(S)ome guy whose name I didn’t catch gave an astonishingly simple-minded lecture on the history of American radicalism since the populists.

…

“And then in the 50s, we had the civil right movement…” the guy droned.

“Uh, I think we should conclude the lecture and break up into groups to discuss our nonviolent direct action training,” said Landis. “We seem to be losing people.” A lot of them, too.

…

Landis asked what kind of a world we wanted to see. Someone said, “Socialism” and Landis said the topic for discussion was now how to plan for a “hypothetical direct action.” Every time somebody brought up something that was actually happening, Landis insisted that our agenda was set and we were only discussing hypothetical situations. So we talked about hypothetically withdrawing money from a hypothetical evil bank, or hypothetically stopping the hypothetical fracking in the Catskills that is going to poison New York City’s hypothetical drinking water.

“What about May 1?” said a retired professor.

“What about it?” said Landis.

“I heard that Occupy Wall Street was calling for a general strike. They’re planning actions all around midtown and they’re saying that nobody should go to work that day.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Landis. “We’re talking about hypothetical situations here.”

And so it went from 6:30 to 9:30 last Tuesday night. Over half the crowd left early. Most of those who stayed appeared to be angry and mystified that they had received no training whatever in nonviolent direct action. I doubt that the Democrats or MoveOn succeeded in co-opting anyone, and I predict that they will be inventing more dreary front groups as the election year grinds onward. “Front groups, not issues!” should be Obama’s rallying cry.

“I’m taking the subway to Wall Street,” said a guy in his 20s (probably the only guy in his 20s) as he walked out the door. “That’s where the action is. People are sleeping on the sidewalk there. Apparently the police can’t arrest you if you take up less than half the sidewalk. Go to Maydaynyc.org if you want to find out about the general strike.”

“The first clue … was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale.  …  Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.”

Yes, The 99% Spring Is A Fraud

Charles M. Young, This Can’t Be Happening

Fri, 04/13/2012 – 11:44

(h/t Lambert Strether @ Naked Capitalism)

Well here’s an interesting factoid I’ve missed so far this season.  There are now two female drivers working with Formula One teams, Maria de Villota of Marussia and Susie Wolff of Williams.  As the Daily Mail article alludes, they are hardly taken seriously by the corrupt macho culture that is F1 and frankly the backlog of drivers wanting seats is so deep that you have to bribe a team to get one.  I doubt either will see any race time even in GP2, but from little acorns…

Let’s talk a bit about Mercedes.  One of the reasons they’ve performed relatively well so far (though not top 3) is an aero innovation they’ve introduced.  Shades of the blown diffuser, holes exposed during deployment of the Drag Reduction System funnel air forward through carbon fiber chassis tubes and spoil downforce on the front wing too.  It survived a challenge from Team Lotus this week and is expected to be widely copied by the other teams to the extent they can.  The Mercedes chassis is purpose built around this and since they’re one of the most (and largest) pissed off teams at the moment, I expect this will stick while a similar innovation from Lotus got ruled illegal 3 weeks after approval.

Go figure.

Red Bull is very disappointed at their start this year and is intending to run dual setups.  Webber will be running a refinement of the rear aero used at Sepang and Vettel will be running the setup used in winter testing.  McLaren was using pitot tubes on the rear end to gather additional data during practice.

Hamilton has a problem.  His original gearbox is cracked and he’s highly likely to have to replace it and accept a 5 grid penalty though we won’t know for sure until today.  It may not matter so much as Qualifying has proven a less than reliable indicator of performance so far-

Pole Position Is Falling Behind

By BRAD SPURGEON, The New York Times

Published: April 13, 2012

It used to be that the man who scored pole position was almost certain to win the race. But as the series prepares for the Chinese Grand Prix outside Shanghai this weekend, the value of the pole and qualifying in general seem to have diminished as the fastest drivers on Saturday have rarely been those who finish the race in the top spots.

“I won’t deny that I’m disappointed to have had two pole positions and not to have been able to convert either of them into victories,” Hamilton said. “But I prefer to think of it that luck just hasn’t been on my side and that it will swing my way sooner or later.”

As usual it’s tires, tires, tires and the offering this week is Mediums and Softs though it’s distinctly possible that a large part of the race will be on Inters and Wets.  Shanghai has had rain 4 of the last 8 years and it rained during morning Practice on Friday.  Timo Glock parked hard in the second session, but says he’s ok and is expected to race.

• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast

The actual race is a 2:30 am start tomorrow on Speed with a repeat at 3:30 pm.  If you happen to be up right now you can join me in watching Formula One Debrief or wait until 2 pm.  If you start watching at midnight tomorrow you get the full trifecta run up of Debrief, Qualifying, and Race.

(Note: As previously mentioned, Part 3 has already been posted and I didn’t make a promise to promote in any particular order.)

BREAKING: White House To Delay Implementation Of Key Anti-Discrimination Order

By Igor Volsky, ThinkProgress

Apr 11, 2012 at 6:45 pm

After months of dodging questions about the progress of an executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal contracting, the White House won’t issue the directive, but will instead study whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees require employment protections, ThinkProgress has learned. The news comes after White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett held a meeting with LGBT advocates to discuss the matter.

Existing studies suggest that 11 to 16 million additional employees would have gained protections as a result of the measure, since many “federal contractors do not currently have those policies, and they employ millions of workers.”

…

“Today’s news that the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors will launch a study to better understand workplace discrimination against gay and transgender Americans is confounding and disappointing,” said Winnie Stachelberg, the Executive Vice President for External Affairs at the Center for American Progress. “The President should use his executive authority to extend existing nondiscrimination requirements of federal contractors to include sexual orientation and gender identity,” she added.

Earlier this month, 72 Congressional lawmakers urged the administration to enact the order, noting that it would “extend important workplace protections to millions of Americans, while at the same time laying the groundwork for Congressional passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).” Data show that “43 percent of LGB people and 90 percent of transgender people have experienced workplace discrimination” and that the overwhelming majority of Americans – 73 percent – would have supported a measure prohibiting it.

The delay represents a departure for the president who committed to supporting a “formal written policy of non-discrimination that includes sexual orientation and gender identity or expression…for all Federal contractors” as a candidate in 2008 and pledged to fight for the community in 2009 and 2011. “I’m here with a simple message: I’m here with you in that fight,” Obama told the Human Rights Campaign in 2009, adding, “Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair. It’s not right. We’re going to put a stop to it.”

Oh my yes.  A departure from the President who had Donnie McClurkin sing for him and Rick Warren deliver his inaugural invocation.

That Barack Obama.

After Media Challenge Closure of Guantanamo Hearing, Government Proposes Remedy

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday April 11, 2012 3:16 pm

A “war court judge” allowed a First Amendment attorney to represent a “consortium” of media organizations and argue against closing a hearing expected to feature testimony from an accused USS Cole bomber on how he was treated during CIA interrogations. The testimony, according to the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, was to be given as part of an argument by the defense that he should not be shackled to the floor during interviews because it would remind him of how he was inhumanely treated or tortured by CIA interrogators.

…

The judge then asked Schulz to leave the courtroom and proposed a “non-shackling” option that made testimony from Al-Nashiri unnecessary. The defense could be locked in a room with Al-Nashiri unshackled. Since the testimony was to be given to prevent shackling that could cause “retraumatization,” this essentially solved the problem.

Faced with objections from the media, the government was put in a position where they had to comply with the defense’s effort to win the right to interview or speak to Al-Nashiri without detention center guards shackling him to the floor. Granting Al-Nashiri this privilege was better than risking the possibility of more attention being brought to how the CIA had tortured Al-Nashiri.

The agreed remedy is also politically convenient because, for now, the Obama Administration can claim they are upholding increased transparency in the Guantanamo military commissions by keeping the hearings open to the press.

Growth of Income Inequality Is Worse Under Obama than Bush

Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Yesterday, the President gave a speech in which he demanded that Congress raise taxes on millionaires, as a way to somewhat recalibrate the nation’s wealth distribution.  …  A common question in DC is whether this populist pose will help him win the election.

…

A better puzzle to wrestle with is why President Obama is able to continue to speak as if his administration has not presided over a significant expansion of income redistribution upward.  The data on inequality shows that his policies are not incrementally better than those of his predecessor, or that we’re making progress too slowly, as liberal Democrats like to argue.  It doesn’t even show that the outcome is the same as Bush’s.  No, look at this…

…

Yup, under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007.  They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President.  Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom.  That’s not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents.  In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush.  Obama accelerated the growth of inequality.

…

Despite his recent speech, President Obama knows that his income tax proposal is going nowhere.  So let’s look at three recent policy choices that are going somewhere.

1. President Obama is on the verge of approving a Free Trade deal with Colombia, despite the murder of union organizers in that country.  Not content with establishing similar deals with Panama (which has to do with enlarging tax havens) and South Korea, the administration is now embarking on a much vaster Trans-Pacific Partnership deal with countries all over Asia.  And it’s being negotiated entirely in secret, with corporate and government officials the only ones allow to be in the room.  Trade is a significant driver of lower wages.
2. President Obama just pushed for and signed the JOBS Act, which is a substantial relaxation of regulations and accounting requirements on corporations seeking to go public.  Bill Black has many four letter words to describe this bill, but it’s basically a license for Wall Street to commit fraud in the equity markets.  The SEC is beginning to promulgate instructions on how this will work.
3. President Obama just refused to issue an executive order forcing campaign spending disclosure by government contractors.  President Obama actually criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United at a State of the Union address, but as with yesterday’s speech on raising taxes on millionaires, there was actually no there there.

…

Mitt Romney might be easy to jeer at for his wealth and arrogance, but Saez’s data suggests that Barack Obama is just as much the candidate of inequality.

Misnamed JOBS Act – Which Deregulates Financial Markets – Gets Senate Vote Today

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday March 20, 2012 8:15 am

Go to ten people on the street – go to ten people on Wall Street – and ask them if securities laws created the economic crisis, and only their abolition can bring America back to prominence and prosperity. And before you curse the damn Republicans for selling out to the finance lobby again, consider that only a couple dozen Democrats voted against the JOBS Act in the House, that Chuck Schumer is pushing this bill along in the Senate, it was initially a Democratic bill written by Rep. Jim Himes, and that the White House supports it.

(Note: TheMomCat pointed out to me last night that anything with 6 installments so far was a series and observed that I had only crossposted Part 3.

So, ahem, I’ve decided to make it all available in The Stars Hollow Gazette format in case you’re just too embarrassed to link to DocuDharma.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Periodically I’ll be promoting them as part of our regular content, though you might want to jump ahead to the most current- Part 6)

Ironies in American justice and political cheerleading

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Tuesday, Mar 20, 2012 6:18 AM Eastern Daylight Time

A reader reminded me of this yesterday and it’s really quite something: in July, 2009, NBC’s Chuck Todd went on Morning Joe to defend President Obama’s decision to shield all Bush officials from prosecution for torture, arguing that because Bush got his lawyers to say he could torture, it was legal. I interviewed/debated Todd a couple of days later about those views, but before I did, I wrote a reply to the argument he made on television. When doing so, I tried to think of the most extreme tyrannical and lawless power possible which a President could hypothetically assert, in order to reveal the invalidity of Todd’s reasoning, and this is what I wrote:

I’d like to ask Chuck Todd:  if Bush had John Yoo write a memo opining that it was perfectly legal for Bush to deploy hit squads within the U.S. to assassinate American citizens without any due process, would it be wrong to investigate and prosecute that, too, on the ground that everyone had permission slips from a DOJ lawyer and that’s just what lawyers do?

The current President has, of course, obtained his own DOJ permission slip to assassinate American citizens without due process. Since that permission slip is too secret for us to see, we do not know whether the authorized assassination power is confined to foreign soil or extends to the U.S., although once one embraces the Bush-Cheney-Yoo theory that the entire world is a “battlefield,” there is no coherent way to limit those asserted powers to foreign soil. In any event, the real point here is that our government has become so radical and warped that it outstrips one’s ability to create absurd hypothetical powers to test the validity of a principle: before you blink your eyes, you find that your hypothetical has become reality.

…

There are a couple of articles that have appeared in the last week or so about the willingness of many Democrats to passively accept or even actively cheer for policies under President Obama that they vehemently condemned (or would have condemned) under President Bush: this from Politico, and this from Tim Carney at The Washington Examiner. Back in June, 2009, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert – once an ardent admirer of President Obama – wrote a column lambasting his civil liberties record, and this was the first sentence in Herbert’s column: “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.” At the time, I truly did not fathom how that principle – which really should just be an unstated axiom – would not only come to be so controversial but routinely violated and ignored.

There is only one of course.  This Saturday was the 158th official running of the Oxford Cambridge Heavyweight 8s and like many things sporting had both its share of unexpected drama and political implications.

Not that there haven’t been dramatic events in the past.  Over the years there have been 2 mutinies (1959 and 1987, both Oxford), 7 sinkings, and one tie because the Judge was sleeping under a bush (a not uncommon collegiate experience).  

This year the race was disrupted by a lone swimmer, Trenton Oldfield.

Before we get to the politics, I’d like to talk about the race which I only saw from the restart.  As far as I’m concerned the Umpire showed a distinctly pro-Cambridge bias.  Despite Oxford leading by a quarter length the boats re-started even.  When Oxford lost a blade the Umpire ruled it Oxford’s fault and blamed it on their female coxswain.

Asshole.  He handed it to Cambridge.

Also the lead oar of Oxford collapsed from exhaustion but was left untreated for several minutes because everyone was too busy patting themselves on the back.

Against which I offer this statement from the notorious Trenton Oldfield-

(T)his reach is (…) the site of a number of past and present elitist establishments; Fulham Palace, Chiswick House and St Paul’s Schools and a large collection of other ‘independent/public/free schools’. It is also where Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minster of the Government lives with his family, despite his constituents living hundreds of miles away in post-industrial Sheffield. Most notably and most importantly for today, it is a site where elitists and those with elitist sympathies have come together every year but one for the last 158 years to perform, in the most public way, their ambition for the structures and subsequent benefits from elitism and privilege to continue. (They even list in the programme which public school the rowers attended before Oxford or Cambridge)

The boat race itself, with its pseudo competition, assembled around similar principles of fastest, strongest, selected …etc, is an inconsequential backdrop for these elite educational institutions to demonstrate themselves, reboot their shared culture together in the public realm. It is also inconsequential to the performance that the overwhelming majority of the population continue to remain interested in their own lives and disinterested in the boat race. The boat race, while accessible to everyone, isn’t really advertised or promoted as something for the general public to attend, you know when it’s on because it is part of the social networking calendar. This is a public event, for and by the elites with broader social relations aims. The fact that it happens in the public realm (visible) almost exactly as it has done for the last 158 years also becomes important; the untouched; the unchanged is significant. Most standing alongside the Thames today are in fact the pumped-up though obedient administrators, managers, promoters, politicians and enforcers; functional, strategic and aspirational elites.

…

When hasn’t elitism lead to tyranny? When hasn’t the belief of being ‘more’ than another person led to tragedy? Who benefits from elitism? One won’t be surprised to learn the etymology of the word ‘elite’ derives from ‘the elected’ … unfortunately not elected by democratic means, but rather, elected by god. Yup…’elected’, ‘selected’, ‘chosen’ … by god … inherited. When has this understanding of oneself or by a group of people ever been a good thing? When has this understanding not resulted in tyranny? Is tyranny surely not the inevitable outcome? And in contrast, when hasn’t the pursuit of equality, not resulted in these long passages of tyranny being overcome, even if temporarily?

…

To enclose and to enslave requires the audacity, cunning and daring to take advantage of our natural kindness, our belief in others, our respect for authority, our desire to please, and our apprehension about ‘causing waves’, our hope for all to have a better life, somehow. It also depends on our disbelief, despite having experienced it, that other people would purposefully set out to harm us for their own advantage. More recently we have also been encouraged, though the evidence displays the opposite much of the time, that a whole raft of institutions exists that work to prevent human catastrophes like our right to protest being denied, detention without trial or charge, the monopolisation of  industries, and essentials like food and water. These institutions were established to prevent slavery, genocide, indentured labour and groupings of indices of deprivation and poverty from occurring.  It is likely many in the western Baby Boomers generation (large percentage of the UK population), who have benefited so much from these institutions, are finding it very difficult to consider that these institutions might now be turning against them, their children and their grandchildren?

…

Do we resist now setting out to avoid something akin to slavery and imperialism? Or do we hesitate and find ourselves and our children without agency once again and in a long battle to gain it again? How long might it take and how many lives might this demand?

Some more corporatist sympathetic links-

• Tradition and Boat Race Both Upended on the Thames, The New York Times
• Cambridge defeat Oxford after Thames swimmer forces Boat Race restart, The Guardian
• Protester halts Boat Race by swimming into path of the Oxford crew, The Guardian

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I’ve been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to being a viciously stupid and dishonest law, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

Actually, that’s not putting things in strong enough language. In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

…

This is like formally eliminating steroid testing for the first five years of a baseball player’s career. Yes, you can pretty much bet that you’ll see a lot of home runs in the first few years after you institute a rule like that. But you’d better be ready to stick a lot asterisks in the record books ten or fifteen years down the line.

…

(L)et’s just say this is a dramatic step taken by Barack Obama. Nobody should have any illusions about where he stands on Wall Street corruption after this thing. Boss Tweed himself couldn’t have done any worse.

Speaking of Eric Schneiderman-

CREDO Calls Out Securitization Fraud Task Force: Investigators Not Even Deployed

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday April 9, 2012 8:15 am

We have heard very little from that task force since it was inaugurated in January, and CREDO has become the first progressive group to come forward with their concerns. But more is coming. This is the kickoff of a pressure campaign among several groups, querying the Administration in public about what was described to me last week as “the case of the missing task force.”

…

This matters not just because of broken promises, but because the foot-dragging has serious consequences. Many of the various types of fraud that this task force is supposed to be investigating have statutes of limitations, some of which will run out on the very last securitization deals completed before the housing bubble collapsed. There are several 10-year statutes of limitations, particularly through the federal law FIRREA. But other statutes have a 5-year limit, and the last deals were made in 2007. So this looks suspiciously like running out the clock.

The Administration obviously must answer these charges, and I’ll try to get some clarity on that today. But Eric Schneiderman’s office needs to also speak up. Schneiderman and his staff said specifically that they would walk from the task force if they felt it wasn’t living up to the promises made to him in terms of resources and will. We’re only three months in, but that looks exactly like what’s happening. If there are bad actors blocking investigations, Schneiderman needs to say it, as he vowed to do.

When the coalition seeking accountability from the banks acquiesced to a settlement on foreclosure fraud with the hope that this task force would bring the investigations, prosecutions and relief needed, they said that election-year pressures would force something real to come about. That has proven so far to be a chimera. We shall see if they can elevate the issue again, with less leverage thanks to the settlement’s completion.