This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Higher Education White Paper: Euphemisms for Destruction — Will Davies in the Political Economy Research Centre blog: It is easy to moan about ‘privatization’ of higher education, but this is arguably something worse. With privatization go some of the benefits of privacy. Instead, we have a technocratic dream of perfectly calibrated ‘satisfaction’ and fees, where every ‘incentive’ is ‘aligned’. It all stems from a Benthamite fantasy that (as I explore in The Happiness Industry) money and subjective experience have a simple, stable relationship to each other. Sustaining the fantasy in an area like higher education involves regulatory complexity on a scale and cost that even Blairites might have blanched at. Technical complexity of this nature benefits one ‘stakeholder’ above all others: consultants.
• Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them — Adam Johnson, at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR): There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. […] Never mind, the pundits said—Clinton had been “vetted” and Sanders had not.
• Obama said Hillary will Continue his Legacy – Indeed! — Michael Hudson. Okay, academic now, but this is a very important point I've not heard expressed from anybody else. Forget superdelegates; the Democratic primary process included essentially irrelevant states in the sample that was supposed to prove Clinton's electability: Appointed as DNC head by President Obama in 2008, [Tim Kaine] dismantled Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, not bothering to fight Republicans in the South and other solid Republican states. His move let them elect governors who gerrymandered their voting districts after the 2010 census. The DNC designated these “neglected” states to come first in the presidential primaries. They were the ones that Hillary won. Sanders won most of the swing states and those likely to vote Democratic. That made him the party’s strongest nominee – obliging the DNC to maneuver to sideline him.
• Time to ditch Rawls? — Branko Milanovic: Liberal democracies do not affirm the principles of liberalism, as Rawls expected, neither domestically nor internationally. It is inconceivable for Rawls, if these societies would be working well, that they would, as in the US now, generate a third or more of “malcontent” population that clearly does not believe in liberal principles nor is willing to affirm them in their daily lives. Far from it. This, plus the pervasive role of money in electoral politics, lower tax rates for capital than labor, neglect of public education etc. imply that domestically so called liberal societies are very far from Rawls’ idea of liberalism. The difference is so great that we cannot, I think, speak of the discrepancy any longer as the expected difference between an abstract idea and what exist in reality. These societies belong to an entirely different category. Moreover, in foreign policy, as became clear with the Iraq war, they act like outlaw states since they break the fundamental rules on which the international community is founded, namely absence of wars of aggression.
• The Gig Economy — Ted Rall:
  
• Building a Progressive International — Yanis Varoufakis continues his crusade of optimism in the pages of Project Syndicate: Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” in the US, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK’s Labour Party, DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement) on the continent: these are the harbingers of an international progressive movement that can define the intellectual terrain upon which democratic politics must build. But we are at an early stage and face a remarkable backlash from the global troika: witness Sanders’ treatment by the Democratic National Committee, the run against Corbyn by a former pharmaceutical lobbyist, and the attempt to have me indicted for daring to oppose the EU’s plan for Greece.
• Why Jeremy Corbyn Matters — Richard King in 3 Quarks Daily: It's this prospect of genuine grass-roots democracy that scares the bejesus out of the establishment. The Blairites like to talk about "credibility" and to lament or decry Corbyn's lack of it. But they know as well as anyone that the public's notions of what is credible are changing faster than Donald Trump's policy positions. Boris Johnson, a man who can't comb his own hair and describes African people as "piccaninnies", has just been made British Foreign Secretary: how's that for "credibility"? No, the Blairites aren't anti-Corbyn because they think he can't beat May in a general election. They are anti-Corbyn because they're worried he will.
• Class in America and Donald Trump — Karin Kamp interviews historian Nancy Isenberg for BillMoyers.com: Donald Trump’s success is rooted in a raw, unscripted speech, outright rudeness and his ability to project anger without being constrained by the well-measured idiom of the politician. His campaign manager admits he is “projecting an image.” Who’s surprised? Our electoral politics has always countenanced con artists and has abided identity politics. An Australian observer described the phenomenon succinctly back in 1949, and it’s true today: Americans have a taste for a “democracy of manners,” he insisted, which was in fact different from real democracy. Voters accept huge disparities in wealth, he observed, while expecting their leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.”
• My Fellow Americans: We Are Fools — Margot Kidder vents on CounterPunch on the occasion of Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton's coronation as Democratic nominee: I am half Canadian, I was brought up there, with very different values than you Americans hold, and tonight — after the endless spit ups and boasts and rants about the greatness of American militarism, and praise for American military strength, and boasts about wiping out ISIS, and America being the strongest country on earth, and an utterly inane story from a woman whose son died in Obama’s war, about how she got to cry in gratitude on Obama’s shoulder — tonight I feel deeply Canadian. Every subtle lesson I was ever subliminally given about the bullies across the border and their rudeness and their lack of education and their self-given right to bomb whoever they wanted in the world for no reason other than that they wanted something the people in the other country had, and their greed, came oozing to the surface of my psyche.