This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How Bernie Gives Hope for the Future — Ian Welsh provides a nuanced and pursuasive variant on the "nothing left to lose" argument for social change, to which I've never subscribed, but hey, you take your hope where you can get it: This is not the 2000s or 90s. This is not the age of compromise. The fruits of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and oligarchy are being reaped; the youngsters have now grown up and never known a good economy. Many barely remember a time when the US wasn’t at war. […] The Democrats are the conservative party right now. They are about the status quo: Keep neo-liberaling, keep bombing and invading brown people’s countries, keep shoveling money to the rich. […] But Bernie lost in a genuinely hopeful way, showing that a socialist is now viable in the US and that young people are massively against the status quo.
• On decriminalizing the sex trade — Chris Dillow: Here, though, is the thing. I – and I, strongly suspect, Mr Corbyn too – favour legalization of the sex industry in the context of other policies that empower women to reject exploitation. For me, these include full employment policies to give them other career possibilities; a mass housebuilding programme to reduce rents; and – of course - a basic income to improve their outside options.
• What Will Many Bernie Sanders Voters Do After July? — Ralph Nader in Common Dreams: Here we go again. Every four years, the Democratic leaders define the Democratic candidate by how bad the Republicans are. This is designed to panic and mute their followers. Every four years, both parties become more corporatist. Sanders’ voters want to define the Democratic Party by how good it can be for the people. […] Where does this leave the Sanders people who see Hillary as experienced in waging wars, qualified as an entrenched pol, and realistic to suit the plutocracy’s tastes, and not really getting much of anything progressive done (alluding to the ways she has described herself)?
• The trouble with getting the BBC to be less popular — David Mitchell, who—damn him—is still occasionally funny, in the Guardian: A report, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and published last week, argues that “greater distinctiveness” in the BBC’s output will allow its commercial rivals to make an extra £115m a year. […] Unfortunately the distinctiveness of a Hitchcock movie, a Lowry painting or a Cole Porter lyric doesn’t seem to be the sort the report is getting at, because that’s a kind people really like. That would be entirely counterproductive to its stated aims. By “distinctiveness”, the report means that the BBC should deliberately target smaller and more niche audiences, in order to allow the commercial sector to take the bigger ones. Its distinctive flavour would be less like chicken liver and more like calves’ brains. Because that would be fairer on the market place.
• Paul Samuelson on Deficit Myths — L. Randall Wray at New Economic Perspectives: […] the need to balance the budget over some time period determined by the movements of celestial objects, or over the course of a business cycle is a myth, an old-fashioned religion. But that superstition is seen as necessary because if everyone realizes that government is not actually constrained by the necessity of balanced budgets, then it might spend “out of control”, taking too large a percent of the nation’s resources. Samuelson sees merit in that view. It is difficult not to agree with him. But what if the religious belief in budget balance makes it impossible to spend on the necessary scale to achieve the public purpose? […] We don’t need myths. We need more democracy, more understanding, and more transparency. We do need to constrain our leaders—but not through dysfunctional superstitions.
• The Fed shouldn’t accept the “new normal” without a fight — Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute: [A] key contributor to productivity growth is technological advance. This technological advance does not fall from the sky, rather it is the product of directed investment (R&D) and trial and error (workers learning by doing). When the pace of R&D investment is slow and output growth is slow enough to provide fewer opportunities for learning by doing, it is not shocking that technological advancement may slow. Further, there is ample evidence that firms boost labor-saving investments (which boost productivity) when labor costs are rising rapidly. Rapid labor cost growth has not been a feature of the recovery from the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2014, real hourly pay for the median worker, for example, has slightly declined (see Table 1 here), and the share of corporate sector income accruing to capital owners rather than to employees reached historic highs. This labor market slack and weak wage growth has provided very little spur to boost productivity in the search for higher profits.
• How negative-gearing changes can bring life back to eerily quiet suburbs — Kim Dovey in The Conversation: It is impossible to say how much this production of empty architecture is a function of negative gearing since it also goes hand-in-hand with neoliberal markets and high disparities of wealth. However, the curbing of negative gearing will have a significant impact in getting empty housing onto the market. This in turn could go some way to reversing this cycle of emptiness – bringing life to the shops, offices, streets, parks and public transport.
• It's Time to Rid the DNC of DINOs, Starting With the Chair — by a gestalt creature called The Daily Take Team, from The Thom Hartmann Program: Jim Fouts, a three-term Independent mayor of Warren, Michigan, attended Sunday's Democratic debate, just like he had attended the Republican debate on Thursday. […] He told BuzzFeed News that he was seated behind Wasserman Schultz, and that he was praising Bernie's performance and talking about how this debate proved that more debates were a good idea for the Democrats. Then, during an early commercial break, Fouts and his assistant were taken out of their seats and the sergeant at arms told him, "The people that run this want you ejected, they don't want you here." Fouts was allowed to watch the rest of the debate from his seat, but he had to be careful about even clapping too loud or at the wrong time, for fear of getting ejected. […] Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn't the only Democrat-In-Name-Only (DINO) in the Democratic leadership. But as the DNC Chair, she is the highest-ranking DINO in the party. Tim Canova will take her seat in Congress, but Clinton is sure to give her a plum job elsewhere, for services rendered during the primaries.
• On the results of the UK referendum — DiEM25: OUT won because the EU establishment have made it impossible, through their anti-democratic reign (not to mention the asphyxiation of weaker countries like Greece), for the people of Britain to imagine a democratic EU.
• The American Fascist — Robert Reich: As did the early twentieth-century fascists, Trump is focusing his campaign on the angers of white working people who have been losing economic ground for years, and who are easy prey for demagogues seeking to build their own power by scapegoating others. […] As the Washington Post’s Jeff Guo has pointed out, Trump performs best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.
• Whither Europe? The Modest Camp vs the Federalist Austerians — Yanis Varoufakis and James Galbraith: Soon after the Great Crisis of the Eurozone struck, Europe decided to treat it piecemeal – as though each affected country had committed separate and unrelated policy errors. The governing institutions of Europe denied that the difficulties of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy could be part of a single disaster, spanning at once the realms of banking, public debt and investment.
• Negative Gearing. It's turning us into a nation of landlords and serfs — Peter Martin: The great Australian dream meant owning your own home. "Getting ahead" means getting ahead of someone else. It's how Treasurer Scott Morrison sees the Australian dream. […] It's certainly what negative gearing is about. "The vast bulk of Australians who use negative gearing are just trying to get ahead and trying to get their family in a better position," Morrison says. But negative gearing only gets them ahead if prices climb. The more that people negatively gear in order to get ahead, the more prices climb. The further they climb, the harder houses become to buy. And the harder they become to buy, the more the Australian dream recedes.
• Whittingdale is wrong: it is advertisers who are destroying the digital economy — Alexander Hanff in openDemocracy: Publishers feel like they have no control over the type of ads being forced on them by adtech companies and advertising agencies. This is a situation that needs to change – publishers should control all of the content they publish – including ads; and traditionally that was always the case. […] Advertisers and brands need to understand that their route to the audience is via the publishers whose content they are poisoning through invasive technologies and an ever increasing greed for more and more data. They need to purify the water before they can persuade us to start drinking it again – they need to stop tracking and profiling us, they need to better police their networks and platforms to eliminate malvertising and they need to yield control of the experience back to the publishers who own the audience. [Needless to say, we should object to being considered "owned" by publishers as well.]