May 2014 Archives

Dear America,

I feel something near guilt about what I am about to say with regard to Bill Gates.  I have said it so many times before that it almost feels like a vendetta.  But I'll get over it because a guy who has increased his fortune from $55 billion to $76 billion during his hiatus from the top spot on the Forbes list of richest men in the world, all the while claiming the mantle of philanthropist nonpareil, is a hypocrit, and a self-serving braggart in the bargain, and if it's a vendetta, that's what he deserves.  Despite his fulminations of purely selfless, virtuous intent, he has even less of a chance of getting into the gates of heaven now than he ever did.  To put it bluntly, when camels pass through the eyes of needles...and for that matter, when pigs fly...Bill Gates will be able to claim virtue by dint of having his expensive hobby.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is nothing but an apology for acquisitiveness that can never be justified.  I saw him recently, showing off his tote bag full of books he is going to read to find out what the rest of the world needs him to work on as if he were voluntarily undertaking Herculean labors, or even more unctuous, self-immolation.  All appearances to the contrary, butter would definitely melt in his mouth...and it has about 76 billion times.  This is why I think it important to think about Gates' self-aggrandizements carefully.

We are entering a political era in which the focal issue for campaigners everywhere will not be immigration, education loan repayment, aid to flood victims or mistreatment of the Tea Party's affiliates by the IRS.  We are going to be talking about income equality and wealth disparity, and the other things only to the extent that they relate to those two seminal issues.  The American people seem to be recognizing, at last, that vast preponderance of the wrongs they see stem from the disparity between the power of the average man or woman and that of Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Warren Buffet, George Soros and a slew of other hedge fund managers, real estate "tycoons" like Donald Trump, the Walton family one and all, and a bunch of others whose names are ominously absent from public debate on this subject.  There are billionaires everywhere these days, and right across the street from them are people carrying signs begging them to at least pay a decent minimum wage. It's sheer numbers now.  There are just more of us than there are of them, and finally, we know not just who we are, but who they are as well.

If a guy like Karl Rove read this, he would complain about "class warfare."  But it's a funny thing about class warfare: nobody seems to complain when the rich declare war on the rest of us.  When they marshal their fortunes for political purposes just to prevent the workers at the low end of the economic ladder from climbing up it, that's class warfare.  When they contribute millions of dollars to the campaigns of the venal congressmen and senators who will vote to keep their taxes down as long as their campaign coffers remain full, that's class warfare.  When John Boehner claims that an increase in the minimum wage is a "job killer" because the business owners of the world will create fewer jobs that aren't worth having because you can't support yourself on what they pay anyway, that's class warfare.  We are in a class war, and the upper class wants us to stop fighting while they continue to carve us up.  Well, I'm not going to go along in silence anymore.  Call me a class warrior, but don't expect me to be ashamed of it.

There is, however, plenty of shame to go around in this class war.  That's where we come back to Bill Gates.  In the practice of law, a lawyer has what is called a "duty of candor toward the tribunal."  That means that a lawyer who gets caught lying to The Court, or to other participants in the legal processes, is subject to discipline, and if the lie is great enough, to disbarment, and even though the reputation of lawyers for candor is not stellar, lawyers do get disbarred for dishonesty of one kind or another, and it happens all the time.  I think that there should be a similar consequence for rich people who lie to the rest of us about the virtue of what they are doing, and about our right to be dissatisfied with it.  Let's call it "defortunating."  If you try to mislead people about class warfare, you should suffer defortunation.  If you commit fraud because even though you have hundreds of millions, you want, in the immortal words of John D. Rockfeller, "just a little bit more," you should be defortunated.  In fact, it seems to me that essentially all of the multi-millionaire class are committing some kind of inhumane practice, so they should all be defortunated.   Okay, defortunation may seem like the right thing to do, but obviously we could never get away with it.  But here's what we can get away with.  We can insist that our next congress restore the inheritance tax to some semblance of a just system in which those who do nothing but go to parties on mommy and daddy's fortunes cannot expect to go on like that from generation to generation.  We can insist on a top marginal income tax rate of, let's say, 50%, which is less than the top rate was after World War II, and we had a pretty good economic boom in consequence of it.  Let's demand that the aspects of our tax code that make it possible to profit from out-sourcing jobs to other countries be corrected so as to exact a price from the greedy buggers who do that...more rich guys like Steve Jobs.  Let's insist that our legislators stop treating money made with money, that is capital gains, as less taxable than money that we work for, that is earnings.

We are engaged in a class war.  It's about time we committed ourselves to winning it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

When I hear things like what John Boehner said when confronted at a news conference by the single most prominent Hispanic news man in America, I am reminded of Art Buchwald.  Buchwald had a syndicated column in which he often wrote farcical, dystopian accounts of government panjandrums making non-equatorial (there's no such word, but you know what it means) pronouncements to the world around them, including to questions by the press, except when Buchwald wrote them, they were satirical; he had his tongue in his cheek.  When Boehner does it, he thinks he's being smarter than everyone else...that no one notices that his bombastic evasions are just one step away from gibberish; he has his foot in his mouth.  Yesterday, Jorge Ramos, the most avuncular newsman on Hispanic television--the Mike Wallace of Univision--asked Boehner why he was preventing a vote on immigration reform, specifically the Senate bill that had been passed and forwarded to The House of Representatives in April where it has languished without being debated or considered because Boehner won't allow it to come to the floor for debate and consideration. In response, Boehner launched into a nonsensical diatribe on the subject of "Obamacare" and the confidence in President Obama that, according to Boehner, the American people lacked because he had postponed several deadlines for various provisions to become active.  It was a preposterous, abjectly transparent evasion of the question; a red herring nonpareil.  Ramos then asked the same question two or three more times, his inquiry meeting with a "I just gave you an answer to your question" response each time until Boehner finally said, "Thank you for your thoughts," and just wondered off to the next reporter's question.  It was as if he had been endowed by Kurt Vonnegut with some kind of cloak of rationality inscrutability, so that no one could see that he wasn't really the Speaker of the House, but was in reality the Mad Hatter.

But when these things happen, and they seen to happen frequently, it seems to me that all of the news media--not just Rachel Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC answer to Fox-TV--should be reporting it and following up on the question.  Every American voter should have on his lips the question, why won't John Boehner allow a vote on the immigration that has already passed in one house of our federal congress.  Mind you, I'm not asking why every American voter isn't asking why the Senate immigration bill sitting in The House wasn't passed.  I'm not even asking that all Americans ask John Boehner whether he is for it or against it.  I'm asking why every American isn't asking why, with regard to an issue as important as immigration reform, no vote is being taken in the House of Representatives...what people like Boehner call "the people's house"...when one could be taken immediately except for the fact that The Speaker of our House won't permit it.  In other words, we would have an up or down vote...one that every legislator could be held accountable for...and the issue could be resolved except for the interdiction being perpetrated by one single man: John Boehner.  It isn't the first time he has prevented an issue from being resolved by a legislative vote, and unless his feet are held to the fire, it won't be the last.  That means that John Boehner can single-handedly veto any bill without ever having to be accountable for it.  That is anti-democratic.  It is totalitarian, and our news media--the freest press in the world--doesn't even bother to point it out.

Where you when we need you, Diane Sawyer?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I've just started reading Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," and I must admit that I'm tempted not to go any farther than the free sample provided on my Kindl.  The sample is the prologue to the book, it seems, and it details the method he used in reaching his conclusions about the shape of our economic future...predicting it really, or at least postulating how we can change what seem to many of us to be the inevitable...the perduring financial trends in our lives.  Set aside the fact that he is obviously quite proud of his place in his discipline's professional pantheon of sages alive and dead, and of his Gallic heritage as well, and you still are left with nothing that smacks of innovative thought other than the package that his ideas are presented in.  It's all historiography and deduction from the events of the past, which is what economists always rely on to predict the future and direct us as to how to get there.  But the fact is, if in economics the past is prologue, someone in economics would have figured out the human economic condition centuries ago.  Lord knows many of them have written tomes on the subject and professed to know.  And in Piketty's case, the affliction of the economic prognosticator is his as well, though he claims to be looking at it all with an entirely new perspective.  He thinks that the trends of past periods will tell us how to modify trends in the future, but the problem is that they never have, and for good reason.  Economics has always professed to be a social science, and it has tried to reinforce the idea by creating formulae to reify that conceit.  If the formulae make sense, I suppose the thinking goes, it gives legitimacy to economics as a whole.  But once those formulae go beyond theory, they seem always to come up short when policy and practice are being considered.  Whenever we hit a rough patch, at least two camps appear to say that the extent to which the policies urged on us by the others are at fault, because it seems that there is always something in our economy to blame on someone.  In other words, there is no objective reality in theoretical economics.  So, if it were as easy to figure it all out as Piketty wants us to believe it is--if all we have to do is rationally review history with the proper methodology--I must argue that someone would have done it already.  If all it would have taken, after all this time, to contend with society's tendency toward the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (call it what you will, but that ancient saw is what Piketty is writing about) was a plenary understanding of economic history, someone who could read records of the past, would have read them, and then informed us.  After all, there's big money in predicting the future, and even bigger money in changing it.  But with regard to Piketty, let me be a little more specific.

His thesis is essentially that a couple of formulae that he has created tell the whole story of the tendency of wealth to accrete in the hands of a few.  He says that the rate of return of capital is greater than the rate of growth, and that causes capital to accumulate in the accounts of those who already have some.  Money makes money...how revolutionary.  But, he adds, there are justifications for some of that concentration of wealth, and there probably is no debate on that subject either.  You take risks with your money, you deserve a reward; nothing startlingly new there.  And then of course there is the question of how to divide the profits of enterprise between labor and capital, and I suppose that his book might be worth reading if he has come up with a formula for that, but the problem such a formula would have to overcome is the virtually infinite number of variables that have to be considered when deciding such things.  In point of fact, economics as a discipline is really just an assessment of human interaction that presumes to be able to predict mass psychology in a meaningful way...that is before it leads to undesirable consequences...and that is precisely what economics has never succeeded in doing.  So, Piketty is welcome to try, but the reality is that economics isn't science, no matter how much it relies on empiricism and inductive thinking.  The rules it derives always fail to provide any significant insight as to how to alter the human condition any better than the folk wisdom that we all indulge in across the living room ether.  It reminds me of a moment that I experienced when I was sixteen.  I was working construction for a ne'er-do-well relative and I came upon him sitting, and doing something that looked a lot like nothing.  I asked him what he was doing, and he said, "making big ones out of little ones."  That was all he said and he continued manipulating the piece of rope or wire he had in his hand, apparently accomplishing...nothing.  Making big ones out of little ones was a euphemism for trying to give the impression that what one was doing was significant when in reality, it was only a show intended to legitimate idle pursuit.

I saw a brief interview of Piketty on the news a few nights ago, and he seems an engaging enough fellow; he didn't emit an aura of deluded grandiosity or pontifical tendencies.  But his point seemed to be that we can address earnings inequality and the disparity in wealth between those at the top of the modern Darwinistic economic pyramid and those on the bottom with tax policy, and I think he is partially right.  But the real question is, what policy.  He talks about inheritance tax, and I have always thought...and said right here in fact...that family wealth taxation was a good idea, and I'm not alone.  As a policy issue, that one has been on the table, and not just in the living room, for as long as I can remember.  As to the graduated income taxes that have been imposed in virtually all advanced countries for over a century, they are not just de rigueur, they are inescapably just and necessary to prevent reversion to the egregious disparities of weal that afflicted the world through the first fifty to seventy-five years of the industrial revolution, and continue to do so in some of the less socially developed nations.  But how graduated should they be?  That is the question, and that question can be answered only politically.  So, what else is new.

My thesis is much simpler than Piketty's, which doesn't make it correct, but does make it easier...and quicker...to absorb and apply.  I know you have read it here before, but indulge me.  I think there are two kinds of wealth, both earned and accrued.  There is natural wealth and there is artificial wealth.  The former comes from inventive thinking and hard work.  The latter comes from just being in the right place, or the right womb, at the right time.  I have no respect for the latter, and I think it should be vigorously taxed.  As to the former, if you earn it, you should be able to keep a bigger share, but that includes not just the creation of the idea that works, but the labor that goes into reifying it as well.  And there should be a point at which all taxation represents a rejection of mindless acquisition.  The accretion of wealth that is so vast that it can never be spent is despicable in my opinion.  Warren Buffett might be a great guy, but what does anyone need $50 billion for.  And as for Bill Gates, he makes a big show of his foundation and how much money he has given it, but the fact is that, even with what he has given, his fortune is 50% bigger now than it was when he started the Bill and Melinda Gates Fund, and the fact that it is eponymously named is no inadvertency.  It's just a well directed hobby for him, and he shouldn't be getting so much credit for doing the minimum that a guy with his kind of power and wealth owes the rest of us.  He didn't get rich alone, and now he isn't getting richer because of anything he is doing for posterity.  He is getting rich by being rich, and that is in no way admirable.

That's my economic theory, and it's free for the reading...or, you can pay $30 for Piketty's book if you like.

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

If it weren't for the past, I would feel confident that the Republicans and conservatives in general have no chance of coming anywhere near control of congress in November.  If only it weren't for the past.  After all, an increase in the minimum wage continues to be anathema to the Republicans despite the fact that such an increase in earnings would help many millions of people...most of whom vote.  And there is immigration reform, which even Republican operatives say is crucial to the success of the party at the polls, but which, in spite of what would seem self-interest, they continue not just to oppose, but to actively thwart.  There is the obvious political theater represented by the incessant investigations of issues from Benghazi to Lois Lerner of the IRS--investigations that are nothing but reprises of already failed investigations of the same things that were inspired by naked political strategy.  That enthusiasm for the Republicans continual calls for, and pursuit with junk-yard-dog enthusiasm of, such "inquiries" is shared only by their own die-hard partisans, while there is nothing but opprobrium coming from the general public, who see nothing getting done in the Republican House of Representatives and only threats of filibuster coming from the hard right Republicans of the Senate minority...both of which have brought the country to a standstill on many fronts.  Now, there is the continuing saga of the failure of the House to pass an extension of unemployment benefits passed in The Senate in April.  Speaker Boehner won't even allow a vote on the bill, and a Republican from Nevada, Republican Dean Heller, who sponsored the April bill is introducing a new version in response to Boehner's refusal in lieu of a "jobs creation" bill.  Heller has added to the unemployment extension in his first bill an $85 billion corporate tax cut, presumably to mollify Boehner on the "job creation" issue.  Whether Democrats in The Senate will vote for such a bill is unknown, but the likelihood that the American people will tolerate such largess directed at the corporate oligarchy seems quite low to me.  You can call a tax cut for those who already have too much money in the bank "job creation," but my guess is that the American people regard more spending power for millions of them as more likely to create jobs than would be any corporate sop obviously directed at eliciting more campaign contributions this summer would accomplish.

But it's not just regular people who have good reason not to vote Republican.  Today, there is a congregation of posse comitatus groups in Washington, D.C.  They make the Tea Party look like main-stream liberals, and they have advised their constituents on the contact policies...what they have denominated the rules of engagement, or ROE...for this convention they are holding out of doors in the nation's capital. The members of the various posses are to leave their guns and ammunition in the closest neighboring states where they are permitted to carry them, and they are not to confront or assail law enforcement in D.C...or elsewhere for that matter.  That includes speeding in their cars, running red lights and resisting arrest if they get on the wrong side of the law.  According to the organizers, they expect between one and thirty million participants...that's thirty, not three.  And their mission, for those who choose to accept it, is to expel the "communists," which include among them not just President Obama but John Boehner as well, from our governing bodies, replacing them with what they didn't say.  So, that's up to 30 million no votes for Republican candidates in November's elections.  Add them to the no votes precipitated by those commies on the issues of the minimum wage, immigration and tax breaks for corporations...the poor corporations that are sitting on about $2-3 trillion as we speak...and you have probably fifty million votes, minimum, that are going to go somewhere other than to Republican candidates.  That's a big hole to climb out of in electoral politics, and while the posse comitatus groups are going to be unarmed when they arrive in Washington, the Republican Party never goes anywhere without its foot-shooting pistol, which they have now fired so often that they are going to have to reload with some more bizarre ideas to try to sell to the American electorate.  With all these inimical factors working against Republican prospects for taking over control of the two houses of congress, all of us liberals should be resting easy, but somehow, I can't.

We have been in these straits before, and it hasn't always gone well for the progressives among us.  For some reason, these Republican contra tempts seem unreliable as auguries of Republican defeat.  In 2010 for example, not just Republicans, but Tea Party Republicans, managed to arrogate control of The House from the majority, which was Democratic before the election, and from the Republicans who became the majority in The House of Representatives on that occasion.  The Tea Party, once they had procured the capitulation of the new House Speaker, John Boehner of course, managed to run roughshod over the entire legislative process, and acting in concert with the disloyal minority of forty Republican Senators, they continued their reign of terror even through the election of 2012, which was a defeat for the Republicans, but not a large enough one to bring them down from their cat bird seat.  Thus, the Democrats have been blamed for every debacle in Washington by the obdurate Republicans, and for some reason, the public doesn't repudiate the puling of the Republicans on the casuistic obfuscation of the truth that has become their political strategy on all occasions.  Their crocodile tears seem convincing.  Once again, all we can do is wait for November, but perhaps President Obama could help us.  Maybe he can stop giving little speeches in the middle of the day that result in ten second sound bites on the news--always followed by the same kind of attention to McBoehnell, who persist in bending the truth until it breaks--and have a few prime time news conferences instead in which he can lay out his points for all to hear, not just the unemployed, those who stay home by design and children too young to vote who are staying home because they are faking illness.  It takes guts to hold a news conference, but maybe some guts in our president is our last hope.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's been a month or two for newly released books of broad interest.  First there was Thomas Picketty's book, "Captital in the Twenty-First Century," and now, Timothy Geithner has released his own apology for the way in which he handled the economic crisis of 2008 for his part as Treasury Secretary in the form of his book, "Stress Test."  After hearing Geithner interviewed, it is apparent to me that the establishment in the realm of finance learned nothing from the past six years, and despite the Dodd-Frank Act, we will likely have another round of the same kind of economic disaster in the not-too-distant future.  When interviewed, Geithner's position is as it always was: save the big guys in order to save the rest of us.  He continues to deny that letting financial institutions fail would not only have accomplished a desirable end, but would have been the fair thing to do in the bargain.  He insists that the only way to prevent unemployment on the Depression level was to bail out the banks so as to prevent any more of them from failing after Lehman Brothers went under, and perhaps he is right.  But whether he is or not, all his book does is beg the question of how we got into the position of having to save venal, avaricious predators from the fate they created for all of us while the rest of us struggled to keep from drowning in the financial cesspool they dug for us.

Unfortunately, the interviewer, Robert Seigel of NPR's All Things Considered, asked Geithner all of the questions that he had prepared to answer given his financial-system-insider's outlook, but failed to ask him the one central question that no one discusses today, nor did they ever.  He should have asked Geithner if the financial crisis would have occurred if President Clinton had not listened to then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and had vetoed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act instead of signing it.  The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in the 1930's in response to the last catastrophic collapse of our financial system starting in 1929, and it kept us from suffering another for sixty years.  It took only about ten years after its repeal for the same kind of catastrophe to occur again and for essentially the same reasons...all because Glass-Steagall was repealed.  Yet, the Republican-conservative notion that laws like Dodd-Frank serve only to impede the kind of financial activity that we need to grow continues to enjoy credence from insiders like Geithner, who self-servingly thinks like the rest of them that the cause of the crisis was not the rampant betting on the prospect of financial failure in consequence of irresponsible lending practices, it was the lending itself.  It wasn't the fact that bankers had to pay up on "credit default swaps" and other bizarre derivatives when mortgages started to fail; it was the failure of the mortgages themselves that put millions out of work, stymied demand, and thus led to not just low economic growth, but decline in our economy.

That idea made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.  If people began losing the houses they had bought but couldn't afford, they would have paid the price for overreaching financially, but that problem could have been overcome.  All we needed, and I said this at the time, was a program of federal mortgage guarantees based on restructured mortgages for those who were having trouble keeping up.  The banks could then have forestalled payment of the obligations they had undertaken in the form of those derivatives without loans from the federal government because those mortgages wouldn't have failed, and the only losers would have been the people who bought the derivatives, and thereby bet on the rest of us to fail...just deserts if you ask me.  Instead, what we did is perpetuate the cycle by which the disparity in wealth from the top stratum of our economy to the bottom burgeoned even further.  Somehow, the wealthy managed to come out of the water dry, as the Russians say, leaving the rest of us to tread water until general prosperity, that is jobs, returned, and they haven't completely done so even as of now...six years after the crisis blew up in all our faces.  It is just a further demonstration of the principle that Picketty propounded in his book, and that old saws have pointed out for centuries.  The rich always get richer, and guys like Timothy Geithner are OK with that.  That's why Picketty's book is so important.

He points out, at least in interviews unlike Geithner, that capital should not reap all the rewards from our dynamism and hard work.  At some point, labor must be rewarded for sustaining the system as was the case after the last depression and World War II.  During that era, prosperity of a more universal nature supplanted the old regime that had started with the "Gilded Age" in the late nineteenth century.  Our economy came more into balance with regard to rewards for those who created prosperity...that is labor got more and capital/management got less.  In the fifties, the average corporate president made about forty times what the average worker made.  Now, he makes hundreds of times what the worker made, and the worker has made no financial progress as adjusted for the passage of economic time while the managers and owners have continued to increase their wealth, and hence their creature-comfort.  The combination of the few taking more and the failure of demand to grow because labor's share of the wealth hasn't grown has led to the stagnation we are now experiencing.  It isn't that taxes are too high, as Picketty points out by citing the fact that after World War II the top marginal rate was 82% during the greatest expansion of universal prosperity in American history.  It isn't that regulation "kills jobs" as the lack of "moral hazard" extant in 2008 when the entire crisis began demonstrates.  It's kind of like the final scene in King Kong when Carl Denham says, "It wasn't the planes that killed him.  'Twas beauty killed the beast."  And it was greed that killed our economy.  Not the attempt to control it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I actually started to feel sorry for John Boehner after the last attempt at extortion-by-shutdown of the reactionary element of the Republican House of Representatives.  When he lost his temper in front of the press and exclaimed "Are you kidding me!" after recounting the Tea Party's in-caucus disclaimer that they never thought it would work anyway, I thought that there was hope for him after all.  Perhaps, I thought, he can overcome the Republican fixation on obstruction of the opposition's plan at any cost, regardless of its merit, and actually work in concert with the Democrats to get something done...and send the disloyal opposition within his party packing in the bargain.  But that momentary fit of pique turns out to have been nothing but personal frustration over the undermining of his Speakership by an obdurate, recalcitrant minority within his party that was as willing to dispatch him as it was to do so to the Democrats.  It was not ideological perfidy that he was complaining about as it turns out.  It was personal disloyalty...disloyalty to him...that upset him, and he seems to be over it now.  This week, he commissioned a sub-committee to investigate...for the um-teenth time...the Benghazi murders of four state department personnel on September 11, 2012.  The sub-committee's focus is to find out what the administration is withholding in the way of self-incriminating documentation with regard to...I don't know.  Every time I hear John McCain or some other staunch Republican claim that there was some sort of malfeasance in the executive branch on the occasion of the Benghazi attack I find myself wondering just what Hillary Clinton wondered out loud when she was before an investigatory committee just after it happened: so what?  Why does it matter if the administration erred or misstated the motivation for the attack on our consulate?  And besides, who told these congressmen who are totally lacking in military experience--or the insight, for that matter--that they are competent to question the military command's decision not to deploy troops during that few hours when the attack was under way because there were no troops near enough to intervene in a timely fashion. Last, but not least--or perhaps more aptly said, least among the insignificant--what difference does it make what the administration knew the Sunday morning after the attacks when the assistant Secretary of State, Susan Rice, went on the Sunday morning talk shows and attributed the attack to reaction to an anti-Islam video, and, I would add, who cares.  It seems more significant that the State Department had cut back on security because of cuts to its budget under sequestration, which was largely a Republican idea, if they care to remember.  But that isn't going to be a topic for discussion, and my guess is that the witness list will be the same old disgruntled employees...Greg Hicks, for example...who will reiterate what they have said in the past to no good effect whatsoever, except that the Republicans can keep this non-issue alive until the election and pretend that it is meaningful.  It's all so unseemly.

But, what is worst of all about these things--and there are others like the contempt hearing against Lois Lerner, the IRS employee who pled the fifth when she was called to testify and the continued puling about conservative organizations being denied taxation advantages because they are political, even though the Republicans say they aren't (after all, what organization chooses a name including the phrase "Tea Party" if the organization isn't political)--is that this kind of political theater plays well, at least among the already converted.  It's frenzy whipping material.  In conversations with ordinary Republicans, but with staunch conservatives in particular, these hearings will be referenced regularly, as if the fact of the hearings means that there is something amiss to have hearings about.  And at the center of all this is Trey Gowdy, the conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former federal prosecutor, trying to make a name for himself from his seat on the back bench like so many Republicans before him.  He puts on his rabid dog persona and struts about...at least figuratively...in these committee hearings like the enforcer on the Republican congressional hockey team as if to strike fear into the hearts of guilty and innocent alike.  (By the way, someone should give him a ticket on the same bus ride to Hair Club for Men that they send Rand Paul on, though Gowdy's problem isn't too little hair, it's too much...and for a guy like me who doesn't have enough himself, that's quite a tonsorial indictment, but I digress.)   And as he does so, the choir to whom he is preaching swells its collective chest with righteous indignation that they think is borne out by his sanctimonious pronouncements on C-SPAN.  It's almost like a satire on Saturday Night Live, except that the audience takes it so seriously.  And now, we are six months from an election that will determine how recalcitrant the congress with which Barrack Obama will have to deal for the last two years of his presidency will be.

If I were The President, this is what I would do.  First, I would start holding press conferences at 8:00 at night on week nights...avoiding Thursdays (you don't want to mess with the audience of "The Big Bang Theory"); at least one a month from now on.  I would give these issues a full airing, and I would give the American people an understanding of the significance of a Republican Congress for the years 2015 and 2016.  In fact, I would have done that in 2012.  I would have said, don't vote for me if you are going to vote for a Republican in congress.  If you think that they have the right idea, give them a president who agrees with them.  But remember to be careful what you wish for, because if enough of you vote Republican, you will surely get it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

My experience with  numbers is based on what I learned in school.  They are precisely defined, susceptible of manipulation for the purpose of drawing conclusions about the world, and useful for purposes of real-world decision making...unless they are coming from economists or politicians.  In the case of politicians, the only numbers you will hear any of them talk about are the ones that favor their positions.  As for economists, they all seem so engaged in applying their chosen dogmas that they never analyze their choices of the numbers they emphasize nor, more disturbingly, do they bother to determine the true significance of those numbers by evaluating their derivations.  I am thinking at the moment about a number, or references to that number, that quantifies the rate at which people are ceasing to look for work these days.  That one number is cited every month by Republican nay-sayers who will say anything to undermine the Democrats, Barrack Obama in particular, but they say very little about why those people have stopped looking.  For example, when someone retires, that's not a bad thing in economic terms, is it?  Yet, those people are lumped in with others for purposes of this single number on which those looking for reasons to be pessimistic rely.  And the media, who should be looking for such tendentious analyses say nothing about it.  In fact, often times they report the same numbers without analysis as if everyone understands that none is needed.

An example of that kind of shoddy thinking, two of them actually, were published in the New York Times this Sunday.  One was by a guy named David Leonardt, who is one of The Times stars, and actually, he did pretty well in limning the recently published popular-economics treatise of a French economist named Piketty, which book everyone is talking about.  Piketty seems to be the John Kenneth Galbraith of the day...popularizing subject matter that academicians in the field of economics have long seemed to suggest was too complex for us common men...and women of course.  Piketty's thesis seems to be that income inequality is nothing new, and that it can be addressed by progressive taxation and promotion of education for everyone.  He sees education as the great equalizer when it comes earning capacity, if I understand Leonhardt's synopsis correctly, and progressive taxation as the great leveler of an economic topography that is already inequitable.  While the observation that there is nothing historically anomalous about the current stratification of our society in terms of a disparity in the possession of wealth may be something of a revelation, his proposal for remediation of income inequality through tax policy and universal education seems little more than reiteration of what has become progressive dogma in this country...hardly novel solutions to the problem.  And while Leonhardt may not have set out to demystify Piketty's work, that was the effect of his article on the subject in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in which he demonstrated some skepticism of his own, most of it healthy.  But deep in his exposition of Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," was an imbedded canard that betrayed Leonardt's tendency toward hackneyed ideas rather than the ostensible cutting-edge thinking with which his 41 year old brain has been charged by The Times.  He said, when talking about Piketty's reliance on progressive taxation as a remedy for the tendency of our free market, like every other free market according to Piketty, to stratify our society economically (wealth begets wealth, Piketty apparently opines as if that is something revelatory), that our current efforts at progressive taxation "often stealthily through the payroll tax" place too heavy a burden on the poor and middle class.  But as you probably know, though Leonardt seems not to, the "payroll tax" is the amount withheld from everyone's paycheck for Social Security, and though it is denominated a tax, that isn't what it is any more than a private payment into an annuity is a tax.  Even Ronald Reagan knew that and so stated during and before his presidency, but the idea that forced savings--which is what the payroll tax is--is tantamount to taxation keeps resurfacing among conservatives as a pretext for their efforts to eliminate the social safety net in general, Social Security in particular, and now with Leonardt, one of The Times' more recently coronated intellectual leading lights.  If he doesn't get that, what else doesn't he get, and if there are other things, why should we be reading what he thinks, whether The Times thinks he's a great thinker or not.  Just another case of shoddy thinking.

And then there's Frank Bruni, another editorialist whose thoughts have been deemed worth reading by The Times.  His Sunday Review piece was about the perception that America is in decline...that our children will inherit a lesser nation than we did, and that we should rethink our national withdrawal from the leadership roll internationally and from the hegemony in all spheres of activity that our country has "enjoyed" over the past century or so.  The piece is essentially a paean to the America that was, toward the end of encouraging us to "refuse to go gently into that good night" of parity with the other nations of the world when it comes to responsibility for what happens in it.  It's kind of Reaganesque in that it suggests, as Charlie Daniels sang when Reagan was in his first term, that we "talk real loud and walk real proud again," never mind the fall that that pride has recently gone before.  Bruni even acknowledges the fact that in much of the world we have been reviled for the conceit in which we have indulged that we know best what everyone else should be doing and how they should be doing it, but he seems undaunted by 9/11 and the overt opprobrium shown us in much of the world today.  Paternalism is still our calling in the mind of Frank Bruni...another Times new-era star.   One more case of encouragement to follow the primrose path just because it is popular.

Conservatives, and Republicans in particular, seem convinced that the New York Times is a liberal journal, biased, if not obscenely slanted, toward the left.  But people like Leonhardt and Bruni, both of whom are ostensibly of the ilk complained of by the right, demonstrate that there is no liberal slant at The Times.  There may be some misjudgment as to what constitutes profound thought, but there is no liberal slant.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I woke up this morning thinking about an old girlfriend from high school.  It was more than fifty years ago that we had a six week romance of sorts, though I never even kissed her.  She was charismatic, pretty, independent minded and popular within a certain alternative kind of crowd, to which I too was drawn.  We all wanted to think about things other than the prom and where we would be going to college, so we read Hesse's Siddhartha and waxed existential as we listened to Stan Getz and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and most importantly, we recognized that we knew next to nothing.  Lynne was my Beatrice as I look at it in retrospect.  Every once in  awhile, I indulge in subjunctive speculation about what my life would have been like if I had been different from the 17 year old adolescent that I was.  I had one of the most lastingly memorable moments...one of the most beautiful...of my life with her the night we became a couple.  She was having a party and the rest of the group was out in the living room as we met by chance in the kitchen.  We stood in the subdued light across from one another in the small galley and talked for probably half an hour; a conversation that in my memory was profound and incisive, though who knows what the reality was.  Then, all of a sudden, she swept across the six or seven feet of floor space between us and threw her arms around my chest as she put her head down on my shoulder.  If you had seen her at that moment you would know why that was such a memorable moment for me.  For the first time in my life I felt loved by someone other than family.  I was buoyant with emotion as I held her for what seemed like an hour.  We were inseparable for the following six weeks, but then I had to tell her how I felt.  I loved her, I told her, and she was stunned...stunned and frightened.  She told me she was not ready for such depth of emotion, and I broke off our relationship as a consequence.  There were signs in the following days that she wanted me to reconsider, but I was unable to accommodate her even though I wanted nothing more.  Thus, when I think back on that brief period--on those halcyon days of youthful romance--they look like the perfect love story...up until I screwed it up.

I am married now, though not to Lynne, and our two children have graduated from college and moved out on their own in pursuit of romances of their own, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  I love my wife and I don't want to be with anyone but her.  Yet still, when I think of those days with Lynne they are pristine and enticing, even if my memory is less than accurate, which it may well be.  My point is that as a nation, we seem to continue to have a romance with an illusion from decades ago and we fail to either appreciate or shepherd the common weal we enjoy today.  And the romance is with a presidential administration and era that was less than extolled by the masses when it was occurring.  Of course, I am talking about the Reagan era.  I read a piece from the American Enterprise Institute, which is euphemistically described as a conservative think tank, the equivalent of observing that Mussolini was partial to brown shirts in my opinion.  In that piece certain propositions on which the supply-siders rely were reiterated as if they needed no perspective from which to be assessed, but like all economic data, the one piece on which they doted was far from expository.  They cited what they called the longest period of economic expansion and the largest increase in federal revenue ever accomplished during a presidential administration.  But what they left out was that as a share of GDP, revenue fell drastically initially when Reagan cut taxes, and rebounded only partially thereafter.  They also neglect to mention that a growth in federal revenue can be as reflective of high inflation as it is of high earnings and productivity, which it was in the first eight years of the 1980's.  Add to all that the fact that while the accumulated wealth of the top 2% of the American plutocracy has gotten much richer, the average worker has stayed in place as his economic well-being is measured in current year dollars, and what is expected of him by his boss has steadily increased, inconsistent with the stagnation of his income.  So, when the AEI dwells on a couple of numbers that favor the notion that prosperity "trickles down" and increased wealth among the few "floats all boats,"  the reality is something different, yet the Republican Party, and especially conservatives within it, continue to float these ideas, and what is remarkable is that the American people seem to continue to accept them.  We keep having elections and we keep standing still with the Democrats having their hands on the throttle while the Republicans stand steadfastly on the brakes.  We are going nowhere, and the Republicans complain that it is the Democrats who are causing the inertia, which was the point of the AEI article.  So what is the Democratic Party to do?

Well, I say that they should set about disabusing the American people of the canard that the eighties were the good old days by pointing out what the policies of the Reagan administration left us with besides a few misleading statistics about federal revenues and prosperity as defined by corporate profits.  Inflation in 1980 was nearly 14% and unemployment went from an already-high level of 7.5% in 1980 to just shy of 11% at the end of 1982.  So, while federal revenue may have climbed, that is hardly an indication of the well-being of the American people or their economy.  Add to that the fact that while Reagan lowered taxes for the wealthy few, he then raised taxes of all kinds fourteen times during his administration...not on the affluent mind you.  And then there is the Clinton administration, fraught as it was with problems of various kinds.  Taxes on the highest bracket of income recipients were raised despite doing so, Clinton ushered in the longest bull market in the history of the stock market.  People bought houses and cars in record numbers, but unfortunately, Clinton also listened to Larry Summers and signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which left the financial industry free to give us the depression of 2007, and Newt Gingrich prevailed upon him to sign the package of legislation that they tried to call "welfare reform,"  which took from the unemployed most of their access to federal financial help during such periods unless they could prevail on the Tea Party congress to extend unemployment benefits.  That's the strategy I think the Democrats should use: Reality Therapy.  It's time we stopped waxing poetic about an era that turned back the advances of the working class by decades and began the reprise of the rapacity of the Gilded Age. And by the way, the Republican vote against the increase in the minimum wage is just more of the same, which should be an albatross around their necks, not a badge of distinction.

Your friend,

Mike