A lot of things have been going on, so let’s catch up with some reading:

• Why Low Minimum Wages Kill Jobs and Crush Living Standards for Everyone.
• A May Day post at Jadilyya: The obstacles facing labor in post-revolutionary Egypt.
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States.
• Prison labor and free market capitalism.
• Timothy Burke reflects on divestment and what campaigns did right and what they did wrong.
• Two years after the BP oil spill, people are catching shrimp without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs without claws.
• On Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger:
  • Shut up, Johnny Depp.
  • The Albatross around Johnny Depp’s Neck.
• Our Country is Being Fracked by the Merger of Government and Big Business.
• The New Inquiry has dispatches from May Day demonstrations all over.
• Massive May Day Turnout Highlights Media Disconnect.
• Police change tactics against May Day demonstrations.

Targeted arrests, through which police attempt to head off large-scale civil disobedience by snatching individual activists out of the crowd, were documented yesterday in Oakland, New York and Seattle. Unlike the now-familiar Occupy scene of demonstrators being arrested en masse in dramatic, late-night evictions, May Day protesters in many locales were arrested individually throughout the day, in some cases for crossing over onto sidewalks or, according to local media on the scene in Oakland, seemingly at random.  As Gawker reported Monday, the NYPD, with involvement from the FBI, raided at least three New York activists’ homes that day to interrogate them about their May Day plans.

• Politicians reel as Europeans turn against austerity.
• Bill Easterly translates founding documents into World Bank jargon
• The Accidental Sex Offender.
• The assumption that immigrants shouldn’t get to vote in an election is just that – an assumption.
• So, the UCLA Medical School is run by a bunch of racists.
• Here’s the racist blog post at the Chronicle about Black Studies. And some responses here and here.
• Some laws are recognizing the racial influence in death sentence verdicts.
• Tunisian courts convict filmmakers for translating Persepolis.
• Sympathy for Obama.

It seems that he exerted all the pressure he reasonably could within the system we have. At every step, he was as attentive as possible to the weirdness of the system, starting with the primaries. He pushed the discipline of the Democratic party as far as he could, for instance by naming as his point-man the guy to whom the younger and more centrist Democrats owed their jobs (Rahm Emanuel). He was willing to pay people off if necessary — remember when Ben Nelson demanded a special exemption for Nebraska from one of the provisions of health care reform? He was willing to exploit procedural loopholes when possible, as in using reconciliation to pass the health care reform bill (retrospectively making his odd insistence on making it deficit-reducing seem like a pretty good idea). And it seems like all the things that he could’ve done unilaterally would have just increased the executive power grab that, as I recall, we were all opposed to when Bush was president.

• The entirety of civic life cannot be reduced to a get out the vote campaign. Why Occupy shouldn’t be the Tea Party of the Left.
• 68% of the sons of the 1% work for daddy.
• Babies are racist. What else is new?
• Ethno-nationalism is on the rise across Europe.
• Daniel Solomon’s response to Gerard Prunier’s latest op-ed.