Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – To the extent corporatist voices are pushing increased private involvement in funding Canadian health care, their main argument generally involves the claim that private insurers will be more willing to fund expensive courses of treatment which might be rationed out of public plans.
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Yes, there’s plenty more on the Cons’ Senate scandal, with Tim Harper headlining the latest discussion: Mike Duffy is radioactive. The one-time Conservative cheerleader is now the poster boy for the filth which envelops the party brand. The man holed up on Friendly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Babad takes a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wages and employment levels – reaching the conclusion that the corporatist effort to drive wages down does nothing to improve employment prospects. But the absence of any remotely plausible policy justification
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – Daniel Boffey catches one of David Cameron’s top aides saying what most Cons leave as an unstated assumption: that recession and depressed wages are good for business (as long as “business” is defined only to mean short-term profits based on exploitation): The prime
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On distortions
Yes, there’s generally reason to be skeptical of corporate apologists trying to claim a populist, anti-corporate-welfare mantle while pushing for business to contribute less and less to society as a whole. But even if we weren’t going to hold that skepticism against the Fraser Institute’s Mark Milke, there are two
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Armine Yalnizyan makes the case as to why wealth equates to far too much power in Canada: The problem is not that the wealthy are too powerful. The problem is that, with rare exception, as their power has increased, it has not been
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On public evils
Yes, there’s plenty of reason to wonder what the Canadian public is getting for millions of dollars in ads intended to advertise…nothing at all. But I’ll point out that the answer may be even worse than one might suspect at first glance. Here’s the background to the latest set of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On public evils
Yes, there’s plenty of reason to wonder what the Canadian public is getting for millions of dollars in ads intended to advertise…nothing at all. But I’ll point out that the answer may be even worse than one might suspect at first glance. Here’s the background to the latest set of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Linda McQuaig discusses Stephen Harper’s class war: Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading… – Joseph Stiglitz discusses the abuse of intellectual property law to turn publicly-funded research into privately-held profit centres (no matter how many people die as a result): (A) Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Conservatives attack on unions a threat to shared prosperity in Canada, says Broadbent Institute
By: Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive: The right-wing’s regressive anti-union rhetoric and U.S.-styled attacks on the labour movement threatens Canada’s prosperity, says a report recently released by the progressive Canadian think tank Broadbent Institute. The report expresses grave concern about the Conservative government’s current political agenda and “highly-organized right-wing campaign to import American-style
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Ed Broadbent takes a look at how our tax system can combat inequality in more ways than one: The Broadbent Institute is presenting proposals Tuesday to the Finance Committee of the House of Commons. Our primary recommendation is that Canada establish as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Thomas Walkom writes that yesterday’s minor tinkering aside, the goal of the Cons’ temporary foreign worker program is still to drive down Canadian wages. And Miles Corak argues that the resulting distortion of employment markets shouldn’t be any more acceptable to a libertarian
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – We shouldn’t be surprised that the corporate sector is reacting with contrived outrage to the Cons’ tinkering with a severely flawed temporary foreign worker program. But Jim Stanford points out what it would take to actually move labour standards upward rather than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction – while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction – while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Olive writes that the dangerous effects of long-term unemployment (caused in no small part by gratuitous austerity) are just as much a problem in Canada as in the U.S.: With our persistent high levels of long-term unemployment, Canada is at risk of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Andrew Simms and Stephen Reid note that the corporatist dogma that everything is done more efficiently in the private sector has no apparent basis in reality: The myth of private sector superiority says that the private sector is efficient and dynamic, the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On selective equity
Boy, it’s reassuring to see the Sask Party lamenting the unfairness of a 15-fold difference in treatment between groups of landowners. I’m sure they’ll be getting to Saskatchewan’s contribution to the 235-fold difference in salary between CEOs and the rest of us any day now.
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