"...the idea that the economy exists to serve society was for generations one of the foundational and legitimising pillars of capitalism. Central to this threat is the rising power of vested interests. As President Obama has pointed out, well-funded lobby groups give “an outsized voice to the few” by “selling out our democracy to the highest bidder”. They are not, however, limited to Washington. Australian vested interests too are gathering force."

- Extract from an essay called "The 0.01 Percent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia", by Wayne Swan in The Monthly. I haven't posted anything remotely political in a while, but this article is an interesting read which concerns the widening gulf between rich and poor in developed economies like the UK, the USA, and potentially, Australia. Read the whole thing here at themonthly.com.au.

What follows is an extract from an article by Matthew Herper from Forbes Magazine titled "With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again".

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Bill’s dad had set up a dinner at Seattle’s posh Columbia Tower Club with the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). While the meeting started with birth control—among other efforts, PATH taught Chinese condom makers to test their products before shipping them—Gates began consuming data that startled him. In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.

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Read the whole thing here. It's interesting stuff and inspiring to see someone who has the financial capacity to make a positive difference actually doing it.

Nauru is a destitute Pacific island with a population of just over nine thousand. The country’s failed economic strategies have included offshore-banking schemes and providing Australia with refugee-detention services. For a time, the national airline had no plane—it had been repossessed. Nauru is also, however, one of the hundred and ninety-three member states in good standing at the United Nations. The underpublicized countries of Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu are also in. Kosovo and Taiwan are not. South Sudan was the most recent to be welcomed, in July. South Ossetia remains on the outside. As on a night-club rope line, if you have to ask what it takes to get into the U.N., you may not be suitable for admittance.

Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, has provoked the latest turmoil in Middle Eastern diplomacy by suggesting that the U.N. should recognize Palestine as a state, even though it is clear that no such nation can be self-sustaining without a negotiated peace with Israel. Abbas has not yet pursued the fullest membership rights, but he has implied that an elevated observer status is in order, whereby Palestine would be sanctified as a formal country.

- Extract from the article "Membership Dues", by Steve Coll and published in The New Yorker, September 26th 2011. It's a great overview of the current situation in Israel and Palestine and the ramifications of Palestine's application for observer-member status at the United Nations last Friday. Read the whole thing here at newyorker.com.

The last hanging in Britain occurred in 1964. Across the channel in France, the peine de mort was done away with by the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s. So the two great historic homelands of theatrical capital punishment—conservative Britain with its “bloody code” and exemplary gibbetings described by Dickens and Thackeray, and Jacobin France with its humanely utilitarian instrument of swift justice for feudalism promoted by the good Doctor Guillotin—have both dispensed with the ultimate penalty. The reasoning was somewhat different in each case. In Britain there had been considerable queasiness as a consequence of a number of miscarriages of justice that had led to the hanging of the innocent. In France, in the memorable words of Mitterrand’s Minister of Justice, M. Robert Badinter, the scaffold had come to symbolize “a totalitarian concept of the relationship between the citizen and the state.”

- Extract from "Staking a Life", an essay by the great Christopher Hitchens, published in Lapham's Quaterly. The execution last night in Georgia of Troy Davis, whose guilt had not been conclusively proved, also brings to mind a quote from Mohandas Ghandi, who once said "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind".

Read the whole essay (and I highly recommend you do) here.

What follows is an extract from an interview with Tony Judt conducted by Merav Michaeli, a columnist with Ha'aretz, as part of a larger film project. Judt was a British historian who sadly died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) only a month after this interview was recorded. It was reprinted in The Atlantic and is a fascinating insight into a not always publicised view on Israel and the issues it is currently facing.

"Why is it ok for a Jewish minority to dominate an Arab majority, its leaders to call for expulsions of majority members, etc., but not ok for a democracy to have a majority and minority both protected under law? At least Israel could then call itself a democracy with a clear conscience.

What you are really asking is whether I think the Palestinians would immediately set out to rape, pillage and murder the Jews? I don't see why they would want to -- there is no historical record suggesting that this is what Palestinians do for fun, whereas we have all too much evidence that Israelis persecute Palestinians for no good reason. If I were an Arab, I would be more afraid of living in a state with Jews just now."

- Tony Judt

Read the whole thing here at theatlantic.com.

Secluded in an emergency operations bunker, long after darkness had fallen to mark the start of the Sabbath last Friday, Israel’s most powerful men had become convinced that history was about to repeat itself.

Hundreds of miles away, six intelligence officers, detailed to protect Israel’s embassy in Cairo, had barricaded themselves in the building’s strongroom. A mob of hammer-wielding Egyptians were closing in. The rioters had already broken down two of the strongroom’s doors and were now hammering on the third. Three of the Israelis drew their guns, preparing for a last stand.

Speaking to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who had been patched through on a secure line, the most senior of the men, identified only as Jonathan, asked his commander-in-chief to deliver news of his capture or death to his wife in person, rather than by telephone.

For all involved, as Israeli officials later recounted, the drama threatened to become a reprise of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when 52 US diplomats were held captive for 444 days after an Islamist mob had stormed the American mission in Tehran.

This time, the most feared outcome was averted – thanks to the intervention of the White House. Facing American threats of dire retribution if any of the Israelis was harmed, Egypt’s military rulers dispatched a team of commandos to rescue the trapped men, a mission completed in the nick of time.

- Extract from the article "Israel watches its old alliances crumble", by Adrian Bloomfield, from The Telegraph website telegraph.co.uk. It's an interesting article which touches upon a controversial situation likely to soon occur at the UN when the Palestinian Authority petitions for full statehood. Read the whole thing here.

The Murdoch story is a cautionary tale for our times that goes well beyond the now-compromised fortunes of News Corp.

The United States, after all, has been doing its own good impression of life in the political sewers recently. Republican ideologues with no notion of the national interest do their brinkmanship number as the country hovers near an unthinkable default. The only thought in their heads seems to be: How will all this play next year in the election and how can we hurt President Obama without being blamed for it?

Is the calculation of these Republicans that different from [David] Cameron’s? It’s all about the next news cycle, and spin, and ego, and where the money for political campaigns is, and a total absence of judgment. What it’s not about is responsibility and the commonweal.

Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance. He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them.

Something deeply insidious and corrupt is at work that has been on view in both Britain and the United States. It involves the takeover of politics by money and spin and massaged images and privileged coteries. It is the death of statesmanship.

- extract from "The Cameron Collapse", by Roger Cohen, published in the New York Times, July 18th 2011.

It's an excellent article. Read the whole thing here on the New York Times website.

In other news, I'm a musician and songwriter and actually have two gigs in New York City this week. Check the gig guide for details.

Here's an infographic from The Globe and Mail in Canada displaying the increasing and just about out of control proportions of Europe's debt. It's measured by the debt (the amount a country owes) to GDP (the amount of 'income' a country has in a year - Gross Domestic Product) ratio and puts it in reasonably easy to understand terms. For a bigger and better view of the infographic, click here.

I've been posting a lot of economics stuff recently. Must be a phase I'm going through. It is interesting though. Oh well. I'll put more music and CP news up soon...

For more info on Europe's (and particularly Greece's) debt problems, there's a very good essay here by John Lanchester in the London Review Of Books.

Things changed as e-commerce took hold, and hackers began to focus on financial gain for their payloads — stealing credit card data, online banking credentials and corporate secrets. More recently, attacks have evolved to so-called advanced persistent threats — where attackers, some state-sponsored, patiently worked their way deep into a network and sat there months or years silently siphoning national secrets, source code and other sensitive data.

Stuxnet was different from all of these. It wasn’t an evolution in malware, but a revolution. The idea that someone would create such a sophisticated worm to slither blindly through networks in search of a single target was “leaps and bounds” beyond what the Symantec researchers had expected. “I could work in this industry for another twenty years and never see another project like this,” O Murchu said recently.

- extract from "How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History", by Kim Zetter, published at wired.com on July 11th, 2011.

It's a fantastic read, so go check out the whole thing here at wired.com.