CEO Pay

A report by the Economic Policy Institute shows that pay for CEOs is increasing faster than other high income workers and that the ratio of pay compared to average workers is trending back up.

Meanwhile, many Americans live paycheck to paycheck and real median household income in trending down.

Second!

Big news recently out of Texas and the Supreme Court and one other notable headline:

Birth, Education and Economic Mobility

The mobility feature called "stickiness at the ends" has a lot to do with education.  Matt Bruenig has a chart that shows the impact of a college degree on where children from families at different income quintiles end up.  He points out that children born into the top quintile and don't get a college degree are two and half times as likely to end up at the top than those from the bottom quintile who do graduate.

Update (June 23):  Matthew O'Brien points out that high-achieving, low-income students don't attend selective universities at the rate that high-income students do.

Update (June 7, 2014):  Results of a 30 year study by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olsen concludes that "where you start in life is where you end up".

Update (January 4, 2015):  Josh Zumbrun shows an amazing correlation between income and Scholastic Aptitude Test performance.

When the SAT is crucial to college, college is crucial to income, and income is crucial to SAT scores, a mutually reinforcing cycle develops.

Deficit Reasoning

A farm bill that would have cut $20.5 billion over ten years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was defeated in the House of Representatives because 62 Republicans didn't think the bill fucked over poor people hard enough.  But surely Republicans can get behind an immigration reform bill the Congressional Budget Office projects will cut the deficit by $1 trillion over 20 years?  Maybe not.

Update (August 10):  Charles Blow writes about "a town without pity".

Update (September 6):  A USDA report finds that 49 million people or 14.5 percent of households experienced food insecurity at some point during 2012.

Update (September 15):  Ruth Marcus reviews the new Republican proposal to cut $40 billion from SNAP over ten years.  It's a funny thing--SNAP responds to the recession as it's supposed to, but all Republicans see is spending out of control while refusing to do anything to create jobs and reduce dependence on entitlements.

Update (September 19):  The House of Representatives passed the SNAP cuts 217 to 210.

Update (October 26):  As the farm bill goes to conference committee, Michael Tomasky proposes that the SNAP cuts are the "single worst thing" Republicans have done during the Obama years.

Update (November 9):  Separate from the draconian proposed SNAP cuts was the scheduled rollback of benefits added as part of the 2009 stimulus.  A cut of twenty to thirty dollars per month may not sound like a lot, but it has an impact on those with little to begin with.

Update (November 17):  Joseph Stiglitz looks at overall food policy in the US.  The impact of Republican proposals is no unintended consequence--it's taking from the poor to subsidize the rich.  Stiglitz says if the bill became law, it "would be a moral and economic failure for the country".

Update (January 10, 2014):  Congress may be heading toward a $9 billion "compromise".

Update (January 27, 2014):  It looks like the compromise is for $8 billion over ten years unless liberals and Tea partiers combine to defeat it.

Update (January 29, 2014):  The House of Representatives passed the conference report 251 to 166.

Update (February 4, 2014):  The Senate passed the conference report 68 to 32.  And a nice quote from an interview with former USDA official Joel Berg:

Our political system is basically evil versus spineless

Update (September 1, 2014):  Caitlin Rathe explains the history of food stamps (signed into law 50 years ago) and how they were supported by business as a way to help farmers and grocers.

Turn Down the Heat 2

In a follow up to last year's report, a new study commissioned by the World Bank looks at likely impacts of a 2 to 4 degree Celsius rise in global temperature.  Some of these impacts will be sooner rather than later.

Highest Honor

From an on-line question and answer session with Edward Snowden:

Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American

Damn right.

Update (December 11):  Edward Snowden is Time Magazine's runner-up for Person of the Year.

Update (December 24):  Eugene Robinson makes the case for Snowden over the Pope.

Energy and Climate

A report by the International Energy Agency concludes that the world is not on track to limit the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius.  While the United States and Europe has lower carbon dioxide emissions, worldwide emissions increased by 1.4 percent.  The report offers four policy measures that can help get back on track for the 2 degree limit.  Delaying stronger climate action until 2020 is expected to cost $3.5 trillion.

Inequality in Advanced Economies

The World of Work Report from the International Labour Organization shows that income inequality grew in the United States since the economic downturn began in 2007.  Inequality is also highest in the US among 26 advanced economies.

NSA and Phone Data

Of course, the crime will the leak and not the invasion of privacy.  Alex Seitz-Wald summarizes the recent revelations.  Gizmodo reports on more leaked documents and the PRISM program.

Update (June 8):  Summary table from the New York Times.

Update (June 9):  More from Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian about Boundless Informant.

Update (June 9):  James Risen and Eric Lichtblau write about data mining technology.  The Guardian's interview with Edward Snowden who disclosed the NSA documents.

Update (June 10):  Some criticism of the original reporting from Bob Cesca.  David Sirota asks who the real criminals are.

Update (June 15):  CNET is reporting that the NSA has disclosed that analysts have the authority to listen to domestic phone calls without warrants.  There apparently was some confusion about Rep. Nadler's question, but further research seems to corroborate the initial headline.  Also, more about PRISM.

Update (June 18):  The NSA director says Edward Snowden had access to the top secret court order during an orientation at NSA headquarters.

Update (June 19):  Additional criticism from Rick Pearlstein which includes a link to some informed speculation on how PRISM might work.  Also, an update on Rep. Nadler's exchange with FBI director Mueller.  Nadler says the NSA cannot listen to calls without specific warrants. The June 15 links above also reflect a retraction of the original claim.

Update (June 20):  New documents published by The Guardian describe how the NSA is to target people who are not United States citizens and minimize data collected from Americans. But data "inadvertently" collected can still kept and used without warrant.

Update (June 21):  Conor Friedersdorf makes the point that the rules for what the NSA does with collected data it isn't allowed to have should not be secret.

Update (June23):  Blogger digby comments on a McClatchy article about President Obama's Insider Threat Program which applies to all federal agencies.  The program equates leaks to the media with espionage.  Charles Pierce reacts,

This is giving Big Brother a desk in every federal agency and telling him to go to work.

Update (June 28):  New York Times op-ed calls the NSA surveillance programs criminal.

Update (July 6):  Eric Lichtblau describes the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as "almost a parallel Supreme Court" whose role has expanded from case-by-case wiretapping orders to issuing major opinions on surveillance practices.

Update (July 9):  Global Post summarizes 11 items learned from the Snowden leaks so far.

Update (July 11):  How Microsoft collaborated with the NSA.

Update (July 13):  Falguni Sheth interviews Glenn Greenwald.  Also, a statement from Edward Snowden.

Update (July 24):  The House of Representatives defeated a Republican co-sponsored amendment to limit NSA spying.  The Obama administration opposed the amendment.  The vote was split in each party:  94 to 134 for Republicans and 111 to 83 for Democrats.  Which means it could have passed.

Update (July 31):  The NSA program called XKeyscore is able to collect extensive data from anyone using the internet.

Update (August 7):  A statement from President Obama during an appearance on the Tonight Show:

Q:  It's safe to say that we learned about these threats through the NSA intelligence program?  Is that a fair assessment?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, this intelligence-gathering that we do is a critical component of counterterrorism.  And obviously, with Mr. Snowden and the disclosures of classified information, this raised a lot of questions for people.  But what I said as soon as it happened I continue to believe in, which is a lot of these programs were put in place before I came in.  I had some skepticism, and I think we should have a healthy skepticism about what government is doing.  I had the programs reviewed. We put in some additional safeguards to make sure that there's federal court oversight as well as congressional oversight, that there is no spying on Americans.

We don't have a domestic spying program.  What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.  And that information is useful.  But what I've said before I want to make sure I repeat, and that is we should be skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy.  None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers, but they're pretty significant powers.

And I've been talking to Congress and civil libertarians and others about are there additional ways that we can make sure that people know nobody is listening to your phone call, but we do want to make sure that after a Boston bombing, for example, we've got the phone numbers of those two brothers -- we want to be able to make sure did they call anybody else?  Are there networks in New York, are there networks elsewhere that we have to roll up?  And if we can make sure that there's confidence on the part of the American people that there's oversight, then I think we can make sure that we're properly balancing our liberty and our security.

Update (August 9):  A report by Dana Priest outlines how the phone records program ("215") is regulated. Also, Patrick Smith makes the case that recent reports of terrorist threats are a spectacle intended to counter the impact of the NSA revelations.

But a new document from Edward Snowden indicates that a 2011 rule change potentially allows warrantless searches.  Meanwhile the heads of the NSA, CIA, and FBI seem to think privacy can be defined in different ways.

Update (August 13);  While the NSA claims to "touch" only 1.6 percent of internet traffic, Jeff Jarvis looks at the numbers for internet data and argues this percent amounts to essentially all meaningful communications data.

Update (August 15):  NSA documents provided to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden earlier this summer give the results of an internal audit from May 2012.  It shows that the NSA violated surveillance rules thousands of times since 2008 with 2776 "incidents" in the 12 months previous to the audit.  It's also been pointed out that 1904 of these incidents are foreign cell phones brought to the US.

Update (August 21):  The Wall Street Journal cites multiple sources to report that the NSA has the capacity to reach 75 percent of internet traffic.  Data collected includes so-called metadata as well as the actual content of communications.  Some of the communications data from Americans is stored in NSA computers.

Also, a declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion ruled an NSA collection program unconstitutional in 2011.  NSA may have collected as many as 56,000 domestic communications per year until then.  In 2012, collected domestic communications were purged. It's not clear to me if the WSJ article is referring to another NSA program that may still have domestic data stored.

Update (August 29):  The Washington Post has obtained the 2013 budget summary for the National Intelligence Program from Edward Snowden.  The so-called "Black Budget" amounts to US $52.6 billion for 16 intelligence agencies.

Update (August 31):  More from the budget summary at the Washington Post.  US intelligence services carried out 231 offensive computer network operations in 2011 including one called GENIE that put foreign networks under US control.

Update (September 2):  And now the Drug Enforcement Administration turns out to have access to a phone records database even larger than NSA's.  The Hemisphere program started in 2007 while the database maintained by AT&T goes back to 1987.

Update (September 5):  NSA along with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have worked together to break internet encryption codes.

Update (September 7):  Declassified documents published in the Washington Post show that a 2008 ban on certain searches of NSA databases was reversed in 2011.  Plus, a timeline of the Edward Snowden revelations at Al Jazeera America.

Update (September 9):  Spiegel reports that NSA can access smart phone data.

Update (September 13):  The FISC has ordered a Justice Department review of it's own ruling for later declassification.  Judge Dennis Saylor noted that unauthorized disclosures have generated great public interest.  Even Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that public debate needed to happen.

Update (September 28):  Since 2010, NSA has put together social network graphs on some Americans using a variety of databases.

Update (October 9):  The Brennan Center for Justice has a report called "What the Government Does with Americans' Data".

Update (October 14):  NSA has collected millions of e-mail address books.

Update (October 24):  NSA monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders and encouraged officials in other US government agencies to help NSA add more phone numbers to the surveillance list.

Update (October 25):  Stop Watching Us is organizing against NSA abuses.

Update (October 29):  Eugene Robinson on "The out-of-control NSA".

Update (October 30):  NSA secretly infiltrated the private networks of Yahoo and Google giving them access to data from hundreds of millions of user accounts including those of Americans. The program is called MUSCULAR and avoids FISC approval by operating on overseas data centers.

Update (November 22):  Marcy Wheeler describes how the NSA tried to keep their illegal wiretaps hidden.

Update (December 4):  NSA collected as much as 5 billion cellphone location records per day.

Update (December 10):  NSA is using the same browser "cookies" that advertisers use to track potential targets for hacking.

Update (December 16):  US District Judge Richard Leon has ruled that the NSA's collection of phone data from US citizens is likely unconstitutional.

Update (December 18):  Steven Rosenfeld has another take on Judge Leon's ruling--Leon is not a friend of progressives and his ruling will prompt the Supreme Court to take up the case where a majority don't look kindly on civil liberties.

Update (December 20):  Praise from Eugene Robinson and the Boston Globe for the recently released Report and Recommendations of The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.  But one recommendation is for phone data collections to be held by private companies instead of the government.

Update (December 24):  Edward Snowden says his mission is "already accomplished".

Update (December 26):  From Edward Snowden's broadcast to the United Kingdom:

Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

Update (December 27):  US District Judge William Pauley dismissed an ACLU lawsuit challenging the NSA's collection of phone records.

Update (December 29):  Der Spiegel reports that NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division intercepted packages to implant hacking equipment.

Update (January 3, 2014):  Glenn Greenwald explains the importance of privacy.

I think the primary value of privacy is personal as opposed to legalistic or constitutional or political, by which I mean it’s essential to what it means to be human that we have a private life. We interact with other human beings as social animals, and live part of our lives in the public eye — that’s crucial — that’s why if you put someone in solitary confinement for 23 and a half hours a day like we do in U.S. prisons, it’s a form of torture. And it makes people go insane, because we need, as part of our human functioning, to be seen by other human beings and to be perceived by them and understood through the eyes of other people. But equally important to who we are is a realm where we can be free of those judgments, of people watching us.

That’s why people have always sought out realms where they can conduct themselves with anonymity and privacy. Where there aren’t other human eyes forming judgments and posing decrees about what they should and shouldn’t do. The reason it is so crucial is that it is only in that state that we are free to do the things that other human beings would condemn us for doing. We can be free of shame and guilt and embarrassment; it’s where creativity resides, it is where dissent to an orthodoxy can thrive. A human being who lives in a world where he thinks he is always being watched is a human being who makes choices not as a free individual but as someone who is trying to conform to what is expected and demanded of them. And you lose a huge part of your individual freedom when you lose your private realm. Politically that is why tyranny loves surveillance, because it breeds conformity. It means people will only do that which they want other people to know they’re doing — in other words, nothing that is deviant or dissenting or disruptive. It breeds orthodoxy.

Update (January 4, 2014):  NSA has a research program to produce a quantum computer. Such computers are theoretically able to handle hard problems such as the factoring of large numbers needed to break encryption codes.

Update (January 13, 2014):  Peter Van Buren lists ten myths about NSA spying.

1) NSA surveillance is legal.

2) If I’ve done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide. So why should I care about any of this?

3) But the media says the NSA only collects my "phone metadata," so I'm safe.

4) Aren’t there are already checks and balances in our system to protect us against NSA overreach?

5) But I trust Obama (Bush, the next president) on this. 

6) But don't private companies like Facebook already have access to and share a lot of my personal data? So what's wrong with the government having it, too?

7) All this surveillance is distasteful and maybe even illegal, but isn’t it necessary to keep us safe? Isn’t it for our own good? Haven’t times changed and shouldn’t we acknowledge that?

8) Terrorists are everywhere and dangerous.

9) We've stayed safe. Doesn't that just prove all the government efforts have worked?

10) But doesn’t protecting America come first -- before anything?

Update (January 15, 2014):  NSA has installed software and radio frequency technology in foreign computers to conduct surveillance.

Update (January 16, 2014):  NSA collects 200 million text messages per day.

Update (January 17, 2014):  President Obama announces some modest reforms for the NSA.

Update (January 20, 2014):  Glenn Greenwald criticizes Obama's NSA proposals.

Update (January 23, 2014):  A report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concludes that the NSA phone records program ("215") is illegal.  Also, Snowden takes questions and Patrick Smith's take on Obama's NSA speech.

Update (March 10, 2014):  Edward Snowden speaks at the South by Southwest conference via live video link.

Update (March 15, 2014):  How surveillance powers have expanded since 2001.

Update (March 18, 2014):  NSA has the capability to record all the phone calls of an unnamed country (or countries) and stores them in a 30 day buffer.

Update (March 24, 2014):  President Obama will propose legislation to end bulk data collection by the NSA.  Data will still be held by corporations for up to 18 months.

Update (March 26, 2014):  Patrick Smith calls the proposed reforms meager.

Update (March 28, 2014):  A fact sheet from the White House on ending the 215 program.

Update (April 9, 2014):  In an excerpt from an interview with Vanity Fair, Edward Snowden claims he did raise complaints with the NSA.

Update (April 10, 2014):  Edward Snowden gave testimony to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Update (April 11, 2014):  An internet security flaw in OpenSSL software known as Heartbleed was discovered this week.  Apparently the NSA knew about the bug for two years and took advantage of it.

Update (April 14, 2014):  Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras of the Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post for covering the NSA story.

Update (May 13, 2014):  Glenn Greenwald new book is called No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. National Serveillance State.  GQ has an interview with Greenwald, TomDispatch.com has an excerpt, and the Washington Post has a review.

Update (May 23, 2014):  The House of Representatives passed a version of an NSA reform bill, although 76 of the original 152 co-sponsors voted against it.  The concern was over weakened security safeguards in the new bill.

Update (May 24, 2014):  Andrew O'Hehir writes about Justice Louis Brandeis' prescient dissent in a government wire-tapping case from 1928.

Update (May 30, 2014):  Edward Snowden had an interview with NBC News and responds to an NSA claim that a Snowden e-mail undercuts his whistle-blower status.

Update (June 1, 2014):  NSA collects millions of on-line photographs for use with facial recognition programs.

Update (June 14, 2014):  The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "metadata" is constitutionally protected.

Update (June 20, 2014):  The House of Representatives actually passed limitations on NSA searches.

Update (June 30, 2014):  A letter sent to Senator Ron Wyden from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that NSA, CIA, and FBI are conducting warrantless searches of American communications.

Update (July 5, 2014):  A German article reports that NSA has targeted people who even search for information on privacy software tools.  The information may have come from a source other than Edward Snowden.

Also, a Washington Post investigation discovered that about 90 percent of individuals whose communications were intercepted by NSA were not the original targets.

Update (July 7, 2014):  The Washington Post story was based on 22,000 intercept reports provided by Edward Snowden that contained 160,000 individual intercepts.

Update (July 8, 2014):  Glenn Greenwald reports on five Muslim-Americans that NSA has been spying on.

Update (July 11, 2014):  Former NSA code-breaker William Binney says "[t]he NSA lies about what it stores", and that "[t]he ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control".  Binney is a little optimistic after the Supreme Court ruled that smart phone searches require a warrant.

Update (July 24, 2014):  John Napier Tye has come forward with his own warnings about illegal domestic surveillance.

Update (August 15, 2014):  James Bradford has a long article about Edward Snowden.

Update (September 13, 2014):  Documents have unsealed detailing Yahoo's resistance to the PRISM program.

Update (October 13, 2014):  NSA has used agents to infiltrate foreign networks and journalist Laura Poitras has made a documentary about Edward Snowden called "Citizenfour".

Update (October 21, 2014):  An interview with Laura Poitras.

Update (October 25, 2014):  Another interview with Laura Poitras.

Update (December 27, 2014):  Documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ACLU reveal instances of illegal surveillance by the NSA.

Update (January 19, 2015):  Britain's GCHQ captured thousands of e-mails from journalists.

Update (February 21, 2015):  NSA hacks hard drives and SIM cards.

Update (April 19, 2015):  It seems that NSA is working on a way to catch "insider threats".

Update (May 7, 2015):  The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize the bulk collection of American phone records.

Update (June 2, 2015):  President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law which puts some restrictions on NSA data collection.

Update (June 4, 2015):  It seems that the Freedom Act amended provisions in the Patriot Act that technically expired and don't exist anymore.  Also, newly released documents from Edward Snowden show a secret expansion of NSA surveillance for combating computer hacking.

Update (June 6, 2015):  Edward Snowden in the New York Times:

Two years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong.

Within days, the United States government responded by bringing charges against me under World War I-era espionage laws. The journalists were advised by lawyers that they risked arrest or subpoena if they returned to the United States. Politicians raced to condemn our efforts as un-American, even treasonous. 

Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated.

Update (May 16, 2016):  The Intercept published a collection of newsletters from the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate. This is the first batch of documents to be published from the Snowden archive.

Update (May 30, 2016):  Former Attorney General Eric Holder says Edward Snowden broke the law.

We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made.

Update (June 26, 2018):  The Intercept reports on a network of AT&T buildings used by the NSA for the FAIRVIEW program. Eight facilities are identified in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Update (March 6, 2019):  An NSA surveillance program that replaced the operation Edward Snowden exposed is apparently ended.

Update (September 3, 2020):  Vindication:

Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful — and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

Global Inequality

Half of global income goes to the top eight percent of the population.  Branko Milanovic with the World Bank has an overview of global income inequality.  A UN sponsored report seeks to end extreme poverty by 2030.  There's also a video based on Milanovic's research that I find complementary to these previous videos.

Update (June 5):  George Ingram with Brookings praises the UN report.

Tax Cuts and Expenditures Benefit the Wealthy

A paper by Thomas Piketty, et al., shows an international relationship between tax cuts and the increase in the share of income for the top one percent.

At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office shows that the highest income quintile in the United States receives half of the income tax expenditures (including deductions, preferential rates, etc).

Update (August 15):  Wall Street and Washington combine to produce the highest income inequality in the world.