I had my first experience with the U.S. military when I was a young reporter covering the civil war in El Salvador. We journalists were briefed at the American Embassy each week by a U.S. Army colonel who at the time headed the military group of U.S. advisers to the Salvadoran army. The reality of the war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, bore little resemblance to the description regurgitated each week for consumption by the press. But what was most evident was not the blatant misinformation-this particular colonel had apparently learned to dissemble to the public during his multiple tours in Vietnam-but the hatred of the press by this man and most other senior officers in the U.S. military. When first told that he would have to meet the press once a week, the colonel reportedly protested against having to waste his time with those "limp-dicked communists."

For the next 20 years I would go on from war zone to war zone as a foreign correspondent immersed in military culture. Repetitive rote learning and an insistence on blind obedience-similar to the approach used to train a dog-work on the battlefield. The military exerts nearly total control over the lives of its members. Its long-established hierarchy ensures that those who embrace the approved modes of behavior rise and those who do not are belittled, insulted and hazed. Many of the marks of civilian life are stripped away. Personal modes of dress, hairstyle, speech and behavior are heavily regulated. Individuality is physically and then psychologically crushed. Aggressiveness is rewarded. Compassion is demeaned. Violence is the favorite form of communication. These qualities are an asset in war; they are a disaster in civil society.

Homer in "The Iliad" showed his understanding of war. His heroes are not pleasant men. They are vain, imperial, filled with rage and violent. And Homer's central character in "The Odyssey," Odysseus, in his journey home from war must learn to shed his "hero's heart," to strip from himself the military attributes that served him in war but threaten to doom him off the battlefield. The qualities that serve us in war defeat us in peace.

Most institutions have a propensity to promote mediocrities, those whose primary strengths are knowing where power lies, being subservient and obsequious to the centers of power and never letting morality get in the way of one's career. The military is the worst in this respect. In the military, whether at the Paris Island boot camp or West Point, you are trained not to think but to obey. What amazes me about the military is how stupid and bovine its senior officers are. Those with brains and the willingness to use them seem to be pushed out long before they can rise to the senior-officer ranks. The many Army generals I met over the years not only lacked the most rudimentary creativity and independence of thought but nearly always saw the press, as well as an informed public, as impinging on their love of order, regimentation, unwavering obedience to authority and single-minded use of force to solve complex problems.

So when I heard James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant general and currently the federal government's director of national intelligence, denounce Edward Snowden and his "accomplices"-meaning journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras-before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week I was not surprised. Clapper charged, without offering any evidence, that the Snowden disclosures had caused "profound damage" and endangered American lives. And all who have aided Snowden are, it appears, guilty of treason in Clapper's eyes.

Clapper and many others who have come out of the military discern no difference between terrorists and reporters, and by reporters I am not referring to the boot-licking courtiers on television and in Washington who masquerade as reporters. Carry out an interview with a member of al-Qaida, as I have, and you become in the eyes of generals like Clapper a member of al-Qaida. Most generals I know recognize no need for an independent press. The munchkins who dutifully sit through their press briefings or follow them around in preapproved press pools and publish their lies are the generals' idea of journalism.

When I was in Central America the U.S. officers who were providing support to the military of El Salvador or Guatemala, along with help to the Contra forces then fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, did not distinguish between us journalists and the rebel forces or the leftist Sandinista government. We were one and the same. The reporters and photographers, often after a day or two of hiking to reach small villages, would report on massacres by the Salvadoran army, the Guatemalan army or the Contras. When the stories appeared, the U.S. officers usually would go volcanic. But their rage would be directed not at those who pulled the triggers but at those who wrote about the mass killings or photographed the bodies.

This is why, after Barack Obama signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military to seize U.S. citizens who "substantially support" al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces," to strip them of due process and to hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, I sued the president. I and my fellow plaintiffs won in U.S. District Court. When Obama appealed the ruling it was overturned. We are now trying to go to the Supreme Court. Section 1021 is a chilling reminder of what people like Clapper could do to destroy constitutional rights. They see no useful role for a free press, one that questions and challenges power, and are deeply hostile to its existence. I expect Clapper, if he has a free hand, to lock us up, just as the Egyptian military has arrested a number of Al-Jazeera journalists, including some Westerners, on terrorism-related charges. The military mind is amazingly uniform.

The U.S. military has won the ideological war. The nation sees human and social problems as military problems. To fight terrorists Americans have become terrorists. Peace is for the weak. War is for the strong. Hypermasculinity has triumphed over empathy. We Americans speak to the world exclusively in the language of force. And those who oversee our massive security and surveillance state seek to speak to us in the same demented language. All other viewpoints are to be shut out. "In the absence of contrasting views, the very highest form of propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a definition of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible," C. Wright Mills wrote. "What is being promulgated and reinforced is the military metaphysics-the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military."

The Super Bowl is different things to different people. To many, it is a cherished national holiday that provides a much-needed mid-winter excuse to host a Thanksgiving-like shindig with friends and family. To others like author Steve Almond, it is a hideous example of how American culture happily celebrate - rather than deplores - brutality and violence that results in paralysis, brain damage and suicide (and possibly at some point, on-field death). To still others, the thousands of reporters converging to cover the game prove that for all the laments by media organizations that they have no resources to cover news, they have plenty of resources to aggressively cover frivolities like a football game.

To me it is all these things all at once, but it is also more than that. In the midst of cuts to social programs, the Super Bowl is empirical evidence of how America eagerly prioritizes games over even the most basic human needs. That backwards value system is enabled by what I've previously called Selective a Deficit Disorder. It is a pathology whereby public budget deficits are cited as a rationale to eviscerate the social safety net, and yet those deficits are selectively ignored when it comes time to spend money on anything (a subsidy, a procurement contract, a war, etc.) that gives taxpayer cash to politically powerful corporations.

As previously reported here at Pando, Silicon Valley is increasingly a beneficiary of Selective Deficit Disorder. At the state and municipal level, local governments plead poverty to justify slashing social services, all while handing out lucrative tax breaks for server farms and corporate headquarters. Likewise, the federal government gets in on the action by citing deficits to slash food stamps and unemployment, while throwing ever-more cash at the tech-sector's private intelligence industry.

But this is far more than just a tech-sector story, as this week so clearly proves. Indeed, in the span of just a few days, there was a damning report showing that states cutting worker pensions in the name of austerity are profligately spending on corporate handouts; there was a new farm bill that cuts food stamps in the name of deficit reduction yet preserves massive subsidies to politically connected agribusinesses; and now the same states slashing social spending in the name of fiscal responsibility are hosting an expensive taxpayer-subsidized football game.

Pro Sports: Your taxpayer dollars at work

No single industry exemplifies Selective Deficit Disorder like sports. Detroit tells one microcosmic story. There, public officials are making a fiscal-responsibility argument in their push to slash the average municipal worker's $19,000-a-year pension. At the same time, those officials are reassuring private professional sports franchises that massive public subsidies for a new stadium will go forward as planned.

As The Atlantic's Gregg Easterbrook exhaustively documents, this political scheme which transfers wealth to multi-billion-dollar sports leagues has been replicated all over America. In the name of fiscal responsibility, politicians today demand cuts to public workers' pensions, education and basic government services. They then turn right around and throw cash at already-lucrative sports industries.

At the collegiate level, this means resources generated by ever-higher student fees at public universities being used to subsidize big-time NCAA sports and coaches' multi-million-dollar salaries. At the professional level, it means public resources that could be going into social services instead going to finance stadium construction and maintenance costs. It also means special breaks that both allow individual teams to reduce their tax bills and permit multi-billion-dollar leagues to pay no taxes at all. And this is all done, by the way, even though there is almost little proof that such giveaways provide a real macroeconomic benefit to local communities.

As the Brookings Institution reports in a study confirmed by other analyses:

A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.

Out of all the sports enterprises benefiting from this pillage, none has more deftly exploited Selective Deficit Disorder than the National Football League.

During this era of budget austerity, Bloomberg News reports that pro football teams have raked in $18.5 billion in stadium subsidies, or more than $900 million a year over the last 20 years. And that's on top of all the other special tax breaks that allow the $9-billion-a-year league to avoid paying the taxes that other businesses (are supposed to) pay.

Each year, the Super Bowl is the ritualistic cash-burning orgy that celebrates these rip offs, and, in the process, puts Selective Deficit Disorder on display for all to see.

For example, as the federal government considers a new round of budget cuts, it - and not the profitable NFL - will be spending heavily on security for the game. If history is any guide, it will also probably spend money on celebratory spectacles.

At the local level, it's even worse for taxpayers, as evidenced by this year's game in the New York City region.

There, at the same time New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and his administration officials have refused to adequately fund schools and demanded government be "more efficient" by slashing public worker pay, they are not only pushing new corporate tax cuts and an estate tax cut for the super-rich, they are also spending millions of taxpayer dollars on Super Bowl revelry. That included a taxpayer-financed party for more than 3,500 members of the media. As Capital New York reported, that one gala saw the state "paying $100 a head from the $5 million Governor Cuomo secured in the state budget" for such festivities. That is on top of the additional security costs that New York taxpayers will be forced to finance.

On the other side of the Hudson River, it is even more offensive. As Gov. Chris Christie (R) has slashed the pensions of his state's workers and reduced education funding, he has already had his state cough up almost $18 million to subsidize Sunday's game. That is in addition to the $400 million the New York Times notes New Jersey taxpayers spent to improve the Meadowlands. It is also in addition to the special tax breaks New Jersey gave the NFL.

Just as they pretend stadium subsidies are reliable tools of economic stimulus, politicians insist that Super Bowl subsidies are investments that will generate far bigger returns for taxpayers. More specifically, they insist Super Bowls generate somewhere between $550 million and $600 million for host cities, even though, as the New York Times notes, there is no verifiable proof that such estimates are vaguely accurate. In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite. It suggests, in short, that just like stadium-subsidies often do not boost local economies, Super Bowls do not produce the promised return on investment, and certainly nothing close to a half billion dollars or more of revenue.

USA Today reports that "the nation's sports economists (say) the actual number is a fair bit lower. Like, maybe, zero." Economist Andrew Zimbalist says it is probably a bit higher than that, but in summing up the data from past Super Bowls, he concludes: "What is strikingly clear from this scholarly work is that what the NFL is putting out is just PR hype. The numbers have no relation to the actual effect."

In sum, there may be a short-term spending boost in a host city, but that doesn't produce anywhere near the revenues to cover for all the stadium subsidies and other public subsidies that the NFL typically requires of prospective host cities.

The Omerta of the sports-industrial complex

Of course, sports' embodiment of Selective Deficit Disorder is rarely discussed in all the media noise around athletics. Why? Probably because so many media corporations are themselves financially tied to the larger Sports-Industrial Complex, and such ties instill a powerful omerta. That code of silence is only strengthened when, say, the governor of New York spends his taxpayers' hard-earned money to wine and dine 3,500 reporters. When that happens, reporters aren't going to be too eager to seriously scrutinize the spending decisions, much less contrast them with that governor's other budget cuts.

At the same time, though, the omerta has also existed outside the media bubble. America loves its sports and hates its politics, and you get the sense that many haven't wanted to honestly evaluate the unseemly connection between the two.

But, then, that may be changing. Polls are starting to show some real awareness of - and opposition to - how we prioritize sports over other human needs. Meanwhile, a few cities have recently seen grassroots left-right uprisings against stadium subsidies. It seems that with the economy struggling and inequality rising, the old corrupt politics that siphons more and more public cash into sports industries may be transforming from something society tolerated into a symbol of a much larger problem.

The Republican response to the State of the Union was delivered by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican representative from Washington - and it was remarkable for its lack of content. A bit of uplifting personal biography, a check list of good things her party wants to happen with no hint of how it plans to make them happen.

The closest she came to substance was when she described a constituent, "Bette in Spokane," who supposedly faced a $700-a-month premium hike after her policy was canceled. "This law is not working," intoned Ms. McMorris Rodgers. And right there we see a perfect illustration of just how Republicans are trying to deceive voters - and are, in the process, deceiving themselves.

I'll get back to "Bette in Spokane" in a minute, but first, is Obamacare "not working"?

Everyone knows about the disastrous rollout, but that was months ago. Since then, health reform has been steadily making up lost ground. At this point enrollments in the health exchanges are only about a million below Congressional Budget Office projections, and rising faster than projected. So a best guess is that by the time 2014 enrollment closes on March 31, there will be more than six million Americans signed up through the exchanges, versus seven million projected. Sign-ups might even meet the projection.

But isn't Obamacare in a "death spiral," in which only the old and sick are signing up, so that premiums will soon soar? Not according to the people who should know - the insurance companies. True, one company, Humana, says that the risk pool is worse than it expected. But others, including WellPoint and Aetna, are optimistic (which isn't a contradiction: different companies could be having different experiences). And the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has run the numbers, finds that even a bad risk pool would have only a minor effect on premiums.

Now, some, perhaps many, of those signing up on the exchanges aren't newly insured; they're replacing their existing policies, either voluntarily or because those policies didn't meet the law's standards. But those standards are there for a reason - the same reason health insurance is now mandatory. Health reform won't work if people go uninsured, then sign up when they get sick. It also can't work if currently healthy people only buy fig-leaf insurance, which offers hardly any coverage.

And what this means, in turn, is that while we don't know yet how many people will be newly insured under reform, we do know that even those who already had insurance are, on average, getting much better insurance. Since the goal of health reform was to make Americans more secure - to reduce their risk of being unable to afford needed health care, or of facing financial ruin if they get sick - the law is doing its job.

Which brings me back to Bette in Spokane.

Bette's tale had policy wonks scratching their heads; it was hard to see, given what we know about premiums and how the health law works, how anyone could face that large a rate increase. Sure enough, when a local newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, contacted Bette Grenier, it discovered that the real story was very different from the image Ms. McMorris Rodgers conveyed. First of all, she was comparing her previous policy with one of the pricier alternatives her insurance company was offering - and she refused to look for cheaper alternatives on the Washington insurance exchange, declaring, "I wouldn't go on that Obama website."

Even more important, all Ms. Grenier and her husband had before was a minimalist insurance plan, with a $10,000 deductible, offering very little financial protection. So yes, the new law requires that they spend more, but they would get far better coverage in return.

So was this the best story Ms. McMorris Rodgers could come up with? The answer, probably, is yes, since just about every tale of health reform horror the G.O.P. has tried to peddle has similarly fallen apart once the details were revealed. The truth is that the campaign against Obamacare relies on misleading stories at best, and often on outright deceit.

Who pays the price for this deceit? In many cases, American families. Although health care enrollment is actually going pretty well at this point, thousands and maybe millions of Americans have failed to sign up for coverage because they believe the false horror stories they keep hearing.

But conservative politicians aren't just deceiving their constituents; they're also deceiving themselves. Right now, Republican political strategy seems to be to stall on every issue, and reap the rewards from Obamacare's inevitable collapse. Well, Obamacare isn't collapsing - it's recovering pretty well from a terrible start. And by the time that reality sinks in on the right, health reform will be irreversible.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

A Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl, that annual celebration of violence as sport, featured a most joyous homecoming for a U.S. veteran of the Afghan War. It was a fitting tribute to the fact that he survived, but you would have to be drunk on Bud not to notice that the three decades since the United States first meddled in Afghanistan have been an unequivocal disaster and that those who did not survive—NATO combatants and far larger number of Afghan natives—died in vain.

This was a point made clearly but largely unnoticed on that day of obligatory patriotic flag waving in an interview with Hamid Karzai, the U.S. anointed leader of Afghanistan, who told British newspaper The Sunday Times of London that "I saw no good" resulting from yet another American adventure in imperial democracy:

"This whole 12 years was one of constant pleading with America to treat the lives of our civilians as lives of people," Karzai stated, continuing his denunciation of the terror of anti-terrorism exemplified by Bush's orgy of torture followed by Obama's drone attacks that traumatize the Afghan countryside. Karzai, no stranger to corruption and contradiction, has refused to sign a pact authorizing a continued and much reduced U.S. presence in his country unless all such unilateral military attacks on his people are ended. As for the Taliban enemy that the U.S. invasion had temporarily deposed, Karzai referred to them as "brothers" while he dismissed his erstwhile American sponsors as "rivals," indicating that Obama now has his own "mission accomplished" embarrassment.

Maybe that dismal outcome of the Obama-ordered surge, comparable to the ultimate failure of Bush's in Iraq, is why Karzai observed that he and Obama have not spoken directly since June. For the Democratic hawks, Afghanistan was going to be the good war, but Obama has learned, as did then-President Jimmy Carter more than 30 years ago, that the Afghans are not to be toyed with.

In Carter's case back in the late 1970s, he was convinced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president's terminally confident national security adviser, that supporting Muslim extremists to overthrow a secular pro-Soviet government in power in Kabul would draw our main international adversary into its version of our Vietnam quagmire. What fun but the strategy failed, and the Soviets didn't invade until the U.S. imported sufficient foreign fighters to destabilize a country on their border.

When Obama, back in December 2009, launched a troop "surge" in Afghanistan, he argued that "we did not ask for this fight," but of course we did. To know that, all he had to do was ask his then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had been an adviser to Carter and, in a 1996 memoir, exposed "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen six months before the Soviets invaded."

After Gates' admission, French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur asked Brzezinski whether he regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and he replied: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

He said that in 1998, and three years later, "some stirred up Muslims" flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The eradication of their movement became our national obsession, one that justified raising U.S. military expenditures back to the highest levels of the Cold War, even though there was no technologically significant enemy to justify this restoration of the power and the glory of the military-industrial complex.

In the process, we have come to sacrifice the basic rights of the individual enshrined in our Constitution in the name of finding what our last president, in his comic book lingo, termed the "evildoers," without ever conceding that they were once, as President Reagan defined them, our "freedom fighters." Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, a former top exec at defense contractor Halliburton, must have chuckled at that one, knowing full well that a primitive enemy holed up in mountain caves could not justify blowing trillions on the most sophisticated oceangoing aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and other relics of an era when we had a militarily significant enemy.

It seemed to make sense only when both Republican Bush and Democrat Obama, in Afghanistan and Iraq, invoked the imagery of democratic nation building but instead exploited sectarian and tribal differences. Those efforts succeeded only in upending what remained of the stabilizing social order in both countries and have unleashed a never-ending cycle of violence providing invaluable propaganda for the al-Qaida elements we claimed to be eradicating.

"The money they should have paid to the police," Karzai said, "they paid to private security firms and creating militias who caused lawlessness, corruption and highway robbery. What they did was create pockets of wealth and a vast countryside of deprivation and anger."

There are times when hatred is a needed, logical and moral stance to take. Evil, injustice and corruption are fine examples of what to appropriately hate. For the overwhelming majority of people it is now rational to hate the super rich, notably the thousands of billionaires holding most of the world's wealth and wielding power over political and economic systems. They have been successfully raping the global economy and while doing that have kept increasing their wealth as well as economic inequality afflicting ordinary people. One dollar, one vote describes the new reality.

Before discussing some basic reasons to hate the super rich consider some facts about them.

How many billionaires are there? According to the inaugural Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census 2013, the global billionaire population reached a record 2,170 individuals in 2013, with a combined net worth of $6.5 trillion. What happened after the most recent global economic meltdown? Some 810 individuals became billionaires since the 2009 global financial crisis. In other words, plain millionaires moved up to billionaire status.

But the super rich include many more than the billionaires, because the top one percent on the economic scale have monster size wealth, according to a new report Working for the Few. The one percent of the richest people in the world have $110 trillion. That equates to some 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population. But among the millions of the top one percent, the richest 85 people, true billionaires, have wealth equal to the bottom half of the world's population. As to the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer. That leaves 9 percent, about 30 million Americans, in the upper class that did very well as they strive to make it into the top one percent.

When people talk about economic, wealth or income inequality they are really talking about the incredibly small fraction of the richest people relative to the larger population that still are not sharing in the global jackpot, no matter how hard they work. Inequality means that money is not being fairly distributed. There have been times in history when prosperity was shared, as in the several decades after World War II.

No surprise that only 7 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup report, currently feel "very satisfied" with our nation's distribution of income and wealth. Similarly, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 81 percent of Americans believe the economy is working very or fairly well for the wealthy, compared to 22 percent for the middle class.

Why hate the super rich and the rising economic inequality that benefits them?

This distorted economic system means that democracy is more delusional than real. Consider this: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both." Truly wise words.

The near total lack of public confidence in Congress, both major political parties and the whole political system by Americans goes hand-in-hand with the perverted economic system. You have every right to hate the super rich because for a long time in many visible and invisible ways they have intentionally manipulated the political system to create and maintain the unjust economic system. Their economic power gives them political power. Rather than one person one vote, think in terms of one dollar one vote.

Hate the super rich because their degree of wealth and power is obscene.

Hate the super rich because they persecute the vast majority of people worldwide. Some of the super rich play up their charitable activities, but that does not negate all the evil consequences of economic inequality on the daily lives of billions of people.