This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway. — Michael Kruse in Politico: Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most. “I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”
• Al Franken Just Gave the Speech Big Tech Has Been Dreading — Nitasha Tiku, in Wired: Franken has not shied away from voicing concerns about tech’s encroachments on privacy and competition in the past, but Wednesday’s criticism was unusually sweeping, tying together a revised narrative about Silicon Valley that only emerged in glimpses during the Russia hearings. Franken argued that the same control over consumers that facilitated the spread of Russian propaganda on social media also helps Facebook and Google siphon advertising revenue from other publishers and helps Amazon dictate terms to content creators and smaller sellers. Tech giants are incentivized to disregard consumer privacy, Franken noted. “Accumulating massive troves of information isn’t just a side project for them. It’s their whole business model,” he said. “We are not their customers, we are their product.”
• Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths — Alex Matthews-King, the Independent: […] Professor Lawrence King of the Applied Health Research Unit at Cambridge University, said it showed the damage caused by austerity. "It is now very clear that austerity does not promote growth or reduce deficits - it is bad economics, but good class politics," he said. "This study shows it is also a public health disaster. It is not an exaggeration to call it economic murder.”
• Trump is trying to quietly reverse decades of social progress in America — David Usborne, the Independent: It is to the federal courts that disputes of law always travel, some eventually landing in the Supreme Court. Where America goes next on social issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, the constitutionality of the death penalty, religious rights - to name a few - will turn on rulings from federal judges. It is some of those same judges nominated by previous presidents who have blocked Trump’s travel ban. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” Trump lamented during a recent meeting of his cabinet. “But when you think about it…that has consequences 40 years out. A big percentage of the court will be changed by this administration over a very short time.”
• The world's most important asset class — Patrick Commins, Australian Financial Review: "The definition of 'important' is malleable but try this one: name an asset class that – were it to either fall or rise in value by 30 per cent – would inexorably imply a global recession or a global boom? Oil, gold and arguably the US dollar fail that test for the simple reason that all have seen price changes of or near that magnitude this decade with little direct effect on the global economy," [Bernstein analyst Michael] Porter says. So what is the world's most important asset class now? Answer: Chinese real estate.