December 2014 Archives

Dear America,

I was walking in the parking lot of the supermarket yesterday when I saw a bumper sticker on a pick-up.  It read, "I never knew a veteran who fought for socialism."  By coincidence, last night I heard a piece on the news about a school for butlers in China, which still considers itself a communist country.  One of the financers of the school said, when asked how training butlers to work for wealthy Chinese was consistent with Chairman Mao's little red book, that Mao's ideas were still valid, but they needed to be updated to conform to modern Chinese thought.  And when I heard that, it occurred to me that neither Chinese communists nor American capitalists understand what socialism is...what it entails and what it doesn't.  It's not that I am an expert on the subject, but I feel comfortable in saying that socialism is predicated on the premise that society functions best when it is collective in its orientation, that is, when society is regarded as an organism of which each member is a part.  It has nothing to do with totalitarianism or tyranny, nor does it have to do with how leaders come to power or stay there.  Those things do not separate communism from capitalism, which emphasizes individual prosperity and the freedom to achieve it rather than the common good, even at the expense of society if that is what the free market demands.  Yet, in China today the United States and the capitalist world continue to be the adversary of the Chinese system of communism because of that emphasis on the free market at all costs while the Chinese themselves are developing the same kind of system as we have, with its casualties among the masses regarded as justifiable sacrifices to prosperity.  Simultaneously, we rely on notions like social safety nets and government supervised self-providence in the form of programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are just methods of requiring self-sufficiency, and Medicaid for those who cannot provide for themselves.  Not to put too fine a point on it, as time passes we become more and more like our primary adversaries in the world, and they become more and more like us, yet the partisans in both camps never bother to look at the positives and negatives of either where we have come from or where we are going.  That's why Chinese plutocrats now need butlers and American veterans don't fight for socialism...because neither understands either the quest for wealth or the quest to eliminate hunger and want.

From its very advent in world politics, communism, which is in theory just pure socialism, has been vilified in non-communist countries as authoritarian and inimical to individual liberty.  In the eighties, Ronald Reagan had only to mention communism as the antithesis of what he wanted to do in order to ensure popular support, even if what he wanted to do involved excess in favor of the few or dogmatism in international relations.  We facilitated the overthrow of a democratic socialist regime in Chile in the sixties and allowed a tyrannical military junta to take its place just because that junta's central figure, Augusto Pinochet, was a rabid capitalist...some might even say a fascist...and we did the same in Nicaragua with Anistacio Samosa, and in Argentina with the military rulers who ran that country with an iron fist to put it mildly.  We stood by while thousands were tortured or "disappeared" for protesting injustice in those countries, but we regarded them as allies because they were not communist.  When a benign figure like Salvatore Alliende ascended to power in Chile, we conspired with those who assassinated him just because he favored socialism and an equitable distribution of wealth in a nation that had been corrupted by a rich oligarchy, and we did so only because he opposed the form of capitalism that had led to that corruption and the concomitant predation by the few inside the oligarchy at the expense of the common people of Chile.  And that loyalty to capitalism at the expense of all other American values, like personal liberty, due process, and at  the core of our newfound and monolithic dedication to free markets without regard for consequence, our dedication to government of and by the people, became the American creed without second thought by virtually anyone.  It was a consensus of values in a putatively democratic nation that allowed alliances with non-democratic politicians in other countries who shared our dedication to accretion of wealth, but opposed every other high-minded principle that had inspired the formation of what we deluded ourselves into thinking was still a nation dedicated to the primacy, under God, of liberty and justice for all.  And now it appears that the nations that created revolutionary communism have been co-opted by the very things they have heretofore condemned as western excess and affluence without scruple.  Our ideological adversaries have become essentially like us, and we more and more like them with the emerging opposition in our electorate to social and economic egalitarianism if it costs those who have.

It's all so mindless, and it has led to so much bloodshed in the service of rabid dogmatism that it is mind-boggling that we never seem to talk about it.  Not since the youth movements of the sixties and seventies have these political anomalies been the topic of protest and major political movement, and frankly, I despair of the possibility that such lofty debates will ever again give us pause as a nation.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I was skimming through the channels last night--cable costs a fortune but offers very little in the way of entertainment no matter how many channels you get--when I happened upon a symposium by one of those conservative think tanks being given by the editor of the National Revue and his wife along with two other conservative thinkers.  I listened for a few minutes and I realized something.  They were doing nothing more than offering conservative pedantry to the audience, which was in turn lapping it up.  It was not a display of dazzling empiricism to support the notion that liberals were dragging academe, or as they called it, the academy, down the primrose path, but rather a series of postulations that were nothing more than opinions, but that sounded like irrefutable facts by virtue of the certitude with which they were enunciated.  It was clever; the presentation was one sided but it looked like a debate because the four contributors were all giving different opinions not about the subject itself, but about a single assertion as to the subject...that liberals were abusing their control of "the academy."  Thus, whether liberals are abusing their control of the academy, or even whether or not liberals had control of the academy was not up for debate.  It was considered axiomatic, and without opposition on the panel, no one bothered to address the topic, and thus, given that the discussion was about something assumed to be a fact, it became such to anyone who was listening and who was so inclined anyway.

I realized that a variation of that tactic was how the Republican conservative party had managed to shift the nation's politics so far to the right that the Democrats went from controlling both houses of Congress after six years of Republican abuse of their control univocal control, to losing the control of both houses won in 2006 within eight years.  They didn't exactly lie.  They just didn't bother to confront the truth.  For example, during the Bush administration, over 60% of the American people favored a single payer system of health care.  But when the Democrats in a congress led by Nancy Pelosi were given the opportunity to pass laws creating such a system, they were thwarted by a collaboration between Republicans and Democrat conservatives, who presumed to call themselves "Blue Dogs."  Thus, an idea propounded by the Republicans when the Clinton administration appeared to be leaning toward a single payer system--that is a system in which government would require everyone in the country to buy what a business, the insurance industry, was selling--was the only thing that Congress could pass, and then only barely so during a narrow window between when Senator Al Franken's election to The Senate was validated and when Ted Kennedy died.  So, we got what the Republicans had wanted when both the Democrats and the electorate wanted something else, but the Republicans still managed to turn the nation against both notions because neither one of them was theirs.  And the way they did it was by this same tactic of creating axioms that people who subscribed to their general dogma could believe, like the notion that everyone was going to lose his extant insurance, or the right to chose his own doctor if his policy didn't get cancelled.  They did it by trotting out a few cases in which policies preferred by some conservatives were cancelled under the Affordable Care Act because they didn't comport with The Act's minimum requirements, but they left out two things.  First, they made it seem like these tales were commonplace when in fact they were so rare that only a few of them ever came to light.  But more importantly, that these people who lost their insurance were offered insurance that complied with the law and were better off on account of it.  And they trumpeted the purported vindication of their condemnation of what they began to call "Obamacare" in derision so loudly that no one noticed when eleven million people signed up for insurance under the federally mandated scheme to get affordable health care for the forty eight million who couldn't afford it when the law was passed.   Nor did they even have to confront the fact that the law had resulted in affordable healthcare for more than five million people who had never had insurance before.  All of their rhetoric was based on just enough truth--there were a few cases in which people could no longer get the insurance they had before the law was passed and as a result found themselves in different physician networks--to give the illusion of axiomatic truth that was beyond refutation, and the Democrats let them do it with impunity.

It was the same with the recent "CROMNIBUS" appropriations agreement.  The provision of the Dodd Frank Act that was intended to obviate future bailouts of banks by requiring banks to separate their commercial banking enterprises from their proprietary investment activities, like the purchase and sale of derivatives that was the cause of the recent great recession, was repealed by agreement with the Democrats, who denied that they were in favor of it but voted for it anyway, thus denying themselves any claim that it was the Republicans who screwed us all, not them.  And they did it with arguments like, that law really only affects four or five big banks, and the banking establishment in general will not be changed by the repeal. Of course, it was only five or six banks that put us in the economic mess we've been in for the past six years, but Democrats never seem to mention that.  The Republicans did the same thing with campaign financing under cover of a conservative doctrine upheld by our conservative Supreme Court that endows corporations with the rights of human beings, which Mitt Romney invoked when he said, "corporations are people too, my friend," at a highly publicized campaign rally.

In short, the Republican resurgence was not a matter of superior positions on pivotal issues.  It was simply a matter of superior polemical skills...and a failure of Democrats to call them on it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I know that I mentioned my feelings about this subject just a week or so ago, but I can't get it out of my head because it's really just an extension of something I have mentioned many times before in different contexts.  The Democratic endorsement of the Republican CROMNIBUS--a Republican euphemism for "gimme your lunch--was supposedly a compromise, but it is just one more example of the Democratic Party governing by self-fulfilling prophesy...one more example of doing for the Republicans what they threaten to do based on the assumption that they can, and thus sharing the blame for it with them.  The consequence in this case is that the Democratic Party is going to have a tough time campaigning in 2016 against the pro-Wall Street Republican effort to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act because the Democrats voted to repeal its most important provision themselves; compromise or no compromise it was a bad idea.  If they were afraid that the Republicans were going to do bad things when they assume control of the second house of congress starting in January, they were right...and they still are even with this putative compromise.  The Republicans are going to do what they want in a month no matter what the Democrats do, and now the party has made their first effort in that regard a bipartisan one.  It all leaves me with a single question: why bother going to the polls so I can vote Democrat when the Democrats are just going to capitulate to the Republicans in the end anyway.  Next election day, I'll probably stay home if it's raining.  Why get wet?

This spirit of capitulation starts in the White House.  That is the only thing I can think of on which I agree with Marco Rubio.  Barrack Obama is the weakest negotiator we have had as president in my memory, and my memory goes back to Eisenhower.  And the reason that negotiating skill is so important at this time in our history is the Republicans' shameless and proportionally unequaled manipulation of our democratic process through abuse of the rules under which both houses of congress work.  The filibuster, which requires sixty votes to break, and the ability of the Speaker of the House to depart from the "regular order" of business and thus prevent a vote on bills in the U.S. Congress, are the instrumentalities of the Republicans' ability to govern from the minority, which has led the American electorate to view the Democrats as "effete, intellectual snobs" to quote Spiro Agnew.  The inability of Democrats to both work their collective will and to control the public debate--which Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner lead as the most prominent Republicans--have allowed those two machiavellian politicians to work their wills by utilizing special rules that require nothing more than a simple majority (for the past two congresses a Republican majority) in The House, and only a minority of 41 in the Democrat controlled 100 vote Senate.  The only way to put an end to this is to sacrifice control of congress for the next two years by appealing to the American people to require of the Republicans in both houses that they exercise the "nuclear option," as they started calling it when they last controlled both houses.  The filibuster and the ability to pass special rules that vitiate the regular order ability of any congressman to call a vote on a bill must be abolished, and the only way to do that is either with the majority in both houses, which the Democrats had but have now forfeited for failure to use them, or taking the highly publicized high ground from the minority when it is disadvantageous politically to do so.  Only leaving the Republicans to exercise their complete control of the Congress will expose them for what they are, and only Democratic opposition to their will can elucidate for the electorate what the Democrats stand for, and more importantly, what they don't.  This is a "be careful what you wish for" moment, and only the Democrats can cram it down the Republicans' throat, and the only way to do so is to let them have their head while protesting vocally all the while.  And if the Democrats don't do that, I fear that all will be lost for perhaps another generation as the Republicans lead the American people to be their lesser selves.

As a party, the Democrats must decide who they are and what they stand for, and they must then stand for it.  The time for craven politicking in the name of compromise is past because compromise is just the Republican euphemism for getting what they want.  And whereas six years ago the question for Republicans was will their party continue to exist, that is now the question for the Democrats as the Republicans surge toward political hegemony again.  The conversation on the issues has to be loud enough that the voting public hears it clearly, and it has to be lucid enough, the details lurid enough, that the distinctions between the parties are clear.  That requires that the Democrats stop living in fear of losing, because it is that fear that has led to betrayal of Democratic principles and loss of the confidence of those who don't seem to understand that what Republicans stand for is inimical to the prosperity of the ordinary working man and woman.  And if they want to elect Republicans contrary to their interests, let them.  But no matter what, the Democrats must once again be an alternative to the Republicans, not their enablers.  Republican outcomes when Democrats are in power only show that the American people can't do better.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Marco Rubio's self-serving, sanctimonious hand wringing over the change in American foreign policy toward Cuba is despicable.  It isn't despicable because Rubio lied to his constituents about his parents fleeing Cuba to escape Castro's repressive government.  It isn't despicable because his parents and the rest of his family have been harboring that convenient, ultra-conservative myth about heroically standing for democracy by fleeing Castro's regime when they actually were fleeing from the repression of the Batista regime that Castro overthrew.  It isn't even despicable because of the knee-jerk aversion of Cuban refugees to communism in Cuba that has inspired it despite the fact that everyone in Cuba now gets certain minimum benefits that they had no access to under Batista--universal health care, schooling, respite for the elderly when the time comes--thanks to Castro and his brand of communism, which supplanted the destitution of the many on account of the social Darwinism, corruption and mindless avarice of his Batista's few.  And Rubio's misguided fear that somehow the now defunct policy of ostracization and economic embargo against Cuba that has failed to achieve the purportedly desired end of inspiring democracy there for more than fifty years would have ceased to be a failure if only it had another year...or fifty...to succeed isn't even as dastardly as the real reason that Rubio's grandstanding is so despicable.  The real reason is that he is preaching the opposite of the truth: what devastated the Cuban people in the first place was the fascist regimes that preceded Castro's, and what ensured that Castro could not fully actuate the potential of Cuba was the misguided policy of thwarting him at every turn that the United States...and only the United States...saw fit to impose.  Rubio isn't a misguided liar.  He is a dogmatist who refuses to see the error of his ways and doesn't care who has to pay for his self-vindication even though it will never come.

Don't misunderstand me.  I am no Pollyanna when it comes to Cuba, but I was no Pollyanna when it came to Cuba when Fulgencio Batista was in power either.  Like Castro, he ascended to power through a movement against the dictator who preceded him, and through political machinations and outright tyranny, he managed to cement himself into control of the country for two decades until, just as was the case with his ascendancy, it ended at the hands of another rabble led by another purported reformer, Fidel Castro, who overthrew him and forced him into sybaritic exile where he eventually died.  That, of course is where he and Castro are no longer analogous.  Castro is still in Cuba, having ceded his political power to his brother, Raul, and it is there that he will die, in a future not too distant it would seem.  But unlike Batista, he will not die in ignominy and opprobrium.  His people will not deplore him even though there is no mistaking the fact that he used repression to ensure that his communist revolution succeeded.  But though  unlike in the case of Castro, there is also no mistaking American foreign policy's role in supporting other autocrats as they did the same things.  We propped up Anastasio Samoza in Nicaragua for decades, and he was no less a dictator than Fidel Castro.  And though Augusto Pinochet of Chile became a brutal embarrassment, his tenure as dictator in that country was a veritable invention of the American CIA, which facilitated, and perhaps even inspired the assassination of Pinochet's predecessor, Salvatore Alliende, and the overthrow of his democratically elected government along with the "disappearance" of thousands.  So, if we are going to assess the motivations of political leaders, including our own, we should be willing to admit our own tyrannies in the form of the tyrannies we made possible and the romanticized versions of them that were sold to the public here in the United States.  Time has demonstrated that communism isn't the political problem in repressive nations.  Malevolent and greedy men are, regardless of their political philosophies, and our foreign policy has buoyed them just because they weren't communists, and in spite of what they actually were.  In fact, I wonder if there but for fortune would go Marco Rubio.  He certainly is willing to say anything to attain and maintain power.  He certainly has only a casual acquaintance with intellectual honesty.  And as for ambition, he certainly is not lacking in that regard.

But underneath it all is this.  Rubio has been confronted with his embroidered ancestral heritage, and he has excused himself for the embroidery by blaming it on his family, which according to him told him the story of his parents' emigration from Cuba and the love of freedom that precipitated their immigration to the United States...as illegal aliens for the first four years or more, I might add.  As to his loathing for Castro, he has used the fable of his parents indomitable love of freedom to vilify a straw dog, Fidel Castro, instead of Batista, the real villain of his parents piece, just because that was the politically correct thing to do.  No one gets elected in little Havana for opposing capitalist dictators.  It takes a communist foe to unify support in Miami.  And Marco Rubio is just the man to undertake the task: all talk and no honesty.

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

Like most people, I have been doing some seasonal shopping over the past two weeks or so, and I had occasion to go into Walmart, which I avoid assiduously most times.  The stores seem so understaffed, and the people who work there always seem unhappy, but on that occasion I was looking for something that I had been told only they had.  I was in the store for approximately fifteen minutes, and during the entire time, a child was screaming...not a series of children, but one particular child.  I never heard a remonstration with an adult to the effect that the child should cease and desist, nor was there ever an abatement of his or her top-of-the-lungs screeching.  It was an unmistakable temper tantrum replete with the variegations of tone and volume that go with such things, but again, there was never a sign of an adult intervening.  I thought to find the child and intervene myself, but of course, I was acutely aware that it was not my prerogative, thought the headache I was getting did seem to make it my business.  Still, I hurried to finish my unsuccessful quest for that thing that Walmart purportedly, but not in fact, sold and I got out of there as quickly as I could.  It will be a long time before I go into Walmart again.

Coincidently, a few days later while reading the paper, I came across an article that was capped by a half-page photo of a woman standing erect with her hands together, arms hanging at full length holding her purse in front of her, with her head bowed in obvious deference to something.  Next to her, and slightly behind her, was a smaller--the woman looked to be probably six feet tall given the surrounding people and things--dignified man standing solemnly in his dark suit with his head unbowed but with a grave expression on his face...the kind we in The West associate with a loss of face in eastern cultures.  The picture depicted the CEO of Korean Airlines, part of a family-run conglomerate of apparently considerable size, with his daughter, by then only a former executive at the airline since he had stripped her of her title and station within the company.  She had thrown a tantrum just before the takeoff of her recent flight on the airline she helped run over the fact that the macadamia nuts she had been served came in the bag rather than being poured out onto a plate...forcing the plane back to the gate so she could discharge the head steward on the spot.  The article went on to explain that the father had felt that his daughter's arrogance and self-importance was a disgrace, and as a consequence, not only did he require his daughter to stand there with him while he did it, he was compelled to apologize deeply and profoundly to the government of South Korea for his child's transgression, but to plead to take the blame himself because, he said, "I failed to raise my child properly."  He did this on national television, that's how seriously he took the matter of his child's abuse of an employee and blatant demand for recognition of her privileged status, though there is more to the incident in that there has been public opprobrium for the proprietary family lately for reasons similar to those prevailing in this country.  The conglomerate is apparently blamed for some of the income inequality and disparities of wealth between working people and the plutocracy that now prevail in Korea.  Still, the public mortification and supplication of two powerful people, one a parent and the other his child, demonstrate a kind of investment in child rearing that is emblematic of eastern culture, and the absence of which is emblematic of parenting here in The West.

Thus, while at first blush the incident in Walmart and that in Korea might have seemed unrelated when I first brought them up, it seems to me that they point to failings in both cultures.  Here, we allow our children to run roughshod not only over us, but over everyone else as well, and we do nothing to prevent it or to deal with it when it happens.  It seems to be a kind of privilege that is asserted in our culture based on the lack of any feeling of collectivism and mutual responsibility.  Even in my family of origin there is among some of my siblings and their spouses the belief that if their children want something they should have it without reservation.  And the notion that a child should be disciplined for creating a scene over being denied is thus completely foreign to them.  On the other hand, the strict constraints that parents apparently impose on their children in The East--and I admit that I have drawn the conclusion that strict constraint is a wide-spread cultural phenomenon in the orient based only on assumptions I derived from the airline executives' story and from my limited experience with my children's oriental friends when they were in school--may yield a different kind of solipsistic conceit, that is no less solipsistic and conceited.  And both reveal a great deal about the cultures in which they occur.

We live in a country in which Hiltons and Kardashians get television shows of their own--oxymoronically called "reality tv"--simply because they are famous, and in spite of the fact that being famous is all they are famous for.  Our children all have cell phones and they have the audacity not only to indulge themselves on them while we are trying to talk to them, but to ignore us when we try to contact them by call or text.  We and our children take all of our creature comfort for granted and thus consider it more or less an entitlement while some children in this country go to bed hungry and wear nothing but clothes they are given by those who have more than they need and who give them not out of genuine compassion but rather for the tax break they represent and because they can then pat themselves on the back and profit at the same time.  There are terrible things happening in the world, so to some extent concerning myself with parenting skills and the impact they have had on our society seems a trivialization of our problems.  But at the same time, I feel compelled to observe that much of the trouble I am referring to is a function of that solipsism and conceit that these two anecdotes denote.  Adam Lanza was an indulged, albeit pathologically impaired, child.  The Taliban and ISIL have allowed themselves to think that they have the right to impose their beliefs on everyone else without reservation, demonstrating that same kind of self-absorption and callousness to the wants and needs of others that Lanza and all the others who kill because they feel abused demonstrate.  The plutocratic class in this country is never sated by the excesses of wealth in which it indulges, and as a consequence begrudges the working people who have helped them get and stay rich as much as a reasonable minimum wage and universal health care.

The way I see it is that all these things are connected in a way that I used to characterize to my children as a deficiency of evolution at his time in human history that keeps us from being all that we should be, and I made sure they didn't think that I excused myself for my own selfish tendencies by pointing that out.  We have to do more to make ourselves aware of the roles we play in each other's lives if we are to become what we sometimes claim to be both as a nation and as individuals.  Going to church isn't enough.  We have to mean it when we pray, and we have to think about what is happening around us when we are not praying.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On Tuesday I wondered if Jeff Bezos' free version of The Washington Post was co-opting me, and it was my intention to answer the question today.  I have since discovered that what he gives his Amazon Prime patrons is not the straight news from The Post, but rather a "curated" version that is designed to appeal to a broader audience, and that revelation came not just from some anonymous internet source, but from the published admissions of Post staff.  But if the news is curated, that means it is culled and padded in order to create a presentation rather than just the facts, and therein lies the rub.  Once the news is managed that way, it is altered, and if it is altered, it is slanted.  But since I asked the question, other more pressing matters have arisen, specifically the $1.1 trillion "CROmnibus" appropriations bill, which includes within it what could be characterized as either leveraged provisions or poison pills depending on who you are.  Of course, since the bill comes out of the Republican House of Representatives, the extraneous provisions--one to increase campaign spending limits by a multiple of ten, and the other to roll back the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that implemented the "Volcker Rule," thus prohibiting big banks from using investor, federally insured funds for proprietary investment, that is investment that profit's the bank rather than patrons of the bank--are no surprise.  They must cause any political observer to harken back to 2010 and 2012 when they put riders on the continuing resolutions needed to keep the government running, actually shutting down the government for fifteen days once.  But the difference between those previous effectively usurpatious uses of the budget process to control all of government policy and this one is that our president...a Democrat remember...has acquiesced in the attempt, and his party has consequently rebelled.  The bill passed in The House on Thursday and went to The Senate, but it passed in The House with a 70% majority of Democrats voting against it, the other 30% capitulating based on the contention that the bill was a compromise.

The reason that 2010 and 2012 are germane is that in 2010 particularly, compromise really meant capitulation even though President Obama represented the spending bill that came out of the lame duck congress as a compromise.  What happened on that occasion was that the Republicans got everything they really wanted, and they conceded on the things like the "don't ask, don't tell" policy repeal that they intended to relent on anyway in consequence of popular consensus.  It was effectively a rape of the progressive movement with the complicity of our president.  But in 2013, The President developed a spine and he continuously, and irreversibly, demanded a "clean CR," which meant that while budget talks continued in The House and The Senate, he refused to sign any continuing resolution that included riders to effect partisan goals. The Republicans took a huge political blow for obdurately refusing to comply, and thus shutting down the government, even though they tried to blame the Democrats for it; they argued that all the Democrats had to do was "compromise" and the shut down would end and thus it was the Democrats' fault, but the voting public didn't buy it for a second.  That is how the election-refortified Barrack Obama handled the Republican attempt to extort their agenda out of The Congress and The President.  He refused to be bullied, and he prevailed, as did the American people.  But some time between last year and this--mind you, that strategy worked a few times during the last fiscal year, and the Republicans didn't dare try extortion as a partisan ploy again--the courage injection Obama enjoyed from the public rebellion against Republican partisanship wore off, and once again he is in capitulation mode.  That is why 30% of the Democrats in The House voted with him for this "compromise" that restores to the big banks the ability to use derivatives to do to us what they did in 2007 and 2008 courtesy of the capitulation of Bill Clinton in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.  So, despite the fact that deregulation of the financial industry after 66 years prevented the debacle that occurred in late 2007 when so many big banks sat on the edge of the abyss of failure and had to be "bailed out" by us taxpayers, President Obama is agreeing to it again with the repeal of the operative provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, exposing us to the next financial debacle.  Set your watches.  We should have about ten years until the next near-depression, which is being brought to us by the Republicans and the financial industry with no small contributions from President Obama and the Democrats who never seem to learn that they can say no.

I'm so tired of the pusillanimous practices of my party that I recently found myself thinking in apostatic terms.  Maybe the Republicans are right.  Maybe they can govern better than we can, though the wars and financial chaos that developed during their last period of hegemony argues strongly against that proposition.  The next great political hope may be a Republican.  Jeb Bush believes in immigration reform, for example.  Maybe we should stop looking for a Democratic leader who is liberal and start looking for a Republican one who is.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Please forgive me for the desultory nature of what I am about to write, but the experience of reading the Washington Post on my Amazon tablet this morning evoked several thoughts at once,  the first being a dismayed reaction to an article in The Post about big-money Republican donors.  The Post reports that several billionaires are withholding their early financial support because they see the field of Republican aspirants to their party's nomination for president in 2016 as being so crowded that support for too many of them might result in the kind of crowded field that would dilute the potency of their money as a force in American politics.  So, the first subject that entered my mind is the newly old Citizens United case.  It has been the subject of at-first-copious commentary, but now after being debated, so to speak, as its own subject relative to monetary pollution of our political process it has become just a short-hand reference to the deleterious effects on money on American democracy and egalitarianism, but every once in awhile something comes along to revitalize the case as a matter of profound concern for me.  The Post article was just such an event as it discussed culling process indulged in by these uber-riche robber-barons'--among them a major force in the gambling "industry"--regarding the 2016 crop of Republican hopefuls.   The article made references to one of them "interviewing" candidates over the past few months and continuing to do so in order to ascertain the viability of the various candidates' incipient campaigns for the office of most powerful national leader in at least the free world, implying that the choice of at least one party's candidate will be decided by the thrower of a cocktail party somewhere near Las Vegas.  That is a frightening prospect to me, not just because some rich person of perhaps dubious integrity is playing such a prominent role in directing the history of the world from 2016 on, but because this deference to the moneyed few is so Republican and Republicans seem so much on the rise today.  Thus, these king makers are making preliminary decisions that may well affect women's right to abortion, the role of government in our lives in the form of provident benefactor for those in need, foreign policy that may or may not result in war, the autonomy of business and the enabling of predatory and avaricious practices, the degradation of our environment in the name of facilitating business's predatory and avaricious practices, disparity in wealth and income between those who work to produce and those who happen to have capital, and all of the rest of the panoply of areas of American endeavor in which government plays a role.  After reading that article, I was chagrinned.

The next article I read was about Chris Hughes, Face-book multimillionaire by virtue of being  Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard, buying The New Republic...a renowned liberal journal that has a noble history, but is now suspended from publication by its barely post-adolescent super-rich owner because all of his news staff quit out of resentment of his glitzy ambitions and cognate management decisions.  But then I read the rest of what Amazon was offering under the masthead of the Washington Post, and I felt affirmed in fact about what I had thought, and in fact wrote here, about Jeff Bezos' acquisition of the paper about a year ago.  In addition, the contrast between what Hughes did to the New Republic was inescapable, though comparing multi-millionaires to one another seems nothing but a pointless diversion.  I said then, when everyone was puzzling over his motivations for spending $250 million to buy it, that his ability to provide quality credible news coverage to his customers at a price that he set--and the price is minimal compared to other news outlets--would be just one more asset in the treasury of his primary occupation, running Amazon, the world's largest on-line retailer, but it seems it is not being abused as is The New Republic, but is being used well, as the venerable old institution should be.  Of course all that depended on the reaction of those who might benefit from what ostensibly is Bezos' largess in providing the service for almost nothing to his loyal customers, but that remained a subject for skepticism in my mind until today.  I was given that tablet as a birthday present last August just before I was to have back surgery, which was to result in a period of fairly inert recuperation, and frankly, I didn't want it.  But with it came a short subscription to Amazon Prime, which I extended for a year for $89 dollars, as I recall, and as of today, I am getting The Washington Post as a perquisite of my decision to do so.  What that means to me is that my subscription to The New York Times is now superfluous, because much to my surprise, The Post is every bit the paper that The Times is...and I don't have to pay for it.  My perusal of The Post on the internet was easy to accomplish, and the range of subjects covered by Post articles was just as broad, if not broader, than is that of The Times.  Of course, some features of The Post are not available on my internet version of the paper, or at least if they are, I haven't found them yet.  But I can do without the crossword puzzles and the commentaries of David Brooks and Paul Krugman if I have to, and I can be just as well informed as I was when The Times was what I relied on.  What's more, when my subscription to Amazon Prime expires in eight or nine months, I'll renew it because not only can I shop from home and get delivery of Amazon products free, I can read a world-class newspaper at no cost with the rest of its content--the frills I mentioned above--available for as little as $17 a year.  But now I wonder: am I being co-opted by a man with money just like American politicians are?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I was listening to the news on the radio a couple of days ago while I was doing other things and there was a report that I heard just a phrase from.  Deaths from avoidable medical errors--a euphemism for malpractice--have declined by 50,000 per year.  I thought, if they have declined by that many, there can't be many left, so I went on the internet to look up the statistics.  I checked several sources and they were all consistent in that they reported that such deaths still number--that is, even after being reduced by 50,000 per year--between 400,000 and 440,000 per year.  To put that figure into a more graphic form, that means that every day something in excess of 1,100 people die because doctors, nurses and hospitals make mistakes that could be avoided...by better communication between doctors and nurses as they change shifts for example.  Medical malpractice is rampant, and it is lethal, but if these are the figures for deaths, imagine what they must be for injuries of various kinds: amputating the wrong limb, prescribing medications that interact with already prescribed medicines in injurious ways, failing to diagnose problems that are obvious...as in the Texas ebola case for example.  It's dangerous to get sick in this country, and these figures evoke this question; is the cure worse than the disease these days.

As I digested all this I reflected on the political summit held by President Obama with the Republicans when the Affordable Care Act was still under consideration.  It was televised and among the issues that the Republicans wanted to deal with in any health care reform law was tort reform to reduce the $5 billion per year that malpractice litigation costs the medical profession by virtue of elevated malpractice insurance premiums.  I have heard the statistics about these malpractice deaths before, but I was unaware of them then, and the only umbrage I took at the time was that $5 billion is not even a drop in the bucket when medical care costs us $3 trillion per year, so the Republican emphasis on this particular phenomenon was only a matter of typical partisan politicization of a non-issue based on the Republicans' affiliation with the people who have the most money, in this case, doctors.  But when I heard the report on malpractice deaths earlier this week a different form of umbrage overtook me.  It was more important to those Republicans on that panel to cut health care costs by a little over .001 percent by letting doctors off the hook for the carnage they were causing than it was to find a way to reduce the carnage.  Once again, money was more important than people to the Republicans, which doesn't surprise me, but I wonder; would it surprise the people who used to vote Democrat when the Democrats controlled Congress, but now are voting Republican.  And more importantly, if they did know, would they continue to trend toward the Republicans.  Finally, why aren't the Democrats making an issue of all this, not just for political purposes, but because this is a moral issue, and it is life and death.

So here I am back on President Obama and his diffident approach to informing us Americans.  Why isn't he talking about this problem as the Republicans continue to assail the first good thing the government has done for us with regard to our healthcare system, that is "Obamacare," since Medicare and Medicaid fifty or more years ago?  Why aren't my senators and congressmen talking about it here in Connecticut?  Why aren't your senators and congressmen doing so?  More than once every two years, the medical profession kills more people than died in the Civil War.  Each year they kill 8 times the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war.  Medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in this country behind only heart disease and cancer, and it is about twelve times more lethal than motor vehicle crashes.  Why is the House Oversight Committee still investigating the murders in Benghazi two years ago even though two congressional committees have published reports that prove there is no scandal to uncover while it does nothing to investigate the failure of our government to act on curtailing medical malpractice murder.  Of course, these are all rhetorical questions because we all know the answer...the single answer...to all those questions: politics.  But the most important question of all isn't why our politicians do or don't do anything.  The real question is, if the Republicans are on the wrong side of so much of this misdirected energy, why do they continue to get elected and reelected.  In a nation that prides itself on its capacity to teach the rest of the world how to govern democratically, why aren't we doing a better job--and when I say we I mean you and I--of winnowing out the idiots, shallow opportunists and fortune hunters from our political system by using our votes with just a little bit of discretion?  What are we thinking?  Are we thinking at all?

Of course, I have asked all these questions in different contexts when commenting on the last three elections, all of which surprised me in that Republican obduracy on the subject of everything that constrains moneyed interests, even when they act to the detriment of the American people, seems so overt and well publicized.  Still, this medical malpractice plague seems different both quantitatively and qualitatively to the point that everything else our government doesn't do for us seems nothing more significant than a momentary glint on a distant horizon.  Close to half a million of us are dieing every year of a preventable cause, but our politicians seem not to notice.  Maybe we shouldn't vote for any of them, and just let the country run as best it can without them.  For about 440, 000 of us a year, it couldn't make things any worse.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

One of the things that bother me about media coverage of seminal events like the grand jury decision on the Michael Brown-Darren Wilson case is the role that self-aggrandizing, preening "experts" play in forming public opinion with not just the blessing, but the license of the major media outlets both electronic and print.  In the case of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson police, the grand jury convened for the sole purpose of determining whether Wilson should be prosecuted for the shooting made its decision last week, and rioting was the consequence.  Notably, the police seem to have managed the public discord much better than they did when the initial lawlessness occurred in conjunction with the legitimate protest demonstrations that developed at the time of the shooting, which, by the way, were accompanied by looting, which has nothing to do with protest in my opinion.  And then, as now, the opinions have flown with cognate righteous indignation in abundant supply, but this time the sanctimony is over the legal process that resulted in the decision not to try the police officer, and for the most part, the criticism of the process has been misinformed, even in the case of the putative experts hired by the media...the grand-standing, high profile lawyers and social critics whom the media can't seem to distinguish from those who actually know what they are talking about.

The function of a grand jury is to determine whether there is "probable cause" to prosecute someone accused of a crime.  Everyone agrees on that because it is in black and white in the law.  That's what grand juries do; they determine whether there is probable cause.  But no one seems interested in explaining to the public--especially the public in Ferguson--what probable cause is.  This is what Black's Law Dictionary, the single most authoritative source for definition of legal terms, says in its definition of probable cause:

Reasonable cause; having more evidence for than against.  A reasonable ground for belief in the existence of facts warranting the proceedings complained of.  An apparent state of facts found to exist upon reasonable inquiry (that is, such inquiry as the given case renders convenient and proper), which would induce a reasonably intelligent and prudent man to believe, in a criminal case, that the accused person had committed the crime charged.  (Black's Law Dictionary, Fifth Ed., p. 1081.

The first sentence really says it all, because the standard of proof--that is the quality of the evidence that must be produced for a conviction--in a criminal case at trial is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  At the grand jury level however, the standard of proof is lower: a preponderance of the evidence, or as Black's puts it, "more evidence for than against."  The purpose of a grand jury is not to bring people to trial.  It is to determine whether the state should bring the person in question to trial because in layman's terms, there are more indications that he is guilty than there are that he is not.  So, the complaining over the way in which the prosecutors in Missouri put the case before the grand jury based on the pontifications of "legal experts" who aspire to media celebrity is not justified by the fact that an indictment was not delivered by the grand jury.  Indictment is not the grand jury's job.  Fact finding is, and indictment is permissible only if the facts found justify it.  In Ferguson, a grand jury determined that they don't.  It has nothing to do with the fact that the proposed defendant was a cop, and by the way, I have no love for them either.  I have had my own occasions to resent them, and I am white, so I can only imagine what a black man or woman feels.  But cops are entitled to the same due process as are the rest of us, and Darren Wilson got his.  That's all that happened in Missouri; a man got his due process rights.  There was no cover up, and no one benefited from bias in his favor.  My point is that the indignant experts all seem to feel that the prosecutor should have brought the case for the purpose of indicting Wilson rather than for the purpose of finding out whether he should, and while that may be the way grand juries work in fact, it is not what is intended for them.  And while prosecutors single-mindedly look for conviction, that is not--in my sixties-radical opinion--what they should be doing.  The state has all the power in a criminal prosecution.  The defendant has only rights that circumscribe that power.  That is why the standard of proof applies to the prosecutor's burden at trial, not the defendant's.  The fact is that the most common miscarriage of justice in this country may be the mainstream course of our criminal justice system in the form not of prosecutorial discretion, but of prosecutorial fixation on conviction without concern for justice.

Don't misunderstand me.  It is not the job of the prosecutor to look out for the defendant.  That's the defense attorney's job.  But in a grand jury proceeding, there is no defense attorney.  In fact, there is no defense at all, though the grand jury in this case saw evidence produced by the defense team of the suspect, courtesy of the prosecutor.  And then there is this to consider.  Darren Wilson as the proposed defendant had a right to remain silent, and any defense attorney will tell you that he almost never counsels his client to give up that right.  But Wilson did so, and he testified before the grand jury...a thing that I would never have allowed if I had been representing him.  It's like giving up one chance out of two to be absolved.

So, when you consider how you should react to the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict one of the community's cops, ask yourself what you would have wanted for your son or daughter had he or she been a cop in Ferguson and been accused as Wilson was.  This wasn't the Rodney King case in which there was video tape of the police beating a victim.  And Michael Brown was no Rodney King anyway.

Your friend,