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By Greg Fingas, on June 14, 2013, at 10:02 am Assorted content for your Friday reading.
- Michael Harris tears into the Harper Cons for their compulsive dishonesty: Everything in the Westminster model under which we are supposed to operate depends on information, debate and verification — all of which are missing in ‘Harperland’, to use Lawrence Martin’s ringing coinage. Also missing is that high bar of behaviour known as being an “Honourable Gentleman”.
One of the few federal bureaucrats who stood up to Harper’s cult-conservatism was the lately-departed chief of the PBO, Kevin Page. He regularly challenged the phoney books and unsupported policy of this catch-us-if-you-can government — and (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on June 1, 2013, at 12:32 pm Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- David Cay Johnston and Miles Corak both discuss the results of a study which compares economic outcomes in technologically advanced countries, and shows that tax giveaways to the wealthy exacerbate inequality without doing anything at all to contribute to economic development.
- And Paul Krugman highlights the fact that all the evidence in the world won’t stop the Republicans from trying to take away what few supports are left in the U.S., with a particular focus on food stamps: Food stamps have played an especially useful — indeed, almost heroic — (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 29, 2013, at 9:45 am Assorted content to start your week.
- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the epidemic of wage theft by U.S. employers: Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 28, 2013, at 11:18 am Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.
- Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction – while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And Shaun Thomas discusses the no-knowledge zone set up around the Northern Gateway pipeline, as Nathan Cullen’s questions within the review process revealed that the federal government hadn’t so much as talked to First Nations or affected industries about the possible impact of an oil spill.
- But then, the Cons (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 28, 2013, at 11:18 am Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.
- Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction – while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And Shaun Thomas discusses the no-knowledge zone set up around the Northern Gateway pipeline, as Nathan Cullen’s questions within the review process revealed that the federal government hadn’t so much as talked to First Nations or affected industries about the possible impact of an oil spill.
- But then, the Cons (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 11, 2013, at 10:44 pm Assorted content to end your day.
- Carol Goar discusses how the Cons’ latest attacks on Employment Insurance add just one burden to the backs of workers who have already borne the brunt of decades of corporatist policy:
(L)ast Sunday, employment insurance benefits in two-thirds of the country were quietly reduced. Existing recipients were spared but new EI claimants — starting with the 54,500 workers who lost their jobs in March — will be subject to tougher rules. Most will get less support.
Generalizations are impossible. The impact on any person depends on his or her employment record, skills and
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
By Greg Fingas, on April 6, 2013, at 10:54 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- The Star makes the case for a serious crackdown on offshore tax avoidance: Thanks to a spectacular data leak Canadians are getting a glimpse into what some have dubbed the “black hole” of globalization: The $20 trillion or more in unreported income thought to be stashed in offshore tax havens by the world’s richest people to avoid taxes. It’s not a pretty sight.
At a time when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is struggling to eliminate a $26-billion deficit and when governments around the world are starved for resources, the seismic leak to
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on March 29, 2013, at 11:58 am Assorted content to end your week.
- While there’s room to question whether we should accept spending as self-definition in the first place, Zoe Williams is right to make the point that arbitrary restrictions on benefits serve to put yet more barriers to full social participation in front of the people who can least afford them: Replacing cash with vouchers has a number of damaging effects. First, it’s infantilising. Crisis loans delivered this way take on the shape of pocket money or charity. Second, it’s stigmatising, as asylum seekers on the Azure card often point out – people don’t want
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on March 25, 2013, at 10:07 am Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Tanya Gold discusses how the UK Cons – like other right-wing parties around the globe – are seeking to minimize the effectiveness of government by declaring that anybody who can benefit from social support is inherently undeserving: How many benefits have been unfairly removed or reduced? But there is meaning behind this farce; it was no mistake. This is a rehearsal for the future of the welfare state, as seen through Tory spectacles – they are resentful at paying for anything. Need is now irrelevant.
The PR for the project, enthusiastically pursued by
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 14, 2013, at 8:51 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Marc Lee and Iglika Ivanova offer up a framework for a more progressive and fairer tax system.
- Andrew Hanon looks behind the Fraser Institute’s labour-bashing and finds that what it’s really criticizing is fair pay for women in the public sector.
- Fern Brady notes that conservatives have succeeded in pitting exactly the people with the greatest need for social assistance against each other – with the result being that far too few people are questioning whether cuts serve any useful purpose in the first place: Logically, I’d expect those on
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 13, 2013, at 9:02 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Carol Goar discusses Canada’s broken fiscal stabilizers – as unemployment insurance and social programs intended to assure citizens of at least a reasonable standard of living have been cut to well below that level: Canada’s economic shock absorbers are badly worn.
Employment insurance, which once softened the blow of losing a job, has dwindled to the point that only a minority of the unemployed are eligible for benefits.
Welfare, which once prevented people from hitting rock bottom, now leaves recipients 60 per cent below the poverty line.
The income tax system has become
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 12, 2013, at 9:10 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Yves Engler discusses the importance of a “social wage” – and how the minimum standard of living we’re prepared to tolerate affects the well-being of all kinds of workers: These attacks against the poor and unemployed should be opposed by anyone who cares about their fellow human beings. But in addition to compassion, working people have another important reason to oppose these cuts to social benefits: a self-interest in maintaining the social wage.
Right-wing pundits often claim that welfare payments or unemployment benefits cost us all. And at one level it is
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 3, 2013, at 12:29 pm Assorted content for your Sunday reading.
- The Guardian discusses how the all-too-familiar trend of growing inequality and ever more precarious lives for all but the fabulously wealthy is unsustainable: While the debate in the UK is mostly focused on growth and how best to engender it, Reich explains in chilling detail why growth alone may not be enough. For too many, he explains, social mobility has begun to slide backwards. A small but growing band of global pirates – billionaires all, without allegiance to community or country, devoid of civic responsibility – accrue wealth from the continued immiseration of
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 30, 2013, at 12:26 pm Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Alison highlights the attempts of Sun TV to rally the most extreme reactionary movements in the country behind its bid for mandatory carriage. And the question of whether we want to publicly sanction a network beholden to such interest groups would seem to answer whether the application is justified.
- Paul Krugman comments that the Republicans’ attacks on disabled workers are both thoroughly contrary to any sense of fairness, and utterly useless in practice:
(W)hen Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 27, 2013, at 10:57 am This and that for your Sunday reading.
- James Galbraith compares the mindless drones carrying an increasing share of the U.S.’ military load, and those serving to try to attack social programs in the name of illusory deficit reduction. But sadly, Galbraith misses one of the most important similarities: in both cases, the use of replaceable machines for the task makes it far too easy to keep launching attacks even when reason would dictate otherwise.
- Meanwhile, Ivan Semeniuk reports on how poverty can influence childhood development. And Rob Carrick reports that lenders are finding ways to extract
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 23, 2013, at 8:30 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Erika Shaker rightly tears into the special brand of FAIPOF demanding that First Nations protesters focus solely on their own community leaders rather than recognizing broader and more systematic inequality: Much is being made of Chief Spence’s Escalade (although I’m unsure if she actually owns one or if it’s urban legend) to try and mock the principled stand she has taken to call attention to the shameful conditions in which so many Indigenous peoples live. Because apparently if she had figured out how to stretch those shamefully inadequate federal transfers instead of engaging
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 1, 2013, at 12:02 pm This and that to start the new year.
- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the dangers of needless means-testing for basic social benefits: When I spoke to Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed the idea that “means-testing is mean.” Programs like Medicare and Social Security, he explained, are matters of political economy. They are important to social cohesion, where support comes from the fact that everybody is participating. “We don’t means-test public education,” explained Stiglitz, “because we believe that we want people to have the same opportunities and we lose out on that with means-testing.” The same is true of our
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 21, 2012, at 8:50 am Assorted content to end your week.
- Jim Stanford is the latest to point out that the Cons see accountability and transparency solely as punishments to be inflicted on their perceived enemies, not as values to be applied to their own decision-making: Following Mr. Hiebert’s logic, any organization in society that benefits from a tax expenditure (no matter how indirect) should be required to post similarly detailed and intrusive financial and expenditure data on a government website. Here is the current listing of federal tax expenditures. Every organization connected to any expenditure listed in that catalogue (whether the personal, corporate,
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 17, 2012, at 8:19 am Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.
- While far too many in the media seem to have glossed over what the Cons’ attacks on votes in Parliament this fall actually meant, Mia Rabson nicely sums it up: (F)or the government to simply reject every single suggestion the opposition makes as an abuse of the process proves the government isn’t even pretending to listen to other ideas.
The idea that a majority government should be able to do away with votes simply because they know they can win is so contrary to the principles of how a government is supposed
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on December 15, 2012, at 9:28 am Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.
- Susan Delacourt writes that laughable conspiracy theories look to be the Cons’ stock in trade as they fight against any accountability for electoral fraud: (I)t may be true that Ford has left-wing opponents on council and that the Council of Canadians, which has launched the legal challenge on so-called robocalls, would prefer that Harper had not win the last election.
But these are not illegal views in this country — at least not yet. Demonization of your adversaries is a spin tactic, not a legal defence.
Besides, Hamilton knows that the concern over
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on November 26, 2012, at 8:19 am Miscellaneous material to start your week.- The U.S.’ budget negotiations are leading to some public lobbying as to whether wealthy Americans will make any contribution whatsoever to closing the country’s deficit. On the plus side, Warren Buffett is re… . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on November 23, 2012, at 9:18 am Assorted content to end your week.- Christopher Curtis and Stephen Maher break the news that the Cons have falsified donation records, claiming donations to their Laurier-Sainte-Marie riding association from individuals who deny ever making contributio… . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on November 16, 2012, at 7:14 pm This and that to end your week.- Tavia Grant writes that at least one region of the globe – Latin America – is seeing some real progress in combating inequality. And the World Bank has some ideas to keep up the momentum:The bank still sees room for imp… . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
By Greg Fingas, on November 9, 2012, at 9:47 am The Mound of Sound is rightly appalled at the revelation that JP Morgan is making money off of the U.S.’ food stamp program. But lest we think the problem is limited to our neighbours, let’s note that the Cons are doing their utmost to ensure that ever… . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: On unwanted imports
By Greg Fingas, on October 23, 2012, at 7:37 pm A quick look at the latest developments in the Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign…
- Erin Weir has unveiled an ambitious child care plan intended to make publicly-delivered daycare and early learning available to all parents. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Weir’s plan is that it may actually undersell the value of making child care available: while Weir costs out the proposal at a price of $180 million per year plus initial capital investments, there’s reason to suspect that the return on allowing parents to participate more fully in the labour force might actually outweigh the initial price tag.
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Leadership 2013 Roundup
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