Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy?

The tech giant's 'wearable computing' project is now being tested by volunteers, meaning you might already have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded on to Google's servers. How worried should you be?

• 
• • Charles Arthur
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 15.08 GMT

Google's Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass at New York fashion week. Photograph: AP

If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass – the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world – then here's an idea of the interest in them. Last week, someone claiming to be testing Glass for Google auctioned their $1,500 (£995) device on eBay. Bidding had reached $16,000 before eBay stopped it on the basis that the person couldn't prove they had the glasses. (They weren't due to get them until last Friday.)

Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive. In the past 50 years we have moved from "mainframe" computers that needed their own rooms to ones that fit in a pocket; any smartphone nowadays has as much raw computing power as a top-of-the-line laptop from 10 years ago.

The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it. The videos that the company has put online – and the demonstrations by Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, who has been driving these imaginative leaps – suggest you can whirl your child around by their arms, say: "OK, Glass, take video!" and capture the moment. (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".) The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head. Brin has already appeared on stage at a TED conference wearing his Glass glasses (will we call them Glasses?) and looking vaguely like a space pirate. He has described ordinary smartphones as "emasculating" (invoking quite a lot of puzzlement and dictionary-checking: yup, it still means what you thought). And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass (as it's quickly becoming known). The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?

David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially, tweeted on this point the other day: "There's a young man wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant, which, until just now, used to be my favourite spot."

Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything and uploading it to Google's servers (and a Google+ page). Which just feels creepy. It's not a trivial concern. Joshua Topolsky, an American technology journalist who is one of the few to have tried out Google Glass – at Google's invitation – discovered this directly. He wore them to Starbucks, accompanied by a film crew. The film crew were asked to stop filming. "But I kept the Glass's video recorder going, all the way through."

Still, you might think, where's the harm? The thing is, though: this is Google, not Fred's Amazing Spectacles Company. This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private". From Google Buzz (where it created a "social network" from peoples' email lists, forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends; it was bound over for 20 years by the US's Federal Trade Commission) and the rows over Street View pictures, to the intentional snaffling of wi-fi data while collecting those pictures (a $25,000 fine from the US Federal Communications Commission for obstructing its investigation there).

And that's before you get to criticism in Europe over its attitude to data protection (information commissioners grumbled last October that its unification of its separate privacy policies meant "uncontrolled" use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.

For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google? You can guess what would happen the first time you put on Glass: there would be a huge scroll of legal boilerplate with "Agree" at the end. And, impatient and uncaring as ever, you would click on it with little regard for what you were getting yourself, and others, in to. Can a child properly consent to filming or being filmed? Is an adult, who happens to be visible in a camera's peripheral vision in a bar, consenting? And who owns – and what happens to – that data?

Oliver Stokes, principal design innovator at PDD, which helps clients such as LG, Vodafone and Fujitsu design products, says Yee's restaurant scenario is "concerning". "The idea that you could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming. And Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."

That, he points out, could be hugely useful. "Supermarkets and packaging companies spend lots of money trying to work out which packages you look at first on a shelf. Potentially, through Google Glass, they would be capturing that data as standard. That would be quite powerful – to be able to say why people buy things."

Of course, the benefits wouldn't accrue to the wearer. Google would sell the data (suitably anonymised, of course). And your smartphone already provides a huge amount of detail about you. Song Chaoming, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, has been analysing mobile phone records (including which base stations the phone connects to) and has developed an algorithm that can predict – with, he says, 93% accuracy – where its owner is at any time of the day (by triangulating from the strengths of the base station signals; that's part of how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map). He analysed the records of 50,000 people; the accuracy was never below 80%.

When you consider that Chaoming was only doing this in his spare time, and that Google has teams of people whose only task is to develop better algorithms to work out where a phone's owner is, and what they're going to do based on their past activity and searches, you realise that if you're using an Android phone, Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.

 A model with Google Glass at New York fashion week. Photograph: Andrew Kelly / Reuters

The obvious objection to these concerns is that we're used to being filmed; CCTV is part of life. Yee's response: "Not 5,000 cameras a city – five million. Not 5,000 monitors – one." Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google, aggregating, sifting, profiting.

Yet we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting. The other day my Twitter timeline came alive with someone tweeting about watching a couple having a furious row in a cafe; the man had had multiple affairs, the woman had had a breakdown. Their unhappiness was being played out in public, though the cafe wasn't strictly a public space. If either used Twitter, they might have found themselves (or friends might have recognised them). And Twitter's content is retained and searchable through plenty of web services.

Social media such as Twitter, and the ubiquity since 2003 of cameraphones (and now of smartphones that not only have still and video cameras, but can also upload their content immediately) means we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story. Without it, we wouldn't know the true circumstances surrounding the death at the G20 protest of the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson.

What if everyone who had been there had been wearing Google Glass (or similar) and beaming it to the web? Would the police have behaved differently?

Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop. That's part of the plan behind the "Glass Explorer" scheme, which aims to get the devices into the hands – or rather, on to the faces – of ordinary people (and which enabled one member of the trial to putatively auction their Glass).

"It may be that new social norms develop with Glass, where people develop an informal way of showing that they're not using it – say, wearing it around their neck to signal they aren't using it or being distracted by it," said one person who has spoken to Google staff on this, but who has to stay anonymous. "One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things, as well as the devices."

The other big question about Glass is: how will we behave with each other? My own experience with a Glass-like system, of wearable ski goggles, suggests that distraction will happen quite easily. That system, from Recon, has a lens in the top right that shows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps (useful in whiteouts). It was very easy, while standing and talking to someone, to glance up and read something off the screen. Being present and not-present became almost reflexive, and that was with only one week of use. Yet at the same time, the display wasn't overwhelming. Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard, when required.

Carolina Milanesi, smartphones and tablets analyst at the research company Gartner, says: "Interestingly this [distraction element] is the first thing I thought of – not that Glass was giving you something that phones cannot give you, in terms of sharing or accessing content, but that they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything. In other words, with the phone, if I am taking a picture, the person I am focusing on will likely notice me; with Glass they do not."

Despite her line of work, Milanesi is concerned about whether we get too deeply involved with our technology, to the exclusion of the real people around us. She has a different restaurant concern from Yee's. In June 2011, she pointed out how smartphones change us: "Look around a restaurant or coffee bar at how many people, couples even, are sitting across from each other and they're both looking down at their mobiles."

Glass might change that for the better – though would you appear to be looking at each other, while really intent on your email or a video? Topolsky, who used Glass for some days, said: "It brought something new into view (both literally and figuratively) that has tremendous value and potential … the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."

He loved how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts, and he could deal with them without taking his phone out of his pocket to see who was calling. Walking and need directions? They're in view. "In the city, Glass makes you feel more powerful, better equipped, and definitely less diverted," he said. But, he added, "It might not be that great at a dinner party, or on a date, or watching a movie."

Hurst comments, "Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you'll suspect that you don't have their undivided attention. And you can't comfortably ask them to take off the glasses (especially when, as it inevitably will be, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – and here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you."

Stokes points out that we're already seeing body language change as smartphones – with their glowing screens – become more pervasive: the hunched walk that 10 years ago marked out a financial whiz with a BlackBerry is now seen on every pavement.

"I think there will be a pushback," Stokes says. "Maybe you'll have to have a lens cover to show you're not filming." He points out though that the present model seems to require voice control – "OK, Glass, shoot video" – and that this might discourage some users in public. "I've been watching for people using Siri [Apple's voice-driven iPhone control]. I just don't see people using it in public places. Maybe it's too gadgety."

"People will have to work out what the new normal is," says Stokes. "I do wonder whether speaking and gesturing might be essentially banned in public."

"At home my husband already jokes about me checking into [location service] Foursquare from the piece of carpet I am standing on," Milanesi says. "How much more will we have of this now that it is made so simple for us? And the other side of the coin: how much are we going to share with others, and at what point will we have a backlash? When will it all be too much?"

Chavez a true Democrat - termed Dictator by the American Right

If you want to learn about human rights in Venezuela before Hugo Chavez, type “Caracazo” into Google, and do so with a strong stomach. Back in 1989, then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez won an election on a fiery platform of resisting free-market dogma: the IMF was “a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing,” he proclaimed. But after safely making it to the presidential palace, he dramatically u-turned, unleashing a programme of privatisation and neo-liberal shock therapy. With gas subsidies removed, petrol prices soared, and impoverished Venezuelans took to the streets. Soldiers mowed protesters down with gunfire. Up to 3,000 perished, a horrifying death toll up there with the Tienanmen Square Massacre – in a country with a population 43 times smaller.

It was his abortive coup attempt against Pérez's murderous, rampantly corrupt government in 1992 that launched Chavez to prominence. Though locked away, Chavez became an icon for Venezuela's long-suffering poor. By the time he won a landslide victory in 1998 on a promise to use the country's vast oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela was a mess. Per capita income had collapsed to where it had been in the early 1960s. One in three Venezuelans lived on less than $2 a day. Oil revenues were squandered.

Over the coming days, you will be repeatedly told that Hugo Chavez was a dictator. A funny sort of dictator: there have been 17 elections and referenda since 1998. Perhaps you think they were rigged. When he won by a huge margin in 2006, former US President Jimmy Carter was among those declaring he had won “fairly and squarely”. At the last election in October 2012, Carter declared that, “of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” I was there: perhaps you think I was like those hopelessly naïve Western leftists who visited Potemkin villages in Stalinist Russia. I was with a genuinely independent election commission, staffed with both pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez sympathisers, who had previously been invited by the opposition to run their own internal elections. We met with senior opposition figures who railed against Chavez, but acknowledged that they lived in a democracy. When they lost the election, they accepted it.

Social justice

Indeed, Chavez himself has had to accept defeat before: back in 2007, he lost a referendum campaign, and did not quibble with the results. Until he came to power, millions of poor Venezuelans were not even registered to vote: but dramatic registration drives have nearly doubled the electorate. There are 6,000 more polling stations than there were in the pre-Chavez era.

On the other hand, the democratic credentials of many of his opponents can certainly be questioned. In 2002, a Pinochet-style coup was launched against Chavez, and was only reversed by a popular uprising. Much of the privately owned media openly incited and supported the coup: imagine Cameron was kicked out of No 10 by British generals, with the support and incitement of rolling 24-hour news stations. But Venezuela's media is dominated by private broadcasters, some of whom make Fox News look like cuddly lefties. State television could rightly be accused of bias towards the government, which is perhaps why it has a measly 5.4 per cent audience share. Of seven major national newspapers, five support the opposition, and only one is sympathetic to the government.

The truth is that Chavez won democratic election after democratic election, despite the often vicious hostility of the media, because his policies transformed the lives of millions of previously ignored Venezuelans. Poverty has fallen from nearly half to 27.8 per cent, while absolute poverty has been more than halved. Six million children receive free meals a day; near-universal free health care has been established; and education spending has doubled as a proportion of GDP. A housing programme launched in 2011 built over 350,000 homes, bringing hundreds of thousands of families out of sub-standard housing in thebarrios. Some of his smug foreign critics suggest Chavez effectively bought the votes of the poor – as though winning elections by delivering social justice is somehow bribery.

Alliances

That does not mean Chavez is beyond criticism. Venezuela was already a country with rampant crime when he came to power, but the situation has deteriorated since. Around 20,000 Venezuelans died at the hands of violent crime in 2011: an unacceptable death toll. As well as drugs, near-universal gun ownership and the destabilising impact of neighbouring Colombia, a weak (and often corrupt) police force is to blame. Although the government is beginning to roll out a national police force, endemic crime is a genuine crisis. When I spoke to Venezuelans in Caracas, the sometimes frightening lack of law-and-order was brought up by pro-Chavistas and opponents alike.

And then there is the matter of some of Chavez's unpleasant foreign associations. Although his closest allies were his fellow democratically elected left-of-centre governments in Latin America – nearly all of whom passionately defended Chavez from foreign criticism – he also supported brutal dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria. It has certainly sullied his reputation. Of course, we in the West can hardly single out Chavez for unsavoury alliances. We support and arm dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia; Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair is paid $13 million a year to work for Kazakhstan's dictatorship. But our own hypocrisy does not absolve Chavez of criticism.

The so-called Bolivarian Revolution was overly dependent on Chavez's own reputation, and inevitably his death raises questions about its future direction. But have no doubt: Chavez was a democratically elected champion of the poor. His policies lifted millions out of abject poverty and misery. He represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. His achievements were won in the face of an attempted military coup, an aggressively hostile media, and bitter foreign critics. He demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity. He will be mourned by millions of Venezuelans – and understandably so.

If bankers leave the country, it would be no loss

Ignore their howls of protest. 

They took home unheard of sums. Only in Britain do ministers dance to their tune. But public fury cannot be defied for ever

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013

Illustration by Belle Mellor

The peasants are revolting across Europe. They want bankers' blood and mean to get it. Until now, public response to the credit crunch has been one of general bafflement and wrist-slapping. The banks persuaded the world it was all an act of fate. As it was, they were too big to fail and their leaders too saintly to atone for it. For four years, British banks were showered with nearly half a trillion pounds of public and printed money. They duly recovered and stayed rich, while everyone else went poor.

The worm has turned. The banks and government alike have failed to deliver recovery. The people want revenge, and have found it – of all places – in the European parliament. It has declared that EU bankers cannot get bonuses bigger than their salaries, or twice as big if shareholders approve. This applies wherever EU bankers work, and to any overseas banker working in the EU.

Meanwhile, a Swiss referendum now requires top executives to seek explicit shareholder approval for their pay, with a ban on golden hellos and goodbyes. The Netherlands is talking of a tighter 20% cap on bonuses. Even laissez-faire Britain has seen the National Association of Pension Funds demand that boards keep executive pay rises down to inflation.

Europe's once omnipotent banking lobby has been all but neutered by the scale of scandal. The German government caved in to the EU parliament under pressure from the opposition Social Democrats. This was after the Libor scandal revealed Deutsche Bank cutting one trader's bonus by £34m, thus implying a staggering original sum. The Swiss campaign was kicked into life by the drugs firm Novartis giving its departing chairman a $76m gift. Some 68% of Swiss voted for the new curb.

Only in Britain do ministers still dance to the bankers' tune. Last month RBS executives brushed aside their state shareholder and paid themselves £600m in bonuses after posting a £5bn loss. Loss-making Lloyds dipped into its till and gave senior staff an extra £365m. Money-laundering HSBC announced 78 of its London executives would take home more than £1m each. They all say bonuses were unrelated to fines or losses, but they always say that. George Osborne was humiliated in Brussels on Tuesday by having to plead their fruitless cause.

Last year the City of London's much-heralded "shareholder spring" got nowhere. Revolts against executive pay at WPP, Barclays, Trinity Mirror and elsewhere had little noticeable impact. While overall pay stagnated, that of top executives rose 12%. Opinion polls showed the public overwhelmingly hostile to top pay. Only the government and the London mayor stand between the very rich and a furious public. The peasants' revolt means that even British ministers cannot defy opinion for ever.

The reality is that the banking community has allowed this thirst for revenge to build up for over four years, and it just did not care. Ever since the 1980s and financial deregulation, the profession took home sums of money unheard of in any other line of work.

This had nothing to do with free markets, except within a tight group of high-rolling traders. Modern bankers derive "economic rent" from exploiting oligopolistic cartels in financial services, with shareholders kept at one remove. The astronomical traders' bonuses are asymmetric returns on cash that properly belongs to depositors and shareholders whose money bears the risk. In any other business such bonuses would be regarded as theft from the firm.

For four years the British government – Labour and the coalition – huffed and puffed but was too terrified of the banks to act. Regulators were suborned by lobbyists and ministers, their offices packed with seconded bankers, and did as they were told. They gave huge sums to the banks in the belief that this was benefiting the demand economy. In Britain, some £400bn of cash was "pumped into the economy" via the banks. They merely traded or hoarded it, to their ever greater enrichment. The money vanished. A thousand pounds handed to every British citizen would have had more impact on the economy.

Last year, as if learning nothing, the Treasury gave the banks another £80bn to boost business and mortgage lending. This week it was predictably revealed that lending to small businesses actually fell as result. It was like giving money to a drunk and telling him to support his children. Never in the history of money can policy have been so glaringly inept. The banks laughed.

No trade unions are fiercer in defending their interests than the rich professions. As we saw this week with lawyers, cut their largesse and they threaten to take it out on the poor, the economy, the government, everyone. The banks howl that the bonus cap means their greed will go "offshore". This seems exaggerated. But the EU curbs could possibly see the start of the high-rollers moving out of over-regulated Europe towards the Americas and Asia.

This would not be wholly good news for Britain: finance has been the boom industry of the past quarter-century. But more likely is that the more toxic activities will go, and that is no loss. Either way, the banks have themselves to blame. They flew their golden wings too near the sun, and rage has melted them. They have only one plea on their side. The culture of greed in the City was nothing to the culture of ineptitude at the Bank of England and the Treasury. They pumped out the money. Never in British economic history can so much have been so wasted on so fruitless a cause. And still no hint of remorse.

A Record of Hugo Chavez - RIP

by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN in the hindu

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias, President of Venezuela, who died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58, was a defining figure in Latin American politics for fifteen years, becoming almost synonymous with the popular tide that has elected and reelected left and centre-left governments across the continent in that time.

Mr. Chávez combined courage with immense conviction. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.

Yet ordinary people’s suffering under austerity measures led Mr. Chávez’s fellow officers to try again, in November 1992; they failed. Mr. Chávez, however, renamed his group the Movement of the Fifth Republic, which later merged with other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and won the 1998 presidential election on a socialist manifesto, promising millions relief from a system which had put oil wealth into luxurious lives for the rich and profits for the oil corporations.

Mr. Chávez removed corrupt military officers and started a national reform programme. Venezuela, according to the United States Department of Energy and a former CIA oil expert, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 1.36 trillion barrels, and the new president promptly nationalised the main oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), putting the profits into very effective social programmes. Carles Mutaner, Joan Benach, and Maria Paez Victor note in CounterPunch that between 2000 and 2010 social spending increased by 61 per cent or $772 billion; the country has the region’s lowest level of inequality, with a reduction in its Gini coefficient of 54 per cent. Poverty is down from 71 per cent in 1996 to 21 now, and extreme poverty is down from 40 per cent to 7.3. The programmes, or Misiones, have reached 20 million people, and 2.1 million have received senior citizens’ pensions, a sevenfold increase under Mr. Chávez.

The country has also cut food imports from 90 per cent to 30 per cent of its consumption, and has reduced child malnutrition from 7.7 per cent in 1990 to 5 today; infant mortality has declined from 25/1000 to 13 in the same period, and the country now has 58 doctors per 10,000 people (as against 18 in 1996). As many as 96 per cent of the population now have access to clean water, and with school attendance at 85 per cent, one in three Venezuelans is enrolled in free education up to and including university.

Oil royalties help. A 2001 law cut foreign companies’ share of the sale price from 84 to 70 per cent, and they now pay royalties of 16.6 per cent on Orinoco basin heavy crude; they used to pay 1 per cent. Exxon and Conoco Philips rejected these terms, as Deepak Bhojwani says in the Economic and Political Weekly (December 22, 2012), and were expelled, but Chevron stayed.

Mr. Chávez of course infuriated the mainly white elites, some of whom talked of him in racist terms, as well as the United States government and press, both of which have consistently vilified him in language bordering on the delusional. The State Department greeted the 2002 coup against Mr. Chávez by expressing solidarity with the Venezuelan people and looking forward to “working with all democratic forces in Venezuela.” The statement also said Mr. Chávez had dismissed the Vice—President and Cabinet. In fact it was the coup figurehead, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who, according to the Notable Names Database NNDB, dissolved the national assembly, disbanded the supreme court, closed the attorney—general’s and comptroller’s offices, and repealed 48 redistributive laws meant to help the poor.

Yet huge public support for Mr. Chávez meant the regime collapsed within days. The President was reinstated, but the then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hectored him to “respect the constitution”, and Greg Palast points out in The Progressive that in 2006 the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy called him a demagogue out to undermine democracy and destabilise Venezuela.

The U.S. press dutifully played its part. In September 2012, the WorldNet columnist Drew Zahn called Mr. Chávez a “socialist dictator”, when the President was about to win a fourth successive election. All those elections were of far greater probity than the respective U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004; this time Mr. Chávez won by 11 percentage points on a turnout of 80 per cent. Other U.S. media bodies have spread partial truths about the Caracas government, saying it bloats the public sector and lets the budget deficit spiral. In fact, as Mark Weisbrot notes in the Guardian, 18.4 per cent of Venezuela’s work force is in the public sector, in contrast to Norway’s 29 per cent, and its 2012 budget deficit, projected at 51.3 per cent of GDP, is lower than the European Union average of 82.5 per cent; inflation has declined too, from 27 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent now. Weisbrot also points out that the New York Times — which welcomed the coup — has taken 14 years, longer even than other American media outfits, to publish any arguments for Mr. Chávez. Carles Mutaner and colleagues comment that U.S. analysts ask what Venezuela will do when the oil runs out, but do not ask that about other oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Canada; neither do critics note that the country’s interest payments are only about 3 per cent of export earnings.

One of Washington’s problems is that, as Greg Palast recognises, Mr. Chávez kept oil revenues within Latin America; unlike Saudi Arabia, which buys U.S. treasury bills and other assets, Venezuela at one point withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve, and since 2007 has aided other Latin American countries with $36 billion, most of which has been repaid back. In effect, this supplants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and possibly also its neoliberal fellow—crusader the World Bank. Even more unpalatably for Washington, Chávismo is now a clear political programme towards a Bolivarian Revolution, which Palast calls a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with progressive income tax, public works, social security, and cheap electricity. For Bolivarians, such things are rights; they are even reminiscent of T.H. Marshall’s view that they are integral to substantive citizenship. Worst of all for U.S. regional hegemony, Mr. Chávez himself said Venezuela is no longer an oil colony, that it has regained its oil sovereignty, and that he wanted to replace the IMF with an International Humanitarian Bank based on cooperation; Uruguay already pays for Venezuelan oil with cows. Mr. Chávez wished the IMF and the World Bank would “disappear”, and his passionate concern for Latin American countries’ sovereignty made him a decisive figure in the 2011 creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac).

Mr. Chávez could be ruthless; in 2010 a military court sentenced his former key ally Raúl Isaias Baduel to just under eight years for embezzlement after a long—delayed trial, and Baduel is now banned from future political office, almost certainly because he criticised constitutional reforms which would allow a president more than two terms. Mr. Chávez was, however, no doctrinaire leader. Although a Christian, he criticised clerical collusion with the ancien régime, and did not accept the Church’s authority in politics. He also thought seriously about political economy. Bhojwani notes that he favoured a form of 21st century socialism partly derived from the work of Heinz Dieterich Steffan. For Mr. Chávez, ethics, morality, cooperativism, and associationism make for strong public economic activity and in turn protects the equality which is essential to liberty; it even includes a respect for private property.

The Venezuelan electorate have repeatedly endorsed this; in the December 2012 gubernatorial elections — the first ones in 14 years in which Mr. Chávez himself did not campaign — Mr. Chávez allies won 20 out of 23 states. After the President’s win in October, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had sent him a message saying, “Your victory is also ours.” Billions, and not only poor people, around the world would agree: Tu victoria es también la nuestra.

We can ignore history at our own peril

Dileep Padgaonkar 

We shouldn’t turn to the past to compare or contrast it with the present in a mechanical fashion. That would be worse than odious: it would be misleading. But what we can and should do is to find out if the echoes of personalities, trends and processes that shaped events at a particular stage of history reverberate in our times. Such an exercise offers us a perspective that is all too often lost in the hurly-burly of daily life.

It took Adolf Hitler a good decade - from 1919 to 1929 -to gain control of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). During this period he had made a mark in Bavaria with his fiery speeches redolent with ultra-nationalist rhetoric targeted at Marxists – an umbrella term that included communists and social democrats, trade-unionists and intellectuals, artistes and gays and, above all, Jews. But in those years, as he pointed out time and again, he was content to be the drummer boy of an array of right-wing forces. And he seldom failed to point out that his was a petty bourgeois background ‘without name, special position or connection’ and that he had ‘come up from the bottom.’ He also made much of the fact that he had abjured meat and alcohol and that his private life was scrupulously chaste – a claim that is still a matter of speculation.

For all his talk of socialism, Hitler, in order to acquire a cachet of legitimacy that he desperately needed to fulfil his dream of wielding political power, befriended landed aristocrats and industrial barons. They were wary of him at first because of his claim to champion the cause of workers, farmers, petty shop-keepers and civil servants. But by and by they came around to Hitler’s view that the crises that plunged Germany into chaos after its defeat in the First World War could not be contained without a powerful leader who would impose iron discipline to cleanse the Weimar republic of corrupt, self-serving, ineffective and hedonistic elites including, in the first place, ‘Marxist’ politicians, intellectuals and artists.

What impressed them – as it needed impressed ordinary folk – was not only Hitler’s single-minded pursuit to avenge the defeat of WWI but also his skills as a consummate actor. His oratory, as Ian Kershaw notes in his splendid two-volume biography of the Nazi leader, mesmerised his listeners. It included ‘ the delayed entry into the packed hall, the careful construction of speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and the body language.’ About the delivery of the speeches, Kershaw adds: ‘A pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key, even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed ‘rallentando’ (gradual decrease of speed) to expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all were devices carefully nurtured to maximise effect.’

Hitler himself acknowledged what drove him to such frenzy. It was the recognition that ‘masses are blind and stupid. What is stable in them is one emotion: hatred.’ The more he preached intolerance and hatred as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience ate out of his hands: hatred for rivals in his own party ranks and for political parties that stood in his way, hatred for minorities, hatred for liberals, hatred for Germany’s neighbours.  During these passages, as Kershaw writes, the crowds often interrupted him with cheers and shouts of ‘Bravo!’ followed at the end by a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil!’ 

The indoctrination of the masses, Hitler reckoned, was an imperative to realise his ambitions. He therefore laid great store by propaganda. He was the first politician in Germany to cut 50000 records of his speeches for nation-wide distribution and exploit the new technology of radio and the talkies to spread his message: something that was as effective then as the Internet is today. The message, however, has less to do with policies and programmes and more to do with rubbishing his ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ opponents on charges of acting at the behest of foreign, enemy forces who were hell-bent on striking at the roots of German nationalism.

That this approach worked is evident from the rapturous welcome he received on 24 February 1928 when, led by the stalwarts of his party, he declared that  ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown that ‘we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him.’ Five years later, such rhetoric propelled him to absolute power with consequences that need no reiteration. But should students of history overlook the fact that statements along similar lines have been voiced against minorities in our own country before and after we got rid of colonial rule? And can one ignore the fact that the search of a ‘strong man’ to solve intractable problems led to rack and ruin in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s? 

Let me repeat: speaking about this past in Europe is not to harp on the situation in India today. Our political parties know that India is far too pluralistic to succumb to the lure of atavistic emotions, especially if one individual, or one family, claims to speak on behalf of one people, one nation and one culture. But we can ignore the developments in crises-ridden Weimar Germany at our own risk. We need sound policies, not sound bytes, reforms, not recrimination, debate, not demagoguery, a statesman, not a messiah.  

A Capitalist Command Economy

With threats and bribes, Gove forces schools to accept his phoney 'freedom'

Through its academies programme, the government is creating a novelty: the first capitalist command economy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 4 March 2013 20.30 GMT

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

So much for all those treasured Tory principles. Choice, freedom, competition, austerity: as soon as they conflict with the demands of the corporate elite, they drift into the blue yonder like thistledown.

This is a story about England's schools, but it could just as well describe the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs.

All over England, schools are being obliged to become academies: supposedly autonomous bodies which are often "sponsored" (the government's euphemism for controlled) by foundations established by exceedingly rich people. The break-up of the education system in this country, like the dismantling of the NHS, reflects no widespread public demand. It is imposed, through threats, bribes and fake consultations, from on high.

The published rules looked straightforward: schools will be forced to become academies only when they are "below the floor standard ... seriously failing, or unable to improve their results". All others would be given a choice. But in many parts of the country, schools which suffer from none of these problems are being prised out of the control of elected councils and into the hands of central government and private sponsors.

For five years, until 2012, Roke primary school in Croydon, south London, was rated as "outstanding" by the government's inspection service, Ofsted. Then two temporary problems arose. Several of the senior staff retired, leading to a short period of disruption, and a computer failure caused a delay in giving the inspectors the data they wanted. The school was handed the black spot: a Notice to Improve. It worked furiously to meet the necessary standards – and it has now succeeded. But before the inspection service returned to see whether progress had been made, the governors were instructed by the Department for Education to turn it into an academy.

In September last year the Department for Education held a closed meeting with the school's governors, in which they were told (according to the chair of the governors) that if they did not immediately accept its demand, "we will get the local authority to fire you, all of you ... if the local authority don't do it, we will. And we will put in our own interim board of governors, who will do what we say". The governors were instructed not to tell the parents about the meeting and their decision.

They did as they were told, partly because they had a sponsor in mind: the local secondary school, which had been helping Roke to raise its standards. They informed the department that this was their choice. It waited until the last day of term – 12 December – then let them know that it had rejected their proposal. The sponsor would be the Harris Federation. It was founded by Lord Harris, the chairman of the retail chain Carpetright. He is a friend of David Cameron's and one of the Conservative party's biggest donors.Roke will be the Harris Federation's 21st acquisition.

The parents knew nothing of this until 7 January, when 200 of them were informed at a meeting with the governors. They rejected the Harris Federation's sponsorship almost unanimously, in favour of a partnership with the local secondary school.

The local MP appealed to the schools minister Lord Nash, who happens to be another very rich businessman, major Tory donor and sponsor of academies. He replied last month: the decision is irreversible – Harris will run the school. But there will now be a "formal consultation" about it. He did not explain what the parents would be consulted about: the colour of the lampshades? Oh, and the body which will conduct the "consultation" is ... the Harris Federation. There is no mechanism for appeal. The parents feel they have been carpet-bombed.

Similar stories are being told up and down the country. Academy brokers hired by the department roam the land like medieval tax collectors, threatening and cajoling governors and head teachers, trying to force them into liaisons with corporate sponsors. Far from targeting failing schools, they often seem to pick on good schools that run into temporary difficulties. When standards rise again, the sponsors can take credit for it, and the "turnaround" can be claimed as another success. Ofsted is widely suspected of colluding in this process.

Where threats don't work, the department resorts to bribery. Schools are being offeredsweeteners of up to £65,000 of state money to convert. Vast resources are being poured by the education secretary, Michael Gove, into the academies programme, which has exceeded its budget by £1bn over the last two years. We are being pushed towards the policy buried on page 52 of the department's white paper: "it is our ambition that academy status should be the norm for all state schools".

Is this a prelude to privatisation? A leaked memo from the department recommends "reclassifying academies to the private sector". Just as Conservative health secretaries have done to the NHS, Michael Gove has published misleading statistics about our schools, to create the impression that they are failing by international standards. They are not.

Neither truth nor principle stands in the way of this demolition programme. All the promises of the market fundamentalists – choice, competitive tendering, decentralisation and savings – are abandoned in favour of brutal and extravagant dictat. Thus the government creates a novelty: a capitalist command economy.

Ten years on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid

A decade after Saddam was overthrown, why are some progressives still loath to celebrate his demise?

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 3 March 2013

Saddam Hussein during his trial in 2006. 'I can guarantee that you will not hear much about his atrocities in the coming weeks,' writes Nick Cohen. Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

Every few months a member of the audience at a meeting I am addressing asks whether I regret supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The look in their eyes is both imploring and accusatory – "surely you must agree with me now", it seems to say. I reply that I regret much: the disbanding of the Iraqi army; a de-Ba'athification programme that became a sectarian purge of Iraq's Sunnis; the torture of Abu Ghraib; and a failure to impose security that allowed murderous sectarian gangs to kill tens of thousands.

For all that, I say, I would not restore the Ba'ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after 35 years of tyranny. If my interrogators' protesting cries allow it, I then talk about Saddam's terror state and the Ba'ath's slaughter of the "impure" Kurdish minority, accomplished in true Hitlerian fashion with poison gas.

My questioners invariably look bewildered. The notion that, even if they opposed military intervention, they had obligations to support those who suffered under a regime which can be fairly described as national socialist had never occurred to them. No one can say that time's passing has lessened their confusion.

It's 10 years since the overthrow of Saddam and 25 since he ordered the Kurdish genocide. I can guarantee that you will not hear much about Saddam's atrocities in the coming weeks. As Bayan Rahman, the Kurdish ambassador to London, said to me: "Everyone wants to remember Fallujah and no one wants to remember Halabja." Nor, I think, will you hear about the least explored legacy of the war, which continues to exert a malign influence on "liberal" foreign policy.

Iraq shocked liberals into the notion that they should stay out of the affairs of others. Of itself, this need not have been such a momentous step. A little England or isolationist policy can be justified on many occasions. There are strong arguments against spilling blood and spending treasure in other people's conflicts. The best is that you may not understand the country you send troops to – as the Nato governments who sent troops to Iraq did not. But unless you are careful you are going to have difficulties supporting the victims of oppressive regimes if you devote your energies to find reasons to keep their oppressors in power. Go too far in a defence of the status quo and the idea soon occurs to you that an oppressive regime may not be so oppressive after all.

Liberals are always the first to walk into that trap. A conservative nationalist has few problems saying: "My country comes first. If foreigners are in trouble, that's their lookout." Liberals need to dress isolationism in the language of morality. They need to feel righteous, especially when they are being selfish, and nowhere more so than in the Obama administration.

Sharp operator and orator though he is, it is hard to imagine Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton without the help Iraq gave to his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Since coming to power, he has proved the truth of Karl Marx's warning in the 18th Brumaire that "the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue".

Obama learned that George W Bush's foreign policy was a disaster, and translates each new crisis back into the language of his political childhood. If Bush was against dictatorships, Obama would "reset" relations with Russia and Iran and treat them as partners. The failure of his initiatives never deters him. Despite his efforts, Russia remains a mafia state and Iran remains a foul theocracy determined to acquire the bomb. Their peoples, naturally, are restive. Russians demonstrate against Putin's rigged elections. The Iranian green movement tries to overthrow the mullahs. But Obama and the wider tribe of western liberals have little to say to them. The example of Iraq taught them that it is dangerous to worry too much about oppression, so they treat popular revolts that are liberal in the broad sense with indifference and embarrassment.

Russians and Iranians are not alone in noticing the reactionary strain in western "progressive" thinking. The forlorn figure of John Kerry had to beg Syrian opposition leaders to meet him, only to prove to them that their initial instinct to stay away was well-founded. While Iran, Russia and Hezbollah engage in illiberal intervention on Assad's behalf, Kerry made it clear that the Obama administration is determined that there should be no liberal intervention in the form of arms for the opposition or a no-fly zone. Even David Cameron is keener on taking practical steps to prevent a catastrophe in the Levant than this, and when Syrians can receive a fairer hearing from a shire Tory than an American "progressive" you should have the wit to realise that a sickness has taken hold.

So deep has it penetrated that Arab liberals now want nothing to do with the supposed leader of the world's liberal left. In an open letter to Obama, Bahieddin Hassan of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies explained the hard struggle he and his comrades were fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood. The police murdered demonstrators, he told the president. Theocratic thugs raped women activists – "to break the political will of the victims through profound degradation". Yet, he noted, the Obama administration continued to praise the Muslim Brotherhood and patronise its liberal opponents.

Hassan had met Obama in the White House. But he had no illusions left about winning his support. All he asked was that the president's "liberal" officials bite their tongues and stop providing political cover for reactionaries. If "they cannot speak the truth about what is happening in Egypt," he said, "they should keep silent."

Shut up and stop pretending to be our friends. What an epitaph that makes for the 21st-century's first generation of "progressives". From the start, I wrote that their parochialism would lead them into double-dealing, but Ian McEwan put it better than I ever could. In his Saturday, set on the day of the great anti-war march of 2003, he has the hero, Henry Perowne, argue with his daughter. Perowne, a surgeon, has treated the victims of Saddam's torture chambers and asks her: "Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam."

"He's loathsome, it's a given," she replies.

"No, it's not," says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"