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Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 03/10/2013 
Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:29:58 +0000 
We Are Living_in the_World Dick_Cheney_Made Howard_ Fineman Huff_Post_03_04_ 
20 13.pdf The Brut—ality_Casca—de David_Brooks NVT Marc1 4,2011.pdf; 
Mooching_off:Medicaide Paulfrugman Maroc 3,2513.pdfl 
Particle_ Physicists in_U.1._Worry_AbourBeintieft_Behind Dennis_Overbye_NYT Ma 
rch_4, 013.pdf; Come_Home,_America 
lizabeth Hoffman Fin March_4,2013.pcif; 
Come_Home,_America Elizabeth Hofftrian NYT Tv1arch 4,:2013a).pdf; 
Reading_God's Mind Frank Bruni March —4,_20r3.pdf;the_Good,_Racist_People_Ta-
Nehisi_Coates3YT_Taarch —6,_2013.pdf; Fiugo_Chavezn
profile.pdf; 
A Polarizing_Figure Who _fed a_Movement Simon_Romero_NYT_March 5,_2013.pdf; 
Ifi_Years_Later,_Looling_Baccon the Iraq3Var_So_We_Can_Clearly_Loa_Forward_A 
rianna_Huffington_Huff Post 05 OZ 2f713.pdf; 
Why_we_give_foreignjw_Citar s krauthammer TWP March 7,_2013.pdf; 
A Dangerous 'New Normal' in &lege Debt darles-Blow RYT_March_8,2013.pdf; 
 
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DEAR FRIENDS.... 
Last week the controversial President of Venezuela, Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias died. Although 
highly popular in his home country this four-term President was often portrayed by Western Media as 
a cross between Zimbabwe's despot president, Robert Mugabe and American comedian, actor, radio-
TV personality and host Soupy Sales. And for most of us, whether you liked or hate him, he was and 
most likely will always be an enigma. With more than three million grieving supporters going past 
Hugo Chavez casket paying their respects, there is no doubt that he enjoyed a special place in millions 
of his fellow countryman's hearts. Let's remember that Hugo Chavez was elected four times by a 
majority of Venezuela's voters without the aid of voter suppression, rigged voting machines, the help of 
his Supreme Court and hanging chads. I recently heard someone who knows Venezuelan politics say, 
that if Chavez had lived and wanted it, he would have easily been re-elected to a fifth term. I don't 
know much about Venezuela, its politics and Chavez, but I do know that he didn't start any wars, 
he didn't loot the country's treasury to amass huge wealth home or abroad and during his presidencies 
the country's economy grew, while American's contracted and most of all 
he bettered the quality of 
life for the average citizen through the building of schools and housing for the poor, as well as 
providing healthcare, food and fuel subsidies for the poor. Yes, he was larger than life, and often his 
actions were contrary to his dialog, but he has never forgot that he was raised in a three room dirt floor 
shack to cozy up to his country's elite. Not a bad legacy.... 
WIKIPEDIA: 
Hugo Rafael Chavez FrIas (28 July 1954 — 5 March 2013) was the President of Venezuela from 
1999 until his death in 2013. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political 
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party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the 
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he led until his death. 
Following his own political ideology of Bolivarianism and "socialism of the 21st century", he focused 
on implementing socialist reforms in the country as a part of a social project known as the Bolivarian 
Revolution, which has seen the implementation of a new constitution, participatory democratic 
councils, the nationalization of several key industries, increased government funding of health care 
and education, and significant reductions in poverty, according to government figures. Under Chavez, 
Venezuelans' quality of life improved according to a UN Index and the poverty rate fell from 48.6 
percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2011, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin 
America. 
Born into a poor working-class family in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chavez became a career military officer, 
and after becoming dissatisfied with the Venezuelan political system, he founded the secretive 
Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200,he early 1980s to work towards overthrowing 
an
it. Chavez led the MBR-200 in 
unsuccessful coup 
against the Democratic Action government 
of President Carlos Andres Perez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned. Released from prison after two 
years, he founded a social democratic political party, the Fifth Republic Movement, and was elected 
president of Venezuela in 1998. 
He subsequently introduced a new constitution which increased rights for marginalized groups and 
altered the structure of Venezuelan government, and was re-elected in 2000. During his second 
presidential term, he introduced a system of Bolivarian Missions, Communal Councils and worker-
managed cooperatives, as well as a program of land reform, whilst also nationalizing various key 
industries. He was re-elected in 2006 with over 60% of the vote. On 7 October 2012, Chavez won his 
country's presidential election for a fourth time, defeating Henrique Capriles, and was elected for 
another six-year term. 
Allying himself strongly with the Communist governments of Fidel and then Raul Castro in Cuba and 
the Socialist governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in 
Nicaragua, his presidency was seen as a part of the socialist "pink tide" sweeping Latin America. Along 
with these governments, Chavez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary 
of the United States' foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of the US-supported neoliberalism and 
laissez-faire capitalism. 
He supported Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and was instrumental in setting up the pan-
regional Union of South American Nations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Bank of the 
South, and the regional television network TeleSur. However, Chavez had extensive disputes with 
Colombia, and supported rebels in Colombia and Ecuador, causing ambassadors to be recalled and 
troops to be mobilized. Chavez was a highly controversial and divisive figure both at home and abroad, 
having insulted other world leaders and compared US president George W. Bush to a donkey, and 
called him the devil. 
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On 30 June 2011, Chavez stated that he was recovering from an operation to remove an abscessed 
tumor with cancerous cells. He required a second operation in December 2012. He was to have been 
sworn in on 10 January 2013, but the National Assembly of Venezuela agreed to postpone the 
inauguration to allow him time to recuperate and return from a third medical treatment trip to Cuba. 
He died in Caracas on 5 March 2013 at the age of 58. 
IN SUMMARY: During his four presidencies Chavez upended the Venezuelan aristocracy — that old, 
corrupt, entrenched establishment of oil tycoons and beauty queens. He made the poor his cherished 
children. And yes, to keep firm control of his message, he abolished the ministries' press offices and 
centralized the news. He renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. He forged ties 
with Fidel and shunted petrodollars to Cuba. He nationalized Venezuela's huge reserves of oil, gave 
away fortunes, created a new class of rich (merrily referred to as the Boligarchy), built miles of housing 
for the indigent and, when the bills came around, printed more money until the over-leveraged 
economy foundered. His goal, was to unite Latin America in a firm alliance of revolutionary republics 
that served as a bulwark against the United States, which wouldn't have been possible if the 
US hadn't supported so many corrupt dictatorial regimes/banana republics throughout the Caribbean, 
South and Central American. 
With everything else that happened last week, (the Pope retiring, the death of Hugo Chavez, the 
sequester and Rand Paul thirteen hour filibuster in the US Senate), you may have not noticed that 
voters in Switzerland this past week overwhelmingly approved a referendum to give shareholders a 
binding say on executive pay. The Swiss measures are the latest and most far-reaching of various say-
on-pay policies now in place or under consideration in many European nations. Denmark, Norway, 
Sweden and the Netherlands all have some form of voting on binding pay. This Swiss measures 
require lawmakers to pass a law giving shareholders the right to hold a binding vote on all 
compensation for executives and directors of Swiss-based public companies. The law will also ban 
one-time bonuses for joining or leaving a company, and it will require greater transparency. For 
example, pension funds will have to disclose how they vote at shareholder meetings, which will enable 
a fund's members to assess whether their interests have been represented. And although top corporate 
executives may bristle at the suggestion that they are overpaid. But the higher the pay, the likelier it is 
to be disconnected from market fundamentals or the concerns of shareholders, employees and, in 
cases of bailed-out bankers, taxpayers. Also, it often weakens moral with a company whereas last year 
the CEO of a major US company received a 27% pay-raise, while other executive pay was limited to a 
maximum 3% and the company did a 5% across the board employment cut. 
While American laws do not require the level of control imposed by some European nations, the 
Securities and Exchange Commission has been too slow in carrying out the shareholder protections 
that are on the books. In the United States, shareholder votes on executive pay are nonbinding. That's 
better than having no say at all, which was the case before the rules were changed in 2011 under the 
Dodd-Frank law. But a nonbinding vote still regards shareholders as advisers, rather than owners. 
And the S.E.C. has not yet proposed rules to implement a Dodd-Frank provision that requires 
companies to calculate and disclose the ratio of a chief executive's compensation to the company's 
median pay package. That data is crucial to gauging whether executive pay is excessive and how pay 
disparities affect company performance and the economy. This week, in a pre-emptive strike against 
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rules that have not yet been written, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on 
the Banking Committee, introduced a bill that would weaken the executive pay disclosures required by 
Dodd-Frank. That would be exactly the wrong way to go. Again, one of the problems with unrestricted 
executive pay is that it leads to management often goosing stock price instead of concentrating on 
longer term structural objectives and the best way to make sure that this doesn't happen is 
be decoupling huge bonuses from short-term stock profits. 
As an ardent supporter of President Obama I believe that one of his major failings has been his 
administration's inability to bring criminal charges against a single major Wall Street bank or a single 
leading Wall Street banker for what the FBI termed an "epidemic of fraud" that blew up the entire 
economy, even though a number of investigations here and in the UK revealed the banks committed 
routine fraud in peddling mortgage securities they knew were garbage, trampled basic property laws, 
laundered money from Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords, conspired to game the basic measure of 
interest rates and more. Yet, time after time, the Justice Department and regulatory agencies settled 
for sweetheart deals, with no admission of guilt, no banker held accountable, and institutional fines 
that were the equivalent in earnings of a speeding ticket to the average family. 
Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder stated openly what was already apparent: The Justice 
Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against 
banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk. Here's what 
Holder said: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does 
become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if 
you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps 
even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have 
become too large. "(emphasis added) Holder was responding to questions by Republican Senator 
Charles Grassley about why the Justice Department brought no criminal charges against the large 
British bank HSBC after it admitted laundering money for parties in Iran, Libya and Mexican on behalf 
of drug lords. The Attorney General acknowledged that the sheer size of the big banks "has an 
inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. That is 
something you (members of Congress) all need to consider." 
This is outrageous. Allowing the big banks to operate above the law is at one with the philosophy that 
has guided both the Bush and the Obama administrations during the financial collapse. Tim Geithner, 
former head of the New York Federal Reserve bank under Bush and Treasury Secretary under Obama, 
would preach that it was necessary to "foam the runway" to protect the banks from total crackup. That 
"foam" included literally trillions in the backdoor bailout of banks organized by the Federal Reserve, 
abandoning the underwater homeowners who were victimized by Wall Street's wilding, while 
neutering any regulatory or criminal accountability. 
Holder's outrageous admission means that bankers operate -- and know that they can operate -- above 
the law. As a result the argument about regulations and legal limits is laughable, and in reality it is 
beyond the big ugly. With bankers spending tens of millions lobbying to weaken regulations and 
starve regulators of authority and resources so that they can trample the laws, mislead the regulators 
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and defraud their customers, swathed in the confidence that the laws will not apply to them, is 
something that should not be tolerated. 
There is no reason a bank with billions of assets could not survive the indictment of its CEO or CFO 
and their traders. If the Fed and Treasury can 'foam the runway" to protect otherwise insolvent banks 
from collapse, they surely could insure that a multi-billion dollar bank survives while the executives 
are held personally responsible for their crimes. Putting a few bankers in jail and holding them 
personally accountable for their frauds would do much to bring sobriety back to Wall Street. For some 
reason the Attorney General is afraid. Wall Street and the big banks know it, and as such feel free to 
operate above the law. And as the conservative head of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank Richard 
Fischer and many others have argued, the big banks are not disciplined by the market. They know 
their losses are covered, while they pocket their winnings. They have multi-million dollar personal 
incentives to leverage up, use other people's money to make big bets on high risk gambles that offer big 
rewards. Their excesses blew up the economy, but they got bailed out and emerged bigger and more 
concentrated than ever. 
And, of course, since investors know the big banks can't fail, the big banks can attract money at much 
lower rates than smaller banks, a subsidy worth about $89 billion a year, according to recent 
calculations by Bloomberg News. Clearly, institutions that are above the law and beyond the 
discipline of the market cannot exist in their current form. Congress has only two choices. The big 
banks can be nationalized and treated as public utilities. The public would pocket their profits and 
cover their losses. Or the big banks can be broken up, and be accountable to both the law and the 
market. Something has to be done, otherwise this same behavior that cause the financial markets to 
crash in 2008 will happen again. And in a country that puts teenagers in jail for selling $20 worth of 
drugs, there should be no problem jailing executives that laundry money for drug cartels and despots 
and oversee institutions that issue predatory loans and sell financial instruments that they know will 
fail. To that I say 
Eric Holder get some balls and do yourjob.... 
In the 1959 British film comedy - The Mouse That Roared - of the 1955 satirical novel by Irish-
American writer Leonard Wibberley, an impoverished backward nation declares a war on the United 
States of America, hoping to lose, but things don't go according to plan. The Plot: The tiny (three miles 
by five miles) European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, supposedly located in the Alps between Switzerland 
and France, proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot 
Grand Fenwick wine. However, an American winery makes a knockoff version, "Pinot Grand Enwick", 
putting the country on the verge of bankruptcy. The prime minister decides that their only course of 
action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing 
army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself 
through the generous largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies (as it did 
for Germany through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II). 
Instead, the Duchy defeats the mighty superpower, purely by accident. landing in New York City, 
almost completely deserted above ground because of a city-wide disaster drill, the Duchy's invading 
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"army" (composed of the Field Marshal Tully Bascomb, three men-at-arms, and twenty long-bowmen) 
wanders to a top secret government lab and unintentionally captures the "Q-bomb" (a prototype 
doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered) and its maker, Dr. Kokintz. The invaders 
from Fenwick are sighted by a Civil Defense Squad and are immediately taken to be "men from Mars" 
when their mail armor is mistaken for reptilian skin. The Secretary of Defense pieces together what has 
happened (with help from the five lines in his encyclopedia on Grand Fenwick and the Fenwickian flag 
left behind on a flagpole) and is both ashamed and astonished that the United States was unaware that 
it had been at war for two months. 
With the most powerful bomb in the world now in the smallest country in the world, other countries 
are quick to react, with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom offering their support. With the 
world at the tiny country's mercy, Duchess Gloriana, the leader of Grand Fenwick, lists her terms: all 
the nuclear weapons of the powerful nations must go through an inspection by impartial scientists and 
the "Tiny Twenty" (a joke about the "Big Three" Nations) should be formed, a group of twenty small 
nations so that small nations can get their voices heard as well as large ones. Soon Duchess Gloriana 
and Tully Bascomb get married, and during the wedding Dr. Kokintz discovers that the bomb is a dud 
and that the bomb Grand Fenwick used to threaten the world into obedience never had any power 
whatsoever. However, Dr. Kokintz decides to keep that fact to himself considering that the pretense 
still furthers the cause of world peace. 
I am not sure if 28 year old Kim Jong-il, Supreme Leader of North Korea has ever read the book or saw 
the movie, but this past week when he threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States, he 
reminded of The Mouse That Roared. And yes North Korea has 1.2 million soldiers, approximately 
12, 000 artillery guns mostly near its border with South Korea, 82o fighter jets, 4,200 tanks, several 
submarines, a limited number of short and mid-range missiles, a stockpile of fissile material that 
could be enough for six to eight nuclear weapons, and up to 5,000 metric tons of biological and 
chemical weapons that can wipe out a mid-size industrial city. Experts say North Korea is years away 
from being able to hit continental America with a nuclear weapon despite a decades-long push toward 
an atomic capability. And he doesn't even have enough fuel to fly sorties or conduct needed drills to 
maintain combat effectiveness against South Korea's 46o jets across the border. 
So why is this Mouse Roaring 
 Obviously, like many of his generation who grew up 
in privilege with rap music, video games, NBA and soccer and now being The Supreme Leader who 
is married to a local Pop Star, he wants attention, evidenced his recent foray into international 
diplomacy, when he invited former basket ball player & bad-boy, Dennis Rodman to Pyongyang. As I 
use to say in the 196os if we had dropped televisions instead of bombs in Vietnam, the war would have 
been over years earlier. And in this case, if we send JayZ and Beyonce to visit him and then invite him 
to Disney World and Aspen.... to assuage his ego, so we can avoid war with the Mouse. 
This week the Dow closed Friday at 4,397.07 more than double of what it was four years ago. Also the 
Labor Department data showed 236,00o jobs were added in February. January's numbers were 
revised down, but the figures from December were increased. All told, monthly gains have averaged 
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more than 200,000 jobs since November. and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.7 percent, the lowest in 
four years. With both housing starts and home values their highest since 2008. And corporate America has 
horded more than $3 trillion. THINK: if government employment had just held steady since the end of 2008, 
instead of cutting more than 700,000 jobs, the unemployment rate would be 7.2 percent today, noted the Wall 
Street Journal's Justin Lahart. Mitt Romney campaigned in 2012 on the slogan, "Obama isn't working." With 
almost every other Republican leader echoing that the President's economic policies would cause another 
recession. At the same time Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said that Republicans should 
take credit for the stronger than expected economy. 
The problem is that numbers don't always reflect the strength of the economy. From 2009 to 2011, 
average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7% but the gains were very uneven. Top 196 incomes 
grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Hence, the top 1.% captured in% of 
the income gains in the first two years of the recovery. Warren Buffet recently noted, 40 
years ago, the corporate tax contribution of 4% of GDP was far higher than today's 1.5% and growth 
was stronger. And corporations are malting more money than ever. Yet no one is concentrating on the 
most important economic problem in the country, the need for more jobs. Yes, companies are doing 
better than ever and the rich are getting richer. While the Middle Class is being squeezed and the 
needs of the elderly and poor are being ignored. So as encouraging as the numbers were this past 
week, both Congress and the President should do whatever they can to create jobs which will have a 
multiplier effect on the economy. And when the Private Sector is not creating enough jobs, 
government should. And with borrowing costs at the lowest point ever, we should use this opportunity 
to rebuild the country's infrastructure, which is a way to give future generations, something, aldn to 
what Congress did in the 1930s with the Hoover Dam, Eisenhower did with The Federal-Aid Highway 
Act of 1956. And successive Administrations did to create the transcontinental railroad. 
THIS WEEK's READINGS 
Last Sunday's Weekend Readings started out with a critique on Bill Moyers show - -Fighting 
Creeping Creationism -- where he interviewed 19-year-old anti-creationism activist Zack 
Kopplin, who from the time he was a high school senior in his home state of Louisiana, has been 
speaking, debating, cornering politicians and winning the active support of 78 Nobel Laureates, the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New Orleans City Council, and tens of 
thousands of students, teachers and others around the country, challenging education laws that 
encourage teaching creationism alongside evolution, and supporting school vouchers to transfer 
taxpayer money from public to private schools, where religious fundamentalists backed by the right 
wing can push a creationist agenda. And then talked with journalist and historian Susan Jacoby who 
talked with Bill about the role secularism and intellectual curiosity have played throughout America's 
history — a topic explored in her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and 
American Freethought. 
If you didn't think that I was crazy last week, I am revisiting Religion again based on Frank Bruni op-
ed in the New York Times last week -- Reading God's Mind -- questioning why there is such a 
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stubborn barrier to the full acceptance and bigotry against gay and lesbian Americans in the Christian 
religion. If we are all God's People, why are there still bigoted attitudes toward homosexuality 
deeming such love sinful and against God's wishes in many Christian Churches? 
Bruni tells a story of Jeff chu who married last September on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against 
the backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. And although 8o people came, his mother and father who are 
strict Southern Baptist, didn't Jeff homosexual feelings surfaced while he was attending a Christian 
high school. To suppress these feelings he dated women when he attended Princeton. But in London 
for graduate school, he began to date men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when 
God had presumably made him the way he was. To explore these issues, Jeff roamed the country, 
visiting Christian churches and groups of diverse theological stripes to explore their attitudes toward 
homosexuality. At the same time he was coming to terms with his own homosexuality, knowing that 
he was going to hell because he is gay. 
Neither being gay or religious, this story caused me to recall one of gospel singer Kirk Franklin's 
favorite musical chants, 
are you with me." And if you believe that we are all God's children, then 
why in Christian circles is homosexuality a sin and these children of God, going to hell? 
After watching R.J. Cutler's disturbing new feature documentary called 'The World According to 
Dick Cheney", this week in The Huffington Post columnist Howard Fineman posted - We Are 
Living in the World Dick Cheney Made - as it is a cautionary tale of unchecked zealotry in 
action and how deep conviction can also take down a democracy. Cheney at his height, had virtually 
unchecked power to rain destruction on other nations and who drove the creation of the military-
diplomatic world in which we still live on the eve of the loth anniversary of the fiery "shock and awe" 
launch of the Iraq War. And as a result the country and the world that we now live in is largely the 
product of Cheney's thinking. 
The film distils interviews with journalists, biographers and central figures in Cheney's saga, including 
20 hours with the former vice president himself, Cutler chronicles how Cheney -- zealously, 
relentlessly, single-mindedly -- accumulated the power he then wielded in the first term of President 
George W. Bush. We see Cheney shrewdly and patiently playing the inside game for decades --
attaching himself to rising stars in successive Republican administrations; becoming a leader in 
Congress; finally steering Bush to pick Cheney as his running mate and then insisting on 
unprecedented control of security matters. This portrait is riveting because we know what Cheney's 
ascent led to: our seemingly irrevocable, full-blown security state, with all the attendant risks of 
constitutional and civil liberties abuses; wholesale destruction and civilian deaths in swaths of 
Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 6,50o dead and more than 50,000 wounded U.S. soldiers; the rise of 
remote-control warfare, now embodied by drones; and a relationship with the Arab and Muslim 
worlds arguably more antagonistic than ever before. The film has the dreadful fascination of a road trip 
you know ends in a car wreck. 
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Since Cheney left the capital, President Barack Obama not only hasn't dismantled most of the "world 
according to Dick Cheney"; in many cases, he has either actively ratified it (drones and intrusive 
surveillance and monitoring of leaks). In other cases in which he has opted for rollback (Afghanistan), 
Obama has moved with extreme caution. And although the documentary is about Cheney, it is about 
Bush, too. In his first term, the president let Cheney be Cheney, often without even knowing he was 
doing so. As the years passed, Bush belatedly moved to rein in his vice president, siding with Justice 
Department lawyers on surveillance issues; firing Cheney's dearest friend, Donald Rumsfeld, from his 
Pentagon job; letting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice win the argument over whether to bomb a 
Syrian nuclear reactor site (we didn't). Finally understand that he had been seriously played by 
Cheney, in the administration's last days, Bush refused to pardon his right-hand man, Lewis I. 
"Scooter" Libby, who had been convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Valerie Plame case 
(though he did commute Libby's prison sentence). 
Unrepentant, convinced of his rectitude and his ultimate place in history, the 72-year-old former vice 
president unequivocally defends wars, harsh interrogation methods, domestic surveillance and other 
features of the world he made. At the same time, he uses the film to sharply criticize Bush and to settle 
scores with bureaucratic rivals from back in the day. Cheney to this day regards his critics as weak, 
naive, partisan and unpatriotic. The saying is that Power Corrupts and All Power corrupts absolutely 
and no one personifies this more than former Dick Cheney. I strop
 urge everyone to watch this 
109 minute film when it premieres on Showtime, next week (9 
on March 15), because I am and 
whether you are a supporter or hater, it is important to understand how and what happen 
and most 
of all why America is becoming more and more a police state, which is the real lasting legacy of Dick 
Cheney. 
David Brooks wrote an interesting op-ed this week in the New York Times — The Brutality 
Cascade - using the metaphor of how the pervasive use of steroids in Major League pressured a 
number of top athletes to use them too. And how students feel pressured become junior workaholics 
in preparations of college admissions. And how these situations have become brutality cascades where 
the most brutal player gets to set the rules and everyone else feels pressure to imitate, whether they 
want to or not, or whether it is in their best interest or not. 
Nowhere is this "brutality cascade" (as Brooks coined it) more rife then in politics. Let's say you are a 
normal person who gets into Congress. 
rather not spend all your time fund-raising. 
like to 
be civil to your opponents and maybe even work out some compromises. But you find yourself 
competing against opponents who fund-raise all the time, who prefer brutalism to civility and 
absolutism to compromise. And if you don't you get primaried by people in your own party. Pretty 
soon you must follow their norms to survive. 
You might call these situations brutality cascades. In certain sorts of competitions, the most brutal 
player gets to set the rules. Everybody else feels pressure to imitate, whether they want to or not. The 
political world is rife with brutality cascades. Let's say you are a normal person who gets into 
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Congress. 
rather not spend all your time fund-raising. 
like to be civil to your opponents 
and maybe even work out some compromises. But you find yourself competing against opponents who 
fund-raise all the time, who prefer brutalism to civility and absolutism to compromise. Pretty soon you 
must follow their norms to survive. 
Brooks then extends this theory to world affairs. Whereby the United States, a traditional capitalist 
nation that has championed an open-seas economic doctrine, and believes that everybody benefits if 
global economics is like a conversation, with maximum openness, mutual trust and free exchange. But 
along comes China, an economic superpower with a more mercantilist mind-set. Many Chinese, at 
least in the military-industrial complex, see global economics as a form of warfare, a struggle for 
national dominance. 
Americans and Europeans tend to think it is self-defeating to engage in cyberattacks on private 
companies in a foreign country. You may learn something, but you destroy the trust that lubricates 
free exchange. Pretty soon your trade dries up because nobody wants to do business with a pirate. 
Investors go off in search of more transparent partners. But China's cybermercantilists regard deceit 
as a natural tool of warfare. Cyberattacks make perfect sense. Your competitors have worked hard to 
acquire intellectual property. Your system is more closed so innovation is not your competitive 
advantage. It is quicker and cheaper to steal. They will hate you for it, but who cares? They were 
going to hate you anyway. C'est la guerre. 
In a brutality cascade the Chinese don't become more like us as the competition continues. We 
become more like them. And that is indeed what's happening. The first thing Western companies do 
in response to cyberattacks is build up walls. Instead of being open stalls in the global marketplace, 
they begin to look more like opaque, rigidified castles. Next, the lines between private companies and 
Western governments begin to blur. When Western companies are attacked, they immediately turn to 
their national governments for technical and political support. On the one hand, the United States 
military is getting a lot more involved in computer counterespionage, eroding the distance between the 
military and private companies. On the other hand, you see the rise of these digital Blackwaters, 
private security firms that behave like information age armies, providing defense against foreign attack 
but also counterattacking against Chinese and Russian foes. 
Brooks continues: Pretty soon the global economy looks less like Monopoly and more like a game of 
Risk, with a Chinese military-industrial complex on one part of the board and the Western military-
industrial complex on another part. Brutality cascades are very hard to get out of. You can declare war 
and simply try to crush the people you think are despoiling the competition. Or you can try what 
might be called friendship circles. In this approach, you first establish the norms of legitimacy that 
should govern the competition. You create a Geneva Convention of domestic political conduct or 
global cyberespionage. Then you organize as broad a coalition as possible to agree to uphold these 
norms. Finally, you isolate the remaining violators and deliver a message: If you join our friendship 
circle and abide by our norms, the benefits will be overwhelming, but if you stay outside, the costs will 
be devastating. 
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Where I differ from Brooks is with his analogy that somehow President Obama should break out of this 
vicious cycle when pressured by Republican zealots, whose #1 goal is to score points at all costs, 
making his a failed Presidency even if it hurts the country. As Brooks points out, "President Obama is 
caught between these two strategies. He never quite pushes budget showdowns to the limit to 
discredit Republicans, but he never offers enough to the members of the Republican common-sense 
caucus to tempt them to break ranks." When everyone knows, carrots alone don't work and you better 
have a big stick and make sure that your adversaries know that you are not adverse to using it liberally. 
Otherwise, I find Brook's op-ed insightful. 
Paul ICrugman in and op-ed this week in the The Washington Post - Mooching Off Medicaid 
—'Conservatives like to say that their position is all about economic freedom, and hence making 
government's role in general, and government spending in particular, as small as possible. And no 
doubt there are individual conservatives who really have such idealistic motives.' He continues, 
"When it comes to conservatives with actual power, however, there's an alternative, more cynical 
view of their motivations — namely, that it's all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the 
afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot. And if you want a strong piece of 
evidence in favor of that cynical view, look at the current state of play over Medicaid." 
Some background: Medicaid, which provides health insurance to lower-income Americans, is a highly 
successful program that's about to get bigger, because an expansion of Medicaid is one key piece of the 
Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. But there is a catch. Last year's Supreme Court decision 
upholding Obamacare also opened a loophole that lets states turn down the Medicaid expansion if they 
choose. And there has been a lot of tough talk from Republican governors about standing firm against 
the terrible, tyrannical notion of helping the uninsured. Now, in the end most states will probably go 
along with the expansion because of the huge financial incentives: the federal government will pay the 
full cost of the expansion for the first three years, and the additional spending will benefit hospitals 
and doctors as well as patients. Still, some of the states grudgingly allowing the federal government to 
help their neediest citizens are placing a condition on this aid, insisting that it must be run through 
private insurance companies. And that tells you a lot about what conservative politicians really want. 
Consider the case of Florida, whose governor, Rick Scott, made his personal fortune in the health 
industry. At one point, by the way, the company he built pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and paid 
$1.7 billion in fines related to Medicare fraud. Anyway, Mr. Scott got elected as a fierce opponent of 
Obamacare, and Florida participated in the suit asking the Supreme Court to declare the whole plan 
unconstitutional. Nonetheless, Mr. Scott recently shocked Tea Party activists by announcing his 
support for the Medicaid expansion. But his support came with a condition: he was willing to cover 
more of the uninsured only after receiving a waiver that would let him run Medicaid through private 
insurance companies. This is not about free markets. This is all about spending taxpayer money, and 
the question is whether that money should be spent directly to help people or run through a set of 
private middlemen. And despite some feeble claims to the contrary, privatizing Medicaid will end up 
requiring more, not less, government spending, because there's overwhelming evidence that Medicaid 
is much cheaper than private insurance. Partly this reflects lower administrative costs, because 
Medicaid neither advertises nor spends money trying to avoid covering people. But a lot of it reflects 
the government's bargaining power, its ability to prevent price gouging by hospitals, drug companies 
and other parts of the medical-industrial complex. 
EFTA00652586

For there is a lot of price-gouging in health care — a fact long known to health care economists but 
documented especially graphically in a recent article in Time magazine. As Steven Brill, the article's 
author, points out, individuals seeking health care can face incredible costs, and even large private 
insurance companies have limited ability to control profiteering by providers. Medicare does much 
better, and although Mr. Brill doesn't point this out, Medicaid — which has greater ability to say no —
seems to do better still. You might ask why, in that case, much of Obamacare will run through private 
insurers. The answer is, raw political power. Letting the medical-industrial complex continue to get 
away with a lot of overcharging was, in effect, a price President Obama had to pay to get health reform 
passed. And since the reward was that tens of millions more Americans would gain insurance, it was a 
price worth paying. 
But why would you insist on privatizing a health program that is already public, and that does a much 
better job than the private sector of controlling costs? The answer is pretty obvious: the flip side of 
higher taxpayer costs is higher medical-industry profits. So ignore all the talk about too much 
government spending and too much aid to moochers who don't deserve it. As long as the spending 
ends up lining the right pockets, and the undeserving beneficiaries of public largess are politically 
connected corporations, conservatives with actual power seem to like Big Government just fine. 
One of the great traditions of the past 15o years is American thirst for innovation and its tradition of 
exploring the limits of basic science. From Thomas Edison's famous workshop to Bell Labs to Silicon 
Valley, every American could be proud of our country's many scientific accomplishments. But this 
tradition maybe coming to an end, with budget cuts that are challenging the tenants of basic science —
science for science sake and corporate downsizing and the quest that every penny produce sizable 
results, has limited many companies from pursuing basic science. Today basic science is only pursued 
in universities and at a few think tanks. Except even here both public and private funding is becoming 
scarcer and scarcer. To which Dennis Overbye wrote this week in the New York Times - Particle 
Physicists in U.S. Worry About Being Left Behind - "Are the glory days of American 
physics over?" 
On a Sunday morning early in January, about two dozen prominent physicists gathered behind closed 
doors at the California Institute of Technology to ponder the state of their craft. American physicists 
were not exactly sitting on the sidelines last July when CERN announced the probable discovery of the 
long-sought Higgs boson, the key to understanding the origin of mass and life in the universe. The 
United States contributed $531 million to building and equipping the Large Hadron Collider, the 
multi-billion-dollar European machine with which the discovery was made. About 1,200 Americans 
work at CERN, including Joe Incandela from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led one 
of the two teams making the July announcement. But as science goes forward, American particle 
physicists are wondering what role, if any, they will play in the future in high-energy physics — the 
search for the fundamental particles and forces of nature — a field they once dominated. "There is 
enormous angst in the field," said Michael S. Turner, a physicist and cosmologist at the University of 
Chicago, who attended the Caltech meeting. 
EFTA00652587

After canceling the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the world's most powerful 
physics machine, in 1993, and shutting down Fermilab's Tevatron in 2011, the United States no longer 
owns the tool of choice in physics, a particle collider. Fermilab's biggest project going forward is a plan 
to shoot a beam of neutrinos, ghostlike particles, 800 miles through the earth to a detector at the old 
Homestake gold mine in Lead, M., to investigate their shape-shifting properties. The results could 
bear on one of the deep-seated and intractable problems in cosmology, namely why the universe is 
made of matter and not antimatter, but there is not enough money in the project's budget to put the 
detector below ground, at the bottom of the mine, where it would be sheltered from cosmic rays and 
able to observe neutrinos from distant supernova explosions, instead of on the surface. Americans 
who want to taste the thrills of the frontiers of high-energy physics have to cast their eyes east to 
CERN's collider, which is set to dominate the field for the next 20 years. Or they might look west, to 
Japan, which is budgeting about $120 billion in stimulus money to help recover from the disaster at 
the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and wants to use some of 
it to host the next big machine, the International Linear Collider, which would be 20 miles long and 
could manufacture Higgs bosons for precision study. 
In February, in a ceremony at a physics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the team that had 
been designing the collider for the last decade handed over the plans to a new consortium, the Linear 
Collider Collaboration, directed by Lyn Evans, who built the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Dr. 
Evans said the next big highlight of his career would be seeing construction start in the next couple of 
years in Japan. How desperately does the United States want to participate in these projects, from 
which the next great advances in our understanding of the universe could come? "Our issue is that 
Europe and Asia are contemplating or have made $10 billion investments in particle physics," 
explained Jim Siegrist, associate director for high-energy physics at the Department of Energy, who 
says that kind of money is not going to be forthcoming in the United States. "How we compete is a 
problem for us." 
Physicists are hoping to have some answers by this summer when they convene in Minneapolis for 
Snowmass, a planning conference named after the Colorado resort where it used to be held until the 
place got too expensive. In the meantime there are only questions, like what is the country's future 
relationship with CERN? The United States is presently an observer at CERN, but that arrangement 
expires in 2017. Joining as a full member would cost somewhere around $250 million a year and is out 
of the question. "Neither the agencies nor Congress is interested," Dr. Siegrist said. Nor, he thought, 
was CERN itself interested in having the United States Government Accountability Office and others 
"crawling down their shorts." For only about $25 million, however, the United States could become an 
associate member, an outcome favored by CERN's director general,Rolf-Dieter Heuer. "To my mind, 
that would be a breakthrough," Dr. Heuer said in an interview recently, but he acknowledged that it 
would be fraught with political and budgetary difficulties on the American side. For now, Dr. Siegrist 
said, American officials and CERN would talk about how the United States could help with a major 
upgrade in the collider planned for 2022. That will require new superconducting magnets made of 
niobium-tin wire. "CERN would like to take advantage of our technology there," Dr. Siegrist said. 
Likewise with the coming linear collider. Dr. Siegrist said Japanese officials and a Japanese delegation 
would be visiting the United States this spring to talk about schemes for cooperation. Dr. Siegrist said 
the American investment in the CERN collider had set a precedent for helping to support particle 
accelerators overseas. And it showed that the United States could be a reliable partner in such 
EFTA00652588

projects. In return, he said, Fermilab might get foreign aid for the neutrino experiment, enough to put 
the detector underground, or for a proposed facility to produce intense proton beams, called Project X. 
How such efforts will fare in this age of sequestration and federal cutbacks is unknown, he admitted, 
but particle physics has produced important spin-offs into medicine, including imaging devices and 
beams to treat cancer, and in materials science. 
But with no clear vision and goal other than "what if — or a "let's try this"attitude — and that 
there might be nothing else to discover or understood with today's technology — this kind of 
discovery science is clearly the business of government. We need politicians who understand the 
potential benefits thus support basic science, which is the quest to discover the unknown instead of 
cynics and bean-counters who have the curiosity of a hibernating slug and no sense of adventure. 
Would Americans have landed on the Moon in 1969 if JFK had not challenge the scientific community 
and the country at large? I often disagree with Newt Gingrich, but applauded him when during a 
January 2012 Republican Primary Debate he tried to defend US space exploration, suggesting that 
America should embark on setting up a colony on the Moon.... only to have to abandon this vision, 
when he was slammed by the rest of his Republican opponents Common everyday products started 
out as NASA inventions, including Invisible braces, Scratch-resistant Lenses, Memory Foam, Shoe 
Insoles, Long-distant Telecommunications, Adjustable Smoke Detector, Cordless Tools, Water Filters 
and everyone's favorite Tang. Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." So here 
are some of the accidental inventions; Penicillin, vulcanized rubber, the Pacemaker, plastic, Teflon, 
Saccharin and Coke. Basic science allows for creation beyond what is known 
And physics is one of 
its cornerstones... 
At a time when we are cutting nutritional programs in schools, pre-school programs for the poor, 
benefits for returning servicemen and women, support initiatives for the elderly and puffing off 
repairing the country's crumbling infrastructure, we still have huge military bases in Germany, Japan, 
Korea and elsewhere as a line for protection for our allies. Since 1947, when President Harry S. 
Truman set forth a policy to stop further Soviet expansion and "support free peoples"who were 
"resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,"America has acted as the world's 
policeman. 
From the Truman Doctrine emerged a strategy comprising multiple alliances: the Rio Pact of 1947 
(Latin America), the NATO Treaty of 1949 (Canada and Northern and Western Europe), the Anzus 
Treaty of 1951 (Australia and New Zealand) and the Seato Treaty of 1954 (Southeast Asia). Seato ended 
in 1977, but the other treaties remain in force, as do collective-defense agreements with Japan, South 
Korea and the Philippines. Meanwhile, we invented the practice of foreign aid, beginning with the 
Marshall Plan. 
EFTA00652589

But conditions have changed radically since the cold war. When the United States established major 
bases in West Germany and Japan, they were considered dangerous renegades that needed to be 
watched. Their reconstructed governments also desired protection, particularly from the Soviet Union 
and China. NATO's first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, famously said the alliance existed "to keep 
the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." 
Today, our largest permanent bases are still in Germany and Japan, which are perfectly capable of 
defending themselves and should be trusted to help their neighbors. It's time they foot more of the bill 
or operate their own bases. China's authoritarian capitalism hasn't translated into territorial 
aggression, while Russia no longer commands central and eastern Europe. That the military brass still 
talk of maintaining the capacity to fight a two-front war — presumably on land in Europe, and at sea in 
the Pacific — speaks to the irrational endurance of the Truman Doctrine. 
Our wars in the Middle East since 2001 doubled down on that costly, outdated doctrine. The domino 
theory behind the Vietnam War revived under a new formulation: but for the American umpire, the 
bad guys (Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea) will win. And despite his supporters' expectations, President 
Obama has followed a Middle East policy nearly identical to his predecessor's. He took us out of Iraq, 
only to deepen our commitment to Afghanistan, from which we just now pulling out. He rejected the 
most odious counterterrorism techniques of George W. Bush's administration, but otherwise did not 
change basic policies. Mr. Obama's gestures toward multilateralism were not matched by a 
commensurate commitment from many of our allies. 
Realists contend that if we quit defending access to the world's natural resources — read, oil — nobody 
else would. Really? It's not likely that the Europeans, who depend on energy imports far more than 
the nation that owns Texas and Alaska would throw up their hands and bury their heads in the sand. 
It's patronizing and naive to think that America is the only truly "necessary" country. Good leaders 
develop new leaders. The Libyan crisis showed that our allies can do a lot. The United States can and 
should pressure Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs. It must help to reform and 
strengthen multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the 
World Bank. It must champion the right of small nations, including Israel, to "freedom from fear." 
But there are many ways of achieving these goals, and they don't all involve more borrowing and 
spending. And acting as the World's Police Force is not the only way to do it. 
As Elizabeth Hoffman wrote this week in the New York Times - Come Home, America — With 
everyone focused on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we should ask, why do we have military 
forces/bases in Germany, Korea and Japan? And why during the sequester — and $85 billion this 
year in across-the-board budget cuts, about half of which will come from the Pentagon — gives 
Americans an opportunity to discuss a question we've put off too long: Why we are still fighting World 
War II? 
America since 1945 has paid a price in blood, treasure and reputation. Umpires may be necessary, but 
they are rarely popular and by definition can't win. Perhaps the other players will step up only if we 
threaten to leave the field. Sharing the burden of security with our allies is more than a fiscal 
necessity. It's the sine qua non of a return to global normalcy. And if North Korea Kim Jong-un's 
EFTA00652590

nukes are such a danger, why don't we let South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China and Vietnam deal with 
the problem, instead of our normal knee-jerk reaction that he is only minutes away from dropping a 
bomb over Manhattan, when all he really wants to do is hang out with Dennis Rodman with the hope 
that JayZ and Bayonne drop by for a visit someday soon... 
If you ask most white Americans, they will tell you that America is a post racial pluralistic society, 
evidenced by the fact that there is a Black President and JayZ, P Ditty, Kobe Bryant and Oprah Winfrey 
are rich. But anyone with a black or brown skin can tell you that this isn't true. This week in an op-ed 
in the New York Times - The Good, Racist People — Ta-Nehisi Coates starts the piece, "Last 
month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. 
Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog 
ranging from "The Great Debaters" to "The Crying Game" to "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai." 
By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can't get his turn as Idi Amin out of 
their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for 
autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked 
him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, El been 
robbed." 
Coates: Since the Whitaker affair, I've read and listened to interviews with the owner of the 
establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a "sincere 
mistake" made by a "decent man" who was "just doing his job."I believe him. And yet for weeks now I 
have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin 
Gaye's "Distant Lover" and Al Green's "For the Good Times." In modern America we believe racism to 
be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and 
ores. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., 
uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: "As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel 
that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed 
community." 
A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on "Seinfeld") once 
yelled at a black heckler from the stage: "He's a ni
 He's a nigger! He's a nigger!" Confronted 
about this, Richards apologized and then said, 
not a racist,"and called the claim "insane." The 
idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a 
democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting 
ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker's assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes 
Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of 
redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap 
between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years. 
EFTA00652591

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the 
victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, 
who observe the norms of the "middle class,"will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-
enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the 
American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such. 
How else can you explain why a majority of white Americans believe that the shooting of an unarmed 
African American teenager walking home with a bag of snacks from a local convenience store by a 
twenty-eight year old Caucasian Hispanic man , who stalked him for several blocks believing him as 
suspicious because he was wearing a hoody (it was rainy) and confronted this teenager which escalated 
into a street fight and killing him — that this was/is self defense. I am trying to imagine that if the 
colors were reversed, even if using police jargon, "this was a righteous shooting," these same 
people wouldn't be saying that the shooter should taken the beat-down that people like me would say 
he deserved, as he initiated the events that lead to the killing of an unharmed seventeen year old. 
Stereotypes can get you killed 
As Chris Matthews said this week — "I think about these hate groups. What did Obama do to earn 
their hatred? Is he some kind of dangerous criminal? Not exactly, Obama came up as a community 
organizers, a soft-cell guy. He's done just about everything right in his life. didn't have a father 
around, but did a great job in school himself. Got into Columbia, later, Harvard law. He didn't 
become a money grubber. He decided to work helping people in his own community, a peaceful kind 
of guy. Is he some bounder who doesn't take responsibility for his manhood? I say just the opposite. 
So what is it that the haters fear about this guy? What do they hate? That he's black? Is that it? He 
didn't push gun issues until Newtown. Is it the immigration issue? He's the same as the gang of 8 
right there in the middle. what is it they hate in this guy? They should be applaurnhim as a role 
model. A hundred years from now, white, black and brown, this is just the guy 
want standing 
out there as our role model." 
I understand that every white person isn't a racist but I believe that the racist jingoistic culture that 
permeates the culture in America today that allows people to feel justified to ask the President for his 
long-form birth certificate (which I couldn't produce today for myself), and in a PPP poll after the 2012 
election, 49% of Republicans believe that the defunct group ACORN is the reason that President 
Obama won re-election -- ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform) closed its 
offices and ceased operations on November 2, 2010. So why do so many Republicans believe this in 
their hearts and heads. The crazies are still on the rise. 
A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds that the number of anti-government patriot groups 
has exploded over the last four years. According to the study, these groups typically believe that the 
federal government is conspiring to take Americans' guns away from them and destroy their liberties 
as it paves the way for a global one-world government.-- groups like the Constitution Party, We Are 
Change, Tyranny Response Team, and Americans For a Free Republic. And these anti-government 
patriot groups have skyrocketed in number during President Obama ' s time in office. There were only 
149 groups back in 2008. In 2012, there are more than 1,300. And that's an increase of over 800 
percent. 
Coates: I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news 
conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor 
EFTA00652592

arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn 
or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and 'find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth 
considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: "Don't leave home. They don't want you 
around." It is messaging propagated by moral people. The other day I walked past this particular 
deli. I believe its owners to be good people. If& ashamed at withholding business for something far 
beyond the merchant's reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a 
little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. "What if they did that to 
your son?" she asked. And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the 
good people I could take. 
In The Huffington Post this week — Arianna Huffington wrote - 10 Years Later: Looking 
Back on the Iraq War So We Can Clearly Look Forward. Starting out the article with Milan 
Kundera's - "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," that 
on March 20th it will be the loth anniversary of one of the biggest disasters in the history of the United 
States. That was the day George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and a team of others -- along with much of 
Washington and a very complicit mainstream media -- took the nation to war against Iraq. The 
devastating consequences of that war will continue for decades, but a full accounting has still yet to 
happen. And that in itself has consequences. Allowing the toxic mixture of lies, deception and 
rationalizations that led to that war to go unchallenged makes it more likely that we will make similar 
tragic mistakes in the future. 
With this, she asked that we all try to understand what happened to so that it can be avoid in the 
future. Who got it right and who got it wrong? What was the role of the media? What are the ongoing 
consequences? Especially when those who are most responsible for it still have loud voices in our 
foreign policy. "For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to 
disaster decently shrank from the public stage," writes James Fallows. "Rusk, Rostow, 
Westmoreland were not declaiming on what the U.S. should and should not do." And yet, after what 
Fallows calls "the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II," 
that accounting has not happened. 
After Iraq, there has been a weird amnesty and amnesia about people's misjudgment on the most 
consequential decision of our times.... Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Rice, McCain, Abrams, 
and others including the pro-war press claque are still offering their judgments unfazed. One of my 
father's saying is, "history is always re-written by the winners." And somehow with most 
people acknowledging their glaring blunders and falsehoods, these warmongers feel free to continue 
their lies and deceptions that led to this calamity. Here are just a few of the classics from Huffing-ton's 
article: 
George Tenet, who, according to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, was asked by President Bush, 
"George, how confident are you?" Tenet's answer? "Don't worry, it's a slam-dunk." And what were the 
personal consequences of that colossal misjudgment? He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, as were 
then-General Tommy Franks and former Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer. "These 
EFTA00652593

three men symbolize the nobility of public service, the good character of our country, and the good 
influence of America on the world," said President Bush. So much for accountability. 
Then, of course, there was Vice President Cheney: "We do know, with absolute certainty, that 
(Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to 
enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." -- "No. I think we may well have some kind of presence 
there over a period of time. But I think the level of activity that we see today, from a military 
standpoint, I think will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." 
Or this one, from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, uttered in the midst of the rioting and 
looting that broke out in the very predictable vacuum created when we toppled a central government 
with not much of a plan to replace it: "Stuff happens... and it's untidy and freedom's untidy, and free 
people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their 
lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here." Or how about then-National 
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's warning that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom 
cloud." Or, of course, when President Bush declared the end of "major combat" in Iraq on May 1, 
2003, while standing in front of a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." Over 90 percent of 
coalition deaths occurred after that victory lap. 
How about then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's warning that "we don't want the 
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Or, of course, when President Bush declared the end of "major 
combat" in Iraq on May 1, 2003, while standing in front of a banner that read 'Mission 
Accomplished." Over 90 percent of coalition deaths occurred after that victory lap. Then there was the 
moment when then-General Eric Shinseki told Congress that an occupation of a country as large as 
Iraq would require a force of "several hundred thousand soldiers." Two days later, then-Deputy 
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz indirectly called Shinseki's analysis "outlandish" to a House 
committee. He continued: I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in 
assisting Iraq's reconstruction ... We can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators ... 
[but] I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep 
requirements down ... It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-
Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's 
security forces and his army. Hard to imagine. 
And the big ugly is how huge a role that the media played in allowing -- indeed, enabling — this 
catastrophe. What should have been a brake on a process fueled by lies was instead an accelerator. But 
here, too, there were those who got it right. As HuffPost's Max Follmer put it in 2008: In the 
months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington 
M
.
 
bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration's allegations of links 
between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The team of 
Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, 
produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to 
sell the war to the American people. There was also the AP's Charles Hanley, who actually looked into 
the Iraqi sites that the Bush administration had claimed had failed inspections. "In almost two months 
of surprise visits across Iraq," he wrote, 
arms monitors have inspected 13 sites identified by 
U.S. and British intelligence agencies as major facilities of concern,' and reported no signs of revived 
weapons building, an Associated Press analysis shows." 
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And the consequences of this disastrous war are still very much with us. In the seemingly endless 
manufactured crisis over the 'fiscal cliff' and the sequester, it's amazing how much airtime and print 
space have been devoted to the deficit with the word "Iraq" barely getting a mention. Clearly a triumph 
of forgetting. "It's really the decision of how to pay for it that has had such a negative effect on the 
U.S. economy," said Linda Bilmes, lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-
author, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, of The Three Trillion Dollar 
War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. "Because unlike any previous war in U.S. history, this 
was paid for entirely by debt at the same time that we cut taxes." 
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, by 2019, the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts 
will account for nearly half of our $17 trillion projected debt. And even less discussed than the ongoing 
costs of the war are the opportunity costs -- the many things we might have spent that money on 
instead. In 2010, Bilmes and Stiglitz wrote that not only was their $3 trillion estimate of the war's cost 
too low, but so was their estimation of the opportunity costs: The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the 
severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased 
indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have 
had ... The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits 
larger than they would have been absent the war. In addition to the ongoing debt, there's the issue of 
the cost of the care for the millions of Iraq war veterans. "We will have a vast overhang in domestic 
costs for caring for the wounded and covering retirement expenditure of the war fighters," said 
policy expert Loren Thompson in 2011. "The U.S. will continue to incur major costs for decades to 
come." 
Will those who argued vehemently to get us into the war advocate as single-mindedly on behalf of 
those who fought and died and got wounded in that war? I think we already know the answer to that 
one. 
More proof of our losing struggle against forgetting could be seen just a few weeks ago, in the battle 
over Chuck Hagel's confirmation to be Secretary of Defense. Not only was opposition to his 
nomination led by those who were most wrong on the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in recent 
memory, the opposition was, to a large extent, actually based on the fact that Hagel had been right 
about Iraq. Having been in favor of the war initially, Hagel quickly saw it for what it was, and 
committed the grave error of speaking the truth. Like the fact that: "Iraq is not going to turn out the 
way that we were promised it was." And that: The Iraq War was "ill-conceived" and "poorly 
prosecuted." And: "When I think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it -- no planning, no 
preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we were going to get out, went 
in without enough men, no exit strategy, those kind of things -- I'll speak out." 
And yet, here we are, lo years later, when being right about a war actually costs a nominee for 
Secretary of Defense confirmation votes. And what of Iraq today? As it turns out, it's one of the 
closest allies of Iran. Just last week, it was reported that Iraqi Premier Noun al-Maliki has turned 
down the U.S. demand for sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program. Iraq also just approved the 
building of a pipeline for natural gas to flow across Iraq to connect Iran and Syria, which, as the AP put 
it, is "likely to strengthen Tehran's influence over its neighbors." Meanwhile, 136 Iraqis were killed in 
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