Glenn Greenwald had a fascinating conversation with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s Sunday morning TV show, This Week in which Greenwald said, at one point,

One of the most amazing parts of this entire episode has been that top-level national security officials like James Clapper really did get caught red-handed lying to the American Congress, which everyone now acknowledges, about what the NSA is doing. And it’s amazing that he not only hasn’t been prosecuted, but still has his job. And what that does is, it lets national security officials continue to lie to the public, which is what happened in that exchange you just referenced.

The way that I know exactly what analysts have the capability to do when they’re spying on Americans is that the story I’ve been working on for the last month that we’re publishing this week very clearly sets forth what these programs are that NSA analysts — low level ones, not just ones who work for the NSA, but private contractors like Mr. Snowden — are able to do. The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. And what these programs are, are very simple screens like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address and it does two things: it searches a database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered. And it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address of that IP address do in the future.

And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst. There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans. You can’t target them without going through the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool exactly of the type that Mr. Snowden described. And NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday. And I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I just said.

Two points here. The first is the question of why a public official who lies to Congress has not been suspended, prior to prosecution? The second is whether the NSA officials who are scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday will be asked to respond under oath to Greenwald’s remarks?

Very good blog post by Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s Economics Editor, about what’s happened to Britain. Excerpt:

So why is the Britain of 2013 a much more placid place? One theory is that things are not really that bad. Living standards are now so high that a relatively small fall (in a long-term historical context) makes little or no difference to levels of contentment. A century of growth means that rich and poor alike live better, eat better, have more leisure time and enjoy far higher disposable incomes than did their forebears in the run-up to the outbreak of the first world war. The welfare state is now much more generous than the fledgling system set up by the Asquith government, while record-low interest rates mean cheap mortgages for owner-occupiers. A century ago, 10% of people owned or were buying their homes: today it is around 70%.

Theory number two is that while things might not be all that great here, they are a lot worse elsewhere in the world. People look at Spain or Greece and are thankful for small mercies.

A third theory is that the drop in living standards is accepted as the inevitable consequence of flying too close to the sun in the years before the crash. A period of personal austerity is seen as the necessary pre-condition for putting the economy back in decent shape, thus allowing the pattern of rising prosperity to resume, eventually.

There are doubtless other explanations but it is worth investigating the notion that what has been happening since the financial crisis is an aberration, albeit a fairly lengthy one.

Both the government and opposition believe this to be true. Politicians on the left, right and centre dream of a high-wage, high-productivity UK economy, forging ahead in new industrial sectors, wiping the floor with the international competition and generating the resources to fund a gleaming new NHS and top-quality care for an ageing population.

That’s the dream. The reality is that in the summer of 2013 we have a low-investment, low-wage, low-productivity and low-growth economy. And there’s little to suggest the outlook will change any time soon. Almost four-fifths of the jobs created in the UK over the past three years have been in industries where the wage is below £7.95 an hour. Over the same period, business investment as a share of national output has fallen from 8% to 5%, one of the lowest in the industrialised world.

Ed Miliband — the only leader of a political party willing to condemn Rupert Murdoch — has now embarked on an epic political gamble. He seeks radical reform of the corrupt way we currently fund British political parties. But to be credible — and to counter Tory spin — he first has to get his own house in order, which means terminating the shady process by which trade unions supported Labour financially by pretending that their members were Labour supporters.

As Oona King points out in the New Statesman, there are laudable democratic aspirations behind this policy.

We are told Miliband risks the historic link between Labour and the trade unions, and that in financial terms, Labour may not survive. The main difference between now and 100 years ago (the House of Lords ruling was overturned in 1913) is that the call for reform comes from the Labour Party leader himself, something unimaginable even in Tony Blair’s day, never mind Keir Hardie’s. These proposals make Tony Blair’s reform of Clause IV look like timid toe-dipping. What began as a little (or a large) local difficulty in Falkirk has, on the leader’s say so, become nothing less than a debate around the nature of politics itself. 

At heart, this isn’t primarily an argument about Labour’s link with the trade unions; it is primarily about Labour’s link with democracy, and whether our internal governance is democratic.

Miliband’s gamble is a really bold one, because without union funding Labour is basically bankrupt, and will therefore not to be able to afford a serious election campaign in 2015. And at this point, even those of us who are not necessarily Labour supporters begin to sit up and take notice. Because if — like me — you have come to the conclusion that the Coalition is a disastrous government, then Labour is the only show in town for the 2015 election. The alternative is a government led by Cameron, Gove, Osborne & Co, without even the bleating restraint of the Liberal Democrats.

So here’s my modest proposal.

We know that the best way to eradicate the corruption that stems from our current method of funding political parties — in which cash-rich billionaires, corporations, lobbyists and unions provide campaign contributions in return for you-know-what — is to have a system where parties are funded entirely by small individual donations (maximum £100).

Until fairly recently, such a system would have been costly and difficult to build. But that was then and this is now. The infrastructure for doing it now exists: it’s called the Internet. Not only has it spawned a variety of ways of raising money for charitable purposes (e.g. Just Giving) but also for supporting commercial and non-commercial projects (e.g. KickStarter).

And we know that it works; the Obama campaign in the last two presidential elections in the US showed just how powerful the Net can be as a way of collecting small campaign contributions in huge volumes. As the Washington Post puts it:

Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House, dramatically ushering in a new digital era in presidential fundraising.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama’s online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

“You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies,” Joe Rospars, the 27-year-old director of Obama’s new-media department, told The Post. “You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him,” and, when it came to online donations, “people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do.”

The final total raised by Obama online was $1.1 billion.

If Miliband really wants to revitalise British politics — and release us from the grip of the neoliberal lunatics now in charge of our polity — then imaginative use of the Net should become an absolute priority for him. Donations don’t have to come just from Labour supporters. There are lots of Britons who would never think of voting Labour in normal conditions but who also know that some way has to be found of unhorsing a government which won’t even contemplate banning security companies who are facing investigations for massive fraud from bidding for new government contracts.

Setting up an imaginative donation system is not rocket science. Most of the heavy lifting has already been done by the Obama crowd. The old adage –“where there’s a will, there’s a way” — applies: There is a way: Do Miliband & Co have the will?

From the “you-couldn’t-make-it-up-but-unfortunately-it’s-true” Department.

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”