Assorted content to end your week. – Alison Bennett reports on the OECD’s work on offshore tax avoidance, highlighting the “stateless income” that’s shuffled around the globe so as to avoid contributing to social good anywhere: Policymakers around the world are stepping up efforts to tighten rules because a growing
Continue readingTag: inequality
Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Joseph Stiglitz comments on the wider lessons we should take from Detroit’s bankruptcy: Detroit’s travails arise in part from a distinctive aspect of America’s divided economy and society. As the sociologists Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have pointed out, our country is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Dan Leger points to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion as an all-too-vivid example of the intersection of privatized profits and socialized risks: Are we tough enough on corporations that destroy, burn and kill? What’s happening at Lac-Mégantic suggests we aren’t. There’s a scramble on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Henry Blodget recognizes that the systematic corporate squeeze on mere workers represents a deliberate choice rather than an inevitability: One of the big reasons the U.S. economy is so lousy is the American companies are hoarding cash and “maximizing profits” instead of investing
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Funding Cuts to Alberta’s PSE Sector: There Are Alternatives
It has recently been reported that the University of Alberta wants to “reopen two-year collective agreements” with faculty and staff “to help the university balance its budget…” This appears to be in direct response to Alberta’s provincial government announcing in its March budget that there would be a “7% cut
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Matthew Yglesias sums up the effects of four decades of U.S. union-busting, and points out how the supposed benefit from pointing a fire hose filled with money in the general direction of the corporate sector hasn’t materialized: If you turn back 30 or
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Linda McQuaig for Toronto Centre
For the “You Read It Here First” file, I wrote on Friday: Toronto Centre needs a candidate with a track record of advancing more substantive and more progressive positions on economic issues. Specifically, the NDP should nominate someone who can take on Freeland regarding inequality and what to do about
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On test cases
Not surprisingly, Linda McQuaig‘s entry into the NDP’s Toronto Centre nomination contest against Jennifer Hollett has set off plenty of discussion this morning. And much of the focus has been on a possible by-election battle between McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland – the authors of the two most prominent recent books
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – David Atkins comments on the ever-growing disconnect between the interests of a few making a killing on Wall Street and the lives of people stuck in the real economy: (T)the entirety of supply-side economic thinking is based on the idea that inflating
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Saturday reading. – Rick Salutin writes about the need for the labour movement to better promote its contribution to the general public – and my only quibble is that I’d prefer to see a focus on what still can be (and needs to be) done rather
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Is Chrystia Freeland Progressive?
Chrystia Freeland, The Globe and Mail’s candidate in Toronto Centre, recently wrote a book about inequality (which I have not yet read) and is supposed to “bring fresh thinking to the Liberal Party’s economic team.” She has already attracted a few jabs from right-wingers Terence Corcoran and William Watson. But
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Bruce Livesey discusses how offshoring undermines government – and how it happens with the approval of those same governments claiming we can’t afford to provide for citizens: Today, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) claims that offshore banks globally hide
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the questions raised by a sudden drop in potash prices – and why we should reconsider our economic and social priorities so that a minor fluctuation in a still-ample level of wealth isn’t seen as reason to push the panic button. For further reading…– My discussion of Robert
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Thomas Walkom points out that while Stephen Harper managed to push the world in the wrong direction over the past few years, he may be missing the boat on where it’s headed: The Harper government’s failure is longer-term. It still operates under the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Frank Graves comments on the fundamental political choices we’re facing in determining whether to continue operating based on corporatist orthodoxy – and the reality that the vast majority of Canadians don’t agree with the side chosen by the Harper Cons: (T)he devil’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Bill Gardner discusses the effect of inequality and poverty starting at birth: There are three important facts packed into this slide. First, the lines stack up in order of increasing age, meaning that older people reported worse health than younger people. Second, all the lines
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Peter Buffett rightly questions the trend toward making the provision of basic necessities subordinate to a corporate mindset, rather than putting human needs first: As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Bill Curry reports on the Cons’ continued refusal to provide accurate information to the PBO – with the end result being that an office intended to provide a fully-informed, unbiased perspective in evaluating government action is now being forced to make Access to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Myles discusses the Cons’ war on evidence: The mandatory Census was the lifeblood of almost all social and business planning. It provided key data for studying things like income inequality and poverty since both low- and high-income households were required to report.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Gerald Kaplan discusses how the privileges of power have contributed to the utterly callous response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion by Stephen Harper and Ed Burkhardt: For me, of all Burkhardt’s outrageous statements nothing surpasses his public accusation that the train’s engineer, Tom
Continue reading