Assorted content to end your week. – Umut Oszu contrasts the impoverished conception of rights being pushed thanks to the Cons’ highly politicized museum against the type of rights we should be demanding: In their modern incarnation, human rights were fashioned after the Second World War and entered into widespread
Continue readingTag: free trade agreements
Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Naomi Klein discusses how entrenched corporate control through trade and investment agreements will prevent us from making any real progress against climate change. And Cory Doctorow weighs in on the Cons’ FIPA sellout of Canadian sovereignty, while highlighting the NDP’s petition to stop
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – James Meek observes that decades of privatization in the UK have eliminated public control over housing and other essential services – and that privatization takes far more forms than we’re accustomed to taking into consideration. And Rick Salutin offers his take on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how Brad Wall is kicking Ontario while it’s down by demanding that it let stimulus funding leak out of a province which actually needs it – and how Saskatchewan and other provinces stand to suffer too if Wall helps the Cons impose similar restrictions across the country. For
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Bert Olivier is the latest to weigh in on Paul Verhaeghe’s work showing that the obsessive pursuit of market fundamentalism harms our health in a myriad of ways: What does the neoliberal “organisation” of society amount to? As the title of the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Glen McGregor reports on Michael Sona’s conviction as part of the Cons’ voter suppression in 2011. But both Michael den Tandt and Sujata Dey emphasize that Sona’s conviction was based on his being only one participant in the wider Robocon scheme – and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On reality barriers
Shorter Brian Crowley: It turns out that finding “facts” and “evidence” about mythical trade barriers is tougher than I’d realized. In light of this adversity, can’t we just agree to accept my unsupported assertions as fact, and impose the most extreme anti-government policy my corporate benefactors can imagine in response?
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how we should take Germany’s rightful concern over investor-state dispute settlement provisions as an opportunity to reevaluate what we expect to accomplish through trade and investment agreements such as CETA. For further reading…– Peter Clark, Michael Geist and Scott Sinclair discuss Germany’s objections to new trade agreements with
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Vineeth Sekharan debunks the myth that a job represents a reliable path out of poverty, while reminding us that there’s one policy choice which could eradicate poverty altogether: A job alone does not guarantee freedom from poverty. In fact, in 2012, at least
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Marc Lee looks in detail at the risks involved in relying on tar sands development as an economic model: The UK outfit Carbon Tracker was the first to point out this means we are seeing a “carbon bubble” in our financial markets – that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Joseph Heath responds to Andrew Coyne in noting that an while there’s plenty of room (and need) to better tax high personal incomes, there’s also a need to complement that with meaningful corporate taxes: (A) crucial part of the Boadway and Tremblay
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Katrina vanden Heuvel criticizes the U.S. Democrats’ move away from discussing inequality by in favour of platitudes about opportunity for the middle class. And while Matthew Yglesias may be correct in responding that the messaging change hasn’t resulted in much difference in
Continue readingCorporations suing countries—how crazy is that?
Lone Pine Resources sues Canada because Quebec has imposed a moratorium on fracking. Philip Morris sues the Australian government over its tobacco plain packaging legislation. Swedish energy company Vattenfall sues Germany because of that country’s decision to phase out nuclear energy. Fracking is a method of exploiting oil and gas
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Also, James Moore is firmly devoted to swatting flies which threaten the very fabric of space-time
No, the Cons still can’t be bothered to try to actually identify mythical “trade barriers” as they push to give the corporate powers that be a practical veto over provincial governments. But they’re certainly trying to make the myth sound more terrifying – and they won’t meet anything more than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, looking at one of Thomas Piketty’s findings about the self-propagation of wealth which has received relatively little attention – and pointing out how the a pattern of greater wealth grabbing higher returns can both be managed in order to reduce undue concentration of wealth, and even turned to the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Eduardo Porter writes about the rise of inequality in the U.S., while Tracy McVeigh reports on the eleven-figure annual cost of inequality in the UK. And Shamus Khan discusses the connection between inequality and poverty – as well as the policy which
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – The American Prospect writes about Thomas Piketty’s work on inequality – and how we’re just scratching the surface of the policy implications of a new gilded age: Piketty is rightly pessimistic about an immediate response. The influence of the wealthy on democratic politics
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Robert Reich writes about the basic economic lessons the U.S. has forgotten since its postwar boom: First, America’s real job creators are consumers, whose rising wages generate jobs and growth. If average people don’t have decent wages there can be no real recovery
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne calls out Stephen Harper’s hypocrisy in paying lip service to the problems with the use of disposable temporary foreign labour while expanding exactly that policy throughout his stay in power: The program was supposed to be a last resort for employers
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Dan Leger and Leslie MacKinnon both theorize that 2013 represented a new low in Canadian politics. But while the Cons may have taken some new steps in petty scandals and cover-ups (and Rob Ford’s clown show managed to attract an unusual amount
Continue reading