Automatic (or semi-automatic) alternative to cut and paste WANTED, please

It's not clear to me what exactly you're trying to achieve, but this can be done by the script.

The general approach could be like so:

I assume you have a number of LABELTEXT xml-elements in your document.

You can get all of them who have the programId attribute into the array and loop through each element doing something with attribute values:

main();

function main() {
	var xmlElement, xmlAttribute, value,
	doc = app.activeDocument,
	rootXml = doc.xmlElements[0],
	programIdArr = rootXml.evaluateXPathExpression("//LABELTEXT[@programId]");

	for (var i = 0; i < programIdArr.length; i++) {
		xmlElement = programIdArr[i];
		xmlAttribute = xmlElement.xmlAttributes.item("programId");
		value = xmlAttribute.value;
		$.writeln("Do something with programId " + value);
	}
}

Hey - sounds like an interesting issue. 

I'm not 100% sure on this or what you are looking to do - can you elaborate on your workflow?