Assorted content for your Friday reading. – In addition to providing my latest tagline, Alex Himelfarb takes aim at the austerians who seem happy to attack social well-being and economic development alike in the name of government-slashing: (A)usterity had never been driven by fiscal policy or economics or evidence. It
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jacob Chamberlain discusses the all-too-familiar pattern of corporate insiders using their wealth and influence to try to attack basic social supports for less-privileged citizens: CEOs from America’s largest corporations—including its biggest banks, retailers, and insurance companies who helped drive the country into
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Raz Godelnik challenges the all-too-conventional wisdom that corporations (and indeed individuals) should see tax avoidance and evasion as virtues: One of the most common arguments is that the tax-avoidance techniques used by corporations like Starbucks or Google are legal and therefore they’re not
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the general irrationality of the right-wing obsession with chaining public services and tax rates to population growth – and the particularly egregious application of that theory by the Regina Chamber of Commerce when it’s put added pressure on city services by insisting on generous tax abatements for some
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – George Monbiot reminds us that the mere fact that neoliberal economic theory has failed by any rational measure doesn’t mean there won’t still be plenty of well-funded efforts to promote it at the expense of social interests: The policies that made the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Frank Graves’ review of the current state of Canadian politics focuses in on the growing gap between the Cons’ waning interest in listening to the public, and their growing expenditures on advertising and marketing: In Canada in 2006, the federal government spent roughly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Crawford Kilian comments on Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats as a useful expression of trends many of us have seen in action for some time: (T)he plutonomy is not just booming, but skewing the still-depressed economy the rest of us live in. Many of the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Barbara Yaffe lets Hugh Segal make the case for a guaranteed annual income to end poverty in Canada: (Hugh Segal) says it could be arranged by way of a tax credit through the income tax system, to top up income of anyone
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Frank Graves writes about the decline of Canada’s middle class – and notes a parallel between the type of economy which tends to produce broad social failure, and the Cons’ familiar obsession with extraction: The other key factor is rising inequality and a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On forced growth
Saskatchewan’s NDP leadership campaign has featured plenty of discussion as to how to define success as a party and a province. But it’s well worth contrasting the varying forms of quality-of-life and social health themes being debated within the NDP against an announcement which epitomizes the appallingly narrow focus of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Pam Palmater explains the historical background to Idle No More: (M)ost Canadians are not used to the kind of sustained, co-ordinated, national effort that we have seen in the last few weeks — at least not since 1969. 1969 was the last time
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Ed Broadbent responds to the Fraser Institute’s attempts to minimize the importance of growing inequality: Economists tell us the chances of finding and keeping a good job today depend more than ever on a high level of education and skills required by
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Murray Dobbin connects a pattern of economic trends which has seen more and more wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people to the elimination of public discussion about work life: The neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s proposed unfettered capitalism
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, expanding on this post as to Simon Enoch’s study of corporate power in Saskatchewan – and suggesting that we use the networks mapped out by Enoch in analyzing the Saskatchewan Party’s corporatist policy choices. Again, Enoch’s study is available here. And you’ll find some of my previous writing about
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Is Canadian Progressivism a Farce?
The topic came up recently in a discussion I had with a prolific and thoroughly progressive blogger who will go unnamed. He lamented that he had become fed up with Canadian prog bloggers who seemed not terribly interested in progressivism at all and, by contrast, far less interesting than their
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jeremy Warren reports on the origins of the Idle No More movement – recognizing it as an ideal example of how a few people resolving to take action can have a massive impact on public discussions. And Tim Harper notes that Stephen Harper
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On revealed connections
Simon Enoch’s study mapping corporate power in Saskatchewan may be one of the most important pieces of research I’ve seen in quite some time – and I’ll highly encourage visitors to give it a thorough read. But I’ll quibble with one aspect of Enoch’s conclusion – he’s done more work
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Bill Curry reports on Jim Flaherty’s arbitrary choice to declare that Canadians can’t have any more CPP retirement security than the most callous provincial government in the country is willing to grant them. And Martin Regg Cohn rightly responds that our reaction
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Freedom of the Press, Freedom From the Press
Western mass media have long been deservedly criticized for having an “if it bleeds, it leads” attitude to news. At one point sensationalism was seen as the sizzle that sold the steak, genuine information. It was an old carny trick from ages past. But that reflected a past in which
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