February 2015 Archives

Dear America,

The XL segment of the Keystone pipeline system made news again this week.  The Republicans in congress lived up to their threat as the bill from The House to approve the pipeline over The President's objection was also passed by The Senate and sent on to the White House where President Obama vetoed it...as he promised he would do.  The bleating of the purportedly wounded conservative Republicans could be heard around the country as they claimed that the Democrats, and The President in particular, were obstructing the creation of tens of thousands of jobs as they continued to leave the Department of Homeland Security unfounded in lieu of reversal by Mr. Obama of his executive directives regarding immigration.  But the claim of obstruction rings hollow enough that Senate (Republican) Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a bill to The House that would fund Homeland Security without the quid pro quo of rescission of executive orders on immigration.  House Speaker John Boehner promptly declined to predict whether he would allow a vote on the senate bill as he cowered in a corner in fear of what the conservative wing of his party...aka the Tea Party...banged on his office door demanding that he take administrative measures to prevent passage of the bill, which everyone knows would pass if put to a vote in The House as a function of political pragmatism if not conscience, conscience in The House being something of an oxymoron.  But the facts that are relevant to all this belie the Republican puling about it.

According to The Economist magazine, President Obama has exercised his veto power only three times in his entire presidency, fewer than almost any president in history, so the claim that he is preventing congress from exercising the will of the people is unjustified.  Then there is the Republican record of obstruction during the first six years of the Obama administration, which was overt and unabashed.  I heard a congressman on the news making the claim that the Democrats were obstructing Homeland Security funding by filibustering the house bill requiring reversal of executive immigration orders before funding the department.  But just after he made that claim, even he...brazen as he is...qualified his claim of obstructionism by saying that the Republican party had been the obstructionists, but now the Democrats were.   Partisan hyperbole is not very effective when you admit that it is hyperbole in the next sentence...and what's more, it looks moronic, but that never stopped Republicans.  Then there is the issue of the XL segment of the pipeline itself.  All it does is increase the volume of tar-sand oil that can be shipped from Canada to a preexisting junction in the pipeline system that already exists in Steele City, Nebraska.  And as to the number of jobs that construction will produce, The Economist points out that at most about 3,900 jobs will be created for two years to build the pipeline, and we produce nearly ten times that many every month without the pipeline, and those will be mostly in Montana, which doesn't have an unemployment problem.  Add to that the fact that The Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill...in fact two of them...early in the last session of congress, but Boehner--again in fear that the conservative wing of his party would take his speakership away from him--refused to even allow a vote on it.  How can that obstruction be blamed on the Democrats or President Obama; how can any of this obstruction be laid at the doorstep of anyone but the Republican Party, yet they continue to try.

But, while I oppose the XL because I think it will result in nothing better than a few temporary jobs with the capacity to export Canadian oil through our Gulf Coast refineries and ports, it just doesn't seem that important in light of the continuing trends in accidental spillage of crude oil as it is transported by rail instead of pipeline.  Even environmentalists may now be reconsidering their opposition to it in light of the comparative scale of damage done by rail transport over pipeline conveyance.  Maybe this isn't the battle of principle that the Democrats should be waging.  It probably isn't a good idea to raise the amount of Canadian crude that goes through our country to other places, but it just may be that the better course of prevention would be campaigning for legislation that does so.  The Republicans and their patrons in business oppose such legislation, preferring to loosen the restrictions on exportation of domestically produced petroleum that have been in effect for forty years or more.  Maybe the contrast between their position and Democratic opposition to allowing petroleum exportation before filling all domestic need would be good for the Democrats.  Maybe introducing another immigration bill in The Senate would help too.  And then there is Republican effort to vitiate the positive effects on our populace that the Affordable Care Act has had.  There are over ten million of us whose lives have been improved by the ACA, and all of those represent votes in 2016, both in congressional races and in the presidential election.  There is still the possibility that the Republicans will see the light, even if it is just the illumination of their own self-interest.  Why are you laughing; it could happen.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We are developing a caste system in this country that is becoming no less rigid than the one that has plagued India for millennia.  A Brahmin class is emerging in our corporate boardrooms, which has more to do with the quality of life that the rest of us enjoy than one might think.  These new corporate Brahmins occupy the boardrooms of corporations big and small, and they control their own destinies with absolute impunity...or at least they have until recently.  The way in which they do so is that they elect one another to boards of directors and hire one another as corporate executives, and then they control not just their own compensation, but that of the high level executives they hire for the companies whose boards they sit on, and vice versa.  Thus, the flow of money from corporate coffers, and therefore from the pockets of investors, is essentially guaranteed and in the cases of corporations that issue hundreds of millions of shares--and there are many--by imposing bylaws that prevent in practical terms anyone else from nominating new board members, they live like sybarites in perpetuity.  In recent times, corporations have liberalized their bylaws, but they still essentially prevent interference with the perdurance of the corporate noble class.  The executives nominate the board members over and over again, and the shareholders have no choice but to elect them as they have no opposition.  Then, the board members, who are often compensated with six figure remuneration for attending one or two meetings per year, vote on the seven or eight figure compensation of the chief executive officer and his henchmen who nominated them.  It's a neat little daisy chain that redounds exclusively to their collective and mutual benefit, and it doesn't even depend on whether they succeed in their corporate ministrations.  In the cases of CEO's over the years, they enjoy compensation packages that not only allow them to "earn" more in a year than most people earn in a lifetime in many cases,  they have predetermined termination provisions in their contracts that guaranty them years worth of compensation even if they are fired for incompetence and failure.  In the cases of large corporations in particular, this process is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had its own compensation issues a few years ago when its chairman was let go for lack of competence, and his package turned out to be worth over a hundred million dollars.  A few years before that, Jack Welch, the long-serving moron who was CEO of GE for decades, retired or was forced out after a hundred million dollar loss stemming from his efforts to incorporate Honeywell into the GE corporate structure.  But even with that as his legacy, he received the use of a million dollar condominium in Manhattan as part of his compensation package, though there was such an uproar about it that he had to give it up.  In short, corporate governance has become the inbred family business of a select few people, and they have had absolute impunity until now.

What is happening is that strictures on the nominating process for corporate boards have created a furor and regulators have been compelled to take notice.  I wrote about the catch-22 nature of the bylaws at Goodyear several years ago, in which nomination of an alternate corporate board member required a large proportion not just of the attendees at the annual meeting, but of the total number of shares held: a standard that was impossible to meet because so few shareholders actually attend those meetings.  And now, the poster child for the kind of corporate corruption that has dominated American business and industry for a century is Whole Foods Markets.  You would think that a company that specializes in something like organic food for those of us who are morally and health conscious would also be moral, but it isn't.  Shareholders sought to put an on the annual meeting's agenda a new rule to allow holders of 3% of outstanding shares to nominate board members, but Whole Foods prevailed upon the SEC to allow it to exclude that proposal in favor of its own, which requires 5%, a burden that is almost impossible to meet.  To no one's surprise, the SEC took Whole Foods' part, but the hue and cry was so loud that the decision had to be reversed, and now the 3% rule is going to be considered, much to the chagrin of the Whole Foods powers that be.  There will likely be some changes at Whole Foods soon, which means that the silver spoons will no longer be part of the corporate place setting, and thus will not be passed down from generation to generation of corporate mafia members.  But if we have to rely on the SEC to protect shareholders in this way--and by the way, in Europe corporate shareholders owning just 1% have the right to nominate board members--we will have a tough row to hoe.

The alternative is legislation either on the state or federal level, but the likelihood of that occurring is slight at best.  The majority of states now have Republican legislatures, and as everyone knows, that's what we have on the federal level too.  Can you imagine John Boehner and Mitch McConnell permitting bills liberalizing corporate governance to reach a vote on the floor of either the Senate or The House?  It won't happen while they are in power.  So, our Brahmin class will likely live on for a good long time, and who can predict what kind of rapacity they will engage in with the protection of their Republican patrons as secure as it seems to be.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Recently, there has been a burgeoning understanding of and interest in the disparity between  rich Americans and the rest of us as to how much we earn and how much we have.  Over the past six years of the recovery from the economic crisis that our financial institutions put us in it has become increasingly apparent that the top 10% of our economic community, and the top 1% in particular, have nowhere near the exposure to financial adversity that the rest of us do.  While they have much more to lose than we do, losing it makes very little difference in their lives because no matter how much disappears due to imprudence or greed, there is plenty left to support their sybaritic lifestyles.  As to the rest of us, it only takes mild adversity before we begin to feel it in fundamental ways...the homes we live in, the food we eat and where our children go to school, for example.  Still, the political trend in this country is toward Republican leadership, and that puzzles me to some extent.  I realize that for the most part that is a function of rubrics rather than specifics.  By that I mean that Republicans paint themselves as "values" politicians, and for the most part, voters don't need to know much more.  Republicans oppose same-sex marriage, and those who vote for them probably never ask themselves why they care who else gets married.  They oppose "Obamacare" on the grounds that it is somehow an impingement on fundamental, constitutional rights, but voters never seem to ask themselves whether that is indeed so...much less whether there aren't many ways, such as taxation, public safety, public education and other kinds of mandatory insurance in which we all allow our rights to be circumscribed in the name of the common good.   But most relevant among Republican tropes is "trickle-down economics," which is a euphemism for the paternalistic notion that if we just defer to the rich and support their accretion of the wealth of our nation, they will take care of us by giving us minimum wage jobs and insurance that will still allow us to be bankrupted if we get sick often enough or really badly.  They will give us charter schools for the select few and the kind of income that keeps them rich--unearned capital gains and the earnings of the corporations in which they own stock--will be taxed at a lower rate than the hard earned wages of the working poor and the lion's share of the middle class.  Even though we are the majority, and even though they have someone else's interests at heart, Republicans continue to prosper politically, and in that vein, a new issue is arising as state budgets, under the austere aegis of the Republican polity, begin to look for revenues that can help to dissolve the state budget deficits that have begin to pop up all over the nation.

For purposes of this discussion there are two kinds of taxes: income and sales.  Income taxes, as you all know, are assessed on a graduated basis according to income level...from each according to his ability to pay, more or less.  Sales tax however is set at one rate.  Everyone pays it on food, clothing and services at that one rate.  So if you spend 20% of your income on food, that expenditure gets taxed when you make it at the rate of the sales tax in your state.  That translates to a tax of 1.2% of your income if the sales tax is 6%.  The corollary is that if food expense is one tenth of a percent of your total income, your tax is .06% of your total income...a much more affordable assessment that favors people more as they make more...more from each who has less ability to pay.  Here in Connecticut, the governor is proposing a cut in the sales tax.  It is quite modest, but to those who make the least it is the most significant.  In Maine however, and in South Carolina and Ohio as well as other states too, that strategy--taxing those with the least more and keeping taxes on those with the most low--the policy of favoring increases in sales tax for the purpose of closing budget gaps is the chosen path.  The rationale is that keeping income taxes low facilitates business, and therefore job, growth.  But it is still the fact that American business is sitting on a pile of cash totaling something between $2 trillion and $3 trillion while it ships jobs abroad and our federal congress does nothing about tax policy to deter it.  And as to taxation of the investing class, how can anyone subscribe to the notion that people with lots of money need to be encouraged to invest their money and make it grow, and I think everyone can see that.  Yet as a people, we continue to vote for people who promote the notion that the rich deserve to be rich, and without them the rest of us would be even less well-off than we are...that we need them more than they need us.

I'm raising this issue because even though it has been raised many times before, it never seems to be taken into account by the people who matter most on this account: those who have the least, and thus pay their taxes with muscle and bone instead of fat.  I always say that on election day the majority in America get exactly what they deserve.  The problem is that those of us in the minority also get it, and as to the rise of the middle class, as a general rule that's more often a shaft than an elevator.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As any of you whom I could rightfully call my readers know, I am fixated, if not obsessed with people thinking for themselves as opposed to subscribing to the thoughts of others.  As you have read in these letters before, I habitually adjure you to think with your own heads, not someone else's.  This past weekend I came across evidence that it is easy to get lulled into false credence...even if you are dead set against it.  I saw a piece in the New York Times "Week in Review" that was an outing of various purveyors of canards around the world, and I was particularly struck by one that related to toasters.  The European Union, or EU, has embarked upon a systematic evaluation of the energy efficiency of appliances in the midst of a broader course of study on increasing energy efficiency and reducing green house gas emissions within its regulatory ambit, and among the appliances studied was toasters.  The British publications The Daily Express and The Daily Mail, which I assume to be tabloids based on the following, decried the purported intention of the EU to ban toasters among other appliances.  So I went on the internet looking for an original account of what the EU is actually doing vis-à-vis toasters and I discovered that, while the EU may issue legislation or regulations regarding toaster efficiency, it is still under study, and initial indications are that toasters having two slots will be required to offer operation of a single slot at a time in order to eliminate the wasteful heating of elements in the unused slot when the user wants only a single slice of toast.  As some of you may be aware because you own them, such toasters are available in this country, though I would wager that most households (and I include this one) don't have them.  In my wife's and my defense, the only things we toast are bagels, and since they only get toasted after being sliced in two, we always need two slots when we use the toaster, but now that I think about it, a toaster that can be operated one slot or two slots at a time at my option makes a lot of sense.  Unfortunately, that feature on toasters is apparently proprietary, so only a few manufacturers make them, but the idea still makes sense, and making such features available universally on new toasters is a thing to be pursued in my opinion, whether with new technology or licenses for the old, but either way, the claim by The Daily's that the EU was threatening to ban toasters was an exaggeration at the very least if not an absurd misrepresentation that swept the nation and became emblematic of the British movement to withdraw from the EU.

In the course of researching the toaster thing, I came across a commentary on the Glass-Steagall Act, which you may recall me writing to you about in the past...many times...and it was written by David Stockman.  Stockman was Ronald Reagan's budget expert, and over the past few years I have seen him interviewed on television by some very credible people regarding deficit spending and the like, and he is surprisingly rational about such things.  So, when I read his thinking on the big banks and the need to re-enact Glass-Steagall in lieu of the watered down, politically kneaded Dodd-Frank Act, I once again credited him with sagacity.  First of all, he agrees with me.  But in the end, I felt affirmed only until I read more on the website on which it appeared: David Stockman's "Contra Corner."  As it turned out, there were articles on that site advocating auditing The Fed, which is one of Rand Paul's libertarian fixations, and various diatribes against "crony capitalism" (a pet peeve of mine too), not just the toaster thing.  But there also appeared articles by a guy named Pater Tenenbrarum, who it turns out is one of those Hayek/von Mises economics guys, all of whom fall under the rubric "lunatic fringe" in my opinion.  I don't subscribe to the notion that a belief is valid just because someone propounded it a hundred years ago, although guys like Glen Beck seem to.  The corollary to that principle is that I don't subscribe to the views of people who rely on such antique ideas just because they have some kind of intellectual "cred" by virtue of their reliance on them today.  Thus, I viewed Tenenbrarum's views on everything, including toasters, with a uniform tendency to dismiss them, but many people aren't as skeptical as I am.  The consequence is that the Libertarian camp gets credence for all its ideas in the form of votes for candidates like Rand Paul, which opens the door for the crackpot aspects of their political platform.  That's why this issue is important.

In Britain, there has always been ambivalence about the EU, and I can understand that.  But a canard about banning toasters shouldn't be among the considerations of the British when they decide, and perhaps vote, on whether to stay in it.  Likewise, auditing the Federal Reserve, as Rand Paul suggests, might have a glitzy appeal to those who view monetary policy with suspicion as an artificial manipulation of free market principles...that's the Hayek/von Mises school of thought...and there might even be some merit to doing so, but whether you believe that there is a need for such an audit, it is not the case that government mandates about low-flow toilets and more efficient light bulbs are tyranny, again, as Rand Paul suggests.  Paul justifies his campaign against low-flow toilets with the claim that the pipes in his house clog because the toilets don't flush with the force needed to clear them: a pure canard, though you can find confirmation of the myth on the internet easily...unless you look to a reliable source.  The EPA has a program called "Watersense" that certifies new toilets for performance and efficiency.  Meeting the new standards by which Watersense goes is confirmed by independent testing of individual products, and while the original high-efficiency toilets of the early 1990's had problems, modified designs have rectified them, and new toilets perform just as well as old style, high flow toilets.  That doesn't mean that new toilets never clog, but old toilets clogged too...just no more than new ones.  As to light bulbs, they are flawed to some extent, but we are still importing millions of barrels of oil every day, so we have to do something in the way of common efforts to address the common problem of reliance on the resources of others who may not themselves be too reliable over time.  And as to LED bulbs, I replaced all the bulbs in my house and my electric bill for consumption is down 25%, so they have paid for themselves.  So Paul voiced his subscription to a myth in the case of toilets, and he ignored what has been a national goal for decades, energy independence, because he doesn't like being told what to do...even when it is everybody's best interest, even his.  Now he is running for president.  What would he do if he were elected, and more importantly, what would he base his decisions on.  That's the crux of it, and that is why I always say, think with your own head, not someone else's, and make sure you do it before you vote.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

My wife and I watched some of the Grammy Awards last weekend, and we all have seen the advertisements for the various other awards programs that will be airing in the near future.  Some of them are of near universal interest...the Oscars come immediately to mind for example.  We all watch movies, and for some reason many people are interested in which of them Hollywood likes as much as we do.  I, for one, don't really care how much even Meryl Streep likes a particular movie, but the idea of designating something as the best example of a class of things--movie, actor, actress, director--oddly has wide-spread appeal in this, perhaps the most competitive society in the world.  And the process might have some utility in an arena in which things in the real world matter, like politics.  So I am initiating a new award: the LIAR in American politics.  LIAR is an acronym for Lack of Integrity And Responsibility.  Of course, the Republicans will always have an advantage in the competition for the honor as they are so adept at avoiding responsibility for their actions by blaming others for not doing things the Republican way, but in the end, some Democrats might well be high in the running too...Bart Stupak comes to mind in that regard...but I digress.  I think the award should be given once a month, and a yearly award should be given in any year in which a single individual wins the monthly award more than once.  Of course, given the politics of the 21st century, there will have to be multiple winners in most years.

For February--this will be the first monthly award--even this early there are two stand-out contenders: Mitch McConnell, of late the Majority Leader in The Senate, and John Boehner, The Speaker of The House.  There has been an ongoing squabble over immigration reform, not just between conservatives and liberals, but within the Republican Party as well.  As you may recall, a bipartisan immigration reform bill--actually two of them as I recall--went from The Senate to The House of Representatives early in 2013 just after the 113th congress began.  At that time, even Mitch McConnell was cajoling the Republicans in The House to pass it, but one man, Boehner, not only prevented the bill from being passed, he prevented it from even coming to a vote by having his majority party give him or his designee...in that case the former deputy obstructionist/liar in chief, Eric Cantor...the exclusive right to call for a vote on the bills, which is a right that House rules bestows on every member except when such a special rule is passed by a majority, and the Republicans had one.  So, the reason that the executive orders issued by President Obama are such a bone of contention with Republicans now is that Boehner wouldn't allow them to be resolved by putting the matter to a vote...the hallmark of American Democracy everywhere but in congress.  Now, The President having gone around the 113th congress, in the 114th congress Boehner and his Republican colleagues have resorted to an often-used Republican tactic: extortion.  They have attached to a bill funding the Homeland Security Department a provision that reverses The President's executive orders, which exempt those who have been dubbed "Dreamers"  (undocumented immigrants who were brought here by their parents when they were too young to make their own decisions in such matters) from deportation for a period of time in contemplation of immigration reform that should address their status.  That funding, or appropriation bill was sent to The Senate where the Democrats did to the Republican majority what the Republican Majority did to them about a hundred times in the last session of congress: they filibustered it by simply voting against cloture.  It takes 60 votes in The Senate to allow a bill to get voted on because there is a "gentlemen's agreement" to pretend that a filibuster--stalling a bill by talking endlessly so as to prevent a vote--is in progress unless a sixty vote majority declines to pretend anymore.  That kind of vote is called cloture, and the Republicans didn't have the 60 votes required, so it was prevented from passing, though not defeated.  Now here's how these two guys shot to the front of the pack of contenders for the February LIAR in American Politics award.

First, McConnell, in a tacit admission of the fact that others had done unto him what he had done unto them, publicly called Boehner out by saying that the Republican majority in The House had to send The Senate another bill such as would get through The Senate--appropriations bills have to originate in The House under the American Constitution--even though that is the last thing he wants.  But Boehner wasn't having any, and he shot back that, "It's time for the Senate to do their work," which is McConnell's responsibility.  And he went on to suggest to McConnell that he should "...go ask the Senate Democrats when they are going to get off their ass [sic] and do something other than voting no..."  as if Hell has already frozen over.  Boehner is famous for crying when he makes profound pronouncements, but this time the only crying was of crocodile tears.  They are of the same variety as were cried when Newt Gingrich refused to pass a budget in The House during the Clinton administration...which lost the Republicans seats and Gingrich his job as Speaker...and which hurt the Republicans the last time they tried it under the aegis of McConnell's and Boehner's leadership.  With the figurative butter dripping from his lips, Boehner effectively swore that it hadn't melted in his mouth, and he apparently thinks that this time, the American people won't notice.

So, while McConnell is just politically disingenuous this month, Boehner is definitely this month's LIAR, and I can't think of any event that could occur in the balance of February that would change that.  Are you voters going to give him the good news or should I?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I find myself wondering to whom I can turn for factual coverage of the news.  I subscribe to the New York Times on weekends, but even though the Times is reputed by conservatives to be a liberal journal, the paper's coverage of several things has waxed Republican lately, and if I hadn't known that the purported facts with regard to one issue and the soritical leap taken in another were erroneous, I might well have just accepted that what the Times was saying to me was the truth because that used to be something on which one could count.   I've written to the Times about the factual error--the XL segment of the Keystone pipeline does not run from Canada to the Gulf Coast, it runs only from Hardisty, Alberta in Canada to Steele City in Nebraska, which route is already served by sections of the Keystone system--but they persist in reporting the canard that the XL is a new route to the refineries on our Gulf Coast.  No wonder the American people are in favor of the thing; they don't know what it really is.  And while I don't really feel terribly concerned about the XL itself, I am concerned that for various reasons, it may be just the nose of the camel inside our national tent, and I believe that if the facts were adequately reported somewhere other than on the internet (even Wikepedia seems more accurate than the Times on this point) there might be few more questions asked...even by Republicans.

But the worst aspect of the casual editing that seems to be de rigueur at the Times these days is that it distorts public opinion on all kinds of issues, and thus puts people in office who shouldn't be elected to anything.  For example, there was an article in Sunday's Times about the Affordable Care Act that started off with the story of a woman who complained that the orthopedist that was in her insurer's network was too far away.  She complained, "don't they realize that he is in another state?"  And as it turned out he was, but he was only 14 miles away from her home.  That's a twenty minute ride, regardless of whether you have to cross a state border.  I drive that far to see my orthopedist, and it never seemed a hardship to me.  But I didn't get my insurance through the state run ACA website whereas she apparently did, and of course, she had other complaints.  For example, her new plan changed the amounts of deductibles and co-pays on her.  Again, my plan did that too...well before the ACA was passed.  Others quoted in the article complained about their doctors not participating in their plans, but that didn't start in 2010 either.  I could go on, but I think the point is made: the fact that people have complaints about their health insurance companies is nothing new, and it has almost nothing to do with the ACA.  Then there was the article about detention facilities on our southern border in which women and children are housed while their cases are being adjudicated.

The article starts with a title page on which the following appears: "The Obama administration's draconian policy toward female refugees and their children has sown misery on the border..."  When you read the article, you discover that the conditions of which the article complains have existed since the W. Bush administration.  But you won't find any reference to the fact that two bipartisan immigration reform bills were passed by The Senate in the 113th congress and died in Boehner's House, not because they couldn't pass, but because Boehner wouldn't allow a vote in the knowledge that it might well do so.  Add to that the Republican intransigence on the sequester, which resulted in cuts in the budgets of all government departments including Homeland Security, and a commensurate decline in the quality of housing for the applicants for asylum who were the subject of the piece.  And while we are considering unconsidered facts that bear on the issues raised by the Times article, we should think about the fact that the Obama administration had to go hat-in-hand to congress to get more money for judges to adjudicate the cases faster and get people out of the holding facilities, the quality of which was the central cause for vilifying President Obama.  So, the Times' castigation of the Obama administration may not have been wholly misguided, but there was more ground for criticism of other politicians who got no mention by the author, and that never crossed the mind of the editor apparently.  If it did, he certainly didn't insist that the deficiency in the piece be corrected.

My only point is that we cannot have a true democracy if our electorate is not informed and endowed with resources by which to check the facts for itself.  The internet is reliable if one uses it with an appropriate amount of discriminating diligence, thoroughness and skepticism.   There are reliable sources that are unbiased on almost every point of fact, and if we all refer to them and confirm or refute claims of fact...especially those made by people with political motivations...we should be able to make sound decisions about who runs our country.  But if we don't, we'll get...well, what we have now.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As The Senate continues to thrash about--its Republican leader kidding himself that he is showing the nation that Republicans can govern by bringing up the same bill over and over for the dubious purpose of abrogating President Obama's immigration reforms--the world watches and scratches its collective head.  It seems that every lesson that the Democrats learned over the four years since they took over the House of Representatives was not wasted just on the Democrats, but on the Republicans too.  The same rule that thwarted the Democrats in The Senate for six years continues with regard to all but a few legislative initiatives is the one that is thwarting the Republicans.  The filibuster is the enemy of all legislative progress, and everyone in The Senate knows that.  Yet, on the first day of each session of Congress, when it is possible to change the rules of that body so as to vitiate or even eliminate the pernicious practice, the party that has retained or assumed control declines to do anything, and thus seals its own fate as a feckless leader in a process that has ceased to be a process at all.  But the Republicans still think that a little slight of hand can reflect the inability of the ruling party to accomplish anything back onto the opposition Democrats, and in that vain effort, they have not "introduced" a healthcare plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.  They seem to think that this recycling of ideas that couldn't fly before will be more acceptable than it has been in the past just because they dressed the pig up and put lipstick on it.

The supposedly new package that the Republicans are trying to float comprises nothing more than three or four regressive ideas consolidated into just two, which actually led to Obamacare, as the Republicans pejoratively call it, but they have no more appeal now than they had when they galvanized the Democratic opposition to the ACA into voting for it.  They knew that if they didn't pass the law we would all get the Republican version, which is as usual a giveaway to the members of our economic society who already have what they need.  Specifically, the core of the Republican plan is three ideas that go back a long way...though not quite as far back as the Republican proposal of what became "Romneycare" in Massachusetts and Obamacare on the national level, which they now oppose, mostly because they didn't pass it when they had control of both bodies of Congress during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration.  The first is one that has been purported to be a new alternative to the ACA on two or three occasions when it came from the mouth of two or three Congressmen: taxing the cost of health insurance that employers give to employees as income to those employees.  In other words, the Republicans want to raise money by taxing the middle class, which lives on salary, while protecting the tax advantages of corporations and the rich.  The second idea--it is multi-faceted but it comes down to using states' rights to prevent any form of universal healthcare from occurring--is to give the states discretion as to whether they want to have insurance exchanges and to roll back the expansion of Medicaid, thus decreasing federal budget deficits by making healthcare less accessible to the poor and disadvantaged.  And the third is to protect the tax deduction that employers get now for the premiums they pay...another sop for the business community in the name of proliferating business activity as if the $3 trillion that it already has in the bank can't be spent unless it is compounded with tax breaks.

So here is the scenario that the Republicans want to foist on the American voter as governance.  They propose to prevent an increase in the minimum wage, deport as many of the workers who will do the work that Americans refuse to do as they can, continue to allow the rich to pay less on their capital gains than the working people of this country pay on their earned income, and see to it that healthcare continues to be rationed along lines that correspond to economic prosperity.  All in all, the Republican platform can be summed up this way.  We will give to, and protect the wealth of, the plutocracy of the United States, and we will keep our foot on the collective neck of the working majority in this country, but we will tell everyone that what we want to do is best for them and they will believe it even though their lives will not improve while the rich get richer.  That's the Republican plan...it seems.

So, Paul Ryan will continue to blame the less fortunate for not being more fortunate and he will call their wish to be fairly compensated for their work and to see the doctor when they are sick "envy."  He will claim that the rich are paying too much in taxes without explaining how if that is the case and it is truly inimical to economic growth the wealth of our nation gets more and more concentrated in the hands of those who do not do the work that creates that wealth.  And his reward will be that he will be reelected, and frankly, in Ryan's case that has been a pretty good plan.  He continues to get reelected in his mid-western district while he spews supply-side economics shamelessly.  He peremptorily denies the reality that his type of Ayn-Rand-inspired economic policy has prevented the working people of this country from improving their standard of living for three decades...ever since his patron saint, Ronald Reagan, unleashed those policies on us all.  And simultaneously, more congressional districts have sent more Ryans to The House.  So in the end, you've got to hand it to the Republicans.  Contrary to any rational notion, they have found out that we Americans are masochists, and as long as they continue to inflict pain on us, we will continue to send them to Washington and allow them to make their friends richer.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

You may not recall, but the rate of economic growth in this country for the third quarter of 2014 exceeded 5%.  It was the best rate for any such period since the beginning of the economic crisis from which we are finally emerging.  So, when the Republicans swept the mid-term elections of last year, Mitch McConnell claimed that that bump in growth was anticipation of a Republican legislature being manifested in voter preferences.  But as it was reported in the New York Times a few days ago, the rate of growth for the fourth quarter was only 2.6%, which would be nothing to brag about, but for the fact that it was still in excess of that in Europe and the rest of the world.  McConnell hasn't been confronted with the fact that in the quarter in which the election occurred and the Republican majority in both houses actually was "achieved," the rate of growth dropped sharply, even though it was the season for Christmas shopping and the ebullience that usually accompanies Thanksgiving. I guess McConnell was a little premature in his attempt to take credit for growth that, as it turned out, didn't happen, but that's Republican politicking for you, and it goes on ad nauseum.  For example, President Obama has released his annually proposed budget, which has been an exercise in futility since he became president in this country in which "loyal opposition" is anathema to the party that doesn't occupy the White House...the Republican Party in particular, and the demagoguery has filled the airwaves.

Paul Ryan, the erstwhile and unsuccessful Republican candidate for vice-president and still chairman of the House Budget Committee, has kept the ball rolling with his comments on the budget.  He is claiming, like the rest of his party, that President Obama's economic policies have been a failure, and that his new budget reflects "envy economics," which Ryan asserts have been the policy for the past six years.  But since the Republicans have controlled the legislature with the majority in The House and de facto control of The Senate via the filibuster for the past four years, that would seem a claim that could be no better than disingenuous, but more likely nothing less than politically inspired fantasy rhetoric.  Virtually nothing that the Democrats have wanted has gotten through the federal legislature since the Affordable Care Act and the Obama stimulus package with the exception of a two percent hike in taxes for those making over $450,000 per year.  As to the ACA, the law has been successful in reducing the number of the uninsured in this country by millions, and it has cost the rich nothing.  The stimulus is almost universally attributed with averting a depression instead of a deep recession with unemployment being cut almost in half since Barrack Obama took office--another success.  Meanwhile, the modest increase in the rate of income taxation imposed on the upper-middle to the upper-upper classes hasn't kept them from gaining from the recession that afflicted the rest of us and accruing an even greater proportion of the nation's wealth than they had before the economic crisis began.  In that respect, Mr. Obama has failed in that the disparity in income and wealth from the top to the bottom of our economically stratified country has only increased, but Ryan and the Republicans would ordinarily consider that to be a success, though Ryan has chosen not to give President Obama credit for that one, and rightfully so.  Then, of course, there is their opposition to increasing the minimum wage so that it can also become a living wage.

Ryan's contorted criticism and McConnell's preposterous boasts have only served to illuminate the shallow motivations behind almost everything that the Republicans say as a party, but the question in the end is, why are so many buying their self-service.  There continues to be resistance to the ACA, both in the form of public opinion and Republican tactics--Boehner's Republican controlled House is preparing to pass another bill to repeal "Obamacare" to go along with the previous forty-seven, and McConnell's Republican Senate has passed its own version of the House bill approving the XL section of the Keystone pipeline--but no one seems to be repudiating their thinly veiled partisanship or the fact that neither serves the American people well.  While the XL serves only to bring oil from Canada to a pipeline bottleneck in Steele City, Nebraska and the ACA isn't going anywhere unless the Supreme Court coalesces with conservative forces to effectively eviscerate The Act in any of several law suits brought by conservatives including Republican attorneys general, these gestures don't seem to register with the voters as being what they are.  The XL serves no purpose but to move Canadian oil closer to the refineries that will export the petroleum distillates that it will become, and the vast majority of the American uninsured will have access to affordable healthcare, in many cases for the first time in their lives thanks to the ACA, but the Republicans have achieved legislative hegemony by trumpeting their opposing positions on those issues and others.  Immigration reform is openly scorned by Republicans almost dogmatically though the Hispanic working class favors it as do the "dreamers," who have done nothing but work to assimilate since their parents brought them here, and they seek to reduce tax rates for business so as to put more money in the hands of corporate executives even though American business as an institution is already sitting on close to $3 trillion in profits accrued since the recession began that it declines to reinvest in American business and industry.  How can votes for more wealth for affluent businessmen overcome the the votes of a large segment of the workforce that makes their quality of life possible?  Then there is Governor Scott Walker of Michigan--who disemboweled the public labor unions shortly after his first election--not only celebrating his reelection to the governorship of his state, but apparently running for the Republican nomination for the presidential election in 2016...to rave reviews, I might add.

I can't help thinking we are headed for a fall as a nation.  Nothing makes any sense anymore.

Your friend,

Mike