August 2013 Archives

Dear America,

I saw Republican former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on his Fox-TV show, and while it was farcical in its content, I have to give him credit for at least feigning to propose an alternative to the Affordable Care Act rather than just claiming that it usurps some contrived right that he claims is guaranteed by the constitution.  And he started with the great conservative "American Exceptionalism" argument that we have health care that is the envy of the world.  In reality, we probably do have more of the highest paid experts in the world, but we are well down the list of nations when you compare them for life span, success in curing cancer and, unbelievably, infant mortality.  But setting aside the opening canards about rights and the nature of the problem--and incidentally, the failure of the fair market as a health-care paradigm never got mentioned other than to deflect blame from it--he did make some sound suggestions.  First, he wants to focus on prevention, which the Affordable Care Act also emphasizes in terms of required coverage, though Huckabee didn't mention that either.  But though he sees that particular light, he blames the failure of our free market system to do so on Tom Cruise demanding that we "show him the money" and the fried food he grew up on, not to mention the fact that no one cares what the insurance company pays for the care we get, while it never occurs to him that if you cut the insurance companies out of the process, you save at least 20% of the nearly $3 trillion per year that health care costs in this country.  And while he acknowledges that Americans pay almost 18% of total Gross Domestic Production for health care--over one and a half times as much as the next most costly industrialized nation--he claims that doctors are underpaid and are hence leaving the profession at a time when they are in short supply...the former a claim that I had never heard before, though the shortage of doctors, especially in poor areas, is a long-term problem.  Tough to make the bucks out there where people have more chickens than money, and we all know that magnanimity won't make your Mercedes payments for you.

Overall, Huckabee's proposal is just rehashing old purported solutions, like healthy life styles and free-market style price pressure with a few antique ideas, like health savings accounts and "it's all the Democrats' fault" thrown in for spice.  As to the health savings accounts, the way he would have them work is that everyone would have a certain sum...he chose $2,500...set aside for him, "perhaps by his employer," and that money would be spent on medical care before the catastrophic coverage of the insured kicked in, and of course, that plan would be only as effective as what the patient chose to afford, if affording something is a choice at all.  Of course, Huckabee never addressed the Panglossian nature of the notion that someone out there would put that money aside for us, nor did he talk about the fact that when families have to choose between clothes and shoes for school and catastrophic care health insurance premiums, usually the clothes and shoes take priority, but that was one of the central concepts on which he relied.  As to the Democrats, he complained that they had been against the Republican solutions...like health savings accounts...but he never mentioned the fact that when the Clinton administration set up a commission to study universal health care, the Republicans proposed Obamacare as an alternative to a single payer system, which generally means a public healthcare system, and Republican governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney even created one.  He also complained that 80% of what we spend on healthcare is incurred in the last two years of life.  It sounded like a vague plea for what he and his Tea Party compatriots were calling death panels that would surely emerge, they argued, from the passage of Obamacare.  Of course, they were never part of what the Democrats passed, but maybe Huckabee wants to enlist Sara Palin for a second attempt to create them.  And he droned on for about half an hour about all these putatively advanced ideas, never saying a word that wouldn't lead one to believe that more federal spending on funding cures for major diseases--which Republicans are against as they oppose increasing the deficit and the debt--and letting the healthcare marketplace set its own prices--which is what has led us to the place we are in now with 48 million uninsured before Obamacare has taken effect--are the real solution to our healthcare problems.  No wonder his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 only lasted about ten minutes.  But he at least got on television and said something that acknowledged the problem that thousands of people die needlessly every year because they don't have the money to participate in our healthcare system.  Even though his little talk was more of a bad joke than a real lesson in sagacity, it was an effort to participate in the search for a solution to the problem, and his observation that what we got in the Affordable Care Act wasn't healthcare reform but rather was insurance reform was profoundly accurate in my opinion, which is important because we should be only at the beginning of the search for a solution to a problem that belies our claim to exceptionalism.  That puts Huckabee ahead of the vast majority of his Republican colleagues, and to my way of thinking qualifies him to lead the discussion for his party.  Unfortunately, the only way he will be able to do so is if he runs for president again, but it looks as though the Republicans have already selected enough guys like Rick Perry to fill their slate of idiots for consideration to be their nominee.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Egyptian general who led the military when it ousted Mohammed Morsi is named Abdel Fattah el-SiSi.  His biography is much like that of any other military man, and as a dedicated member of the military of his country, he rose through the ranks after a military education that included a stint at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which educates military people for leadership rolls.  In an interview on the subject of the general, his advisor at the college spoke of a paper el-SiSi wrote that was "not for publication," an option that was available to the writer apparently as it was el-SiSi who so specified.  But the advisor was asked about el-SiSi's nature as it relates to his current position of leadership in the Egyptian army and in consequence of that leadership, his role in the formation of a new Egyptian government.  The advisor's sole comment was on that paper, in which el-SiSi pointed out that in Egypt, a wholly secular government was an impossibility, which sounded like a revelation to the advisor...that religion was seminal in the governance of Egypt, if not all Arab states.  Of course that begs the question of how much useful preparation el-SiSi could have gotten in this country since the concept of religious inspiration in any form other than the opening prayer of a legislative session is foreign to us, but for better or worse, he took that course here as well as others in Egypt's equivalent institutions.  He may have taught his mentors here more than he learned from them, but it is beginning to look like his mentors never spread the message.

The political buzz on Egypt focuses on our military aid and whether we should suspend it during the tenure of a military-backed regime.  Senator John McCain seems to be the shrillest voice advocating such a course in accord with an American statute that prohibits aid to military governments who rule as a consequence of coups.  Of course, the debate on the subject includes a fair amount of semiotic caviling on the subject of whether what happened in Egypt was a coups, and I suppose that should be the starting point of the decision making process, unless you want to consider the events in terms of their potential portents and decide what to do on that basis, which is the path I would choose if anyone asked me.  Because, while el-SiSi is certainly a military man, he is not a potential junta leader if his history...including that paper I mentioned...is any indicator.  He is a pragmatist who recognizes that there will be a significant amount of fundamentalism in any government that can succeed in Egypt...perhaps even to the point of being seminal in the promulgation of the next national constitution and the related statutes.  Thus, if el-SiSi remains in effective control, what will emerge from this political tumult will be a government that straddles the fine line between theocracy and democracy, and that is the best we can hope for.  So why antagonize him by threatening him, and doing so to no effect since the other Arab states are willing to make up for whatever we deny him, and have said so publicly.  And what if they don't make up the difference?  If one of the potential consequences is that the military will fail to restore order in Egypt because of lack of resources we will be at least partially culpable, and we risk getting our just deserts in such a case as the country that emerges could be a seriously fundamentalist enemy not just for Israel, but for us too...maybe another foe like Qadaffi's Libya, which sponsored terror attacks against western powers, including the U.S.  Someone should ask McCain if that is a risk he wants to take, because that is really the salient question that our foreign policy should be based on in this case.  Usually you hear a lot about protecting American interests, and it isn't an endearing aspect of American foreign policy when it leads to interventions, sanctions and support of proxies who share our interests.  But in this case, it is the only prudent course, and in the bargain, American silence on the subject of Egypt would probably be welcomed by the rest of the world.

Can we, as a nation, keep our national mouth shut, or will we once again insist on inserting our collective foot in it in full view of an already critical world.  A billion and a half is chump change in this scenario, and withholding it is all we will do if we do anything at all, so why do it.  Besides, no one will come to accept the notion that the United States doesn't take sides in the domestic affairs of other nations just because we do withhold the money, but if we give it as we always have, even when Mubarek was in the kind of despotic control that withholding the money is supposed to demonstrate an aversion to, we will be doing nothing outside the status quo.  In other words, we can't gain anything by holding the money back, so again, why do it.  As these popular movements and governmental reactions proliferate in a region that was volatile to begin with, it is important for the United States to chose a policy philosophy that will serve us more or less universally, and the right way to go seems to be that chosen in Libya when there is something akin to consensus among regional powers, but it is something less apparent when only internal affairs are involved and there is no activist movement among the nations of the region.  In those cases, we can take no action to best effect, and that means in the case of Egypt doing what we have always done there: giving their military the aid they need to be the bulwark against fundamentalism in the Middle East, more or less in concert with our only other reliable ally, Israel.  With Syria appearing to be an uprising in which consensus has evolved, we can take concerted action with impunity because we will not be alone and hope that the outcome works in our favor without running the risk of appearing to be imperialists.  The corollary is what should be our Egyptian policy: the boat was rocking and someone stepped in to stop it.  That is an effort that we might not be well served to actively support, but it is one that can only serve our interests and that we cannot be vilified for not taking a role in.  We should just pretend that nothing is happening in Egypt and contend with Syria where we have colleague states, so to speak, and an oppressor who is universally recognized as such.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Even though Diane Sawyer thinks that reports on young girls who escape being mauled by bears and Prince William and his wife changing their own child's diapers are of paramount import, there are things happening in the world that are of broader interest, such as the insurrection that ousted Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and the counter-insurrection that ensued.  Over a thousand people have been killed in that reaction to Morsi's removal from office, and it is important because its outcome may determine the near term history of our ally Israel as well as the durability of the Muslim Jihad movement all over the Middle East.  Thus far, the United States has acted with respect for Egyptian self-determinism and with restraint, though the old soldiers in congress like Senator John McCain keep agitating for sanctions against the military interim regime...interim we hope.  But even if the Egyptians work everything out themselves tomorrow, the lack of in-depth coverage of the tumult there is a disservice to the American people, who have to vote for the people who will make our policies in such situations in the future, and there is much to say that light-weights like Sawyer don't seem too concerned about.  (Peter Jennings must be spinning in his grave.  Even Charlie Gibson's tenure looks good by comparison to what ABC news has become under Diane Sawyer.)

Central to all of Middle Eastern politics is a principle that we in The West don't understand.  In Europe and The Americas, government is secular and religion is free.  We can worship as we like...or not...but government has nothing to say about it, but in the Middle East, the opposite is true.  Religion in the Muslim world, and in the Jewish state of Israel too for that matter, is an integral part of daily living, and it influences politics not just indirectly as it does here through PAC's and the use by clergy of the Bully Pulpit so to speak, but directly even to the extent that religious principles are integrated into national constitutions.  It is most important for us to recognize that just as we cannot fathom a society ruled by religious sentiment, that two billion or so people who live in North Africa, southern Europe and Asia who subscribe to Semitic faiths are just as perplexed by the dichotomization of how we live and how we worship.  And if you think about it, there is at least some sense in which their skepticism about the validity of such a bifurcation of morality and law is understandable.  We hearken to one set of principles on Saturday and Sunday mornings and another the rest of the time.  People go to church and extol abstention of one kind or another and then abandon abstemiousness when they put the game on television and open a beer before retiring for the night with cohabiting significant others to whom they are not married.  We attend churches that abhor birth control and then we practice it anyway because the law says we can.  And frankly, despite the hypocrisy of it all, I think it should be thus--even hypocrisy should be an individual choice.  But in Muslim countries, a substantial portion of the populace--enough in the case of Egypt to democratically elect a fundamentalist who doesn't believe that such a dichotomy is either moral or workable--does not subscribe to the notion that we can lead both secular and pious lives, while the remainder of those societies wants the secular right and the right, not the obligation, to lead deistic lives as they see fit.  The consequence of that schism is what we are seeing not just in Egypt, but also in Iran and Iraq...and Turkey lately as well.  In fact, we joined in a peacekeeping action in Bosnia because Muslims and Christians couldn't live together after eight hundred years of strife between them starting with The Crusades, that war demonstrating the centrality of religion in eastern culture, even in the Balkans.  And we have to support Israel, even when that country does things in violation of international law like settle conquered territory, because the Muslim and Palestinian population of the region cannot tolerate the existence of a Jewish state and the Jews of Israel insist that it remain religiously monolithic in terms of its governance.  Yet, even with all this experience regarding a way of life that is different from our own, we still think we can insist on Middle Eastern governance that cleaves to our western idea of secular society.  That's where Diane Sawyer, and others similarly situated, come in...or at least should come in.

The news media are the primary continuing-education institution of the vast American electorate.  They inform us for the rest of our lives after we cease to attend schools and have history and philosophy pushed at us.  We are a free society...predominantly secular despite the sanctimony of some politicians and broadcasters...and the news media are free to do as they like and say what they like as long as they don't tell outright lies, though sometimes they do and nothing seems to happen in consequence.  But the license to broadcast of every major electronic media outlet on either radio or television carries with it a duty to perform public service by both law (the Communications Act of 1934) and regulation (See the Federal Register for the FCC).    Thus,  when ABC's news' priorities allocate five minutes to Prince William's infant son's "nappies" but only fifteen seconds to the Sequester-inspired, sharp curtailment of the Head Start program with only a few seconds to the proposition that "some say there are alternatives" without even mentioning who or what they are respectively, that should be at least potentially a breach of that duty to serve the public.  And it is of consequence such is not the case because people vote on the basis of what they believe, and what they believe is based on what they hear...not just from each other, but from the news media as well.

My wife was a fan of Diane Sawyer's when she ascended to the position of leadership at ABC News, but she sees the vapidity of ABC's coverage of news under Sawyer's stewardship.  My guess is that we will soon be eating dinner with someone else reporting the news to us--CBS, for example, runs two to three times the amount of hard news coverage that ABC does and its viewership is up 7%--joining the hundreds of thousands who have given up on ABC and NBC as sources of current events coverage and have come to rely on other broadcasters.  I for one advocate Public Broadcasting, for even though Sean Hannity thinks it is liberally biased, it seems to me that when they say something on PBS, it is more likely to be important--more likely to be true as well--than if it is said on Fox or ABC, which used to be different but now are just different shades of gray.  In fact, while ABC reported on the girl who survived the bear attack...twice in the same day mind you...PBS gave full coverage to the Head Start issue with interviews of informed people with opposing viewpoints on the subject, as did NPR.  But maybe that's not so important.  After all, on NPR and PBS, we didn't hear anything about the bear.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I watched Charlie Rose interview Larry Ellison on Saturday night.  Ellison is the CEO of Oracle, which apparently is a huge presence in what they call "enterprise software," the meaning of which is somewhat beyond my humble understanding of computer technology.  At any rate, in the field of computer technology, he is one of the pioneers and he has become one of the five or six richest men in the world...worth over $35 billion according to the estimates of the publications that know about such things...and at least to the larger extent, his wealth is legitimate--what I call natural wealth.  He has become rich by doing things that benefit society technologically, and our productivity as a nation--by productivity I don't mean the output of the average worker but rather the advance of our species toward a higher evolutionary state--has been enhanced by his efforts.  Concisely put, I think he has earned his money as legitimately as such amounts can be earned.  But after watching the interview for awhile it occurred to me that either his personal philosophy made it possible for him to do the things necessary to enrich himself or his riches precipitated a personal philosophy that serves him and people like him.  But either way, he is not one of us, and I don't think he shares interests with the population at large, which begs a question: are rich people different from the rest of us, and can we trust them to be as much in control of our society as we have allowed them to become.

Despite the Republican promotion of an Ayn Randian kind of economic Darwinism, there are many who still wonder, as I do, if we are truly benefited by the oligarchic control of our world by our economic giants.  To be specific, I am forced to wonder whether Ellison, Gates, Buffett, Forbes and the rest can even identify what serves us all in the larger social sense, and thus tailor their enterprises to not only make money for them, but to enhance the lives of the great mass of people at large.  And that ability, or the lack thereof is significant because if they cannot identify what we want, but more importantly what we need, they cannot possibly facilitate its creation except serendipitously, and that kind of generalized luck just hasn't been evinced by the efforts of big business to date.  Of course we have all benefited from various forms of technological change that has made certain individuals rich, but in general we pay a price in the form of the actual autonomy that we no longer enjoy.  We are subject to high prices for various things we have come to need because those with money control how much we pay, and the list of such things includes everything from gasoline to antibiotics, and I think the rich are aware of that.  In Gates' case for example, he has created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he goes about touting the efforts of the foundation, which is predominantly controlled by him and his wife.  But despite his apparent altruism and philanthropy, he continues to get richer, and not by virtue of anything he does.  He wanted to find a way to preserve vaccines and other medicines in tropical climates--certainly a magnanimous goal--so he offered a prize for anyone who could create a practical system capable of keeping drugs cold without external power, and one was created, but Gates only contribution was $1 million reward...a pittance, if that, in the total scheme of things in Bill Gates' world.  Ellison likewise has his foundation, which focuses on diseases of aging.  They all unctuously cloak themselves in magnanimity by pursuing their interests in what look like profoundly public spirited ways, but do they wield their power beneficially overall?  That is what interested me about Ellison.  In much of what he said, he made it clear that the answer is no.

For example, he isn't concerned about what the NSA has done in the area of collection of personal data, largely from companies that use his software or other software like it: Google, Microsoft, Facebook and their ilk.  He says, and rightly so, that we already give up our privacy every time we apply for a credit card, but he goes on to argue that therefore, it makes no difference if the NSA gets and keeps what we give away anyway since we give it away voluntarily.  But that is just the glaze on the problem that such data collection represents.  It is true that we give away a great deal of information in exchange for the convenience of shopping with a credit card, but we do so voluntarily, and only for that purpose, not for it to be passed along.  Further, we give up much more information through the use by various vendors of software like that which Ellison sells, without ever knowing we have done so, and unlike when we apply for credit cards, internet goods and service providers don't ask us if we want to share it with them...and everyone else they want to sell it to, much less the NSA.  Ellison is one of those who think that civil liberty is something that no one needs unless he has something to hide: an easy position to take if you are in control of the collection and use of that data, but not such a comfortable notion if you are just an ordinary person.  And misuse of such information has occurred; remember Richard Nixon and his enemies list, which resulted in audits of people whose opinions Nixon didn't like.  Remember Manzanar--the concentration camp on American soil for Americans of Japanese extraction--and ask yourself if you are sure that you want the government to be able to identify you by the friends you keep or by your ancestry.  And most obviously, remember Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and all the people whose lives they ruined because McCarthy and his cadre didn't like their politics, and ask yourself how much you want the government to have access to with regard to what you think and what you say and to whom.  Overall, the government has not always abided by the rules we set for it in our constitution, and Ellison's willingness to trust it is largely a function of his being beyond its reach by virtue of his wealth, but even more prominently it is a function of the fact that he sells the tools by which that information is accumulated.  Given the power that inures to him simply by virtue of what he owns and controls, an opinion like his may be hazardous to the rest of us.  Compound Ellison's potential for malefaction with the fact that Microsoft too collects data every time Windows boots up on your laptop as does Facebook every time you check your account to see who has written what on your "wall."  And whether you realize it or not, all kinds of web sites place cookies and slices and add-ons on your machine, not to mention the nefarious among us who install trackers, beacons and malware on it without ever letting us know.  With a subpoena, the NSA can get that information as can others with whom those surreptitiously placing their tools on your computer wish to share it.

So in the final analysis, I have to conclude that the threat to our liberty isn't just the government's surveillance of our every keystroke.  That is something that happens only because people like Larry Ellison make it possible, and corporations from Sears to Samsung use the implements that those people provide.  The real danger is that business has become so intrusive that no one is ever really alone anymore because someone is always watching.  Mind you, I don't have anything to hide, but it makes me uncomfortable anyway...and so does Larry Ellison.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

In my last letter I bemoaned the presence of Louis Gohmert on the ABC news program This Week.  And in the past, just as I have questioned the merits of George Stephanoupolis's judgment on such choices, I have questioned that of Diane Sawyer, the current Peter Jennings epigone trying to bring ABC back to its hegemony in the news business.  But she seems to hit a new low every night when it comes to the substance and merit of her reportage, and it is coming back to haunt the network.  On another news program yesterday, a reporter interviewed a protestor in Cairo who was a supporter of the military leader of the intervention that removed Mohammed Morsi from power about two months ago.  That general, General CiCi of the Egyptian army, installed the former vice-president as interim leader of the government when Morsi either failed or was disinclined to take steps to ameliorate the problems being protested by his detractors in the millions, but there has been no abatement of the civil disobedience in Egypt...just a reversal as to who is the rebel and who is the establishment against whom the rebellion is being waged.  The issue, at its root, is whether, or at least to what extent, Egypt will be governed in conformance with Muslim principles like Sharia Law, and both sides claim a popular mandate.  In the past few days, over 600 civilians have been killed in violence waged by the military authority in an effort to quell the civil strife that was killing civilians before the military began doing so, but Sawyer barely noticed.  She did inform us that post par tem mothers could save over $2,000 a year by negotiating the fees that their gyms charge them.  Apparently viewers of ABC pay enormous amounts to go to gyms whereas people like me, and you too probably, pay only about ten dollars a month for their gym privileges, but putting aside the frivolousness with which Sawyer conceives of her stories and the shallowness of the viewers she seeks to attract, there is the fact that even abroad, American news agencies are dismissed as partisan, chauvinistic and unreliable.  In that interview with an Egyptian protester, the interviewer described a banner being flown by the anti-Morsi protesters calling CNN and ABC liars, and the protester he interviewed denied that the military had killed all those protesters; it was the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's party, that had killed them, he said.  He believed rumors rather than the reportage of the two most prominent popular media news outlets in this country, but if he was watching Sawyer last night, he at least knows that he can negotiate his gym membership.

But frankly, I am more concerned about that attitude in this country than I am about Egypt's problem with popular myth guiding its history.  When Mitt Romney's campaign was in its final days, ABC News reported polling information that had him in a dead heat with Barrack Obama, but only after changing their polling affiliation from its regular pollster to a notably conservative one that had reported The President to be in a comfortable position. Obviously, the polling data on which they had been relying before the change was accurate, but accuracy seemed...at least in retrospect... to be a secondary concern.  The consequence is that people like Louis Gohmert continue to say things that get reported as fact, and the same reliance on myth creeps into our political discourse just as it seems to be doing in Egypt.  For example, Gohmert took to the floor of the House of Representatives during the Republican debate season before the last election and reported that the EPA had promulgated a regulation that was violated if a farmer kicked up dust on the dirt road leading to his farm house.  And despite the preposterous sound of such a claim, it gained sufficient credence that Newt Gingrich repeated it in support of his claim that regulation was at the heart of the great American recession, and Gingrich was not the only prominent figure to promote the apocryphal regulation as proof that efforts to control our degrading environment had gone too far.  Of course the claim was almost immediately debunked, but while it had been reported as news initially, no one ever made much of the revelation that no such regulation existed...or ever had.  And similar myths fuel popular disdain for Obamacare, which admittedly is not without limitations and flaws, regulation in general, the need for "energy independence" through drilling everywhere when we are shipping much of what we pump and refine to other countries, and so on.  The cavalier attitude of the entities that are responsible for informing us all are not doing what they are meant to do, but are rather allowing discord to be fomented by the misinformed and the devious, and in the case of ABC for example, even promoting myth as fact by treating people like Louis Gohmert like they were credible and possessed of expertise that qualifies them to influence mass thought.  When the Tea Party promoted the notion that Obamacare included "death panels" that would determine whether our grandmothers would get medical care or be allowed to die when the law actually does no more than require health insurance to pay for counseling for those who wanted it as to what treatment at the end of life was palliative and what was ameliorative, virtually nothing was said about Sarah Palin, for example, spreading the canard.  And the consequence--at least in part--is that to this day, Obamacare is in disfavor while no one talks about the fact that it is the only thing that could be passed because the conservative in the Republican Party would not allow a single payer system.  In fact, when such a system was being considered as a solution to our medical care system's tendency to omit care for the poor and marginally endowed during the Clinton administration, those same conservative Republicans proposed what became Obamacare...and Romneycare in Massachusetts...as an alternative, but partisan mythology has been allowed to taint the half loaf that conservatives could not stop.  It is the news media who have failed in that regard, and it may well be that some day, the fate of Egypt today will befall us in consequence of our refusal to demand more of them.  And the failure to inform our populace is not just the responsibility of ABC, but rather of all of the media outlets including the mainstream networks like Fox and CNN, and perhaps even NPR and PBS from time to time.  Democracy depends on an informed electorate, and the alternative has reared its ugly head time and time again in world history in the form of nations in which tyranny and injustice are institutionalized with the consent of the governed.  If something doesn't change, we are doomed to take our place among them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

This week, the news is the news.  Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO and principle shareholder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post for himself...not for Amazon, but for himself.  The news of the purchase sounded more like a Bezos panegyric than reportage, and the speculation about his motives was rampant.  It went like the tale of Daniel Boone: he is smart, he is incisive and business-savvy, he loves the written word, he is interested in the truth, he built him an empire when he was only three...  There is so much over-thinking going on about this that it is beyond perplexing.  Of course, I could be wrong, but Jeff Bezos's motive seems too obvious to ignore, even though everyone is doing so.  The Washington Post sold for $250 million, a substantial amount, but Bezos is a billionaire, so not one that he can't handle...comfortably.  At the same time, Bezos's fortune reposes on a solid base of Amazon stock.  And what does Amazon own?  Amazon owns Kindle.  So, it comes to this.  A newspaper whose circulation has declined, as its earnings have, by 40% over the past ten years is bought by a man who owns controlling interest in a corporation that has its own mode of circulation for books already, and the man has a history of building his business model step by step until his corporate brain child sells anything and everything that anyone wants under its aegis, whether directly or indirectly so that he can sell newspapers too...to a market that he already has.  Why no one seems to realize that the likelihood is that Bezos isn't buying The Post out of grand Olympian principle or love of the printed word, but rather because he can make money out of it by selling the daily newspaper to millions of subscribers to his digital book reading system, or even giving it to them and supporting it with advertising, is beyond me.  He has always found ways to enhance Amazon's prosperity even when, near its very inception, everyone was saying that it was an unworkable idea, and now he has found just one more.  With other book sellers and would-be competitors breathing down his neck in court and in commerce, he suddenly had an idea.  What if I give my Kindle customers a newspaper too, and not just any newspaper.  What if I give them a paper that is read all over the world by serious people...powerful people.  That will give me not just a competitive edge; it will give me the ears of powerful people.  What could be bad?  And now, Jeff Bezos is also in the newspaper business.  He is a serious man who doesn't take himself too seriously, but it seems likely that he is motivated by a desire to do something profound.  But why not make some money while doing it.  He must be scratching his head and asking, why didn't Steve Jobs think of this.

And at the same time, the mainstream media are getting more and more like comic strips, what with Diane Sawyer wrinkling her brow as she tells us in sensationalistic tones about how ABC News is going to tell us tomorrow night how we can save not just money, but big money, and George Stephanopoulos including right-wing wacko Congressman Louis Gohmert from Texas among his panel of experts on ABC's This Week, becoming more and more difficult to take seriously.  Yet people watch and think that they have been informed when they are regaled with tales of planes crashing into houses and families selling their I-phones for cash while the downward spiral of Egypt's democracy continues and thousands die in Syria without being even mentioned on the nightly news.  They speculate about who will be challenging Hillary Clinton for the presidency in light of which politicians are appearing at the Iowa State Fair as if that is something that needs to be discussed by experts rather than being one of those que sera, sera things that might be marginally interesting but really aren't worth talking about because...well, what will be, will be.  The Washington Post doesn't do those things.  So Jeff Bezos can buy it and stand above the phalanx of supposedly serious people who presume to tell us what we need to know while feeding us commercial pap, and actually tell us what we need to know.  And in the bargain, he can make another billion out of it.  I don't say that cynically either.  I have no objection to people making money out of good ideas, and I give even more credit to people who do so with good intentions and scruples...and I think Bezos has those.  But I can't understand why no one seems to be talking about it.  He may be a good guy for a billionaire, or even for a guy with only a buck in his pocket for that matter, but he isn't Socrates or Plato.  He isn't doing this because he's a nice guy.  He isn't spending a quarter of a billion dollars out of intellectual curiosity about how to run a newspaper.  He's just dancing with the one who brought him, and I say, more power to him.  I just hope he uses it wisely.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It appears that the lessons of President Obama's first term weren't lost on him.  On the domestic scene, we have the impending debt ceiling fight looming above our weak economic recovery like a dark cloud, and the Republicans in the House of Representatives in particular are rattling their sabers again.  After two prior such campaigns, the Republicans getting what they wanted in each of them though both sides described the outcomes as compromises, The President seems to be saying out loud that he isn't going to play that game again.  He has not only said that there won't be any quid pro quo for an increase in the ceiling--a non-event in previous political eras--but that he won't even discuss it.  He has learned that the outcome of negotiations with a Republican Party that won't compromise is that the Republican Party, and its conservative wing in particular, wins, even if not completely.  They get some of what they want if not all of it, and the Democrats look to their constituents like wizened old hacks, which many of them are.  This new resolve on President Obama's part may actually revitalize the Democratic Party, and that would be a positive development from the perspective of progressives and liberals, among whom I count myself.  Just as in the Clinton years, The President is saying that it is the Republicans who are threatening to shut down the government by refusing to raise the money necessary to operate it, not the Democrats who are refusing to submit to partisan extortion.  The standoff may not end too well in that there could be at least a temporary cessation of some of the governmental activities that make this country run smoothly, but the blame will be squarely and aptly placed on the Republicans by the electorate, and that is as it should be.  But the domestic scene is not the only area in which fortitude is the new presidential modus operandi.

After more than a decade of policies that led to near permanent ensnarement in the politics of inherently unstable nations, we are finally acting prudently.  It appears that the Assad regime in Syria will survive the rebellion against it, though at great cost in human life and suffering.  But instead of rushing in unilaterally as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are taking a place alongside the other nations of the world and waiting for consensus rather than forcing our political will on anyone.  And the prudence of that policy is manifested in the current condition of Libya.  It appears uncertain whether that nation will turn toward western style democracy or will rather opt for a more fundamentalist, Muslim theocratic form of social organization.  And a peremptory American policy of intervention would not have changed that fact.  After more than a decade in Afghanistan and also in Iraq, where we still have troops though we no longer fight battles there,  the best we can claim for our efforts is Pyrrhic victory, and the ultimate outcome of each of those two wars is far from certain.  So, following the Libyan policy model in Syria rather than the Afghanistan-Iraq unilateral interventionist model seems to have been by far the more prudent choice, and President Obama made it.

And now there is the Edward Snowden affair.  I am not sure how I feel about what he did; his disclosure of NSA intelligence activities could be whistle blowing, but it could also be treason. And for the benefit of our society at large, for posterity, that disparity has to be resolved.  There is too much at stake to allow for politicization of the issue, and it seems to me that the only way to resolve it is with a trial.  But now Russia has given Snowden asylum as if he were indisputably a political refugee being persecuted for his beliefs.  In response, the Obama administration has cancelled a scheduled "summit meeting," that is a meeting of the two undisputed leaders of the nations involved, in protest of Vladimir Putin's decision to afford that status to Snowden.  Of course all this begs the question of what we would have done if Snowden had been a Russian seeking asylum in the United States, but we returned Elian Gonzalez to Cuba, so the issue is at least open to debate.  And as to the Russian policy of not just declining to assist rebels in Syria but abetting the Assad regime by providing heavy armaments and technology for Assad's use in his effort to survive as a despot, it is just one more thorn in the American national side, and there are others, so the rebuff of Putin is well in line with what caused it.  But the Obama administration is also taking on the Israelis, who have been acting with impunity on the issue of settlement of the West Bank of the Jordan River for nearly fifty years.  The international consensus is growing, and it is generally opposed to such settlements not just as an issue of international law, but as a moral issue as well.  And in the past, American policy would have been to stand staunchly on Israel's side, virtually no matter what it did, but President Obama has shown a more circumspect attitude on Israel and has demonstrated that he is unwilling to give it carte blanche, at least not on the settlement issue. The virtue of his parsing of American foreign policy is that it gives us flexibility when it comes to deciding when to vest American resources in resolving issues either peacefully or by armed conflict, which in turn leaves us free to repudiate autocrats whether they are on our side or not.  That flexibility is a sine qua non for rationality and sound judgment as well as morality in American international behavior, and President Obama is making it possible, perhaps for the first time since we became a world power, and certainly for the first time since we became the only world "superpower" remaining.  I like the way this is going, this second term.  I just hope he keeps it up.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

With all the fuss over A-Rod's suspension and The President's potential appointment of Larry Summers as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, perhaps the most important issue of the day is going un-discussed.  If nothing changes between now and October 1, the government will at least potentially shutdown for want of a federal budget and the appropriations that send the money in the budget to the departments where it is needed.  It's the debt ceiling again, and this time, the dispute isn't just between the parties.  This time it is between the two houses of our bicameral legislature as well.  Each house--The Senate and The House of Representatives--has an appropriations committee, and before a debt ceiling can be approved by the two houses, it has to be agreed upon, and the two houses are presently about $91 billion apart.  That $91 billion is the amount of the sequester that devolved from last years' debt ceiling fight, and it has become the operating position of the conservative, Republican-controlled House of Representatives.  Of course, everyone says that sequester is a bad idea...including House Republicans.  But since it is already in place, they take it as a given and will resist appropriations exceeding their budget figure of $967 billion, even if it means shutting down the government because it can no longer borrow to fund all of the federal deficit.  This must sound familiar because the only thing that has changed is that the Republicans have the sequester...already a matter of law...on which to stand this time.  Once more, Democratic concessions are like chickens coming home to roost, and it is likely that once more, there will have to be Democratic concessions...unless...

My position now is that if the government has to shut down rather than allowing further cuts imposed on the people who can least bear them, let it happen.  Shut down the airports that the rich fly out of and the harbors where they dock their yachts.  Stop processing applications for oil drilling permits and start bringing the troops home from Afghanistan a few months early.  If the key to "getting our fiscal house in order," as the Republicans like to put it, is cutting everything, let's make it hurt everyone...everyone who will vote in November 2014.  I believe that the Republican electoral tide has been stemmed, and I also believe that even registered Republican voters are coming to see that at some point fiscal restraint becomes partisan obstinacy, and sane judgment is no longer sane, and the result may well be Republicans voting Democrat.  The United States has made these annual pilgrimages to the brink of governmental chaos too regularly...and with too many consequences...for people to ignore the fact that, while more abstemious government spending may be desirable, parsimony is destructive.  As a nation, we are more than the Darwinian model that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney ran on, and we Americans are beginning to awaken to the Faustian nature of the bargain that those conservatively oriented politicians would have us strike.  We cannot buy prosperity with the very marrow of the poor, and doing so for the sole purpose of enriching the rich on the theory that their patronage will enrich us all is doubly reprehensible, not to mention demonstrably irrational, and I think that more and more people are seeing it that way.

So this fight over the debt ceiling is slightly more evolved than was the debate that we witnessed each of the last three years.  Finally, we are getting to the point at which the moral issues will be raised, and we will have to face ourselves and define our ethos honestly.  At this moment in our history, we are at a particularly pivotal juncture.  Our economy is stumbling forward, but at some point that stumbling may become another fall if more isn't done to sustain its momentum.  Similarly, once the reform of "welfare as we knew it" occurred, an erstwhile unnoticed phenomenon occurred with it.  Without welfare, which is now limited in duration, we as a people have to turn to other programs to sustain those who are intractably without resources, including the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly, the infirm and children whose parents are among the former groups.  The spectacle of people without resources dieing in the streets is not one we will see in this nation until callousness is the rule rather than the creed of only those on one far end of the political spectrum.  Thus, unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Medicare, Food Stamps and similar programs have been utilized to accomplish what welfare used to, resulting in the same costs to tax payers of not more.  You can't get something for nothing, and taxes have had to keep pace with need through other programs.  Despite the fact that welfare costs per se are reduced, other costs have been incurred with extensions in the unemployment insurance eligibility of those who cannot find work, for example.  There has been much talk about our grandchildren and the legacy we are creating for them by paying those costs, but I believe that many of us are no longer focused exclusively on that future generation.  Some Americans don't want their grandchildren to live in the America that the Tea Party and Paul Ryan envision.  They want their grandchildren to live in our grandmothers' America, in which people saw to it that others got fed and that everyone was warm enough to survive long, cold winters.  What we have lost in the name of money is more valuable than individual wealth.  What we have lost is our commitment to the common weal, and it is going to be interesting to see whether the Republicans in The House learned anything from the loss they suffered from a perceived position of strength in 2012.  I have asked this question before, and usually on the eve of what I construed to be a pivotal election: 2008, 2010 and then 2012.  In those three elections the pendulum has swung nearly one full cycle in the aggregate.  Now we'll see if it continues to swing back to where it was in 2006, and that will be the best indicator yet of how this country will continue to evolve.  Are we gravitating toward a new Roosevelt or a new Reagan; the harbinger of that trend will be in the debt ceiling debate.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It seems that Larry Summers' star is on the rise again.  You may recall that he was one of President Clinton's primary economic advisors during the 1990's, eventually rising to the position of Secretary of the Treasury in 1999 where he remained into the Bush administration, and he later became president of Harvard University where all those financiers who rape our economy get their MBA's.  He lasted at Harvard until he was accused of some financial conflicts of interest and indicated in a speech his belief that women were not better represented among the ranks of certain professions for want of acumen as a function of gender related deficiency.  A faculty vote of "no confidence" spawned by his conflict with a popular African-American Studies professor forced him to resign, though he continued to be a financial industry star, and is to this day.  But while his contra temps at Harvard may make him a troglodyte when it comes to modern thought on the subjects of gender and race, that is among the lesser foibles that disqualify him to re-ascend as an economic leading light, this time to the Fed chairmanship when Ben Bernanke's term ends.  I'm surprised that President Obama has allowed Summers' name to be linked with his administration--which it has been in an advisory capacity and is again as the list of potential Bernanke successors gets shorter--in light of those other profound shortcomings that he has demonstrated and failed to disavow in light of the economic collapse that is largely attributable to them.  But that The President would consider him for anything that involves more than catching dogs is not just a sign of imprudence; it is incomprehensible.

After the collapse of our finance industry on account of its manipulations and contrivances to create wealth out of the illusion of it, congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to reign the industry in.  But Dodd-Frank is a pale imitation of the Glass-Steagall Act that was passed in 1933, the last time we suffered a financial debacle of the magnitude of the crisis of 2008 in consequence of corporate inveigling.  Glass-Steagall effectively separated banks into two categories.  There were commercial banks--what we laymen know as banks, where we keep our money and borrow to buy our homes--and there were investment banks, which were essentially like brokerage houses except that they invested in everything, not just stocks and bonds, and they also sold financial products of their own as they do today.  That's where derivatives came from.  Banks began to sell not things themselves, but promises to buy and sell things as well, and in the case of "credit default swaps" to insure against the failure of things too.  That is more or less what the derivatives that caused our current crisis were: credit default swaps and variations of them.  They were not mortgages, but rather promises to make good on mortgages if they failed, which they did...in droves.  And because there were individual investors involved in that market since the repeal of Glass-Steagall had allowed commercial banks to do investment business and vice versa, thus mixing the fiduciary function of commercial banks with the self-interest of investment banking houses, the federal government had to get involve because in the course of investing for themselves, the banks had gotten very over extended with risk that was becoming reality, and you know the rest.  But it is notable that there were some in the financial industry who saw the risks involved in the derivatives markets and tried to get the federal government to regulate them before the collapse of that market, though they were thwarted, and even discredited for their efforts.  Guess who opposed those regulations?  And it gets even worse.

The only thing that was keeping the financial industry from running amok with those derivatives was  the then seventy-odd year old Glass-Steagall Act, and the moneyed class wanted to change that because amok is where the big money is.  So it marshaled a conservative movement--led prominently by Summers and Alan Greenspan--against The Act and eventually, the Republican controlled congress sent a repeal bill up to President Clinton for his signature.  He was reluctant, to his credit, but Larry Summers persuaded Clinton to sign the repeal.  None of what we are suffering economically today would have happened if Larry Summers hadn't been in the White House buzzing in Bill Clinton's ear, because Glass-Steagall would have prevented it, and you needn't take my word for it.  President emeritus Clinton himself characterizes letting Summers talk him into it as one of the greatest mistakes of his presidency...along with failure to intervene to prevent the slaughter of 350,000 people in Rwanda.  That's who is in line to be chairman of the agency that controls our banking industry today: a guy who professed to believe that Wall Street didn't need regulation because it would police itself.  He believes in laissez-faire based on the premise that what is good for the wealthy is good for everyone...a premise that has been demonstrated go be false time and time again since the beginning of feudalism.  The only benefit that inures to serfs as a function of fealty to their liege is the right to continue to be serfs, and that principle continues to operate today from the counter at McDonalds to the boardroom at Jamie Dimon's J.P. Morgan-Chase.  A person who believes that such is how economies should run is not a person whom I want to see in charge of regulating our economy through the financial sector, which is in control of the economy today, and I am surprised to hear that President Obama feels otherwise.  Either The President believes in the middle class or he doesn't, and this nomination for Chairman of the Federal Reserve may be the test.

Your friend,

Mike