September 2014 Archives

Dear America,

I recently wrote to you about the current crop of self-characterized tech-altruists to question their validity as such, and in fact to pose the question of whether they are indeed benefactors, or are rather just robber barons with good public relations skills, and I specifically pointed the finger at Bill Gates.  He spends a billion or two every year in high profile endeavors like eradicating malaria in Africa, but still has managed to increase his wealth over the course of the past ten years from more than $60 billion to now more than $80 billion.  In that connection, I would point out that for a billion or so, Gates could probably fund the interdiction of the ebola outbreak in Africa, but to my knowledge, there hasn't been a word uttered by his philanthropy foundation.  I think a true altruist would have seized the opportunity.  But I also mentioned Larry Ellison, the prime mover at Oracle.  He has retired from Oracle and is now doing whatever he wants.  His last avocational endeavor was the Americas Cup team for the races last year, in which he spent who-knows-how-much money on our national yacht while people starved in lots of places because it was a matter of national pride that he thought important, and now that he has retired, he has bought an island--Lanai--in Hawaii.  He claims to want to create a new, entirely green place there for its few thousand resident...and fifty or so of his closest friends who don't already own enough mansions.  He wants to renew the two erstwhile luxury hotels and add another on the island to reinvigorate the tourist industry there, and as I said, create those fifty or so luxury lots for himself so he and his friends have a place to get away to.  It was the subject of a report in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, and it seems to tip the scales in the altruist-robber baron debate pretty clearly.  This project of his was at first met with general approbation among the 3000 residents of the island, but the blush is now off the rose, and the real Larry Ellison has stepped forward.  All the purportedly altruistic projects--a desalinization plant to provide fresh water both to the new enterprises and to the extant population who have lived with fresh-water supply shortages up until now, renovation of two golf courses, which has been incomplete and is now deleterious to the environment of the residents where weeds have taken over the various improvements made so far and the water on at least one of the courses has turned rancid, killing the fish and polluting the air with foul odors, and a solar array that was to provide energy for the island, but that hasn't really been evident so far--seem to be on hold, and what is left is incomplete daydreams apparently as ill-conceived as his yachting career, all of which manifests the problem created by having too much money.

Ellison fancies himself a dreamer, and probably a futurist in the mold of other great thinkers like Ronald Reagan, the proponent of the SDI--Starwars Defense Initiative--that cost billions and never produced anything worth having and Newt Gingrich, who has run for office on the basis of his claims to see what none of the rest of us can, which has made him rich, but hasn't done any of the rest of us any good at all.  The management company he set up to oversee his project on Lanai started out having all these humanistic town meetings with the population to tell them what the new developments were going to do for them, and the future looked bright at first.  But problems began to arise very quickly, and the government of the only town on the island began to assert itself when it began to look like Lanai was going to be a casualty rather than a beneficiary of all the development Ellison envisioned.  It almost seems as though now that Ellison has started the project, he has either gotten bored with it or doesn't want to spend the money to do for others rather than himself as he originally suggested was his intent.  Of course, it is still very early on in the process of development of the Ellison grand scheme, and things could turn around, but they could also go the way of his Americas Cup entry, which was oblivion rather than glory.

My point is that much of what happens in America these days is a function of the whims of people who have more money than they could ever spend, but who always think they need more.  Financiers go to jail over schemes to make more money than they already have, even when they already have too much to count.  People like Ellison and Gates promote their ideas brazenly, but sit like misers on vast hordes of gold as if in the end they amount to something in and of themselves, and we call it the American Way.  Meanwhile, we continue to send to Washington people who may not have money like Ellison and Gates do--they are the richest and the fifth richest men in the world--but who think that piling it up that way is a good thing and needs to be not only protected, but encouraged.  That's why I like Jeff Bezos, who is himself the seventeenth richest man in the world, but instead of buying an island and wreaking havoc on it in the name of some self-aggrandizing fantasy, he buys a world class newspaper and practically gives it away in the name of facilitating the informing of the American public, albeit also facilitating the building his retail empire even further, but I don't want the future of our nation to depend on the largess of these men, as it will if they have all the money...and thus all the power.

This is the issue of our time.  We are trending, as is China, Russia, Europe and every other developed or developing area of the world, toward not just oligarchy, but plutocracy.  If all those plutocrats are the philosopher kings that Plato commended as the best way to govern the masses, that will be all well and good, but it seems to me that by allowing our politicians to promote their ascendancy we are taking an awful risk: one that could only rectified by a revolution if it manifest itself in the way that I fear it will.  We need tax reform that demands of the super-rich that they pay at least what they paid in the years after World War II, that is, more than 50% of income, and we need to remove the Reaganesque distinction between capital gains and earned income when we are assigning tax rates.  We need to increase the tax on testamentary wealth transfers so that the profound wealth that at least arguably has been earned by these tycoons cannot be passed down to profligates and fools who will burn everything down rather than build it up.  It is only by reallocation of resources that we can avoid catastrophe, but all this seems very abstruse and of remote consequence.  So here's a prediction from an amateur.  If we don't undertake the redistribution of wealth soon, the near-term consequence will be deflation as a result of the decreased buying power of the masses of people who do the work, but who make little or no progress toward prosperity in our new economy.  That will be because there is too little money in the hands of people who will spend it since so much is in the hands of people who don't.  Goods then compete for buyers, and prices fall, which is like the onset of the crumbling of a house of cards.  We've seen it before in the 1930's, and even though it supposedly can never happen again, that is where we are headed.  Remember that when you vote.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A thought keeps coming to me, and I can't decide whether it is crazy or eminently rational.  It seems that the form of reactionary Islam that ISIL is practicing in Iraq and Syria keeps rearing its ugly head, and it also seems that there are enough enthusiasts for that kind of brutal fundamentalism that it attracts true-believers in sufficient numbers to fight wars, even Pyrrhic wars, that take significant tolls on the rest of us.  The question that continually arises in my thinking is, if so many want it, why shouldn't we just let them have a swath of land sufficient to accommodate them with the understanding that they won't try to expand their reign over other lands?  If that many people prefer the seventh century to this one, why not let them live in it?  But before we can propose such an arrangement to them, we have to overcome a few problems.

First, all this macho head chopping and mindless killing of those who don't share that particular brand of Sunni fanaticism will be the way of the world in such a country, so we have to make sure that those who aren't up for it can get out.  And who would they be?  Well, first they would probably be women...millions of them.  There does seem to be a significant population of women who don't mind being veiled all the time and having their male significant others rule over them absolutely, but I can't help wondering whether there are enough such submissive women to fill the needs of the men of this new ISIL country if we allow it to emerge unimpeded.  Let's say there are, between ISIL, the Taliban, all of the various reactionary substrates of the movement and those living in civilized Muslim countries who would prefer the less civilized kind of Islam, 20 million men.  Could they count on 20 million women to come and live with them.  If not, there would be a problem because if we are to go about this in a civilized way, we can't be forcing women to accommodate these brutes, or for that matter, allow the new ISIL to force them to come along.  We all know how men get when there aren't enough women around...and sometimes even when there are.  Without sufficient volunteer women, how could we count on them to keep to their agreed upon borders.  That problem may be the deal breaker.  But even with regard to the men, the new ISIL would have to agree that it wouldn't force men to join them, and perhaps more importantly, that they would allow men and women who changed their minds to leave.  ISIL doesn't seem to have much of an ethos when it comes to respecting the wishes of outsiders, and if that is part of their national creed, how could we count on them to allow free traversal of their borders by any who might, remote as the possibility might seem, become disaffected?  We'd need some kind of a treaty between the world and ISIL, but who would enforce its terms?  That's basically the problem now.  ISIL has no intention of joining a civilized world with mutual respect as a creed.  That's why we have this quasi-war now.  Given the way ISIL does things, outside of being allowed to run rampant, they don't seem good prospects for citizens in a civilized world.

Then of course there is the problem of prosperity.  What wealth ISIL has it has taken by force from its rightful owners, including the oil it is selling abroad to fund its ugly enterprise.  But in a seventh century culture, who would generate the wealth necessary for trading with the rest of the world?  There are references here and there to the advances in human social evolution brought as far as southern Europe by Muslims we refer to as Moors.  There was architecture, poetry and art, not to mention algebra.  But these guys today don't seem the type to be worried about the human condition...that is about anyone else's human condition.  I can't forget the image of that fool from Minneapolis who went to fight with the Islamists in the horn of Africa and made a video in which he claimed that what they were doing was tantamount to Disneyland.  It's obvious that free thinking isn't among the attributes of reactionary Islam's culture...except for that kind of perversion, that is, and what good will come of that: certainly not poetry and architecture...and forget about algebra.  So how could we expect of them that they could sustain their new nation without something on the order of Somalian piracy on a grand scale.  The treaty with them would have to specifically rule out predation as a national enterprise, and how could we count on them to abide by a provision like that?  They haven't so far.

No, the idea of just letting them have a third of Iraq, and all of Syria for that matter, just wouldn't fly, unless...  If the rest of us cultivate the kind of indifference to the well being of those around us, we can just stop thinking about such things and build an enormous fence around ISILland, somewhat the way the Israelis have with Gaza.  And every time they tried to shoot rockets out of their country, we could just go in and mindlessly bash heads...again, like the Israelis.  Which begs the question: is a two state solution really a solution for the Palestinians and Israel, or is it just a pipedream...like the two state solution of  ISILland?

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

I've been looking for some light bulbs for some time lately.  They are for the track lights in our living room and kitchen, and I wanted GU 10 LED bulbs, which can cost $20 or more each if you go to Home Depot or Lowe's and get a brand name.  For some reason--probably because I have bought two such bulbs on the internet and been disappointed with both of them--I eschewed the obvious answer to the problem of locating competing vendors: Amazon.  But my wife and daughter bought me one of those Kindle notebooks for my birthday, so I have been trying to use it out of appreciation, and because it is an Amazon product, there is a button on the home page by which you can not only go to your own account on Amazon, you can by things with a single push of a button if you are a member of Amazon Prime.  So I started looking through what Amazon had to offer--and it must be remembered when one shops on Amazon that it is now more like the e-bay of consumer commerce than it is a single vendor--and I found what I was looking for on the first page, consumer ratings, specifications and descriptions and all.  So, I ordered the bulbs...10 of them for about $65...and I can expect delivery on Thursday.  In every respect, this sale and one or two more I have purchased over the past few weeks since my birthday, was a stellar success for both Amazon and me, but today, I started thinking about Amazon's beginnings when the "dot com" era first started.  You may recall that in the beginning, it was only books that they sold, and Jeff Bezos, the human incarnation of Amazon then and now, was just another e-commerce whiz kid with a reputation for making money our of nothing.  But unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and the rest, Bezos has never really been tarnished by his pursuit of self-interest.  He was in a little trouble early on when it turned out that selling books alone on the internet was not going to be a big deal, and he...and Amazon for that matter...went through a crisis of credibility for some time, but all the while, Bezos was amending his original business plan, and eventually, he went from questionable would-be genius to venerable business innovator with a perpetually changing future.  In fact, he was doing all this relatively sub rosa, and still is, which leaves him considerably more enigmatic than, say, Bill Gates, who goes about touting the $ billion or two that he gives away each year as if it's some kind of sacrifice that he should be lauded for or Larry Ellison, who thinks that dedicating millions to getting thrashed in The Americas Cup is a noble pursuit while people who don't have insurance die of diseases that can be cured because they don't have enough money.  Of course, Steve Jobs' crass pursuit of some kind of telephone hegemony for the sake of being dominant and richer than anyone else at the expense of clerks whom he called geniuses instead of paying them a living wage fits in there nicely too.

It should be noted that there may well be something as Machiavellian in Bezos' private mind, but as far as manifesting it in action is concerned, even at his most self-interested, he doesn't display the kind of crazed megalomania that the others of his class of captains of industry, or robber barons if you choose, seem to demonstrate.  For example, he bought the Washington Post...he, Jeff Bezos himself, bought the Washington Post, not Amazon...and if you were at all as suspicious as the creations of the aforementioned evil geniuses would justify, you would have to wonder why.  When he made the purchase there was a lot of speculation in the media about the reason, but I saw immediately what he would do, and sure enough, he did it.  Amazon offers the Washington Post at a severe discount, though other than the sub $40 per annum price that it is going for at the moment I don't know the terms of sale.  But as to those terms, Bezos seems to be building Amazon Prime, which is Amazon's new corporate masthead, into a new version of Amazon as a whole, which will make money by charging a membership fee in lieu of all kinds of benefits and considerations.  For example, as a member of Amazon Prime, those light bulbs I bought are being sent to me free of shipping charges.  And in the bargain, we get Amazon Prime on our smart TV (smart TV seems like an oxymoron to me, but no body asked my opinion), which offers not only the episodes of network programs from the not-too-distant past for us to see, but is beginning to offer some original content as well.  So Amazon Prime is giving me an inducement to use it in the form of offering me a compendious catalog of the products I want, a world-class newspaper virtually for free as a counterweight to the ever more pandering network "news" programs, and an alternative to the mind-numbing sameness of the police procedural laden commercial networks...all for $99 per year.  How Machiavellian is that...or is it Machiavellian at all.

It may be that of all the newly minted billionaires in the electronic firmament, he is the only real star.  It may be that he simply wants to take a good portion of the vigorish out of modern free-market commerce instead of giving it to overpaid diletanttes who skim over the waters of our economy from job to job collecting huge stacks of money for doing nothing but taking meetings on the golf course.  Maybe Bezos sees that you can make money by being fare to consumers and giving them what they really want rather than manufacturing oversized phones and then ginning up demand for them from simple-minded people who just have to have the latest thing.  Maybe he isn't a sybarite, but rather is a Robin Hood trying to give to all of us what Gates, Ellison and Jobs have thought should be all theirs.  It could be that Jeff Bezos is the last rich good guy we'll ever see...maybe even the first.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Please indulge me while I briefly explain a couple of legal concepts.  First is mens rea, which is one of the things that a prosecutor must prove in order to get a criminal conviction against a defendant.  Literally, it means "guilty mind" or a guilty or wrongful purpose.  So, when a prosecutor proves that a crime--an "actus reus" or guilty act-- has been committed, he must also prove that the defendant had a wrongful purpose, or a guilty mind.  Second is the distinction between "malum in se" and "malum prohibitum."  An act that is malum in se is one that is wrong in and of itself.  No one has to tell you that such an act is wrong, and there is virtually no controversy on the point.  Murder is malum in se as are kidnapping, rape, stealing and beating up another person, though they are malum prohibitum as well.  "Malum prohibitum" on the other hand refers to an act that is illegal only because it violates the law, or simply stated, one that is prohibited rather than wrong in and of itself.  Driving over the speed limit is malum prohibitum as are spitting on the sidewalk and creating a public disturbance.  In case you haven't guessed, I offer these distinctions and definitions relative to the NFL's public stance on the conduct of a couple of its players, and for that matter, the recent political stance of Democrats and Republicans on the domestic violence charges against a federal judge, Mark Fuller of Alabama, which were disposed of quietly and virtually without consequence to the perhaps not-so-honorable Judge Fuller.

The first major hue and cry was over Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens NFL football team in light of film of him punching his then-fiancé with a closed fist and knocking her cold.  Notably, she still married him and also excoriated his critics for meddling in a private matter.  And the case is somewhat nuanced by the fact that the film suggests that the woman who now is Mrs. Rice was striding across the elevator with the intention of doing to Mr. Rice if she could what he ultimately did to her, but that doesn't alter the fact that Ray Rice's blow was malum in se.  No one claims that a man beating a woman, regardless of the reason notwithstanding self-defense, is justified in doing so, or that his act is moral...or legal for that matter.  There are no two ways about the merit of punishing Ray Rice, though with all things considered, the question of the penalty fitting the crime--and I am referring only to the actions of the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens now--is open to debate, especially since Mrs. Rice has come out so vocally against it, probably because Rice's money is at stake...though of course her motive must be true love.  Still, no matter how Ray Rice's tagging of his soon-to-be spouse is punished by the NFL, Rice is at least nominally getting what he deserves.  But then there is this other case of a player taking a switch to his four year old child, and that one is considerably more complicated to resolve, though he has suffered the same fate as Rice at the hands of his employers, the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL.

Adrian Peterson is, like Rice, a big man, and his victim was his presumably small four year old son.  Peterson took a switch, that is a willowy branch from a tree, to his son and left marks, bruises and broken skin on the little boy while in the act of disciplining the child.  Petersen admits his act and is going to be prosecuted for it, but the case raises questions of the guilt of his mind and even whether his act was wrong in itself if you happen to believe in some fundamentalist principles that you and I might find repugnant, but that are still de rigueur among some cultural groups even in this country.  Peterson hasn't attempted to shirk responsibility, and his lawyer has let it be known that switching was the way in which Peterson was disciplined as a child, and on that basis, he did to--or under the construction favored by those who believe in corporal punishment, for--his child what had been done to, or for, him.  So, the question is, even if switching does now rise to the level of child abuse in Texas where the incident occurred, did Peterson have the requisite guilty mind, not in the legal sense, but in the context of our cultural mores.  Was Peterson trying to hurt his child, or was he trying to help him understand the difference between right and wrong for his own good.  I wouldn't presume to posit a resolution of that question for anyone else, though I do have my own opinion.  But given the nuances of Peterson's case, just as in Rice's, the question that must be answered is, does the punishment levied by his employers, the Minnesota Vikings, who have suspended him, and the NFL again, fit the "crime," and more particularly, was Peterson's act malum in se in the sense in which wife beating is.  Of course, the fact that a federal judge is getting away with beating his wife without paying a price doesn't vindicate either Rice or Peterson, though in my opinion Judge Fuller should be impeached...which is a fancy way of saying fired.

As to Rice and Peterson though, there is more than just the right to play professional sports at stake in those two cases.  The teams involved both levied sanctions against their players as did the NFL, but both teams imposed harsher sanctions once their sponsors began weighing in.  Nike made its displeasure known in the Peterson case, and the team immediately suspended him until his legal problems were resolved in response because the management wanted to "get it right," which seems to be the justification for righteous indignation that is current in sports.  What it amounts to is this: money talks even on moral issues, and big corporations like Nike have more of it than any of us do.  Thus, corporations now can influence not just elections, but employer-employee relations in quarters other than their own.  It's something to think about.  I know that I wouldn't want Nike, much less the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL, deciding how I should discipline my child, would you?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We have so much that is existential to worry about in the world outside our borders that it almost seems trivial to concern oneself with our economy and where it is leading us.  I say "leading us" because no matter what policy concerns are announced, the trend toward towering wealth in the hands of a very few--and perhaps most importantly the manifestation of that wealth in the form of political control of the nation as a whole that derives from that concentration of wealth--seems ineluctable.  And the longer it is allowed to persist the more at risk our way of life is, not just in the material sense, but more importantly in the sense of the ethos to which we at least give lip service.  In an article in the New York Times several days ago, Janet Yellen, the new chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, noted that income inequality is "one of the most disturbing trends facing the nation."  The Times observed that during the 2010-2013 "recovery" from the economic debacle of 2007-08, which financial catastrophe itself was a function of this very phenomenon and the power--and alarming respectability--of greed in our society today, the most affluent 10% of our society experienced an increase in personal income of 10%.  Concomitantly, and I say concomitantly because there is a cause and effect relationship at work, the bottom 20% of income earners lost 8% of their earnings to the migration of capital into the hands of the aforementioned top 10% and others just below them.  And that fact is manifested in the relative sizes of the estates of those two demographic groups.  As the wealth of the top 10% of earners increased by over 3%, that of the bottom 20% lost an astounding 21% to the economic shift, and the new wealth of the wealthy certainly did come from those at the bottom of our economy as the extent of overall wealth in the nation didn't increase at all; it was merely redistributed from bottom to top.  What most people, even those at the top of our economic pyramid, fail to recognize is that this trend is the death rattle of the dieing of the golden goose that got us all here.

I've said this all before, but I have never before seen it so clearly stated by a national policy maker rather than by someone who is part of the radical fringe on our political spectrum.  Alarmist as it sounds, it now seems eminently realistic to raise that alarm since the chairwoman of our central banking systems active arm has expressed her concern.  The reason is that when income and wealth accrete at these lofty levels, it reposes in the hands of people who will never spend the vast majority of it, thus taking it out of circulation and allowing our upward spiral of general economic well-being to reverse itself.  It is consumer spending that fuels a market, capitalistic economy, and restricting such consumption prevents money from recirculating in the form of new jobs needed to meet demand.  Unemployment thus resists efforts to address it, and the few jobs that are created are not adequate in terms of the earnings they represent to keep the flow of wealth moving.  The next step in that progression is deflation, which Yellen and others have referred to obliquely, but deflation was the mechanism by which the depression crushed the American economy and the spirits of tens of millions, and deflation will do the same thing to us again if it recurs.  The current trend is just the continuation of a long term trend that resulted in collection of 30.5% of all income by the top 3% of families in 2013, up from 27.7% in 2010, as reported by The Times that day.  Further indications of the prospect of deflation is the way in which average families have changed their spending habits.  Average family debt has declined to 105% of annual income in 2013 from 125% in 2010.  At first blush that seems a positive thing as less debt makes the average family commensurately less vulnerably financially.  But in conjunction with the trends in income and overall wealth, it suggests that people feel more vulnerable that in the past, and in consequence of that tenuous state of affairs that the majority of Americans sense despite the claims that we have been experiencing a recovery is that there has been no recovery in their houses, and thus they are staunching themselves against what they anticipate will be an ominous future.  

Unfortunately, if and when the day of financial reckoning comes, those already at the top will be easily able to weather the storm, even if it lasts a decade as the depression did.  On the other hand, those of us below that elite level...as many as 80%-90% of us depending on how severe the cataclysm is and whether we can elect another egalitarian like FDR...may not be so lucky.  The rich will suffer losses, but they will not have immediate effect on their daily lives.  You and I however, will experience every painful month of it.  So, since there is no real incentive for the super-rich to rethink their acquisitiveness, we are on our own, and the only real tool we have is the polls.

The elections in November are important, but as indicated by the tendency of Americans to be more apathetic during these mid-term elections, they are not critical to our long-term future the way that presidential election cycles are.  My hope is that there will emerge over the next two years a political movement among mainstream politicians that advocates not just recognizing the impending disaster but also advocates policies and practices--including but not limited to tax policy, labor rights, constraint on hereditary wealth, statutory mandates in the form of tariffs that prevent corporations from hording profits abroad rather than paying taxes on them, and other highly directed strategies--intended to reverse the trend toward putting excess wealth in the hands of those who run our economy and promoting its flow into the hands of the people who do the work instead.  Understand that I am not opposed to capitalism in any way.  It seems the most compassionate form of governance, and it allows at the same time for variegation of circumstances as deserved depending on initiative, talent and application of oneself to the labor that is his or her contribution to the system overall, which is only fair.  But today, we have seen that principle run amok, and we are creating a class of patrician executives and financiers who take more than they produce or merit just because they can.  A country that pays the chief executive of a football league $44 million per year while it doesn't demand that its legislature renew unemployment compensation or some other form of welfare benefit for those stricken by our economic dysfunction, needs ethical reorientation in the form of more enlightened government.  I plan to vote with that in mind.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am somewhat surprised by the reaction to President Obama's speech about dealing with the ISIL threat, and for once it isn't a function of the conservative Republican response.  The norm for Republicans is to contrive some sort of criticism of The President's policies and positions for nakedly political reasons, but this time, there seems to be a recognition of two things tempering their instinct to obstruct.  First, the consensus among the American people seems to be that ISIL is not just a threat to the people on the other side of the world, but rather is transportable, at least in small packages, from Iraq and Syria to the United States and elsewhere in the "free world."  Second, the Republicans, in the persons of John McCain and Lyndsey Graham, demanded a policy, which they professed to prefer would look like just what President Obama limned on Wednesday evening.  For once, President Obama and the Republican Party see the truth the same way.  But none-the-less, there is a swell of criticism coming out of the news media that is perplexing to someone like me, who believed all along that the press were at least neutral on the issue of what kind of president Mr. Obama has been.  The increasingly grizzled and seemingly breathless Wolf Blitzer of CNN, who made his bones during the first Gulf War along with General Norman Schwarzkopf, has spent the last twenty years living on laurels earned back then, and now is in the habit of taking anti-authority positions just for the sake of doing so, it seems.  Still, with what I thought was at least a lack of bias in the media toward The President, I didn't expect to hear the same kind of reportage from him and from the shellacked coiffure pretty faces on Fox News.  After they joined the chorus of conservative and Republican critics over President Obama's admission that no strategy had yet been formed relative to ISIL in Syria at least, they now are implicitly auguring another middle east war, full blown from its inception in the air over what purports to be the new Islamic caliphate, proclaimed by The President on national television just two days ago.  As with all issues in the news, a phrase comes to designate the central concern, and in this case, it is "boots on the ground."  And while even John Boehner, whose acquaintance with the truth is only passing at best, invoked the phrase by saying that someone's boots would be, but that they wouldn't be ours.  But the media continues to ignore the parameters of the administration's plan for ISIL and instead direly warns us all that this is how American forces become inextricably involved abroad, implying that it is inevitable in this case, even though President Obama and his policy are specifically designed to avoid just that.  I'm not sure what is happening, but let me add my voice to the chorus.

The plan in Iraq and Syria is to bomb ISIL wherever it is found and whenever it is tactically advantageous to our allies on the ground.  We will have planes and other machines in the air, but no men with guns in their hands below.  There will be "boots on the ground," but they will be the boots of soldiers from various countries that have a direct stake in the outcome of the battle against the bestial and heinously inclined ISIL forces.  Thus, we are offering support to our allies in this cause, but support of only a limited nature.  We will not be getting our hands dirty now or later in this case, and what this imputes is not that we are on the edge of another military adventure that will turn into an abyss.  What it suggests is that we will do what we can to abet those with minds like to ours in routing a foe that is abhorrent to both them and us.  But that by the same token, if the effort fails, it won't be for lack of our effort to that extent, but rather as a consequence of the lack of the level of commitment--or perhaps even capacity--of those whose first hand business all this is to prevail.  The Obama policy in this case isn't that the United States will carry the banner for the rest of the world.  It is that we will aid our friends from arms length, and let the chips fall where they may.  There will be no second decade in Iraq, nor will there be a first decade in Syria.  If our efforts and those of the countries in the region fail, it will be a bad thing for all of us, but nothing immediate for us, and therefore, we are leaving countries from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Turkey to cast their own fates.  And while it is true that at least none of those three has taken an active role thus far, if ISIL begins crossing the border from Iraq into Turkey, they will take one, we can all be sure, but in the interim, we have no duty to them other than to suggest to them that they carefully consider what they are not asking for, fore they well may not get it when they need it, which might be when it is too late.

For my part, I think The President has done a masterful job of dropping the task at the doors of those to whom it rightfully belongs.  At the same time, he has essentially said that they can open those doors and take on their responsibilities to their own people at their own discretion, but that we will not be their surrogates while they shrug with indifference, or worse, condemn our efforts with faint praise.  This war will be a war of attrition waged for a long time, but it is not now, and never will be, our war, regardless of what Wolf Blitzer and The Kelly Report on Fox impute to it.  We are not returning to Iraq, nor will we be in Afghanistan this time next year.  Our wars are behind us.  What is ahead is the war of the Arab peoples to determine whether their destiny is in the twenty first or the seventh century, and they alone will reap the fruits of their labors...or the lack thereof.  That's what President Obama said, Wolf.  You weren't listening, were you?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The past week has been an exhibition of the "Obama Doctrine" in operation.  At the conference for NATO leaders in Wales, and previously in a speech given in Tallinn, Estonia while on his way to Wales, The President made a clear statement of the commitment of NATO to the defense of all its members, specifically including the Baltic states, which have already had their experiences with Russian dominion, and he announced the means by which NATO would offer that defense.  The alliance will form a mobile, rapid response force to be available anywhere within the alliance where a member's borders and sovereignty are threatened as an alternative to placement of masses of NATO troops wherever NATO nations border possible aggressors, meaning Russia.  This strategy, in opposition to accretion of massive forces where they can be seen by Russia and pointed to as aggression themselves, is an astute way of warning Vladimir Putin that NATO doesn't intend to build a modern Maginot Line for him to reflect off of when he rhetorically prepares the world for a Ukraine style invasion.  The rapid response force demonstrates preparedness, but does not represent a threat to any other geopolitical entity that isn't in an aggressive posture toward a NATO member, so on the one hand, President Obama has announced the alliance of the willing that he was seeking with regard to Russian, but not a concerted action directed at Putin's aggression.  It is a defensive stance, yet it represents strength of purpose and concerted effort by an international mass greater than Russia, which stands alone in the world today.  And then there was ISIS.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that a new alliance had been formed including Britain, France, Australia and Germany, among others, to combat ISIS in all respects from blocking the recruiting of foreign combatants to undermining the groups finances, and to support a reformed government in Iraq in unspecified but obvious ways in its struggle against ISIS on the field of battle.  This alliance was the condition precedent for a comprehensive plan to thwart the threat constituted by ISIS, the absence of which as been the center of much criticism of President Obama over the past two weeks.  The plan itself will be forthcoming in the immediate future, and it will then be for congress to put its own imprimatur on the battle against the jihadists everywhere who menace not just Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Syria, but all nations.  It is the first implementation of Mr. Obama's concept of "leading from behind" that is cohesive and realistic as well as vastly substantive.  An alliance of all the modern nations of the world against any enemy should daunt him, and that is what has formed over the past few days, characterizeable as not just as an alliance of the willing, but an alliance of the able as well.  And as such, it signals a new role for the United States in the world that will satisfy all with its proportion and symmetry with the goals and policies of all other nations.  The United States will no longer pronounce what it sees as imperatives and act with or without world consensus.  Rather, when crises arise and action is needed, we will be the rudder rather than the wind in the sails of the international ship of state.  Thus, the Obama Doctrine is a new alternative to the United Nations to be used by this country when there is no time for Security Counsel diplomacy and politics.  While the notion of leading from behind has been cast in a skeptical light by Republicans, and conservative Republicans in particular, the fact is that this is where we should have been since World War II.  Instead of fueling our foreign policy with national pride and chauvinism, we should have been marshalling the forces of the world to deal with the world's problems.  Instead of forging ahead even when we were alone in our mission, we should have been seeking concurrence and modifying our own stance whenever collective wisdom merited doing so.  Instead of dictating to the world what constitutes a noble nation, we should have been respecting differences and offering assistance toward the end of facilitating change rather than insisting on it.  If such had been the American foreign policy ethos, there would have been no Iraq and Afghanistan wars fought preponderantly by a staggering, overtaxed United States without real support from almost anywhere else.  We will not longer be the keepers of the flame, but we will continue to be vigilant and mindful of our values and how they interplay with those of others.  That is what an enlightened nation does.  It steers...whether from behind or not.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last Saturday, two elder statesmen from the Republican Party...ostensible moderates...sent President Obama a letter through the New York Times OP-ED page.  It was about ISIS, the group preying on the internecine Islamic schisms that have plagued the middle east, what ISIS and others historically have called "The Levant," for centuries.  The crux of it was that ISIS is a threat to us one and all, not just those who live within the ambit of their terrible oppression, and military confrontation will be to no avail unless the mutual antipathy of the parties to the Iraqi government can be put aside and a functional, inclusive government can be formed and maintained, but we need a plan.  The plan of these two moderates, Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona and Senator Lindsey Graham (R) of  South Carolina, is to logistically support the various armed factions in the war against ISIS that is raging in Iraq and Syria and to provide them with what used to be called "advisors" during the first years of the Vietnam era.  We should also bomb ISIS in concert with our local allies through a new alliance of like minded nations in the region, and President Obama should accomplish all this by submitting a plan to congress for its ratification in the form of legislation and funding.  If you've been listening to our president speak to the subject over these past couple of months, you have heard these ideas in various forms before...from him, not from Republicans, so what are these Republicans doing with this OP-ED piece?  You have to translate if from politician to civilian to understand.  The translation goes like this.

A guy walks into a pharmacy and asks the clerk where he can find the talcum powder.  The clerk says, "Walk this way."  And the customer replies, "If I could walk that way I wouldn't need the talcum powder."  It's like the Chinese recipe for rabbit stew: first you catch a couple of rabbits.

This little grand stand play by McCain and Graham is not quite transparent, but to those of us who watch Washington not just for what it does but for how it gets away with it, it's just more of the same old stuff.

The first problem posed by McCain's and Graham's solution is creating an alliance in the middle east.  The reality is that ISIS is just an enormous Islamic mafia engaged in extortion of funds from its own constituents, bestial violence intended to keep them in line, and outright theft of all the resources they need from those whom they can beat into submission.  The impact of their criminal syndication will be felt by all the nations in the area including some with enormous resources of their own: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Israel, Yemen, Lebanon and, of course, Iraq and Syria.  While Syria is no longer a functioning state, the others all are, and they don't need us to lead them to the conclusion that their own suzerainty is at stake.  Common sense should have led to each of them sheathing the saber it waggles at the others and at the recalcitrant within each toward the end of unifying an effort at mutually beneficial action against ISIS, but as everyone can see, that hasn't happened.  Iraqi Sunnis still murder Iraqi Shiites, and the Kurdish militia known as pesh merga is busy concerting its own efforts toward not just holding ISIS at bay but forging a position from which it can assert its own autonomy when all this is behind us.  Syria is its own story of chaos in the face of a need for unity of this single purpose, and none of them will ever turn to Israel, which may be the only nation with the real power to save the region from descent into medieval feudalism.  Of course there is the incomprehensibly wealthy aggregation of emirates and kingdoms in the Persian Gulf, but despite their resources, they don't do anything for themselves...some kind of entitlement thing, I think.  That's the first rabbit President Obama is supposed to use in McCain's and Graham's recipe.  But The President says that without an alliance, we aren't going to do anything, because the last few times we have tried we have paid in blood and dollars for something that never eventuated.  Though McCain and Graham seem to think that we benefited from what they characterize as changes of heart by presidents, none of those they cited yielded anything...except the genesis of ISIS and the problem they now want to solve with the same strategy.  George Bush's "surge," which was a revision of the preexisting Iraq policy, didn't save the United States from defeat.  It just prolonged a futile effort to make enemies drink from the same trough.  And Jimmy Carter didn't do the United States any favors by changing our policy toward the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan.  In fact, all we wound up doing was to arm the very anti-soviet mujahideen groups that ultimately became Al Queda.  And then of course there is their recommendation as to The President's course with congress: the second rabbit.

Getting this Republican House of Representatives and the filibuster-bound Senate to do anything he wants is like herding cats into a room and prevailing on them take their medicine.  There are 535 members, and none of them wants to do what will help any other who isn't in his own party.  No plan submitted by this president would pass congressional muster, and unless both McCain and Graham have reached their dotage, they know that.  So, what's this all about.  The answer is the Fall elections.  What should be happening now is that the Republican House should be passing a bill proposing funding for a complex of anti-ISIS activities, and The Senate should be passing it when it comes to them--including endowing The President with the power to make the necessary wartime decisions--so that President Obama can go to those in the middle east and say we have the money and the planes, but you have to put the boots on the ground.  In fact, something similar should be happening in Europe so that the United States isn't the only country dropping bombs on these nefarious, glorified "gangbangers."  But McCain and Graham both know that there isn't a chance in hell that the Republicans who keep our legislature from acting in every other arena are going to turn over a new leaf just for this.  So instead of pointing a finger at their own, they are pointing it at President Obama, as if he can actually do anything to overcome the concerted effort to thwart him that has been the hallmark of this Republican era, and that is what it is.  So don't be fooled by some disingenuous editorial essay intended to misdirect the attention of the American people from the role that McCain's and Graham's party has played in bringing this country, and indirectly the world, to its knees.  In the end, their "plan" is a good idea.  They just want the wrong guy to change in its service.

Your friend,

Mike

Just a brief note today, necessitated by a slight miscalculation on my part.  I had spine surgery last Wednesday, August 27, and I thought I would probable be able to write you again on Friday, two days afterward, but it is now apparent that I took the procedure somewhat too lightly.  This is the first time I have been able to sit down to the computer to type, and I have to admit that I am still reading Friday's Times, so I don't really have much of an idea at this moment as to what is going on, though as is usually the case, probably not much has changed since last Tuesday when I wrote to you last.  At any rate, I'm trying to catch up, and I hope to be in touch this Friday, if not tomorrow.  I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Your friend,

Mike