September 2013 Archives

Dear America,

I have been hearing some chatter about the relationship between Social Security and the national debt again lately, even though Social Security has never added a cent to the debt.  The discussion always starts from the proposition that it isn't so, though no one ever says it, and the consequence is spurious conclusions based on convenient and abiding conservative fiction.  For that reason, it seems to me that we should talk about what should be the starting point of every debate over retirement age, benefit reduction and the long term future of the program in terms of its funding.  Let's start with that.

The Social Security Trust Fund contains about $2.5 trillion.  That is a fact, not an opinion, so when we discuss funding for the program, we should start from the fact that our government has borrowed that money from us--the people who contributed it to The Fund and will one day draw from it--rather than borrowing it from the Chinese.  But it is still our money, so when conservatives try to claim that the Social Security Trust Fund really doesn't exist, all they have to do to legitimate that claim is pay us back what the treasury has borrowed from our fund and then close it down.  But don't worry, they can't do that because when the Roosevelt government created the program, they created it with a trust fund to prevent conservatives from claiming that the program couldn't be funded by the government, which is what they now say.  And Roosevelt made his reason for creating the fund clear in speeches he gave during the depression, which Social Security was designed to prevent from leaving the elderly, widows and orphans homeless and hungry in future depressions as that depression had done.  Roosevelt saw the Tea Party coming eighty years away...and he planned for it so that we wouldn't have to feel threatened by them.

Then there's this issue of how many workers it takes to fund the program relative to how many it took when the program started.  The fact is that two contributors now support every beneficiary, but even so, they can sustain payments at the rate of 75% of current rates even after the surplus in the Trust Fund is gone.  The conservatives always complain about that fact as if it were a sign that Social Security is in decline because there used to be fifteen or so contributors--actually it was 42 when the program began--for each recipient, but that decline in numbers really just demonstrates how little must be done by 2042 when the trust fund runs dry at current rates in order to make the fund solvent longer term.  The fact that it used to be 15 workers who contributed for every recipient only demonstrates that the various fixes over the years have sufficed and that another fix is not only possible, it's been done before, and nobody died.  Nobody lost his benefits and the fund didn't dry up.  But if we go in the direction advocated by conservatives and make everyone retire later and take less rather than amending the contribution schedule, bad things will happen.  For example, if I hold my job for another year, that's another year that it isn't available to someone who just graduated from college or law school, and someone has to support him or her, usually the parents.  And while that is going on, that young, dependent person isn't creating demand with his own labor, and it is demand, not supply, that makes our economy run.

Then there is the notion that retirees get more than they pay into the Social Security system.  And until now, that has been the case, though as time has passed the surfeit of return has continuously diminished.  Now however, as Time magazine reported in August 2012, the average married couple gets slightly less than it puts in, and that diminishing return will continue to diminish given even the extended life spans that we now enjoy.  And finally, there is the issue of the national debt.

The Social Security program has never added a single penny to the national debt.  But more importantly, no change to the Social Security program will reduce the national debt because by law, benefits can only be paid out of the Social Security Trust Fund, and the only source of funding for The Trust is contributions from potential recipients.  The Social Security program has nothing to do with the federal budget, and in fact it reduces the demand of the federal government for credit from foreign countries because if we didn't lend the money we contribute to The Fund to the U.S. Treasury until we need it to pay benefits, that $2 trillion owned by The Fund would have to have been borrowed from China or the United Arab Emirates or some other cash rich country.  Further, measures like the proposed chain CPI--which will reduce benefits by reducing the cost of living allowance of every recipient--will reduce the federal budgetary deficit by reducing the amount that the government has to repay the fund in any given year in order for benefits to be paid, but in so doing will have only the effect of deferring repayment of the federal government's obligations, not diminishing them.  It is a way of passing debt on to later generations of tax payers, which conservatives complain about when they advocate budgetary austerity in the name of debt reduction.

So, the next time you hear someone complain about "entitlements" as the problem in our system of fiscal policies, consider the facts before accepting such complaints as well founded.  Social Security is entirely our program, and unlike all of the conservative favorites like defense and business oriented tax policy, Social Security pays for itself and even reduces governmental dependency on foreign capital.  The benefits paid generate jobs and even tax revenue, which primes our economic pump rather than slowing it down.  It is the largess of the American people from which the federal government only benefits.  So why on earth would we want to make it smaller.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

I fret constantly about the lack of concern in this country over what I see as our greatest problem, and as each day passes, I am evermore earnest in my fear for the future of the American capitalist system.  Since the ascendance of "Supply-Side Economics" during the Reagan years, the cognate fixation on supply...that is capital...has gone essentially undiminished despite the fundamental discredit into which supply side economics as a whole has fallen in consequence of the deepening socio-economic divide and injustice that have devolved from it.  Still, even our president, who disavows supply side theory, seems to be fixated on the supply side of the supply/demand equation as evinced by, among other things, his favor of Larry Summers to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, though Mr. Summers has withdrawn his name from consideration as of this date...a boon for which we should all give thanks.  Summers, you may recall, is in favor of unfettered banking practices, and he advised President Clinton to sign  the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that had protected us from the predation of those in the financial industry for sixty years...until then that is.  Note that it only took 18 years of the free reign provided by the repeal of Glass-Steagall to plunge us back into a situation like that which precipitated Glass-Steagall in the first place.  But Summers isn't really the issue.  Banking--the financial industry as a whole really--is just one of the tails wagging the dog of our economic philosophy.  We are also being undermined as a society by concepts like "increased worker productivity," which is just a euphemism for business owners' ability to give workers less and less in wages while still increasing the amount of wealth that those workers produce for them.  And then there is the conservative plaint about "big government," which is a euphemism for the more in our society that mandates provision of the rudiments of life to those who cannot provide them for themselves.  Of course, Christian values are often invoked to refute the claim that each day we stray as a nation more and more from keeping our brothers in the Christian sense when used to rally conservatives to ostensibly moral-Christian-values type candidates who would ignore the Christian creed of charity and compassion, but seek to preserve our right not to be taxed or to be required to have medical insurance so that everyone can gain access to our healthcare system...if indeed we even have one.  But even these ethical issues are not material in my fears for our prosperity as a people.  What concerns me is the amorality of American capitalism and the governance that it has precipitated, which, if I may introduce a little banality here, actually undermines not just Christian, but capitalist values.  They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Starting with the most recent manifestation of what I am suggesting, the Republican controlled House of Representatives has passed a massive cut in the food stamp program.  Frankly, I cannot profess to know exactly what the cuts are in nature because I haven't read the bill, though I intend to, but the politics surrounding it falls squarely along liberal-conservative lines.  Information I have seen so far goes to the effect that almost 4 million people will be wiped off the roles of the program, 10% of the total recipient population today, and these aren't people who are comfortable living off the system.  These are people who are on the bottom wrung of our economic ladder, and what they will lose is not new clothes or candy; it is food from their tables.  How can you justify taking food off someone's table and leaving him hungry with the kind of impunity that the vote on the bill represents.  Setting all that aside however...leaving morality off the table, and this is my point...that $40 billion that the bill cuts from food stamps over the course of the next ten years is money that will not be pumped into the economy, and in particular into food stores in impoverished areas.  In other words, what are called "food deserts" will likely result from these cuts and people who have no personal transportation will have nowhere within a reasonable distance to shop for food...with or without food stamps.  Supply, that is businesses that are now outlets for groceries, will dry up because demand has dried up, and the jobs that they create will go with them.  Then there is the failure to pass tax penalties for companies that ship their jobs overseas, which has been defeated in The Senate by the threat of a Republican filibuster more than once.  If those jobs that have already gone abroad are not induced to return to this country, the demand that their wages represent won't return either...at least not here in the United States.  And then there is the manifestation of many of these things in the form of a statistic: 95% of the financial gains that have accrued during the years since the financial crisis began at the end of 2007 have inured to the benefit of 1% of the American people, and those people will never spend that money...more demand that will never affect our market economy because it is sidelined in off-shore accounts just to be counted and never spent.  So why is all that significant for us ordinary Americans you might ask.

Well, the list of these vectors pointing us toward diminished demand are not just some incidental trend.  Without demand, who are the supply-siders going to sell their goods to.  And if it isn't going to be Americans, who will be living here rather than overseas where the demand, and thus the jobs on the supply side, have migrated to.  In short, what will become of the United States if we do not find a way to reverse the trend toward emphasis on the supply side of the supply and demand equation?  Seventy percent of our economy is consumer spending, the rest being spending by government and business.  So why is no one noticing that we are digging our own grave by trimming back the seventy percent portion of our economic activity.  The consuming populace of a nation are the geese that lay the golden eggs, and supply-siders are actually eating the geese for dinner because they claim that is they who lay those golden eggs...and they're betting not just their future, but ours on that false premise.  The New York Times published a story in its Sunday business section last week about a new SEC rule regarding disclosure by registered corporations of the ratio between CEO salaries and those of their average workers.  The crux of the piece was that it would be more appropriate to measure the ration between CEO salaries at comparable companies, but it seemed to ignore the fact that those salaries...all of them...are set by boards of directors, the chairmen of which are...you guessed it...those very CEO's.  It used to be that there was a chairman of the board and a president who answered to the board and ran the company day to day.  But some time around the advent of supply-side economics a trend began with regard to not just electing presidents to the board, but making them chairmen of the board as well.  And those chairmen/CEO's run roughshod over the other board members, most of them being sinecure members of other boards as well.  It's kind of like part-time minimum wage supplementation for the rich.  Thus, when the board determines the CEO's salary, they are docilely led by the CEO to the pay level he seeks, but no one complains about his conflict of interest in being involved in the process.  That the SEC isn't interested in regulating, and thus, the daisy chain that siphons corporate profit into the accounts of ever fewer rich executives goes unabated and the rich get richer but demand continues to decline because the working man gets a smaller and smaller wage for what he produces.

It comes to this.  Just as diminished government spending on programs for the less fortunate in our society puts more money in the pockets of wealthy tax payers, it puts less into the demand aspect of our economic cycle, and the failure of government regulation to address the root causes of the trend just ensures its perpetuation.  That perpetuation is a death spiral.  The rich will blame the poor, but the real drag on our economy is not the food that a poor person gets, it is the money that a rich one gets, but never spends.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's toe hunting season again, and the Republican Party has reloaded its foot shooting pistol once more, and with the same gauge ammo as well: extortion.  Last week, John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, floated an informal straw poll on a bill that would have increased the debt ceiling but de-funding "Obamacare."  But his conservative disloyal opposition within the party balked and the bill never came to a vote.  And the reason for the balk wasn't that they didn't think they could manage to de-fund Obamacare; it was that they didn't want to increase the debt ceiling.  A Tea Party style conservative measure wasn't far enough right for them, so they held out for something farther out in right field, and today they are going to get it.  Boehner has a new plan.  This time he wants to pass a continuing resolution--that is an extension of the present levels of sequester spending--until December, and to that he wants to attach the de-funding of Obamacare.  Maybe he thinks that the difference is too arcane for us humble Americans to follow and he can put over on us some things that he failed to accomplish on several other attempts, but because he has bundled a couple of them together we won't notice that it's the same old song and this time we'll feel different about it.  I haven't seen a Pew Research Poll on it yet, but I think he is taking dead aim on what few toes his party has left to shoot off.

The difference between the two bills is that the first one would have resolved the issue of the debt ceiling for probably another year or so without any budgetary implications except for the de-funding of universal insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.  But Boehner underestimated the obduracy, not to mention the irrationality and single mindedness, of his intra-party rivals.  As he has discovered on several occasions in the past two years, conservative isn't conservative enough anymore.  The Tea Party caucus within the Republican Party--and by the way, the fact of a Tea Party caucus within an elected body certainly suggests that the IRS was right to scrutinize organizations with the phrase Tea Party in their names that were looking for tax exempt status based on the lack of a political agenda--won't have anything to do with extending the debt ceiling once and for all when they think that opposing it with anti-social austerity instead is a winner for them.  That is why the second try for Boehner doesn't increase the debt ceiling but just puts off the fight over it with a continuing resolution that would prevent default on our national debt in the short term while it creates a current fight over the debt but preserves the issue for a rematch in December when the continuing resolution is scheduled to expire.  They see the national debt and deficit as the apple, as in Garden of Eden, and they think that no one will notice that they are trying to take two bites.  But recent history, which goes back now to 2010 when the "super-committee" was created and to 2011 when it yielded nothing but the sequester about which everyone is now complaining but about which no one is doing anything, makes that unlikely.  Everyone will see, especially when the Democrats start pointing it out, that we've been here and done that already on a couple of occasions.

It is likely that in 2014 by contrast, when we all go back to the polls, even conservative voters will repudiate the advocates of that strategy in light of its persistent failure and its withering effect on Republican hopes for redemption in the popular consciousness.  I understand that Boehner has no choice since his party is what it is, and if he wants to be speaker he has to mollify its most powerful contingent: the Tea Party.  They aren't the majority of Republicans, but they claim that they represent the nearly universal trend in the party, and the moderate Republicans are afraid they are right, which is prudent for a bunch of career politicians.  The nomination is now the election that must be won in many districts, so the question in those districts is, are you conservative enough to comport with the parochial political bent.  If you get nominated you'll win the general election because Republicans are the majority in those districts on account of redistricting, which drives the candidates in the district further and further right, and further and further out of the main stream nationally.  In consequence, these people have entrenched positions that cannot result in legislation because they are in the minority nationally even though they feel the pulse of their home district voters.  And as self-interest is what motivates them, they do what they have to do to get reelected and ignore the national interest.  But there has to be a limit to the tolerance of conservatives for failure, and until someone on the conservative side comes up with a better plan, every time they brush it off and re-float it they are alienating a few more staunch conservatives who don't give a damn about the Tea Party; they just want to see some change.

So, by the end of the day we will either have another Boehner humiliation to discuss with the defeat of even this effort to pander to those who are giving conservatism a bad name, or The House will have passed yet another bill that cannot become law and they will have to eat it when the Senate revises it and sends it back.  Either way, the Democrats...if they are subtle and smart enough...will take another pound of flesh from the Republican oppositions political body, rendering it that much more moribund, and just in time for the start of the 2014 electoral season.  I say, here's to you boys.  Keep on pulling the trigger on that foot shooter.  You seem to hit your mark every time.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have written many times about a dichotomy between two types of wealth: what I call natural wealth and artificial wealth.  And as time goes by, more and more news related to that distinction emerges, the latest being an article on the front page of Sunday's New York Times about ethanol credits.  At the outset, I have to concede that my interest is a function of my interest in the broader topic of the legitimacy of methods of acquiring wealth and the actual definition of wealth ab initio.  Put concisely, my opinion is that when one's business is siphoning money off the economy through speculation, one is not creating wealth; he is just moving someone else's from that person's pocket to his own.  Also in my opinion, that is only marginally on this side of criminal.  So when someone buys oil futures not so that he can have access to oil at a fixed price but so that he can sell those futures when the price goes up, he is taking a portion of that oil...stealing it really...and arrogating the wealth that it constitutes to his own use while creating or giving nothing in exchange.  And while those who indulge in such practices--often resulting in the amassing of huge fortunes--profess to be just hard working businessman, to my way of thinking they are just highwaymen whose profession has been legalized by those who make no distinction between productivity and wile, between well and ill gotten gains.  The Times article is related to those ideas.

In an effort to deter producers of gasoline from selling gasoline without diluting it with ethanol--setting aside the fact that the use of ethanol in lieu of gasoline is controversial in and of itself, which is another issue--federal law makers created the ethanol credit in the form of the RIN (Renewable Identification Number) and effectively an opaque, over-the-counter market in which to buy them; producers have to buy these RIN's, each one assigned to a single gallon of gasoline, from those who have excess credits if they do not blend their products with ethanol and do not want to incur penalties.  And you would think that the logical way to administer such a system would be for the EPA, for example, to be the clearing house for those credits, and thus to monitor their use and confine it to the intended purpose: inducing use of ethanol, a renewable, domestically produced fuel, in lieu of petroleum, much of which we must import.  If such were the case, there could be regulation of ownership of RIN's and there would be no middleman to skim profit off the top of the commercial value of the credits, but when the credit was created, no such provision was made.  Mind you, there were fears expressed widely that investors, including large investment banks trading for their own profit, would hijack the market for RIN's.  In fact however, ethanol credits are traded on open commodities markets in which anyone can buy them and sell them, apparently including Jamie Dimon's J.P. Morgan-Chase, which is right in the middle of this money-making scheme.

Those who engage in such trading would certainly claim that they are just making money when in fact they are not making anything, but rather are...again...siphoning value off of the credits they trade, thus making the gasoline produced with those credits more expensive as the credits are in effect one of the raw materials that are used to produce gasoline, just like the ethanol they represent.  If a gasoline refiner buys credits at a price five cents a gallon over what those credits were sold for, the cost of the product he refines is increased by five cents, and to put the cost in perspective, the cost of a RIN went from $.07 in January to $1.43 in July according to The Times.  We pay that price at the pump...or those in other countries to which over 100 million gallons of gasoline per day are shipped from our Gulf Coast do.  Thus, some gallons of gasoline produced in that period of time cost almost an extra dollar and a half, not because of governmental taxes but because our financial markets imposed that "private tax," so to speak, on us.  The question is, if the traders in ethanol credits added no value to them or to the ethanol that they represented, what economic policy is served by the profit they made.  That is, indirectly, what the Times article is about.  These credits are traded like oil futures.  People make money from them just by letting them pass through their hands...or rather their accounts.  They don't even handle anything in the physical sense, so like most everything else that Wall Street institutionalizes, this trade perverts the principles of economics, which are primarily directed at creation of new wealth and best use of old wealth.  You cannot create something--in this case new artificial wealth--out of nothing.  It has to come from somewhere, and in this case, it's the rest of us who are not trading in ethanol credits.

Despite my indignation over this particular scheme, there are many other phony wealth production techniques that our financial system not only indulges in but encourages.  If you listen to brokers and bankers, they think everyone should be involved in these endeavors so as to create what they need in the way of future wealth in order to retire and provide for themselves and their families.  But the fact is that if everyone did it, the net result would be a zero sum, and that is the last thing that Wall Street wants.  That is why we cannot get involved in such market manipulations.  They are controlled from the very top of our financial system, and small investors can only get burned by trying to cash in with the big boys, all of which begs the question of what to do about it, and the answer is very anti-Republican.  This particular abuse of the free market is a function of the failure of our federal government to act, not of too much government.  And such is the case with oil futures, agricultural products (you may remember the supposed coffee and sugar "shortages" of a few decades ago) and even electricity (I'm sure you remember Enron).  Market manipulation through speculation is at the heart of all of it, and it is what brought our economy to the brink of disaster, but government does nothing about it because no one makes them.  I've said this before, and I'll say it again.  What we need in this country is a viable third party, because the choices we have at the polls never include anyone who actually wants to do something about all this.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The complexity of the Syria situation continues to expand with each passing effort to vilify The President and ignore the manner in which this whole affair came to pass.  Vladimir Putin's opinion was published in the New York Times today, and it is a classic case of misdirection as has been much of the domestic criticism of President Obama.  To be sure, he has made too many ill-considered statements, including the first, which defined what eventually happened...the use of chemical weapons against civilians...as a "red line."  It was another instance of a politician creating a shibboleth that everyone subsequently threw around with abandon, and our politicians never learn.  Death panels, smell tests, bridges to nowhere, American exceptionalism and hundreds of others during my lifetime have snuck into the American political idiom and have become calls to meaningless political battles about nothing other than the phrase itself if you listened to the debates in our political arena.  And President Obama is no exception to the rule that the effort to capture popular sympathy for a position invariably pollutes the critical thinking process that should be taking place in lieu of the internecine, partisan debate that masquerades as careful consideration of the issues.  But all that should be set aside, and Putin's self-serving assessment of the American position on the use of these dastardly weapons of mass destruction thus reveals itself as an attempt to preempt the American effort to bring Syrian's dictator to heel on the issue of chemical weapons alone.  Putin's hollow praise of diplomacy as the solution to the Syrian situation belies the fact that over the past two years, Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated not a disinterest in negotiations and diplomacy, but an outright rejection of such efforts.  There have been no substantive conversations with Assad much less significant negotiations, and all the while, Russia has been providing the raw materials for the manufacture of more nerve gas to Assad's government whether deliberately or through careless inadvertency.  It is the inescapable fact that Russia has been an enabler for Assad, and for Putin to now claim to be the peacemaker begs the question of where he has been for the past two years if diplomacy is his real métier.  

For purposes of clarity, the issue is singular as far as contemplated American military action is concerned.  Regardless of our political preferences, the sole purpose of the proposed bombing of Syria is to diminish his capacity and willingness to use chemical weapons again.  They are regarded univocally as a scourge that humanity and the governments of the world have condemned, banned by consensus and eschewed using for nearly a hundred years.  The issue is not the presence in Syria of Muslim radicals or political malcontents of various stripes.  It is not the debacles that "American exceptionalism" as a guiding principle has led us to over the past thirty years.  It is not the history of any nation relative to war, warfare, political organization or alliance.  The issue is destroying men, women and children with material that inflicts hellish harm and represents a form of sadism that is beyond perverse.  So, if Russia and Putin sincerely intend diplomatic intercession in this affair with the purpose of ensuring that humanity can continue to feel secure in the belief that no one will ever suffer the horrendous consequences of being exposed to nerve gas or other chemical weapons again, let them get on with it.  Let them acknowledge that the only circumstance under which Assad even admitted to having a chemical arsenal was when the United States government began contemplating taking military action.  Let them undertake their efforts in light of the fact that Assad blatantly lied about those weapons until admitting their existence seemed the only way to avert an American military strike, and let us all understand--American politicians and those in the rest of the world as well--that if that prospect of consequences is abandoned by the United States...if Assad is allowed to believe that he has squirmed out from under the threat by making false promises, false promises will be all that we are left with.

Let me be clear at least as to my own position.  I believe that President Obama has mismanaged a profoundly dangerous threat to humanity.  I believe that he said that we would act in future on the international scene only in concert with the rest of the world, but he then took to the same tactics as have his predecessors who have led us to war and misfortune time after time.  But regardless of his haplessness in the matter of Syria's civil war and the use of Sarin on the people of Syria, his purpose has always been one that no one will ever admit to rejecting.  The American threat to inflict physical damage on Syria's military infrastructure must remain pending for Assad to come to terms that will serve the purpose of ridding the world of the chemical weapons arsenal of a man and a nation that have demonstrated a willingness to use them.  And frankly, given Vladimir Putin's record in Chechnya and elsewhere in his sphere of political control, I don't think anyone will take his attempt to preach to even an errant American president seriously.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

The big day is here as to the facts surrounding the Syrian use of nerve gas against civilians in that country in that President Obama is speaking to us tonight, presumably to lay out the case against Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian army relative that atrocity.  Since Mr. Obama referred the matter to congress for the purpose of obtaining from it authorization to act militarily against Assad, there has been the usual posturing, political cat-calling and grandstanding, but amidst all the palaver there was a kernel of sincerity in the form of the questions that should have been asked over and over again since the Vietnam War, mainly, why are we doing this, and how is it going to work, but answers have not been forthcoming.  While the specifics of The President's plan are certainly, and justifiably, top secret, there must at least be some intelligence or information that he could reveal and on which he relies for the conclusion that, not only did the Syrian army do it, but Assad was involved personally.  My hope is that we will hear all about that tonight, and that when the speech is over, we will all know enough facts to certify the villainy of Assad's regime and merit its chastening by fire, so to speak.  But the reality is that if the information we get tonight is sufficient to convince us and persuade a skeptical congress to vote out a resolution giving The President what he is asking for--that is the authority to order cruise missile strikes and any other feasible martial coercion necessary to deter a repeat of the mass killing we have already seen--that might be the least desirable outcome for Mr. Obama, and perhaps even the world at large.  That is because if military action is authorized, it then makes such action politically necessary, and the fact is that without a strategy entailing regime change in Syria and trial for Assad before the World Court, the whole thing will be an exercise in spitting into the wind.  President Obama will seem like a diffident, even callow president who could do no more with the unleashed military might of the United States than cause a tyrant a little inconvenience, and that isn't what anyone involved in the decision-making has in mind.  In fact, this one ill-conceived course of action on President Obama's part, starting with his "red line" and ending with a few cruise missiles hitting some military bases in Syria, will illuminate his entire presidency with an unflattering light, and what little he has really accomplished--albeit under the worst of political circumstances--will not be enough to offset the pejorative narrative of his critics that will ensue, and will likely resonate for the balance of his second term.  Frankly, it's been a botched job from the beginning, but there is a way out.

If an ever-obdurate Republican House of Representatives stays true to form and denies The President the power to act, he can seize the moral high ground not only with his political adversaries, but with the entire world.  With a "nay" vote behind him, he can tell the world that he tried but that the lack of moral resolve on every continent prevented him from doing for the world what the world would not do for itself, but should have.  There is no debate about the heinousness of what Assad did, so the lack of international will to act on it is indubitably shameful.  As for the Republicans, they are in a bind whatever they do.  If they authorize the bombing, they are in line for any criticism that eventuates on account of the consequences...or lack thereof...of the campaign.  If they vote against it, they are in line for the same criticism as applies to Great Britain and the rest of the world, apparently including even the Arab League.  This is the world's problem, not just ours, America.  And someone should call the world out on it.  Since President Obama is the only one in it who has even tried to do anything, he will be the only one on high enough moral ground to castigation anyone else.  The Bush Doctrine, which was really just an extension of the Jingoism and Chauvinism inspired by Ronald Reagan, relied on the premise that as a nation, we are superior to all others and thus empowered to act both preemptively when we feel threatened and peremptorily when we think we might be, otherwise known as "American Exceptionalism."  The President stepped back from that Reagan/Bush proposition and in the case of Libya, he consigned our nation to lead the world, but not to be its sole proxy when Qaddafi--a tyrant like Assad--began mutilating those in his country who opposed him.  This Syrian situation is really a referendum on the difference.  A vote for the bombing will be an endorsement of the Bush Doctrine and a repudiation of what might be called the "Obama Doctrine"...that is, minding our own business unless by consensus we are invited to take action in concert with an array of other nations.  That doesn't mean silence when criticism is merited, nor does it mean perpetual conciliation.  In fact, whether under the Bush or the Obama doctrine, Russia should be publicly and loudly castigated for abetting Assad's regime in their heinous conduct and then obstructing the world when it took notice and might have acted in concert.  But the way to do that is not for us to rush into Syria; it is to rush into the U.N. Security Council and demand a vote on a resolution allowing the U.N. to create a peacekeeping force and send it to Syria to arrest Assad and separate the two sides until a Bosnia style resolution can be fashioned by and for the Syrian people.  Then, if Russia casts its veto, Vladimir Putin will be the world's goat, not our president, and the United States will be insulated from any claim that we have abdicated some ethereal responsibility with which the world endowed us whether we asked for it or not.

The way I see it, this is not about Assad anymore.  He is what he is, and I believe by consensus, the phrase "war cirminal" is nowhere near harsh enough to describe him.  The open question for the world is whether Vlad the Putin or Barrack Obama is the world's paradigm for international political leadership.  And when that question is resolved, the United States will have to decide what role it wants to play in the world rather than letting the world dictate all the terms.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The lack of international abhorrence directed at the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad...or at least at his government...over the murder by nerve gas of over a thousand people in a single incident, and many more over the past year or so, is discomfiting to say the least.  It seems to me that there is a moral connection between this atrocity and the last such use of gas by a dictator, Saddam Hussein, who used nerve gas against both the Iranians in their war against one another, and against the Kurds in their rebellion against his regime, and it does not redound to the credit of the international community.  In both cases there has been broad self-righteous indignation, genuine or feigned, but in neither case has there been a call for action.  True, such "weapons of mass destruction" provided the pretext for George W. Bush's reelection war against Hussein and Iraq, but in the end, the actual previous use of lethal gas was nothing more than a gambit used to give credibility to the claims that he was still a threat to do so since there really wasn't any evidence to indicate that he still had any, or even had what he needed to make more.  But even that war had at best only half-hearted approbation in the world at large and our real allies in the enterprise comprised only Great Britain and Poland along with a couple of dozen other small countries who provided a handful of troops in the aggregate that didn't even amount to much more than the number of casualties the United States suffered there.  Of course, the lack of credibility of the justification for that war, as evinced by the scant nature of the "evidence" to support it, explains the world's half-heartedness in that case, but the gassing murder of the Kurds barely got mentioned on the news when it occurred, and to the best of my knowledge, Hussein was never prosecuted for it until he was captured after the Bush war, despite the fact that it was an obvious crime against humanity when it happened nearly two decades earlier.  And despite the fact that the war between Iraq and Iran was a matter of mutual hostility, the use of lethal gas even in warfare has been banned by universal conventions for nearly a hundred years, but no consequence was suffered by Hussein in that instance either.

To put all this in context, after World War II it became apparent that the Nazi regime had used lethal gas--in fact the same gas as is being used by Assad today, Sarin, was among the gasses used--in its concentration camps as a means of human extermination.  And while we often hear talk of the six million Jews who died that way, there were actually something between eleven and fifteen million victims: the Jews plus political undesirables, the handicapped, Poles, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and anyone else who didn't fit the German concept of the "master race."  Thus, after the war there were trials held at Nuremberg, and the twenty or so surviving Nazi oligarchs were prosecuted and many were executed or remained in prison for the rest of their lives.  The reason that I pointed out that the victims of the Nazi holocaust were not just Jews but were human beings of all kinds is that the current international ennui over the use of lethal gas on innocents and military adversaries begs the question of what would have been the prevailing mood in post-1946 Germany if only Jews had died.  Would it have been the same as it is now when it is only Arabs?

The popular consensus in the United States seems to be based on a series of considerations.  The first is the freshness of our memories of the costs of war in the Arab world, and they have been enormous for us in terms both of life and weal.  But there is also what used to be called "the credibility gap" that has grown between the American government and us Americans.  After the subterfuge used in the inspiration of the Iraq war became abundantly clear and the persistence of the war in Afghanistan even after the purpose of its inception--the capture of Osama bin Ladin and Al Qaeda's leadership--had become an unrealistic fool's errand that dragged on for ten years longer, the American people don't really want to hear the sirens' calls of patriotic duty and national pride.  Before committing to overseas military action, we all want to know exactly what is going to take place and how long it is going to take, not to mention at what cost, and rightfully so, I think.  And the pursuit of more ethereal ends like the protection of innocents from slaughter and mayhem is not nearly as clear a purpose as it used to be before efforts to do so ended in sectarianism and civil strife that at least ostensibly had been prevented in the past only by the grotesque existence of the ones we had just expelled from power.  And then, no one believes that Assad is susceptible to punishment as a deterrent, and no one wants to risk entrenchment in the bellicosities of Syria just to make some kind of point that will fall on deaf ears.  That is why the prospect of an attack intended to "punish" Assad seems so far fetched.  Add to all those reservations the unpopularity of our president among a substantial number of Americans for reasons varying from Tea Party irrationality to outright bigotry and the likelihood that President Obama's attempt to gain popular approval for bloodying Assad's nose with a few cruise missiles becomes remote at best...perhaps rightfully so.

What I think should be done starts with international politics.  The moral arguments about use of weapons of mass destruction should be renewed without the war in Iraq as a backdrop.  An international convention already exists, and has for many decades, but it seems time for a discussion world-wide about what the international community should empower itself to do about its breach, and the role of the UN should be central in the debate.  That entails a discussion of the dysfunction, and the very continuing existence as currently designed, of the Security Council of the UN.  The Security Council comprises five permanent members, each with veto power--the United States, the Russian Federation, China, France and Great Britain--along with ten other nations, each elected for a two year term.  That dysfunction would seem familiar to any American who follows congressional politics.  In the case of the Syria debate, for example, Russia is committed to using its absolute veto power to block UN action against Syria, and as that is the case, no international action can gain the imprimatur of the only duly constituted world body dedicated to peaceful international political dispute resolution.  If the Russians could not unilaterally prevent UN actions, the entire geo-political scenario would be different, and perhaps more than a thousand lives could have been saved from excruciating death due to gas exposure and tens of thousands as casualties of more conventional civil war.  That is what President Obama should be fighting for today...a permanent end to the peremptory interdiction by individual powers of consensus, international action.  There is no reason for the five most powerful nations of 1950 to continue to be the arbiters of international action in a world now as diverse as the one in which we live.  That is the position that President Obama should stake out, thus addressing all of the criticisms of what he now proposes, and doing so in perpetuity and for the universal benefits of the community of nations.  If the UN is to live up to its potential as an international quasi-government, that is what is required, and anything short leaves behind an often hollow shell where a grand idea should be.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

In one of my favorite movies, the villainous protagonist, a corporate raider trying to take over a wire and cable company, addresses the annual shareholders meeting in opposition to the extant, humanistic founder's team--who point out that they respect their workers and treat them fairly, and they play a responsible role in the community by cleaning up their own pollution--to try to convince the shareholders that they should authorize the marauder's new team to run the company by dividing it up and selling its assets for more than the company's stock is then worth.  He wraps up his argument by telling them that attracting a larger and larger share of an ever decreasing market is a sure-fire route to corporate disaster.    Imagine, he challenges all present, that you own the last company making buggy whips in America as the last horses and buggies disappear from the road.  I'll bet you would make the best buggy whip in the world, he tells them, but do you want to own that company?  And that modern homily on corporate philosophy begs many other questions as well: is there such a thing as too much horizontal integration, which results in diminishing returns rather than increasing ones; if there is a cost, should a corporation be concerned about the employees; are we good guys because we are ultimate capitalists, or are we bad ones.  Of course there are many more questions that little scene from "Other People's Money" raises, but the real issue is, do we ever ask them.  That's really a question for Republicans than for Democrats as a function of socio-economic policy, but it is also a political paradigm in some respects, because politics is largely a business these days.  People get into it as a career, and they often get rich as a consequence.  But putting money aside, if the Republicans are sincere as human beings...if they truly believe the things they say they do...don't they have a vested interest in being something other than the best political buggy whip maker in America?  I'm talking about Tea Party conservatism now.

On the front page, above the fold, in Saturday's New York Times, an article titled "G.O.P. SENATORS FAIL TO HEAD OFF TEA PARTY RIVALS" began.  The story was about a phenomenon that we have seen evolving for nearly a decade now, but that finally manifested itself under the rubric "The Tea Party."  In real political terms, it started with the election in 2010 really, when there was a large enough contingent of single-minded fiscal conservatives with microphones to constitute a critical mass, and they got heard by enough people at the grass roots level that they could commandeer for themselves a cute, politically recognizable though inapposite name and run with it.  Rallies popped up everywhere and the politics of self-serving myth was born full-blown, starting with the fact that the Boston Tea Party was indeed about taxes, but the myth that it was about too many taxes paid by colonists rather than too few being paid by merchants selling tea for a mercantile syndicate created by and operating under the aegis of the British government.  That tax break gave the British East India Company a competitive edge over the colonist tea-smugglers who dressed up as Indians one night to protest.  In other words, those who perpetrated the real tea party were just criminals objecting to the strategy of the government in making them uncompetitive and driving them out of business, but I digress.  The point of the article was that the very contingent of the conservative movement in this country that chose to go by the name Tea Party, is becoming the driving political force within the Republican Party, which has been the voice of conservatism until recently.  But now that conservatism has lapsed into a procrustean, reactionary rant, the Republican Party is getting a greater and greater share of ultra-conservative votes, but conservative Republicans are becoming a smaller and smaller component of the American electorate.  As a consequence, Senators--who get elected in state-wide elections--get beaten by Tea Party activists in primaries in which party trends are not diluted by overall popular trends, but the Republicans who do get nominated cannot get elected when the populace at large votes because the Tea Party may be the majority among Republicans, but they are just irrational right wingers to the rest of us.  And thus, the Republican dream of taking the majority in The Senate is nothing more than a pipe-dream it seems.

Still, Tea Party conservatism is a problem for all of us because our representatives in the House of Representatives do not get elected state-wide.  They are elected in districts that are revised every ten years when there is a constitutionally mandated census, as there was in 2010, and in most states, the legislatures redraw the districts to concentrate the political power of the majority party on the state level.  That sounds like politics as usual, but it is something much more insidious, because the House of Representatives is populated by people who vote in accord with the popular wishes prevailing in their states, but against the interests expressed by the majority of the American people by a significant margin, simply because they have concentrated the power of Republican conservatives through this redistricting process.  That is what prevents the Republican Party from reentering the American political mainstream: self-destructive wielding of local and state political power, and that is why Washington is standing still: The Senate represents the nation but The House represents state and local politicians.  And while I suppose I would rather have inaction than conservative action, we can't go on like this forever.  Conceding to the minority is not compromise, but that is the only way in which forward political motion can be created since our second major party is dominated by a determined minority that refuses to compromise, so what are we to do short of capitulating to the demands of an ever-more strident and intractable minority.

 

The irony of all this is that main-stream Republicans are saying these things all the time, but the only way in which they can reemerge as the guiding contingent in the Republican Party is to adopt the tactics used by the very contingent that is wreaking internecine strife on the party as a whole.  It surprises me a little, but I find myself hoping that the Republicans figure that out, because the only way we can succeed as Democrats is with a rational Republican Party at our side...and the prospect of that is not too good these days.  The Republican Party may well have made the best buggy whip in American politics

Your friend,

Mike