Jobs Report Reax: Treading Water

Jobs Unemployment

Dylan Matthews provides the above chart and a quick summary:

The May jobs report wasn’t spectacular, and it wasn’t disastrous. Unemployment ticked up to 7.6 percent, largely due to a slight increase in labor force participation. The nation gained 175,000 jobs, which is heartening, but the pace is not nearly fast enough to close the jobs gap anytime soon. In fact, according to the Hamilton Project’s calculator, it will take 9 years and 5 months to get back to pre-recession employment levels at this rate.

Ed Morrissey has a similar take:

This still isn’t a great jobs report.  It’s just better than expected.  The US economy needs ~150K new jobs each month to keep up with population growth, so this is just a little better than a maintenance level for job creation. … Basically, we treaded water, which is always better than sinking, but it really doesn’t get you anywhere.

Ryan Avent looks at the recovery as a whole:

Despite all the fretting over the slow pace of job creation in the recovery, and despite major shifts in the stance of economic policy, employment has risen at an extraordinarily stable pace.

That stability is a bit illusory. There are wiggles. In February private employers added 319,000 jobs, one of the best performances of the recovery. Last June the gain was only 78,000—the worst since payrolls began growing again. The composition of the employment recovery has also changed. Early on manufacturing helped lead the way forward. Now construction is pulling more weight (though less than many had hoped, and less than professional services and retail). At the first, federal government jobs were flat while state and local government employment tumbled. Now the latter is recovering while federal payrolls are shrinking rapidly. Over the whole of the employment recovery, of course, governments have been a major drag, slimming down by 622,000 workers since February of 2010. Strikingly, work in health care—long the stable core at the heart of the employment recovery—slowed noticeably in May.

Mark Perry puts a positive spin on the sector-specific numbers:

Although overall US job growth continues to be weak, we are seeing strong job growth in some sectors of the economy – temporary help services, construction, architectural and engineering services, motor vehicles, and oil and gas extraction.  Together, those five sectors added 40,600 jobs in May, which represents more than 23% of the overall increase in US payrolls last month of 175,000. Looking forward, we can expect increased hiring in those sectors, as America’s energy revolution continues, the housing recovery gains momentum, and auto production and sales continue on an upward trajectory.

Dean Baker reads the sector breakdowns differently:

Job growth was again narrowly concentrated, with the restaurant sector (38,100 jobs), retail trade (27,700) and temporary employment (25,600) accounting for more than half of the job growth in May. These are all low-paying sectors. It is worth noting that the job growth reported in these sectors is more an indication of the weakness of the labor market than the type of jobs being generated by the economy. The economy always creates bad jobs, but in a strong labor market workers don’t take them.

Neil Irwin finds some positive news buried in the unemployment stats:

While the headline unemployment rate ticked up one-tenth of a percent in May, a broader measure of joblessness actually showed slight improvement. U-6, a measure of unemployment that includes people who have a part-time job but want full-time work and people who want a job but have given up looking out of frustration, fell to 13.8 percent in May, from 13.9 percent in April. That measure has come down tremendously in the last year, from 14.8 percent in May 2012.

Drum searches the effects of sequestration:

Once again, the fiscal cliff deal and the sequester don’t seem to be showing up in the job numbers yet—though public sector employment was flat and federal employment was down, which might be partly due to cutbacks. In any case, the changes aren’t huge. So far, it looks like we’re continuing to tread water.

Annie Lowrey, on the other hand, thinks sequestration is beginning to show up in the numbers:

The monthly jobs report is starting to show the effects of the $85 billion in across-the-board budget cuts that the government needs to carry out before the end of the fiscal year in September. That’s not much in a $16 trillion economy, of course. But economists still expect it to slow growth and reduce employment in the coming months and years. And it is. Federal employment had been on a downward trend since the start of 2011, with the government shedding about 3,000 or 4,000 positions a month through February. Then sequestration hit on March 1. And in the last three months, the federal work force has shrunk by about 45,000 positions, including 14,000 in May alone. …

Sequestration is having an impact on private businesses as well, even if it is harder to see given the way the recovery continues to chug along. Millions of their customers have less money to spend. The government is trimming back on contracts awarded to private firms. But just because sequestration’s impact is diffuse and cumulative over time does not mean it is not there.

Catherine Rampell focuses on the sequester’s impact on the 7.6% still unemployed:

Almost every state has cut its unemployment insurance benefits as a result of the sequester, according to the National Employment Law Project, a labor-oriented research and advocacy organization. Some states, like Florida and Maine, are cutting the weeks for which jobless workers will continue receiving benefits, and others, like Illinois, are reducing the size of the weekly benefit checks (in Illinois, the cut was 16.8 percent). Some states, like Washington and Idaho, are also laying off employees who work in the labor agencies that help workers apply for benefits and find jobs. North Carolina is ending its federally funded extended unemployment benefits on July 1 because reductions in its state benefits left it ineligible for the federal money.

Jared Bernstein withholds judgment on the unemployment statistics:

What we have here is a high stakes game of musical chairs, as payrolls grow at a steady, if not-that-impressive, clip, essentially adding chairs to the game.  Meanwhile, more players are coming off the sidelines looking for places to sit.  Last month, there were more new players than seats.  In future months, we’ll keep a close eye on how that balances out.

A Transgender Breakthrough

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Anderson gets an exclusive interview with Kristin Beck, who used to be Navy Seal Chris Beck (with a big gnarly beard). Money quote:

Though her identity was hidden, the rest of what Beck offered was true. “I gave true brotherhood. I did my best, 150% all the time, and I gave strength and honor and my full brotherhood to every military person I ever worked with.”

Never under-estimate the power of the US military to foment social change. They shifted American culture when they integrated in 1948; they have done more to debunk the notion of female weakness or subjugation than any other comparable institution; they proved that gay people are and always have been among this country’s patriots and war heroes; now we learn that a member of the Navy Seals has become truly herself.

More to the point, she’s engaged with fellow veterans in the staggeringly tough job of living in America after living and dying in Iraq. Here’s her webpage, called Healing Grounds. Money quote:

The purpose of the “Healing Grounds” is to have a specialized “community service” focused nursery and gardens for returning Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. This will be a place to receive landscaping information and training as well as plants, trees and simple kits to start a garden or fishpond in the veterans’ own backyard. We will also offer to ship items and install as necessary in their houses. Depending on need and funding available there will be many free installations for the veteran who qualifies. Too many of my comrades are returning from the battle grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan and do not find peace and worse are committing suicide.

See the zen garden above. Once a service-member, always a service-member. Many just don’t know anything else but serving and saving their comrades.

We have yet to grapple culturally with transgender equality in any sufficient way. But here we have a genuine war hero who needed to become a physical woman to match who she felt she was inside. That matters, even as I mourn the beard. From the Special Forces blog – which uses a priceless illustration:

This just in, and yes it’s true. I first met Chris when she was at SEAL Team One. While Chris was always a little different I had no idea what was lying under the surface, as I’m sure a lot of people will have the same experience. I do know that Chris went on to serve out a full retirement, and finished his twenty years of service as an E-8 at US SOCOM, and a tour of the recently scandal-clad ST-6.

At its core, the gay rights movement is not about enabling people to be gay; it’s about helping more people to be themselves, without persecution or ostracism. And that’s why transgender issues also are at the heart of this movement – and of broader civil rights. What we need is more familiarity, more courage, more discussion. Thanks, Kristin, for advancing that by putting yourself out there. It isn’t easy. But it’s the only way we will shift the world.

The FBI May Have Your Phone Records, Ctd

Stephen Walt responds to my initial post on the NSA-Verizon story:

The United States is still going to be a major world power long after the contemporary jihadi movement is a discredited episode in modern history, even if the country repealed the Patriot Act and stopped all this secret domestic surveillance tomorrow. Second, after acknowledging the potential for abuse in this government surveillance program, Sullivan warns that the “consequences of its absence” could be “terrible.” This claim depends on the belief that jihadism really does pose some sort of horrific threat to American society. This belief is unwarranted, however, provided that dedicated and suicidal jihadists never gain access to nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorism — even of the sort suffered on 9/11 — is not a serious threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to do as much damage as they might like. And this would be the case even if the NSA weren’t secretly collecting a lot of data about domestic phone traffic.

Indeed, as political scientist John Mueller and civil engineer Mark Stewart have shown, post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic dangers than they are from “jihadi terrorism.”

Meanwhile, Benjamin Wittes zeroes in on the key phrase justifying the court order that granted the NSA access to all Verizon’s domestic phone records:

To acquire such an order, the government does not have to do much—just as it doesn’t have to do much in a criminal investigation: It merely has to offer, in pertinent part, “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

I’m trying to imagine what conceivable of facts would render all telephony metadata generated in the United States “relevant” to an investigation, presumably of the bombing. This would include, of course, all telephony metadata that, as matters turned out, postdates the killing of one bomber and the capture of the other—though there’s no way the government could have known that when the application was submitted. And it would also include all telephony metadata that postdates the government’s conclusion that the Tsarnaev brothers were apparently not agents of any foreign terrorist group. But even if this were not the case, how is it possible that all calls to, say, Dominos Pizza in Peoria, Illinois or all calls over a three month period between two small businesses in Juno, Alaska would be “relevant” to an investigation of events in Boston—even if we assume that the FBI did not know whom it was investigating in the Boston area and did not know whom that unknown person was communicating with?

Orin Kerr’s answer:

If the [court] order is what it appears to be, then the order points to a problem in [the US legal code] Section 1861 that has not been appreciated. Section 1861 says that the “things” that are collected must be relevant to a national security investigation or threat assessment, but it says nothing about the scope of the things obtained. When dealing with a physical object, we naturally treat relevance on an object-by-object basis. Sets of records are different. If Verizon has a database containing records of billions of phone calls made by millions of customers, is that database a single thing, millions of things, or billions of things? Is relevance measured by each record, each customer, or the relevance of the entire database as a whole? If the entire massive database has a single record that is relevant, does that make the entire database relevant, too? The statute doesn’t directly answer that, it seems to me. But certainly it’s surprising — and troubling — if the Section 1861 relevance standard is being interpreted at the database-by-database level.

Cool Ad Watch

Copyranter chokes up a little:

The goddamn Brits know how to use emotion to sell products, don’t they? Remember this amazingly moving commercial for Robinsons fruit drinks from last month? This time, we visit some wonderful European town, a town infinitely more wonderful than where you or I live. In this town lives a wonderful elderly gentleman and his wonderfully cute, obedient doggie. They are soulmates on a daily mission.

With these mini-story types of commercials, the introduction of the product often ruins the vibe. Not so with these two spots which are executed exquisitely. Almost makes me want to get back into advertising.

Why would you when you can get into the fantastic new kickass world of fucking awesome sponsored content.

Dissing Glenn?

I don’t begrudge a reporter truncating quotes on deadline, but if you were to read the NYT’s profile of Glenn Greenwald today, you might think I’m a bit of a douchey critic. So just because I can, here’s the actual full email quote I gave to the NYT and forwarded on to Glenn just now:

I count Glenn as an honest blogger whose passions in real time can sometimes lead to misreadings of others. But we’re all vulnerable to that in the blogosphere, and in our various spats, I’ve always enjoyed the give-and-take, rather than resenting some of the occasionally unfair barbs. They come with the territory. But once you get into a debate with him, it can be hard to get the last word. A friend described debating him as like engaging with a rhetorical trampoline. But I actually enjoy rhetorical trampolining, as long as no one gets hurt too much. I do not take anything he writes about my work personally.

His passion is a great antidote to the insidery access-driven village of Washington journalism, but at times, I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war. He’s a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work.

Yes, we’re friends. We’ve hung out a bit, and are bonded by a couple of things. He relies on readers for much of his income (and I rely on readers for all of mine) – and has made online debate much sharper in many ways. I’ve benefited from his criticism, even as I remain to his “right.” And he is forced to live abroad with his partner David because the US refuses to acknowledge the validity and dignity of bi-national gay couples. I was in that exact position for a long time with my American husband – and our shared experience matters a lot to me. Our husbands have also bonded over the same issue.

And I genuinely like him as a human being.

you can use any all or none of that

Ask Fareed Zakaria Anything: Stay Out Of Syria

Earlier this week, Fareed weighed in on the ongoing unrest in Turkey. In today’s video, he offers an unequivocal warning about getting more involved in Syria:

Fareed Zakaria GPS airs Sundays on CNN, as well as via podcast.  Zakaria is also an Editor-at-Large of TIME Magazine, a Washington Post columnist, and the author of The Post-American World, The Future of Freedom, and From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role. Our Ask Anything archive is here.

What Does PRISM Mean For You?

The president is responding to your questions:

1. Will I be charged extra for this service?

I’m happy to say that the answer is no. While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.

The FBI May Have Your Emails

The other shoe drops:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows them to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The program essentially provides [WaPo] the agency with a search bar into Americans’ lives:

To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. The same math explains the aphorism, from the John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from Kevin Bacon.

The tech companies participating “include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley,” such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Skype. Ambers theorizes how this exchange works:

It is not clear how the NSA interfaces with the companies. It cannot use standard law enforcement transmission channels to do, since most use data protocols that are not compatible with that hardware. Several of the companies mentioned in the Post report deny granting access to the NSA, although it is possible that they are lying, or that the NSA’s arrangements with the company are kept so tightly compartmentalized that very few people know about it. Those who do probably have security clearances and are bound by law not to reveal the arrangement.

This arrangement allows the U.S. companies to “stay out of the intelligence business,” one of the officials said. That is, the government bears the responsibility for determining what’s relevant, and the company can plausibly deny that it subjected any particular customer to unlawful government surveillance. Previously, Congressional authors of the FAA said that such a “get out of jail free” card was insisted by corporations after a wave of lawsuits revealed the extent of their cooperation with the government.

Several of those tech companies immediately denied letting the government into their servers. Andrea Peterson explains what this might actually mean:

Comparing denials from tech companies, a clear pattern emerges: Apple denied ever hearing of the program and notes they “do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order;” Facebook claimed they “do not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers;” Google said it “does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data”; And Yahoo said they “do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.” Most also note that they only release user information as the law compels them to.

But the PRISM program’s reported access to data and the now repeatedly confirmed widespread access to phone records and other types of digital data appears to be almost exactly what the 2008 Protect America Act (PAA) allows Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to compel tech companies to do — as many warned around the time of its passage. If tech companies are not providing direct access to their servers but are cooperating with the PRISM program, that leaves at least one other option: Companies are providing intelligence agencies with copies of their data.

Timothy B. Lee flashes back to when Congress passed the Protect America Act, on Sept. 11 2007:

Civil liberties groups warned that the PAA’s vague requirements and lack of oversight would give the government a green light to seek indiscriminate access to the private communications of Americans. They predicted that the government would claim that they needed unfettered access to domestic communications to be sure they had gotten all relevant information about suspected terrorists.

It now appears that this is exactly what the government did. Today’s report suggests that the moment the PAA was the law of the land, the NSA started using it to obtain unfettered access to the servers of the nation’s leading online services. To comply with the requirement that the government not target Americans, PRISM searches are reportedly “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness’” — the lowest conceivable standard. PRISM training materials reportedly instruct users that if searches happen to turn up the private information of Americans, “it’s nothing to worry about.”

Tim Worstall defends the program:

[T]his sort of behaviour is not something that we should be shouting about government doing. It’s something that we should be shouting about government notdoing. The crucial point is here, from the DNI:

Section 702 is a provision of FISA that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States. It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.

As I say that’s the important part of it all. The information, the data, may be in the US as a result of the global spread of the internet and the physical location of servers. But the information cannot be about either a US citizen or someone who is in the US. And, if we’re prepared to be honest about matters, we do actually want the government to be keeping an eye on foreigners in foreign lands. Which is what they’re doing.

Amy Davidson is unsatisfied with that explanation:

[T]his is all supposedly meant to stop terrorism by foreigners. When the N.S.A. looks through the private files of people who are one or two degrees of separation from the person who has caught its eye, though, it hasn’t just gone beyond that mission but has betrayed it. The Post article described analysts using “selectors” that are “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness.’ ” If they turn out to have targeted “U.S. content”—beyond all the incidental information on Americans that’s swept up—they are supposed to submit it to yet another database, “but it’s nothing to worry about.” Actually, it is.

James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, has released a terse statement on the leak:

Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.

Always Look Out For The Cook

Adam Johnson pens a fascinating profile of the man who fetched caviar, cognac and Big Macs for Kim Jong-il before becoming an intelligence asset for Japan:

The chef’s name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il’s personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. …

When he finally escaped, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community’s single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known. We don’t know how many people live there. (Best guess: around 23 million.) It’s uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late ’90s. (Maybe 2 million.) Also mysterious is the number of citizens currently toiling their way toward death in labor camps, places people are sent without trial or sentence or appeal. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn’t even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date. (January 8, 1983.)

Lil Kim was apparently a bit of a frat boy as well:

Kim Jong-il invited the singer with the bobbed hair to perform for Fujimoto. Her name was Om Jong-yo. …  Soon they were singing a duet of “The Bride of Seto” on their wedding day, an event at which Kim Jong-il enforced heavy drinking, causing Fujimoto to black out. As a wedding prank, Kim Jong-il had the unconscious Fujimoto’s pubic hair shaved off.