Good morning. It is September 5th. It's getting hotter in New York City on the way into what's supposed to be a humid weekend, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The latest federal jobs report is out. According to the initial numbers for August, the United States added only 22,000 jobs in the month while losing 12,000 manufacturing jobs, and 15,000 government jobs. Bloomberg notes that manufacturing jobs are now down by 78,000 this year and government employment is down by 97,000 since the Trump administration took over. In revisions to previous months numbers, July picked up a few more jobs in retrospect, while June's numbers were reduced to the point that job growth that month is now in the record as negative. 

In other news about how the Trump administration's policy is intersecting with the manufacturing sector. The Wall Street Journal reports, “hundreds of people, including South Korean workers, were arrested in an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor battery plant under construction in Georgia, weeks after the carmaker pledged $26 billion in U.S. investments. South Korea protested the action to the U.S. and said it was trying to secure the release of its citizens. Around 450 people were arrested, said the Atlanta office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in a social media post. The post described the people as unlawful aliens.” The story explains the factory is being built by a joint venture between South Korea based Hyundai Motor and the South Korean battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution. It is located in the town of Ellabell near Savannah, Georgia and is part of a $7.6 billion Hyundai complex that the state has described as the largest manufacturing project in Georgia's history. The story goes on to say “among those detained at the factory were South Korean employees of LG Energy Solution on business travel.” 

Meanwhile, in North Korean relations, the New York Times unfurled a gigantic reconstructive narration of a secret operation by SEAL Team 6 in 2019, approved by President Trump in which the Special Operations Forces tried to sneak on shore in North Korea to plant a high-tech listening device to intercept the communications of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, a scheme which, the Times writes, “called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine nearly two football fields long into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale, that would motor silently to shore.”

This ultra stealthy mission got spotted by a boat in North Korean waters. The SEALs in the landing party operating under a communications blackout decided the best way to deal with the uncertainty was to open fire on the boat, abort the mission and flee. The Times writes, “the shore team swam to the boat to make sure that all of the North Koreans were dead. They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said number two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead. Officials familiar with the mission,” the Times continues, “said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crews' lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink. Meanwhile,” the Times writes, “believing the SEALs were in imminent danger of capture, the big nuclear submarine maneuvered into shallow water close to the shore, taking a significant risk to pick them up. It then sped toward the open ocean. All the US military personnel escaped unharmed.” The story goes on to say, “in the months that followed, North Korea fired more missiles than in any previous year, including some capable of reaching the United States. Since then, the United States estimates, North Korea has amassed 50 nuclear warheads and material to produce about 40 more.” The Times then writes, “the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy. Among some in the military who've worked with them,” the Times writes, “the SEALs have a reputation for devising overly bold and complex missions that go badly. Team Six's debut mission, which was part of the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, is a case in point. The plan was to parachute into the sea, race to the coast in speedboats and plant beacons to guide assault forces to the island's airport. But the SEALs plane took off late. They jumped at night and landed in stormy conditions, weighed down by heavy gear. Four SEALs drowned and the rest swamped their speedboats. The airfield was later seized by Army Rangers, who parachuted directly onto the airfield. Since then,” the Times continues, SEALs have mounted other complex and daring missions that unraveled in Panama, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. During a rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2010, Team Six SEALs accidentally killed a hostage they were trying to rescue with a grenade and then misled superiors about how she had died. In part because of this track record, President Barack Obama curtailed special operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight, reserving complex commando raids for extraordinary situations like hostage rescues. The first Trump administration reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions. A few days after taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump skipped over much of the established deliberative process to greenlight a Team Six raid on a village in Yemen. That mission left 30 villagers and a SEAL dead and destroyed a $75 million stealth aircraft.” 

On the theme of Donald Trump's appetite for murder, the front of today's print edition of the New York Times returns to the story of Tuesday's unprovoked slaughter of a boat full of people in the Caribbean. Now the coverage is two columns wide in the form of a NEWS ANALYSIS piece, which still has the less than precise headline package, “Without Arrest or Trial, Killing Drug Suspects / Trump Applies Wartime Rules.” You have to get to almost the very bottom of the story before the Times nails down how profoundly false its own subhead is. Donald Trump may have asserted, on completely bogus grounds that he was carrying out a military action, but even that doesn't change the open illegality of what he did. As the story says in the fourth paragraph from the end, “it is a war crime for troops to deliberately kill civilians, even criminals, who are not directly participating in hostilities.” But the top of the story does lay out most of the basic facts of the situation. “By ordering the US military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug smuggling boat,” the Times writes, “President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.” The story goes on to note, “the trafficking of an illegal consumer product is not a capital offense, and Congress has not authorized armed conflict against cartels.” And it says that blowing up the boat departed from the decades-long approach of having the Coast Guard or the Navy intercept and board ships when there is a suspicion of drugs being smuggled in international waters. “That,” the Times continues, “raises the question of whether Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to tell the military to summarily kill people it suspects are smuggling drugs, and whether the administration allowed career military lawyers to weigh in.” There is one more for the “raises questions” means answers-questions file. As the story immediately then says, “‘it's difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,’ said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.” The story also points out that even in military counterterrorism situations. The US has a record of blowing up the wrong people, and points out in a 2001 incident “the CIA told the Peruvian government that a plane was smuggling drugs and its Air Force shot it down only to find that the plane had instead carried American missionaries.” And considering the present-day situation around the decision the story says “the strike has escalated Mr. Trump's use of military power in ways that were previously understood to be off-limits. He has also invoked a wartime deportation law against suspected members of the same Venezuelan gang he said was targeted in the strike on the boat. He has sent migrants to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and deployed federal troops to the streets of American cities over the objections of local and state elected leaders.” It also notes how Trump spent his first term praising Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, whose own policy of murdering people accused of involvement in drugs, as is now the Times writes, “facing charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.” This is all good and useful and damning context and analysis. It just “raises the question” of why the Times needed three days and the input of a panel of experts to correctly identify the meaning and the news value of the president casually murdering a boatload of people in international waters. 

The rest of the top of the front page is a big picture of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gesticulating as he addresses a Senate hearing under the headline, “Grilled by Senate, Kennedy Defends Vaccine Moves. Several in GOP,” the subhead says, “imply that he broke vow.” 

“Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” The Times writes, “faced a barrage of questions on Thursday during a fiery Senate hearing in which he defiantly defended his vaccine policy, blamed the nation's public health agency for a rise in chronic disease and repeatedly clashed with Democrats, whom he accused of ‘making stuff up.’ The three hour hearing before the Senate Finance Committee revealed that Mr. Kennedy was on uncertain ground, even with some Republicans who voted to confirm him. When Mr. Kennedy courted their votes, he promised repeatedly and in writing to do nothing that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines. On Thursday, he insisted that he had lived up to his word. ‘I’m not taking vaccines away from anyone,’ he said.”

The story continues, “but in the seven months since he was sworn in, Mr. Kennedy has delivered a lukewarm endorsement of the measles vaccine, dismantled a panel of experts who make vaccine recommendations to the government, taken steps that will effectively restrict access to COVID-19 vaccines, canceled $500 million of grants and contracts for the development of mRNA vaccines, and just last week forced out the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because she disagreed with him on vaccine policy. Several Republicans including Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, John Barrasso of Wyoming and Tom Tillis of North Carolina suggested pointedly that he had broken the promise he made when he was confirmed. Mr. Cassidy, a physician and a fierce proponent of vaccination, agonized publicly over whether to vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy and in the end decided to do so.” 

Yeah, well, guess what? You're not a fierce proponent of vaccination if you voted for the guy who was a known obvious liar and fanatical anti-vax activist. Maybe even more than the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense, the Kennedy confirmation certified that there was absolutely no limit on Republicans readiness to roll over for Donald Trump, no matter what principles were involved or what obvious damage would be the result. And, RFK Jr.'s behavior has amply illustrated that he knows he doesn't have to answer to anyone but Trump, which is why the reports from the hearing seem to document that the only thing that really made him squirm was his attempt to align himself with Donald Trump's own completely self-contradictory positions that the development of the mRNA COVID vaccines under Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous triumph for Donald Trump and that the anti-vax movement in general and the anti-COVID vaccination movement in particular are righteous and correct and he is their champion.

And below the photo of still above the fold on the front page, the headline is, “Chinese Data Theft May Affect Most Americans / A Cyberattack Targeted More Than 80 Countries.” Man, who cares? How many times by how many different people does the same stuff have to be stolen before we can stop worrying about it? Wow. The Chinese have the same stuff that Elon Musk's DOGE team has, and maybe the same stuff that the New York Times’s Nazi hacker/collaborator stole from Columbia, just put one more data breach letter on the pile, and call me when the people who compiled these data sets in the first place and failed to protect them get rounded up and sent to prison. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.