The Zero Room

This week , I have been mostly reading:

• Greek tragedy - Christos Tsiolkas and a very unimaginative sub-editor at the Monthly: (Varoufakis:) "It wasn’t bad faith, it was a very definite plan. I called it the Schäuble plan. He has been planning a Greek exit as part of his plan for reconstructing the eurozone. This is no theory. The reason why I am saying it is because he told me so."
• Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed by U.S.-Led Bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria - Cora Currier, The Intercept: "The report, from the nonprofit group Airwars, which tracks coalition airstrikes on Iraq and Syria, says that it has documented between 459 and 591 civilian deaths in 52 credible incidents. In one of the worst cases, in Al Bab, Syria, a U.S. strike on a local Islamic State headquarters being used as a jail killed up to 58 non-combatants, including women and teenagers. Next Saturday marks the first anniversary of the United States’ bombing campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq. Over the past year, a U.S.-led coalition including Canada, France, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and other European and Gulf states has carried out over 5,800 airstrikes against the group in Iraq and Syria."
• The unmaking of the Australian working class – and their right to resist - Dennis Glover in The Conversation: "Something similar to […] England in the first three decades of the 1800s has happened in Australia between the mid-1980s and today. Not the degree of immiserisation, but the pace and scale of social and economic change. The transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial era has been so total as to constitute the sociological equivalent of an extinction event."
• I am not well - Tressie McMillan Cottom, the smartest person on the Internet (according to me; I'm mailing the medal now, as it happens): "Jokes have abounded over the years about that time I was arrested. People on the Internet find it hilarious. Even my family makes fun of it at Thanksgiving. And it is funny. It’s especially funny after three years of being alive to allow it to be funny. It’s probably funnier because I wasn’t murdered. Jokes are weird that way."
• The Web of Relationships We Have To Save - Zeynep Tufekci: "Facebook engineers will swear up and down that they are serving people “what they want” but that glosses over the key question that if the main way to tell Facebook “what we want” is to “like” something. How do we signal that we want to see more of important, but unlikable, updates on Facebook? We can’t, it turns out."
• Corbyn and the Cringe Caucus - Paul Krugman at the usual venue: "There was a Stamaty cartoon during the Reagan years that, as I remember it, showed Democrats laying out their platform: big military spending, tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor. “But how does that make you different from Republicans?” “Compassion — we care about the victims of our policies.”"
• Obama: Opponents of Iran Deal are Warmongers - Juan Cole: "Lame duck Obama"—seven years worth of lame, that is—locates spine, says something. But still…
• To Defend Iran Deal, Obama Boasts That He’s Bombed Seven Countries - Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept: "By “ordered military actions in seven countries,” what he means is that he has ordered bombs dropped, and he has extinguished the lives of thousands of innocent people, in seven different countries, all of which just so happen to be predominantly Muslim."
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• America in the Way - Joe Stiglitz at Project Syndicate: "Just a few years ago, Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, talked about a global savings glut. And yet investment projects with high social returns were being starved of funds. That remains true today. The problem, then as now, is that the world’s financial markets, meant to intermediate efficiently between savings and investment opportunities, instead misallocate capital and create risk."
• Cops Gun Down un-Armed Journalist’s Career, LA Times fires Ted Rall – evidence blows up in newspaper’s face - Greg Palast: "The police believe they have silenced Rall, that his public pillorying by the Times “serves as an example” – a warning to troublesome journalists. Rall, to their dismay, is proving more of an example of undeterred courage."
• 14 Years Ago, a Woman Vindicated Me Now - Ted Rall: "One small way I can show my appreciation for my privileged status in American society is to speak out, like here, about my own experiences with bad cops. Because if it’s happening to white guys like me, you know it’s even worse for people of color."
• Style, Substance, and The Donald - Paul Krugman: "So why is Trump regarded as ludicrous, while Bush and Walker are serious? Again, on the substance they’re all ludicrous; but pundits are taken in by the sober-sounding personal style of the runners-up, while voters apparently are not."
• How the battle over biologics helped stall the Trans Pacific Partnership - Deborah Gleeson and Ruth Lopert in The Conversation: "Data exclusivity refers to the protection of clinical trial data submitted to regulatory agencies from use by competitors. It’s a different type of monopoly protection to patents. While a product is covered by data exclusivity, manufacturers of cheaper follow-on versions of the product can’t rely on the clinical trial data produced by the originator of the drug to support the marketing approval of their product."
• No Evidence Forced Waiting for Dole Will Work - Xavier Smerdon from Pro Bono Australia: What? Can't they just let their golden parachute tide them over for a few weeks? Next you'll be telling me kicking beggars doesn't do them any good!
• Your job will never love you: Stress and anxiety in our frightening new job world - Excerpt from "The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity" by Allison J. Pugh in Salon.com: "One might think that the pervasive sense of increasing job insecurity— and its resigned acceptance by precarious workers—would give rise to increased detachment from work, as people adjust to a new employment bargain. When one party in an exchange is seen as withdrawing its commitment, surely it is a rational response for the other party to pull back as well. Furthermore, concerns about losing worker dedication might then in turn act as a counterweight to these trends, discouraging employers from retreating from commitments to their workforce." Nope.
• Leader of extremist Israeli organization calls for torching churches - Ma'an News Agency: About time, too. "Despite announcements by the Israeli government in May 2014 to crack down on violent attacks carried out by Israelis against Palestinians, prosecution rates of Jewish extremists remain remarkably low." Go figure.
• Bernie Sanders should stop ducking foreign policy - Norman Solomon in Al Jazeera America: Personally, I have an angel on one shoulder advising "Pick your battles," and one on the other shoulder saying "You can't defend the indefensible".
• From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious - Paul Krugman, NYT: "The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. […] Modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume."
• Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections - Mark Sullivan, VentureBeat: This is huge. Everything you do online is data in a credit worthiness report.
• 800,000 Australians Unemployed - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono News: "For the first time in 20 years there are more than 800,000 unemployed people in Australia, with five people looking for work for every vacancy available. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that unemployment rose to 6.3 per cent last month." […] "[Senator Abetz] said the Government had formulated an economic plan designed to deliver stronger jobs growth by investing $5.5 billion in the new Growing Jobs and Small Business package, delivering $3.25 billion in tax cuts for small business and $1.75 billion in accelerated depreciation measures, investing $6.8 billion in jobactive, the new employment services system and negotiating Free Trade Agreements which will attract growth." Hey, the fewer people we hire, the more tax cuts and freebies we're given! Win-win!

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Open the Music Industry’s Black Box - (That) David Byrne, in the New York Times: I'm a dirty hippie who believes that paywalling art is, all else being equal, a bad idea. Byrne doesn't seem to agree with me on that, but is rightly perturbed that the kind of people who used to justify their income by the production and movement of plastic discs, still appear to be making way more money than the artists who no longer need the plastic discs.
• Say goodbye to the weirdest border dispute in the world - Sam Taylor at WaPo: I still maintain that "border protection" is a meaningless occupation—you can neither protect nor damage an imaginary line—but this example verges on the justifiable. Which only adds to the argument that if your borders happen also to be oceans, you should STFU.
• This Hacker’s Tiny Device Unlocks Cars And Opens Garages - Andy Greenberg, Wired: "'My own car is fully susceptible to this attack. I don’t think that’s right when we know this is solvable.'"
• Oracle security chief to customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities - Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica: And we'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling hackers!
• That’s Not Funny! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke - Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic: "I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex."
• Supervenience, isomers, and social isomers - Daniel Little: "Significantly, this example appears to have direct implications for the relation between social facts and individual actors. If we consider the possibility of "social isomers" -- social structures consisting of exactly similar actors but different histories and different configurations and causal properties in the present -- then we also have a refutation of the idea that social facts supervene upon the actors of which they are constituted."
• Why Economists Have Trouble With Bubbles - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "But there has always been one big problem with rational expectations -- it might just not be right. People really might make systematic mistakes in the way they predict the workings of the economy. If economists insist on using an incorrect assumption as the core of their models, it will force them into ever more Byzantine theoretical contortions, as the models repeatedly fail to fit the facts."
• In the Age of Trump, Will Democrats Sell Out More, Or Less? - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: "[…] framing every single decision solely in terms of its utility in beating the Republicans leads to absurdities. Not every situation is a ballot with Ralph Nader on it. The Democrats insisted they had to support the Iraq War in order to compete with Bush, but they ended up not competing with Bush anyway and supporting a crappy war that no sane person believed in. All it won Democratic voters in the end was a faster trip into Iraq, and the honor of having supported the war at the ballot box."
• Third Bailout and the Third Punic War - John Weeks, guestblogging at TripleCrisis: "In pursuit of setting “the EU’s political agenda,” [president of the European Council, Donald] Tusk cemented his right-wing credentials by stating publicly that “I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion, not financial contagion, of this Greek crisis.” Lest anyone miss his point, the former Polish prime minister went on to say that his concern was caused by the “radical leftist illusion that you can build some alternative” to the EU’s neoliberal economic model."
• The Down Under book and film remind us our copyright law’s still unfair for artists - Nicolas Suzor and Rachel Choi from QUT in The Conversation: "Greg Ham’s flute riff is exactly the kind of tribute that imposes no costs on the original creator. Both the documentary and the book point out that, in fact, this is not just harmless copying of copyright expression – it’s exactly the kind of creativity that Australian copyright law should encourage."
• The Politics of Economics and ‘Very Serious People’ - Mark Thoma in the Fiscal Times: Mark reflects on Henry's article. I find his conclusion that "when the economics and politics are at odds, as they often are on issues such as free trade and immigration, the economics must prevail" unsatisfyingly utilitarian. Moral, and consequently political, considerations must precede any determination of desirable economic outcomes.
• 12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education - Mark Thoma again: I agree that internal v. online education is an apples and oranges comparison. Which is why the latter shouldn't be used as a blanket cut-price alternative to the former. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with online education, provided the delivery mode suits the subject matter.
• Neoliberal realpolitik: choking others in our name - Markha Valenta, openDemocracy: "In this way, the deaths of the 20,000 migrants who have perished on Europe’s iron doorstep in the face of ever more stringent surveillance, policing, and legislation – barbed wire fences slicing feet, hands, grazing any bit of brown skin, border guards beating those they catch; whole seas and generations of fish fed on their drowned bodies; roads stained by their truck-crushed carcasses – all these dead are said to have only themselves to blame."
• New Labour is 'unelectable' - Amit Singh at openDemocracy: "It is Jeremy Corbyn, not the other candidates, who is targeting the majority of voters who shunned the Tories (and also shunned Labour). This is why he is becoming so popular, because an anti-austerity, social justice message does have scope. […] Just look at the shadow cabinet who all look so quintessentially Blair, and so similar to their Tory opponents. They went to the same sort of schools, the same sort of universities and worked the same sort of corporate jobs before becoming politicians. People don't want New Labour, that's abundantly clear. The only people who want New Labour are Labour."
• Yanis Varoufakis is being pilloried for doing what had to be done - Philippe Legrain at the Guardian: I have two observations: a) In what way was Varoufakis "outspoken" during his tenure as finance minister? This is a man who presumably had to pack his tongue in ice every evening after a long day biting it. And b) Tax(/council rate) credits also seem to be a jolly sensible solution to less extreme forms of fiscal imbalance, such as that suffered by municipal councils, as well as encouraging local economic development.
• We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life - Patrick Hogan in some sort of clickbaity thing called Fusion: I daresay I could find you a clutch of administrators (yes, that is the collective noun) at Aussie Swazi University still prepared to put money (not their own, of course) on our inevitable Second Life future. Some of them have even caught on to this up and coming thing called MOOCs. What if you could do a MOOC in Second Life? Just imagine yourself in this compellingly immersive virtual environment that's almost exactly like sitting alone at home in front of the computer, in your underpants, doing an online multiple choice quiz!
• Dentists and Skin in the Game - Paul Krugman, NYT: "As it turns out, many fewer people have dental insurance than have general medical insurance; even where there is insurance, it typically leaves a lot of skin in the game. But dental costs have risen just as fast as overall health spending, and it may be that the reduced role of insurers actually raises those costs."
• A Most Peculiar Friendship - Yanis Varoufakis: "Tories like Lord Lamont and lefties of my sort may disagree strongly on society’s ends. But we agree that rules and markets are means to social ends that can only be determined by a sovereign people through a Parliament in which that sovereignty is vested."
• The Defeat of Europe – my piece in Le Monde Diplomatique - Yanis Varoufakis: "No European people should ever again be put in a position of negotiating in fear. For that to happen, Europeans must not fear to negotiate a European New Deal that restores the dream of shared prosperity within a democratic polity. If we fail, barbarism will rise up from within. For a continent that has generated the best and the worst humans are capable of, this ought to be a sobering thought."
• The socialist objective - John Quiggin: "So, it’s pretty clear that removing the socialist objective is not a matter of moving away from a dogmatic commitment to public ownership. Rather, it means abandoning any notion that Labor aspires to change society for the better, or that it has any fundamental disagreement with market liberals."
• Bailout Money Goes to Greece, Only to Flow Out Again - Jack Ewing and Liz Alderman: "Since 2010, Greece has received €227 billion from other eurozone countries and the I.M.F. Of that, €48.2 billion went to replenish the capital of Greek banks, according to MacroPolis, an analytics firm based in Athens. More than €120 billion went to pay debt and interest, and around €35 billion went to commercial banks that had taken losses on Greek debt."
• Every club should be like Labour – you can’t join as a new member unless you’re already a member - Mark Steel at the Independent (via Simon Wren-Lewis): "Because the most important job for any political leader, as we’re told every day, is to 'stay in the centre ground'. You could argue a true leader tries to change the centre ground, but that’s romantic nonsense. So a sensible Labour leader in the year 1500 would have said: 'It’s all very well Jeremy Corbyn promising to stop burning witches, but that will lose us the election by abandoning the centre ground.'"
• In conversation with El Pais (Claudi Pérez), the complete (long) transcript - Yanis Varoufakis: Q: "I think that is a uncontroversial: your ideas about austerity and debt relief, everybody says you are right." A: "If you were talking to me in January it would not have been so. The only reason why now this is not controversial anymore is because we struggled for six months. For those who say to me we failed, these six months were in vain, I say “No we did not fail”. Now we have a debate in Europe which it’s not just about Greece, it’s about the continent. A debate we would have not had otherwise."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• What Is Detected? - Carl Straumsheim, InsideHigherEd: "'We say that we’re using [Turnitin] in order to teach students about academic dishonesty, but we’re using software we know doesn’t work,' Schorn said. 'In effect, we’re trying to teach them about academic dishonesty by lying to them.'"
• The Nauru Inquiry Proves We Can't Outsource Our Ethical Obligations To Asylum Seekers - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "Nauru cannot do the job. […] It does not have the resources, the independent judiciary and police, let alone the political will to attend to the allegations arising from the detention centre. They will not be resolved. But offshore processing has never been about resolving problems. It’s about outsourcing them."
• Who Will Nudge the Nudgers? - Timothy Taylor: "Insights from behavioral economics applied to consumers, workers, savers, investors, and firms often suggest some basis for government actions to "nudge" behavior in other directions. But it seems plausible to me that behavioral economics as applied to government will suggest that a number of existing government actions are misdirected or misconceived. And when that happens, it's not clear who will "nudge" government in appropriate directions."
• Authoritarian capitalism in modern times: when economic discipline really means political disciplining - Peter Bloom st openDemocracy: "Authoritarian policies once reserved for the “developing” world have now come home to the west. Greece is just the latest example of a capitalism that respects democracy only so long as it profits elite stakeholders."
• Donald Trump Has the GOP Establishment’s Number - E.J. Dionne Jr. at Truthdig: "Trump struck again on Wednesday, tweeting a picture with another of his Donald-come-lately critics, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, 'in my office last cycle playing nice and begging for my support and money. Hypocrite!'" Hey, you guys can't touch me. I'm my own PAC!
• Depression’s Advocates - Brad DeLong at Project Syndicate: "Not only have policymakers in the eurozone insisted on repeating the blunders of the 1930s; they are poised to repeat them in a more brutal, more exaggerated, and more extended fashion. I did not see that coming."
• Speech to Labor National Conference - Julian Burnside: "Labor today looks like a weak centre-right party which does not believe in itself. A party that believes in nothing except power will end up with nothing at all."
• Europe in its Labyrinth, Greece on its Knees - Matías Vernengo, the Wire: "Krugman adds that the destruction of the European project is not Greece’s fault. However, this view seems to assume that the European project is still the old social-democratic project of the Treaty of Rome, the one that was designed with the failures of the inter-war period and the European Civil War, as Keynes referred to the Great War, in mind, and that was acceptable to the United States in the context of the Soviet menace. The actual project being defended by the European Commission today is the other one – the neoliberal project – and it is doing just fine."
• Varoufakis – a new kind of politics? - Paul Tyson, openDemocracy: "A politician who is ‘realistic’ must simple comply with the extra-state non-democratic dictates of high power if their own position within the tree of power is to be preserved. Here even big players, such as Chancellor Merkel, are pawns."
• How Labor Right sneaked turnbacks through National Conference - Independent Austrralia: "Bill Shorten and the Right leadership team, the source said: "... are petrified of the mainstream/Murdoch media responding to a Left win on the floor of the conference with a headline that says 'Socialist Left controls Labor Party' or 'Radical Left controls Bill Shorten'. That's why Labor's conference is furiously agreeing on almost all amendments.""
• Going Mainstream - Craig Murray: "The sheer panic gripping the London elite now is hilarious to behold. Those on the favoured side of Britain’s enormous wealth gap are terrified by the idea that there may be a genuine electoral challenge to neo-liberalism, embodied in one of the main party structures. This is especially terrifying to those who became wealthy by hijacking the representation of the working class to the neo-liberal cause."
• The last thing Labour needs is a leader like Jeremy Corbyn who people want to vote for - Mark Steel at the Independent: "If you look at Corbyn’s record it’s clear he just can’t win elections. In his constituency of Islington North he inherited a majority of 4,456, which is now 21,194. He’s one of the few Labour MPs whose vote increased between 2005 and 2010, when he added 5,685 to his majority. This is typical of the man, defying the official Labour policy of losing votes and getting more of them instead, just to be a rebel."
• Why I Support the BDS Movement Against Israel - Chris Hedges at Truthdig: "Israel is not an anomaly. It is a window into the dystopian, militarized world that is being prepared for all of us, a world with vast disparities of income and draconian systems of internal security. There will be no freedom for Palestine, or for those locked in our own internal colonies and terrorized by indiscriminate police violence, until we destroy corporate capitalism and the neoliberal ideology that sustains it."
• The Web We Have to Save - Hossein Derakhshan, Medium: "The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television."
• So this company Cyagen is paying authors for citations in academic papers - Ben Goldacre: "The business model is very specific: if you cite them in an academic paper then you get $100, multiplied by the Impact Factor of the journal (a widely used measure of the journal’s influence). So if you cite them in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has an impact factor of 56, then you will receive $5600 from Cyagen. If you cite them in the British Medical Journal, you get $1700. And so on."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Euro MOA+MOE plus Drachma MOE - Nick Rowe, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Suppose your country (call it 'Greece') is in recession, because there is an excess demand for money (call it 'Euros'). And suppose that the Euro is both Medium of Account (prices are quoted in Euros) and Medium of Exchange (all other goods are bought and sold for Euros). Now suppose your government introduces a new currency (call it 'Drachmas'). […]"
• Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties Noam Scheiber: "'In the past, firms overstaffed and offered workers stable hours,' said Susan N. Houseman, a labor economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 'All of these new staffing models mean shifting risk onto workers, making work less secure.'"
• IMF: Most misleading sentence ever? - Mean Squared Errors: "In summary, when the IMF writes about the the failure to implement the program as assumed, this is the sort of thing is has in mind: the "failure" of the Greek government to find anyone willing to pay €11.5 billion for a stake in banks that require daily injections of liquidity from the ECB simply to keep the cash machines full. "
• Killing the European Project - Paul Krugman, NYT: "In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line."
• The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie. - John Pilger: "Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as "liberal" or even "left", Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, "schooled in postmodernism", as Alex Lantier wrote."
• The 9 charts that show the 'left-wing' policies of Jeremy Corbyn the public actually agrees with - Matt Dathan and Jon Stone at the Independent: "Tony Blair has described some of Mr Corbyn's policies as “old-fashioned" but it turns out the public agree with a lot of them."
• Tomgram: Tim Weiner, The Nixon Legacy - Tom Englehardt introduces an excerpt from Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon: "[…] Richard Nixon was never at peace. A darker spirit animated him -- malevolent and violent, driven by anger and an insatiable appetite for revenge. At his worst he stood on the brink of madness. He thought the world was against him. He saw enemies everywhere. His greatness became an arrogant grandeur."
• On the Euro Summit’s Statement on Greece: First thoughts - Yanis Varoufakis: "The recent Euro Summit is indeed nothing short of the culmination of a coup. In 1967 it was the tanks that foreign powers used to end Greek democracy. In my interview with Philip Adams, on ABC Radio National’s LNL, I claimed that in 2015 another coup was staged by foreign powers using, instead of tanks, Greece’s banks. Perhaps the main economic difference is that, whereas in 1967 Greece’s public property was not targeted, in 2015 the powers behind the coup demanded the handing over of all remaining public assets, so that they would be put into the servicing of our un-payble, unsustainable debt."
• Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece - Harry Lambert - New Statesman: "By resigning and not signing a deal he abhorred, he has kept both his conscience free and his reputation intact. His country remains locked in a trap he spent years opposing and months fighting, but he has escaped."
• Roach Motel Economics - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So we have learned that the euro is a Roach Motel — once you go in, you can never get out. And once inside you are at the mercy of those who can pull your financing and crash your banking system unless you toe the line."
• [Australian Federal Police] using hacking software from group aiding human rights abusing nations - Murray Hunter at IA: Because it's there.
• Yanis Varoufakis Hits Australian Radio To Denounce Greek Bailout Deal As 'New Versailles' - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "It’s got nothing to do with putting Greece back on the rails towards recovery. This is a new Versailles treaty which is haunting Europe again – and the Prime Minister knows it. The Prime Minister knows he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t."
• In defence of welfare - Chris Dillow: "For one thing, welfare acts as a form of automatic stabilizer; higher welfare spending in bad times helps to support aggregate demand and so moderates recessions. […] And it protects us all. Benefits aren't so much a payment to claimants as a payment through claimants. They are spent at Primark and Lidl, and so support employment there. The distinction between welfare and work is therefore a false one; welfare helps to create jobs."
• Greece and Trust - Simon Wren-Lewis: "The narrative about failing to deliver is just an attempt to disguise the fact that the Troika has largely run the Greek economy for the last five years and is therefore responsible for the results."
• Perpetual war creates endless consequences - Norman Solomon at Al Jazeera America: "While the automation of Uncle Sam’s killing-at-a-distance has sharply reduced American casualties, it has increasingly rendered the U.S. war path as the main avenue for pursuing its goals. And the nation’s top leaders, as well as the military contractors that profit from this tendency, appear to like it that way."
• Kid Stuff - Molly Knefel, the New Inquiry: "The very important end-of-year test featured in the little girl’s play is used to hold other kids back, fire their teachers, and close their schools. The test is written not for them to succeed, but for them to fail."
• On Paleo and Faith in Government - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute: "What strikes me about this argument is that the Republicans have no less faith [than Democrats] in the power of government. They have faith that the government can privatize social insurance in a way that won’t involve weaker security and higher costs. They have faith that if the government gives employers wage subsidies for poorer workers, employers won’t simply pocket them in wage bargaining. They have faith, against evidence, that the government having no taxes on capital will cause a boom in private investment. They have faith that the government cutting taxes will more than make up the lost revenue. Their faith leads them to conflate building a robust civil society and economic security with laissez-faire economics."
• Neoliberal moralism and the fiction of Europe: a postcolonial perspective - Sadia Abbas, openDemocracy: "Sometimes the virulence of the German response seems to suggest that the Germans cannot forgive actually existing Greeks for being inconveniently and insistently who they are, given the importance of ancient Greece to the German intellectual imagination. At the risk of being florid, it's inconvenient for that imagination that Greeks are not just broken statues, stripped of paint, in the world's museums. "
• The true Greek tragedy - James Meadway at the NEF blog: "The euro’s flaws have been known from the start. In a stunningly prescient essay, written in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty that paved the way for the single currency neared ratification, economist Wynn Godley predicted the outlines of the present crisis for Greece: “If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation.” Without exit, this now looks like the future."
• Dr Schäuble’s Plan for Europe: Do Europeans approve? – English version of my article in Die Zeit: "The euro crisis has expanded this lacuna at the centre of Europe hideously. An informal body, the Eurogroup, that keeps no minutes, abides by no written rules, and is answerable to precisely no one, is running the world’s largest macro-economy, with a Central Bank struggling to stay within vague rules that it creates as it goes along, and no body politic to provide the necessary bedrock of political legitimacy on which fiscal and monetary decisions may rest."
• Are We Seeing the End of Homeopathy? - Steven Novella: "There is even a possibility that the FDA will decide to do their actual job – require testing of homeopathic products to demonstrate efficacy before allowing them on the market. If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night, because there is no evidence to support any homeopathic product for any indication. They will have to endure the outrage of quacks, charlatans, and the deluded, but hey, that’s their job. Suck it up."
• Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers: "Nothing captures this ensemble of ideological practices better than O Magazine, whose aim is to 'help women see every experience and challenge as an opportunity to grow and discover their best self. To convince women that the real goal is becoming more of who they really are. To embrace their life.' O Magazine implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, identifies a range of problems in neoliberal capitalism and suggests ways for readers to adapt themselves to mitigate or overcome these problems. […] We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects."
• Greece, Europe, and the United States - Jamie Galbraith in Harpers: "SYRIZA was not some Greek fluke; it was a direct consequence of European policy failure. A coalition of ex-Communists, unionists, Greens, and college professors does not rise to power anywhere except in desperate times. That SYRIZA did rise, overshadowing the Greek Nazis in the Golden Dawn party, was, in its way, a democratic miracle. SYRIZA’s destruction will now lead to a reassessment, everywhere on the continent, of the 'European project.'"
• The Beer IneQuality Index - Frances Wooley: Producers operating in high-regulation, high-unionisation environments must compete on quality rather than price. So laissez-faire means crappy beer.
• Dominique Strauss Kahn, addressing “German friends” - via Yanis Varoufakis: "We are expending all our energies on infighting and running the risk of triggering a break-up. This is where we are. A eurozone, in which you, my German friends, would lay down your law with a few Baltic and Nordic states in tow, is unacceptable for all the the rest."
• Between Free Speech and Bureaucracy: Anarchist Political Theory and a Way Forward for Reddit - David Banks at the Society Pages: "At the very least come up with some sort of aspirational progressive vision of what kind of community you want to have and persuade others that they should work to achieve it. This sort of move is the biggest departure that anarchist political theory takes from mainstream liberalism: that communities can agree on the features of a future utopia and govern in the present as if you are already free to live that future utopia. Organizing humans with blanket laws forces you to explain the obvious, namely that hateful people suck and should be persuaded to act otherwise if they wish to remain part of a community that is meaningful to them."