STIRRINGS IN KOREA?

How bad are things for the North Koreans? It’s hard to be certain. We do know that at least 100,000 of them prefer living like hunted animals in China to life at home. Satellite photographs support estimates that 200,000 of them live in North Korea¡’s horrific concentration camp systems. Up to 2 million of them are estimated to have starved to death since a famine, selectively focused on the least “politically reliable,” began in 1994. No government has been so oppressive of its own people since the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. No government has ever let its people suffer such a fate while spending so lavishly on the opulent lifestyles of its leaders, and on a bloated war machine that it holds against the throats of its neighbors.

Given that the greatest mass slaughter of Koreans in history is taking place 30 miles north of Seoul — at this very hour and minute — one would expect strong reactions in South Korea. One would expect to see mass candlelight vigils for the millions of North Koreans selectively culled for starvation since 1994. One would expect Koreans to rain their nationalist fury at China for propping up Kim Jong Il’s failed state in order to keep Korea divided. There should be battalions of riot police protecting the Chinese Embassy from angry students each time China hunts down more North Korean refugees and pitches whole families of them back into Kim Jong Il¡¯s furnace. There should be outcries that Korea’s government tolerates this without a peep of protest. Politicians should face eternal demands not to kowtow to the leaders of China, and to demand apologies from them for the next century. One would not expect South Koreans to help perpetuate the oppression of their brothers by buying North Korean products or booking overpriced Mount Kumgang tour packages. One would expect them to be passionately interested in the courageous work of the brave souls who risk confinement in Chinese prisons to save the lives of North Korean refugees.

Yes. Instead we have this:

Two aides in the administration of former South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, have been indicted over allegations the government made secret payments to secure an inter-Korean summit.

An indepedent inquiry has found the Kim administration paid more than $US100 million to the North ahead of the landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000.

The investigation stopped short of describing the money as a bribe, but did say the donation was clearly related to the summit and had been secretly sent through improper channels.

I met with Kim Dae Jung some years ago, and I thought he was a well-meaning man though a bit kooky (he explained to me that he had once been saved from murder by Jesus’ personal intervention). But I repeat what I’ve said here before: The dreadful goings-on in North Korea will come out, as will the complicity of many South Korean politicians. And the result will be quite dramatic. (Via The Marmot’s Hole).

ED CRANE AND THE VAST NEOCONSERVATIVE CONSPIRACY: Porphyrogenitus isn’t persuaded.

NOT SO MUCH A SMOKING GUN as a gun factory, apparently:

U.S. investigators in Iraq have found equipment for a nuclear weapons program and millions of detailed documents relating to chemical and biological weapons, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. . . .

Three U.S. officials told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that an Iraqi scientist who was part of what Saddam called his “nuclear mujahadeen” had led intelligence officials to a barrel in a residential garden in an undisclosed part of Iraq, where they found plans for a nuclear centrifuge and components of a uranium enrichment system.

The sources said the plans, the discovery of which was first reported by CNN, dated back to the end of the first Gulf War, when Saddam was already widely known to be seeking such weapons, and came as no great surprise.

Sources told NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski that within just the past week, U.S. investigators had found two shipping containers filled with millions of much more recent documents relating to chemical and biological weapons.

One of the documents, from 2001, was titled “Document burial and U.N. Activities in Iraq,” the sources said. It gave detailed instructions on how to hide materials and deceive U.N. weapons inspectors, the sources said.

Other documents related to the concealment of VX nerve gas, the sources said.

Then there’s this:

Obeidi told CNN the parts of a gas centrifuge system for enriching uranium were part of a highly sophisticated system he was ordered to hide so as to be ready to rebuild the bomb program at some time in the future.

“I have very important things at my disposal that I have been ordered to have, to keep, and I’ve kept them, and I don’t want this to proliferate, because of its potential consequences if it falls in the hands of tyrants, in the hands of dictators or of terrorists,” said Obeidi, who has been taken out of Iraq with the help of the U.S. government.

WMD has never been the key reason for war, in my opinion, but this sounds like pretty clear proof of “material breach” to me (assuming, of course, that these reports pan out). And Saddam certainly suffered the promised “serious consquences,” didn’t he?

Of course, the usual suspects will no doubt claim that these were all planted by the Bushitler and his cabal of evil (Jewish) neoconservative handlers.

JACOB T. LEVY WRITES on constitutonal change in Britain, in The New Republic. Excerpt:

In the past the system has tottered along largely on the strength of British institutional conservatism. The traditional constitutional order exercised a hold on the political imagination; upheavals were out of character. But New Labour’s modernizing project shows that this Burkean conservatism has dwindled, and it’s further contributing to its diminution. Whatever emotional attachment Britons might have had to the centuries-old Lord Chancellorship–with its pomp, circumstance, and Great Seal–they are unlikely to extend to the new Minister of Constitutional Affairs.

Indeed.

GEPHARDT’S UNPERSUASIVE DEFENSE: I got the same email that Eugene Volokh did, and I know the source, so I can vouch for its reliability. But while I was off having a leisurely lunch talking about blogs with a colleague from the Journalism School, Eugene Volokh posted a lengthy analysis of Gephardt’s statement, together with a what-he-said-then-vs.-what-he’s-saying-now table. So rather than duplicate Eugene’s work, I’m going to send you there.

UPDATE: Stuart Buck is defending Gephardt. But I don’t think Gephardt is Lincoln.

WILLIAM GIBSON WRITES:

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

Indeed. But read the whole essay.

MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN on outsourcing in the Information Technology area is getting a lot of feedback. There’s an interesting debate going on in the comments. There’s also this email:

A certain large laser printer company started outsourcing to India not because of costs, but because, when they started this project, it was IMPOSSIBLE to hire engineers here. Intel was leasing cars for college hires as an incentive to get them to come to work; trying to hire anyone in a place where you can buy houses for $100,000 was nearly impossible.

The savings from outsourcing turn out to be smaller than you might expect considering wage rates in India). The net effect will probably not be dramatic losses of jobs, but reducing upward pressure on salaries of engineers.

I have great sympathy for the engineers out of work, but this was mostly the collapse of the 1990s bubble, and foreign outsourcing is probably not a significant part of it. It does mean that some of these jobs may not come back after the economy recovers, and when they do come back, the wages won’t be quite so spectacular for recent college grads.

At least my employer is still doing H1B visas–because they claim that they can’t find people willing to work for $65-75K–and they probably can’t. Lots of engineers won’t leave California to work in Idaho. The H1B visas need to stop, however, to encourage employers to raise pay scales enough to get people to move.

I don’t know much about the H1B program, but I keep hearing that it’s being abused. Reader Yann A. Le Gouellec says it’s not true:

Re: your TCS column about immigration and outsourcing … While I agree with you about outsourcing, I would like, however, to debunk the fallacy (as reported by the Boston Globe) about H1-B holders taking jobs from “good americans”.

Having been one H1-B holder (now with a green card) and having recently hired one, I can tell you that the minimum requirements include: high degree (usually Ph.D.), publications, and agreement from the Labor Commission that this job could not be filled by a US Citizen, and salary in the level prescribed by the State. So enough with whinings that US citizen can’t compete …

Jayakrishnan Nair, meanwhile, notes that it’s not just tech jobs, but cartoons that are moving to India. And reader Daryl Biberdorf sends this:

Speaking as as a worker in the technical trenches, though, the REAL impact of the continued flood of H1B/L-1 visa workers coupled with the mass exodus of information technology (IT) jobs to India and other places, is that I expect a strong trend to unionization in these fields within the next five years. Every day, the American IT worker sees entire organizations moved to India, thousands of jobs at a time. The logical arguments lose their attraction when you’re the guy wondering how the mortgage is going to get paid. The unionizers are going to appeal to this. Then, the question is, how does the AFL-CIO vote?

Yes, I suppose it’s possible that the AFL-CIO will (on issues outside its core) move right in response to a different crop of union members.

UPDATE: Many, many readers wrote to say that Le Gouellec is overstating the requirements for an H1B visa. and they appear to be right — as reader Kevin McKinley notes, this site says a 4-year degree is all that is required, and missing years of college can be replaced by work experience. One reader wrote:

Your reader Yann A. Le Gouellec is, I think, incorrect.

My last experience dealing with the H-1B visa bureaucracy was 1986, when I hired a software engineer from South Africa. I tried, very hard, to find an American, but several weeks of advertising gave us about 40 nominally qualified applicants–of whom more than half were fresh graduates, who needed H-1B visas to start work. This guy was the only of the 40 applicants who actually had work experience, along with two bachelor’s degrees (electrical engineering and computer sciences). No publication history, and only about three years of work experience.

The Dept. of Labor made it a laborious process, and seemed to be making a serious effort to make sure that we hired an American if at all possible–but it was longer on process than intelligence, and I suspect it would have been possible to work around their process, if we had been so inclined.

The current situation is quite different. On the bulletin board here at work are three H-1B visa applications, one for a software engineer (salary described as $55,000 to $65,000, so apparently someone with 2-3 years experience and a CS degree), and two for electrical engineers, one at $80,000 a year, and another at $100,000 a year, so these are probably people with at least five and ten years experience, respecitvely. (These are good salaries, in southwestern Idaho.) None of these positions should be hard to fill, since so many engineers in this field are out of work.

Reader Davis King writes:

The big abuse behind H1B’s and L-1’s, though, is not whether they take away “American” jobs, but that people who are brought here on H1B’s and 1L’s face legal restrictions on their ability to switch employers. If they could compete in the job market on equal terms, their wages would quickly rise to match the wages of US citizens, and any economic incentive to replace existing workers with new visa holders would disappear.

In other words, this is one of those cases where the press blames free-market competition, greedy corporations, and globalization, while the real culprit is a government regulation that restricts labor market competition. A simple, libertarian solution — granting every H1B holder a green card and the right to compete freely for any job he/she chooses — would be much more effective than a union-led effort to cut visa numbers and expel immigrant engineers from
the country.

I will never understand why the people who created the H1B program thought it was a good idea for us to single out the highest-educated, most tech-savvy, hardest-working immigrants for a “temporary” worker program that can force them to leave the United States if they lose their jobs.

Interesting.

ONE FINAL UPDATE, to this too-long post: Reader Scott Wood sends this:

I have worked in the IT department of a very large manufacturing company for most of the last 7 years, and I can’t remember a single (technical) meeting in which American’s weren’t greatly outnumbered by Indians, Mexicans and Filipinos. (In other departments China is the country du jour.) And everyone in my department (I am a short term interloper, so the skin in the game is a little different for me) is due to be replaced by an Indian contingent by September. So here are my somewhat knowledgeable but not at all unbiased observations:

1) I’m skeptical about it being cheaper. Our experience is that for all the talk about their vaunted education, the Indian replacements are, by and large, just not very qualified. Managers who say otherwise are, well, managers, and probably have bonuses linked to short term budgetary savings, and want to curry favor which higher level managers. However.

2) They are probably not very qualified as much for lack of experience as anything else. I wonder if the outsourcing firms aren’t going to create a bad reputation for themselves by growing more quickly then they can handle. This is complicated by sheer distance and the nature of the outsourcing contract itself making seriously judging individual qualifications before hiring pretty much impossible. Lots of people have paper qualifications that were probably acquired through book cramming. Finally,

3) Here, anyway, the daily work environment is so poisoned that coming to work is drudgery for me for pretty much the first time in my life. This is exceptionally ironic since I am working with pretty much my entire corps of best friends that I have made since moving to this area. I can’t help but assume that the large contingent of on-site Indians, including some personal friends, feel the hostility. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and hope, after I leave in September, never to experience it again.

–sw

ps-For the record, I agree with your correspondent who criticizes the H1B program for making the most qualified people leave the country. After years of arguing that the political clout of auto and textile workers shouldn’t be able to everyone else poorer, I can’t very easily carve out an exception for myself. It’s hard to maintain that position in the face of my (local) friends who have always been much more protectionist, trade-unionist types.

Well, I don’t know where I come down on this exactly — I’m generally pro-immigration and pro-free trade, but H1B isn’t exactly either, though outsourcing more or less is — but it seems that this is a hot-button issue that’s likely to generate some heat unless the economy recovers sufficiently to take the pressure off here.

Interestingly, another (Indian) reader emailed that Indian companies are starting to outsource low-cost work to China. Sooner or later, I suppose, they’ll run out of low-cost places. . . .

DAVID NISHIMURA RELAYS A “DEVASTATING” REPORT ON LOOTING in Baghdad.

It appears that there were, in fact, massive violations of the Hague Convention — by the Iraqis. I’m waiting for the chorus of condemnation now. . . .

JUSTICE O’CONNOR TALKS about affirmative action and the Michigan decision, in an interview by Jan Crawford Greenburg.

AMY ALKON IS A bright woman.

THIS PUTS A WHOLE NEW SPIN ON AGGRESSIVE REPORTING:

More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi’s headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say.

Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a “Judith Miller team,” in the words of one officer close to the situation.

In April, Miller wrote a letter objecting to an Army commander’s order to withdraw the unit, Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, from the field. She said this would be a “waste” of time and suggested that she would write about it unfavorably in the Times. After Miller took up the matter with a two-star general, the pullback order was dropped.

On the other hand,

Viewed from one perspective, Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, nationally recognized expert on weapons of mass destruction and co-author of a best-selling book on bioterrorism, was acting as an aggressive journalist. She ferreted out sources, used her long-standing relationship with Chalabi to pursue potential stories and, in the process, helped the United States take custody of two important Iraqis. Some military officers say she cared passionately about her reporting without abandoning her objectivity, and some of her critics may be overly concerned with regulations and perhaps jealous of the attention Miller’s unit received.

I link. You decide.

LOTS OF TECHNICAL JOBS are being outsourced to Third-World countries. My TechCentralStation column looks at the response to this phenomenon, and at whether there will be a political backlash that might affect the 2004 elections.

ADVICE TO GEPHARDT: “When in a hole, stop digging.”

Meanwhile Porphyrogenitus notes: “I like to think that if Paul Tsongas (D – MA) were still alive, he’d give Gephardt a ‘Pander Bear’. ” And Bill Hobbs offers a history of Executive Orders and their abuse.

AUSTIN BAY: “Rogue states that aid and abet terrorists are erasing their own borders.”

COLBY COSH’S PLEDGE DRIVE / Blogosphere unemployment compensation solicitation has raised $1,000 so far. In terms of relative deprivation, he figures this makes him a match for Andrew Sullivan.

SOME THOUGHTS ON IRAN, REVOLUTION, and what the United States should do.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Vanities is up, full of fresh bloggy goodness from all over.

JAMES LILEKS IS BEING OBLIQUE — but it’s obvious that someone doesn’t like The Bleat.

Which just proves that there are idiots in need of stern correction everywhere.

UPDATE: Ken Layne agrees.

NGO WATCH is a project aimed at scrutinizing NGOs. Well, someone should.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, INVOKING FANCY MATHEMATICS, I WROTE IN THE COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW that scholars should look at the Supreme Court’s actions, however random-seeming, for signs of deeper patterns. Now, a mathematician has done just that, and those patterns seem to be there, and to exist independent of legal issues, or the composition or politics of the Court. I find this very interesting, though not entirely surprising.

SO IF YOU’RE ANTI-GLOBALIZATION, YOU SHOULD DENOUNCE THIS, RIGHT? Turner Classic Movies is featuring the best of Bollywood this month.

IS BRIGHT the new gay?

UPDATE: Next, meet the Tony Blair Democrats!

FOUR COLOR HELL is a comics blog that’s worth your time. Er, if you’re into comics, that is.

THE GEPHARDT CAMPAIGN is invoking Harry Truman to defend his comments about Executive Orders and the Supreme Court. Phil Carter points out that Truman’s record with Executive Orders and the Supreme Court doesn’t really help the Gephardt campaign’s position. Carter points out that Truman acted by Executive Order in the Steel Seizure Cases and his action was overturned by the Court:

There is great irony in the assertion by Dick Gephardt’s campaign that he would follow the example of Harry Truman with respect to Executive Orders. Harry Truman did some great things unilaterally, such as his desegregation of the military and recognition of Israel, among others. But we can also learn what presidents cannot do from Truman’s experience in the White House. I hope that Mr. Gephardt learns those lessons as well.

Good point.

I HAVE JUST LEARNED THAT KEN SCHWETJE, general counsel of the NSS and former chair of the ABA’s International Space Law committee (which I also chaired some years earlier, and which is where I think I first met him), and adjunct professor teaching space law at George Washington University, has died suddenly of a heart attack.

Ken was a very smart and nice man, and an excellent lawyer. He will be missed.