This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Australia's unreported poverty line — Gerry Georgatos in Independent Australia: If we can begin to be honest about the markers of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, in the least we would have to immediately double the numbers of the poor, unemployed and homeless. By this measure, there are at least six million Australians living in poverty and the proportion in poverty will continue to increase long into the foreseeable future. There are closer to two million Australian children living in poverty rather than the 740,000 children that we are officially told, or allowed to believe, are living in poverty.
• Universities hoover-up the great unwashed — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness: In addition to the lowering of university entrance scores, further evidence that Australia’s universities have turned into quantity-based ‘degree factories’ is also provided in the most recent Department of Employment skills shortages report, which showed there were a record 1 million domestic students enrolled with a higher education provider, 730,000 of which were enrolled in bachelor degrees – an extraordinary amount of higher education students in an economy of 24.5 million.
• FIRE sector vampire continues to bleed economy dry — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness:
  
• The Skills Gap that Always Explains Unemployment — Dean Baker: There is a substantial segment of elite types who are always happy to hear about the skills shortage as an explanation for unemployment. See, the problem is not the state of the economy and its poor management by economists, the problem is always the ill-trained workers. You don't need evidence for this one, just assert that the problem is workers don't have the right skills and furrow your brow in a concerned manner. Works every time.
• If Africa is rich – why is it so poor? — Bill Mitchell: Essentially, Gunder Frank argued that it is essential to understand the relationship between the “metropolis and its economic colonies” under capitalism. The underdeveloped countries were in that state because they were functionally essential to making the developed nations at the core richer. This was a very conception of the process of economic development that organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank hold out as they impose neo-liberal policy structures onto the underdeveloped world. What Gunder Frank argued was that these policy structures were not about developing the undeveloped nations but, rather, developing the richer nations further and holding the underdeveloped nations in a state where they could act as resource conduits for the richer nations.
• The U.S. Is Shocked Shocked Shocked! That Russia May Have Meddled With Our Election — Ted Rall:
  
• Behind the Media Surge Against Bernie Sanders — Norman Solomon: A few days earlier, the newspaper had front-paged another “news” story hostile to grassroots political forces aligned with Bernie -- a de facto editorial masquerading as news coverage, headlined: “Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win.” In a bizarre disconnect from electoral reality, the article portrayed a party establishment that had lost election after election, including a cataclysmic loss to Trump, as being about winning. And the article portrayed the party’s activist base as interfering with the establishment’s winning ways.
• Theresa May can nail Brexit, she just needs to make sure everyone continues feeling sorry for her — Mark Steel in the Independent: I think I’ve worked out what’s happening here. It’s a mass psychological test – we’re all being monitored to see at what point we feel sorry for Theresa May. By November, she’ll be at a G8 summit crawling round the floor looking for her contact lens and get tangled in the Japanese Prime Minister’s wife’s kimono, which she’s allergic to so she turns purple, but the blotches on her neck will spell “I’m shit at Brexit” then she’ll get trodden on by a stray llama, and let out a series of growls that accidentally sound like “You can have Scotland for a fiver” in German to Angela Merkel.
• Kensington & Chelsea’s reserves prove people don’t want government to run surpluses — Richard Murphy: As a matter of fact local authorities need reserves. They are solely dependent upon revenues they can raise from local taxes, central government and the supply of services. They can borrow, but only with difficulty in most cases. And the reality is that they face unpredictable demand for their services and central government has a poor record of responding to their needs in times of crisis. So, they have reserves. These are, literally, a contingency fund for the unforeseen. Kensington and Chelsea has made this fact visible and it seems that people do not like it. What they resent is that they have paid tax without a purpose.
• "Bribing voters" and all that: neoliberal contempt for democracy? — John Weeks in the Prime Economics blog: Social provision rather than commercialization through markets is the underlying political economy of social democracy. Social democrats restrict markets; neoliberals enhance them. The social democratic commitment to universal provision directly contradicts the neoliberal vision of a market dominated economy. Over the last decade neoliberals have responded to the social democratic principle of universal provision by labelling it populism of the left. […] means testing by definition divides households into the “haves” and the “have-nots”; indeed, it reinforces and institutionalizes that division. This division fosters the shirker/striver and undeserving/deserving ideology of neoliberalism. Universal provision unites society rather than dividing it.
• Australia’s housing bubble obliterates all records — Leith van Onselen
  
• Exclusive: Steve Keen on the secret source of eternal Australian growth — in MacroBusiness: Australia avoided a recession in 2008 only by adding additional leverage to its already over-indebted household sector, and the only ways that Australia can keep its winning streak on GDP growth going (given that its government is obsessed with trying to run a surplus) is to either to achieve a huge trade surplus, or for the household sector to continue piling on debt faster than GDP itself grows. […] It may continue to [keep credit demand high] for a while, particularly if encouraged by government policies like a renewed First Home Vendors Grant, further interest rate cuts by the RBA, or some policy doozie like letting suckers—sorry, I meant first home buyers—use their superannuation for a house purchase. But it will reach a plateau, and before it does, credit-based demand will at best fall to zero. Far more likely is that it will turn negative, as it has done in every other country that has experienced a recession caused by falling credit, with both the business sector and the household sector deleveraging.
• There is a true oppositional Left forming and gaining political traction — Bill Mitchell: [The British and French parliamentary elections], particularly the British outcome confirms what we have been noticing for a few years now – there is finally what we might call a true oppositional Left forming and gaining political traction in these nations. This is a Left platform that concedes little to the neo-liberals. It is vilified by the conservatives and the so-called progressive commentariat (such as the Guardian writers) and politicians (New Labour in Britain) as being in “cloud cuckoo land” and predictions from all of sundry of electoral wipeouts have been daily. But the results demonstrated that the message (such as in the Labour Manifesto) resonates with millions of people (40 per cent of those who voted in Britain). It is now a mainstream Left message that has taken over the British Labour Party and the Blairites are hiding under rocks. There is hope. People will only tolerate being bashed over the head for so long. There is now retaliation going on.
• Cognitive dissonance helps old dogs with their new tricks — Suzanne Cope in Aeon: ‘We learned from the rapidly changing views on gay marriage that direct personal contact with gay family or friends had the greatest impact on challenging views,’ said Judith Beth Cohen, an adult learning expert at Lesley University in Massachusetts. ‘In this case, cognitive dissonance came from the human contact, which made an abstraction come alive. Given that most new media feeds people what they want to hear, we need ways to get beyond our bubbles and encounter the “other”, not just virtually but in the flesh.’