A Gentleman’s view.

By JAKE SHERMAN | 8/31/11 7:50 AM EDT

A top lawmaker in the Congressional Black Caucus says tea partiers on Capitol Hill would like to see African-Americans hanging from trees and accuses the movement of wishing for a return to the Jim Crow era.

Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana who serves as the CBC’s chief vote counter, said at a CBC event in Miami that some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree.”

Carson also said the tea party is stopping change in Congress, likening it to “the effort that we’re seeing of Jim Crow.”

The explosive comments, caught on tape, were uploaded on the Internet Tuesday, and Carson’s office stood by the remarks. Jason Tomcsi, Carson’s spokesman, said the comment was “in response to frustration voiced by many in Miami and in his home district in Indianapolis regarding Congress’s inability to bolster the economy.” Tomcsi, in an email, wrote that “the congressman used strong language because the Tea Party agenda jeopardizes our most vulnerable and leaves them without the ability to improve their economic standing.

“The Tea Party is protecting its millionaire and oil company friends while gutting critical services that they know protect the livelihood of African-Americans, as well as Latinos and other disadvantaged minorities,” Tomcsi wrote. “We are talking about child nutrition, job creation, job training, housing assistance, and Head Start, and that is just the beginning. A child without basic nutrition, secure housing, and quality education has no real chance at a meaningful and productive life.”

Carson is hardly the first lawmaker to use heated rhetoric. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) yelled “you lie” as President Barack Obama was addressing Congress. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) yelled “baby killer” at former Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) as abortion was being discussed during the health care debate.

Carson, who represents Indianapolis, is the second Muslim to ever serve in Congress. He has been in office since 2008 and took the seat that was held by his late grandmother — Democratic Rep. Julia Carson.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62396.html#ixzz1WcK0IaiY

OP-ED COLUMNIST Darth Vader Vents By MAUREEN DOWD

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea? Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Scorched earth runs in the family. Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues. Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune. Cheney may no longer have a pulse, but his blood quickens at the thought of other countries he could have attacked. He salivates in his book about how Syria and Iran could have been punished.

Cheney says that in 2007, he told President Bush, who had already been pulled into diplomacy by Condi Rice: “I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert.” At a session with most of the National Security Council, he made his case for a strike on the reactor. It would enhance America’s tarnished credibility in the Arab world, he argued, (not bothering to mention who tarnished it), and demonstrate the country’s “seriousness.” “After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

By that time, W. had belatedly realized that Cheney was a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against “the diplomatic path” and “multilateral action” had pretty much ruined his presidency. There were few times before the bitter end that W. was willing to stand up to Vice. But the president did make a bold stand on not letting his little dog be gobbled up by Cheney’s big dog. When Vice’s hundred-pound yellow Lab, Dave, went after W.’s beloved Scottish terrier, Barney, at Camp David’s Laurel Lodge, that was a bridge too far. When Cheney and Dave got back to their cabin, there was a knock at the door. “It was the camp commander,” Cheney writes. “ ‘Mr. Vice President,’ he said, ‘your dog has been banned from Laurel.’ ” But on all the nefarious things that damaged America, Cheney got his way for far too long.

Vice gleefully predicted that his memoir would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” But his book is a bore. He doesn’t even mention how in high school he used to hold the water buckets to douse the fiery batons of his girlfriend Lynne, champion twirler. At least Rummy’s memoir showed some temperament. And George Tenet’s was the primal scream of a bootlicker caught out. Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies. He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney. It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions.

Mostly, Cheney grumbles about having his power checked. It’s bad enough when the president does it, much less Congress and the courts. A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force. Cheney shows contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction. He’s churlish about President Obama, who took the hunt for Osama bin Laden off the back burner and actually did what W. promised to do with his little bullhorn — catch the real villain of 9/11.

“Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities,” Cheney writes. “I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.” Tacky. Finishing the book with an account of the 2010 operation to put in a battery-operated pump that helps his heart push blood through his body, he recounts the prolonged, vivid dream about a beautiful place in Italy he had during the weeks he was unconscious.

“It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there,” he writes. “I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers.”
Caesar and his cappuccino.

Video: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is revealed to members of the press before opening to the public. The design is derived from part of King’s famous “I have a dream” speech when he said, “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The memorial sits by the tidal basin between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.

Aug. 28 is the anniversary of the 1963 march and rally at which King delivered the indelible “I Have a Dream” speech. That event — one of the watershed moments of 20th-century America — was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Meaningful employment was a front-and-center demand.
The idea and impetus for the march came from A. Philip Randolph, one of the most important labor leaders in the nation’s history. Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union that demanded and won decent pay and better working conditions for thousands of railroad employees, most of them African American. By 1963, Randolph had become a vice president of the AFL-CIO labor federation.
King and his fellow civil rights leaders understood the importance of good jobs that paid a living wage — and the social and economic mobility such jobs provide — in forging a nation that honors its promise of fairness and equality. If he and Randolph were alive today, given the devastating blows that poor and working-class Americans have suffered, I’m confident they’d be planning a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom II.”
As an African American old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation in the South, I’m amazed at the progress toward racial justice. We’re not all the way there, but we’re light-years from where we started. King was a passionate advocate for economic justice, speaking not just for African Americans but for all Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. On this score, we haven’t just failed to make sufficient progress. We’ve stopped trying.
With unemployment above 9 percent, what task absorbs our elected leaders? Certainly not an urgent search for ways to put people back to work. Instead, we’re obsessed with deficit-reduction measures that, if applied in the short term, would destroy jobs rather than create them.
Look beyond the recession. Between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War, the typical income for an American household roughly doubled (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Since then, the Economist magazine noted last year, income for a typical household rose by just 22 percent — and even this modest increase was due to the fact that women entered the workforce in large numbers. The Pew Research Center found that if you look just at men in their 30s, they earned 12 percent less in 2004 (again, inflation-adjusted) than their fathers did at a similar age.
As everyone knows by now, the top 1 percent of earners capture an increasing share of national income. The rich, without a doubt, are getting richer. The middle class and the working class are seeing their incomes stagnate or fall. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is an outrage. Food, clothing, housing and transportation on $7.25 an hour? There aren’t enough hours in the week.
It’s no coincidence that this massive transfer of wealth — basically, from workers to investors — took place at a time when union membership was in steep decline. In 1983, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. In 2010, only 11.9 percent were union members.
The result? In 2010, the median weekly pay of a male worker over 25 who belonged to a union was $982, according to the BLS. The comparable figure for a worker not represented by a union was $846.
King was assassinated in Memphis, where he was supporting the demands of sanitation workers for more pay, better working conditions and the right to unionize. The civil rights leader was increasingly focused on the economic dimension of the freedom struggle and was planning a massive Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his death. The new King memorial is inspirational. When I visited Wednesday, the crowd of visitors was large, diverse and generally awe-struck at the memorial’s simplicity and power. Once again, the great man stands in Washington to challenge our morality, our faith and our conscience.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

New CNN Poll: Perry sits atop GOP field
By: CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser
Washington (CNN) – A new national survey is further proof that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entrance earlier this month into the race for the White House has dramatically altered the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.
According to a CNN/ORC International Poll of Republicans and independent voters who lean towards the GOP, Perry now sits atop the list of Republican presidential candidates, with strong support from most demographic groups.
Full results (pdf)

The survey, released Monday, indicates that 27 percent of Republicans nationwide support Perry for their party’s nomination, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who’s making his second bid for the White House, at 14 percent. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin follows at ten percent, with Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at nine percent, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who’s making his third bid for the presidency, at six percent. Every one else listed on the questionnaire registered in the low single digits.

The survey follows a Gallup poll out last week which also placed Perry at the top of the GOP field. Other polling released in the past week also confirms the findings of the CNN and Gallup surveys.
“Perry’s support is higher among Republican men, at 32 percent, than Republican women, at 23 percent, but he has more support among either group than any other candidate,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
According to the survey, Perry supporters tend to be older and have higher incomes, but the longtime Texas governor also tops the list, albeit by smaller margins, among lower-income Republicans and those under 50 years old.

“Perry’s biggest support comes from Republicans who say they are supporters of the tea party movement – he wins 37 percent of their vote – but he also edges Romney by a couple of points among Republicans who don’t call themselves tea party supporters,” adds Holland.
While both Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and Giuliani, who ran for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, have both frequently flirted with bids for the White House, neither has taken concrete steps to launch a campaign.

Take Palin and Giuliani out of the mix and listing only the announced candidates, and the poll indicates Perry with 32 percent support, followed by Romney at 18 percent, Bachmann at 12 percent, Gingrich at seven percent, Paul at six percent, and everyone else in the low single digits.
While Perry has surged in the polls following his late entry into the race, the question remains whether he can maintain his position in future surveys. The last two candidates who made high profile late entries into the race for the White House did not have staying power.
“In 2003, Wesley Clark was a late entrant in the Democratic field and almost immediately jumped to the top of the pack. Fred Thompson did the same thing four years later on the GOP side and quickly was in a virtual tie for first place. But by November, both men had dropped in the polls and neither did very well when the voting started,” says Holland. “Bill Clinton was a late entry in 1991 – he filed his papers with the Federal Election Commission in August – but the Democratic field that year was much less crowded than the GOP field today.”

Much could change in the coming weeks, as the pace of the race for the White House picks up with a vengeance over the next two months, with five GOP presidential debates (including two CNN debates) and six major events that will also attract many of the candidates.
Meanwhile, the survey indicates that number of Democrats and independents who lean towards the Democratic party who would like the party to nominate someone else besides President Barack Obama has topped out after months of steady growth.  Seventy-two percent of Democrats want to see Obama re-nominated, with 27 percent wanting a different candidate. That’s virtually unchanged since early August, although it is higher than in June.

The CNN/ORC International Poll was conducted August 24-25, with 467 Republicans and independents who lean Republican, and 463 Democrats and independents who lean Democratic, questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

White Privilege, Race and the Church of Denialism

Republican guru Karl Rove recently appeared on Fox News to dispute the idea that America is a “Christian nation.” And he was right to do so, but not because our country lacks an overarching canon. We certainly do have a national religion—it’s just not Christianity. It’s Denialism.

Some branches of this religion deny the science documenting humans’ role in climate change. Others deny tax cuts’ connection to deficits and deregulation’s role in the recession. But regardless of the issue, Denialists all share a basic hostility to facts.

As this know-nothing theology expands, none of its denominations claims a bigger membership than the one obsessed with race. Today, many reject the fact that black people typically face bigger obstacles to economic and political success than whites. Instead, they insist that whites are oppressed.

If you’ve followed politics, you’re familiar with this catechism. In the 1980s, lawmakers often implied that welfare programs persecuted whites. In the 1990s, the same lawmakers demonized affirmative-action initiatives that tried to counter college admission preferences for white “legacy” families. These days, demagogues cite Barack Obama’s political ascendance as supposed proof that black people are unfairly privileged.

The late Democrat Geraldine Ferraro first floated this specific fable in 2008, when she said that Obama was “very lucky” to be black and that “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in (his) position.” Obama rightly noted that “anybody who knows the history of this country … would not take too seriously the notion that (being black) has been a huge advantage.”

But the meme nonetheless persists. In May, Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., said Obama’s election “comes back to who he was: he was black.” Now, it’s Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who last week declared that “as an African-American male,” Obama received a “tremendous advantage from a lot of (government) programs.”

Though Coburn’s dog-whistle racism is (sadly) mundane, his statement is news because of its timing.

In the same week the Oklahoman insinuated that government gives African-Americans a “tremendous advantage,” The New York Times reported on data showing black scientists are “markedly less likely” to win government grants than white scientists. A few weeks earlier, the Pew Research Center had reported that “the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households.”

These representative snapshots remind us that despite Denialist rhetoric, institutional racism and white privilege dominate American society.

This truth is everywhere. You can see it in black unemployment rates, which are twice as high as white unemployment rates—a disparity that persists even when controlling for education levels. You can see it in a 2004 MIT study showing that job-seekers with “white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews” than job seekers with comparable resumes and “African-American-sounding names.” And you can see it in a news media that looks like an all-white country club and a U.S. Senate that includes no black legislators.

Denialists imply that this is all negated by Obama’s success. But while his rise to the Oval Office certainly was an achievement, Obama was correct when, upon becoming Harvard Law Review’s first black president in 1990, he said, “It’s crucial that people don’t see my election as somehow a symbol of progress in the broader sense, that we don’t sort of point to a Barack Obama any more than you point to a Bill Cosby or a Michael Jordan and say, ‘Well, things are hunky-dory.’ ”

Of course, things aren’t “hunky-dory” for most people in this recession—but they are particularly awful for black Americans. Unfortunately, if you refuse to acknowledge that truth, there’s a whole Church of Denialism ready to embrace you.

In memoir, Cheney defends decisions, Bush as president

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney provides an unapologetic defense of the George W. Bush administration in his memoir to be released next week, including explanations of his own decisions on contested national security and domestic policies that often come at the expense of former Cabinet members and colleagues.

Those include the justification to invade Iraq in 2003, a judgment he blames on CIA failures, and the lack of support for his urging that the United States strike a Syrian nuclear reactor site in 2007. Israel ended up doing so despite recommendations from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that it “choose the path of diplomacy,” which Cheney correctly predicted the Israelis would reject.
Although he praises Bush for his leadership and many of his decisions, Cheney said he warned him that nominating White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court would be “a tough sell.” Bush eventually withdrew the nomination amid questions about her qualifications to serve on the high court.
“The president later said he was sorry he had put his friend through such a meat grinder,” Cheney writes in “In My Time,” a copy of which The Washington Post obtained on Thursday.
Cheney’s “personal and political memoir,” as he describes it, confirms the central role he played in the eight tumultuous years of the previous administration. He notes that “from the transition onward, there were media stories that I was somehow in charge,” echoing accounts of his time in office that portray him as one of the nation’s most powerful vice presidents.
“They weren’t true,” Cheney quickly adds. “And stepping out too publicly would only have fed them.”
But at times he belies that statement with details that suggest Bush relied on his opinion. For example, Cheney writes that he received his daily intelligence briefing at 6:30 a.m., then attended the president’s briefing a few hours later.
“If I was traveling or at an undisclosed location, the president would often be briefed in the White House Situation Room, so I could join by secure videoconference,” Cheney writes.
Cheney also recalls Bush, then the governor of Texas, bringing him a cup of coffee in his room at the governor’s mansion in Austin where in February 1999 he was meeting with the emerging campaign team. He calls it the “highest-ranking room service I’ve ever had.”
Later, Bush asked Cheney to lead his vice presidential search. Cheney writes that “it is harder to find a good vice presidential candidate than you might think,” adding that “everyone has negatives.”
Sen. Connie Mack (Fla.) told Cheney that he did not want to be considered, and Cheney discloses that Donald H. Rumsfeld, who would later become Bush’s defense secretary, was briefly on the list of possibilities. Finally, Bush turned to him.
“He said to me more than once, ‘Dick, you’re the solution to my problem,’ ” he writes.
Mindful of his weak heart, Cheney left a signed resignation letter with David Addington, his general counsel, to be given to Bush if he were ever incapacitated.

Addington “double-wrapped the letter in two manila U.S. government envelopes, took it home and put it in a dresser drawer” for easy access, Cheney writes.
He almost resigned another way. On three occasions leading up to the 2004 campaign, Cheney writes, he offered to “take myself off the Republican ticket.”

He knew he had become “a lightening rod for attacks from the administration’s critics,” he writes, and getting Bush reelected had become “critically important” to continuing the fight against terrorism. Bush brushed him off twice, Cheney writes, but on the third occasion, “he went away and thought about it” before saying several days later that “he wanted me to run with him again.”
The memoir unfolds largely chronologically, although it is dominated by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Cheney’s role in the construction of the intelligence and national security framework to manage the aftermath.
He recounts being flown along with his wife, Lynne, to Camp David shortly after the attacks, and a meeting there a few days later with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser.
“We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” he writes. “There would be no easy, quick victory followed by an enemy surrender. I thought it probable that this was a conflict in which our nation would be engaged for the rest of my lifetime.”
Cheney notes that he was “surprised by the intensity of the media interest” in the “undisclosed location” where he was sometimes reported to be, mentioning a “Saturday Night Live” skit that imagined him in a cave in Afghanistan.
But, he writes, the “undisclosed location” was the more mundane Vice President’s Residence, his home in Wyoming and, most often, Camp David.
Cheney sheds little new light on the development of some of the Bush administration’s more controversial national security policies, and echoes his previous criticism of President Obama’s effort to end harsh interrogation tactics and to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Cheney defends the use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects, practices some human rights groups have called torture, and the National Security Agency’s former eavesdropping program on communications from the United States.
“The Terrorist Surveillance Program is, in my opinion, one of the most important success stories in the history of American intelligence,” he writes. “If I had to do it all over again, I would, in a heartbeat.”
In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney portrays Bush as more rigorous about intelligence claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction than has been previously suggested.
On the evening of Dec. 22, 2002, with the White House decorated for Christmas, Bush led his national security team in a review of the CIA assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the administration’s chief argument for war.
Cheney describes Bush as turning to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, who delivers the now infamous appraisal: “It’s a slam-dunk, Mr. President. It’s a slam-dunk.”
“The president wanted a better presentation,” Cheney writes. “What he envisioned, he said, was a case against Saddam that was like a closing argument in a trial.”
In a lengthy discussion of the Valerie Plame case, Cheney is scathingly critical of the administration’s public apology for Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003 that Hussein has “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Many accounts of the episode have discounted the claim — including that of former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, whom the CIA sent to Africa in 2002 to investigate it, and whose marriage to Plame, a CIA official, was later reported in media accounts suggesting that she had arranged his trip.
Once her clandestine identity was revealed, Plame had to leave the CIA. Several administration officials later acknowledged discussing Plame with reporters, but only I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal investigators about it.
Cheney calls the public apology, issued by Rice, a “major mistake,” and says that she later “came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right.”
“On many occasions,” Cheney says, he told Bush that Libby deserved a pardon, invoking Bush’s father’s pardon of former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger after Weinberger was indicted in the Iran-contra scandal. As Bush was leaving office, Cheney says, “I was under the impression that he agreed with me.”
But at the last of their private lunches, he says, Bush told him he had changed his mind. “George Bush made courageous decisions as president,” Cheney says, “and to this day I wish that pardoning Scooter Libby had been one of them.”
Although he offers sympathy for the “difficult” task of intelligence agencies, Cheney lays the blame squarely on them for the administration’s claims, writing that “the intelligence that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD was wrong.”
He repeatedly criticizes Tenet, but says that Tenet’s decision to resign in June 2004, as the WMD story was unraveling, was “unfair to the president,” especially during the reelection campaign.
Cheney also describes his pre-war diplomacy, drawing on relationships he had formed over decades in Washington.
On Jan. 11, 2003, Cheney invited Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, to his West Wing office at Bush’s request. Bandar was mindful of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when his country backed U.S. forces but Hussein remained in power.
“Is Saddam going to survive this time?” Bandar asked, according to Cheney.
“ ‘Bandar,’ ” I said, “ ‘once we start this, Saddam is toast.’ ”
Although they served amiably together during the administration of George H.W. Bush and jointly managed the first Gulf War, the relationship between Cheney and Powell, as secretary of state, quickly disintegrated under George W. Bush. Powell has publicly faulted Cheney for much of what he thinks went wrong, and Cheney returns the favor.
Powell, Cheney writes, repeatedly took policy differences outside the government — to the media and allies in Congress — rather than voicing them on the inside.
When Bush began to consider Cabinet changes after he was reelected, Cheney thought that “getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.” After Bush accepted Powell’s requested resignation letter, Cheney writes, “I thought it was for the best.”
As he has in previous accounts, Cheney notes his unwavering support for Rumsfeld as defense secretary, saying he twice talked Bush out of replacing him until Bush finally decided, in November 2006, that Rumsfeld had to go.
As Bush’s suggestion, Cheney says, he was the one to call Rumsfeld with the news.
Cheney devotes two pages to post-war failures after the Iraq invasion.
As have other members of the administration, he notes that “we had anticipated a number of dangerous contingencies that failed to materialize,” including the presence of weapons of mass destruction and Hussein’s torching of the oil fields.
But, he writes, “it is fair to say that we underestimated the difficulty of rebuilding a traumatized and shattered society.”
U.S. officials sent to run the government “didn’t always get it right,” he acknowledges, “and we didn’t always get it right in Washington.”
By the summer of 2010, Cheney writes, he was “rapidly descending into end-stage heart failure.” After having emergency surgery to receive a battery-operated heart pump, he was unconscious for weeks.
“I had a prolonged dream,” he writes, “more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy.” In a country villa, he “walked stone paths to get coffee and newspapers,” he writes.
“I have some medical choices to make in the future,” Cheney, 70, notes without elaboration, “but I’m doing well for now. I’ve gotten used to the various contraptions that are always with me.”

By John Lewis, Published: August 26

Forty-eight years ago Sunday, when Martin Luther King Jr. was about to make his historic speech on the National Mall, I was huddled close to the statue of Abraham Lincoln, tapping on a portable typewriter, making last-minute changes to my own speech. As the newly elected chair of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, speaking at the March on Washington was one of my first important actions. Dr. King spoke tenth; I was sixth. Today, I am the last surviving speaker from the march.

When I think back on that day, and the hundreds of thousands of people who responded to the call to march on Washington, there is no question that many things have changed. Then, Martin Luther King Jr. was a controversial figure taking risks so that his voice might be heard. Today, the mere mention of his speech — and its powerful “I have a dream” refrain — evokes hope for the future, stirring memories of the past and mandates for change, but the context in which Dr. King delivered those words was quite different.

In April of 1963, just a few months before the march, he had written his now famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” advocating the moral imperative of non-violent protest by faith leaders.  In May, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham,  Eugene “Bull” Connor, had used police dogs and fire hoses on children engaged in peaceful protest in the city.  And in June, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was killed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan outside of Evers’s home near Jackson, Miss.
The March on Washington represented a coalition of labor leaders, civil rights organizations and faith groups united in their call for governments and members of civilized society to defend human dignity, especially at a time when that dignity was under siege.
We have come a long way since then. If Martin Luther King Jr. were here today, he would take heart in the fact that the vestiges of legalized segregation are gone. He would be amazed that a likeness of him had been placed on the National Mall. And he would be gratified that the United States had elected its first African-American president.
Yes, we have come a great distance — but we still have a great distance to go. King’s speech was a cogent statement about the need for civil rights, but its deepest purpose was about much more. His dream was about more than racial justice, though racism often represents the greatest moral stain on our society. His dream was about building a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being. That effort is the true legacy of King’s dream. Were he alive today, it is telling that his message would still be essentially the same. It is troubling that unemployment is so high — indeed, far higher than it was in 1963 — and that we are so caught up in details of deficits and debt ceilings that we question whether government has any moral duty to serve the poor, help feed the hungry and assist the sick. Today, Dr. King would still be asking questions that reveal the moral meaning of our policies. And he would still challenge our leaders to answer those questions — and to act on their beliefs.

Among those leaders, I know he would take a special interest in President Obama — not only because he is the first African-American to sit in the Oval Office, but because Dr. King recognized the power of one man to transform a nation. He would say that the president has the capacity to unify America, to bring us together as one people, one family, one house.  He would say that a leader has the ability to inspire people to greatness, but that to do so he must be daring, courageous and unafraid to demonstrate what he is made of.

As a minister, never elected to any public office, Dr. King would tell this young leader that it is his moral obligation to use his power and influence to help those who have been left out and left behind.  He would encourage him to get out of Washington, to break away from handlers and advisers and go visit the people where they live. He would urge him to meet the coal miners of West Virginia; to shake the hands of the working poor in our large urban centers, juggling mutiple jobs to try to make ends meet; to go to the barrios of the Southwest; and to visit native Americans on their reservations.  He would urge Obama to feel the hurt and pain of those without work, of mothers and their children who go to bed hungry at night, of the families living in shelters after losing their homes, and of the elderly who chose between buying medicine and paying the rent.

Dr. King would say that a Nobel Peace Prize winner can and must find a way to demonstrate that he is a man of peace, a man of love and non-violence.  He would say it is time to bring an end to war and get our young men and women out of harm’s way. Dr. King would assert without hesi­ta­tion that war is obsolete, that it destroys the very soul of a nation, that it wastes human lives and natural resources.
A. Philip Randolph, the dean of the civil rights movement and the convener of the March on Washington, once advocated creating what he called a “freedom budget” that would be a collection point for the resources government would use to help create jobs, rebuild infrastructure, clean up the waterways and make sure we have clean air to breathe and nutritious food to eat. I think Dr. King would ask why we couldn’t do something like this today.
He would say that Obama’s election represents a significant step toward laying down the burden of race, but that this task is not yet complete. The election of 2008 was a major down payment on Dr. King’s dream, but it did not fulfill it. When one member of Congress calls the president a “tar baby” on a radio show and when another cries out “You lie!” during a State of the Union address, it is more than clear that we still do not understand the need to respect human dignity despite our differences.
Dr. King would tell this young president to do what he can to end discrimination based on race, color, religious faith and sexual orientation. He would say that righteous work makes its own way. There is no need to put a finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. There is no need to match each step to the latest opinion poll. The people of this country recognize when a leader is trying to do what is right. Take a stand, he would say. Go with your gut. Let the people of this country see that you are fighting for them and they will have your back.
There will be opposition, and it might become ugly. Dr. King faced frequent threats on his life and the bombing of his home, and he and his family were in constant danger. He had no protection beyond his faith. But he believed in the power of the truth to expose what is wrong in America. He often quoted the notion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And the reason it does is because of the central goodness of humankind.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed that once people heard the truth, their tendency to bend toward what is right would pave the way for goodness to prevail. And it still can.
outlook@washpost.com
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1987.

Matt Taibbi on the Explosive Investigation Revealing the SEC’s Cover-Up of Wall Street’s Crimes
In an interview with Amy Goodman, Matt Taibbi explains how the SEC has let the Wall Street bankers who created the global economic crisis get away with it all.
August 23, 2011  |

In the following interview on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviews journalist Matt Taibbi about his recent investigation into the SEC’s shady practices.
AMY GOODMAN: Is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission covering up Wall Street crimes? That’s the question examined in an explosive new report by Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi.
He begins the piece: “Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case.” Taibbi argues this is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street bankers who helped cause the ongoing global economic crisis.
Matt Taibbi joins us now, political reporter at Rolling Stone magazine. His latest piece, again, “Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?”
How are they doing it, Matt?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, the SEC had a number of different levels of investigation. They had a thing called a MUI, which is a “Matter Under Inquiry,” and this is basically any preliminary investigation, any tip that came in from a whistleblower or from a self-regulating organization like the Stock Exchange or FINRA, if they—suspicious trades, anything like that. If they investigated it and they did not get permission from the people up above in the SEC to proceed to a full-blown investigation, they then shredded all that evidence they gathered in the preliminary stage. So they destroyed all the evidence of all MUIs dating back to 1993, and that might be as many as 18,000 cases.
AMY GOODMAN: Under whose authority?
MATT TAIBBI: Under the authority of the enforcement division. Now, this—there’s no legal authority to do this. And, you know, apparently, according to my sources, this was illegal. You can’t just unilaterally shred any government document, no matter how insignificant. And these are significant law enforcement investigatory files that they were unilaterally destroying.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about just what the SEC does, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, they police the financial markets. They’re the main cops on the beat on Wall Street. It’s basically a two-tiered structure. It’s—you know, for Wall Street crime, it’s the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are the two main sort of policing organizations that prevent things like insider trading, market manipulation, securities fraud. They also make sure that all publicly traded corporations—they have to make regular disclosures, you know, every year, and they make sure that those disclosures are accurate, that you don’t have an Enron situation, for instance, where a company is reporting profits that they don’t have and hiding losses that they do have. The SEC is supposed to be the number one cop on the beat preventing all of this stuff. And if they’re not doing their job, which they apparently haven’t been, you know, what results is a situation like 2008, where just corruption overwhelms the markets, and you have this explosion of, you know, a lack of confidence all around the globe.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is the whistleblower who started to expose what was taking place?
MATT TAIBBI: His name is Darcy Flynn. He’s a 13-year veteran of the SEC. He had a variety of positions in the SEC, but most recently, he is an attorney who worked, and part of his responsibilities were to maintain the records, within the agency. Now, when he took this new job in 2010, he discovered this policy that the SEC had been destroying all of its preliminary investigations. And he was, you know, understandably upset. And he started this whole process of coming forward. He contacted the National Archives, because he wanted guidance on the issue. And he only came forward publicly because he couldn’t get reassurances from the SEC that they wouldn’t take action against him for coming forward. And so, that’s why he came forward.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Grassley said the files include “important cases such as the investigation of [Bernard] Madoff, Goldman Sachs trading in AIG credit default swaps in 2009, financial fraud at Wells Fargo and Bank of America in 2007 and 2008, and insider trading investigations at Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, [and] SAC Capital.”
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no. One of the criticisms of my article, after it came out, was, well, you know, all of these cases, these MUIs that got destroyed, they were insignificant cases, that’s why they didn’t proceed to full-blown investigations in the first place. Well, we know that this isn’t true. We know that at least a couple of these cases involved Bernie Madoff in the years before the Madoff story came out.
Also, Darcy Flynn, this whistleblower, he also came forward with revelations about his own experience as an investigator. One of the first cases that he talked about was one where he was trying to pursue a case involving Deutsche Bank, a very promising securities fraud case, but it was rejected by the chief of the enforcement division, who shortly thereafter took a job as the general counsel of Deutsche Bank. So we know that this is part of the culture at the SEC. There’s a whole problem where there is this dichotomy. There’s the lower-level investigators, who were the sort of career bureaucrats, career—they’re more like cops, basically. And the guys on the upper level are more like political appointees who come from all these high-priced Wall Street banks, and they’re rejecting a lot of these important cases.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Henning, who writes “White Collar Watch” for DealBook at the New York Times, wrote yesterday, “Although Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone described the policy as ‘Orwellian,’ the practice looks more like corner cutting to avoid cumbersome federal regulations on document disposal—the very type of conduct that the S.E.C. often criticizes companies for when it pursues an enforcement action.” And he goes on to say, “The actual document destruction, which ended last year, probably had no significant effect on any continuing investigations because it only [applied] to inquiries dropped [early].”
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, that’s just preposterous. I mean, I don’t know how—can you imagine if the DEA, for instance, destroyed the files on 18,000 cases of drug enforcement? How could anybody seriously argue that this wouldn’t have an effect on ongoing investigations? Every—you know, law enforcement these days is increasingly dependent upon this intelligence-based model of enforcement, where you piece together bits of information from all kinds of investigations, and you identify patterns that grow over time. So, if you have a company—and there were a number of these companies, like Lehman Brothers and AIG and Goldman Sachs, that had multiple complaints against them in the last 10 years—if you don’t—if you’re an investigator and you don’t have the opportunity to go back and look at those cases and see what patterns might have been there or not been there, I don’t know how you can say that that doesn’t have a serious effect on all enforcement.
AMY GOODMAN: Is this going to stop?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, they have stopped the policy of shredding the files. Last year, after Darcy Flynn came forward, they did adjust the policy. But the thing that was really troubling about that is that when he came forward and made—and brought this to the attention of the people in the enforcement division, they did not immediately admit it, and, you know, admit the problem to the National Archives. They tried to cover it up. And so, we know that there—the culture problem at the SEC that caused this in the first place is—it’s still there. It’s still the same people who are running the SEC, the same bad instincts that got us to this place in the first place, are still—are still a problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about our headline today about Obama administration reportedly putting increasing pressure on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to agree to a broad state settlement with banks over questionable foreclosure tactics. The federal settlement has been widely criticized because it would insulate the nation’s largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, from all criminal investigations in exchange for civil fines. Schneiderman and others have opposed the settlement because they say it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities. Matt Taibbi?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no. This whole issue of securitization was central to the cause of the financial crisis. All of the banks—not just a few of them, all of them—were engaged in this wide-scale fraud scheme to take worthless and/or extremely risky subprime mortgages and sell them as AAA-rated investments to unsuspecting investors all over the world, including, you know, pension funds here in the United States and foreigners in Scandinavia, China, Saudi Arabia. Basically, this was a fraud scheme where you’re selling garbage as gold. And they were all engaged in this fraud scheme. They all knew that they were selling extremely risky stuff as AAA-rated investments.
And the Schneiderman investigation is targeting this whole—the root of this process, the securitization process, where they took the subprime mortgages and chopped them up and then waved their magic pixie dust on it to turn it into AAA-rated investments. The national deal is seeking to cover this up and try to insulate all the banks from liability, especially civil liability, for what they did. If they do that, then they’re going to get away with this, and we’re not really going to fix the problem. And I think Schneiderman is really the only law enforcement official out there right now who is seriously trying to uncover this mess.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me get to two other headlines. One is Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, now retaining a top lawyer known for defending Enron defendants. His name, Reid Weingarten.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no. Goldman’s now stock price has now plummeted to $104, which is unbelievable. It was, you know, in the $160s just earlier this year. And I think this news that Blankfein has retained Weingarten is a serious indication that they’re expecting serious prosecution.
AMY GOODMAN: And Deven Sharma stepping down as head of Standard & Poor’s?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, I mean, I think—you know, I don’t know what to make of that. I do know that Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s and all these ratings agencies are going to become—going to come under increased scrutiny for their role in creating the financial crisis, after they—you know, they downgrade the United States. I think it’s time to start taking a look at them again.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, thanks so much for being with us and for your reporting.
MATT TAIBBI: Thank you.