July 2014 Archives

Dear America,

Today's political news is yesterday's release of a new plan for federal participation in the fight against the rampant poverty that afflicts millions in this country.  With a new document that is as much an exercise in political rehabilitation as anything else, Paul Ryan, the erstwhile Republican vice-presidential candidate and running mate of Mitt Romney, has proposed a familiar variation on a perennial Republican theme in that he wants to fund anti-poverty programs federally, but give the money to the states in the form of block grants to allow them to administer several extant programs and invent new ones.  Of course, the problem with such plans always emerges in the same way.  Conservative governors and legislators do all in their power to undermine the programs they don't like because the cost too much or they help the wrong people in their political schemes of things, and such would be the case with this new alternative to the "War on Poverty" institutionalized by Lyndon Johnson in the sixties.  Ryan's claim is that his proposed changes wouldn't increase the federal deficit...that is the amount by which the U.S. Treasury's collections are less than the amount it pays out for federal programs...while the reality is that he is already spending the savings reaped by the parsimony of the aforesaid conservative state governments through their retrenching of the social safety net as we know it.  It's the same old dance with a slightly different tune being played by the band.

So, why is Ryan going to all this trouble to look more receptive to the needs of the poor?  The year 2016 comes to mind.  The Republican Party is in the news daily, constantly trying to be noticed by the voters without offering them anything new, just retreading the same old worn out ideas, much the same as Paul Ryan has done with his "new" proposal for discussion of welfare reform.  But as in the case of Ryan's plan, which will meet with some Democratic acceptance for the few kernels of sense in it, will also be confronted with the reality that some of his proposals will have dire consequences for the very people they purport to serve by realigning their attitudes and acclimating them to working.  For example, in states where programs like the programs Ryan is proposing are already in effect, certain paradoxes have emerged.  There have been reports about welfare in states with work requirements that demonstrate the flaw in any plan to give states authority to administer them.  In one case, in order to get a minimal benefit to supplement food stamps and rent subsidies a claimant has to do job searches, and many of the applicants live in areas in which public transportation is not available.  In addition, many of them have children who must be cared for while the parent looks for work.  Thus, in some cases the cost of qualifying for the program is near equal to, if not in excess of, the benefit to be received.  And then there is the question of the kind of work that is available to people with high school diplomas and nothing more.  Placing such a person in a dishwashing job does not represent a step toward self-sufficiency, much less can it be claimed to constitute an advance toward a prosperous life.  My guess is that to a state governor like Rick Perry in Texas, that would be alright, but in reality, it is nothing but lip service to the goal of lifting people out of poverty and respecting them, even the poorest of them, for their potential to be self-sufficient if they can just get the help they need to find the right path.

I confess that I am somewhat suspicious of any plan that includes a concept like "workfare," which I used to favor as a younger man, but which I now see as an impracticable method of raising the standard of living of the participants in such programs.  The jobs that are available to those who start out their lives disadvantaged educationally, socially or otherwise don't facilitate the kind of changes that the programs themselves profess to pursue.  The idea that you can become an entrepreneurial star without a high school diploma is a pipe-dream, even though someone can surely point to one somewhere.  And that, like the emphasis on training young people in community colleges with skills that business, but mostly industry needs flouts the reality that as a nation, we have moved away from the cultural norm that works the best.  There was a time when people went to work for companies that trained them.  Those companies, having invested in the preparation of their workers for careers in their employ, rewarded them for their loyalty year after year, which allowed them to pay taxes, buy houses and cars, and prime our economic pump constantly.  Today, despite the fact that American enterprise has something on the order of $2.5 trillion in idle cash sitting around--which, by the way, would be trickling down on us all if supply side economics actually were a valid idea--business and industry pule about the lack of qualified workers by want government to train them...an nobody seems to want to point out that if we are going to give welfare to anyone, it shouldn't be a business community with hundreds of billions in the bank.  In fact, if the Republicans were not hypocrites about who the drivers of capitalism are, they would have already pointed out that American business has no business coming to government for a hand out when it comes to training the workers they want.

A couple of years ago, I was speaking to a mid-level manager at a software company and he bemoaned the fact that there was no lack of applicants for jobs in his department, but there was a dearth of applicants with experience.  It never occurred to him that such applicants could get their experience with his company, nor was he rueful about his search for experienced workers abroad when there were unemployed people, some of them even possessed of Ph.D's he said, with resumes on his desk right then.  For a program about lifting people out of work to succeed, that kind of self-sustaining spiral of dissatisfaction with the American workforce has to be addressed.  And if we want to get people started working without worrying about their educational qualifications, we have to do more to support their efforts.  At any rate, Ryan's proposal is too little of the wrong things, and in the end, it won't lead to any reconciliation of the principles of the two camps in our nations' politics.  Poor Mr. Ryan is doomed to be an also-ran again if this is the best he can do.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Kudos are due the conservative movement in this country for finally reaching the ultimate depth of political depravity.  There were three judicial decisions yesterday and today in cases questioning the legality of the subsidies that less affluent people are eligible for under the ACA (Affordable Care Act), otherwise known in Republican circles as "Obamacare."  One of those decisions affirmed the legality of those subsidies, but the other two did not, setting the stage for a protracted battle over the issue all the way to The Supreme Court, which begs this question: What kind of people look for a way to prevent the working poor and the lower middle class from getting health insurance, which they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.  The issue is a legitimate one in the sense that our congress, both houses, and our president for that matter, made a simple mistake in the drafting of sections 1311 and 1322 of the ACA in that the language inadvertently made those subsidies available only to those who get their insurance through the state insurance websites, but failed to mention the federal website at all in that context.  That's significant because thirty four states declined to set up their own websites, either because they wanted to rely on the federal site rather than incur the redundant expense of creating their own or out of obduracy in an attempt to undermine the ACA.  So, technically the issue of whether the IRS can give the subsidies--which take the form of tax credits--to people who got their insurance on the federal site is legitimate, but who would raise it.  What kind of people would take from people...needy people...the resource that makes health insurance possible for them?  It's clever in that if they can kill those subsidies, the ACA might well wither and die--that's what they have been striving for since 2010 when it passed isn't it.  But it is a contrivance considering that the purpose of the ACA was to do just what the provision in question is doing now--subsidize insurance for people who need subsidies.  But while technically, as I said, they may be right, it wasn't a problem until the plaintiffs in these cases made it one.

One case was filed by a U.S. Senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin who challenged the authority under the ACA of the Obama administration to give subsidies to congressional staff, some of whom apparently aren't paid very well if since they purportedly qualify. That case was dismissed by a federal judge in Green Bay because Senator Johnson had not established that he was harmed by the drafting imprecision of his organ of government, the legislature.  But in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., the case of Halbig v. Burwell, who is the Secretary of HHS, was also decided, and in that case, the three judge panel ruled 2-1 that the law doesn't provide for subsidies to those insured through the federal site.  And then there is the case of David King, et al. v. Burwell decided by a unanimous three judge panel in the Richmond courthouse of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the subsidies in another putative taxpayer suit.  In the latter case, the plaintiff-appellants complained that they would have to buy health insurance if they were eligible for the subsidies or face a tax penalty, which only demonstrates the insincerity of the whole enterprise...plaintiffs complaining about being helped because they value something less than they do nothing.

These lawsuits could not be mounted by individuals eligible for subsidies because of the enormous cost of litigating in the federal courts on this level.  Obviously, the suits complaining about subsidies are being subsidized themselves, but not by a government endeavoring to be provident.  Rather they are being subsidized by a conservative, monied establishment that opposes the Democrats and President Obama first, and the ACA only because they didn't provide the relief that it represents for people who are financially disadvantaged in this country.  And joining them in their efforts are the attorneys general of several states that chose not to provide their citizens with an ACA website, elected officials working against the provision of an opportunity to get insurance for the poor and near-poor in their respective states.  It is a sinister political ploy intended to thwart a progressive president and his party, and as such, it is Machiavellian, perfidious, disingenuous and generally reprehensible.  That a political camp would go to this length...denying their constituents the opportunity to provide affordable insurance for themselves and their families...is despicable without question, and it is my hope that it will be the coup de grâce for a form of conservatism that stands for cynicism, greed, obduracy, callousness and a kind of dogmatism that is an internecine force in our country today.  We are being consumed in the sense that what we have been is being transmogrified into something cold, hard and barren by a chiliastic minority bent on assuming the helm of the ship of state.  I hope the nation takes this exhortation to heart: show them what we are made of.  Vote.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

The Hobby Lobby has succeeded in amending the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without legislative action in consequence of its victory in the Supreme Court regarding mandatory provision of birth control under health insurance policies.  The provision of the ACA that required insurers to include provision of birth control in every policy was struck down by Samuel Alito and the new conservative majority on The Court, and now, no person working for a "closely held" corporation owned by someone with purported religious convictions that oppose birth control...at least birth control through abortion, either with medication or a medical procedure...can count on her insurer covering it if she needs it.  But there was already a legal process through which an employer could opt out of contraceptive coverage, and all it required was completion of a two page form.  In such cases, the employer's payments to the insurance company would no longer be applied to the provision of contraceptives, but the insurance company still would be required to provide that coverage under the law...only for free.  But there are law suits all over the country objecting to requiring religious entities to even sign the form.  Hobby Lobby alone doesn't excuse them as it applies only to businesses, but the form was created specifically to accommodate religious organizations without the mandate of a Supreme Court decision during the national debate over the issue when the ACA was being passed, or shortly thereafter.  It was intended to obviate litigation, not to precipitate it, but apparently that wasn't enough.  What remains of the litigation in any form that opposes implementation of aspects of the ACA is obviously a form of guerilla litigation rather than a battle over principle, but that is immaterial.  The Supreme Court seems to comprise a minority that wants to see contraceptives available to all women as a function of the provision of what women need to be healthy, and contraceptives are a women's issue, not one of general application, make no mistake about it.  Condoms were never to be provided under the ACA, and as there is no biological preventative for male fertility, it's only various pills and procedures that are the target of the suits against the ACA.  But, the Supreme Court, while it is willing to consider the convoluted claims of religious rights made by rich businessmen who happen to be religious--some might say to a fault--that solicitude for the protection of rights doesn't seem to extend to half of the American population: women.  Don't women have rights too?

No doubt the argument was made during the hearings before the courts in the Hobby Lobby case, and its cogency seems unassailable.  But beyond the argument that women are being deprived of their rights, there is the fact that religious institutions and business owners are being given the right to force women to practice their religious principles, a fact that might seem nothing but a rhetorical flourish, but there is a deeper constitutional consideration as well.  The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."  The breadth of that proscription has been the subject of a great deal of litigation over the centuries since it was written, but it literally says only that congress may not make laws about religion, by implication that means that congress may neither means create a state church or protect one church or another, but that is exactly what the Hobby Lobby decision did.  It imposed on the store's women employees...all women employees, not just those with beliefs similar to those of the owners...the tenets of the religion of the owners of the business by denying those women their right to equal protection of the law...specifically the ACA.  The ACA guarantees reproductive rights for all women, but only if they don't work for religious business owners if you take Justice Alito's point in the decision he wrote for Hobby Lobby.  And Hobby Lobby and other closely held business owners have said that such is not the case because those women don't have to work for their companies, and that is largely true, though in this economy it is not practically realistic.  However, the same goes for women who work for companies whose executives are male chauvinists, and for African-Americans whose bosses are racists.  Yet in those cases, the fact that other employment might be an option for the employee in question doesn't protect the improper imposition of objectionable, or even odious conduct and practices.  Still, there may be a way out of this on the state level.

In Connecticut, the home state of Estelle Griswold of Griswold v. Connecticut fame, one of the U.S. Senators, Richard Blumenthal, is suggesting to the Hobby Lobby abide by state law, which requires that an employee be provided with contraceptives under the ACA.  There has been a lot of growth in Connecticut since The Supreme Court ruled that the state did not have the right to deny Estelle Griswold and Planned Parenthood the right to counsel about contraception and provide it as well. So Hobby Lobby might well be back in court as the company is contemplating three new stores in Connecticut to go along with the one already extant there, and if the state law enforcement establishment pursues the matter, Hobby Lobby might well be the defendant again when it gets to court, and there might even be fines involved as provided by the ACA.  We'll see how money affects the will of Hobby Lobby to vindicate its religiosity at the expense its women employees.  After all, if Hobby Lobby doesn't want to obey Connecticut's law, there are plenty of other states they can do business in...and countries with required religions too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I'm wondering if John Boehner knows something that the rest of us don't.  His latest antic is seeking approval from his Republican congress to sue President Obama for delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) requirement that businesses with more than fifty employees must provide affordable health insurance to those employees.  It is obviously subterfuge in that the Republican constituency is primarily business people, and the rich ones who own businesses with fifty or more employees are their biggest campaign donors, so the purpose of the suit cannot be to precipitate the enforcement of that provision, which will take some money out of the pockets of very rich, very powerful people...Republican people.  So what is it that Boehner hopes to accomplish?

I think the scenario plays out like this.  The suit goes to court, and like all other law suits involving purported constitutional issues, it will take some time to reach a court that can render a final decision, and in this case that will indubitably be the Supreme Court, which will not rule until the lower courts have.  So, no decision will be made in this case until at least the session beginning October 2015 when the Supreme Court session after the next one begins, which by coincidence is just ten months after the employer mandate will begin to be enforced.  And in the interim, there will be mid-term elections, and the Republicans will do anything to win more congressional seats in it, this lawsuit being one of them.  Thus, the decision isn't the main purpose of the suit in terms of the 2014 elections, but the fact of filing the suit is intended to bring the Tea Party types back into the fold.  It looks significant at first glance, and Boehner will try to divert everyone from looking too deep with more of his contrived nonsense about trusting President Obama, but it literally means nothing because by the time the next congress is seated, the deferment of the mandate will have ended, and the lawsuit will be moot.  All of the campaign noise about it will be a red herring and Boehner knows that as do all those Republicans on The Hill, so there must be a secondary purpose for this suit, and I think it is all in the timing.

The case won't get resolved until late 2015 most likely, but then only by a dismissal because it will be moot by then because the deferral ends on January 1, 2015.  But that dismissal will be just in time for the 2016 presidential election.  Of course, President Obama won't be an issue anymore since he can't run for reelection, but the ACA is characterized as big government and trampling on constitutional rights by the Republicans, so when the decision comes down, it will seem natural for those arguments to be resurrected just as they were in the 2012 presidential election; it won't seem artificial because it will just be reaction to either a good or a bad decision depending on which side you are on.  As a bonus, if the decision is earlier than 2015 and The President's deferment of the implementation of the "employer mandate," as it is called, is ruled to be a legal exercise of executive power, a bunch of businessmen who will then have to provide affordable insurance alternatives or pay $3,000 per employee will sue the federal government department that enforces the ACA just like the conservative attorneys general did, and like the Hobby Lobby Shop did relative to ACA mandated coverage of abortion procedures and medications. 

So this lawsuit is nothing but one more battle in a war of attrition.  It has no purpose other than to wear the Democrats and their progressive constituency down by dragging them through the courts over and over again.  And that strategy is necessary because with 8 million people already taking advantage of the ACA, and probably another several million doing so starting this fall in November for...you guessed it...2015, there will be a lot of people realizing that if they can't have a single-payer system, the ACA is a pretty good thing.  That will make the Republican effort to anathematize the ACA look misguided, or perhaps even disingenuous to all those newly insured and about to be insured people.  The suit is nothing but the Republicans scrambling to find something to commend them, and since they have no policies to invoke as things they stand for--since they have managed only to interdict the efforts of the Democrats to change things for the better--they are going to stick with what they know.  Despite their efforts to turn Benghazi into something with which to vituperate the Democrats, and since they are demanding that the President get all those kids back to Guatemala but refusing to give him the money to process those deportations as the law passed during the Bush administration requires, they really don't have anything but casuistry to work with.  And sooner or later, the electorate is going to recognize that fact.  So with this lawsuit, they can pretend that there is something with which to reproach the Democrats...something tested and effective, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

So once again, my fellow Americans, it is up to us to loudly repudiate a devious effort by the Republicans to mask their petty political motives with sound and fury signifying nothing.  If more of us begin to think with our own heads rather than someone else's, that just might work.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We're back from our brief sojourn on Cape Cod, and though we feel somewhat refreshed--we'll be going back soon for a bit longer break from the tedium of daily life--the tedium of American politics has gone on unabated.  John Boehner, speaker of the Republican House of Representatives and leader of the Republican Party in that body, spoke to the press yesterday about President Obama's request for $3.7 billion intended to augment the due processing of the child immigrants in custody on our southern borders and said, "If we look at The President's request, it's all about continuing to deal with the problem."  That would be a good thing I would think, and I venture to guess that if President Obama were a Republican, Boehner would have said so with a praising tone in his voice.  But as usual, if President Obama does it, it's wrong by definition in the Republican political lexicon, and so it was this time.  Of course, when President Obama wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary about the gathering of child-émigrés in California and Texas--mostly refugees from Honduras and Guatemala mostly, where a child either joins or dies in a feudalism-like, gang culture that has supplanted government--Republicans criticized him for inaction.  And now, when he tries to expedite the morally dubious due legal process of  sending them home, which one might think the Republicans would applaud, they balk at giving him the money to hire the immigration judges and attorneys needed to do so.  Conservatives do want The President to do more to close the border, but they are the ones who pass the appropriations and the legislation in congress, and they haven't done anything about immigration yet...even though The Senate already sent them a bill that could serve as the framework for a law that President Obama could sign.  There is a scene in an old movie in which a man on a horse comes to a railroad crossing while a train is going through it.  As the train passes, he spurs his horse all along, which is essentially a direction to the horse to commit suicide, and the horse's instincts prevent him from obeying the command until the train has passed, at which time he careens on with the sadistic, irrational rider on his back.  That is what this president's one and a half terms as president have been like; the Republicans blame him and then obstruct his efforts to address every problem.  And then when he does what he can through executive order, thus going around the intractable congress, they sue him for bypassing them.  And all the while, the American people continue to vote Republican, in ever increasing numbers if the "experts" are correct.  It makes me want to go back to The Cape and bury my head in the sand, which is what the voters seem to be doing.

With all that in mind, and considering the response that President Obama is making, I feel closer every day to concluding that the current administration is doomed to going down in history as a failed attempt to do the right thing.  Healthcare reform, which should have been in the form of a single-payer system, took the form of health-insurance reform instead thanks to the Republican Party's obstruction for political purposes and the Blue Dog Democrats perfidious cooperation couched in their questionable, self-serving motives.  And while it is a step forward, it is tainted by a conservative Supreme Court's paring and a disingenuous political opposition inspired by the authorship of the idea rather than its merits.  Meanwhile, immigration reform, which might well address the very plaints that the Republicans and conservatives in general level at President Obama, languishes in congress as Speaker Boehner plays politics in the full knowledge that allowing a congressional vote on the subject will either result in passage of a bill that will galvanize the Tea Party against the main stream or will result in its defeat and ignominy among the mostly Latino immigrant population.  So, the more these impasses occur, the more obvious it becomes that our problem as a nation is rampant conservatism beyond what is reasonable rather than progressive errancy and inertia, which is what the conservatives want to call it.  Wage growth is suppressed in consequence of conservative Republican policy and the rich get richer at a faster pace than ever, yet the American voter seems dispirited without animus toward those who have caused the great American debacle of the past seven years since the financial crisis became the crisis in millions of home in this country and around the world.  What is frustrating about all this is the malaise of the voters, and the unwillingness of President Obama to confront the problem head on.  I have said this so many times that even I don't want to hear it anymore, but until President Obama begins having press conferences after dinner that everyone who watches television will have to watch...press conferences in which he takes questions from a largely hostile press and points the finger at the real culprits...the progressive movement will continue to be mired in a kind of political bog born of their own effete response to the assault of a merciless, meretricious and unscrupulous opposition.  I hesitate to counsel more of the same in response, but without leadership in the form of a president who stands at the fore and challenges his foes, what can we do but fight back with strategies of the same kind.  Of course, the problem there is that no one on this side of the political aisle is either so inclined or so well endowed as to pull it off.  We're stuck, and we are becoming our own victims.  So in reality, there's no one else to blame.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I'm going to be away for the next four days, so I thought I would just drop you a brief line before I go.  In 1483, a Spanish Dominican monk named Tomas de Torquemada was elevated to the rank of Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.  His ardor was unquenchable, and he perpetrated many atrocities against those whose Catholic faith did not measure up to his draconian standards of belief and comportment.  He and his movement are emblematic of rigid positivism and inhuman intolerance for any variation from the norm for which they stood. He was diabolical.

Today, what started out as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, more aptly named the Islamic Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, is now transmogrified by its leader into just The Islamic State, a world-wide caliphate. As its self-appointed leader, Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi has required of all Muslims complete and unequivocal allegiance to The Islamic State, which will be governed under Sharia Law, under penalty of all kinds of heinous punishment for failure to heed his edict.

So, here's the question for the day.  How was Torquemada different from al-Bahgdadi?  And if he is the Muslim version of Torquemada, should Muslims fear al-Baghdadi's ascent with Torquemada's acts as a portent of Islam's future?  If so, what should the world's Muslims do about him: join him or scourge him?

See you next week.

Your friend,

Mike