Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Paul Krugman calls out the U.S.’ deficit scolds for continuing to invent a crisis to distract from the real problems with middling growth and high unemployment. And Bruce Johnstone singles out a few of the Cons’ talking points which have somehow become conventional
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne discusses the need to address inequality through our political system. But that will require significant pressure from exactly the citizens who have decided they’re not well served by today’s political options – and Trish Hennessy’s look at Canadian voter turnout reminds
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Michael Hiltzik writes about the efforts of the corporate sector – including the tobacco and food industries – to produce mass ignorance in order to preserve profits: Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Bill Kerry writes that extreme inequality serves to reinforce itself – and points out what needs to be done to counter the temptation to kick others down: One of the major difficulties in tackling inequality is the way it coerces many people into accepting
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Andrew Coyne sees the disproportionate influence wielded by the representatives elected by a minority of voters in Canada and the U.S. as evidence that both countries should move toward proportional representation: Two systems, both dysfunctional, in opposing ways. Is there nevertheless a common
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Tavia Grant reports on the most recent world happiness report from the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And David Doorey points out a rather striking similarity among the countries at the top of the list, while Dan Gardner highlights Stephen Harper’s longstanding
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman points out that workers are receiving less and less benefit from technological advancements – and offers a simple policy prescription to ensure workers of all skill levels don’t suffer unduly based on forces far beyond their control: I’ve noted before that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Daniel Cohn theorizes that the only real problem with RBC’s outsourcing of Canadian jobs is that they called attention to the government policies which facilitated that outcome. But for those of us who think there’s actually a problem with an economy designed around
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman discusses how a myopic focus on slashing taxes and services figures to cheat future generations out of desperately-needed social structure: You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest “report
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jason Fekete reports on the growing recognition that tax evasion and avoidance are serious global problems – and the Cons’ attempt to be seen nodding at the issues. Needless to say, that posturing would be far more plausible if the same Cons weren’t
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Friday reading. – Michael Moss writes about the amount of time and money spent by corporate conglomerates to push consumers toward eating unhealthy food: The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Murray Mandryk and Bruce Johnstone both thoroughly slam Gerry Ritz and the Cons for their food-safety negligence. But Johnstone hints at the larger issue: Ritz, for all his faults, is not the cause of this latest debacle. He’s merely a symptom of
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Assorted content to end your weekend. – For those wondering where progressive leaders are going with their policy proposals, the last week offered a couple of noteworthy examples. At home, Tom Mulcair’s Canadian Club speech commented on the importance of real roles for the government and the public in making
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On single issues
Apparently today is Stadium Cheerleading Day in the Leader-Post. But in correctly noting that this fall’s election will be decisive in determining whether a stadium goes ahead, Bruce Johnstone seems to me to give away the real choice voters face: Of course, this doesn’t mean that the stadium is the
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Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – Gerald Caplan weighs in on Jack Layton’s legacy: It seems to me that Jack Layton’s enduring legacy is twofold. First, he set a standard of doing politics that, if followed by others, would change the entire tone of public life for the country.
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This and that for a sunny Sunday. – Mitchell Anderson’s second article on Norway’s success in converting oil resources into a massive source of public wealth focuses on the country’s history of resistance to outside ownership. But I wouldn’t see much reason why Canada couldn’t turn its own sense of
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Olive comments on the world food crisis, making the point that what we’re lacking is some link between more-than-sufficient productive capacity and the nutritional needs of less wealthy people around the globe: (A) permanently higher price for oil spurred successful innovation to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On failed strategies
Let’s follow up with one more point from Bruce Johnstone’s attempt to justify ramming through a stadium deal without any serious public input – which speaks less to the stadium project than to the bona fides of the politicians who are pushing it: Is it perfect? No, because unlike some
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This and that for your weekend reading. – Dave Coles comments on Brad Wall’s attempts to erase a century’s worth of gains when it comes to labour rights, but recognizes that we instead have an opportunity to again lead the way toward social progress: During this moment of relative prosperity
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Bruce Johnstone and the Star-Phoenix editorial board both join the voices decrying the Cons’ decision to throw parliamentary democracy under their omnibus budget bill. And Gerald Caplan points out the Harper Cons’ more general tendency to silence dissenting views: (T)here’s little doubt the
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