Wall Street and Washngton

A day after Michael Lewis pointed out the advantages High Frequency Traders have in the market, Pam Martens uses a new book by Nomi Prins, “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power”, to inveigh against the TBTF banks.

As Martens sees it, Prins' book shows how the banks have controlled the government from Teddy Roosevelt's time to today. The fundamental reason for the banks' receiving this support is that they are considered an essential financial component of the U.S. war arsenal.

Some quotes from the book sound a lot like today's problems:

• “…home prices had softened in 1926, car sales dropped in 1927, and construction would level off in 1928. Inequality had increased dramatically, threatening economic stability. The whole system was buckling.”
• "In November 1923, the Federal Reserve began increasing its holdings in government securities (such as Treasury bonds) by a factor of six, from $73 million to $477 million, in what could be considered the first instance of ‘quantitative easing.’ This keeps rates low, not by setting them explicitly but by forcing the price of bonds up, which has the net effect of driving rates down.”
• the Fed, “ kept rates relatively low on loans to banks during the speculative period and required little in the way of reserves, or collateral, to be set aside for stormy days.”
• “By the fall of 1929 Chase had acquired six major New York banks, making it the second largest private bank in the world, next to Mitchell’s National City.”
• "The money that was being funneled into the market to fuel financial speculation (rather than productive or social capitalism) provided the illusion of stability and prosperity, but it was not the kind of long-term capital upon which true economic growth could be sustained.”
• “Beginning in 1934 the financiers used the more stable banking system that had been engineered by the New Deal as a platform upon which to drive up the volume of stock speculation, and with it stock prices. The confidence this exuded and the media attention paid to it combined with New Deal stimulus to make the country appear to be exiting the Depression. This rise proved unsustainable and the market and the overall economy would dip again in 1937 and 1938, until it became more substantively elevated by war financing efforts and related employment opportunities for those not in combat overseas.”

Taking advantage

Vieing with Toyota

Last year Toyota had the largest number of cars recalled in the U.S., 5.3 million vehicles; Chrysler had 4.7 million and Honda 2.8 million. GM will likely top Toyota this year, as after only three months it has recalled 4.8 million vehicles; in all of last year it recalled 800,000.

Some of the problems causing the recalls:

• loose fitting for the transmission’s oil cooler line, which could allow oil leaks and possibly lead to fires. 
• right-front axle half-shaft could break, cutting power to the front wheels.
• defect with the ignition switch on their compact cars; this has caused at least 13 deaths.

This last problem is not a new one; G.M. knew about the defective ignition switches for more than a decade but did not recall the vehicles.

Photos from a plane

Here are some surprising photos taken from the air. They almost look like paintings. More can be found here.

Lake In Poland

Rice Fields in China

Niagara Falls

These come to us from The San Francisco Globe via our Florida correspondent.

The U.S. is fourth...

...in the number of executions taking place last year. We executed 39 people. China topped the list, followed by Iraq and Iran. Numbers for these countries is unavailable. It is thought by Amnesty, the originators of the report,  that China executed thousands. 

Texas accounted for 41% of our executions, with Florida being second. The South as whole accounted for 82 percent overall.

Ratzilla

That's the name given to a huge rat found in Sweden. Ratzilla was almost 16 inches long, the average rat is 10 inches. He appeared in the apartment of a Swedish family a few weeks ago and terrified them plus their cat. Pest controllers finally killed the intruder using an oversized trap.

Settling Suits

Yesterday Bank of America settled five lawsuits, four brought by the Federal Housing Finance Authority and one by the state of New York. The feds collected $9.5 billion, the state $15 million. BofA must be ruing their acquisitions of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide as these two companies were the cause of a good portion of the suits. In addition, New York fined Ken Lewis, former CEO of BofA, 

Even after shelling out this money, BofA thinks they will still have fines to pay as they think they haves now resolved around 88% of the total cost of pending litigation relating to the bank's conduct during the housing crisis.

Is it Art?

Thanks to Marvelous

The Rich Are Back in the Saddle

The following two charts are taken from The New Yorker, which took them from the work of Thomas Piketty et al who have written “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a book that has generated a lot of interest and comments. I apologize for the charts being small, but c'est la vie. The first chart looks at the share in our national income of the upper 10%, the second the 1%.

Step 1 in freeing college athletes

Last month I wrote about the efforts of Northwestern football players to start a union and have it recognized by the powers that be. Well, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) thought that was a good idea. He agreed with the players, “It cannot be said that the employer’s scholarship players are ‘primarily students’. ” 

He decided that Northwestern football players were on campus to play football, and very different from other students. First of all, players are recruited for their athletic ability, not their academics. Team guidelines include drug testing and a provision that players cannot refuse a friend request from a coach on Facebook. If players do not follow the rules, their scholarships can be revoked.

The ruling applies only to scholarship football players at Northwestern, a private university. But the precedent could extend to all Division I scholarship football players at private universities. (Collective bargaining at public universities is governed by state law.)

Naturally, the NCAA will appeal the decision to the five-member N.L.R.B. in Washington.

What? Me Worry?

Lake Powell, the huge reservoir that straddles the border of Arizona and Utah, has lost half of its water since 1999 because of drought and human water use. The drop in water levels is evidenced by the pale pink “bathtub rings” along the canyon’s iconic sandstone walls.

True story?

There's another odd story coming out of North Korea. You remember the most recent one about dogs eating Kim Jong-un's uncle. That was proven to be a hoax. Today's story is about men's haircuts, a vitally important state issue. The word came down that all men must wear the same hair style as Kim Jong-un.

Giving some credence to the story is that the BBC ran it and also claimed that North Korea has approved hair styles for men and women for a number of years. Women have 18 styles, men 10 to choose from.

We do live in an odd world.

The next Maria Callas?

The secret of selling

Katie Francis says, "It takes lots of time, commitment and asking everybody I see." Maybe that's why she, a girl of 12 from Oklahoma City, sold 18,107 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in seven weeks. This was a new record, topping the old record of 18,000. She was also the Girl Scouts' top seller last year when she sold 12,428 boxes.

BOLI

That stands for Bank Owned Life Insurance. Banks have taken out insurance policies on some of their employees. And we're not talking about a little insurance. JPMorgan has $10.4 billion of insurance. As of last year, the four biggest banks - JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup -held over $53 billion. This insurance is supposed to be held on key employees, but when you look at the numbers, it seems as though the definition of "key employee" is quite broad.

It gets worse, as the banks need not cancel the policy if the employee leaves the bank. There are cases where several banks hold policies on the same person. And then there's the matter of taxes. Both the buildup in the cash value of the policy over time and the payment of the death benefit are tax-free income to the bank.

The situation appears to be so important to the bank that JPMorgan is the assignee for Patent number 5.806.042 titled “System for Designing and Implementing Bank Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) With a Reinsurance Option.” 

Is Peter Kraska right?

He is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies who has done some reporting on police SWAT teams. The Economist has based an entire article on Kraska's work. That seems strange to me. I wouldn't have expected the magazine to write an article like this based primarily on one person's thoughts. After all, The Economist is not a small-town tabloid and Kraska makes some serious charges in his attempt to demonstrate that the U.S. police have become far more militarized than ever before.

Here are some of Kraska's claims:

SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog.

According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

There is no easy way to determine the validity of Kraska's numbers as police departments are not very forthcoming about the details of their SWAT raids.

A corporation's religion

The Citizens United case gave personhood to corporations. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case (Hobby Lobby Stores vs. Sebelius)that could result in for profit, secular corporations being allowed to impose their religious beliefs upon their employees. Clearly, this is not a good thing. The following infographic from ProPublica tells you why in detail.

All cigarettes are dangerous

E-cigarettes are becoming popular. But they can be even more dangerous than tobacco cigarettes since they contain powerful neurotoxins, tiny amounts of which can cause vomiting and seizures and even be lethal. 

The neurotoxins come in liquid form and are not regulated by federal authorities. They are mixed on factory floors and in the back rooms of shops, and sold legally in stores and online in small bottles that are kept casually around the house for regular refilling of e-cigarettes. 

The number of accidental poisonings is on the increase, particularly among children. Of the 74 e-cigarette and nicotine poisoning cases called into Minnesota poison control in 2013, 29 involved children age 2 and under. In Oklahoma, all but two of the 25 cases in the first two months of this year involved children age 4 and under. 

Poison control centers report that the number of cases linked to e-liquids jumped to 1,351 in 2013, a 300 percent increase from 2012, and the number is on pace to double this year, according to information from the National Poison Data System. Of the cases in 2013, 365 were referred to hospitals, triple the previous year’s number.

Lowering college costs

Since 1980 college tuition has risen at nearly five times the rate of the CPI. Steven Cohen thinks he has a way to lower these costs: cut the expected family contribution (E.F.C.) that the government calculates as what a family should be able to contribute to a child's education. The E.F.C. is the starting point used by colleges in their computation of aid packages. Lowering the E.F.C. would force colleges to construct financial aid packages without the artificial price supports of inflated contribution numbers.

The E.F.C. uses a formula set by Congress. Cohen asserts that the E.F.C. is an unreal number. For example, it doesn’t take into consideration geographic differences in cost-of-living, or the lack of liquidity in one’s home. He also speculates that colleges may have some influence in Congress' setting of the formula; lobbying expenditures by colleges, universities and higher-education organizations have totaled more than a half-billion dollars over the past five years — the eighth highest special-interest category attempting to influence Congress.

Maintaining our nuclear weapons superiority

This maintenance is not cheap. In the 2015 budget, it will be $8.608 billion, not counting administrative costs.  That's more than Reagan, the warrior, spent, as the chart below shows.

Generals get off

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair pleaded guilty to mistreating his mistress (a captain in the Air Force), adultery, soliciting explicit pictures from female soldiers and other charges. All told, they carry a combined maximum prison sentence of 25 and a half years. However, the judge, Col. James L. Pohl, decided that Gen. Sinclair need not serve jail time nor leave the service. His only penalty appears to be to forfeit $5,000 a month in pay for four months. He will keep his pension and other benefits.

Would a private have received the same punishment?

Oggi e il primo giorno di primavera

Grazie a Deo!

It has been a real crappy winter and I'm truly glad it is over. Spring will begin in about two hours. But this being New England, it's doubtful that we have seen the last of winter weather. There is still some snow on the ground. There is a possibility of snow on Saturday. And it has snowed here as late as May.

What's with Florida men?

Earlier this month police arrested Bernard Marsonek for copulating with one of his eight pit bulls.  Marsonek is 57-years-old and was charged with  sexual activity involving animals. This week 61-year-old James Guy Bull was arrested for copulating with his mixed-breed, 8-month-old dog on multiple occasions at his Daytona Beach apartment.

Is there something in the water in Florida?

Capturing 100% of phone calls

The latest Snowden announcement is of a NSA system called Mystic. It has captured all of the calls made in a month in an unnamed country. It has been in operation since 2011. Did this go through FISA? When will it be operational here?

Another attempt to prosecute mortgage fraudsters

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and representatives Elijah Cummings and Maxine Waters have not dropped the battle to get the Department of Justice to put some of those responsible for the Great Recession in jail.  They were likely prompted by the release last week of a report by the DOJ's Inspector General. They wrote to Mr. Holder, “This report calls into question the Department’s commitment to investigate and prosecute crimes such as predatory lending, loan modification scams, and abusive mortgage servicing practices.”

The report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that even though the FBI had received $196 million in funding to investigate mortgage fraud activities in the aftermath of the crisis, its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Miami ranked mortgage fraud as either a low priority or not a priority.

Students for Justice in Palestine is not well liked by universities

Northeastern recently banned  Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and threatened disciplinary measures against some of its members. The university attributed the ban to  postings on campus replicas of eviction notices that are routinely put up on Palestinian homes set for Israeli demolition. 

In 2011 in California, 10 students who had disrupted a speech at UC Irvine by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren were found guilty, put on informal probation and sentenced to perform community service.

Activists at Florida Atlantic University were stripped of student leadership positions after they walked out of a talk by an Israeli army officer and were ordered by school administrators to attend re-education seminars designed by the Anti-Defamation League. 

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (CSJP) was placed on suspension in the spring of 2011 and barred from reserving rooms and hosting events on campus. The university administration, before the ban, had a practice of notifying the campus Hillel in advance of any CSJP event. The suspension was eventually lifted after a protest led by attorneys for the CSJP.

Is Israel behind these actions?

The end of the world?

Dahr Jamail reports on our ongoing environmental catastrophes on land, sea and in the air.  It is absolutely frightening if he is correct - and he does make a strong case. Food is being destroyed by genetically modified crops. Herbicides are poisoning food. Fracking is causing earthquakes and contamination of water supplies. Rivers in the Arctic are ice-filled for fewer months in the year. Fish are dying. Drinking water is becoming scarce in several areas. Jakarta and other areas in Indonesia are sinking. And it goes on and on.

Stiglitz on the TPP - 2

Joe Stiglitz has another entry in his catalogue of why the TPP is bad for us. His fundamental point is that it benefits corporations by weakening regulations and does nothing for the middle and working classes.

He cites a couple of examples as to how corporations can use the agreement against us. One example is a current case in which Philip Morris has sued Uruguay, claiming that its antismoking regulations unfairly hurt profits, violating a bilateral trade treaty between Switzerland and Uruguay. A second possibility is where an American corporation creates a subsidiary in some Pacific Rim country, invest in the United States through that subsidiary, and then takes action against the United States government — getting rights as a “foreign” company that they would not have had as an American company. 

Again, why is Obama for the TPP?

Is everybody to blame for the Great Recession?

Dean Starkman says, "NO".  The primary cause was the mortgage industry. Sure, some of the average Joes who took out a mortgage did commit fraud. But Starkman looks at the numbers and demonstrates fairly convincingly that there were a small number of cheating average Joes. 

New Century, one of the prime lenders, reported that borrowers had failed to make even the first payment on 2.5% of its loans. The Treasury Department reported that so-called “suspicious activity” reported by banks peaked at 137,000 incidents in 2006. But even if every single one of those reports represents actual borrower fraud, that’s still only about 1% of the 14 million mortgages made that year. The FBI put total fraudulent mortgages during the peak boom year of 2006 at more than $25 billion. Compare that dollar value to the write-downs of $2.7 trillion of mortgages for that year.

Starkman argues that if one believes the average Joe bears major responsibility for the crash, then one assumes that everyone is to blame. If we are all to blame, this may be why so little has been done to punish the transgressors. 

But Sparkman disputes the notion that people knowingly took out bigger, riskier loans than they could afford—and that they all decided to do it rather suddenly around 2004. One story making the rounds is that people bought houses for investment rather than as a residence. Yet, the numbers show at most 15% of these cases.

The industry appraised properties. Yet, groups of appraisers collected 11,000 signatures asserting they were being pressured by lenders to inflate values of appraisals. The lenders decided the loan-to-value ratio which is a key determinant in lending. Mortgage brokers forged borrowers’ signatures and altered documents. Citigroup alone settled with the FTC a case alleging sales deception that involved two million clients in a single year. 

In 2006  more than half the subprime loans issued went to borrowers who had credit scores “high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.” This was repeated often during the period.

Starkman makes a strong case and also tells us how come companies tried to motivate their employees.

Did you know, for instance, that WMC Mortgage Corporation, owned by General Electric, hired former strippers and an ex-porn actress to entice brokers into selling their mortgages, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity? Or that Wells Fargo gave its mortgage stars all-expense-paid vacations to Cancun and the Bahamas and treated them to private performances by Aerosmith, the Eagles, and Elton John? Or that New Century sent top loan sales reps to Porsche driving school?

161 Pennsylvania homes, farms, churches and businesses were damaged by fracking

Finally, government officials are doing research on the effect of fracking. Pennsylvania is where the damage in this post's title occurred. It came from oil and gas development over the period from 2008 to 2012. Last year DEP's Oil and Gas Program issued a determination letter concluding that the high chemical levels in the water near Donegal, PA were caused by nearby fracking activity. 

There are two primary causes of the damage - leaks of drilling fluids and other contaminants from well casings and waste water produced during fracking. According to Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor at Cornell University, "One in 20 wells leak immediately, and over time the percentage increases." Millions of gallons of waste water are produced during fracking.

It is not and open-and-shut case, however, as Pennsylvania has a history of mining and oil and gas drilling, which could have caused the problem or part of it. Whether fracking is responsible could be revealed by using tracing fluids to track fracking fluids and waste water throughout a region's water system. But the industry won't do it. Another complication was introduced in 2005 when the EPA expempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Lunchtime

Courtesy of our Plymouth correspondent

Polite and helpful cats

Courtesy of our Plymouth correspondent

Married 75 years

Dorothy and Cameron Forbes recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. She's 93, he's 100.

53,615 Homeless

That's how many there were sleeping in NYC homeless shelters in January of this year; last January there were 50,135 people, 7% less. And it gets worse.  More than 40% of the homeless are children; the 22,712 children sleeping in homeless shelters in January 2014 was 8% more than last year. And the average stay for homeless families with children is more than a year.

The annual report by the Coalition for the Homeless attributes the increasing problem to the “disastrous homeless policies” implemented by Bloomberg; the city’s worsening housing affordability; and the growing income inequality gap.

Senate vs. CIA & White House?

It looks as though the White House is involved in the dispute between the CIA and the Senate. McClatchy has found that the White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege. The White House does not deny this. In a statement to McClatchy, the White House confirmed that “a small percentage” of the 6.2 million pages of documents provided to the committee were “set aside because they raise executive branch confidentiality interests.”

I'm glad Obama runs such a transparent operation.

Numbers as time moves

An amazing use of 3D printing

Not a friendly cat

ABC Entertainment News | ABC Business News

Trying to sell Obamacare

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

American Exceptionalism as seen by some members of the press

Andrew Bacevich has fun reviewing the press' reaction to the Ukraine situation. He sees a number of media people citing our need to act there because we are who we are, an exceptional nation. Bacevich sees this largely as selective amnesia on their part. There are numerous examples of each tenet. Herewith some excerpts:

Tenet Number One. History is what exponents of American Exceptionalist theology choose to remember. What they choose to forget does not exist. Or, at the very least, it lacks relevance. So selective amnesia is not only permitted—it’s essential.

Tenet Number Two. The events we are commanded to remember are those that happened during the period 1933-1945. In geographic terms, we can be even more specific: They occurred in the space bounded by London, where stiff upper lips withstood the Blitz, and Auschwitz, where countless Jews were murdered. But the true epicenter was Munich, site of the great betrayal from which the horrors were said to follow.

Tenet Number Three. The events of 1933-1945 summoned the United States to determine history’s future course. This became and remains the nation’s responsibility— not only to prevent any recurrence of 1933-1945, but to create a new world in America’s own image. When Washington exercises “global leadership,” good things happen—peace reigns, economies grow, freedom rings. When Washington hesitates, the world goes to hell in a hand basket.

Tenet Number Four. Too few ordinary Americans recognize the nation’s providentially ordained responsibility. The unwashed masses are too quick to give into the temptation to shirk their duty.

Precept Number Five. Political leaders without guts or gumption, seeing the world in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, facilitate this shirking of duty. The key to preventing Americans from behaving irresponsibility, the world once again experiencing the horrors of 1933-1945, is visionary and charismatic leadership. The Ukraine crisis provides only the latest example of our wimpy president’s failure to lead.

A 7-legged frog

They do exist. Brandon Ballengée, a biologist and more, has found several deformed frogs and other amphibians and documents them on his website. He calls them reliquaries. He is also an artist and environmental activist. 

Here is his description of his work:

These reliquaries are created by chemically “clearing and staining” terminally deformed frogs found in nature. This process obscures direct representation- as I do not want to exhibit large images of “monsters”, which would be frightening and be exploitative to the organisms. This process is followed by high-resolution scanner photography of each specimen to create individual portraits. These portraits are printed as unique watercolor ink prints (never made into editions) and each individual frog will be centered appearing to “float” in what looks to be clouds. This otherworldly quality is reinforced by the titles named after ancient characters from Greco-Roman mythology. They are scaled so the frogs appear approximately the size of a human toddler, in an attempt to invoke empathy in the viewer instead of detachment or fear: if they are too small they will dismissed but if they are too large they will become monsters. Each finished artwork is unique and never editioned, to recall the individual animal and become a reliquary to a short-lived non-human life.

A new record

199 animals living in a small house in Lynnfield, Ma. They included 77 cats, 27 dogs, 81 birds, five skinks (lizards) and two snakes. They were in crates and cages stacked to the ceiling. The floor was a pool of feces and the odor could be smelled outside.

The animals were surrendered to the Animal Rescue League of Boston and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A few were euthanized, but most were dispersed to local shelters for care, rehabilitation, and adoption.

David Bromwich on the Obama Presidency

It's long, I know. But the following is a very good analysis of why Obama may be the worst president I have lived under, even worse than George W.

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was putting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was quoting himself. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.

For some time now, observers -- a surprisingly wide range of them -- have been saying that Barack Obama seems more like a king than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant” of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be something like a benevolent monarch -- a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans and others may feel naturally attuned.

A large portion of his experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s approval ratings for several months have been hovering just above 40%. But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office -- or rather, his idea of his function as a holder of that office. It is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five years in office.

What could have given Obama such a strange perspective on how the American political system was meant to work? Let us not ignore one obvious and pertinent fact. He came to the race for president in 2007 with less practice in governing than any previous candidate. At Harvard Law School, Obama had been admired by his professors and liked by his fellow students with one reservation: in an institution notorious for displays of youthful pomposity, Obama stood out for the self-importance of his “interventions” in class. His singularity showed in a different light when he was elected editor of the  -- the first law student ever to hold that position without having published an article in a law journal. He kept his editorial colleagues happy by insisting that the stance of the Review need not be marked by bias or partisanship. It did not have to be liberal or conservative, libertarian or statist. It could be “all of the above.”
This pattern -- the ascent to become presider-in-chief over large projects without any encumbering record of commitments -- followed Obama into a short and uneventful legal career, from which no remarkable brief has ever been cited. In an adjacent career as a professor of constitutional law, he was well liked again, though his views on the most important constitutional questions were never clear to his students. 

The same was true of his service as a four-term Illinois state senator, during which he cast a remarkable number of votes in the noncommittal category of “present” rather than “yea” or “nay.” 
Finally, the same pattern held during his service in the U.S. Senate, where, from his first days on the floor, he was observed to be restless for a kind of distinction and power normally denied to a junior senator.

Extreme caution marked all of Obama’s early actions in public life. Rare departures from this progress-without-a-trail -- such as his pledge to filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications industry in order to expose them to possible prosecution for warrantless surveillance -- appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The law journal editor without a published article, the lawyer without a well-known case to his credit, the law professor whose learning was agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of his position on the large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of yes or no votes, and the U.S. senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant legislation: this was the candidate who became president in January 2009.

The Man Without a Record 

Many of these facts were rehearsed in the 2008 primaries by Hillary Clinton. More was said by the Republicans in the general election. Yet the accusations were thrown onto a combustible pile of so much rubbish -- so much that was violent, racist, and untrue, and spoken by persons manifestly compromised or unbalanced -- that the likely inference was tempting to ignore. One could hope that, whatever the gaps in his record, they would not matter greatly once Obama reached the presidency.

His performance in the campaign indicated that he had a coherent mind, did not appeal to the baser passions, and was a fluent synthesizer of other people’s facts and opinions. He commanded a mellow baritone whose effects he enjoyed watching only a little too much, and he addressed Americans in just the way a dignified and yet passionate president might address us. The contrast with George W. Bush could not have been sharper. And the decisiveness of that contrast was the largest false clue to the political character of Obama.

He was elected to govern when little was known about his approach to the practical business of leading people. The unexplored possibility was, of course, that little was known because there was not much to know. Of the Chicago organizers trained in Saul Alinsky’s methods of community agitation, he had been considered among the most averse to conflict. Incongruously, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out in Blessed Are the Organized Obama shunned “polarization” as a valuable weapon of the weak. His tendency, instead, was to begin a protestby depolarizing.  His goal was always to bring the most powerful interests to the table. This should not be dismissed as a temperamental anomaly, for temperament may matter far more in politics than the promulgation of sound opinions. The significance of his theoretical expertise and practical distaste for confrontation would emerge in the salient event of his career as an organizer.

As Obama acknowledged in a revealing chapter of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, the event in question had begun as a protest with the warmest of hopes. He was aiming to draw the attention of the Chicago housing authority to the dangers of asbestos at Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where he worked. After a false start and the usual set of evasions by a city agency, a public meeting was finally arranged at a local gymnasium. Obama gave instructions to two female tenants, charged with running the meeting, not to let the big man from the city do too much of the talking. He then retired to the back of the gym. The women, as it turned out, lacked the necessary skill. They taunted and teased the city official. One of them dangled the microphone in front of him, snatched it away, and then repeated the trick. He walked out insulted and the meeting ended in chaos. And where was Obama? By his own account, he remained at the back of the room, waving his arms -- too far away for anyone to read his signals. In recounting the incident, he says compassionately that the women blamed themselves even though the blame was not all theirs. He does not say that another kind of organizer, seeing things go so wrong, would have stepped forward and taken charge.

"I Can't Hear You"
 “Leading from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his engagement.

In Libya, all the world knew that the planning for the intervention was largely done by Americans, and that the missiles and air cover were supplied by the United States. Obama was the leader of the nation that was bringing down yet another government in the Greater Middle East. After Afghanistan and Iraq, this marked the third such American act of leadership since 2001. Obama, however, played down his own importance at the time; his energies went into avoiding congressional demands that he explain what sort of enterprise he was leading.

By the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a president needs congressional approval before he can legally commit American armed forces in “hostilities” abroad. But according to the argument offered by Obama’s lawyers, hostilities were only hostilities if an American was killed; mere wars, on the other hand, the president can fight as he pleases -- without the approval of Congress. No American soldier having been killed in Libya, it followed that Obama could lead the country from behind without congressional approval. This delicate legal sophistry served its temporary purpose and the bombing went forward. Yet the awkward description, “leading from behind,” would not go away. These days, the phrase is mostly used as a taunt by war-brokers whose idea of a true leader runs a remarkably narrow gamut from former president George W. Bush to Senator John McCain. These people would have no trouble with Obama if only he gave us more wars.

The curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency, leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders, community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”
The I-can't-hear-you anecdote has been conveyed both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around 1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph: You command a movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on. Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from me. It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years, the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America. They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in 2008.

And yet, in 2008 there had been a swell of popular opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes, just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had designed it to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America” (renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.

By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had already picked an economic team from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first “big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a transparent absurdity.

The movements had never been consulted. Yet Obama presumed an intimacy with their concerns and a reliance on their loyalty -- as if a telepathic link with them persisted. There was a ludicrous moment in the late summer of 2009 when the president, in a message to followers of "Obama for America," told us to be ready to knock on doors and light a fire under the campaign for health-care reform. But what exactly were we to say when those doors opened? The law -- still being hammered out in congressional committees in consultation with insurance lobbyists -- had not yet reached his desk. In the end, Obama did ask for help from the movements, but it was too late. He had left them hanging while he himself waited for the single Republican vote that would make his "signature law" bipartisan. That vote never came.

The proposal, the handoff to Congress, and the final synthesis of the Affordable Care Act took up an astounding proportion of Obama’s first year in office. If one looks back at the rest of those early months, they contained large promises -- the closing of Guantanamo being the earliest and the soonest to be shelved. The most seductive promise went by the generic name “transparency.” But Obama’s has turned out to be the most secretive administration since that of Richard Nixon; and in its discouragement of press freedom by the prosecution of whistleblowers, it has surpassed all of its predecessors combined.

In the absence of a performance to match his promises, how did Obama seek to define his presidency? The compensation for “I can’t hear you” turned out to be that all Americans would now have plenty of chances to hear him. His first months in office were staged as a relaxed but careful exercise in, as was said at the time, “letting the country get to know him.” To what end? The hope seemed to be that if people could see how truly earnest, temperate, patient, thoughtful, and bipartisan Obama was, they would come to accept policies that sheer ideology or ignorance might otherwise have led them to doubt or reject.

It was magical thinking of course -- that Americans would follow if only we heard him often enough; that people of the most divergent tempers and ideas would gradually come to approve of him so visibly that he could afford to show the country that he heard the call for reform. But one can see why his presidency was infused with such magical thinking from the start. His ascent to the Oval Office had itself been magical.

To be known as the voice of the country, Obama believed, meant that he should be heard to speak on all subjects. This misconception, evident early, has never lost its hold on the Obama White House. The CBS reporter Mark Knoller crunched the first-term numbers, and some of them are staggering. Between January 2009 and January 2013 Obama visited 44 states, led 58 town hall meetings, granted 591 media interviews (including 104 on the major networks), and delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled public remarks. From all those planned interactions with the American public, remarkably few conversions ever materialized. By following the compulsion (which he mistook for a strategy) of coming to be recognized as the tribune of all the people, Obama squandered indefinite energies in pursuit of a finite opportunity. For there is an economy of gesture in politics, just as there is in sports. Show all your moves too early and there will be no surprise when the pressure is on. Talk steadily on all subjects and a necessary intensity will desert you when you need it.
In Confidence Men, the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president’s belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his “pivot to jobs” had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road.  He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.
He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician’s. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe “symbols and gestures... are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”

The road trips have proved never-ending. In 2014, a run of three or four days typically included stops at a supermarket outlet, a small factory, and a steel mill, as the president comforted the unemployed with sayings such as “America needs a raise” and repeated phrases from his State of the Union address such as “Let’s make this a year of action” and “Opportunity is who we are.”

In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said -- in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance -- that we have not yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. 
Consider his “all of the above” energy policy, which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels, Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean coal.”

Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law and the rollout of the policy makes a fair epitome of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with Sebelius left an impression -- which the recent provocative actions of the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced -- that the president is not much interested in what the officials in his departments and agencies are up to.

The Preferential 
President Obama entered the presidency at 47 -- an age at which people as a rule are pretty much what they are going to be.  It is a piece of mystification to suppose that we have been denied a rescue that this man, under happier circumstances, would have been well equipped to perform. There have been a few genuine shocks: on domestic issues he has proven a more complacent technocrat than anyone could have imagined -- a facet of his character that has emerged in his support for the foundation-driven testing regimen “Race to the Top,” with its reliance on outsourcing education to private firms and charter schools.  But the truth is that Obama’s convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became president.

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing.

More than most people,Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of former president Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago; and so it is Carter whom he must not touch.

As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.

What, then, of Obama’s commitment in 2008 to make the fight against global warming a primary concern of his presidency? He has come to think American global dominance -- helped by American capital investment in foreign countries, “democracy promotion,” secret missions by Special Operations forces, and the control of cyberspace and outer space -- as the best state of things for the United States and for the world. We are, as he has told us often, the exceptional country. And time that is spent helping America to dominate the world is time that cannot be given to a cooperative venture like the fight against global warming. The Keystone XL pipeline, if it is built, will bring carbon-dense tar sands from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and probably Obama would prefer not to see the pipeline built. Yet it would be entirely in character for him to approve and justify its construction, whether in the name of temporary jobs, oil industry profits, trade relations with Canada, or all of the above. He has already softened the appearance of surrender by a device that is in equal parts real and rhetorical. It is called the Climate Resilience Fund: a euphemism with all the Obama markings, since resilience is just another name for disaster relief. The hard judgment of posterity may be that in addressing the greatest threat of the age, Barack Obama taught America dimly, worked part time at half-measures, was silent for years at a stretch, and never tried to lead. His hope must be that his reiterated preference will count more heavily than his positive acts.