… great big dirty world (quoting Randy Newman in this beautiful song). That’s why I’ve been posting somewhat less than usual.

But so what. I’m not blogging in order to share with you my distress that

globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the rich to travel more freely than those of everyone else. The result is rampant tax avoidance, labor offshoring and a class of elites that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nations and their taxpayers. “The 1% can move anywhere they want and profit handsomely from the relocation,” says Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist. “But the 99% are left with the aftermath – the empty buildings of a deserted Detroit, the toxic waste from chemical plants in West Virginia or the unsustainable tax liabilities of Puerto Rico.”

Back in the mid-‘nineties, Christopher Lasch wrote a book whose title says it all: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

Two decades later, it’s all much worse. Around $36 trillion has been taken from a world of suffering people. That’s almost as much as Harvard University’s endowment.

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And when UD thinks of little Delaware! Delaware, whose sweet flat little soybean fields she greets each summer on her way to Rehoboth Beach! Sweet flat little Delaware!

Mr Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. But Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware (population 917,092), which is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are dodgy shells.

Delaware, whose state tourism slogan, Endless Discoveries, is now Endless Justice Department Discoveries …

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No, no, she’s not blogging to burden you with her boohoohoo over this great big dirty world. She’s blogging to share magazine articles with titles like

ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM DEFEATS ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM, 83-66

She’s blogging to express admiration for the honesty about America’s universities that appears in this article:

To the NCAA, [academic fraud at the University of North Carolina is] a scandal, but to North Carolina and the athletes who took part, this was very obviously the right thing to do, a way of meeting scam requirements with scam action… By now, reasonable people see the NCAA’s insistence on the “college” side of college as a prerequisite for playing revenue sports as a mean-spirited scam — one bigger and more institutionalized than anything UNC is accused of doing. Academic fraud, in this case, is just what you call not keeping up appearances to the satisfaction of the people profiting off the scam….

The NCAA may well come down hard on North Carolina here, because that’s its role in this comic opera. UNC was playing their role to a T — the system as it is incentivizes exactly this behavior — until they went a little too far and made the “student-athlete” concept look the charade it is. In practice, the cheaters aren’t the programs that commit academic fraud. (Every major program does it to an extent, but one which keeps them from getting caught, which is what the NCAA prefers.) The cheaters are the programs that don’t even bother with the pretense that higher education is anything other than a cartel-imposed hoop to jump through.

Fuck the NCAA, and fuck anyone else who insists on forcing college upon kids who don’t want it just so their own paychecks can be bigger by dint of not paying the people who actually bring in the money. If UNC committed academic fraud, it was in the service of the reasonable, even noble, cause of letting athletes who wanted to do so focus on athletics. It’s merely an accident of history that college is in any way connected to amateur sports, and it’s time to start applauding the big-time programs that have found ways to take the academics out of college.

Damn straight. Whether it’s an international $36 trillion scam or a scam in the billions that’s turned some of our once-reputable universities into big fat jokes, we need to face up to it. We need to know absolutely everything we can about it. We need to be absolutely honest about it.

If we can’t do anything about it – and UD certainly thinks the trillion dollar one is unfixable – we need to figure out other ways to show the heavens slightly more just.

If we can do something about it – and we can definitely do something about the NCAA and the big-sport schools – we should fight. In particular, we should fight for the absolute decoupling of universities and big-money sports programs.