Saving the Net from the surveillance state: Glenn Greenwald speaks up (Q&A)

The man to whom Edward Snowden entrusted his NSA documents isn't content just to save the Bill of Rights and reinvent journalism. He also wants to stop the Internet from becoming history's most dangerous spy tool.

by Edward Moyer

December 6, 2013 12:01 AM PST  

Big Brother may be watching you. But Glenn Greenwald is watching Big Brother.

That's not a bad take on how the 46-year-old constitutional-law attorney turned crusading journalist turned thorn in the side of the NSA might describe his mission.

At least in part. Greenwald is doing more than just watching. By combing through the tens of thousands of classified NSA documents leaked to him by Edward Snowden -- and publishing in newspapers around the globe report after report on the secretive agency's mass-spying activities -- he's got the whole world watching too.

The Mandela Years in Power

by PATRICK BOND

 

The death of Nelson Mandela, at age 95 on 5 December 2013, brings genuine sadness. As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question: how did he change South Africa? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is, how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver? South Africa now lurches from crisis to crisis, and so many of us are tempted to remember the Mandela years – especially the first democratic government – as fundamentally different from the crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally-securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime we suffer now. But were the seeds of our present political weeds sown earlier? 

The critical decade was the 1990s, when Mandela was at the height of his power, having been released from jail in February 1990, taken the South African presidency in May 1994 and left office in June 1999. But it was in this period, alleges former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, that “the battle for the soul of the African National Congress was lost to corporate power and influence… We readily accepted that devil’s pact and are damned in the process. It has bequeathed to our country an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the dire plight of the masses of our people.”

Given much more extreme inequality, much lower life expectancy, much higher unemployment, much worse vulnerability to world economic fluctuations, and much more rapid ecological decay during his presidency, how much can Mandela be blamed? Was he pushed, or did he jump?

South Africa won its democracy in 1994. But regardless of the elimination of formal racism and the constitutional rhetoric of human rights, it has been a “choiceless democracy” in socio-economic policy terms and more broadly a “low-intensity democracy”, to borrow terms coined respectively by Thandika Mkandawire for Africa, and by Barry Gills and Joel Rocamora for many ex-dictatorships. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa fit a pattern: a series of formerly anti-authoritarian critics of old dictatorships – whether from rightwing or left-wing backgrounds – who transformed into 1980s-90s neoliberal rulers: Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela (South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Museveni (Uganda), Nujoma (Namibia), Obasanjo (Nigeria), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland) and Yeltsin (Russia).The self-imposition of economic and development policies – typically at the behest of financial markets and the Washington/Geneva multilateral institutions – required an extraordinary insulation from genuine national determinations: in short, an “elite transition.”

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax

• State Policy Network co-ordinating plans across 34 US states
• Strategy to 'release residents from government dependency'
• Revelations come amid growing scrutiny of tax-exempt charities
• Read key excerpts from the SPN proposals
• Portland Press Herald: group's plan to eliminate taxes
• Texas Observer: the money behind the fight to wreck Medicaid

Ed Pilkington in New York and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
theguardian.com, Thursday 5 December 2013 13.21 EST


Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

Next, say goodbye to the waiters and waitresses

by David Atkins

The internet, workforce mechanization and deskilling have already decimated America's manufacturing jobs. Soon those forces will be coming for the white collar jobs as well. Also, package delivery people. Cab drivers and car salesmen, too.

But service sector jobs should be OK, right? You still need people to serve other people, right?

About that:

Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.

Dean Baker: Pension Theft: Class War Goes to the Next Stage

In the past two days we've seen a federal judge rule that Detroit can go bankrupt, putting its workers' pensions in jeopardy, and we have seen Illinois' Legislature vote for substantial cuts in its retirees' pensions. Undoubtedly these two actions are just the tip of the iceberg. We have opened up a new sport for America's elite: pension theft.

The specifics of the situations are very different, but the outcome is the same. Public employees who spent decades working for the government are not going to get the pensions that were part of their pay package. In both cases we have governments claiming poverty, and therefore the workers are just out of luck.

Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets

How two alienated, angry geeks broke the story of the year

by Janet Reitman

DECEMBER 04, 2013

 

Early one morning last December, Glenn Greenwald opened his laptop, scanned through his e-mail, and made a decision that almost cost him the story of his life. A columnist and blogger with a large and devoted following, Greenwald receives hundreds of e-mails every day, many from readers who claim to have "great stuff." Occasionally these claims turn out to be credible; most of the time they're cranks. There are some that seem promising but also require serious vetting. This takes time, and Greenwald, who starts each morning deluged with messages, has almost none. "My inbox is the enemy," he told me recently.

And so it was that on December 1st, 2012, Greenwald received a note from a person asking for his public encryption, or PGP, key so he could send him an e-mail securely. Greenwald didn't have one, which he now acknowledges was fairly inexcusable given that he wrote almost daily about national-security issues, and had likely been on the government's radar for some time over his vocal support of Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks. "I didn't really know what PGP was," he admits. "I had no idea how to install it or how to use it." It seemed time-consuming and complicated, and Greenwald, who was working on a book about how the media control political discourse, while also writing his column for The Guardian, had more pressing things to do.

ALEC calls for penalties on 'freerider' homeowners in assault on clean energy

• Documents reveal conservative group's anti-green agenda
• Strategy to charge people who install their own solar panels
• Environmentalists accuse Alec of protecting utility firms' profits

• ALEC facing funding crisis after exodus of big donors

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 December 2013 12.49 EST

An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilising to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels – casting them as "freeriders" – in a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.

Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama's main channel for climate action.

Details of Alec's strategy to block clean energy development at every stage – from the individual rooftop to the White House – are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.

Paul Krugman: Obama Gets Real

Much of the media commentary on President Obama’s big inequality speech was cynical. You know the drill: it’s yet another “reboot” that will go nowhere; none of it will have any effect on policy, and so on. But before we talk about the speech’s possible political impact or lack thereof, shouldn’t we look at the substance? Was what the president said true? Was it new? If the answer to these questions is yes — and it is — then what he said deserves a serious hearing.

And once you realize that, you also realize that the speech may matter a lot more than the cynics imagine. 

New Guardian Docs Show ALEC Misled Press, Public

Thursday, 05 December 2013 09:07  
By Brendan Fischer, PR Watch | Report

Internal documents from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) published by The Guardian provide stunning insight into the inner workings of the "corporate bill mill" -- and offer new evidence about how the group has continually misled reporters, the public, and even its own members.

The notoriously secretive ALEC has been thrust into the sunlight in the two years since the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org, analyzed over 800 of ALEC's previously-secret model bills, and documented the corporations and legislators pushing ALEC's legislative agenda. It now appears that ALEC has been scorched by the sunshine.

David Cay Johnston: A Hard Lesson from Motown: They Will Steal Your Pension

Anyone in a public-sector job looking forward to retiring in comfort should look carefully at what is going on in Detroit and Springfield, Ill. Sherlock Holmes would call it the case of the missing pension money.

News leaking out this week from the Motor City tells how the enormous gap between the pensions workers earned and the money set aside to pay for them will be closed. By stealing from the workers.

Courts, legislatures, and corporations are all working in concert not to pay the full benefits owed. For decades, political and business leaders failed to set aside the right amount of money each payday to cover the pensions workers earned and, in some cases, covered up the mismanagement of pension fund investments.

The lies behind this transatlantic trade deal

Plans to create an EU-US single market will allow corporations to sue governments using secretive panels, bypassing courts and parliaments

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013 15.31 EST

Panic spreads through the European commission like ferrets in a rabbit warren. Its plans to create a single market incorporating Europe and the United States, progressing so nicely when hardly anyone knew, have been blown wide open. All over Europe people are asking why this is happening; why we were not consulted; for whom it is being done.

They have good reason to ask. The commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments.

They have good reason to ask. The commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement. Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments.

Another Batch of Wall Street Villains Freed on Technicality

by Matt Taibbi
DECEMBER 04, 2013

I love covering trials, which is one reason I've been a little sad since switching over to the Wall Street beat: Few of the bad guys in this world ever even get interviewed by the authorities, much less indicted, so trials are comically rare.

But we did have one last year, a big one, and though it was boring and jargon-laden enough on the surface that at least one juror fought sleep in its opening days, I thought it was fascinating. In a story about the Justice Department's Spring 2012 prosecution of a wide-raging municipal bond bid-rigging case, I called it the "first trial of the modern American mafia":

"Of course, you won't hear about the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that . . . But this just completed trial in downtown New York . . . allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street."

Paul Krugman: France's Ideological Downgrade

So Standard & Poor's has downgraded France's credit rating. What does this tell us? The answer is: not much about France. It can't be overemphasized that the ratings agencies have no special information about national solvency — especially for big countries like France. Does S.&P. have inside knowledge of the state of French finances? No. Does it have a better macroeconomic model than, say, the International Monetary Fund? You have to be kidding. So what's this about?

I think it's useful to compare I.M.F. projections for France with those for another country that has been getting nice words from the raters lately: Britain. The charts on this page show data from the World Economic Outlook Database — real numbers through 2012, I.M.F. projections up to 2018. First, real gross domestic product per capita: France has done better than Britain so far, and the I.M.F. expects that advantage to persist.

GAO Report Highlights Compelling Reasons for New Federal Privacy Law

Consumers keep sharing and disclosing lots of personal data—each time they shop, surf the Web, subscribe to magazines, or contribute to charities. Mounds of this data are being compiled and combined, creating so-called digital dossiers that outline much about who we are—or, at least, some approximation of who companies think we are, based on our consumer preferences. As our data gets resold, recombined, and repurposed, we often have little idea who has data about us, where a given company may have initially obtained that data, and what that data will be used for in the future. It feels as if we have no real control over our own data. This is the brave new world of big data.

US Health Reform Keeps Insurance Companies in the Mix, No Matter the Cost

Tuesday, 03 December 2013 13:08  
By Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed

In a recent online post for the Roosevelt Institute, the economics commentator Mike Konczal said most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of the Affordable Care Act's complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare is not complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: Neither Social Security nor Medicare is complex in structure. As Mr. Konczal wrote, it's complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable.

New Study Confirms that Lower Corporate Tax Rates Don’t Create Jobs

Corporate executives love to peddle the notion that they need to have their low tax payments reduced even further, even as the share of GDP represented by company profits is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, corporations paid between 5% and 6% of GDP in taxes in the early 1950 versus a trivial 1.3% in 2010. The GAO reported earlier this year that the effective Federal tax rate paid by large corporations in 2010 was 12.6%, versus a nominal rate of 35%. And roughly 10% of large companies pay no Federal tax at all.

One of the arguments made by big companies in favor of making their low payments even low is that they’d go out and create more jobs. This is clearly spurious. Large companies are already awash with cash, thanks in no small measure to taking advantage of the Fed’s largesse and issuing bonds. They could invest and create jobs with the dough they already have if they were so inclined. But in fact, large corporations have been shedding jobs for some time, since Wall Street reacts positively to downsizing and higher stock prices lead to bigger executive pay packages. And don’t blame the crappy economy. Big companies weren’t investing even in the last expansion; they had abandoned the role of capitalists and were net saving. Large companies have been more keen to buy back stock than invest in the business of their business.

The Rise Of Obamacare McCarthyism

Sahil Kapur – December 2, 2013, 1:50 PM EST

When House Republicans unveiled a proposal in the fall aimed at avoiding a dead-end government shutdown over Obamacare, the conservative backlash was swift and brutal: they called it a surrender, a betrayal, an appeasement of the health care law they all abhor.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) decried it as "procedural chicanery" that would make House Republicans "complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare," should they go along with it. FreedomWorks called it a "bait and switch to give the Senate a hall pass to fund Obamacare" and accused House GOP leaders of wanting to "cave and run."

Dispelling an urban legend, new study shows who uses emergency departments frequently

While it has often been said that the most frequent users of overburdened hospital emergency departments are mentally ill substance abusers, a study out today (Dec. 3) by researchers from NYU Wagner and the University of California, San Francisco, has found that this belief is unfounded – an "urban legend."

Co-authored by John Billings of NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Maria C. Raven of the University of California and published in the December issue of Health Affairs, the new analysis of hospital emergency department (ED) use in New York City by Medicaid patients reveals that conditions related to substance abuse and mental illness are responsible for a small share of the emergency department visits by frequent ED users, and that ED use accounts for a small portion of these patients' total Medicaid expenditures. However, according to the study, frequent emergency department users have a substantial burden of disease, often having multiple chronic conditions and many hospitalizations.

The Facts Are in: Austerity Politics Doesn't Work

Wednesday, 04 December 2013 09:20  
By Sally Kohn, Yes! Magazine | Opinion

From England's double-dip recession to Portugal's spiking unemployment, there is now conclusive evidence of the complete failure of austerity.

The idea that rational thinking should govern political decision making in America dates back to our very founding. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Oh, John Adams, where are you when we need you? Facts have been buried in a political era in which partisan ideology overrides reason. And while the Republican Party has embraced fact-free governance as its personal brand, Democrats are not entirely innocent either.

What You Need to Know About the International Test Scores

by Diane Ravitch

The news reports say that the test scores of American students on the latest PISA test are "stagnant," "lagging," "flat," etc.

The U.S. Department of Education would have us believe -- yet again -- that we are in an unprecedented crisis and that we must double down on the test-and-punish strategies of the past dozen years.

The myth persists that once our nation led the world on international tests, but we have fallen from that exalted position in recent years.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

US Government Has Secret Kill Switch for Communications

Wednesday, 04 December 2013 11:29  
By Kevin Mathews, Care2 | Report

Someday, your cell phone and internet may suddenly go out, but it will have nothing to do with failing to pay your bills. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the President has the authority to shut down everyone’s internet and phone service in one fell swoop, reports Mother Jones. 

Though it seems sinister, the government assures us that this “kill switch” capability is for our own protection. Developed during the George W. Bush administration, the plan is that the executive branch can turn off communication technology in the event of a mass emergency or terrorist attack.

GOP debunked on food stamps: Everything they say about SNAP is wrong

Forget the nonsense about them breeding dependency. Food stamps increase self-sufficiency, research shows

Paul Rosenberg

Hilary Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote a particularly notable paper last year. Instead of increasing dependency, as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege: It actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.

That was just one of two main results reported in “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” which Hoynes co-authored with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond.  As stated in the paper’s abstract, access to food stamps for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”  Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a century in the past.

John Pilger | Discovering the Power of People's History - and Why It Is Feared Today

Tuesday, 03 December 2013 10:07  
By John Pilger, Truthout | Op-Ed 

England is two countries. One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow. When I first arrived from Australia, it seemed no one went north of Watford, and those who had emigrated from the north worked hard to change their accents, and obscure their origins and learn the mannerisms and codes of the southern comfortable classes. Some would mock the life they had left behind. They were changing classes, or so they thought.

Here’s the most depressing coffee table book of all time

By Holly Richmond

There’s nothing like a thick book of gorgeous nature photography to show the Avon lady you’re a savvy art connoisseur. But if you’d rather passive-aggressively shoo her and those door-to-door evangelists away as quickly as possible, just show ‘em Your Beautiful, Fragile World: The Nature and Environmental Photographs of Peter Essick.

Microplastics make marine worms sick

Tiny bits of plastic trash could spell big trouble for marine life, starting with the worms, say a team of researchers from Plymouth University and the University of Exeter who report their evidence in a pair of studies in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 2. Those marine worms play a key ecological role as an important source of food for other animals.

Work by Stephanie Wright from the University of Exeter found that if ocean sediments are heavily contaminated with microplastics, marine lugworms eat less and their energy levels suffer. A separate report, from Mark Anthony Browne on work performed at Plymouth University, shows that ingesting microplastic can also reduce the health of lugworms by delivering harmful chemicals, including hydrocarbons, antimicrobials, and flame retardants, to them.

The Retirement Deficit

Many of America's CEOs don't think we're "entitled" to a secure retirement.

Sunday, 01 December 2013 11:18  
By Sam Pizzigati, OtherWords | Op-Ed 

Struggling families all across America now have less food on their tables. Budget cuts that kicked into effect November 1 have lowered the nation’s average federal food stamp benefit to less than $1.40 per person per meal.

Austerity American-style is squeezing elsewhere as well, from Head Start for kids to Meals on Wheels for seniors, and more cuts are looming, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill near still another budget deliberation deadline, this one midway through December.

The next federal program in the crosshairs? Maybe the biggest of them all: Social Security.

Fighting the 'spin' war over Obamacare

Commentary: claims are distorted, but GOP is displaying message discipline 

By Wendell Potter
6:00 am, December 2, 2013 Updated: 11:13 am, December 2, 2013


Now that November is history, will the Obamacare website work flawlessly from now on? Or, as the president has said, will it at least work for the “vast majority” of people who need to buy insurance on their own?

We will know in a few days if, as administration officials pledged last week, most of the problems that plagued HealthCare.gov were actually resolved. They predicted that at least 90 percent of folks seeking to enroll in a health plan online would be able to do so by the first of December.

Paul Krugman: Better Pay Now

’Tis the season to be jolly — or, at any rate, to spend a lot of time in shopping malls. It is also, traditionally, a time to reflect on the plight of those less fortunate than oneself — for example, the person on the other side of that cash register.

The last few decades have been tough for many American workers, but especially hard on those employed in retail trade — a category that includes both the sales clerks at your local Walmart and the staff at your local McDonald’s. Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973.

Where the Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace With the Earnings of the 1%

By Alan Pyke

December 2, 2013  |  If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as the earnings of the top one percent of Americans the federal wage floor would be more than triple [2] the current hourly minimum of $7.25. Instead, the minimum wage has been lower than a poverty wage ever since 1982.

 

The New York Times compiled those and other basic facts about the minimum wage into an infographic. Together with demographic data about who actually holds [3] minimum-wage jobs — less than a quarter of the minimum-wage workforce are teenagers, and nearly four in ten are over the age of 30 — the graphic makes the fundamental case for fighting inequality and economic hardship by raising the minimum wage.

The war on democracy

How corporations and spy agencies use "security" to defend profiteering and crush activism

A stunning new report compiles extensive evidence showing how some of the world's largest corporations have partnered with private intelligence firms and government intelligence agencies to spy on activist and nonprofit groups. Environmental activism is a prominent though not exclusive focus of these activities.

The report by the Center for Corporate Policy (CCP) in Washington DC titled Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage against Nonprofit Organizations draws on a wide range of public record evidence, including lawsuits and journalistic investigations. It paints a disturbing picture of a global corporate espionage programme that is out of control, with possibly as much as one in four activists being private spies.

Dean Baker: Everyday Low Wages at Walmart: Brought to You by Government Policy

There is a large and growing movement to pressure Walmart to raise its workers’ wages. This has taken the form of direct action by workers, efforts to pass higher minimum wage or living wage laws, and implicit threats of consumer boycotts if Walmart does not raise wages and benefits.

This drive is encouraging, and often inspiring, as many workers have bravely risked their jobs and their livelihoods to try to get a better deal for themselves and their co-workers. But an important part of the story is missing in the way it usually gets presented.

The Fascinating Ways the Global Recycling Industry Really Works

By Adam Minter

November 21, 2013  |  Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade [3] by Adam Minter. Copyright ©2013 by Adam Minter. Published by Bloomsbury Press. Reprinted with permission.

A single strand of burned-out Christmas tree lights weighs almost nothing in the hand. But a hay-bale-sized block? That weighs around 2,200 pounds, according to Raymond Li, the fresh-faced but steely general manager of Yong Chang Processing, a scrap-metal processor in the southern Chinese town of Shijiao.

He would know.

I am standing between him and three such bales, or 6,600 pounds of Christmas tree lights that Americans tossed into recycling bins, or dropped off at the Salvation Army, or sold to someone in a "We Buy Junk" truck. Eventually they found their way to a scrapyard that pressed them into a cube and shipped them off to Raymond Li's Christmas tree light recycling factory. Raymond is anxious to show me how it works.

The Real Privacy Problem

By Evgeny Morozov on October 22, 2013

In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.

It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention.

Tea Party Bill Would Gut Endangered Species Act

Center for Biological Diversity | November 25, 2013 12:53 pm

Tea Party senators introduced a bill last week that would effectively end the protection of most endangered species in the U.S. by gutting some of the most important provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Senate Bill 1731, introduced by Tea Party members Sen. Paul (R-KY), Sen. Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Heller (R-NV) would end protections for most of the species that are currently protected by the act and make it virtually impossible to protect new species under the law. It would also eliminate protection for habitat that’s critical to the survival of rare and struggling animals and plants around the country.

Paul Krugman: Obamacare’s Secret Success

The law establishing Obamacare was officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And the “affordable” bit wasn’t just about subsidizing premiums. It was also supposed to be about “bending the curve” — slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs.

Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.