Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Marc Lee takes a high-level look at the absurdity of our destructive economic choices: Exhibit one: the North Pole at the moment is a one-foot-deep aquamarine lake. After reaching record low ice cover and thickness at the end of summer 2012, an ice-free
Continue readingTag: economy
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Bill Curry reports on the Cons’ continued refusal to provide accurate information to the PBO – with the end result being that an office intended to provide a fully-informed, unbiased perspective in evaluating government action is now being forced to make Access to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Myles discusses the Cons’ war on evidence: The mandatory Census was the lifeblood of almost all social and business planning. It provided key data for studying things like income inequality and poverty since both low- and high-income households were required to report.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Dean Beeby reports on the utter uselessness of the latest set of publicly-funded Con propaganda. But more importantly, John Ibbitson notes that most of the provinces have little use for the lone new announcement – meaning that it’s for the best if Canadians
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Gerald Kaplan discusses how the privileges of power have contributed to the utterly callous response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion by Stephen Harper and Ed Burkhardt: For me, of all Burkhardt’s outrageous statements nothing surpasses his public accusation that the train’s engineer, Tom
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jim Stanford discusses the OECD’s findings that job protection actually improves better employment outcomes – while “flexible” labour markets serve only to ensure less opportunity for workers. And Sid Ryan makes the case for premiers to reject a low-wage agenda. – Oil spills
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to end your week. – Patrick Wintour and Simon Bowers discuss the G20’s predictable finding that our global tax system isn’t set up to address the problem of offshore tax evasion: The long-awaited report, prepared for a meeting of the G20 finance ministers in Moscow this weekend, says
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
This and that to end your Thursday. – The Huffington Post discusses a study showing how poor Canadians pay the highest marginal tax rates on income that pushes them over benefit thresholds. But it should be fairly obvious that the solution is to set up rational models for social programs
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Upworthy and the Equality Trust both provide fascinating examples of greed in action. – Rank and File discusses the relentless wage-slashing that has led to a perpetually smaller number of workers with sole responsibility for dangerous cargo, while Leo Panitch makes a similar
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Murray Dobbin writes about the crisis of extreme capitalism: (T)he “free economy” romanticized by Friedman and his ilk is anything but. Completely dominated by giant corporations whose wealth outstrips all but the richest nations, economic freedom does not exist for anyone else, including
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Robert Reich asks a few impertinent (but important) questions about plutocratic encroachment on the U.S.’ political system. – Catherine McKenna explains why it’s important to try to make a difference in our political system. But Chris Cobb reports on what happens to
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Check-Mate #ClimateChange
What’s utterly frustrating when discussing Climate Change with Deniers, is they don’t plan the big picture logically. More specifically, their plans can be shown to place civilization into extreme danger of ending [GAME OVER]. Perhaps because I grew up playing Chess, I’m familiar with the concept that no matter how
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Martin Lukacs offers up the definitive response to the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy: The deeper evidence about this event won’t be found in the train’s black box, or by questioning the one engineer who left the train before it loosened and careened unmanned into
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Corporate Responsibility
Do corporations kill? Unfortunately, yes, they can. A corporation is a person in our crazy legal system. How do we best punish a corporate person, for killing people? Burkhardt had drawn criticism for forwarding the responsibility for the explosion on to others. He told the Toronto Star earlier in the
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Wealth in the USA Graphed Nicely
You can see what Americans desire as wealth distribution, vs. what they think the unfair situation is vs. reality. It’s off the charts, literally, how much money the 1% makes in comparison to what sort of uneven system Americans accept they experience. It really displays the absurdity of even well-off
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Michael Harris nicely describes what the Cons are actually doing with power while pretending to be innocuous fiscal managers: The PM and his government are not good managers. The nauseating repetition of the claim that the Tories know what they’re doing with
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Thomas Walkom discusses how a continued economic slump is combining with the Cons’ economic policies to destroy secure jobs in favour of precarious, low-paying work: Those making economic policy from afar may admire creative destruction. Those being destroyed rarely do. Here in
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Spending a Billion #cdnpoli
Many homes and lives were recently destroyed in Alberta last week. Warnings about where, and how to build homes were not heeded. A former Alberta MLA who headed up a flood mitigation task force after the 2005 floods says new development should not have been allowed to spring up in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Chris Lehmann discusses the destructive impetus behind the ever-present austerity scolds: In their new book The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Stuckler and Basu show distressingly consistent increases in such key public-health indicators as suicides, heart disease, alcoholism and HIV infection in societies
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Paul Krugman writes that the only real difference between the latest global crisis and past depressions is that we’ve moved further and further toward a rent-based economy – meaning that aggregated growth doesn’t necessarily result in any benefit for the vast majority
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