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. – 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
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – George Monbiot writes about the absurdity of the right-wing choice to promote inequality in the name of competition among the wealthy when the ultimate results are worse for everybody: The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – George Monbiot discusses the fallout from decades of corporate-controlled governments abdicating their responsibility to consider the public interest: In other ages, states sought to seize as much power as they could. Today, the self-hating state renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Frances Russell weighs in on the Cons’ continued contempt for democracy: The Conservatives under Stephen Harper are running an effective dictatorship. They believe they are quite within their rights to muzzle Parliament, gag civil servants, use taxpayer money for blatant political self-promotion, stand
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Assorted content to end your week. – Public Interest Alberta takes a closer look at that province’s rhetoric about taxes, and finds that in fact most Albertans pay more income tax than they would under the more fair and progressive systems applied in other province: “Albertans who believe the myth
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Moore questions the much-hyped assertions of a permanent Republican Conservative majority by pointing out that Canadian values haven’t changed at all even as the Harper Cons have tried to use public money to change the channel. And Justin Ling sees the Cons
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellanous material for your Monday reading. – Will Hutton recognizes that an unregulated market can lead to disastrous results for everybody concerned – and that conversely, effective regulation can help to ensure the success of businesses which best meet the long-term needs of their workers and customers: What the Paterson
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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: 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: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Frances Russell discusses how the Harper Cons have capitalized on the general public’s lack of familiarity with how our parliamentary system is supposed to work – and the conventional checks and balances which have been overridden at every turn by a governing party
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Assorted content to end your day.- Frances Russell nicely sums up the effect of the Cons’ bevy of anti-democratic trade deals:Don’t be fooled. The innocuous language used to describe the avalanche of so-called “trade” agreements raining down on …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Frances Russell discusses how the Cons have corporatized Canadian politics: In fact, elevating corporate rights over the rights of citizens and their democractic institutions seems to be the Harper government’s core agenda. Its aggressive “free trade” stance has led to agreements with
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Assorted content to end your week. – Frances Russell comments on how the Harper Cons are ready to impose exactly the kind of centralized and unresponsive decision-making they’ve long loathed – but only when it comes to favouring Alberta’s interests over B.C.’s real environmental concerns. But Michael Harris notes that
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris lists ten things the Harper Cons want Canadians to forget before the 2015 election. But it’s worth keeping in mind that their expectations for mind-wiping are surely shaped by their own willingness to completely forget what they were repeating incessantly before
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, expanding on this post as to the importance of a functioning federal system as a means of counterbalancing regional declines – and the forces working to limit anything of the sort in Canada. For further reading…– Frances Russell also laments the Harper firewall model based on the need for
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Thomas Walkom criticizes the Cons’ war on labour at the federal level – though John Ivison notes that the Cons’ habit of interfering in every federal labour dispute looks to help the NDP all the more. And Pat Atkinson worries that the Sask
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Brian Topp weighs in on Canada’s history of raw resource exploitation that should offer a lesson for anybody interested in learning. And pogge points out why Thomas Mulcair is right to dig his heels in, while Frances Russell observes that Mulcair is just
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Drew Anderson comments on the support the NDP is winning among groups which have historically supported the Cons: Seniors and men. Until now they formed the rock-solid base of the Conservative Party. But they’re trending towards Mulcair, and that should have Harper’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The Cons’ move to suppress Canadian wages by encouraging the use of disposable, temporary foreign labour is receiving plenty of due outcry. Here’s Armine Yalnizyan: Disturbingly, the federal announcement also set out new wage rules that permit employers to pay temporary foreign
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