Gordon Brown: Global New Deal: America’s path to growth through higher consumption is blocked by high personal borrowing and negative equity. Another well-trodden road out of recession—a private investment spurt—has failed to materialize as businesses hoard cash in the absence of a growing home market. ........ And now that the debt deal will forestall the other traditional path—a stimulus from public investment—just one route to sustained growth remains that can prevent a decade of high American unemployment. ....... Obama should now refocus his attention on securing a global growth pact that will free the world as a whole, and particularly the West, from years of anemic growth. ....... far bolder: “America’s plan for the world economy”—to achieve for global trade and growth now what Gen. George Marshall’s plan did for the faltering world of the 1940s. ........ a “global New Deal” ....... Today, 60 percent of China’s income comes from exports, while America’s export share is just 25 percent. ..... The need is urgent because as Asia’s middle classes double in the next decade, its consumer market will dwarf all others, accounting for 40 percent of all global consumer spending. Without a bigger footprint in Asia, America will be left behind. ....... if—as predicted—India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, South Korea, Indonesia, and Russia, which today buy just 15 percent of U.S. exports, account for 70 percent of future global growth, then no American company can afford to stay at home. ........ Europe’s only hope of salvation from a decade of high unemployment is to export its way to growth. ....... an up-skilling of America’s middle class and calls for U.S. public and private sectors to frontload investment in education technology and infrastructure. And a global growth pact will require America to agree to common global financial standards that can prevent future financial crises. ......... with each iPad sale, only $4 of profit go to its Asian manufacturers, while $80 go to its American (and British) designers ........ From now until Election Day, the president’s opponents will frame his position as “burdening our children with debt.” Indeed, so adept have those on the right been at playing the politics of fear, on all continents, that even in Australia—a country with virtually no debt—the incumbent Labour government lost its majority when it was faced with a conservative onslaught about deficits. ....... Two thirds of a century ago, after the greatest of depressions and the worst of wars, General Marshall rejected the politics of fear for the economics of hope, and the Marshall Plan pioneered a global program that framed the new world order. It repaid itself many times over, doubling global trade and putting America’s flagging postwar economy on course for its most successful era ever. Now, with the same vision and by accepting that a global new deal is the only way forward, an America reborn can lead again.
Image via WikipediaPeople in America who seek to cut government spending in ways that will send the world economy hurtling down into a grand recession should look to London now. And you thought only Third World dictators needed to face street power.
This is not the time for austerity measures. This is the time for a Global Marshall Plan.
No black person before Barack Obama ever became President Of The United States. That was racism. Blaming Obama for what Bush did is racism. Blaming Obama for not having brought forth some kind of a leftist utopia is also racism.
When you disagree with Tea Party fiscal insanity and blatant racism, you support the other guy. That other guy is Barack Obama. There are too many liberals in America who neither oppose the Tea Party nor support Barack Obama and simply sit back and complain. These are people who only get energized whey they are completely thrown out of power. These are people addicted to powerlessness.
You have to learn to be in power. The liberal crowd has much to learn.
New York Times: Second Recession in U.S. Could Be Worse Than First: the economy is much weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007, with most major measures of economic health — including jobs, incomes, output and industrial production — worse today than they were back then. And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped, even though a recovery technically started in June 2009. ..... When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available. ....... the four years since the recession began ...... Today the economy has 5 percent fewer jobs — or 6.8 million — than it had before the last recession began. The unemployment rate was 5 percent then, compared with 9.1 percent today..... the typical private sector worker has a shorter workweek today than four years ago...... Income levels are low, and moving in the wrong direction ...... with construction nearly nonexistent and home prices down 24 percent since December 2007, the country does not have a buffer in housing to fall back on. ..... the economy is smaller today than it was when the recession began ....... Unlike during the first downturn, there would be few policy remedies available if the economy were to revert back into recession. ....... Interest rates cannot be pushed down further — they are already at zero. The Fed has already flooded the financial markets with money by buying billions in mortgage securities and Treasury bonds, and economists do not even agree on whether those purchases substantially helped the economy. So the Fed may not see much upside to going through another politically controversial round of buying. ...... at the end of 2007, the federal debt was 64.4 percent of the economy. Today, it is estimated at around 100 percent of gross domestic product, a share not seen since the aftermath of World War II, and there is little chance of lawmakers reaching consensus on additional stimulus that would increase the debt. ...... “There is no approachable precedent, at least in the postwar era, for what happens when an economy with 9 percent unemployment falls back into recession” ...... 1937, when there was also a premature withdrawal of fiscal stimulus, and the economy fell into another recession more painful than the first ..... Corporate profits are at record highs
Even before this recession hit in 2007 China was on schedule to become the number one economy in the world by 2016. Continued policy mistakes in America might only hasten that process. There has been much self destructive behavior.
The stimulus bill was not big enough. The stimulus money was not spent fast like it needed to be to have any effect. One third of the stimulus bill was tax cuts. That was a mistake. Obama did that to get Republican votes, and no Republican voted for the bill anyway. That instead was seen as a sign of weakness and might have hastened the Republican takeover of the House.
The biggest chunk of the stimulus bill needed to go to taking all of America to one gigabit per second kind of broadband. Instead the biggest chunk of the money went to old economy stuff and to humdrum payments. Paying the unemployed is important, but paying the unemployed is not what creates the next generation of jobs.
The threat of a double dip is very real. And the one thing that can save the country is a stimulus bill.
The biggest mistake perhaps has been to apply Great Depression lessons to the Great Recession. The Great Recession is America reeling from a lack of global institutions that globalization asks for. Capital wants to go global at breakneck speeds, but the global infrastructure to make that happen is not there. The Great Depression gave us macroeconomics. The Great Recession needs to give us globoeconomics.
What is needed is massive jobs programs, massive public works programs. Send a million mentors into the inner city schools, and pay them. Send another million to whitewash the roofs across America, and pay them.
New York Times: London Sees Twin Perils Converging to Fuel Riot: Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services. At the same time, a widely held disdain for law enforcement here, where a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse, has only intensified through the drumbeat of scandal that has racked Scotland Yard in recent weeks and led to the resignation of the force’s two top commanders...... there was not long to wait until a new one erupted: across London, skirmishes broke out on Sunday between groups of young people and large numbers of riot police officers, which one officer said were drawn from forces around London. ...... In Enfield, a usually calm suburb, shop windows were smashed and debris lay in the street. In nearby Edmonton, groups of young people gathered near damaged storefronts. In Tottenham itself, roads were closed, a helicopter hovered overhead and squads of police vans swooped in to make arrests in side streets. ....... The march turned into a pitched battle between hundreds of officers, some on horses, and equal numbers of rioters, wearing bandannas and armed with makeshift weapons that included table legs and an aluminum crutch. Looting throughout northern London continued past dawn, leaving streets littered with glass. In daylight, residents emerged to survey buildings, many considered landmarks, that had been left gutted and smoldering. ........ unless endemic youth unemployment in Tottenham was curbed, “this will happen again. These kids don’t care. They don’t have to pay for this damage, we do. Working people do. What do they have to lose?” ...... many voiced concern that looters in other areas of London had been allowed to smash and steal for several hours before officers arrived. ....... Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months. ....... Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were attacked in their Rolls-Royce as protesters — some of whom were subsequently jailed — shouted “Tory scum,” a reference to the Conservative Party’s traditional links with the aristocracy, and “off with their heads!” In March, a reported 500,000 people marched against the cuts, with some protesters occupying the exclusive food store Fortnum & Mason — Prince Charles’s grocer. ...... one man shouted, “This is our battle!” When asked what he meant, the man, Paul Rook, 47, explained that he felt the rioters were taking on “the ruling class.” ....... As the budget cuts take hold, risk of unemployment increases and social measures like youth projects are sacrificed, Mr. Beech said, and “all logic says there will be an increase in antisocial behavior.” “Boredom, alienation and isolation are going to be factors”
John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got “90 percent of what we wanted” from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today’s mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. ...... marks Wall Street’s largest losing streak since 2008. ..... a giant sell-off like this is motivated by hard, cold realities. ..... the economy looks like it’s dead in the water. ..... job growth is just about at a standstill. ..... investors now know the federal government’s hands are tied. The original stimulus is over; the Fed’s “quantitative easing” is over. ..... This week’s deal over the debt ceiling cinches it. The market is now on its own — without enough rocket power get out of the continuing gravitational pull of the Great Recession. ....... The economy plunged 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 – the steepest quarterly decline in more than half a century. And in 2009 household buying declined almost 2 percent (compared with a previous estimate of 1.2 percent). That’s the biggest contraction in almost sixty years. ....... the original stimulus should have been much larger in order to offset the drop. With cash-starved state and local governments simultaneously scaling back their own spending, the federal stimulus needed to be even bigger. ...... So much for Republican claims that the original stimulus “didn’t work.” Of course it didn’t, given the size of the slide. ....... It was never a debt crisis. The debt crisis was manufactured. It’s been a jobs, wages, and growth crisis all along. ...... stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth. ...... We need a bold jobs bill to restart the economy. ..... The jobs bill should be number one on the nation’s agenda. It should have been all along.
There are people who never made peace with the fact that, oh well, there is a now a black guy in the White House.
The racist white Republicans' hatred for the folks out there in the Third World is so strong, they would be willing to jack up the unemployment rate in America all the way to 29% if that is what it will take to inflict pain on the Third World folks.
This divided government thing is obviously not working. I say give the House back to Barack Obama. Like they kicked Mubarak out in Egypt it is time to kick the Republicans out. March.
The New Yorker: Smash The Ceiling: y the subprime meltdown, skyrocketing oil prices, the Eurozone debt crisis, and even the Tohoku earthquake ...... —a failure to raise the debt ceiling, which would almost certainly throw the economy back into recession ...... the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one. There’s no debt limit in the Constitution. ...... Congress can simply vote to lift it, as it has done more than seventy times in the past fifty years. But it’s too strong because its negative consequences (default, higher interest rates, financial turmoil) are disastrously out of proportion to the behavior it’s trying to regulate. For the U.S. to default now, when investors are happily lending it money at exceedingly reasonable rates, would be akin to shooting yourself in the head for failing to follow your diet...... time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. ...... Under time pressure, negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chances that an agreement will be what psychologists call “integrative”—taking everyone’s interests and values into account...... by turning dealmaking into a game of chicken, the debt ceiling favors fanaticism ..... “It does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, coolheaded, and in control of oneself” when it comes to brinksmanship. It doesn’t, in short, help to be President Obama. That may be why all the deals that have been taken seriously this season rely much more heavily on spending cuts than on tax increases: the deals represent Republican priorities, because the Republicans seem to be more willing than the Democrats to let the country default........ Instead of figuring out ways to raise the debt ceiling, we should simply go ahead and abolish it.
There was no sex. There was no alcohol. Not only that day, but any day before that. We had been seeing each other, spending time in the evenings. This was summer. I had just finished my freshman year. She had showed up as a freshman.
There was no sex, there was no alcohol. Me, her, this Afghan guy, and another girl slept on the floor. There were these two guys, the Afghan guy's brother, and this Albanian, they slept in the adjacent room.
It had been a small party in the evening. And a sleepover.
We slept on the floor.
The girl was Jewish, I learned only weeks after we started seeing each other. (Larry Ellison) But that ends up being a key detail to the story.
Many, many weeks later the college president met my entire student government team and with tears in his eyes said: "My daughter got raped." With those four words the motherfucker destroyed my college experience. He is going to have to answer for that with his legacy. I will make sure that happens. I got time.
Kara went ahead and fucked this Macedonian at a party and became pregnant and birthed a child. She said she did that because she feared I might go back to India and launch a nuclear war. Racist bitch Woolfoo put Kara into financial aid trouble for thus expressing solidarity.
One asshole - Economics professor - went ahead and christened me "the Gandhi of Berea." Gandhi is like Lincoln, he is big, he is actually bigger than Lincoln. Don't be disrespecting no Gandhi.
One, my immigration court date got postponed, for now looks like indefinitely.
Two, two black guys claiming to be Hispanics from the Bronx met me at a tech event the final Monday of Internet Week. (Internet Week: Final Day: June 13) They had identical, give-away short hair cuts. The one who talked gave a false name and an email address that bounced. For someone claiming to be a political worker in the Bronx he knew too many details about me. I asked if he knew so and so in the Bronx, he said no. The talk first started gentle. He is like you Obama people really did good raising 10 dollars and so on and so forth. Then he started getting hostile. I felt like he was recording the conversation. It is like when I was in the thick of a political revolution in Nepal in 2006 and some agent showed up in my Yahoo Messenger: I am a Muslim boy, 16 years old, want to come to New York. You can tell when it is a professional or when it is just some stranger.
So this guy is like, you could not have done what you did if you were in NYC. I said that is correct. If I had been in Kathmandu or even Delhi, I could not have done the political work I did for Nepal.
Then he is like, the Indian intelligence agencies are watching your every move. He insinuated I might be sending funds to armed Madhesi groups.
I was about to say, "Tell your boss, I am smarter than him. He is going to stop misbehaving or I am asking for a name and a badge number. This harassment is going to have to stop."
But this is what I said for the benefit of his recording device.
"My mother's cousin was Education Minister for Bihar, the second most populous state in India. There was this guy Laloo who was Chief Minister at the time. Well, a few years back Laloo was Education Minister for all of India."
"My phone company always knows where I am at." You don't fucking need no Indian intelligence agency to follow my moves. It is not even rocket science. Just read my blogs. Give me some page hits.
This reminded me of May 2008. When they picked me up their first insinuation was I might blow up a tunnel. The motherfuckers would say something like that fully knowing there is not an ounce of truth to something like that. The only people more disrespectful of the 3,000 victims of 9/11 than the Al Qaeda are law enforcement people who would do something like that. And now this dude is like we think you are funding armed groups. Motherfucker, I am funding armed groups?
You see that thing before you? The potentially biggest political tsunami in world history that is unfolding before your very fucking eyes, I just so happen to be the top political authority on the topic on the planet, and I look to you like I am funding armed groups? I looked to you like I might blow up a tunnel?
Racist people in Kentucky, racist white people, would do the same thing. They would front a black guy to do their racist bidding. There is a term for that: institutional racism.
Rangel is not in the picture. So who is doing this? The orchestrations against me when inside were too precise for it to even be the work of a committee. Maybe there is one faceless bad apple sitting somewhere in the ranks.
The guy is like, so your hero is Malcolm X? No, motherfucker, my hero is Larry Ellison, I am a tech entrepreneur, I just so happen to be extremely good at this politics thing. Malcolm X never masterminded a nonviolent democracy movement for 30 million people.
Three, I was followed when I was taking pictures around Williamsburg. (Hello Williamsburg) I was taking pictures with the same camera that made Barack Obama president.
The haircut gives it away. This clean cut white guy with a dog that just did not look like belonged in a home, it sniffed me with too much care, a trained dog. So I snap a picture.
"Were you taking a picture of the pole?"
The guy is like, you saw me, you got scared, and you nervously took a picture of that pole?
"Hey there doggie," I said to the dog, gently touched.
I turn the corner, walk the block, and they have to plant a black guy again. Will I please take five pictures of him standing against this wall?
Read: we got you sniffed, and we tried to scare you, but you did not get scared, and because there is a black guy in the White House, we think you are clean, you just like to take many, may pictures, and we think that's okay, no, we don't think you are a terrorist.
I go near the water. No van on my way there. But a police van on my way back. A dog barks inside. I make a point to stand right in front of the van and snap a picture of a graffiti on the wall.
I walk three blocks. The van comes by. I meet eyes. The van moves on green. It felt like when Jason Bourne is followed in the streets right before this scene.
I don't do physical, assholes. I do nonviolent militancy on behalf of movements for democracy in the Global South. That is my specialty. Let me be. And, by the way, if a few pages bothered you let me inform you, I have 200 pages that will be published down the line.
I have not been bothered since. And that's a good thing.
My final scare idea from them in 2008 was this Hispanic druglord who had served seven years already in a federal facility. The guy banged on the glass window and threatened to kill the guards. They had me sit next to him on the bus ride to Alabama.
In Alabama I'd buy icecream and I would eat most of it, and I would hand it over to him, and he would finish it up.
I single handedly stopped a fight between this dude and this other black dude. All I did was talked. Something similar in a next door dorm had ended up with use of tear gas shells.
I do political. I do tech. That is what I do. Calm the fuck down.
Harry Hopkins had nowhere near the rules and regulations we have now. (In 1933, Hopkins’s Civil Works Administration put 4 million to work in a month.) ...... President Obama came in with a really good energy policy, including an idea to provide both a tax credit for new green jobs and for startup companies, to allow the conversion of the tax credit into its cash equivalent for every employee hired. ....... the obvious candidate for that role today is changing the way we produce and use energy ...... Before the financial meltdown, the four countries that will meet their Kyoto greenhouse-gas emission targets were outperforming America with lower unemployment, more new business formation, and less income inequality. ...... We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America. ...... You get 7,000 jobs for every billion dollars in retrofitting. Let’s start with the schools and colleges and hospitals, and state, county, and local government buildings. That would keep the construction industry busy for a couple of years, creating a million jobs that would ripple through the whole economy, spurring even more growth. ....... One of the reasons Harry Reid won in Nevada is that, right before the election, two big Chinese companies announced they were moving factories there to make LED lightbulbs and turbines for the big wind farms down in Texas. ........ They said, “We’re coming here because Nevada has the best state incentives to go with the federal incentives.” They were very clinical. They said labor costs in China are still cheaper, but these turbines are big and heavy, and higher transportation costs to the U.S. market would offset the labor gains—and there was a tax credit from the federal government for green-energy manufacturing, and extra credits in Nevada. ........ Banks still have more than $2 trillion in cash uncommitted to loans. ....... I suggested that the federal government set aside—not spend—$15 billion of the TARP money and create a loan-guarantee program that would work exactly the way the Small Business Administration does. Basically, the bank lends money to a business after the federal government guarantees 75 percent of it. Let’s say that the SBA fund has about a 20-to-1 loan-to-capital ratio, and it’s never come anywhere near bankruptcy. If we capitalized this more conservatively at 10-to-1, we could guarantee $150 billion in loans and create more than a million jobs. ........ Look at the tar roofs covering millions of American buildings. They absorb huge amounts of heat when it’s hot. And they require more air conditioning to cool the rooms. Mayor Bloomberg started a program to hire and train young people to paint New York’s roofs white. ........ In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week. ...... Every analysis shows that TARP and the stimulus saved us from a second Great Depression. After the GM and Chrysler bailouts, we have something like 75,000 more jobs in the industry. Closure of the factories and the suppliers with them would have cost a million jobs. The stimulus should have been more vigorously defended in the last election. It did work, but it didn’t “fix the economy” because it was an $800 billion stimulus trying to fix a $3 trillion hole. ........ If we cut a lot of government spending while our economy still has so little private investment, we risk weakening the economy even more and increasing the deficit because tax revenues can fall more than spending is cut. ...... When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton said, “Because that’s where the money is.” We have to unlock that money and take steps to get U.S. corporations to invest some of the $2 trillion they have accumulated. ....... The real thing that has killed us in the last 10 years is that too much of our dealmaking creativity has been devoted to expanding the financial sector in ways that don’t create new businesses and more jobs and to persuading people to take on excessive debt loads to make up for the fact that their incomes are stagnant. ...... In the seven years and eight months that preceded the meltdown, our economy produced a meager 4 million new jobs, far too few to cope with millions coming into the workforce, and virtually all those jobs were created in housing, finance, and consumer spending. ........ the former labor commissioner in Georgia, Michael Thurmond. After job vacancies go unfilled for a certain period of time, the state offers businesses the money to train potential employees themselves. During the training period, the companies don’t become employers, so they don’t have to start paying Social Security taxes or employer benefits. They train people their way, then hire those who succeed as regular employees, reducing the time lag between when a job is advertised and when it is filled. With unemployment at 9 percent and the real rate of those without full-time work higher, there are 3 million posted job vacancies. Filling them faster could make a big difference. ........ Lower the rates to be competitive, but reduce the loopholes that cause unfair disparities. We all need to contribute something to help meet our shared challenges and responsibilities, including solving the debt problem. ...... we abandoned the path of balanced budgets 10 years ago, choosing instead large tax cuts especially for higher-income people like me, along with two wars and the senior citizens’ drug benefit. In the history of our republic, it’s the first time we ever cut taxes while going to war. ...... There must be opportunities to be tapped, given all the cash in banks and corporate treasuries. ........ There’s been a remarkable lack of attention to “microeconomics,” the untapped growth potential of American corporations, entrepreneurs, and workers.
Now we know, the banks are sitting on two trillion dollars of cash, and the corporations are sitting on two trillion dollars of cash. There is no shortage of cash. There is no shortage of people with skills. There are huge unmet demands. So what's amiss?
Bill Clinton is well qualified to be talking on this topic. He sat on an economy that did well. The economy did so well he deserved a third term.
But there is a big missing link in the picture he paints. That missing link is globalization. Bill Clinton never really got that part. He was the kid standing on the shore admiring the waves of globalization. But he never really got into the waters, as Governor, as President, and as former President. That is a curious thing to say because I would give him an A for trying.
Money wants to grow. Four trillion dollars sitting around is money not growing. It is safe, but it is not growing. And money wants to grow. It is the very nature of money, that it wants to grow. And the best way to grow that money is by building the global financial infrastructure that will take trillions into global microfinance and global infrastructure. There will be guaranteed 10% annual returns. Money wants to grow.
Early in the recession the Chinese challenged the special place of the dollar in the world. They were right. You can not complain about the very real deficit and debt problem America has and also protect the dollar's special place in the world. There is a direct correlation between that special place for the dollar and America's fiscal indiscipline.
Another gap in his thinking is that he seems to suggest clean tech has taken the place of internet technology as an engine of growth. And so you see a huge blind spot: broadband. Ubiquitous wireless broadband is the interstate highway of these times and America does not have ubiquitous, it does not have wireless, and it does not have broadband. One gigabit per second would be broadband.
Image via WikipediaCreating jobs is no rocket science. The entrepreneurs in the private sector do it. But people in DC can get in the way in a major way. And they have been doing it. The single biggest reason why America does not have the jobs it needs would be the Bush tax cuts.
I am for a small, efficient government. Heck, I am a tech entrepreneur, I want the government out of my face as much as possible. And cutting taxes is one way to achieve that goal of small government. But you have to create surpluses first.
You don't engage in a trillion dollar war in Iraq a-n-d spend another trillion dollars on tax cuts with borrowed money. That is like saying the small government agenda in America is China's responsibility.
The single best thing DC can do to create jobs is to balance the budget. And so getting rid of the Bush tax cuts is going to have to be the center piece of the Obama 2012 effort. If you want to keep the Bush tax cuts, vote for someone else, vote for Arizona Palin, or whoever. Because Barack Obama is for eliminating the irresponsible Bush tax cuts and creating jobs for the American people.
Image via WikipediaNovember 2005: Barackface: Pentagon, Hexagon: The Pentagon masterminds the physical wars the US wages. .... I propose a Hexagon, a physical building, perhaps not as large, as an appendage to the US State Department structure, preferably in New York City somewhere, perhaps in Queens. ..... This is about waging a war with communications technology. This is about spreading democracy the grassroots way. This is about the immigrants in New York City taking the lead for their respective countries.
March 2006: Barackface: Long War: This Long War might give an opportunity to instead master a war with communications technology. Because if you don't, you are practically gearing for a hot war with China. I would think that is a total no no.
New York Times: U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors: The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks. ...... The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” ......... Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet. ....... liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe. ...... stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya ....... $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will. ........ has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler ....... operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls ...... a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil ....... disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate ...... “No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.” ........ a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. ....... By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies ...... “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive” ...... From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication. ..... “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”
The military action in Libya was necessary - to prevent a Rwanda, to send a signal to dictators elsewhere - but it is not scalable. You could not take it to Saudi Arabia, not Iran, not Russia, not certainly China. But you can take these stealth communication tools everywhere. The phone is mightier than the sword.
Image via WikipediaThe obesity epidemic in America more than anything symbolizes what is wrong with this country, and how it has gotten itself off the tracks. Michelle Obama more than any other single person in this country has managed to hit the nail on the head, although her efforts need some major scaling.
The obesity epidemic in America and the debts and deficits as far as the eyes can see are both deeply correlated. A people that can not eat right are not capable of voting for elected officials who can make the right decisions for them in public matters like the budget.
The trimming of the national budget has to start with the voters' waistlines.
The number one reason the job market in America is so bleak is because the national budget is out of control. You erase the deficit and you will start creating jobs. And both parties have been focused on the tiny slivers of the budget. I mean, come on, if defunding Planned Parenthood might have balanced the budget even I might have supported the move.
You balance the budget by looking at the military budget. You take one hard look at the entitlement programs. And the Bush tax cuts are so very offensive. The Bush tax cuts are probably the number one reason why there are not plentiful jobs in America.
Getting people to come out into the streets in large numbers is the hardest part of a democracy movement. But when they do, it is for the world to support them. And the Syrian people are not being accorded that basic reach out.
There are many, many nonviolent options. One would be for the governments of the world to no longer recognize the Assad government. Kick his ambassadors out. Freeze all his global assets, and that of his cronies. There is so much that can be done outside of Syria to help out the brave people of Syria.
Even the most brutal of dictators think of their personal future. Assad crossed the line a long time ago. He knows full well that when all is said and done and when he has lost as he will, he will face either imprisonment or death.
Image via WikipediaI am in agreement with Gordon Brown. 
