Former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt quits NDP Harcourt let membership lapse over many issues including the party’s opposition to carbon tax CBC News Posted: Apr 01, 2014 8:10 AM PT Last Updated: Apr 01, 2014 8:10 AM PT Have to agree with Mike, in principle, although my membership lapsed years
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Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Krugman compares the U.S.’ longtime recognition that concentrated wealth can do massive social harm to the Republicans’ recent efforts to claim that raising any revenue from the rich is somehow un-American: The truth is that, in the early 20th century, many leading
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Thomas Walkom writes that the Cons’ economic prescriptions are doomed to fail because they’re based on a fundamental misdiagnosis: (T)hat half of the Conservative theory is correct. There is still persistently high unemployment. But the other half, the study found, does not
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Joe Fiorito discusses the spread of income inequality in Canada. And Doug Henwood reviews Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, while wondering what will follow from the empirical observation that accumulated wealth tends to perpetuate itself to the detriment of most of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman expands on the Republicans’ insistence on privileging inherited wealth over individual work: (N)ot only don’t most Americans own businesses, but business income, and income from capital in general, is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. In 1979
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Edward Robinson laments the willingness of European centre-left parties to abandon any attempt to argue against austerity even when the evidence shows that’s the right position to take: Centre-left parties in Europe appear to have completely lost the argument for pragmatic fiscal
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Andrew Jackson writes that increases in Canadian inequality have been the result of deliberate policy choices: In an important recent book, Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics, Keith Banting and John Myles argue that, while rooted in the market, politics has
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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jim Stanford writes that union-bashing has proven to be political poison for many of the parties who have tried to distract from increasing inequality with attacks on workers: (T)he biggest problem for Mr. Hudak’s crusade was a deeper sentiment in Canadian public opinion
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Following up on yesterday’s column, David Atkins discusses his own preference for front-end fixes to poverty and inequality: The standard way you’ll hear most progressives address inequality issues is to allow the labor market to run as usual, but levy heavy taxes on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Brian and Karen Foster question why steadily improving productivity has led to increasing stratification rather than better lives for a large number of people: (W)ith all the optimism, why hasn’t technological progress actually opened up a world where we all work, and we
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The Economist looks at the relationship between equality and growth, showing that there’s at worst little evidence that fairer economies have any trouble matching their more-polarized counterparts – and best some indication that they perform better: Inequality is more closely correlated with
Continue readingwmtc: lessons from wisconsin and michigan: tim hudak’s threat to ontario workers is not over
Last September, when Tim Hudak announced that he intended to break Ontario’s unions, it came as no surprise to labour activists. The head of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party, cynically framing the issue as one of “choice,” talked about “right-to-work” – a familiar euphemism for union busting – and repealing the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – The New York Times editorial board points out that a higher minimum wage can produce clear economic benefits for businesses as well as for workers: One 2013 study by three economists — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester and Michael Reich — compared the
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Loretta Saunders: Unifor calls for justice for all missing and murdered aboriginal women
by: UNIFOR | Press Release HALIFAX, Feb. 27, 2014 – Unifor members across the country were devastated to hear the news late yesterday afternoon that police had discovered the remains of Loretta Saunders near the Trans-Canada highway inNew Brunswick. “This is a terrible loss, and our thoughts are with her family, friends, and
Continue readingwmtc: the ndp: so sad, so frustrating, so maddeningly predictable
Where oh where has the NDP gone? One of the most wonderful things about Canada, for me, has always been the presence of a viable third party on the left. When we first moved here, it was so amazing to hear Jack Layton, Libby Davies, Peggy Nash, Paul Dewar, Olivia
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Stephen Hume writes about the importance of tax revenue in building a functional and compassionate Canada: My taxes provide our mostly peaceful, prosperous and safe society; a health care system that for all its flaws and glitches is pretty darn good compared to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Michael McBane highlights one of the less-discussed changes in the Cons’ 2014 budget – as it officially eliminates the federal distribution of health care funding based on provincial need in favour of handing extra money to Alberta: The Harper government is eliminating
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rick Smith hopes that the Cons’ backtracking on income splitting means that they won’t go quite as far out of their way to exacerbate income inequality in the future: (T)he unfortunate reality is that we are still becoming ever more unequal, a trend
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Lynn Stuart Parramore offers five convincing pieces of evidence to suggest that the U.S.’ plutocrats are losing their minds in their effort to set themselves apart from the rabble. Kevin Roose tells a story about some awful, awful (and disturbingly wealthy and powerful)
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