Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Martin Lukacs offers a reminder that Doug Ford is nothing but a mercenary for his fellow children of privilege, while Andrea Horwath’s NDP actually offers a platform which will benefit the 99%. And Michal Rozworski observes that Ontario’s election is properly focusing on
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ann Pettifor discusses the trend toward financialization which has led to regular economic disasters – and suggests the public is well aware it’s getting left behind in the policy choices which have created it. – ScienceDaily takes note of the strong connection between
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Krugman reminds us of the fraud that is right-wing bleating about deficits: There have been many “news analysis” pieces asking why Republicans have changed their views on deficit spending. But let’s be serious: Their views haven’t changed at all. They never really
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Canada needs more Jeremy Corbyn, less Justin Trudeau, 21st annual Parkland Institute conference is advised
PHOTOS: Guardian journalist Martin Lukacs, moments before his remarks to the 21st annual Parkland Institute Conference in Edmonton yesterday morning. Below: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn and Prime Minister Theresa May (U.K. Photos: Wikimedia Commons); and bestselling Canadian author Linda McQuaig before her keynote
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rupert Neate reports on a new study showing that the world’s 1,500-odd billionaires between them control over $6 trillion in wealth. – Stuart Trew sets out Canada’s choice between corporate-oriented trade deals such as the CETA, or sustainable and fairly-distributed economic development. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Martin Lukacs discusses the need for collective action to fight climate change – and the dangers of allowing ourselves to be distracted by calls to focus solely on individual choices: These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Martin Lukacs writes that the world should able to draw plenty of positive examples from Canada’s politics – though not from the corporate-focused federal Libs: As Donald Trump rips up the Paris climate accords, it may seem easy to despair. But these provincial
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Martin Lukacs contrasts Justin Trudeau’s hype machine against the genuine hope offered by Jeremy Corbyn, while Paul Mason sees the election result as just a first battle against the UK’s ruling elite. And Thomas Walkom discusses how left populism is the real
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Martin Lukacs argues that the way to avoid a Canadian Donald Trump is to ensure people have a progressive challenger to the corporate establishment: Trudeau’s social liberalism has been partnered with the very economic policies that have cemented inequality and savaged people’s quality
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Evening Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The Star argues that Canada can’t afford to leave tax loopholes wide open for the rich – as the Libs are doing in violation of their campaign promises. And Martin Lukacs notes that obscene giveaways to the rich seem to be the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
– Paul Wells argues that climate change and First Nations reconciliation – two of the issues which the Libs have tried to turn into signature priorities – look set to turn into areas of weakness as Justin Trudeau continues his party’s tradition of dithering. And Martin Lukacs writes that Trudeau’s handling of continuing injustice facing First Nations has involved an awful lot of flash but virtually no action:
The extractivist worldview—bent on treating everything as a commodity—that lay behind Stephen Harper’s resource agenda just as powerfully shapes Trudeau’s. In fact, the Liberals’ attempt to wrap themselves in the UN Declaration without embracing its central right may constitute a new, more subtle form of extraction: the extraction from Indigenous territory of consent itself.
Liberal moves to extract and manufacture consent and support for outdated policies are evident elsewhere: restoring funding to the Assembly of First Nations, a government-dependent organization that has since plumped frequently for them; appointing an Indigenous Justice Minister, even though Indigenous critics argue she has sided with the government agenda throughout her political career; and agreeing to call an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, but with a mandate far short of what impacted families wanted. As the weight of reality presses against Trudeau’s rhetoric, the ability to generate consent is crumbling.
Reconciliation is a powerful hope, an uplifting prospect, a deeply desired new relationship that Trudeau has compellingly invoked. But if reconciliation does not include the restitution of land, the recognition of real self-government, the reigning in of abusive police, the remediation of rivers and forests, it will remain a vacant notion, a cynical ploy to preserve a status quo in need not of tinkering but transformation. It will be Canada’s latest in beads and trinkets, a cheap simulation of justice.
– Guy Caron discusses the CRA’s role in Canada’s two-tier tax system. Stephen Punwasi comments on the connection between Canada’s willingness to facilitate tax avoidance, and the real estate bubbles driving housing prices far beyond what working-class Canadians can afford. And Marc Lee then highlights the connection between soaring urban real estate prices and increased inequality.
– David Ball notes that many municipalities are retaking control over their own services after learning that the promises of efficiency through privatization are entirely illusory.
– Richard Orange points out Sweden’s intriguing idea of reducing taxes on repair services to discourage people from throwing out consumer goods. But I’d wonder whether that step alone would make a dent if it isn’t paired with a concerted effort at training potential repair workers for a job which the corporate sector would prefer to eliminate.
– Finally, Paul Mason makes the case for economics to be based on real-world observations of human behaviour, rather than insular mathematical models whose assumptions about market efficiency bear no relationship to reality. And Branko Milanovic discusses the need to measure and reduce inequality as part of a global development strategy.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Neil MacDonald discusses the unfairness in allowing a wealthy class of individuals to set up its own rules, while Jeffrey Sachs notes that the U.S. and U.K. are among the worst offenders in allowing for systema…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Martin Lukacs highlights the Canadian public’s broad support for the Leap Manifesto – and the opportunity available to any party willing to put its contents into practice. And Shawn Katz is hopeful that the N…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Tom Bawden notes that inequality is as much a problem in our relative contribution to climate change as it is in so many other areas of life. And Steven Rosenfeld lists some of the ways in which the increasingly-weal…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Mariana Mazzucato discusses the futility of slashing government without paying attention to what it’s intended to accomplish. And Sheila Block and Kaylie Tiessen are particularly critical of Ontario’s short-term sell…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Robyn Benson offers her take on the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as an election issue. Peter Mazereeuw notes that the nominal labour protections in the TPP – which were of course negotiated without workers having a seat at the table –
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – PressProgress highlights just a few of the Cons’ obviously-flawed claims about corporate tax rates. And Ethan Cox discusses why we should be talking about the CETA and TPP during the campaign both due to their own importance, and the potential to tap into
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Martin Lukacs offers up the definitive response to the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy: The deeper evidence about this event won’t be found in the train’s black box, or by questioning the one engineer who left the train before it loosened and careened unmanned into
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