Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Linda McQuaig highlights the false promise that a market aimed at enriching billionaires will somehow benefit anybody else. Chris Giles reports on the continually-expanding gap between soaring CEO pay and stagnant wages for workers in the UK. And Anna North discusses how the
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Sandy Garossino offers a reminder of the large-scale corruption – including bribery supporting dictatorial regimes and multiple instances of illegal practices in Canada – at the root of the Libs’ SNC Lavalin scandal. Andrew Coyne comments on the parallels between SNC Lavalin’s lobbying
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Katrina vanden Heuvel discusses the importance of pushing toward universal child care in order to relieve avoidable stress on families. – Allison Jones reports that the Ford PCs are only making matters worse by ordering school boards not to hire to fill developing
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Say No to Bubble Boy
There are already more than enough galling stories circulating in Alberta’s political scene to emphasize why Jason Kenney and his party are grossly unfit to exercise any power. But it’s worth pointing out one more problem which matches the combination of deeply-rooted corruption and austerian disregard for the public good
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your year-end reading. – Kenan Malik comments on the many forms of classism. And Roderick Benns examines how Ontario’s basic income recipients were able to make use of their increased income security – including by spending more time with friends, with family and volunteering in their communities.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Joe Pinsker offers a reminder that the wealthiest individuals are primarily concerned with positional rather than absolute gains – meaning that nothing useful is accomplished by diverting wealth toward them other than to drive up the price of status symbols. And Thomas Piketty
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Gavin Kelly writes that the UK’s welfare state has been shaped by the Cons to prevent working households from being able to aspire to anything better than precarity: According to a recent analysis for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the combined effect
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Machinations of Alberta’s United Conservative Party
Source: Edmonton Journal We will soon be having a provincial election and I for one, do not want to return to the dark conservative backwater Alberta languished in for some 40 odd years. We have a New Democratic Party Government that, when situated on the political spectrum, comes up centrist
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Ainslie Cruickshank reports on Grand Chief Stewart Phillip’s call to prevent catastrophic climate change rather than devoting public money toward fossil fuel subsidies. And Eric Holthaus points out that the recent “hothouse Earth” report includes the recognition that it’s not yet too late
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On public interests
Plenty of others have pointed out the most direct lie in Jason Kenney’s attempt to blame Alberta’s NDP for the decisions of an Ontario court dealing with Carillion’s Canadian bankruptcy. But it’s worth taking a look at the much more fundamental lie at the core of Kenney’s complaint. As mentioned
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Ed Finn writes that we shouldn’t believe claims that Canada lacks money for social benefits when Lib and Con governments have deliberately chosen not to bring in the revenue needed to fund them: Canadian governments back in the 1960s and ‘70s never
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Dana Brown and Thomas Hanna discuss the possibility of a public option for access to medication in the U.S. And while the Winnipeg Free Press warns that Brian Pallister might want to stand in the way of a national pharmacare program, that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Terry Schwadron writes about Donald Trump’s war on the poor, while Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson highlight how U.S. businesses and their political pawns have undermined the labour movement. And David Climenhaga and PressProgress point out that we should expect exactly the same
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Jake Johnson writes about the obscene amount of money handed to the wealthy in the U.S. by the Republicans’ tax scam. And Robert Reich discusses how the spread of inequality and isolation helped to lay the groundwork for Donald Trump’s destructive presidency.
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: On Honesty In Politics
Politicians have always played fast and loose with the idea of truth. Facts get weighted certain ways to support a narrative, creative “spin” is applied to manipulate the public perception of events and policy announcements and so on. I get it – everybody is trying to make their version of
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Who’s the Real Enemy?
“You’re either with us or against us.” — Benito Mussolini First the UCP demanded the Premier ignore the rules of the House, then they accused her of being against rural Albertans and siding with the criminals because she refused to ignore the rules of the House. Do these guys even
Continue readingKen Chapman: Can Alberta Conservatives Win in 2019 and Deny Climate Change?
Abacus Data has a new on-line survey of 1534 Canadians randomly selected from a panel of 500,000 Canadians. They weighted the responses to “match census data to ensure that the sample matched Canada’s population” demographics. Not sure that weighting is reliable or even possible. The Harper government killed the long
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Yves Engler discusses how Justin Trudeau is now the face of the exploitation of poor countries and workers by the Canadian mining industry. And Penny Collenette writes that governments and business should both bear responsibility for human rights – though it’s worth
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Kevin McKean discusses how inequality undermines the goal of ensuring a healthy population. Matt Bruenig examines new data showing that the concentration of wealth in the U.S. is getting more extreme by the year. Steven Pearlstein writes about new polling showing that
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