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."

This week, I have been mostly reading, and what I have been mostly reading is:

• Killing Bin Laden: Seymour Hersh's Explosive Revelations Are Worth Taking Seriously - Michael Brull at New Matilda: … Because it's Seymour Fucking Hersh. There are just some authorities for whom the appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. Also, does anybody at this point think that Obama would hestitate for a second before cheerfully ordering a hit on a defenseless elderly cripple under house arrest? It was probably a deeply-held ambition long before bin Laden emerged as a possible target. There'll be some innocent old guy in a nursing home in Jalalabad or somewhere who's only alive and eating custard pudding today because bin Laden pushed him out of the frame. Also:
• The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful - Trevor Timm in Columbia Journalism Review: "It has been rich watching journalists fall over each other to see who can more vehemently criticize Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, despite the fact that using anonymous sources is a tried-and-true Washington ritual that receives almost no criticism in day-to-day reporting. Banal sound bites are regularly printed on the front pages without names attached, and entire press conferences are held every day with “senior government officials” who refuse to be named."
• Pyne Ignores The Elephant In The Lecture Hall: Reactions To The Higher Ed Budget - Max Chalmers, New Matilda
• David Graeber and the Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare - Cora Currier (who must be heartily sick of jokes about being the hipper culinary equivalent of Dora the Explorer) at the Intercept: 'We might think of police as principally protecting us from violent crime, solving murders and muggings and rapes, but they are mainly occupied in enforcing disputes over property and non-violent behaviors. “Bureaucrats with guns,” as Graeber puts it.'
• Those who half make reformism dig only their own graves - James Meadway at openDemocracy.net: "The dense, corrupt networks of power and privilege at the centre of British political life will not allow space for anything less than a thoroughgoing commitment to neoliberal values. Miliband was duly hung out to dry. It is necessary to either accept those values, or make a clean break." Does anybody have Neil Kinnock's phone number?
• The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You - David Corn at MoJo: "Wolfowitz and all his senior-level colleagues in the Bush-Cheney administration got Iraq wrong. They each were guilty of wishful thinking and arrogantly believed they knew better than area experts in various government agencies. But within this crew, as a ferocious advocate of a wacky and paranoid conspiracy theory, Wolfowitz went further in denying reality." Also:
• Fraternity of Failure - Paul Krugman at the NYT: "Jeb Bush wants to stop talking about past controversies. And you can see why. He has a lot to stop talking about." And:
• Errors and Lies - Krugman again: "The campaign of lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war."
• "Whiteness," Criminality and the Double Standards of Deviance/Social Control - Truthout's abridged version of Nancy A. Heitzeg's article: "White criminality is increasingly defined and controlled via the medical model. This is made possible by the white racial frame, which constructs 'whiteness' as normative and white deviance as individual aberration or mental illness. Conversely, the white racial frame constructs Blackness as synonymous with criminality. […] The result is double standards of definition and control which medicalize whiteness and criminalize Blackness. This differential framing of whiteness and Blackness provides the foundation for the expansion of both the medical and prison industrial complexes, which are characterized by real racial differences despite comparable patterns of deviance across racial lines."
• Would graduating more college students reduce wage inequality? - Marshall Steinbaum at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "The key to reducing inequality is more jobs and a higher demand for labor. In the absence of more jobs, heroic assumptions about educational improvement are likely to deliver only modest economic benefits." See also:
• The One Where Larry Summers Demolished the Robots and Skills Arguments - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute: Quoth Summers, "What we need is more demand and that goes to short run cyclical policy, more generally to how we operate macroeconomic policy, and the enormous importance of having tighter labor markets, so that firms have an incentive to reach for worker, rather than workers having to reach for firms."
• The Laffer hypothesis in Australia - John Quiggin: Apparently, the IPA invited Arthur Laffer to Australia. In 2015. Not 1985. Oh to be present at the meeting of minds between an aged court astrologer and the whey-faced adolescents of the IPA. "One thing we've always wondered, this 'napkin': so this was some sort of early smartphone or tablet? Like a Blackberry?"
• Forget What We Know Now: We Knew Then the Iraq War Was a Joke - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, plus Paul Krugman at the NYT, plus plenty of other people in the reality-based community.
• The student debt boom (cont.) - LBO News from Doug Henwood: "Since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, households have been borrowing very cautiously (how much it’s their decision, their lenders’ decision, or a combination of the two, isn’t fully clear). The glaring exception is student debt."
• Money, Inflation, and Models - Paul Kruman, NYT: "This is actually wonderful: economic theory used to make a prediction about events far outside usual experience, with the theory’s predictions very much at odds with the conventional wisdom of practical men — and the theory was right. True, basically nobody has changed his mind — the people who predicted runaway inflation remain utterly convinced that they know how the world works. But you can’t have everything."
• New Labour’s Economic Illiteracy Exacts a Terrible Price: “I’m afraid there is no money.” - Bill Black at NEP: "The single most insane post-crisis New Labour policy has been the fervent embrace of economically illiterate and self-destructive austerity. This means that the people New Labour appointed to senior financial leadership positions like Byrne had to be – or pretend to be – unfit for their jobs. In either case – true or feigned ignorance that is causing devastating harm to the public – the official has to be unfit – intellectually or morally (or both)."
• Life in a windowless box: the vertical slums of Melbourne - Ralph Horne and Megan Nethercote in the Conversation: "Developers in Melbourne can build at four times the densities allowed in New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong. Moreover, inner city developers are generally under no obligation to contribute to essential public infrastructure, such as affordable housing and community facilities, through density bonus systems. The findings are nothing short of damning, not least for a city that prizes itself, year on year, as the “world’s most liveable city”."
• Consuming wealth without spending a dime - Frances Wooley for a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "If I was poor, it would be tough having an old, unreliable car. The unexpected, yet inevitable, major repairs would be a financial nightmare. $750 to repair the clutch. $200 to fix the axel seal. If the car broke broke down, and I couldn't get to work, I might lose my job. But because I'm financially secure, I can afford a cheap car. I can self-insure against financial risks: unexpected repair costs, taxi fares, rental cars, and so on. I can afford to get my car towed. If it was beyond repair, I could get another car tomorrow." And in recent months I have been repeating to my cats "Don't get sick. Don't get sick…"
• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me - "Edward Schlosser", Vox: "I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to "offensive" texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students' ire and sealed his fate."
• How US students get a university degree for free in Germany - Franz Strasser, BBC News, Germany: "'It's not unattractive for us when knowledge and know-how come to us from other countries and result in jobs when these students have a business idea and stay in Berlin to create their start-up,' says Steffen Krach, Berlin's Secretary of Science."
• Platforms All the Way Down - John Herrman at the Awl: "Platform conflict, private or public, sensible or capricious, explicit or implied, will determine the manners in which we read and watch and communicate and produce online. A type of co-dependency that would be familiar in any advanced industry becomes incomprehensible at such scale and seemingly boundless acceleration—a billion users as unsure about what they’re seeing as where they’re seeing it from."
• 'Harro prease': Will SBS's 'Scott McIntyre Standard' Apply To This Journalist's Comment? - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: The capricious politics of context collapse.
• Cheney Thought al Qaeda was Bluffing - Jon Schwartz at the Intercept: "So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went."
• Restoring the Public’s Trust in Economists - Mark Thoma at the Fiscal Times: A good overview of the "mathiness" debate. "What is mathiness? Berkeley’s Brad DeLong defines it as “restricting your microfoundations in advance to guarantee a particular political result and hiding what you are doing in a blizzard of irrelevant and ungrounded algebra.”"

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.”"

This week, instead of writing my final essays for the session, I have been mostly reading:

• VCs Go Missing In Action As University Whistleblowers Speak Out On Four Corners - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: "The highly anticipated program was partially based on a recent Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) investigation which warned the pressure on academics to pass students in universities was so extreme it could be conducive to corruption." Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
• Waiting for the fallout: Australia and return of the patrimonial society - John Quiggin on the relevance of Piketty to Australia in the Australian Review of Public Affairs: "The claim that the rich are mostly self-made is already dubious, and will soon be clearly false. Of the top ten people on the Business Review Weekly (BRW) rich list for 2014, four inherited their wealth, including the top three. Two more are in their 80s, part of the talented generation of Jewish refugees who came to Australia and prospered in the years after World War II. When these two pass on, the rich list will be dominated by heirs, not founders."
• A New Deal for Greece – a Project Syndicate Op-Ed by Yanis Varoufakis: "The result of [the troika's] method, in our government’s opinion, is an “austerity trap.” When fiscal consolidation turns on a predetermined debt ratio to be achieved at a predetermined point in the future, the primary surpluses needed to hit those targets are such that the effect on the private sector undermines the assumed growth rates and thus derails the planned fiscal path. Indeed, this is precisely why previous fiscal-consolidation plans for Greece missed their targets so spectacularly."
• Statement on resignation from CPD and alternative - Public Statement by Mark Bahnisch, Eva Cox and John Quiggin: "Current policy making is shaped largely by limited influences and insider advice that fails to read public opinion or evidence. Business-funded lobbyists and think tanks dominate public debate, crowding out the very limited alternatives to current ‘verities’. Many public-minded advocates, active in the past, are silenced by the financial constraints of universities, and too many NGOs are now more dependent on government funding. There is much public disquiet about the state of our society and polity. However, few offer carefully devised and well promoted alternative options."
• Zombies of 2016 - Paul Krugman OpEdding at the NYT: "Pundits will try to pretend that we’re having a serious policy debate, but, as far as issues go, 2016 is already set up to be the election of the living dead."
• The BBC Trust: a work in progress - Jacquie Hughes at openDemocracy: I know nothing about the current structure of the BBC, which leaves me eminently qualified to speculate that BBC Worldwide appears to be the money-spinning tail that has for many years wagged the emaciated public service dog. Any avenue for genuine public accountability (as opposed to philistine euphemistic demands for financial sustainability - i.e. bleeding the patient) seems something to be welcomed.
• Miliband Goes the Full Henry Jackson - Craig Murray: "But Miliband was not admitting that the Guernica style massacre was wrong – he voted for it. No, he was going the full Henry Jackson and arguing that what had been needed was neo-colonial occupation of Libya in order to reform its institutions – precisely as had been done in Iraq. And we all know how that went."
• Rorschach Tests at the Nuremberg Trials - Neurosceptic
• After the recent tragedy in the Med, why can’t we talk about free migration? - Morten Thaysen, openDemocracy: Capital and products are assets to be welcomed, people are a liability to be demonised, spurned, and left to die. Discuss.
• Hello World Intellectual Freedom Organization - Mike Linksvayer: Mike is in the top tier of the world's smart people, and an all-round good egg. This [c|sh]ould be huge.
• The Cops Have Met Their Enemies: They Are Us - Ted Rall at aNewDomain: Bull Connor has won; it just took a while.
• The Killing of Osama bin Laden - Sy Hersh at the London Review of Books:

  Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? […] The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

• Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web - Chris Bloom and a language warning: My obvious tl;dr is "Don't use a web service for anything you can do on your own computer."
• Greatest Threat to Free Speech Comes Not From Terrorism, But From Those Claiming to Fight It - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: 'Basking in his election victory, Prime Minister David Cameron unleashed this Orwellian decree to explain why new Thought Police powers are needed: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.'” It’s not enough for British subjects merely to “obey the law”; they must refrain from believing in or expressing ideas which Her Majesty’s Government dislikes.'
• 10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser, May He Rest in Peace - Ted Milles on Open Culture: "Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard."
• Democratically controlled, co-operative higher education - Joss Winn at openDemocracy: "In short, co-operative higher education is entirely compatible with the idea of the ‘public’ if we reconceive it as an autonomous, open, democratically governed ‘commons’: An academic commons, democratically controlled by academic and support staff, students, cleaners and others."