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Yet even if one agrees that a country has a right to restrict immigration, it does not follow that it ought to do so. Mr Legrain argues that it is not just in the global interest to have free migration, but also in that of recipient countries. A standard “gains from trade” analysis would suggest that this should be true. But if one is to argue for free movement of labour on economic grounds one needs a sense of the likely consequences. Analyses of free migration in the presence of huge real wage differentials suggest that we would end up with vast informal sectors and shanty towns. That is what happens within poor countries. Why should it not happen across the globe? I cannot see how one would persuade a host population that this outcome would be in their interests.

You can hear the change in what prominent would-be centrists are saying. In the 1990s, when neoliberalism was the centre, the line was: we must slash middle-class entitlements in order to be more competitive in the global free market. Now the line is: in order to save free-market globalism from populists preying on middle-class economic anxieties, we must expand the middle-class welfare state.The winners – at least for now – are welfare state liberals such as old-fashioned New Dealers in the US and their equivalents in other countries. The position of the original “third way” of 1932-68 always made sense. Middle-class social insurance programmes, by guaranteeing economic security, reduce the appeal of populism, socialism and other kinds of ­radical statism, and make possible broad political support for open and competitive national and global markets. You will hear much more of this line as politicians rush to occupy the new centre in the years ahead.

it should be apparent to all of us that sometimes senior executives, including the chairman, do not fully understand the businesses in which the company is involved. The financial instruments now causing such turmoil were not properly priced for their inherent risk and managers were unaware of the integral problems with these instruments. Much of this was made possible by the advanced technology used to devise and distribute these instruments.

As the man who oversees about $20 billion of fixed-income investments at American Century Investments, we revisited with Keegan as part of today’s The Game column on the recurring foibles of Wall Street. Deal Journal: You were right back in April. You called it all. Why does Wall Street keep messing up? Jim Keegan: It’s too profitable to stop. It’s too profitable at the individual level, so the individuals interests are not necessarily aligned with the company’s interest. Pay me now and you pay for it later. There is no clawback. Employees can walk away with hundreds and tens of millions of dollars. And someone else will hire them to do it again.

Transformational Government, dressed in the language of consumerism, is what NO2ID calls “the database state” – management of citizens’ lives through centralised computer systems; pooling and cross-referencing information about people gathered on any pretext for any purpose, amounting to mass surveillance. Once your relations with the state preserved your privacy, being limited to relationships with bodies that were separate from each other. A single department was powerful, but it did not judge you on your whole life. Transformational Government changes that. You will have a single permanent record, and your identity managed (or determined) by the state. That will be held together by cross-referencing databases – which is what a National Identity Register is needed for. ‘ID cards’ are the concrete expression of this register, but strictly speaking are not necessary: numbering you and making constant reference to the central file will do.

Nor did they anticipate that this quiet man would be able to boost his maverick image by skilfully playing on the public's distrust of the media

As Ségolène Royal says: in her "participative democracy" all citizens are experts.

Yet, one day, reality will take its revenge on reality shows.

Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values:

Most Europeans wouldn't know it, but 400 citizens from across the EU are gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels this weekend to participate in Tomorrow's Europe, a Deliberative Poll exercise in the parliamentary chamber. A prepoll of a larger random sample of Europeans has already taken place, but this group will answer some big questions about the future of Europe. It's a massive logistical undertaken by Jacques Delors' pro-EU Notre Europe think-tank with the blessing of the European Union itself. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten little media attention. I'm getting information from the dLiberation blog at openDemocracy. Only a handful of bloggers in Europe have mentioned it this week.

Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 

We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.

who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.

Laura Kyrke-Smith

upposedly, the Kane & Lynch debacle was settled weeks ago, but it’s very possible that Eidos recently decided to pull future ad campaigns, which definitely could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for the bigwigs at CNET. Like it or not, the “professional” sites, whose opinions seemingly matter most, battle with the balance of journalistic integrity and advertising relationships day-in and day-out. And it should come as no surprise that it’s the “community” sites that are much more resistant to these influences because advertisers aren’t flocking to them as frequently.

I remember a story from an old college professor of mine who works for Time Inc.: Time magazine published an article that slightly badmouthed one of IBM’s computers, which resulted in the computer giant in pulling its advertising for the following three years. Whether or not the writer was fired, I don’t know.