EFTA00652576.pdf

From: Gregory Brown < To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 03/10/2013 Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:29:58 +0000 Attachments: We Are Living_in the_World Dick_Cheney_Made Howard_Fineman Huff_Post_03_04_ 2013.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; 21:713.pe 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 EFTA00652576 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 it. Chavez led the MBR-200 in an 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. EFTA00652577 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 EFTA00652578 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 offraud" 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 difficultfor 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 thefact 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 EFTA00652579 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 EFTA00652580 "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 EFTA00652581 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 EFTA00652582 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. EFTA00652583 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 EFTA00652584 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. EFTA00652585 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 infavor of that cynical view, look at the current state ofplay 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 ofAmerican 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 thefield," 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 problemfor 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,