Assorted content to end your week. – Jerry Dias sees the forced passage of an unamended Bill C-377 as a definitive answer in the negative to the question of whether the Senate will ever justify its own existence. And Nora Loreto emphasizes that the bill has no purpose other than
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Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Mark Anderson reports on the Change Readiness Index’ findings that the growing concentration and inequality of wealth is making it more and more difficult for countries to deal with foreseeable disasters. But Jon Queally points out that a concerted effort to quit
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Jeff Spross argues that in addition to ensuring that employees are fairly paid for the overtime hours they work, we should also be pushing to ensure people aren’t required to work as much to begin with. And Angella MacEwen points out that
Continue readingThe Trans-Pacific Partnership—never heard of it ???!!!
The above headline is plagiarized directly from a CBC article. I added the punctuation gratuitously to convey my horror that a proposed “trade” agreement that could have major effects on Canadian lives is largely unknown to those same Canadians. The agreement is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and it involves 12
Continue readingObama stopped in his free trade tracks
Free trade agreements are frequently referred to by dissenters as corporate rights agreements, and as I pointed out in a recent post, there are powerful reasons why politicians negotiate them in favour of corporate interests. But regardless of who they are primarily intended to serve, the agreements contain articles which
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – The Ottawa Citizen rightly slams Stephen Harper for failing to take climate change and energy policy seriously, while Mel Hurting points out Harper’s general economic failures in relying on dirty resource extraction rather than trying to build a cleaner and stronger economy. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Maude Barlow and Sujata Dey point out that the job promises linked to CETA and other new trade agreements are no more plausible than the false ones made in previous rounds of corporate rights giveaways. And the Canadian Labour Congress discusses the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Dylan Matthews reports on Joseph Stiglitz’ work in studying what kinds of systemic changes (in addition to more redistribution of wealth) are needed to ensure a fair and prosperous economy. And Martin O’Neill discusses James Meade’s prescient take on the importance of social
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Elizabeth Warren reminds us (PDF) that previous trade agreements were packaged with the same promises of labour and environmental standards being used to sell the latest versions – and that there’s been no enforcement whatsoever of the elements of the deals which
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Joseph Stiglitz laments the corporate takeover of policy-making processes, including by imposing trade rules which impede democratic decision-making: The real intent of [investor protection] provisions is to impede health, environmental, safety, and, yes, even financial regulations meant to protect America’s own economy
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jordan Brennan discusses the utter failure of past trade agreements to live up to their promises, making it all the more unclear why we should be prepared to accept a new wave of even more inflexible restrictions against democratic decision-making. The trade and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Jay Baron Nicorvo discusses how the myth of U.S. meritocracy serves largely as a means of funneling profits toward the 1%. And Mary Hansen points out one way of fighting back against evolving forms of corporate power – being the development of new,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Henry Mintzberg rightly challenges the myth of a “level playing field” when it comes to our economic opportunities: Let’s level with each other. What we call a “level playing field” for economic development is played with Western rules on Southern turf, so
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman highlights the policy areas where we need to look to the public sector for leadership – including those such as health care and income security where we all have a strong interest in making sure that nobody’s left behind. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On foundational assumptions
Shorter John Geddes: Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. And so the miserable results of Stephen Harper’s consistent privatization, free trade obsession and corporate tax slashing don’t count as a conservative record.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: A seat at the table
Richard Trumka’s address and the subsequent response panel at the Progress Summit have aptly addressed issues in trying to strengthen the grassroots of the labour movement. But Trumka’s focus on trade agreements also raises a related question which may not easily be dealt with at the grassroots level. As I
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Harvey Kaye discusses how the rich’s class warfare against everybody else has warped the U.S. politically and economically. And PressProgress observes that the Cons’ reactionary politics have produced miserable results for Canadian workers. – Which isn’t to say the Cons plan to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Emily Badger discusses Robert Putnam’s work on the many facets of increasing inequality in the U.S.: For the past three years, Putnam has been nursing an outlandish ambition. He wants inequality of opportunity for kids to be the central issue in the 2016
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Cam Dearlove writes a must-read column on the role of housing in building a healthy society: For housing advocates and researchers, our nation’s inability to make headway on homelessness and housing instability is not only a moral failure, but also a financial
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Tavia Grant, Bill Curry and David Kennedy discuss CIBC’s analysis showing that Canadian job quality has falled to its lowest level recorded in the past 25 years: Several reports have concluded that the country’s job market is not as strong as it looks
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