This is a big response to a big problem.

It still faces hurdles. The austerity hawks who are so good at thinking up reasons to go to war but so bad at paying for them-and so very bad at meeting commitments to those who serve-will keep raising objections. House Republicans are making predictable demands for "offsets" equaling the cost of the VA initiative, peddling the fantasy that other programs must be cut in order to find the money to aid veterans. The Philadelphia Inquireris hails the Senate measure as "an unusually swift and welcome response" that has "broad support and the potential to alleviate some of the department's serious shortcomings."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state-which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time.

"Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called 'higher intelligence' is very low," Chomsky said. "Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the 100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy ourselves and many other life forms on the planet."

Climate change "may doom us all, and not in the distant future," Chomsky said. "It may overwhelm everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished. There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations-the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world."

If Mayr was right, we are at the tail end of a binge, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, that is about to drive us over a cliff environmentally and economically. A looming breakdown, in Chomsky's eyes, offers us opportunity as well as danger. He has warned repeatedly that if we are to adapt and survive we must overthrow the corporate power elite through mass movements and return power to autonomous collectives that are focused on sustaining communities rather than exploiting them. Appealing to the established institutions and mechanisms of power will not work.

"We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here in eastern Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system. Men and women-women left the farms to be 'factory girls'-bitterly resented it. This was also a period of a very free press, the freest in the history of the country. There were a wide variety of journals. When you read them they are pretty fascinating. The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings being forced into what they called 'wage labor,' which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact this was such a popular mood it was a slogan of the Republican Party-'The only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for the wage is supposed to be temporary.' "

"I remember this as late as the 1930s with my own family," he said. "This was being taken away from us. We were being forced to become something like slaves. They argued that if you were a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell a product that you produce, then as a wage earner what you are doing is selling yourself. And this was deeply offensive. They condemned what they called 'the new spirit of the age,' 'gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.' This sounds familiar."

It is this radical consciousness, which took root in the mid-19th century among farmers and many factory workers, that Chomsky says we must recover if we are to move forward as a society and a civilization. In the late 19th century farmers, especially in the Midwest, freed themselves from the bankers and capital markets by forming their own banks and co-operatives. They understood the danger of falling victim to a vicious debt peonage run by the capitalist class. The radical farmers made alliances with the Knights of Labor, which believed that those who worked in the mills should own them.

"By the 1890s workers were taking over towns and running them in eastern and western Pennsylvania, such as Homestead," Chomsky said. "But they were crushed by force. It took some time. The final blow was Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare."

"The idea should still be that of the Knights of Labor. Those who work in the mills should own them. There is plenty of manufacturing going on. There will be more. Energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren. But under the capitalist morality the calculus is profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. We are getting lower energy prices. They [business leaders] are enthusiastic that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we have lower energy prices. And we can undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy."

The rise of powerful populist movements in the early 20th century meant that the business class could no longer keep workers subjugated purely through violence. Business interests had to build systems of mass propaganda to control opinions and attitudes. The rise of the public relations industry, initiated by President Wilson's Committee on Public Information to instill a pro-war sentiment in the population, ushered in an era of not only permanent war but also permanent propaganda. Consumption was instilled as an inner compulsion. The cult of the self became paramount. And opinions and attitudes, as they are today, were crafted and shaped by the centers of power.

"A pacifist population was driven to become war-mongering fanatics," Chomsky said. "It was this experience that led the power elite to discover that through effective propaganda they could, as Walter Lippmann wrote, employ "a new art in democracy, manufacturing consent.' "

"Most of the intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause," Chomsky said of the First World War. "There were only a few fringe dissenters. Bertrand Russell went to jail. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed. Randolph Bourne was marginalized. Eugene Debs was in jail. They dared to question the magnificence of the war."

This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.

"The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves," Chomsky said. "This is not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to us. Take Obama's terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremburg judgments. Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict."

Today's elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away from MIT, "a deep indoctrination system."

"There is the understanding that there are certain things you do not say and do not think," Chomsky said. "This is very broad among the educated classes. It is why they overwhelmingly support state power and state violence, with some qualifications. Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as a Nazi general who thought the second front was a strategic blunder. That's what we call criticism."

"In the 1920s the labor movement had been practically destroyed," he said. "This had been a very militant labor movement. In the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism. There were circumstances [the Great Depression] that led to the opportunity to do something. We are living with that constantly. Take the last 30 years. For a majority of the population it has been stagnation or worse. It is not the deep Depression, but it is a semi-permanent depression for most of the population. There is plenty of kindling out there that can be lighted."

Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore's discussion at Nashville's tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.

Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that "we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment" in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when "95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in '09, goes to the top one percent, that's not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that's a fact."

Gore may have been alluding to the tech economy becoming a significant driver of that inequality.

As Princeton economist Alan Blinder noted in a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, technology is "clearly the major villain" in rising economic inequality, as "e-commerce eliminated many 'ordinary' jobs (while) enhanc(ing) the opportunities and rewards for some 'extraordinary' jobs." One way to see this is in the app economy, which often rewards billions to companies with a relatively few employees, thus concentrating wealth in fewer hands.

Later in his discussion, Gore said that "democracy has been hacked" by moneyed interests. Then, in response to a question about tech billionaires spending big on allegedly philanthropic enterprises, he said: "That's a good thing, as long as the rest of us don't ever fall prey to the illusion that charity is going to do the job of what democracy needs to do."

Those latter comments come only a few weeks after Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced a $120 million donation to San Francisco-area schools. That donation came only a few years after California considered a ballot measure to increase funding for its schools. Zuckerberg was notably absent from the campaign to pass the measure.

That detail is germane to Gore's point about charity and democracy.

Indeed, there seems to be a trend of billionaires and tech firms making private donations to public institutions ostensibly with the goal of improving public services. Yet, many of these billionaires are absent from efforts to raise public resources for those same institutions. Zuckerberg is only one example.

For instance, hedge funders make big donations to charter schools. Yet, the hedge fund industry lobbies against higher taxes that would generate new revenue for education.

Likewise, there are the Koch Brothers, who simultaneously finance the nationwide anti-tax movement while making huge donations to public institutions.

Meanwhile, Microsoft boasts about making donations to schools, while the company has opposed proposals to increase taxes to fund those schools.

To understand the conflict between democracy and this kind of philanthropy, remember that private donations typically come with conditions about how the money must be allocated. In education, those conditions can be about anything from curriculum to testing standards to school structure. No matter what the conditions are, though, they effectively circumvent the democratic process and dictate policy to public institutions. While those institutions can reject a private donor's money, they are often desperate for resources.

In this, we see a vicious cycle that undermines democratic control. Big money interests use anti-democratic campaign finance laws to fund anti-tax policies that deprive public institutions of resources. Those policies make public institutions desperate for private resources. When philanthropists offer those resources, they often make the money contingent on public officials relinquishing democratic control and acceding to ideological demands.

Several times in recent weeks I've found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they're being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.

The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration - and a lot of the reporting too - emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed.

But this is all wrong. You should judge leaders by their achievements, not their press, and in terms of policy substance Mr. Obama is having a seriously good year. In fact, there's a very good chance that 2014 will go down in the record books as one of those years when America took a major turn in the right direction.

First, health reform is now a reality - and despite a shambolic start, it's looking like a big success story. Remember how nobody was going to sign up? First-year enrollments came in above projections. Remember how people who signed up weren't actually going to pay their premiums? The vast majority have.

We don't yet have a full picture of the impact of reform on the previously uninsured, but all the information we do have indicates major progress. Surveys, like the monthly survey by Gallup, show a sharp drop in the percentage of Americans reporting themselves as uninsured. States that expanded Medicaid and actively promoted the new exchanges have done especially well - for example, a new survey of Minnesota shows a 40 percent drop in the number of uninsured residents.

And there's every reason to expect a lot of additional progress next year. Notably, additional insurance companies are entering the exchanges, which is both an indication that insurers believe things are going well and a reason to expect more competition and outreach next year.

Then there's climate policy. The Obama administration's new rules on power plants won't be enough in themselves to save the planet, but they're a real start - and are by far the most important environmental initiative since the Clean Air Act. I'd add that this is an issue on which Mr. Obama is showing some real passion.

Oh, and financial reform, although it's much weaker than it should have been, is real - just ask all those Wall Street types who, enraged by the new limits on their wheeling and dealing, have turned their backs on the Democrats.

Put it all together, and Mr. Obama is looking like a very consequential president indeed. There were huge missed opportunities early in his administration - inadequate stimulus, the failure to offer significant relief to distressed homeowners. Also, he wasted years in pursuit of a Grand Bargain on the budget that, aside from turning out to be impossible, would have moved America in the wrong direction. But in his second term he is making good on the promise of real change for the better. So why all the bad press?

Part of the answer may be Mr. Obama's relatively low approval rating. But this mainly reflects political polarization - strong approval from Democrats but universal opposition from Republicans - which is more a sign of the times than a problem with the president. Anyway, you're supposed to judge presidents by what they do, not by fickle public opinion.

A larger answer, I'd guess, is Simpson-Bowles syndrome - the belief that good things must come in bipartisan packages, and that fiscal probity is the overriding issue of our times. This syndrome persists among many self-proclaimed centrists even though it's overwhelmingly clear to anyone who has been paying attention that (a) today's Republicans simply will not compromise with a Democratic president, and (b) the alleged fiscal crisis was vastly overblown.

The result of the syndrome's continuing grip is that Mr. Obama's big achievements don't register with much of the Washington establishment: he was supposed to save the budget, not the planet, and somehow he was supposed to bring Republicans along.

But who cares what centrists think? Health reform is a very big deal; if you care about the future, action on climate is a lot more important than raising the retirement age. And if these achievements were made without Republican support, so what?

There are, I suppose, some people who are disappointed that Mr. Obama didn't manage to make our politics less bitter and polarized. But that was never likely. The real question was whether he (with help from Nancy Pelosi and others) could make real progress on important issues. And the answer, I'm happy to say, is yes, he could.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

The United Kingdom's top spy agency is facing legal action following revelations published by The Intercept about its involvement in secret efforts to hack into computers on a massive scale.

Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has been accused of acting unlawfully by helping to develop National Security Agency surveillance systems capable of covertly breaking into potentially millions of computers and networks across the world.

In a legal complaint filed on Tuesday, the London-based civil liberties group Privacy International alleges that the hacking techniques violated European human rights law and are not subject to sufficient safeguards against abuse. The complaint cites a series of details contained in a report published by The Intercept in March, which exposed how GCHQ was closely involved in the NSA's efforts to rapidly expand its ability to deploy so-called "implants" to infiltrate computers.

GCHQ and the NSA have developed an array of the sophisticated surveillance implants, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, with each of the spy tools tailored for a different purpose. Some are used to compromise large-scale internet networks so that the spies can sweep up private data as it is passing through them. Others infect specific computers with malicious software that effectively gives the agencies total control of a target's machine - enabling them to take covert snapshots using its webcam, record audio using its microphone, log what is being typed on the keyboard, collect data from any removable flash drive that is connected, and snoop its Web browsing history.

Privacy International argues in its 21-page legal complaint that the hacking tactics are more intrusive than more traditional eavesdropping methods, and that, if left unchecked, they could amount to "one of the most intrusive forms of surveillance any government has conducted":

In allowing GCHQ to extract a huge amount of information (current and historical), much of which an individual may never have chosen to share with anybody, and to turn a user's own devices against him by coopting them as instruments of video and audio surveillance, it is at least as intrusive as searching a person's house and installing bugs so as to enable continued monitoring. In fact, it is more intrusive, because of the amount of information now generated and stored by computers and mobile devices nowadays, the speed, ease and surreptitiousness with which surveillance can be conducted, and because it allows the ongoing surveillance to continue wherever the affected person may be.

Eric King, head of research at Privacy International, said in a statement on Tuesday that GCHQ's hacking programs were "done under a cloak of secrecy without any public debate or clear lawful authority," adding that "unrestrained, unregulated government spying of this kind is the antithesis of the rule of law and government must be held accountable for their actions."

On Monday, the White House announced a new executive order that will bar federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. This order culminates years of advocacy from those on the front lines of the gay rights struggle to get this president to use the force of his office to reduce discriminatory conditions and processes for LGBTQ people. It is also clear that this administrative shift is part of his very explicit attempt to begin crafting his legacy as the outgoing president.

Alongside the Affordable Care Act, My Brother's Keeper and federal support for robust immigration reform, President Obama continues to roll out a set of initiatives that firmly appeal to the demographics most responsible for his ascent to the White House. Even though I celebrate this signal move on behalf of the Obama administration and urge that the U.S. Congress follow suit and pass federal legislation outlawing discrimination against LGBTQ people, I remain unclear about how to judge the legacy that Obama is building with respect to solidly liberal issues.

Recent advocacy through initiatives like My Brother's Keeper, expanded clemency opportunities for low-level drug offenders and raising the federal minimum wage suggest explicit attention to the plight of working-class people and men and boys of color. There are also guidelines within the rollout of My Brother's Keeper to address the especial concerns of gay and trans men and boys of color.

However, there seems to be very little on the horizon for one key demographic: black women and girls. Though the administration could stand to address all women and girls of color, the call earlier this spring for his administration to review its own deportation policies could at least minimally and explicitly begin to ameliorate some of the devastation to Latino families caused by the inordinate amount of deportations presided over by this administration.

However, black women, Obama's single largest voting demographic, have been the subject of no executive orders, no White House initiatives and no pieces of progressive legislation. Ninety-six percent of black women voters voted for Obama compared to 87 percent of black men. Seventy-six percent of Latinas voted for the president compared to 65 percent of Latino men.

Though black and other women of color who are a part of the LGBTQ community will benefit from this latest executive order, no initiative has explicitly addressed the structural issues of racism, classism, poor education, heavy policing and sexual and domestic violence that disproportionately affect black and Latina women.

As a black woman who voted twice for this president, despite some misgivings, I find myself wondering how we will fit into the legacy of progressive policy initiatives that the president is trying to craft as part of his exit strategy.

This kind of conflict seems to be representative of the political moment in which we find ourselves. I remember feeling conflicted in this way when the Supreme Court struck down DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act) in the same cycle that it gutted the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. But with the Supreme Court's unrepentant band of rabid conservatives, I'm not surprised.

I am surprised, however, that a man who lives in the White House with four black women feels no allegiance at the level of policy or legacy to the one demographic that is most singularly responsible for his two terms in the White House. I am both disappointed and disgusted that in President Obama's political vision, all the blacks are men.

Twenty five years ago, UCLA law professor Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" as a way to help us think about how black women were uniquely disadvantaged by employment discrimination laws that could remedy discrimination against women or discrimination against black people, but could not remedy discrimination against black women as an intersecting category. For instance, if a company singled out black women, but not all women, or not all blacks, then black women were simply out of luck in terms of having legal protection. Getting at this concept has been so critically important because anti-workplace discrimination laws have been the centerpiece in terms of how the U.S. has historically counteracted the effects of racism, sexism and homophobia against marginalized groups.

Crenshaw's coining of that term has also revolutionized the modern academy by helping us to think in almost every humanities and social science discipline about the interactions of race and gender and systems of racism and sexism. These kinds of intersectional interactions help shape the framing of everything from the POTUS discussion of the new restrictions on carbon emissions as a policy that helps poor black and brown youth to the political justifications for the My Brother's Keeper initiative.

In this way a framework named and articulated by black women to speak to the structural dislocation of black and brown women is now being used to justify our erasure at the policy level.

This is unacceptable.

While I appreciate the carrots that the president continues to throw out to his liberal base, it is clear that black women on the whole are being overlooked and actively dismissed by this administration. I say this, not in an attempt to set racial concerns at odds with LGBTQ issues. LGBTQ people are black and brown, too. But robust attention to discrimination against queer-identified people does not constitute a racial justice program.

And a program that focuses only on boys and men of color does active harm and injustice to black and brown women and girls. If President Obama wants his political legacy to be that he cared the least about the demographic that supported him the most, it should be clear that black women are not going to lie down and take it.

If our votes count, that means our issues ought to count, too. And this is why today, more than 1,000 women and girls of color, including me, have signed a letter urging the president to include women and girls of color in all forthcoming My Brother's Keeper initiatives.

When it comes to addressing racial justice issues, President Obama's personal identifications with blackness take center stage, trumping substantial attention to black women as a political constituency. I used to believe that Obama's personal racial identifications were powerful, that having a president who had experienced racism personally would help him commit to doing something about it when he had the opportunity to do so. But what has become apparent is that President Obama's personal understanding of racism is deeply tethered to his position as both black and male. The effect is that his personal experience has limited his vision of racial justice to just one gender.

On issues of immigration and LGBTQ rights, the president has to think through the policy and electoral implications of meeting the needs of these constituencies. But on racial justice, the president allows his personal narrative of father-lack to lead. By lamenting the absence of fathers in black families, he unwittingly indicts black mothers, and reinstantiates a patriarchal frame as the thing that will save black communities from ruin. He sounds the alarming ring tones of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's tangle of pathology thesis, while missing the irony that his lack of father did not prevent him from ascending to the presidency. But then maybe we are supposed to conclude from this that only having a white family can ameliorate the effects of not having a black father.

Such thinking is not only offensive, but pernicious. And as a matter of political resources and policy prescriptions, it's downright dangerous. Though the president surely knows and relies upon the love, labor and loyalty of black women to help him be great, he engages in political rhetoric that relegates us to an ancillary position, puts us on the defensive, and places us in a politically disadvantageous position. The evidence is on our side, that racism and sexism (alongside poverty and homophobia) severely constrict black women's opportunities, in everything from education to housing to personal safety. But these facts are no match for the more powerful narrative of the singularity of black male victimization.

Dear unterfuhrer Kandidat Esk,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your "final solution" for gay marriage, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 07-05-2014. We salute you Herr Esk, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden