Hunton & Williams Left Fingerprints at SEIU

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Hunton & Williams, the law firm that solicited HBGary and two other security firms to spy on Chamber of Commerce opponents, has remained silent so far about its efforts.

But it hasn’t covered its tracks. The SEIU reports that people from Hunton & Williams spent 20 hours last November–at the time when Themis was pitching H&W to use a JSOC approach to go after Chamber opponents–on the SEIU sites.

Server logs and leaked emails reveal that employees at Hunton & Williams, the principal law firm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, spent 20 hours on SEIU websites last November while partners from the firm were working with private security firms on an illegal “dirty tricks” campaign aimed at undermining the credibility of the Chamber’s political opponents, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

And of course SEIU is able to see precisely what H&W was looking at in that period: top H&W page views in 2010 include SEIU’s page on the Chamber and on big banks. People from H&W searched on individuals at SEIU as well as on SEIU’s organizing of protests outside of BoA’s General Counsel. They even searched on “hourly pay for SEIU organizers.” (Whatever that is, it’s less than Themis was going to charge for its paid trolls.)

No wonder H&W has been so quiet about their role in this campaign.

Update: This post has been edited for accuracy.

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HBGary Fees: “Dam It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta”

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One of the more interesting documents on HBGary et al’s partnership with the Chamber of Commerce details the prices they wanted to charge. Now, other emails make it clear that the Chamber balked at what the team originally proposed would be $2 million of work–the Chamber didn’t pay these rates (indeed, they probably haven’t paid for any of this).

But I was particularly interested in what HBGary’s Aaron Barr proposed charging for the work of what they called a “Social Media SME.”

Social media sme ($250 per hour) – experienced in social media link analysis. Personna development. Content management. Social media exploitation techniques.

This is a social media consultant, someone we know from the team’s plans they intended to deploy on Facebook and Twitter in false personas ultimately aiming to destroy the credibility of anti-Chamber activists.

These are just reasonably skilled trolls.

And for that, they wanted to charge $2,000 a day.

To put it in even more stark perspective, consider one ultimate target of the campaign: the men and women SEIU organizes pushing back against the anti-worker policies of the Chamber. Many of these workers–the kind of people who keep your building clean or care for you when you’re sick—make as little $12/hour or less (though the wages for nurses and other skilled medical care providers are higher).

These corporate spook assholes–in addition to targeting Americans for political activism–also think they’re worth 20 times as much as the people who care for the sick.

As the Palantir employee working with Barr on these numbers put it, “Most of all that we are the best money can buy! Dam it feels good to be a gangsta…..”

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From the ChamberPot: A Carefully Worded Nondenial Denial

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The Chamber of Commerce has responded to ThinkProgress’ reporting of the Chamber’s discussions with Hunton & Williams about an intelligence campaign against USChamberWatch and other anti-Chamber efforts. It purports to deny any connection with Hunton & Williams and HBGary.

More Baseless Attacks on the Chamber

by Tom Collamore

We’re incredulous that anyone would attempt to associate such activities with the Chamber as we’ve seen today from the Center for American Progress. The security firm referenced by ThinkProgress was not hired by the Chamber or by anyone else on the Chamber’s behalf. We have never seen the document in question nor has it ever been discussed with us.

While ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress continue to orchestrate a baseless smear campaign against the Chamber, we will continue to remain focused on promoting policies that create jobs.

But it does no such thing.

First, note what they are denying:

  1. The “security firm” referenced by TP was not hired by the Chamber or by anyone else on the Chamber’s behalf
  2. “We have never seen “the document in question”

By “security firm,” it presumably means HBGary, the one of the three security firms involved that got hacked.

Note, first of all, that they’re not denying hiring Hunton & Williams, the law firm/lobbyist which they hired last year to sue the Yes Men. They’re not even denying that they retain Hunton & Williams right now.

What they’re denying is that they–or, implicitly, Hunton & Williams, on their behalf–hired HBGary.

But as I suggested in my last post on this, they are not paying HBGary (or Hunton & Williams) for the work they’re doing right now; they’re all working on spec, to get the business (business which I’m guessing they’re not going to get).

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The Homes Chuck Schumer Didn’t Save

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DDay and Zach Carter both reported yesterday on the NY Fed’s conclusion that the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill had pushed an extra 200,000 people into foreclosure. Here’s Zach:

Economists at the New York Federal Reserve have concluded that a controversial 2005 law backed by banks and credit card companies pushed more than 200,000 people into foreclosure and exacerbated the subprime mortgage crisis.

[snip]

In a paper released Tuesday, New York Fed researchers Donald P. Morgan, Benjamin Iverson and Matthew Botsch determined that the law sparked about 116,000 additional subprime mortgage foreclosures a year after going into effect.What’s more, they note, these foreclosures pushed home prices down, which may have lead to additional foreclosures. When the value of a home drops below what a borrower owes on the mortgage, it becomes nearly impossible to get out of the loan by selling the house or refinancing, making foreclosure more likely if they become unable to afford the monthly payment.

“By making it harder for borrowers to avoid paying credit card debt, [the 2005 bankruptcy law] made it more difficult for them to pay their mortgages, so foreclosure rates rose,” the economists wrote.

Which I guess means it’s time again to recall what Chuck Schumer responded to me on January 28, 2008, when I pointed out that the bankruptcy bill was going to exacerbate the financial crisis that was about to hit. Schumer, Byron Dorgan, and Sherrod Brown all agreed the law was a problem. (Schumer and Dorgan voted against the bill, though Debbie Stabenow, pictured in my post, voted for it.) But, Schumer said, we couldn’t just fix the obvious problems with it in 2008 because (you guessed it) we needed a bigger majority.

Senator Schumer explained that he didn’t want to pick around the edges, he wanted to make a real fix, and we’re not going to be able to do that until we get a bigger majority.

That was, of course, in 2008. That November, the Democrats would win solid majorities in both houses, as big a majority as you’re ever going to get. Yet the Democrats never found time to get around to fixing the Bankruptcy bill.

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“Made in America” in the 21st Century

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In Trash Talk, bmaz wrote about a “lunchpail” Superbowl, pitting two teams named after people who make things against each other: the Steelworkers versus the Meatpackers. And the game ended appropriately, with a team owned by the people of a small city, having gone to a monstrous stadium as much a tribute to one arrogant man as it is a sports venue, taking home the trophy named after the man who put their city on the map. We can rest easy as Jerry Jones and the other greedy bastards threaten to lock out their players, knowing that the spirit of the game will be in the hands of the people of Green Bay.

All of which was the perfect background for this ad, as much a tribute to a city and a way of life our elites would like us to forget as it is an ad for a car. The visuals are amazing–not just the great monuments of Detroit, but (at :16) the juxtaposition of the disaster porn that our media have lapped up in the last couple of years–“a town that’s been to hell and back”–with the American flag–“the finer things in life.” (It was perhaps a better tribute to our national anthem than the one Christina Aguilera gave.) And, then, with Joe Louis’ fist punctuating the image, followed quickly by Diego Rivera’s tribute to industry, the ad laid out its creed in a working man’s voice.

You see, it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. Add hard work and conviction and the know-how that runs generations deep in every last one of us. That’s who we are. That’s our story.

All culminating in a synthesis of the grit of Eminem and the uplift of gospel.

Yeah, there’s an irony at the heart of the ad: as the tagline “Imported from Detroit” suggests. We’ve been sold to the highest–the only–bidder, for scraps. And it took the genius of a metrosexual Canadian-Italian to reclaim the dignity of America’s industrial base.

Made in America isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Back in the 70s, as our industries were first struggling against the challenges of globalization, the unions had a campaign–Made in America–that appealed to the pride and perhaps parochialism of average Americans as reason enough to buy a product.

As the last few decades have shown, it turns out that Made in America wasn’t reason enough.

This ad, I think, tries to reclaim that idea, to appeal to the dignity of the men and women in flyover country so often maligned by “experts” who know little about what they write.

Now, it’s probably not the [story] you’ve been reading in papers, the one being written by folks who’ve never even been here and don’t know what we’re capable of.

Who knows if the ad will work? Who knows whether it’ll sell cars; who knows whether it’ll convince a region barely regaining confidence after a terrible trauma to believe?

But whatever the cynical calculations behind this ad, whatever the value of the Chrysler 200, someone needed to tell this story.

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Alan Simpson: America Is a Cow w/300M Tits. Plus, 10M MOTUs?

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Alan Simpson claims he misspoke back in August when he called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

He explains,

“I meant to say that America was a milk cow with 300 million teats, and not just Social Security.”

Oh. Okay. So Social Security is not the only way we suck at our nation’s teat, huh? Since he’s pushing to cut defense along with Social Security, I guess he’s arguing that our servicemen and women are just a bunch of freeloaders.

But I’m curious.

Back in August, Simpson said Social Security had 310 million tits–presumably counting every American since every American participates in Social Security. His revised statement says America has just 300 million tits.

So where’d the other 10 million tit-sucking Americans go?

My guess? Simpson doesn’t want to hurt the fee fees of any of the MOTUs who mythologize their own accomplishments even while ignoring that they are themselves the chief teat-suckers.

So there you have Alan Simpson’s census of America. 300 million of us are deadbeat teat-suckers. And the MOTUs? I guess they are the poor cow.

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Clinton’s Blowjob: 5 Times More Important than the Wall Street Crash

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Honest, I’m posting this video not for obvious affinities I have for Dylan Ratigan’s argument. But mostly because of the obvious suggestion, based on the resources we dedicate to investigating them, that Clinton’s blowjob was five times more dangerous for our country than the crash of our entire financial system.

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“No One Could Have Predicted the Housing Bubble Middle East Status Quo Would Crash”

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The WSJ has a fascinating narrative of how both the US and Mubarak’s government were utterly unprepared for a democratic revolution in Egypt. From a meeting two months ago at which Egypt again refused democratic reforms, after which Hillary declared Egypt to be the “cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond,” to a meeting on Monday when when a Middle East expert asked Obama’s National Security Council, “Please tell me you have contingencies in case Mubarak’s regime collapses” (the NSC said they did not), our government’s certainty that it could depend on the status quo generally and Egypt specifically has utterly collapsed.

And it was not just the government generally; predictably, the intelligence services paid to anticipate such events had no idea it would happen, either. Just one week ago, the new head of Israel’s military intelligence, Major General Aviv Kochavi, echoed Clinton’s earlier certitude that Egyptian would remain stable.

…on January 25, the day when massive protests first erupted across Egypt, Major General Aviv Kochavi, newly appointed head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, told a Knesset committee that “there are no doubts about the stability of the regime in Egypt”…

And while he’s predictably using the observation to demagogue, Crazy Pete Hoekstra ascribes the surprise to same kind of group think that has long plagued our intelligence analysis.

We were blind sided on Egypt. Problem is group think and risk aversion in state/intel community!

Part of the problem may be that US intelligence services rely more on the Egyptian government than on talking to opposition figures directly.

For years, the US Central Intelligence Agency has worked closely with the Egyptian security establishment in the contentious context of Washington’s “war on terrorism”. But it is unlikely that the CIA has been as meticulous in developing trustworthy contacts inside Egypt’s fragmented but dynamic and energized Egyptian opposition. The latter, whether religious or secular, is naturally distrustful of American officials, whom it sees as longtime supporters of the dictatorial rule of President Mubarak, in the interests of what US Vice President Joe Biden has called “geopolitical interests in the region”.

But that’s definitely not the whole of the problem. As Wikileaks revealed, we know our government met with a youth activist in 2008, as well as other NGOs. Yet embassy officials deemed that activist’s assessment that the opposition would have to replace Hosni Mubarak with a parliamentary government before the 2011 elections to be “highly unrealistic, and [] not supported by the mainstream opposition.” (Dismissing the activist’s claims so easily undoubtedly also made it easier to dismiss the suggestion that the US should pressure Mubarak “by threatening to reveal information about GOE officials’ alleged ‘illegal’ off-shore bank accounts.”)

It appears, then, that the US has met with some of these activists; it just apparently dismissed them as a bunch of naive youth.

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The $900 Million Headline Versus Our Afghan Policy Backing a Vertically Integrated Criminal Enterprise

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The NYT has one of the most stunning headlines of the day.

Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million

The story tells a story of Afghanistan’s own “Too Big to Fail” problem that offers opaque descriptions of precisely what caused the problem, but waits until the 17th and 18th paragraph to explain the real problem with the bank.

Kabul Bank has extensive links to senior people in the Afghan government. In addition to Mahmoud Karzai, other shareholders included Haseen Fahim, the brother of the first vice president, and several associates of the family from the north of Afghanistan. Afghan officials said the bank poured millions into President Karzai’s election campaign.

It is the loans and personal grants made by the bank to powerful people, including government ministers, that could prove the most explosive, Western and Afghan officials said. “If people who are thought to be clean and who were held up as ‘good’ by Western countries suddenly are caught with their fingers in the till, it will cause questions from donors,” said a Western official in Kabul. “They will say, ‘Why are we here?’ ”

I wondered why Dexter Filkins, who has done so much on Afghan corruption, focused on the missing money rather than the problem of corruption. But then I remembered–after I saw Alissa Rubin and James Risen on the byline–that Filkins moved to the New Yorker earlier this month.

As it turns out, Filkins has his own version of the story. The explanation of the same disappearing hundreds of millions Filkins offers in an article 3.5 times longer than the NYT’s already long 1800 words is that–as one of Filkins’ sources explains, the Afghan government is a “vertically integrated criminal enterprise.”

Much of the money disappeared (Filkins explicitly states what the NYT just suggests) in outright bribes to the key members of Hamid Karzai’s administration.

The evidence, according to American officials close to the inquiry [into the collapse of the Kabul Bank], appears to implicate dozens of Afghan officials and businessmen, many of them, like [Karzai’s finance minister and campaign treasurer, Omar] Zakhilwal, among Karzai’s closest advisers, with regulatory responsibilities over the Afghan financial system. Among the others are Afghans regarded by American officials as among the most capable in Karzai’s government: Farouk Wardak, the Minister of Education; Yunus Qanooni, the speaker of the Afghan parliament; and Haneef Atmar, the former Minister of the Interior.

[snip]

“Just straight bribes,” a senior NATO officer said of the payments to Afghan officials.

Much of that bribe money–perhaps as much as $14 million–came in response to Hamid Karzai’s request for campaign donations and went to pay for his badly discredited 2009 re-election.

Now American officials say that Zakhilwal was one of dozens of Afghan leaders and businessmen who, collectively, accepted tens of millions of dollars in gifts and bribes—some sources say as much as a hundred million dollars—from executives at Kabul Bank.

[snip]

According to several current and former Afghan officials, during the 2009 campaign Kabul Bank and Karzai’s reëlection machine became nearly interchangeable. Afghans who served in Karzai’s government say the more likely contribution from Kabul Bank was between eight and fourteen million dollars—and that it kept on doling out money even after the election, which Karzai finally won, in November, 2009. At the time, election monitors declared that about a million ballots cast for Karzai were fraudulent.

More troubling still is Filkins’ report that some of this money is being funneled to the Taliban.

At Kabul Bank, according to a Western official familiar with the investigation, records show that Ruhullah, the head of a private security company and an ally of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President’s half brother, transferred money into accounts believed to be controlled by the Taliban.

At the same time, Filkins explains here as he has in the past, this corruption is what drives Afghans to support the Taliban.

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Our Industrial Policy Needs to Do More than Arm Dictators

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Spencer has a useful catalog of all the war toys Egypt buys with our military aid.

Whatever Egypt’s military does next, chances are they’ll do it with American weapons.Al-Jazeera showed M1A1 Abrams tanks carrying Egyptian soldiers through Cairo in what its correspondents called “a show of force.” Those iconic American tanks have been co-produced in Egypt since 1988; the Egyptians have about 1000 of them. As was endlessly re-tweeted, canisters containing tear gas that the police used on protesters — before the hated police melted away over the weekend — had “Made in America” stamped on them. (Our colleagues at Ars Technica take a look at what’s inside the Pennsylvania-manufactured tear gas.)

On Sunday, fighter jets flew low over a Cairo crowd, turning on their afterburners to deafen their audience. Most likely they were part of Egypt’s fleet of 220 F-16s.

Most of the $1.3 billion that the U.S. annually provides to Egypt in military aid goes for weaponry to defend Egypt against foreign assault, like Patriot air-defense missiles, Multiple Launch Rocket System rocket pods and TOW anti-armor missiles. That’s not particularly relevant for crowd control against protesters.

He’s right: the spectacular images of the Egyptian military showing its presence amid protesters serves to highlight the war toys at the heart of our influence with the Egyptian military, and therefore at the heart of our relationship with Egypt. No more spectacular, of course, than the video from al Jazeera, above, showing US-made F-16s buzzing thousands of protesters in Tahrir (Liberation) Square.

Meanwhile, in far less spectacular news, today Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Energy Secretary Steven Chu will quietly be rolling out the White House’s effort to “Startup America,” which is either an effort to focus an investment on jobs or a cynical election year stunt.

The contrast, though, is instructive.

We have long publicly forsworn anything that resembles an industrial policy here in the US. But we actually do have an industrial policy; it’s called the Military Industrial Complex (recently enhanced with the Intelligence Industrial Complex). While we refuse, as a country, to invest in technologies and jobs in manufacturing peaceful goods, an enthusiasm for investing unlimited amounts in military technology (the jobs are a critical side benefit) is almost a requirement among our elected leaders.

Not only do those toys provide desperately needed jobs around the country. Not only do these toys allow us to extend our empire around the world. But just as critically, they serve a critical role in maintaining our hegemony. We give millions and (in the case of Egypt) billions in aid to friendly leaders, and they turn around and spend it on our war toys. Many of these friendly leaders are dictators that use the toys as a veiled threat and occasionally a blunt instrument to sustain their own power.

Which leads to uncomfortable moments like these, where a dictator’s last gasp consists of unleashing American war toys against his own people.

While the juxtaposition of those F-16s buzzing the brave protesters with this latest attempt to try to solve the jobs crisis in the US is just an odd coincidence, it needs to be instructive as the Administration tries to “Startup America.” Not only do we need a more proactive jobs policy, an investment in goods that someone besides friendly dictators will want to buy. But if we don’t do that–if we don’t find something to make that won’t inevitably end up playing a starring role in a dictator’s brutality–then we’re going to have a lot more problems down the road.

Obama may really believe that we will “Win the Future” by out-innovating, out-building, and out-educating our competitors. Good. Because it’s increasingly clear the way to “Win the Future” is not by brutalizing other countries’ mobs.

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