Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Emily Badger discusses how poverty affects people who are forced to use their physical and mental resources on bare survival: Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to
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Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Alan Pyke observes that instead of reflecting any particular merit, massive payouts to CEOs are all too often made despite (or because of) executive incompetence and illegality: The best-paid CEOs in American business have overseen companies that were bailed out, been fired,
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The real reasons for threats of war against Syria
(that the mass media won’t tell you about) 1. The Middle East holds 60% of the world’s remaining energy reserves: therefore, the entire region is critical to control – for anyone with an empire fetish, that is. And if you’re serious about controlling the Middle Eastern oil reserves, then you
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Polly Toynbee reminds us that a precarious living for much of the middle class is nothing new – and neither is a cacophony of reactionary voices claiming that a desperate struggle for survival is the natural and proper state for most of humanity.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Simon Enoch nicely challenges the City of Regina’s blind faith in “risk transfer” by pointing out how that concept has typically been applied elsewhere: So what price should we put on such a risk transfer? This is where things can get dicey. How
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – The Economist takes a look at the effect of a “lean in” philosophy toward work – and finds that we’d get better results encouraging creative development rather than needless busy work: All this “leaning in” is producing an epidemic of overwork, particularly in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Not surprisingly, this week’s revelations about Pamela Wallin have set off plenty more discussion about what’s wrong with the Senate and its current beneficiaries. Andrew Coyne recognizes that the problem lies in the design of an institution based on patronage and unaccountability
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Alison Bennett reports on the OECD’s work on offshore tax avoidance, highlighting the “stateless income” that’s shuffled around the globe so as to avoid contributing to social good anywhere: Policymakers around the world are stepping up efforts to tighten rules because a growing
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Joseph Stiglitz comments on the wider lessons we should take from Detroit’s bankruptcy: Detroit’s travails arise in part from a distinctive aspect of America’s divided economy and society. As the sociologists Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have pointed out, our country is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Dan Leger points to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion as an all-too-vivid example of the intersection of privatized profits and socialized risks: Are we tough enough on corporations that destroy, burn and kill? What’s happening at Lac-Mégantic suggests we aren’t. There’s a scramble on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Matthew Yglesias sums up the effects of four decades of U.S. union-busting, and points out how the supposed benefit from pointing a fire hose filled with money in the general direction of the corporate sector hasn’t materialized: If you turn back 30 or
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your holiday reading. – Paul Buchhelt discusses eight areas where privatization has proven to be a disaster in the U.S. – with one holding particular interest for Regina residents: A 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The GOP War on Working Class America
Freshmen GOP – 2010 Paul Krugman recently questioned the sanity of Congressional Republicans who, he contends, have inflicted such a level of dysfunctionality on the federal government as to leave America ungovernable. Robert Reich, however, seems method in the madness of the “Party of No.” The real answer, I think,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – David Atkins comments on the ever-growing disconnect between the interests of a few making a killing on Wall Street and the lives of people stuck in the real economy: (T)the entirety of supply-side economic thinking is based on the idea that inflating
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Frances Woolley rightly challenges the conventional wisdom that there’s no such thing as a popular and efficient tax: Few taxes generate enthusiastic popular support, but some are more popular than others. Those are the ones that fill the red circle. The area labelled
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Bruce Livesey discusses how offshoring undermines government – and how it happens with the approval of those same governments claiming we can’t afford to provide for citizens: Today, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) claims that offshore banks globally hide
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the questions raised by a sudden drop in potash prices – and why we should reconsider our economic and social priorities so that a minor fluctuation in a still-ample level of wealth isn’t seen as reason to push the panic button. For further reading…– My discussion of Robert
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Thomas Walkom points out that while Stephen Harper managed to push the world in the wrong direction over the past few years, he may be missing the boat on where it’s headed: The Harper government’s failure is longer-term. It still operates under the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Frank Graves comments on the fundamental political choices we’re facing in determining whether to continue operating based on corporatist orthodoxy – and the reality that the vast majority of Canadians don’t agree with the side chosen by the Harper Cons: (T)he devil’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Bill Gardner discusses the effect of inequality and poverty starting at birth: There are three important facts packed into this slide. First, the lines stack up in order of increasing age, meaning that older people reported worse health than younger people. Second, all the lines
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