This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Crossed wires: ISPs are already struggling to retain our metadata - Philip Branch in the Conversation: Today we learnt that 84% of internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia have not met the deadline set by the federal government for them to start collecting metadata. And 61% are asking for some exemption or variation in the requirements specified in the legislation. Wait. We're doing what now? Clearly I have not been paying enough attention.
• Snowden and Allies Issue Warnings as Australia Unleashes Mass Spying - Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams. Oh. Okay, it's this:

  Beginning today, if you are Australian, everything you do online is being tracked, stored, and retained for 2 years. https://t.co/g8etUYgHGr

  — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 12, 2015

• Unpaid Care Work, Women, and GDP - Tim Taylor: In a broader sense, of course, the issue is not to chase GDP, but to focus on the extent to which people around the world are having the opportunity to fulfill their capabilities and to make choices about their lives. Countries where women have more autonomy also tend to be countries where the female-to-male ratios of time spent on unpaid care are not as high. The share of unpaid care provided by women highly correlated with women's ability to participate in the paid workforce, as well as to acquire skills and experience that lead to better-paying jobs, as well as participating in other activities like political leadership.
• Former U.S. Detainees Sue Psychologists Responsible For CIA Torture Program - Jenna McLaughlin at the Intercept: “There’s much talk about interrogation” when it comes to Mitchell and Jessen, [ACLU attorney Steven Watt] says. “But it wasn’t about gathering information for them. It was about breaking [the inmates] down, it was about torturing them. That was their true intent.”
• On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail): Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries - Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch: Based on their performance, the security forces on which the Pentagon has lavished years of attention remain visibly not up to the job. Meanwhile, ISIS warriors, without the benefit of expensive third-party mentoring, appear plenty willing to fight and die for their cause. Ditto Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much. Based on partial but considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be following an eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat have returned with a vengeance.
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• TPP is “Worst Trade Agreement” for Medicine Access, Says Doctors Without Borders - Tharanga Yakupitiyage, Inter Press Service: MSF treats almost 300,000 people with HIV/AIDS in 21 countries with generic drugs. These drugs have reduced the organization's cost of treatment from US$10,000 per patient per year to US$140 per patient per year. […] As part of the TPP negotiations, the U.S. sought to include the 12-year protection rule. Trade ministers went back and forth on the rule, finally settling on a mandatory minimum of five to eight years of data protection. […] MSF predicts that at least half a billion people will be unable to access medicines once the TPP takes effect.
• EasyJet and Gap Yahs - Richard Seymour: The left critique of the EU says that it's a Europe of the neoliberal bourgeoisie, a Europe of spivs, business mercenaries and yuppies. Meanwhile, the major campaign for the EU defends it on the grounds that it's a Europe of the neoliberal bourgeoisie, a Europe of spivs, business mercenaries and yuppies.
• Weak States, Poor Countries - This week's Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton in an article from 2013 republished by Project Syndicate: The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty. (My emphasis.)
• Structural Reform Beyond Glass-Steagall - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute. Worth reading for this quote: One of the brilliant insights from the neoliberal political project is that if you want to do something brutal that politics won’t sustain, you have “the market” do it. Can’t destroy Medicare? Turn it over to the market it and give people coupons for it that slowly die out. Then it is seen as a natural outcome, even if “the market” here is just the continuation of politics by other means.
• A stimulus junkie's lament - Simon Wren-Lewis: [I]mportantly, in the years preceding [2009, Germany] built up a huge competitive advantage by undercutting its Eurozone neighbours via low wage increases. This is little different in effect from beggar my neighbour devaluation. It is a demand stimulus, but (unlike fiscal stimulus) one that steals demand from other countries. This may or may not have been intended, but it should make German officials think twice before they laud their own performance to their Eurozone neighbours. If these neighbours start getting decent macro advice and some political courage, they might start replying that Germany’s current prosperity is a result of theft.
• Thanks to Sanders, Democratic Party Just Debated Merits of Capitalism - Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams: I prefer to think of it as "Thanks to growing popular opposition to neoliberalism, an avowed socialist can be a potential US president". Either way it's significant.
• Life plus 70: who really benefits from copyright’s long life? - Catherine Bond in the Conversation provides your summary of copyright state of play for this week: According to data generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a woman in Australia aged 30 in 2012 will likely live for another 54.90 years. If this figure is correct in my case, then copyright will protect this article for nearly 125 years. It will officially enter the public domain on 1 January, 2141. Is what I say in this article so significant that I, and many generations of Bonds to come, should enjoy a right to control who copies this piece for the course of the next century and beyond?
• Three Years Ago, These Chicago Workers Took Over a Window Factory. Today, They're Thriving - Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine: This is what local power looks like: companies like New Era Windows and Doors creating the stability that comes with locally rooted employment, insulated from the speculative finance that, in the case of publicly traded companies, requires many jobs be moved to low-wage regions. These worker-owners focus on values, including the possibility for others to also be worker-owners, and the importance of producing ecologically smart products.
• The fiscal charter media fiasco - Simon Wren-Lewis: Even the ‘highbrow’ news programmes like Channel 4 news and Newsnight chose to spend most of its time talking about U-turns on either side. No mention of the complete lack of economic support for this charter. On an issue with such important consequences, is that fulfilling a duty to inform? We have millions of hardworking but poor families who will be made substantially worse off as a result of a fiscal rule which no academic economist has supported? Will these families ever find that out? What does that tell us about our media, and our democracy?
• Brazil´s Sudden Neoliberal U-Turn - Franklin Serrano, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA): President Rousseff and her party […] decided — in an attempt to reduce the rising criticism from firms, banks, part of the Congress, and the media — that the government was intervening “too much” in the economy. They shifted the government’s economic role to providing incentives (generous, unconditional tax cuts to firms) for private investment so as that the business sector would lead (instead of follow) economic growth. This policy failed completely.
• Thinking the unthinkable - John Quiggin: There is now overwhelming evidence that for-profit education has been a disastrous failure wherever it has been tried, and particularly where for-profit firms can gain access to public funds through policies designed to enhance “consumer choice”.
• This new $5 service will endure the hassle of canceling Comcast for you - Ashley Rodriguez, Quartz: Capitalism: Delivering innovative solutions to the problems it creates. And the problems created by those solutions. And so on.
• AUSTERITY 101: The Three Reasons Republican Deficit Hawks Are Wrong - Robert Reich explains Keynesian countercyclical stimulus:
• Conning the working-class - Chris Dillow: [S]ocial comparison theory tells us that people compare themselves to those who are like them. […] It's tempting for lefties to believe that people vote Tory because of "neoliberal" ideology and the right-wing media. But there might be more to it than this. Even without such propaganda, there are cognitive biases at work which undermine class solidarity.
• What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death? - Jonathan Mahler: A mere six months late, the US newspaper of record concedes that Sy Hersh may be right and Hollywood may be wrong. The system works, America!
• Populism and Patrimonialism - John Quiggin at Crooked Timber: There’s nothing inherently ludicrous in the suggestion that the very rich should pay most or all of the costs of sustaining a system that benefits them so greatly. […] Teenagers from high-income families are increasingly less likely to work, particularly in minimum wage jobs that do nothing for a resume. More importantly, as the real value of the minimum wage has fallen, the number of “working poor” or near-poor households has risen. […] So, it’s time for populism. A program based on taxing the rich much more heavily and raising the minimum wage is not only politically saleable but economically sensible.
• While Sanders Scores Small Donors, Clinton and Bush Buoyed by Wall Street - Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams: Wall Street's support for its former champion in the U.S. Senate, Clinton, is not surprising, despite her recent pledges to get tough on corporate malfeasance and Wall Street greed. "She’s doing that because of Bernie," Camden Fine, the head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in an interview with Morning Consult this week. "She’s gonna all of a sudden become Mrs. Wall Street if she’s elected. So it’s all Bernie theatrics right now. She’s a Clinton, for God’s sake. What do you expect?"
• Big Win For Fair Use In Google Books Lawsuit - Corynne McSherry: Court fails to crumble in the face of the evil incantation "intellectual property".
• How television fails in its duty to inform - Simon Wren-Lewis makes a pithy observation: Take for example the clip where the Prime Minister lied about cuts to tax credits. There David Dimbleby asks him by saying “some people” have suggested tax credits would be cut, rather than “every non-partisan expert”. This may seem small, but this kind of detailed textual analysis is critical (and it is what many journalists have been trained to do).
• Everything You Need to Know about Laissez-Faire Economics - David S. Wilson interviews Alan Kirman: [Gary] Becker had the economics of everything—divorce, whatever. You’d have these simple arguments, but not necessarily selection arguments, often some sort of justification in terms of a superior arrangement. The marginal utility of the woman getting divorced just has to equal the marginal utility of not getting divorced and that would be the price of getting divorced, and that sort of stuff. Adam Smith would have rolled over in this grave because he believed emotions played a strong role in all of this and the emotions that you have during divorce don’t tie into these strict calculations.
• Technical change as collective action problem - Chris Dillow: We can imagine a society in which super-machines do indeed allow us all to live in luxurious leisure. But the decentralized decisions of capitalists might not get us there.
• The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Education - David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books reviews the film Ivory Tower: [H]owever fanciful the conceit may be, the MOOC movement has a clear economic motive. Many universities today want to cut back drastically on the payment of classroom teachers. It is important therefore to convince us that teachers have never been the focus of real learning.
• Why the Fiscal Charter makes no economic sense - James Meadway at New Economics Foundation: A surplus on the government budget means the government is getting more in taxes than it is spending. Those taxes have to come from somewhere – us! If those tax receipts are not spent, this is simply sucking money out of the economy, rather than doing something useful with it. This is particularly acute when the economy enters a recession. Since a recession means households and firms are spending less, the government needs to spend more to compensate. A rule to always deliver a surplus would prevent that.
• Bernie Sanders has morphed into a serious contender - Bob Rigg, openDemocracy. Bernie hasn't morphed; the commentariat have, slowly and reluctantly: What is really fascinating about the debate is that all three focus groups set up by CNN, Fox News and Fusion strongly endorsed Bernie Sanders. In the case of the CNN group, although more than half had supported Clinton when the debate began, a clear majority actively supported Sanders at the end. In the case of Fox News, an overwhelming majority enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders, to the ill-concealed consternation of some resident talking heads.
• “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series - Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl a.k.a Stone. Absolute genius: At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who […] had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.
• Hillary vs. Bernie Will Decide the Future of the American Left - Elizabeth Bruenig in the New Republic: In November of 2014, Sweden’s prime minister Stefan Löfven explained the logic of universal benefits in a conversation at NYU Law School, saying the main focus of such programs is to build “a welfare system for everybody, for all, rich and poor—because universal solutions have lower transaction costs, and it also [has] the advantage that you mobilize everybody to support the institutions that brings this welfare system.”
• Scores of Scores: How Companies Are Reducing Consumers to Single Numbers - Frank Pasquale, The Atlantic: Though consumers have not been able to glimpse the actual algorithms for setting scores, some basic contours of credit scoring are intelligible: Don’t run up too much debt, and don’t be late on payments. But by 2009, financiers were scrutinizing more data, in ways completely opaque to scored consumers. Buy “little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor”? You might be rewarded with a higher credit line, or lower interest-rate offers. Purchase a beer at a billiards bar? Expect the opposite.
• China's latest building binge: the education factory - Alexandra Harney at Reuters: Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks - dubbed "education factories" - designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.[…] But the expansion comes even as many existing vocational schools are struggling to live up to their promise. Sounds oddly familiar.
• Slow Burn: Bernie Sanders Ignites a Populist Movement - Rick Perlstein, The Washington Spectator: The crowd’s response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It continues into a chant: “BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!” And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated exhilaration doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t leave, until Bernie returns to to the podium for something I’ve never witnessed at a political event, an encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.
• Consequences of the Canadian Liberal Majority - Ian Welsh: Justin Trudeau is going to feel good, for a while, compared to Harper. He will be better. He will repeal some of Harper’s worst policies. He will also not be an offensive creep, and that matters. But he is, at the end of the day, a believer in the neo-liberal consensus. He will run a kinder neoliberalism, but it will still be neoliberalism.
• Guest post: Dirty Rant About The Human Brain Project - Anonymous Neuroscientist that Cathy O'Neil knows: So, the next time you see a pretty 3D picture of many neurons being simulated, think “cargo cult brain”. That simulation isn’t gonna think any more than the cargo cult planes are gonna fly. The reason is the same in both cases: We have no clue about what principles allow the real machine to operate. We can only create pretty things that are superficially similar in the ways that we currently understand, which an enlightened being (who has some vague idea how the thing actually works) would just laugh at.