January 2014 Archives

Dear America,

The State of the Union Address is now history, in a manner of speaking; it wasn't really historic in its scope or depth.  However, it did serve as an itemization of the issues ahead of us...at least those that will be preeminent in the two most imminent election cycles.  A gauntlet has been thrown down by The President as the surrogate of the Democratic Party as a whole.  But while the issues have been specified in a manner of speaking, the solutions continue to be little more than an ethereal mist hanging over the political arena, or perhaps more aptly, a toxic miasma.  The President offered a few glimpses of what we might do if we are serious about reducing the depth and width of the gap between the rich and the poor, but there is something half-hearted about his pronouncements of both the problems and the remedies.  Preschool education might well benefit children as they become adults, but I suspect that the statistics on the subject would yield an impetus that is more targeted than the "universal pre-k" that President Obama is advocating.  And his proposals to change the tax code so as to reward bringing jobs back to this country and penalize those who do the reverse makes great sense as does eliminating the tax rate that favors investment income over earned.  But such measures do not eliminate the problems we have as a capitalist society for a variety of reasons.  Economists talk about "structural" problems when they analyze our current straits, but structural doesn't go near deep enough. 

With regard to preschool education for all and changes in our attitude toward parenting skills, it may be useful to start all children's educations earlier, though I personally have my doubts, and it would certainly be useful to mentor parents as to how to teach their children to control themselves and exhibit some self-discipline, but the question of whether that will solve any of our problems will remain open even if related programs can be legislated and implemented.  And reducing teen pregnancy and the ever increasing acceptability of child bearing outside of marriage may play a role in the deterioration of some of our social institutions, but those things are matters of personal choice and as such, they defy legislative alteration.  Besides, who is to say that those things are problems that need to be addressed.  The American creed, if there is such a thing, is constantly changing as a result of our political and personal freedom.  We see signs of that change in every facet of national life from the advent of the acceptance of children born out of wedlock to the approval nationwide of same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana.  In our politics, that change is an issue--perhaps the issue--and thus, those who exemplify the classical definition of the reactionary pit themselves against the progressive left on the premise that such things are axiomatically political issues, but are they.  If they are, it is paradoxical that teen pregnancy has declined over the past decade or two, concurrently with a profound liberalization of our society's tolerance for abortion, single parenthood and premarital, or non-marital sex.  AIDS has become less of a problem, in this country at least, despite the ever increasing tolerance for homosexuality and heterosexual cohabitation without benefit of marriage...if marriage is a benefit in the first place, and that may be the crux of the matter.  Our Judeo-Christian origins, which inject God into the commencement of every session of congress and require a supplication for God's blessing at the end of every State of the Union address, don't seem to be the guiding light that they used to be.  Whether cynicism or social evolution, or something else altogether is the impetus in that direction, it is overtly evident that our society no longer cleaves rigorously to the fundamentals that once defined virtue for us.  The deistic positivism of the past is just that: a historical fact but one that is no longer definitive in America, and whether one believes that it represents decay or progress or something in between, the evanescence of the kind of absolute morality and positivistic value systems is upon us, and it is here to stay.

So, the suggestion that we can address the lack of upward mobility in our society--which has recently been documented to be, like our health care system, not quite the envy of the rest of the world that we have always presumed it to be--by buttressing adherence to those antiquated, perhaps even quaint, prescriptions for a good life may well be misguided.  Perhaps what we need to consider is that reality, not our economic reality but our social reality, has changed for good, and what we have now in the way of social mores is what we will be living with for the foreseeable future.  On that basis, the change we seek must be geared more to coping with and anticipating the future rather than attempting to reprise the past.

So, given that perspective, what should we be doing to facilitate the egalitarian ideal that we have always believed to be our preeminent value, which belief is being undermined by the ever-more-rapid vitiation of our illusions about our form of capitalism.  What should we do to make access to prosperity as universal as we want to believe it is.  About that I have some strong opinions, and I will be glad to share them with you next time, but they don't entail much of what President Obama said Tuesday night.  The course to where we want to go is much more direct in my opinion; it will require less dogma and more common sense.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Watching the Sunday talk shows is pointless.  You can just rerun the tape of any of the previous programs from the past year or two and you will hear the same thing.  It is not just the politicians in Washington who are fixated on slyly designed polling questions and what they think is important; the press follows the same compass when deciding what is worthy of coverage.  The topics being discussed are all the same old hash: Obamacare and the "rollout," The President's leadership abilities, the obduracy of the Republicans, why immigration reform hasn't been passed and how can it be, and on and on.  In a new poll unleashed by ABC on Sunday morning, only one third of the American people, according to ABC and the Washington Post anyway, believe in President Obama's decision-making ability, and as many people think that the Republicans know which way to turn as think the Democrats do, and in neither case is it a majority.  But underlying all those figures is the public opinion that the voters will employ in November and in 2016.  According to that same poll, the American people do not have a positive opinion of anyone in Washington, and in fact, barely a quarter of the Americans polled want to reelect their own congressmen.  The reason for the disfavor of politicians is plain, but those in power and those who want to talk about them refuse to take notice.  The majority of the American people finally understand that no one in Washington is doing anything for them, and that acknowledgement of the disservice that our political class is guilty of is coming to bear once and for all.

What the majority wants has always been clear relative to health care.  Even during the George W. Bush administration, more than 60% of the American people favored a single-payer system.  But what they got was health insurance reform in lieu of health care reform.  And while the former is overall better than the nothing we had before, it hurts enough people right in the middle of the political spectrum that its inadequacy may be more of a factor in the elections to come than is the already-three-million-person enrollment that the Affordable Care Act has achieved thus far.  And the proposals for immigration reform all include provisions for the importation of highly skilled labor for the benefit of business, as if current tax policy that doesn't penalize business for exporting those jobs in the first place isn't enough...as if corporations need even more than the $3 trillion they already have in the bank to thrive.  As for the unemployed in America themselves, the only suggestions Republicans can make is that they should move to where the four million jobs available at any given moment are.  Yet, there are PhD holders waiting tables in pizza parlors because they can't get those high wage, high skilled jobs even in their own fields, and the reasons are revealing, even if demonstrated only by anecdote, some of which you may have read here.  First, business no longer wants to train its workers, preferring to shrug the responsibility off onto governments at all levels, and second, why pay an American when you can get someone from abroad to come here for half the cost.

Pick any area other than health care and immigration and you will find the same callous indifference to both the American people and to reality in the decision making process.  The proposals for a farm bill can't become law because the conservatives in congress want to cut back on food stamps...support for the poor who don't have enough to eat for God's sake.  As a consequence, ground beef now costs $4 a pound.  When it comes to national security, it looks like the NSA will continue to be able to collect data on whom we all call every day despite a report from a government formed committee that says they don't need to and it hasn't born any fruit anyway.  A year after President Obama called for an increase in the federal minimum wage, none has been passed because Republicans claim that paying a living wage is bad for business and will cost jobs.  Of course, they never admit that no one wants a job on which he can't afford to both house and feed his family.   The list of things the American people want that the American government isn't giving them is almost endless.  But speaking of the clarion call from President Obama in last year's State of the Union address, there's going to be another one tonight, and Washington is all atwitter about it.  Speculation about what The President will say, like speculation about how the American people will vote, is the current topic of conversation when what should be discussed is what the American people want on government's agenda for the next year.  And it would be easy for both the politicians and the press to figure that out because it all falls within a single rubric: the reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  The question is as old as that timeless postulate of life in the world itself, and now, Americans are coming to realize that they are not sequestered by some divine ordination from that world.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer here too.  So let me join the chorus of State of the Union speculators as a gadfly, not with another meaningless hypothesis on what President Obama will say, but with an admonition to him as to what he should say.  

Our capitalist economy has reiterated the pre-Depression trend toward concentrating wealth in the hands of the few...the very few.  And despite Dodd-Frank, the high-finance industry continues to run amok while people like Jamie Dimon, the CEO and Chairman of the Board of J.P. Morgan-Chase, continue to get rich from it--producing nothing but federal fines as they do--while doing no more than moving wealth from the pockets of the many into the pockets of those same few.  And all the while, shareholders are stymied by corporate by-laws requiring a majority of stockholders' votes to make a change in the means by which executive compensation is determined rather than just a majority of the votes cast at an annual shareholders' meeting.  The result is that CEO's now make 400 times what the average worker makes rather than the 40 times they made in the fifties.  Federal law should put an end to that, and doing so would be the first giant step in a government effort to stop the pillage of our national wealth by a few plutocrats.  And people can inherit the magnitude of wealth that allows them to continue the Sybaritic lifestyles of their parents, whether their parents earned the right to be the "idle rich" or not, and regardless of whether the heirs did too.  Inheritance taxes should rise, not fall.  Then there's the fact that investments on capital pay lower taxes than earned income, when it should be the other way around.  The tax incentive to invest is superfluous; the rich want to get richer when they pay 35% on new wealth just as much as they do when they pay only 10%.  That tax break should end.  The cost of a college education continues to rise steeply as American students take on ever increasing--and ever more crippling--amounts of debt in order to get that education.  Yet, as tuition rises the amount of financial assistance that a student can get declines in real terms.  Higher taxes on the well-to-do, including college presidents and emeritus sinecures, should be used to increase the amount of assistance students get.  And instead of insurance reform, which portends to fill the coffers of companies in the largest industry in America--in some cases the same companies that created the derivatives crisis that led us to economic disaster--we should have genuine health-care reform in the form of a single payer system like that being used in every industrialized country in the world to better effect than our current system yields.

The fact is that our capitalist system, which is now dysfunctional, runs on demand, not capital.  And the concentration of wealth in too few hands doesn't increase demand, it stifles it.  That's the great irony of this period of decline in the quality of our lives...this period in which our children cannot expect lives as good as those of their parents; greed is the agent of our internecine decay.  That's what President Obama should talk about in his State of the Union address.  As to a predicting what he will say in fact, why waste the time.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

After World War II, Winston Churchill was addressing Parliament when he said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time."  That sentiment seems appropriate with regard to the Affordable Care Act (the ACA); it is the worst health care system, except for what has gone before it in this country.  The facts seem to elude the conservative masses, but the statistics are an ineluctable demonstration of that principle.  We had, before the ACA, the most expensive health care system in the world by a third, and that continues to be the case as the incomes of medical specialists climb at a pace that dwarfs inflation.  And while conservatives tout that system as the best quality health care in the world, the statistics on infant mortality, morbidity and death from serious disease, rates of obesity and virtually every other measure belie that notion, and actually render belief in it inconceivable.  Yet, conservatives, both those in government who spread their dogma on the subject as if it were holy gospel and those whose politics make those government agents believable despite the deracination of their reasoning from reality, refuse to give up the fight to bring the ACA down--and not incidentally its progenitor, President Obama--while proposing nothing in its place.  I heard someone arguing that the fact that only 11% of those now enrolled for health insurance under the ACA--actually that statistic is only one finding among several on this point ranging up into percentages in the high twenties, as the proponent of the 11% figure admitted when confronted--were lacking insurance before the law was enacted.  But even if that is true, it means that somewhere around 250,000 people (and if the higher percentages are correct that figure is more like 700,000) can get the health care they need to keep body and soul together rather than dieing of diseases that can be cured if the victim can just afford it.  If you are one of those people, you are quite glad for the ACA, so it is no trivial accomplishment even if the conservatives' preferred figures are true...presuming that they mean something in the first place.  But I would set all that aside if I were debating the subject and ask this question, which I have asked countless times before, quite possibly to the annoyance of anyone who reads these letters: "What do you have in mind to address the problem of people dieing for lack of money in the richest country in the world?"

I will admit that I too oppose Obamacare.  I never liked it, and frankly, it always sounded more Republican than Democratic...more conservative than progressive...to me.  When Mitt Romney sponsored the idea in Massachusetts, that's exactly what I thought and my mind has not changed.  But then came 2010 and the fight over universal health care first proposed as a "single payer system" like those employed in all of the rest of the industrialized nations.  Those systems resulted in better outcomes...virtually all of them...than we were getting here in the United States.  But an unholy alliance of Republicans and conservative, Blue Dog Democrats scuttled that idea, and the result was the ACA, which those same conservatives now call Obamacare, though only in derision.  We have what I oppose, but what else is there in the offing.  To put it simply, Obamacare is the half loaf, or maybe even the quarter loaf, that is better than nothing, though nowhere near the full loaf that those in favor of a single payer system envision for our American future.  Add to all this the fact that, not only did Mitt Romney get the first version of insurance reform passed in Massachusetts, embracing the term Romneycare, but the origins of the idea was in the opposition to a single payer system that was evolving as the preferred plan when Hillary Clinton was heading a commission during the first Clinton administration to determine how the nation could best proceed on the issue of universal health care.  Insurance reform...Obamacare, or the ACA if you prefer...was the conservative scheme for business to make money out of everyone getting the medical attention he needs, and frankly, it still is.  That's why I oppose it, but why do conservatives oppose it.  It is a somewhat nefarious conflation of government serving the people with government promoting business, the latter being the holy grail of Republicanism.  But despite my aversion to such policy, I must admit that I see it as better than nothing.  So, why is it that the Republicans, whose dogma is the guiding principle of the scheme, oppose it so vociferously.  Why do they vituperate President Obama for this feat of heavy political lifting that presidents have been attempting to accomplish for a hundred years...even Republicans like Richard Nixon.

The answer is simple: politics.  Republicans have been out of power for a long time, and now they are out of favor with all but their hardest baked supporters.  My guess is that the next election will be a rout in favor of the Democrats because despite their efforts to color it otherwise, the Republicans are still an obstructive force in Washington, and that becomes more apparent every day.  Now they have attached the ACA's defunding to some extent to the extension of unemployment benefits, and that's a couple of million votes right there.  They still haven't passed a farm bill, which has effects not just on food stamp recipients, but on farmers...agribusiness...as well.  And the internecine force of the Tea Party has not abated, and won't until the voters dispatch them to whence they came, the first opportunity for doing so coming up in November.  The Republicans showed an appreciation of that fact when they passed the current budget plan over their objections, but as soon as they had done the pragmatic thing in that regard, they reverted to the inflammatory disputation of everything Democratic that got them into this mess.  When will they ever learn.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On Friday, David Brooks wrote a piece in the New York Times about what is being discussed these days under the rubric "income inequality."  He wrote five or six hundred words, but he could have used just six: "You know what we conservatives think."  His thesis is that the problem of income inequality is not that at all.  Income inequality, he opines, is the effect, not the cause.  Of course, his opinion is a peremptory resolution of the age old chicken and age paradigm as it applies to our hyper-capitalist society.  For example, he cites a study to demonstrate that raising the minimum wage has a meager effect on poverty if any at all, but he eschews discussion of the moral issue suggested by minimum wages that are insufficient to live on coming from corporations like McDonalds, which earns enormous amounts for its executives and shareholders while stifling any instinct to exceed expectations among the workers behind the counter and over the grill by capping their prosperity with practical ceilings on what they can expect to earn.  Is that the result of poor decision making among the poor and economically marginal in our society, or is it vice versa.  Does a life of futility lead to indifference to the options one elects because none of them make any difference in the long run.  When people like David Brooks pontificate on the subject of how the poor are their own worst enemies because they read some professorial treatise on the matter, it becomes necessary to look at the anecdotal evidence, which abounds.  But there is one case that is seminal in this debate, and that is the case of Boeing, the airplane manufacturer located in the far northwest corner of the United States, which not too long ago threatened to move its manufacturing facilities to South Carolina, a transition that would no doubt be enormously expensive.  But the plan is off, for now at least, and the reason puts the lie to Brooks' contention that the working poor have some kind of control over their lives if only they would exercise it prudently and we would improve their educations.

Boeing has been in Washington state for decades, and it is enjoying profitability that would be the envy of many corporations these days, and corporate profits are generally pretty good.  But Boeing called a vote on a contract offer three years before the current workers' contract ends in 2016 in an effort to effect austerity savings.  The offer agreed to provide the workers with an increase in the pension contributions Boeing makes on their behalves, but the company insisted on changing the pension program from a "defined benefit" plan under which they are entitled to a percentage of their yearly earnings each year after retirement depending on their years of service to a 401(k) plan.  In other words, Boeing wanted to transform what amounts to a private social security system with reliable benefits into a roulette game in which the worker is vulnerable to vicissitudes of the stock market, that is, to the success or failure of companies like Boeing.  That is what the vote last November was about.  But there was a vote in June 2011 that presaged all this.  On that occasion, Boeing asked the union to agree under contract not to strike for the next 10 years.  The union declined to give up its members' bargaining power, and that is when a move to South Carolina had its nascency.  That is when the trouble began.  And at the heart of it all was the Republican governor of South Carolina, who brokered tax breaks for Boeing, on top of the prospect of a plant without a union in a state that has open shop laws.  Of course, the union in Washington State immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which filed suit against Boeing alleging retaliation against the workers and their union, which forced Boeing back into the weeds to contemplate its next move, which came this past fall in the form of the pension plan demand.

It has to be admitted that this series of events doesn't involve the poor.  Everyone from the machinists to the engineers at Boeing makes good money, but the tactics being employed by management are virtually universal among corporations these days: if you want to work, give us what you've got now so that we can give you less.  And because there is a paucity of well-paid work in this country now--largely because the moneyed class is managing our economy and finances for their benefit exclusively...shipping jobs to places with cheep labor and gambling on whether we will be able to pay our mortgages or not--the leverage is in the hands of management, and labor is being driven back toward the status it held at the turn of the last century, which was barely better than indenture.

The Boeing anecdote makes the broader point that the momentum in labor relations has shifted toward management, and the Republican establishment is nurturing the trend with tactics like filibustering the appointment of commissioners to the NLRB thus depriving the Board of the quorum it requires to take actions like the suit against Boeing two years ago.  So Boeing has an open field in which to run, the pension issue being the ball they are currently advancing, and the government has been hamstrung, so the union is on its own against a management team that is obdurate even though it is prospering along with the company, and a legal team that no doubt will use the litigation process to the advantage of the company in order to thwart any effort to vindicate the rights of the workers and their union.  It is the dynamic of modern American capitalism that is in question when we discuss income inequality, not whether the people on the lower end of the economic ladder are doing all they can to help themselves.  It is whether the deck is stacked against them that is at the core of the dialectic, not whether business is the root or the branch of American wealth, and that is where decent conservatives like David Brooks go wrong.  They think that if they can point to a numerical support for the notion that business is benign and the fault of the poor is that they don't try hard enough.  People like Brooks don't understand that it is hard to get up when someone is kicking you all the time, no matter how many years you go to school.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The President's announcement in North Carolina on Wednesday that he was seeking to create a "manufacturing institute" there was a step in what has been a lackluster policy package based on "Promise Zones."  All of these would-be innovations are based on the same principle--one urged by business in the form of puling over the lack of trained job applicants for the jobs they purportedly would fill with Americans if only Americans were more qualified...and cheaper--because it is de rigueur in today's economic milieu to augment the economy by priming the pump rather than turning on the irrigation system, if you'll excuse the tedious metaphor.  Of course, we have now had about three and a half decades of Reaganomics by which to measure the efficacy of such policies, and given the growth of the economic divide between management and capital on one side and unions and labor on the other...given the palpable inequality that our economy has wreaked upon us...one may draw his own conclusions without looking far for data on which to base it.  But even liberal politicians continue to eschew the progressive course that served us so well during the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930's because communalism in America is passé.  Out of false pride, arrogance, or just the conceit that we are a nation in which going it alone, as we now say we do, is a virtuous creed, we have abandoned the qualities that made this country the place to which everyone wanted to come for all the right reasons.  This was a place in which justice thrived and oppression was unknown.  People got together to build each other's barns and to feed each other in hard times.  By the middle of the twentieth century, we were an enormous community of common men and women who had from the inception of our nation rejected the concept of royalty and constitutionally banned hereditaments of title, thus guaranteeing that each of us is as entitled as each other, but from 1980 on, a new system of entitlement began to emerge.  The Reagan administration was the nascency of what I call neo-feudalism, in which power does not emanate from those hereditaments barred by the language of The Constitution.  Rather, it devolved from the evolution of a plutocratic class that now has control of so much of the wealth of our nation that they are an oligarchy--a political ruling class--rather than just a de facto force in our politics.  The Koch brothers, the Waltons and their ilk are now in control by virtue of the trillions of dollars in their coffers, and with the power of their wealth behind them, they can withhold the jobs we need as if those jobs were their largess to give.  That's what The President's Promise Zones are designed to overcome, but it will never work.

The problem is not that there is a paucity of resources with which to enhance our economy with more job opportunities.  Corporate America is sitting on a pool of about $3 trillion right now, so giving those corporations more money won't solve any problem.  The problem is "structural," as economists say.  It is not just a function of today's circumstances.  It is born of the concentration of too much wealth in the hands of too few when those few will never be satisfied that they have enough.  The problem is that 95% of the wealth created over the past five years of what we euphemistically call a recovery has gone into the bank accounts of 1% of the American people, and half of that has gone to one tenth of that one percent.  That might not be such a bad thing if they had created all that wealth, but they didn't.  Some of it, what I call artificial wealth, came from the stock market, which is nothing but a rigged game these days.  Some of it came from the toils of labor...most of it, in fact.  But other than financial manipulation, the rich created almost none of it.  We have become a nation of owners and the owned because in some larger sense, the vast majority of us owe our souls to the company store, which doesn't need subsidies from government designed to be passed on to the rest of us in the form of dead-end jobs.  Part of Mr. Obama's plan is to give back to business in the form of tax credits up to 20% of the first $15,000 that it pays new workers, but that won't encourage employers to hire anyone at a salary over minimum wage.  It is a plan to augment wealth and institutionalize substandard pay and living conditions.  And as for enhancing our educational system so that business and industry don't have to train anyone anymore, that is just another sop for the rich...kind of like a prayer that they will do the right thing.  It hasn't worked for thirty years, and it won't work now.

As I read over what I have just written, I recognize in it the radical fervor of my youth...echoes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Ruben.  And frankly, that's no way to make an impression in this day and age, much less to make progress.  But in a more subdued vein, let me point this out.  As a society we are in the process of formulating what we will be in the history of the twenty first century.  When historians assess our contribution to the order of the world, will they opine that we stood for those principles on which we founded our nation or will they see us as a force for something less idealistic...less pure.  Like many of us, I ponder that question and my role in determining the answer.  I hope we all do.  I think we all should.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

My son is a little ham-handed.  Like most vigorous men of twenty-four, he still thinks that force is the best way to address most problems.  So, while we were working on the brakes of my old car, he twisted the bleed valve off leaving the threads in the hole, but little else to grab on to.  So, I went to Sears to get something to reverse the threads out of the hole, but it is something like a reverse threaded drill bit and it didn't come with a handle.  I thought I could use pliers, but I couldn't gain sufficient purchase on the little drill bit, so I went to Lowe's to find one.  They don't carry them, even though for this purpose and for tapping and threading new threaded holes you need one.  Lowe's is a hardware store, and this thing I needed is not only hardware, it is something that is commonly used...needed and used.  My first problem at Lowe's was finding someone to help me, and my second was that they didn't have something that every hardware store should have.  Mind you, the only reason I went to Lowe's was an experience I had had about two weeks ago at Home Depot just across the street. 

On that occasion I found what I was looking for, but before I did, I passed a conclave of one customer and three "associates"--they used to be clerks--in a huddle, the customer talking to the person who had sent him.  He was saying that the people at Home Depot didn't seem to have what he had been sent for: a Forstner bit.  Since I was near the tool department, I went over and got one, and then brought it back to the scum of Forstner seekers to present it to the customer.  "This is a Forstner bit," I said.  "They're located with the other drill bits in the tool section," at which point the three associates scowled at me as if to say that I should have minded my own business, which brings me to my point.

We live in an age in America in which jobs are not easy to come by.  And there are people with basic skills...like carpentry and auto mechanics...begging for work.  Any unemployed carpenter would have known what a Forstner bit was, just as any unemployed auto mechanic would have known what to look for when I asked for the handle one uses to rethread a bolt hole, but neither Sears nor Lowe's had such a mechanic, and Home Depot didn't have a carpenter either.  All three have CEO's however, and those guys make millions on the premise that they can lead their corporations out of the corporate malaise that at least Sears has been suffering from for the past  decade or more, but they pay the people who have to lead customers to the Forstner bits ten bucks an hour, which explains why they can't hire the out of work carpenters and mechanics.  As to Home Depot, it is profitable now, but it wasn't long ago that it fired its CEO because he wasn't performing...paying him off with a small fortune just to get him out of the corner office.  And Sears, under the guidance of its CEO, bought K-Mart out of desperation, which desperation has continued and has now put Sears on the verge of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  And I'm willing to bet that not one of those company's CEO's knows what a Frostner bit is, but it hasn't occurred to any of them apparently that the reason that their stores fail is not that they didn't take the right courses at Wharton.  It is because they don't know what a Forstner bit is...and more importantly, they don't know to ask their future employees...their future associates, I mean...if they know what a Forstner bit is.

What I'm saying is that corporate America, which invests $12 dollars for robots for every $1 it spends on new hires, is running amok while putting fortunes into the pockets of those who own the capital in this country, prominent among them all those CEO's who get paid even though they don't know the businesses they run.  When Home Depot's board of directors began interviewing candidates to take over from their last disastrous choice, I'm willing to bet that they didn't ask the candidates whether they knew about Forstner bits, nor did they ask anything else about the business they were running.  They looked at the resumes and made their choice, and among those resumes were the resumes of other former CEO's who had failed at their last jobs, or who had succeeded often because they just happened to be at the right place at the right time, but the rest of us don't have a monopoly on stupidity.  There are stupid carpenters and auto mechanics, but there are stupid lawyers--I know; I met plenty of them while I was practicing--and doctors, and as it happens, CEO's.  Maybe you have heard Jack Welch speak.  He sounds like a moron, and despite the fact that somehow he has entered into the pantheon of former CEO's who are regarded as sages for the present ones, he did plenty of stupid things when he was running GE.  In fact, the last thing he did there was spend $100 million on an attempt to take over Honeywell, which attempt failed because, as the European regulators of these things pointed out, such a merger would be monopolistic.  Apparently Welch thought he was smarter than they were because GE rose 4000% in value during his twenty year tenure there, but in reality, it was all those people at GE who know what a Forstner bit is that caused GE to prosper...along with some dubious practices for which the company was sanctioned at components of the company like GE Capital.  But when he retired, he took plenty of that growth with him, some of it in the form of a million dollar condominium in Manhattan, over which there was such a hue and cry among shareholders that he had to give it back, maybe because he continues to say stupid things while taking credit for being their former CEO.  About the time that President Obama was reelected, unemployment took a dip while job creation wasn't anything spectacular.  Welch "tweeted" something to the effect that Obama and his people would "stoop to anything" to stay in office, insinuating that the administration had cooked the books on the unemployment figure.  But the figure was never challenged, and as it continued to go down, it became apparent that it was genuine...even to Welch I guess, because outside of his interviews on Fox News, nobody ever spoke to him about his unfounded, no, preposterous suspicions again.

All of this suggests to me that the problem with the American economy is at the top, not the bottom.  If the people who knew how to do the work ran the companies that do the work, we would all be a lot better off.  And by extension, if the companies that sell Forstner bits were run by people who knew what Forstner bits were...

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Bill Clinton is famous for several things, some of them dubious.  But it is his misfortune that the single most memorable thing he ever said was, "It depends on what the meaning of "is" is."  That moment--captured on tape as he was interrogated over his statements under oath at a deposition regarding Monica Lewinski and played on the evening news more than once--is probably the high watermark in modern logomachy intended to obfuscate...until now.  The anniversary of the "War on Poverty" initiated by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in January 1964 during the course of his State of the Union Address occurred earlier this week, and the Republicans in congress have jumped on their band wagon to wage a war of their own against it.  Among the elements of their strategy is debate over what the meaning of "poor" is.  Of course, if you're poor you know it.  And even if you're not poor, it can be possible to think you are in these times when jobs are fewer in number than workers.  So the Republicans are pointing out that under the measure used by the federal government when the program was initiated, there has been little progress--a few percentage points they say--and that the reason is that the idea of government as an agent of that kind of change is a failure.  Of course there is also a debate over how to define poverty on both sides of the issue; it's the kind of debate that only those who aren't poor can afford to indulge themselves with.  But the underpinning of the issue scholars take with the now ancient definition is that it doesn't take into account the benefits that some people receive, which would lift them from the ranks of the poor if they were included in their income, and there is some legitimacy to that argument.  The point of the War on Poverty was to assure every American a standard of living that represented the modicum of creature comfort that everyone can recognize as just that: a modicum of comfort.  Thus, having to spend one third of one's income on food came to be the standard, though it begs the question, why a third; why not a quarter, or ten percent, which is apparently the average today.  And including the government benefits such people receive is imperative if we are going to measure whether the War on Poverty has succeeded to any extent, but then so is taking into account what factors may have added to the roll of the poor as these programs were diminishing it.  The point is that, all in all, the question shouldn't be what the meaning of poor is.  The question should be how do people become poor and what else can we do to prevent it.

One of the things we shouldn't have done goes back to Bill Clinton; fitting in that his logomachy is where I started.  Conservatives, Republicans in particular, point to the "end of welfare as we knew it" as a moral victory.  That occurred in 1996 when Newt Gingrich's "contract with America" succeeded in shoving a welfare "reform" law through congress and down Clinton's throat, as well as that of the poor.  It imposed a work requirement on welfare recipients after two years, which accomplishes nothing but diminution of the welfare rolls in an era in which jobs are scarce.  It doesn't induce employment because there is not enough employment to be had.  And of those who get jobs, much of the work available is at low wages that fail to lift them out of poverty when welfare is no longer available, or food stamp eligibility ends as the reform statutes required.  And all the while, the disparity in earning power and affluence between the poor and the rich continued to burgeon, exacerbating the problem of poverty in American, the richest country in the world.  So, while the debate over the meaning of the word poor has some merit, in the final analysis it is meaningless because it doesn't comprise a comprehensive discussion of the subject of poverty, including all of its causes, one of which must surely be greed as the credo of American business and finance.  We never talk about what the differences between what I have called artificial wealth and natural wealth, and the discussion today makes scant reference to it.  The observation that CEO's today make 400 times what the average worker makes as compared to 40 times in the 1950's almost never comes up.  And something I mentioned just last Tuesday...the abdication by business of its responsibility to train its workers and provide them with the security of life long careers...has been swept under the political rug by conservatives who would rather blame labor's demand for financial security for the failures of businesses to thrive than look at squandering profits on high-paid executives who fail and on trillions of dollars already in corporate coffers sitting idle instead of developing the workforce. 

In short, the conservative plan for reducing poverty is delegating to the states the task of pulling everyone up in the fashion most suitable to each respective state.  But the problem with block grants is that they are used for various other purposes as well: incentivising the poor to leave a state, driving minorities from the state, punishing single mothers and the like.  In fact, the Social Security Act of 1935 was based on the same concept: federal funding of state programs.  But by 1939 it was clear that nothing constructive would ever happen under such a system and FDR and his congress passed the amendments of that year, taking back control of the four Social Security programs, which included welfare, and creating the Social Security Trust Fund for the old age retirement part of the plan so as to protect the program from claims that it cost too much and providing it with a perpetually renewed source of funding.  But the welfare and unemployment compensation programs, which were for people who had no means and thus couldn't contribute, also returned to federal control...and for the same reason.  The states could not be relied upon to do the best thing then, and they still can't be, so central, federal control of such programs is essential, and "block grant" strategies continue to be just a euphemism for leaving the underprivileged to the mercy of local politicians, some of whose motives are not necessarily pure.

As usual, the resolution of the debate in the final analysis will come when the voters go to the polls in November.  Will they will repudiate the casuistry in the name of fiscal responsibility that is spewing from conservative fonts like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell?  It is tempting to working people who are just barely keeping up to blame those less fortunate and confiscate some of what little they have.  But there seems to be a rising tide of rational progressive thinking in this country, which is colliding head on, even in the Republican Party, with the mindless parsimony of the Tea Party right.  As has been the case in the past three elections, this one may be the most important one yet.  One side or the other is going to turn a corner.  The question is, which one.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As The Senate goes into the final stages of consideration of an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, the dubious arguments against it continue to be expounded: it makes people dependent; it encourages people not to look for work; the unemployed should go where the jobs are, like North Dakota in the oil fields for example.  But the speciousness of the arguments is reflective not just of conservative supply-side dogma.  As in the case of universal health care, this issue is not just a function of political bent.  We are engaged in a moral dialectic, not a political debate.  As I have opined many times before, I think we are engaged in defining American morality, and the fact that the divide seems to be along politically parallel lines is immaterial.

I saw a movie with my son over the weekend that, on its surface was just a Matt Damon action film that might be described as Mad Max meets Star Trek.  But Elysium, as the film was named, was more an allegory than an idle rumination on the future.  The story is about a worker on earth who is lethally dosed with radiation in a factory that is owned by a moneyed oligarch who lives on Elysium: a rotating satellite world where only the rich can afford to live.  The factory and the people who work in it live on an impoverished earth in what can only be described as an enormous slum, and Damon's character is an expendable worker who is sent into a small room to fix a problem foreshadowed with doom, which predictably claims him.  But there is hope...on Elysium.  On that orbital Garden of Eden there are machines that can cure any affliction, even traumatic injury, in seconds, but Damon's problem, and the gambit of the film, is getting there.  Elysium is forbidden to anyone not identified as entitled to be there--anyone who isn't rich.  The plot proceeds and is complicated by Damon's childhood romantic interest and her  infirm child, and after bloody fights between exo-skeleton wearing adversaries performing super-human feats of strength and carnal violence, the plot resolves with a climactic fight and the death of Damon's character, resulting in the salvation of all those who are sick on earth in consequence of his final, self-sacrificing, beatifying act.  That is why I think every conservative should see it.  As with every allegory, the plot is not the point.

We live in a world in which money not only talks, it speaks volumes.  It enhances the lives of a few but circumscribes the lives of several billions of us.  Elysium describes that great divide, albeit hyperbolically, and though a predictable plot is not fully off-set by spectacular special effects, it is a story worth watching in these times.  The nature of allegory is that it dramatizes the mundane, which on this planet, in this country at this time is four times as many jobless people as there are jobs available despite the claim that everyone can work if he wants to and will just go to North Dakota to take one of the oil-field-jobs vacated by the death of one of the 136 people who died there doing that kind of work this past year.  Those 136 deaths are another story.  But, the argument goes, if the poor would just help themselves, extended unemployment would disappear.  All they need to do is relocate across the country, risk their lives on work they have no experience with and live in dormitories so that they can send all they earn back to their families.  And they wouldn't need the Affordable Care Act either if they had the training necessary to get jobs with employers who provide health insurance.  To conservatives, poverty is a function of acts of will, not circumstance, and that would be accurate if we were willing to return to the days of the company store and debt as a means by which plutocrats controlled, and effectively owned the working poor.  But we have evolved past that point in the industrial revolution at which life for many people was just a form of indenture.  We have recognized that such arrangements are unjust and we forbid institutionalized servitude, but it exists in effect none-the-less, and that is the moral issue our politicians are sorting out for us today.

Should we demand of those who, for whatever reason, are unable to find gainful employment that they make profound sacrifices in order to find work that often times will not improve their lives or those of the ones they love, or should we help them to sustain themselves until jobs adequate to sustain them in the modicum of comfort that everyone recognizes as fair--a roof overhead, enough food to eat so that children don't go to bed hungry and access to medical care that could cure them if they just had the money to procure it--are available to them.  Half of Americans don't recall the mid-seventies, when the last recession of the kind of intractability that our last one demonstrated occurred.  Unemployment was rampant then too, but in 1973 congress passed, and President Richard Nixon signed, a law that trained workers in the course of government subsidized employment: CETA. It was something like the depression-era WPA program, so it was a model to which the United States had turned in prior hard times to good effect.  I knew people who were retrained through CETA, and the law changed their lives.  As to "Obamacare," I have also experienced the financial anguish of trying to keep a young family healthy when income is scarce, as nearly fifty million Americans had to do before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and it is seldom a function of indolence to find one's self in such straits.  Like unemployment, lack of access to health care is a calamity that befalls some of us.  It is not a character flaw that can be remedied by an act of will to prosper.

So, now we stand atop both a political and a moral watershed.  We must decide on the right thing to do: subsidize the preparation of people for better lives by making sure they get the kind of training they need to work and they remain sufficiently healthy to do so, or relegate all of the unfortunate in our society to lives of despair in what must surely seem to them to be post-apocalyptic environs after the deepest recession we have experienced in four and a half decades.  With all of the capital sitting idle in the private sector--estimated to total $3 trillion--private industry could return to the days when businesses trained workers for themselves and people made careers working for a single company.  But business would rather rely on government in the form of community colleges, technical high schools and the like, decrying the cost of the role government plays in our lives, CEO's making 400 times the wage of a worker on the line all the while.  So it is up to government to provide in this area as private interests are no longer willing to be provident.  The question is, are our surrogates in Washington up to a moral decision that reflects our country's moral aspirations rather than its financial ones...and will we vote against them if they aren't.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Now that the year 2013 is done it might be fair to ask this question.  What just happened?

The political reversals that occurred during the year seem unlike those of any year in memory.  President Obama started the year on a roll, and when the Republicans tried the same old Newt Gingrich politics that relegated him to the political hinterlands, they stood with great confidence behind the same fatuous, specious rhetoric that Newt used to get where he is today, and they got to the same place.  What a surprise.  For calculating politicians, the Republicans sure don't seem to learn their lessons very well.  But then came Healthcare.com and the Obama administration's stock sank like a stone...once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  It's amazing how often that phrase comes up when describing the Democratic Party.  The Republicans are the foot shooters and the Democrats are the defeat snatchers; the two parties would have to change their names thusly if there were truth in politics as there is in advertising, but I digress.  As to the outcomes of these two debacles however, I would have to say that the Democrats won ground in the exchange of failures.  In the end, the Republicans had to make a virtual apology to the American people for following the course dictated by the reactionary cadre within, and the leadership of the party wound up disavowing their politics...John Boehner even chastening the Tea Party faction with, "are you kidding me" when referencing the admission in caucus by those dogmatic, ultra-conservatives that they never thought their plan to defund Obamacare by refusing to keep the government open would work anyway.  On the other hand, once The President fell on his sword over the incredible scale of the failure of a company called CGI--which also failed in Oregon and Massachusetts--to manage creation of Healthcare.com, he grabbed the bull by the horns and oversaw the rectification of that failure in what must be characterized as an equally spectacular fashion.  Over two million people, many of whom never had health insurance before, have now signed up for plans on the federal website and those of the various states that opted to design their own.  The goal is seven million by March 15, and it seems within reach if the past predicts the future.  It is a phenomenon, this reversal of fortune by the Democrats: something that rarely happens to that party, and couldn't be more timely with elections coming up in eleven months.  If I weren't so sure that the Democrats are not capable of such foresight, I would conclude that it was all part of a plan.

But still, John Boehner has declined to rule out a fight over the debt ceiling, which will be an issue again in February.  Thus, the Republican foot-shooting pistol seems ready and loaded for elephant again, so 2014 may be a reprise of years past in that regard.  The Tea Party just won't go away, but McBoehnell at least seem willing at this point to buck the tide they represent, at least so they have said on a couple of occasions on which the Democrats ate their lunch, and that suggests that this year, government might return to functionality, and to the civility and comity that characterized it in earlier decades...such as it was.  Politics in Washington has always been a contact sport, but at least in the eighties, when Reagan was president and Tip O'Neill was Speaker of the House, the executive branch and the legislature could talk to each other and agree to disagree in pragmatic fashion.  Of course, there was posturing then, and there will be more in this election year; after all, the primary goal of every politician is to get reelected.  But beyond lip-service to the obduracy of neo-conservatives in the Republican Party, my guess is that we will return to debate over issues without extortionate maneuvers...either procedural or parliamentary.  Unfortunately, that may mean that no more progress will be made toward eliminating the filibuster for good, and though it gets little attention, The House has its own parliamentary esoterica--the equivalents of "filling the tree" and the cloture rules for ending filibusters in The Senate--that show no signs of frailty.  Any representative can call a vote under the "regular order" of The House, but the equivalent of filling the tree in The House--passing a rule for a given bill that only the speaker or his designee can call the vote--is de rigueur when partisan issues arise.  Thus, we might well get another record for congressional inaction in 2014 thanks to John Boehner's shamelessness when it comes to party loyalty, but in The Senate, business should return to the normalcy that obtained when "Washington" was a collective institution that actually operated to some good effect.

Regardless of filibusters and special rules, 2014 should be a better year than 2013 if current trends continue.  After all, it probably couldn't get worse.

Your friend,

Mike