March 2015 Archives

Dear America,

I'm going to make a prediction now that you shouldn't repeat.  The reason that you shouldn't repeat it is that if you do, people will think you are either stupid or nuts.  I predict that Hillary Clinton will not run for president.  All of the pundits are assuming that she will be the Democratic nominee because no one seems to be stepping forward to challenge her presumptive nomination, but whether a credible alternative to Clinton comes forward or not--Elizabeth Warren (she would be the first woman president elected), Chuck Schumer (he would be the first Jewish president if elected) or someone else who would be a clear alternative to politics as usual--Hillary Clinton won't get the Democratic nomination even if she tries, and frankly I don't think she will.  But either way, without the nomination, she can't run for president.

My reasoning isn't really related to the conventional wisdom.  I don't think Republican attempts to resurrect Benghazi will ultimately amount to anything but a colossal waste of time, and the fact that the Republicans persist in it will redound to Clinton's benefit.  And references to ancient history like White Water won't be availing either.  Everyone knows, even everyone who supports her, that honesty is not her cardinal trait.  Like probably every other politician who has achieved the kind of prominence on the American political scene that she and her husband have, she has no doubt made some deals and done some things that would disqualify her for sainthood.  No, a lack of probity will not be her coup de grâce.  A lack of prudence will.  Just look at the things that have brought her character into question.  White Water was a land deal that went bad, and it involved some characters of dubious virtue.  The Rose Law Firm, for which she worked at the time, put together all of the papers necessary for that deal, and she herself oversaw the process.  It was a classic case of questionable cards being kept close to a player's chest, but as a lawyer myself, I can tell you that handling your own legal work is imprudent.  There is even an old saying in that regard; any lawyer who represents himself--or in this case herself--has a fool for a client.  And that tendency to chose bad counsel seems to run in the family; just look at her husband's choice of attorneys during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Bill Clinton chose Robert S. Bennett to represent him in the lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones.

Jones, who was represented by some clever Republican attorneys and still ultimately demonstrated that she was nothing more than a refugee from a trailer park, sued Clinton for sexual harassment--there was a proposition related to oral sex, a Bill Clinton modus operandi,  involved--among other things, and in the course of that litigation, then-President Clinton was subpoenaed for a deposition.  Bennett fought the subpoena, but ultimately he lost, and that should have been the end of it.  All Bennett had to advise Clinton to do was refuse to testify, or at the very least, allow him to testify and then advise him not to answer certain questions...specifically those involving Monica Lewinsky.  The worst that could have happened to Clinton was that he would have been defaulted on the issue of liability and never appeared under oath anywhere in the Jones case.  He would have had to pay her a couple of hundred thousand dollars (at most) in a judgment against him related to the degradation of Jones' reputation, if she even had one, and left some questions about his universally-known reputation as a hound dog in the public perception of him, and they would have been there anyway.  His political accomplishments would have put all that in his rear view mirror within a year.  But now he will forever be known as the president who lied to the American people and probably perjured himself in the process of saving himself a few dollars that someone else would have paid for him anyway when he really never had to say or do anything.  Oh, and by the way, he is also only the second president ever to be impeached, albeit unsuccessfully.  That puts him one step ahead of Richard Nixon in the historical race for the honor of most legally imprudent president.  Bennett obviously didn't know what he was doing, or in the alternative, Clinton himself overruled Bennett and did the stupid thing anyway, which is no better.  A lawyer taking his own legal advice is only one rung of foolishness below representing himself.

So now comes Hillary with her computer server in her basement and only one cell phone on which she did not just her personal business but the business of the nation as well.  You don't have to be a lawyer to know that if you have some business of your own that you don't want to share, whether it is questionable or not, you don't do that business on your official telephone line, which is what her personal cell phone became by virtue of her using it as such.  And then, when some officious politicians inquires of you as to what your cell phone records contain, you don't pick what you want them to know and provide it to officials in another department, and then erase everything, including the records related to your official duties.  She could have kept those and erased the rest, and all they could have said about her was that she had done her job but was hiding something: an allegation that they could never prove.  Now, she has also destroyed official records and presumably all traces of them on a device in her home, and potentially destroyed evidence...a crime.  She could be impeached before she is even in office.  That she finds herself in this predicament is just stupidity on her part, and she may have been advised by a lawyer to do it all.  Forget the legality...or illegality...of it all.  Do you want a president who couldn't figure that out in advance and avoid it just by keeping her private affairs private on a second cell phone?  Common philanderers and crooks know better, but you don't want them for your president either.  They may lack character, but at least they are smart enough.  Hillary doesn't seem to be.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It is difficult to say whether the Middle East is imploding or exploding, but the distinction is significant, especially in the United States.  President Obama has essentially abrogated the "Bush Doctrine," which was a euphemism for the notion that everything everywhere is our business, an adjunct to the conceit of "American Exceptionalism."  Thus, Mr. Obama has made it American foreign policy to play a measured role in military interventions when we are asked to do so, and even to precipitate in and lead such efforts in some instances as in Libya and against Syria's ISIL contingent, but to decline to prosecute such conflicts either unilaterally or even with ostensible alliances...whether of the willing or the coercible...as if they were matters of  American self-interest.  In that context, an exploding Middle East might be a matter of significant American interest, and the potential of ISIL to send human projectiles back to our shores may qualify as such.  But when it came to Libya, American policy was to participate in the rebellion against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi but not to act independently from the coalition, including NATO, that gave air support to the rebels.  Similarly, though there is a revolution going on in Syria, it constitutes the implosion of a state controlled by an autocrat, and as such, the United States has given some meager logistical support to the rebels, but no intervention has been undertaken.  The only role being played by the United States in the Syrian conflict now is that of providing air support to troops from the region, such as the Kurdish pesh merga, in their attempts to degrade and destroy ISIL, which again may constitute a matter of American self-interest by virtue of its potential to foment and execute attacks against us on our own shores.  But as to the revolution against the dictator Assad, we are not participants in the conflict.

The Bush Doctrine took another tack.  In Iraq, George W. Bush manufactured justifications for invasion of that country and deposing its dictator, Saddam Hussein, with thin, and what turned out to be the apocryphal allegations such as Hussein's production of weapons of mass destruction...the infamous WMD's.  Similarly, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan for the stated purpose of apprehending Osama bin Ladin, but that effort continued long after it was apparent that no such apprehension was possible as we didn't know where he was.  As it turned out, he was holed up in Pakistan, where he was captured, though without the necessity of a war against that nation.  But even with these two most recent instances of the failure of American interventionism fresh in our national memory, some American politicians continue to cleave to the paternalistic notion that we are not only responsible for the entire world, we have the right to assert our values whenever we see something we don't like as well.  In that vein, John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, opined during a hearing with one of our military leaders that Saudi Arabia's decision not to inform us about its air strikes into Yemen...another middle eastern country that is imploding...was a reflection of a lack of trust in the United States among  nations in the region, impliedly because we aren't waging more wars in the middle east like the Bush adventures for which McCain apparently pines.  Of course, in the case of John McCain we are safe from any backsliding at his behest since his only real credential in the area of foreign affairs is that he was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War and he came within 30 demerits of being expelled from the U.S. Naval Academy when he was there, graduating fifth from the bottom of an 899 member class.  But there are senators and congressmen who are actually capable of intelligent argument, and among them may be the next George W. Bush.

It has taken us the entire duration of the era between World War II and the Obama administration to realize that, while we indulge in the misguided belief that everyone loves the United States and subscribes to our values, such is often not the case.  There are places even in Europe where the United States is considered intrusive and pontifical in its foreign policy and its moral prescriptions for others.  But now there seems to be an abreaction to the evolution of our policies to other nations in the form of calls for additional American participation in the travails that have befallen the middle east.  Criticism of the Israeli policy of settlement in the West Bank of the Jordan River is becoming politically incorrect after finally achieving at least the status of a topic for legitimate conversation over the past few years.  Though that policy is probably at the center of propaganda being used by Israel's enemies, the country persists and the obduracy on that point of Benjamin Netanyahu got him reelected at this critical time in middle eastern politics.  All he needs is the support of the Republican reactionary contingent in the American congress to embolden him to escalation of his tactics and exacerbation of an already tense and dangerous situation.

Thank God John McCain didn't become president.  All Netanyahu needs is a cheer leader like McCain to put him over the edge.  But we still have a McCain problem.  If he manages to continue to be a leader among Republicans, who knows what he can talk someone like Jeb Bush, another marginal thinker, into advocating.  The focus of our national politics during this prelude to the 2016 elections has been domestic issues, but we had better watch out.  With potential presidents of the ilk John McCain lurking...Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Mike Pence and Mike Huckabee to name just a few...the world blowing up might be a more pressing concern.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Bibi Netanyahu is the most dangerous man in the world.  He is more of an obstacle to world peace than ISIL or Vladimir Putin.  As prime minister of Israel, he has the most deleterious effect on that nation's future of any other politician anywhere.  In fact, he is not only an obstacle to peace, he is a catalyst for conflict among nations, and he has established his dubious distinction in the clear sight of the entire world.

His purported fear is that Iran will get a nuclear weapon and do something with it...to Israel in particular.  But that fear is questionable as is the moral validity of Israel's position as a nation, and Netanyahu's in particular, relative to the issue of Iran's nuclear plans, and it is so for two reasons.  The first is the most obvious: if Iran launched a nuclear attack on probably any other nation, but on Israel for certain, there would be nuclear repercussions for Iran that would turn it into not just a pariah in international relations, but a radioactive one with millions fewer citizens and leaders imprisoned for war crimes.  The use by Iran of a nuclear weapon would be so self-destructive that no one in his right mind, not even an Iranian politician, could possibly envision guiding his nation into doing so.  The consequences of a nuclear attack by Iran would be so devastating and so immediate that it is rendered a virtually impossible prospect.  Bibi and the Israeli people have nothing to worry about in that regard.  The concept of "mutually assured destruction" is nothing new, and except for our own use of nuclear weapons before anyone else had any, such weapons have never been used in the context of international hostilities for that reason alone, and it obtains still, even when it comes to Iran where political moderation seems something of an oxymoron.  But the second reason is the more compelling.

Everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, which it first tested in 1966, but Israel refuses to admit it.  And though Israel has in fact made a unilateral commitment never to "introduce" nuclear weapons to the Middle East--a policy known as "nuclear ambiguity" or "nuclear opacity,"  the fact that Israel is a member of the "community" of nuclear nations is evidenced by the refusal of Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, if nothing else.  And with all that as a predicate, it must be noted that, while Iran has never bombed Israel, in 1981 Israel did bomb Iran's neighbor, Iraq, with the stated purpose of destroying the nuclear facilities of a nascent Iraqi program to develop nuclear power generation, but more likely its own nuclear weapons program, at least according to Israel.  And as to its respect for the sovereignty of other nations in the region, Israel has committed espionage against Iranian nuclear infrastructure used for production of the raw materials necessary for nuclear power generation, or bombs Israel assumed.  And then, of course, there is the near continuous expansion of Israeli settlements in furtherance of its occupation of the West Bank of the Jordan River, which is inhabited primarily by Palestinians and is the most likely site of the Palestinian portion of the contemplated "two state solution" to the Palestinian problem.  The international community of nations, including the United States, subscribes to the notion that the Palestinian people have a right to autonomy, and most national governments also subscribe to the two state solution as the most reasonable means of effecting such an advent.  Until recently, that community of nations included Israel, but in the course of campaigning for his reelection last week, Netanyahu disavowed the creation of a Palestinian state, though he now is attempting to repudiate that position by parsing and equivocating about it.  And now, though he is claiming that his opposition to the two state solution is only "at this time," no one believes him, and a reputation for something less than candor preceding him, thee is little likelihood that he can unravel the position he has taken and resume his posture of innocence and his claim of unjustified mistrust of Israel.  There has been a fifty year long attempt to justify Israeli settlements as necessary for national security because Israel is only a few miles wide in that area, but no one has ever explained how increasing that narrow strip of land between northern and southern Israel would enhance Israel's capacity to defend itself.

But that theory has been tested twice.  Israel managed to win the first such test, the 1967 Six Day War, and in what is called the Yom Kippur War of 1973, they managed to defend all they had conquered and to rout the combined forces of Egypt and Syria again, gaining even more territory, which they ultimately abandoned.  Thus, Israel has demonstrated that the settlements are not necessary for self-defense, and further, that international law obliges Israel to withdraw from conquered territory as it has done in the past.  But all that being said, there must be a safe Israel for the world's Jews to repair to, and the fate that international Jewry has suffered over the course of centuries makes that abundantly clear.  That is why Netanyahu, who is really no more than an epigone of one of his rabidly nationalistic predecessors, Manachem Begin, is such a danger to the world.  Just as in the case of the impending agreement between Iran and the rest of the world regarding nuclear weapons and technology, if the Israelis do not allow some form of conciliation with the rest of the nations in the Middle East in the form of a Palestinian nation, an Iranian accord, the withdrawal of West Bank settlements and some accommodation to the region regarding its own nuclear armaments, it is not peace that is guaranteed by recalcitrance.  It is perpetual siege and menace.  Netanyahu is the primary agent of internecine destruction of a region that is uniformly Semitic, albeit so variegated as to be a virtual cauldron of cultural animus.  The solution to all of the problems of the region is more likely to be an alliance among wary parties than the erection of physical and political embankments between them, and Netanyahu will never see that.  And as long as he leads his nation, the nation never will either. Israel is at the political and geographic center of the region, and if it is ever to eventuate, Israel will have to be at the center of the peace as well.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, which is administered by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed something that should be of interest to the Republican Party if they want to retain power in congress.  The poll still shows that more Americans oppose "Obamacare" than favor it, but then there is something ostensibly paradoxical that the poll adds to its assessment of popular opinion on the subject.  While 43%, down from 53% last July, oppose the Affordable Care Act, only 41%, up from 37% favor the law.  However, while there is still a slight margin  for those opposing the law rather than favoring it, only 40% favor repeal while 46% prefer that congress continue to implement the law...or expand it.  The only logical conclusion to be reached from this reliable survey of public opinion is that repeal of the ACA would be politically unpopular overall, and thus would result in a diminution, or perhaps even a loss, of the Republicans' control of the House of Representatives and The Senate.  The fact that the majority of Americans want the ACA to endure its challenges in the legislature and the courts is nothing new, and in fact Americans have always felt that the ACA was inadequate, not that it was objectionable as an overall concept, though you would never know that if you just listened to the Republicans.  But the frailty of the margin by which the American people disapprove of the law, whether because it goes too far or not far enough, may well be within the margin of error, and that has two implications.

The first is that the Republican claim that the American people oppose the law is now questionable, but by the time the next poll is taken, it will probably be an outright lie.  And when that change eventuates, all the time the Republican Party has wasted trying to repeal it will become apparent for what it is: political obstructionism in the face of a vacuum of plausible ideas on the subject within the party.  The second relates to the Republican budget proposal that was just released. It includes repeal of the ACA as part of what ostensibly is a deficit reduction package worth, the Republicans say, $5.5 trillion over the next decade, and that is the platform on which they will presumably run...for both congress and the presidency...in 2016.  As part of that deficit reduction plan, they want to change Medicare by converting it into a voucher program, but despite the smoke and mirrors that are sure to be rolled out in defense of their retreaded plan to cut a hole in the social safety net that has been built since FDR, you can't get something for nothing.  If their plan cuts government funding, the money that it saves has to come from somewhere, and it will come from us.  Thus, it will require that some people who would otherwise have been able to rely on a sound, self-funded insurance program--remember that we pay for Medicare in advance with assessments against our paychecks that go into a trust fund from which all Medicare expenditures are paid, and with small monthly premiums that come out of our Social Security checks--will no longer be able to do so in their retirement years because they won't be able to afford it.  They will lack the funds necessary to supplement their vouchers in order to acquire adequate insurance coverage for themselves...unless the ACA continues to be in effect along with the subsidies it entails.  Put concisely, the ACA is necessary to make their Medicare voucher program work, and the Democrats will surely make that point in 2016.  The Republicans have hoist themselves by their own petard, and they have built that bomb and set it off in a single document.

Set aside the rest of the proposed budget for the moment, though there are sure to be austerity measures that would change many lives for the worse if they were ever to become law.  They will just be frosting on the Democrats' cake.  But this two pronged attempt by the Republican Party to shoot itself in the foot...again...is almost a travesty.  No, it is a travesty.  It is a mockery of prudent fiscal economy as laughable as a Punch & Judy show.  While the Republicans beat their constituents over the head with the club of mock austerity, the audience--that is the rest of us voters--will be watching, but we won't be laughing as their plan is to beat us over the head too.  By 2016, it should be apparent that the Republican Party is on the side of very few of us.  There are about ten million millionaires in this country, and I would guess thousands of billionaires.  More than ten thousand households declare incomes of $10 million or more, but those ten thousand households plus whatever proportion of the ten million millionaires see fit to support them, cannot get a majority of Republicans elected to congress by themselves.  The rest of us will have to be on a hemlock diet to go along, and I don't think that a majority of the American electorate is willing to commit suicide.  The real question is this.

Will the Republicans recognize the political folly of their position on Medicare and the ACA in time to save themselves?  I don't think so.  The next iron they will shove into the fire, I predict, will be cuts in Social Security benefits--again, a program that is paid for out of a trust fund that we all contribute to just as we would to annuities provided by private insurers if there was no Social Security program.  The Social Security Trust Fund is solvent well into the 2030's, but some kind of adjustment needs to be made, and given that the disparity in the levels of prosperity favoring the top one percent of us, who own just under 40% of the wealth in America, and the bottom eighty percent of us, who own only 10%, the logical solution would seem to be raising the level of income at which FDIC contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund cease to be required.   There is no need for the elderly to stop eating beef and start eating chicken as the "chained CPI" would require, and that is where the Republicans are headed.  But if you compound the loss of disposable income required by a system of Medicare vouchers rather than the current Medicare plan with less in monthly benefits on account of the chained CPI, you wind up taking a significant bite out of every senior citizen's budget each month, and a majority of seniors have been voting Republican lately.  But I don't think they'll do so for much longer.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I can't understand the Republican persistence in what seems to me a transparent strategy of desperately clinging to any "scandal" that they can possibly characterize as such.  The most recent is about emails...Hillary Clinton's emails.  What is it that they are trying to accomplish by castigating her for using private email for official communication rather than the state run system, which by the way is probably more likely to get hacked than the private server she has in her house.  If you think about it, there can be only one motivation for the Republicans: they want to see her personal emails, not the only ones to which they have at least a colorable right--those that have relevance to her tenure as Secretary of State.  But, if she had wanted to sequester her personal communications from those related to her official duties, she would have done just the opposite of what she did.  She would have used her official email account for anything she didn't want to hide, and she would have used her personal email, which no one has a right to see ordinarily, for everything she wanted to hide.  That is why eventually, the public is going to figure out that the Republicans aren't looking for any kind of scandalous official behavior that merits sanctions or, more importantly, the opprobrium of the voters; they are looking for scandalous personal behavior.

My guess is that there probably is some of that personal indiscretion in her personal communications, but my opinion is that it isn't anyone's business unless it was illegal.  Indiscretions don't count among those illegal things. They aren't anyone's business any more than was the fact that Bill Clinton couldn't keep his fly closed.  I have to admit that Bill was significantly diminished in my opinion because he turned out to be such a roguish infidel, but that doesn't diminish his accomplishments...and for those who admire roguish infidels, it doesn't mitigate his failures either.  Similarly with Hillary, I think she is probably a pretty shady business person, and maybe in consideration of areas other than sexual dissoluteness she is just as amoral as her husband.  But when the public begins to say "so what" every time Trey Gowdy rants about transparency in emailing, it's going to be one more demerit for the party to go along with the other thing Gowdy rants about: the nearly three year old Benghazi murders committed not by Hillary Clinton, but by rabid Jihadists in Libya.  No one cares whether Clinton, the State Department and the CIA didn't know who the assailants were for a few days.  To reference an old political axiom supposedly coined by Abe Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time...etc.  The Republicans are getting into a delusionary mode in that regard in that they seem to be operating on the belief that you can fool all of the people all of the time if you just persist.  Three years after Benghazi, they still haven't found anything inculpatory...at least not as to Hillary Clinton.  But still they persist as if the millions of dollars they are spending and the lack of result, much less the lack of portent for any result they might get, will not be significant to an electorate being squeezed on all sides by Republican austerity and self-declared sanctimony.

And now, that lack of apprehension of the potential electoral consequences of all their flailing around without even the prospect of anything meaningful eventuating has been manifested in another way: a letter from 47 Republican senators to the government of Iran about the nuclear negotiations of a coalition of nations led by the United States, which comes directly after the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner to Israeli prime minister BiBi Netanyahu to address the American congress on the same subject.  The question all this evokes has to be, what were you thinking and what purpose did you think you were serving.  As to Boehner, I just attribute his decision to invite a dogmatic reactionary like Netanyahu to speak before congress to intellectual kinship and partisan obstructionism.  But as to the 47 senators who signed that letter, even those who did so are beginning to equivocate on having done so, and their natural allies in the local presses of the states where they run for office are briskly castigating them too.  Then there are people like Senator Rand Paul, who says contrary to any rational interpretation of events that the letter strengthens The President's hand...what?  How?  No one is going to subscribe to the notion that it makes clear to the Islamic state of Iran that Mr. Obama has to bring home the bacon with these negotiations, and I chose bacon deliberately.  Everything the senator signatories said was inimical to any kind of treaty...good, bad or indifferent...from the Iranian perspective.  Why would they agree to forego further development of their nuclear potential for two years until another president and congress take office with the knowledge that they might well be right back here where they started at that time?  No, the only legitimate interpretation of these events is that 47 Republican senators, led by a neophyte who just seems like another Tea Party loose canon, are doing more flailing about in an attempt to diminish their opponents' political prospects.  It's nothing but partisan scratching and biting because in the war of ideas, the Republicans seem to be unarmed.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Sometimes I read the letters from readers to a local publication called the "Reminder," which I believe is a franchise, so there may be one published in your area and delivered to your mail box for free every week or so.  I never, however, read the comments sent to the New York Times, nor do I send comments to either publication, though my frustrations over what people seem to think, including some columnists at the Times and even editorialists like David Brooks, well up inside me and  virtually compel me to write these letters even though I suspect that no one reads them.  Underlying that frustration has been the presumption that almost no one, if anyone at all, sees the problems we face in accurate terms as evinced by those comments published in the Reminder.  In the Reminder, the letters are almost always uninformed if not misinformed or even dysinformed in ways that are not matters of opinion but rather reflect objective errors, that is, factual errors: Obama has raised the tax on rent, the XL pipeline will create millions of jobs and will link Alberta with the Gulf Coast, common core requirements are the federal government's attempt to take over local and state educational institutions so as to control what we think, gun registration is a threat to our freedom as a nation in that it is how the federal government will find us to take away our guns and oppress us, and the like.   Such opinions as those relative to the common core issue, to choose just one, in that they seem so commonly held are a virtual indictment of our educational institutions as they functioned before the common core and they commend the very thing they condemn.  They manifest the fact that someone needs to improve our methods for teaching the young how to think, which is not the same as teaching them what to think.  The paranoid among us rightfully fear such mind control, but common core requirements do not threaten us that way in that they don't relate to imbuing us with ideas; rather they inculcate in our students the capacity to reason for themselves...to think with their own heads rather than someone else's as I am fond of saying.  The opinions of David Brooks, on the other hand, employ erudition to propound ideas that may or may not be valid, and to advocate for subscription to them.  That, it seems to me, is somewhat more menacing, which also acts to compel me to write to you like this.  My consternation over all this is fueled by the assumption that no one is arguing such points to any effect with regard to the opinions of one so illustrious as Brooks, much less disabusing the Reminder's letter writers of their erroneous notions.

To put it concisely, I have been daunted by the generalized presumption that readers of both the Reminder and the New York Times (in consequence of the misinformation it disperses with surprising frequency) don't seem to make distinctions between fact and pronouncement...between other people's opinions and the truth, which may or may not comport with one another.  And in a presumption that, as it turns out, was unjustified, I feared that even among the readers of the newspaper that is attributed by many with veracity above that of all others, no one seemed to be reasoning with any greater acumen for the task than were the readers of the Reminder, at least not in my experience.  But this week I read several of the comments of readers of one of David Brooks' editorials and I was surprised by their quality and perspicacity.  Brooks reported the findings of a scholar whom he apparently respects relative to the role of education in reversing income and wealth inequality.  That scholar's thesis was that raising the educational levels of workers would serve to equalize the levels of prosperity of workers relative to  management/ownership.  But there are soritical flaws in that proposition, most prominent...I might say glaring...among them being that someone has to mop floors and fix cars, and that will be the case whether we all have Ph.Ds or not.  I think that the problem we face as a society in this regard isn't that some people aren't qualified to do the more sophisticated work of a technologically advancing society.  The problem is that those on the top of the labor-mangement/ownership pyramid have insufficient respect for those who perform the labor from which they benefit financially and on which they rely in their personal lives.  The problem isn't that we don't pay the grill worker the same remuneration as we give to the owner of the franchise.  The problem is that the franchise owner benefits from the labor of many, but pays them inadequately relative to the importance of what they do...for him.  In other words, he doesn't attribute to them the significance of their efforts in the creation of his wealth.  And, while there is certainly a correlation between what we see as the deficiencies of life among the working poor on the one hand, and what they earn on the other, the notion that those deficiencies are a function of a lack of objective moral and ethical standards in consequence of the failure of the labor force to acquire graduate degrees, which is what Brooks' contends in his piece, is that soritical error to which I referred earlier.  But much to my relief, the readers of the New York Times see that too...almost univocally if their comments are any indication.

I suppose the bottom line for me personally is that my letters to America are not feeble, isolated efforts to be heard over the tidal surf of ideas held by the vast majority.  There is a debate going on among us, and both sides are represented.  They just don't read the same things.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

For years now I have been contemplating how the Republican Party has managed to reemerge after being repudiated in the 2006 mid-term elections.  That year, the Democrats assumed control of both bodies of congress, and two years later, they took the White House as well, which gave me hope that the American electorate had finally seen some kind of light.  But in 2010, just two years after the election of our first president of color, the Republicans took back the House of Representatives and made John Boehner its Speaker, and now, after a drubbing in the Obama presidency's second mid-term elections, the Republicans control both houses of congress with their focus on paternalism--that is, supply-side economics--once again the guiding principle of our federal government.  It is laws that control our national course, not the occupant of the White House, who serves no purpose other than to guide the ship of state and execute the laws that congress passes, albeit with some discretion of his own.  Despite the concern about executive power in American politics these days, it is congress that sets the domestic course of our nation, though exertion of that power requires univocality in all branches of government.  The Supreme Court is almost theirs, requiring just one more conservative justice to make its conservative bent a reliable fait accompli., so that is control of the second of three branches for the Republicans, who tend to be conservative as we all know.  And now, Jeb Bush is ramping up his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, trying to paint himself as both the conservative and moderate candidate that the Republicans need to recapture the third branch; the presidency is the last element of political power in America needed for complete Republican dominance of our nation's ethos.  But all this precipitates the question of how the American polity has come to submit to the conservative notion that, while government control is inimical to political and economic freedom, the oligarchy of the wealthy can be trusted to distribute Americas weal equitably.  Though I have suspected this before, the Jeb Bush campaign, which but for Scott Walker is all but a juggernaut, makes it all clear.  The Republican strategy is to sell the American voters a package that comprises mainly, and most overtly, the moral vision that is inherent in conservatism by wrapping it all in pride, omitting the notion that pride is a sin and instead encouraging the conceit that we, as Americans, are something special, and then throwing in supply-side economics as an inseparable part of the package.

It is obvious that such is Bush's strategy in much of what he says, which is rich in cliché but devoid of substantive defense of plutocracy and the basic concept of "American Exceptionalism" that candidates in the Republican Party have for decades invoked as axiomatic in one form or another while the rest of the world sees it as conceit and arrogance.  Most recently, Bush has said almost that in his comments about President Obama's geo-political philosophy.  Bush wants to resurrect his brother's under girding foreign policy motif by asserting that the United States is a uniformly unquestionable force for some objective good that will serve the world, without reviewing the nature of that good or ever questioning the political and economic forces behind our international goals.  It is the teleological equal of Richard Nixon's statement that if the president does it, it is legal.  But the rest of the world doesn't subscribe to the notion that if the United States wants it, it is by definition in everyone's best interest.  Much of the world sees us as Philistine pillagers who are to be resisted, and that is why the Iraq and Afghanistan wars spawned ISIL and Iranian hegemony in the middle east.   No president in a century before Barrack Obama has questioned whether the United States should control the world's ethos by divine right, and it is by diving right that we presume to act, including not just sanctioning and rebuking those who don't comport their conduct with our notions of propriety, but waging war on them for it as well.  So now, Republican politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani proclaim that The President doesn't love this country because he eschews the arrogance of conservative thinking.  And while Jeb Bush doesn't explicitly so state, he makes it clear that he concurs.  It is un-American, he intimates, for our nation to conduct the foreign policy of allowing others to determine their own fates when we, after all, know full well what they should be doing, and furthermore, that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing without American tutelage if not moral fiat.  This Bush wants to take us down the same road that the last Bush did, and that is a frightening prospect.

My son texted me a couple of weeks ago and said something like, Jeb Bush might not be too bad.  If my son, who waxes liberal to radical most of the time, has been seduced by Jeb's low pressure sales pitch, I imagine that many liberal-leaning independents will vote for him as an alternative to the feckless Democratic Party's submission to the race, and all conservative independents and Republicans will see Bush as a viable version of the pandering, amoral political ambition of Mitt Romney.  Bush seems like a good guy, and he knows better than to admit something like one of the Romney contretemps: that he likes Cadillacs...his wife has a couple of them.  In the final analysis, Jeb Bush's advantage is that he is what Eric Hoffer, the socio-political philosopher, called a "true-believer," which gives him a good chance of fulfilling his political ambitions, because we are a nation of them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The 114th congress has been in session for about two months now, and whereas the first months of most new congresses are dedicated to major legislative achievements that are intended to demonstrate the commitment and competency of the party in power, this congress has accomplished nothing but humiliation for the newly empowered Republican Party.  The very first step the Boehner-led House of Representatives took, outside of the perfunctory bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that Boehner orchestrates once every month or two, was to pass a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama had previously and continually promised to veto if it was passed by The Senate and sent to his desk, which it was, and which he did just two days ago.  The next step toward political irrelevancy that the Republican leadership took was to pass in The House a new appropriations bill that would fund the Homeland Security Department only if it did not implement President Obama's executive orders relative to immigration reform.  The House bill went to The Senate where the Democrats did to it what the Republicans did to Democratic initiatives throughout the 113th and 112th congresses; they filibustered it to death.  In light of Democratic intractability on the subject...and after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it up for debate three times, meeting with the same filibuster each time...The Senate sent a "clean bill" to The House, even though appropriations have to start in The House under the constitution.  Boehner, after his failure to get his majority party The House to pass even a three week appropriation, got a short term, one week appropriation through so that funding wouldn't run out last Friday while he attempted to reason with the recalcitrant right wing of his caucus, and somehow he managed with another clean bill, this one running until September 2015 passing just this past Wednesday.  Coincidentally, McConnell had his own, almost simultaneous failure in The Senate as a bill to override President Obama's veto of the Keystone XL congressional approval bill failed along party lines.  What a surprise.  All these votes, supposed moral successes of the conservative movement, turned out in reality to be nothing but Pyrrhic victories if not unmitigated failures, and it is somewhat surprising that they even tried given the political realities...and two decades of history of the same.

Starting with Newt Gingrich in the mid-nineties having to capitulate after closing down the government for three weeks with conditional appropriations that President Clinton vetoed, and running through a similar attempt in 2013 that failed despite Senator Ted Cruz's melodramatic actual filibuster and Rand Paul's previous and similarly futile gesture related to the use of drones by the government, the only consequence of these martyrdoms has been execration by the majority of the population.  And as to the veto of the XL pipeline, despite the attempt to make its approval a major issue, the fact is that it means very little even with the bellowing of the Republicans about job creation.  Thus, the failure of their bills to override The President's determination to wait for the official evaluation of the project by the State Department--the normal course of events--has never risen to the status of political miscalculation that the Republicans hoped it would, and now, the humiliation of eminently predictable failure along party lines makes the Republican leadership look like bumbling, bombasts at best.  As it turns out, the right wing of the right wing within the party has engineered its own failure by insisting on the failure of the party as a whole.  But the question all this raises is, will the failure of the Republican right wing be a good thing or a bad one for the nation in the end, and the answer depends on whether both parties understand that this is an opportunity for moderation to prevail again...on both sides of the aisle.

In Parliamentary states, like Great Britain and Israel, governance is effected through formation of coalitions among the several parties in existence at any given time.  For example, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud Party needs its alliance with other parties of conservative and liberal ilk in order to control the Knesset, Israel's legislature, and thus hold the Prime Minister's office.  The same process controls legislatures and the effective chief executive's offices in many European countries, which ends up creating a realization of mutual dependency in the parties, which in turn results in compromise.  We now have a multi-party system in our legislature too; we no longer have just a two party system.  The Democrats have the "Blue Dogs," many of whom are gone now as conservative Republicans replaced them in 2012 and 2014, but as a concept, there is a recalcitrant conservative wing of the Democratic Party just as there is one--the Tea Party--in the Republican Party.  That leaves only one prospect for legislative progress, and that is a coalition of moderates from both parties, and the Homeland Security funding bill is proof that it is possible.  It passed with 257 votes, 75 of them being Republican and the 182 vote balance coming from the Democratic Party.  That is the coalition that can succeed in this Republican Congress.  It is the same in The Senate where the Republicans are in the majority but the bill passed 68 to 31 with more than twenty Republicans voting against the conservative, Tea Party wing's position.

In The Senate, the mechanism for passage was to separate the appropriation from the overriding of The President's executive order, in other words, to repudiate the extortionate tactic of tying funding of something crucial to the Republican position on something else.  It may well be that, at least in The Senate, the days of that kind of anti-democratic practice may be a thing of the past, which is paramount among predicates for legislative progress.  If congress as a whole will desist in this practice of packaging disparate intentions into single "omnibus" bills, the moral equivalent of derivatives in the financial markets, we might begin to see some productive efforts in our legislature.  One can hope, can't one.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

In the interest of full disclosure, let me begin with the acknowledgment that my father was Jewish and some of my relatives were killed and displaced by the Nazis.  With that said, Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to congress today, and except for the din of the political acrimony it has generated, it is probably of little consequence.  Netanyahu, whose nickname "Bibi" is how he is disparagingly referred to in many of the corridors of power in the world, will say nothing new, and his enmity toward Iran, whether more or less justified than Iran's enmity toward Israel, is a well known commodity.  Bibi is widely regarded as a liar and a politician with unlimited ambition that he will serve in any way he can, and his views on Iran are tainted by the things he has done in the way of service to his constituency without regard for their more global consequences.  His claim that the majority of Jews, even in the United States, agree with him that Iran is such a threat to Israel's existence that any deal with them is a death warrant for Israeli Jews is an exaggerated endorsement of his claim to be the leader-in-fact of worldwide Jewry.  As he has puffed himself on the stage of American journalism, other Jews, even Israelis, have been heard to castigate him for making himself the issue with regard to this speech he is giving at the invitation of John Boehner.  Boehner's own ulterior motive is political as is every word he utters whether intellectually honest...as it seldom is...or not, so he and Bibi are appropriate bedfellows in this dubious endeavor.  But the criticism of Netanyahu is broader than the observation that this speech is a contretemps that will further impair Israeli-American relations than his intransigence already has.  While many Jews both within Israel and without see Iran as the "existential threat" that Netanyahu does, they also see the weight of Israeli policy toward Palestinians as an existential hazard for which Netanyahu and his political coalition have not acknowledged, much less accepted, the moral hazard.

The Palestinians are attempting to build a new city, Rawabi, in the West Bank, the territory that comprises land to the west of the Jordan river that has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war and is the home of millions of Palestinians.  But its location in the middle of the desert requires that it be serviced by electricity and water infrastructure that is under the control of Israel.  As to the electricity, it comes from the Israel Electric Corporation, a state owned utility that provides power to the area including both the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian population.  The utility has been interrupting power in the Palestinian areas every day in lieu of Palestinian settlement of a claim relating to millions of dollars worth of the taxes that Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority each month.  Similarly, the water supply, which Israel doles out to Jewish settlers at a rate estimated at six times that with which it provides water to Palestinians in the region, has been withheld from the new city's developer because of a lack of accord on a joint Israeli-Palestinian authority that is required under a prior treaty, the Oslo Accords, to approve all water projects.  That authority hasn't met in five years because the Palestinians have been opposed to projects advocated by the Israelis for the service solely of Jewish settlements, which the Palestinians oppose in accord with their objection to the further colonization of the West Bank under the aegis of the occupying Israelis.  That process of colonization has been the crux of the animosity between Israel and the Palestinians since 1967, and the international community largely subscribes to the principles of international law that ban settlement of occupied territory such has been undertaken by the Israelis for half a century.  In spite of that political impasse, however, Israel's administrators of the West Bank have finally approved the pipeline necessary to supply Rawabi with potable water and the project will now continue sale of residential property on the premise that the Israelis will allow the pipeline in the end to carry water to the community.

The significance of this imbroglio regarding water and electricity is that it is emblematic of the relationship between occupied and occupier, which has spawned actual warfare in the formerly  occupied Gaza portion of the erstwhile Israeli occupied territories, and assassinations and unrest in the West Bank.  And all of this tumult is a function of the Israeli intention to control the West Bank in perpetuity even though an indigenous population opposes even the mere existence of Israel on the premise that Israel is an artificial entity created at the expense of the Palestinian population of the region.  Both sides are irreconcilably wrong given the history of the world and the region in particular.  After World War II, there was no question about the need for a Jewish state, and it was established in an area where there already were many Jews...more to come.  As to the Palestinians, the Israeli obtuseness on the subject of their feelings of dispossession by the Jews of Israel--especially in light of the four millennium old, virtually tribal enmity between Jews and the other residents of what used to be known as the Levant--is not only myopic, it is self-destructive.  Though reconciliation between Jews of Israel and Palestinians as well as other Arab and Persian peoples is a far off dream, coexistence should be the contemporary goal, and even that will require enormous restraint on the parts of both Israelis and Palestinians, not to mention others tangentially involved in the battle of ideas that has plagued the middle-east for thousands of years.  The problem that has to be overcome is the intransigents on both sides...starting with Bibi Netanyahu.