This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia — Ryan Gallagher for the Intercept and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, said the Australian government needs to provide “accountability and transparency” on its role in U.S. drone operations. “The legal problem that’s created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict … and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap,” Howie said. “The first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.”
• Marketising Social Care: Why we need to talk about the NDIS — Fiona Macdonald in Arena: As the Productivity Commission continues to look for new ways to introduce ‘greater user choice, competition and contestability’ in human services, the marketisation of social care in Australia proceeds apace. Here, as in the other liberal states (the United States, Canada and Britain) and in many European countries, care provisions for children, the elderly, the ill and people with disabilities are increasingly likely to be commodities purchased by consumers through markets. We are in the middle of the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and just this year Consumer-Directed Care (CDC) has been introduced in home care for the aged. Yet there has been relatively little public discussion about the likely downsides of these latest moves to marketise social care in Australia. The provision of care through ‘cash-for-care’ or voucher schemes—involving the allocation of public funding to individual care users to purchase their care services on the market—is increasingly widespread. While lauded by proponents as empowering—by placing control in the hands of care users—and seen as increasing efficiency, the construction of care markets in which individuals are care ‘consumers’ does not necessarily produce good outcomes for people requiring care. At the same time, marketised care economies are mostly built on large workforces of low-paid workers in insecure work with poor working conditions. The mixed origins of cash-for-care schemes provide an indication of why, despite these problems, they have some appeal for consumer and care-user advocates
• Social Security: Still The Most Efficient Way To Provide Retirement Income — Dean Baker in the Huffington Post: A big part of the benefit of Social Security is that it is very efficient. The administrative costs of the retirement portion of the program are just 0.4 percent of what is paid out in benefits each year. By comparison, the costs of even relatively well-run privatized systems, like those in Chile or the United Kingdom, are 10-15 percent of benefits. That difference would amount to $80 billion a year (close to $1 trillion over a ten-year budget horizon) being paid out to the financial industry instead of to retirees.
• Trump Sends More Troops Into The Afghanistan Meatgrinder — Ted Rall:
  
• The Taliban Tried to Surrender and the U.S. Rebuffed Them. Now Here We Are. — Ryan Grim at the Intercept: For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War. So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.” Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members. So how do you kill terrorists if there aren’t any?
• Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads — Julia Angwin, Noam Scheiber, and Ariana Tobin for ProPublica and the New York Times: Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found. The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers. Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it a crime to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.
• 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017 — Nick Tabor, New York Magazine: […] given that the congressional year has otherwise been marked by turmoil and inaction, and given the high staff turnover and the parade of scandals at the White House, it’s been easy to miss what this administration has already done. In the background, Donald Trump’s Cabinet members and their collaborators have been working hard to deliver on Steve Bannon’s vision of dismantling the “regulatory state.” With Trump’s blessing, they have made drastic, structural changes on education, immigration, environmental protections, broadcasting and internet laws, and rules of military engagement, among other issues. Most often the changes have taken direct aim at Obama’s legacy, but some apply to regulations and programs that date back decades.
• Who is Reality Winner? — Kerry Howley in New York Magazine: Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The loanable funds hoax — Lars P. Syll: The age-old belief that Central Banks control the money supply has more an more come to be questioned and replaced by an ‘endogenous’ money view, and I think the same will happen to the view that Central Banks determine “the” rate of interest.
• Have We Learned Our Lessons from the Financial Crisis? Rewriting History Is Not a Good Sign — Dean Baker: As I have argued elsewhere, it is convenient for economists to blame the financial crisis rather than the bubble, because finance can be complicated. After all, who knew that AIG had written $600 billion worth of credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities? On the other hand, the bubble was pretty simple. We had an unprecedented nationwide run-up in house prices with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market. Rents were going nowhere and vacancy rates were already at record highs before the crash. And the bubble was clearly driving the economy. Residential construction was at a record high as a share of GDP and consumption boomed based on the bubble generated housing wealth. When the bubble burst, there was no source of demand that could replace the lost construction and consumption, which is the story of the Great Recession.
• Sometimes giving a person a choice is an act of terrible cruelty — Lisa Tessman in Aeon: Sometimes, it’s pure bad luck that puts someone in the position of having to choose between wrongdoings. However, much of the time, choice doesn’t take place in contexts that are shaped entirely accidentally. It takes place in social contexts. Social structures, policies, or institutions can produce outcomes that favour some groups of people over others in part by shaping what kinds of choices people get to – or have to – face. Members of some social groups might face mostly bad choices, in the sense that their choices are between alternatives, all of which are disadvantageous to them. But there’s another sense in which the choices might be bad: these might be choices between alternatives, all of which make them fail in their responsibilities to others. The American Health Care Act, which was considered in the United States House and Senate, would have created moral dilemmas by offering people without high incomes – especially if they were also women, or old or sick – a range of bad options. It would have forced some parents to make choices between two equally unthinkable options, such as the ‘choice’ to sacrifice one child’s health care for another’s.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway. — Michael Kruse in Politico: Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most. “I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”
• Al Franken Just Gave the Speech Big Tech Has Been Dreading — Nitasha Tiku, in Wired: Franken has not shied away from voicing concerns about tech’s encroachments on privacy and competition in the past, but Wednesday’s criticism was unusually sweeping, tying together a revised narrative about Silicon Valley that only emerged in glimpses during the Russia hearings. Franken argued that the same control over consumers that facilitated the spread of Russian propaganda on social media also helps Facebook and Google siphon advertising revenue from other publishers and helps Amazon dictate terms to content creators and smaller sellers. Tech giants are incentivized to disregard consumer privacy, Franken noted. “Accumulating massive troves of information isn’t just a side project for them. It’s their whole business model,” he said. “We are not their customers, we are their product.”
• Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths — Alex Matthews-King, the Independent: […] Professor Lawrence King of the Applied Health Research Unit at Cambridge University, said it showed the damage caused by austerity. "It is now very clear that austerity does not promote growth or reduce deficits - it is bad economics, but good class politics," he said. "This study shows it is also a public health disaster. It is not an exaggeration to call it economic murder.”
• Trump is trying to quietly reverse decades of social progress in America — David Usborne, the Independent: It is to the federal courts that disputes of law always travel, some eventually landing in the Supreme Court. Where America goes next on social issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, the constitutionality of the death penalty, religious rights - to name a few - will turn on rulings from federal judges. It is some of those same judges nominated by previous presidents who have blocked Trump’s travel ban. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” Trump lamented during a recent meeting of his cabinet. “But when you think about it…that has consequences 40 years out. A big percentage of the court will be changed by this administration over a very short time.”
• The world's most important asset class — Patrick Commins, Australian Financial Review: "The definition of 'important' is malleable but try this one: name an asset class that – were it to either fall or rise in value by 30 per cent – would inexorably imply a global recession or a global boom? Oil, gold and arguably the US dollar fail that test for the simple reason that all have seen price changes of or near that magnitude this decade with little direct effect on the global economy," [Bernstein analyst Michael] Porter says. So what is the world's most important asset class now? Answer: Chinese real estate.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Little Black Box That Took Over Piracy — Brian Barrett, WIRED: Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of North American households have a Kodi device configured to access unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future.
• Freedom for the Many — Shant Mesrobian in Jacobin: After salary or wages, the most significant part of the [US] employment contract tends to be health insurance. And employers know it. The resulting dependency and vulnerability is especially acute when a worker’s entire family relies on them for health coverage (particularly if one of their family members has a chronic or life-threatening disease). In such cases, health insurance surpasses even monetary compensation as the primary motivation for maintaining employment. When your child has cancer, it’s that much harder to speak up about your boss’s sexual harassment. […] Lack of health insurance (and college debt, and middling disability benefits — the list goes on) severely limits a person’s ability to choose which career to pursue, where to live, when to start a family, how many children to have, and what types of hobbies to take up. In short, it’s not about free stuff — it’s about a free life.
• The Angriest Librarian Is Full of Hope — Alex Halpern in CityLab: Those mousy, quiet librarians are a thing of the past, if in fact they ever existed at all outside of Hollywood. Today, depending on the community they serve, a public librarian is part educator, part social worker, and part Human Google. What they aren’t is a living anachronism, an out-of-touch holdout in a dying job who’s consigned to a desk, scolding kids for returning books a few days late.
• Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism — Kate Raworth in the Conversation: ‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there. The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.
• Physics Confession — xkcd:
  
• Willmot now last Sydney suburb with a median house price under $500,000 — Nicole Frost at Fairfax's dog-wagging tail Domain (via MacroBusiness): There are just 632 houses located in the suburb, which was established in the early 1970s and named for the first president of the Blacktown Shire Council, Thomas Willmot. The majority of the suburb’s homes are owned by investors. It has been this feverish investor activity that has led to the disappearance of Sydney’s sub-$500,000 suburbs. At the start of the year there were four and five years ago there were more than 150.
• The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer — Andy Beckett, the Guardian: In the vast literature written about Labour between the 1980s and 2015 – all the fat gossipy memoirs, diaries and biographies, confident overviews by journalists and historians, and careful analyses by political scientists – there is an absence, which has seemed ever larger and more puzzling since Corbyn was overwhelmingly elected leader. He and his closest comrades for decades – John McDonnell, now shadow chancellor, and Diane Abbott, now shadow home secretary – rarely feature. They are not in books about the 2003 Iraq war, which they all opposed. They are hardly in books about New Labour; or about the Conservative government and its austerity policies, which they opposed when their party barely did. They do not even feature much in studies of Labour’s startling success in London, where they all have constituencies and have hugely increased their majorities since the 90s.