We’ve averted the arbitrarily-created fiscal cliff, but “fixing the debt” is still on the minds of many GOP leaders. No, they don’t call for more cuts on defense spending but rather, and as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich fears, cutting into Social Security and Medicare net in shaky economic times. Hope the elderly are hanging on tight.
The Article: Why Don’t White-Collar Criminals Get Equal Time? by William Grieder in The Nation.
The Text: The Obama administration collected some crowd-pleasing headlines with its announcement that the Justice Department is suing Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency that notoriously fueled the financial crisis and crash by duping investors into buying billions in rotten securities. The government is said to be seeking a cash penalty of more than $1 billion.
That sounds good, but President Obama and his administration are stalked by a question of scandal that will not go away: Why isn’t anyone going to jail? The lawsuit’s accusation against S&P sounds like a crime. The firm, it charges, “knowingly and with intent to defraud, devised, participated in, and executed a scheme to defraud investors.” Yet federal investigators seem unable to identify any Wall Street executives to prosecute as criminals.
Why not? The popular explanation, widely shared among citizens, is that leaders of the largest banks and financial firms are given a pass because they are “too big to jail.” The public’s cynicism sounds right. It has become a momentous black mark on the Obama presidency, like a blood stain that cannot be washed away. Does the government operate two systems of justice—one for mom-and-pop criminals and another for influential titans who run the “too big to fail” banks?
One brave–or just bored–WaPo correspondent takes on conservative blogger Michelle Malkin and the equally outrageous Gretchen Carlson about–you guessed it–disregarding the facts in their pursuit of being fair and balanced.
But c’mon, it’s not like we didn’t see that one coming.
The Article: Geeks are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties by Gabriella Coleman in Technology Review.
The Text: A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most vibrant civil liberties movements we’ve ever seen. It is a culture committed to freeing information, insisting on privacy, and fighting censorship, which in turn propels wide-ranging political activity. In the last year alone, hackers have been behind some of the most powerful political currents out there.
Before I elaborate, a brief word on the term “hacker” is probably in order. Even among hackers, it provokes debate. For instance, on the technical front, a hacker might program, administer a network, or tinker with hardware. Ethically and politically, the variability is just as prominent. Some hackers are part of a transgressive, law-breaking tradition, their activities opaque and below the radar. Other hackers write open-source software and pride themselves on access and transparency. While many steer clear of political activity, an increasingly important subset rise up to defend their productive autonomy, or engage in broader social justice and human rights campaigns.
Despite their differences, there are certain websites and conferences that bring the various hacker clans together. Like any political movement, it is internally diverse but, under the right conditions, individuals with distinct abilities will work in unison toward a cause.
