Bye Bye Privacy: Personal Data are Being Extracted and Refined to Power Big Business/Big Government

You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome

By Natasha Singer | June 16, 2012 | New York Times

Justin Bolle for The New York Times
Acxiom’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. Analysts say the company has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers.

IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.

Steve Keesee/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Scott E. Howe, the chief executive of Acxiom since last summer, has said he sees the company as a new-millennium “data refinery,” rather than a data miner.

It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.

Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

Turn Out The Lights – The Largest U.S. Cities Are Becoming Cesspools Of Filth, Decay And Wretchedness

Staff Report | May 24, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world.  Sadly, that is no longer the case.  Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying.  Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families.  Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness.  Millions of good jobs have left our major cities in recent decades and poverty has absolutely exploded.    Basically, you can turn out the lights because the party is over.  In fact, some major U.S. cities are literally turning out the lights.  In Detroit, about 40 percent of the streetlights are already broken and the city cannot afford to repair them.  So Mayor Bing has come up with a plan to cut the number of operating streetlights almost in half and leave vast sections of the city totally in the dark at night.  I wonder what that will do to the crime rate in the city.  But don’t look down on Detroit too much, because what is happening in Detroit will be happening where you live soon enough.

Change—and Some Hope

By Victor Davis Hanson | May 12, 2012 | PJ Media

Rays of Sun Amid the Storm

The Rasmussen Tracking Poll recently had Romney up 50 to 42 over Obama. At this early juncture, such polls mean nothing—except as diagnostic indices of why perhaps both candidates go up and down in popularity.

So why has Barack Obama plunged in the polls these last few days?

The Republican slugfest is over. The media cannot headline any longer the daily conservative suicide. Barack Obama’s job report came out at 8.1% unemployment—but, more importantly, with information that a smaller percentage of adult Americans are working than ever before, and fewer in absolute numbers than nearly four years ago when Obama took office.

So someone must be asking, “What then was the lost $5 trillion for?” Note, in this regard, the 5.4% unemployment rate that won George Bush the slur of a “jobless recovery” in 2004.

There was some pushback to Obama’s spiking the football on the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.

The Left’s One-Percenter Problem

By Frank Salvato | May 17, 2012 | New Media Journal

In the aftermath of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Howard Dean” moment in Ohio this week, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the Progressive-Democrat Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to their political attacks on the so-called “rich.” As the unwashed masses of the Occupy Movement – the overwhelming majority of which are anarchists, pseudo-Socialists, Progressive activists and union operatives – take to the streets of Chicago to protest the NATO summit, I really do have to wonder if they – the useful idiots of the new millennium – know that those who they follow are the one-percenters?

Among the leaders of the Progressive Movement and the Democrat Party, it is nearly impossible to identify anyone among them who isn’t in the one-percent, and that includes President Obama and, yes, Vice President Biden. Maybe that’s why his statement, “They just don’t get us,” made my head cock like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Who’s us,” I thought to myself.

The New Class Warfare

By Joel Kotkin | Spring 2012 | City Journal

California’s superwealthy progressives seem intent on destroying middle-class jobs.

Few states have offered the class warriors of Occupy Wall Street more enthusiastic support than California has. Before they overstayed their welcome and police began dispersing their camps, the Occupiers won official endorsements from city councils and mayors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Irvine, Santa Rosa, and Santa Ana. Such is the extent to which modern-day “progressives” control the state’s politics.

But if those progressives really wanted to find the culprits responsible for the state’s widening class divide, they should have looked in a mirror. Over the past decade, as California consolidated itself as a bastion of modern progressivism, the state’s class chasm has widened considerably. To close the gap, California needs to embrace pro-growth policies, especially in the critical energy and industrial sectors—but it’s exactly those policies that the progressives most strongly oppose.

Illustration by Arnold Roth

Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend. From 2007 to 2010, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, income among families in the 10th percentile of earners plunged 21 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 14 percent. In the much wealthier 90th percentile of California earners, income fell far less sharply: 5 percent, only slightly more than the national 4 percent drop. Further, by 2010, the families in the 90th percentile had incomes 12 times higher than the incomes of families in the 10th—the highest ratio ever recorded in the state, and significantly higher than the national ratio.

It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the California 10th-percentile families were earning less than their counterparts in the rest of the United States—$15,000 versus $16,300—even though California’s cost of living was substantially higher. A more familiar statistic signaling California’s problems is its unemployment rate, which is now the nation’s second-highest, right after Nevada’s. Of the eight American metropolitan areas where the joblessness rate exceeds 15 percent, seven are in California, and most of them have substantial minority and working-class populations.

When California’s housing bubble popped, real-estate prices fell far more steeply than in less regulated markets, such as Texas. The drop hurt the working class in two ways: it took away a major part of their assets; and it destroyed the construction jobs important to many working-class, particularly Latino, families. The reliably left-leaning Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy found that between 2005 and 2009, the state lost fully one-third of its construction jobs, compared with a 24 percent drop nationwide. California has also suffered disproportionate losses in its most productive blue-collar industries. Over the past ten years, more than 125,000 industrial jobs have evaporated, even as industrial growth has helped spark a recovery in many other states. The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 40 percent of its industrial positions during this period, the worst record of any large metro area in the country. In 2011, while the country was gaining 227,000 industrial jobs, California’s manufacturers were still stuck in reverse, losing 4,000.

Yet while the working and middle classes struggle, California’s most elite entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are thriving as never before. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And what a world it is. Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value.” Meanwhile, in nearby Oakland, the metropolitan region ranks dead last in job growth among the nation’s largest metro areas, according to a recent Forbes survey, and one in three children lives in poverty.

One reason for California’s widening class divide is that, for a decade or longer, the state’s progressives have fostered a tax environment that slows job creation, particularly for the middle and working classes. In 1994, California placed 35th in the Tax Foundation’s ranking of states with the lightest tax burdens on business; today, it has plummeted to 48th. Only New York and New Jersey have more onerous business-tax burdens. Local taxes and fees have made five California cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Culver City—among the nation’s 20 most expensive business environments, according to the Kosmont–Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey.

Still more troubling to California employers is the state’s regulatory environment. California labor laws, a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce study revealed, are among the most complex in the nation. The state has strict rules against noncompetition agreements, as well as an overtime regime that reduces flexibility: unlike other states, where overtime kicks in after 40 hours in a given week, California requires businesses to pay overtime to employees who have clocked more than eight hours a day (see “Cali to Business: Get Out!,” Autumn 2011). Rules for record-keeping and rest breaks are likewise more stringent than in other states. The labor code contains tough provisions on everything from discrimination to employee screening, the Chamber of Commerce study notes, and has created “a cottage industry of class actions” in the state. California’s legal climate is the fifth-worst in the nation, according to the Institute for Legal Reform; firms face far higher risks of nuisance and other lawsuits from employees than in most other places. In addition to these measures, California has imposed some of the most draconian environmental laws in the country, as we will see in a moment.

The impact of these regulations is not lost on business executives, including those considering new investments or expansions in California. A survey of 500 top CEOs by Chief Executive found that California had the worst business climate in the country, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls California “a difficult environment for job creation.” Small wonder, then, that since 2001, California has accounted for just 1.9 percent of the country’s new investment in industrial facilities; in better times, between 1977 and 2000, it had grabbed 5.6 percent.

Officials, including Governor Jerry Brown, argue that California’s economy is so huge that it can afford to lose companies to other states. But for the local economy to be hurt, firms don’t have to leave entirely. Business consultant Joe Vranich, who maintains a website that tracks businesses that leave the state, points out that when California companies decide to expand, often they do so in other parts of the U.S. and abroad, not in their home environment. Further, Brown is too cavalier about the effects of businesses’ departure. As Vranich notes, many businesses leave California “quietly in the night,” generating few headlines but real job losses. He cites the low-key departure in 2010 of Thomas Brothers Maps, a century-old California firm, which transferred dozens of employees from its Irvine headquarters to Skokie, Illinois, and outsourced the rest of its jobs to Bangalore.

The list of companies leaving the state or shifting jobs elsewhere is extensive. It includes low-tech companies, such as Dunn Edwards Paints and fast-food operator CKE Restaurants, and high-tech ones, such as Acacia Research, Biocentric Energy Holdings, and eBay, which plans to create 1,000 new positions in Austin, Texas. Computer-security giant McAfee estimates that it saves 30 to 40 percent every time it hires outside California. Only 14 percent of the firm’s 6,500 employees remain in Silicon Valley, says CEO David DeWalt. The state’s small businesses, which account for the majority of employment, are harder to track, but a recent survey found that one in five didn’t expect to remain in business in California within the next three years.

Apologists for the current regime also claim that the state’s venture capitalists will fund and create new companies that will boost employment. It’s certainly true that in the past, California firms funded by venture capital tended to expand largely in California. But as Jack Stewart, president of the California Manufacturing and Technology Association, points out, a different dynamic is at work today: once a company’s start-up phase is over, it tends to move its middle-class jobs elsewhere, as the state’s shrinking fraction of the nation’s industrial investment indicates. “Sure, we are getting half of all the venture capital investment, but in the end, we have relatively small research and development firms only,” Stewart argues. “Once they have a product or go to scale, the firms move [employment] elsewhere. The other states end up getting most of the middle-class jobs.”

Radical environmentalism has been particularly responsible for driving wedges between California’s classes. Until fairly recently, as historian Kevin Starr says, California’s brand of progressivism involved spurring economic growth—particularly by building infrastructure—and encouraging broad social advancement. “What the progressives created,” Starr says, “was California as a middle-class utopia. The idea was if you wanted to be a nuclear physicist, a carpenter, or a cosmetologist, we would create the conditions to get you there.” By contrast, he says, today’s progressives regard with suspicion any growth that requires the use of land and natural resources. Where old-fashioned progressives embraced both conservation and the expansion of public parks, the new green movement advocates a reduced human “footprint” and opposes cars, “sprawl,” and even human reproduction.

The Bay Area has served as the incubator for the new green progressivism. The militant Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in San Francisco. Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, author of the sensationalist 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb and mentor of President Obama’s current science advisor, John Holdren, built his career at Stanford. Today, more than 130 environmental activist groups make their headquarters in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and surrounding cities.

The environmentalist agenda emerged in full flower under nominally Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who initially cast himself as a Milton Friedman–loving neo-Reaganite. On his watch, California’s legislature in 2006 passed Assembly Bill 32, which, in order to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, imposes heavy fees on using carbon-based energy and severely restricts planning and development. One analysis of small-business impacts prepared by Sacramento State University economists indicates that AB 32 could strip about $181 billion per year, or nearly 10 percent, from the state’s economy. At the same time, land-use regulations connected to the climate-change legislation hinder expansion for firms.

Another business-hobbling mandate is the law requiring that 30 percent of California’s electricity be generated by “renewable” sources by 2020. The state’s electricity costs are already 50 percent above the national average and the fifth-highest in the nation—yet state policies make the construction of new oil- or gas-fired power plants all but impossible and offer massive subsidies for expensive, often unreliable, “renewable” energy. The renewable-fuel laws will simply boost electricity costs further. The cost of electricity from the new NRG solar-energy facility in central California, for instance, will be 50 percent higher than the cost of power from a newly built gas-powered facility, according to state officials. For providing this expensive service, NRG will pay no property taxes on its facilities. By some estimates, green mandates could force electricity prices to rise 5 to 7 percent annually through 2020.

Read the full article here.

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Five myths about America’s decline

By Ian Bremmer | May 3, 2012 | The Washington Post

 Challenging everything you think you know 

Drawn-out wars, economic struggles, exploding debt — it’s easy to point to these signs and conclude that America is in an irreversible decline; that after a good run, it’s time to hand the superpower baton to China or some other up-and-comer. Certainly, America faces big challenges, and it’s true that, economically, the United States was better off a decade ago. But those seeing decline as inevitable do not just ignore the nation’s history of resilience, they also misread the facts on the ground. America’s decline is a myth — and here are five common misconceptions worth dispelling.

1. The United States is no longer a superpower.

Certainly, countries such as China and Russia have more power than ever to obstruct U.S. foreign policy goals; their United Nations veto against intervention in Syria is one recent example. And the United States is increasingly unwilling to play the role of global cop, as it pares back its presence in the Middle East and fights over significant possible cuts to its defense budget because of Capitol Hill’s failure to reach a debt deal.

Even so, the United States is still the world’s only superpower, and so it will remain for the foreseeable future. Its economy is more than twice the size of second-place China’s. Only America can project military power in every region of the globe: It has a military presence in more than three-quarters of the world’s countries and spends more each year on defense than the next 17 nations combined. This security role lets Europe and Japan spend less on defense and more on other priorities. The U.S. Navy safeguards important trade routes, enabling global commerce, while American aid bolsters poor and disaster-stricken states.

2. America’s economic future is bleak.

Part of the reason the United States is less willing to engage abroad is because it has its hands full with economic concerns at home: spiraling federal debt, high unemployment, lower wages and a growing disparity of wealth.But while the U.S. economic outlook may not shine as bright as it once did, it is hardly grim. America’s higher education system is unparalleled, with a record 725,000 foreign students enrolled at U.S. universities last year. No country has a greater capacity for technological breakthroughs: The United States is the destination of choice for aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s the research and development center of the world, and Silicon Valley’s start-ups and venture capitalism are exemplary.On energy, innovation in unconventional oil and gas resources has been the biggest game-changer of the past decade, with U.S.-based companies leading the charge. The United States is now the largest natural gas producer in the world. It is also the world’s largest food exporter, giving America some leverage against food price shocks or shortages. Demographically, the United States is better off than other large economies. The U.S. population is expected to rise by more than 100 million by 2050, and the labor force should grow by 40 percent. Compare that with Europe, where the population is slated to shrink by as much as 100 million people over the same span, or to China, where the labor force is already contracting.

3. America’s political system is broken.

Gridlock in Washington makes all of America’s problems seem even more intractable. Many believe that Congress is too divided to ever pass meaningful legislation again. But let’s not forget that the first two years of the Obama administration saw more significant legislation passed — such as the stimulus, the health-care overhaul and the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms — than any period since the mid-1960s. Whether or not you like the direction in which Obama took the country, the system is hardly broken.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]