January 2015 Archives

Dear America,

The Senate passed the Keystone XL pipeline bill on Thursday and will send that bill to President Obama's desk, where it will almost certainly be vetoed.  The leader of the Republican, majority party in The Senate knows that, and he continues to jawbone against the veto...without mentioning why he wants it other than to cite a preliminary State Department report that estimates creation of 42,000 jobs over the course of the construction of the XL section of the Keystone system.  He never mentions that none of those 42,000 jobs will be permanent except for the 35 (that's 35, not 3,500 and certainly not 35,000) that are required to run that section of the system.  Nor does he mention that the figure he is quoting refers to the ripple effect from the real, 2,500 to 6,000 jobs that will be created for the purpose of construction.  In other words, it includes the people who work on the food trucks that sell the workers sandwiches and the people who make the trucks from which the sandwiches are sold.  There's a lot of minimum wage stuff mixed in with the few real jobs that pipeline construction will create over the course of the two year process, and none of those jobs will last even as long as the duration of the construction.  As the process moves south from Alberta, Canada, the jobs will move with it, and they will disappear where they have moved from.  And the misinformation isn't coming just from Mitch McConnell.

I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR last night when the passage of the bill was reported, and the reporter said that the bill passed the continuation of the Keystone pipeline to the Gulf Coast, but it does no such thing, and the news that NPR has reported in the past about the resistance to the project in Nebraska makes that clear, so what's their excuse for disseminating myths about the Keystone XL?  The fact is that the XL section of the pipeline...the thing that is behind all the partisan bickering...runs only from Alberta to the Oklahoma-Nebraska border.  At that point, it joins preexisting pipelines that run east to refineries in Illinois and south to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico that are already receiving oil from elsewhere by the section through which the oil from the XL will have to flow.  This is disturbing not because the XL segment of the Keystone pipeline is particularly significant, nor is it a profound issue simply because something between 70 and 120 million gallons of petroleum products refined on the Gulf of Mexico's shores get shipped to other countries.  It is a profound issue though because it is so easy to proliferate bogus ideas if you are in politics, and even NPR can't be trusted to debunk them.

It reminds me of when reform of Social Security was the burning topic before the 2010 elections.  There was all this talk about reducing benefits paid by increasing the retirement age or using a reduction in COLA increases as a function of the formula by which they are calculated as if those things would reduce the national deficit and the debt.  But the reality is...and was...that Social Security has enough money in trust to carry it well into the 2030's, and the only way reductions in benefits effect the deficit is that the treasury has to borrow from others what it has borrowed from the Social Security trust because benefits paid out now exceed premiums paid in by about $100 billion a year.  True, at some point a better balance of income and benefits paid must be accomplished, but it isn't any emergency.  And besides, the less the treasury pays back to the Social Security trust now, the more has to be paid back by "future generations," which are the people that the Republicans claim to be concerned about burdening.  It is obvious to anyone who examines the issues closely, yet NPR proliferated the Republican myth about Social Security's  solvency almost without change until they finally did one analysis on one evening that lasted no more than three minutes--hardly enough time to disabuse listeners of the erroneous notions that NPR had helped proliferate for months before.  To whom should we turn for the information we need to determine our own positions on the issues?

Well, I've said this before--many times, in fact--there isn't anyone that a thinking person can trust for trenchant analysis or disclosure of the fact.  The information is available, but each of us has to get it for himself or herself.  The internet is dangerous because you can read arguments and elliptical statements of fact all over it, so even if you do your own research you have to be careful.  I happened upon a site that is run for apologists for the XL pipeline for example, and the few subtle facts they left out of what they said--they didn't lie, mind you, but they didn't tell the whole truth--were enough to allow for what looked like some pretty good arguments for the pipeline.  I won't go into detail about that, but it makes the point I have tried to make many times in the past.  You are responsible to inform yourself, and to analyze what you find out so as to reach your own conclusions.  So, if you want to vote based on how your congressman or senator voted on the XL, or if Social Security is important to you and you want to know if your representative or senator is on your side, listen to what he or she says, and then look it up to see if he is telling you the truth.  Find the fact for yourself...and then think with your own head, not someone else's.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The big news today is the blizzard here in the northeastern United States.  The storm portends to dump up to three feet of snow in parts of Connecticut where I live, and at least two feet everywhere.  But all in all, while that news is fun for the kids, who have today and maybe even tomorrow off from school all over this state, the real fun is happening in Washington and Iowa.  That is where the Republicans are foreshadowing the next two political years, and hence, their party's role in them.  In Iowa, the blather is flowing fast as the various kings and king makers--including the grand-master of bloviation, Donald Trump (does he seriously believe that anyone but the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe takes him seriously, much less as a candidate for the presidency)--ply their trade in an effort to occupy the spotlight and thus garner another bullet point on their resumes.  Some of them are trying to become the designated front-runner of the Republican Party in anticipation of the next Iowa caucuses, which won't occur for almost a year, by making the noises that they think will garner both attention and support for their proposed platforms.  Thus, the conservative, Ted Cruz crowd is rattling everything from sabres to the bb's in their empty skulls where their brains are supposed to be, and the more sober contingent is trying to look temperate and prudent next to them--not a more difficult feat than distinguishing squirrels from elephants--while using stale partisan rhetoric that will easily identify them as conservative, but politically so.  Jeb Bush, for example, is hawking the Keystone XL pipeline without a shred of cogent analysis of the issues involved, just because that is the conservative thing to say, while he eschews hawkish positions on the middle-east and endorses the Republican creed on taxes...that is, never increase them even if it's to avoid national penury and the policies it necessitates.  But the real show is still, as always, in the halls of Congress where the non-candidates are still hard at work trying to look sagacious.

In that pursuit, McBoehnell gave a joint interview to Scott Pelley of CBS News, who played a little game of "what's dead on arrival in Congress" with them.  Their answers were so predictable as to obscure the point of doing such a thing, but it did elucidate the attitudes of the two men, and that made it clear that in Washington, it is business as usual in our nation's legislature.  The obvious gravamen of their remarks was that The President, the only Democrat with any power in Washington these days, is on the wrong track with regard to everything but his inclinations toward fast-tracking more trade agreements and escalating American involvement in the Arab wars, both Republican preferences and issues on which most Democrats think Mr. Obama is misguided.  What a surprise; the Republican leadership will support only what they want while they condemn as partisan intransigence any position contrary to their own preferences.   Most importantly though, the brazenness of their tones, especially Boehner's, betrayed their intention to render the balance of Mr. Obama's presidency a nullity...not realizing that that is the Democrats' plan.  To the extent that the Republicans get nothing done from now until the 2016 election, they are digging their own hole, regardless of the philosophical justification they employ to excuse their inaction.  They are volunteering to be treated by the Democrats at election time in the same way in which they treated the hapless Democrats in 2010 and 2012 by being just as hapless.  They are in power, and the onus to cooperate in the political enterprise is now on them as they are in control of the process.  So the extent to which they dig in their heels is the extent to which the American people will blame them, and they have demonstrated that they don't understand that.  Setting aside the interview, they have made their own case by their actions in Congress so far, and they have managed to show themselves to be incompetent in a matter of just a few weeks.  They took up the abortion issue by trying to pass a bill banning the procedure after 20 weeks, which is four to six weeks short of the end of the second trimester of pregnancy, which in turn is what the Supreme Court allowed under Row v. Wade as a matter of constitutional right.  Thus, the law was conceived, pun intended, as a failure, and then on top of their obdurate pursuit of that failure, they left a necessary contingent of female representatives out of in the cold by excluding exceptions for incest and rape.  The result was that the bill had to be withdrawn before it got voted down...a miscalculation so blatant that Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership were left with their bare, red faces hanging out on what they wanted to use as a line in the sand between them and the Democrats.  And then of course there is the XL, which McConnell has publicly stated he is going to shove through the newly Republican Senate with the full knowledge that President Obama will veto it, and that there isn't enough support in either body to override the veto.  He thinks that the American people will be so incensed that they will disavow the Democratic credo in general, but he fails to realize that when the veto comes, it will be accompanied by a high profile--the process itself will guaranty that The President gets more golden opportunities to address the public, including a televised news conference or speech if Mr. Obama is smart--repudiation of the XL pipeline that will make the Republicans look foolish.  You can't harp on energy independence while you seek to enable export of petroleum and distillates without looking like a hypocrite...or a fool...and that is what the Republicans are in their support of a petroleum industry, both here and in Canada, that wants nothing but profit and is thus motivated by nothing else.  As to abortion, the nation is more than 50% women, and women want to have control of their own reproductive systems...at least the majority do: another loser for the Republican troglodyte wing.

The thing is, the Democrats showed all these pitfalls to the Republicans, and the Republicans took advantage of them starting less than a decade ago.  When health care reform was on the congressional agenda, it wasn't the Republicans that made a single payer system impossible, nor did they make passage of the Affordable Care Act difficult.  It was a contingent of "Blue Dogs" in the Democratic Party that thwarted what was the will of 60% of the American people as recently as the second term of the W. Bush administration, and maybe even to this day.  And the show of party discord wasn't an effect of anything the Republicans did.  It was Bart Stupak and about a dozen sycophants, whom I use to call Stupak and the Stupettes, who pointed out that the Democrats' house was not in order when the voting on the ACA was about to take place.  Substitute the Tea Party Kool-aid tipplers for the Blue Dogs, and the Republican women for Stupak and the Stupettes, and you've got the same situation.  They have watched it all before when it afflicted the opposition, and they're trying to do the same things as if they can do it better.  They can't.  Washington is always just more of the same, and what we get from it never gets any better.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday was pretty good, I think.  He laid out a progressive agenda worthy of a progressive president, perhaps for the first time with some actual significance.  I say that because over the past six years, his address has been about stalemate in Washington or things we need to do but haven't, and more importantly, never will as long as the Republicans control the capacity of Congress to take action.  His tone has been anything from conciliatory to cajoling, but it has all been for naught.  This time was different because what he gave wasn't really a state of the union address.  It was the Democratic platform for 2016.  Over the next two years, the Democrats under the leadership...finally the leadership...of President Obama will push the initiatives limned vaguely in The President's speech whenever they get the chance to speak about policy, and come November 2016, the American voters will decide two things.  First, they will decide who they are because what President Obama proposed on Tuesday night was a truly progressive shift in our national direction regarding everything from taxes to education, and he did so with a phrase, perhaps a misnomer but certainly definitive in its nature: middle class economics.  The phrase says it all since much of what The President proposes is not just for the benefit of the middle class, but for those striving to get into it as well.  At last we have a formulation of a progressive alternative to "trickle-down" and "supply-side" sloganeering, and sometimes a good slogan is all a politician needs.  Second, the voters will decide whether what the Republicans will produce over the next two years is what they really want, that is, if the Republicans produce anything much.  They haven't had to take responsibility for anything since 2006, the last year that they were in control of Congress, but the worm has turned and everything that happens, or doesn't happen for that matter, will be attributable to Republican leadership.  It's put up or shut up time, and that has liberated a president who has been handcuffed since the day he took office despite the ostensible control of Congress by the Democratic Party.

The speech set a bar for the Republicans, and for the first time in his presidency, Mr. Obama doesn't have to worry about either the Republicans or the Democrats, the latter having been as fractious and bumptious a party during its periods of relative hegemony as the Republicans are now.  The failure to get a single payer healthcare system passed was as much a function of the Blue Dog Democrats' intransigence as it was Republican sabotage, but it redounded only to the detriment of the Democratic Party because the Republicans incessantly and deceitfully asserted  that the Democrats were in control.  Now, legislative failure is no longer a reflection of Democratic haplessness.  It's all the Republicans now--be careful what you wish for McBoehnell.  Uh oh, too late.  There's no going back now.  The Republicans have been bad-mouthing the Obama era of Democratic putative control for six years, claiming that they, the Republicans, had the answers.  But the economy is in pretty good shape right now, at least as far as the numbers go, and improvements are going to be only nominal for the next two years.  That won't serve to affirm the Republican brag that they know better than the Democrats what we all need.  And since they have claimed that the economy is still in the doldrums for the purpose of discrediting the Democrats and The President, no modicum of change will suffice to anoint them as the nation's saviors.  All that talk on Tuesday night about working together was just the same old sanguine self-delusion that it was when it was first spouted in The President's 2009 inauguration address.  He didn't know that inter-party cooperation could never be anything but illusory at best then, so he wedded himself to what he thought was the portent of an era of cooperation.  But in the first mid-term election the Democrats got a drubbing, and in the succeeding lame duck session, the Republicans showed what the word compromise means to them.  As I've said before, it doesn't mean, "let's work together."  It means, "give me your lunch money," and that's exactly what President Obama and the Democrats did.  The Democrats agreed to call it a compromise legislative package to save face, but as a corollary to the old saw would have it, if it doesn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, it isn't a duck...and it wasn't.  But that can never happen to Barrack Obama again.

So, the way this will all play out is that there will be a lot of stumping for the next two years, and President Obama even said he was taking to the hustings to sell his ideas.  If he can just muster the courage to have a few prime-time press conferences, his efforts might well yield some actual progressive legislation, though he hasn't shown that kind of fortitude yet.  What is more likely is that inch by inch, he will reclaim the political ground he has given up under the illusion of compromise.  He has nothing to lose, nor does Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.  The Republicans can pass whatever they like unless the Democrats use the filibuster the same way the Republicans did...basically "slash and burn."  With a careful modulation between giving them what they want when it will bite them in the ass and denying them what they want when it won't, the 115th Congress will be Democratic again...the presidency too.  During the same period in the Reagan administration, the conservative wing of the conservative Republican Party of the day took to saying, "let Reagan be Reagan."  Now it's time for Obama to be Obama.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

If you read these letters regularly you are aware that I have commented on healthcare costs many times, but in the past, I have always been focused on statistics and general principles.  Today I have something more specific on my mind.

On December 7, 2015--I remember the date because...well, we all do--I was up at about 4:00 a.m. because I had been experiencing a right of passage for late, middle-aged men who don't pay particular attention to what they eat and drink; the passage to which I refer is kidney stones.  I didn't know this until I spoke to my female doctor in the ER and my father-in-law's girlfriend, but apparently many women who've had both experiences say that they'd rather have another baby than pass a kidney stone.  The pain is intense, and it doesn't vary from when the stone first lodges until it passes, which is why after about twenty four hours of passing stones, one after another with nothing but a few hours between for a respite, I relented and asked my wife to take me to the hospital.  Never having experienced kidney stones before, I thought I was dieing.  When I got there, the first step in my treatment was waiting, which I did for an excruciating forty five minutes, after which, step two was taken.  I was outfitted with a saline drip bag that had a dose of pain medication in it, which was unhelpful, by the way.  About an hour after that was plugged into my arm, I was taken for a CT Scan, during which I apparently passed a stone and felt relief that lasted for a few hours, by which point I was home with my diagnosis of kidney stones...no ruptured arteries or tumors.  That's all they did at the hospital: make me wait on a gurney, give me one dose of pain medication that didn't work and take a CT Scan, oh, and then talk to me about it for a minute or two.  The doctor spent a total of perhaps six or seven minutes with me during all this, and one nurse was involved in the hanging of the saline solution.  Otherwise, I might just as well have stayed home as I passed another stone later in the day...just as painfully, I might add...and got as much relief with acetaminophen as I did from whatever the hospital gave me, that is, I grinned and bore it.  But the episode passed, as did the pain, until I got the explanation of benefits from my insurance company.  That four hour event in which I didn't even get to lie in a real bed cost $7,902, and that is what I'm on about today.

Since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare if you are a Republican who disdains Democratic successes, there has been an ongoing controversy about the benefits we will derive as a society from the law.  First there was the website itself, then how many would actually sign up, then the Republican inspired lawsuits about subsidies, Medicaid expansion and constitutionality in general, and the tens of bills passed by John Boehner in The House to repeal the ACA, none of which was anything but a flailing gesture intended to keep the attention of those already on his side regarding the ACA.  And somehow, those partisan, arbitrarily contrary efforts yielded legislative hegemony for the Republican Party in the form of majorities, and hence "control," in both houses.  (I say control with the qualification that as long as the Speaker of the House can pass special rules to prevent the opposition from calling a vote on a particular bill and The Senate continues to honor that now-decades-old tradition of filibustering by taking a vote, rather than taking the floor and speaking, as long as you have a 41 vote minority behind you, no one has control except for the purpose of ensuring that nothing happens in Congress.)  And during all this sturm und drang over healthcare there has been some lip service paid to the issue of the cost of healthcare, but the primary issue has been the effort by President Obama and his party to make sure that, whatever the cost, everyone has access to healthcare, which is a good thing considering the size of the bills that healthcare generates, as in the case of my kidney stones.  But consider this.  If we paid for our medical care as taxpayers rather than as insured individuals, none of this would be an issue.  Healthcare represents 20% of our gross domestic product.  That's a total of about $3 trillion a year--at least one and a half times the cost in the next most expensive country, Germany, and two or more times what it costs in the other twenty five or so of the most industrialized countries in the world.  That is the problem.  Healthcare is too expensive, and it has thus become a privilege rather than a right.

In my final analysis, while the ACA was a good first step, it includes a middleman, the insurance industry, which makes more money the higher costs are because that is how they justify higher  insurance premiums, a percentage of which is profit.  The proof I need to the effect that we need a single-payer system is in my own experience with kidney stones if nowhere else, and I am beginning to think that the only way for us to solve the problem of healthcare being rationed by financial status is for everyone to get kidney stones...and to have to pay the bill himself.  Of course, I don't wish the experience of kidney stones or the bills on other people, given what I went through...except perhaps John Boehner, and you can throw Mitch McConnell in there too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The new congress--the 114th--has just begun, but the character of this two year session is already apparent.  The first legislation to be considered by Mitch McConnell's new Senate and John Boehner's House was intended to abrogate President Obama's immigration initiatives by de-funding them, and to roll back the effects on our biggest banks of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the catastrophic near-failure of those banks in 2008-9.  It is Mitch McBoehnell's dream: they can now undo everything accomplished by the Democrats and President Obama and bring us back to the state of affairs that existed when the financial failure began, but with the advantage of unlimited campaign funding courtesy of our newly conservative Supreme Court and its decision in Citizens United and an even wealthier plutocracy that capitalized on the financial crisis while the rest of us floundered.  The now have impunity to utilize the lawmaking process to keep the Republicans, and hence conservatives, in office...and wealthy.  At the same time, their judicial assault on the Affordable Care Act continues unabated with the justification that the American people "hate" the law, even though polls indicate that they want to keep it in place, but revise it where it needs revision.  How the Republicans have convinced the American majority that putting them in charge was good for the average man and woman is a mystery to me.  Our only hope is that President Obama grows a spine and uses the veto to prevent complete predation of the bottom 90% by the top 1%.

But I wonder; do the American people not know that among the lawsuits leveled at the Affordable Care Act--Obamacare if you prefer--one of them would serve no purpose but to take federal subsidies away from people who therefore will no longer be able to afford health insurance?  Why would the American majority, which claims to be righteously Judeo-Christian, vote for that?  And as to the repeal of the sections of the Dodd-Frank Act that require the big banks to divest themselves of the dangerous investments that got us into so much economic trouble and keep their operations for the banks' corporate profits separate from those undertaken on behalf of federally insured investors, who would vote for that?  Yet, the Republicans have overtly vowed to do these things, and others, and they have now achieved hegemony in our entire legislature, having won majorities in both The House and The Senate.  And they still insist that they seek compromise when all they do is assert their own conservative, trickle-down principles that have the effect of further stratifying our economy, and thus our society.  In short, the conservative, Republican Party wishes to preside over a return to the "Gilded Age" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by conserving wealth at the expense of the working people who created it for their employers, and the working people keep voting for them.

To be somewhat specific as to Obamacare, the Republicans with their new majority in both houses propose to change the rule, which comes into effect this year, that the employer of anyone working 30 hours per week has to provide health insurance for that employee so that only workers working 40 hours or more have to be provided for if that employer employs 50 or more people.  The rationale is that employers will reduce the hours of the already underpaid workers below 30 so they don't have to comply with the law, but why would that be to the advantage of the employer?  The work still has to be done, so he'll only have to hire more workers to replace the hours of production he loses.  According to Republican orthodoxy, hiring more workers, even if they earn less, is a good outcome.  In the alternative, the Republicans argue, the employers of fifty or more would drop employees so that he no longer employed 50 people, but again, someone has to do the work, so does that mean that the remaining workers get more hours, and thus come closer to a living wage.  Isn't that consistent with Republican dogma too?  None of what the Republicans want to do is rational even under Republican, conservative models if you are a working person, yet our working people continue to vote sufficiently Republican that the party is ascending in terms of its power.  It's all reminiscent of the lyric from that old sixties song: "something's happening here...what it is ain't exactly clear."  You wanna know what I think?

It all goes back to that old Will Rogers line: "I'm not a member of any organized party.  I'm a Democrat."  It is the Democratic Party, from top to bottom that has failed, not that the Republicans have succeeded.  All those things I discussed earlier were on the news, but the Democrats failed to attach them to the issues that comprise the partisan divide.  Democrats--aligned primarily with progressive principles--are diametrically opposed to most of what the Republicans--aligned primarily with conservative principles--propose to do.  And what the Republicans propose to do is not so good for the majority of us who don't happen to be well-off.  The Republicans are waging a class war, but somehow, the Democrats seem to be unable to make that clear.  They seem unable to explain how the Republican agenda is deleterious to the egalitarian principles on which this country was founded, and that the proof is in the fact that wages have not increased appreciably in terms of current dollars for the past 35 years...ever since Ronald Reagan first promoted supply-side, trickle-down economics...but business is enjoying record profits.  So, I guess the bottom line is that we Democrats have to change our criteria when we look for candidates to run for national office on our ticket.  We still need people with high-minded ideas, but what we need more is people who can explain them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It appears at last that the Islamic Jihadist movement has gone too far...for Muslims.  Even Hezbollah, which is widely regarded as a radical, and even terrorist organization has condemned the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical-cartoon magazine, along with the internet disseminated beheadings of bound and helpless westerners, the kidnappings of little girls, and the whole-sale slaughters of small school children and whole villages in Africa as inimical to the existence of Islam in the modern world...doing more harm to the Prophet Muhammad than childhood education or any book, film or drawing could ever do.  And it seems that even the Muslim community in France as a whole has been galvanized by what it recognizes as events that do not burnish, but rather tarnish the international perception of Islam and besmirch the faith over a billion and a half human beings.  French Muslim clerics have publicly condemned the terrorism that has ignited a broad based French demonstration of sentiment against not Islam as a whole, but against the intolerance of diversity demonstrated by the Jihadist few who perpetrate these acts of bestial terror.  But the real test is not in the words uttered, even if they are shrieked from the rooftops.  The real test is in the actions that are taken, and in the identities of those who take them, that ensue upon these signal acts of gratuitous brutality and cruelty.

The unfortunate truth, it seems to me, is that the primitive forces riddling world-wide Islam are not accessible from without.  We drop bombs on the Islamic State, and with some effectiveness lately, but no matter how many we drop, and no matter how effective, the will of the very few among Muslims to inflict pain, suffering and fear on the rest of the world cannot be crushed by military force alone.  Nor can we identify the villainous culprits who would inflict their views on us all by the use of intelligence gathering and espionage.  The identities of these putative Muslims is known to others either on the fringes of the movements concerned or in the Mosques where they worship by virtue of the stridency of their pronouncements, both public and private.  The key to defeating Islamist terror is not forces from without, but forces from within.  This latest heinous act and its sequel in a Jewish delicatessen in Paris that apparently was intended to facilitate the escape of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre have precipitated the appropriate response from the Muslim community, but it remains to be seen whether that indignation, and perhaps even consternation born of fear that a holocaust-like mentality will surge in the rest of the world and become a groundswell of sentiment toward revenge and extirpation like that which led to the extermination by the Nazis of millions of Jews and others, will inspire a unified Muslim campaign to expose and purge from the ranks of civil Islam all those who would victimize the rest of us.

Though it is the case, and always has been, that the victims of Islamic extremism have been other Muslims, no countermovement has formed as yet.  That has been the missing mechanism in the fight against the inhumanity that characterizes Islamic Jihad as conceived by movements like ISIL, al Qaeda and the Nusra Front, which now has turned its bellicosity toward even Hezbollah in light of condemnatory statements made in the aftermath of the terrorism most recently in the news in France and Lebanon.   Thus, it may now be the case that the militants have turned on the wrong Muslims and thereby promoted their own destruction.  Hezbollah has demonstrated not just resilience, but competence in its activities in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Israel, and that formidability, together with the lack or restraint and integrity in which they indulge, could be the harbinger of the destruction of the malignancy of what might be referred to as Jihady imperialism.  Now, if the Muslim population of the world takes up activism in pursuit of those whose actions besmirch them all, there could be substantial progress toward the eradication of radical Islam for the benefit of all.

Time will tell how far the current, tumescent indignation over terrorism will go and how long it will last, but without it, the effort to extinguish terrorism as a substitute for proselytizing will be a decades long, if not an endless, slog.  So it is time for the reactionary social forces that have led to calls for exclusion of Muslims from German immigration policy, among other things, to unite with anti-reactionary millions from within Islam.  They are oddly natural allies in the fight against the terrorism scourge that affects us all, and from that unity will arise not just a formidable force against brutality, but a union of interests that can guide mutual tolerance in a world of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.  We can be united in the fight, and thus we can ensure that such movements as plague society today cannot emerge again.

We are all in this together.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We have discussed the Keystone XL pipeline in the past, so I won't burden you with a reiteration of that discourse now, but it is important to maintain a fresh memory of the facts germane to the pipeline's completion for purposes of considering what is relevant to us in today's letter.  The Keystone XL pipeline is only a part of a larger project: the Keystone pipeline system.  The XL portion runs only from Hardistry in Alberta, Canada to Steele City on the Nebraska-Oklahoma border.  It is a duplication of an extant portion of the Keystone system that runs from Hardistry east through Canada, and then south at a 90° angle briefly through Canada to a point on the Canada-US border due north of Steele City from which it then runs straight south to Steele City.  The effect of the XL portion of the pipeline will be to slightly more than double the capacity to transport Canadian tar sands oil to its destinations in the United States, primarily on our Gulf Coast, over a route that forms the hypotenuse of a right triangle formed with the already existing Keystone sections I described above.  There are no opinion there...just facts.  But there are opinions on the issues of whether the XL is necessary, useful or even harmful to American interests.  I am of the latter persuasion for several reasons.

First, the material to be transported through the XL is even more hazardous if spilled--and all pipelines suffer spills, some regularly--than other forms of oil already running through American pipelines all over the country serving terminals and refineries from New Jersey to California.  Second, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called President Obama out when he introduced his new bill to give congressional approval to the XL pipeline on Wednesday by calling it a "jobs bill"--that's the Republican way of vindicating anything they want that is otherwise dubious...they call it a "jobs bill"--for determining to veto it even before it was passed, as if the issue addressed in the bill were somehow new and more inviting than it was the last several times it was mentioned by conservative Republicans on the floor of each of the houses of Congress.  But analyses of the proposed pipeline concur on the fact that there will not be 42,000 jobs created by building the pipeline, but no more than perhaps 6,000, very few of which will last for the full two year duration of the construction project, and that is the high end of the estimate range, which goes as low as 2,500.  Then, after that two years of construction only about 35 workers will be needed to keep it operating.  So, calling the XL a jobs bill is like pretending that no one objects to it.  Third, and perhaps most important, the US exports something between 70 million and 120 million, depending on whose estimates you believe, of petroleum distillates: gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene for jet fuel, and that is every day.  Again, that is a fact, not an opinion, and like the rest of the facts I have cited, you can check them on the internet by going to reliable, non-partisan websites and reading for yourself.  Most of it is transported from the gulf coast refineries, along with about 200-300 barrels of certain kinds of petroleum itself that are exempt from the statutory ban on exporting petroleum that has been in effect since the mid-seventies OPEC oil embargo.  So, if the oil coming through the XL is to benefit the United States, it has to be refined into products that we will use here at a price that is higher than the price that oil companies and refiners can get in other countries...but we have the cheapest gasoline in the world right now, with the exception of the OPEC countries themselves.  So what is the incentive for refiners and oil companies to keep that oil and its derivatives here in this country where it is less valuable than it is in other places, soon to include Cuba, I might add.

All of that was just priming the pump (no pun intended) for what I am really interested in today.  On NPR on Wednesday, what Mitch McConnell said on the floor of The Senate was distilled (again, no pun intended) to a single line: President Obama has promised to veto this jobs bill before it even passes and gets sent to his desk.  I'm paraphrasing, not quoting, but he did characterize the bill as a jobs bill.  The "White House" response was that The President does not intend to bypass the regular process by signing a bill before he gets the final State Department report on the pipeline.  State reviews such projects when they are the projects of foreign countries or corporations.  And this is what drives me crazy.  The White House response never mentioned the fact that the XL bill has nothing to do with jobs other than a few for limited periods after which unemployment won't be improved at all.  And whoever at the White House made the response apparently never mentioned any of the other matters to be considered before the XL pipeline gets approved, such as the fact that the only people who want the pipeline are the petroleum industry here and Trans Canada, the Canadian equivalent of Exxon-Mobil.  By the way, there is another pipeline, part of the Keystone system I believe, that is planned to go through Washington State, which the people there are protesting just as those in Nebraska are, all of which begs the question, why doesn't Trans Canada build that pipeline in Canada and just send all of the tar sands oil to refineries on the Pacific Coast...of Canada.

Set aside the facts, all of which have been stretched out of proportion apparently.  The XL isn't a big jobs bill, and it probably isn't a catastrophic risk to our environment, although the jury...literally...is still out on that in Nebraska.  But still, the Republicans are able to make hay out of it while "the White House" just paws the dirt and says, "aw shucks, can't we just get along."  Someone should tell President Obama that some guy who looks like a turtle is eating his lunch, and ask him why he doesn't do something about it.  And if you happen to see him, maybe you want to ask him what he hires these guys who speak as "the White House" for anyway.

Your friend,

Mike    

Dear America,

Now that the 114th congress is going to be in session, the Democrats once again have an opportunity to do something smart.  On Capitol Hill they call it the "Nuclear Option."  The Democrats have nothing to lose by advocating it now that they are in the minority in both houses, and if the Republicans decline to effectively eradicate the practice of stalling government by parliamentary maneuver--the filibuster in The Senate and special rules in The House--the Democrats cannot be blamed for using those tactics just as the Republicans did when the Democrats were in the majority.  But if the Republicans do eliminate parliamentary inertia by ending the power of the minority to prevent majority action, they will have to take responsibility for what their 114th congress produces, and I can almost guarantee that it won't be much.  Will Rogers, the everyman gadfly of the 1930's, used to say, "I'm not a member of any organized party...I'm a Democrat."  And that claim to fame--lack of organization--used to be a unique distinction of the party, but no longer is that the case.

Today's Republican Party is at least as fractious as the Democrats, but with a tendency toward internecine, bellicose public discourse that is not only unseemly, but widely destructive.  Partisan dogmatists like Raoul Labrador are persistent mad dogs within Republican ranks, and he keeps getting reelected despite his disruptive behavior.  And then there's Texan congressman Louie Gohmert, who is not only oblivious to the effect his malapropisms and misstatements of fact have on party politics, he doesn't even know that he's a fool, though everyone else does.  He makes the term "buffoon" seem like a compliment.  There's Marco Rubio, the Florida senator of Cuban descent who acts like his parents were saintly political refugees from Castro's Cuba even though it has been pointed out quite publicly that they came to the United States while Fulgencio Batista, the tinhorn American-supported dictator, was still in power, and that they didn't even come because they were persecuted; they just wanted a better life.  And though Rubio's father came here illegally at first, Rubio wants any immigration reform to eschew amnesty leading to citizenship for undocumented aliens in favor allowing them to go through the process of getting green cards.  (He did note in a recent New York Times interview that once you have a green card you are eligible to apply for citizenship, so his opposition to amnesty is really just pandering to the conservative contingent of his party that he needs if he is to fulfill his ambitions to become president: a distinction without a difference, born of political pragmatism.)

The list goes on, including dozens of hyper-conservatives with axes to grind and personal political gains to be pursued.  I would estimate that there are probably at least as many rogue Republicans as there were "blue-dog Democrats."  But the rogue Democrats constituted a different problem since philosophically and politically they were diametrically opposed to much of what the Democrats have stood for over the course of a century or more, that is, the progressive agenda.  They were outliers, and as such, if the Democrats had wanted to disown them--and it would have been smart to do so since the American people blamed the Democrats for the party's near misses and failures, which were largely attributable to the blue dogs--they could have, and Nancy Pelosi should have seen to it, but she didn't.  I believe that is why we don't have a single payer healthcare system, or at least why some aspects of the Affordable Care Act never saw the light of the congressional floor: the power to negotiate with drug companies over the prices of medicines and the flexibility to buy drugs from Canadian vendors if it was cost effective to name just two.  Her failure to exert the power of the Speaker of the House, her office from 2006 to 2010, explains a great deal, and that failure is attributable to her fear of the party minority that was the key to her retention of the Speaker's gavel, which she lost anyway.  John Boehner holds that gavel now, and he is just as pusillanimous in service of his own ambitions as Pelosi was, which is demonstrated by the fact that he didn't even allow a vote on a bi-partisan Senate immigration bill that sat in The House for a year and a half.  And more than once beyond that failure, Boehner couldn't manage to muster the majority needed to pass compromise legislation because of a gang of about 85 congressmen who thought that if they just dug in their heals they could turn the nation to the conservative, dark side.  Thus, the Republican Party still touts the notion that the American people favor repeal of "Obamacare" though, while they favor amendment, a majority don't favor its repeal.

My point is that it looks as though the Republicans gotten what they wished for, but they weren't careful enough about it.  Two years will go by and Congress will accomplish very little, just as has been the case over the past four years of Republican control of the House of Representatives.  Someone will be blamed by an electorate that has already demonstrated a disinclination to support Republicans for nationwide offices like the presidency, and the Republicans will try to indict the Democrats for doing just what the Republicans did for four years: sabotage.  That is why taking away the power to commit that kind of scorched-earth legislative devastation should be ceded by the Democrats.  If they cannot stop the Republicans from doing what they will surely do if they get the absolute power to do so by virtue of repeal of the rules that allow a filibuster in The Senate by as few as 41 senators.  I say, give them the reigns and let them go rather than sharing with them the blame that will surely befall them.  There's nothing to lose.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The conservative battle for political hegemony has gone from simple sanctimony to militancy, and the consequence is a new war directed at accomplishing the goal.  It is a "take-no-prisoners" affair, and the civilian casualties number in the millions. Take for example the controversy over the "common core," which forty three states subscribed to, Oklahoma's revocation of its adoption of the code bringing that total down to forty two.  The battle in Oklahoma was not just vicious, it was personal to many people, including many educators, and the fodder for the canons was ignorance and distortion.  No one has bothered to explain how the common core works or what it is intended to do, so conservatives could mischaracterize it with impunity the way they did with gun control, the national debt and deficit, abortion...you know, the whole panoply of issues on which the conservatives assume their own righteousness and thus forego the niceties of democratic principles and an informed electorate.  It is unscrupulous, and worse, it is relentless.  The conservative vision is to turn this country into a nation compelled to live under conservative rules rather than one that is based on individual liberty.  And with that in mind, it is hard to see how a movement like the progressive movement can successfully fight the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.  The pitched battle over the common core makes the point.

I had a call from my brother, who is not a particularly educated man, but he loves his children and wants the best for them.  When I spoke to him last a couple of weeks ago when I reported to you his conversion to advocate for the Affordable Care Act in light of his first insurance coverage in her lifetime, his report on how his sons are doing was laced with criticisms of the common care and its purported affect on his boys, which he could never quite articulate.  It seems that in New York, the educational establishment is having trouble implementing the common core requirements, including the testing platform on which it stands.  Albeit, these test batteries seem to be onerous for the kids required to take them, but school is onerous in my recollection, so I doubt that having these tests to take depreciates the quality of their lives.  But outside the fact of the burden the testing represents, my brother at least had nothing to say about the common core that was anything but an emotional rant.  Somehow, conservatives have managed to conflate vindication of states' rights, as in the gun law debate, with the fight against the common core without being required by their cadre...or more aptly described, their cabala...to explain the relationship, or common core as a principle overall, so let's start there.

The first time I heard about competency based training or testing was during my master's program in the late seventies.  It isn't a simple technique to utilize because competency is a relative term and agreement must be reached in that regard for such a program to work, but it is essentially what the federal government is trying to induce the states to undertake.  It is, simply put, requiring a student to demonstrate competency in a specific discipline before allowing him to advance to the next level of study in it.  I would argue that that is what a grading system of A's, B;s and C's on report cards does on a simple scale, but that scale has failed us.  Our schools are deficient when measured against the performances of the other advance industrialize nations, and something must be done or our labor market will no longer be competitive for our own children.  That may be a simplification, but I believe it is close enough to make the point.  The federal common core doesn't require that schools teach only what it oversees, but it does require that schools have their students master the core requirements in order to get the federal aid attached to hem.  In other words, the federal government is trying to make sure that every state school system does its job, and somehow, I think with nothing more than the induced paranoia of threatening a federal takeover of our schools and a national, propagandizing curriculum, conservatives have managed to seduce ordinary parents that they are in jeopardy, and thus, so are their kids.  It is demagoguery in its most insidious form--it paints the objective as just the opposite of what it is, and does so relying on nothing but fear and misinformation.  And in the final analysis, the conservatives are engaged in a cynical, in fact diabolical, attempt to gain power through the use of unjustifiable fear...which the Democratic Party seems incapable of mounting a campaign against, so I have an idea.

I've said it before, but let me say it again.  The mistake the federal government is making is offering the rewards for bringing their standards up to an acceptable level is that the states themselves are the problem now that the Republicans have enjoyed their resurgence of the past six years.  The better process would be to appeal directly to the parents, and this is how.  In New York when I was a kid we had a Board of Regents, which awarded a special  "Regents' Diploma" to those who did well on standardized tests that were analogous to the common core of today.  In addition, if you scored high enough, you got a scholarship or a small grant, depending on where on the curve your score wound up being.  If the federal government did the same thing, I guarantee that the parents in every state would demand that their school boards prepare their students for the exams, and in so doing, the modicum of general knowledge in math and science that we need for our workforce to be completive for the rest of this century would be provided.  And all this baloney  about having to "teach to the test" and the teachers losing their autonomy in the class room would just disappear.  

I, for one, think that there is no shame in testing our students to see if they have learned at least some acceptable proportion of what we are trying to teach them, and then giving them a credential with which they can tell the world of business and industry that they have done so.  It seems like a good thing to me.

Your friend,

Mike