December 2011 Archives

Dear America,

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First, taxes are stable at the rates they have been at since the 2003 Bush tax cuts. Perhaps the business community hasn't heard yet, but the Republicans extorted a continuation of those cuts, even for the richest of us, for another two years. Second, with what amounts to a 2% raise for every working American in the form of the Social Security contribution reduction, demand seems to be improving, and hence, new jobs necessary for business to meet the commensurate 2% increase in demand are being created. Third, as of the end of the last fiscal year, business on the whole was sitting on the biggest capital reserve in history, estimated at more than $2 trillion, which I characterize as the money they're saving for a sunny day. Fourth, as to the debt and the deficit putting a damper on business's enthusiasm, the tax cut for the top earners in our country put $70 billion in their pockets this year, which would be more than enough to reduce the 2011 budget deficit by even the amounts that the Tea Party seems to be set on. So if they were so concerned about the deficit, why did they let their political surrogates demand that they continue to get that unneeded funding for themselves personally when it could have helped fund the nation that they all claim to be concerned about. As to the fear of regulation causing reluctance to invest, the world is choking on noxious substances, so environmental controls are not some liberal cause, they are life and death pursuits. On the issue of financial regulation, well, just look what they did to us without the regulations that they managed to abrogate in consequence of their lobbying and cajoling over the past thirty years. And even at that, they made enormous gains in profitability in 2010 despite having to borrow money in 2009, and while the rest of the nation struggled behind debt that the banks more or less created while pocketing huge windfalls by doing so.

All of this may seem simplistic, but it is no less reasonable for being so, and at the very least, if it were all put to the American people to consider, it would be up to the Rcc to refute it. Instead, however, they seem to have created an irrefutable, or at least un-refuted presumption that their obsession with tax cuts and austerity budgets to the exclusion of tax reform is the right solution. The question is, who should be raising the issues for debate. The President, that's who, but he isn't doing so. On March 15, 2011, The President held his twelfth solo press conference at the White House...at 11:15 a.m. on a Wednesday. Last Friday, he was on one of his field trips to a UPS plant, and he spoke to the workers in the morning about all the new jobs that were created last month. No one saw it except for what the news media deigned to present that night. In fact, the President has held only four solo press conferences in prime time since he took office. It is almost as if he is afraid to face the press in the presence of the vast majority of the American people. It's surprising in light of the fact that he has taken so many pages from the Clinton play book since the disastrous mid-term election. Clinton put the Republicans to the test by making them take a position, but then he summoned the press to hear what amounted to his soliloquy on the subject at a press conference. And he always managed to put the blame where it should lay with an argument so cogent that the conservative majority at the time had no choice but to retreat. He was the master of the "Bully Pulpit." The term comes from Teddy Roosevelt in the form of an off hand remark he made while reading a speech to his confidants in the White House. He recognized in its content that he was moralizing and preaching to the nation, but while he may have been loathe to do so, he couldn't resist because he had "such a bully pulpit," bully in the British sense meaning "jolly good." That's what we hire a president to do. Anyone can go to the office and shut the door. But a president has to come out in public and lead, not just by using his veto pen, but by invocating his moral authority loudly and in public. That is where Barrack Obama has failed his ever less faithful following.

So, I would exhort President Obama to more powerfully assert his intelligence and reasoning power against the forces of...dogma (I'll bet you thought I was going to say evil, didn't you). There is but one man in the world who can get the major television and radio networks to give him time to address us all whenever he wants, and that's the President of the United States. There are specific reasons why the Republican proposed spending cuts are draconian, I'm sure, but no one knows them because the Republicans control the discussion and no one, not them or their adversaries, is calling them on the specifics. Someone has to take the time to tell us all why what they want to do is wrong...specifically. I don't have either the information or the bully pulpit from which to do it, and in fact no one but The President does. That is why his party, and for that matter millions of those of us who voted for him want him to start showing up for work...where we all can see him.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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The persistent redolence of that recent battle may well be a palpable augury of the long term future, and if it is, we may be able to finally emerge on the other side of the financial crisis that the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has been thirty years making for us. Provided that the Obama administration can keep the speculation that drove gasoline prices suppressed, the additional money in consumers' pockets from the Social Security tax cut should reduce unemployment to something between 7.5% and 8% by November, and a Democratic tide should swell again. And for once, the second term of an administration may actually be as spectacular as presidents always hope they will be. If the Senate remains Democratic and the Democrats have the nerve and the foresight to end the filibuster as we know it, the "party of no" can caterwaul all they want, but they will be unable to prevent a progressive juggernaut that might even result in a balanced budget and restoration of faith in our system of social safety nets and humanistic awareness similar to that which emerged after the first Clinton term.

So, until January 2, I am taking a vacation. We have nothing but bold prospects at this moment, and I want to enjoy our bright future without worrying about what they are going to do next to disappoint us. I may be writing you to remind you of things past between now and then, but for now, I hope you had a happy holiday, and that we will enjoy the new year together in peace and harmony.

Your friend,

Mike

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The capitulation of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives on the issue of the compromise two month extension of the Social Security tax cut is a political benchmark of great significance. It is the manifestation of our will as the measure of the limits to which a political party can go in its quest for political power with partisanship rather than principle as its motivation. John Boehner spoke to the press after announcing the concession and said in conspicuous terms that he and his party had fought a battle that was ill-advised and that they had lost, admitting in essence that it had been a cynical attempt to expand their undemocratic usurpation of our political processes and nothing more, though it seems apparent that he failed to understand either how ignoble the attempt had been or how nakedly opportunistic he and his party had shown themselves to be. At the same time, he has demonstrated that, as the White House apparently says behind closed doors, he couldn't deliver pizza, much less the votes of the party of which he is the putative leader. His reign of terror appears to be over, and it may well be that the political aspirations of his colleague and nemesis, Eric Cantor, are dashed as well, and Cantor seems to know it as he has been conspicuously silent in the aftermath of their attempted coup. And make no mistake, a coup is what they had in mind, not just in the ouster of President Obama, but in the impunity from the popular will that they were attempting to demonstrate. In the end, not only did The President speak, but we Americans listened, and we chastened the Republicans in the many thousands with letters, emails and telephone calls that they ultimately had to admit represented a power greater than themselves. They do answer to someone, and that someone is us.

On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell had greater savvy than Boehner in the end, and he had led his Republican minority in that body to concede the moral and popular victory to the Democrats by delivering his previously unperturbable mob of forty to the slaughter. With a healthy majority, in fact nearly all of them ceding the victory and voting for the compromise ultimately passed by the Democrats in The Senate, senate Republicans bowed to the popular will that they too had flouted for the past three years with fulminations about rich job creators and butter that wouldn't melt in their mouths. This time, there would be no crocodile tears for them when a bill failed because of an alleged unwillingness to compromise by the opposition. This time, they had been exposed as liars, pants ablaze and without recourse but to admit defeat. A new paradigm has emerged, and we can hope that there will be no going back to the old one. The bald-faced lie of Democratic intransigence is no longer a viable tactic. McConnell may save his hide as he is not up for reelection until 2014, but Boehner's fate may be much less favorable as he will be judged by his constituents in just a little more than ten months. His weakness as a leader, his lack of understanding of the limits of his party's power to persuade in the absence of a real cause and his failure to take control of his caucus may seal his doom. He is not a man of principle but rather a creature of Washington politics, which puts him squarely in the mainstream, but he lacks the political sophistication to hide his crasser nature, and that in itself is a political sin. It remains to be seen whether Cantor will be affected, but his only hope is that the voters in his district are as unprincipled and eristic as he is and as willing to prevaricate in self-service.

It will be interesting to see what kind of a fight on the extension of the tax cuts for the rest of the year will bring. McConnell made a weak attempt to characterize the issues as matters of principle for which his fellow Republicans in The Senate would fight doggedly, but when they try to link extraneous issues to the tax cut...when they try to take money out of the pockets of 160 million voters again on the pretext that the other side won't see the light of the supply side of economic Darwinism, they will have to make again the same argument that failed this week, and it remains to be seen how far, and in which direction, the attempt will take them. We may be on the cusp of a new Democratic belle é poch in American politics. But if the Democrats meet the coming challenge with the diffidence that led to the haughty bravado and resilience of the Republican Party-- out of touch with the American people but never-the-less formidable-- this episode may look more like an inoculation against popular rejection than like the rout it appears to be today.

Once again, it is up to us.

Your friend,

Mike

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The Senate passed a two month extension of the tax cut by a vote of 89-10. In other words, less than one fourth of even Republicans voted against it. The quid pro quo was an expedition of the approval of the XL Pipeline from Canada to Texas, a project that has met staunch resistance from environmentalists, which resulted in deferral of the approval process The President. Still, The President announced his approval of the bill, even with the reversal of his policy decision on the pipeline-- it actually gives him cover to expedite the pipeline approval process without losing votes from his environmentalist constituents-- and it went to the House of Representatives for their vote. The reason for a bill authorizing only two months of the tax cut is that the Republicans in The Senate recognize that the money that 160 million of us expect in our pockets as a result of a continuation of the tax cut is completely non-controversial. We all want it...even Republicans. But it has become the Republican modus operandi to resist everything, even what they like, to extort from the Democrats something on the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc's) agenda with every vote in order to ensure the loyalty of the most conservative elements of that constituency. The pipeline thus gave the Republicans cover with the insurgents in their ranks as well, and everybody won. However, in the House of Representatives, the vote was, 229 Republicans against the compromise, interim bill, and 193 Democrats in favor: a straight party line vote. But the same realities apply to getting elected in The House as do in The Senate, so the question is, why are Congressmen so willing to take the political risk that Senators have eschewed. Here's the answer; they think their practiced strategy will work one more time, even though the majority of their own constituents oppose them on the issue. They think that if they say that night is day again, everyone will believe them, even if we all can see that the moon is out, and then they can extort even more out of the Democrats.

The way their strategy works has been made patently clear from yesterday's remarks by the Republican leaders of The House. Eric Cantor, the poster boy for distortion of the truth and prevarication, said to the media that it was too bad that the Democrats were willing to raise the taxes of the middle class, this even though every one knows that only Democrats voted for this bill to cut taxes, and what's more, only Republicans voted against it, and all of them did at that. He used for cover the conservative Republican position that they were in favor of a one year extension, but not two months, which will require more negotiations if the tax cut for the rest of the year is to be passed. More short-term, pressure filled negotiations now; that's what they want so that they can extort more from the Democrats while the moment to pressure them is rife with opportunity. In reality, they fear that with two months to face trying to sell their nefarious ploy, the Democrats will steel themselves with public sentiment that will harden against them as people have even more time to worry about the outcome of Republican intransigence. If they resist now, they can pack two months of discussion into about eleven days worth, thus elevating the pressure on everyone to get the tax cut passed and making it more likely, they think, that the Democrats will yield, and giving the electorate more time to forget what the Republicans have done. Their past experience has been that the Democrats buckle under the pressure at the end of such time frames, and they want to capitalize on the year end deadline built into the debate over the Social Security tax cut, which ends December 31. In other words, the longer they go on holding the American people's feet to the fire along with those of the Democrats, the more likely it becomes that the American people will figure it out and hold it against them, so if they are going to advance their supply-side goals...if they are going to tear another gaping hole in our social safety net...they have to do it now.

When he was asked to respond to The President's exhortation that he help get the bill passed, John Boehner sniped back that he wanted The President's help, even though he, like The President, had been in favor of the bill just a couple of days earlier and the tactics of his party were completely contrary to what he had earlier said. The question is, will we American people take this no for an answer. How long will we tolerate blatant hypocrisy.  Boehner and Cantor are long term incumbents, and there seems little likelihood that they can be unseated. But though they are their party's stalking horses on this issue, or their shills depending on how you look at all this, there are eighty six freshman, mostly Republican Tea Party-ers, who are in reality responsible for this debacle, and they can be unseated. Either the experiment that their conservative supporters ran by electing them will end, or it will become the norm: a scary prospect, my friends...for Democrat and Republican alike.

Your friend,

Mike

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I grew up on Long Island, just east of New York City. Every other weekend after I reached about eleven years old, I went into The City to visit my father as my parents were divorced, and I went in on the Long Island Railroad to Penn Station in Manhattan. Transport in Manhattan is by one of four modes: private car, taxi, subway or bus. So, from Penn Station I rode by subway and bus to my father's apartment in Riverdale, a fairly affluent area in The Bronx, as taxies were too expensive and I was obviously too young to drive my own car. That was in the 1960's, and air pollution as a political cause was in its nascency. In fact, I would say that politicians had given it little more than lip service. The buses spewed dark gray to black smoke so thick that the entire city smelled of it. There was no fresh air anywhere until you got well away from downtown Manhattan, and scientists were just beginning to attribute lung disease, including lung cancer, to air pollution-- smog as we called it back then-- in a high profile, highly public way. Those old diesel buses were so primitive that many of the engine covers in the backs of the buses flapped as they drove because they had been opened and closed for repairs so often. The air was actually hard to breathe. I was a kid during that period: eleven to about eighteen years old. And my opinions were in their formative stages. So, in my simplicity I used to wonder...politicians have to breathe the same air I do. We all have to breathe that same air regardless of wealth or political power. If it is going to kill me, it is going to kill them as well, so why don't they do something about it...if not for me then for themselves and the people they love.

Well, gradually, addressing pollution became a necessity not just for public health but for political survival as well. The EPA was eventually born. Efforts were made up near Albany, the state capital, to clean up the PCB pollution in the Hudson River caused by General Electric and other sources of pollution were closed down and their aftermath was addressed under what was called the "superfund." Cars were required to have air pollution devices under their hoods...at first just canisters with sponges in them but eventually, with full blown catalytic converters that reduced smog emissions by percentages in the nineties. Regulations were passed and power plants and factories were required to clean up their emissions of pollutants, specifically by removing most of the particulates from their exhaust emissions. And gradually, there was a difference. I remember noticing one day that the bus in front of the one I was in was not spewing smoke. There may well have been smog coming out of its engine, but at least I couldn't see it. Then, in the seventies I realized that I couldn't smell the buses when I was in New York anymore. And California, a state that runs on individualized transportation rather than mass-transit like New York's, imposed its own more stringent regulations and laws on top of the federal ones, and California began to enjoy its air again. Make no mistake about it. We have made enormous strides with regard to pollution in general, all because of law and regulation. But it cost money, and though business and industry passes such costs on to consumers, they eventually forgot about the fact that it had really cost them nothing in the long run to clean it all up, and pollution control became just another cost, like labor and taxes. Now, fifty years after it all began, comes the Republican conservative complex.

Pollution control is just another cost of doing business to them. They do not see that we pay for it in the price of the goods and services we buy, but rather think of it as infringement on the profit making ability of American business: an unnecessary cost, or at least an excessive one, rather than a service they provide at no cost to them. So among their salient political initiatives is the persistent campaign to curtail...sharply...regulations relating to air and water quality in particular. It is so important to them that, even though virtually every economist warns that failure to extend the Social Security tax reduction would have dire effects on our economic recovery, they are willing to attach environmental regulation abatement efforts to the bill that would extend those tax cuts and thus risk its non-passage. I try to fathom their rationale for doing so, but I keep hearing a line from the movie, "Shakespeare in Love." In the film, The Bard is asked how a play not yet written can open the next night, or where the money to put it on will come from and he simply says that it always works out. How, he is asked. And his answer is always the same: "It's a mystery." When I ask myself why the members of the Rcc aren't afraid to die of lung cancer, that's the answer that always comes back: It's a mystery.

The Republican Party is carrying the Rcc banner on this issue, and the crusade to roll back regulation includes everything from bogus financial theories to absolute apocrypha about regulations on dirt roads and industrial fear of future regulations causing business to refrain from hiring new workers. But as I said before, the cost of air and water quality regulations has been built into our consumer prices for scores of years, and abatement of regulation does not yield cost containment for industry, nor will it yield price reductions for consumers or more jobs. It yields only a windfall that gives them something that we have paid for all these years. So my suggestion to the American people is this. When the Republicans ask for our votes so that they can reduce regulation, we should say no...that we would rather have reductions in pollution. And as to the cost, we should tell them that we already gave at the plant.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Once again we come to the impasse at the end of the road and our Congress will be able to build a tenuous bridge to the future only at the eleventh hour. As an electorate, we cannot be expected to react with alarm, or even concern, much less interest anymore. It is now a rule of the game that each party will hold the other's collective foot to the flame, and in the end, the party with the most guile, and unfortunately the strongest will, prevails. I say unfortunate because that is always the Republicans these days, and they get their way despite all indications that we, the American people, oppose what they seek and ultimately find in consequence of the diffidence...the lack of confidence in us...demonstrated by their docile adversaries in the opposing party. The newest appropriations bill's details are still not completely clear, but it will surely be dubbed a compromise even though it will be no such thing. The Democrats resisted for awhile, holding out for a decision on specific measures relating to Social Security withholding reductions and extension of unemployment compensation, but in the end, they blinked in the apparent fear that the Republicans would sway the electorate and make political gains because we Democrats lack the resolve to stand for our fundamental beliefs at the polls. The result is that the Social Security withholding tax holiday has not been renewed though it is scheduled to expire in about two weeks and unemployment compensation has not been extended, so The Congress may well go on vacation before anything gets done about them. The Commodity Futures Trade Commission, part of the Dodd-Frank Act, was not fully funded nor was the IRS funded to begin preparing for the individual mandate under the Affordable Health Care Act. Programs across the full spectrum of government activities, excluding defense, were cut, but various "policy riders" gave the Republicans enough victories on principle to save their wizened, cynical faces with their implacable conservative base. All the Democrats got was that certain more draconian riders were not approved. In other words, it is a compromise because the Republicans got only most of what they wanted.

As to the Social Security tax decrease and unemployment, the Republicans are using their usual tactics: there is a quid pro quo for agreeing to either. The price for the Social Security tax decrease is that the Democrats abandon their attempt to pay for it with a tax on millionaires-- a winning issue with the vast majority of Americans if they had stuck to their position-- and instead the Democrats have to agree to a controversial pipe line running all the way from Canada to Texas across some apparently very sensitive natural environment. What I don't understand about the pipeline is why the oil companies are not just building refineries along the Canadian border rather than running the oil through an enormous pipe over about 1500 miles of the United States: an invitation to all kinds of disasters including terrorism. Doing so would take some of the environmental pressure off the West and Gulf coasts and produce jobs in the mid-west, which is economically devastated. But be that as it may, the Republicans will precipitate an exacerbation of the funding problem in the Social Security Trust fund by preventing a limited tax increase to pay for the extension of the tax holiday despite the fact that when it is convenient they insist on paying for every dollar of new spending, and it appears that they will agree to only a half measure with regard to unemployment because they claim it is too expensive, naturally since they won't agree to increased taxes to fund it.

Aren't you sick of this stuff? I know I am. I thought that the Democrats would finally hold the Republican's feet to the fire until they capitulated rather than alienating a majority of us, but once again, it was only an empty threat. The outcome of every dispute on principle is now etched in stone before anybody even specifies his position. The Republicans will always get their way because the Democrats are afraid of their own shadow, or should I say their own constituents. We tell them in polls that we support their positions, but they don't seem to be willing to rely on that. They are afraid of us voters. Unfortunately, the Republicans always get what they want because they aren't.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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We have all heard of Solyndra, for example, and we have heard from the Republicans that the Obama administration bent over backwards to get approval for the $500 million loan that made the company possible by subordinating the federal government's right to recover loan proceeds to the rights of private investors, who wouldn't go along otherwise. When the company failed and the government lost most of what was lent or guaranteed under an investment program started by the Bush administration, gnarled Republican fingers were pointed and big Republican mouths opened wide to criticize, with Mitch McConnell leading the charge. Perhaps that's fair as Solyndra was a huge start-up company in the field of solar energy, in which China has an enormous, government subsidized advantage over the rest of the world. But without our own government's largess we will never be able to compete in this form of clean energy production, the argument went. Thus, with minimal collateral, Solyndra was born and died at tax payer expense. But the Rcc also criticizes the Obama administration for the failure of private banking to lend to such enterprises. Part of the failure of Obama economic policy is the inability to promote funding for new and small businesses, they claim: a paradoxy. If the government cannot step in to fill the void that the financial industry has left because the risk then falls on the taxpayer, and yet we want to avoid another financial crisis like the one we now suffer because lending ran amok and bad debt ensued right on its metaphorical heels, what is President Obama supposed to do? He's supposed to lose the 2012 election, that's what he's supposed to do, and he looks like he's on course to oblige. Easy credit for Solyndra was the wrong thing, but prudent credit in the banking industry is also wrong: paradoxy. Barrack Obama can't win for losing, as the saying goes.

As to small businesses, they need money to promote job creation, the Rcc claims, even though there seems to be plenty of profit going into corporate coffers at present. Reduced taxes...always reduced taxes...and more lending are required to get job creation going, they say. But banks are leery of unsecured lending since the home mortgage crisis, in which mortgages backed by insufficient equity led to such enormous financial losses for them that taxpayers had to bail them out. They learned a good lesson about reckless lending, and now, unless government gives guarantees-- the Republicans oppose guarantees, if the Solyndra case be considered, because taxpayers are the actual guarantors-- banks won't engage in unsecured lending, and rightly so. They won't, and shouldn't, lend to people with nothing but a good idea or to small businesses that have gotten themselves into such a position that they need money just to survive or they want to expand but have no equity to back what they want to borrow. What's a President to do? Paradoxy.

Then there's taxes. The rich, according to the Republicans, need the money they pay in taxes to create jobs, even though the Bush tax cuts haven't created enough jobs so far. But the middle class doesn't need the Social Security withholding reductions proposed by The President to create demand, they argue, because unemployment didn't go down when we did that in 2011 (not true, incidentally, as I have pointed out in past letters). Results count, apparently, unless they are negative for the Republicans' policies or positive for Democratic ones: paradoxy again. And small business creates most new jobs, the Republicans say, so raising taxes on millionaires will make less money available for small business job creation. But according to Treasury Department statistics-- and to common sense and experience as well-- less than 1% of millionaires are small business proprietors. So, raising taxes on the other 99% of millionaires would result in revenue production from people who are essentially sitting on their money and producing no jobs for anyone, which would address some of the deficit problem created by reducing payroll taxes. And since the deficit is a Republican fixation these days, that should be good, right? Deficit reduction is the holy grail if you're a Republican, right? Apparently not if you are reducing the deficit by taking money from those who don't need it and create nothing, and giving it to ordinary people who do need it and create demand, which in turn creates jobs. It is preferable to allow the Social Security tax holiday to lapse, thus increasing working people's taxes, rather than raising taxes on rich people who produce nothing in order to reduce the deficit. Republican tax reductions good, Democratic tax reductions bad: paradoxy.

I'm going to send this letter to President Obama too. I think this is something that the American voter will understand. Paradoxy: the new conservatism. That's the ticket.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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Yesterday, on Meet the Press, the governor of Iowa was part of the panel discussion of electoral issues, and he demonstrated at every turn that he has only two or three notes to play: regulation impedes job creation, taxation impedes job creation and the deficit impedes job creation. Yet, there is regular reportage in the New York Times and other news outlets about the fact that none of those claims is the case, for example, only 1% of the richest 1% own small businesses and actually create jobs, so taxing the 1% could have only a negligible effect on jobs, if any at all. And recently, much was made over a purported regulation of dust from rural dirt roads, but it was reported on both NPR and in The Times as well as in many other news outlets that no such regulation exists. On NPR, a farmer was interviewed and he expressed his indignation over the supposed regulation, which he apparently believed to exist because some Republican told him it did, though he had no evidence that there was such a regulation and he apparently made no effort to confirm its existence either. And just for the record, Newt Gingrich is just such a Republican.

On November 29 at a town hall meeting in South Carolina, Gingrich characterized EPA officials as a bunch of "left-wingers trying to use the power of the government to reshape the whole economy on their terms," as he spun the tale of this apocryphal agricultural dust regulation, claiming credibility by saying "you can't make these things up..." Obviously you can. I have found that each of the last two presidential administrations have regulated particulate matter in general, an acknowledged health threat, and even saint Ronald Reagan's administration issued such regulations. But EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has publicly stated that not only does the EPA not have any regulations specifically relating to dirt roads, it does not intend to issue any, and I have found none myself. Notably, however, the EPA does publish literature about how to keep dust down on dirt roads, which is deleterious to life even on the farm, a public service that would end if conservatives abolish the EPA, but there is no regulation involved.

This particular red herring started on the floor of The Congress with a Texas Republican representative named John Carter, who claimed that the EPA was about to impose regulations that could result in a fine if you were caught driving home on your own dirt road at night, and the outrage that his canard generated among the gullible and the devious resulted in three bills attempting to curtail the activities of the EPA in general, not just with regard to non-existent regulations relating to dirt roads. That is how it works. Death panels, regulations on dirt roads, cuts to Medicare benefits when in reality the only cuts were to reimbursements to insurance companies under Part C plans, which are optional coverage for seniors, regulations impeding business, taxes preventing job creation...and all the while the Bush tax cuts are still in effect and business is experiencing enormous profits with resultant multi-trillion dollar cash reserves. Even though the Republicans claim that business has no confidence in the future and therefore won't expand, business continues to thrive, and at record levels at that, yet when someone like John Carter launches a Republican campaign based on falsehood right on the floor of Congress, no Democrat stands up and asks Mr. Carter to name the act and cite the proposed or extant regulation by number. It is time the Democrats took the bull@#$* by the horns.

This week, the owners of the West Virginia mine in which 29 miners were killed because of safety violations two years ago agreed to pay $200 million to the bereaved families, but no one has gone to jail yet. And in Wyoming, the EPA announced scientific findings that the chemicals used by gas exploration companies were turning up in the ground water that Wyoming citizens drink...dangerous chemicals. If there were no EPA, there would be no regulations, much less safety research in that industry. And without the federal Mine Safety Health Administration, part of the Department of Labor, Bureaus of Mines in the various states, which regulate the mines as well, would be rubber stamps for the industry that feeds them, and deaths like those in West Virginia would be the rule, not the exception. The notion that the financial industry is suffering because of unjust regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act is just as absurd, especially in light of the fact that much of the bill cannot be implemented because the Republicans are using technical tactics in Congress to prevent it, and business is largely going on as it did in 2008. You remember what that resulted in. Without regulation, business would not just thrive, it would prey on us.

So, the Democrats, our president in particular, have only two choices. They can either go home in 2013, or they can fight Republican misinformation and deceit in the open, and often so that every American has no choice but to hear. I am not much for pursuing political power for its own sake, but pursuing it to prevent people as irresponsible, and frankly, as Machiavellian as the Republicans in Washington, I would welcome almost anything.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In my experience, there are things that count more than effort and ability. There is obsequiousness: the person who puckers up first when the boss walks by usually has an advantage. There is sometimes a sexual component; I suspect that had a lot to do with the rise of Carly Fiorino from secretary through the corporate ranks to CEO as she seems to have been the beneficiary of a patronage system into which she ultimately married. There is office politics, which require of you that you cultivate the friendship of those with power in order to benefit from their largess. There is docility, that is, the willingness to see what is going on and say nothing: the moral flexibility to live with it rather than speaking up. And of course there are the somewhat more palatable facts of life that make success aleatory: being at the right place at the right time, being born to the right parents, having money to start with, and so on. And when you put all of those factors together, you have the reasons why Newt Gingrich's desire to put poor children to work as janitors is so odious. There is first his presumption that the poor-- a euphemism for minority in Gingrich's case-- lack role models in their homes, which entails his inexplicable ignorance of the fact that in many poor households the parents not only go to work every day, they go to work two or three times every day. Then there is the fact that not everyone is blessed with the kind of facile mind-- and I mean facile in both the best and worst senses-- that Gingrich has demonstrated over the course of his sixty eight or so years as a self-promoter. But more important is his willingness to promote the Rcc ethos regarding the availability of success to us all in service of his own quest for riches and power. His willingness to rely on the specious notion that he has something to teach the poor because he has succeeded ignores the venality that has evinced itself during his rise to the top, including his current rise from the ashes of his previous, discredited political career and his failure to understand that what he has done to and with his past wives are not mistakes but moral failures, and that his failure to so understand disqualifies him to pontificate on the subject.

On NPR a couple of days ago, there was a surprising piece in which the reporter played the entirety of Gingrich's rationale for what he said along with the brief thoughts of one of his critics and the more extended, post hoc exculpation by one of his apologists for his purported tendency not to explain what he says. Ignored was the fact that to predicate his thoughts on the experience of his affluent audience, he asked how many of them had earned money for working by the time they were ten by baby sitting or mowing lawns, a barely anyone in the crowd raised his hand. Even with the evidence that his premise was unsupported by the experience of his acolytes in the room, he went on to propound it for their benefit. Regardless of the effort to qualify Gingrich's ill-conceived remarks, that they were ill-conceived shone through because what he said applies to the idle rich as much as it does to the poor who do not have work paradigms to emulate in their homes. Only 1% of the top 1% are small business people according to recent statistics from the Treasury Department. The rest are CEO's, who now earn on average 105% of the wages of their average non-management workers according to NPR, actors, professional athletes, lawyers, doctors, and though they call themselves entrepreneurs, people whose money wasn't earned but was inherited, which brings me to my point. It might do overpaid rappers, has-been wrestlers, the housewives of this city or that who make their livings by feuding over expensive lunches, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton some good to clean a few floors instead of getting paid for finding new excesses to spend their families' money on, getting married and wearing expensive clothes that show off their asses on television.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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The official record reflects one minor ethics violation to which Gingrich pled guilty, though there were originally more than eighty specifications of unethical behavior in the complaint against him. But whether the one violation to which he pled guilty was significant or not, the sanction his colleagues imposed on him was a fine of $300,000, and he was forced to give up the post of Speaker a year later, albeit in the main because his strategy of partisan warfare led to a rout of his party in the mid-term election of 1998. Notably, the vote to accept his plea and the sanction proposed was nearly unanimous with only 28 no votes in a Republican controlled Congress, and some of the no votes were a reflection not of support for Gingrich, but of protest against the modesty of the sanctions imposed. The reason for Newt's plea is something that only he can actually know, although if he had been censured, he would have been removed from the post of Speaker automatically, and it is pretty clear that Newt loves to be the prince. But again notably, by pleading guilty he avoided a public airing of his conduct at a hearing before The Congress, which there was pressure to televise. A year later, he was forced out of the role of Speaker, at which time he resigned his seat having just being re-elected a day earlier. And now, with Gingrich minimizing his violations as technical in nature, which he most likely has convinced himself that they were, Nancy Pelosi, a Democratic former Speaker herself, has threatened to disclose the particulars of Gingrich's ethics violations. Newt says that would violate the rules of the ethics committee; rather than clarify the nature of his alleged misconduct and defend himself, he is coercing someone who threatens to reveal the details. So we are left to guess what he was accused of doing, and in fact whether he did those things, and former Speaker Gingrich prefers that to telling the whole story, suggesting that while running for office, either the details will not serve him well, or he is unwilling to confront reality himself.

Besides his disjunction from reality, there are his positions on many issues that may well determine whom rank and file Republicans nominate for president. He openly advocated for the "cap and trade" system of carbon emission reduction through credits for those who reduced their pollution emissions below those permissible and selling the resulting carbon credits to others but now he denies it. He also espoused a reform of insurance law to require everyone who could afford it to buy health insurance with penalties for those who did not do so even though they could afford it. Now however, he characterizes the Affordable Health Care Act, the very thing that he once advocated, as tyrannical and requiring repeal. And while he diametrically opposes positions he once took on important political and social issues of the day, he accuses his primary competition for the nominations, Mitt Romney, of vacillating for political gain. Hypocrisy, thy name is Newt...or is it self-delusion, thy name is Newt.

Now, Gingrich says his heart goes out to "Herman," as he calls his friend Herman Cain, an oft accused philanderer and solicitor of sexual favors. Perhaps condemning Cain would be too hypocritical for even Newt Gingrich given his own record. Throw in Gingrich's desire for the youthful poor to work as janitors in their schools because they don't have a work ethic while he proposes elimination of the capital gains tax for the children of the idle rich, many of whom never have, and never will work for a living. Then add his preposterous claim that Freddie Mac paid him $1.8 million to be their "historian." And top it all off with his characterization of his marital infidelities, his mistreatment of the women he discards after having affairs with and marrying them, his ethics lapses, none of which he is inclined to explain, and the fact that he did all these things as he was hectoring others for doing the same, and you have a portrait of a man who is either in denial or who is a pathological liar, in either case, not so good for a president.

I, for one, want a president who has some imagination, but Newt Gingrich is ridiculous.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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I have my own catalog of sins for which I will one day have to answer, but my character is not the business of anyone by myself and those affected. Presidential candidates are another story. The character of a president affects not just those within his personal circle of affairs, but all of us, as we have seen graphically demonstrated in the spectacles of the impeachments of two presidents and the trial of one within the past fifty years. But secondly, there is the direction of the nation to consider, as the policies propounded by each administration as well over and above the personal integrity of our president are a product of different elements of the moral fiber of our ultimate leader. Ronald Reagan led us away from the eleemosynary philosophy of FDR, and George W. Bush led us into war with dubious motives at the cost of thousands of American, and tens of thousands of other, lives as well as resources spent on destruction rather than sustenance of those in need. Hedonism, megalomania, paranoia, peccancy, venality, cupidity, vanity...all the sesquepedalian flaws to which presidents are err change the political destiny of the nation, and are thus relevant in considering for whom to vote. And with the Republican field, the potential danger of such unenviable qualities changing our direction for the worse is profound.

Newt Gingrich is a narcissistic pedant who uses his ability to quote from sometimes obscure historic tracts to confirm his own thoughts as if the fact that someone famous said something once means that it is true when Newt says it now: a form of pedantry that is particularly dangerous given the many old ideas that are not so valid today and sometimes never were. He recently professed the belief that child labor laws should be abolished so that poor children can learn to work as janitors, and just before Christmas in 1994 he expressed the Dickensian belief that the children of the poor should be in orphanages rather than on welfare. Add to that Gingrich's condemnation of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) after he was on their dole to the tune of over a million dollars just a few years ago under the pretext of being their "historian," and his condemnation of the previous Speaker of the House for a sweetheart book deal followed by his own censure at the hands of a Republican congress for the inflated payment of a patron for the right to publish a dubious book written by Gingrich, resulting in the loss of his standing within the party and his Speakership as well, and he looks more and more like the poster boy for moral turpitude. Then there is his campaign for Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying about an extramarital affair while Gingrich himself was carrying on such an affair.

And Gingrich's hypocrisy on marital morality, he being several times married and only once faithful, if that, is matched by that of Herman Cain, who would have us, and his wife as well, believe that the Democratic Party, which would love to see Cain win the nomination, has engineered the allegations of misogyny, molestation and infidelity of five different women out of fear of the cogency of his ideas: a less than credible defense from a man who apparently doesn't know that there was a war in Libya recently and who feels that the joblessness of the unemployed is their own fault...all 14 million of them. And then there is the venerable Mitt Romney. He apparently does respect marriage vows, and he cleaves to his faith for spiritual guidance...that is when it is not politically expedient of course. He had an idea that took Massachusetts in the right direction regarding getting health insurance for the uninsured when he was governor of that state, but apparently that plan is no longer a good idea since it turned out that so many conservatives don't like it. Add to the list of Romney's ambivalences abortion law and immigration policy, on which he apparently is conservative because he is "running for office, for God's sake," and it is hard to pin his morality down at all. Waiting until he is elected to find out seems an imprudent course of action.

All in all, the Republican field reflects badly on the national character in my estimation. It is like a parade of people in Mardi-Gras attire pretending to be what they are not so that they can ride the float to the White House. And since that is the case, we should probably encourage the Republicans to include Ebenezer Scrooge on their primary ballots. That way, when they nominate a candidate and he loses, we can credibly say to the world, it was just a nightmare; it's over now.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

However, in the months after January 1, 2011, unemployment did decline, albeit very slowly, until April when speculation in the oil futures markets began to drive up gasoline prices-- which consume about 10% of the average American's budget-- at which point unemployment went back up. So, the tax relief we got as of the first of the year worked until the Republicans' "free market" began to work on petroleum futures, nullifying the tax break and even going further by transferring some of the income of the average working family into the pockets of speculative investors. That was at about the time that the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, so the speculators leapt upon the opportunity to claim that a shortage of oil was possible and they began buying oil futures to hold for sale at that projected time of scarcity. Oil future prices went up and gasoline prices skyrocketed, but the shortage never came, and when the resulting downward pressure on prices began, prices did fall, but not nearly to the point at which they had been prior to the phantom crisis of supply, so the profiteers continued to take from us all. Of course, the Republicans in Congress ignore all of the market manipulation and the havoc it wreaked and continues to wreak on consumer spending in other areas, thus nullifying the gains that might have been made as a result of more take home pay for us all. Instead, they are trying to sabotage the renewal and extension of the tax decrease by claiming that the miniscule increase in millionaires' taxes needed to keep the Social Security Trust Fund in tact will prevent job creation, a myth as demonstrated by the past eleven years of the Bush tax cuts, which have yielded virtually nothing in the way of new jobs.

But the real reason for their resistance to a tax cut for us rather than the rich is not that it won't work. Actually they are afraid that if the payroll tax reduction is extended, and even expanded, the economy will react again as it did for the first three months of 2011, only this time in an election year. Barrack Obama will look pretty good in that case: more money in people's pockets, more jobs coming every month, consumer spending rising along with consumer confidence, and maybe even a bottom to the housing market collapse with a tick or two upward. And if that happens, all of the partisan machinations that have inflicted this protracted economic tribulation on us all will have been for naught. In fact, at that point, the vast majority of Americans would likely see it all for what it was: the quest for a return to power no matter whom it hurt. So they have had to come up with a way to prevent the tax cut from working. Enter Mitch McConnell.

The Republican alternative to the Democratic plan is to pay for the reduction by freezing federal employee wages for three years and cutting the federal payroll by 10%, and by cutting Medicare and unemployment benefits with means testing. The latter two provisions are just back door spending cuts at the expense of those who can least afford them in furtherance of the Republican effort to erode the social safety net out of existence: an ancillary benefit for them at the expense of the rest of us. But the reduction in the federal work force and the freeze in the wages of the 90% remaining translates directly into a loss of consumer spending power at least equal to the gain that the payroll tax cut represents, and you can immediately see how that will work. Their plan would nullify the payroll tax cut, after which they would say to the Democrats, you see, we told you so. And with that they would claim that only they can save our economy, which they will do by ceasing to sabotage it.

The only question now is whether the Democrats have learned anything about how to join the battle with the Republicans for the hearts and minds of the American people, and frankly, if the supposedly liberal media don't do a better job of getting out what ever message the Democrats seek to send, the Republicans may succeed again in sacrificing us all to the benefit of their wealthy patrons, and indirectly themselves. So, I'm sending a copy of today's letter to you to President Obama as well. I hope he will have the fortitude to explain all of this to America at large, and that the Democratic leaders in Congress will do the same, because frankly, I don't know how many more times we liberals can suck on the fuzzy end of the stick and survive.

Your friend,

Mike