This evening's music features pioneering Memphis r&b singer Rosco Gordon.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Obama's "purist" problem rears its ugly head again:

Political Staff Overruled "Purists" at State Department Who Tallied Slavery Problems

A devastating new Reuters story chronicles how political concerns watered down the State Department’s annual report on human trafficking around the world. The story quotes anonymous diplomats as saying that human rights experts shouldn’t be “purists” when it comes to the forced labor policies in foreign countries that amount to modern-day slavery.

The report from Reuters, based on over a dozen sources, alleges that senior personnel at the State Department, up to and including John Kerry’s chief of staff Jonathan Finer, boosted the grades for 14 countries, over the recommendations of experts at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known in Washington as J/TIP. The upgrades included China, India, Mexico, Cuba and Malaysia. ...

Malaysia’s ascendance to Tier 2 allowed them to remain in Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, after a federal statute barred Tier 3 countries from receiving “fast-track” approval for any trade agreements with the United States. ...

Calling those concerned about the forced labor of human beings “purists” fits with a long and troubling history of U.S. governments ignoring human rights concerns in partner countries, particularly to advance trade deals. A study by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office earlier this year found labor-related human rights abuses in 17 of the 20 countries with whom the U.S. has trade agreements.

Syria approaching de facto partition amid Assad military setbacks

The growing anarchy and stalemate in Syria has brought the country closer to de facto partition, as the overstretched and exhausted army of the president, Bashar al-Assad, retreats in the face of a war of attrition that has sapped its manpower.

The regime’s military has sought to retain a footprint in far-flung areas of the country, from Deir Ezzor in Syria’s eastern desert to Aleppo in the north and Deraa in the south, attempting to consolidate its hold over state institutions and protect its officer corps by retreating in the face of overwhelming offensives and subjecting lost territory to relentless and indiscriminate aerial campaigns.

But, facing a manpower shortage as tens of thousands of young men desert, the military has had to rely largely on local militias as enforcers for the regime. It is ceding territory to rebel fighters and the terror group Islamic State in favour of regrouping in its strongholds to the west, slowly paving the way for partition.

Cybersecurity bill could 'sweep away' internet users' privacy, agency warns

Homeland Security admits Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act raises concerns while corporations and data brokers lobby for bill as it returns to Senate

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said a controversial new surveillance bill could sweep away “important privacy protections”, a move that bodes ill for the measure’s return to the floor of the Senate this week.

The latest in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government.

Minnesota senator Al Franken queried the DHS in July; deputy secretary of the department Alejandro Mayorkas responded today that some provisions of the bill “could sweep away important privacy protections” and that the proposed legislation “raises privacy and civil liberties concerns”.

Much of the attention on Cisa has been directed at companies such as Google, Facebook and Comcast, which have large hoards of internet user behavior. But arguably more important are data brokers. Among the groups lobbying for the passage of Cisa are Experian, which tracks consumer trends using information from loyalty cards and other sources and licenses the information to help target advertising; Oracle, whose Data Cloud product works similarly; and Hitrust, which aggregates healthcare information.

Cop Filmed Handcuffing 8-Year-Old With Mental Disorder Slapped With Lawsuit

Legal advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against a Kentucky sheriff's deputy who handcuffed two children with mental disorders in an elementary school in 2014, alleging that the students suffered trauma after being punished for behavior that they could not control.

Video of one of the incidents shows Kevin Sumner, a deputy with the Kenton County Sheriff's Office, pulling an 8-year-old boy's arms behind his back and placing handcuffs on his biceps. The third-grader — identified in the lawsuit by the initials S.R. — cries out in pain. ... After attempting to discipline the student, school officials reportedly called Sumner to restrain him.

Various legal advocacy groups, including the Children's Law Center and the ACLU, filed the lawsuit against Sumner on behalf of the boy and another child who was restrained. The plaintiffs are seeking a change in policies by the Kenton County Sheriff's Office, and additional training for police officers who work with special needs children. ...

"These disciplinary practices… feed into the 'school-to-prison pipeline,' where children are funneled out of public schools and into the criminal justice system," the ACLU said in a statement. "Many of these children have disabilities, yet instead of receiving necessary educational and counseling services, they are often punished and pushed out."

Don’t look now, but the TPP just hit a major snag

What once looked like a foregone conclusion now appears stalled by major policy disagreements. What's next?

Since the passage of fast-track authority, the biggest obstacle to more corporate-written international trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not been unions or environmentalists or public health advocates. It’s been the calendar. And jostling by TPP member countries over domestic priorities may have just created such a calendar problem that we will not see a deal completed by the end of the Obama presidency.

Ministerial meetings in Maui last week were supposed to end in an agreement between the 12 nations negotiating TPP. But those talks broke up on Friday without a breakthrough. Officials played down the differences, claiming that anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of the details have been finalized. But the outstanding issues involve the basic building blocks of a trade agreement — specifically, what industries get tariff elimination and unfettered market access, and which remain protected. ...

If TPP talks don’t restart until November, the timeline slides into elections in the U.S., exactly what President Obama had been trying to avoid. Under fast-track rules, the government must publish the complete text of any trade agreement 60 days before signing. So even completion of TPP in November — and there’s no guarantee of that — would mean that signing wouldn’t take place until next January. And after that, there are reporting requirements that must take place before the White House can introduce the bill in Congress, which could mean another delay of at least 90 days. At that point, Congress has 90 session days to act on the implementing legislation.

So you’re talking about a series of TPP votes in Congress right in the middle of both the presidential race and Congressional primaries, a distasteful scenario for members who don’t want to draw an angry challenger because of their trade vote. ...

This is what happens when world leaders try to make deals they know their populations will detest. Apparently the last threads of democracy remaining are strong enough that, sooner or later, these same leaders must stand before their people and defend gutting regulations, selling out their sovereignty and benefiting multinational corporations instead of the public. It’s apparently hard to find a good time to do that.

239 Years Ago, Adam Smith Predicted Fury of Seattle Business at CEO Who Pays Workers Well

Dan Price, the CEO of a small Seattle credit card processing company called Gravity Payments, announced several months ago that over the next three years he’ll gradually raise the minimum salary there to $70,000.

How did his counterparts at other businesses react? Let’s get a prediction from Adam Smith, who wrote this 239 years ago in the most famous book about economics ever published, The Wealth of Nations:

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

Was Adam Smith right? As a recent New York Times story demonstrates, he called it precisely:

Brian Canlis, a co-owner of his family-named restaurant, is [a client of Gravity Payments]. He said he was fond of Mr. Price, but was more discomfited by his actions. …

The pay raise at Gravity, Mr. Canlis told Mr. Price, “makes it harder for the rest of us.”

Mr. Price winced. “It pains me to hear Brian Canlis say that,” he said later. “The last thing I would ever want to do is make a client feel uncomfortable.” …

Leah Brajcich, who oversees sales at Gravity, fielded complaints from several customers who accused her boss of communist or socialist sympathies that would drive up their own employees’ wages …

As for other business leaders in Mr. Price’s social circle, they were split on whether he was a brilliant strategist or simply nuts.

Bernie Sanders, Open Borders and a Serious Route to Global Equality

Some progressives expressed dismay last week to discover that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, doesn't favor a policy of open immigration. ... It is hard to justify people in the United States living so much better and longer lives than people in places like Bangladesh or Burundi, just like it's hard to justify the children of the rich and privileged in the United States living so much better and longer lives than their poorer counterparts, but there is not a plausible story where this inequality will be addressed by mass immigration. There are, however, more serious ways to think about addressing global inequality.

One of the main reasons that workers in the United States get much higher wages than workers in the developing world is that they have more capital to work with. They also are much better educated on average. The same policy can help to address both gaps. Specifically, we can make our "intellectual property" freely available to the rest of the world at the cost of transferring it, which will generally be close to zero.

We can accomplish this by exempting the developing world from intellectual property (IP) claims in the form of patent and copyright protection. ... There would no longer be any issues with drugs costing tens of thousands of dollars a year. Nearly all of them would sell for just a few dollars per prescription. The same would apply to chemicals used in agriculture, also to newly designed crops that use land or water more efficiently. The operating systems and software on computers and cell phones would also be available at no cost, as would be various programs applications in research and business. ...

The education aspect of this story would also benefit from ending IP claims in the developing world. If schools and training facilities in the developing world all could gain access to books, computer software, online lectures and other educational material at zero cost, it would substantially reduce the cost of education. In short, a substantial portion of the benefits of the wealth can be transferred to the developing world simply by changing IP rules. ...

Fortunately Senator Sanders has already been thinking along these lines. Back in 2011 he proposed two bills that would replace patent monopolies with more modern mechanisms for financing drug research. His specific proposals may not be the best financing method, but they are at least a serious effort to move away from the anachronistic patent system.

Also of interest:

New Greek Bailout Increases the Possibility of Grexit

Greece Succumbs to Imperialist Banksterism

Koch Political Machine Focuses on “Freedom” to Pollute and Pay Less Taxes

Israel wrecked my home. Now it wants my land.

US Politicians’ Racist Anti-Iranian Remarks Don’t Make Headlines

W. E. B. Du Bois to Malcolm X, The Untold History of the Movement to Ban the Bomb

Why America's Inequality Problem Is About a Lot More Than Money