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 readingTag: murray mandryk
Accidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the conflict between Canadian values including a reasonable quality of life and freedom from an employer’s total control, and the explicitly anti-Canadian message of employers seeking to expand and exploit a temporary foreign worker underclass. For further reading…– Once again, Dan Kelly’s comments were caught by PressProgress, while
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the cult of “lean” is just part of the most damaging Saskatchewan Party belief which is undermining our health care system and other public services. For further reading…– Murray Mandryk has had plenty to say about “lean” in his previous columns. – And the Saskatchewan Union of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman points out how the U.S.’ corporate elites are agitating to make sure that any economic recovery helps only those at the top, rather than reaching most workers in the form of wage increases: Suddenly, it seems as if all the serious
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Zoe Williams interviews George Lakoff about the need for progressive activists and parties to work on changing minds rather than merely pursuing an elusive (and illusory) middle ground: (T)he left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year, it cedes more ground
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne calls out Stephen Harper’s hypocrisy in paying lip service to the problems with the use of disposable temporary foreign labour while expanding exactly that policy throughout his stay in power: The program was supposed to be a last resort for employers
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Robert Reich (via GlenInCA) points out the connection between a strong middle class and curbs on corporate excesses – with may go a long way toward explaining why the business lobby is working so hard to eliminate the concept of a secure livelihood
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how P3 structures create a divergence of interest between short-sighted governments and the general public – and a few policy fixes to ensure we don’t lose value or accountability as a result of politically-motivated choices to use them. For further reading…– The Saskatchewan NDP introduced its P3 accountability
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – James Bloodworth discusses the most important challenge facing Ed Miliband and Labour in the UK – which largely matches the task for progressives around the globe: People have never put all that much stock in politicians of course, and the expenses scandal
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On core products
It may not come as much surprise that I thoroughly disagree with Murray Mandryk’s paean to corporate protection agreements. But his take on the CETA does signal one point worth highlighting. Last week, my column dealt with the shift toward seeing politics as a matter of marketing and microtargeting, rather
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb comment on Canada’s dangerously distorted conversation about public revenue and the purposes it can serve: As we argue in our new book, Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word, the Canadian tax conversation has become dangerously distorted. Any reasonable
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
This and that to end your Thursday. – The Huffington Post discusses a study showing how poor Canadians pay the highest marginal tax rates on income that pushes them over benefit thresholds. But it should be fairly obvious that the solution is to set up rational models for social programs
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The Canadian Labour Congress calls out Jim Flaherty for stalling on his promise to work on boosting the Canada Pension Plan. Meanwhile, in attempting to keep profits flowing to the financial sector, several Fraser Institute drones find that increased CPP contributions…substantially increase
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Chrystia Freeland writes about the dangers of increased concentration of wealth – particularly when it bears at best a passing relationship to any worthwhile contribution to society at large. And CBC’s report on Peter Sabourin’s investment fraud highlights the fact that the tax
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Armine Yalnizyan makes the case as to why wealth equates to far too much power in Canada: The problem is not that the wealthy are too powerful. The problem is that, with rare exception, as their power has increased, it has not been
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Sadly (if perhaps unsurprisingly), the Trudeau Libs’ vote with the Harper Cons against civil rights has received relatively little notice compared to the two parties’ attack ad posturing. But there’s still plenty worth reading on the subject – including another post from pogge,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On adaptation
Murray Mandryk’s Wednesday column serves as a downright painful example of Monday morning quarterbacking – cherry-picking examples from seven decades of Saskatchewan governments to criticize “rash decisions” without recognizing the difference between reasonable experimentation and blatant cronyism. And under Mandryk’s implicit standard for public-sector risk aversion (that if something could
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman discusses how a myopic focus on slashing taxes and services figures to cheat future generations out of desperately-needed social structure: You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest “report
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Edward Greenspon discusses the importance of a public service whose focus extends beyond the narrow interests of the government of the day: The hundreds of thousands of Canadians who work for governments, particularly those employed – in the evolving argot of recent
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: #skndpldr Roundup
With this weekend’s convention approaching, we’re starting to see plenty more media coverage of the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race. So for those who haven’t yet voted (or those looking for some new material generally), there’s discussion on offer through:– Metro’s brief profiles of each of Cam Broten, Ryan Meili and
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