From this morning’s New York Times:

PARIS — At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.

The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January. Those attacks, which included the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, left 17 people dead.

As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who travel to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad, often lured over the Internet, the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.

The powers being sought would

allow the intelligence services to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet companies to comply with requests to allow the government to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.

The intelligence services could also request the right to put hidden microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers, or to place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.

This is interesting in all kinds of ways, but mainly because it shows that surveillance isn;t just an American or a British problem. It’s a ubiquitous problem, and it’s always justified by the same rationale — states of exception

Nice post by Paul Mason:

The polls have not moved, so we’re about to get the second hung parliament in succession, in a system that never used to produce them. Only this time we don’t just get a coalition government. We get an existential crisis of the constitution, and of the UK as a political entity, that no political party is currently geared up to deal with.

To understand why, you have to recognise the demographic tribalism that an economic system in crisis has produced. I’ve written about this before: the division of England into an asset-rich south, a post-industrial north and the emergence of a positive national consciousness in Scotland linked to the rejection of neo-liberal economics.

Worth reading in full.

Martin Wolf is one of my favourite columnists. This is his verdict on the two contenders for power in the forthcoming election.

Hmmm… Only in so far as they surveill Americans at home. Today’s New York Times reports that

On Thursday, a bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the so-called metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden was overwhelmingly passed by the House Judiciary Committee and was heading to almost certain passage in that chamber this month.

An identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader.

Under the bills, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection, and sweeps that had operated under the guise of so-called National Security Letters issued by the F.B.I. would end. The data would instead be stored by the phone companies themselves, and could be accessed by intelligence agencies only after approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The legislation would also create a panel of experts to advise the FISA court on privacy, civil liberties, and technology matters, while requiring the declassification of all significant FISA court opinions.

Neither bill will, however, do anything to end the unrestricted surveillance of non-Americans, i.e the rest of the world, whose privacy, and therefore their civil liberties, will continue to be infringed by the US, without let or hindrance.

The thing about neoliberalism is that it’s a machine for producing and amplifying inequality. In other words, inequality is not a regrettable and inevitable byproduct of an otherwise admirable economic doctrine: it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as programmers would say, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Hot on the heels of Thomas Piketty come two terrific books. Tony Atkinson has been studying inequality for decades, and his new book challenges the conventional wisdom that there’s nothing we can do about rising inequality. He sets out a comprehensive set of policies that could bring about a real shift in income distribution in developed countries. To reduce inequality, he says, we need to go beyond taxing the wealthy (though we should also do that). Atkinson thinks we need new ideas in four other areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital. If I had to summarise the book in a phrase, I’d say it was the embodiment of informed optimism.

Joe Stiglitz has been writing about inequality for ages too, and his new book is a set of essays that expand on the diagnosis he proposed in an earlier best-seller, The Price of Inequality. Like Atkinson, Stiglitz thinks that we could reduce inequality if we were smart and determined enough. The conventional neoliberal wisdom which says that we have to choose between economic growth and fairness is, he thinks, bunkum. I agree. Trouble is, none of our politicians do.

Like many people, I’m puzzled by Hilary Clinton. I thought she was a good US Secretary of State. But I’ve been suspicious of her preparations to run for the presidency, which looks awfully like a formulaic enterprise from an operating manual laid down two decades ago. And she’s clearly the Democratic Establishment’s candidate. But I’ve no idea what she’s like as a person, which is why this piece by Bertrand-Henry Lévy (who has met her three times) is interesting. Especially this bit:

Sometimes her expression is briefly clouded by a streak of stifled pain, obstinate and not wholly contained. Five years earlier, she was the most humiliated wife in America, a woman whose private life was thrown open – fully and relentlessly – to public scrutiny. So she can talk national and international politics until she is blue in the face. She can sing the praises of John Kerry, whom her party has just nominated in an effort to deny George W. Bush a second term. And she can expound on her role as the junior senator from New York. Still, there persists an idea that I cannot push out of my head, and that I enter into the travel journal that I am writing for The Atlantic.

The idea is this: to avenge her husband and to take revenge on him, to wash away the stain on the family and show what an unblemished Clinton administration might look like, this woman will sooner or later be a candidate for the presidency of the United States. This idea brings to mind Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, published a year after the Senate acquitted her husband of perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, with its searing portrait of how indelible even an undeserved blot on one’s reputation can be. She will strive to enter the Oval Office – the theater of her inner, outer, and planetary misery – on her own terms. And the most likely outcome, my article will conclude, is that she will succeed.

At the CSaP conference last week there was an interesting session on what (if anything) we have learned from the 2008 banking crisis. The consensus was not reassuring. The banking system we have now is still dangerously fragile, despite all the ‘stress testing’ of banks etc. And, as always, we prepare to fight the last war. Barry Eichengreen, whose book, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History, is a must-read on this stuff, said something bracing about this towards the end of the session. In the course of a discussion of where we should be looking for the early-warning signals of the next catastrophe, he said: “I think we’ve done a good job of putting in place an early-warning system for the last crisis”. (My emphasis.)

So what kinds of shocks could trigger another collapse? Two candidates were discussed. One was Grexit — the departure of Greece from the Euro and the chaos that would ensue from that. The other is a crisis in the Chinese economy triggered by a collapse in its housing and construction sector. A few days later, I talked to an expert on the Chinese property market, who poo-poohed the idea. And then, today, I find in the New York Times this quote from Henry Paulson’s new book, *Dealing with China:

“Frankly, it’s not a question of if, but when, China’s financial system will face a reckoning and have to contend with a wave of credit losses and debt restructurings.”

Note: not if but when. And Paulson is bullish on China!