This and that for your Thursday reading. – Eduardo Porter highlights the continued growth in research showing that social benefits do nothing to stop people from pursuing work, but instead serve to mitigate the risks of precarious survival for the people who need it most. – And Michael Marmot discusses
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Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your election day reading. – Ed Finn discusses how neoliberalism is damaging Canada, and what we need to do to reverse its influence: Corporate influence on federal politics, the country’s flawed electoral system, and the staunch pursuit of a political and economic ideology since the 1980s that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Ian Welsh writes that the Harper Cons have destroyed Canada’s historic economic balance by scrapping the parts of the manufacturing sector which previously provided a buffer against low resource prices. And Bruce Campbell compares Canada’s record on climate change to Norway’s, and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ian Welsh discusses how our problems with poverty and inequality arise out of artificial scarcity: We either already have excess capacity or we have the ability to create more than people need of all necessities. This includes housing, food and clothing. We still
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Ian Welsh rightly points out how our lives are shaped by social facts far beyond individual’s control: If you are homeless in America, know that there are five times as many empty homes as there are homeless people. If you are homeless in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Robert Reich describes how U.S. voters are rejecting the concept of a ruling class from both the left and the right – while noting that it’s vital to get the answer right as to which alternative is worth pursuing. And Owen Jones
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – PressProgress makes the case that we can’t afford to risk another term of government neglect by the Harper Cons. Jeremy Nuttall discusses how the Cons’ fixed election date and anti-social economic policies each figure to cause direct damage to Canada’s economy in the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Jim Stanford points out how the corporate tax pendulum is swinging back toward asking business to make an equitable contribution to Canadian society: The federal rate was cut virtually in half after 2000 (to just 15 per cent today). Several provincial governments
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Toby Sanger takes a look at Canada’s balance sheets and finds that both households and governments are piling up debt while the corporate sector hoards cash: (A)ll the recent handwringing over rising household and debt levels ignores one critical point: any one person’s
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This and that for your Sunday reading. – The Vancouver Sun interviews Andrew MacLeod about his new book on inequality in British Columbia. And Tanara Yelland talks to Guy Standing about the need for governments responsive to the needs of the precariat: One central demand Standing makes is for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Peter Ladner discusses why our tax and fiscal policies should be designed to reduce inequality – rather than exacerbating it as the Cons are determined to do: Right now, the richest 20% of Canadian families hold almost 70% of the country’s wealth.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Edward Keenan is the latest to point out that any reasonable political decision-making process needs to include an adult conversation about taxes and why we need them: This week, when asked about the prospect of raising taxes beyond the rate of inflation in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jacques Peretti discusses how corporate elites rewrote our social contract in a concerted effort to the inequality we’re fighting today – and suggests it’s well past time to push back in the name of moral economics: Politicians have now, as then, conspired in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that to start your year. – Ian Welsh comments on the challenges we face in trying to turn wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few into a better world for everybody: The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia. We have the potential to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Reviewing Darrell West’s Billionaires, Michael Lewis discusses how extreme wealth doesn’t make anybody better off – including the people fighting for position at the top of the wealth spectrum: A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Linda McQuaig discusses the radical difference between how Canadians want to see public resources used (based on the example set by governments elsewhere), and the determination of the Cons and their corporate allies to instead fritter away every dime of fiscal capacity the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your weekend. – Lana Payne challenges the Big Lie that right-wing politics are anything but antithetical to broad economic growth. Dennis Howlett weighs in on the Cons’ choice to make the rich even richer through their tax policy. And Daniel Tencer juxtaposes the boom in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Joe Conason discusses the increasingly widespread recognition that inequality represents a barrier to growth. And Heidi Moore takes a look at Thomas Piketty’s place in making that point: This is a deep point. Many American households, if they are lucky, will grow their
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Michael Harris writes that the Cons’ primary purpose while in power has been to hand further power and wealth to those who already have more than they know what to do with: These corporations and their political mouthpiece, the Republican Party, are Stephen
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ian Welsh discusses the connection between one’s view of human nature and one’s preferred social and economic policies – while noting that policies themselves serve to shape behaviour: The fact is this: incentives work. The second fact is this: using strong incentives is
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