This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Detention centres and State censorship - Kellie Tranter at Independent Australia: "The Government's approach has historical precedents. An order issued in 1933 by the German commander of Dachau, Hilmar Wäckerle, is instructive in terms of the mindset of officials who engage in censorship on behalf of the State. The order prescribed a program of punishment for inmates for infractions of rules including those prescribing rigid censorship concerning conditions within the camp"
• A Harvard Don is Enraged that Pope Francis is “Opposed to the World Economic Order” - Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives: "Stavins is appalled that a religious leader could oppose a system based on the pursuit and glorification of “great possessions.” He is appalled that a religious leader is living out the Church’s mission to provide a “preferential option for the poor.” Stavins hates the Church’s mission because it is “socialist” – and therefore so obviously awful that it does not require refutation by Stavins. This cavalier dismissal of religious beliefs held by most humans is revealing coming from a field that proudly boasts the twin lies that it is a “positive” “science.” Theoclassical economists embrace an ideology that is antithetical to nearly every major religion."
• Labour's choice: neoliberalism or more neoliberalism - Ben Whitham, openDemocracy: "Neoliberalism re-enchants the rich. The neoliberal assumption structuring British politics today is that a small “special class” of “wealth creators”, which three of the Labour leadership contenders describe so admiringly, are able to conjure wealth out of thin air. This assumption is false."
• Curb Your Malthusiasm - George Monbiot: "People are poor and unemployed, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith claimed in this week’s Sunday Times, because of “the damaging culture of welfare dependency”. Earlier this month, Duncan Smith, in a burst of Malthusiasm, sought to restrict child benefit to two children per family, to discourage the poor from reproducing. A new analysis by the Wellcome Trust suggests that the government, which is about to place 350 psychologists in job centres, now treats unemployment as a mental health disorder."
• Ultra Violence - Nathan Eisenberg at The New Inquiry: "Through the figure of the Ultra, football fandom produces a nationalism without a nation, and provides the model for a kind of violent organizing that sees its greatest historical resonance with the far right." Bloody hell. We are Sparta FC.
• Hillary Clinton ca. 1993 on Presidents Fighting Rich Corporations: "Tell Me Something Real" - Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: Can't say you weren't warned.
• Strengths and Weaknesses - xkcd:
  
• Barbara, tagged and monitored like a criminal - John Grayson, openDemocracy: "Electronic tagging is used in the criminal justice system to monitor offenders and to disrupt offending patterns. Imposing tags and curfews on asylum seekers, who have committed no crime, is an extension of this intrusive power that should worry all of us, for who is next?"
• The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy - Mike Konzcal for Next New Deal: "At this point, the preponderance of stories about work ending is itself doing a certain kind of labor, one that distracts us and leads us away from questions we need to answer. These stories, beyond being untethered to the current economy, distract from current problems in the workforce, push laborers to identify with capitalists while ignoring deeper transitional matters, and don’t even challenge what a serious, radical story of ownership this would bring into question."
• The euro was a big mistake, and Greece is paying the price - Timothy B. Lee at Vox: "So if you wanted to help Greece, you'd want to start printing more money in an effort to lower interest rates, boost demand, and bring down the country's unemployment rate. On the other hand, if you were just focusing on the German economy, you'd reach the opposite conclusion."
• Many ‘benefits scroungers’ are hard working people you rely on for your care - Elizabeth Cotton at the Conversation: "Of the 1.4m people working in social care, 160,000 are earning less than the living wage, particularly domiciliary carers who are paid only for their 15 minutes of contact time and not their travel between clients. Not earning enough to live puts us in a precarious position, and when we are precarious at work we are vulnerable to burnout, bullying and failures in our duty of care."
• Bernie Sanders Blasts Greece's Creditors - Daniel Marans at HuffPo: "'Let us not forget, after World War I, the Allies imposed oppressive austerity on Germany as part of the Versailles Treaty,' Sanders said in the statement to HuffPost. 'As a result, unemployment skyrocketed, the people suffered, and the policies of austerity gave rise to the Nazi Party. We cannot let a situation like that ever happen again.'"
• 'Tis The Season For Middle And Upper-Class Entitlement - Stuart Rollo, New Matilda: "Our good treasurer is the example par excellence of this system in action. While publicly demanding an ‘end to the age of entitlement’, Mr Hockey, who is paid $366,000 dollars a year by the Australian public and owns a property portfolio valued at around $10 million dollars, continued his long standing practice of claiming $270 a night from the taxpayer to stay in his own family home whenever he is in Canberra, a house that has increased in value from $377,000 in 1997 to around $2 million now. Totally legal, and completely unethical."
• British Tribunal Flip-Flops on Wrongful Surveillance of Amnesty International - Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept: "The tribunal notably did not rule that the U.K. spy agency’s initial interception of communications was unlawful, just that retention rules had been violated." That's okay then.
• Watchdog Tries to Verify Coordinates of Afghan Health Clinics; Gets a Surprise: "“Thirteen coordinates were not located within Afghanistan,” the letter [from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)] reads. Additionally, 13 more were duplicates, 90 clinics had no location data and 189 coordinate locations had no structure within 400 feet. One set of coordinates was in the Mediterranean Sea."
• Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points - Yanis Varoufakis
• The IMF: An inexcusable, incorrigible failure - John Quiggin: "The IMF has understood from the start that the austerity policies it has imposed are economically unsound and a repetition of past failures. And yet it has been unwilling and unable to do anything else."
• The something for nothing culture - Chris Dillow: "I know someone who has made almost £400,000 tax-free without working - equivalent to almost 20 years of getting the maximum welfare benefits the Tories are considering. […]That someone, of course, is me. And the £400,000 is the tax-free profit I made from rising house prices."
• Yemen Is Starving, and We’re Partly to Blame - Chris Toensing, Foreign Policy in Focus via Juan Cole: "80 percent of people in the Arab world’s poorest country are in danger of starving to death under a U.S.-backed blockade and bombing campaign."
• The ideologues of the Eurozone - Simon Wren-Lewis: "The problem for the Euro project is that it has become captured by an economic ideology, and austerity is that ideology’s principle weapon. A self-confident and mature Eurozone would be able to tolerate diversity, rather than trying to crush any dissent. A Eurozone captured by an ideology will insist there is but one path, and that the imperative of austerity is too important to accommodate democratic wishes."
• My experience of 'signing on' at the Job Centre - Nicholas Glover, openDemocracy: "So whilst the Government’s analysis of Britain as marked by welfare dependency and worklessness continues to conjure up popularised notions of ‘shirkers’ and ‘skivers’ and helpless dependents – the ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ – the job centres do the dirty work by creating hostile and shaming environments for all those who find they need social security. "
• Minister No More! - Yanis Varoufakis: "I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride."