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."