Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Alison chronicles how the definition of “accountability” has changed since the Cons’ own actions started to come under the microscope, while Paul Wells writes about the three different interests at play in the Cons’ scandal. And Tonda MacCharles explores how the Senate bribery
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Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The Economist takes a look at the effect of international trade agreements – and confirms the long-held concern that the erosion and non-enforcement of labour standards consistently follows the signing of government suicide pacts: Some results are rather unsurprising. Countries with better
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Sean McElwee discusses the crucial distinction between wealth and merit – while recognizing which actually serves to improve the condition of those around a particular individual: Because the wealthy are no longer willing to use their wealth for good, they have decided to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – George Monbiot writes that corporate control over a political system may be a huge factor in limiting public participation – even as it makes a substantial counterweight all the more important: The political role of business corporations is generally interpreted as that of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – The CP reports on Suzanne Legault’s much-needed warning about the Cons’ secrecy in government: In a closed-door session with dozens of bureaucrats Thursday, Suzanne Legault cited a series of novel measures she says are damaging an already tottering system. “I am seeing signs
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – There was never much doubt that the Cons’ demolition of Canada’s long-form census was intended to ensure that we lack data needed to develop evidence-based policies – and that the effects would be most significant among the most marginalized (or exclusive) groups. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne discusses Unifor’s goals in the wake of its founding convention: The hope is that, collectively, working people can push back in new and profound ways against what has been a decades-long, anti-worker agenda perpetuated by both governments and corporations. But just
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Justin Ling reports on the federal government’s covert surveillance of Idle No More: Sitting in her teepee on Ottawa’s Victoria Island in December 2012, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence was officially starting her hunger strike, breathing fire into the Idle No More movement
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Kershaw highlights what’s most needed to support Canada’s younger generations: Even with all this personal adaptation, most in Gen X and Y can’t work their way out of the time and income squeeze when they start families. Since two earners bring
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Assorted content to end your week. – Polly Toynbee discusses how the UK’s attacks on social programs are based on gross ignorance about what social spending does (and who it helps): The Citizens Advice Bureau reports a rise of 78% in the last six months in people needing food banks
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the tendency of both political decision-makers and the general public to give too much credence to secret information – and the need for citizens to scrutinize leaders all the more closely if they rely on bare declarations that we’d agree with their actions if only we knew what
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Marc Lee takes a high-level look at the absurdity of our destructive economic choices: Exhibit one: the North Pole at the moment is a one-foot-deep aquamarine lake. After reaching record low ice cover and thickness at the end of summer 2012, an ice-free
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Assorted content to end your week. – Bill Curry reports on the Cons’ continued refusal to provide accurate information to the PBO – with the end result being that an office intended to provide a fully-informed, unbiased perspective in evaluating government action is now being forced to make Access to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Gerald Kaplan discusses how the privileges of power have contributed to the utterly callous response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion by Stephen Harper and Ed Burkhardt: For me, of all Burkhardt’s outrageous statements nothing surpasses his public accusation that the train’s engineer, Tom
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Lest anybody think the Harper Cons’ combination of dishonesty and secrecy is limited to political payoffs, Blacklock’s reveals (PDF) that they subsidized the shipment of corporate jobs out of Canada – and didn’t deign to inform the public that the program existed until
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rick Salutin highlights the dangers of relying on bulk data collection and algorithmic analysis as a basis to restrict individual rights: The National Post’s Jen Gerson interviewed a U.S. privacy expert. She asked about the PRISM program, by which U.S. agencies spy on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Chris Lehmann discusses the destructive impetus behind the ever-present austerity scolds: In their new book The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, Stuckler and Basu show distressingly consistent increases in such key public-health indicators as suicides, heart disease, alcoholism and HIV infection in societies
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