Archive for the ‘History’ Category
What Brian Mulroney got wrong on free trade with the U.S.
Tuesday, March 5th, 2024
Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher sang a siren song. Get governments out of the way! Let the market rule! Economic globalization, with its program of free trade, privatization and deregulation and everyone would benefit. Corporations surely did… And Canadian CEOs did too… the richest CEOs are paid 246 times more than the average worker.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, privatization, standard of living
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Beware Economists Bearing Policy Paradigms
Tuesday, May 25th, 2021
The ideas dominant since the 1980s – variously called the Washington Consensus, market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism – originally gained traction because of the perceived failures of Keynesianism and excessive government regulation. But they took on a life of their own and produced highly financialized, unequal, and unstable economies that were unequipped to cope with today’s most significant challenges: climate change, social inclusion, and disruptive new technologies.
Tags: economy, featured, ideology, poverty, privatization, standard of living, tax
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The pandemic can spur long overdue change for Canada’s workers
Monday, September 7th, 2020
… it’s time to reinforce our social safety nets to ensure affordable housing, accessible child care and support for the unemployed. We didn’t need a pandemic to show us that too many workers in Canada are often living paycheque to paycheque and worried about the future of their families; that women and racialized workers often make up the majority of those doing precarious, low-paid – but essential – front-line work.
Tags: child care, economy, featured, Health, ideology, participation, pharmaceutical, standard of living, women
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How Canada won its first debt war
Friday, July 24th, 2020
[Post WW2] … North American manufacturing was in its heyday, trade liberalization was boosting exports and productivity, and the baby boom fuelled consumption. Today, protectionism is on the rise, and the aging of the baby boomers poses significant long-term problems for labour productivity… Stepped-up enforcement against tax evasion, an annual wealth tax and higher corporate income tax rates are needed…
Tags: economy, tax
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Stephen Harper still favours business over big government. So how did that work out after 2008?
Thursday, May 14th, 2020
Day by day, week by week, Trudeau’s government is increasingly making clear that its approach to bailouts will not follow the path taken more than a decade ago, when much of the aid to corporate giants never did filter down as promised to economically devastated citizens. The Occupy movement and its cries against the “one per cent” were a direct result of the frustration and fallout of the 2008 crash and the income inequality it exposed.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living
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Ottawa should produce vital products — like it did in the Second World War
Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
… many companies have signalled a willingness to produce materials for the pandemic. But, without a powerful government agency overseeing production and distribution, we’ve been left scrambling to buy scarce equipment in a chaotic private marketplace, bidding against U.S. states and governments all over the world. If the Trudeau government seems unable to break out of its subservience to the marketplace, some in the labour movement are showing more vision.
Tags: economy, globalization, Health, ideology
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They’re World War deficit levels, but not the biggest or the baddest yet
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020
The deficits being projected now look to be roughly 5 to 8 per cent of GDP… The 1984 deficit was 8.1 per cent of GDP, when the economy was recovering from the 1982 recession and interest rates paid on the national debt were high. But in those terms, the deficits are not on the scale of the Second World War, when military production and defence spending pushed the annual deficit to 23 per cent of GDP in 1943. A comparable deficit in 2020 would be nearly $500-billion… Canada has seen worse.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology
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Keep it quiet, but universal basic income is coming
Friday, March 27th, 2020
The rise of fascism and the Second World War required the creation of the full welfare state (which was previously restricted to meagre old age pensions) to avoid a replay the next time the economy tanked. The current emergency may be fostering the rise of ideas previously seen as too radical to contemplate, but nobody is saying “universal basic income” yet.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living
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The Legacy of Destructive Austerity
Sunday, January 5th, 2020
There are multiple explanations for the populist rage that has put democracy at risk across the Western world, but the side effects of austerity rank high on the list… If ordinary working families no longer believe that traditional elites know what they’re doing or care about people like them, well, what happened during the austerity years suggests that they’re right.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology
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In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever
Thursday, January 2nd, 2020
NYTimes.com – Opinion December 31, 2019. Nicholas Kristof Nicholas Kristof: I fear that the news media focuses so relentlessly on bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the […]
Tags: featured, globalization, Health, ideology, poverty, standard of living
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