This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism - William Davies in Theory Culture & Society which, as the name suggests, comes with a mild Foucault warning: "In place of profitable production, neoliberalism discovers sources of profit through expanding risk calculus into non-productive areas of social life, which can then be drawn into the financial economy. When it transpires that some of these risks cannot be handled by the private financial economy, they are transferred to the state." Great little synopsis.
• The economic consequences of austerity - Amartya Sen in the New Statesman: "“An inefficient, unemployed, disorganised Europe faces us,” says Keynes [in 1919], “torn by internal strife and international hate, fighting, starving, pillaging, and lying.” If some of these problems are visible in Europe today (as I believe to some extent they are), we have to ask: why is this so?"
• RCEP: the trade agreement you’ve never heard of but should be concerned about - Belinda Townsend, Deborah Gleeson, Ruth Lopert: New rule. For any agreement said to be a trade agreement, we can a) assume it mostly isn't about trade, and b) assume it's bad and automatically reject it.
• Doug Cameron Takes Aim Over 'Slap On The Wrist' For 'Egregious' Worker Exploitation - Thom Mitchell at New Matilda: "Working six days a week, for between nine and 11 hours a day, 30 employees from the Philippines received roughly a third of the pay they were promised. […] For the 13 Chinese workers, even more vulnerable because few of them spoke any English, the abuse was worse." Hooray for the flexible labour market. Didn't realise Cameron had quit politics and joined the Labor party. Still, he seems keen to continue fighting, even with both hands tied behind his back.
• Facing psychological coercion and manipulation has become a daily part of claiming benefits - Felicity Callard and Robert Stearn at the Conversation: "In the past, conditionality related to things like refusing to take a job after receiving three offers of work. This was hardly beyond criticism. Now, the supposed absence of positive affect can trigger some form of sanction. “Lack of work experience or motivation” is one of the criteria for being sent on a Community Work Placement – six months’ unpaid community service for 30 hours a week."
• Digging Your Own Grave: Evil Employers Can Lay You Off, But You Don’t Have To Go Quietly - Ted Rall: "What if the standard response of a laid-off employee in the United States was not to leave quietly, but to sabotage computers with viruses, trash their office, break as much equipment as possible, and go out kicking and screaming?" Direct action gets satisfaction, as the Wobblies would say.
• Citizenship discussion paper offers a misleading take on this right - Rayner Thwaites, the Conversation: "Australian citizenship is not a contract. Talk of “contract” is a loose and misleading use of legal language. More fundamentally, citizenship is not dependent on performance. Australians are a mixed bunch, ranging from community saints to those convicted of terrible crimes. Those falling in the latter category don’t cease to be Australian. Citizenship status is not normative in that way."
• Did the Bush Invasion of Iraq “Create” ISIS? - Brian Glyn Williams at the GMU History News Network: "One Sunni’s anguished complaint captures the sentiment of this group that felt it had been arbitrarily removed from power by the Americans after ruling Iraq since the 1500s. This source stated “We were at the top of the system. We had dreams. Now we are losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability. Curse the Americans, curse them.”"
• Inequality of opportunity: Useful policy construct or will o’ the wisp? - Ravi Kanbur and Adam Wagstaff at Vox: "Any attempt to separate circumstances from effort – to identify that portion of the inequality of outcomes which is a legitimate target for redistribution – is fraught with empirical and conceptual difficulties. Fine-grained distinctions between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcomes do not hold water in practice, and we are likely to greatly underestimate inequality of opportunity and hence the need for intervention."
• Grexit: end of the illusion - John Weeks, openDemocracy: "The Greek public debt cannot be paid in full and will not be. Even the cast-iron austerian Wolfgang Schäuble must know that.  Greek government submission to the neoliberal EU project or forced exit was the Troika game plan from the moment Syriza formed a government."
• Adam Smith’s Pin Factory: Capital vs division of labour - Cameron K Murray: "The 18 distinct operations Smith recounts could just as easily be conducted by the same labourer on 18 different days to generate the same output per person over an 18 day period as in the case where labour is divided between workers."
• Why Sen is right about what is being done to Greece - Simon Wren-Lewis: "Yes, this is a battle over resources, but it is a battle where one side is using its power to pursue a policy that is very short-sighted, involving incredible hubris, and which is ultimately self defeating. The Troika are not acting in the long term interests of those they represent. This is I believe what Amartya Sen was saying when he compared these negotiations to the Versailles agreement. "
• Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges - John Cassidy at the New Yorker: "As long ago as 2010, when Greece was first bailed out, many knowledgeable observers, including some members of the I.M.F.’s board of directors, worried that Greece would never be able to pay back all of its debts—its total debt burden is about a hundred and seventy five per cent of the country’s G.D.P.—and advocated imposing a haircut on its creditors. Rather than doing this, the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the I.M.F. loaned the Greek government money to pay its creditors, which were mostly European banks, at a hundred cents on the dollar. In the now-famous words of Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, the bailout “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”"
• Minister No More! - Yanis Varoufakis: The most reasonable person in the negotiations has been asked to stay at home. "And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride."
• America Snores When Christian Terrorist Threatens to Massacre Muslims - Dean Obeidallah at the Daily Beast: "Doggart […] didn’t mince words about his plans for the Muslims of Islamberg: “We will be cruel to them. And we will burn down their buildings [Referring to their mosque and school.] ...and if anybody attempts to harm us in any way... we will take them down.”"
• The Professor of Parody - Martha Nussbaum in 1999, on Judith Butler: "Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?" Also "Turgid Charisma" would be an excellent name for a rock band.
• Nordic Zombie Arguments - Matt Breunig at Demos (US, not affiliated with the Blairite UK think tank): "[…] they can't, for seriousness purposes, admit that the Nordics do as well or better than the US on all important growth/innovation fronts though. That would not play well for their jobs as pundits. And thankfully, because "innovation" is just a vague placeholder without any precise meaning, they have found that thing they can say about why our horrifically brutal system truly is better and necessary for the world."
• The Bernie Sanders Moment - Todd Gitlin, NYT: "His enthusiasts cut across age lines. Tim Ashe, a Vermont state senator who got his political start working for Mr. Sanders, is 38. He has met 20-somethings and 40-somethings who say they moved to Vermont because of Mr. Sanders’s appeal — not in order to vote for him, but to live in a place that would elect him."