May 2016 Archives

Dear America,

I must admit that I am somewhat disturbed by the untoward conduct of some Sanders supporters in Nevada this week, but I am even more discomfited by the candidate's lack of vigor in condemning that conduct.  Disruption of a convention is one thing.  Sometimes disruption is the only course of action available in pursuit of a noble goal.  But threats of violence are beyond the pail, and Bernie Sanders, who started his campaign as the noble warrior, has become the progressive version of Donald Trump, and his moral flexibility does not redound to his credit.  His outrage about Nevada was focused on what he and some of his followers perceive as unfair rules in Nevada's Democratic delegate allocation process, and I candidly admit that I have no idea what the rules are in Nevada or whether the criticism of those rules is valid.  But the one thing I am sure of is that the civility that I attributed to Sanders from the beginning of his campaign seems to be eroding to the point that my support is eroding with it.  All Sanders is reported to have said about the violent threats is that, "it goes without saying" that he opposes violence.  He did not condemn the actions of the few in his camp in Nevada specifically, but rather relied on a statement of general principle, with which I must assume--given the descent of Sanders' campaign into such familiar, questionable strategizing--that he was endeavoring not to alienate those supporters whose standards of conduct used to be beneath him.  I expect some old 60's style guerilla leanings from him, but the failure to outright condemn such threatening and personalized rancor as swelled to a crescendo in Nevada is far worse than progressive activist irascibility.  It is the beginning of a descent into political hell, until now the exclusive domain of the great Satan, Donald Trump and his Republican imps.

If you look at the delegate count, Hillary Clinton seems on her way to winning the nomination even without the super-delegates about which the Sanders campaign is complaining.  We needn't get into why those super-delegate seats at the convention were created other than to say that the intention was sound, albeit expedient and pragmatic to a fault perhaps.  Thus complaints about them are not born solely of Sanders' personal convenience, but while it behooves us all for Sanders to continue advocating his position through the convention, it is unjustifiably risky for him to allow this kind of off-the-rails support to go un-denounced.  If Sanders wins the popular vote in the end, then there will be cause for ardent protest and maybe even finger pointing.  But as of this moment, principle should prevail in the Sanders camp, whereas it looks more and more like it is more personal ambition than principle that is motivating Sanders, and his compatriots are beginning to reflect that departure from Sanders' original purpose.  I can understand such a lapse; it is quite human.  Engaging in politics seems to taint even the righteous souls.  But in Sanders' case, it seems to be verging on hubris, and that taints the whole effort. 

I still believe that income and wealth inequality are the greatest problems we face as a society, and that from them stem many social evils: unequal access to health care, lack of economic power in labor negotiations for individuals, economic stagnation caused by stifled demand, disparities in the availability of quality education and the juxtaposition of Sybarite life stiles with poverty so abject that food is an issue in a nation that has so much of everything.  But I also believe that the descent of our politics into partisan bickering and status seeking, control of our governance institutions by ideologues who stymie progressive initiatives but propose no alternatives for addressing our pressing social problems, and in general, the hegemony of epicene fogies in our legislature who manipulate the system with what is almost hereditary power is a function of personal ambition and greed.  Thus, for Sanders to show signs of being tainted by the quest for power is frightening.  If even our sainted defenders can bow to the temptation to ascend to such power, what do we have left to hope for.

That's where Hillary Clinton comes in.  She is somewhere in between the best and the worst of us.  Her judgment is questionable, as in the whole personal server scandal, but on the larger issues, she is sane and reasonable, albeit tending a little too much toward pragmatic.  I find her morals questionable, not so much with regard to her flexibility relative to her husband's dalliances but more with her possible involvement in legal affairs than personal ones: Whitewater and the missing travel documents that turned up on her desk in the White House when Bill was president come to mind.  Yet, I believe that she is on her side, even if it is only because of her desire to be president, which I think is also a desire to be remembered in a good way rather than in the way in which so many think of her when they rate her unfavorably in political polls.

For those reasons, and for other more nuanced ones, I feel compelled to commit to Clinton now in the hope that, in concert with those of many others my voice will rise to a level that Bernie Sanders can hear.  I still want to hear what he has to say, and I still feel that he would be a good president, though possibly as much of a demagogue as Ronald Reagan was, only our demagogue rather than theirs.  But as of now, Clinton is my choice, and I think, the choice of many others.  Sorry Bernie, but you did it to yourself.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last week, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, met with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the self-styled-redoubtable Donald Trump: a meeting equivalent to an attempt to reconcile fire and ice...in inverse order.  I detest Trump, which I cannot claim as a singular distinction.  I don't recall another presidential candidate raising such umbrage among voters with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater, and there are some parallels between Goldwater's candidacy and that of Donald Trump, but they're well discussed already, and there's not much I can add.  It should be noted that in many respects, however, Goldwater was a better human being than Trump, but we can go into that some other time.  For now, I am struck by the fact that in terms of the relative humanity of the two men, Trump and Ryan, Trump actually seems the more noble of the two, which says a lot about Ryan.  Ryan is still harping on prevention of tax increases for the rich while Trump at least gives lip-service to the roll that taxation of the rich can play in diminishing income and wealth inequality.  And coded into Ryan's tough anti-tax, anti-spending palaver is his adherence to the conservative Republican, rigidly free market creed.  At its core, Republican economic conservatism relies on the premise that anyone who shows up for work and dedicates himself to the task will prosper.  Apparently Ryan doesn't read the human interest stories in the newspapers about people who have worked...and none-the-less struggled...all their lives for people who have prospered on their labor.  He doesn't seem aware of the fact that while entrepreneurial spirit may be admirable, more than half of all business start-ups fail within five years, and with those failures go foreclosures, bankruptcies, divorces, and yes, even suicides.  He also doesn't seem to recognize that if you are a member of a minority group, you are far less likely to get a good job coming out of college than is a white person--that in consequence, while a college degree might pay for itself for a white man, it may well not for a black one.  He loves to tell everyone how he worked at McDonald's himself to pay for college because his father had died when he was younger, but he ignores the fact that not everyone wants to be, or is even capable of becoming a politician, which is how he has made his living for the majority of his working life.  He doesn't recognize that for millions of Americans, Social Security is all that keeps them off the streets, and for millions of others , the WIC program and what little benefit welfare has turned into are the only ways in which to feed their children because a single mother cannot work and pay for child-care at the same time as feeding, clothing and housing her children...at McDonald's or elsewhere if she has no education.

While the adumbration of Ryan's callous political philosophy could easily continue for a long while, it's time to mention Trump in comparison.  He claims to want to equalize the federal income tax system so that we all pay the same proportions of our incomes in taxes.  True, his plan to implement a slightly stratified flat tax rate actually seems to favor the rich still, he has again at least paid the proverbial lip-service to seeking to reduce the disparity between our government's treatment of the rich and its treatment of the middle class.  And though Trump's callousness relative to the immigration of Mexicans, Muslims and Syrians is despicable whereas Ryan and the Republicans condemn him for it, it must be noted that a fair immigration system--one that respects the fact that undocumented aliens do much of the honest, but undesirable work that needs to be done to put food on our tables--has been in the offing since 2010 when the Republicans took over The House of Representatives, it still hasn't emerged...not even now that they have also taken over The Senate.   Thus, the Republican denunciation of Trump on immigration issues rings hollow, not just a little, but a lot.  And when it comes to foreign policy, Trump's vision for the United States is more like a pipe dream than coherent policy based on reasoned desiderata.   Those in control of the Mexican government have already scoffed at Trump's claim that he can make them build a wall between our two countries, and as to his nakedly irrational claim that he can sit down with Vladimir Putin to bring him to heel, it's just like the real basis of his campaign; he thinks he is the art of the deal.  To sum it all up, his favorite trope--I'm going to make such great deals that American will be great again--are virtually meaningless, but Ryan's conservatism is not just fatuous, it's malevolent, so Trump's even got him there.

I guess it comes to this: I am scared to death about the prospect of a Trump presidency, but Paul Ryan becoming president would be like the ascension of the anti-Christ if you ask me.  So maybe we should count ourselves lucky that the Republicans are nominating a bombastic, bloviating buffoon of a blatherskite rather than a fascist ideologue like Paul Ryan.  I suppose it's better to have someone get us into trouble because he's a fool than because he's an evil genius...better a jovial clown than a mean spirited one.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

Andrew Ross Sorkin, seemingly the product of intellectual spontaneous generation--he began writing for the New York Times when he was still in high school and is now an editor and columnist for the paper and a commentator for MSNBC as well as an author of best selling books on the financial industry despite nothing in his history to commend him other than a father who is a mergers and acquisitions lawyer for a major world-wide law firm and a Cornell University degree in some unspecified major--wrote an article on the "Obama economy" that appeared in the Sunday magazine of The Times this week.  Despite my dubiety regarding his credentials, the article was pretty good in a sketchy kind of way (most of what he writes and says is a little sketchy), but he left out a few politically significant details.  I say politically significant for two reasons: first the Republicans keep harping on The President's performance in addressing the financial crisis as if they had nothing to do with it, and second because come November, that will be the mantra of Donald Trump and every other Republican candidate for national office.  And with regard to Sorkin's somewhat fluffy piece, both the devil and the saint are in the details, some of which he missed.

Sorkin likes to quote people and rely on their credentials as if they can substitute for his own, and that practice...like relying on an extensive bibliography and copious footnotes when you wrote a paper in college...is acceptable in my mind as long as you understand what it is, but his piece is a little short on facts that are quite significant.  For example, President Obama had to do a lot of arm twisting to get the few Republican votes he got for his stimulus package, just enough I might add to compensate for the Democratic defectors in congress, and in doing so, he had to give some things that he and those Democrats weren't too keen on.  For example, about $325 billion of the $800+ billion package, a full 40% of it, was in the form of tax considerations, both cuts and what they call "tax expenditures," that favored business.  Yet, while the Republicans held his feet to the fire in order to get those corporate sops, they complained all the while about the size of the package that they bloated with their supply-side rationale (that's their modus operandi: cause a problem and then blame the other guy).  That fact is significant because when they now complain that the stimulus package was a relative failure because Keynesean economic principles don't work but supply-side principles do, they always decline to comment on the fact that the stimulus had plenty of supply-side money in it in the form of those tax cuts and expenditures.  And all of that relates to the fundamental principle that "fiscal conservatives" always cleave to: lower taxes create jobs and stimulate the economy.

That tax package along with the fact that American business is sitting on cash totaling more than $1 trillion by some estimates puts the lie to the proposition that we can do anything on the macro-economic level to coax business to invest when it doesn't want to.  The idea that Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand are on to something is based on the premise that the taxes paid by big business are an impediment to investment, as if business would spend more if we left it more of its ever rising profits by taxing it less.  In other words, money saved in taxes translates directly into capital investment.  The fact that some corporations already pay as little as nothing on their profits--nothing is what GE infamously paid on tens of billions of profit a few years ago, and they admitted it very publicly--while they sit on huge capital reserves doesn't seem to deter people like Ryan from making claims based on the conservative postulate that tax reduction is a remedy for economic malaise.  That is why the tax element of the stimulus package is important.  It is evidence to the contrary, and Hillary Clinton and other progressive candidates will need all the help they can get when the Republican propaganda machine begins cranking out self-serving tripe in a couple of months.  The campaign is going to be about whether Clinton's affinity for Obama policies will work, with creation of good jobs at the core of it all.   And Ryan, along with the rest of the Republican conservative establishment, will be spewing their claims to anyone who will listen.  The only hope of their progressive adversaries will be in rebuttal and refutation, which requires facts, like the fact that tax cuts abounded in the stimulus, so they can't have their cake and eat it too.  Either their policies failed right alongside Keynesean government spending, or both succeeded, and thus, the Obama economy is a success story, not a source of hand-wringing woe.

So, while I first noticed Sorkin when he initially came out as an apologist for the financial industry in 2009, redeeming himself with criticism of the industry only later on, he seems to be on the right side now, though his technique leaves something to be desired.  So I hope that Hillary Clinton reads what he writes and uses Sorkin's broad-stroke technique against the Republicans' preferred shibboleths regarding taxes and spending.  They are a chimera, and little more than a euphemism for institutional greed, but there is a way to combat it, and the facts are its core.  So a little Sorkin and a lot of Robert Reich ought to do it.

Your friend,

Mike