Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Benjamin Shingler reports on the push for a basic annual income in Canada. And Christopher Blattman notes that cash serves as a valuable treatment for poverty wherever one diagnoses the disease: The poor do not waste grants. Recently, two World Bank economists looked
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Joseph Stiglitz wraps up the New York Times’ series on inequality by summarizing how the gap between the rich and the rest of us developed, as well as how it can be reduced: The American political system is overrun by money. Economic
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Harry Stein discusses how government policy is currently designed to exacerbate inequality by subsidizing the concentration of wealth: This issue brief puts aside the question of whether new policies, such as a global wealth tax, should be enacted to reduce economic inequality.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how personal and institutional stress make it more difficult for people to defend their interests – and on the need to respond to political strategies increasingly aimed at exploiting that principle to reduce public participation. For further reading…– Again, Chris Mooney discussed the effect of stress on voter
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Gar Alperovitz suggests in the wake of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that it’s long past time to reconsider who controls capital – and make a concerted effort to democratize that control: The name of the game — Piketty’s book fairly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Thomas Frank discusses the corporate takeover of U.S. politics – and how even nominally left-oriented parties are willing to go along with the corporate position even as voters regularly demand something else: One of the reasons the phrase appealed to me, 17 years
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Bryce Covert rightly challenges the claim that poverty bears any relationship to an unwillingness to work – along with other attempts to blame the poor for their condition: In fact, the majority of able-bodied, adult, non-elderly poor people worked in 2012, according
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, offering a suggestion as to how to give Saskatchewan workers significantly more control over their working hours than they hold today. For further reading…– Again, the OECD report recommending a “right to ask” for flexible hours is here (PDF). And the UK already has similar legislation.– The Saskatchewan Employment
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kathleen Geier discusses the U.S.’ culture of overwork and its human toll: There is abundant evidence that long working hours is incredibly dangerous from a public health perspective. Fatigued or sleep-deprived workers who drive or operate heavy machinery are an obvious menace to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Neera Tanden points out that a wide range of citizens rely on a strong safety net at one time or another – and suggests that it’s long past time to start discussing how important social programs have been in our own lives: I
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Capital, Labour, and the Eurozone Crisis
Most of the coverage regarding the Eurozone crisis has understandably focused on the politics of austerity. Less attention, however, has been paid to the longer term trends in the industrial relations of those countries hardest hit by the crisis: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain; the so-called PIIGS countries. Recent
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links – #VoteOn Edition
This and that for your Thursday (and Ontario election day) reading… – Joseph Heath makes the case against Tim Hudak’s PCs in particular, and the shift from public to private goods in general: (I)t’s fairly clear what the PCs are planning. They are proposing a general shift in Ontario away
Continue readingNorthern Insight: Conflict of interest. Wazzat?
When football coach Jerry Sandusky recruited, groomed and molested boys, he continued for years because people around him stayed quiet. In 2009, Sara Ganim, then a 22-year-old writer for a small newspaper, sussed the importance of rumours involving the Penn State icon. Three years later Sandusky faced 30 to 60
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Robert Reich proposes that the best way to address corporate criminality is to make sure that those responsible go to jail – rather than simply being able to pay a fine out of corporate coffers and pretend nothing ever happened. – And
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Community Unionism
At Unifor’s founding BC regional Council, a speaker stood up at the mic and shared an idea. As a member of the Vancouver-based Local 3000, representing workers at various White Spot locations and elsewhere in the service industry, the speaker shared thoughts about how to reach out to non-union restaurant
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – David Graeber writes that unfettered capitalism will never tame itself, but will instead need to be countered by a sufficiently strong counter-movement to seriously question its underpinnings. And Thomas Frank follows up with Graeber about the warped incentives facing workers as matters stand
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Joseph Stiglitz offers his suggestions (PDF) for a tax system which would encourage both growth and equality: Tax reform…offers a path toward both resolving budgetary impasses and making the kinds of public investments that will strengthen the fundamentals of the economy. The most
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – PressProgress digs into the PBO’s report on tax giveaways to look at what Canada has lost from the Cons’ cuts to federal fiscal capacity – and how little has been gained as a trade-off: (T)he Harper government, by starving the public coffers, is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Jim Stanford looks into the fine print of the Hudak PCs’ assumptions about corporate tax slashing and finds that even their own numbers show that most of the money gifted to corporations would be thrown away (emphasis added): On second reading there are
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – James Greiff makes the case against the right’s faith-based reliance on costly high-end tax cuts in place of attracting people through jobs and quality of life: (T)he recent record suggests those U.S. states that cut taxes find themselves with bigger deficits and none
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