It’s always interesting to watch a social movement become a mass media phenomenon, as the Québec student strikes have started to become in the last week. It is rarely remembered that Occupy Wall Street was a virtual non-story through its first week, even in most of the alternative press. Many of the stories that did run sentenced that movement to irrelevance. It was only around day nine or ten of the occupation in New York City, after some startling video of police abuse started circulating online, that journalists decided that this was something they should be paying attention to. The movement snowballed from there.

I think we are now witnessing the same sense of escalating momentum with regard to the Québec students. The details of the protests against rising tuition fees and mounting student debt, which began in February, have long been available. Yet, as of late April, one of the few stories on the subject in the United States accurately dubbed the protests “The Biggest Student Uprising You’ve Never Heard Of.”

The lack of attention wasn’t due to a lack of numbers. Hundreds of thousands in Québec had rallied on March 22. That’s more than either the Tea Party or Occupy ever turned out for their protests—and the Québécois were drawing from a much smaller population.

Nor was the neglect a product of insufficient confrontation. As the Chronicle of Higher Education hadreported:

The strike has been supported by near-daily protest actions ranging from family-oriented rallies to building occupations and bridge blockades, and, more recently, by a campaign of political and economic disruption directed against government ministries, crown corporations, and private industry. Although generally peaceful, these actions have met with increasingly brutal acts of police violence: Student protesters are routinely beaten, ...

In the beginning, there was pump and dump. In the dot-com bubble of the late '90s, the stock-analyzing arms of investment banks would pump up a new stock's price with rave reviews. The banker arm underwriting the new stock issue would sit back, watch the price explode and then dump it — as would their favored customers. The folks who fell for the hype and bought in at inflated prices were the little investors, also known as "dumb money."

This scheme was deemed unfair to ordinary investors, so a reform was put in place that appeared to require analysts to keep their mouths shut before an initial public offering. It forbade analysts to publish written reports, be they on paper or electronic, containing new information about the company. Notably absent was any mention of telephones.

Along comes the fantabulous Facebook stock offering and ensuing fallout. Suspicions are high that a select few were told about Facebook's recently disappointing revenues, which might not justify the initial public offering price of $38. They got out the minute they could, or they sold the stock short or made other bets that the stock price would fall. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the matter. And a shareholder class-action suit has been filed. Meanwhile, if the conversations about Facebook's revenues were done by telephone or over cocktails, it is unclear that anyone broke the law.

But this is clear. The Facebook IPO dance was not about investing for the long term, though the dumb money may have thought so.

Did you notice how, in the goodness of their hearts, Facebook and the bankers made an unusually high number of shares available to the public at the initial offering price? As of Tuesday, Facebook's stock ...

A week ago last Sunday night, I was sitting around a table at a friend’s house with two other friends in the Plateau East neighborhood of Montreal, having a quiet & delicious dinner after the Anarchist Bookfair weekend, when at 8 pm, we heard the singular noise of someone banging on a pot in the nearby distance, then two, and maybe three or four. My friend got up to peak around the corner, to see which of his neighbors was making the noise, telling us that there was a Facebook call to bang pots & pans in solidarity with the student strike (as it turns out, it was a professor’s idea, and he did indeed post a FB page for it).

Last night, May 27, that same friend and I met up with other friends at the “usual” corner on Mont-Royal near St-Denis on the Plateau West side of this Montreal neighborhood. At first a handful came, right at 8 pm, like us, and then dozens, growing quickly to hundreds. It was my second night at this intersection, near to the home of another friend, and already I recognized most of the faces, and people nodded at each other, and more of them talked to each other (and my two friends and others are busily organizing toward their first neighborhood popular assembly this coming Saturday).

As we moved from crossing with the light, to crossing at the traffic light, to finally taking the intersection, a group of young children–barely teens–among the many young children on the streets with us, decided to lead a breakaway march, skirting past the police car that had now arrived to “help” us manage the traffic. We adults quickly ran after them, laughing, as our ...

Mexico’s presidential elections are less than six weeks away, and for now it appears that opposition candidate Enrique Peña Nieto remains the clear favorite. His party’s reliance on traditional media, however, has ignited a firestorm within the country’s “Facebook Generation.”

Younger Mexicans expected this to be the first presidential election cycle in which social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn would transform the political landscape. Instead, they’ve found, Old Media is striking back.

At last check, Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held a 20-point lead over his rival Josefina Vázquez, from the ruling National Action Party (PAN). 

Vázquez, a Social Media sensation, got millions of women Tweeting, and enlisted millions of youth as “Friends” on Facebook. But her campaign has run up against a PRI advertising blitzkrieg that has blanketed the country’s newspapers, billboards and airwaves.

Concepción May is a PRI member. For the past few months she has been hard at work organizing neighborhoods – handing out T-shirts, making sure voters have transportation to polling places and delivering campaign posters people can hang on doors and windows. “This is a campaign and the winner will be chosen by people who get away from their computers and go vote,” she says.

That’s a far cry from her sister, who supports the PAN candidate but spends her time on the sofa with her Facebook friends. “She might as well be playing video games,” May says. “I doubt she even knows where to vote.”

The PRI, which expects to win the presidency after 12 years of PAN presidents (Vicente Fox and the ...

Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.

Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook.

Mark Gongloff offers a good overview of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wild Ride, in which a stock that was offered at an IPO price of $38 soared to $45 and then plunged to its current (as of this writing) price of $31. A lot of people lost money - which means a lot of people made money, too.

Zuckerberg promptly sold his 30.2 million shares, netting a quick billion dollars and change. That tells you what he thinks of this investment.

Here are ten reasons why it makes sense to be suspicious of the Facebook IPO, starting with the fact that any overview of the three institutions which handled it might best be described as "rounding up the usual suspects":

1. Morgan Stanley has a history - and a culture - of tricking their own clients into making lousy investments.

It was Morgan Stanley's brokers who, in one notorious account, loved to brag "I ripped his face off!" after convincing one of the firm's own clients to buy a stock that the firm knew was lousy. (See Frank Portnoy's account in Fiasco.)

CNBC reports that "Morgan Stanley may have spent billions of dollars to support the (Facebook) stock price by buying shares in the market." This kind of market manipulation is common. They do these things to ...

At this time of year, at graduation ceremonies in America and elsewhere, those about to leave university often hear some final words of advice before receiving their diplomas. To those interested in pursuing careers in finance – or related careers in insurance, accounting, auditing, law, or corporate management – I submit the following address:

Best of luck to you as you leave the academy for your chosen professions in finance. Over the course of your careers, Wall Street and its kindred institutions will need you. Your training in financial theory, economics, mathematics, and statistics will serve you well. But your lessons in history, philosophy, and literature will be just as important, because it is vital not only that you have the right tools, but also that you never lose sight of the purposes and overriding social goals of finance.

Unless you have been studying at the bottom of the ocean, you know that the financial sector has come under severe criticism – much of it justified – for thrusting the world economy into its worst crisis since the Great Depression. And you need only check in with some of your classmates who have populated the Occupy movements around the world to sense the widespread resentment of financiers and the top 1% of income earners to whom they largely cater (and often belong).

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Robert J. Schiller, click here.

While some of this criticism may be over-stated or misplaced, it nonetheless underscores the need to reform financial institutions and practices. Finance has long been central to thriving ...

It is way too early to tell whether Facebook shares will end up being a good buy, but the reaction to the initial public offering (IPO) on the first day of trading should serve as a serious warning. While the website may have hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it is not clear that this will translate into profits for the company.  Facebook could follow in the footsteps of Pets.com, Webvan and other end-of-the-century start-ups that quickly collapsed following multi-billion dollar IPOs.

Of course Facebook is unlikely to go out of business, but it is certainly possible that its business model is not sufficiently robust to justify a position among corporate America’s elite in market capitalization. A year or two down the road it may well turn out that its share price ends up at half or less of its IPO price.

In this case there will have been an enormous transfer of wealth from the purchasers of Facebook stock to those able to cash out following the IPO. This will make many of those on the inside of the company fantastically wealthy. However, much of their wealth would not result from making a good product that society valued; rather it came from being part of a successfully hyped company.

These insiders benefitted from the ability of Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues to convince investors that Facebook had much more profit potential than in fact was true. This ability to hype a product, in this case company stock, can be an incredibly valuable skill, but it provides nothing of value to society. In that way it is similar to the skills of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. "Fabulous Fab"), who was apparently very skilled in putting together complex mortgage derivatives for Goldman Sachs that were designed to fail.   

In the last two decades the economy seems to have created many openings for people whose primary skill is lifting money out ...

The Victorian era gave birth to a very unpleasant custom called slumming. Parties of swells in London and New York would descend on impoverished neighborhoods as a form of entertainment. In addition to breaking up the tedium of their posh lives, the adventure made them feel superior.

A much updated version of slumming has been taking place in Manhattan, where Facebook is arranging its initial public offering. This time, though, it's the super-rich visitor, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is dressed in rags — his trademark T-shirt and hoodie. The Wall Street investors currying his favor are the ones in expensive business suits.

What Zuckerberg's costume says is: "They need me. I don't need them." Like the tuxedoed waiters scurrying about the four-star restaurants that tech tycoons visit in jeans and baseball caps, Wall Street heavies are merely another kind of servant. Of course, most eyes stay dry at images of investment bankers in the top half of the top 1 percent being dissed by a kid in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

Less appetizing is the con perpetrated on Facebook users. The entire wealth of the enterprise is based on the munchkins' willingness to surrender their privacy and friends' names to Facebook — data to be packaged a thousand ways and sold to the highest bidder. To use the users, Zuckerberg must get them to trust him, hence the after-school sweats.

Elsewhere on Facebook's upper deck, another founder, Eduardo Saverin, has just renounced his American citizenship, a mere 14 years after the Brazil native obtained it. Saverin denies that he became a citizen of Singapore to avoid the American taxes he'd surely pay after the spectacular stock offering. Funny how no one believes him.

From the annals of ingratitude: Under a kidnapping threat, Saverin's wealthy family left Brazil for the safety of Miami.

Eduardo later attended Harvard. There he met ...

With daily headlines focusing on war, terrorism, and the abuses of repressive governments, and religious leaders frequently bemoaning declining standards of public and private behavior, it is easy to get the impression that we are witnessing a moral collapse. But I think that we have grounds to be optimistic about the future.

Thirty years ago, I wrote a book called The Expanding Circle, in which I asserted that, historically, the circle of beings to whom we extend moral consideration has widened, first from the tribe to the nation, then to the race or ethnic group, then to all human beings, and, finally, to non-human animals. That, surely, is moral progress.

We might think that evolution leads to the selection of individuals who think only of their own interests, and those of their kin, because genes for such traits would be more likely to spread. But, as I argued then, the development of reason could take us in a different direction.

On the one hand, having a capacity to reason confers an obvious evolutionary advantage, because it makes it possible to solve problems and to plan to avoid dangers, thereby increasing the prospects of survival. Yet, on the other hand, reason is more than a neutral problem-solving tool. It is more like an escalator: once we get on it, we are liable to be taken to places that we never expected to reach. In particular, reason enables us to see that others, previously outside the bounds of our moral view, are like us in relevant respects. Excluding them from the sphere of beings to whom we owe moral consideration can then seem arbitrary, or just plain wrong.

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Peter Singer, click ...

As it heads toward a House vote, critics say the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would allow private internet companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to hand over troves of confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency, FBI and Department of Homeland Security, effectively legalizing a secret domestic surveillance program already run by the NSA. Backers say the measure is needed to help private firms crackdown on foreign entities — including the Chinese and Russian governments — committing online economic espionage. The bill has faced widespread opposition from online privacy advocates and even the Obama administration, which has threatened a veto. We speak with Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A legislative battle has erupted on Capitol Hill over a controversial House bill that critics say would allow private internet companies to hand over troves of confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency and other agencies. In a letter on Monday, 18 Democratic House members warned that unless specific limitations were put in place, the bill, quote, "would, for the first time, grant non-civilian federal agencies, such as the National Security Agency, unfettered access to information about Americans’ internet activities and allow those agencies to use that information for virtually any purpose." The bill is titled the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or simply CISPA.

Backers of the legislation say it is needed to help private companies crack down on foreign entities—including the Chinese and Russian governments—committing online economic espionage that is stealing trade secrets from U.S. ...

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, up for debate in the House of Representatives today, has privacy activists, tech companies, security wonks and the Obama administration all jousting about what it means – not only for security but Internet privacy and intellectual property. Backers expect CISPA to pass, unlike SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that melted down amid controversy earlier this year.

Here’s a rundown on the debate and what CISPA could mean for Internet users.

What exactly is CISPA?

The act, sponsored Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., would make it easier for private corporations and U.S. agencies, including military and intelligence, to share information related to “cyber threats.” In theory, this would enable the government and companies to keep up-to-date on security risks and protect themselves more efficiently. CISPA would amend the National Security Act of 1947, which currently contains no reference to cyber security. Companies wouldn’t be required to share any data. They would just be allowed to do so.

Why should I care?

CISPA could enable companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers, to share your personal information with the National Security Agency and the CIA, as long as that information is deemed to pertain to a cyber threat or to national security.

How does the bill define “cyber threat”?

The bill itself defines it as information "pertaining to a vulnerability ...

But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect -- from Google, YouTube, and Facebook -- the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of “an acoustic world,” one with “no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,” a new “information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.” He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that “we become what we behold,” that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Media were to be understood as “make-happen agents” rather than as “make-aware agents,” not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.

To account for the transference of the idioms of print to those of the electronic media, McLuhan examined two technological revolutions that overturned the epistemological status quo. First, in the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, which deconstructed the illuminated wisdom preserved on manuscript in monasteries, encouraged people to organize their perceptions of the world along the straight lines of the ...

Just because SOPA and PIPA, the infamous internet "kill switch" bills, are largely dead does not mean the threat to internet free speech has become any less serious. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), also known as H.R. 3523, is the latest mutation of these internet censorship and spying bills to hit the U.S. Congress -- and unless the American people speak up now to stop it, CISPA could lead to far worse repercussions for online free speech than SOPA or PIPA ever would have.

CNET, the popular technology news website that was among many others who spoke up against SOPA and PIPA earlier in the year, is also one of many now sounding the alarm about CISPA, which was authored by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.). Though the bill's promoters are marketing it as being nothing like SOPA or PIPA, CISPA is exactly like those bills, except worse.

What CISPA will do, if passed, is remove all the legal barriers that currently stop internet service providers, government agencies, and others from arbitrarily spying on internet users. In the name of "cybersecurity," a term that is undefined in the bill, CISPA will essentially allow internet users to be surveilled by the government without probable cause or a search warrant, which is a clear violation of users' constitutional civil liberties.

Additionally, it will allow websites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to intercept emails, text messages, and other private information that might be considered a threat to "cybersecurity." The government can then demand access to this information, even if it has nothing to do with copyright infringement, which is one of the excuses being used for why such a bill is needed in the first place.

Internet users are already required to abide by the same laws as everyone else

"Just because ...

Americans can't rely only on getting good people elected, Reich argues, because nothing positive happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are organized to help make those things happen after the election. But in order to be effectively mobilized, we need to see the big picture. Reich connects the dots for us, showing why the increasing share of income and wealth going to the top has hobbled jobs and growth for everyone else, while undermining our democracy; has caused Americans to become increasingly cynical about public life; and has turned many Americans against one another. He also explains why the proposals of the "regressive right" are dead wrong and provides a clear road map for what must be done instead. Here is a blueprint for action for everyone who cares about the future of America.

Congress is busy pushing a bill that “would give government intelligence agencies broad powers to work with private companies to share information about Internet users.” The bill, known as the Cyber (CISPA),

Provides companies and the government “free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for ‘cyber security purposes.’”

Of course, the spy lobby is all over this. What is surprising is the support it’s getting from the tech world. The lists of organizations pushing for this bill include Facebook, AT&T, and Microsoft.

Among the spy lobby organizations in favor of the bill are two National Security Agency (NSA) contractors: the Computer Science Corporation and the Sciences Applications International Corporation.

The danger here?

Like the for-profit college industry, which uses taxpayer money to lobby for even more taxpayer money while defrauding students, the extent to which private sector firms with government spy contracts are lobbying for broader power should alarm everyone.

Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Stop Cyber Spying page to learn more and get involved.

For it was during the country’s civil society mobilization against the former government that social media first gained popularity as a platform for airing grievances here. 

Now, as Banda begins to purge the Malawian government of corrupt officials and woos international donors back in an attempt to ease the country’s economic woes, users on social media have increased. 

The news of President Bingu wa Mutharika’s death began circulating as rumors on Facebook newsfeeds in Malawi two days before it was officially confirmed by government officials on Apr. 7. 

The subsequent appointment of former Vice President Banda as the new head of state, and the first female president in southern Africa, only amplified the level of online activity as messages of support and optimism sprouted up all over Twitter and Facebook. 

July protests stir up online community

But the country’s online community was first stirred to action during last year’s protests. On Jul. 20, 2011, the apparently peaceful country of Malawi broke out into nationwide anti-government protests in response to a deteriorating economy and political mismanagement. Persistent fuel and foreign exchange shortages added to the frustrations. 

The protests lasted two days and resulted in 20 deaths. 

So when the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) temporarily shut down private broadcasters and popular news websites were blocked, Malawians turned to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for the latest information. 

"There’s a tendency among officials — especially government politicians ...

Who is writing that brilliant, stupid, nasty, brave and/or dishonest online comment? We haven't a clue, because the author hasn't shared his or her name, hometown, gender, age and/or nationality. Or even worse, the author pretends to be another real person. Scammers, misfits, crooks, creeps, criminals and nice people all venture through cyberspace without identifying themselves. We can only guess what they're up to.

Web anonymity is often a force for evil in the civic conversation. There is the celebrated case of the blog known as "Gay Girl in Damascus." Followed by many and quoted by some journalists as an authority on events in Syria, the gay girl turned out to be a 40-year-old married American man writing from Scotland.

Some defenders of Web anonymity hold that not only was the Gay Girl blog not evil, it was a potential force for good. Maybe the author wasn't really a lesbian in Syria. The blog did help real gay men and lesbians by giving them a forum in a country where homosexuality is shunned or worse.

But did it? How could gay Syrians know that they were really communicating with other gay Syrians? A forum participant may have been a heterosexual teen in Dallas or a table of drunken friends in Seattle having fun at another's expense. "He" or "she" could have been a homophobic resident of Damascus, luring local gays ...

If you're a regular reader of Natural news, you're already well aware of the fact that government, the courts, and private industry have all essentially disregarded the intent and meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the age of information technology. It seems that you give up your right to be "secure" in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" if you dare to use a social media network or virtually any other information exchange system.

The latest onslaught comes from the FBI, which is only the most recent federal agency seeking to monitor all of your conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of "publicly available" information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.

'Early warning' system?

The goal, according to the bureau's request, is to develop a sort of early warning system that provides real-time intelligence to improve "the FBI's overall situational awareness." The proposed program must "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats."

The FBI joins DARPA - the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency- and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in searching for a program that can "monitor" ...

At the General Assembly meeting last night, Occupy Wall Street’s dreamer contingent got a very special valentine: the GA endorsed the Direct Action Working Group’s proposal to call for a general strike on May Day—May 1, 2012. Occupiers celebrated with cheers and Valentine’s Day balloons.

The text approved by the GA is as follows:

May Day 2012 Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: *No Work *No School *No Housework *No Shopping *No Banking TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!

The prospect of an Occupy general strike has been circulating for a while already. One of the several Facebook event pages devoted to it has more than 10,000 attendees. Occupy Los Angeles began calling for a May 1 general strike as early as last November, and Occupy Oakland joined