Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – David Dayen discusses how prepaid debit cards are turning into the latest means for the financial sector to extract artificial fees from consumers. And Matt Taibbi reports on the looting of public pension funds in the U.S.: Nor did anyone know that part
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Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Alison and PressProgress both discuss how Brad Butt’s attempt to defend voter suppression is based on what even he had to concede was nothing short of legislative fraud. And Stephen Maher notes that the Cons’ unilateral rewrite of election rules figures to
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Scott Doherty recognizes that Saskatchewan’s failure to collect a reasonable royalty rate for potash and other natural resources is directly responsible for the province crying poor when workers are laid off. And Alex Himelfarb points out that the magical theory behind perpetual tax
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – In the course of grading Canada’s job market, Kayle Hatt traces the rise of precarious employment in both absolute and relative numbers – and notes that other countries haven’t seen the same type of move toward temporary employment encouraged by the Cons.
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Ibbitson reports that the Cons’ obvious priorities have finally been made explicit: as far as they’re concerned, the sole purpose of international diplomacy is to serve the corporate sector. And Ian Smillie documents how the Cons hijacked Canada’s foreign aid program (while
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Duncan Cameron writes that Stephen Harper’s CETA triumphalism may result in serious long-term damage to Canada for the sake of a temporary political reprieve: Promoting the big bamboozle means Harper is gambling with Canada’s economic future. The PM is touting a deal not
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Charles Campbell discusses Robert Reich’s work to highlight the importance of a fair and progressive tax system. And while Lawrence Martin is right to lament the systematic destruction of Canada’s public revenue streams under the Libs and Cons alike, his fatalistic view
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Annie Lowrey reports on the still-spreading blight of income inequality in the U.S.: An updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows that the top 1 percent of earners took more than one-fifth of the country’s total income
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Glenn Greenwald, David Atkins and Simon Jenkins all discuss the U.K.’s detention of David Miranda – with heavy emphasis on the Cameron government’s apparent belief journalism and terrorism are synonymous. And Ian Welsh points out the need to fight back against a pervasive
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jacob Goldstein discusses how one-time, no-strings-attached funding for the poor in developing countries can produce lasting improvements in their standard of living – while also highlighting the need for longer-term development: A charity that gives away money, as opposed to, say, offering
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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: 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
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Duncan Cameron discusses how the G20 is dancing around the problem of corporate tax evasion. The Economist issues a call to action against offshoring. And David Atkins points out what’s more likely needed to deal with a global problem which can be
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Pat Steenberg observes that the Harper Cons’ deficits are the result of conscious choices to reduce government revenue – and that we can fix our deficit and rein in inequality at the same time by reversing the damage: (W)hen our governments say they
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – Duncan Cameron is the latest to weigh in on the Cons’ distorted sense of priorities in directing public research money toward private profits: Publicly available research is important. Since no one knows where discoveries or advances in knowledge will lead, the entire
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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,
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – John Studzinski describes how a sense of social responsibility and a country-wide commitment to making jobs available have placed Germany in a better economic position than its European neighbours: Let me highlight some of the features unique to the Mittelstand model that
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- Duncan Cameron highlights the choice between austerity and prosperity facing the governments of both Canada and the U.S.:The economic realities faced by working people in both Canada and the United St…
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Erika Shaker describes the effect of the “right-to-work” laws so popular among our more regressive politicians: “Right-to-Work” still remains a dubious—even Orwellian—term, probably because we have a sweatshop-sized vat of research documenting examples of what this scheme has meant for those American jurisdictions
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – No, the aftershocks of an e. coli outbreak which has unfortunately given both Canadians and export markets reason for concern about the safety of some of our major food sources aren’t about to end simply because the Cons are again pretending everything’s fine.
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