This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Psychologists Throw Open The “File Drawer” — Neuroskeptic: Now, a group of Belgian psychology researchers have decided to make a stand. In a bold move against publication bias, they’ve thrown open their own file drawer. In the new paper, Anthony Lane and colleagues from the Université catholique de Louvain say that they’ve realized that over the years, “our publication portfolio has become less and less representative of our actual findings”. Therefore, they “decided to get these [unpublished] studies out of our drawer and encourage other laboratories to do the same.”
• Insanity — xkcd:
  
• Reform School — Malcolm Harris at The New Inquiry reviews Schools on Trial, by Nikhil Goyal: In 1837, Horace Mann, the founder of American compulsory education, established the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such agency and one which would become the model for the nation. But Mann didn’t want a more intellectually engaged population—literacy in the state already stood at 99 percent. Social control was a serious concern for Western elites after a series of failed revolutions, and Mann was very impressed by the system he saw on a visit to Prussia. He returned with a plan for public education. “Compulsory schooling evangelists,” Goyal writes, “which included many industrialists and financiers, in fact, wanted to ‘dumb down’ the American population to create docile followers, not potentially troublesome freethinkers who questioned authority.”
• Trade Treaty Propaganda Goes Into High Gear — Dean Baker, CEPR: As far as the protectionism in the TPP, the deal is quite explicitly about increasing the length and strength of patent and copyright protection. Yes, that is "protection" as in "protectionism." Patent and copyright protection do serve a purpose in providing an incentive for innovation and creative work, but all forms of protection serve a purpose. The question that serious people ask is whether there is a better way to serve the purpose.
• 'I Love My Label': Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech — Audrey Watters: As someone who works outside of academia, without an institutional affiliation, I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it is to be unable to access journal articles. I always get so irked when I hear technology evangelists proclaim “You can learn anything you want on the Internet.” No, you can’t. Huge swaths of knowledge, art, science remain inaccessible; and it’s a loss for scholarship, which need not and does not only happen among those with access to a university research library or with log-in credentials to its online portal. That inaccessibility is a reflection of institutional culture, industry culture, corporate culture, copyright (that is, intellectual property laws), capitalism, and code. That is, when we talk about the future of something like “education technology” or even when we talk about the future of research and scholarship or teaching and learning, we must grapple with issues that are technological, sociological, and above all, ideological.
• The elites hate Momentum and the Corbynites - and I’ll tell you why — David Graeber, providing "opinion" for The Guardian, as opposed to whatever the hell you'd call the utter tripe they normally publish about Corbyn: I’ve spent much of the past two decades working in movements aimed at creating new forms of bottom-up democracy, from the Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street. It was our strong conviction that real, direct democracy, could never be created inside the structures of government. One had to open up a space outside. The Corbynistas are trying to prove us wrong. Will they be successful? I have absolutely no idea. But I cannot help find it a fascinating historical experiment. […] insofar as politics is a game of personalities, of scandals, foibles and acts of “leadership”, political journalists are not just the referees – in a real sense they are the field on which the game is played. Democratisation would turn them into reporters once again, in much the same way as it would turn politicians into representatives. In either case, it would mark a dramatic decline in personal power and influence. It would mark an equally dramatic rise in power for unions, constituent councils, and local activists – the very people who have rallied to Corbyn’s support.
• The Duncan Smith resignation: fundamentally shifting the economic debate — Neil Schofield: 'I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.' In other words, for the first time a key player in the post-2010 Conservative project has said, almost explicitly, that austerity is a political, not an economic choice. […] In other words, Duncan Smith’s resignation letter – and the events surrounding it – powerfully endorse the fundamental tenet of Jeremy Corbyn’s and John McDonnell’s economic programme: that austerity is a choice, not an economic necessity. It wholly destroys the intellectual underpinning of McDonnell’s opponents in the Parliamentary Labour Party.
• Peak Indifference — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online: At a certain point, indifference to tobacco’s dangers peaked – long before actual tobacco use peaked. Peak indifference marks a turning point. […] That’s why it’s time for privacy activists to start thinking of new tac­tics. We are past peak indifference to online surveillance: that means that there will never be a moment after today in which fewer people are alarmed by the costs of sur­veillance.
• A world war has begun. Break the silence. — John Pilger: In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president.
• Budget accounting tricks — Simon Wren-Lewis: One of the problems with fixed date deficit (or in this case surplus) targets is that they encourage playing around with the public finances to hit the target. Generally, but not always, this involves making a saving today by shifting costs into the future. Privatisation is an obvious example. It may be justified if the net present value of the sale is positive, or if privatisation really improves efficiency, but all to [sic] often it is a device to meet a short term target. Although a New Keynesian (Wren-Lewis will when pressed admit he subscribes to the superstition of "sound finance"), he makes a good point here. i.e. that, just as in the popular bugaboo where public deficits can be run up by unscrupulous pollies who "buy votes", those same unscrupulous pollies are more likely in the current neoliberal environment to buy a reputation as good economic managers by using fire sales of public assets (usually a bad thing) to hide deficits (rarely a bad thing).
• Get ready for a recession by 2017 — Steve Keen in the Australian: Whichever party is in opposition at the time will blame the incumbent, but in reality this recession has been set up by the sidestep both parties have used to avoid downturns for the past quarter century: whenever a crisis has loomed, they’ve avoided recession by encouraging the private sector to borrow and spend. […] Australia’s most famous recession sidestep was during the GFC, when it was one of only two countries in the OECD to avoid experiencing two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth (the other country was South Korea). Since then, the private sectors of the advanced countries have collectively de-levered, reducing their debt levels from about 170 to 160 per cent of GDP. Australia, in stark contrast, has levered up.
  
• Tony Blair's spin unspun: how his claims compare with the Chilcot report — Andy McSmith, The Independent: Mr Blair has claimed that he was promising the Americans his support as a way of influencing Washington’s decision making and getting them to seek United Nations approval before acting. Taking questions from journalists, he asserted that his support was not “unconditional”. But the opening words of that July note [to Bush] – “I will be with you, whatever” – do sound unconditional.
• I read the Chilcot report as I travelled across Syria this week and saw for myself what Blair's actions caused — Robert Fisk, The Independent: When Blair can say, as he did the moment the Chilcot report was published, that it should “lay to rest allegations [sic] of bad faith, lies and deceit” – without a revolution in the streets against his bad faith, lies and deceit – then you can be sure that his successors will have no hesitation in swindling the public again and again. After all, what’s the difference between Iraqi WMDs that don’t exist, 45-minute warnings that are falsities, 70,000 non-existent Syrian “moderates” and a fictitious NHS windfall of millions if Britain left the European Union?
• To Save The Economy, We Have To Break Its One Sacred Rule — Jason Hickel, Co.Exist: As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things that GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things. And that’s exactly what we started to do in the 1960s. GDP was adopted during the Cold War for the sake of adjudicating the grand pissing match between the West and the USSR. Suddenly, politicians on both sides became feverish about promoting GDP growth. GDP growth became a sacred rule. And we remain in thrall to it today.
• Mocked and forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class? — Chris Arnade in The Guardian: America, and particularly the white working class, is dealing with a drug epidemic that is killing more people each year at a startling rate. Just in the past decade deaths from drugs has doubled. The National Review sees it as another sign of the flawed character of the poor. This is a common and moralistic trope those battling an addiction have long dealt with – that it is all the fault of their weakness. The reality is often far more complex. Addiction thrives in societies undergoing stress.
• Stopping Deflation? Dead Easy. So Why Isn’t It Being Done? — Ian Welsh: If you let fixed costs have inflation above income increases, then everything else is going to have to suffer deflation, because it is discretionary. Gotta eat and have a warm place to sleep, first.
• The Tory leadership election is a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist — Frankie Boyle in the otherwise disgraceful, paper of choice for the discerning New Labour war criminal, The Guardian: [The Parliamentary Labour Party] say they need a leader who knows how to oppose, albeit primarily their own party membership. The idea is that Corbyn is unelectable, and it’s just one of life’s sad ironies that none of the people who believe this will be able to beat him in an election. […] One of the PLP’s main worries will be that Labour’s vote will crumble to Ukip under Corbyn, who won’t produce enough racist mugs and mouse mats to reassure everybody. And, to be fair, it must be galling to a party that invaded Iraq, rendered Libyans to be tortured by Gaddafi and detained asylum seekers with Dickensian cruelty to lose voters on the race issue.

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.]

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• So Sue Them: What We’ve Learned About the Debt Collection Lawsuit Machine — Paul Kiel, ProPublica: In 1996, there were around 500 court judgments in New Jersey from suits filed by debt buyers. By 2008, that number had reached 140,000. […] For the most part, debt buyers purchase defaulted credit card accounts, typically for a few pennies on the dollar. Starting in the late 90’s, the industry began a period of rapid growth and then exploded in the middle of the last decade. That led to a sharp spike in suits, many of them by smaller debt buying companies that have since gone out of business. The industry is now dominated by several large companies.
• Hey Joe, banks can’t lend out reserves — Steve Keen: For me, watching academic economists and Central Bankers (the vast majority of whom trained as economists) tell the banks to “lend your excess reserves to the public, dammit!”, is akin to watching some delusional person in a playground watching two kids playing on a see-saw, and criticising them because they weren’t both up in the air at the same time.
• The Barbarism of Donald Trump — Ian Welsh: I don’t know if Clinton will torture. I know Bernie Sanders won’t. I know there are options available in the American election that don’t sell the tattered remains of America’s soul.
• Corbyn's Progress — Tariq Ali: Blair, angered by this outburst of democracy in a party that he had moulded in his own image, declared that the Labour Party would be unelectable unless Corbyn was removed. Brown kept relatively quiet, perhaps because he was busy negotiating his very own private finance initiative with the investment firm Pimco (Ben Bernanke and the former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet are also joining its ‘global advisory board’). Simultaneously, his ennobled former chancellor, Lord Darling, was on his way to work for Morgan Stanley in Wall Street. Blair, an adviser to J.P. Morgan since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies.
• Folks Worried About Robots Taking Our Jobs Need to Learn Arithmetic — Dean Baker: It is important to recognize that “owning robots” is a political issue, not an economic one. Specifically, people own robots because we give them patent monopolies. In most cases robots would be very cheap to produce if the government didn’t threaten to arrest people for not respecting patents. […] So we end up with money going from the rest of us to people who own robots because the government has given these people a monopoly over the use of the technology. Suppose the government didn’t give a monopoly over the use of the technology. Suppose that we funded the research through a different mechanism or at least made the monopolies shorter and weaker. Then the folks who developed the robots would not have so much money, the robots would be cheaper, and the rest of us would be richer.
• MMT, trade balance and balance of payments — Mike Norman: A net importer is gaining "stuff" in an exchange with a net exporter, and the net exporter is accumulating the currency of the net importer. Thus the net importer is benefiting in real terms while the next exporter is benefiting in financial terms. The net exporter is diminishing domestic product (real) for domestic use, and the net importer is increasing indebtedness (financial) to the net exporter. On the other hand, net imports are beneficial to the economy and nation at full employment. The nation has more stuff than it would otherwise have at the current level of productivity. Because foreign workers are contributing to domestic productivity. And the country is not exporting jobs.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
• Listening to past Treasurers is a dangerous past-time — Bill Mitchell: On January 23, 2016, a former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello (1996-2007) gave a speech to the Young Liberals (the youth movement of the conservative party in Australia) – Balanced Budgets as a Youth Policy – which was sad in the sense that some people never get over being dumped as out of touch and unpopular and was ridiculous in the sense that it is a denial of reality and macroeconomic understanding. He mounted the same old arguments that have been used to justify the pursuit of fiscal surpluses (grandchildren etc) but failed to recognise that his period as Treasurer was abnormal in terms of our history and left the nation exposed to the GFC as a result of the massive buildup in private sector debt over his period of tenure. The only reason he achieved the surpluses was because growth was driven by the household credit binge which ultimately proved to be unsustainable. Fiscal deficits are historically normal and should not be resisted. They are the mirror image in a national accounting sense of non-government surpluses, which historically, have proven to be the best basis for sustained growth and low unemployment.
• Tilting at windmills: The Faustian folly of quantitative easing — Steve Keen, Real World Economics Review Blog: QE gets into the money supply—not via lending, which is impossible, but via asset purchases, which far and away benefit rich households more than poor ones. Rich households also benefit from the income the share transactions generate. And finally, some of that money gets to poor households when the rich ones—made richer still by QE—buy some services off them. The real economy has thus received some impetus from QE, but only a relatively trivial amount of the money created has got into circulation in Main Street. As Michael Hudson puts it, Bernanke’s helicopter dumped money on Wall Street, not Main Street. The bubble before the financial crisis had already exaggerated income inequality past what is sustainable in a capitalist society. Central Bank meddling via QE has made this problem worse, and without the illusion of a boom (like the Internet and Subprime Bubbles) to make it seem somehow palatable. And Neil Wilson adds some more context, though I must admit that I couldn't follow his logic for one crucial step.
• Bernie Sanders proved politicians can make it this far without selling their souls — Robert Reich in the Guardian: Sanders’ courage in taking on the political establishment has emboldened millions to stand up and demand our voices be heard. Regardless of what Sanders decides to do now, he has ignited a movement that will fight onward. We will fight to put more progressives into the House and Senate. We will fight at the state level. We will organize for the 2020 presidential election. We will not succumb to cynicism. We are in it for the long haul. We will never give up.
• We are being led by imbeciles — Bill Mitchell: I was reading John Maynard Keynes recently – circa 1928 – that is, 8 years before the publication of the General Theory with his Treatise on Money intervening. He was railing against the principles and practice of ‘sound finance’, which he noted had deliberately caused billions of pounds in lost income for the British economy. He urged the Treasury and the Bank of England to abandon their conservative (austerity) approach to the economy and, instead, embark on wide-scale fiscal stimulus to create jobs and prosperity. He concluded that with thousands of workers idling away in mass unemployment that it was “utterly imbecile to say that we cannot afford” to stimulate employment via large-scale public works – building infrastructure etc. He considered the policy makers who opposed such options were caught up in “the delirium of mental confusion”. The stark reality is that 88 years later, he could have written exactly the same article and would have been ‘right on the money’.
• Why I don't use heroin — Chris Arnade, The Guardian: Addiction is a symptom of something very wrong with our society. That in any city or town, across all of America, people live on the streets, shooting up, selling themselves for another bag, should make us all stop and ask ourselves “why does our society create and allow such pain?”.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era — Thomas Piketty in Le Monde via the Guardian: In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.
• Lobbyist Superdelegates Tip Nomination Toward Hillary Clinton — Lee Fang, The Intercept: There are 712 superdelegates in all, which is about 15 percent of the total delegates available and 30 percent of the total needed to win the nomination. If the nomination process is close, superdelegates may effectively pick the party’s presidential nominee, potentially overriding the will of voters. [This is why "Jeb!" couldn't make it in the big league. His vote-rigging skills are inadequate. Bernie has already won 2016 by a far wider margin than Gore won 2000, but Debbie Wasserman Shultz can halt a landslide with a single Medusa glare.]
• Sydney Uni’s sweeping restructure: cutback and fightback ahead — Dylan Griffiths at Solidarity Online: On the last day of work for 2015, the University of Sydney’s Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, announced a drastic restructure of the University. The decisions were made in a secret Senate meeting days earlier. They include amalgamating ten faculties and six schools into six faculties and three schools and cutting down 122 degrees to 20 degrees.
• The free market is an impossible utopia — Henry Farrell chats with Fred Block and Margaret Somers about Karl Polanyi, Washington Post: In the first instance the market is simply one of many different social institutions; the second represents the effort to subject not just real commodities (computers and widgets) to market principles but virtually all of what makes social life possible, including clean air and water, education, health care, personal, legal, and social security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods and social necessities (what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities”) are treated as if they are commodities produced for sale on the market, rather than protected rights, our social world is endangered and major crises will ensue.
• If you thought one Bernie Sanders was good, how about 100 of him? — Anoa Changa in the Guardian: I am a part of an initiative called Brand New Congress. Many of us are former Sanders campaign staffers, who are hoping to help elect Bernie Sanders-like candidates in at least 100 different districts in the next two years. […] The aim is to run one campaign for hundreds of candidates. Instead of running the races separately, we will be centralizing fundraising, awareness raising and organizing for campaigns across the country. Our unified process will level the playing field, and thus permit new leaders to rise up from the ranks of our working and middle class.
• ‘You want a description of hell?’ OxyContin’s 12-hour problem — Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover, LA Times: Reps were ordered to visit doctors and “refocus the clinician back to q12h.” Doctors needed to be reminded “on every call,” they were told. “There is no Q8 dosing with OxyContin,” one sales manager told her reps, according to a memo cited in an FDA filing. She added that 8­-hour dosing “needs to be nipped in the bud. NOW!!” If a doctor complained that OxyContin didn’t last, Purdue reps were to recommend increasing the strength of the dose rather than the frequency. There is no ceiling on the amount of OxyContin a patient can be prescribed, sales reps were to remind doctors, according to the presentation and other training materials. […] An analysis of the medical records of more than 32,000 patients on OxyContin and other painkillers in Ontario, Canada, found that one in 32 patients on high doses fatally overdosed. […] OxyContin “does a great job of keeping me out of a wheelchair and moving...for 8 hours. Then I start going into withdrawal,” one patient wrote on an online message board in 2004.
• Reclaiming Innovation — Jim Groom and Brian Lamb in Educause Review Online: The myriad costs associated with supporting LMSs crowd out budget and staff time that might be directed toward homegrown, open-source, and user-driven innovation. Indeed, institutional leaders may refuse to support alternative systems, such as blogs and wikis, lest they draw attention and users away from the "serious" enterprise learning tool, diverting resources and endangering investments. If a technology is sufficiently large and complex, it can dictate policy, resource allocation, and organizational behavior far beyond its immediate application.
• The Faulty Foundation of Higher Education — Todd Rose, Ed.D., and Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., who have qualifications, in Psychology Today: Within our Taylorized system of college education, a Bachelor of Arts in Civil Engineering is designed to be equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, each diploma held to represent an equal unit of learning independent of who a graduate is or which college she graduated from. This uniformity was intended to ensure that the brain of every student who earned a diploma attained the same level of “critical thinking,” “civic awareness,” “cultural literacy,” or some other normative set of skills or knowledge.
• Why Britain’s Housing Crisis Heralds the Next Financial Crash — Steve Rushton at Occupy.com: Housing prices in London have risen by 50% in the last five years. If the U.K. property bubble goes boom, it will be proportionally biggerthan the U.S. housing bust at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. How did we get here? For starters, U.K. banks in 2015 lent over £1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) for housing, accounting for 70% of newly made loans. The result is that when this bubble pops, it could catalyze another global financial meltdown. While there are many other possible triggers, the next financial crash is more likely than not.
• Guest Post: POSITIVE MONEY IN ACTION — Geoffrey Gardiner's Modest Proposal at New Economic Perspectives: The system of transaction accounts at the central bank will be used to keep track of the population. Every person will be allocated an account at birth and vital details will be recorded and updated. The records will include a record of the person’s genome. The bank will issue identity documents. The transaction account number will be the person’s identity and passport number, and also the number of his or her tax account. Transaction account statements will be sent automatically to the tax office, which will have the duty to debit it with all assessed taxes. Every immigrant or visitor to the country will get an account and give similar identity details.