I put an entry up last Wednesday evening for people to post their suggestions and follow up regarding next week's WLIT session. But in the interim the site has moved to a new server and I guess the entry was lost. So here is another.
Some of the things we should find materials on are "dying with dignity," tax shifting, carbon taxes and possibly other issues that were raised that I can't remember right now. Also I posted links to some stuff I wrote about 8 years ago dealing with payroll taxes and employer paid benefits. Below are the links again (NB: I didn't write the headlines for the op-eds):
"Hours of Work: Moving Beyond Gridlock," paper presented at the Labour Research Forum in 1997
At Wednesday's meeting we talked about the European Dream and how this is a socialist democracy model that contrasts with the market capitalism model of the American Dream. The values associated with the European Dream were much closer to Canadian values than were the economic values of the American Dream. There is an ideological battle between these two views and Canada lies in the middle with strong pressure from politics and the mass media to embrace the neo-liberalism that is taking root in BC, Ontario and Alberta. I feel like one role of the Work Less Party is to expose this trend and to prevent the decline of our Canadian values, and to resist being forced into economic feudilism.
New Zealand provides a model for what is currently happening to Canadians, and this should serve as a warning for what we can expect if workers don't defend their rights(Click on my ov id to read an article on this). New Zealand is experiencing impressive economic gains, and this has been at the expense of the workers who have had their wages reduced continually over the last few years. There is a disjoint between the economy and the quality of life. The rising tide that lifts all boats sounds nice in theory but in reality the little boats that are anchored to the bottom simply get swamped and sink. We need to make people aware of the reality which is not represented by the promises.
I think we need to look at comparing the economic prosperity with the quality of life, and showing that the former is a class war against the wage earners, and that quality of life represents the general population and not just a small elite investor class. There are other countries that have recently been where we are right now and their betrayal should be our warning, and objective evidence that exposes the pack of lies put forth by the prosperity crowd.
Posted by: ov at February 14, 2005 12:25 PMI just finished reading "Rational Exuberance-Silencing the enemies of growth" by Michael Mandel. He champions an exagerated business cycle as being healthy for long term productivty growth and wealth building across classes. The wealth created is top heavy for the already wealthy but also partially redistibutive.
Posted by: Jim Walker at February 21, 2005 12:48 AM