Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Gil McGowan highlights how the UCP’s intolerable plans for Alberta include another four years of systematic wage suppression in order to further enrich the donor class. – Cory Doctorow writes about the importance of having “ideas lying around” to respond to an obviously
Continue readingTag: heather mallick
Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Nuki, Jennifer Rigby and Anne Gulland write about the refusal to acknowledge the airborne spread of COVID-19 which led to a continuing failure to put basic precautions in place – though part of the problem is noted to involve the match between
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Eric Dolan reports on new research showing the connection between a sense of entitlement and a refusal to take basic steps to protect public health in a pandemic. And Francine Kapun reports on the Peel region’s move to fine employers who don’t put
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Eric Doherty, and Eric Galbraith and Ross Otto, respectively write that the response to the coronavirus shows how it’s possible to imagine and implement needed changes along the lines of a Green New Deal. And Heather Mallick theorizes that it can also
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Stephen Buranyi laments the reality that the public’s increased awareness and concern about our ongoing climate breakdown isn’t being reflected in political decisions. And Noah Smith writes that while the rapid drop in prices for renewable energy may help us avoid the worst
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Christopher Ingraham reports on the reality that extremely wealthy Americans are now paying lower systemic tax rates than workers. And Andrea Germanos writes that Michael Sayman is among the plutocrats calling for his own class to pay its fair share. – Heather Mallick
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Heather Mallick discusses the pattern of right-wing governments obsessing over undoing the good done by their predecessors, rather than paying the slightest attention to the public interest. And Mariana Mazzucato and Josh Ryan-Collins examine (PDF) about the importance of having leaders who
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jessica Corbett writes that Earth’s atmospheric carbon concentration has reached levels not seen in 80,000 years, while Jonathan Watts reports on a new study showing that climate change may be pushing our planet toward a “hothouse” state which might threaten human life.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Embarrassing honorary degree stories: ‘Did no one warn them?’
You have to ask why universities bother handing out honorary degrees like bonbons when you think about all the trouble it can cause them. Consider the embarrassing 2012 case of the Israeli university that came up with a scheme to give an honorary degree to an unsavoury right-wing foreign politician
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Time To Put Away Childish Things
For a nation that calls itself the greatest country on earth, the United States has a lot of growing up to do. That is the trenchant opinion offered by Heather Mallick in today’s Star, one that is likely to earn her more than her usual quotient of hate mail from
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Penney Kome raises the question of who will be responsible for the damage wrought by climate change. And Trish Audette-Longo reports that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set to start examining how human behaviour contributes to, and is affected by,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Madmen in the White House … this time it’s a thing, not just a ‘strategy’
PHOTOS: U.S. President Richard Nixon pointing the way to the exit for Donald Trump’s benefit. Below: Mr. Nixon about to board the helicopter that would take him away from Washington for the last time in an official capacity; a recent photo of President Trump; the sinister Dr. Henry Kissinger, then
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Power That Resides Within All Of Us
We live a world where far too many decisions are heavily influenced, if not determined, by economic considerations. The cost of everything, and the value of nothing, seems to be today’s ruling ethos, to the point where we regularly seem to be little more than cogs in a giant mercantile
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Allan Woods looks into the pitiful responses to states of emergency declared by First Nations, as well as a decade and a half worth of neglect of cries for help from Pikangikum First Nation in particular. Krist…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Paul Theroux comments on the gall of corporations who move jobs to the cheapest, least-safe jurisdictions possible while trumpeting their own supposed contributions to the countries they leave behind. And Wilma Liebman sees more progressive labour legislation as one of the keys to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Andrew Jackson writes that the Cons have gone out of their way to destroy the federal government’s capacity to improve the lives of Canadians: When the Harper government took office, federal tax revenues (2006-07 fiscal year) were 13.5% of GDP, a bit shy
Continue readingAlberta Politics: The #AngryCon: he learned those attitudes about the media from the party he supports
PHOTOS: A screen shot of the man identified by the Toronto Star as Earl Cowan at the moment he informs a reporter she’s a lying piece of … something. Below: Tory operative Fred DeLorey and Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick. I have to confess I felt the tiniest bit of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Sheila Block points out the problems with the spread of low-paying, precarious jobs. And PressProgress fact-checks the CFIB’s attempt to make as many workers’ lives as precarious as possible by suppressing minimum wages and standards. – But Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports that Ontario’s provincial
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Janine Berg writes about the need for strong public policy to counter the trend of growing inequality. And Gillian White traces the ever-increasing divergence between worker productivity and wages in an interview with Jan Rivkin: White: Some say that the decrease of collective
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Cameron Dearlove laments the fact that Canada is failing to recognize and replicate other countries’ successes in using the social determinants of health to shape public policy: Today we know that social and financial inequities — particularly the experience of poverty — has
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