This and that for your Thursday reading. – Frances Woolley points out how the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the effects of decades of austerity on Canada’s health care system. Martin Regg Cohn discusses how the spread of the coronavirus is requiring us to seriously rethink how much of our society
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Susan on the Soapbox: COVID-19: A Study in Leadership
“The first role of government is to help people in crisis or need. That’s why we have government.”– John McCain Crisis separates the leaders from wannabes. We will be watching our leaders and wannabes very carefully over the next few months to see how they respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Jim Stanford offers his take on how our governments should respond to the coronavirus epidemic – including an emphasis on health, income security and debt relief, along with a plan for reconstruction. And Armine Yalnizyan and Jennifer Robson provide some more specific
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Todd Gordon and Geoffrey McCormack write about Canada’s crisis of capitalism – which is only being laid bare by a coronavirus pandemic exposing the fragility of a system built on precarity and debt. – Kim Kelly discusses how service workers will face the
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Collapse of Modern Civilization
More than 150 years ago Thoreau commented, “Our sills are all rotten.” He was right. It is for that reason that Western, and Westernized, “modern” “civilization” is collapsing. This could be cataclysmic, of course, (as in, an ecological holocaust), or relatively peaceful, (akin to the Maya abandoning their great cities
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan write about the U.S.’ choice between health care for all, or the spread of disease as people can’t afford to seek medical treatment. – David Dayen highlights how the coronavirus is likely to expose the weaknesses of
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Globalization: Killed By Coronavirus?
Globalization was already a dying ideology and socio-economic-political order, program, or pattern, by 1999, twenty years ago. The defeat of the MAI and the Seattle World Trade Talks made that clear. As economic analyst Max Keiser has said, de-dollarization and de-globalization are two of the major on-going patterns or trends
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Importing From China: A Virus? Or A Totalitarian Model Of Elite Control?
Someone prescient once said, “Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for a little security, deserve neither, and will lose both.” We would do well to remember those words now. And we are most definitely in the process of losing both, as we speak. But maybe we aspire to be
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Thanks UCP Voters
We all know the UCP are scum. Just terrible garbage people. Broken promises left and right, austerity for everyone, and harming the poor, the young, the old, the severely handicapped, and everyone. Then they lie about doing these things even as they are doing them. This is pretty much
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Budget 2020 and the Snake
On Feb 27, 2020 the Kenney government released Budget 2020. The day it was tabled it was under water, less than two weeks later it drowned. It sank beneath the surface once and for all because of a snake (or some other creature) in a wild animal market in Wuhan,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Polly Toynbee and David Walker write about the brutal social consequences of a decade of austerity in the UK. – Andrew Jackson reviews James Crotty’s Keynes Against Capitalism with a strong emphasis on Keynes’ recognition of the need for a democratically-planned economy. –
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Latent Racism in the Better Homes in America Program
An interesting article over at JSTOR by Manisha Claire It reminds me that that the reality we live today were conscious choices that were made by people in the past. Part of the American zeitgeist is a strong emphasis on personal responsibility and ‘rugged individualism’. These qualities did not
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Bill 1 and Freedom of Assembly
What do the Wet’suwet’en First Nations blockades have to do with Alberta’s Budget 2020? Everything. The blockades are the rationale (flimsy as it is) for Bill 1, Critical Infrastructure Defence Act which the Kenney government will use to quell protests when Albertans experience the full impact of Kenney’s budget cuts.
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Teck Withdraws the Frontier Application
Let’s try to have a sensible conversation about Teck, shall we? On Sunday, Feb 23, 2020 Teck Resources Ltd pulled its application for the Frontier oil sands project. The federal government was supposed to give Frontier the green light, or not, on Tuesday. Jason Kenney blames the feds, saying “It
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Family Day Alberta Style
Tomorrow is Family Day in Alberta. While we wait for Jason Kenney’s Family Day announcement extolling the virtues of the family and maybe throwing in a reference to Albertans as “people of destiny” (he hasn’t rolled out that hoary chestnut for a few months) we pause to consider how Family
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Annie Lowrey writes about the affordability crisis which has left most Americans in dire financial straits even as aggregate economic numbers look reasonably strong: (B)eyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The Teck Decision Provides a Lesson on Handouts
For a long time Ms Soapbox has been trying figure out what Mr Kenney and the UCP mean when they talk about a “hand up” and a “handout”. She knew from the context that a “hand up” was good and a “handout” was bad, but she was never quite sure
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Why Is It Always Someone Else’s Fault?
When Jason Kenney convinced Albertans that our economy is solely dependent on fossil fuels (diversification is a luxury, remember) and government policy, not the global marketplace, drives our economy; he needed a scapegoat when our economy failed to grow. Cue Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau, although with the passage of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Gabriel Winant reviews Matt Stoller’s Goliath, and discusses in the process the importance of challenging the assumptions capitalism as a system rather than presuming that it can be rendered just merely by taking steps to break up immediate monopolies. And Alexandra Posadzki’s
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: In the Eye of the Storm
Here we are in the eye of the storm, a place of relative calm surrounded by a ring of thunderstorms (known as the eye wall). We passed through one eye wall to get here and we’ll have to pass through another eye wall to get out. This won’t be easy
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