This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Leftie Come Lately — Ted Rall:
  
• How New Zealand fell further behind — John Quiggin in Inside Story: Australians of all political persuasions understand that “reform” is code for harder work, lower pay and a more unequal distribution of income, and “austerity” means cuts in tax for the rich and cuts in services and benefits for everyone else. On these criteria, we are indeed trailing most of the English-speaking world. All the advocates of reform and austerity need to do now is convince us that these countries are outperforming us on the measures that count. This is difficult, to put it mildly.
• Dream of New Kind of Credit Union Is Extinguished by Bureaucracy — Nathaniel Popper, NYT: The only good thing about Bitcoin is that it keeps the avaricious and gullible so preoccupied that they are limited in the harm they can do to anyone else. However, killing off a Brewster Kahle project is like kneecapping Santa Claus on December 24th. 'The original vision of this thing — of helping nonprofit workers, or helping the poor — they will not allow it,' Mr. Kahle said.
• Modern Monetary Theory and Value Capture — Bill Mitchell: Public sector infrastructure developments push up land values in nearby areas and deliver windfall gains to land owners sometimes well in excess of the initial outlays required to fund the project in question. […] Land Value Capture this aims to ensure that those who gain windfall profits from land holdings that skyrocket in value because of a particular government decision (rezoning, infrastructure project etc) pay for some or all of the project.
• Moral Blankness — George Monbiot: In leaked correspondence with the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council (which covers his own constituency), David Cameron expresses his horror at the cuts being made to local services. This is the point at which you realise that he has no conception of what he has done.
• Gendering The Making of Modern Finance? — Adrienne Roberts at Progress in Political Economy makes some intriguing observations about and around this year's blockbuster book of historical political economy. For example: Like all financial frauds, the practice of shaving metal off the edges of coins is inextricably tied to the social markers of gender and class. Women’s participation in this practice was conditioned by their relation with the market and with silver, which, as Knafo points out, was associated with daily transactions, whereas gold was associated with mercantile activities.
• What if the adventure chooses you? — Jonathan Rees: Personalized learning, the pitch goes, allows professors to spend less time doing things that others can do better (like lecture), you can spend more time helping students learn. Unfortunately, like Lucy and Ethel in that chocolate factory back in the 1950s, it is easy for your employers to speed up your line by giving you more students – particularly if you work in an online setting where the size of the classroom is no longer a limiting factor. "Professor"? What's a professor?
• The Philanthropy Hustle — Linsey McGoey in Jacobin: In 2014, the Gates Foundation announced an $11 million grant to Mastercard to establish a financial inclusion “lab” in Nairobi, Kenya. The grant will last three years, after which Mastercard has indicated that, should the venture prove sufficiently lucrative, the company may be willing to foot the bill for further financial expansion in the region. […] The gift to Mastercard — and it is a gift, rather than a loan or an equity investment — is the latest in a long list of donations that the Gates Foundation has offered to the world’s wealthiest corporations. From Vodafone, a British company notorious for paying zero corporate tax in the United Kingdom, to leading education companies such as Scholastic Inc., the Gates Foundation doesn’t simply partner with for-profit companies: it subsidizes their bottom-line.
• Friction is now between global financial elite and the rest of us — Robert Reich in the Guardian: Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars. By 2014, America’s largest employer was Walmart and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earned about $9 an hour. This does not mean the typical GM employee half a century ago was “worth” four times what the typical Walmart employee in 2014 was worth. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than the Walmart worker. The real difference was that GM workers 50 years ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all carworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members.
• Republicans’ Lust for Gold — Paul Krugman, NYT: [T]he Friedman compromise — trash-talking government activism in general, but asserting that monetary policy is different — has proved politically unsustainable. You can’t, in the long run, keep telling your base that government bureaucrats are invariably incompetent, evil or both, then say that the Fed, which is, when all is said and done, basically a government agency run by bureaucrats, should be left free to print money as it sees fit.
• Friday lay day – Is MMT applicable to the Eurozone? — Bill Mitchell provides an introduction to the German translation of Warren Mosler's book The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, which also serves as a handy summary of same: The use of the term – Innocent Frauds – is Mosler’s generous interpretation of the way that these myths emerge and are sustained in the public domain. […] Among this list of dolts who push ‘innocently’ these tawdry lies are “mainstream economists, the media, and most of all, politicians”. One could easily dispute the presumption of innocence. There is ample evidence that across each of these cohorts a more sinister agenda pervades – one that is centred on class control and developing conditions that permit the maximum redistribution of national income to the top end of the income distribution.
• Students Left in Crushing Debt as For-Profit College Empire Collapses — Mark Karlin, Buzzflash: But the higher ed. bubble isn't burst till the public system goes under…