Susie linked to this clip.

And while she’s right to point to all the evidence that L’il Luke Russert is an ignorant toad about how many jobs Obama’s trade deals will send overseas, I’m more amazed by his arrogant response to being asked about slave and dead labor.

Here’s my take on the exchange, starting from where Dylan Ratigan first interrupts L’il Luke to call him on the claim trade deals will create jobs.

L’il Luke [reciting a script]: A few things where they could find common ground are free trade agreements that are pending with South Korea and Colombia and Panama. It’s unclear whether or not [overtalk]

Ratigan: Hold on, hold on.

[Luke adopts self-satisfied smile]

Ratigan: Are you referencing those free trade deals?

L’il Luke: I am referencing the free trade deals.

Ratigan: I mean, come on now Luke, let’s talk about that for a second.

[Luke bites his lips]

That Panama deal’s nothing but a bank secrecy haven–

[Luke bursts out laughing]

That’s basically what that Panama deal is.

[Luke finally manages to look serious]

The South Korean deal is a way to hire North Korean slaves to make South Korean products so that we can refund the North Korean government–

[Luke has lost it again, openly laughing]

–After giving them sanctions, I call that the “let’s give them a nuke anyway plan,”

[Luke looking down, trying to compose himself, looks up again, biting his lips]

You know, what are we talking about? [Relents]

I’m giving you a hard time.

L’il Luke: No, I know you are. [Laughs] You threw me off my game there a little bit.

Ratigan: Tell me the truth, Luke.

L’il Luke: Aw look, —

Ratigan: When they discuss the South Korean trade agreement around Congress, do they refer to it as “hey let’s give North Korea a nucl- anyway plan?”

L’il Luke [finally adopting his serious pundit face]: No they do not.

Ratigan: They don’t?

L’il Luke: They say it’s a job creator.

Ratigan: For who? For North Korean slaves?

L’il Luke: For the United States, no, they say for the United States. They say it’s a job creator, can immediately [create] thousands and thousands of jobs.

[finally finding comfort in the Village script again, but trying to move on]

You also heard today from President Obama–

Ratigan: How?

L’il Luke [completely sheepish look]: The [??] of free trade, you take the tariffs away, people, you know, build things here,

Ratigan: No, no no. But the tariffs are away, and if I’m exploiting the ability to access a rigged Chinese currency system and North Korean slave labor,

[L’il Luke furrows his brow slightly, affects to look concerned, bites his lips again, shifts his head]

Seems interesting.

L’il Luke: It does.

Ratigan: My Colombian, the Colombian deal’s my favorite. That’s a big job creator.

[L’il Luke looks worried. He hasn’t studied for this test.]

Whaddya say we do a deal with the only country in the world that openly murders all labor organizers–

[L’il Luke has just decided he’s not having fun anymore; juts out chin, peeved now that Dylan is making him play this game]

–to ensure that they will never ask for a raise ever.

L’il Luke [apparently grasping on something he read in college or heard at a cocktail wienie fest]: Well, Colombia, though, in all fairness, Colombia has had massive strides in improvement in terms of their security. I mean, you’re bringing up something that George Miller–

Ratigan: But I’m saying the murder rate of union organizers on a per capita–

[Juts out chin, affects his serious look]

L’il Luke: Well, that’s why there’s Democratic opposition in the House for it right now and they have to figure out that, you know, technicality there.

“That, you know, technicality.” That Democrats think maybe it’s a bad idea to open into unfettered competition with a country that kills labor organizers. But that slave labor in Korea, that cheap labor in China? That–that sounds interesting.

L’il Luke is only where he is because Daddy combined his down to earth Buffalo roots with actual knowledge and–in the years before his death–access, access, access.

But it’s L’il Luke’s smugness that makes me want to vomit. Ratigan is trying to talk about how working people die over this shit. And Luke, shaken for the moment off his tight Village script, not only doesn’t have the knowledge to engage with Ratigan, but doesn’t even have the respect for the subject to avoid laughing openly.

What do you think of your kid, now, Timmeh Russert? Laughing at the idea of slaves and dead workers?

Our Dying Economy

The National Employment Law Project has a report showing how this Depression is hollowing out middle class jobs, with 8.4% of all middle wage jobs gone (and that’s on top of a process that had already started before the Depression). One profession that has shown growth among middle wage jobs, though, is “bailiffs, correctional officers, and jailers”–they make up over 81,000 of the news jobs. Sarah Jaffe has more. Meanwhile, ALEC is pushing policies that allow private prisons to employ inmates at less than prevailing wages, effectively undercutting real businesses.

The DC Circuit has shot down an SEC rule that would make it easier to get dissident Directors in corporate board elections. To back it’s decision, the panel seems to have badly cherry-picked studies to claim that giving stockholders greater say in corporate governance is a bad thing.

Obama missed an opportunity to blame Republicans for letting Delta’s union-busting get in the way of FAA reauthorization–and instead losing billions in the process. Instead, he blamed Congress generally.

Reuters reports on reverse mergers, in which companies use dormant shell companies to get listed on US exchanges, while avoiding the scrutiny an IPO would require. Of 122 Chinese companies that used reverse mergers to list on US exchanges, they have lost $18 billion in market capitalization.

Our Dying Empire

David Axe reports that the arms we’re giving to African troops to fight al-Shabaab in Somalia ending up in al-Shabaab’s hands; the troops are selling the weapons because their paychecks are withheld from them.

Joshua Foust looks at how a shift of aid–things like USAID–to the Defense budget just as we start talking about cutting big money from national security puts such aid at risk. Meanwhile, Nancy Youssef catches the Republicans doling out an extra $50 billion to DOD.

In 2009, USA Today reported that retired officers were getting up to $330/hour to consult with DOD on things like weapon systems as part of a mentor system. So DOD passed rules that required those retirees to reveal their ties to defense contractors. The result? Most of the participants–all but 20 of the 158 mentors in the program when they first identified this gravy train in 2009–have left the program. (h/t POGO) No wonder Republicans are working so hard to prevent Obama from passing an Executive Order requiring transparency on other contracting–because transparency actually works.

Justice and Injustice

Radley Balko writes about Corey Maye’s return home after being released from death row.

Rummy’s effort to claim qualified immunity in a suit a US citizen filed for the abuse he was subjected to at Camp Cropper has failed. Here’s the opinion.

Ron Wyden says he will block the Intelligence Authorizaiton bill over FISA changes and transparency. I hope he keeps his word.

In one of my posts on drones, I noted that we have had more deaths this year in AL (238) and MO (159) because of extreme tornadoes the severity of which is probably at least due partly to climate change than we have from terrorism.

But there’s something else that seems to have happened.

Meteor Blades has a post cataloging how many more people are relying on food stamps this month–45.8 million, or close to 15% of the country. He links to the state-level data, which reveals  a huge spike in AL’s use of food stamps. In April 2011, 868,813 Alambamans used food stamps–a worse than average but not abysmal 18% of its population. In May, that number spiked to 1,762,481, over 37% of the population, almost 900,000 new people getting food stamps.

Incidentally, the only people from AL’s congressional delegation to vote no on the debt ceiling vote this week–Martha Robey, Mo Brooks, Richard Shelby, and Jeff Sessions–did so from the right.

Assuming these numbers are right (the numbers reported for new applicants–100,000 from hard-hit Jefferson County–seem to support them), there’s still a good reason why so many Alabamans are relying on federal aid to feed themselves: the devastating tornadoes in April. In response, the state rolled out special sign-up processes, turning around applications in three days time. Though, at least from some quarters, there was skepticism about whether people were applying because of the tornado, or more generalized need.

At the very least, the reliance of over a third of Alabamans on food stamps, half of them in response to the tornadoes, suggests one more cost from this crazy weather.

But it will be interesting to see what happens to these numbers in subsequent months. Will these numbers return to “normal,” reflecting an appropriate and short term response to a disaster (even if it is one Alabama’s legislators all refuse to pay for)? Or are we seeing a poor state come to rely on the government for bare necessities once it becomes easy to apply?

Okay, okay, I should have used a pun on “Echelon” for my title here, not “Carnivore.” After all, it was that earlier SigInt program that the US and its Anglophone partners used to steal industrial secrets in the 1990s.

The point being that, while I am concerned by McAfee’s description of the extent of the data theft carried out in the last six years using a hack it calls Shady RAT, I am also cognizant that the US has used equivalent tactics to steal intellectual property in the past and present.

What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.

What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth in a suddenly more competitive landscape and the loss of jobs in industries that lose out to unscrupulous competitors in another part of the world, not to mention the national security impact of the loss of sensitive intelligence or defense information.

 

McAfee provides all the clues to make it clear China is behind these hacks–though it never says so explicitly.

The interest in the information held at the Asian and Western national Olympic Committees, as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency in the lead-up and immediate follow-up to the 2008 Olympics was particularly intriguing and potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions, because there is likely no commercial benefit to be earned from such hacks. The presence of political non-profits, such as the a private western organization focused on promotion of democracy around the globe or U.S. national security think tank is also quite illuminating. Hacking the United Nations or the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat is also not likely a motivation of a group interested only in economic gains.

The report is perhaps most interesting because of some of the entities–along with the defense contractors and US and other government agencies–described as targets of this hack: a number of construction companies (which could include companies like KBR), real estate firms, various state and county governments, two think tanks, and the NY and Hong Kong offices of a US media company. These are where the secrets China wants to steal are kept.

The problem, of course, is that our intellectual property is one of the few advantages the US has left. Our exports are increasingly limited to things that rely on legally enforcing intellectual property to retain its value: drugs, movies and music, software, GMO ag. Which sort of makes China’s ability to sit undetected in the servers of these kinds of organizations for up to 28 months a bit of a problem.

Good thing the FBI is busy going after hacktavists and whistleblowers instead.

I suggested the other day that Mark Warner’s position on the Gang of Six might bode poorly for SuperCongress being anything but a pre-gamed attack on Social Security and Medicare.

Well, it turns out he has already been running around to the press campaigning for the job, with a conference call and an appearance on Fox.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) would “love” to serve on the new, bicameral committee established by the debt-limit deal passed Tuesday by the Senate.

“My fear is that this could be made of a group that could be the more ideologically rigid in both parties, and I’m not sure that gets us to where we need to be,” Warner said in a conference call Monday, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

[snip]

Warner said Tuesday on Fox News Channel that the new committee needs to address the two major components missing from the debt-limit deal: entitlements and tax reforms.

“The fact that I’m willing to do that probably means that I’m not actually going to get on the committee,” he said. “Chances are that there will be enormous pressure on leadership in both parties to put members that might not be willing to be as bold.”

Of the three Democrats who were on the Gang of Six–Warner, Durbin, and Conrad–Warner is most excited about cutting Social Security. Plus he’s gunning for things like the home mortgage deduction. And all that while he talks “tax reform,” not increased taxes on people, like him, who have far more than they’ll ever need.

Sure, it’s bold for someone who is worth $200 million to ask seniors and struggling families to make sacrifices to balance the budget.

But that doesn’t mean it’s smart.

Justice and Injustice

Amanda Terkel describes how the state-level budget cuts are putting courts and justice out of the reach of Americans.

Dahlia Lithwick transcribes highlights of the remarkable panel she moderated over the weekend.

The Whistleblower–the trailer for which is above–opens on Friday. Nick Schwellenbach provides background on the story it tells–how DOD Contractor Dyncorp was involved in human trafficking–here.

The other day I noted that former Director of ISOO, Bill Leonard, wanted to file a complaint against those in NSA who improperly classified one of the documents charged in the Thomas Drake case. about which he said, “I’ve never seen a more deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document.” Leonard received permission and has now submitted that complaint. In related news, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Raddack have an op-ed on the Obama Administration’s war on whistleblowers.

Surveillance Nation

The Obama Administration says the guidelines it uses to decide what–in addition to a Muslim’s faith–gets them targeted for FBI infiltration is a state secret. That’s an excellent way to protect the First Amendment, don’t you think?

Not only did Bill Nelson join Republicans in blocking more reporting on FISA, but the entire Intelligence Committee took a voice vote to reject Mark Udall and Ron Wyden’s attempt to make James Clapper tell us they are using our phones to track us.

Josh Gerstein reported last week that TSA was going to roll out Israeli-style behavioral screening at airports. It looks like they’re rolling it out at Boston. The idea in principle might be great (it sure beats stripping granny of her adult diaper); but no one is going to pay TSA workers enough to do this competently, I’m betting. Meanwhile, scanner machines introduced for airport security in Australia are set off by sweaty armpits.

The US had to relax its guidance on al-Shabaab so that humanitarian groups could work with the terrorist organization to get relief to famine victims. They really ought to just rewrite the law to get rid of the stupid Holder v. Humanitarian Law interpretation.

Jeff Kaye has a story cataloging the range of uses of water in torture by DOD. Some of these pretty clearly fall into descriptions of water dousing (which DOD wasn’t authorized to use, either; the others are clearly attempts to simulate drowning, like waterboarding). But I think that shows that the ways the government was stretching whatever guidance it had.

As I noted this morning, Obama plans to “pivot to jobs” by creating them in Korea. (This video came from his statement today after the deficit ceiling bill got through.)

But his call on Congress to pass trade deals with Korea, Panama, and Colombia just got even more cynical.

First, because he says these deals will “help displaced workers looking for new jobs.” That word–displaced–is often used to refer to those who have lost their manufacturing jobs because they got sent to, say, Mexico in an earlier trade deal. “Displaced” usually refers to just the kind of people devastated by these trade deals. It seems Obama is pretending that new trade deals will create jobs for the people who lost their jobs because of earlier trade deals. But of course, last we heard, the folks who just successfully held our economy hostage were refusing to pass these trade deals with Trade Adjustment Assistance attached. In other words, chances are good that if these trade deals pass, they’ll pass with nothing to help those who are displaced because of it.

And note Obama’s promise to export “products stamped, ‘Made in America’.” Aside from the fact that a lot of what we’ll be exporting will be American-style fraudulent finance, not manufactured goods, his use of the term is all the more cynical given the likely reason he used it: because of the polling showing near unanimity that the US should make things again–like the 94% of Americans polled who think creating manufacturing jobs here in America is important.That is, he’s trying to co-opt the almost complete opposition to this policy–which almost certainly wouldn’t create any new manufacturing jobs here in the US–as a way to try to claim that trade deals that will result in a net loss of jobs will instead create them.

The headline news about Mitt Romney’s new advisory committee of 63 lawyers is that Robert Bork is co-chairing it.

But even more troubling is that he has named two of the lawyers that okayed torture–Steven Bradbury and Tim Flanigan–to it.

Bradbury, of course, wrote the Combined Torture memo, which found, in part, that waterboarding someone 183 times in a month does not shock the conscience.

He also told DOD it could do whatever it wanted, so long as it called it “Appendix M.” Bradbury failed to mention that memo from Congress, too, when they asked for a list of all the torture memos he had been involved in.

Bradbury would have been investigated over the memos he wrote, had Michael Mukasey not intervened.

Flanigan was one of the three lawyers–along with David Addington and Alberto Gonzales–who told John Yoo to turn the Torture Memo into a “Get Out of Jail Free” card by saying that if the Commander-in-Chief ordered torture, then it couldn’t be prosecuted.

Now, why would Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney appoint two men who called torture legal to his Justice Advisory Committee?

A number of liberals are sitting around today puzzling through the deal that just happened yesterday. And one thing they’re asking is, “how will Obama pivot to jobs?” One of the many lame excuses the White House has offered for the urgency of this deal, after all, is that by clearing it off the table, it’ll allow the Administration to finally address jobs.

If the debt deal passed yesterday drastically cuts discretionary funding, they note, then there will be no funding for investments in jobs.

But that ignores one thing: Obama has told us how he plans to “pivot to jobs:” he plans to focus his attention on three trade deals–with Panama, Colombia, and Korea–as a central part of his program to address jobs.

Nevermind that these trade deals will send jobs overseas. Nevermind that these trade deals will result in fewer jobs.

Obama plans to, nevertheless, claim he wants these policies in the name of jobs.

Update: Obama made these comments on July 8, in response to last month’s crappy jobs report.

In the middle of the debt ceiling debate yesterday, Naomi Klein tweeted a link to this article, describing how the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is eroding democratic and labor rights.

The economic, and democratic, crisis in Europe raises questions. Why were policies that were bound to fail adopted and applied with exceptional ferocity in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece? Are those responsible for pursuing these policies mad, doubling the dose every time their medicine predictably fails to work? How is it that in a democratic system, the people forced to accept cuts and austerity simply replace one failed government with another just as dedicated to the same shock treatment? Is there any alternative?

The answer to the first two questions is clear, once we forget the propaganda about the “public interest”, Europe’s “shared values” and being “all in this together”. The policies are rational and on the whole are achieving their objective. But that objective is not to end the economic and financial crisis but to reap its rich rewards.

[snip]

The troika (European Commission, ECB and IMF) has decided to improve the mechanisms designed to favour capital at the expense of labour, by adding coercion, blackmail and ultimatum. States bled by their over-generous efforts to rescue the banks, and begging for loans to balance their monthly accounts, are told to choose between a market-led clean-up and bankruptcy. A swathe of Europe, where the dictatorships of António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco and the Greek colonels ended, has been reduced to the rank of a protectorate run by Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington, the main aim being to defend the financial sector.

After which, we had this exchange:

Me: this entire year must feel like an awkward, sickening, “I told you so” for you.

Klein: if i had a magic riot wand, i would wave it now. #debtdeal

Klein: you did ask me how i felt earlier…

Because, after all, it’s not just in Europe where debt is being used as a cudgel to roll back workers’ and democratic rights. The big news of yesterday’s debt deal–one the Administration is crowing about–is an entity that will sidestep democratic processes so as to make it possible to cut back on Social Security and Medicare. (As I was watching the vote yesterday, probably more than half the calls coming into CSPAN were from people talking about how worried they were that this debt debate might interrupt disability or Social Security checks; I think CSPAN was confused that many of these came in on the Republican line.)

And that fact–the fact that this colossal stupidity is somehow happening on both sides of the Atlantic gets too little attention. As I noted the other night on BlogTalkRadio, we can’t attribute the debt deal just to the Tea Party. Not only has Obama been trying a variety of ways to set up a Catfood Commission that could cut Social Security since he got into office (as DDay points out, the Democrats were the first to try to hold the debt ceiling hostage to get a Catfood Commision), but Greece and France and the UK are all doing effectively the same thing, and they’ve got no Tea Party to blame. In fact, a week ago Saturday (July 23), in the middle of heated negotiations with the Republicans on the debt ceiling here, Obama checked in with Nicolas Sarkozy to see how austerity summer was going on his side of the pond.

The President and President Sarkozy of France spoke by phone today as part of their ongoing consultations on shared U.S.-French strategic priorities.  The two leaders reviewed the results of the July 21 meeting of the Heads of State or Government of the Euro area, agreeing that important steps had been taken to help ensure the stability of the Euro area and to sustain the economic recovery in Europe.

Obviously, there are international organizations where these conversations are designed to take place, all with a financial mandate that doesn’t care about democracy or workers rights. (Though to some degree, it would be churlish for those of us in the developed world to complain that the IMF subverts sovereignty, since we’ve been benefiting from the way it has subverted the sovereignty of developing nations for years.)

Now, you might attribute this seemingly magical obsession of the developed world with austerity to the financial crash: in Europe, these cuts arise directly from the banks’ unwillingness to eat the losses for the mistakes they made during the bubble. Except at the federal level, here in the US, that’s not the false urgency used to justify these cuts: it was two unfunded wars, a set of absurd tax cuts (cutting taxes beyond what governments needed to survive is also one of the main factors driving state-level cuts), and the refusal to institute some kind of national health care system. Ultimately, in the US we need to cut our social safety net because the cost of running a world empire has gotten to be too much to sustain.

But the effect is the same: the elite, particularly the financial elite, has used this crisis–a crisis that is either their own fault or artificially created–to roll back the social contract that has governed the developed world since World War II.