March 2013 Archives

Dear America,

Much is being made of a book written by FaceBook's new female CEO, Sheryl Sandberg, in which she urges women to be more aggressive in their business careers, claiming that they are under-appreciated and deprived of the opportunities that men enjoy largely because they don't insist on the right to be just as CEO-like as men.  Though the book purports to be a new perspective, it differs little from the ideas of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, which in my opinion suffered from one persistent short-coming; the underlying premise that the world is no more variegated than "us and them."  But I remember in the early seventies telling a friend that what women don't realize about liberation for women is that it will be as much liberation for men as it is for them, and just like in the case of an election, there will be consequences.  And in the long run, it has been so.  Just as women have come a long way but may have a long way to go, so have men.  It may still be the case that simply being a woman lengthens a person's odds for becoming the CEO of a major corporation, but it is also the case that the odds of a woman becoming a construction worker are still long as well.  Similarly, a woman's odds of becoming CEO may be steeper than those of a man, but the odds that a man can find a woman who will accept a life plan including her working outside the home until she is in her sixties while her husband stays home and cares for children, hearth and home are also rather lopsided.  I, for one, would have preferred to be at home raising my children and caring for our home over going to court with other lawyers, with all the stress that such an occupation embodies, but it was never an option.  Like that of the women of my generation--I am 66--my gender's liberation has not proceeded apace in some areas, though now that I have reached retirement age I am getting my wish with regard to caring for our home while my wife, who is 18 years younger than I am, works to support us.  But I am getting my wish, albeit without the pleasure of raising our children, only in the last third of my life, optimistically speaking, while she is getting the feminist wish in the last two thirds of hers, and I think that now, I have the better deal at last; ironically, she does too.  As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for...

It all seems so simple when an author writes a tendentious work about what he or she wants in the moment but ignores the broader truths that operate on the peripheries of our primary occupations, whether they be in business or at home.  There is a reason that women still live longer than men, but not by as much as in the old days.  I don't profess to know with certainty what that reason is, but I have my suspicions.  And while fantasies about the glass ceiling being breached and being discovered are all well and good, the equalization of the genders brings many other changes with it that don't necessarily make life easier or better.  As I also used to say when engaged in the debate over gender equality, being a man ain't no day at the beach either.   So, what about those areas beyond professional achievement; do they merit discussion?  I saw Sandberg being interviewed, and talking about how husbands have to participate in doing the laundry for a woman to succeed, so women must be more demanding when they choose their mates.  That's fine if they are also willing to make the first phone call for a date, pay for dinner and buy the ring.  What women will find when they do all those things is that sometimes the object of their desires says no.  And then there's sex.  With liberation comes responsibility, and out of sheer mechanical necessity, the responsibility to...light the fire, shall we say...may now be shifting from my gender to the other.  And of course, there's the issue of responsibility for a partners' orgasms--mind you that last thing isn't supposed to be an issue anymore, but ask any man or woman around and you'll see that it is.  There is more and more talk about low testosterone and marital sex becoming less frequent with time to the point of never occurring.  It may be that it was always this way, but now people are talking about it, but at the very least, liberation has meant that the truth is finally coming out, and with the truth there has arisen a new dynamic between the sexes in all spheres from the boardroom to the kitchen.  You thought I was going to say the bedroom, didn't you, but no, the bedroom has probably always been this way; it's just that no one talked about it primarily because women have been so wrapped up in the vanity of being desirable and men in the conceit of virility.  But the word is now out.  With liberation for women came dinner-time commercials about erectile dysfunction and talk shows about why no one is getting it anymore.  Far be it from me to make any connection, but maybe it's worth thinking about.  I see no legitimate objection to women getting equal pay for equal work, or to everyone getting equal pay for equal work...even the bosses nephew.  But if men are supposed to help clean the toilets at home, shouldn't women help mow the lawn?  If women want to ask men for a date, shouldn't men stop opening their doors and pulling out their chairs?  If women want equality in their professional relationships, shouldn't they pay half the bill at the restaurant and buy their own engagement rings?  And if we're going to be equal everywhere else, why should men be expected to worry about any orgasms but their own.

I told my wife that I wanted to read Sandberg's book, which is titled "Lean In."  Don't mistake that for an endorsement of the book; we'll see about that.  But if other women think like Sandberg does, I think we men should know it.  After all, there could be some advantages in it for us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

For the first time in my life I am interested in the ascension of a new Pope.  Pope Francis I seems to be a new breed of Pope in that he is ascetic in his nature and humble to the point that his first gesture toward the mass of Catholics in St. Peter's Square, and the world for that matter, was to ask that the faithful pray for him.  He has been known to wash the feet of the poor and infirm not just as a ritual but as an act born of humility, and to visit apostates like a bishop who married and was thus excommunicated and forgotten.  He rides the bus, and sometimes cooks for himself, and while still a prelate in Brazil he lived in his own small apartment, eschewing the temptation to live in splendor amidst plenitude with servants in the opulence of a prelate's mansion.  He is doctrinaire in some of his thinking about issues relating to personal conduct like homosexuality, but he reportedly may be open to allowing contraception, and he seems to have been chosen because the church establishment wants the kind of reform that it has not been able to engender with European leadership, but wants to be sure that it is administered compassionately.  However, the reform that can be expected with regard to pederasty among priests may not suffice to change the nature of the church as a whole in such a way as to save it from itself.  A day after Francis's election, I heard an interview with a young seminarian who was in Rome with a group of his fellows for the conclave of cardinals.  The interview was about the firsts that Francis represented: the first to choose the name Francis, the first Jesuit, and the first from "the Americas."  The young man then said, when it was pointed out that he was from South America, not North America, that "we will claim him," meaning that we in North America, the United States in particular, can take credit for him...effectively be proud of ourselves because we have produced a pope, implicitly somehow reflecting well on us.  I wondered when I heard him say that whether pride is still a sin.  Not that I am without sin, but I don't presume to tell others how to live their lives or to define virtue for them either.  That seminarian was on the path to doing so however, which begs the question of whether the Catholic faith is being taught on the local level by pious men or cheerleaders, and if the latter, what sins other than pride need to be illuminated for close examination.  Local ministry is going to be the seminarian's job, but his prideful-ness would seem to call into question how well he can guide a new generation of Catholics through a modern life that is replete with values altered by time, and not necessarily for the best, when he apparently is vulnerable to their siren's call.  As a species, it seems to me that we are stalled in our spiritual evolution, and the question is, how can this Pope help us resume our forward progress as a species, even those of us who are not Catholics.

My wife and two now-adult children are Catholic, and none of them goes to church for anything other than special events like weddings and funerals.  They believe in contraception as a means of curbing population growth not to mention family management, and as a matter of general principle, they would never permit The Church to dictate their political positions to them, or even the moral precepts on which they live their lives.  They do not give sex the primacy among moral issues that Catholic doctrine dictates, nor do they eschew modern phenomena like premarital cohabitation and birth control.  Yet they continue to lead lives that respect others and demonstrate concern for them...lives of compassion, commitment and a sense of communal duty.  They would probably be good Catholics in the conventional sense if The Church would face the realities of the modern world and confront the real issues of the day: pridefulness, Chauvinism, greed, venality, mindless materialism and a kind of Solipsism that seems to afflict Americans in particular, but that is a danger to humane instinct all over the world, not that they are above such lapses, but because they need reminding that lapses is what they are, as do heathens like me.  So, in my estimation, that is the manner in which Pope Francis's ministry can distinguish itself.  The problem for the Catholic Church today is not the proliferation and perdurability of the church as an institution; it is the proliferation and perdurability of a moral and ethical code that is consistent with Christian values but consistent with the incumbencies of modern living as well, which will in turn bring people who live in the real world back to The Church.  Over the centuries, Catholicism, and religious denominations in general, have sometimes served themselves rather than those who need them, proselytizing for growth of the order rather than spiritual edification.  Thus, the concepts of evangelism and dogmatic purity have assumed a kind of primacy deracinated from the world that needs churches for the things that people cannot do for themselves.

Though I am not religious myself, I concede that there is something uplifting about going to a place at least once a week in which people who are committed to the same or similar values as you are have assembled.  It is a specific kind of comfort that church is particularly suited to dispense, but that solace of being among one's own is being denied those who find their churches, of whatever denomination, stodgy at best, misguided, myopic, acquisitive and inhumane at worst.  That is the area in which Pope Francis can serve his flock, I believe.  Instead of bringing people back to The Church, he can recognize that it is more important to bring The Church back to people.  Francis' role in the resurrection of faith in the lives of his parishioners, and perhaps in all our lives, will be to change The Church in such a way as to allow access to faith for those who wish to live in the world in such a way that they can feel the same satisfaction from religious living as they do from adherence to their secular humanistic beliefs now.  This pope's commitment to the simple life advocated by Saint Francis seems to me a good beginning to what we can all hope will be a papacy that will be restorative not just to Catholics, but to even secular people all over the world.  It is my ardent hope, and I believe it is one shared by many non-Catholics all over the world, that he can be a man above reproach who advocates for the modern life of virtue--one that can actually be lived in the twenty first century and beyond, and that embodies a basic moral duty to our fellow human beings.  As I said, I am not a Catholic, or even a religious man, but if Pope Francis I wants my prayers, he has them.  As the world plunges headlong into an ethos that emphasizes competitiveness over accomplishment for its own sake, social Darwinism and kill-or-be-killed micro-economics, we need someone to lead us back to decency and basic human kindness.  Who better than a pope...regardless of our denominations and affiliations.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The failure of the assault rifle ban to get so much as a vote in The Senate is an unfortunate reminder that not all conservatives are Republicans.  In fact, not all liberals are Democrats either, but liberal Republicans seem far fewer in number than their conservative counterparts in the Democratic Party to the extent that "liberal Republican" is practically an oxymoron.  The only two I can think of are Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, the latter of whom is retired, and even they voted the party line when called upon by party leaders to do so, whereas the conservatives among Democrats, at least those in the House of Representatives, even have a name: Blue Dog Democrats.  I assume that name to be a derivative of the old expression, "yellow dog Democrat."  A yellow dog Democrat is one who would vote for an "ol' yeller dog" on the democratic ticket before he would vote for a Republican.  It is an expression of partisanship, but in this day and political age, it would be more appropriate to use the yellow dog sobriquet for most Republicans.  Party loyalty is at an all time high among Republicans, and the conservative nature of the party seems ever more quintessential.  As to Democrats, they should probably call the party regulars Yellow Cat Democrats because it seems harder to get consensus out of them than it would be to herd a couple of hundred yellow cats through the halls of congress.  You may remember the debate over what is now called Obamacare.

There was a contingent among the Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives at that time, that seemed more Republican than Democratic in their attitudes and strategies on the issue of health care.  Originally, a single payer system was the goal of the Democrats, but the Republicans were dead set against any health care reform, much less anything universal and government run.  Still, with a univocal party, the Democrats could have passed such a plan, but Democrats like Bart Stupak and his twelve disciples in The House...I refer to them as Stupak and the stupettes...who were practically boastful about being Blue Dogs, and Ben Nelson in The Senate--he was a Democratic Senator at that time but no longer holds office--managed to transmogrify the Democratic majority into impunity for the filibustering, obstructionist, conservative, disloyal mostly Republican opposition that actually controlled congress.  It prevented almost everything progressive from happening from 2006, the first of the two most recent elections after which the Democrats had the ostensible majority in both houses, right up to the present day.  Now the Republicans control The House, and they have an unruly  minority within to contend with as well.  But the difference is that the bumptious little contingent in the Republican Party is not less, but more Republican...that is more conservative...than the party as a whole.  Thus, the Republican leadership can gather a majority on a vote by going farther to the right either substantively or strategically, which is their latent desire anyway.  The Democratic Blue Dogs, to the contrary, are less Democratic...less progressive...than the party as a whole, and to appease them, their party has to dilute every progressive effort to get them to go along, and now, even if the Blue Dogs do cooperate the Democrats are a minority in The House, so they have almost nothing to say about anything any more.  

That is why I invented the term Republican conservative complex, or Rcc...at least I think I invented it.  In any event, that designation hasn't made its way into conventional political taxonomy yet, but I'll continue to use it until something else that reflects the reality comes along; the Democratic Party hasn't controlled anything over the past five years, no matter what the election tallies reflect, because of the Rcc.  It would be more apt to say that the liberals in this country, despite being in the majority on many issues, like tax policy and the desire for universal health care for instance, have not prevailed in any of those areas, health care in particular.  As recently as the middle of the Bush administration and maybe even up until today, more than 60% of Americans favored universal health care.  But despite the advent of Obamacare, all we have to show for our health care reform sentiments is insurance reform, which may be a step in the right direction, but more than anything else it is a boon for the insurance industry.  We are nowhere near achieving universal health care, which all of the other major industrialized nations have had for decades, yielding better, cheaper results by far.  Thanks to what we got in Obamacare, insurers will profit from universal private coverage, and only federal regulation under the Affordable Care Act will prevent their rapacity from making us all their prey.  And even so, many will still be uninsured, and who knows what insurance will cost the rest of us in the end.  For all our political weight, we have achieved virtually nothing...because of the Rcc.  It should have a name, if for no other reason than to make it easier to identify its members.  It isn't the Republican Party that is our problem, America.  It is the Republican conservative complex, and some of its members are Democrats.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Ted Cruz, the Tea Party affiliated senator from Texas, must be the most tedious, presumptuous senator in congress, and there are a lot of tedious, presumptuous senators.  On March 14, he presumed to lecture the senators on the Judiciary Committee, and for that matter all Americans watching the proceedings on CSPAN, about the assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Feinstein and more importantly, about the U.S. Constitution and how to respect it.  Through the usual sanctimony and elliptical citation of fact, he pronounced the assault weapons ban being considered by the committee to be unconstitutional, ineffectual now and ineffectual in the past when, in a different configuration it was passed by congress and unchallenged by the Supreme Court for ten years.  Cruz cited two studies undertaken by the Departments of Justice of Presidents Clinton and Bush the Younger for those propositions, conveniently omitting the fact that both reports accumulated statistics that, while possibly construable as supportive of Cruz's position, were the subject of caveats in the reports--remember that one came from Bush's Department of Justice as run by Alberto Gonzalez, who believed that water-boarding wasn't torture--to the effect that the reports themselves, despite statistics, were inconclusive and that the effects of the ban would take more time to manifest themselves fully, and thus to be evaluated for their effects.  It was like when John Boehner claimed that a McClatchy-Marist poll demonstrated that the American people prefer to balance the budget through spending cuts rather than tax increases when all the poll actually showed was that the majority of those polled objected to federal spending on foreign aid, defense and unemployment benefits but opposed cuts...by substantial margins...when it came to education, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and infrastructure programs according to Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers themselves. The fact that the poll showed that the only measure voters endorse by a measure of 3 to 2 is imposing higher taxes on the rich--and the poll results were the same in December, right after the election that showed the same thing--somehow got left out.  Thus, just as Boehner is out on the wrong limb, Cruz has relied on a biased reading of statistics to favor his claim that banning sale of assault rifles won't prevent any gun crime.  It's a numbers game to conservatives, and they don't play even that game honestly.

But Cruz is a dangerous aberration even among Republicans.  He has that menacing Joe McCarthy swagger, and it is daunting...especially when you consider that the majority in Texas, the second biggest state in the union in both size and population, elected him.  He begs the question, where are we headed as a nation, not just in our attitude toward what I think of as the American Community, but with regard to all our rights to hold opinions other than those of people like Cruz.  I may have said this before in these letters, but when I was young and Richard Nixon was at the height of his power, there was talk of the "silent majority," and that was Nixon's constituency.  My father, who was a refugee from the Nazis as of 1939, but who was there in Austria until the day the Germans occupied Vienna, and thus had been close at hand while Hitler rose to power, said one day, "This is how it started in Germany."  He was referring to the Watergate burglary and the enemies list as well as the autocratic staff with which Nixon surrounded himself.  Of course, I wasn't there in central Europe when Hitler rose to power, but I find myself wondering if such a thing is possible in the United States.  It's a rational thought rather than the self-serving subscription to an idea of a young, sixties radical.  If Cruz was the choice of the majority of voters in a population of about 24 million Texans, how many votes could he get in a population of 330 million.  And if he could be elected nationally, how far behind would repression of those whose beliefs were contrary to his...and to the majority of those 330 million people be--not necessarily by institutional measures, but by popular demand.  As I used to say during my hippie days, it doesn't matter whether the hand holding it is that of a cop or the guy on the bar stool next to yours when someone is beating you with a club.  The fact is that "true believers" don't need no "stinkin' badges" to coin a phrase from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."  Krystallnacht was not an official campaign of violence against the Jews of Germany.  It was a paramilitary operation, unsanctioned by the federal government, but countenanced by silence and toleration of the event.  And it led to the incarceration in prison camps of tens of thousands of Jews just because they were Jews, which led to the incarceration and extermination of six million more Jews, not to mention as many as ten million others just because they didn't conform to the Aryan paradigm.  How many Ted Cruz's would it take to inspire that kind of outcome for our democracy?  His election begs the question, how many are there?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

While the filibuster by peculiar Senator Rand Paul made the national news, it shed light on one legitimate issue--not necessarily the one he was expressing perturbation over--but also somewhat obscured the procedural issue of the filibuster and its uses...more than just dilatory in nature.  Like many others whose political roots are in the sixties, I have been concerned about the expediency demonstrated by American political policies of the past twelve years or so, including the continued internment of prisoners at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, the accommodation of Pakistan as a political ally despite its ambivalence over the relationship and that country's willingness to harbor criminal conspiracies like Al Qaeda and the Haqani clan, the concept of American exceptionalism that permit's American intervention in the affairs of other sovereign nations, and certainly the use of deadly force to eliminate individual adversaries through assassination techniques, many of which I fear we don't even know about.  Drone use abroad does raise significant questions about the arrogation by the United States of not just the power to take action across our national borders, but also to use lethal force to kill people as if those killings had the impunity of execution rather than the moral taint of assassination.  But, not to diminish the issue's import, limiting objection to such tactics to their use on Americans when they are at home is just another form of the questionable moral fabric that goes with the issue and its many variations...all very profound, though barely broached by Paul's grandiose maneuver.  Nor did he ask whether we can imprison people on American soil, albeit non-Americans, without trial or the right to counsel as we are doing in Guantanamo Bay (while Guantanamo is in Cuba, it is a little piece of the United States just like a foreign embassy or an air force base).  In the end, Senator Paul's display made him more Mr. Deeds' epigone than his kindred spirit.  The act itself was a demonstration of what is wrong in Washington rather than what is right, regardless of the merits of the issue to which Paul attached it.

The filibuster has purportedly been tempered by modifications made over the past decade or two.  First, the requirement for cloture of debate was reduced from 67 votes to 60, but that didn't last long as a constraint, if it had any positive effect at all.   Then, there was the "Gang of 14" in The Senate during the administration of Bill Clinton, which made an agreement to use the filibuster with regard to political appointments only under heightened, unusual circumstances.  With Defense Secretary Chuck Hagle's, and then CIA Director Brennan's, nominations, that principle too seems to have been somewhat diminished in its effects by time, but there was at least an ostensible justification in each case.  Hagle seems to be an idiot and Brennan has presided over the aforementioned policy of assassination-by-drone abroad.  But what no one talks about is the filibuster of judicial appointments, some of them critical, in which the Republicans are indulging.  Those filibusters are not matters of conviction; they are sheer politics.  And what is worst of all about them is that they appear to be violations of even the most recent, half-hearted efforts to circumscribe the tactic while preserving it.  Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, the party leaders in The Senate, supposedly made an agreement while new rules were being considered at the beginning of this session of the congress to use the filibuster with restraint...a gentlemen's agreement, which is something on which senators pride, or should I say flatter themselves.  And the fact that it was mere self-flattery for Reid and McConnell to characterize their agreement as that of gentlemen is manifest in its lack of effect regarding those judicial appointments that are being held up by nothing but a head count relative to a cloture vote.  The fact is that The Senate is no better than The House, and the supposedly grayer heads of the former are just as petty and awash in conceit as to their political stature as are any other politicians, even on the local level.  It is amazing that there isn't a mushroom cloud over the congress caused by a critical mass of egotism under one roof: the Capital Dome.

Rand Paul's charade on the Senate floor may have shed some light on what Paul wants us to believe to be an important issue, but in reality, before our government started blowing up its political enemies with drones, we would have to have faced a far more overt usurpation of political power by whatever dictator could emerge to political power in this country, and individual assassinations would be the least of our problems.  What this filibuster actually did was to obfuscate a real problem...a real tyranny that has actually been institutionalized in order to take the will of the people out of government consideration.  Our capital is being populated by would-be national personalities who think that they are running a cult.  Congress, and The Senate in particular, is not the personal bailiwick of each of our politicians.  It is the hall in which The People's business is supposed to be conducted.  It is not supposed to be a place where parliamentary games are used in lieu of democratic practices to direct the course of a nation.  In our congress, our surrogates--not our betters--are supposed to do our bidding rather than obfuscating it or arbitrarily and capriciously overruling our desires.  Most Americans have had enough of this, and would throw them all out if there were a way to do so.  Oh wait; there is.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Kill the body and the head dies.  That's what boxers say when discussing strategy.  You have to wear the opponent down before you put him away.  Apparently there aren't any boxers in the Republican Party, but President Obama seems to have been a boxer, at least in spirit, at some time in his life, and that's what he has been doing.  He went out to the people of this country and made his case, pummeling the Republicans where it hurts...where the votes are.  And now that they are getting tired, he is going for the head.  He is meeting with the Republicans here, there and everywhere, and making the same proposals he has always made, but he is whispering them in their ears rather than shouting them from the rooftops, and they apparently are sufficiently tired of the fight that they are willing to partake of the susurrant alternative and call it a victory even as they fall to the canvas for the count.  It seems apparent that there will be more revenue in whatever budget deals get made in the foreseeable future, regardless of what McBoehnell says.  What's next: Senator Ashley Judd and Speaker Nancy Pelosi redux?  We can only hope.

It seems that the second term of President Obama will be something entirely different from the first.  He may actually be effective this time.  In the past, we have had presidents who were famous for their political acumen.  Lyndon Johnson was said to be so skillful that when he wanted something from an opposition politician, he would call him to the oval office for a private meeting, and before he would know it, the opposition would become the loyal opposition and the thing would be done without the victim even knowing that he had been had.  Joe Biden, though never a president and never to be one, is another example of that kind of political skill, and President Obama has learned to use him well.  We got tax increases at the beginning of this year from Mitch McConnell because Biden went over to the Senate...his alma mater...and "negotiated" with McConnell until McConnell gave Biden what he wanted, or at least half of it, without getting anything in return.  And now President Obama, having discovered the "Bully Pulpit" during the last election, has been out in the tulles regaling the average American at the plant with the swan song of intractable conservatism, pointing out to all of them that we are still stuck where we are instead of further down the road because the conservatives won't get out of the way.   The average American has been listening, and the conservative Republican Party now has conceded that such is the case.  They can call it campaigning if they want, but there's no election impending, and everyone knows that.  They can bemoan the fact that The President isn't "showing any leadership" on the contentious issues, which in reality is just code for "he isn't giving us what we want," but leading is just what he is doing.  He is leading a mass rebellion against mindless conservative penury and obduracy.  He is championing a kind of non-supply side economics that is not quite Keynesian, but is more so than the Hayek laced policies advocated by the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), and in the end, the American people understand moderation now that President Obama is explaining it to them, and the Republicans know they have met their match.

This weekend, the group of congressmen who enjoyed dinner at the Jefferson Hotel with The President last week were seen praising President Obama for coming back to Washington to meet with them, in essence claiming that he has finally paid them tribute.  But the reality is that he has killed their body, and now he is administering the knock out punch.  All of a sudden, President Obama has compromised and the Republicans have agreed to more revenue in principle.  The President has always said that entitlement and tax reform were on the table along with revenue enhancement, but in the past, the Republicans have balked at a deal because revenue had already been enhanced according to them.  But now, President Obama's willingness to sign entitlement and tax reform into law if there is also an increase in revenue entailed in the package is compromise rather than intransigence.  But, in the words of the Immortal Bard, what's in a name.  Call it compromise...call it an uppercut to the jaw.  I don't care, just so long as it gets done.  And apparently the Republicans finally see that the majority of Americans feel that way too...now that Barrack Obama has pulled back the curtain.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I'd like to amplify a point I made a couple of days ago.  The Republican tactic of withholding necessary measures for the country to continue running smoothly--in 2011 it was increasing the debt ceiling--yielded the super committee that was supposed to obviate the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) mandatory deficit reduction known as "sequestration."  The current sequestration amendment to GRH--the current iteration of the law, which has been ruled unconstitutional, amended, eviscerated, ignored and allowed to expire is called "PAYGO"--fashioned by the congress and signed into law by President Obama under the duress of not getting an increase in the debt ceiling, was required to total $1.2 trillion.  It was supposed to occur if the super committee didn't impose its own cuts and revenue enhancements totaling a similar amount, which they did not.  And the reason they did not is that the Republicans on the super committee refused to consider any revenue increases at all, led for the most part by Jed Hensarling, a southern Tea Party type Congressman with national ambitions and an insatiable appetite for the camera and the lights.  But then, less than a year and a half later in December of 2012, the Republicans agreed to a tax increase, in other words more revenue, in the amount of something between $650 and $800 billion, depending on who is doing the counting.

With all that in mind, the point I want to amplify is this.  If the Republicans on the super committee had agreed to just two thirds of the lower number in tax increases then, only $800 billion more would have been required in the form of cuts, and the Democrats would then have had to agree to any reasonable proposal--a strategic win for the Republicans.  But the Republicans refused to seize the opportunity.  Why? Because they feared repudiation at the polls by their constituents if they allowed any revenue enhancement, and they thought the rest of us were asleep at the switch.  Then, of course, the elections of 2012 came along about a year later, and their constituents repudiated them anyway, along with the rest of us, largely because progress was more important to the voters than whether taxes on the rich went up or not. Thus, during the lame duck session of congress following the election, the Republicans agreed to the tax increases, at least in part, but it was in the way of capitulation rather than celebration of the fact that they were willing to compromise.  Doing it in the first place would have served them much better than doing it as an act of contrition...a poor choice by anyone's estimation, I believe, and you would think they might have learned a lesson.  But now, seeing themselves as boxed in by the same constituency that rejected their tactics in 2012, they are trying to salvage their reputation with the voters in the same way; anything but raising taxes on those who can pay, and any way at all seems to be what they are willing to do...exactly why they lost the election of 2012.  Nobody likes them for being liars and slanderers, but here they are again, doing what they do, now what they are known for. 

This incessant palaver about the sequester being The President's idea in tandem with the claim that he got "his tax increases" in January is the current tactic embraced by the Republican Party as a fiat from leadership.  They have dictated that rationalization to the members and demanded that all members use it as if it were the script of a Mamet play, changing not a word, and that is why it always sounds so stilted, and thus contrived, when you hear it.  But the American public seems not to be subscribing to the Republican slant on this whole thing this time any more than they did last year.  As to the sequester being President Obama's idea, the analogy I heard last weekend was this.  If a robber accosts you and demands your money while waving his gun at you and threatening to kill you, it is no defense for the robber that offering to give him your watch because you have no money was your idea.  And as to the notion that The President got his tax increases, those increases and more would have occurred two years ago if the original Bush tax cuts had been allowed to expire as was the condition of their enactments during the first term of George W. Bush.  But through the same tactics--filibuster, holding other measures hostage, casuistry and the like--the Republicans extended their life for two extra years.  So, as to the reversion to the Clinton era rates for the 1%--the tax increase that The President got according to Boehner--that was only half the tax increase that President Obama wanted in exchange for twice as much in spending cuts.  Half a loaf is better than none, but it still isn't enough.

It seems that most Americans don't pay much attention to the details.  But it appears that the majority of us were in the room when all this occurred, and thus we know in the global sense what is going on, and who is driving the crises from each one to the next.  In 2010, it seemed that the Republicans were one step ahead of the Democrats...prepared with new rhetorical caviling for every occasion that required it.  But now they have overreached, and the vote in 2012 should have made that clear.  They missed their chance to refresh their image in 2011, and the Democrats, including President Obama, seem to realize it this time, much as they did under Bill Clinton in the mid-nineties when Newt Gingrich was dispatched to political purgatory...now, it seems, never to return.  The question this time is this.  Will the Democrats engage in enough hyperbole and word games that they become the new Republicans of 2014.  And to think that none of this would be happening if Harry Reid and the Democrats had just let themselves be emboldened by their convictions and ended the power of the Republican senate minority to thwart them at every turn, which derives almost entirely not from a popular mandate, but from their ability to do so.  Every time I hear a Republican reproach the Democrats for their failure to act while they had control of both houses of congress and the White House I wonder if anyone else recognizes that with the filibuster in The Senate and the Blue Dog Democrats in The House, the Democrats didn't control anything.  If enough people do, and the Democrats don't over reach as the Republicans always do, maybe the myth of control will become reality in 2014.  That's our next chance to effect real change...if only Harry Reid will get out of the way.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's all Harry Reid's fault...the sequester and the budget impasse, I mean.  If he had had the integrity and the political moxie to end the practice of filibustering in The Senate when he had the chance at the beginning of the current session of congress, The Senate would have passed an alternative to the sequester by a vote of 51 to 49 last Thursday, and John Boehner and the Republican House of Representatives would have been stuck either refusing to avert the possible fiscal disaster that sequester is purported by many to be, or they would have had to pass it, thus averting the sequester cuts in favor of a more moderate and rational approach to deficit reduction.  It's that simple.  Harry Reid is to blame for the effectuation of the sequester.  But as time passes, the true consequence of the sequester becomes more and more debatable.  It has nothing to do with the clever figures being tossed about by both sides: it is only a 2½% reduction in a federal budget in excess of $3 trillion; it is more dire than it seems because it constitutes only an $85 billion cut, that cut will occur over the course of only seven months.  But in opposition to those dire characterizations of sequester there is this: we won't feel the effects right away, but they will come; we will lose 750,000 new jobs, but the GDP will shrink by only half a percent.  So what will happen in consequence of the sequester, and is it really such a bad thing.

My opinion has been expressed on more than one occasion...for what my opinion is worth.  The sequester is the only way to effect significant bipartisan budget cuts, and they will all be able to claim that it was the other guy.  That was the miscalculation of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) congress and president, Ronald Reagan.  They thought that these gross cuts would be so unpalatable to so many that they would never occur, and that has been the case.  Congress and whatever president was in office when it came up have found ways to wheedle agreement out of one another when GRH was triggered, and nothing has been done about the failure of the federal government to balance its budget...even to the length of not passing a budget for the past four years.  Convenient fictions have emerged over and over again to mask that failure, but the gross cuts mandated by GRH have never occurred...until now.  Finally, the congress has been inadvertently hoist by its own petard.  By the way, Shakespeare's "petard" wasn't a pair of suspenders; it was a bomb, and being hoist by one was being blown up, which seems a fair analogy to what our politicians say has happened with the sequester.  In other words, the sequester is what I refer to as the BBB--bipartisan balanced budget--Act.  Coupled with the recent tax increases on the top 1% of incomes, the federal government has been coerced into reducing the impending deficits of the next decade by $2.5 trillion...about one quarter of where we were headed before all this wrangling began, and in my opinion, thee was no other way to get there.  Further, it will be just as painful to go the rest of the way.  Just ask Bill Clinton, the president whose budgets were balanced.  In fact, the reason for that balance was in the main that the Bush tax cuts hadn't been passed, and in fact, some of the Reagan tax cuts were reversed.  But here's a way in which we can do it without all the sturm und drang--tax capital gains at the same rate as we tax earned income...or more.

That's right, risk shrinkage of the economy as measured by GDP and job creation by increasing taxes on the only people who have income that they didn't earn, and only on that unearned income.  Let everyone else alone and just make those with big money in the bank pay taxes on the income that money earns as if the owners of that capital had earned it.  Remember, before Ronald Reagan, that's the way it was; income was income and it was taxed on the basis of how much of it you had.  And how can that be done?  It's easy.  Change the rules in The Senate so that a bill enacting such a tax increase cannot be filibustered to death.  In other words, fire Harry Reid.  That's how I propose to solve all of our national budget problems.  Fire Harry Reid and replace him with someone who has the courage of his convictions and believes they will carry the day on a democratic basis...by garnering the majority of the votes of The People as represented by their surrogates in congress.  That's the only way that we will manage to finally quash this myth that you have to induce the rich to make more money by giving them a tax break when they do so.  I've said it before and I say it now.  You will never see a rich person refuse to make $.65 because he isn't being given an additional $.15 in tax breaks.  The rich love their money, and what's more, they love yours too, and they will do anything to get their hands on some of it.  That means that no matter how little they get for investing, they will invest.  It doesn't take any kind of leap of faith to believe that.  In fact, it is counterintuitive to believe otherwise.  If there's one thing we can always depend on, it's greed.  Actually there are two things we can count on.  The other is that Harry Reid will never have the guts to do the right thing.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We are being allowed to believe that the "sequestration" that is impending is a new idea.  But the fact is that it was invented nearly thirty years ago in the form of the Gramm-Rudman Hollings Act (GRH), formally known as the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.  The 2011 act that inflicted this sequestration on us was just an amendment.  GRH was to serve the same purpose as the current sequester: to impose radical spending cuts if our government couldn't manage rational ones.  In 1968, LBJ had managed to get Social Security, and thus the debt to, and the corpus of, the Social Security Trust Fund put "on budget," thus including it in the general fund's accounting of our national fiscal state by ignoring the debt owed to the fund as part of the national debt, and GRH addressed that machination as well.  Social Security had been off budget since the creation of the trust fund in 1939, and actually earlier in an informal way as under the 1935 act that created Social Security, payroll taxes were to be collected and held in reserve by the treasury.  It was scheduled to be taken off budget again in 1993 by the Social Security Amendments of 1983, but in addition to creation of sequestration, GRH restored Social Security to "off budget" status even earlier from the on budget status contrived by the Johnson administration to make the budget look more balanced.  It was actually just the opposite of what John Boehner and the others who claim that the trust fund is just an illusion would have us believe.  When Gramm-Rudman Hollings was amended for the second time, among the things it did was to put Social Security and the trust fund off budget by 1990 as opposed to the scheduled date in 1993, and thus it eliminated the  myth that the Social Security Trust and expenditures for the program were part of the general fund a little earlier than prior law had required as well as creating the sequester mechanism.  That is all significant because of the connection of Social Security to the discussion of the national debt and the federal deficit since the law that created sequestration as a tool for budget control also expedited the eradication of the myth that Social Security had anything to do with it...a myth that the Democrats had cooked up and used to their advantage as far as national accounting was concerned for nearly twenty years.  That off-budget designation was the actual myth rather than the other way around; Social Security started our being off budget and was on budget for only twenty years...and then only as a contrivance of no real substance.

So now, when people talk about Social Security and the deficit in connection with obviating the sequestration that is looming over our economy--rightly or wrongly--like a thunder cloud, they are misrepresenting the truth in several ways.  First, the sequestration was created as a bad idea that no one would allow to happen about three decades ago, not last year by the Republicans for the purpose of compelling a "super-committee" of congressmen to act responsibly.  Second, it didn't work when GRH was passed, and it didn't work even after it was amended.  Congress just went around it then as they are arguing over doing today.  Third, even GRH acknowledged that Social Security wasn't part of the problem of deficit spending when it was passed, and that hasn't changed.  Fourth, sequestration wasn't President Obama's idea even if one of his staff brought it up as a way to compel a sincere effort to reduce the deficit.  The mechanism was there all along, and this isn't the first time that it has been invoked to no avail.  And finally, sequestration became an issue again because the Republicans refused to consider any increases in revenue...that is, they would not consider tax increases on the rich as part of a budget balancing formula.  It was the only way to get the Republicans to allow the debt ceiling to go up, and thus avert default on the U.S. Treasury's obligations, an issue that will arise again within a few months.  All in all, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has reached back into history for a bad idea that never worked before, and used it to the same effect again.  They should be running out of fans to stick there fingers in by now, but there is no sign of it.

The ultimate irony to all this is that if the super-committee had just agreed to the tax increase that the Republicans allowed a couple of months ago, they would have been more than half way to the $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next ten years that was their mandate.  With $400 billion or less left to achieve with cuts, the sequester would have been that much easier to avoid, either then or now.  But once again, by digging in their heels the Republicans have made a bad situation worse, and everyone appears to know it if poll data is any indication.  The only questions remaining are, will they relent this time, and if not, what will be the consequences.  Either way, they are going to get the blame...and they seem to deserve it.

Your friend,

Mike