Tag: ek Politics

Yum.

(Note: this is kind of a compliment to Magnifico’s Next Big Oil Spill Disaster Set for the Arctic.- ek)

This is kind of a tough story to assemble because the images are graphic and disturbing.  Just warning you before you click through on the links.

A lot of people are talking about Al-Jazzera’s story on the horrible consequences of the BP Oil Disaster on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem-

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

Dahr Jamail, Al-Jazzera

Last Modified: 18 Apr 2012 03:16

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

…

(Dr. Andrew) Whitehead’s (associate professor of biology at Louisiana State University) work is of critical importance, as it shows a direct link between BP’s oil and the negative impacts on the Gulf’s food web evidenced by studies on killifish before, during and after the oil disaster.

“What we found is a very clear, genome-wide signal, a very clear signal of exposure to the toxic components of oil that coincided with the timing and the locations of the oil,” Whitehead told Al Jazeera during an interview in his lab.

According to Whitehead, the killifish is an important indicator species because they are the most abundant fish in the marshes, and are known to be the most important forage animal in their communities.

“That means that most of the large fish that we like to eat and that these are important fisheries for, actually feed on the killifish,” he explained. “So if there were to be a big impact on those animals, then there would probably be a cascading effect throughout the food web. I can’t think of a worse animal to knock out of the food chain than the killifish.”

But we may well be witnessing the beginnings of this worst-case scenario.

Whitehead is predicting that there could be reproductive impacts on the fish, and since the killifish is a “keystone” species in the food web of the marsh, “Impacts on those species are more than likely going to propagate out and effect other species. What this shows is a very direct link from exposure to DWH oil and a clear biological effect. And a clear biological effect that could translate to population level long-term consequences.”

Back on shore, troubled by what he had been seeing, Keath Ladner met with officials from the US Food and Drug Administration and asked them to promise that the government would protect him from litigation if someone was made sick from eating his seafood.

“They wouldn’t do it,” he said.

What is Al-Jazeera’s special expertise in this story?  The Persian Gulf has been experiencing the toxic effects of oil spills for nearly a century.

ThinkProgress is covering it as is dday  who opinies-

There’s no way that every one of these mutated fish was caught before it ended up on a dinner plate. I don’t know what that means for humans who consume them; the process of cooking may have removed some of the toxics. But I am no longer hankering for Gulf sushi. And the Gulf of Mexico provides 40% of all seafood consumed in the US, so it’s not really “Gulf” sushi at all.

Scientists know enough about dispersants to say fairly confidently that they’re causing the mutations in the Gulf. I’m sure the American Petroleum Institute can find some who think otherwise. And the office of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, contacted for the story, claimed that “Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health.”

At Naked Capitalism George Washington has an excellent post with many, many links to the terrible damage that has already been documented-

George Washington: 2 Years After the BP Oil Spill, Is the Gulf Ecosystem Collapsing?

By Washington’s Blog, Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Mother Jones points out that the White House pressured scientists to underestimate BP spill size. And see this Forbes write up, and our previous reporting on the topic.

This is exactly like Fukushima and the financial mess, because  government’s approach to crises is consistent, no matter what area we are talking about: let the giant companies which fund political campaigns do whatever they want … and then help them cover up the extent of the crisis once it inevitably hits.

And what is BP doing about it?  Extend and Pretend, because that’s working oh so well.

The Big Spill, Two Years Later

The New York Times

Published: April 17, 2012

BP has paid $14 billion in cleanup costs and $6.3 billion in damages to individuals and businesses, with another $7.8 billion pledged. The company is also likely to owe several billion dollars for damages to natural resources under the Oil Pollution Act, and somewhere between $5 billion and $20 billion in penalties under the Clean Water Act, depending on the level of negligence.

BP may well prefer a negotiated settlement of these damages to a long and potentially damaging trial. If so, the Justice Department should press for the best possible deal from what is still a deep-pocketed company. Congress must make sure that the bulk of this money is used not only to address particular damage from the spill but to carry out a broad program of ecosystem restoration – the wetlands and barrier islands that had been weakened well before the spill by industrialization and mismanagement of the Mississippi River and by Hurricane Katrina.

Duh.

BP proposes Gulf spill accord terms, trial delay

By Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:16pm EDT

If BP wins a trial delay, the schedule suggests that any trial on federal and state government pollution claims, claims against BP’s drilling partners, and claims among BP and those partners would not start until well into 2013, if not later.

“States represent millions of citizens, and they deserve their day in court,” Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, who coordinates state interests with his Louisiana colleague James “Buddy” Caldwell, said in a telephone interview.

“I think quite frankly that BP is not going to focus on a comprehensive settlement until it is up against a trial deadline,” Strange added.

…

The medical settlement addresses claims by people made ill from exposure to oil or chemical dispersants. It covers clean-up workers and residents of beachfront or wetland areas, and allows people who develop symptoms later to sue BP at that time. About 16,000 plaintiffs have submitted claims, court papers show.

Victims who are unhappy with the settlements may opt out and pursue their claims separately.

Those ineligible to recover include financial institutions, casinos, people claiming hardship from an Obama administration moratorium on deepwater drilling, and some private plaintiffs in Florida and Texas.

…

“Neither side will receive everything it wants,” but the settlements are “more than fair, reasonable and adequate” and could avert a decade of litigation, BP and plaintiffs’ lawyers said in papers filed in New Orleans federal court.

…

“BP made a commitment to help economic and environmental restoration efforts in the Gulf Coast,” Chief Executive Bob Dudley said in a statement. “This settlement provides the framework for us to continue delivering on that promise, offering those affected full and fair compensation, without waiting for the outcome of a lengthy trial process.”

…

Prior to the settlement, the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg had paid out $6.1 billion to spill victims who submitted claims under BP’s $20 billion Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

BP expects the $7.8 billion payment to come from that trust. Claimants with final offers from Feinberg can receive 60 percent of their money now, and if eligible under the new program may receive the remaining 40 percent or seek higher awards.

…

BP still faces tens of billions of dollars of potential claims from the U.S. government; Gulf states; and drilling partners Transocean Ltd, which owned the rig, and Halliburton Co, which provided cementing services.

The oil company’s potential liability for violating the federal Clean Water Act alone could reach as high as $17.6 billion upon a finding of gross negligence. BP has already taken a $37.2 billion charge for the spill.

Your tax dollars at work-

Congress falls short on oil spill safety, panel says

By Neela Banerjee, Washington Bureau, L.A. Times

April 17, 2012, 6:24 p.m.

The report by members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling complained that Congress had failed to pass legislation requiring the offshore oil and gas industry to bear the costs of federal oversight through fees on leasing and permitting reviews. The presidential panel had also recommended that the $75-million liability cap for offshore oil spills be increased substantially.

The Democratic-controlled Senate has passed a bill to funnel penalties from the spill to restoring the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem, but House Republicans have yet to approve it.

Several recent developments signal the need for more serious steps to bolster offshore drilling safeguards, the report said. In the last 10 months, “at least three offshore oil and gas rigs around the world have experienced significant leaks, demonstrating again and again how risky this activity is,” the report said. “Risks will only increase as drilling moves into deeper waters with harsher, less familiar environmental conditions.”

Some senior administration and congressional staffers complained that the report used simple letter grades to sum up complicated efforts.

And as usual, Magnifico scooped me on that story too-

U.S. oil production is increasing and offshore drilling is expanding, but yet the problems that contributed to the BP Gulf oil disaster remain. “It is unfortunate that two years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, Congress has yet to take action to bolster the government’s program for managing offshore activities,” the commission wrote in their report card.

…

With increased drilling and intentionally negligent oversight, it isn’t a matter of if there will be another oil drilling disaster off the American waters, but when it will happen. The environment and people who depend on it for their existence, which is everyone, will be negatively impacted.  With the inevitable oil spills, the commission reports that “Congress has provided little support” for spill response and containment too. So, the country remains unready to respond to the next disaster.

…

So, while the Obama administration has been opening up more areas for drilling, the Republican-controlled House and the ineffective Senate have been at best doing nothing to responsibly oversee offshore oil drilling and at worst been proactively trying block oversight.

The commission is being generous when it gave Congress a “D” grade. “Congress has provided neither leadership nor support for these efforts,” the commission wrote summarizing nearly two years of inaction.

We need to do better electing people to represent us and our nation’s interests. More oil at the expense of our country’s environment is not the solution.

Not what you think.

Sequoia Fund Manager Campaigns Against Goldman Board Member, Former Fannie CEO Jim Johnson

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Thursday, April 19, 2012

I had a colleague tell me today that I shouldn’t use the “c” word, meaning corruption, since it would alienate potential allies. The logic is similar to arguments against being shrill. He claimed that even if a lot of people in positions of authority engage in corrupt looking behavior, that doesn’t mean they understand it to be corrupt, so calling the corrupt will merely get them worked up to no useful end. They could well think they are doing the right thing and just be victims of cognitive capture.

I deeply oppose this line of argument. First, it assumes that decision-makers don’t recognize when they are taking ethically problematic actions. The people I know who have yielded to institutional pressures to do the wrong thing say they knew they were doing so and found a way to rationalize it. And I suspect even sociopaths know where the lines are. They have to do a better job of covering their tracks when their conduct is dubious.

Second, it assumes that it isn’t worth taking a firm position on ethics because it will turn off powerful people who have engaged in questionable behavior. Better to be less accusatory in order to have a dialogue with them. I don’t buy that because being indulging their justifications of their conduct helps preserve a bad status quo.

One aspect of American exceptionalism is many still believe the US is cleaner and more above board than most other advanced economies. But if you go overseas, you will find that a lot of businessmen see the US as not particularly ethical. One British colleague who has worked with major US firms described the US as becoming more and more a scam-based economy (in fairness, he was really talking about the financial services industry). An American who works a great deal with foreign investors said his clients saw the US at best as on a par with other big countries, at worst, with Russia.

One of the big reasons for the erosion in US behavior is the notion that elite crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted because it would harm the system. Glenn Greenwald describes the pardon of Richard Nixon as a critical embodiment of this principle.

…

So it is important to define norms and not shy away from words like “fraud” and “corruption” when they fit. While it would be nice if more people in power were capable of feeling guilt, shame will do. Thus naming and shaming are legitimate strategies for letting the elites know that the broader public is not fooled.

(h/t Lambert Strether @ Corrente)

When I was 6, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm-‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ and I even saw an ethical dimension to ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world, I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendants of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces-an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and the struggles of the labor unions, working class and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was 6: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them-regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit, but one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for ‘conspiring to kill and maim’ in those countries- because I support the mujahedeen defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ‘terrorist,’ yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the ‘terrorists’ are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

First They Come For the Muslims

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Posted on Apr 16, 2012

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled-even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

…

“I was unprepared for the fact that the government would put together a case that was just one lie piled up on top of another lie,” Downs said. “And when you pointed it out to them they didn’t care. They didn’t refute it. They knew that it was a lie. The facts of most of these pre-emptive cases don’t support the charges. But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people. It wants to take them down for ideological reasons.”

“In the past, when the government wanted to do something illegal it simply went ahead and broke the law,” he said. “They rounded up the Japanese during World War II and stuck them in concentration camps. They knew they were breaking the law when they decided to go after the activists with COINTELPRO in the 1960s but they rationalized that they were doing it for a higher purpose. This is different. The government is destroying the legal framework of our country. They are twisting it out of recognition to make it appear as though what they’re doing is legal. I don’t remember that kind of a situation in the past. The opinions of the court are now only lame excuses as to why the courts can’t do justice.”

“The government lawyers must know these pre-emptive cases are fake,” he said. “They must know they’re prosecuting people before a crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the future. They defend what they are doing by saying that they are protecting the nation from people who might want to do it harm. I’m sure they’ve been co-opted at least to believe that. But I think they also know that they are twisting the legal concepts, they are stretching them beyond what the framework of the law can tolerate. They have convinced themselves that it is OK to convict many innocent people as long as they prevent a few people from committing crimes in the future. They are creating an internal culture within the Justice Department where there is contempt for the law and for the foundational principle that it is better for one guilty person to go free than that one innocent person is convicted. They must know they do not do justice, and that they serve only ideological ends.”

Downs pointed out that if the government was actually concerned about the rule of law it would prosecute politicians and other prominent Americans who have publicly spoken out in support of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis), an armed group on the State Department terrorism list that carries out terrorist attacks inside Iran. They include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton and Gen. James Jones, who was President Obama’s first national security adviser. Some of them voiced their backing in speeches for which they were paid lavishly.

…

Already dissidents such as peace activists, environmentalists and outspoken intellectuals have been treated as terrorists. Downs expects soon to see labor organizers and those in Occupy encampments treated as terrorists, especially if domestic dissent spreads. Yet despite his pessimism he has no intention of surrendering.

“I take comfort from organizations like the White Rose in Germany,” he said, referring to the anti-Nazi group that defied Hitler and saw most of its members arrested and executed. “They were doomed almost from the beginning. How long could you defy Hitler before you were rounded up and shot? It appeared to be a futile effort. And yet, after the war, when people went back and began to rebuild the German nation, they could look to the White Rose as an example of what German culture was really about. There were Germans who cared about peace, freedom and tolerance. I’m working now as much for the historical record as for those still in jail.”

‘Better 100 guilty go free than one innocent punished.’  (Benjamin Franklin on Blackstone’s Formulation)

The White Rose.

Does the 2012 Presidential Election Matter?

Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Friday, April 13, 2012

The 2012 election … is at this point a completely empty enterprise, bereft of substance, or integrity.  This is new to our era, reminiscent of the late 19th century electoral landscape which was dominated by policy consensus around corruption and plutocracy while electoral contests were organized around “bloody shirt” smear campaigns.  Populism intruded briefly, but there’s a reason that time period was known as the time of the robber barons.  It’s increasingly analogous to our time.

In 2003-2004, a large Democratic field and George Bush bitterly debated questions of war and peace.  In 2007-2008, both parties saw significant debate between multiple candidates in which they argued about a whole set of questions, from war to civil liberties to the financial crisis.  The financial crisis was probably determinative in 2008, with the lead seesawing between the two candidates until John McCain “suspended” his campaign.  There was a substantive amount of deceit, of course, in previous contests, and it’s true that many of the promises were not real.  But at least the candidates had to debate in a way in which their words had to bear some resemblance to the world in which voters resided.  But this time, there is literally no relationship between the reality of the policy questions and the political debate.

…

For instance, at the same time as the Rosen spat occurred, this week we also saw a report from the Inspector General of TARP that Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department has simply not implemented a $7 billion program intended to help families hardest hit by foreclosures.   That could have been a scandal of sorts, with the Republicans attacking the administration for incompetence and the administration making arguments about its economic stewardship.  The major problem facing our economic structure is the collapse of the housing finance system, with 96% of mortgages at this point backed explicit by government.  Yet, no debate, nothing.  It’s millionaire kabuki.  There are now murders happening around the foreclosure crisis.  Nothing.  No pressure from the left, or the right.

Major policy initiatives, such as the JOBS Act eliminating accounting requirements for companies using public equity markets, are now bipartisan, beyond debate.  AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka is apparently “personally disgusted” by that bill, but he can’t help but argue how Barack Obama is the President for the middle class.  The Democratic campaign will center in at least some part on tax justice and economic fairness, with the Republicans decrying class warfare.  Yet, the data on inequality betrays that this narrative is completely disconnected from substance, from reality.  Without an debate over the policies that led to this endpoint, it’s hard to figure out whether the 2012 election matters.  Since Obama is still taken seriously when he promises to redress inequality immediately after signing the JOBS Act, this debate can’t happen.

…

This is not to say that politics is the only route to social change, it certainly is not.  And this is not a “your vote matters” argument.  It doesn’t always matter.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.  What is striking is how little pressure is coming from the populace, towards the political elites in both parties.  The Republicans have a bitter class divide within their party, but they have quickly clamped down on the populists in their midst.  Meanwhile, Barack Obama can give stump-speeches on his support for the middle class with a straight face.  Until this dynamic changes, and someone or something forces a real debate that reconnects substance and politics, our American decline will continue.  Until then, the debates in DC will happen behind closed doors among powerful interests, and the public will only witness a fierce kabuki performance over Hilary Rosen’s tweets.

(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)

(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.