This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals — Daniel Oberhaus for Motherboard: In the so-called “post-truth era,” science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences. In the course of the investigation, which was chronicled in the documentary “Inside the Fake Science Factory,” the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.
• The biggest policy mistake of the last decade — Ryan Cooper in the Week: After the 2008 financial crisis, old-fashioned Keynesians offered a simple fix: Stimulate the economy. With idle capacity and unemployed workers, nations could restore economic production at essentially zero real cost. It helped the U.S. in the Great Depression and it could help the U.S. in the Great Recession too. But during and immediately after the crisis, neoliberal and conservative forces attacked the Keynesian school of thought from multiple directions. Stimulus couldn't work because of some weird debt trigger condition, or because it would cause hyperinflation, or because unemployment was "structural," or because of a "skills gap," or because of adverse demographic trends. Well going on 10 years later, the evidence is in: The anti-Keynesian forces have been proved conclusively mistaken on every single argument. Their refusal to pick up what amounted to a multiple-trillion-dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk is the greatest mistake of economic policy analysis since 1929 at least.
• We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised — George Monbiot in the Guardian: As Jacques Peretti argued in his film The Men Who Made Us Fat, food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance. They hire biddable scientists and thinktanks to confuse us about the causes of obesity. Above all, just as the tobacco companies did with smoking, they promote the idea that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. After spending billions on overriding our willpower, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
• Omarosa’s New Book — Ted Rall:
  
• Miscalculating Medicare-for-all — J.D. Alt at New Economic Perspectives: We habitually imagine these treasury operations to be “borrowing”—and even tally them up as something we call the “national debt.” But modern analysis and explanation shows that in a sovereign money system the definition of “borrowing” does not apply to treasury operations; the securities created by the operations, themselves, are “money” issued—as needed—by the federal government. Thus, the U.S. government can (and does) pay for anything that Congress deems necessary or desirable—so long as it’s for sale in U.S. dollars—without collecting tax-dollars. Regarding Medicare-for-all, then, the initial pertinent question is NOT whether we can raise enough taxes to cover $3.3 trillion in new expenditures (that question is not pertinent at all!)—the question is whether the medical services to be purchased are actually available in America. Do we have the doctors and nurses, the hospitals and clinics, necessary to provide the care and procedures? If so, and if Congress decides it is in the interest of the American people to have access to that care, the U.S. treasury can, through its securities operations in coordination with the Federal Reserve, create the “health-dollars” necessary to pay the bill.
• Trump Officials Were Warned That Family Separations Would Traumatize Children — Ryan Devereaux at the Intercept: The government’s program of forcibly removing thousands of children from their parents, including toddlers and babies, was the result of conscious decisions made by specific Trump administration officials. Tuesday’s hearing added new data points to that story, with a career civil servant testifying that his office, tasked with providing care for minors in the immigration system, raised concerns with administration officials in the year leading up to “zero tolerance” becoming an official policy, warning that the separation of children from their parents would put the children at risk of serious psychological harm and that the system was not built to handle such an initiative. Additionally, officials testified that there was little warning within their respective agencies that “zero tolerance” was actually being implemented until it was imminent, or already happening.