Links, 8/16/11

The Steelworkers made this cool video for their Convention. I think the voiceover guy is the same one as did the Chrysler 200 Super Bowl ad.

Banana Republic of America

Public Citizen has a calculator you can use to find out how many jobs from your congressional district may be lost in the Korean Trade deal.

The GOP is gaining among poor and younger white voters. A lot of these people are the same hardest hit by the jobs crisis.

Naomi Klein compares the London riots to Argentine riots of 2001 and looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

It turns out Quantitative Easing helps the MOTUs, but not so much the little people–it mostly went to increased profits and higher prices for goods. Yet these same people who benefited from the higher profits say they can’t be taxed because it’d be unfair.

WalMart’s sales continue to be at risk because their customers keep switching down to lower priced goods.

Our War on Communism Terror Drugs African-Americans Photographers Commuters

The National Security Archive, after much work, has liberated the CIA’s official history of the Bay of Pigs. One of the big revelations is a judgment from November 15, 1960 that the plan would fail without full DOD support–a judgment never shared with Kennedy.

Yochi Dreazen says the SEALs killed in last week’s helicopter attack were pursuing low-level militants unworthy of such an elite team. Of course, one might ask why we’re fighting Taliban with SEALs and not those last 50 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, too.

Another Al Jazeera journalist has been arrested, this time by Israel. They claim the journalist, Kabul bureau chief Samer Allawi, has ties to Hamas.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms just gave promotions to the supervisors who lost a bunch of guns in Operation Fast and Furious–one of them to be Deputy Assistant in BATF’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Security, their internal watchdog. If Darrell Issa didn’t already think this was a cover-up I’m sure this would convince him.

Rahm wants to settle the civil suits arising out of Jon Burge’s torture. While he seems squeamish about letting Mayor Daley testify, settling the suits is absolutely the right thing to do–and a far cry from what Rahm’s former boss is doing in the Vance, Doe, and Padilla suits–these men were all tortured by their government and it’s just appalling to try to deny liability to save a few bucks. Athenae has more on the reporting on this story.

I once took a photography class with a guy doing an entire book of road kill–some of the images were very cool. Lucky, that was in UT and not Long Beach, since cops in that city have a policy that says they can detain photographers if their images have no aesthetic value.

SUSA shows that most people aren’t that bugged that BART shut down its tunnel network last week. (h/t Digby) Hopefully, that won’t deter the FCC from their investigation.

Power to the Power Companies

Japanese utilities, encouraged by the government (and specifically the nuclear industry watchdog), are astroturfing meetings to create the illusion of support for reopening nuclear power plants. Now the effort is backfiring.