Secretary Geithner continued his public appearances today with a speech at the Economic Club of Washington. Geithner said that there are encouraging signs in the economy, but warned that the global growth pattern of the mid-2000s is unsustainable. ”We must set ourselves on a path so that one country or group of countries does not consume in excess while another set of countries produces in excess,” said the Treasury Secretary referring to the global trade imbalances. Many lawmakers have already held the view that the system of international trade in its current shape is not working for the U.S. economy and our society. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown spoke today at the International Trade Association at George Washington University of the need to assess the impact of Free Trade Agreements before more of them are approved by Congress. The Senator said that he would introduce legislation to put pending trade deals on hold until a federal commission and the Government Accountability Office studied the benefits of existing trade policies. A new Pentagon cyber-command is in the works and will be finalized very soon. The command will apparently cover the security of military and intelligence agencies’ computer networks. You may not have known it, but the Department of Homeland Security is already charged with protecting the government non-military computer networks. A cyber-command is long overdue, as evidenced by increasingly bold attacks on the U.S. government, including military computer systems. ManufactureThis already talked about the most recent successful attempt, allegedly from Chinese hackers, to steal computer data on the U.S. military’s most expensive weapons system Joint Strike Fighter Jet. The FBI is also in the process of hunting down 6 Ukrainian hackers who corrupted 1.9 million computers between February and March of this year all around the world, including federal government computers in the U.S. and Europe.