August 2015 Archives

Dear America,

I have been watching the news with a certain unease lately because has sometimes been the case in my experience the news is history unfolding, and not just ordinary, day-to-day history.  There are times when momentus change seems imminent given the news of the day, as when President Kennedy took to the airwaves one night when I was in high school and told the world that only the Soviet Union could pull us back from the brink of the abyss.  That was the climax of the Cuban missile crisis, and I went to bed that night believing that I might not awaken in the morning...that none of us would.  And there have been other historic moments in the lives of those of us of a certain age: Richard Nixon flashing a peace sign as he boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn for the last time; people clinging to another helicopter at the American embassy in Saigon as it carried the last Americans away from the imminent peril of the change of Vietnamese dominion from that of an American ally to that of an American foe.  I saw Neil Armstrong on television walking on the moon before any other man ever did, and before that, I remember watching a Yankee game as a young boy one day when the announcer told us all that the Russians had just put Sputnik in orbit...another moment of deep foreboding; if they could go into space, what more could they do...to us.  But the anxiety I feel today based on what I see on the news has had a more subtle etiology.  It hasn't been one seminal event or speech.  It has been a torrent of news that has intensified over the past few years to the point today at which it seems quite clear to me that seismic change is not just in our future but imminent.

Start with the refugee crisis in Europe.  Masses of people are fleeing conflict areas around the Mediterranean, and they are, for the most part, Muslims being driven away from their homes by other Muslims.  There is Chaos in Libya, fractious insurgency in Syria and sectarian violence in Iraq at the hands of not just ISIL but the militias that purport to be attempting to vindicate Iraq and its sovereignty but in reality seem to be retaliating against the Sunni's who dominated Iraq in similarly brutal fashion just a little more than a decade ago.  Then there is American politics with Donald Trump eliciting the worst from a not insignificant number of Americans who see his xenophobia and jingoism as an American heritage.  There is Bernie Sanders pointing out that the class divide in America...and the world for that matter...that manifests itself in obscene wealth juxtaposed with heart-wrenching poverty has become intolerable and must be rectified.  Even Hillary Clinton is mouthing like sentiments, as is the only other Democratic aspirant to the party's presidential nomination, Martin O'Malley.  Then there is the latest stock market dive, which does affect everyone with retirement funds in a 401(k) account while they sit powerlessly and watch it happen.  There are acts of gun violence in which people are being killed for being who they are, most recently live and in color on the television news, while our government denies that there is anything that can be done about guns when everyone knows that such is not the case because there is no other country in the world that suffers from such violence on anything near the scale on which, nor with anything approaching the frequency with which, we suffer it.  And surrounding these major stories are, to paraphrase George H.W. Bush, a thousand points of darkness that anyone paying attention can see.  There is the obdurate resistance to the Affordable Care Act out of political allegiance with complete disregard for the good the law has done, and there is the resistance to the reform of our financial system under the Dodd-Frank Act, a provision of which, incidentally, will go into effect in 2018 requiring major corporations to publish the ratio between the amounts they pay their CEO's and what their average workers earn, and that can be expected to crystalize the momentum toward equalizing wealth, or at least making its distribution more equitable.

Perhaps I am hysterical in nature, but I see a common thread and a conflation of impact in these events and phenomena.  The refugees want decent lives and they are willing to die trying to find them.  The countervailing pressures within the Muslim world--not just between religious factions but between haves and have-nots as well--seems ready to erupt into confrontations like the Yemeni civil war in which rich Saudi Arabia is stepping on the neck of its impoverished neighbor because a potentially threatening political wave is sweeping over the country.  That is part of the same refugee crisis in that there are wealthy Arab nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia alongside poor ones that are now not only poor but are besieged by fundamentalism as well.  It is all of a piece, this strife between those who have been backed into a corner and those who have backed them into it.  It is the ultimate class war.  It is between those with power that they have misused for self-aggrandizement and those with no power other than their numbers who seem more and more likely to realize that there is no place else for them to flee, so they must now consider turning to fight.

All of this may blow over.  The tidal wave of refugees may wane and there may be peaceful resolution of the disparity between the well-being of the rich and that of the poor.  We may reform what needs reform, both in the middle east and here and throughout the world, and we may do it in a peaceful and orderly fashion.  As to the threat of cataclysm in America, I have always been among those who believe that it can't happen here.  But the tolerance of the vast majority of human beings has been sorely tested these past few decades, and the pot certainly looks ready to boil over.

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

The Keystone pipeline has been in the news again recently.  The candidates are being asked about their positions on the TransCanada owned project and there was a set of hearings in Pierre, South Dakota about its path through the state, though it is for a renewal of a permit that was approved in 2010 at the state Department of Public Utilities regulation level, albeit the federal regulatory level permit is the one that counts.  By the way, the need for State Department approval of any pipeline that crosses an American border into our country was promulgated by the administration of George W. Bush in the first of his two terms, and I presume that American pipeline companies made him do it.  Bernie Sanders is against the proposed XL segment of the pipeline and Hillary Clinton refuses to commit.  Trump is for it, of course.  He informed his supporters via Twitter, which allows him to formulate his policies in 140 character phrases rather than fully articulated, comprehensive discussion, which is good for a guy with all kinds of nonsensical ideas that have no foundation in reality.  He's from the camp that urges immediate action, because thinking is overrated, and Twitter fits right in.  But the pipeline question isn't resolvable by Trump's pontifications on the lack of environmental impact and the man many jobs he claims...despite studies showing that no more than 6,000 and as few as 3,000 will be created all along the 1,100+ mile course of the pipeline and less than 40 permanent jobs will result...neither answer the questions nor resolve the claims into facts.  The real issue is the utility of the XL segment in light of the extant Keystone pipeline, which runs from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada through Steele City, Nebraska all the way to the Gulf Coast.  The XL segment serves only one purpose, and that's to get 600,000 barrels more Canadian tar sands oil to the Gulf Coast refineries so that more can be exported.  By the way, the Obama administration has just approved trading with Mexico to the tune of 100,000 barrels of crude per day, which raises our exports of crude and distillates even further at a time when there isn't enough in the mid-west of things like the petroleum distillate propane, necessary in agriculture.  But that brings me to what I see as the solution to the dilemma of whether to build it or not.

At Steele City, the pipeline now forks, sending raw crude oil to the refineries in Illinois and also to the refineries on the Gulf Coast.  We need it in one place (Illinois) and we don't need it in the other, from which we are already producing so much distillate that we are exporting it.  So why not limit the flow of XL crude so it meets our national needs rather than the commercial demands of a refining industry that is already awash with cash.  What if the permit for the XL were revised so that instead of running to Steele City it ran to the refineries in Illinois at Patoka and Wood River where the supply is needed.  By rerouting the pipeline that way, the prospect of increasing the exportable supply of distillates from the Gulf Coast, and it would obviate the need for shipping the refined petroleum products from the Gulf Coast to where they are needed in the mid-west and the north-east.  Extend the length of the pipeline carrying petroleum from Canada and reduce the flow of gasoline and the like over our highways, railways and domestic pipeline system.  It would seem thereby to reduce environmental hazards at least proportionately with the increase represented by the XL, it would create that many more jobs, and it would ensure that we are meeting our own needs as a nation of consumers rather than as a corporate refining conglomerate.

How about that, America?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There isn't much of interest happening in politics at the moment.  Trump is still rampant and a few die-hard Republicans are still trying to catch Hillary Clinton in a lie--admittedly she is too clever, by her own estimation, by half so that is to be expected--but that is the state of affairs in our country today and we will be sufficiently exposed to it as to be inured by the time it all comes to fruition in elections.  Frankly, I'm there already.  But there are matters of more imminent import that merit attention from all of us, and though many of them stem from political venality, self-interest and dubious ideological consanguinity actually rooted in self-interest, those are not the salient features of them.  Things like the price of gasoline impact us in our daily lives and, while the ability of nefarious participants in the market play a role, their political affiliations are secondary, meriting consideration when we go to the polls but constituting only the background noise in our lives from day to day.  I'm speaking about the most recently prominent of actors in the play, the refiners.

As a backdrop for the piece, consider the fact that we export over 115 million gallons of petroleum distillates, something approximating 50 million gallons of gasoline alone, every day.  The consequence of that practice has always seemed to be that gasoline prices were inflated here and the result was political pressure for things like the Keystone XL pipeline and more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico with less regulation of it.  But the free marketers' rate of success has been mottled.  Unfortunately for us, the "drill baby, drill" mantra of the Republicans and their allied business interests has succeeded in large part, thus rendering the next petroleum harvesting catastrophe a certainty.  On the other hand, "fracking"--that is diluting and pumping petroleum out of the oil shale beneath the ground in various fields across the country--has led us to the dubious distinction of being the largest petroleum producer in the world, though the only real consequence is that the SUV is back and more barely post-pubescent young men are driving 400 horse power pick-up trucks than ever...except for one thing.  The price of gasoline is lower than it's been in six years, and it may go below $2 per gallon at least one expert on the subject has predicted.  The free market is finally working...in spite of itself...in spite of the vertical and horizontal integration, sponsored by its political apologists, that has led us to the slaughter at the hands of the virtual cartel of domestic oil producers for years, which brings me to the refiners.

While listening to one of those business programs on NPR a couple of days ago, experts on the petroleum refining sub-industry were pontificating on the subject of the price of gasoline, and at least the two that were polled claimed that refineries were working at 90% capacity and the availability of gasoline in certain regions of the country--the mid-west in particular--was under pressure though there is a glut of petroleum world-wide driving the price per barrel of oil down to the $40 range, another six year low.  But the problem for the refiners is that, no matter how much they threaten darker days for us petroleum addicts, they seem to be getting farther and farther away.  The consensus has always been that energy prices have to go much higher before people will change they consumption habits, but that seems to be wrong too.  For example, more and more people are switching to LED light fixtures and bulbs, which in our household reduced our electricity consumption by between 17% in the summer when the AC is running to 25% when we heat with gas in the winter.  And the proliferation of companies manufacturing solar panels and installing such has been notable.  If you listen to commercial radio you will hear ads for such installation companies all the time, and my guess is that within a decade, solar generation panels will be so affordable that most people will either have them or plan to get them, and there is evidence to that effect.  In most states, if not all, if you generate your own power your electric meter runs backwards, but also in most states, there is a limit to that required repurchase of power by the electric utilities: 15% in Connecticut.  It isn't higher because the power companies have resisted it claiming that it interferes with their infra-structure plans necessitated by spikes in demand.  But the nationwide grid that serves us all is already there to supply the power needed in all kinds of circumstances, and you never hear about "brown outs" anymore.  Similarly, the warnings of the refining industry that any refining outage, and they purportedly occur all the time, might cause a dire shortage of petroleum distillates.  Yet, the price of gasoline keeps on falling, though momentary spikes continue to be generated by a speculative international oil market run by the top 1% as if it were their own big ATM.  Still, the trend is downward as far as price is concerned, and despite the resurgence of gas guzzling vehicles, while summer gas consumption is purportedly up 6%, that demand still doesn't exceed...or even equal...supply, it seems.

We may be seeing the beginning of a new trend in which the erstwhile free market of the moneyed few in our world ceases to be their ally and actually begins to operate in the fashion in which they have been telling us all along that it does...though it hasn't.  It's petard time you rich people.  Prepare to be hoisted.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We are still in excess of a year from the next presidential election and the nomination process has already waxed into an intense imposition on common sense and civility.  The Republicans have allowed their nomination process to become a circus that may go into periods of dormancy but it is always active to some degree.  I feel as if I have been inoculated against it, but in its omnipresence it cannot be ignored.  But the Democrats seem to be lapsing into the same excess as characterizes everything Republican, and it bothers me.  Usually, the Democrats exhibit a kind of moderation that the Republicans eschew in favor of hyperbole and prevarication, but that now seems to be the style for candidates of both parties.  I saw John Kasich, the Ohio governor, on some news program last night bragging about how he brought the state from its $8 billion budget deficit to a $3 billion treasury surplus...apparently alone...and that he thus generated 350,000 new jobs during his tenure and saved the state from a Democratic cataclysm...again, single handed.  But I also saw Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, waxing rhapsodic about his administration's record of the best median income in the nation, though he at least redeemed himself with a declaration that he favors reenactment of the Glass-Steagall Act, which did a far more comprehensive job of regulating the financial industry that Dodd-Frank does, thus insulating the people of the country from the greed of the big money people that has now twice sent this country reeling into economic depression.  Of course, there is Hillary Clinton and her server, which she has now...finally...given to the FBI for examination, though it has no doubt been wiped so clean that it couldn't be distinguished from a brand new one.  Mind you, the "scandal" that Trey Gowdy and Lyndsey Graham are trying to fabricate over this and the Benghazi attacks of a couple of years ago is so transparently political and without substance, even if in reality there was some misfeasance that could be exposed, that to a large extent she can't be criticized for the place her private emails occupy in the current news cycles   Still, if she had just done the smart thing with regard to her emails in the first place--that is do her public business within official channels and her private ones...well, privately, none of this would be happening.  It wasn't smart, and it wasn't even necessary, which makes me somewhat skeptical about her capacity to run a nation, but as they used to say out in the hustings, I'm a yellow dog Democrat.  I'd vote for Cujo over any Republican I've seen since Nelson Rockefeller.  

But we do have Bernie Sanders to be thankful for.  He just keeps chugging along, quietly--you have surely noticed that he almost never gets even mentioned, much less covered by the major news outlets--pulling in crowds of thousands who cheer him enthusiastically and vow support no matter what other factors people try to pry them away with: Bernie can only siphon votes from Hillary Clinton but he can't win, he's a socialist so no one will want to elect him in America, etc.  In my opinion, the reality is that Bernie becomes more viable as the Democratic nominee with every passing day on which his opponents fail to dispatch him, much the same way that Donald Trump does.  You may remember candidates like Herman Caine, whose lechery brought him down as fast as he had risen, former Texas governor Rick Perry, who became the poster boy for dim wittedness in one "duh" moment of forgetfulness about his own, anti-government manifesto, Newt "the futurist" Gingrich, who wasn't satisfied to wear a tin foil pyramid on his head in public, he had to make tin foil pyramids a part of his platform, Michelle Bachman, who has no more rational, non-political thoughts in her head than does Sarah Palin, and if you do remember them you also remember how quickly and far they fell from being number one in the polls. Then you remember what the Republicans' nomination process left them with: Mitt "Mr. 47%" Romney.  Add the fact that he proudly declaimed that Cadillacs were good cars and his wife owned a couple of them and Donald Trump seems that much more viable...and durable as a candidate.  Once you do that, Bernie Sanders looks pretty good.

So, to the extent that this whole spectacle is going to go on for another year until the nominations are in and then two and a half more months after that until the election, it is a huge inconvenience.  We have to watch these twenty people make public spectacles of themselves for more than fourteen months before we can expect a year or so of relief before campaigning against the winner starts for his first mid-term election.  But I guess we can all stick it out...as if we had a choice.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Over the past twelve hours, I've gone from dispirited to heartened just from watching television.  Last night, I watched a documentary called, "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream."  It was about the residents of 740 Park Avenue in New York City, who include or have included an heir to the Chrysler fortune, David Koch of the infamous Koch brothers, the hedge fund managers Saul Steinberg and Stephen Schwarzman, John Thain, the former, disgraced CEO of Merrill Lynch (he is famous for spending a million dollars to renovate his office as the corporation was suffering losses totaling $15 billion, concomitantly giving out performance bonuses to his henchmen who had helped him preside over the 2007-08 collapse of our economy as the corporation failed to the extent that a subsidized takeover by Goldman Sachs was necessary) and several other notably reprehensible people.  It is the lap of luxury...literally...though morality and virtue seem nowhere to be found at 740.  Among the specific topics discussed was the political unassailability of the 15% tax rate paid by hedge fund managers on their income, based on the fact that they take what amounts to interest on the funds they manage in lieu of salary or fees, a sop for the super rich protected by Chuck Schumer, the number two Democrat in the Senate.  Of course, wage stagnation was mentioned along with the facts that CEO's today make more than 200 times what their average workers do, and that 40% of food stamp recipients go to work every day, but they cannot make enough money to feed their families while simultaneously keeping a roof over their heads.  The gravamen of the piece was that the rich few control more and more of our national wealth through politics that result in those of us who worked to make them rich having no real chance to prosper because of their Reaganesque, supply-side pontifications and the sway they hold in Washington.  They oppose the increases in the minimum wage that are being proposed on those bases, even though millions of people need those food stamps because they don't earn a living wage.

Then this morning, I saw a piece on CBS's Sunday Morning about the fact that in a small American Indian community in the Southwest, the population has no access to potable water except when it is brought in by trucks or carted back in containers from a well located at an Indian mission miles away.  It's not that they couldn't have water locally; there is a proposed project to bring it to them.  But the cost would by about $700,000 and neither the state nor the federal government will pay it, so they are trying to raise the money themselves with contributions.  The contrast of people without water to drink and bathe in against people who have so much that they can never spend it but want more and more at the expense of the rest of us was...as I said, dispiriting.  What kind of a nation have we become.  What kind of people are we when so many of us can consider voting for a nouveau-riche blatherskite like Donald Trump on the theory that, because he purports to be a successful businessman who thinks more benefits for business are the key to helping the rest of us, he can make this a better country.  But then I watched Face the Nation And saw former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley being interviewed.

It started like all the other interviews of political hopefuls in the party races for the presidential nomination.  He eschewed sucker punching the opposition and went directly into self-puffery, much of which was of no substance or merit at all.  He talked about the state he governed having the highest median income of all the states, failing to mention that tens of thousands of federal employees live in the Maryland suburbs of the District of Columbia, which brings the median up dramatically, but says very little about life in Baltimore or Hagerstown.  He touted his "executive experience" as a qualification, and maybe it is, but they all have experience of one kind or another that they say is uniquely qualifying, and maybe they are right too.  And he talked about the fact that the working people of this country haven't seen wage growth relative to the value of the dollar they earn in over thirty years...in other words, since the advent of supply-side economics during the Reagan administration.  He quoted some statistics that favored his point of view, but they all do that.  But then he said something that made me feel that Bernie Sanders isn't the only alternative to Hillary Clinton.  He said that he favored re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act, which I have been advocating since the financial crisis and the first letters I wrote on this blog.  Glass-Steagall was a reaction to the last time the financial industry wrecked the nation and then the world...a cataclysm that he, Bernie Sanders and many others predict is going to recur pretty soon given the soaring stock market, the obscene accretion of wealth among the 1% and the evanescence of the middle class and its standard of living.

Let me be clear.  I'm still a Sanders man.  But there will be only one Democratic nominee for president, and if it's Bernie, I'll vote for him.  If it's Clinton, I'll vote for her...reluctantly.  But it could be O'Malley.  He may be the best combination of egalitarianism and political viability available, and until this morning I wasn't aware that we had one.  Boy am I relieved.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I started the day with the New York Times and the Washington Post on the internet, reading about Donald Trump of course, and I realized how  little I know about his positions on the issues.  So, I shuffled around and looked at what I could find everywhere from the New York Daily News to Mother Jones only to discover that there really isn't anything to read about his positions on the issues.  The main reason is  that when he speaks, whether during a party debate or on the television news programs, he really doesn't say anything other than what he has concluded about what needs to be changed in the world; there's never any mention of solutions to the problems.  Oh, he has  said  that he wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and that he is going to make Mexico pay for it, but  he never acknowledges the problems involve, not the least of which is making Mexico do anything.  His answer when someone points such impediments to achieving the world according to Trump, his  answer is, "leave that to me," or "I know how  to negotiate."  But despite the vaguerie of Trumpism, he  has garnered the  support of millions of people who are prepared to live  in a country in which a man like Trump  could  become  president.  I  find it frightening...not just that a Trump could conceivably occur, but  that there  are enough Americans to make that possibility a threat that can't be  ignored.  Let me tell you why I feel such trepidation.

I'll start with the trivial.  Between his hair and his neckties, Trump looks more like a mafia don than a presidential Donald.   Add in his penchant for anything that glitters (if you've seen some of the gold and chrystal festooned interiors in Trump Tower you know what I mean) and you have a man more notable for ostentation than prudence, much less intelligence. But George W. Bush's redneck tendencies were nearly as obnoxious and he managed to sit with the other leaders of the free world just because he was President of the United States, so the  gravitas of the office might well outweigh  the gauchness of the man if Trump got elected though  there no doubt  would be condescending sneers every time he turned his back.  But less trivial is his lack of consistency: he used to be a supporter of abortion rights but now calls himself a right to lifer with the exception of pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother or are the product of rape or incest; used to favor a one time surtax on the wealthy of 14.5% to pay off the national debt, but now he  wants to eliminate corporate taxation and reduce taxes for everyone else with no explanation as to how he would balance the  budget; he used to accept same-sex marriage but  now says his views are evolving ( a line he apparently expropriated from President Obama even though he says nothing good about  The President otherwise).  Then we get to the more weighty matters.  He wouldn't be making any deals with Iran.  He  would just threaten them with oblivion and, according to Trump, they would fold like Bedouin tent.  He would deport  all 11million illegal aliens without considering their investments in the  lives they have led in this country, and more  out of self-interest, who was going to  do the work that they do since he doesn't seem to believe in a minimum wage. Finally, his campaign claims  that Trump has a nine  issue position paper already written, but he won't release it.  In other words, a compendium of his best and most broadly  significant ideas...a catalogue  of his  best thinking  about the  most important issues of the day as he  sees it...isn't suitable for broad dissemination.  If  his best and most cogent arguments for the things he  wants to do are not such a credit to him and his  candidacy that he  wants to get  them out, what is the  country going to be subjected to if he  gets behind the big desk in the oval office?  Or is the claim that a  comprehensive statement of policy exists just another bombastic boast on a par with  his claim that he can brow-beat the Mexican government into building a multi-billion dollar wall down the middle of the Rio Grande.  Really...who is this guy?

In the end, we probably know enough about him to make up our minds about voting for him from just  what he has said and declined to say so far.  He isn't going to get smarter or more rational,  and no one is going to be able to reign him in.  He will never be anything more  than a narcissistic buffoon, but like Herman Cain in the last election, he has gotten support from a certain constituency that thinks of  such idiots as iconoclasts rather than blowhards. Good luck with this one, America.  We are going to need it, not just to keep Trump from exerting power but to keep his supporters from doing so.  And I  thought the Tea Party was a problem.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

     A week ago, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote what Paul Simon might have referred to as a "desultory philippic" about the unlikely pair of Hillary Clinton and tom Brady, the delinquent quarterback of the New England Patriots.  She analogized the apparent transgressions of Brady in what is now being called "Deflategate" (gate now being the designation for a scandal of profound import in the American vulgate) to Hillary Clinton's email server contretemps, which raised two  of my hackles, albeit her piece was less about Brady than about the prospects of Clinton and the others, Republican and Democrat alike, for the two party's presidential nominations.  Still, the nominations are more than apt as topics for a New York Times editorialist, though Brady's smashed cell phone and Hillary's now blank basement server are hardly appropriate technological bedfellows, but even that isn't my hackle raiser. What infuriates me is that both are still the topics of conversation not just for people who think football is important, but for people who think that contrived political issues are too.

     As to Brady, if Dowd, among the hundreds and thousands of others who presume to tell us what is important every day in print, in the electronic media and on the internet...people like me, I must concede...has something important to say, the name Tom Brady shouldn't be involved.  He plays football, and now he won't be playing football for the first four of his teams games next year.  That makes him neither an anti-hero nor the anti-Christ, nor of any consequence at all really.  He is just some dumb jock who did something stupid and of little or not moment in the cosmic scheme of things.  So, hackle number one is that there is still conversation about his trivial breach of what passes for ethics in a game that rewards hitting other people hard enough that they can't get up.  Put concisely, football doesn't matter unless you are one of the thousand or so gland cases and steriod freaks who get paid a  million dollars a year or more to parade around in tight pants, perform ridiculous, bombastic, boastful rituals of conceit in the end zones of stadiums in cities all over America that the tax payers have been suckered into subsidizing by forty or fifty industrialists with too much money and not enough scruples. Dwelling on it is  nothing but self-aggrandizing by fans of a "sport" for people who are bored with the important things in life and need an excuse to drink beer at noon time on Sunday.

     As to Clinton, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has followed her career that she is sufficiently haughty to think she can make up her own rules.  The fact that she kept her official emails on a server in her basement outside the scrutiny of her adversaries and friends alike, and apparently did so despite the contrary advice of even Bill Clinton's advisors, is  only the most recent evidence of her  hubris...and her incompetence.  That's my second Dowd-inspired hackle.  No one talks about her foolish decision.  Everyone talks about her imprudent one.  It wasn't imprudent...at least that wasn't the cardinal trait of her decision not to communicate officially within official channels.  The salient aspect of her decision to have all her email communications--professional, private and secret--all in one place whether that place was private, official or secret.  If she was afraid that people would find out some of what she was saying, she should have kept those things private...on a server in her basement, perhaps.  But in order to preserve her right to keep that stuff private, she would have to have done her official communications where they could be overviewed by the Republicans in congress, her colleagues in the State Department or even by Dowd's New York Times.  If she had, she could then have claimed her civil right to privacy barring probable cause to believe that she had broken the law such as would justify a search warrant. That protection is good enough for you and me, and it should have been good enough for her.  Then, if she were involved in something really nefarious, prurient, kinky or otherwise kinky, she could have used a third server with another account  that she wiped clean every night, which she could later claim was just a spare that she never used if perjury were within her repertoire. I'm not saying it is, but if it were.

     My point is that if Hillary's reliance on secrecy or pragmatism bothers you, considering her past and her proximity to various questionable events, you can't possibly be taking her candidacy seriously anyway, so who cares about her basement server.  And if you are enough of a pragmatist that none of that matters because you presume that her intentions are noble even if her methods aren't, who cares about her basement server.  But if you care about competency in the White House...if you care about judgment and prudence in the person who plays such a large role in running the country as a president does...Hillary isn't your choice anyway, if for no other reason than her decision to do all her emailing on her basement server.  All I can say in the end is, Go Bernie.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

I'm vacationing on Cape Cod this week, and my daughter came down from Boston to spend some time with her mother and me.  While she was here, two seemingly unrelated  incidents occurred.  First, my daughter suggested that my wife should by an Apple lap top to replace the old one she has...which by the way is old enough that it is essentially useless thanks to the continual changes in operating systems and the proliferation of applications  that require the updates.  I told her that I don't buy Apple products, though my wife may feel differently about Apple.  Second, a few hours after my daughter left for home today, I read a two day old issue of the Cape Cod Times, and it contained a transplanted article from the Washington Post.  The article was about the $15 minimum wage, specifically the fact that the cost increase needed to pay fast food workers at McDonalds that wage would be about $.17 per burger...$.30 per meal.  Next to the article was a picture from a protest a year ago at which a marcher  carried a sign that read, "The CEO of McDonald's maes $9,245 per hour!"  You don't see the connection between the two things?  Let me explain myself.

A year or so ago, the New York Times ran a series of articles about the Chinese company that builds most of the iPhones, iPads and other Apple technological superfluity to which we are addicted.  During the height of the conversation inspired by the articles, one of the journalists responsible was interviewed on NPR, and he pointed out that Apple, which sells these devices for exorbitant sums that have resulted in tens of billions of dollars in Apple's bank account, saves approximately $5 per unit by manufacturing those devices in China.  The workers are forced to live in dormitories and work sometimes seven days a week for wages that wouldn't conform to the laws of the various American states where there are more than enough workers to do the  work...but for a living wage and while living lives in their own homes with their families. But what does Apple care. There is money to be...banked.  Do you see the connection now?  Both the Times' articles and the one in the Washington Post demonstrate a central fact in the debate that I believe will decide the next presidential election, which will be centered on the issue of whether CEO's deserve to make 400 times or more than the workers who produce the goods from which their corporations profit.  That fact is that the people responsible for the prosperity of the nation, and for that matter many nations, are living lives of "quiet desperation" while the people who  have managed to rise to the top by standing on their shoulders  reap such wealth as to make their compensation not just excessive, but Sybaritic, and thus not just venal but sinful, and  mortally so.  Forgive me for waxing sanctimonious, but I feel that we are long past the point at which enough corporate greed was enough.

As the Republicans claim that we need to reduce corporate taxes so that their wealth can trickle down on us in the form of low paying jobs  without security, providence in the form of health care, retirement funds, "leisure time" for things like paternity and maternity much less vacation and a quality of life that makes life worth living, corporations take not just more than they need, but more than they can even use.  Oh, they do want to reduce all of our taxes too, but that won't lead to better lives because keeping 90% of less-than-enough instead of 85% doesn't remedy the fact that it is less-than-enough.  As for the concomitant reductions in corporate taxes, all they will provide is higher bonuses for the people who make decisions on the golf course and call it work.  But let's set aside the '60's hippy screed and look  at the rationales involved.  The objection to a $15 minimum wage is that there will be fewer jobs available for working people, but consider this.  If we take a fast-food restaurant as the paradigm, the question that claim raises is, if McDonald's hires fewer workers, who is going to flip the burgers?  Someone has to.  Who is going to slide the UPC codes past the scanner on the checkout line? Someone has to.  Who is going to clean the CEO's office?  Someone has to, and you can be damn sure it isn't going to be the CEO, so I say this.

Give the workers the  $15 minimum wage, even at the risk of there being fewer low paying jobs out their if their bosses decide to flip the burgers, run the cash  registers and clean the offices themselves.  I think we are all willing to take the risk.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

These anti-Planned Parenthood tapes keep coming, or at least they did until a judge imposed an injunction on the organization releasing them, the Center for Medical Progress.  They are heavily edited so as to give the impression of something worse than unseemly.  But the videos are as disingenuous as the name of the organization responsible for them, which is no more about medical progress than it is about fairness.  I remember when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 against John McCain, there was a tactically similar campaign against him.  Obama was interviewed on tape for a news program, and an organization with a dubious and shadowy constituency, not to mention nefarious intent like that of the Center for Medical Progress, truncated Obama's answer to a question about John McCain's repudiation of the rumor that Obama was a Muslim by publishing only the phrase "I am a Muslim."  The whole answer was something like, "He deserves credit for disavowing the claim that I am a Muslim." A person with whom I was doing business at the time insisted on showing me the video, which I told him was false, but he refused to believe me...because he is a bigot, not because it was credible.  So I emailed him the full clip, but it changed absolutely nothing about his opinions, including his insistence that Barack Obama was a Muslim. My point is that the Planned Parenthood videos show people talking about the process of harvesting and distributing to researchers fetal tissue from abortions, which is directed at real medical progress, and disjointing their content so as to  suggest something else in such a fashion as to make them nothing but prevarications...that is, telling enough of the truth to intentionally lead someone to the wrong conclusion while the entire truth is available but deliberately omitted.

The problem isn't the effect on public opinion that such devious, politically inspired tactics cause.  They are preaching to the choir  in every case, and while some people sitting on the fence regarding the relevant issue are probably influenced, that most likely works  both ways as the credence of a similar number of the  adherents to the principles of the organization, people or person responsible is most likely vitiated, if not completely destroyed.  The problem is politics, because these Trojan horses tend to galvanize the political establishment most closely aligned with the purposes of the organizations and people involved, and they have real power to create change.  That is exactly what is happening in this instance as The Senate prepares to hold hearings on the subject and politicians who are aspirants to  office, especially presidential aspirants, attempt to insulate themselves from any taint among voters who are potential supporters.  It is the actions that counts, not the at-best-negligible effects of smear tactics that should concern us, and given the Republican control of both houses of congress, action is  entirely possible.  Though only 3% of Planned Parenthood activities are abortions, The Senate will debate de-funding the organization completely, and that represents $500 million per year that will not be available for birth control counseling, cervical cancer screenings, clinical treatment of STD's and the like.  Those are services that protect women from all kinds of things, including unwanted pregnancies and thus, ironically, the abortion of those pregnancies: anathema to organizations like the Center for Medical Progress.  And just to be clear, as things stand none of that money can be used for abortions pursuant to the decades old "Hyde Amendment," which renders the effort to defund Planned Parenthood inimical to conservative goals, not facillitative of them.

That is what demonstrates with absolute certainty that such organizations are politically, rather than morally, inspired.  Their efforts are directed at dogma rather than practical reality.  In this instance, the deceit of the Center for Medical Progress will have the  effect, if successful, of precipitating perhaps thousands of abortions sought by poor and undereducated women, but it will not prevent even one dollar of the money that might have prevented the from being spent on the very thing they oppose: abortion.  It is self-destructive, this  effort by a conservative, self-appointed moral arbiter, and that is what it deserves, but the women who will not be served because of it accomplishes deserve better.

Your friend,

Mike