August 2016 Archives

Dear America,

Today is going to be an interesting day in American politics.  Donald Trump is going to Mexico to meet with the country's president, Enrique Peña Nieto at Nieto's invitation, a meeting that has been described as being between "the two most unpopular men in Mexico."  Nieto has a popularity rating in the low 20%'s range, and Trump is losing popular approval daily in his quest for the American presidency...so much so that he is beginning to hedge on bets that he was eager to be identified by at the beginning of his campaign.  So you've got to hand it to Trump; he is voluntarily meeting with the man who has said point blank that there will be no payment by Mexico for an American border wall, that wall being Trump's salient promise since it fell from his careless lips in the first day or two of his quest for national power.  And Trump is going to a country that he has characterized as sending us drugs, rapists and murderers from day one of his political life in this country, so what are the odds that there will be a popular groundswell of approval when he lands in Mexico City.  My guess is that Nieto, unpopular as he is, is inviting Trump to Mexico despite the fact that the rest of the world's leaders take Trump seriously only in the same way as they do the Zika virus.  He has calculated that he can embarrass Trump in public and thus aggrandize himself with his own people.  The pair will meet today, and then, I would speculate, there will be either one joint press conference or two individual ones, and that's when we'll know for sure.  But consider the prospects for Nieto.

If he bows to Trump's will, the Mexican electorate that dislikes him anyway will be enraged that their president attempted to mollify a bigot who ostensibly despises Mexico, and thus, by doing so he will be sealing his political fate...and not in a good way.  On the other hand, if he humiliates Trump publicly, Nieto becomes something of a dragon slayer...the Mexican political equivalent of Saint George, and in a Catholic country, that could go a long way.  So the odds in favor of Trump coming away from this confabulation with a political gain seem remote at best, because even if Nieto agreed, he has a legislature too, and his commitment means nothing without its approval in the form of a budget allocation, or of a treaty or something akin to it.  Trump's opponents can just dismiss such a promise as one of Trump's bombastic gestures, and they'll be on firm ground.  Thus, as far as political "cred" is concerned, Trump has nothing to gain, while if he fails to get this wall financed by Mexico, his claim to being able to accomplish such--a claim after which he always says, "believe me"--he will be discredited in front of the entire world, and the phrase "believe me" will become the subject of mockery and late-night taunts by television comedians rather than a mantra that he can intone every time he says something absurd.  As to his support from constituents, they will see that his central boast is a complete myth at best, and more likely an utter self-serving fabrication.  His putative artistry in making deals will be just another bit of braggadocio...a sort of declaration of character bankruptcy to go with the financial bankruptcies that he claims are just the way business is done.  As a consequence, nothing he says will be credible in the future, and that will be the effective end of Donald Trump as a prospective president.  You've got to give Trump credit; he is wagering all of his prospects on the good will of a man who has already repudiated him by rejecting his demands.  Today is all or nothing for Trump, and he is letting an adversary make the choice.  Whether it's a gutsy move or a stupid one only time will tell.

I understand that Trump doesn't see this a cockiness.  He believes what he says, and hence he thinks that he can cause the President of another country to concede to him just on the basis of force of personality.  But this decision is somewhat like Hillary Clinton's choice to put her emails on a private server.  It isn't so much that these decisions have or will likely lead to political disaster that makes them negatively emblematic of the persons making them.  It is that both decisions were imprudent at best right from the beginning.  Clinton's server has been all over the news, and everyone in the nation has expressed an opinion on it, but Bernie Sanders said it best:  it was the lack of judgment in Clinton's decision that made it notable.  If Trump doesn't succeed--and what are the odds--the decision to even go to Mexico much less to meet with a politico who has nothing to gain by acceding to Trump's will make the imprudence of Hillary Clinton look like pure genius, and in the bargain, demonstrate that Donald Trump is nothing but a blustering blatherskite who lacks judgment: a narcissistic clown who would not be a strong leader, but rather would be the object of derision and jocund references in every capital around the world.  I think Trump has been outfoxed...used by a smarter politician, and it cannot redound to his credit.

I am filled with glee at the prospect of Trump's political demise.  My heart is racing as I write in anticipation of tonight's evening news.  This is the best thing to happen to me in weeks.  Imagine how Hillary Clinton feels.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

We're deep into familiar Republican territory now, and it is hard to say whether Hillary Clinton can play the game.  The ad hominem attack is the métier of the campaigning Republican politician, especially the conservative one.  For the most part, such tactics amount to little more than preaching to the choir, and since our polity breaks down in thirds--one third Democrat, one third Republican and one third unaffiliated--Republican voters become more entrenched because of it, but the voters who turn elections, that is the independents, tend to think rationally and vote based on policy rather than calumny.  This time, however, we are dealing with a chimera in the form of Donald Trump, who is imbued with the traits of Republicans along with the amorality and greed for both money and power of a modern American businessman plus the win-at-any-cost mentality of a father who believed that it didn't matter what you were as long as you were a big one.  Between Trump's egotism--his preening, strutting narcissism--and his lack of conscience, any restraint at all is unlikely if not impossible, and with its absence, the prospect of civility and rationality on the right is grim.   We are on new ground now with the injection of racism and bigotry into the rhetoric of the campaign, which will serve to mobilize the very kind of voters that founding fathers like Hamilton, Madison and John Jay feared.  As far back as their papers titled The Federalist, founding fathers Hamilton, and presumably his co-authors of the papers, proposed at least one idea intended to minimize the impact of what they might have called "the rabble."   The Senate they proposed would comprise representatives from the various states elected by the means chosen by each state legislature, which the founders intended to mean that the legislatures would vote on them, not the populace.  Their rationale was that those who ascended to such state office would be more able to concentrate on the business of politics if they were not required to consult with the populace, and that they would represent a more restrained and less fickle point of view, especially with regard to the desirability of ratifying the newly written constitution.  That didn't change until 1913 when the 17th Amendment to The Constitution passed and the people finally had to be involved in the selection of senators, and that eventuated only because of the abuse of the political process by the various state legislatures; they were apparently populated by the venal rich and powerful rather than the vindictive and petty masses, so popular election was deigned the lesser of the two evils.  And that putatively lesser evil chooses the president too.

And now we have Trump's campaign being run by Breitbart's CEO: a man whose lack of restraint allows him to depart from rational criticism with impunity.  His management of the campaign of a man similarly inclined will likewise be as far off the rails as Breitbart's "news" tends to be.  Stephen Bannon is less a loose cannon than a loose "dirty bomb."  Like his ilk--I'm referring to people like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh to name just two--he will say anything to achieve conservative hegemony, which means that he fits right in with Donald Trump.  Add to that terrible twosome the input of Roger Ailes, the former, disgraced head of Fox News, and you have a troika of would-be banana Republicans who see themselves as leading the horses to the Kool-Aid they want them to drink.  There is a sufficiently massive constituency of right to far-right leaning voters that a political triumvirate like them could be dangerous to a candidate whose life is built on rationality and giving all Americans what they want as long as everyone, including our posterity, is protected from lunacy and predation.  To put it concisely, if it's not too late for that already, I'm not sure that Hillary Clinton is vicious enough to overcome a juggernaut like the Trump-Bannon-Ailes terrible trio, and the most recent exchange regarding bigotry makes my point.  The great majority of reasonable voters won't be persuaded of anything they don't already believe by Clinton's insinuation of Trump's own racism in that he does nothing to repudiate the racism of many of his supporters.  Trump's mantra about the odiousness of "political correctness" practically insulates him from such criticism.  But Trump's response that Clinton is the racist as between the two of them could convince some of the less contemplative voters who are not members of either political party, which in turn makes this election too close for comfort, but what's Clinton to do.  Fighting fire with fire seems the best course, though in the end, what does she have to gain.  On the other hand, if she stays on the high road, which she has already strayed from to some extent with her unfitness argument, isn't she open to the criticism from her own camp that what distinguishes her in terms of character from her opponent is being clouded by comparable bad behavior.

If I had Clinton's ear, I would counsel a somewhat subtler approach, but in the end, I think she has no choice but to "call 'em as she sees 'em" and call Trump out on what he has failed to do: repudiate the viler and more vicious of the movements that support him, specifically articulate sane policies that will accomplish desirable ends and comport his conduct with some acceptable moral standard rather defaming others and calling his opponent corrupt just because he knows that his own corruption is soon to become a palatable cross that he must bear once the debates start.  So I say, go on with your bad self, Hillary.  Just keep it down a little.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

In the never-ending quest for a scandal they can build into something, the Republicans have now seized upon the $400 million that we paid to Iran just after that country released a few Americans whom they were holding, which are not being characterized as hostages.  No one ever talks about what the Americans in question were allegedly doing in Iran, but that may well be beside the point.  The fact is that they were there, under arrest, and we got them sent home in some fashion.  Of course, the Republicans original complaint about the Iran nuclear deal was that we got nothing from it...not even release of the Americans that Iran was holding.  Now we've gotten some of them back, as they insisted we should during the course of the Iran nuclear negotiations, so they have to find some other way to complain about them.  The complaint on which they have settled is that the United States doesn't pay ransom, and that's what the $400 million was.  It was ransom in exchange for hostages.  And in reality, there were hostages involved: 400 million of them.  But we didn't pay the ransom.  Iran did.

We have owed Iran nearly $1.4 billion since the Shah was ousted by the first Ayatolla Khomeini.  The Shah had made a deal with the United States for arms...jets, I believe...but the planes were never delivered because we certainly weren't going to arm an anti-American reactionary republic in the middle east.  So we've been holding that money since the early 70's waiting for the international court in The Hague to rule on whether we had to pay it, which apparently it was expected to do any time now.  But as is often the case with litigation, negotiations continued in private, and eventually it was agreed between the parties that the United States would pay the $400 million, even though as yet, no judgment has been entered.  And in consequence of the voluntary nature of the repayment, it was agreed that we wouldn't have to pay any interest on the debt, which had been calculated hypothetically at $1.3 billion.  So, in reality, we were holding 400 million hostages that Iran wanted desperately enough that they agreed not to wait for the international court to enter a judgment in their favor and levy punitive interest in the bargain.  Put another way, we used Iran's money for three decades or so, and not only never paid interest on it, we got three American prisoners out of Iran in the bargain: a pretty good deal...about which the Republicans are now complaining...because they didn't do it. 

Republican efforts to turn little ones into big ones aren't new.  They tried for two years to make something out of the fact that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State when our consulate in Benghazi, Libya was overrun and our ambassador was killed.  But in spite of five commission investigations, one of them lasting over two years, they found no link between Clinton's conduct of her office and the deaths of American diplomatic and security personnel, which the chairman of the committee, Trey Gowdy, admitted only grudgingly and with bogus qualifications when he publicly announced the dissolution of the committee.  He even looked like a bulldog with a bone when he did it, but no matter how he tried, he couldn't find any meat on it.  These former prosecutors all think they're the Tasmanian Devil and then they turn out to be Goofy instead.  And that they all seem to be Republicans is somehow fitting.

Of course, there is still the infamous email server and the claim that Hillary Clinton risked revelation of secret information by using it, but so far, there hasn't been any disclosure of information that was marked classified at the time of its arrival or departure from the server.  I have said it before and I'll say it again...as if everyone else, including Clinton hasn't said it ten times already...that private server was a foolish mistake.  It does reflect badly on her, but not because there was really any risk of classified information being spilled.  It reflects a tendency toward bad judgment in certain areas of her activities, and we have had enough bad judgments by presidents in the past fifty years.  That's an argument that would give Republicans some credibility, but they insist on emphasizing issues that just make them look like scheming politicians.  I don't think that's going to work out for them this November.

Still, with all the mud they throw against the wall, many people will seize on it as a reason to vote against Clinton even though none of it has stuck so far.  The Republicans seem to be thinking that volume will result in credence among voters.  But we're not that stupid...are we?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I find myself wondering about "American Exceptionalism," which I always associate with Newt Gingrich for some reason.  The reason is the four swimmers in Rio who trumped up--and I use the phrase "trumped up" with some admitted deliberation--a robbery for some unknown reason.  I say that the reason is unknown because if I had done what they did on that occasion, I would have tried to not just keep it to myself, but to forget about it, because as it turns out, they weren't being robbed when the incident occurred; they were vandalizing a gas station rest room either after or before urinating on the wall of the building it was in.  They were also apparently drunk after being at a party, which is another issue; who did they know in Rio de Janeiro with a place at his or her disposal in which to have a drunken bash, other than other Olympians living in quarters provided for them by the Brazilian government or the International Olympic Committee, at such a distance from their own quarters that they needed a cab to get back to their rooms.  But set aside what seems to be the wont of star athletes to indulge in excesses of one kind or another because they feel entitled to do so without consequence, and the apparent lack of supervision that these obviously adolescent boneheads were in need of, but didn't get.  I used to be the campus judicial officer at a small division III college, and even there...where the star athletes were universally destined to sell tires at Sears more than they were to play even minor league professional sports...that snotty attitude was rampant among the BMOC's, who didn't realize yet that their self-endowed grandeur was more a delusion than qualification for privilege, and that's the ultimate issue.  It's the other thing I think of when I think of American Exceptionalism: snotty attitude.

There was a time when all the world admired the United States of America.  We were the righteous power in the world under whose aegis much of the rest of the world indulged in freedom and democracy.  We were provident and compassionate...benevolent and virtuous.  But somewhere between, let's say, the Korean Conflict and about 1975 we took a turn for the worse as a nation.  We went from being a beacon of light and hope to being crass and arrogant as a nation.  We began telling others not that we could help them be more like us, but that they should be more like us, and that we were going to make them be so whether they liked it or not.  We had Vietnam, Granada, and then a series of wars in the Middle-East that have left us not just with enemies, but with terrorist threats and the hatred...not just the distain inspired by tourists wearing sandals and socks with their Bermuda shorts making demands for service...the outright animus of nations.  We have carried weapons great destructive power to nations all over the world, which we have used as if we were doing them a favor by ridding them of tyrants whom we replace with chaos and violence.  I'm not saying that the petty vandalism of a quartet of conceited, ephemeral sports stars equals in consequence the enormity of the devastation and death that has resulted from our nation's international officiousness and contempt for the suzerainty of nations with which we disagree.  But I am saying that the behavior that has ensued upon the popularization of the concept of American Exceptionalism has not reflected well on us, much less demonstrated any kind of exceptionalism other than the kind evinced by those four swimmers in Rio de Janeiro.  Their conduct is merely a miniscule reflection of the conduct of our nation in the world and the ethos that inspired it, and we are right to apologize for it as our own Olympic committee has now done.

Don't get me wrong.  I would still rather be an American than a citizen of any other nation.  I still think we do good things that no one else could or is willing to do.  I still think the values we ostensibly profess and advocate are noble and worthy of proliferation.  But I don't think that it is unpatriotic to be critical of the way in which we do what we do, and the four boys in Rio make my point.  The most prominent of them, Ryan Lochte (and I mention his name because he deserves to be named, mostly because he had the audacity to complain about the incident instead of confessing that he had done a bad thing), is primarily responsible for the public nature of our national shame over this incident, though the shame belongs to all of us.  Our culture indulged his arrogance over the course of his twenty-odd years of life because he was a star, and then we sent him abroad in spite of it just so he could reflect some glory onto us...never thinking about the potential consequences of letting a punk like him loose in another country, as it appears that these people weren't under any kind of adult supervision at all.

You may think that my fervor in this matter is unjustified, but I will not apologize for my vitriol.

This incident should be a lesson to us on a much bigger scale than just its own parameters.  If the best of us seem to the rest of the world to be nothing but self-entitled hooligans, we can expect more of what we have been getting lately, including terrorism.  As a nation, we need to rehabilitate ourselves, and thus our reputation.  We need to return to charitable concern for our fellow men and women across the world and reign in our tendency toward chauvinism and narcissism.  Maybe we should also desist in our saber rattling and return to leadership by example.  And it wouldn't hurt for us to acknowledge that equality in this country is something of an illusion, though as a creed it continues to guide us.  Maybe we can start by informing the stars in our society that in the final analysis, they are just like everyone else, and when they disrespect everyone else, there are consequences.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We are past the point at which Donald Trump's qualifications were the issue.  It now seems abundantly clear that it is his sanity that voters should be questioning.  He thinks that without voter fraud of some sort, he is sure to win the presidential election in Pennsylvania.  He thinks that Barrack Obama founded ISIL, and that Hillary Clinton was his henchman.  He thinks that he can make Mexico build a multibillion dollar wall all along their border with the United States.  He has never categorically disavowed his "birther" claims about The President.  All that could just be political hyperbole meant to appeal to a "true believer" class of voters as ignorant as he is.  But every time he says something outlandish--and usually he insists on repeating it for several days before someone advises him against it behind closed doors, or in one recent instance on the radio--he denies that he meant what he said and he expects to be believed not just on that point, but with regard to the next outlandish thing he says.  This time, with the ISIL founder thing, even an ally tried to get him to temper the remark with a colorably sane, albeit factually erroneous rationale on his conservative talk-radio show.  But Trump spurned the effort to throw him a life-line and insisted that he meant the claim literally...and everyone heard it on the evening news that night.  The next day, he started claiming that the news media were persecuting him because he was being sarcastic...even though when that was offered as an explanation he categorically rejected it, insisting that it wasn't just that current policy toward ISIL that he was talking about.  He said, "I disagree," when the host tried to rationalize Trump's outlandish demagoguery away by offering that explanation to him.  Trump insisted that he meant what he said literally, and that it should be taken that way.  That is insane.  We all heard him say that he meant what he said, and we heard him say that he wasn't speaking metaphorically.  Are we now to believe that he didn't say what he said...or that we misinterpreted his remarks?  Are we all part of the media conspiracy against him?  That kind of absurd paranoia qualifies as insanity in my mind, and because Trump also hints that some 2nd Amendment nut might just want to do something about Hillary Clinton, implying something that the Secret Service then warned him about implying, I think he is a candidate for involuntary commitment because he is dangerous.  How dangerous?  Let me give you a couple of examples of the kinds of things his supporters do and say in response to his dangerous rants.

I saw film--that is, there was film on the evening news--of one of his rallies, which in this case was attended by what looked to be a ten or eleven year old boy.  The boy stood with his arms in the air waving a placard that said, "GUT THE BITCH."  Some Trump supporter not only said such a thing within earshot of his young son, he allowed that young son to create a sign proclaiming that sentiment, and then allowed him to come to a rally of reactionary whackos like himself at a Trump whistle stop and show the world that he thought Hillary Clinton should be gutted.  And then, just last weekend at one of Trump's rallies, an older man stuck his face in a television camera after Trump had accused the media of conspiring against him, and with a possessed looking rave accused the cameraman of being "a traitor."  I doubt that it was the same guy, but he looked like an older man who had shoved a forearm into the jaw of a protestor being ejected from a Trump rally several months ago.  Trump never reproaches the perpetrators of these questionable-at-best rants, and certainly never repudiates them.  In fact, Trump seems to be energized by them.  He feeds off them.  Lest you think my suggestion that he be committed is disproportionate to the threat he represents, or that I'm just being sarcastic, consider Hitler.

After World War I, the allied countries that had defeated Kaiser Wilhelm in his attempt to take over the world imposed on Germany a surrender treaty that effectively crippled Germany economically in the course of insuring that the German's couldn't mount a renewed offensive against the rest of Europe and the world.  Inflation, economic stagnation, unemployment and desperation followed, from which Hitler emerged with a nationalist policy that the German people couldn't resist.  His rants against the Jews were a little like Trump's rants against Mexicans, Syrians and Muslims.  The policies Trump advocates are redolent of Hitler's agenda, namely nationalism, racism, religious exclusivity and scorn for the physically and mentally disabled, all of which ended up inflicting on the subject populations everything from sterilization to extermination, all toward the end of extirpation of their kind in Nazi Germany...toward the end of making Germany great again.  Try to think of one of those things that Trump hasn't paralleled, albeit subtly, with one or more of his publicly uttered remarks.  And given the zeal of his followers, who can give the nation the assurance that none of those things could happen here.

Donald Trump is no longer the clown.  He is no longer the blatherskite.  He is no longer the blustering buffoon.  Donald Trump is messianic and paranoid.  And because of his belief in those terrible concepts that, in their abhorantly refined form manifested themselves as the Nazi ethos that cost tens of millions of lives across the world prior to and during World War II, Trump is a threat to the American way of life...a danger to everyone.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A few weeks ago, the Chinese released data on their GDP, that is, their gross domestic product.  For the last quarter, the annualized rate of GDP growth declined to 6.7% compared to our annualized growth rate of between 2% and 3%.  The reason for the greater increase in GDP in China was an increase in consumer spending that accounted for over 84% of that 6.7% growth rate, whereas in the United States it hovers just below 70%.  Consumer spending is driving Chinese economic growth, and it constitutes a vast majority of growth in all industrialized nations.  Business and industrial investment is a small fraction of GDP...less than 15% and probably closer to 10%.  So, if we want to stimulate our economy to faster growth, should we be supplementing business spending with tax cuts for business and industry, or should we be augmenting consumer spending by raising the minimum wage, and thus raising our consumers' capacity to spend.  The reason that that question doesn't end with a question mark is that it is rhetorical.  Of course, higher incomes lead to more growth than capital spending does because there is more of it to start with...and everybody does it.  When the only people you help are businesses--remember, Mitt Romney told us all that "businesses are people too" and a conservative Supreme Court agrees with him--you get only a fraction of the boost for GDP because so many fewer people are enriched.  In short, tax cuts for business and industry don't help us nearly as much as tax cuts for the spending public...those at the bottom--the ones who spend a larger portion of their incomes, and an increase in the minimum wage would probably help the most.  But what other evidence suggests that, in particular, tax cuts for business don't help much.

Well, even if you believe the New York Times' business and industry shills like Adam Davidson --he says that American business and industry is hoarding only $600 billion--it seems clear that there is plenty of money laying around for capital expenditure already.  Of course other estimates of idle capital in the hands of business and industry range from $2 trillion to $7 trillion in this country, and considering that Apple alone admits to having $200 billion all by itself, the higher estimates seem far more credible.  So, how will putting more money in the hands of business and industry leaders cause more capital expenditure.  Again, a rhetorical question.  It won't, and it hasn't.  In fact, business tax rates seem to have next to nothing to do with economic growth as evinced by the fact that Ronald Reagan decreased taxes for business, among others, and his administration created about 16 million jobs.  Bill Clinton twisted Newt Gingrich's arm to force an increase in taxes to pre-Reagan rates, and his administration created in excess of 22 million jobs.  Then of course there's George W. Bush, who resurrected the Reagan tax cuts, and by the time he left office we were losing close to 800,000 jobs per month and his administration managed to create less than a net of 1.5 million jobs in eight years, whereas the Obama administration, in which taxes on the top 1% returned to pre-Reagan levels, has created close to 10 million jobs in just more than 7 years despite starting out with the legacy losses created by George W. Bush.  In terms of percentages of job creation, Ronald Reagan in eight years barely beat Jimmy Carter who had only four, and Bill Clinton outstripped Reagan by about five to four.  In a nutshell, tax cuts have a pretty dismal record when it comes to the economy as it affects the common man.  Add to that the fact that real earnings, that is the amount of money that a working man or woman makes adjusted for inflation, didn't grow for the first thirty years after Reagan, and it is barely growing now, if at all, while the top 1% control record amounts of income and wealth as percentages of the whole.  Our economy becomes more stratified every day based on money, and that is a function of the lingering economic affliction that is Reagan's "supply-side economics."

Of course, Paul Ryan, the Republican Ayn Rand acolyte who runs the House of Representatives,

still believes in the supply side, and his policies favor tax cuts and deregulation, both of which are Republican mantras that you can hear anytime one of them opens his mouth.  And Donald Trump, you know who and what he is, wants tax cuts that favor the rich too.  Ironically, both men claim that such strategies will help the middle class working man and woman.  Apparently history means nothing to Republicans, but it should mean something to you, America.

Throw in the fact that none of the Republicans ever specifies which regulations are so burdensome that they cost jobs and you have a full outline of the differences we are looking at.  Imagine how fast we common people would be losing ground if business were all of a sudden unregulated.  We will all be voting in less than three months, and we have the choice of allowing the stagnation of our general population's economic weal to continue or hoping for change in the form of a progressive...or at least comparatively progressive...president, and perhaps more importantly, a more progressive--that means Democratic--Congress and Senate.  I know which I prefer.

Your friend,

Mike