Chris has put forward some ideas. I am not an economist, but I would like to offer some ideas for other areas to cover, or sub-areas.
ENVIRO: I didn't see anything about "green business" policies. I just finished a private sector project on sustainable development. Whatever else one wants to say about it, it is "subversive" in the sense it undercuts much of the business ethic embraced by the right. First, "monetizing carbon emissions" puts cost back on coal and the like. Thus, it supports development in alternative energies like wind and solar and small hydro. Poll after poll, year after year, shows the general public wants those energy sources. They are popular. However, the current system, provides hidden subsidies to old energy sources. Second, the inherent definition of sustainable development is "subversive" in that it "connects everything." SD is about the "triple bottom line." That is, business cannot merely operate with a traditional single bottom line, it has to account for social and environmental costs. This brings non-business opinion to greater prominence (not dominant, of course). In this regards, it is not surprising to see universities starting to offer combination MBA-Enviro programs. I believe all six law schools in Ontario now offer Enviro-Law programs. MEDIA: Centralization of ownership is already heavy. Canada has a longer history of investigating this, for obvious reasons. It can be a popular issue as well as an educational one. Showing the public how media really works is productive in a political sense. My formal training is broadcast journalism. I always enjoy anything that lets people "look behind the curtain" at how it works. For instance, after all these years, I still get a smile every time I watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the audience sees its first "live reporter" -- who, on TV monitors appears to be at the scene; but, being in studio, the audience sees he is actually a few metres away from Stewart, against a blue screen backdrop. Fighting the FCC tendencies permits critique of mass media manipulation. Chris wrote: > Labour policies: Completely premature at this end > of the 21st century to try to abolish wage slavery > as part of an electable programme. They need to redo > their focus groups to find out how to achieve > consensus between aspirational and disadvantaged > workers. By no means impossible because even the > aspirational workers all know family members or > friends who have suddenly become disadvantaged. Right. E.g., the western IT labor sector is currently a disaster area. It went from "aspiration" to "desperation" in five years. It crammed life times of industrial labor reality lessons into a short period. These people are both energized and demoralized at once. Despite the grand pronouncements of the new economy, in the end, nothing was different. The same old rules applied. And, unless these same people want to go through that again, or want their children to go through it, they had better build a better safety net. Likewise, they are very likely to want to see more Waksal's locked up in real prisons. Ken. -- According to UN estimates, the richest fifth of the worlds people consume some 66 times as much as the poorest fifth, including 58 percent of total energy. And they own 87 percent of the world's vehicles, a major source of greenhouse gases. And the two hundred and twenty-five people who comprise the super-rich have a combined wealth of over one trillion US dollars, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the worlds people. Surely history tells us such imbalances are not sustainable. -- Maurice Strong, 2001