This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia — Ryan Gallagher for the Intercept and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, said the Australian government needs to provide “accountability and transparency” on its role in U.S. drone operations. “The legal problem that’s created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict … and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap,” Howie said. “The first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.”
• Marketising Social Care: Why we need to talk about the NDIS — Fiona Macdonald in Arena: As the Productivity Commission continues to look for new ways to introduce ‘greater user choice, competition and contestability’ in human services, the marketisation of social care in Australia proceeds apace. Here, as in the other liberal states (the United States, Canada and Britain) and in many European countries, care provisions for children, the elderly, the ill and people with disabilities are increasingly likely to be commodities purchased by consumers through markets. We are in the middle of the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and just this year Consumer-Directed Care (CDC) has been introduced in home care for the aged. Yet there has been relatively little public discussion about the likely downsides of these latest moves to marketise social care in Australia. The provision of care through ‘cash-for-care’ or voucher schemes—involving the allocation of public funding to individual care users to purchase their care services on the market—is increasingly widespread. While lauded by proponents as empowering—by placing control in the hands of care users—and seen as increasing efficiency, the construction of care markets in which individuals are care ‘consumers’ does not necessarily produce good outcomes for people requiring care. At the same time, marketised care economies are mostly built on large workforces of low-paid workers in insecure work with poor working conditions. The mixed origins of cash-for-care schemes provide an indication of why, despite these problems, they have some appeal for consumer and care-user advocates
• Social Security: Still The Most Efficient Way To Provide Retirement Income — Dean Baker in the Huffington Post: A big part of the benefit of Social Security is that it is very efficient. The administrative costs of the retirement portion of the program are just 0.4 percent of what is paid out in benefits each year. By comparison, the costs of even relatively well-run privatized systems, like those in Chile or the United Kingdom, are 10-15 percent of benefits. That difference would amount to $80 billion a year (close to $1 trillion over a ten-year budget horizon) being paid out to the financial industry instead of to retirees.
• Trump Sends More Troops Into The Afghanistan Meatgrinder — Ted Rall:
  
• The Taliban Tried to Surrender and the U.S. Rebuffed Them. Now Here We Are. — Ryan Grim at the Intercept: For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War. So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.” Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members. So how do you kill terrorists if there aren’t any?
• Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads — Julia Angwin, Noam Scheiber, and Ariana Tobin for ProPublica and the New York Times: Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found. The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers. Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it a crime to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.
• 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017 — Nick Tabor, New York Magazine: […] given that the congressional year has otherwise been marked by turmoil and inaction, and given the high staff turnover and the parade of scandals at the White House, it’s been easy to miss what this administration has already done. In the background, Donald Trump’s Cabinet members and their collaborators have been working hard to deliver on Steve Bannon’s vision of dismantling the “regulatory state.” With Trump’s blessing, they have made drastic, structural changes on education, immigration, environmental protections, broadcasting and internet laws, and rules of military engagement, among other issues. Most often the changes have taken direct aim at Obama’s legacy, but some apply to regulations and programs that date back decades.
• Who is Reality Winner? — Kerry Howley in New York Magazine: Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies.