Month: August 2013

$$$ means never having to say you’re sorry

by digby

Can’t keep a good contractor down:

Whatever you think of Snowden, the Teflon character of his former employer, which is where the leaker got access to all of government intelligence secrets, is truly stunning. But, from a pecuniary perspective, the Snowden affair has been a non-event for Booz. Yesterday, Booz reported that quarterly sales held steady, year over year, at $1.4 billion while profits jumped 13 percent to $73.2 million. The higher profits are a result of Booz’s ability to increase rates for its billable consulting hours, a measure of the company’s prestige with clients. Booz stock is up nearly 50 percent this year.

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Air Force cleared Booz of any accountability for Snowden’s data heist, saying that the firm could not have known. In the earnings call, Booz chief executive Ralph W. Shrader addressed the Snowden issue for the first time, saying that “Mr. Snowden was on our payroll for a short period of time, but he was not a Booz Allen person and he did not share our values.”

I’ll say.

They “couldn’t have known” their top secret data was accessible by some guy they hired a few months earlier? No biggie. Let’s throw some more money at ’em.

And I don’t know how they think they’re going to only hire people who “share their values” in the future because I’m fairly sure the thought crime softwear is still in development. The kind of people who know how to do the work from which these fat cats are profiting often see the world from a slightly different perspective than bilking the taxpayers by violating the constitution. Good luck with that.

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Bipartisan decency

by digby

Think Progress reports:

Caleb Howe, a regular contributor to Erick Erickson’s conservative RedState site, is in the hospital with liver failure. Because Howe doesn’t have health insurance, he and his family are worried that they won’t be able to handle the impending bills — but the Internet stepped in to help.

On Tuesday, a page for Howe was created on the crowd funding website GoFundMe, explaining that his family needs to preserve his health for the benefit of his two daughters. “It would lift an incredible burden for Caleb [and his wife] Donna if they could get even the smallest amount of help with these upcoming expenses and with anything extra that comes in,” Howe’s page explains.

Erickson promoted the fund on RedState with a short post entitled, “Please Consider Helping Caleb Howe’s Family.” And the left-leaning Daily Kos also picked up the story, encouraging its readers to help, too. “Allow me to ask you to do the Christian thing and donate to this young man’s fund,” DailyKos user SemDem writes. “He has two young, beautiful and innocent daughters who need him — and that is who the fund is for. He does not deserve to suffer, much less die.”

The appeals worked. As of press time, Howe’s fund had been shared over a thousand times, and ultimately topped its $25,000 goal.

This is a very decent thing to do especially considering that Howe is a fellow with quite a history of cruel online behavior, particularly toward Roger Ebert when he was sick and dying.

He later apologized. But even if he hadn’t, that wouldn’t mean people should be cruel in return. Nobody “deserves” liver failure. And he does have kids who need him.

More importantly, nobody “deserves” to go without health insurance in a wealthy country like the United States. Howe would undoubtedly disagree, and perhaps this fund drive convinces many of his compatriots that charity can pick up the slack for those who have no insurance. But Howe is a celebrity, even in a small way, connected to many important people who can make a fund drive like this bring in some serious money. Most people without health insurance don’t have such friends in high places.

Here’s hoping that Caleb Howe fully recovers and that his family isn’t bankrupted by this illness. Here’s also hoping that it isn’t long before nobody in America has to worry about that anymore.

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Nine days left

by David Atkins

Norm Ormstein, writing on how Boehner’s ineffective leadership combined with the Tea Party caucus in the House are threatening a government shutdown:

Here is the looming problem: The House has nine—count ’em—legislative days in September to complete action on the appropriations bills that make up most of the government we see, and to try to reconcile their bills with the Senate, which has to act on the same 12 bills. The chances of that happening before Oct. 1? Zero. But even if the House and Senate passed all the appropriations bills, chances are close to zero that they could compromise on them—the gulf between the chambers is greater than ever, since the Boehner-“led” House tripled down on the tough sequester cuts for domestic programs (it cut deeper to meet the Ryan plan to balance the budget in 10 years, and it cut even deeper again to shift more money to defense than the sequester provides).

So, even if Boehner can bypass hard-liners’ demands that the administration capitulate on Obamacare to keep the government running, he will have to find a way to spend far more on domestic programs than his party wants via a compromised continuing resolution, or all or part of the government will shut down. More than likely, we will see a short-term extension on Oct. 1, for two weeks or a month. But by Nov. 1, we will have a full-scale confrontation—and one that may coincide with the debt ceiling being reached.

By encouraging the extremists through his rhetoric, and by not looking to compromise spending at all in the House process, Boehner has bought some time and averted some criticism and any chance of a revolt. But that also means that if he endorses a compromise that will fund the Affordable Care Act, move spending levels back at least to the sequester numbers, and extend the debt limit without preconditions, a sizable share of his caucus will go ballistic. Can he do that before we face a shutdown for days, weeks, or months? Can he do it before we actually breach the debt ceiling and suffer the consequences of the destruction of American economic integrity? Will the passive-aggressive approach work this time? I don’t have the answers. But I can say I am not sanguine that we will survive the fall without a major upheaval, in our economy and in Congress.

Which in turn means that the GOP will likely use this as their last hurrah to take down their white whale, Obamacare. Greg Sargent explains:

Republican leaders continue to leave open the possibility that there will be a government-shutdown confrontation to force the defunding of Obamacare. As I noted here yesterday, in so doing, they are in effect misleading the base by leaving impressions that this still could happen, when — for substantive and political reasons alike — it isn’t going to happen….

By holding countless repeal votes, and by continuing to insist Republicans will continue targeting the law for elimination, Boehner and other GOP leaders are only keeping alive the hope that Obamacare will be destroyed before it becomes part of the American landscape. A handful of Republican Senators are trying to talk some sense into their colleagues before it’s too late, arguing that staging an Obamacare-defunding shutdown is deeply misguided and dangerous. But it’s anyone’s guess who will prevail.

We keep reading that GOP leaders have been caught off guard by the depth and ferocity of the conservative commitment to this defunding showdown. As Politico put it the other day: “Republican leaders are growing concerned by the fervor with which some members are demanding that Boehner defund the health care law as part of the government funding talks.”

But really, why are they surprised? They’ve been feeding the repeal monster for literally years now. Even if a government shutdown does happen, of course, Obamacare won’t be defunded. But plenty of other damage will be done in the process. If GOP leaders can’t control this monster, it’s on them.

The convergent dynamics at work here may lead this fall’s debt ceiling fight to be the ugliest thing in government since the Gingrich shutdown.

It would be nice if we could count on a sterner negotiating partner in the White House, and a press more willing to call out fault even when it only falls on one side of the aisle. But that’s wishful thinking, I know.

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Rush Holt for US Senate: he knows without being told that cutting SS is wrong

by digby

Blue America went out this morning with this letter to our membership urging support for Congressman Rush Holt:

Last April, just three months before he passed away, the ailing liberal lion Senator Frank Lautenberg issued a strong statement in opposition to proposed cuts to Social Security. He said:

“We can’t afford to further balance our books on the backs of middle-class families and seniors. The proposed cuts to Social Security benefits are a major problem that would hurt countless Americans.”

Sadly, the man considered to be the front runner to succeed him, Newark mayor and media darling Cory Booker, isn’t willing to hold that line. He said just this week that he’d consider raising the retirement age for younger people, a patented Republican dodge and a sure sign that he cannot be trusted to protect the Democratic Party’s greatest achievement.

But there is someone in the race who will protect Social Security and his name is Congressman Rush Holt. Holt not only opposes all cuts to our most important social insurance program, he is a co-sponsor of the Protecting and Preserving Social Security Act, which would expand Social Security benefits not cut them.

Where Mayor Booker has said that he has “not formed an opinion” on a carbon tax, something which 41 Democratic Senators have already voted for, Rush Holt is card carrying scientist who strongly supports it.

Where Mayor Booker thinks calling for repeal of the Patriot Act is “irresponsible”, Rush Holt sponsored a bill in the House just this week to do just that. He said:

“The executive branch’s groundless mass surveillance of Americans has turned our conception of liberty on its head. My legislation would restore the proper constitutional balance and ensure our people are treated as citizens first, not suspects.”

Where Mayor Booker considers Wall Street a strong friend and ally, Rush Holt … doesn’t.

The last thing we need in the US Senate is another Wall Street friendly centrist with a propensity for government secrecy and a willingness to cut our most important social insurance programs. There are plenty of those already.

Glenn Greenwald calls Congressman Holt “a genuine stalwart on civil liberties and privacy and vehement opponent of the crony capitalism that governs DC.”

Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America says, “He doesn’t just vote progressive, he speaks out and leads on the issues that unite us as progressives — Medicare for All, The Robin Hood Tax, Repeal of the Patriot Act and Hands Off Social Security.”

In the upcoming primary, New Jersey can choose an establishment celebrity who plays a progressive on TV or it can choose a real progressive. Blue America and Progressive Democrats of America strongly believe the choice in this race is clear and urge you support Congressman Rush Holt for US Senate who will be one of the Senate’s strongest civil liberties champions and will join the ranks of Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Ed Markey and Tammy Baldwin in support of economic fairness, justice, and opportunity.

Please donate what you can and spread the word among your friends and acquaintances in New Jersey.

If you care about Social Security, you’ll help Rush Holt. Booker responded today to liberal outrage by backing off his earlier comments and saying he won’t support cuts to Social Security. But if it takes progressives hammering him to protect the Party’s signature program in a Democratic primary is it reasonable to believe that he can be trusted once he gets into the Big Money Boys Club of the US Senate? Honestly, this issue doesn’t take any nuance or any thinking through. A real progressive can answer that question without any equivocation every time he or she is asked: “no, I will not cut Social Security.” That’s not a hard one.

And any candidate who cavalierly tosses off the opinion that repealing the Patriot Act is “pretty irresponsible” clearly has no idea of the stakes in these issues and can be expected to simply go along to get along with whatever the national security state wants to do. We already have too many of those in the US Senate.

Here’s what a real civil libertarian and protector of the constitution sounds like:

You can donate to Rush Holt’s senate campaign here.

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How’d the government know what they were Googling?

by digby

From the Atlantic:

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. …

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

The men identified themselves as members of the “joint terrorism task force.” The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies.

The reporter got a massive runaround from the FBI and the dozens of police agencies involved in the Joint Terrorism Task Force about this, none of them copping to how this happened.

So the big question remains: how in the hell did they know what this couple was googling??? It’s very hard to see why they would have had a normal law enforcement warrant to monitor their computer activity, although you would have thought the authorities would have said so if they did.

The government has determined that the act of revealing its secrets is a threat to national security, regardless of the real world effects, including even journalists. Once that happens, you know they have made an important shift in how they define a “threat” and how they are rationalizing their policies. Eventually they start to see all those who oppose them — even average citizens — as potential enemies.

All you have to do is look at these frightening brochures they put out to all federal agencies to explain the INSIDER THREAT PROGRAM. Here’s the FBI’s:

Everyone is now a suspect. Which, if you look at history, including our own, is inevitable when you allow these sorts of programs to develop in secret, without any real accountability.

Update: It turns out that the husband’s former employer reported him to the police for suspicious google searches:

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

That makes a little more sense. If keywords “pressure cooker” and “backpack” were enough to set off the NSA they’d be rousting millions of people.

On the other hand, it looks as though the “Insider Threat” program is working quite well even in the private sector. Even if Big Brother isn’t personally watching you, your employer is doing it on his behalf.

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The return of Aunt Millie

by digby

It turns out that merely manipulating the financial markets for their own greedy purposes isn’t good enough for the masters of the Universe. They’re branching out:

Goldman Sachs has offered to speed up delivery of aluminum stored in warehouses that it controls as federal authorities examine how delays at the facilities have driven up the price of the metal.

Under scrutiny for the long waits that have cost manufacturers — and ultimately consumers — many millions of dollars, Goldman said on Wednesday that its warehouse unit, Metro International Trade Services, would give customers who store aluminum at the warehouses immediate access to their metal.

Through Metro International, Goldman stores vast amounts of aluminum in and around Detroit. An investigation by The New York Times found that Metro routinely shuffled tons of the metal from one warehouse to another, a tactic that profited Goldman but pushed up the price of aluminum across much of the nation.

Hold the phone, they aren’t alone:

Federal energy regulators said traders at J.P. Morgan Chase used eight different strategies to wring “excessive payments” from electricity markets, offering their first formal allegations of fraudulent activity after a yearslong investigation.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released a two-page notice on the J.P. Morgan allegations Monday that is a precursor to an enforcement announcement.

The document describes several trading schemes, including submitting bids that “falsely appeared” attractive to electricity-system operators and led to payments to the bank valued at “tens of millions of dollars at rates far above market prices.”

In another strategy, traders bid at low prices in odd-numbered hours and high prices at even-numbered hours, leading system operators to pay J.P. Morgan for ramping up energy production, the document said.

The disclosures precede an expected settlement between the bank and agency, which are close to announcing a roughly $410 million fine to settle the charges, people familiar with the matter said. The settlement details could be made public as early as Tuesday.

The alleged manipulation occurred between September 2010 and June 2011 in markets that help set the price of electricity in California and the Midwest. FERC officials have said any improper payments are ultimately borne by the households, businesses and government entities that are end users of electricity, though it can be difficult to measure the precise impact on electric bills.

If that sounds familiar it should:

This is Bob Badeer (a trader at Enron’s West Power desk in Portland, CA, where all these tapes were recorded) and Kevin McGowan (in Enron’s central office in Houston, TX, as he mentions in the transcript):

KEVIN: So,

BOB: (laughing)

KEVIN: So the rumor’s true? They’re fuckin’ takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

BOB: Yeah, grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fuckin’ vote on the butterfly ballot.

KEVIN: Yeah, now she wants her fuckin’ money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fuckin’ 250 dollars a megawatt hour.

BOB: You know – you know – you know, Grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know? You’re not going to –

BOB: Grandma Millie –

I suppose a lot of us thought that the Enron/WorldCom revelations in the early 2000s and then the derivatives debacle and 2008 housing meltdown might have had some effect on the behaviors of the MOU’s. We were wrong. They were undeterred.

Does anyone care anymore? I honestly don’t know.

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See no evil, hear no evil oversight

by digby

So it turns out that members of congress did have access to information about the scope of the NSA’s collection of data. They just didn’t care or didn’t bother to read the details before they voted to re-authorize them. I guess they figured it was better not to know.

Adam Serwer reports:

Of the three documents disclosed by the government on Wednesday, a 2009 report states in the section devoted to Section 215 of the Patriot Act that “orders generally require production of the business records (as described above) relating to substantially all of the telephone calls handled by the companies, including both calls made between the United States and a foreign country and calls made entirely within the United States.” The section also notes that both Section 215 and the “pen register/trap and trace” provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was being used to collect the same kind of information about online communications rather than phone calls, “operate on a very large scale.” The 2011 report provides a similar summary of how the authorities are being used in almost identical language. Also released Thursday was the original secret court order requesting the all the communications records from the customers of a Verizon subsidiary that was published by The Guardian and the Washington Post. There are presumably similar orders in place for other telecommunications companies.

A spokesperson for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, told MSNBC that the declassified reports posted online Wednesday were the same ones referred to in the letters.

The reports affirm that the current backlash in Congress is a product of public knowledge of the programs. Some legislators, like Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, had been making public statements for years that hinted at information members of Congress were being told in private. Legislators who say they were ignorant about how the authorities were being used prior to the revelations effectively made a choice not to be informed. They then voted to reauthorize these laws without knowing what they actually did. Those legislators who were exercising their oversight responsibilities and were concerned about surveillance couldn’t inform the public in detail about what was happening. Far from affirming the Obama administration’s insistence that congressional oversight serves as a key check on executive branch authority, it mostly raises the question of whether effective oversight can be conducted in secret.

Yeah.

Which leads to this report from Josh Feldman at Mediaite about an ongoing piece of illogic spouted by every Villager and administration apologist in the country:

[L]ogical fallacy number one: Toobin believes that Edward Snowden is a criminal who “should not have done what he did,” but thought that the public discussion is good, and said, “My hat’s off to Glenn for investigative reporting.”

Risen pointed out the blatantly obvious problem with Toobin’s logic.

“We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for him. Why do you think–I mean, that’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”

This is not the first time Toobin has made this assertion, as I noted in a column here last month. Here’s what Toobin said on Morgan’s program mere days after the first NSA revelations came out:

“There are many good reasons to protest this law. I’m troubled by this law. But I think there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. And by a 29-year-old kid just throwing open the safe and giving away documents that people have devoted years of their lives to creating and protecting, that’s the wrong way to protest this.”

It really bears repeating that the national security apparatus wasn’t suddenly going to have a come to Jesus moment and decide to become more transparent all of a sudden. We have a secret court with its own secret interpretation of the law, so the government’s pretty firmly in the “secrecy” camp. Snowden releasing the documents was pretty much the only way the public was ever going to find out about these programs.

Whenever I hear these fatuous gasbags say they sincerely want a debate but also see whistleblowing as a criminal act (even treason!) which should be punished I want to scream. There is no mechanism by which this debate can happen without whistleblowers — not even through congressional oversight in which elected officials are given Top Secret clearances! Udall and Wyden were practically immolating themselves on the floor of the Senate trying to warn people about what was going on and it did nothing to spark debate because they couldn’t reveal the details. The only way this could have happened without a whistleblower would have been for the administration to spontaneously decide they needed to come clean and let the American people in on their secret surveillance programs. Needless to say, that did not happen. So here we are.

You can see the video here.

Whither middle class

by digby

Here’s a nice piece by Anat Shankar on the meaning of “middle class” in America and how the powers that be misappropriate the word in order to perpetuate inequality. The fact is that we are running in place to stay middle class, with more family members working and all of us working harder and longer for the same result:

“Middle class” remains our favored self-designation, although the percentage of Americans who select it fell from 53 percent in 2008 to 49 most recently, according to Pew Research. As a friend’s high-school teacher loved to say, “The great thing about America is that everyone can be middle class.” Good thing she wasn’t teaching math.
[…]
Cognitive science teaches us that we learn to make sense of the world by putting things into categories. From the simplistic (edible or not) to the sophisticated (possible spouse or casual fling) grouping elements is part and parcel of our processing. In order to determine what category something fits into and thus what it is, we often rely on considering what it is not. Sometimes, these designations are easy: A smart phone and a rotary dial both count as telephones. But categories of great social significance are subject to interpretation and change with the times. Is that boy “spirited” or “ADHD”? Labels, once stuck, can change perception and policy.

Not finding popular depictions of wealth and poverty similar to our own lived experiences, we determine we must be whatever’s left over. Picking “middle class” is easy enough to do because, again, the language doesn’t present much to go on in terms of what this label describes.

The remaining economic component for all of our class designations isn’t income but stuff you can buy. One common synonym for rich and poor is the haves and have-nots. But consumer goods once deemed luxuries, like cellular telephones and televisions, are now common possessions. This means that even as employers held tight to the gains our productivity generated by keeping real wages at 1970s levels, we sent women into the workforce, labored longer hours, and used new debt products to indenture our way to some happiness. Thus, our stand-in to signify class status – purchasing power – papers over the fact that by income, benefits, and lifestyle standards many of us had long left behind a middle-class existence, even as we clung to the moniker.

Peering behind the once iconic picket fence surrounding a house, we see what “middle class” used to mean. The mortgage was close to paid off; the car loan settled. This feat was accomplished on a single income that came with health care plus pension and enough for domestic vacations and college.

Today, we are left with mere symbols, but these turn out to muddle, not mark. Being in the middle class once guaranteed choices and life without fear that the unexpected would prove catastrophic. Now, this is far from the case. Politicians of all stripes will continue to claim allegiance to the middle class, but that’s just because they’re hoping we don’t notice it’s a brand without a product.

If middle class is a state of mind then what she points out there is what’s changed: the feeling of security. I think many people are living in a high state of anxiety about being able to maintain what they have. That didn’t used to be so. And it changes the fundamental deal implicit in the American Dream. It’s impacting our culture and not in a good way.

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Uhm, I am Marshal McLuhan


by digby