Month: March 2015

If you’re afraid to fly you could be a terrorist

by digby

The Intercept has a post up about the “signs” a traveler might be a terrorist TSA agents are trained to look for:

Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points.

These are just a few of the suspicious signs that the Transportation Security Administration directs its officers to look out for — and score — in airport travelers, according to a confidential TSA document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

The checklist is part of TSA’s controversial program to identify potential terrorists based on behaviors that it thinks indicate stress or deception — known as the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. The program employs specially trained officers, known as Behavior Detection Officers, to watch and interact with passengers going through screening.

The document listing the criteria, known as the “Spot Referral Report,” is not classified, but it has been closely held by TSA and has not been previously released. A copy was provided to The Intercept by a source concerned about the quality of the program.

The checklist ranges from the mind-numbingly obvious, like “appears to be in disguise,” which is worth three points, to the downright dubious, like a bobbing Adam’s apple. Many indicators, like “trembling” and “arriving late for flight,” appear to confirm allegations that the program picks out signs and emotions that are common to many people who fly.

Most of those would seem to also indicate someone who is nervous about flying — for any number of reasons. There must be millions of people who get flying anxiety that mirrors those behaviors. I know I do. I’ve become a white knuckle flyer in recent years and I’m sure I manifest a lot of those behaviors.I guess I don’t fit other aspects of the profile so I don’t get unduly scrutinized (although my bag gets manually searched every single time after it comes through the machine and my hands are often scanned for chemical residue. But I think that’s just random.)

I do know that you cannot complain about the screening — or even talk about it — without arousing suspicion. My husband was detained and aggressively grilled when he told a woman in the line who was complaining that she should just do what the TSA says to do because they have a lot of power. Apparently, that was seen as some sort of insult — which presumably also indicates a terrorist frame of mind. After all, who else but a terrorist wouldn’t understand that a loyal citizen not only does exactly what he is told but he does it because he believes in the inherent decency and pureness of heart of those who are protecting us?

Since its introduction in 2007, the SPOT program has attracted controversy for the lack of science supporting it. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office found that there was no evidence to back up the idea that “behavioral indicators … can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security.” After analyzing hundreds of scientific studies, the GAO concluded that “the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance.”

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security found in 2013 that TSA had failed to evaluate SPOT, and “cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program’s expansion.”

Despite those concerns, TSA has trained and deployed thousands of Behavior Detection Officers, and the program has cost more than $900 million since it began in 2007, according to the GAO.

But it does have this going for it:

One former Behavior Detection Officer manager, who asked not to be identified, said that SPOT indicators are used by law enforcement to justify pulling aside anyone officers find suspicious, rather than acting as an actual checklist for specific indicators. “The SPOT sheet was designed in such a way that virtually every passenger will exhibit multiple ‘behaviors’ that can be assigned a SPOT sheet value,” the former manager said.

The signs of deception and fear “are ridiculous,” the source continued. “These are just ‘catch all’ behaviors to justify BDO interaction with a passenger. A license to harass.”

Feature, not bug. That’s the sort of thing that’s always useful for law enforcement. Just in case. That whole probable cause thing is such a drag.

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Nice little democracy you have there …

by digby

Just don’t call this blackmail.That would be illegal:

Big Wall Street banks are so upset with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, sources familiar with the discussions said.

Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.

Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them. However, there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision, they said.

I happen to have found a video recording of that meeting:

Seriously, this is truly disgusting. They don’t even try to hide it. They just put this out there as a blatant threat.

It would be nice if the Democrats would get incensed by such obvious strong-arm tactics and tell them to go fuck themselves. There are plenty of other places to find money and if they play their cards right they might even be able to leverage some of the populist anger for real to fight these bullyboy gangsters.

I won’t hold my breath.

Oh, and by the way, someone should inform the press that the alleged Tea party populists don’t seem to be stepping up on this one. All we hear from the Villagers is that they are just as populist and against big banks and bailouts as the left wing of the Democratic Party is. And yet, oddly, they don’t seem to be pressuring their representatives on this the way they pressure them on stuff like immigration or abortion. In fact, there isn’t even one Republican in congress who seems to give a damn. Why do you suppose that is?

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Institutional racism for dummies

by digby

Good lord:

The University of Oklahoma says it has determined that fraternity members learned a racist chant at a national event organized by Sigma Alpha Epsilon four years ago — and it wants to know what the leaders are doing about it.

OU President David Boren is expected to announce the results of the school’s investigation into the episode at 1 p.m. ET Friday, but revealed some findings in a letter to the frat’s executive director.

“The chant was learned by local chapter members while attending a national leadership cruise sponsored by by the national SAE organizations four years ago,” Boren wrote.

“While there is no indication that the chant was part of the formal teaching of the national organization, it does appear that the chant was widely known and informally shared amongst members on the leadership cruise.”

I find it very hard to fathom how this could happen in 2015. Not one of these frat boys on the cruise or elsewhere stepped up to say it was disgusting? Really? There were no black people there? Would you just stand there? Or join in? I wouldn’t.  In fact, I never did, even when I was young and this sort of thing was out in the open. But you’d think that in this day and age nobody would stand for it.

I knew that racism still existed in our society, of course. In fact, I used to write a lot about it long before Obama was elected and got flack for my position from people who insisted that I was pounding an old, out of date drum. But this really crude stuff in a large group of young people is something I thought had pretty much disappeared. Clearly not.

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Hey look! An issue!

by digby

Just introduced an amendment with Senators Manchin, Murray, Brown & Schatz to strengthen & expand Social Security. pic.twitter.com/cwRUT6TjP6— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 27, 2015

This got 42 votes in the Senate.

It sounds like something a presidential candidate might want to run on.

TPP To Be Declassified “Four Years After Entry into Force”

by Gaius Publius

We’ve been writing lately about TPP and the new leaked chapter dealing with extra-judicial “trade courts.” These would allow any corporation to sue any foreign government for lost future profit due to, for example, regulation, or “buy local” programs, or … anything really that would cost them money. For example, did you know that much of our fish is literally processed by slaves (my emphasis)?

A year-long AP investigation reveals
the global fish market feeds off a robust slave fishing trade
benefitting everyone involved except the slaves, who are reportedly kept
in cages and whipped with toxic fish when they get tired. Sounds pretty
bad!

So how does the free-labor fish get into your cat food and onto your dinner table? The AP
managed to get inside one fishing operation, where the slaves—usually
Burmese citizens—are forced to live in cages on a “tiny tropical island”
in Indonesia called Benjina. Despite days spent catching food, they are
not allowed to eat the fish, for it is apparently deemed too valuable
for them.

This is a perfect example. If a country that processed fish in this way were to sign TPP — and Indonesia is considering it — their fish processing corporations could sue any TPP-signing government that banned slave-labor seafood. Would the corporations win? That’s for the TPP “trade court” (not the national court) to decide. But if the nation being sued were small enough (poor enough), it might not even mount a defense. And if a large nation’s government were wealth-captured enough, they might not either.

This is what extra-judicial “trade courts” — “tribunals” that operate outside any nations legal system — do; this is what they make taxpayers in every signing nation liable for. There are “trade courts” already; NAFTA and CAFTA have them, for example, as well as a great many bilateral (two-country) trade agreements.

Four Years Into the Agreement, Its Text Will Remain Secret

Here’s page two of the WikiLeaks PDF — page one of the original (source here) — which specifies document handling and declassification (click to enlarge):

To put this another way, the document is so “sensitive” — so toxic — that its authors don’t want it released to the public until four years after TPP is already in force. That’s toxic. And its authors are right; this is really poisonous stuff — poisonous to nations that sign it; poisonous to the passage of the deal.

I’ll say again — the only people who want this deal are global billionaires, the mega-corporations they control, and the politicians who serve their interests. Why else keep the text and other details secret from the citizens of every nation considering it?

Elizabeth Warren on “Investor-State Dispute Settlement”

The legal phrase for what this chapter covers — the right of companies to sue countries for “lost” profit” — is “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). ISDS documents like this one establish “tribunals” where companies (and only them) can sue government entities (and only them). Here’s Elizabeth Warren on how bad that idea is:

Warren’s examples are stunning:

“A French company sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage.”

“A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster.”

“A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic
didn’t bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.”

I discussed this at greater length here, and included a look at the damage done by the recent KORUS (Korea–U.S.) trade agreement. As usual, that one too promised “more jobs, bigger trade surplus,” a promise that was, quelle surprise, 180 degrees wrong.

TPP — like NAFTA, this time with jobs. You’ve heard that song before. Just say No.

Democrat Ron Wyden & TPP

Right now, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) holds the key to Fast Track and TPP. If it can’t get out of the Finance Committee (he’s the Ranking Member), it can’t get to the floor. If Wyden won’t support it, Senate corporatists will find it hard to break a filibuster, which is promised.

But if Wyden says Yes to Fast Track and TPP, it’s likely to head to the House for a vote there. And we know Obama’s just dying to sign it; a TPP-friendly industry trade publication quotes Sen. Orrin Hatch calling this an Obama “legacy” item (subscription required):

In remarks to the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the Finance
chairman [Sen. Orrin Hatch] said President Obama desperately needs a
“legacy” issue. The two trade deals that the Administration is
negotiating – the TPP and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership – could be that legacy.

Ron Wyden’s contact information:

As the commenter at the link, Lambert Strether, notes, “a letter is better than a phone call, a phone call is better than email.”

I’ll make one more suggestion regarding Mr. Wyden. This could prove an electoral problem for him. He’s getting a lot of pressure from MoveOn, DFA and labor. Let’s make sure he feels it, with a challenge to his job. One courted primary challenger was Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, but he’s reportedly uninclined to challenge Wyden this time.

Nevertheless, Wyden needs a primary, in my view for even pursuing what’s called “a path to yes” as hard as he’s pursuing it. He’s asking for changes to Fast Track legislation at the margins only, and Obama is pushing Orrin Hatch, chair of the committee of which Wyden is Ranking Member, to say yes to Wyden and get this thing done.

In other words, Wyden is already complicit, already a problem. Punish him now, or after it’s too later to change his behavior, after he’s already pulled the trigger on TPP and gone home? If you live in Oregon — I know many of you do — and especially if you’re a MoveOn or DFA member, you can do three things:

1. Help find Wyden a primary challenger.
    
2. Tell Wyden you’re helping find a primary challenger.
    
3. And if you have the nerve, tell him you’ll withhold your vote even if he makes it out of the primary.

Nothing frightens some people like the loss of a high-profile job, which means that pressure can go both ways. Be sure to tell him — You’re doing what we’re doing now, since he’s doing what he’s doing now. By negotiating a “path to yes,” he’s already over the progressive line, working to take back progressive territory.

Ron Wyden is a member of Senate “class 3” — his next election is in 2016. He’ll probably tell you then, “Because Republicans!” Tell him No, Democratic Senate or not. Again, pressure can go both ways, and there does need to be a price for very bad deeds. As most of us see it, enabling TPP is a very bad deed indeed. Like NAFTA has done, TPP will do its damage when your grandparents are dead and your children have children of their own.

Say no to TPP today by saying no to Ron Wyden today. And tell him you’re doing it.

GP

Never created a job?
by Tom Sullivan

Again this morning, Paul Krugman knocks down some of the right’s cherished beliefs about its economic theories:

At a deeper level, modern conservative ideology utterly depends on the proposition that conservatives, and only they, possess the secret key to prosperity. As a result, you often have politicians on the right making claims like this one, from Senator Rand Paul: “When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan.”

Actually, if creating “millions of jobs” means adding two million or more jobs in a given year, we’ve done that 13 times since Reagan left office: eight times under Bill Clinton, twice under George W. Bush, and three times, so far, under Barack Obama. But who’s counting?

After the president fact-checked his critics in Cleveland last week, Susan Crabtree of the Washington Examiner, appearing on “The Last Word,” tried to tamp down his taking credit for unemployment falling to 5.5 percent, citing 30 million people who have dropped out of the workforce. Eugene Robinson would have none of it, pointing out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure is the “standard way that we have measured unemployment for many, many decades.” When the game is not going your way, you don’t get to move the goalposts. (IOKIYAR)

Krugman continues:

As a number of observers have pointed out, however, for big businesses to admit that government policies can create jobs would be to devalue one of their favorite political arguments — the claim that to achieve prosperity politicians must preserve business confidence, among other things, by refraining from any criticism of what businesspeople do.

Under “the confidence con,” any criticism of these “sensitive souls” will prompt Job Creators to take their investments and go home. But there is another free-market dogma not heard much anymore, one voiced by former RNC chair Michael Steele in 2009: “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” Yet during the 2012 debate over whether the sequester would hurt the defense industry, the goalposts moved again. But worry not. Like Ah-nold, “never created a job” will be back.

Imagine a self-serving, industry-funded Sunday talk show ad:

One million workers in this country owe their cars, their homes, their kids’ education, and their steady paychecks to the private-sector, free-market entrepreneurs of the American defense industry.

The Defense Industry — meeting demand for fine consumer products like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the fuel-efficient M1 Abrams tank, Tomahawk cruise missiles, the new Zumwalt class guided missile destroyer, and the Hellfire-equipped Predator drone. Predator — for when you really want to reach out and touch someone.

Free Market Capitalism — because government never created a job.

They are so worth it


by digby

The other day I wrote about the fact that Wall Streeters were lamenting that their bonuses only rose 2% this past year. Tough times.

Mother Jones puts it into proper perspective:

Yes, yes, I know that one Wall Street trader is worth a million minimum wage workers in this world. Unlike the contribution of  say, the nannies who raise their kids or the servants who feed them and clean their home, their contribution to this world is worth every penny and more of that 28.5 billion dollars. Indeed, they actually get a lot more. Remember, that’s just their bonus. And I think we can assume their money is making a lot of money too.

Why? Because they’re woooorth it.

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Better than a bumper sticker

by digby

This makes sense. As a Republican he’s beholden to Big Energy and is likely to cause even bigger problems in the middle east than already exist. And he’s well … Ted Cruz, so the homage to the Onion is perfect.

And anyway I’ve always thought Cruz looked like a sad eyed Pagliacci. A tear drop is perfect. And his voters can show their loyalty simply by embellishing their existing adornments:

*Kidding, kidding.  Prisoners can’t vote.

Forgiving Rand

by digby

This piece about how libertarianism’s only true home being on the right came to mind this morning when I read this article by Paul Waldman about Rand Paul’s rather convenient new position on military spending. In the original piece, the author contends that at one time he and all his libertrian friends were caught up in Obamamania, believing that he was going to be an economic moderate and an isolationist protector of civil liberties. (And considering that he was opposed by the warmongering hawk John McCain, you can see why at least a few of them might have leaned Obama’s way.) But he was betrayed by all that Keynesian Obamacaring and then found out about drones and so he realized that the GOP is his one true home. Sure, theocrats might want to impose their religious rules on everyone but they are willing to let states and local governments do the imposing rather than the feds so they’re not all that bad. And sure they all might be bloodthirsty warmongers and authoritarians but since there are some Democrats who are too it all comes out in the wash. And anyway, Rand Paul is a Republican and he definitely doesn’t support all that excessive military spending and foreign wars and all that.

Or does he?

The move completes a stunning reversal for Paul, who in May 2011, after just five months in office, released his own budget that would have eliminated four agencies—Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Energy and Education—while slashing the Pentagon, a sacred cow for many Republicans. Under Paul’s original proposal, defense spending would have dropped from $553 billion in the 2011 fiscal year to $542 billion in 2016. War funding would have plummeted from $159 billion to zero. He called it the “draw-down and restructuring of the Department of Defense.”

But under Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.

The boost would be offset by a two-year combined $212 billion cut to funding for aid to foreign governments, climate change research and crippling reductions in to the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Education.

Paul Waldman suggests he has to do this in order to compete for the presidential nomination because Republicans are warmongers and he’s right. But he thinks it could also be a problem for him because it makes him look like a hypocrite to his followers. And it should. But I’m going to guess this won’t worry the Paulites all that much. They are, after all, mostly young white guys who deep down in their hearts think military spending isn’t really the problem, it’s the government spending on losers, both foreign and domestic, who aren’t “self-sufficient” young white guys and imposing regulations that might impinge on their God-given freedom to exploit and pillage that pisses them off. The war business is unpleasant but it isn’t a deal breaker. If it were, they wouldn’t vote for the party that makes a fetish of them.

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Scott Walker is a genius

by digby

A foreign policy savant at least:

Walker: I remember the movie in the 80s, Trading Places…

Hewitt: Right.

Walker: …you know, with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, it’s like Iran and Israel are trading places in the sequel. In the eyes of this president, our ally is supposed to be Israel. Our adversary has been historically Iran. And yet this administration completely does it the other way around. We need to call radical Islamic terrorism for what it is, and a commander-in-chief who’s willing to act.

Joan Walsh quips:

No word on which nation is Aykroyd and which is Murphy; hoping other reporters will follow up. (If Walker finds that metaphor doesn’t work, he can play around with “Freaky Friday.”)

Walsh’s whole piece is worth reading. Honestly I cannot figure out why so many smart people think Walker is a formidable political talent. He’s a typical GOP shallow, banal doofus without any of the macho swagger of Bush or the charisma of Reagan. You’ve got to have something and I cannot for the life of me see what it is he’s supposed to have.

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