This and that for your Sunday reading. – David Suzuki discusses the merits of a four-day work week in improving both working and living conditions: It’s absurd that so many people still work eight hours a day, five days a week — or more — with only a few weeks’
Continue readingTag: neoliberalism
Michal Rozworski: Trudeau’s Growth Council is back with more bad ideas
Justin Trudeau’s friends in finance, consulting and big business dominate the grandly named Advisory Council on Economic Growth. A few months after recommending a giant privatization scheme, the gang is back with more ideas, many very good for them but very bad for you and me. The biggest news: a recommendation to
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: My New Favourite Journalist – Caitlin Johnstone
Much has happened in the world in the past few months. Especially since November 8, when the “left” or the “progressives” in the USA and indeed the world have been crapping their pants about some orange skinned person with homunculus like hands winning the seat of most powerful person in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Branko Milanovic offers his take on how the U.S.’ version of liberalism paved the way for Donald Trump and his ilk both by buying into corporatist assumptions about success, and by treating electoralism as the basis for political organization: In economics, liberalism
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Anatole Kaletsky discusses the gross failures of market fundamentalism. And William Easterly points out that the risks to democratic governance which now seem to be materializing can be traced to the lack of a values-based defence of empowering people to decide their own
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Lethal Legacy – Part 2
In Part 1, I wrote about the lethal consequences for many who have worked at GE Peterborough. A toxic workplace that has resulted in crippling disease or death for many is not the kind of legacy these men and women anticipated. To compound the tragedy of the situation, Ontario’s Workplace
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Lethal Legacy: A Province’ s Version Of Neoliberalism
The Toronto Star has run a heartbreaking series, very well-worth reading, on the fate of many of the employees of Peterborough’s GE plant, whose lives were either cut short by, or are riddled with, disease thanks to exposure to a toxic brew of chemicals during their working lives. Entitled Lethal
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: "The Cancer Of Inequality"
In a recent post well-worth reading, The Mound reflected on the decline of support for liberal democracy. Today, Star readers respond to an article carried by the paper entitled, How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’. Their message is clear: inequality is at the root of the problem,
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: What A Pretty Face Conceals
When one thinks deeply about neoliberalism, one conjures up the face of greed, rapacity and monetary narcissism. Not at all a pretty face. But here in Canada, Thomas Walkom writes, neoliberalism is concealed by a human, some would say pretty, face, that of Justin Trudeau. The essence of neo-liberalism is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Ben Tarnoff discusses the two winners – and the many losers – created by the spread of neoliberalism: Neoliberalism can mean many things, including an economic program, a political project, and a phase of capitalism dating from the 1970s. At its root,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Murray Dobbin highlights how our political and economic discussions are poorer for the dominance of neoliberalism: That’s it? That’s the best the economics profession can come up with to explain Canadians’ indebtedness catastrophe? It’s all about human behaviour, written in stone, so I
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: A Primer for a Prime Minister
It’s almost impossible to discern how much our prime minister really understands about globalism and the neoliberal order. He claims he gets it but that’s far from clear. The prime ministerial confusion was manifest in his interview today in The Guardian.It was with some relief that I came upon a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Simon Enoch and Christine Saulnier examine how P3s are used to privilege corporate profits over the public interest: The CCPA has published numerous publications on the question of P3s because they have been so pervasive and so riddled with problems. There have
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Stephen Hawking discusses the urgent need to address inequality and environmental destruction as people are both more fearful for their futures, and more aware of what’s being taken away from them: (T)he lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Monbiot Tackles Neoliberalism’s Death Grip on the West
Neoliberalism has been the default operating system of western governments, Canada included, since it was ushered in during the Thatcher/Reagan/Mulroney era. Justin Trudeau is a neoliberal as were his predecessors over the last three decades. Canada remains in the clutches of neoliberalism and no one, no leader, no party is
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Neoliberalism Out, Neofascism In?
Cornel West says America is in for a makeover, Trump style. White working- and middle-class fellow citizens – out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. Yet these same citizens also supported a candidate who appeared to blame their
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Miles Corak asks how we should see the growing concentration of income at the top of the spectrum, and concludes that we should be concerned mostly with the breakdown between personal merit and success among the extremely privileged: Connections matter. And for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Janice Fine discusses how the decline of organized labour as a political force has opened the door for the likes of Donald Trump: Just when we need them most, the main institutions that have fought for decent jobs are a shadow of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne comments on the importance of the labour movement in ensuring that economic growth translates into benefits for workers: The findings of a study released this month by the Canadian Centre for Study of Living Standards, an Ottawa-based think-tank, reinforces why there
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Stephen Dubner discusses the importance of social trust in supporting a functional economy and society: (S)ocial trust is … HALPERN: Social trust is an extraordinarily interesting variable and it doesn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserves. But the basic idea is
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