This and that for your Sunday reading. – Matthew Brown and Matt Volz report on the latest oil train derailment in North Dakota. Justin Giovannetti discusses how fracking is leading to regular earthquakes in previously-stable parts of Alberta – which looks doubly dangerous given the presence of pipelines in the
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Friday reading. – Matthew Melmed examines how poverty early in life is both disturbingly widespread, and likely to severely affect a child’s future prospects. – Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis track the extreme gap in wage growth for CEOs as opposed to workers. Robert Skidelsky argues
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Michael Kraus, Shai Davidai and A. David Nussbaum discuss the myth of social mobility in the U.S. And Nicholas Kristof writes that inequality is a choice rather than an inevitability: Yet while we broadly lament inequality, we treat it as some natural
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Eric Morath points out that a job (or even multiple jobs) can’t be taken as an assurance that a person can avoid relying on income supports and other social programs. PressProgress offers some important takeaways from the Canadian Labour Congress’ study of the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman highlights the policy areas where we need to look to the public sector for leadership – including those such as health care and income security where we all have a strong interest in making sure that nobody’s left behind. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Andrew Jackson argues that contrary to the attempt of the Ecofiscal Commission to impose right-wing values like tax slashing and devolution on any action to deal with climate change, we in fact need the federal government to take a lead role: While it
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Enbridge Spills
One in a continuing series. Their playing Regina this time. But don’t worry, the NEB is on the case.
Continue readingPostArctica: Coastal Tar Sands – Journey To Deleted Islands
What happens when a major corporation wants to build an oil pipeline over land to the west coast where it will be loaded on to supertankers that have to navigate some very narrow inlets to pick up their loads? They put out publicity pictures and graphic videos that magically remove
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Dangers Are Only Too Apparent And Predictable
I was taking a bit of a break from blogging today when this came up, a sobering object lesson in the environmental disasters that we flirt with on the West Coast: A 135-metre container ship laden with bunker and diesel fuel is adrift off the west coast of Haida Gwaii,
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Something To Be Thankful For This Weekend
The National Energy Board inspires little confidence in many of us, often appearing less an independent regulator of the energy industry and more an extension of the Harper regime’s tarsands’ agenda. It is therefore both a surprise and a delight to read that they are actually showing a bit of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rick Smith discusses the growing public appetite to fight back against burgeoning inequality – along with the need to make inequality a basic test for the fairness of any policy: (I)t is significant that a finance minister of our decidedly right-wing government showed
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: It’s the Climate, Stupid!
Not two weeks since the federal government’s long-anticipated approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline, the magnitude of the obstacles faced by the project are becoming clearer by the day. There is widespread public hostility — both in Kitimat, envisioned as the pipeline’s end location, as well as across British Columbia
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 readingPolitics and its Discontents: A Tale of Intimidation At TransCanada Corporation
Despite the best efforts of the Harper government to make its own addiction to the fossil fuel agenda the Canadian people’s as well, increasing numbers are voicing their concern and opposition to the expansion of the Alberta tarsands through new pipelines. And evidence is mounting that those concern are wholly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Mark Taliano discusses how corporatocracy is replacing democracy in Canada, while Jaisal Noor talks to John Weeks about the similar trend in the U.S. And DownWithTyranny reminds us how corporations came to be – and how radical a difference there is between
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Ian Welsh writes about the concentration of wealth and economic control: Money is permission: you can’t do squat in a market economy without it. Those who can create it, or who have excessive profits, control what other people can do. It is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jim Stanford discusses how unions and collective bargaining improve the standard of living for everybody: The following figure illustrates the broad negative correlation between bargaining coverage and poverty: that is, the higher is bargaining coverage, the lower is relative poverty (and the more
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Little Hope is Effective…
A lot of hope is dangerous. – President Snow This may be a little hokey, but I think Catching Fire is an important film to see right now. And it’s awesome! I read the books ages ago, but even though I know how they each end, it didn’t stop me
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Martin Regg Cohn discusses EllisDon’s ability to dictate political choices by the Ontario Libs and PCs as a prime example of corporate manipulation of the political system: What Wynne didn’t say was that EllisDon, its subsidiaries and executives, have been shockingly generous donors
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – It shouldn’t be a surprise that more people are pointing out the importance of effective regulation in preventing disasters like the Lac-Mégantic explosion. But it may be somewhat unexpected to see that message from a CEO in the industry which stands to be
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