The president Monday responded to the scandal everyone’s heard about—the one that broke open on Friday when an IRS official admitted that the agency had specifically targeted for extra scrutiny, conservative and tea party groups seeking nonprofit status.

“This is pretty straightforward. If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on, and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that’s outrageous. And there’s no place for it. And they have to be held fully accountable,” Obama said during a press conference.

“I’ve got not patience with it. I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” he added.

The president, taking the position that pretty much all reasonable people are taking on this scandal—which is that it’s outrageous that a government agency would be targeting political groups based on ideology. It’s unacceptable and the sort of thing that cannot be allowed to happen in this country. But that scandal does not exist in a vacuum. In order to fully understand the IRS targeting conservatives scandal, you really need to know about the other, hidden, untold IRS scandal because that virtually unknown, secondary scandal is actually the fertile soil in which the seed for this new scandal was planted.

So, here’s what you need to know about the scandal-behind-the-scandal: It starts with groups applying to the IRS for 501(c)4 status. That’s a classification given to groups dedicated to social welfare—because they are dedicated to social welfare, they don’t have to pay taxes. Makes sense. But, and here’s where the scandal part starts, what exactly counts as “social welfare”? How does the IRS decide if your group, applying for this special no-tax-paying status, qualifies?

The IRS’s own documentation on this question, flagged in recent days by Ezra Klein, shows such examples of social welfare organizations: a group aimed at helping unemployed people over a certain age find work, a group working to build a stadium for a school district, a group dedicated to counseling for people in financial trouble, a group that subsidizes kids’ tickets to sporting events to get them interested, a neighborhood beautification group and on, and on.

Now, those all sound like the sorts of groups that should be counted as tax exempt and most people are probably more or less fine with groups like that not paying taxes. Now, there has been a very bright line for a very long time between organizations like those and organizations that were engaged directly in political campaigning. And anyone who has worked in politics, on the left or the right, or in nonprofits, knows that there has been a genuinely important separation in tax law based on that distinction—are you doing campaigning? Or are you on this other side, the social welfare side?

And then the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United came along and blew up that distinction. Citizens United said, essentially, that any organization of any kind can spend money out of its general treasury to run political ads. And that decision brought about a pivotal moment for politics and taxes and campaign spending in this country. Karl Rove looked at this ruling and said hey wait a second, maybe I wanna make a “social welfare” organization. A social welfare organization that also happens to lots of ads during campaign season. Ya know, as part of bettering the community and stuff. Ads like these from Crossroads GPS.

Now, here’s why the Karl Rove move was so brilliant. Those 501(c)4′s, the social welfare organizations—the ones that are helping the unemployed or building stadiums—not only do they not have to pay taxes, they also don’t  have to disclose their donors. So Karl Rove figured out how he could have his cake and eat it, too. And so Karl Rove subsequently went around the country looking us all straight in the face, telling us he’s started up a social welfare organization. Nevermind that it was dumping $70 million into partisan campaign ads.

But it’s not just Karl Rove. It’s also Bill Burton on the progressive end with Priorities USA. They also have a 501(c)4, which is supposed to be a social welfare organization. In fact, pretty much every super PAC worth its salt has its own non-profit, tax-exempt 501(C)4 group fueled by secret donors. And this is the context for the untold IRS scandal. Suddenly, this distinction, between political campaign groups and social welfare groups, which the IRS is tasked with patrolling and maintaining, is effectively obliterated by the Citizens United decision.

People are running around the country making an obvious mockery of the social welfare nonprofit rule. And the folks at the IRS are not idiots—they can turn on the television and see Karl Rove. They know that what he is doing is political campaigning, plain and simple. But then it turns out Rove’s great success is a great inspiration and suddenly the IRS starts getting a flood of new applications from other  political groups and strategists saying, oh, you know what, it turns out I, too want to set up a social welfare organization that just so happens to be focused on, say, taking the country back from Barack Hussein Obama.

Now, here’s the thing the IRS appears to have done unequivocally wrong, that we all agree was absolutely inexcusable: they reacted to all of this by targeting one part of the ideological spectrum in looking at whether this flood of new applicants passed the smell test. But being skeptical about a new wave of wolves in sheeps’ clothing, invading the social welfare nonprofit game was entirely appropriate.

And the question Monday is how is this scandal going to unfold? Are we gonna spend the next few months beating-up-on the IRS and the Bush-appointed former head of the IRS who was in charge when all of this happened? Or are we  also gonna take the opportunity to try to figure out what exactly we should be doing to sort out this completely intractable mess in tax law created by Citizens United?

Republicans wouldn’t even let the nominee out of committee. But here’s the other reason blocking this nomination is so extraordinary: Gina McCarthy is currently the assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the EPA. In other words she is the head of EPA’s air pollution regulation efforts, and as head of the EPA would have the authority, as its current head does, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate carbon—an idea that Republicans and their fossil fuel backers really hate. That’s why the committee’s ranking Republican, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, and his brethren, want McCarthy and the EPA to first answer more than 1,000 questions about the “underlying data used to justify the EPA’s job killing regulations.”

You see, the EPA is our best shot right now at regulating carbon and regulating carbon is pretty damn important considering the milestone we are approaching. We learned that we are about to pass 400 parts per million in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That may not mean anything to you it certainly didn’t mean anything to me. So here’s the context for it. The last time that we had 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere wasn’t a century ago, wasn’t a thousand years ago and it wasn’t ten thousand years ago.

It was 800,000 years ago, according to ice core records of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It’s now higher it is than any other period of time over the past 800,000 years. And in fact, even that is an understatement. What’s more likely, is that the last time we hit those levels of carbon in the atmosphere was about three to five million years ago, otherwise known as the Pliocene era.

Now I don’t know much about the Pliocene era but average temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees higher than today’s with sea levels between 5 and 40 meters higher than today. And yes, there were mammoths. So pro, A lot of mammoths. Con, hot as balls. With as a bonus, really, extraordinarily high sea levels, particularly if that kind of sea level rise were to happen again today. But of course that doesn’t matter to Republicans because they’re either so in the pocket of big carbon that they want to deny it or they’ve decided, as some might put it, that God won’t allow us to ruin the earth.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who offered a stunning 17 minute answer to that un-named person’s statement, including the notion that any God who gave us earth also gave us its natural laws. If no divine power stops gravity from operating, no divine power will stop the heating of our planet, when we know that are putting an element into the atmosphere at outrageous levels, that will lead to an untenably hot planet.

It’s time for Republicans to get out of the fringe lane, out of the pocket of big carbon, and into reality. Before we’re all riding woolly mammoths underwater.

May Day started in Chicago. In 1886, workers peacefully came together, striking for an eight-hour work day. That rally turned deadly after a bomb was thrown at police—protesters and police alike lost their lives. You learn about the Haymarket Affair in school, but the story, essentially, has been lost to history. We forget about all the labor tragedies and triumphs along the way.

On a day like May Day, we think about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers in New York City. We think about all the moments in American history when people have struggled for basic autonomy—dignity, solidarity, and protection for themselves in the places where they work. Sometimes we think that all that stuff that happened in the 19th and 20th centuries: labor mobilization, fighting for better conditions—that’s is just some story. A fairytale from the past. But this battle is not in the past. It is very much in the present.

Now take a look at Bangladesh—a country of 150 million people. And last week, the country suffered the single most lethal incident in the history of the garment industry.

Rana Plaza was an eight-story building made out of concrete and glass, located in the outskirts of the capital city of Dhaka. It was built on a swamp, without the proper permits. And according to the country’s chief engineer, three of its stories were added illegally. Rana Plaza housed a number of businesses—including at least five garment factories that supplied Western clothing retailers. Last Wednesday, it collapsed. Over four hundred people have died, and that number is sure to rise, as the search for survivors has now turned into a mission to recover the dead. When I first read about this tragedy, I thought to myself: this is horrific.  But I also thought that this was one of those stories you read about, you feel awful, and you keep going about your day.

It’s tempting to think that this is just the way the world is. That this kind of tragedy happens in that kind of country. The people of Bangladesh disagree. In the wake of this horrific event, there has been a society-wide mobilization. Not unlike what happened in India after a young woman was gang raped on a bus. Not unlike what happened here in this country, in the wake of Newtown, Conn., when a long-festering social problem announced itself in a way that shook the nation’s conscience. In the meantime, the horrific details surrounding Rana Plaza’s collapse keep trickling out.

The New York Times reports on what went on the day before the building collapsed:

“Workers on the third floor were stitching clothing when they were startled by a noise that sounded like an explosion. Cracks had appeared in the building.”

An engineer came to assess the building. He examined three support pillars and concluded the building needed to be closed immediately.

It wasn’t.

Workers at Rana Plaza earned as little as $40 a month. They had no union. They didn’t even have the power to say, I cannot go to work today because I don’t feel safe. That lack of power is what killed them. The man who had all the power at Rana Plaza was the building’s owner, a man named Sohel Rana.The New York Times describes him “as untouchable as a mafia don.”

Mr. Rana was reportedly involved in illegal drugs and guns. He also happened to be the local leader of the ruling political party’s youth wing. When it became clear he was responsible for the conditions at Rana Plaza, Mr. Rana tried to sneak out of the country. He was nabbed by the police, and is now going to be brought to trial. If these details outrage you, you are not alone.

Today, thousands of Bangladeshis took to the streets in the capital city of Dhaka demanding better safety standards for their neighbors, their brothers, their sisters, for themselves. Because Bangladesh right now as a society is saying what other societies has said at other moments: Enough. This cannot stand. It is a stark reminder on this day, when we think about what it means for working people to band together and assert their power, it literally is a matter of life and death,.

All of us have some type of understanding that the clothes we wear on our backs were made somewhere. They might have been made in one of the factories inside Rana Plaza. The future we should be heading towards isn’t a future in which our clothes aren’t made by people in Bangladesh—or other parts of the globe. The future is a future in which our clothes are made by people in Bangladesh—but those people have the right to form a union. They have the right to earn a living in an environment with the proper building permits. They have the right to go to work every day, earn a fair, livable wage, and come home every night—safe, to the people they love. It’s the most basic demand, but it doesn’t just happen by magic. It happens through struggle.

Happy May Day.

The big deal Wednesday on Capitol Hill was the reaching or leaking of big deals. And the way that Washington talks about a deal is that a deal is inherently good because a deal is the end, in-and-of itself.  You’re always looking for a deal, so when you get one it must be good news!

But in the real world, where we all have to live every day, a deal is good only if it’s a good deal. Deals are, almost by-definition, cut in the center. And so what matters most in Washington deal-making is how the center is defined. And what made two of the deals being rolled-out on Wednesday —at least tentatively—promising is the fact that the center around-which they are crafted is remarkably further to the left than it was just six months ago.

Take the big, bipartisan gun deal, announced by Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey. It’s pretty narrow deal, policy-wise, simply designed to expand background checks to cover gun show and internet sales. The cost of the deal, apparently, was private, person-to-person sales, which still be exempt from background checks. NBC reported today that the NRA was a “near-constant” presence in the room as Manchin and Toomey worked-out the details. And, for his part, Sen. Toomey would prefer that you not even refer to it as gun control.

See that right there. that’s the power of the center.

The center gets to be “common sense.” Everything else is defined as “politics.”  Now, as narrow as this background check deal may be when put up against the staggering problem of gun violence in this country,  it is still a remarkable thing. Even just six months ago, the idea of the senate opening debate on a bipartisan gun safety bill of any kind would have been unthinkable. There has not been a major piece of gun control legislation debated in the senate since 1994 — that was the last time we saw anything like what’s happening right now. Almost 20 years ago. The only gun measure to get through Congress during Barack Obama’s first term was, notably, an amendment to allow you to carry firearms into National Parks. And even though the NRA was apparently physically looming over the negotiations, the deal announced on Wednesday is exactly the sort of thing that the NRA has been fighting-like-crazy to prevent. The NRA’s elite, placebo nightmare is now on its way to almost coming true. In real life. In a move from Capitol Hill that could not have been imagined last year.

The other big deal in the news comes to us from the bipartisan group of eight Senators tasked with coming up with an immigration reform framework. Those eight senators are just-about-ready to present their proposal to the rest of the senate. And Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Judiciary Committee has already set a hearing for the compromise bill for one week from today.

This pivotal movement on immigration  just happened to coincide with rallies, held in Washington and all over the country pushing for reform. Now, judging from the details of the immigration compromise that are leaking to the press at this point the path to legal status for undocumented workers in this country would be obstructed by some really draconian border security requirements. But even so, again — any deal at all on immigration is a deal that would simply not have happened six months ago. Six months ago, the leader of the Republican Party sounded like this on immigration:

In a matter of months, Republicans have gone from being the party of – “I can’t have illegals” -to working out a deal with Democrats on immigration that does not center around the mystifying and cruel concept of self-deportation. Of course, having-lost the last election among Latino voters by a 44-point margin probably helped them along in their re-awakening on the issue. But even after that shellacking among Latinos, even after Republicans seemed to be coming to the table on immigration, there were moments, over the course of the last few weeks, when it looked like the base was about ready to abandon the effort.

There was Jeb Bush’s immigration book, out last month, arguing that undocumented immigrants should never be allowed a pathway to citizenship. And then, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, it was starting to look like Marco Rubio — a key member of that bipartisan group working toward a deal — might be getting cold feet.

And, to be clear Republicans still might change their minds and decide to blow this whole thing up after all. But today they’re talking about a deal on immigration. And that itself is a victory for the forces of righteousness. Both of these deals on Wednesday were, for progressives, encouraging developments because they show how what could broadly be called the Obama coalition is succeeding in pushing the center of domestic political conversation on a whole-host of major issues to the left.

On some issues, like marijuana legalization in the states and marriage equality — the Obama coalition has been able to move the conversation farther to the left, faster than anyone thought conceivable. And in domestic politics one huge pressing exception to that pattern, perhaps the only place where the center is still defined as so-far to the right that we are still living in the 2010 Tea Party world, is austerity.

The terms of the conversation about austerity and budgets and jobs are still defined by the peak moments of Gadsden flags and tri-corner hats. Which brings us to Wednesday’s third deal — a bad deal that is redeemed by the fact that it is the one of the three deals that is not yet struck. And probably won’t be. It is, instead, a deal offered in the form of the president’s budget. Which, I should say, contains some great progressive stuff.

But there’s also this. The third-to-last bullet point in a five-page summary of the president’s budget is a proposed cut to Social Security benefits. Because the center of debate on fiscal policy is so far to the right, that cutting Social Security benefits is part of the Democratic president’s budget proposal.

The center gets defined in a whole host of ways — who shows up to elections, who gets to appear on cable news, who stands outside on the National Mall or in the street carrying signs. And we’ve seen activists mobilize to tremendous early effect on guns and on immigration. And what we have not seen at this point is mass sustained mobilization against austerity. And we are seeing the results of that absence of political pressure.

But what the numbers represent is a massive nationwide crime scene.

That document is a summary of widespread and systemic error, malfeasance and reckless lack of care on the part of our nation’s big banks. What the numbers show are banks foreclosing on military service members who were entitled to relief, and banks foreclosing on homeowners who had been approved for a loan modification. The numbers even show banks foreclosing on homeowners who were not behind in their payments and not in default.

In fact, amazingly, there are at least 53 documented cases of homeowners who were totally current on their payments being successfully foreclosed on. Not just having foreclosure proceedings initiated against them, but actually having their homes taken away from them for no reason.

According to the findings posted just Tuesday by a federal bank regulator as part of a settlement agreement with a number of major banks, between 2009 and 2010, foreclosure proceedings that were wrongful or in some way contained bank error commenced against nearly four million homeowners.

About 30% of those homeowners had to battle potentially wrongful efforts to seize their homes, and more than 244,000 eventually lost their homes.

Tuesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator who compiled these statistics and came to its settlement with the banks, was supposed to be announcing good news—money to those who have been victimized by the banks practices.

But given the scale of the deception and error, the amount of money is, in most instances, cartoonishly small. A pittance compared to the billions of dollars about a dozen banks and their affiliates likely saved by getting this sweet settlement deal.

For example, there’s the category of homeowners who were foreclosed on—that is, successfully kicked out of their homes—even though the borrowers had worked out a new payment plan with their bank to stay in their home and stuck to it. There are 234,000 of them.

Another 865,000 were in the process of foreclosure, even though they’d worked out a new payment plan.

That, by the way, is euphemistically known as “dual tracking”, where a bank is processing your loan modification but is simultaneously pursuing foreclosure against you. A better term would simply be call it double dealing or double crossing.

The 1,099,000 victims of dual-tracking get $500 each. It’s a number so hilariously low, it has spawned Alex Goldstein’s new Tumblr, “What You Can Buy For Having Your House Stolen.” One of her suggestions: this two-meter dome tent for those homeowners lucky enough to get $5,000 dollars from the settlement.

Which brings us to our next notable category: Cases in which the “servicer initiated or completed foreclosure on a borrower who was not in default.”

If the foreclosure was completed on a homeowner who was not in default, that homeowner gets $125,000.

$125,000 dollars for taking your home away from you without justification. These homeowners are people who did nothing wrong. They were not in default, and their homes were taken. We would say they were stolen in any other context.

The outrage of that category matched perhaps only by this one: “Servicer foreclosed on borrower eligible for Servicemembers Civil Relief Act”. Translation: Banks wrongfully foreclosing on active-duty members of the armed forces.

It’s a criminal felony, but the banks merely pay out $125,000 dollars to those victims. All the other awards in all the other categories pay out mostly nominal amounts.

Many of the three and a half million homeowners who will receive some kind of payment were supposed to get an independent review from the government. But the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) punted.

They punted because the independent review process was “deeply flawed” as the New York Times characterized it. Instead, the OCC engineered a mass settlement.

What it represents is, in any intuitive sense, the evidence of a crime wave that once again the banks will not have to answer for.

But the death of public figures is an incredibly important occasion to wrestle with their legacy. And the wrong message can be massively destructive. The perception of someone’s legacy, has consequences, because it establishes what the consensus position is. What we’ve all learned from the person’s life.

President Obama’s statement read in part, “…the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend. As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered. And yet according to a former advisor, Thatcher herself said, “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.”

Now if Thatcher was known for anything in her amazing career on the world stage it was pulling no punches, and out of deference to that legacy we should pull none ourselves. Here are just some of the hallmarks of Margaret Thatcher’s 11 year tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister: Thatcher initially opposed economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government and she referred to Nelson Mandela’s “African National Congress” as a “typical terrorist organization.”

When Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested for war crimes, including the widespread catpure, torture and murder of political dissidents, she called for his release… and he eventually served house arrest in London.

On the domestic front, Thatcher’s victory ushered in policies that lowered inflation but sent the unemployment rate past 10% for a grinding, miserable five-and-a-half-years.

As former London Mayor Ken Livingstone put it, “She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed.” Even as the economy improved, it came with immediate and long-term costs. Child poverty rose, with nearly one-third of children living in poverty by the time she left office.

Thatcher’s tax policies shifted the burden from the wealthy to those at the bottom, reaching its most audacious peak with a 1990 poll tax which was so severe on the poor to the benefit of the wealthy, there were widespread riots. It was replaced within a year, after Thatcher’s resignation.

Recent documents show Thatcher was scheming to privatize the national health service, which is a beloved and popular institution that has provided universal health care for Brits regardless of means or class since the end of World War II and may well be one of the great hallmarks of western social democracy…

But: “In the face of popular opposition, she retreated from plans to privatize the water industry and the National Health Service, replace college grants with a student loan program, cut back pensions and revamp the social security system.”

Thatcher supported “Section 28″ which said Local authorities shall not “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a *pretended* family relationship”.

Thatcher is often talked about in conjunction with President Ronald Reagan because, as the conservative fairy tale goes, they both came into office during periods of malaise caused by leftist overreach. And they both absolutely eviscerated their left opposition and permanently altered the trajectory of politics in their countries.

Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

But David Hopper, General Secretary of the Durham Miner’s Association, who were resolutely crushed by Thatcher in a series of dramatic and at times violent strikes said, “She destroyed our community, our villages and our people. She absolutely hated working people and I have got very bitter memories of what she did.”

We live now, still today, on the Reagan-Thatcher axis, their legacies reaching forward through the years. In their shared contempt for egalitarianism they both bequeathed massive inequality. Today, decades after they left office, if you compare inequality across industrialized nations, England and the U-S are at the top, also sharing the least amount of social mobility. This is the society that Thatcher and Reagan gave us. Societies of shrinking middle classes and tremendously high levels of inequality. If you do not like that vision, then you have little occasion to celebrate Margaret Thatcher.

Airports with about 410 take-offs and landings per day or less would suddenly have no direction from a central tower–an alarming prospect.

The FAA’s handy map of the 38 affected states was impressive. As was USA Today’s admonition that “starting Sunday, tens of thousands of pilots flying each day will have to rely increasingly on ‘see-and-avoid.’” You do not want to read the phrase “see and avoid” anywhere near the phrase “tens of thousands of pilots.”

To really drive the point home, USA Today online offered this graphic, “When Airplanes Collide,” so we can better predict the exact time at which we might encounter this problem. Turns out most collisions occur during taxi; in second place are collisions during approach.

The City Council of Fayetteville, Arkansas, decided to use its own funds to keep its tower open, and there are a handful of lawsuits by local communities to halt tower closures. But just two days from the first, possibly dangerous, closures, the Department of Transportation announced Friday it would delay them until June 15th. This will give the FAA time to resolve the legal challenges, and according to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, “make sure communities and pilots understand the changes at their local airports.”

In other words, no promise that these closures will be permanently headed off. The tower story captured our attention in today’s editorial meeting because it was a way to focus attention on the tangible consequences of sequestration. But the underlying substance doesn’t change the fact that it was also today’s bright shiny object of sequestration–a distraction.

With Friday afternoon’s announcement of a delay, we were all supposed to breath a huge sigh of relief. But on a parallel track in real time, we are learning that cancer clinics have been forced to turn away thousands of Medicare patients due to sequestration.

Because of the method in which chemotherapy treatment is paid out, a 2% cut in Medicare has put these clinics in a bind. As the chief executive of one cancer clinic put it, “A lot of us are in disbelief this is happening. It’s a choice between these patients and staying in business.”

The patients can be referred to hospitals, but it’s more expensive, and some of the cost will likely be passed on to those patients. According to the Washington Post, “it is still unclear whether hospitals have the capacity to absorb these patients.”

So for the thousands of Medicare chemotherapy patients affected by sequestration, Friday brought no eleventh-hour reprieve, no postponement of a horrible unintended consequence, no huge sigh of relief.

In Austin, Texas, “[L]ocal nonprofit WBC Opportunities is being forced to cut back nearly $400,000 from its senior Meals on Wheels and Head Start programs due to federal spending decreases caused by sequestration,” according to the Hill Country News. For those folks, Friday brought no change in policy.

In Lafayette, Indiana, “Federal budget cuts should have a negative impact on a number of area nonprofit groups. Places like Food Finders Food Bank are expecting a 5% cut thanks to cuts in the Community Development Block Grant program,” according to local news station WLFI. Nothing happened today to change that.

There are local news stories like these all across the country, all because of sequestration— automatic austerity. And of course it doesn’t end there, because other sequestration cuts place an even greater demand on these nonprofits.

Four million meals to seniors. Six-hundred-thousand women, infants and children from the WIC nutrition program. Services to 150,000 veterans, cut due to sequestration. Those people, affected by those cuts, may have, today, heard the news that tower closures had been delayed until June 15th. But they got no such good news themselves.

Poverty and illness can smash a life to bits as surely as a plane crash. And the agencies and organizations tasked with watching out to make sure that doesn’t happen are evacuating their towers.

These are people who have very little power in our society, and they have decided to empower themselves by using the one tool at their disposal: the power to refuse, to say no, to walk out.

They are not the only ones. There is another strike happening as I speak. It features a group of people with far, far less power than even the minimum wage workers in the fast food industry.

This strike is far away from the cameras, and there are no signs. It’s the strike of the most powerless. A strike of those who have quite literally no recourse under the law, who have no autonomy except their own bodies.

I am speaking of the hunger strikers at Guantanamo. The at-minimum 40 men who are using the only power they have—the power to control what goes into their bodies—to make their voices heard. Eleven of them are being robbed of even this and are being force fed through their noses.

And let me be clear, while the Pentagon says there are now 40 men on hunger strike, the lawyers we spoke to on Thursday said that the number in reality is much much higher. The strike appears to be spreading, and lawyers who represent detainees and the few reporters who cover the facility sense we are hurtling towards a breaking point.

Now of the 166 detainees left at Guantanamo over half of them have already been cleared for release, meaning that the government does not have a case against them and does not think they pose a threat to the United States. And yet they languish at the prison at Guantanamo.

They are left to rot thousands of miles away from their families and their home while the United States government tells the world they should be free. And so these men, after a decade of imprisonment have resorted to starving themselves, like they have in 2005 and 2006 and almost every year since.

Yasin Qassem Mohammed Ismail, a Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo, told his lawyer David Remes in a letter on March 11:

In general, everything is going toward the worst. I believe I am going to die in this hunger strike and this might be my last letter or today is probably my last day in this world.

Barack Obama recognized Guantanamo as a stain on the national honor, a moral abomination, an insult to our laws and an unsustainable policy in practical terms. He said:

“It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred.”

And he did, to his credit, try to close the facility, only to be met with the most craven of political opposition from Republican—and then fellow Democratic members of Congress.

But faced with that opposition, he and the Democrats—and frankly all of us as citizens—have fallen into accepting complacency.

Four years after Obama signed his ill-fated executive order to close the prison it remains fully open and operational. More so than it was when he took office.

It is after all very easy not to think about 166 men locked up thousands of miles away. But. the status quo that exists in Guantanamo Bay—where we keep people locked up for no reason other than that we don’t know what to do with them—cannot go on. And yet it does.

But while there are genuinely hard questions on Guantanamo, there are some easy ones too.

The dozens of men who have been cleared by the United States government for release should be released immediately, should be paid restitution, and offered legal residence in the United States.

If that sounds radical or outside the boundaries of political feasability, I would say that shoving tubes up the noses of men a few times a day to force them to stay alive in our prisons, even though we readily admit we have to no reason to continue to keep them, is pretty damn radical, too.

People who saw it in real-time howled involuntarily. Everyone in the stadium was affected. Social media blew up.

Right away, people wanted to know if Ware’s leg was going to be OK, and if he was ever going to play basketball again. But they also wanted to know—I wanted to know—if Ware isn’t going to play basketball again because of this injury, is he going to be able to go back to Louisville next year, and is he going to have a scholarship?

If Ware isn’t going to have a scholarship, what’s going to happen to him? And in any case, who is going to pay his medical bills? Is he covered for this? And most profoundly and urgently, why isn’t Kevin Ware being paid for his labor?

The term “student athlete,” as Taylor Branch points out in his seminal piece in The Atlantic, was “a formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its ‘fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players’.”

If a player was a “student athlete,” he or she wasn’t an employee, and therefore, not qualified for workers’ comp if injured on the field. Which means that NCAA players are–NCAA propaganda notwithstanding–essentially the uncompensated employees of the NCAA cartel: players who literally risk their limbs on the court in order to produce a product that is immensely profitable.

How profitable? In 2010, the NCAA reached a 14-year, $10.8 billion deal with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting, covering just “March Madness.” That’s $770 million a year.

What does that mean for the uncompensated worker in this scenario, the basketball player? There just happens to be a March study that provides the number.

“Football and men’s basketball players at top sports schools are being denied at least $6.2 billion between 2011 and 2015 under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules that prohibit them from being paid,” according to a study by the National College Players Association and the Drexel University Sport Management Department.

$1.06 million over four years for the average men’s basketball player, not including his scholarship. The number is higher, $1.5 million, for basketball players at Bowl Championship Series schools.

The most valuable team in all of college basketball is none other than Kevin Ware’s Louisville, where, the study estimates, players are being denied $6.5 million each in uncompensated labor.

Ware doesn’t have $6.5 million. But Louisville’s basketball program brought in $42.4 million in revenue during the 2011-2012 academic year, according to numbers it reported to the Department of Education.

Ware’s immediate care and recovery will be paid for, but coverage in these situations is deliberately narrow and there are plenty of examples of players who incur horrendous medical bills, in some cases because their injury is not bad enough to qualify for “catastrophic injury insurance”, which itself has a $90,000 deductible, according to The New York Times.  

Scholarships are renewed on an annual basis, so Louisville is under no obligation to renew Ware’s, though it probably will for two reasons: it’s a high profile case, and they want Ware around when he is able to play again.

Kevin Ware emerged today from emergency surgery, which was successful, according to Louisville, and he is expected to be discharged from Methodist Hospital tomorrow. A Louisville spokesman reported that “doctors are expecting a full recovery.”

But for University of Oklahoma basketball player Kyle Hardrick, it was a far different story. After a knee injury in 2009, his scholarship was not renewed, and the tuition bills mounted.

Hardrick’s mother told a congressional panel in 2011: “You believe that your child will be taken care of on and off that court throughout their college career. My insurance does not cover all of Kyle’s medical bills.”

The history of student-athletes like Hardrick–the hundreds of student athletes whose unpaid labor and risk provide profits and revenue for an entire industry—is part of what made that moment with Kevin Ware so gruesome.

It was gruesome on a visceral level, because of the severity of the injury, but it was also gruesome because while all of us were enjoying the game, all the people making money off of it, including the advertisers, and athletic directors, and apparel companies, had to reckon for a brief instant with the fact that this kid, now in agony, was on the job making their programs possible.