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Media Bits & Bytes - Sorry, Wrong Number Edition

Portside
Judge Declares Phone Spying a No-No; Internet of Things Coming Up Fast; Many "Things" Are Already Plugged In; Social Media Becomes a Trusted News Source; San Francisco Gets Free WiFi

America's Child Soldiers

Ann Jones TomDispatch
It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is “youth development program.”

Turning Mandela

Steve Weissman Reader Supported News
Catering to accumulated private wealth and their mythic "free market" may have helped Mandela consolidate a more peaceful transition to South Africa's justly praised multi-racial democracy. But did he have to pay such a high price? A variety of sources discuss this important question.

NAFTA at 20: State of the North American Worker

Jeff Faux Foreign Policy in Focus
Twenty years since its passage, NAFTA has displaced workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, depressed wages, weakened unions, and set the terms of the neoliberal global economy.

The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder

Alan Schwarz New York Times
“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

A Budget Deal That's Bad For America

Dean Baker CNN
The biggest issue . . . is that this is a budget that will continue to impose a drag on the economy . . . While the stimulus approved by Congress boosted growth and added between 2-3 million jobs, the steep deficit reduction of the last three years has slowed the economy, costing millions of jobs. With the housing bubble gone, we are missing close to $1 trillion in annual demand and no mechanism in the private sector that will cause it to replace this demand on its own.