This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Glen Pearson discusses the glaring gap between what citizens actually value, and what gets done by the governments they elect through distorted political systems: This past weekend, I wrote a column for the London Free Press, in which I stated the following:
Continue readingTag: Paul Krugman
Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Luke Savage highlights the distinction between photo-op liberalism and any genuine commitment to social progress: This may be the reason liberal thought endlessly obsesses over the language used in political debate and often seems to place a higher value on its tone
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Gary Younge discusses how regardless of the outcome of the U.S.’ midterm elections, democracy is on the defensive against a Republican attack on voting rights. Janet Reitman goes into detail about the consequences of the U.S.’ law enforcement system failing to do
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – CBC News examines the state of consumer debt in Canada. Jake Johnson writes that despite the growing recognition of inequality as an issue, 2017 saw an unprecedented amount of money funneled into the fortunes of billionaires. And Owen Jones highlights the importance
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Nicholas Shaxson writes that the UK’s disproportionate dependence on the financial sector is akin to the resource curse facing Western Canada among so many other jurisdictions: (T)he finance curse had more parallels with the resource curse than we had first imagined. For one
Continue readingAlberta Politics: There’s a meeting in Calgary tonight, and the people there are going to be very, very angry
Two well-heeled older men who never wanted for anything during their upbringings and now live comfortable, privileged lives will be getting together in Calgary this evening to talk about just how very, very angry they are. The idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage makes them very, very angry. The idea
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Evening Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Aditya Chakrabortty discusses how UK Labour is pursuing genuine and positive class politics by promising to ensure that workers have a share in both the decision-making and the spoils of major corporations. – Duncan Cameron offers a reminder of the lack of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman discusses how Republican obstruction undermined both the shape and size of the U.S.’ efforts to recover from the 2008 economic crisis. And Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick and Ulrike Steins document how the crisis ant its aftermath exacerbated the U.S.’ already-alarming level
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Paul Krugman offers a reminder that the great global policy failure following the 2008 finance-driven crisis was to bail out bankers alone, while leaving people to fend for themselves in the face of subsequent austerity. And Wayne Swan highlights how the continued
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman writes that progressive voices need to reclaim the theme of freedom as it becomes increasingly obvious how deprivation and precarity deprive people of meaningful choices: (L)arge economic players are dominating more and more of the economy. It’s increasingly clear, for example,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Lana Payne’s column for the Labour Day weekend comment on the role unions play in pushing for advancements for everybody. – Paul Krugman offers a reminder that a focus on GDP alone as a measure of economic development misses the issue of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Shape of the Planet; Both Sides Have a Point* … Alberta’s UCP helps make flat-eartherism respectable again!
Surprisingly, as far as we know, neither Opposition Leader Jason Kenney nor any members of his United Conservative Party Legislative Caucus made it to the Flat Earth International Conference at the appropriately named Fantasyland Hotel in Alberta’s capital city Thursday and yesterday. “Flat-earthers from around North America came to listen
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Paul Krugman highlights how work requirements and other barriers to social benefits serve only to needlessly increase poverty without improving employment rates. And Patricia Cohen writes about the growing gap between soaring profits and eroding wage gains in the U.S., while Irina Ivanova
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Who loves ya, baby? Canada’s conservatives urgently need to reassess their dalliance with Donald Trump
A photograph of last weekend’s G7 conclave in Quebec showing several national leaders apparently trying to persuade U.S. President Donald Trump to act like a grownup was doing the rounds on social media in the aftermath of the post-summit trainwreck. With the G7 gathering in La Malbaie already nearly universally
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Gary Younge comments on the highly selective willingness of far too many privileged people to acknowledge suffering around them. And Paul Krugman calls out the Trump administration’s gratuitous cruelty toward the people who already have the least: There’s something fundamentally obscene about this
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne rightly criticizes the World Bank for trying to push discredited and inhumane trickle-down economics as a substitute for viable economic development. – Gary Younge calls for some much-needed recognition of the toxic masculinity behind so many mass killings. And Nora Loreto
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Oleg Komlik takes note of Wade Cole’s research showing how income inequality affects political dynamics. And Hannah Finnie recognizes that young people are joining unions (among other forms of social activism) in order to gain some much-needed influence on both fronts, while Paul
Continue readingAlberta Politics: If there was ever a time for the U of A to stick to its guns and welcome David Suzuki to Edmonton, this is it!
The University of Alberta’s dean of engineering believes his faculty faces “the worst crisis, a crisis of trust, that we’ve faced in more than three decades.” The immediate cause of this perceived looming disaster for the U of A’s most favoured faculty? “The conferral of a single honorary degree,” wrote
Continue readingAlberta Politics: New Kinder Morgan exit strategy hint emerges as tangled Trans Mountain tale twists the national knickers
Jason Kenney, leader of Alberta’s Conservative Opposition party, must’ve struggled yesterday to keep a smirk off his face as he bloviated piously about Kinder Morgan Inc. President Steven Kean’s rumination the time may be nigh to pull the plug on the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project that has the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman writes that a transition to a clean energy economy is well within reach – as long as politicians don’t put the interests of oil money over our economic and environmental future. But Gordon Laxer notes that NAFTA already limits Canada’s
Continue reading