This week, I have been mostly frantically writing essays, with a bit of reading:

• Basic Income and the Anti-Slavery Movement - Neil Howard at openDemocracy cross-posted to Truthout: "No advocate of basic income wants it set high enough to discourage work. Rather, the goal is to give people the "real freedom" to sayNo! to bad jobs and Yes! to good ones. Remember that in the West, it is the punitive social security system which itself creates unemployment traps. If instead of tax-breaks or top-ups we gave people UBI, then nobody would ever face the choice of losing money by accepting work."
• The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful - Trevor Timm in Columbia Journalism Review: "All this brings to mind a story from earlier in Hersh’s career, when, as a relatively unknown reporter in Vietnam, he put together the pieces of his My Lai scoop."
• Corinthian Colleges Secretly Funded D.C. Think Tanks, Dark Money Election Efforts - Lee Fang, the Intercept: …and then declared bankruptcy. But sure, Australia should model its higher education system on the US one!
• Student Organisations Must Be 'Compliant' And 'Cooperative' Says University, As It Tries To Shut One Down - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: A "Student Advisory Board" isn't a union. "No individual or organisation that is beholden to or answers to the University can advocate fully and openly without fear of reprisal."
• Struggle Street is poverty porn with an extra dose of class racism - Steven Threadgold in the Conversation
• The Wars Come Home A Five-Step Guide to the Police Repression of Protest from Ferguson to Baltimore and Beyond - Michael Gould-Wartofsky at TomDispatch: "The point of all of this: to keep an eye on our posts and tweets, intimidate protesters before they hit the streets, pen them in on those streets, and ensure that they pay a heavy price for exercising their right to assemble and speak. The message is loud and clear in twenty-first-century America: protest at your peril."
• Economists: Drop the Signaling Fad - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "Employers want employees who are smart, conscientious, hard-working and team-oriented. But they can’t tell most of those things from an interview or two. So prospective employees might prove themselves by getting some credential -- completing some difficult educational program -- to prove they have what it takes. Thus was born the signaling theory of education."
• Stop-Go Austerity and Self-Defeating Recoveries - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Cameron and company imposed austerity for a couple of years, then paused, and the economy picked up enough during the lull to give them a chance to make the same mistakes all over again."
• Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty - Mikayla Bouchard, NYT: "The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study."
• The future of work in the second machine age is up to us - Marshall Steinbaum, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Summers’ co-panelist David Autor added that since 2000, the education wage premium has reached a plateau and the rate of over-education has increased, both of which are hard to square with the argument that the reason for rising inequality is the advance of technology. Summers added that the idea that more education solves the problem of displaced labor is “fundamentally an evasion.”"