Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden is making waves today for an off-color joke he recently told.

The retired spymaster was speaking at a Washington Post forum on cyber security recently when he acknowledged that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been nominated for a human rights award. Hayden quipped, "I must admit in my darker moments over the past several months, I'd also thought of nominating Mr. Snowden but it was for a different list."

With the U.S. government shutdown and a threatened credit default, Tea Party Republicans are testing out a new system of national governance in which they get their way - or else. But is this the beginning of a new Jim Crow era of imposed white supremacy or just the white man's last tantrum, asks Robert Parry.

American pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP's threatened default on America's credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?

For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.

But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote - and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.

Instead of accepting the emergence of this more diverse and multi-cultural America, the Right - through the Tea Party-controlled Republicans - has decided to alter the constitutional framework of the United States to guarantee the perpetuation of white supremacy and the acceptance of right-wing policies.

In effect, we are seeing the implementation of a principle enunciated by conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1957: "The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically." Except now the Buckley rule is being applied nationally.

The president's health care law is driving down employment in his home state, according to a recent report.

Employers in Illinois are cutting worker hours to avoid costly penalties from Obamacare's employer mandate, where employees in the lowest wage sectors are the hardest hit.

The Illinois Policy Institute studied the three employment sectors - retail, food, and merchandise - whose average hours were closest to 30 hours per week prior to the Affordable Care Act.

The institute found that all three have now dipped below 30 hours per week, the threshold for a full-time worker under the law. Average hours for these sectors had remained steadily above 30 before Obamacare was enacted.

National Park Service rangers are being ordered to "make life difficult" during the government shutdown, according to the Washington Times.

After the shutdown began, park police have been barring tourists from a number of popular attractions nationwide, including the WWII memorial. Even privately-owned landmarks, such as Mount Vernon, are being told by the National Park Service to close their doors.

User info 'may be intercepted, monitored, recorded ... and disclosed' to government personnel

The Kentucky Obamacare marketplace has no "expectation of privacy," warning its prospective customers that their information can be monitored and shared with government bureaucrats.

When clicking "let's get started" on the state-run health insurance marketplace "kynect," the user is quickly prompted to a "WARNING NOTICE."

"This is a government computer system and is the property of the Commonwealth of Kentucky," it states. "It is for authorized use only regardless of time of day, location or method of access. "

"Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy," the disclaimer reads. "Any or all uses of this system and all files on the system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized state government and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign."

I lived through WWII. I remember hearing FDR's "I don't like war, Eleanor doesn't like war" speech on the old Philco console radio with my parents and sister gathered round. We lived in Grand Island, NE then. I recall our victory garden, churning milk to make butter, and the black-outs with Army Air Force war planes flying overhead. I remember driving by the prisoners-of-war prison at Fort Chaffee, Fort Smith, AR and seeing the Germans standing at the fence smoking American cigarettes. I recall the end of the war when I was 7 in Bartlesville, OK.

I also remember the Nuremberg trials and recall wondering how such an evil bunch ever got control over the German people. I never found an answer to that riddle. I wondered if it could happen again, maybe even here.

I recall Goering's shocking statements, "Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." and "...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

A Fountain Hills man says he may soon have to get another job just to pay for healthcare insurance under the new Affordable Care Act.

Michael Cerpok, is a high school drop-out, one of six kids born to a school teacher, and doesn't come from a wealthy family. He has run two businesses for more than 25 years and says he may have to do more to literally stay alive.

"I've worked hard because I've had to, and I've had to, because cancer runs in my family," says Cerpok, who picked his current health insurance based on that family history. His monthly premium is just about half of his monthly take-home pay.

Remember when the media rushed to talk about transparency in the Barack Obama "Hope and Change" era? Good times, good times. Leonard Downie, who once worked as the executive editor of the Washington Post and wrote a novel about Washington corruption and the Iraq War, finds a bigger and non-fictional problem in the successor to George W. Bush. Downie gives the Post a preview of his report from the Committee to Protect Journalists which outlines the Obama war on reporters and their sources:

"A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me," Sanger said. As a result, longtime sources no longer talk to him. "They tell me: 'David, I love you, but don't e-mail me. Let's don't chat until this blows over.' "

Sanger, who has worked for the Times in Washington for two decades, said, "This is most closed, control-freak administration I've ever covered." Many leak investigations include lie-detector tests for government officials with access to the information at issue. "Reporters are interviewing sources through intermediaries now," Barr told me, "so the sources can truthfully answer on polygraphs that they didn't talk to reporters."

The investigations have been "a kind of slap in the face" for reporters and their sources, said Smith of the Center for Public Integrity. "It means you have to use extraordinary measures for contacts with officials speaking without authorization."

According to the Superior General of the Jesuits, by intending to bomb Syria to enforce international law, the United States and France arrogate to themselves a responsibility they don't have, violating precisely that same law. Washington and Paris are planning to lead humanity towards barbarism.

Q. The Holy Father has gone out of the way to speak for peace in Syria, which is now under threat of a new attack by the United States and France. What do you think in this regard?

Father Adolfo Nicolas: It is not customary for me to make comments on situations that have to do with international or political situations. But in the present case we are dealing with a humanitarian situation that exceeds all the limits that would ordinarily keep me silent. I have to confess that I cannot understand who gave the United States or France the right to act against a country in a way that will certainly increase the suffering of the citizens of that country, who, by the way, have already suffered beyond measure. Violence and violent action, like what is being planned, have to always be the last resort and administered in such a way that only the guilty are affected. In the case of a country this is evidently impossible to control and, thus, it seems to me totally unjustified. We, Jesuits, support 100% the Holy Father and wish with all our hearts that the threatened attack on Syria does not take place.

This column was prompted by William Galston's review of Tyler Cowen's new book Average is Over. Galston's column worries about the huge, permanent underclass that Cowen envisions will grow in the United States. I write to challenge Cowen's assumption that winners will prevail through a process of "hyper-meritocracy." Cowen's embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from "merit" - which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the "winners." The people who grew wealthiest were often the people must responsible for the largest destruction of wealth in history. In this first column I show that it is the most anti-meritocratic system. We do not live in a "winner-take-all" Nation. We increasingly live in a "cheater-take-all" system.

What Cowen has missed is the famous (but nearly famous enough) warning sounded by George Akerlof and Paul Romer in 1993 in their classic article "Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit."

"[M]any economists still [do] not understand that a combination of circumstances in the 1980s made it very easy to loot a [bank] with little risk of prosecution. Once this is clear, it becomes obvious that high-risk strategies that would pay off only in some states of the world were only for the timid. Why abuse the system to pursue a gamble that might pay off when you can exploit a sure thing with little risk of prosecution?" (Akerlof & Romer 1993: 4-5).

The result of these perverse incentives is the epidemics of accounting control fraud that drive our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. In the savings and loan debacle, for example:

"The typical large failure [grew] at an extremely rapid rate, achieving high concentrations of assets in risky ventures.... [E]very accounting trick available was used.... Evidence of fraud was invariably present as was the ability of the operators to 'milk' the organization" (NCFIRRE 1993).

The large Enron-era frauds were all accounting control frauds.

Worse, when cheaters prosper market forces become perverse because of the "Gresham's" dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets and professions. George Akerlof explained this in his most famous article on "Lemons" in 1970.

"[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence."

Akerlof was not the first expert to understand the dynamic.

"The Lilliputians look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft. For, they allege, care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, can protect a man's goods from thieves, but honesty hath no fence against superior cunning. . . where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage" (Swift, J. Gulliver's Travels: 1726).