This week, I have been mostly reading:

• “The Art of the Gouge”: NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education - Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: "Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture."
• Tent cities: Seattle’s unique approach to homelessness - Sara Bernard at Grist: "Nickelsville is one of several roving tent cities in Seattle. Christened in a deliberate slam against Seattle’s former mayor, Greg Nickels, whose administration regularly cleared homeless encampments, it has relocated about 20 times since its creation in 2008."
• How to Fix Patents: Economic Liberty Requires Patent Reform - Derek Satya Khanna proffers an intellectually honest conservative/libertarian view for Lincoln Labs: "Only in a place that can honestly argue that pizza is a vegetable can someone with a straight face pretend that patents to “slide to unlock” and the idea of “podcasting” are property."
• Almost half of all people released from the prison system become homeless - by whoever does the UniMelb press releases: "Contributing report author Dr Julie Moschion from the University of Melbourne said that the study found that the longer the time spent in prison the longer the individual was likely to be homeless."
• Stop Calling the TPP A Trade Agreement – It Isn’t - Dave johnson at Common Dreams: "“Trade” is a propaganda word. It short-circuits thinking. People hear “trade” and the brain stops working. People think, “Of course, trade is good.” And that ends the discussion."
• UNSW grads the top choice for 30 most in-demand employers - Leilah Schubert of, erm, the UNSW Media Office: Sounds legit.
• Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Why We Torture Asylum Seekers, But Were Too Afraid To Ask - Lissa Johnson, New Matilda: "Julian Burnside said, “In my naivety, I thought that if the rest of Australia knew the things that I had learned, the Government’s refugee policy would not long survive.” Yet here we are, 13 years later."
• Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance - Peter Maas at The Intercept: "An amusing parable circulated at the NSA a few years ago. Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each. They then sell the melons along a busy road for the same price, a dollar. As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they aren’t making a profit, so one of them suggests, “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”"
• Rand Paul Got One (Huge) Thing Right - Bill Boyarsky at Truthdig: "The fact that Paul brought up the connection between the NSA’s domestic spying and local law enforcement is tremendously important. In doing so, he highlighted the fact that federal drug officers and their local allies have secret access to the NSA’s powerful information-gathering tools. Thus, they can skate around Supreme Court decisions requiring prosecutors to show evidence to defense lawyers."
• Al Qaeda Syria Boss Says That His “So-Called Khorasan Group Doesn’t Exist” - Murtasa Hussain, The Intercept: "While the “Khorasan Group” designation itself was partly a fiction created by the U.S. government, simply a nickname created for a group of people within Syria whom it wanted to bomb, it was reported at the time in hyperbolic media reports as not only a real, discrete organization, but also a more dangerous threat to Americans than the Islamic State." The world is one big Gulf of Tonkin.
• TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You've Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet - Jeremy Malcom at the EFF: Yikes! "The agreement would also prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates. Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market software”, whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source code."
• How Mainstream is Bernie Sanders? - Juan Cole: "Climate change denialists are kooks, and if we had an honest media, it would call them kooks. Instead, Bernie Sanders, whose positions are shared by strong majorities of Americans, is being depicted as the one who is out of step."
• Political donations from Universities should be prohibited - Press release from the Australian Greens:  "'It is a sad reflection on the contemporary higher education sector, as well as the state of politics generally, that universities feel as though making political donations is the best way to influence the political debate,' said Senator Rhiannon."
• Niall Ferguson’s Wishful Thinking - Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: While it's not news that ridiculous fop Ferguson continues to be wrong in every important respect, this graph is particularly telling:
  
  I wish I could locate again the corresponding graph for employment growth since the start of the recession, which shows employment roughly following same the trendline during the recovery, despite productivity flatlining. This is what you'd expect from a punitive social security system that forces people to take the first job going, rather than the one for which they are best suited.
• Poisoning the Well, or How Economic Theory Damages Moral Imagination - Julie A. Nelson: "[…] defining economics around models of individual rational choice is only one option. A far better one, with a longer history, is to think of economics as being about how societies organize themselves to support human life and its flourishing—or about how they fail to do so. Such a 'provisioning' definition of economics encompasses both markets and families, both money and care. The neurological and psychological research reveals that when we say that economics is about 'rational choice in the face of scarcity,' we stack the deck in favor of individualism and selfishness. Contrast this to saying that economics is about 'who gets to eat and who does not.' The latter packs a visceral punch and directs us towards investigating social relations."
• The age of open financial imperialism - Branko Milanovic: "[…] a combination of good statistics with lack of knowledge of history, produces useless results. It is as if one were to study today’s racial wage gap in the US without knowing that there ever was slavery."
• Beyond the Middle East: The Rohingya Genocide - Ramzy Baroud at Uncommon Thought Journal: "It is not easy to sell Burma as a democracy while its people are hunted down like animals, forced into deplorable camps, trapped between the army and the sea where thousands have no other escape but “leaky boats” and the Andaman Sea. Abbott might want to do some research before blaming the Rohingyas for their own misery."
• The Finnish Diesease - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Why can’t Finland recover this time? Debt is not a problem; borrowing costs are very low. But it’s all about the euro straitjacket. In 1990 the country could and did devalue, achieving a rapid gain in competitiveness. This time not, so that there is no quick way to adjust to adverse shocks"
• The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist: I’m selling you out as hard as I can, and I’m sorry - Quinn Norton at Medium: "For years, as a regular writer at Wired, I watched this system grow up with unease. I watched more companies put tracking cookies and scripts in every article I wrote. As my career went on, that list kept getting longer. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing."
• What kind of government service puts public on hold for 811 years? - Kristin Natalier in the Conversation: In the punitive social security—sorry, I mean "human services" (because there is no society and certainly no security)—system, wasting time is a feature, not a bug.
• Why it would be good for the IMF if Greece stopped repaying the IMF loans - Bodo Ellmers, guest blogging at TripleCrisis: "The most effective way to prevent irresponsible lending is to make it clear to lenders that they won’t see their money back if they lend irresponsibly. This is why Greece should default on the IMF loans and force the IMF to write them off. This would substantially strengthen the more prudent voices in the IMF decision-making processes."
• The Student Loan Crisis and the Debtfare State - Susanne Soederberg in Dollars & Sense: "Educational debt has become a ticking time bomb. With over $1 trillion in outstanding loan balances, the student loan industry has a lot in common with the sub-prime mortgage industry, which went into a devastating crisis in 2007-8. Both rely on a financial innovation called “asset-backed securitization” to raise capital and to hedge risk—in other words, to raise money for loans and to reduce the likelihood that investors will lose their money."
• For Terrorist Fearmongers, It's Always the Scariest Time Ever - Glennzilla at the Intercept: "Here we are 14 years after 9/11, and it’s still always the worst threat ever in all of history, never been greater. If we always face the greatest threat ever, then one of two things is true: 1) fearmongers serially exaggerate the threat for self-interested reasons, or 2) they’re telling the truth — the threat is always getting more severe, year after year — which might mean we should evaluate the wisdom of “terrorism” policies that constantly make the problem worse."