Morgan's stunning argument that its pipeline expansion should be allowed in part because of the benefits of oil spills in creating cleanup work. Charles Pierce discusses the environmental devastation caused by unfettered tar sands development. And Mychaylo Prystupa takes a look behind one of the most prominent B.C. astroturf groups pushing for handouts to the resource sector at the expense of the environment and the rest of the population.

- Finally, Alice Funke offers a useful primer as to the nomination processes in Canada's federal political parties.

Wednesday Night Cat Blogging

Passed-out cats.

On skewed perspectives

Shorter anonymous Conservative MP:

Of course we want nothing more than fairness out of Canada's electoral oversight bodies. And by that, we of course mean they should stop damaging our party's cause with this annoying habit of investigating Conservative wrongdoing.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Andrew Jackson reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, while Paul Mason offers a useful summary. And David Atkins applies its most important lesson in response to some typical right-wing spin prioritizing assets over incomes:

(I)nstead of doing something about radical inequality, the new neoliberal answer is to give the 44% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck more savings vehicles and incentives to stash away money to pay for those increasingly impossibly high mortgage and tuition costs.

As the inequality problem becomes more and more severe and as Piketty's arguments gain increasing influence, look for all the neoliberal asset addicts to make ever more preposterous arguments to defend incentivizing boosting assets over boosting wages.

It's all they know, and doing anything else would turn their worlds inside-out and hurt all their very asset-heavy bank accounts.

- Meanwhile, David Dayen calls out the financial sector's attempt to start up another mortgage securitization scheme comparable to the one which caused the 2008 economic meltdown - this time taking all the profits for themselves while enjoying a direct government bailout mechanism.

- Josh Eidelson discusses how the U.S.' laws are set up to squelch any effort to organize workers - with ineffective protection for organization to address wages and working conditions, and none whatsoever for any other type of activity. But Marc Ames discusses how corporate collusion to drive down wages is all too often met with no significant consequences - with Silicon Valley serving as the latest example.

- Paul McLeod reports on the stunning number of requests for Canadians' personal information from telecoms, and I'm not sure which is more appalling: the 1,194,000 requests made annually, or the fact that such indiscriminate requests are being granted the majority of the time (with 785,000 individuals' information disclosed). And the CP follows up to point out that even those numbers only scratch the surface of what's being disclosed behind the scenes.

- Finally, Jim Stanford writes that the Cons' grudging movement to address the abuse of temporary foreign workers may have arisen out of a fault line within their party:

For sure, evidence had been mounting for years that the program was out of control. Migrant employment rose 140 per cent between 2005 and 2012. One in every five net new paid jobs created in Canada between 2007 and 2012 was filled by a migrant worker – a startling reliance on what was supposed to be a “last resort” program. Even the business-friendly C.D. Howe Institute confirmed that the program has pushed up unemployment, including in Alberta.

But this evidence has been around for years, as have anecdotes about employers hiring migrants to do jobs Canadians are clearly capable of filling. The hospitality sector alone had 45,000 guest workers on the roll by 2012, with migrants capturing 40 per cent of net new positions since 2009. How many jobs are there in hotels and restaurants that Canadians truly cannot perform? Almost none – and the government has always known that.
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Many middle-class Canadians know their children need fast-food jobs, given the lousy state of the youth job market. To have even those jobs placed out of reach by an immigration strategy aimed explicitly at suppressing wages fuels resentment that transcends party lines. That’s what the Conservatives sensed, and so Mr. Kenney acted.
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Of course, there is a principled solution to Mr. Kenney’s TFW dilemma, advocated nicely in a recent column by The Globe’s Doug Saunders: Increase permanent immigration and give these workers the same rights the rest of us enjoy. But that wouldn’t win favour from either of the two constituencies worried about here: business lobbyists who want cheap labour and social conservatives who want less immigration. Which is why it won’t happen.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Joshua Holland writes that for all the social and cultural factors contribution to U.S. sickness and death, inequality ranks at the top of the list:

Here in the United States, our high level of income inequality corresponds with 883, 914 unnecessary deaths each year. More specifically, the report concluded that if we had an income distribution more like that of the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland — or eleven other wealthy countries — every year, about one in three deaths in the US could be avoided.

Put that into perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tobacco, including second-hand smoke, causes approximately 480,000 deaths every year, and in 2010, traffic accidents killed 33,687 people and 31,672 others died of gunshot wounds.

The mechanism by which a bullet or a car crash kills is readily apparent. Inequality is lethal in ways that are less obvious. It’s a silent killer – a deadly plague that we, as a society, tend not to acknowledge.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman highlights the important questions receiving renewed attention as a result of Thomas Piketty's work - along with the reasons why the corporate right doesn't want to see them discussed:

For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”

But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?

What Mr. Piketty shows is that these are not idle questions. Western societies before World War I were indeed dominated by an oligarchy of inherited wealth — and his book makes a compelling case that we’re well on our way back toward that state.

- Canadians for Tax Fairness comments on the connection between the Senate's corporate links and the preferential tax treatment of stock options.

- Mike Moffatt writes about the devastating effect of long-term unemployment on future hiring - and how that reality means it's futile to punish the long-term unemployed by cutting off benefits. But it's worth noting that rushing people back to whatever work is immediately available isn't necessarily the only available response - and I'd be particularly curious whether employer prejudice against applicants who have been out of the workforce can be addressed as a problem in and of itself, rather than being taken as an unchangeable assumption.

- Finally, Laura Beaulne-Stuebing reports on the role of social media activity in drawing attention to - and ultimately changing - the Unfair Elections Act.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb comment on the dangers of failing to talk about taxes:

The tax debate is often muddied by disagreement about whether taxes have actually gone up or down. As the economy grows, so too do tax revenues and spending, which is why many (though not all) prefer to measure tax as a percentage of the economy (GDP). The only good data on this come from StatsCan in a survey discontinued in 2008. These numbers show a decline in the scale of tax and spending over the last several decades, as do international comparisons. And using the federal government’s own projections, the scale of federal tax and spending will, over the next years, fall to lows not seen for seven decades.

Whether we’re taxed too much or too little is a perennial debate that now needs rebalancing. It’s all well and good to say that many Canadians want smaller government but that means nothing unless it’s based on some understanding of how this will affect our ability to pursue our shared goals. We ought to know what we’re giving up before we celebrate the next round of tax cuts.

It’s time we restored the tax debate to its rightful place within a larger conversation, which has all but vanished, about the kind of country we want and are willing to pay for.

- Marc Taliano writes that rather than solving any problems arising out of limited public resources, privatization only exacerbates the problem of public dollars being diverted to corporate purposes. And Paul Krugman notes that Cliven Bundy represents a perfect example of an anti-social businessman portraying himself as an individualist while blatantly stealing public resources.

- Marc Zwelling points out the challenge facing progressive voices in discussing poverty, as the general public is willing to respond to the issue when prompted while having little history of considering it as a top-of-mind concern.

- Lawrence Martin responds to the commentators who have tried to treat the failed Elections Canada investigation into Robocon as a retroactive basis to question whether electoral fraud should have been covered in the media. And Michael Harris sees Robocon as the sign of a democracy in decay based on the near-impossibility of holding fraudsters accountable:

What Yves Cote’s report really means is that not all elements of an offence under the Elections Act as written could be established. A big part of the reason for that is the weak investigative powers of the Commissioner rather than a shortage of skullduggery.

It really comes down to the fact that the Elections Canada Act is like a worn out pair of your grannie’s lace-ups. The commissioner can’t compel evidence, and persons of interest can decline to be interviewed by EC investigators. Cote noted that “In one instance, a person who investigators believed could have provided very relevant information declined to be interviewed.”

Many others in this investigation did the same thing. And apparently there is no such thing as attempted voter suppression. Unless a voter is actually prevented from voting, there is no offence. And that’s not all. If incorrect poll information is given out and a citizen wants to pursue a complaint it is “not sufficient to simply prove the content of the call and the identity of the caller.” It is also necessary to prove the call was made with the intention of preventing an elector from voting. The burden of proof, “is the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Believe it or not, the same burden of proof applies to harassing calls: “To transmit false or mistaken information without the requisite intent, however objectionable it may be, is not, in itself, an offence under the Act,” Cote reports.

Think about that for a moment. Without the element of mens rea or guilty mind, a rogue robocaller is not breaking the law merely by misdirecting voters to the wrong poll. In order for an offence to take place, there are two additional requirements. The voter must prove as a result of the call, he didn’t vote; and investigators have to be satisfied that the robocaller intended his misinformation to stop the person from voting.

You see why the jails will not soon be filled with cheating robocallers. Why else would a robocaller send a person to the wrong poll — to introduce him to a part of town he’s never seen before?

- Finally, Susan Delacourt nicely highlights what a tax return would look like if delivered in the same form as one of the Cons' spin-heavy, fact-free budgets.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Joe Conason discusses the increasingly widespread recognition that inequality represents a barrier to growth. And Heidi Moore takes a look at Thomas Piketty's place in making that point:

This is a deep point. Many American households, if they are lucky, will grow their wealth at the same rate as the economy. But, because the wealthy are growing their fortunes at a much faster rate, no one else can ever catch up.

Let's repeat that: no one else can ever catch up.

This is where Piketty adds more nuance: it's not just inequality of wealth and income that we're struggling with, but inequality of opportunity. That's of far more concern. In essence, he is saying, we're lying to ourselves if we believe that hard work will lead to wealth. Mainly, wealth reliably leads to wealth. Everything else is chancy. The middle class is playing the economic lottery to improve their lot in life, while the wealthy have a sure thing.

- Ian Welsh nicely sums up what level of profit we should expect out a functional market economy. (Handy hint: it isn't "every dime that can be squeezed out of a powerless workforce".)

Sustained high profits, in free market economics, are considered the sign of an uncompetitive market.  ...[If] an industry or business makes high profits regularly, and certainly if they do so for more than a decade or so, the market is not competitive.

The response to that should be political: either make the market competitive, or if it’s the sort of market which can’t be or is too much trouble to be made competitive (most utilities, if you’re sane; certainly utility distribution; any insurance required of almost anyone; roads, etc…) then either make them government run, or heavily regulate them.
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The general level of profits in a society should, actually, be pretty low.  5% plus inflation is a good level to aim for.  If high profits are available in parts of the economy, every other business gets starved for cash, as money runs to the high profits.  Economics says that those opportunities should run out and there should be a regression to the mean, but in oligopolistic economies with strong protected works and vast amounts of government corruption, that doesn’t happen—until there is a crash, at which point the most profitable businesses are bailed out, because they used their profits to buy government.

Individual businesses want high profits, but societies want low profits, and should view sustained high profits as a sign of economic illness which requires intervention.

- Joseph Heath duly criticizes Gary Mason's unusually-explicit call to drive down wages in the name of greater corporate profits:

Mason circles around this point:

A weakening Canadian dollar is helping to offset our competitive disadvantage with the United States and others, to some degree, but it doesn’t look to be a long-term answer. And we know wage cuts aren’t likely to happen.

Notice the wistful tone in that last sentence. What he’d really like to see is everyone’s wages go down, but apparently that’s not realistic. I guess we can put that down to the unreasonableness of the working classes, unwilling to sacrifice their standard of living in the interests of securing… a higher standard of living. And why isn’t a weakening Canadian dollar a long-term answer? Depends what you think the problem is. If it’s correcting a balance of trade issue, then yes it is an answer. But if the “problem” is that our standard of living is too high, as Mason seems to think, then he’s right, a weakening Canadian dollar will not lead to a permanent reduction in national income. The fact that he, and the various business leaders he cites, regard this as a problem, suggests that they are either deeply confused, or else they harbour a fundamentally malevolent attitude toward the mass of the population.

- In case there was any doubt that the corporate lobby is firmly in the latter column, Cliff and Stephen Maher both discuss the abuse of the temporary foreign worker program to attack wages and working conditions for Canadian and immigrant workers alike. And the Alberta Federation of Labour looks in detail at the massive numbers of employers misusing the program.

- Finally, Wendy Gillis reports on Canada's increasingly-embarrassing (and damaging) obstruction of access to information.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Edward Greenspon's report on the Keystone XL review process is well worth a read - particularly in exposing how the Harper Cons have handled their U.S. relations (along with many other policy areas) based on the presumption that nobody will ever see fit to consider the environmental costs of maximizing oil exploitation. And on that front, Andrew Leach highlights how Ottawa and Edmonton alike have assumed they can get away with paying lip service to climate change - even as the Obama administration has rightly recognized it as a top priority.

- Stephen Hume is the latest to point out the hypocrisy of free-marketeers insisting that employers be provided with special privileges to import easily-exploited workers rather than paying market wages. And Doug Saunders recognizes that we should be encouraging long-term immigration rather than treating new arrivals as disposable labour.

- While I'd question Michael Laxer's view of a "progressive" orientation as the problem, he's absolutely right in recognizing the need for far stronger presentation of social democratic principles than we're accustomed to seeing on our political scene:

We are told, regularly, that one has to compromise to get elected. But these compromises always seem to be on "our" part and not the right's. The right is not compromising at all when it comes to economic principles.

But, more significantly, these compromises are always at the expense of those living in  poverty, those on social assistance, unions and public sector workers. Always. In other words, these "progressive" political compromises are a basic part of the attack on unions, public sector workers, those living in poverty and those on social assistance as they directly facilitate them.
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The progressive agenda in North America has become so insignificant in its aims that if it got any less so it would simply cease to be. There is nowhere for it to go that is anymore insignificant than it already is.

Are minimum-wage workers and those on social assistance going to be once more sacrificed on the alter of political expediency? Is their extreme need of solidarity to be forsaken yet again?

 - And if we needed more evidence as to how distorted our current political environment is, John Manley's latest pitch on behalf of the CCCE is asking the public to allow the corporate sector to keep evading taxes - even after its own numbers showed how little businesses are contributing to the public interest. And Quebec is the latest province to be confronted with demands that it sacrifice social programs on the altar of corporatist "seriousness" - with precisely zero consideration given to raising additional revenue as another means of balancing the budget.

- Finally, Alison discusses how the true foreign-funded operatives in Canada's political systems are Nigel Wright, Linda Frum and the rest of the Cons who were propped up by the U.S.' right-wing propaganda machine.