The spying by the NSA and other federal agencies has raised all sorts of questions about how the perception of security threats can erode personal liberties. We tend to think that such erosion only occurs in extreme cases and tend to give the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Such complacency is profoundly misplaced. As an example of how the threat of “terror” can be invoked in trivial cases, one need only to look at a public health matter in Tennessee where an official is recorded as saying “…you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.” Now even complaining about something can be considered “terrorism.”
The number of rich people in the world has increased by about a million people from 2011 to 2012. There were 12 million people with investible assets of more than $1 million. The breakdown of residency of those individuals is as follows:
The Guardian has published a fascinating essay on the politics of the global protest movements. The essay acknowledges the large number of protests in the world, and finds that they are correlated with a lack of trust in government. But beyond that, there does not seem to be a unifying message. My personal belief is that the lack of coherence in the movements reflects the absence of a viable left-wing to organize the discontent. In some sense, this absence is a good thing since it avoids the trap of a rigid ideology. On the other hand, the discontent will remain unorganized and the lack of organization will lead to ineffectiveness. We will have to see whether these protests link up in any meaningful way.
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