May 2013 Archives

Dear America,

Five years ago when Barrack Obama was running for president for the first time, I was doing business with a used car dealer with whom I had  become friendly.  One day I went over to see him and he insisted that Obama was a Muslim, and that the future president had so stated.  Setting aside the fact that being a Muslim or not is every American's right and that Muslims are as variegated a people as Christians and Jews with bad people and good among all three groups, I was intrigued by the claim that Mr. Obama purportedly had said he was a Muslim, and I made my erstwhile friend show me the quote on the internet.  Sure enough, there he was saying, " I am a Muslim," just before the three second clip ended.  I went home and found the original clip on the internet, and as it turned out, what Mr. Obama had said in context was that John McCain was to be praised for condemning those who claim that "I am a Muslim."  The point is that any quote deracinated \from its context is suspect, and the fact that news organizations like Fox don't consider that before they run images of people saying this that or the other thing does not redound to their credit.  It only demonstrates their disingenuousness and the conservative tendentiousness of their reportage.  But people still watch them because they know that they will hear what they want to hear, which is only reinforced by what Fox reports...or misreports to be more accurate.  Fox specializes in preaching to the reactionary choir, but they don't purvey news...at least not honestly.

So now we come to the present, and a couple of days ago, my wife's brother told her during a telephone conversation that Attorney General Eric Holder was in trouble because  he had perjured himself before congress in saying that he didn't know anything about the prosecution of reporters for violating the law regarding government secret disclosures.  And it is true that the testimony was not an adroit expression of what he was trying to say because he had indeed signed an application for a search warrant for the records of a reporter named Rosen--an employee of Fox News as you have probably guessed.  But in context, his point was obviously not that he didn't know about the investigation of leaks being conducted by the Justice Department, but that he was skeptical of any policy that led to prosecutions of the press.  And the fact is that the Justice Department isn't looking for the reporters who disclosed the state secrets in question, which were about North Korea...and what we knew about it and how we knew it as well, I assume.  I assume because I don't watch Fox News.  And why would the DOJ need to look for those guys.  The problem they represent is that they have already revealed the secrets so their identities and what they disclosed are matters of public knowledge.  If they were to be prosecuted, the evidence would already be a matter of record.  No, what the Justice Department is looking for is the sources of the information that was disclosed because it is against the law to leak top secret information...and it is dangerous to our security as a nation as well.  That's why it is against the law, and if there is a political party that is focused on national security at any price, it is the Republicans...but not when you can pillory a political opponent for protecting it.  So, Fox reporters have been asking members of a couple of congressional committees what they are going to do about Eric Holders purported perjury, and they have been getting a response...albeit a tepid one.  One committee member told the Fox reporter that the committee he was on would investigate, though he later changed his statement to read that the committee would "look into it."

My guess is that this tempest will stay inside the Fox News tea cup, but who knows.  The other "scandals" being promoted by conservatives aren't working out too well, so this one may be a fall back scandal.  The IRS scandal, including the suspended supervisor of the department in question, Lois Lerner, and her invocation of the Fifth Amendment, hasn't raised much public ire.  And the efforts of one or two conservatives to make her testify have run into the fact that the right to stop testifying whenever you choose is part of that constitutional Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination...at least outside the context of trial it is, and no charges have been filed, nor is a congressional hearing room the same thing as a court house.  That particular conservative congressman remembers that the second amendment is part of the constitution, but he seems to have forgotten about the fifth, which is so inconvenient because conservatives think that no one who has nothing to hide needs it.  They seem to have cut their Constitutional Law classes in law school, which apparently makes such simplistic beliefs possible for them.  Mind you, there is no evidence of any criminal conduct in all this anyway...just arrogance and lack of creativity.  But Ms. Lerner knows that if the Republicans can sink their canine teeth into someone, they will hound that person to the grave, rightfully or not.  So, she did what was prudent...what her lawyer probably told her to do, though if I were him I wouldn't have let her make an opening statement because of that argument that if you start speaking you have to continue, bogus as it may be, at least in this context.  Then there's Benghazi, and you don't even hear about that one anymore.  Besides, what Susan Rice said on Meet the Press and Face the Nation doesn't matter much.  What people care about is the safety of our diplomats, and about that issue there is nothing politically untoward to report.

To summarize, despite all the political gyrations and contortions, and despite all the half-truths, contrivance, casuistry and mischaracterization, the Republican conservative complex including both the politicians and the press--which now includes Karl Rove on Fox (boy has he found a home)--haven't been able to strike a chord.  Yet here we are with real problems for them to address and they can't make the time.  What's an electorate to do?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am always both amazed and frustrated by the things said by representatives of the American Petroleum Institute, and I am daunted by the fact that any one asks them about policy in light of their naked self-interest.  Last Saturday I saw one of them taking public phone calls asking about the XL Pipeline as if she would have anything negative to say about it.  I watched for only a minute or so, but I felt no need to continue as the predictability of her position obviated doing so.  I am confounded by the fact that anyone still sees a need for it when its purpose is to bring Canadian oil to our Gulf Coast--you remember the Gulf Coast where BP spilled millions of barrels of oil polluting the Gulf of Mexico--where we refine petroleum into gasoline that we then export to other countries.  It seems to me that any argument about petroleum that is based on the notion that we are pursuing energy independence is demonstrably tainted by the dubious interests it serves, but amazingly, we continue to have the debate on the subject.  Our congressmen seem to have little to do in that they have time to investigate everything that could be a black eye for the other guy, but they never get around to considering our national interests with regard to petroleum, and there is a good reason: that's where the money is.

Campaign contributions, post-politics jobs, profits to bolster the unearned income of our political oligarchs and the capacity to generate artificial wealth for our affluent class are all ancillary benefits of an unrestrained petroleum industry.  The solutions to the problems caused by the rapacity of those with interest in oil production and refinement all have consequences for those who benefit from an unconstrained petroleum industry, so, discussing those solutions being the first step toward gaining public acceptance for them, none of them get discussed, but there are  ways in which the industry's rapacity could be reigned in...the ultimate being nationalization.  But even short of that remedy, there are ways in which real competitive pressure could be infused into the market for oil.  For example, most people don't realize that the federal government is the single largest consumer of petroleum products.  Ten percent of what we consume as a nation is consumed by the federal government, and ninety percent of that is consumed by the military.  If there were a ten percent drop in the demand on the open market for petroleum, think how much downward pressure there would be on prices.  And with that diminished demand and the cognate lower prices, there would come a commensurate increase in disposable income for the population and an attendant expansion of our economy, including the creation of jobs...a thing we are all concerned about these days...and accomplishing all that wouldn't be as hard as one might think.  We have a branch of the military that monitors and maintains our national waterways' levees and dikes--the Corps of Engineers--and the military also builds its own infrastructure...or it used to before the obsession with contracting such things out to companies like Dick Cheney's alma mater, Halliburton, became de rigeur...so why not create a federal petroleum production division of the military.  Our government could keep some of the oil leases it now sells and develop those federal reserves by doing its own exploring, drilling and production.  Then, that same organization could acquire some of the refining capacity that refiners claim is no longer profitable, modify it as necessary, and begin producing the petroleum products that the federal government...the military in particular...needs or wants to add to our national strategic reserves and now has to buy at inflated prices on the open market.  Production could rise and fall based on the price in the open market, thus giving private producers an incentive to keep prices low, but more importantly preventing them from allowing them to get unreasonably high given the constant threat that as much as ten percent of the market for their products could dry up, so to speak, at any moment with the federal government having its own source of supply at its disposal.  But there are still more solutions to the problem of untrammeled price rises.

Much of what we experience in that regard is a function of speculation.  Oil is bought and sold--even the oil produced in this country by our major oil companies--on an open market, and in that market, there are people who buy and sell not to refine, but to capitalize in the arbitraging of the oil market...that is the buying and selling in response to market fluctuations. But the process of arbitraging creates its own fluctuations in the market, which only increases arbitraging.  The solution that I have been proposing is to require buyers in the markets, and there are several in the world, to have the certified capacity to take delivery of what they buy, and here's another.  We could permit the export of only excess petroleum and refined petroleum products.  It will be a decade or so before we will have an excess, so the export of gasoline, for example, would be prohibited at present and the current exports in excess of a million gallons per day would be proscribed  If we had a million more barrels of gasoline per day the price at the pump would drop substantially.  And we export a total of about 500,000 barrels of oil per day, which we then import along with more.  That swapping of our oil for someone else's would also be prohibited, and the profit made from those transactions would be cut out of the cost of petroleum products in this country.  And here's another suggestion: sell new oil leases, especially in off-shore waters, on the strict condition that their production be used only in this country without reduction of the domestic usage of current production.  And then there's tax policy.  If our oil industry is going to export resources we need here to other, more profitable markets, we can impose export tariffs on those products so that at least the tax burden on the rest of us could be reduced...theoretically if nothing else.

There must be many remedies to the problems posed by the operation of the petroleum markets today, but our congress isn't discussing them...and what's more, we aren't asking them why they aren't.  We have elections so that we can express our will as a governed populace, but we never seem to take a concerted action in that regard.  I think that the next election should be about a few salient issues.  We should consider this abuse of our capitalist system by the petroleum industry among them.  Then we should consider gun control and the phantasmagoric obstacles to it that those with related special interests are foisting on a gullible gun owning minority.  We should consider the filibuster and the unwillingness of our senators to eliminate it so that our interests will have primacy among those that they consider.  Then there's universal health care.  Then money in politics, which is largely a problem because the Supreme Court insists that corporations are people requiring either a constitutional amendment or a change in the way in which we legislate so as to specify in our laws that such is not the case.  But since the catalogue of our political woes is profound and the list of the detrimental principles to which our politicians have shackled us seems without end, we are left only the option to vote for the right people to represent us and hope that they see most issues our way.  Unfortunately, those whom our political problems serve also have the power of the oligarchy that they constitute, and with that power, they can control the ideas proliferated by all of our media.  Thus, they can depict their favorite politicians as they see fit, thereby controlling the choices of tens of millions of voters who believe without question anyone who wraps his wishes in the flag, religion, traditional virtue or deceit masquerading as patriotism.  So much for reform of the petroleum industry.  So much for capitalist democracy in America.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Microsoft announced its new X-Box this week, and it is the stuff of which science fiction used to be made.  It is interactive to the extent that it no longer requires controllers of any kind, but rather it can recognize your face and your gestures, hear and understand your speech, and interact with any other device capable of receiving messages or instructions from it.  And not to be outdone, Google has announced that it is developing a pair of glasses with a small screen imbedded in them that will allow you to direct searches about the things you see and will give you access to the internet for whatever purpose you wish to use it for.  Google has also gone almost all the way toward developing a self-operating automobile that will allow the driver to sit idle while the hardware and software imbedded in the car's guidance system makes all the judgments necessary to deliver the occupants to their destination, even if they're asleep at the wheel, so to speak.  I know that in my own life, the local water authority has ceased to send me the cards by which I used to read the meter quarterly and now estimates my bill based on past usage, and not very well either, because I am unwilling to allow them to install a digital automated transmitter that will send my water usage information--and I fear much, much more information--to their central billing department...or wherever.  Perhaps all this is progress, but I refuse to allow the digital transmitter to be attached to the meter in my house because I don't want information flowing from my home without my family having the capacity to control it...or even to know what information is really flowing from the house.  I may be just paranoid, but with drone aircraft having the capacity to kill people from miles up in the sky without them even knowing that they are targets...with the justice department seizing the phone records of members of the press from third party phone companies, and with cases going to The Supreme Court on the subject of GPS plants by law enforcement without warrants...I don't think I am unjustified in being resistant to...what shall we call them...digital intrusions.  And while the capacity to invade our privacy continues to grow, corporate America is asking us to volunteer to give more of that capacity to it...a kind of power that government still has to get a court order to exercise...as if I would voluntarily trust Microsoft where The Constitution says I don't have to trust the government, which leads me to congress.

As the Republicans convene their congressional kangaroo courts aimed at pillorying upper level civil servants as if they are aware of every pencil stroke that occurs in their agencies, all in a quest to aggrandize themselves and distract the American people, what is important is going unnoticed by them.  The assault on our privacy in every respect, from cameras monitoring our movements by foot on the street to monitors on police cars that constantly scan traffic and record license plates in such a fashion as to allow the police to locate anyone who drove near one of their cruisers at any given time, is intense.  But our legislators blithely ignore it all while they fixate on the possibility that the same government that is watching us relentlessly will launch an attempt to confiscate all of the 300 million or so guns located in 55 million households with the million or so personnel available to them...a feat of impossible scope, and thus no threat to us at all.  They are concerned that each of those million federal military and law enforcement personnel can go to fifty-five houses and force even the posse comitatus extremists who are armed to the teeth to surrender their weapons, but they are undaunted by the fact that we are being watched every minute of every day and private industry is now augmenting the digital network that may well be the instrument that ultimately leads to a full and final end to privacy for all of us.  They are fixated on a few people who were trying to prevent tax-exempt, private status for donors to ineligible political organizations by focusing on the organizations' names--and I don't see why focusing on an organization with the phrase "Tea Party" in its name is proscribed any more than it should be to focus on one that includes any other party name, Republican or Democratic for example--but they do nothing to prohibit companies and individuals from putting software on our computers and cell phones without our knowledge that gives them access to our private digital information, our locations and our habits and thus enables all kinds of things, including theft on a sometimes massive scale.  On Wednesday, you could have seen Chariman Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee that is endlessly investigating this purported IRS scandal explaining that problem away on C-Span as he only incidentally, he would have us believe, made the distinction between an organization having the Tea Party in its name on the one hand, and actually being political because of affiliation with the Tea Party.  His point was that "Tea Party" is a philosophical label, like conservative, not a designation of political activity, much less a political party...a tough point to make given the prideful pandering of congressmen to their local Tea Party organizations and their willingness to vote as a block to effect cognate political change on virtually every occasion.  Note that I said political change, not social change, the latter being the route to tax-exemption and the former being strictly excluded from that privilege by inclusion of the word "exclusively" in the operative statute under which 501 (c)(4) status was created.  Republicans writhe, twist and turn to make political hay, but when it comes to the things that really count, they can't move in a straight line because money talks, not their constituents.  Imagine congress doing something that Microsoft really didn't like.  Corporations have had their way in this country for three decades, and they have gradually invaded our body politic like ticks, but the focus in Washington, even among Democrats who are afraid to ask questions for fear of voter back-lash, is on a few low level bureaucrats who tried to make sense out of a vague provision of the law and chose an easy way instead of a good one.

This all reminds me of a poll statistic that crops up all the time.  The pollsters ask, do you think the country is headed in the right direction, but they never ask in what sense you think so...either way.  Well, here's a news flash for the pollsters.  That isn't a question that demonstrates a political inclination toward either party.  When people say that we're not headed in the right direction, they're not saying that Republicans or Democrats are wrong.  They are saying that all of them are.  In that regard, someone had better wake up argue for a change of course very soon, or it will be too late for all of us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I found myself riveted by the IRS hearings last Friday.  The former interim Commissioner of the IRS was testifying along with the IRS Inspector General who was responsible for the recent report on the "targeting" of conservative putative "social welfare organizations" in the Cincinnati office of the IRS.  The acting IRS Commissioner, Steven Miller, was the sacrificial lamb in all this and the grand standing by Republican congressmen, as well as the ass covering by some of the Democrats anxious to protect themselves from public sentiment being stoked by Republican righteous indignation, was shameless...or it would have been if any of those people had any shame.  Of course, this is an easy one for the Republicans; everyone hates the IRS, although I must say that I have always been treated fairly by them.  Of course, I am overly careful about what I claim and in my obsessive way, never take a deduction that I cannot document, but that's not a popular way to go today.  In modern America, the mantra is take what you can get away with.  That's capitalism in its current iteration.  And in reality, that's what this whole "scandal" is about.  The most open and contemptible abuse of section 501(c)(4) of the IRS code was by conservative organizations, and some of them were so openly contemptuous of the rule of law that many of us wondered how they could get away with it.  For example, the focus on cuts to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act--first decrying them during the 2010 election and then in support of them to justify the Ryan budget during the 2012 election--demonstrates the disingenuousness of those organizations that are flagships of the conservative movement, like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS for example.  But when the IRS began to vigorously scrutinize new applications for that status when the organizations' names contained certain conservative catchwords and phrases, the Republicans got upset because finally, their ox was being gored.  And now, when you listen to the hearings, especially if you can stomach watching these guys as you listen, the feigned innocence is nauseating.  A Republican Pennsylvania congressman, Mike Kelly, ripped into Miller with the most patently self-serving diatribe about American rights and liberty, including the right to equal treatment under the law...unless you are a homosexual or don't believe in God (he didn't say that, but I'll bet it's what he thinks in the privacy of his little mind)...which made him the newest poster child for conservative hypocrisy since...oh...the beginning of last week.  That was when, at the Benghazi hearings, a silver haired congressman from the south reiterated Matt Drudge's fixation on the fact that Susan Rice said not once but five times that the murders in Benghazi derived from an anti-Muslim video that had first precipitated protest in Cairo.  With drama in his voice, he said, "not just once, but f-i-i-i-ve times" as if her reading from a script given her by superiors was not just sinful but five times sinful because she read it that many times.  And the idiotic beat goes on in the IRS hearings as the Rcc (Republican conservative complex) berate the current victim of political expediency the way they did when they ended the professional ascent of Susan Rice by publicly pillorying her for partisan purposes.

But the aspect of this thing that has the greatest magnitude...for everyone except Rice and Miller...is that there is a popular analogue to the Rcc presence in congress and you can see it if you look on the internet.  If you pick an issue of interest from those covered at the hearings and "Google it," the results that rise to the top of the search are conservative rants about a cover up and the supposed standing ovation Congressman Kelly got when he reiterated the same bluster that Republican congressmen had been uttering all day as if he were the first.  The conservative drummers keep pounding their drums, probably more out of failure to understand than cunning.  But all that aside, there is justified concern over the high-handedness that may have been behind the decision to give extra scrutiny to applications for tax exempt status to those of organizations whose names suggested conservative leanings.  To my way of thinking, that is the real issue.  This wasn't criminal, nor was it really political, I'm guessing.  It was one of two things.  Either a group of low level decision makers in the unit that evaluates these applications--and there have been tens of thousands of them since the Citizens United case with only a hundred and fifty employees to review them--decided to take an arguably inappropriate shortcut in identifying the ones that needed the most attention, or a few arrogant rogues decided to harass some people just because they could.  The former is a function of statutory language that says that social welfare agencies must be that exclusively, which the IRS has interpreted that to mean only primarily non-political for some reason, and as I said in my last letter, what's a poor IRS agent to do with such vagaries.  The latter is a matter of agency attitude, which ironically is somewhat like the attitude demonstrated by some of the congressmen investigating all this and the organizations whose abuses of the system precipitating the investigation: that prosecutorial venomousness that has nothing to do with truth seeking but rather has to do with wreaking havoc on adversaries as if that is a legitimate purpose toward which to direct authority and political power.  It was obvious in the procrustean styles in which some of the congressional interrogators framed their questions...that demand for a yes or no answer when there is none possible.  One of them asked Miller if he had spoken to anyone about what they are calling "targeting."  Miller tried to find out whether the congressman was talking about the topic as a generality or about this particular instance of targeting, but all the congressman did to make his question intelligible was to reiterate it and demand a yes or no answer.  And he persisted in his vain attempt to box Miller into a trap, which would have ensnared him no matter whether he said yes or no in the absence of an explanation, until the exchange ended when the congressman's time elapsed.  Foiled by the clock, the congressman limped back into obscurity in an instant, and Miller gave his explanatory answer, which was a sort of coup de gräce for the bull-headed politician in the final analysis.

But for all the jousting that occurred on C-Span over the past week or two on the two subjects of Benghazi and IRS abuses--and there's more to come once they get rolling on the subpoenaed telephone records of the Associated Press--what has been gained?  Not a thing.  The Republicans are still doing what they do, and the Democrats are still trying to stand above the despicable fray with politics-minded Americans just as entrenched in their dogmatic loyalties as ever.  That is the form that modern American politics takes these days.  Nothing is happening in the way of legislating, which after all is what we sent "dem birds," as Will Rogers called them, to Washington for.  And the accretion of a critical mass of ego in congress is rapidly approaching.  Soon, the debt ceiling will be an issue again, and despite the bellowing of the Republican congress about The Senate failing to pass a budget for three years, when they did do so, congressional Republicans refused to bring their Ryan budget to conference with The Senate for reconciliation...the usual next step.  Once again, the Republicans are abusing the privilege of serving their constituents, and the Democrats seem to be saying next to nothing about it.  When will they ever learn...all of them.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

It's notable to me that the Republicans in congress are saying nothing about substantive issues these days, preferring to attempt to capitalize on what they see as missteps by the Democrats and the Obama administration.  Since the emergence of the IRS "scandal" involving the taxonomy of applications for tax exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the IRS code, even Benghazi has taken a back seat in the faux-pas-mongering of the Republicans, and I believe whole heartedly that the IRS problem was just that: a faux pas.  I can't say what the political climate was like in the offices of the IRS in which there was supposed political discrimination against conservative  applicants for that status, but in Connecticut, the campaign season ads we saw on television from groups that claim to be non-political 501(c)(4) "social welfare groups" were anything but non-political, a criterion for this type of tax exempt status.  For example, if you saw an ad run by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS group, you were not left in doubt as to the group's political affiliations or alignment, but the donations to that organization were eligible for tax deduction under the IRS code because of Crossroads GPS's putative status as a non-profit "social welfare organization."  Thus, distinguishing between truly non-political organizations and those with party or candidate affiliations is not easy, even for the IRS.  If Crossroads GPS qualifies, why not the Republican Party?  If you add to this equation the fact that you don't need IRS approval to declare yourself a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, you realize that seeking an IRS determination that you are one has ulterior purposes, and as it turns out, only one of those purposes is to ensure the deductibility of donations of massive size.  Another is the fact that, while a 501(c)(3) organization has to disclose the identities of its donors since it is a political organization, a 501(c)(4) organization does not, and there is the frame for this picture.  Purported social welfare organizations as defined by the IRS Code can take deductible donations from the ultra-rich without disclosing that the ultra-rich gave them...but they are not supposed to be political.  They can't be in the business of influencing legislation, which you can read as lobbying.  They cannot be advocates for political candidates or parties, which you can read as campaigning for candidates.  But obviously, the social welfare organizations that are the biggest do just those things...and that is what they were created to do.  So what's a poor IRS agent to do when an application comes in for predetermined 501(c)(4) status?  He needs some guidance, and apparently a few low level supervisors came up with a solution: look carefully at any organization that proudly wears the badge of a political action group like the Tea Party in its name.  And that's what brought us to today.  Some government workers were looking for a systematic way to do their jobs, and it caused them to seize upon an obvious indicator of a forbidden characteristic in an organization: its name.  Seems logical to me, and to a lot of other people as well, I'll bet.  

Never-the-less, there will be an investigation, and what they will find, I predict, is that of the three denials of organizations seeking social welfare organization status, all of them were justified, and as to whether laws were broken, the status sought by the other seven hundred odd applicants is not an entitlement, nor is it even necessary for their purposes.  It is only a prediction of how the IRS will rule on any claim of tax deductibility for contributions made, mostly by the .1% donors who actually run those of them that are political in reality...oh, and a guaranty that no one will ask who they are.  Neither is what I would call a solid distinction, that is, it is advisory in nature for the IRS to declare an organization non-political in this way...a guide line...not a form of social or political status.  Thus, though the determination to use this taxonomic method may be revealed to reflect a lack of analytic or creative thinking, it was anything but discriminatory in some invidious sense.  It was more exasperation with the deceit of a few than an attempt to deprive them of anything to which they were entitled, but since the Republicans think that their ox has been gored, they will by marching on the castle like town's folk carrying torches looking for a monster, and they will create one if they can...a Democrat no doubt.  But when it comes to real issues, the Republicans have had little success lately.  For example, when did you last hear a Republican complain about energy policy.

You may remember that even as recently as the last election, Republicans were complaining that our dependence on foreign oil and the high price of gasoline and fuel oil were the fault of the Obama administration.  They were undaunted by the fact that BP had poisoned the Gulf of Mexico when they demanded a renewal of the permitting process for deep water drilling because we were in such dire need of more crude...supposedly.  But as it turns out, we have been exporting gasoline from our refineries at the record rate of about 500,000 barrels per day according to the Energy Information Agency, a department of the federal government.  And while our oil companies do so, we import approximately 300,000 barrels per day from Europe here in the Northeast.  In fact, the refineries on the XL pipeline--you may remember the Republican bellowing about the Nebraska governor's and the Obama administration's reservations about the pipeline as an election issue too--export about 60% of the gasoline they produce while despoiling our gulf coast with refineries and pipes, all of this begging the question, what is the point of pursuing energy independence if we will just export what we produce in consequence of it anyway.  Demand for petroleum products has fallen by 9% in the United States since its peek in 2005 and production has risen to its highest level since 1988, but prices continue to rise even though we have done what we were told was necessary to reduce demand for foreign oil and oil company profits are at record levels.  With all that in mind, Republicans can't dwell on the issue without begging the question of whose side they are on--a question that arises whenever they talk about real issues like immigration, the national debt and deficit, and tax reform as well.  Naturally, they are looking for other ways to succeed at the polls.  And they always resort to the tactics they are using now because their supply-sider obsessions won't win them any votes with the American public.  So we can expect this head hunt at the IRS to be front page news for some time, and the hearings about Benghazi will be ceaseless for the foreseeable future.  Until the next mid-term election in 2014, the Republicans will be trying to point the finger at the other guy because they aren't saying anything they want the American voter to hear.  The question is--given the fact that they got away with it in 2010--will they get away with it again.  I mean, how long can they keep up this hyperbole about nothing without the voting public saying, "So what?"  I mean, all they have on Benghazi is that the CIA couldn't tell the administration who did it or why for a couple of days after the murders, so a UN diplomat made a public guess that was wrong.  So what?  And as to the IRS, they were looking for culprits, and where better to look than among the usual suspects.  So what?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Washington politics never cease to provide grist for the criticism mill, but the spectacle that the Republicans make of themselves...the way in which they writhe and contort and twist the facts in pursuit of their political goals without ever considering accepting the fact that it is not just their politics but their ideology as well that discredit them...never ceases to amaze me.  On Wednesday, the House oversight committee commenced new hearings on the subject of the Benghazi affair in which four members of the American diplomatic corps were murdered by a radical Muslim cadre's invasion of the diplomatic compound in which they were housed and worked.  There has already been an extensive investigation, but it didn't turn up any mal- or mis- feasance, so the Republicans, who chair the committee and are in its majority, have decided to try to contrive something.  As those of you who read these letters know, I sometimes watch C-SPAN, which probably makes me one of about ten people in the country who do, and I saw the testimony of three members of the Libya diplomatic mission testifying about what happened.  Then, I saw Bill O'Reilly interview one of the congressmen on the committee, Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio, and I got a preview of how the Republicans will conspire to distort what evidence they can get over and above the mounds that are already on record elsewhere.  And to O'Reilly's credit, arch-conservative that he is, even he greeted the congressman's characterization of the facts with skepticism.

The testimony in question came from a fairly senior diplomat named Greg Hicks, who was in Tripoli that night, in touch with the diplomatic contingent in Benghazi only by phone.  Hicks, whose testimony showed him to be a shameless self-promoter, had been interviewed by the chairman of the committee, Republican Representative Chaffetz, but he was instructed by superiors not to sit down with Chaffetz unless he was accompanied by a Department-of-State lawyer.  Even Hicks admits he was never told not to speak to Chaffetz, but just that he should be accompanied when he did, despite the contrary characterizations of the instruction by conservative Republicans. In fact, Hicks even corrected a Republican on the committee when he tried to make the conservative claim.  The lawyer didn't coach Hicks, nor did she interfere in the questioning, but apparently went along so that there would be a witness to anything said, thus preventing any tortured interpretations or outright distortions.  On another occasion, Hicks was part of a group discussion involving investigators--their report is an in-depth appraisal of what happened that even the committee acknowledges has already been done--and on that occasion, no lawyer was present for security clearance reasons but other department members were.   In other words, this was Hicks' third shot at telling the story, once to a Republican on the committee, without ever implicating anyone in wrongful acts.  Those are the facts to which Hicks testified on the subject of a lawyer's presence.  Congressman Jordan tried to make the supervision of the interview into some kind of suppression of Hicks' testimony when there was never any evidence to that effect, not even this third time around.  Even O'Reilly didn't buy the attempt at inculpation, and the jig done by Jordan to try to make his case serves only to demonstrate the lengths to which Republicans will go to make political hay even if there is none to be made...even when doing so doesn't serve the interests of the American people.  It's all about winning elections to the Republicans; government service has nothing to do with it.  They seem to think that the American people are so easily duped that they can be convinced that an inconsequential nullity is really something to be concerned about if they just kick up enough dust, and the reason they are trying it again with Benghazi is that they aren't succeeding anywhere else.

The last election demonstrated, as the polls continue to do, that the American people want to see higher taxes on the rich, but the Republicans are balking.  The American people want immigration reform for a variety of reasons, but the Republicans are balking.  The American people want same-sex marriage, but the Republicans are balking.  So this series of Benghazi hearings is their attempt to deflect attention from the issues on which they are recalcitrant...and in the minority amidst the American polity.  In short, they see that they need to win one, any one, and there isn't one in sight for them to win with the positions they are taking.  This is what political desperation looks like, and we have seen it before, and I suspect that as long as there are Republicans, we will see it again too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I saw Bill Gates on stage with President emeritus Clinton on Tuesday night.  It was the tape of an interview given to a reporter from MSNBC--which has a relationship with Microsoft that explains how Bill Gates got on the same stage as The President--and the star of the show was definitely Bill Clinton.  I sometimes forget what he brought to his office when he served in it, but whenever he speaks, I am reminded.  He is a liar personally, but as far as his political beliefs are concerned, they are all well reasoned, supported by logic and fact, and at least ostensibly sincere.  I doubt that he has stopped seducing women given the hard life that he wears on his face, but his politics are impeccably progressive with a Keynesian economic slant admixed with just a hint of capitalistic, free enterprise, Darwinian reservation.  Bill Gates, on the other hand, is another thing entirely.  His preference for self-reliance even in the cases of those whose self-reliance can never yield the modicum of creature comfort that should be universal is like a scar on the picture of Dorian Grey...except that it is on his face where it seems to me he thinks it is hidden.  Gates is a man who thinks that he is better than everyone else, and while his foundation makes an enormous show of helping the impoverished with problems like the malaria that is rampant in some of the third world, he also lives in a mansion and appears not to even think about the poor as his driver wends the limo up the driveway.  Mind you, that is a metaphorical observation as I have no idea whether Gates uses a limo, but the image seems apposite given the tone and substance of what he said.  As he opined that the market should be allowed in some way to control the outrageous cost of healthcare, Bill Clinton observed that we pay nearly 18% of our gross domestic product to health care providers and the next most expensive developed nation pays less than 12%.  He then made oblique reference to the fact that those other nations have universal health care institutions except for the one paying 12%, which uses a system like Obamacare.  In that country, the Netherlands, everyone has to buy insurance, but there are accusations of rationing medical care because there is such diversity among insurance plans depending on what people can afford.  Gates' rambling and essentially prattling advocacy of the free market was not even tangentially supported by fact, much less was it tangential to reality.  We have a free market, and it runs amok with impunity.  Listening to the two of them was like hearing a condensed version of the political dialectic occurring in this country today.  There was the captain of industry, who wears his greed on his sleeve like a badge of honor, implying that if he can do it anyone can and thus should be required to without government assistance, and there was the world class progressive politician who knows that if everyone could to it...well, everyone would.

Both men have probably read Dickens, but they have drawn politically diametrically opposed conclusions from his work...Gates identifying with the upper class and Clinton with Oliver Twist.  Gates is a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy, never considering that one who cannot afford shoes doesn't have bootstraps while Clinton sees need and feels that in those cases where there are no bootstraps, they should be provided.  With regard to medical care in particular, the evidence continues to mount that Gates' economic model for society is at best a fantasy and at worst an attempt to reify greed in the form of filthy lucre while Clinton's model is not just realistically compassionately founded, it is a matter of necessity because free enterprise is anything but free if you are not running it.  The federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released data on Wednesday on the subject of hospital charges.  The data demonstrate that those charges are completely deracinated from any reality based considerations and--this is my conclusion rather than anyone else's, but I believe it would be an impossible challenge to refute it--are rather motivated by sheer avarice and acquisitiveness.  There were cases in the study in which charges for the same procedure were ten or even twenty times as high on one side of a city as they were on the other.  In addition, private insurers and Medicare pay only scheduled prices for treatments of various kinds ranging from minimally invasive gall bladder removal to joint replacement, but those without insurance are required to pay the full rate, often hundreds of thousands of dollars: a debt burden that would be life changing for most of us, but catastrophic for those below the mainstream of our economy.

So the data primarily demonstrate two things.  First, someone is getting very rich charging almost a quarter of a million dollars to replace a knee joint in a geriatric patient when the cost of doing so could not possibly even approach that figure.  Second, the burden of that rapacity is being born disproportionately by the working poor and the newly anointed members of the middle class who are just starting to realize their ambitions.  It is Bill Gates versus Bill Clinton, and I know which Bill I prefer.  The data were summarized in the New York Times, but they came from a government survey derived from information provided by hospitals themselves, so the possibility that the data are skewed to make some political point is remote if it exists at all, and it may be just the tip of the iceberg.  If you have ever had major surgery in a hospital, you will most likely recall that you received one bill from the hospital and another, separate bill from your surgeon, and both of them were likely astronomical.  I respect the demands of the medical profession, and I would even acknowledge that ninety percent or more of doctors take those demands seriously and are up to meeting them, the other ten percent being the focus of a discussion on medical malpractice tort reform that we should also be having.  But even so, the idea that a surgeon can make $6,000 an hour challenges my concept of fair compensation.  When I had my three shoulder surgeries over the course of ten years, I had them at the orthopedists' "surgery center" where the procedure was performed on an outpatient basis.  My surgeon's car was self-evident each time, and they went from Porsche Carrera to Audi A8 to Mercedes 500 series AMG.  If you know anything about such things, you know that none of those comes cheep, and at least one goes for about what most people pay for a starter house.  It turns out that the surgeon collects such vehicles and is a scratch golfer, which means he plays a good bit of golf when he isn't in the operating room from noon on most days, and I suppose that would have been justified if he were that talented and capable, but I discovered something on the occasion of the third operation that is suggestive of the contrary.  

I had to sign an authorization for his physician's assistant to perform any part of the procedure, and I refused at first.  But she came into the pre-operation room where I was being prepared for anesthesia and asked me to sign it, which I did after asking her to confirm that the surgeon would be in the operating room at all times.  After she left the anesthesiologist said to me, "you want her to be in that room," and he declined to explain why, but the context of the remark and what I could glean in my aftercare suggested quite strongly that she did the bulk of the work on my shoulder, which frankly was not quite the success that I had hoped it would be.  Of course, my insurance paid what the doctor charged for his own services, not the reduced rate that could be expected to compensate for someone who had never been to medical school, and I paid a price as well as there was no indication that some of the problems noted on my MRI were even considered, much less treated.  My point is one I have often made.  Like most people, I don't mind someone getting rich because he makes an extraordinary contribution to society or to human progress.  But wealth that is not earned by dint of such contributions--what I call artificial wealth--is the vigorish that a privileged few take for themselves just because they can.  As it turns out, that problem pervades medicine just as it does finance,  pharmaceuticals and most every other economic endeavor in our capitalist system.  That is why American capitalism is in jeopardy.  That is also why we need a single payer health care system, toward the end of which the Affordable Care Act is just a beginning, and the evidence to prove it is in.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There is a new bill going before congress.  It is intended to eliminate the current tax small brewers pay on each of the first 50,000 barrels of beer they produce: something on the order of $7 on each of those 50,000 barrels.  It is being sponsored by a Republican congressman...surprise...and presumably, it is intended to "stimulate small business" in a business that is already growing by leaps and bounds, but in this era in which the budget is being cut arbitrarily pursuant to the sequester and the Republican Party continues to obsess about the deficit and the national debt, is this really a good thing...and more importantly, has anyone asked that question?  Notably, small breweries have grown in number by 11% in the past two years, suggesting that the small brewery business is doing just fine and doesn't need tax relief for stimulation.  On the other hand, the Chicago school system is closing down more than fifty schools because the city's budget doesn't allow for all of the schools to continue to be run in light of cuts affecting education in the federal budget.  The consequence is that some small children will have to cross the boundaries between gang turfs at risk of harm and intimidation...on foot.  And conservatives in general want to put guns in schools to deter deranged killers rather than regulate and register guns, while they apparently aren't concerned about the encouragement of beer drinking by making it cheaper for would-be beer gastronomes to buy more than they need at a cost far in excess of that for ordinary beer, in other words, for beer snobbery to be subsidized.  Newly elected Republican senator Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire--a state in which 90% of the population is in favor of universal background checks for gun purchases--voted against the Manshin-Toomey amendment to the gun control bill intended to implement a somewhat diluted version of universal background checks, and now her constituents are berating her for it at town hall meetings over the congressional recess.  She persists in claiming that the measure "would be burdensome" and wouldn't prevent crimes like that committed in Newtown--she even refused to meet with gun shot victims during the current congressional recess--while ignoring the consensus, supported by specific examples of where the lack of background checks enabled crimes of violence, that some crimes of gun violence would be prevented by universal background checks.  My guess is that she will vote for the tax relief for small brewers though, and if she gets the chance, I'm also sure she will vote for cuts in programs like WIC, which helps poor women feed their infant children, and Medicare.  That is the profile of Republican politicians today: anything for business because no one really needs anything else.  But the American people have begun to recognize that business does nothing for anyone but itself.  Before anything trickles down, all of it has to trickle through the hands of those at the top, and they don't miss much when they are deciding what to keep for themselves. 

It reminds me of George H.W. Bush's claim that he was a "compassionate conservative."  He was going to reap the largess of "a thousand points of light" that were supposedly out there, waiting to be generous and altruistic.  It is worth noting that during his entire administration, he identified only four of them, but there was a conversation that the compassionate-conservative-in-chief had aboard a plane full of press during the period of his transition before he assumed office after election that was informative about the depth of his contemplation on the subject.  He was on his way to Texas to hunt quail--not his vice president, Dan, but the birds of the same name--when a member of the press asked him how killing animals was consistent with compassionate conservatism. Bush Responded, "Quail aren't animals.  They're birds."  And that is really the problem with conservatism, compassionate or not.  Just as H.W. didn't seem to know that a bird is an animal, conservatives don't seem to know the difference between people and things.  Like H.W., they don't seem to know that businesses aren't really people no matter what the Supreme Court says.  And because businesses aren't people, they don't think, but more importantly, they don't feel.  They just do what their proprietors make them do, and if those proprietors are conservatives, the needs and feelings of people don't enter into the matter.  For that reason if for no other, the future of conservative Republicanism is in doubt.  The very dogma by which it is identified is the liability by which it is encumbered.  We are not a nation of businesses.  We are a nation of people.  And the inalienable rights embodied by our seminal documents didn't inure to the benefit of businesses.  They were inalienable in men and women, not in things.  But more important for the Republicans is this.  Businesses can't vote even if their owners can control our political process with money...at least to some extent.

There was a treatment on "60 Minutes" of a character who fancies himself a Robin Hood.  He is a stock trader who got very rich in the field of artificial wealth creation, and now purports to give to those in need out of compassion by sponsoring an event each year for his Robin Hood foundation.  He invited four thousand very rich people this year, and by arm twisting he raised over $57 million in one night.  That's an average of just over $14,000 from each of them...millionaires every one...and for that they want to think of themselves as altruists.  But to a person for whom that kind of money represents little more than the interest on his wealth for a week or two, it is a meager show of generosity.  It is like Bill and Melinda Gates giving away a billion dollars a year when their fortune continues to grow by that amount even after their largess is deducted, and I have this to say to those 4000 millionaires, and to the Gates family as well.  If you want your earthly ticket validated so that you can get into heaven, you are going to have to do better.  And in that same vein, if the Republicans want to get elected, they're going to have to do better than giving tax breaks to that 4000 millionaires.

Your friend,

Mike

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, her account of its content in a television interview on "60 Minutes" seems to me to differ 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 as 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.  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.  Still, I think that as of now, I have the better deal at last; ironically, she thinks so 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 pre-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 about being discovered by the rich and powerful 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; 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.  But what women will find when they do all those things is that sometimes the object of their desires says no.  By the way, I always did the laundry in our house, though my wife helped sometimes, and the rest of the chores got divided up pretty equally as well.

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, according to "The Second Sex," 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-show-discussion 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.  So 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 being virile.  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 boss's nephew and the son of the company founder.  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 dates, 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, especially in light of the fact that though a voracious reader, she hasn't finished it yet three weeks in because she says there's really nothing new in it.  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