April 2013 Archives

Dear America,

The war in Syria is full blown now, and as it proceeds, the pressure to intervene builds in this country.  The presumption behind that pressure is that the emerging nation that will replace the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad will be moderate and benign, and most importantly, tractable when it comes to American ideals regarding political and religious freedom, but I find myself asking, what are the odds.  We have had little success backing incipient national movements in any part of the world, and in the Mid-East in particular.  We supported the Shah of Iran for decades despite the fact that he was a brutal dictator and a human rights abuser.  At least partially as a consequence, the regime that overthrew him was religiously intolerant and anti-American.  In Nicaragua we propped up the regime of Anastasio Somoza despite his dismal record regarding political freedom and human rights, and when he was deposed, the successor regime was communist and anti-American.  And since communism was a dirty word in the American political lexicon even though the Sandinista revolutionary government pledged to redistribte much of the land in that country from the connected rich to the agrarian poor, we were not satisfied with the new status quo for which we had lain the groundwork, so we attempted to overthrow that regime covertly with an insurgency comprising the same people whom the Nicaraguan people had just cast out.  Not only did our effort fail but it did so publicly and served to sully American politics and foreign policy for a decade thereafter.  And then of course there is Iraq: George W. Bush's elective war that cost five thousand American lives and a trillion dollars with the end result that the internecine conflict between two Muslim sects that have been wracked by mutual enmity for over a millenium are still wracked with mutual enmity.  Now they don't just hate each other, they are killing each other with bombs in the market place rather than submitting to dictatorship that, while brutal, at least kept the peace.  I still don't understand why The Shah and Somoza were alright but Saddam Hussein wasn't, not that I would like to see any of them in power.  Even Lybia is an exercise in political officiousness that may turn out wrong.  The insurgency was fragmented and now is fractious, leaving in doubt what will emerge as the national identity.  Fortunately we just participated with others in that one rather than making whatever mess eventuates all by ourselves.

Isolating the discussion to the "Arab Spring," our level of prescience has been a match for our understanding of the peoples involved.  Neither our political nor our intelligence communities bothered to educate itself about those peoples before presuming to intervene on the assumption that we could anticipate the outcome because, after all, we are the United States...the only remaining superpower.  In short, just as in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, we are the helping hand that sometimes does more harm than good, and now we are contemplating more of the same in Syria.  John McCain appeared on "Meet the Press" to trumpet his ill-considered position on the subject and despite the consensus against him, he wants to take an active, leadership role in Syria...with or without international countenance his demeanor suggests, though he says otherwise.  But he ignores the consensus opinion on all three of the measures he wants to take: establishing a "safe zone," otherwise known as a no-fly zone, selectively helping the rebels with ordinance and providing humanitarian aid.  The problem with the first is that Syria isn't Lybia, and its air defenses are apparently formidable.  Grounding Assad's air force will be no easy task, and McCain's plan to do it with Cruise missiles seems far fetched in light of the fact that we couldn't do it without manned flights in the face of the less formidable air defenses of Muammar Gaddafi.  And then there is trying to pick the winner by arming him.  Not too long ago, we tried to pick the winner in Afghanistan.  Remember "Charlie Wilson's War?"  As the Russians tried to subdue a country that hadn't been subdued despite repeated foreign conquest attempts over the course of two thousand years, we decided that the Afghans needed help, so we armed their internal insurgency, known as the Mujahidin, which can be spelled in several ways but it all comes to the same thing: the Taliban, jihadism, Anti-American fervor, and last but not least, Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden not to mention the cadre of followers and acolytes that plague us still.  I can only say that I am thankful that we don't have a conservative president.

If George W. Bush were in office, we might well have another war to pay for in blood and treasure for the next ten years, not to mention hectoring movements that snap at our heels for decades.  If it were Dick Cheney, it might be a nuclear war.  But we have a president who is a Democrat, which is no guaranty of sagacity in such matters, but he is a progressive as well.  In the case of Lybia, President Obama insisted that the United States provide what was necessary, but only to an international force led internationally.  We did not overthrow Gaddafi; an alliance expedited the process, but even they didn't overthrow the tyrant.  The deposing and murder of a brutal dictator was effected by an indigenous insurgency, and if our support turns out to be a mistake, at least it wasn't ours alone.  And we will be out of Afghanistan at the end of next year, so our most recent virtually unilateral mistake will be behind us.  With regard to Syria, The President seems to have learned the lessons of history, and if we are to participate in an effort to liberate the Syrian people, it will be only as a part of a larger effort owned and controlled by an international partnership, not just in name but in nature.  President Obama is the first president of the twenty first century to have proceeded this way, and he may thus be the author of some new historical lessons that his successors can heed to our universal benefit.  As a nation, we can choose to be part of the international community or we can control it...but we cannot do both.  It seems to me that the former is the choice to make.  We may not be right in every case just because we participate with other nations by consensus, but it's better than being wrong alone.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A seemingly minor event last Wednesday went almost unnoticed except for an oblique reference to it in the New York Times.  The Republican controlled House Ways and Means Committee began work on a bill to require that tax revenues be used to pay federal debt before anything else in the event that congress fails to raise the debt ceiling.  It seems that the Republicans have learned nothing from past attempts to extort draconian austerity out of our surrogates in Washington, and they are contemplating trying it again.  The last time the debt ceiling was the object of sufficient ardor that it changed our direction at all, the credit rating of the United States was down-graded.  And though there was no consequence--American government bonds are still the most sought after investments for money that has to remain safe, and thus the interest we pay on our debt has not gone up one iota--the world saw our nation's bare backside hanging out and it wasn't a pretty picture.  Naturally, since it was all engineered by Republicans, whose take-no-prisoners political philosophy seems not principled but vicious and callous in the light of day, they paid at the polls and hence, after the 2010 election that swelled their confidence to unrealistic heights came the election of 2012 in which the consensus is that they were routed.  And now, in defiance of national polls on reducing the debt and the deficit, gun control, same sex marriage, immigration liberalization and the effectiveness of a congress in which they control one of the two houses, they are contemplating pushing their luck again.  If it weren't so bad for the country, I would wish for them to do so...to their detriment again, I presume...but every time they try to control our direction, it looks for all the world, and I mean for all the world to see, like internecine conflict.  That image does not serve to make us stronger, even though it never kills us.  You may recall that this year's "sequester" came out of the debt ceiling bout we went through a couple of years ago.  I wonder what new plague the Republicans will wreak on us this time if they don't get their way, and make no mistake about it, getting their way will be painful for us too if they are allowed to foist it on us.  Republican politics is a no-win proposition for the rest of us but they are undeterred.  Those inside the party do worry openly about whether the Republican Party even has a future, but given their actions, they seem intent on making sure it won't.  Suits me.

There has been another garment factory disaster in Bangladesh, this time a building collapse killing at least 180 people, and once again the workers were making garments for Walmart and other well-known brands.  Yet Republicans cling to the notion that business should be able to go its own way even if it means that the economical shopper gets his goods and the CEO gets his bonus only by virtue of shed blood elsewhere.  Profit is king in Republican politics, and they can dress it up how ever they like, but it will continue to smell the same, and more and more, Americans recognize that.  Recently some young men were killed in a corn silo out in our mid-west when they were "walking down the corn" that had become impacted within the silo.  It is a common practice and it is regulated to the extent that the owners of the silo had the requisite harnesses and tethers to prevent the workers from effectively drowning in the corn if the impaction broke free, but they were hanging on a wall in a shed very near the silo while the boys were, as it turned out, risking their lives unprotected.  There is more to the story than that, and in fact there are deaths in silos every year in the course of walking down grain of one kind or another.  But the real question is why does it continue to happen when silo owners know how to prevent the deaths inexpensively and easily.  Shouldn't someone be held responsible for those deaths?  Are there sufficient regulations in that industry for that purpose?  Would more regulation for that purpose impair the businesses of those in the industry, and even if it did, isn't it worth the lives of a dozen or so young people a year?  My point, you see, is one that I have made very often in these letters and elsewhere.  Republicans are oriented toward things--money and profit in particular--and Democrats are more oriented toward people.  That is what the Republicans have to change, not the way they describe themselves.

Yes, we need more jobs in this country, but we don't need jobs that don't pay a living wage, and keeping the minimum wage low while refusing to legislate to make shareholder input on wildly excessive executive pay mandatory won't win the Republicans the votes they need to regain their credibility much less their virtue.  Eventually, flag waving and rants about social issues including the second amendment and gay marriage won't be enough to garner the political support of the American family of unemployed parents and college graduates who can't pay their loans on what they make at the pizza parlor.  At some point, the Republicans who think they are standing on lofty principles are going to have to come down here where we all live and recognize that for all too many Americans, the Darwinist principles on which Republicans rely are a luxury to people who can barely afford the food they eat and the roofs over their heads...and one more thing.

Politics is at least in substantial part about hanging responsibility around your opponents neck.  I would never try to make anyone believe that Democrats don't engage in blame shifting too, but the Republican Party has an unnatural ability to lock its members into the same step when doing so.  And that tendency toward lock-step marching doesn't make their message resonate.  It actually makes it seem contrived and artificially dogmatic, thus robbing the party of credibility.  I admit that I wish the Democratic Party had a little of the intra-ranks discipline that the Republicans display every day in Washington, and I've opined regularly that some of the Democratic Party's conservative apostates should be "encouraged" to defect to the other party.  But I would never advocate conformity...especially mindless conformity like that required of Republicans.  What both the Republicans and the Democrats need is something between the partisan rigidity required by Tom Delay, the disgraced Texas congressman who was known as "The Hammer," and Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, who should be known as "The Doormats."  When issues are important because they are touchstones of the party's ethos, arm twisting is in order if for no other reason than to show the voters what the party stands for.  But when issues are important for the sole purpose of making political hay, or just for partisan petit-politics intended to create victory rather than common weal, the members should be free to go their own way.  The result would be political parties that knew collectively who they were, and thus could make their identities known to the public as well.  Much of the problem in that regard is a consequence of decades of redistricting by prevailing parties for political gain...known as gerrymandering...that results in homogeneity of philosophy in voting districts.  That is why the primary has become the election in many Republican districts, but Republican philosophy is at its edges far outside the mainstream, and that, in turn, is why governance is so fractious today, and why procedure decides more issues than voting.  I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The two major parties should be the liberal party and the conservative party so that everyone knows who the candidates are, and thus how to vote.  We would all be better off.  Even the Republicans.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Let me add something to some of my recent letters about the conservative boiler plate on the subject of gun control.  As you may recall, I have been encouraging everyone who hears an answer to one of the spurious claims or arguments made by a "second amendment advocate" to proliferate it by telling everyone he or she knows, thus giving more and more rational people arguments to make in opposition to the irrational arguments against sane gun policy. And you can't turn on the television or the radio without hearing some reactionary hold forth on the subject of registries as tools of oppression or guns not killing people, but people killing people.  Of course, Bill O'Reilly is one of the reactionaries I'm talking about, though I never watch his show because his smugness verges on criminality in my opinion.  In fact, even when I am scanning the television channels looking for something interesting, if I happen upon his program, I  don't even bother to see what is happening before I move on.  But a couple of nights ago, in the brief interim between  landing on his program and clicking the channel change button on my remote to reject it, I saw the statistic 32,000 motor vehicle deaths annually.  I would like to say that I listened to O'Reilly prattling on the topic just out of intellectual openness, but I didn't.  I just moved on down the list of channels looking for something worthwhile.  However, later on it occurred to me that he was handing me another defense to criticism of gun control without saying a word, and apparently without even knowing it.  In fact, his citation of that statistic was actually an argument in favor of gun control about which he was so dogmatic that he failed to notice his own petard hoisting him.  Fore it may be true that 32,000 people die in motor vehicle accidents every year in this country, and it certainly isn't the case that we ban motor vehicles in response, but we do control them even though we will never prevent all motor vehicle accidents or deaths by doing so.  We require seat belts, licenses for drivers, installation of air bags by manufacturers...and most important of all, we require registration.  I would wager that if O'Reilly were confronted with the holes in his analogy and the ammunition, for want of a better word, that his ill-considered point gave gun control advocates, he would say, well, driving a car isn't a right like gun ownership.  It is a privilege.  But if there is no equivalency between the two, why did he bring it up?  What was he thinking?  And besides, no one is talking about taking guns away from anyone or even preventing more people from owning them.  We gun control advocates merely want to make sure that those who would do us harm don't get them.

That being said, there is a direct parallel between gun ownership and the ownership of cars.  Just as with guns, the right we have relative to cars is the right to own them and use them on our private property, even without licenses and registration, under the fourth and fifth amendments, which guarantee us the right to keep, own and use our property on our property without government interference unless it is seized with a warrant or taken with due process and we are properly compensated where appropriate.  Similarly, anyone can own a gun and use it as he will on his own property so long as he doesn't violate the laws against mayhem and murder and his use doesn't infringe on the rights in general of others.  Thus, cars are a good analog to guns when considering how to control them so as to protect society at large from their consequences.  Note that I said "their consequences," not "the consequences of their use by people."  There is a concept in the law that has developed over the course of the last thousand years of common law from old England to today's modern world known as the "dangerous instrumentality."  A dangerous instrumentality, which a car can be as can a gun, is a thing that has the potential to injure seriously by its very nature.  And while it may take a human actor to cause injury with them, those who control dangerous instrumentalities have a heightened duty to society with regard to their use by themselves and others.  So if you leave your car running outside a convenience store and a twelve year old child jumps in it and drives it away, you are responsible for the harmful acts that child commits with the car because you are responsible for failing to take the precautions appropriate to its use.  In fact, even if it's you who injures someone with your car, under doctrines inherent in the concept of negligence generally you are responsible; that's why we all have to have insurance.  That is why we have laws about use, storage and operation of cars, and that is why we should have them with regard to guns.  They are dangerous instrumentalities, and controlling them saves lives and limbs.  Like every other right, even those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, which is the first ten amendments of our constitution, the right to own a car or a gun exists subject to the rights of others to be free of harm from your ownership and use.  It is a right that supercedes the right of the individual, and it is inherent in the civilized nature of a society, especially a democracy like our society purports to be.  The notion that gun ownership itself is a sine qua non of our democratic freedom is a flawed notion anyway, but the idea that it is absolute and exists regardless of the potential for harm to others that such an absolute right would represent is absurd...and legally incorrect as well.

When I was young I developed my own concept of society, which I called "microscosmic theory."  Under that theory, everyone lives within his own microcosm and is free to do as he or she likes therein.  But when his microcosm comes into the proximity of another in some respect, his freedom to act begins to be circumscribed by the rights of the occupant of the microcosm to which his own is tangential.  And when the two microcosms intersect, the occupants of both microcosms have obligations to one another, each to respect and comport his behavior with the right of the other.  It still seems the best way to organize a society to me, and in my opinion, that is largely the way in which our society is intended to operate, but there are a great many people among us who do not recognize the rights of others, and gun ownership absolutists are among them.  Before the right to keep and bear arms in our free society comes the right to be free of harm from those who keep and bear arms.  Gun owners have the right to be free of government oppression, but we all have the right to be free from the oppression of gun owners.  That's where registration and regulation of guns come in.  Someone ought to tell Bill O'Reilly.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Once again, despite what Harry Reid called a compromise with the Republicans, they have used their veto power in The Senate to thwart the will of the American people.  Mind you, there was no filibuster, but the mere threat of one was sufficient to kill several bills intended to implement stricter control of all guns sold in our country.  The most prominent was the Manshin-Toomey amendment, which would require universal background checks for all gun sales, even private ones.  Ted Cruz's vote was no surprise, but of the 46 Senators who voted against the Manshin-Toomey amendment to the original bill--the amendment was intended to dilute the effects of the gun control legislation overall--the nay votes of four Democrats (Baucus of Montana, Begich of Alaska, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Prior of Arkansas), while not necessarily a surprise were one vote short of being the difference. Harry Reid, whose fault all this is, voted no with them for procedural reasons only, thus allowing himself to reintroduce the bill.  That's really the thing that we all need to bear in mind for the future.  This is Harry Reid's fault no matter how he tries to control the damage.

Reid said, at the beginning of this 113th session of congress when the rules on the filibuster could have been changed, that he wasn't yet in favor of eliminating it by requiring only a simple majority...or at least fewer than sixty votes...for cloture of debate on the senate floor, and notably, the Republican amendments to the legislation were filibustered by the Democrats.  Reid obliged the conservative element of his Democratic Party caucus instead of telling them to either support reform or become Republicans so that the Democrats could no longer be blamed for the things that The Senate didn't do...blame that they now share.  But now, any initiative by the majority Democrats can be thwarted by the Republican minority--incidentally, four Republicans voted for the bill including its co-sponsor and three others--and and in this case, those four conservative Democrats have been allowed to manifest their apostate views in a way that is almost surely in opposition to the will of even their own constituents.  More than eighty percent of Americans in all polls, and up to ninety percent in some, support universal background checks and/or registration, yet those four Democrats and 41 Republicans voted against them on the ground that they would be an infringement of second amendment rights, and on the specious justification that criminals will still get guns without registering them if the law is passed.  But just a week ago, the NY Times reported on an incident in which a man bought a gun from a private seller he had contacted through an internet site that specializes in such things, and he used it to kill his wife and two bystanders at her workplace.  The man was prohibited from even contacting her under a restraining order, which made him ineligible to buy a gun under federal law, and the Manchin-Toomey amendment would have prevented his purchase of the weapon because it would have required the sale to go through a licensed gun dealer or other provider of federal background checks before the gun could have been delivered, which is not the case for private sales now.  At least those three people are dead because of past conservative intransigence on the subject of background checks and registration in general.  While conservatives would argue that this was just a matter of a criminal violating the law, the lack of a better law certainly made it easy for him, which in and of itself justifies doing something about it now.  It is true that we cannot prevent delusional and evil people from committing murder and mayhem, but we don't have to submit to them like lambs  to the slaughter, and the second amendment has nothing to do with it.

When the cloture vote failed to bring the background check bill to the floor of The Senate for a vote on the bill itself, Harry Reid took to the microphone to bemoan the Republicans' intransigence on the subject and vowed along with others to persist in the effort to pass some kind of gun control.  Reid has even professed to have changed his mind to favor banning assault rifles.  But the reason he never got the chance to vote on the issue was his admission of defeat before he and the other 99 senators got the opportunity.  The Senate flatters itself that it is the voice of reason and moderation, and thus indulges its vanity by effectively requiring a super-majority to pass anything rather than a simple plurality of the votes cast.  But the reality is that The Senate is flawed by the very natures of its members and parliamentary procedure is just a way for them to avoid doing the stupid things to which they are wont.  The body is not populated just by sages; it is populated by oligarchs, demagogues, reactionaries and fools as well.  And now, not only have they failed to protect us from fiends who would kill us with guns, they have failed to protect us from those undesirables in The Senate as well, claiming all the while to be defending democracy when in reality they are flouting its principles.  Once again it looks like the American people will have to protect themselves because those charged with doing so are incapable and unwilling to.  Don't forget this when you vote in 2014.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

This is something of an exercise in arithmetic, and I'll be frank.  It is directed at people like Senator Ted Cruz.  There are approximately 310 million people in the United States of America, and the average household has about 2.5 people in it, translating to abut 125 million households.  Approximately 34% of households have guns in them totaling about 300 million guns in private hands.  In other words, there is a gun in about one household out of three, and there is almost one gun for every American.  At the same time, including reserves there are about 2.25 million personnel in the American military...125 million households with 300 million guns and about 2.25 million people at best who could be recruited to confiscate them.  Put simply, each of the members of the military would have to disarm about 55 households for the government to confiscate the guns of the American people, and they'd have to do it before word got out to the households that hadn't yet had their weapons confiscated; as the old saying goes, not bloody likely.  But in spite of the astronomical odds against the American government executing a coup d'etat by confiscating the guns of our citizens, Cruz is afraid that it could happen, and on that flimsy rationale, he opposes universal gun registration, apparently on the theory that if the government doesn't know where the guns are, it would make the already impossible...impossibl-er.  (I assume he buys lotto tickets too.)  He doesn't want the military to know where to look for the fifty-five houses that each of its members will have to go to in a military take over of our nation, as if each of them could go to forty or so homes to disarm two to three people in each one, each with a gun on average.  It's just arithmetic, but it demonstrates the lunacy of the position of the right on the issue of gun control, and universal registration in particular.  No one is trying to take the guns from the American people, at least partly because it couldn't be done.  The impetus today is just to know where they are, and those who oppose registration, which is a minimal response to the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut, are afraid that registration will make a military takeover of the United States possible...absurd, but Ted Cruz got elected on such theories.  Notably, he also believes that it should be easier to institutionalize people who might be a threat to public safety, which would be much greater threat to liberty than registration since it is already possible to involuntarily commit someone who is a threat to himself or others in most states.  In fact, in nations like Nazi Germany, locking up the purportedly insane was a pretext on which political activists were eliminated.  So, here's the question.  What do you call a person who cleaves to a set of ideas that is inherently irrational even though it proliferates a dangerous instrumentality?  Hint: you call the cookie truck when you find one.

Well, that's an exaggeration.  You don't call the authorities to have a person locked up because he believes that any gun control is part of a conspiracy to create a despotic empire in this country.  After all, they all have the right to their points of view, and they all have the right to spew their sentiments to anyone who will listen under the first amendment.  But really, do you vote for them when they run for office?  And if you do, what does that say about your own rationality, and by extension, what does that say about Texas, which elected Ted Cruz?  And that brings me to the real question.  The next time some jack ass says that Texas should secede, why should we object.  Let them have their own country, led by Rick Perry...or the next Hugo Chavez for all the difference it makes.  And I would say that the rest of the world feels about as I do if the UN is any indicator.  Last week, the UN General Assembly voted 154 to 3 for an Arms Trade Treaty (A.T.T.) intended to regulate international trade in conventional arms so as to stifle the tendency toward armed conflict in some parts of the world.  And the treaty does make it incumbent on the nations that ratify it to legislate certain controls on gun traffic so as to prohibit the more ruthless elements of any society from ignoring the treaty's sanctions and controls, which relate exclusively to international trade and explicitly provide for every nation to regulate conventional arms within its borders as that nation sees fit.  By the way, the three countries that voted against the treaty were Iran, North Korea and Syria.  And who is among the one third of U.S. Senators, including two democrats, who are willing to be associated with those opponents of the treaty?  Well, Ted Cruz, for one.  He thinks that people to whom he and others refer as "internationalists" are interfering with our second amendment rights by seeking to ban trade in conventional arms with countries in which the only people who can afford to buy guns are working for an oligarchy and an oppressive government.  The treaty is intended to stop crimes against humanity, and only crimes against humanity, but Cruz apparently doesn't see that as a noble enough goal to justify even these external controls on gun sales and transport.  I am aghast...appalled...discomfited.  Which is why I say, let Texas secede.  If they want to be the wild west again, let 'em, "pard."

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The President's new budget has been unveiled in stages, and there really isn't any news involved.  It is being characterized as the "grand bargain" that he offered Speaker John Boehner a couple of fiscal crises ago taking into account all of the cuts and tax increases already done.  And according to at least one analysis, this budget reduces the federal deficit over the next ten years more than does either the Democratic budget published by The Senate or the Republican budget of Paul Ryan's House budget committee.  But at least one of the spending cuts in this deal is nothing more than misdirection regarding the deficit and the debt, specifically in the area of entitlements, and with regard to Social Security retirement benefits in particular.  We have discussed this before, but the issue seems never to die, so here we are discussing it again.  The essence of my problem with it is that it is a scam unlike any other, and the fact that Republicans like it should tell us something.  The chained CPI as a measure of yearly benefit increases does decrease the deficit, but paradoxically, it does nothing to decrease the national debt.  In fact, chained CPI increases the national debt if you take extra interest paid on what the country owes because it is being permitted to pay the debt back more slowly under this scheme than under the current one.

The way the chained CPI works is that it does not take increases in costs of living into account if there are reasonable, cheaper alternatives in the minds of those who make these decisions.  So, for example, if beef twice a week is in your budget, the chained CPI may substitute chicken for the beef because chicken is cheaper, thus lowering your food bill and reducing the increase in your cost of living over the period in question by reducing the quality of the protein you eat, and of course, taken to absurd lengths it could lead to substituting dog food for the chicken.  So the essence of the change to the chained CPI is that the same people who spend our tax money and in the past have borrowed that money from our Social Security Trust Fund whether we liked it or not will now decide how we should economize instead of increasing our benefits to accurately compensate for the increased cost of the things we buy.  And the estimate of the savings involved could be up to a gross reduction in Social Security benefits of 6% over the next twenty years.  That doesn't sound like much unless you consider that 6% of very little to begin with is even less adequate than it otherwise would have been.  Still, that might be bearable on the premise that we retired people have to pay a portion of the cost of the past that we enjoyed, which was borrowed in our name as well as everyone else's, except...  The problem with this plan is that it has the effect of deferring the national debt by reducing the amount of benefits received by us now, and that is so because while there is $2.5 trillion in the trust right now, just this past year the new contributions to the fund ceased to be adequate to pay benefits due.  That meant that instead of the federal general fund being able to borrow what had been a surfeit of contributions to the Social Security programs every year, it had to start borrowing money elsewhere to pay out on the maturing bonds representing what it had borrowed from us in the past.  Thus, the change in the cost of living increases we would otherwise have been entitled to is nothing but a reduction in the rate at which the federal government has to pay us what it required us to lend to it over the past thirty years.  In other words, the Republicans have now been joined by our president in demanding the renegotiation of the terms under which they borrowed our life's savings so as to pay us back more slowly, thus requiring us to tighten our belts.  It is not as if we are being asked to take something slower, rather it is our government giving us back what is ours slower, even though it promised not to when it borrowed the money in the first place.

So, you see the paradox.  The chained CPI helps the feds today, but we have to pay for it later on...just what the Republicans accuse the Democrats of doing every time they want to increase the debt ceiling.  The only sacrifice being required of anyone in this scenario is that being required of those who have the least to give.  The federal government, on the other hand, just wants to keep on taking, only it wants to take more, and pay more for it in the end as it pays the debt back more slowly.  Bluntly put, switching to the chained CPI looks good on paper now, but it only makes our long term problems worse by deferring, at least in some part, any real action to address them...the national debt in particular, but also including the political problems created by the need to continually increase the debt ceiling, and eventually, increase everyone's taxes.  Sooner or later, there is going to have to be more revenue, and the chained CPI is the conservatives' way of making us Social Security recipients pay now so that it can be later rather than sooner...now.

Recently, I was having a conversation with my son, who has moved into his own apartment with his girlfriend.  We were discussing the problem of living within one's means, and he was talking about how he is making good money, but it is just enough to put a couple of hundred dollars a month aside, and then only if the two of them are reasonably frugal and they both contribute.  But his girlfriend has a tendency--rampant in youth generally in my experience, including my own youth--to buy what looks good: I-phones, new cars on time, lavish recreational activities and the like.  I asked him if he could muster the self-restraint to live on his own on what he makes because he had suggested that he could carry them both, but just barely so, and his answer was no.  In other words, in an ideal world he could manage, but in his real world, he was just as much a grasshopper as his girlfriend...not the ant that he would need to be.  The conversation being had by our politicians is just like that, only there is no father involved to point out that everyone is going to have to change his habits if we are to manage on what we have.  My point is that the chained CPI is just another form of profligacy, but it masquerades as austerity because it doesn't start to feel really bad right away as it's making our financial problems worse, but rather only in the distant future.  The problem is that, just as we are experiencing today, the future does come, and then you have to deal with it.  So, I would ask President Obama this question if I could get his personal attention long enough to do so.  When are you and the Republicans going to grow up and stop lying to yourselves, and worse, to us?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I wrote some time ago that I felt it to be everyone's duty to collect arguments about gun control--I am calling it gun control for want of a better, more all-inclusive term--and to proliferate them as broadly as possible, and that's what I'm doing now.  I was watching "60 Minutes" this evening as Scott Pelly interviewed several of the parents of the children slaughtered in New Town by the son of Nancy Lanza.  I identify him that way because, while I chose not to encourage other lunatics to do the kinds of things he did, I think they should remain nameless, and thus deprived of any perverse gratification that they might have been seeking.  But as to the parent of the Sandy Hook assassin of children and their benefactors, she should be identified in this case, because she enable this catastrophe, and apparently did it gladly, even having left as part of her legacy a birthday care with a check in it specifically intended to allow her son to buy yet another murder weapon.  I doubt that Nancy Lanza would get any gratification out of being her son's enabler, but she deserves the ignominy; that is a topic for another day.  But as to gun control arguments, one of the parents articulated a very simple one that I can't believe I never heard before.  He said, we have all heard gun freedom advocates say that guns don't kill people, people kill people.  So if that is so, what do they have against doing something about the people by requiring universal gun registration?  The argument is so clear and obvious that it's absence from the populist dialectic on the subject is incomprehensible.  If it is people that kill people, why don't we do things with regard to those people to prevent them from doing so, and gun registration is an excellent starting point, but it is not the only measure we can undertake directed at the people who commit or enable gun murder.  

There is something of an impetus for the civil law system to play a role in deterring gun assaults and murder through the tort system.  Torts are violations of the rights of others, whether those rights are legal, constitutional or equitable.  When you sue someone who injures you with his car through his negligent acts, that is a tort action.  When you sue someone for defrauding you, that is an action based in torts.  And when you sue someone for "wrongful death," that is, causing the death of another willfully or negligently, that is a tort action.  And though it may have been around for some time, there is something of a movement toward creating a tort action for the survivors of gun violence against those who enable others to perpetrate those acts by, for example, giving unstable people guns.  In Nancy Lanza's case, the negligence was also unconscionable because she had taken the precaution of buying a lockable gun safe, but she put it in her emotionally disturbed son's room, and then didn't even lock it.  That is a case of negligence that I would imagine would be actionable as a tort under any legal system of either case or statutory law devolving from gun-related tort reform.   And then there is prevention by directing legal measures at people.  

I don't know whether requiring locked gun safes to control the circulation of legal guns could work, because as sure as there would be liability if your child took your gun and hurt someone, even by accident, because you didn't lock it up, there would be liability insurance that would insulate gun owners from catastrophic financial exposure, though I can think of ways to overcome that obstacle to deterrence too.  But there are other ways to control the people who kill people with the guns that don't.  So far we have discussed universal registration and mandatory gun safes under tort law, but what about technological measures.

As sure as there are objections to efforts to control guns, there will be objections to measures like this, but the technology to prevent guns from being fired by anyone but the persons who own them does exist.  Why not make the equipment of all new guns with such capacity mandatory by law and make it a crime to bypass it?  Then, a person could still people, but no one else could do it with his gun, including the intruder on whom he pulled it to defend himself when the intruder took it away from him.  It used to be the statistical case that if you tried to defend yourself with a gun in your home and someone was killed as a consequence, it was more than fifty percent likely that the dead person would be you, not the intruder, so required technology like this would be a form of self-preservation for gun owners, and isn't self-preservation their primary motive...ostensibly?  And what about this.  Why couldn't every gun manufacturer be required to fire a slug out of every gun he manufactures and keep that slug on file, providing the marking identifying that slug to a federal record keeping system just like a finger print.  Better yet, why not require the person buying the gun to provide his finger print as well?  Of course, there would have to be rules of evidence and probable cause enacted to prevent abuse of such data, as there are with finger prints; for example, if you want to introduce finger prints into evidence, you have to produce the thing they came off of, and if you wanted to introduce ballistic information, you'd have to introduce the bullet it came off of too.  But it isn't an unmanageable problem, and it's feasible...very much so.  That's another way to impose liability on people who kill people with the guns that don't, and it doesn't deprive them of their guns at all.

The point is that, even if people kill people and guns don't, something has to be done, and something can be.  Many things can be.  So let's do them.

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

A few days ago, I happened to be listening to the news on the radio when three stories were reported all in a row that seemed to me to sum up what has gone wrong with our free enterprise system in this country.  Mind you, I believe in capitalism, but that is not necessarily the same thing as free enterprise, and the distinction is made by those three stories.  One was about those H1-B visas that bright young, mostly technology minded students get to come to this country to study.  Much was made of the fact that when their studies end, they go back to their home countries because their visas expire, taking what they learned with them and depriving our economy of their ingenuity and entrepreneurship.  But it turns out that what they are actually taking is American jobs as they tend to be hired by consulting companies, who use these talented foreign students to learn the things necessary for outsourcing their jobs to their home countries, and then going back home to help make the transition easier for the American corporations exporting the jobs.  And in the alternative, many of them do the work that Americans are doing, but they do it cheaper, so their employers prefer the foreign students and lay off the Americans...not my story, but NPR's.

The second story was about philanthropy.  It seems that much of what used to be done with foreign aid by our government is now being done by philanthropic organizations...you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for example.  And some countries that used to get aid from affluent countries like the United States are now giving it out, like China for example.  The kind of wealth that used to be possessed by sovereign states is now owned by people like Bill and Melinda Gates and countries like China in which the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the few, just as it is here, but the vast majority of the people who actually create that wealth live very modest lives...more modest than anyone would want.  And the third story was about businesses making money in enormous volumes as well, or in this case, losing it but paying not a dime.

In Manhattan in the 1940's there is a building complex known to me as a youth as Stuyvesant Town, built with government subsidies by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.  In the period after World War II, it was a haven for middle class people in the middle of Manhattan, and when rents began to balloon a couple of decades later, rent control laws came into effect stabilizing rents there and throughout New York.  But during the most recent housing bubble, a couple of big real estate investing companies got a syndicate of pension funds and other big money players--apparently including government investors and subsidizing agencies--together and bought Stuyvesant Town thinking they would get rid of the rent control tenants and rent to more affluent residents who would pay rents perhaps five times what rent control permits.  They paid in excess of $5 billion for the property, only to discover that you can't take money to build or buy such properties and then disregard laws intended to protect the people for whose benefit the properties were actually built in the first place.  The collectable rent that was ultimately permitted by the courts was only half the real estate speculators' payments on what they borrowed, and in the end, they just walked away leaving losses for the California state workers' pension fund and the sovereign investing fund of the government of Singapore in excess of a billion dollars, not to mention all of the other big money players losses.  My guess is that derivatives were involved as well.  You remember derivatives; they're the bets placed by buying interest in mortgages without owning the mortgages themselves..."bets" they were called, losing bets in this case.

What the three stories said to me is that some people have entirely too much money, and they still aren't satisfied.  And the money they have accrued as well as the money they are trying to make with that money is a form of societal excess that is costing the rest of us in that society.  But let's be clear about this.  Bill Gates made his money by dint of hard work, ingenuity and foresight.  It is what I call natural wealth, and I don't begrudge him his money.  But when he calls himself a philanthropist and blows his own horn about distributing mosquito nets to people who own virtually nothing else and puffs out his chest by offering a million dollar prize to anyone who can build a better condom, I feel compelled to point out that the billion he gives away every year isn't from his natural wealth.  He continues to be one of the two or three richest men in the world, and he isn't getting any poorer because the money he gives away is no more than the income his money earns for him, what I call artificial wealth, not the money he earned through his labors.  That isn't philanthropy.  It's advertising, or worse, it's Bill Gates trying to buy his way into heaven, but he's still the camel trying to pass through the eye of the needle in my opinion.  And as to the visas and the housing scam, they represent people with too much money trying to turn it into much too much money, all the while taking no risks of their own and making the rest of us pay for their failures while they reap any gains...free enterprise in pursuit of artificial wealth again, except that the enterprise isn't free for the rest of us.

I don't know if anyone else would see these three stories as connected.  And maybe I do only because I see this distinction between natural wealth and artificial wealth in which one is the product of legitimate contribution to society and the other is an effort to prey on it while producing nothing.  But it seems to me that all three stories point to one thing.  People are pursuing wealth at the expense of others while producing nothing but profit for themselves.  That isn't growth; it's just moving money from someone else's pocket into one's own.  It is one thing to improve everyone's lot and get rich doing it.  It is another getting rich by improving no one's lot but your own.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I started to write to you this week about last week, when the Supreme Court entertained argument about whether to endow homosexuals with the same right that everyone else has to sanctify a monogamous relationship and the Rcc (Republican conservative complex) seemingly turned the tide on sane regulation of guns...away from sanity.  But on Friday, I read David Brooks's column in which he extolled the paper of one of his Yale students for its insight into the prevailing state of mind of the modern college student.  The senior opined that the events of the past decade--the 9/11 murders and the murder of our economy by the privileged few in the years immediately before and including 2008--had led to a cynicism in the generation next up in the capitalistic batting order, whom she denominated "Cynic Kids."  They are committed to inertia because of cynicism about change because the empirical evidence that such change will improve their lot does not exist, she wrote.  Of course, all I got from his article was Brooks's limned version of the paper, but what I saw was enticing.  In essence, the student was saying that between George W. Bush and Jamie Dimon, the next generation of Yale graduates...otherwise known as the A list...have been paralyzed by doubt that they can get what they want just by working hard and being loyal members of the team.  She thinks that the current form taken by our putative "meritocracy" requires that one devote himself entirely to his own success because diverting one's attention to the needs of others has what she calls an "opportunity cost."  Apparently she has just noticed--and it is understandable considering her youth--that in the modern economic ecology, the only way to climb the ladder is over the backs of others.  That's a very severe pruning of her ideas, but what is salient in my mind is all there.  Apparently at Yale, the students of past classes have been under the misimpression that everyone can be a success if only he will try hard and show up everyday.  It seems never to have occurred to anyone at Yale that if such were the case, we would all have yachts, but Brooks's student, young Victoria Buhler, has now turned a New Haven corner in the name of all Yale students and caught a glimpse of the real world...that the rest of us have been struggling in since Ronald Reagan was president.  She has enlightened Yale, and her alumni professor too apparently, as to the fact--not just the statistic but the fact--that the middle class hasn't gained an inch in thirty years even though the vast preponderance of the work that supposedly leads to success is done by them.

What I'm getting at is that the sanguine basis of conservative policy is a myth.  We can't all succeed by simple virtue of the numbers.  Someone has to do the work while those who succeed in Victoria Buhler's newly recognized system spend their summers in The Hamptons.  For someone to be able to take meetings on the golf course, someone else has to stay at the office to answer the phones and still others have to design and create the products that turn into the profits of which they never partake.  Yes Victoria, there is a Santa Claus.  He just doesn't go down everyone's chimney.  But I suspect that what Ms. Buhler sees as cynicism is really something else.  The conservative mantra about hard work and the fruits of one's labors being so pervasive in our thinking as a nation, we all heard the siren call as young people, and most of us never questioned it until we found that in reality it isn't so.  That usually takes the better part of a working life, not just a few salad days at Yale.  Now, however, even those who have the benefit of the Ivy League behind them are finding that all of the low hanging fruit has been picked by the Wall Street wizards and the self-proclaimed beauties who are famous for being famous.  Without daddy's money, money is hard to come by.  And the Ivy Leaguers who in the past have needed only to achieve high B averages in order to benefit from emblazoning their resumes with the names of their alma maters are now finding that the people who review those resumes are more likely to say how impressed, but sorry they are than they are to offer six figure starting salaries.  As the upper class shrinks, the classes below it get bigger, and more and more of the former get painfully introduced to the travails of the latter...and the truth about real life becomes ever more plain to them.

What I think Ms. Buhler is actually seeing is not cynicism.  It is the grim realization among her once idealistic peers that to get ahead, it isn't enough for one to sell his labor, creativity, energy and fealty.  Today, it requires that one sell his soul; the method most likely to be successful in acquiring the material prosperity that is so openly enjoyed by the lucky few is to do so at someone's else's expense.   It is no longer Horatio Alger who instructs us on the virtues of capitalism.  It is Goethe.  To become prosperous today, you can invent something or cure a disease.  And perhaps you can excel at a sport or be exceedingly talented or beautiful, though even then, you have to be lucky.  But if none of those is your lot, well, the odds are against you.  What Brooks's young prodigy is seeing in her classmates is not really cynicism.  It is the dismaying realization that today, the most likely way to succeed isn't to sell an idea or your labor.  It's to sell your soul.  And for secular humanists, some of whom apparently still go to Yale and associate with Victoria Buhler, that is a daunting prospect.

Your friend,

Mike