March 2014 Archives

Dear America,

There is an interesting dialectic taking place within the Republican Party.  It is the attempt to reconcile two kinds of Republicanism relative to international affairs, between those who are world-wide interventionists on one side and those on the other side who see that the ruination of the United States is in that doctrine.  It is not the old hawk vs. dove debate.  That dichotomy exists in both parties and has for as long as I can remember.  Rather, it is the reconciliation of two views not of the world, but of the United States' role in the world--not of protection of American interests worldwide but of fiduciary duty to preserve everyone else's.  One side--manifested, for example, by the plaints of Senator Bob Corker that the Obama administration's policy on Syria has frustrated the King of Saudi Arabia because he expected American military intervention there as if the real problem with our policy is that the King is disappointed--is a tacit claim that this country is the final arbiter of how nations and their governors should behave, and that the right to arbitrate is really a duty.  That is the school of thought that led to everything from the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion through the war of attrition that led to more than 55,000 casualties in Vietnam all the way up through Afghanistan today, where we have spent 5,000 American lives and a trillion dollars to achieve nothing more than the entrenchment of  a kleptocratic regime that is leaning toward giving back to the enemy we went there to fight everything they had before we went there.  It is a doctrine predicated on the notion that futility is not a measure of imprudence if you just believe you are right, and that American virtue, and thus the right of America to opine and enforce its opinion in every geopolitical matter, is axiomatic regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

On the other side of the debate are people like Rand Paul, the Libertarian/Tea Party acolyte aspiring to the Republican presidential nomination.  Paul, whether or not he is confirmed in the belief, as are those on the other side of the debate, that "American" and "virtuous" are synonyms, believes that we have enough problems on our own shores that there is no need to look for problems on someone else's.  That is significant because traditionally, there have been more Democratic doves than there have been Republicans, and there have been times when that mattered electorally, but overall, foreign affairs have been a secondary factor in determining who the next president will be.  But the 2016 election may be the first departure from that tradition in recent decades...since Lyndon Johnson's abdication led to the nomination of George McGovern and the election of the resurrected Richard Nixon in 1968.  Rand Paul could actually be president if the bellicosity of the world around us continues to blossom, and that would be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.  He would keep us out of the conflagration that seems imminent, but he would run this country into the ground with his irrational laissez-faire beliefs if the Democrats don't control both houses of congress, which leads me to this coming November.  We have a lot to worry about between now and then.

Paul might be inclined to persist in the trend of the Obama administration toward pulling in American horns and participating in international politics rather than directing them, and that would be the good thing.  But, while he shows signs of a kind of rationality in that arena, it is frighteningly absent in the rest of his politics as evinced by his willingness to say some of the most absurd things in the course of grandstanding on the senate floor.  He is a glutton for attention, and his smug conviction that he is always right leads him to demand things like the right to buy incandescent light bulbs rather than acknowledging that they have taken us a large step toward the energy independence that he extols on other occasions as he demands more drilling, apparently in lieu of the conservation policy of which the advent of the LED light bulb is emblematic.  And like many politicians, seemingly conservative Republicans trying to make a dubious point in particular, he is inclined to embrace any canard that he thinks will enhance his libertarian creed in the eyes of others.  In committee, he complained that his low flow toilet didn't flush properly and that his pipes were clogged as a consequence.  Coincidentally, I heard the same claim from someone who came to clear a clog in my own pipes...at the site of an old style toilet.  But when another toilet in the house needed to be replaced, it was replaced with a new, low-flow toilet that uses less than one third of the water that the old style toilets do, and I concomitantly retrofitted the other toilets in the house, including the one that had been clogged, with low-flow mechanisms, and we haven't had a plumber in the house since.  Of course, my anecdotes are no more persuasive than Rand Paul's, but research demonstrated that, while the internet is rife with apocryphal reports of Rand Paul style complaints, research has not demonstrated any increase in plumbing problems in consequence of the switch to low-flow technology, but our local water authority is reporting an 18% decline in water consumption over the past decade or so.  Put in practical terms, there is a drought in much of California that threatens our economy as a whole as that is where most of the produce we eat comes from.  An 18% increase in the water available for irrigation would have a national impact, so low-flow toilets and sprinklers that run at night and apply smaller amounts of water to greater effect would be a boon to us all, so, at least in my opinion, Rand Paul's need to exercise the right to choose his own toilet and light bulb technology in the name of civil liberty is at best misguided, and probably more like idiotic, which is a bad quality in a president.  But with a Republican congress, who knows what he might succeed in doing as he sends us back into the past with the rapidity of a projectile from the gun he insists on owning.

My point is that the election in November may be the only way for us to protect ourselves from the possible advent of an ultra-conservative political trend in 2016.  The ascendancy of Rand Paul sounds absurd, but look at him and ask yourself if you want to take the risk that it isn't.

Your friend, \\

Mike

Dear America,

Ted Cruz, the bombastic senator from Texas, has once again taken to the grandstand, this time to oppose Senate Bill 2124--which appropriates money for aid to Ukraine for its economic development and also increases the American financial commitment to the IMF (International Monetary Fund)--on the basis of a claim that the bill would diminish the power of the United States in the IMF and concomitantly enhance the power of Russia within the IMF.  The bill is not that long, though it is rather cumbersome, but its text is not so complex as to defy understanding by us laymen, so I read it.  There are provisions within it relating to American participation in IMF, but the only one that I can see that is relevant to American power within the fund requires the United States to exercise its vote fully in pursuit of remediation of the Russian usurpation in Crimea and interdictions of whatever Russia contemplates in eastern Ukraine.  Those provisions are a minimal portion of the total content of the bill, and in consequence of reading them, along with the balance of the bill, I am baffled by Cruz's claim.  But in reportage regarding Cruz's grandiose pronouncements on the subject, the real motivation for his blathering became apparent, and it has nothing to do with American power.  It has to do with Republican power.

The Republicans are the first to submit unrelated amendments to bills that come before congress, and they bellow the loudest when they are deprived of the opportunity to do so.  But with regard to these issues--aid to Ukraine and funding of the IMF--they are complaining that the two should be separated, and they intend to seek to amend S. 2124 to strip the IMF language and funding out of it, purportedly on principle.  The hypocrisy of their tactics and pronouncements is just part of their modus operandi, so it hardly merits mention.  We see it all the time, and frankly, the Democrats are not above such tactics either.  Hypocrisy is just an accepted part of the acumen that gets our legislators reelected.   But the real motivation behind the Republican effort does merit discussion because it has all been an effort to preserve the effectiveness of a basic Republican axiom: money talks...literally.

The money in question is primarily that of the Koch brothers, who are conservative activists with billions of dollars between them, which they lavishly spend on support of conservative causes and candidates, thanks to the Citizens United case.  You may remember that our Supreme Court vindicated the right of corporations and billionaires to advocate in the electoral process through funding of campaign advertising.  In other words, the right of their money to talk is sacred in America.  The legal doctrines involved, eg. that corporations are people under the law, is too bizarre to discuss here, but suffice it to say that The Court's decision in that case was a deferential nod to the oligarchy that prevailed during America's "Gilded Age."  However, the law with regard to tax deductibility for contributions to political activist organizations still obtains; you may remember the dust devil created by Daryl Issa and his House Oversight Committee based on the claim that the IRS had discriminated against conservative organizations with the words "Tea Party" in their names by denying them 501(c)(3) status, which would have rendered contributions made to them tax deductible.  The IRS had conducted investigations of such organizations toward the end of determining whether contributions to them were tax deductible under 501(c)(3) or were not because these organizations were political.  They could be tax exempt because they were non-profit, but if they were engaged in political activity, including spending more than 20% of their funds on lobbying or any funding of campaigns for office, their donors were denied deductibility for their contributions because they were 501(c)(4) entities, not 501(c)(3) entities.  The latter status is reserved for non-profit, non-political entities pursuing issues only.  The former are outright political organizations, and the use of the phrase "Tea Party" in their names certainly suggests politics to me...as it justifiably did to the IRS.

That flap demonstrated the need for additional regulations to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and the IRS and congress embarked on the task, but the Kock brothers don't like that idea.  Apparently they need the tax deduction because they don't yet have enough money, which means they don't have all of it, and Ted Cruz thinks they should.  After all, without the Koch brothers' money, the Republicans would be in a far less advantageous position this November.  It takes money to float contrived ideas in the cause of getting your cronies elected, and Cruz wants to preserve that Republican edge that the Koch brothers represent.  That's the real issue relative to Senate Bill 2124.  Tea Party Republicans want a quid pro quo for their support of the Ukraine bill, and the pretext for opposing it is this nonsense about the IMF.  It's all a tawdry game, and the motivation is as crassly political as it could be, which is why the Republicans ganged up on Cruz and Rand Paul, who also opposed the bill.  Everyone can see that they are nakedly political in their purportedly moral opposition...once again...and with the prospect of gains in The Senate and The House this November, Republicans like John McCain are trying to create some distance between themselves and the brazenly ambitious, ultra-conservative contingent with which they are now at internecine, partisan war.  That's why Cruz and his cadre relented; the Republicans started sawing off the limb they had gone out on, and they want to be president...at least Cruz and Paul do. But there's one more thing they want.  Cruz...he's from Texas, where oil and gas come from, remember...also wants the ban on exporting natural gas and petroleum lifted for the purpose of marketing it in Europe.  The Russians are the number one supplier there, and there's money to be made by supplanting them if the Russians decide to withhold gas from Europe in retaliation for European sanctions directed at Russian conduct in Crimea.  That's the other quid pro quo Cruz wants.  He'll need that fossil fuel money too if he hopes to be elected president.  It's all about the money.

So, that's the reality with regard to the latest battle of principle in Washington.  It's no revelation that principle has nothing to do with it, which I hope Americans will remember when they cast their votes in November.  Well, we'll see, won't we.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The United States has a persistent problem with its foreign policy.  I remember hearing a conversation decades ago about what should be done with regard to a socialist rebellion against a dictator, and one participant said that the United States should take the side of the rebels and help them in any way we could because their cause--ousting a dictator--was noble.  The other participant favored undermining the rebellion in any way we could because it was communist inspired...and while the national leader against whom the socialists were rebelling was a dictator, they were after all socialists aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union, but the dictator was our dictator.  It was a variation on the old "whose ox is being gored" explanation for the variegation in what is right...depending on who is making that determination.  And here we are again in the middle of a rebellion occurring across the world, interjecting our values into the dispute...as we did in Vietnam, Korea, Granada, Afghanistan, Iraq...and on and on.  It's time we began asking what we can expect to get for our trouble, but do we? No. Never.

So here we are again facing off with Vladimir Putin in what looks more and more like two kids calling each other names in the school yard with each passing day.  We won't let some of the oligarchs who align themselves with Putin out of self-interest--which in that case is just a euphemism for kleptocratic greed--have visas so that they can come into this country, and Putin has now prohibited visas for Johns McCain and Boehner...as if either of them had any intention of going to Russia.  This exchange of attainders is like two members of the debate team lapsing into name calling because neither of them dares strike a physical blow, not that I would recommend combat in this instance.  But attainder is what is being exchanged, which is significant for two reasons.  First, as it is occurring now relative to the Crimea usurpation by Russia, except for the fact that it makes the news, it is meaningless.  None of the attainted parties cares, and the notion that you can sanction a country by declaring a few of its citizens personae non grata is absurd.  It's like putting them on notice that they won't be invited to The President's birthday party.  Conduct like this makes the dispute that underlies it seem as petty and puerile as the conduct itself, but the expropriation by one country of a whole region of another country is nothing of the sort.  But while the annexation of Crimea by Russia is a serious matter, it is no more our business than the independence movement in Puerto Rico is Russia's, which brings me to the second point.

Article One, Section 9 of our constitution prohibits our legislature from passing any "bill of attainder."  A bill of attainder is a law that effectively inflicts punishment on someone without the benefit of a judicial proceeding.  It is singling someone out for punishment just because he is who he is.  That is exactly what President Obama did to a few corrupt politicians from Russia because they had colluded with Putin in the expropriation of Crimea from Ukraine, not that Putin needs anyone's help to do what he has done.  He was elected, but in reality, he is the autocrat of Russia, and no one dares challenge him when he has made up his mind...which, as to Crimea, he obviously has.  Likewise, Putin has attainted a few American politicians who have taken to bragging about being singled out by such a scoundrel.  Attainder may not be against the principles that prevail in Russia, but it is against ours to the extent that it is forbidden as a matter of fundamental right, yet we are doing it anyway, and looking foolish in the process.  Some Russians can't come to Disneyland; so what.  But trivial as all this is, it has the potential to be a prelude to a future escalation of the emotions that are flying, and hence of the actions that ensue.  Why do we never learn.  We threatened Saddam Hussein, and when he didn't meet our impossible demands, the war in Iraq followed...lasting for years and costing thousands of lives and about a $1 trillion.  We demanded that the Taliban surrender Osama bin Laden, and when they refused we invaded.  Now, ten years later, we are still trying to get out of there after thousands more lives were sacrificed...and another $1 trillion by the way...so that we could accomplish what?  The Taliban is negotiating with the corrupt regime we installed in Afghanistan and the chaos in Iraq shows no sign of abating.  People continue to be killed in terrorist bombings there every week, and they  probably wonder if they're better off now than they were before we decided their fate for them.  And just to keep those two current failures of American superimposition of our values on other nations in perspective, we lost over 55,000 young people in Vietnam, and now they make many of our clothes for us.  Korea has a perpetual stalemate between its two halves, and we continue to send young people to Granada to be trained in their medical school.  The bottom line is this: we are not going to accomplish anything in Crimea on the course we are taking.  What we should do is this.  We should make it clear that we don't like what the Russians are doing, and we should tell them that we know we can't stop them, but we don't have to trade with them if we don't like what they do.  Then, we shouldn't trade with them...not now and not for as long as they occupy another country.  Then, instead of defending the right of a corrupt Ukrainian crony of Putin's to govern Crimea, as is implied by our condemnation of the Crimean secession, we should admit that Janukovich was no bargain, nor was the oligarchy that he was leading.  No wonder the people of Crimea didn't want to be Ukrainians anymore. And as far as that is concerned, good riddance to the old Ukrainian regime, and that should be the end of our involvement.  But is that likely to happen?  It never has before, has it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Very little seems to get said about the irrationalism of the dogma to which Republicans like John Boehner subscribe.  As President Obama embarks on a concerted campaign to reduce the gap between rich and poor by mandating fair compensation for workers, people like Boehner continue to spin the same myths into morphologies that fit their purposes without so much as considering the rationality of doing so.  As was the case when Mr. Obama issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 per hour, The Speaker puled that requiring employers to pay additional wages for overtime was a "job killer," the favored shibboleth of supply-siders whenever they don't like something.  But the rationale for that claim, at least in the case of overtime pay is absurd if the goal that Boehner and his compatriots are really pursuing is  job creation.  If he would consider the issue logically, he would see that if employers would be required to lay people off if they had to pay overtime, that would create a need for more employees being paid regular wages to do the work that the overtime-eligible employees had been doing.  Thus, the effect of The President's initiative should be just the opposite of what the conservatives claim it is, and in fact, should be the very thing they claim to be seeking: more jobs for more people.  And in the bargain, there should be an increase in demand related to the increased number of people who are employed and now have wages with which to buy the goods employers are making, which should mean business growth, which in turn will generate even more jobs.  There should then be more demand for manufacturing equipment to make the goods that the newly employed people will be demanding, and more people will get hired to make those machines.  To put it simply, The President's proposal to raise the earning limit at which overtime no longer has to be paid--in other words to pay it to more people--will either put more money in the pockets of the newly eligible overtime workers, or employers will stop forcing overtime on people and hire more workers to work regular hours, and those people get to spend more time with their families, which is consistent with what is supposed to be a central tenet of conservatism: family values.  Everybody wins, and six hundred economists signed a letter to that effect published by the Economic Policy Institute, admittedly an organization funded largely by "big labor."

Of course, the conservative establishment could not be outdone, so they found a group of their own economics professors, five hundred of them in total--including a few Nobel Laureates--to say the opposite in a letter to the New York Times.  So, a total of 1,100 economists have weighed in on the increase in eligibility for overtime-wages proposed by President Obama, and I suppose that since the majority of them favored the increase...well, it was a straw poll of sorts, wasn't it?  You can bet that the National Restaurant Association, which put together the conservative economics contingent, would have found six hundred and one if they were out there, so the fact that more of the surveyed economists agreed with The President isn't completely meaningless...but almost...almost as meaningless as that de facto poll that the two sides have undertaken.  The real issue is just like the one that should dictate governmental policy on all levels regarding the minimum wage: what's fair.  How can you deprive people making just over $20,000 a year of the right to be paid overtime based on the arbitrary determination that they are "management," which is what the law now provides for.  The "assistant manager" at your favorite fast food place probably falls into that managerial category, but in reality, he is just a shift manager for the lowest rank of workers, wishing he could be more and striving toward that goal by working fifty or more hours per week, but more likely destined to keep being used by the franchise owner than he is to become one.  It's all part of the same brand of capitalism that has become dogma since Ronald Reagan sponsored the "the supply side" coming out party during his 1980 term, and the consequence has been the stagnation of wages in the shadow of burgeoning profits and concentration of wealth in the top one percent.  An irony in this on-going battle between employers and employees is that it has recently come out that some of the unemployment compensation that the Republicans have been complaining about having to fund was paid to millionaires.  That fact emerged during the consideration of the unemployment extension just passed by The Senate, now destined for a fight in The House of Representatives.  The consensus is that there will be a battle royal in The House, and that the bill to renew benefits for the long-term unemployed may not succeed there.  It will be interesting to see whether the issue of benefits for millionaires comes up, and if so, what gets said about it, in light of its embarrassing implications for the conservatives in the Republican Party hoping to take over The Senate and augment their control of The House.

To put it concisely, if it's not too late for that, an increase in the minimum wage to a level consistent in current dollars with what the minimum wage was thirty years ago is long overdue, and even the amount proposed on the federal level is less than what is being approved in at least one city in the state of Washington in which $15 per hour is the new minimum, passed by referendum, and San Francisco and other cities are considering following suit.  As to overtime, why should a person be willing to work it if he or she isn't going to be paid a differential that justifies his family having dinner without him or her every night.  Add to that the additional consumer demand that those increases represent--money earned on that level gets spent immediately--and you have a change that everyone benefits from.  So why not stop trying to support one position or the other with surveys of economists as if economics is science.  This all comes down to our opinions, and no matter what happens, everyone is going to seize on a statistic in ten years to support his claim that he told us so, so the debate will rage on no matter what we do.  Why not make life livable for a few million working people in the interim then.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I briefly saw Trey Gowdy on Fox-TV last night.  He is a member of Daryl Issa's House Oversight Committee, and the two of them ooze righteous indignation out of every pore.  They are both Republican Congressmen from sage Republican districts, so they will likely be members of The House for as long as they want to be.  Gowdy was a federal prosecutor and the Solicitor for the State of South Carolina before he ran for Congress.  He won his seat by deposing the incumbent Republican by being more conservative than he was--Gowdy's predecessor actually believed that global warming was precipitated by human activity.  And in a state that could elect a governor like Nikki Haley, a bible-thumping Tea Party-er like Gowdy is a sure bet.  Now, Gowdy has gotten a bill passed in The House...for the most part along party lines...that, if enacted into law, would compel The President to implement every law passed, thus stripping the executive branch of its power to check and balance a congress like the one we suffer with today.  Gowdy is also the guy who wanted to prosecute the IRS high level manager Lois Lerner for her role in investigation suspicious applications for tax immunity on the basis of his now disproven contention that she and others did something criminal when they scrutinized organizations with the phrase "Tea Party" in their names.  You don't get tax exemption if you are a politically activist organization, and if your name is Tea Party something or other, you look pretty political to me, but now Gowdy wants to give Congress the right to sue The President, not for exercising his power, but for declining to do so.  In other words, Gowdy wants to rule the country with his Tea Party buddies the way that Joe McCarthy did in the fifties by investigating anyone he didn't like, all of which raised a question in my mind.  How do people with such unmitigated audacity get elected; who could like them enough to vote for them?

My guess is that most people are afraid to be on the wrong side of someone like Gowdy; I know I would be.  He is a bully, and he is irrational in the bargain.  Throw in the fact that he uses The Constitution to make the points he wants to make, but ignores it when the issue is something like the separation of powers that he doesn't like so much, but that is ingrained in The Constitution to prevent exactly what he wants to do, and you can see how dangerous he could be.  I guess that Congress has always had people like Gowdy in it...or at least as long as South Carolina has been a state.  But it puzzles me as the one time I was in South Carolina--in a little town called Yemesee--the people treated me very nicely in the aftermath of an automobile accident.  They didn't seem like they could have been Gowdy supporters.  Gowdy certainly wasn't elected for his looks, so that isn't the explanation.  And though he is a IIIrd--Harold Watson "Trey" Gowdy III--he doesn't appear to come from money.  His father was a doctor, but that doesn't represent the kind of wealth that buys elections.  Maybe it has something to do with how he got the name Trey.  Maybe it's not the obvious: trey is another word for three, which is what he is...among other things.  Maybe something diabolical inspired the name Trey, and that's what explains how a seemingly unimpressive bully could ascend to such political office.  Or maybe people just felt sorry for him.  He seems to have a pointy head...in more ways than one...and perhaps it was a combination of dread that he would wind up in people's yards dressed in a sheet wearing a pointy hat combined with his futile attempts to cover up his unique cranium, which elicited pity, that led him to power.  But whatever it was, it's nothing to worry about.

Trey Gowdy is a back bencher, no matter how he scrambles to be noticed.  He and Issa have tried to tar the Democrats, and President Obama in particular, with one thing after another.  Issa is still trying to argue that there was some scandal related to Benghazi, and Gowdy's obsession with Lois Lerner is almost like a comedy sketch now.  So, while old Trey has an unlimited future in South Carolina, he will never get much attention...at least not the positive kind...out here in the real world, though he can probably count on Daryl Issa to have hearings to find out why.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The news from Florida yesterday included election results that were being touted as an event that would be a prologue for the November elections in that the central issue in that contest to fill the remainder of a deceased Florida congressman's term was won by the conservative Republican.  In Florida's traditionally Republican 13 congressional district, David Jolly, the late, long-time-Republican incumbents chief of staff, beat the Democratic Secretary of State, Alex Sink.  And the reason for the attribution of electoral augury potential to these results was that the central issues seemed to be the Affordable Care Act, which Sink advocated fixing rather than repealing, and climate change, which Jolly is accused of denying.  The two candidates were almost paradigms of the party platforms that we can expect in November.  For my purposes, the fact that this seat had been Republican for 40 years--and in the hands of the Republican candidates late boss at that--vitiates any claim of this now past election being prologue for the mid-terms, but the experts seem to think that since the parties seem to have poured resources of all kinds into the race it must be meaningful.  What's more significant to me is that Jolly, who was the protégé of a Republican fixture from that district, won by only 1.9%, but what do I know...and what good are predictions anyway.  But this particular contest raised some hackles in my case because of a personal situation.

My brother, who is no liberal, has been on work-related disability for decades and no one else in his household works.  I believe that his annual income is below the poverty line, though he owns his house...no equity, just the title subject to the bank's mortgage lien.  I'm the only liberal in the family, so my credibility at the Thanksgiving table might be suspect if we waxed political on such occasions, but we don't.  This particular brother is probably the most conservative, and on the subject of "Obamacare," he toes the conservative political line, damning the whole thing.  However it is the law, and it makes sense to find out what it can do, don't you think.  But my brother, who has complained about the fact that the penalty will be assessed against him even though he is poor since he assumes he can't qualify, still hasn't even looked at Healthcare.gov to find out what is available to him.  His wife, who has had Lupus for thirty years, and his two sons all have medical problems that go untreated due to the lack of insurance, but he hasn't even inquired as to whether he can get some.  I spoke to him about it a couple of weeks ago since the enrollment peri0d is rapidly coming to a close, and I had suggested it to him before, but he still hadn't checked on his possibilities under the law as of last night.  I spoke to him on the phone the last time I raised the issue but his response was the usual conservative clap trap, so last night I did some preliminary investigation--which suggested that he will be eligible for reduced premiums, federal subsidies or Medicaid by the way--I texted him to tell him what I thought were his prospects, and that I would help him if he needed it.  (In his family the words lawyer and magician are synonyms.)  He had no chance to respond to half the suggestion that he try because the whole thing was posed to him in one fell swoop, and to my surprise, he texted me back to say thank you.  He said he would go on the website and see what was available to him, but we'll see.  On Monday, I'll call him again and ask if he has done it, and if he hasn't, I'll try to get him to stay on the phone with me while I act as navigator...I told him about navigators too.  What I'm guessing is that he won't act on the possibility of getting coverage that would be a boon for him and those he loves, and the reason is the same one that resonated in that Florida special election.

There is a hedge fund operator named Ackman who has taken a huge "short position," that is he has sold stock he doesn't own, in an effort to drive down the price of shares in the company Herbalife, and he has also been openly badmouthing the company in an effort to bring about his ends .  He must have gotten a bad batch of vitamins or maybe someone at the company refused to extend him credit...maybe he was just insulted that they didn't want him to take over the operation, I don't know...and so his short sale has taken on the aura of a personal vendetta, the merits of which are not important here.  But the way a short sale works is that you effectively vote against a company you don't own shares in by selling shares that you borrow from others in an effort to make a profit by buying the stock cheaper later on so as to fill the sales you made with stock bought at a lower price.  It would be fraud in any other business--in fact that is more or less what the film "The Producers" was about--but in finance it is de rigueur...very Republican...which brings me to the point.

My brother, and apparently tens of thousands of Florida voters in the 13th congressional district as well, have been sold short on the Affordable Care Act, and as a result, they won't even consider its merits.  If you believe that electoral politics is the highest calling for a politician, that's all well and good.  But I believe that public service is what politicians get paid for rather than getting reelected and helping their ilk get reelected too, and the effect all this is having on my brother, albeit as a function of his own doings as well, is nefarious.  So I implore you all personally, including my brother: think with your own heads, not someone else's, because if they're Republicans, you just can't be sure that their motives are pure.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

With all the saber rattling in the world...with the price the United States has paid on foreign shores over the past decade in particular, but over the past century in general, it is surprising that people like John McCain want to keep on rattling them.  For more than ten years we have been sacrificing young soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in just the past three years we have participated militarily or diplomatically (if you can call saber rattling diplomacy) in revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Syria, and now we are volunteering to threaten Russia in Crimea and Ukraine as if it were our business.  The lack of a military threat over Crimea is what John McCain calls "feckless foreign policy" and I suppose he would rather that we make such a threat, just so as to assert American hegemony, rather than mind our own business and continue diplomatically, and rationally, on the name of joining leagues of nations rather than recruiting them when there are crises in the world.  It's so Republican, this admonition to act rather than try to prevent others from doing so...so conservative.  Last week, our State Department published a list called "President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims About Ukraine."  Rather than a missive in the diplomatic pouch it sounds like the rant of a cyber bully on FaceBook.  Of course, the Russian state department responded in kind, chastening the chasteners with a review of American interventionism abroad in recent years; a history that is undeniably characterizable as ill-advised if not downright illicit in terms of international law.  The claims raised in both documents were self-serving, tendentious, somewhat contrived and often no more than semiotic in nature, but so what.  As to the antagonists and protagonists, if there are any protagonists to pit against the antagonists, Putin is known to be the leader not of a democracy but of a kleptocracy, which is what started this whole incident: Putin's protégé in Ukraine was a kleptocrat after Putin's own heart, and the Ukrainians ran him out of the country for it...or at least to Crimea from which he crossed the border into Russia.  And as for John McCain, he graduated fourth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis, yet he got to fly jets for the Navy...a posting that is generally reserved for the best and the brightest, not the ne'er-do-well son of an admiral who managed to accrue more demerits in his academic career than any one before him in history, which perhaps explains how he managed to get shot down over Vietnam.  It doesn't explain how he became a war hero because of it though, which leads me to the impact of all this on American politics.

Marco Rubio addressed the Conservative Political Action Convention this week and tried to resurrect his fleeting popularity with conservatives by advocating a more vigorous American response to the Russian invasion of Crimea.  And while he may once again become a conservative darling because of it, the Republican mainstream seems more interested in pulling in American horns abroad than it is in more foreign adventures, ergo a Pyrrhic victory for Rubio if it works at all after his stance on immigration reform.  And as President Obama rattles not his saber but his pocket knife, Republican cat calls ring out in the media...or at least they will...and the Democratic faithful won't be much impressed either, and all this for what.  Crimea was part of Russian until Nikita Kruschev ceded it to Ukraine, one of the members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--you may remember it as the USSR--in 1954, back when the word "The" was a compulsory predicate to the names Ukraine and Crimea.  Before that formality that didn't really change anything within the USSR, Crimea had been the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet since the 18th century, and continued to be until today, albeit now only by treaty.  And when the nations that are trying to prevent Russia from taking Crimea back invaded Crimea during the Crimean War, Russia defended the people of Sevastopol, the regions greatest city, until it fell.  It was the Russians who kept Crimea from falling again during the Nazi invasion effort of World War II, and the people of Crimea who speak Russian, as their ancestors have done for centuries, haven't forgotten.  So with a history that almost begs the question of how Crimea ever got to be part of Ukraine in the first place, why do we care.  The Crimean parliament has set a plebiscite for March 16, and the people of Crimea will speak. What do we care...let them.  This isn't about international affairs.  It is about the unity of the CIS (Confederation of Independent States) which is what the USSR became.  And frankly, I don't give a damn about changes in the Russian alphabet.  Let Putin be Putin; he isn't fooling anyone anyway.  And let the Russians keep piping gas into Europe, Russian gas being 30% of the European supply.  It's cold over there too, and allowing our oil companies to ship our natural gas to Europe at the cost of rising costs in this country seems like a fools errand.

No, Crimea is a sleeping dog, and I'd rather that it sleep in Russia than join in an international expeditionary force...either diplomatically or militarily...designed to prevent what seems a natural change from occurring.  Let's not look for any more trouble.  Iraq and Afghanistan cost us more than a trillion dollars, not to mention the more important loss of thousands of lives of young people who thought they were somehow responding to the 9/11 assaults.  In the end, nothing was accomplished in a favorable sense, but a lot of widows and orphans were made and corrupt governments have been propped up at their expense.  Let's not repeat our mistakes, no matter what John McCain says.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have been writing to you about the great divide in the distribution of America's prosperity between those with capital and those who do the work that produces capital.  Apropos of that subject, last Saturday an article appeared in the New York Times on a topic that is ostensibly unrelated, but that has a tangential relevance to the subject.  A lawsuit has been filed against several silicon valley companies alleging that they conspired to both avoid "poaching" one another's technical personnel--engineers, programmers and the like--and to refrain from making counteroffers to such personnel if they found preferable jobs with new employers.  This isn't a case of the oppressed being further oppressed; technical people in the information technology business make a great deal of money, and as the article points out, they are responsible for the profound spike in the cost of real estate in the area.  My heart isn't bleeding for either side, but the fact of the suit suggests unfair labor practices, conspiracy to fix the price of labor, and perhaps most importantly, personnel practices that border on racketeering.  And guess who was in the vanguard of the movement to institute and enforce the corporate hiring policies involved.  It was Steve Jobs, the patron saint of American free enterprise; the man who told President Obama not to waste his time trying to get the 30,000 jobs he had shipped to China back to this country because he wasn't going to bring them back no matter what.  His justification then was that cost was king among considerations in corporate policy making, and the Chinese would to the work needed to manufacture I-phones cheaper than Americans would...even though the author of a Times series on the subject calculated that the savings amounted to about $5 per unit out of a retail price eighty times that amount or even more, depending on the device in question.  For that savings, Jobs was intractable at a time when many of you were losing your homes because there weren't enough jobs in this country.

So what should we do now to protect wealth accrued out of that kind of sheer greed satisfied at the expense of millions of Americans who used to work in thousands of businesses...Americans  whose jobs are now being done by children in Bangladesh or India or the Philippines.  I mentioned protectionism the last time I wrote on this subject as the topic I would consider next, and now is the time.  The point I want to make on the subject is that there is more than one kind of protectionism, and while some of it, like tariff wars, may be self-destructive for the countries that wage them, protection of business practices at home that redound against the benefit of the nation as a whole do not merit protection despite the supply-side mantra that conservatives sing unremittingly to justify such rapacity.  We have reached the point at which punitive tax policy is necessary in order to prevent the corporate practices that are cannibalizing this nation.  It is time that the labor practices of foreign countries become the standard by which we tax products made in them for American companies, and that is my point in a nutshell.  If a product is assembled abroad, it should be taxed as an import when it comes home.  If parts for a product or raw materials--like "rare earth" substances, of which we have allowed the Chinese to virtually monopolize the production lately--are imported, they are taxed, and we should assess the same kind of protective tariffs against labor that is imported, and make no mistake about it.  Big business is importing labor just as surely as it did when sweat shops existed in New York City's garment district...or for that matter, when the colonists brought indentured servants to this country as virtual slaves for terms of years.  We are subsidizing the barbarous misuse of powerless people in foreign countries just as surely as if we were employing them at slave wages on our shores, and if we are the moral nation we claim to be, we should do something about it.

Tariffs on products made with foreign labor will never be a popular idea, but I ask you, why should the import of man hours--or child hours as the case may be--that result from violation of principles of basic fairness and undermine human dignity in ways that are against the law in this country go unnoticed and un-addressed.  Do our moral obligations cease at our borders?  Isn't the fiction that labor isn't imported just another expedient myth that we employ to excuse ourselves for operating a form of capitalism that is completely deracinated of equitable considerations, much less moral qualms, when it comes to foreign labor--practices that even diminish American workers in the process?  In this case in particular, isn't our lack of moral sincerity self-destructive?  We brook this exploitation of cheap labor abroad in the name of profit on the predicate that promotion of business is what makes our economy thrive.  Thus, conveniently ignoring American complicity in the abuse of labor that just happens to be located abroad is justified only by the expediency of facilitating business in our collective best interest, but the verity of that tacit claim comes more into doubt with each passing day.  The Republican/conservative notion that business can do no wrong merits scrutiny at the very least, and repudiation if it turns out that what we are seeing is what we are getting.  That is why a tariff on foreign labor makes sense.  Certainly we can all agree that fostering the tyranny of business not just here but abroad as well, perpetrated against not just the working poor here but the working impoverished in other countries, is immoral regardless of how many dollars it is worth.

It all comes down to a notion that I have mentioned before.  If we are truly the Judeo-Christian nation that we purport to be--and by characterization of our creed as Judeo-Christian I do not mean to exclude the other moral systems that also bind our people to virtuous principles that we want associated with the rubric "American"--we should act that way in all circumstances.  The fact that we ignore our principles so that we can enjoy cheap clothing and electronics does not redound to our credit, and the world resents us for it.  That, among other things, is what makes us a target...and rightfully so.

Your friend,

Mike