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As Chris Hayes noted in the opening of his show this Monday, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was known for pulling no punches and "out of deference to that legacy, we should pull none ourselves" and reminded his viewers of some of the "hallmarks" of Thatcher's career.

Here's more on that same subject from his site: It’s Thatcher’s world. We’re just living in it:

Margaret Thatcher may have been out of office for nearly a quarter of a century, but we’re still living in her world.

The former conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain died Monday morning of a stroke, but her legacy remains at 10 Downing Street.

The government is once again locked in a pitched battle with British trade unions. And the Labour party—led, ironically, by Ed Miliband, son of the Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband—is a lukewarm, deracinated shadow of what it was before Thatcher came to power. Wave after wave of budget austerity have wracked the country’s finances and contributed to the gradual dismantling of the welfare state. Even the National Health Service, the crown jewel of the United Kingdom’s social safety net, is being irrevocably transformed.

Here are some of the moments that brought us to this point and embody the essence of Thatcherism, the political ideals of the “Iron Lady” that live on.

1) The miners’ strike

Thatcherism’s economic program was one of austerity, privatization, and aggressive union-busting. In the mid-1980s, Thatcher’s government said it would shut down 20 coal mines across Great Britain, costing some 20,000 miners their livelihoods. When the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) responded by going on strike, the government dug in its heels and waged a lengthy campaign to break the power of one of Great Britain’s largest unions.

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The former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged Tuesday to testify against former Vice President Dick Cheney if he is ever tried for war crimes.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman that he would participate in a trial even if it meant personal repercussions.

"I, unfortunately -- and I've admitted to this a number of times, publicly and privately -- was the person who put together Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5 February, 2003," Wilkerson said. "It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it."

In an interview that aired on NBC Monday, Cheney told Jamie Gangel that unlike President George W. Bush, he did not have a "sickening feeling" when they discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq.

"I think we did the right thing," Cheney said.

Joining Wilkerson and Goodman to discuss Cheney's new book "In My Time," Salon's Glenn Greenwald said that it was disturbing to see the former vice president treated simply as an "elder statesman."

"The evidence is overwhelming... that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder -- his word -- of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about," Greenwald explained.

"And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this."

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Well, Haley Barbour might have bowed out of the GOP presidential primary, but we've still got wingnut Herman Cain in the running, who went on the air with Fox's Shannon Bream and recommended we privatize Social Security like they did in Chile under Pinochet, but don't dare call it privatization.

BREAM: Alright, will part of the tough solutions and will the strong medicine include entitlement reform? And how do you sell that to the American public?

CAIN: We have to go from an entitlement society, to an empowerment society. And what I mean by that, all programs need to be restructured. You can't just continue to raise taxes on these programs and decrease the benefits. And Representative Ryan's proposed budget is a great start in that direction. We can't just continue to do the same things we've done before.

For example, relative to Social Security. I think that we put the idea of personal retirement accounts back on the table and do what Chile did thirty years ago. They don't have the problem we have today. Now it got demagogued last time as privatization. That absolutely is not the case. We need to take that route, restructure Social Security so we can achieve solvency, or the problems we're encountering, the crisis that we now have, they're only going to get worse.

Someone needs to tell this clown that Social Security is solvent. And if he thinks the GOP ought to run on privatizing it, whether he wants to call it that or not, more power to him. That didn't work out so well for George Bush, but apparently he's got a short memory. We can fix any shortfalls with our system by simply raising the cap on payroll taxes, or better yet, lift the cap and make it less regressive while we're at it.

And if he wants us to follow Chile's model, maybe someone could direct him to this article -- Chile's Retirees Find Shortfall in Private Plan.

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