February 2012 Archives

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As the Santorum candidacy becomes more prominent in the Republican nomination process, Santorum's true nature becomes more apparent.  I saw him interviewed months before the campaign and the debates began and frankly, I thought he was just another reactionary who was barely one step away from joining a posse comitatus.  The issue being discussed by a panel on that occasion was abortion and his anti-abortion fervor was on public display.  My thought at that moment was that he was only one more zealot for right wing absolutism spouting his belief that life begins at conception without considering the flexibility that modern life not only allows but requires.  The rights of the woman involved never entered into his thinking, nor did the circumstances under which the pregnancy being terminated came to be merit consideration, at least not on that occasion.  He was fixated on what the main stream considers an inchoate life incapable of sustaining itself outside the womb, and thus without rights that exceed those of the possessor of that womb.  No one who has ever been exposed to abortion either directly or indirectly advocates it.  But most of us consider the right to have one to be synonymous with the freedom of women in general.  It would be one thing if the decision to have an abortion were one that can be made frivolously.  But abortion is unpleasant and painful on every level.  It is a remedy for a problem that people elect out of necessity as they see it, and even so it is not a solution that anyone relishes opting for.  And it is not available in cases in which timely action is not taken and the argument that Santorum and his ilk cleave to might actually have some merit.  That is the law everywhere in this country and it was two hundred years in the contemplation and deciding.  As long as Santorum was just a guest on a conservative's talk show, he was entitled to his opinion, but now he is a potential president.

His new found prominence in American politics has emboldened Rick Santorum to let his true colors fly, and I wrote to you about my fear as to what might eventuate if he were to succeed in his quest for our highest office.  It seemed only a remote possibility at that time, so I saw no need to dwell on it.  But now that Santorum has confessed that John F. Kennedy's statement that the separation of church and state is absolute under The Constitution makes him throw up, I must say I am agitated to the point of throwing up myself.  The principle of separation of church and state was not only stated absolutely in our seminal political document, it was of the two guarantees of liberty in the very first statement of absolute right made in that document.  All of the text of The Constitution preceding the bill of rights defines and circumscribes the powers of governments both state and federal and of the organs of the federal government.  But the first ten amendments to The Constitution--The Bill of Rights--is a mandate for not just our government but for those of us who are ruled by it.  It is not the privilege of anyone to foist his religion on others, and advocating for religious primacy is as much a cardinal sin under our system of government as it is to tell someone that he may not hold or express his opinion.  So Santorum's statement that he is effectively appalled by insistence on the freedom of the American people from mandatory religious doctrine demonstrates not only that he is outside the mainstream of American thought, but that he doesn't understand the very foundation of our free nation.  Our nation is built on the notion that no one person's religion can be thrust upon another, and that the government least of all may do so.  But Rick Santorum wants the American people to give the power of the executive branch to a man who apparently does not subscribe to that national axiom that is a first principle on which our national character is based.  And since he has admitted that such is the case...that he does not respect freedom of religion as an immutable American right that includes the right not to have one as well as the right not to share the religion of any elected official...Rick Santorum as a candidate for our highest office is a threat to not just the law that has evolved from the application of our constitution to our governance, but to the fundamental rights that it embodies.  Rick Santorum is a dangerous man.

As I consider historical analogs to his rise to prominence, I recoil at some that seem obvious to me.  But one who frivolously ascribes to anyone the vile tendencies of men like Hitler, Stalin and Torquemada, the original Grand Inquisitor of Spain, fails to understand what harm autocrats can do, and how nearly immune to eradication such a scourge can be.  Yet there is a rising tide in this country, and when men like Rick Santorum become tolerable to the electorate that will determine our fate for the next four years, we are all in jeopardy, not of living in a country in which we are outside the mainstream, but of living in one in which being outside the mainstream is no longer tolerated.  Rick Santorum is not a trivial threat to American freedom.  He is its embodiment.  So, while I hesitate to compare him to those people in history who have taken such a toll on humanity,  I can't help but fear that he may one day be a serious threat to our way of life.

The issue before us is not abortion, but the right to have one.  It is not the value of religion in our society, it is the right to be a member of society without one.  It is not the moral certitude with which Santorum pronounces what he thinks should be our creed.  It is the fact that he thinks it is appropriate for one who seeks to govern to think he should make such prescriptions.  I hope no one takes the threat of a Santorum presidency lightly.  It may be only a remote possibility, but it is an ominous one.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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I have come to conclude, after reading countless opinions both expert and lay about our economy and politics in general, that there are two pervasive dysfunctions that impair our thinking both collectively and as individuals.  The first is reliance on myth.  There are certain myths that have become articles of faith in this country...that is, we believe them as axioms rather than as assumptions or presumptions.  For example, there is the notion of American Exceptionalism.  You don't need me to give you an exegesis on the term, which has become a shibboleth in the neoconservative movement in this country, neoconservative being something of an oxymoron in that those who characterize themselves as such stand for the proposition that we should return to an earlier time for our values...there's nothing "neo-" about that.  In fact, American Exceptionalism as a concept probably needs no explanation anywhere in the world.  It is synonymous with American pride in this country, and with American conceit when you go abroad, but everyone knows what you mean when you say it.  It is the abiding belief that the United States of America is a special nation with cognate rights and privileges.  We smile and puff out our chests when we think about it, but people elsewhere shake their fists and burn us in effigy for it, which is my point.  Our unchallenged belief in what we think is best not just for ourselves but for everyone else leads to policies domestic and foreign that should be challenged, or at least analyzed honestly before becoming the basis for our actions as a nation.  And to our credit as a people, more and more people are engaging in such analysis, but there is still an enormous portion--possibly even a majority--of the American people who never bother to question the notion that if we see a foreign nation operating in a way that we don't think appropriate, it is our right to invade and "correct" the problem, which provides the nexus to the second pervasive dysfunction in our thinking: dogmatism.

Since Ronald Reagan, supply-side thinking has been in vogue among our economists.  The idea that you create prosperity when you give direct largess to the creators of goods and the providers of services rather than inducing them to do so by stimulating demand, has become de rigueur in economics, so much so that it has also become unchallengeable in some respects, even among those to whom common sense dictates that encouraging production of something for which there is no demand makes no sense and is even inimical to financial success.  Yet, even President Obama thinks that if we give business even more money than they already have, and they are sitting on an amount that is somewhere between ten and fifteen percent or our total gross domestic product as it is, we can stimulate "growth" with the higher production that such largess theoretically will induce, substituting that supply for demand as a stimulus...demand for products that are already sitting on the shelves too long because we cannot afford them as individuals.  What these myths and dogmas have led to is the notion that if we just leave business to its own devices...dispense with regulation, reduce taxes, ignore monopolistic tendencies...business will propel our nation, and all of us as individuals, to new heights of prosperity and happiness: the free market myth coupled with supply side dogma about letting business be business, if I can coin a phrase.  But there are two phenomena in our current events that demonstrate that no such thing is the case.

The first, and the more urgent is the sudden shortage of certain medicines, a cancer fighting drug for children among them.  As it turns out, when patents expired on these drugs and generic manufacturing became legal, the profit margin supposedly went down sufficiently that the companies that manufacture the drugs decided not to do so any more.  The consequence is that we are now importing some of those drugs from foreign manufacturers, which apparently have found a way to profit from their manufacture...or do it out of compassion and public spiritedness.  You can't rely on such things in the business and industry of exceptional America.  As a consequence, some people may die, but profits--already at record levels in many companies--have been preserved and the few will die for the prosperity of the many, presuming that it will trickle down on us.  But if that is the consequence of neoconservative thinking, is that who we want to be as a nation?  And that is where the second phenomenon in the news comes in, because even if we are willing to live with the odious moral system that equates a few lives with profit, probably for only another few, there is the price of gasoline to consider in that, while it is a function of high profit, it harms all of us financially.  It doesn't just kill a few unfortunate children.  Morality aside, and that seems to be alright with the neoconservatives...the idea that the oil companies are selling gasoline abroad while telling us that the price is going up because of limited domestic supply should at least get the supply-siders to think a little about what they are selling.  If our economy suffers in consequence of the profit motive superseding the growth of the economy--and hence the national interest, not to mention the greater good--then supply-side economics is the economics of self-destruction.  Here we are as a nation conserving energy, increasing supply by leasing more land to the oil companies for production, augmenting the supply and technology of alternative fuels, and even increasing domestic production of oil to levels not seen in eight years despite the oil-favorable policies of George W. "oilman" Bush--an energy policy that includes everything that supply-siders advocate--and we are still getting raked over the coals by the petroleum industry.  And now, our supposedly Keynesian president even wants to give them a supply-side tax rate reduction.

I think that if we are going to be guided by dogma, we should try to pick the right one.  And as to myth, I think we need a new one.  The free market myth isn't serving us very well right now.  Maybe we need more tooth fairies.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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The President has just announced his newest proposal to stimulate the economy: a reduction in the corporate income tax to 28%...25% for manufacturers.  Just when it seemed he was returning to his progressive principles he now reverts to his "pragmatic" self...you know, the one who hires bankers as his chief of staff and gives everything to get nothing in the name of compromise.  Business, already awash in cash, doesn't need any more help.  Those of us who have lost our jobs to outsourcing do.  I heard a report on NPR's All Things Considered on Wednesday in which an expert on the petroleum industry--and I mean an expert on investing in it, not an expert critic--gave several reasons for the increase in the price of gasoline.  He cited the current policy of the majority of western nations regarding Iran and sanctions against it to curtail its nuclear weapon plans.  He talked about supply fears, which we have discussed in the past.  He talked about the closing down of refineries in this country by the big oil countries because they were out of date and no longer profitable, which I find hard to believe given the price of gasoline today, which diminishes the supply in America by 700,000 gallons a day.  But at the end of his assessment he made this revelation: our oil companies are exporting gasoline because they can get more for it abroad.  Just to make my point clear, they are exporting gasoline while raising the price here because of a purported shortage while they are reducing their production capacity and the gasoline consumption of the American public is declining rather than increasing, and has been for more than a year.  In other words, we, the people, have done everything right, but the price is still going up because of the fact that more money can be made abroad now that we have done those right things.  And the oil companies are going to get their taxes lowered as a reward.  Supposedly the quid pro quo for the lower rate is elimination of corporate loopholes and tax breaks, but that all is subject to the legislative process, and you know what that means.

Then there is Apple.  Not only do they make most of their products with foreign labor, they stand by while that labor is treated in ways that have been against the law in this country in some cases for a hundred years.  They have become one of the biggest corporations in the world, if not the biggest, by cutting corners of not just a business nature but of a moral one as well.  And they are going to get their taxes reduced too.  Incidentally, Bloomberg's weekly magazine reported in an article about CEO's this week that Apple's new CEO makes $189,000 per hour, which begs the question, how can a moral man accept such compensation when he is making it on account of children working in factories and living in dormitories in China.  And how about Calloway...you know, the company that makes the golf clubs that Apple's CEO plays with during meetings...on the golf course.  They have just closed a golf ball manufacturing plant in Worcester, Massachusetts so that they can open a plant doing the same work in Mexico.  They are going to get their taxes cut too.

I want to be clear about this: I am still going to vote for Mr. Obama.  The alternative candidates would not only give these companies tax breaks, they would give them to the $189,000 per hour CEO's as well.  I can't see how anyone would vote Republican, but whether they will or not, I won't.  However, I can't just sit silent while The President waffles on what seem to me to be clear moral issues...not like Rick Santorum's claim that life begins at conception or Newt Gingrich's conversion to religious faith from marital faithlessness, but moral issues that change millions of lives.  So far The President's tendency toward apostasy has come and gone with the political tide, but more and more he shows himself to be unreliable as the bearer of the nation's liberal political standard, and thus the mantle of leader of the Democratic Party.  I concede that this newest initiative is most likely an attempt to beat the Republicans at their own game...to ask for something that they can't possibly oppose and convince the rest of us that it is good for us in the name of further progress on other issues.  It may even be a shrewd tactic since the likelihood that The Congress can pass something between now and, oh say doomsday, is fairly remote.  But as the old saying goes, there is still the principle of the thing.  He managed to outmaneuver the Republicans on the Social Security tax abatement, though it cost some federal workers some of their pension benefits.  Unemployment benefits will be extended, and the issue of taxing the 1% a little more so that the elderly can have health care at a reasonable cost keeps bouncing off  the political wall to the detriment of the GOP and to the benefit of the rest of us and the nation as a whole.  But it would be nice if someday the Democratic Party took the true political bent of its constituency to heart and thre

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So I say this to our Democratic President and his party.  Be the pragmatists now and win the next election by what means you must.  But remember why we sent you to Washington.  At some point that has to be your goal rather than just coming back to power.  At some point we need a Roosevelt to vie for the prize.  We've had enough Clinton's whose hearts may be in the right place and do get some good things done, but who, in the end, are more interested in winning the race.

Your friend,

Mike

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As a nation, we seem to be turning an economic corner and heading in the right direction.  But the distortion of capitalist principles that caused us to stumble has not been addressed.  According to Sunday's New York Times, investors are still plowing billions of dollars into "derivatives" of one kind or another, and surprisingly, some hedge fund managers--and hedge funds in themselves are a perversion of capitalist fundamental principles--have dived back into the mortgage derivatives market.  They may be pursuing different strategies, but the practical fact is that for every derivative bought one has to be written by someone who is effectively taking the bet of the purchaser.  That  leads ineluctably to the daunting realization that if the vast majority of a certain kind of bet have to be paid off because the economy does this or the mortgage market does that, the money to do so has to come from somewhere.  Last time, it came from us, the taxpayers.  We are still paying for AIG, which wrote billions-of-dollars-worth of a certain kind of derivative, the credit default swap, for the purpose of indemnifying...insuring against losses...thousands of rich people who were gambling on the ability of most mortgagors to pay their loans, and lost.  And when AIG announced that it couldn't pay, the financial markets in general all shuddered and the capitalists at The Fed stepped in to make them more or less whole on our dime.  We are headed for the same kind of catastrophe it seems, but no one is doing anything about the perverse practice of betting on the economy to the tune of billions of dollars that someone either rakes out of the economy in winnings--thus stunting the economy's continuing growth by diminishing the amount of capital that consumers have put into it--or loses, which also results in a decline in available resources for capital investment, and we lose again.  Outside of regulating that market, even the Dodd-Frank bill did little to protect us from the next debacle, but right now, a different kind of derivative is on my mind.

I heard on the news Monday night that something like $11 billion has been injected into the petroleum futures market in recent weeks in anticipation of inflating prices per barrel caused by fear.  That purported fear...the fear of Iranian belligerency closing the Straits of Hormuz or aliens coming and drinking all the oil, as I mentioned recently...drives the price ever up because people buy oil futures on the assumption that...well, fear will drive the price ever up.  Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The result is that along with the price per barrel of oil, the price of gasoline and the price of heating oil increase, as do the cost of plastics, chemicals, solvents and the like...all for fear that something will happen or that something else won't, and disproportionately to the consequences of those feared events in the bargain.  As a result, there is less money for consumers to spend on other things, less needs to be manufactured, people get laid off and what is now a positive trend gets reversed.  So, how do we prevent contrived fear from reversing the forward course of our economy?  Well, the answer in part is what we did last time this happened: release oil that we have stored for a rainy day.  It's raining.

You may recall that about nine months ago, The President released 25 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), and many of the oil consuming nations did likewise to the tune of 100 million barrels total.  True, other things occurred: Libya got resolved and oil started flowing from that country again, but the sudden glut of oil caused by current events and the curtailed use of petroleum products by consumers who were weary of being overcharged, enhanced by the release from the SPR, led to steady declines in the price of oil and those things produced from it, and we actually got down to near $3 a gallon for gasoline...still too much but far better than $4.  This time, while the Iranian problem may well go on for some time, we are now producing more of our own oil than we have in years: over 50% of our needs are filled domestically.  And alternative sources of fuel are being developed more and more rapidly.  Natural gas is cheap, and thus electricity prices have come down, so a little bit of increased pressure on the price of petroleum should do a lot of good.  Why not release some more petroleum from the SPR?  Here's why.  Bloomberg Business Week reported on Monday that the Republicans in The Senate have introduced a bill that would tie release of oil from the SPR to approval by The Department of State of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is now being delayed--by the Department of State, not The President mind you--because the route it would take across Nebraska would bring it through an area that has an important fresh water aquifer beneath it.  The Canadian company building the pipeline is already preparing a new application with a different route that will meet environment concerns, but the Republicans don't want to talk about the fact that even the Canadians are preparing to, though they have not yet, addressed the problem in an amended application for approval.  So it seems that their motive is something other than creating jobs since the prospect of those jobs has not disappeared, but has only been delayed until after the next election.  What could it be?

Sometimes things are what they appear to be.  In this case, the increasing price of petroleum products, gasoline in particular, has already been prescribed by Speaker of The House John Boehner as the basis for a strategy against The President's re-election.  They want to blame Barrack Obama for these exorbitant prices--how they expect to be believed I don't know--and they will use any rationale to make their point.  They are going to claim that declines in exploration and drilling permit approvals by the administration after the BP spill didn't just "kill jobs," they also diminished the supply of domestic oil...that even though it takes from five to fifteen years to get oil out of the ground or from under the ocean after a permit is granted.  And then they are going to say that that reduced oil supply sometime a decade from now is the cause of high gasoline prices today.  So, their strategy is to parlay inflated gasoline prices, which will slow the economic recovery, on The President instead of speculators, and thus blame him for the slow pace of the recovery that they are doing their best to impede by preventing him from taking action in The Senate.  It's all too familiar, isn't it America?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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The President submitted his annual budget to Congress this week, and as usual it immediately became the object of the scorn of the opposing party.  Since 1921, The President has been required by statute to submit such a document to Congress in January of each year, though in political times like these it is an act of folly in light of the fact that it has nothing to do with what will be appropriated or spent by Congress.  It is in reality a political document that lays out for the American people what the party of The President has set as its social and political priorities and imperatives, and thus is the starting point for the political debate of any given year.  That is important in a year like this one in which the next president, all congressmen and one third of all senators will be elected or reelected.  I would guess that it is no surprise to you that the debate is not characterized by intellectual integrity, nor is it without casuistry or outright misrepresentation.  And I would also guess that no one is surprised by the fact that the Republican Party seems to be leading with deceptive calumny rather than legitimate criticism.  It always amazes me when they assume that no one will notice that they criticize the Democrats for things about which they have recently taken credit or eschewed responsibility.  For example, they argue that President Obama's claim of reducing the budget deficit by the cost of prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next ten years is an accounting trick since the wars were going to end anyway, but they expect that no one will point out that they blamed The President for the part of the federal deficit caused by those wars even though they were already going on when he took office, but give him no credit though he is the one in office now at the time of their end.  And while The President's budget makes reductions in defense spending, The Republicans claim that he cannot claim such to be deficit reductions as the budget/debt ceiling deal reached last August required $500 billion in cost cuts anyway...this despite the fact that they had no intention of letting those cuts take place; they openly contemplated changes in law to repeal that aspect of the bill passed to increase the debt ceiling.  Of course, the revenue enhancements proposed by Mr. Obama are characterized as "job killers" even though they affect only those who create no jobs and yet rake in most of the income in this country.  Suffice it to say that The President's annual budget is the target at which every politician of the opposing party aims for the coming year, and in this year in particular, that every politician either campaigns against or for.  So the real question is in the analysis of the budget not for the numbers proposed, but for the philosophy behind it and the identities of those whom it benefits.  No surprises there either.

But the budget is just one element of a Republican campaign for the presidency and renewed control of The House of Representatives.  Paul Ryan, appearing on Meet the Press yesterday, characterized the budget as a lack of leadership because of putative accounting ploys that made it seem to reduce the deficit more than it actually did.  He complained about the revenue--that is the tax increases on the wealthiest Americans--that are part of President Obama's plan for the fiscal future and he criticized the proportions of spending reductions as well as continuing economic growth programs, but he also raised the issue of The President's contra tempt with regard to mandatory free birth control as it relates to church affiliated institutions.  Note that there was never a mandate that the Catholic Church--which opposes contraception as a matter of religious doctrine--provide birth control to its employees.  Rather, the Affordable Care Act was deemed by The President to require institutions run by the Catholic Church--for example schools and hospitals, which have many non-Catholic employees who may well want the free contraceptives that those who work for other employers are entitled to--to provide insurance that includes free contraceptives to their employees just as other employers must.  And though the issue of religious freedom and the first amendment may or may not have been implicated in the end, The White House modified its position to require all insurers to provide free contraceptives with all their mandated health insurance plans, thus relieving the church itself of the moral conundrum that obeying the law would have represented.  Then there was the price of gasoline, which is now twice what it was when this administration began.  John Boehner is counseling his minions to pounce on President Obama, rather than the avaricious few who manipulate the price, for the price gouging caused by an increase of over 30% in the cost of crude oil since September...an increase that is justified by nothing but claims of fear: fear that Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz or that aliens may land and drink it all.  Of course, they are crying crocodile tears on that one as they agreed to the Social Security tax abatement only because they could get the offsetting effect of high gas prices in the economy to thwart the economic benefit of the tax cut for ordinary working Americans...forty dollars more in the pocket per pay check going out just as fast as it came in as a reward to speculators and hoarders of petroleum products, leaving a decreased net gain for the economy.  And of course they are complaining about the effect of the tax cut on the Social Security program itself.  Apparently it doesn't matter to them that current law created a $2 trillion surplus that the government has cadged for its own uses and is only being asked to repay a small part of in consequence of this tax cut.

I'd like to think that the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) was capable of some new ideas, but...  Well, maybe in four years.

Your friend,

Mike

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Once again, Social Security has become the object of Republican fantasy about the national debt and the yearly federal deficit.  The payroll tax cut has now been effectively extended until the end of this year without a fight over how to "pay" for it--largely, I suspect, because the Republicans are getting their wish for something to interdict the salubrious effects of the tax cut and thus diminish the prospect of a Democratic gain in November in the form of windfall oil profits and speculation in the oil market--but they have continued to peddle the tendentious notion that we are borrowing from our children's future.  Rand Paul, the Tea Party senator from Kentucky, led the chorus the day after it was announced by John Boehner that The House Republicans had acquiesced without holding the cut hostage for some actual "job killing" provision to pay for it.  He said that it was the worst day in the history of Social Security since its creation in 1935.  But the reality is different, and I must admit that when the first abatement of Social Security tax payments was announced, I too was against it because of my fixation on the solvency of the program.  But what I have realized over time is that the solvency of the program is not really in jeopardy.  Social Security has over $2 trillion in the bank.  How can a program with that kind of surplus be in any kind of trouble.

But Rand Paul has a habit of spewing any fool notion that comes to his little mind without consideration of anything but his libertarian presuppositions to back it up.  For example, he thinks that the federal regulation of light bulbs--and much of our energy use is a function of illumination of our consumer entities like stores and recreational facilities as well as our homes--is an infringement on his liberty...presumably his liberty to contribute to the destruction of our economy by eschewing conservation on the national level and thus enhancing our dependency on foreign oil.  He thinks that low flow toilets are clogging the sewage flow from his home, and that we should thus make no use of the changes in "toilet technology" that have allowed for reduced water use, and thus reduced sewage disposal volumes and so forth.  But while those foolish thoughts are little more than quaint ravings from a bumptious buffoon with a bad toupee, his ravings about Social Security are potentially harmful because they give credence to a conservative canard that could swing an election.  And my reason for characterizing his point as foolish is best explained with an analogy.

Say you have a 401(k) with $2 million in it, and that you are no longer paying into it because you have suffered a decrease in earnings.  Say you are concomitantly unable to pay your mortgage or buy the things your family needs for sustenance at the moment.  You've got thirty years until you retire, but the bank is going to foreclose next month because you have missed a couple of monthly payments.  Do you insist on preserving your $2 million in savings or do you use some to save your home and tide you over until you can get your income back to where it was.  That is precisely the question we, as a nation, are facing with regard to Social Security, though on an obviously grander scale.  It will harm no one for us to spend down our retirement surplus now to save assets and provide our sustenance for this interim period between the economic adequacy of the last two decades and the return to prosperity that is now in the offing for the foreseeable, and perhaps even near-term future.  And as a bonus for doing so we will reduce the national debt by requiring the general fund of the federal government to pay down some of the debt it owes us Social Security participants.  Of course, no one ever talks about that fact: the federal government has to pay into the system now because Social Security isn't collecting as much as it pays out right now, but it is only paying money it has borrowed from us in the first place.  If the national debt is a problem as the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) says it is, to quote the patrician Martha Stewart, "it's a good thing."

Granted, we must make some adjustments to the Social Security program in order to ensure that we do not deplete our surplus to unsafe levels and that we can maintain that surplus with the cost-to-benefit ratio that will ultimately have to be established.  And make no mistake about it, it must be done sooner rather than later.  But it doesn't have to be done right now...now when we need some ready cash to tide us over, and that is what disturbs me about politicians like Rand Paul; they are willing to use Social Security as a political ploy, but it is too important to be trivialized by such a use.  That is why when Republicans call Social Security an "entitlement program" I feel the need to point out that it is no such thing.  The fact that the federal government administers the program doesn't make it an entitlement.  It is not something that someone else is giving us.  It is something that we have paid for and continue to pay for, and we are just getting from it what we are due in consequence of our and our progeny's contributions...and it is something that the next generation will get for the same reasons.  It is not a form of welfare or a dole intended to accomplish a desirable social effect.  It is the original safety net, and it was required of us for our own good by a benevolent government.  It was not given to us by anyone.

The income level at which Social Security contributions end is too low.  It is determined formulaically by statutory mandate, but the formula must be changed.  In order to sustain our economic progress, we need tax abatement at the lower levels because that money goes directly into our economy in the form of consumption, and that is something we need long-term, not just today.  But those at higher levels of income can afford to pay more without significantly impacting their lifestyles, and that is what the revised formula should take into account.  The tax levy for Social Security is the same for all of us in terms of percentage of eligible earnings, but just as a graduated system is more equitable than a single rate for income taxation, it is more equitable for Social Security financing as well.  And as for the eligibility of the rich when they retire, I do not agree that they should pay for the benefit and then not receive it.  But when those eligible have other income that allows them to live above a certain level of comfort--say five times the national poverty standard--they should have to wait longer to receive their benefits...not forever, but longer.  With just these two changes, we can restore Social Security to balance without any significant hardship for anyone, so that's what I think we should do...just not right now.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

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Rick Santorum made the Sunday morning current events rounds with ABC's This Week and NBC's Meet the Press, and he was really quite effective.  Once you set aside his fundamentalist zeal and the jeopardy it puts the rest of our liberties at, the reasons for his recent electoral success are clear.  He speaks with the calm demeanor of a rational man, and that puts him ahead of the slick Mitt Romney and the pedantic Newt Gingrich by a mile.  As to Ron Paul, it appears that the tree hasn't fallen far from the apple, Senator Rand Paul.  I don't believe that we are yet ready for a president from the libertarian fringe.  So of the three viable Republican candidates, and there were only two a week ago, Santorum has the demeanor to beat.  Yet, there is still something that will keep him from being the Republican nominee.  His problem is what he says, not how he says it.  And the specific areas in which he will disqualify himself are the economy, foreign policy and abortion rights...not necessarily in that order.

Starting with the last, he is sternly anti-choice, and I use the phrase anti-choice instead of pro-life with purpose.  If he were just pro-life--that is if he just wanted to curb premarital sex and illegitimate births and he only wanted to defund programs that provided contraceptives and abortions, he could remain in the main stream on at least that issue.  But I have heard him argue that life begins at conception.  That means that all abortions must be banned for him to be satisfied, and we have come too far on the road to freedom of choice for women with regard to the reproductive use of their bodies to go back now.  Despite conservative fulminations to the contrary, there will never be a political reversal of Roe vs. Wade, and abortion for at least the first term of a woman's pregnancy will persist for the foreseeable future, and the second term right will most likely last just as long.  There will be no constitutional amendment, and the Supreme Court will not reverse that decision for fear that without their determination that abortions are legal, there will be a statutory right, and then they will have to decide many other tangential issues: when does life begin, do women have a property right in their bodies that is beyond the reach of the law, is abortion the termination of a life or simply the decoupling of one life from another, and on and on.  And the majority of the American people do not want to go back to the days when countable numbers of women, especially young women, were murdered in dirty back rooms by people who were not qualified to perform the abortion procedure.  As a nation, and more particularly as a people, we are nearly forty years older now, and we know that what Roe vs. Wade accomplished was the arbitration of an issue in favor of people who could express their pain and the pain of others as well.  The line had to be drawn, and no one will erase it for fear that they will have to be part of redrawing it.  As to contraception, Santorum says he opposes it as a Catholic, but he does not claim the right to deny it to others...yet.  But if he would campaign for a reversal of Roe vs. Wade, he would campaign for a reversal of the case of Griswold vs. Connecticut, which was literally was about a doctor and Planned Parenthood counseling about contraceptives, but in the annals of the law it represents a "right to privacy" that is fundamental to both the availability of contraceptives and that of abortions as well.  That is why it would ultimately be of interest to Santorum, and once the American people realize what reversal of Griswold would mean for them, including the end of reproductive freedom for women--and someone will likely bring that up between now and the day after election day, the time depending on how much more success Santorum has and when--they will balk at supporting not just him but the retreat from certain civil liberties that his incumbency would represent.

When it comes to foreign policy, the electorate knows very little about his beliefs, but that won't remain the case if his popularity grows and he becomes a force to reckon with in the nomination process.  He is a classic hawk, and a believer in the "Bush Doctrine," essentially the notion that the United States has the right to act preemptively to prevent terrorist attacks by pursuing not just terrorists and their organizations, but the nations that tolerate and abide them.  That is how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...Afghanistan in particular...were justified, and that is how we came to spend over a trillion dollars in the two countries and to expend close to 10,000 lives over the course of more than a decade in order to achieve what today, even in the light of retrospect, are at best dubious gains in our security.  Extending the duration of that strategy--implementing a "Santorum Doctrine" in effect--will be a tough sell.  And a return to the arrogance of a foreign policy based on the premise of what the neo-conservative movement euphemistically calls "American Exceptionalism" would be a return to what the rest of the world calls American imperialism.  We can no longer raise a high hand to the world and expect it to be taken as a felicitation.  That was the symbolic message behind Barrack Obama's Nobel Prize, and that is the message that even the terrorist networks of the world harp on. 

As to economic policy, Santorum will offer more of the same as the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has commended to us: lower taxes for those who own capital, lower wages for those who provide labor and reliance on cheap foreign labor rather than quality, but more expensive American labor in the quest for ever greater distribution of American wealth to those few who already have most of it.

So in the end, Santorum will look like a good old fashioned American traditionalist, but in the final analysis, he will plainly be something fairly new.  He is the new paradigm for the reactionary right in our society: Calvinistic, prideful, dismissive of all others, and fortunately still in the minority.  Let's hope it stays that way.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It wasn't long ago that I made a prediction about the Republican course of action with regard to the Social Security tax abatement that is about to expire at the end of February.  It was nothing more profound than predicting that the next panda born in a zoo will be black and white, but I must say that I am less than pleased that I was right.  I said that the Republicans would do now what they did last year to make the current two month, temporary extension of the 2011 tax cut necessary.  I said that they would try to extort from the Democrats some measures that would effectively neutralize the benefits of the tax cut, like reducing salaries of government employees.  Sure enough, the Republicans in The House pulled that old chestnut out of the fire one more time with the smarmiest Republican of them all, Eric Cantor, leading the charge.  Of course, tax increases on every million earned after the first one are not something they will consider because they claim that such tax increases "kill jobs."  Aren't you sick of hearing that phrase?  Everything they don't like kills jobs, but they never bother to explain how.  Regulations kill jobs...but which ones?  They never say.  Taxes on the rich kill jobs, but they never address the fact that of the 340,000 top earners who file tax returns in this country--otherwise known as the 1%--only 2400 of them are small business owners who employ other people...less than one percent of the one percent.  Incidentally, those aren't my figures.  They come from the U.S. Treasury Department, but no matter.  The Republicans are doing what they always do, and no one is surprised.  The President called them out in a general way in his address to the nation this past Saturday, and I suspect that everyone (even those who hope that they succeed in undermining the economic progress that we seem to be making in order to enhance the dubious prospect that the Republican nominee will be able to beat President Obama) knows it.  And as we get closer to the end of the month and the expiration of the old tax extension, if the polls continue to show that, as Bill Clinton used to say, "that dog won't hunt," there will be either another extension offered with grumbling and grudging claims that the Democrats are at fault, or the Republicans will recognize that they are extinguishing rather than enhancing their chances of electoral success in November and they'll give up the charade.  But when they do what they ultimately will do, they'll need another torch to give the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) mob so that they can carry it up to the white house calling for the head of the monster they abhor.  And here's what it will be: they will claim that this tax cut will devastate the Social Security program and cause it to fail...in thirty years instead of thirty five, though they won't mention the time frame as they beat the drum.

It's the same old bugaboo.  They confuse everyone with talk about the general fund consequences of a decline in Social Security Trust Fund revenues, and then they call the tax decrease deficit spending that will increase the national debt, but it's baloney.  The only connection between the general fund and the Social Security Trust Fund is that, since the general fund has borrowed all of that money, still much more than $2 trillion, they have to pay it back in small amounts every month to augment the revenues that newly go into the fund from payroll taxes.  But what they fail to mention is that every time they pay off some of the government debt that is owed to the Trust Fund, they reduce the national debt...at least that part of the national debt that is owed to us working people.  They borrow some of the money necessary from other sources--only about 5% of which comes from China, incidentally--but the general fund then owes us that much less in the end.  Seems like a good thing to me.  But if they are truly worried about incurring that debt, why not take the money in taxes from people who won't even notice it.  The Democrats' proposal comes to about $5,000 per extra million in earnings...a pittance to someone who owns the islands that two or three of his houses are on.  And we could make an exception for those 2400 small business owners if "killing jobs" is the only issue.  Of course, that proposal won't get any serious discussion if the Rcc has anything to say about it.  They think that the 340,000 votes of the rich will outweigh the 160 million votes of the people whose taxes are going up if the Republican Party doesn't see the light.  And they are thinking that because they think, as I do, that because of the uncertainty they are creating about the Social Security tax cut, the public will begin resisting the need to spend any money they can hold off on spending, and the unemployment rate will go up a tenth of a point or two.  Then, they will start a new refrain of their favorite song.  "See, I told you so," they will croon.  "The Obama economic plan is a failure."  This is getting tiresome.

Your friend,

Mike

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It seems that Rick Santorum is neither gone nor forgotten.  He apparently still has a following, at least in the mid-west, in that he won in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota, though his delegate total from those victories was zero as all three contests were non-binding.  And even if he gets the delegates represented by his electoral majorities, he will have only about ten percent of what Romney has today.  Still, the fact that Mitt Romney was second in two of those and third in the other is being touted as a failure for Romney, and perhaps it is, though it is hardly the death knell of his campaign.  But what is troubling about these outcomes is that Santorum is so popular anywhere.  While I would love to see The President run against a fringe, unelectable candidate like Santorum, I am daunted by what his popularity says about so much of the American electorate.  I can't erase from my memory his response when a woman who obviously spent more time ranting than she did thinking asked him from the audience to "get rid of Obama" because he was a devout Muslim and he was not entitled to be president.  Santorum glibly responded that he was trying to get rid of Obama, but he never disabused the woman of either her misconceptions about the office or her scurrilous bigotry about its occupant.  That is what passes for a potential president in the Republican Party of Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota: a man who will take a vote any way he can get it and from anyone for even the worst of reasons...a man who apparently has principles only when they serve his purposes.  I don't think even Newt Gingrich is that opportunistic and amoral. 

The success of Rick Santorum in these non-delegate contests means little about even the campaign.  Gingrich has already moved on to super-Tuesday states and is focusing on Ohio, and Romney made little or no effort to cultivate support in these three states other than Colorado, which must be a disappointment to him if not a cause for alarm.  But it says something about the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) and what it really is.  There is in it a level of unsavoriness there that is just barely below the surface, but is never-the-less plainly visible to all, especially the Rcc itself.  This sub rosa vileness of bigotry, self-interest, materialism and lack of compassion or altruism would merit the concern of people who purport to be as righteous as much of the Rcc claims to be, but it seems more likely that erstwhile Christian virtue is in reality only unctuous lip service to the Christian principles that the Rcc claims to stand for when its members speak about the values they vote to preserve.  They aren't your mother's Christian values.

To hear Santorum talk about his presidency is to hear an emphasis on the fundamentalism that he thinks will "save" the United States, though he never says from what with any specificity.  He claims that the Republican states in our electoral politics are dominated by adherents not just to Christianity, but to his kind of Christianity.  When asked about the economy, he says that "family values" are good for the economy.  He complains about "Obamacare," which he lumps with "Romneycare" as he claims, rightly in my opinion, that there is not a whit of difference between the two.  Romney will protest saying that what was good for Massachusetts might not be good for Rhode Island, or whatever state he is in at the moment, and I am glad.  I remember writing months ago that if Romney would take credit for the affordable care act that was passed by the Democrats, he would be a genuine threat to beat President Obama, but there seems no danger of that now.  Still, Santorum's avowal of repeal of the current health care law almost guarantees that his only constituents are those red state Republicans who actually are Santorum Christians rather than real ones.  But the fact that there are so many like Santorum in this country does not bode well for the future.  The Republicans produced Barry Goldwater in 1968--he rather than Ronald Reagan was the father of modern conservatism--and it was only twelve years later that a conservative of Goldwater's stripe won the presidency.  My worry today is that someone other than Romney will win the Republican nomination, and will thus be a landslide loser like Goldwater, but also the forerunner of the next Reagan: jingoistic, chauvinistic, materialistic, Calvinistic and self-righteous to a degree that we have never seen before.  I worry that it is not just the direction of our nation that is in peril, but the very nature of our ethos.  We do not have prayer in school because freedom of religion, including the right to have none, is a fundamental right in the United States of America, but what if a Santorum Christian is the president.  We believe in a social safety net because we recognize that not everyone can be an investment banker or a CEO, and while we all have the right to education, it is beyond the means of many still, even with all we do already to help those in financial need to go to school.  But if a Santorum Christian becomes president, the Rcc myth that everyone can succeed, be rich and ascend to the good life will become a virtual article of faith, and it will therefore be the impetus behind all legislation, including government budgets, that controls that safety net for the future: good for the investment bankers and the CEO's, but not so good for the rest of us, especially those at or near the bottom of the economic scale.  And it is a scale rather than a ladder, because while many can climb up from where they are, many more cannot, and we have discussed the reasons--many of them simple arithmetic--in the past.  Some can climb socially, but for the rest of us, our lives are defined by the weight and volume of what  we can realistically hope to accomplish.

Rick Santorum does represent a change of direction in America, regardless of the success or failure of his presidential aspirations, but success for Santorum does not bode well for the quality of life in this country.  Now, he is just the most recent Romney challenger, and he will fade like the rest have.  But he is also a harbinger of our national fate, and we must be aggressively progressive if we are not to fall to the fate he augers.  To quote a conservative patron saint, "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."  And to quote one of our founding fathers, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."  So look out, America.  Be always on the lookout.  From now on the rule in daily living in this era of terrorism is the rule in politics as well.  If you see something, say something.  Don't be shy, America.  They're not.

Your friend,

Mike

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The employment numbers for the month of January came out this week, and they were reflective of continuing success for the Obama/Democratic recovery policy.  Despite the fact that the Republicans have thwarted any new initiative specifically directed at creation of jobs, they were forced to accede to the Democrats' demand that the Social Security tax abatement of 2011 be extended for at least two months in 2012 until the parties can agree on how to extend it for the rest of the year.  And despite the fact that public confidence is surely diminished by the fact that the final extension is not yet an accomplished fact, consumer confidence was sufficient in January to spawn 250,000 jobs and to reduce unemployment to 8.3% from the 8.5% of December 2011.  It is an indicator of progress that any person possessed of intellectual honesty would concede to be so, but the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), including those who consider themselves experts on conservative Republican politics and members of the party itself, continue to cavil about every Democratic success in a desperate attempt to vindicate their criticisms of the Keynesian opposition.  But the arguments they have made along with those new shadings of them that they are currently claiming to be legitimate are beginning to look tired and contrived.  The consequence is that even the Republican leader in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination has had to concede that the latest figures may reflect some success for the Democratic recovery strategy, though he cleaves to his disparaging attitude by resorting to the fall back position: the recovery would have come to this point sooner if Republican ideas had been the guiding principles followed by the Obama administration.  That's going to be a tough sell if we have a month or two more of the progress that we are now experiencing, and my guess is that we will.

As Eric Cantor, the apotheosis of disingenuous politicking, stood in the well of The Congress to talk about the extension of the Social Security abatement, he apparently felt compelled to endorse the extension though he threw in the need to rescind some federal regulations and reduce the deficit at the same time.  It was a harbinger of the strategy that his party will use, but it is the same policy that failed them last year.  They cannot hold the reduction of payroll taxes hostage again because this time, the American people will not write their congressmen and call them to complain.  This time they will vote against them in an election that will be only nine months away when the crunch comes... a short-enough period that the Democrats can keep the issue alive until it counts.  So, the payroll tax cut will continue until the end of this year, and the concessions that the Republicans will be able to extort out of the Democrats will be minimal because the risk of trying for too much is that they will get nothing since the Democrats have already plumbed the depth of the electorate's sympathies on this subject...and the Republicans have too.  Thus, without reduction in government spending of sufficient magnitude to stifle consumer spending by taking real money out of economic circulation, unemployment will go down.  Oh, next month unemployment will probably stay the same, or even go up a tenth of a point because of consumer tentativeness, but the March figures should make up for that moment of national angst at the end of February when Republicans bellow in consternation from the corner they have put themselves into.  They will agree to the tax cut in the end...probably just at the end...and the public opprobrium that their gamesmanship generates will be a Democratic windfall, but the improving trend will continue.   Then, with new-found stature based on the apparent Democratic success in leading the nation out of the debacle brought to us by supply-side policies, significant chunks of the Obama plan for economic stimulus will have to be passed, adding momentum to what will be slowly becoming a Democratic juggernaut.  In fact, it is my belief that unemployment will be below 8% by this November, and that the Republicans will get their oats...once again.  But let's not get cocky.

With all those favorable prospects just over the horizon, and even with the Republicans showing faith in their advent by hedging their bets on Democratic failure, things could still go wrong as they did in 2010. 

What is different now though is that the Republicans have squandered the impunity they had after the November 2010 "thumping" they managed.  If they had not been so politically greedy over the past year, they might now be sitting in the proverbial catbird seat.  If they had taken credit for the first payroll tax extension and pushed for passage of an extension instead of choosing to obstruct it in the hope that they could squeeze offsetting economic retardants out of the situation, thus preventing what will turn out to be the measure that stems the economic tide from doing so...If they had passed real bills that would legitimately reduce government regulation rather than just pandering to their moneyed constituent base...If they had refrained from the hyperbolic detractions of Democratic efforts to restore the welfare of the American people, they might have succeeded with an argument like the one they are now forced to rely on: that it would all have come sooner if it had been them in power.  Instead, the one metaphor that President Obama went back to time and time again in 2010 will work where it failed in that year's election.  But this time, not only did the Republicans drive the car into the ditch, they tried to stop the tow truck from pulling it out.  "And now," President Obama will say, "instead of saying thanks they say they want the keys again before they have even sobered up enough to see the mistakes they made."  And this time, my guess is, the American people will say what the last Republican president is famed for saying: "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice...and you can never fool me again."

Your friend,

Mike