Letter 2 America for January 28, 2014

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