What We Read Today 29 May 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

• Southeast Asia’s Regression From Democracy and Its Implications (Joshua Kurlantzick, Council on Foreign Relations) As you travel east from India democracy actually has a pretty spotty record with only Indonesia and Philippines having a continuous record of uninterrupted democratically elected governments. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, and Myanmar have struggled.

• Car-Hacking Goes Viral In London (William Pentland, Forbes) Nearly half of the 89,000 vehicles broken into in London in 2013 were entered using electronic gadgets. With more expensive vehicles having 50 or more low powered computers on board, access to any one of those by a hacker can allow access to others in the network including entry locks and the ignition system. The tools? Electronic devices originally developed for use by locksmiths and now available for purchase on the internet. Econintersect: Will electronic security end up costing more than the electronic devices themselves?

• What Happens after Coal? (Jenifer Weeks, Daily Climate, Scientific American) When coal-fired power plants close communities can face painful transitions: jobs are lost, sites contaminated with ash, sludge, arsenic, lead, etc. and the tax base can be reduced.

• Greg Palast: “A Memo That Confirms Every Conspiracy Theorist’s Wet Dream” (Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit) Hat tip to Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit. A November 1997 memo from Timothy Geithner (then an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) to Larry Summers (then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury) may have done more than any other single thing to prevent Larry Summers from becoming Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greg Palast was the journalist who disclosed the existence of the memo to the public in August 2013 (Larry Summers and the Secret “End-Game” Memo). The following video from September 2013 shows Luke Rudkowski interviewing Palast about the memo.

Today there are 11 articles discussed ‘behind the wall’.

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