This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Beyond ISIS: The Folly of World War IV — Andrew Bacevich at TomDispatch: A de facto collaboration of four successive administrations succeeded in reducing Iraq to what it is today: a dysfunctional quasi-state unable to control its borders or territory while serving as a magnet and inspiration for terrorists. The United States bears a profound moral responsibility for having made such a hash of things there. Were it not for the reckless American decision to invade and occupy a nation that, whatever its crimes, had nothing to do with 9/11, the Islamic State would not exist. Per the famous Pottery Barn Rule attributed to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, having smashed Iraq to bits a decade ago, we can now hardly deny owning ISIS.
• Men at work — Allison J Pugh, in Aeon: Most Americans might expect very little from their employers – as one layoff survivor told me: ‘Just a paycheck and a certain amount of respect, I would say.’ They might shrug their shoulders about job insecurity as the inevitable cost of doing business in a globalised economy (even though some economists have found that layoffs usually end up costing firms rather than boosting stock prices or productivity). At home, however, working‑class men expect more of their intimate partners, and brittle yearning turns those expectations into betrayal if they fall short. Abandoned by both employer and wife, Gary aims his ire at just one of these.
• Twitter Wants You To Feel Bad — Britney Summit-Gil in The Society Pages: The analytics don’t teach you how to tweet better, how to reach a broader audience, or how to make a bigger impact. For example, last month the tweet on my account that got the most impressions also had zero engagement. People saw it and breezed by, not even clicking on it. And, of course, Twitter isn’t interested in making you a better tweeter, it’s interested in selling you promotional services.
• QE for People – Neither Right nor Left, Just the Way Forward — Frank Van Lerven, of Positive Money, and some notable quotables: In sum, there is a strong intellectual body of history behind the various alternative proposals for QE. That this body of history is composed by some of most important economists of our time, on both sides of the political spectrum, should show that these types of ideas are credible and merit more consideration. Ultimately, People’s QE types of proposals are nether right nor left, they are simply the way forwards!
• Racism: the achilles heel of middle class liberalism — Kevin Ovenden: Anti-Semitism – the socialism of fools, as the great German socialist August Bebel so brilliantly put it – had a special corrupting effect. It provided an alternative world view – what we might now recognise as a “clash of civilisations” – with The Jew representing both international finance and international Marxism. It glided the path from socialist opposition to the capitalist system towards all sorts of reactionary positions, including fascism, which had a pseudo-antiestablishment veneer. Islamophobia is the Jewish Question of our day. It is not simply one reactionary idea among many, which all principled socialists oppose. It plays a particular corrupting role across politics and society as a whole.
• How to Be an Anticapitalist Today — Erik Olin Wright, Jacobin: If you are concerned about the lives of others, in one way or another you have to deal with capitalist structures and institutions. Taming and eroding capitalism are the only viable options. You need to participate both in political movements for taming capitalism through public policies and in socioeconomic projects of eroding capitalism through the expansion of emancipatory forms of economic activity.
• Five things we learned from the Bank of England this week — Christine Berry at the New Economics Foundation: Seven years on from the crisis of 2008, the Bank acknowledges that we are still seeing “relatively tight credit conditions” for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In other words, banks are still reluctant to support the real economy, despite all the subsidies that have been thrown at them. In that respect at least, the post-crisis period seems to be far from over. […] At the same time, lending for mortgages and consumer spending is starting to recover some of its pre-crisis exuberance: consumer lending increased at an annualised rate of 8.2% in October, the highest level since before the banking crisis.
• Do Not Be Impressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s Phony Generosity — Ted Rall: If you’re a conservative who thinks government can’t do anything right, let me show you a charity that’s worse. The Gates Foundation wants to destroy teachers’ unions to take away their benefits and drive down their wages — hardly a way to attract the best and brightest young college graduates into the profession. And it has poured millions into the disastrous Common Core, which has created today’s “teach to the test” culture in public schools. Given Zuckerberg’s previous involvement in public schools, a $100 million fiasco in Newark, New Jersey that declared war on teachers, fetishized standardized testing and led to so many school closures that kids wound up walking miles through gang territory to new schools chosen for them by, really, an algorithm — it isn’t a stretch to guess that Chan Zuckerberg will look a lot like Bill and Melinda Gates.
• How can you help Flint? Do not send us bottles of water. Instead, join us in a revolt. — Michael Moore: This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison 100,000 people every day for two years – and get away with it. That took a Governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on widening the income inequality gap and conducting various versions of voter and electoral suppression against people of color and the poor.
• Elizabeth Warren Challenges Clinton, Sanders to Prosecute Corporate Crime Better Than Obama — David Dayen, The Intercept: In virtually all the cases she cites — from Standard & Poor’s delivering inflated credit ratings to defraud investors during the financial crisis, to Novartis giving kickbacks to pharmacists to steer customers to their products, to an explosion at a Bayer CropScience pesticide plant that killed two employees — the Department of Justice declined to prosecute individual executives or the corporations themselves, resorting to settlements with minuscule fines that barely disrupt the corporations’ business models. […] Warren also published an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday discussing her report.
• Unreasonable expectations and unpalatable truths — Frances Coppola: Now, the supply of deposits vastly exceeds the demand for loans, interest rates are on the floor, and payments have become a vital (and largely free) public service. And this […] creates a problem. Customers - including asset managers, apparently - want banks to provide a deposit-taking service regardless of whether banks have a productive use for the money. Banks may of course provide such a service, but if they can't use the money to fund profitable activities, they will not pay customers for it. Why should they borrow money at interest when they have no profitable use for it? It would be wholly irrational, and probably a failure of fiduciary duty towards their shareholders. [To my mind "a world of excess money" which is simultaneously a world of high un/underemployment requires intervention via fiscal policy, rather than fatalistic accommodation to the new normal.]
• How bad were the good old days of Hawke/Keating? — Paul Frijters at Club Troppo: In hindsight, I am simply not sure whether to call the Hawke/Keating years the glory days of de-regulation, or the disaster years of a regulatory explosion. I do know that inequality increased a lot following those reform years, in part because of the tax changes then introduced. And the interest groups then created are among the biggest obstacles to a fairer society now.
• US jobs recovery biased towards low-pay jobs — Bill Mitchell: On average, the US labour market has added 237,000 net jobs per month over the last 12 months. What I was curious about was whether these were predominantly low paid jobs or not. I found that the jobs lost in low-pay sectors in the downturn have more than being offset by jobs added in these sectors in the upturn. However, the massive number of jobs lost in above-average paying sectors have not yet been recovered in the upturn. In other words there is a bias in employment generation towards sectors that on average pay below average weekly earnings.
• Defining austerity — Simon Wren-Lewis: I want to define austerity as “fiscal consolidation that leads to a significant increase in involuntary unemployment, or perhaps more formally but less colloquially as leading to a noticeably more negative output gap.”
• When Inequality Kills — Joe Stiglitz at Project Syndicate: The median income of a full-time male employee is lower than it was 40 years ago. Wages of male high school graduates have plummeted by some 19% in the period studied by Case and Deaton. To stay above water, many Americans borrowed from banks at usurious interest rates. In 2005, President George W. Bush’s administration made it far more difficult for households to declare bankruptcy and write off debt. Then came the financial crisis, which cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes. When unemployment insurance, designed for short-term bouts of joblessness in a full-employment world, ran out, they were left to fend for themselves, with no safety net (beyond food stamps), while the government bailed out the banks that had caused the crisis.
• The Politics behind Piketty — Elizabeth Anderson at Crooked Timber: Ideology matters for politics. Once people have acquired income or wealth through the market, they feel strongly entitled to it. In the U.S. and increasingly in the rest of the OECD, the population at large, taken in by such representations, is reluctant to tax. Redistributing income and wealth by means of taxation, as Piketty proposes, becomes harder once people have it in their hands. We need to scrutinize the rules by which income and wealth get generated through the market, before it is taxed. They have been changing in a plutocratic direction for the past 45 years. The rule changes have not only increased r (at least for the top 1%), but also depressed g, by increasing monopoly power, shifting savings from real investment to speculation and scams, shifting top talent from production to value-extraction, and depressing aggregate demand.
• Liberal, Nationals and Labor combine to increase Australian students' debt up to 33% — Mid North Coast Greens: Until now, the $1025 Student Start-Up Scholarship went to all eligible students twice a year. It was a modest amount of money that provided relief at critical times of year for uni students, allowing them to cover bills for textbooks, laptops, internet access and other necessities. Taking away scholarships and turning them into loans means an extra $6000 of debt for the average Bachelor student upon graduation.
• Reward is better than punishment: A Work for the Dole alternative — Jade Manson, Independent Australia: The main argument for Work for the Dole is that it benefits community organisations and job-seekers themselves, by providing them with a chance to contribute and a daily routine. However, it also takes away people’s ability to decide who they will volunteer for. This goes against the spirit of volunteer work and the benefit it brings people knowing they are working for a cause they believe in. Although anecdotal reports have suggested Work for the Dole provides participants with a sense of purpose and "something to do", this assumes that they would not have found something better to do had they not been forced to participate in Work for the Dole.
• Delusion Regarding the Fall of Neoliberalism and Globalization — Ian Welsh: Corbyn is not wrong to say “make the necessary adjustments so it will work today, and go back to post-war policies.” It failed, yes, but it was the last economy which spread money evenly through the economy. Make sure it’s not sexist and racist, update it for new energy technology, and try it. […] Until the developed world’s sanctioned intellectuals (as opposed to pariahs like myself and my ilk) and their masters come to grip with these facts, the population will continue to turn elsewhere. They may turn to sane and reasonable people like Corbyn, or they may turn to people like LePen and Trump, but people will not put up with “it’s going to get worse for the forseeable future” forever.
• Who should be responsible for creating money? — Duncan McCann at New Economics Foundation: Currently commercial banks create 97% of the UK money supply. However the ultimate decision on whether to change the monetary system rests with our elected politicians who are in no rush to understand how it could work better, let alone change it. A recent survey revealed that only 10% of MPs understand the UK’s monetary system.
• No more nudges – only an entrepreneurial state can give us a green revolution — Mariana Mazzucato in the Green Alliance Blog: Signals and nudges to the private sector will not get us where we need to go. If we are to have a green revolution, characterised by the kind of sweeping and widespread technological changes that characterised the IT revolution, then we need to learn the right lessons. More nudging is fudging it. Instead, states around the world must act boldly and courageously to tilt the playing field in the right direction.
• Donald Trump’s “Ban Muslims” Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous But Not Far Outside the U.S. Mainstream — Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept: No matter how extreme and menacing Trump becomes, that’s all one can expect from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned analytical objectivity (how will Trump’s fascism play with New Hampshire independents?) as an excuse for not taking any sort of stand. We are indeed a long, long way away from Edward R. Murrow’s sustained, continuous, unapologetic denunciations of Joseph McCarthy.