Yves here. As much as technology offers great promise as a way to create new routes for organizing, consensus-building, and decision-making, I’m not optimistic about the prospects for democracy in societies with no democratic traditions. Nevertheless, voter choice technology does seem more promising and lower cost than US adventurism as a way to try to build democratic muscles in the Middle East.
Read more...Americans welcomed plutocracy in Gilded Age America with the enthusiasm of an invading army.
Read more...We regularly criticize government-subsidized lending as a terrible way to achieve policy goals. This interview with Sarah Quinn focuses on how Federal credit subsidies have grown and changed over time, with a major objective being to mask the extent of the support.
Read more...Time to boycott Amazon. The Verge has broken an important story on how far Amazon has gone in its relentless efforts to crush workers.
Read more...Whether the Greek government’s protests are substantive or mere grandstanding, any show of opposition is more that the Eurocrats are prepared to accept. And a successful left-leaning government is also seen as a threat in quite a few quarters.
Read more...This interview, with Teresa Ghilarducci, who the Wall Street Journal called “the most dangerous woman in America,” discusses how and why pensions are under stress, and what can be done to fix them. While she agrees that the retirement crisis is real, she also argues that it is eminently fixable, particularly since there really is no free lunch. The alternative, of widespread poverty among the aged, also imposes costs on government and society.
Read more...How America’s patriotism has been converted, or perhaps more accurately, perverted, into a war culture.
Read more...The battle between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of global financial policy is escalating to the point where the ‘haves’ might start to sweat – a tiny little. This phase of heightened volatility in the markets is a harbinger of the inevitable meltdown that will follow the grand plastering-over of a systemically fraudulent global financial system.
Read more...Asking Naked Capitalism readers to support Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley project, an investigation of how the for-profit surveillance industry uses technology to monitor and control our lives.
Read more...Omissions and evasions in Obama’s Selma speech.
Read more...Lambert here: For people who like to “connect the dots,” there is actually a mathematically grounded discipline that studies such networks (or graphs) formally.
Read more...A potential fatal flaw arises in the Pentagon’s plans to create a killing force that didn’t involve messy, unpopular casualties and deaths. Drone operators are quitting faster than new ones can be trained. Killing is apparently not cost free; many drone pilots appear to suffer from a new form of mental disorder.
Read more...How the net neutrality fight created a new coalition of industrial interests and a new, sophisticated political consciousness.
Read more...I’m surprised, but perhaps I shouldn’t be, that a recent study hasn’t gotten the attention it warrants. It points to a direct connection between the impact of the crisis and a marked increase in suicide rates among the middle aged.
Read more...This Real News Network interview describes why the coming mayoral runoff in Chicago is in many ways a referendum on failed neoliberal policies, such as privatizing schools. The very fact that this race is taking place at all reveals an unexpectedly large degree of popular discontent with misrule by what passes for our elites
Read more...