Read this July 29 story from the Associated Press, via globalnews.ca, on the latest twist in the battle ove water in Detroit. DETROIT – Control of Detroit’s massive municipal water department, which has been widely criticized by the United Nations and others for widespread service shutoffs to thousands of customers,
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Rick Perlstein observes that Ronald Reagan’s most lasting contribution to American politics may be his admonition not to recognize flaws or past sins which might require serious responses – and that democratic discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere has yet to recover: (T)he
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Colleen Flood writes that our health care system is more similar to the U.S.’ than we’d like to admit – and that many of the most glaring inefficiencies within it are already the result of services funded through private insurance rather than our
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Paul Krugman calls out the U.S.’ deficit scolds for continuing to invent a crisis to distract from the real problems with middling growth and high unemployment. And Bruce Johnstone singles out a few of the Cons’ talking points which have somehow become conventional
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your weekend. – PressProgress takes a look at the OECD’s long-term economic projections – which feature a combination of increasing inequality and slow growth across the developed world, with Canada do worse than almost anybody else on the inequality front unless we see a shift
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – PressProgress highlights how the Cons’ stay in office has been marked by temporary rather than permanent jobs, while Kaylie Tiessen writes that precarious work is particularly prevalent in Ontario. And Erin Weir notes that more unemployed workers are now chasing after fewer job
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Joseph Heath responds to Andrew Coyne in noting that an while there’s plenty of room (and need) to better tax high personal incomes, there’s also a need to complement that with meaningful corporate taxes: (A) crucial part of the Boadway and Tremblay
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: How Translink Impedes Transit Use
Translink is “being evasive on exactly how much money is being spent on this.” via Compass Card program delayed again by TransLink – British Columbia – CBC News. How’s that for not surprising. Translink is notorious for its taxation without representation: taking municipalities’ money without providing democratic representation to municipalities.
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Occupy Movement Has Changed the Narrative, But We’re Not Done
Recently, with the WEF spending the last few years acknowledging global income inequality is a problem, I’ve declared a kind of victory for the Occupy Movement: getting the lexicon on the 1% and inequality on the tongues of the sly gazillionaires who rule the world, and into mass consumption. Now
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The 1% Has More Solidarity Than We Do
In Davos, the 1% rule the world. Literally. They also have the guns. The 1% are claiming we have it out for them; that if we don’t tone down the rhetoric and stop calling them names like “the contemptuous rich,” we might end up starting a class war. But they
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Carol Linnitt observes that the Canadian public supports a shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy by a 76-24% margin – even as they overestimate Canada’s economic returns from oil and gas. – Meanwhile, Alison takes a look at the spread of (primarily
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer respond to Joseph Stiglitz by pointing out that some of the inequality arising out of capitalism has nothing to do with rules further rigged in favour of the wealthy: Although there is certainly significant substance to Stiglitz’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – David Atkins highlights Gallup’s latest polling showing that U.S. trust in public institutions continues to erode. And Paul Krugman notes that there’s reason for skepticism about the snake oil being peddled as economic policy in order to further enrich the already-wealthy: Why, after
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman offers a response to the assertion that accumulated wealth should be considered as costless capital: (I)f there’s one thing I thought economists were trained to do, it was to be clear about opportunity cost. We should compare accumulation of dynastic wealth
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Thomas Frank discusses the corporate takeover of U.S. politics – and how even nominally left-oriented parties are willing to go along with the corporate position even as voters regularly demand something else: One of the reasons the phrase appealed to me, 17 years
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rick Salutin discusses how corruption has become endemic in the global economy as an inevitable consequence of me-first values: You wouldn’t have those CEO pig-outs absent neo-liberalism’s moral model: get rich not just quick but hugely. As Kevin O’Leary loves saying, and CBC
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Margaret Somers and Fred Block write about Karl Polanyi’s critique of the free-market myth and its increased relevance today: (F)ree-market rhetoric is a giant smokescreen designed to hide the dependence of business profits on conditions secured by government. So, for example, our
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On sucker’s deals
Shorter Brad Wall: But what you less-sophisticated, not-so-business-savvy people don’t understand is this: when you pawn the furniture, you get CASH MONEY UP FRONT. How can that be anything but a great deal?
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jim Armitage discusses how the privatization of public services in the UK is being mashed up with the principles behind subprime lending and debt bundling – leading to a bubble which promises to take down investors and the public alike. – Dylan Matthews
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Simon Enoch discusses the costs of turning over a profitable system of public liquor stores to corporate control – as Brad Wall has finally admitted to wanting to do: A privatized liquor market is very likely to evolve into an ‘oligopoly’, where only
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