Back in 2017, when some countries were handing power to populists promising variations of “drain the swamp,” France went for continuity with Emmanuel Macron, a young, moderate-sounding technocrat from the world of finance who promised to modernize the country without threatening the elites, the welfare state or the bureaucracy. Fast forward a couple of years […]
Why We’re Ungovernable, Part 15: After Germany’s Merkel Comes Chaos
After a long, initially-successful run promoting European integration and mass immigration, German Chancellor Angela Merkel saw the bottom fall out of her political fortunes this year. This morning she stepped down as leader of the formerly-dominant Christian Democrat party and promised not run again when her term as Chancellor ends in 2021. What happens next […]
US Political Center Is Being Devoured From Both Right And Left
President Trump will soon nominate his second Supreme Court justice. The first, Neil Gorsuch, has so perfectly replaced the late Antonin Scalia that it’s safe to assume retiring justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor will be in the same mold – which is to say formidable and unapologetically conservative. The result will be a solid conservative majority […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 5: “the world’s most sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over citizens”
Maybe this series should be renamed “Galloping Fascism”: China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People (Wall Street Journal) – HANGZHOU, China—Alibaba Group’s sprawling campus has collegial workspaces, laid-back coffee bars and, on the landscaped grounds, a police outpost. Employees use the office to report suspected crimes to the police, […]
Be Careful What You Wish For, Police Body-Cam Edition
After the recent deluge of videos showing police abusing and sometimes flat-out murdering more-or-less innocent citizens, the willingness of a growing number of cities to equip officers with video cameras has been hailed as a victory by civil libertarians. But what if those cameras also extend the surveillance network exponentially? In the future, if a […]
In The Police-State-Versus-Freedom Arms Race, Freedom Seems To Be Winning
In the past 48 hours, two stories broke that illustrate how dominant technology has become in the age-old war between freedom and control: Malware Lets a Drone Steal Data by Watching a Computer’s Blinking LED (Wired) – A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion’s cybersecurity lab has devised a method to defeat the security protection known […]
Is Greece Still A Country If Someone Else Owns Its Assets?
This story isn’t actually about Greece, but it begins there. After the country went functionally bankrupt a few years ago, the solutions proposed by its creditors (mostly European banks and governments) included the impoverishment of its current citizens through cutbacks in wages and pensions, the impoverishment of its future citizens through the borrowing of even […]
The End Is Near, Part 1: The “War On Cash”
As the saying goes, you can know a person by the quality of his or her enemies. This is also true of societies, where moral evolution can be traced by simply listing the things on which they declare war. Not so long ago, for instance, the world’s good guys — the US, Europe’s democracies and […]
Clueless In The Middle East
Starting with the CIA’s overthrow (and some would say murder) of Iran’s democratically-elected president in the 1950s and continuing through our serial invasions of Iraq and our arming of Al Qaeda and ISIS, American policy in the Middle East has been a textbook case of a superpower with more money than brains, making things vastly […]
Citi: No Longer the Dumbest Bank — Now the Most Evil
Back in December there was a flurry of press around the passage of a banking bill that was 1) reportedly written by Citigroup and 2) put taxpayers on the hook for over-the-counter derivatives, obscure financial instruments that periodically blow up and in which Citi had a big position. Distrustful cynics like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren […]
Well Played, Wall Street!
So the markets are getting skittish and the media is obsessing about the many things that could go wrong out there. It’s like 2007 all over again, but with one big difference: Back then the mega-banks were reasonably sure the government would, if necessary, bail them out of their hundreds of trillions of dollars of […]
Yeah, This Will Work Out Just Fine
The Islamic State (ISIS) has set a modern-day “emergent threat” record by going from obscurity to existential global menace in what seems like a matter of weeks. But as with most overnight sensations, there was a longer gestation period outside of the limelight. And like most military threats of the past few decades it was […]
A Horrible Thought
Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide chronicles his work with Edward Snowden to bring the US government’s global surveillance network to light. It’s a chilling book for a variety of reasons, including the following: The secret court that was set up to vet government requests for phone taps and such has become a mere formality. […]
Edward Snowden Towers Over His Enemies
The Guardian just ran an interview with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on perhaps the most extensive secret spying program in human history and is now a man without a country, very much in danger of assassination or rendition or any number of other nasty things should Washington get ahold […]
Fake Conflict: Fed Criticizes Big Banks
Yesterday, Federal Reserve official William Dudley had some harsh words for Wall Street banks, sort of calling them criminals, among other things: New York Fed Chief Levels Explosive Charge Against Big BanksThe head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Thursday that some of America’s largest financial institutions appear to lack respect for […]