June 2017 Archives

Dear America,

What a mess we have on our hands, America.  Our president has descended to the depths of petty, sophomoric, personal-insult criticism of those who oppose him rather than responding substantively to their criticisms.  The Republicans are led by two party hacks who think that casuistry, and outright lying for that matter, are acceptable rhetorical tactics, and though our country--and that includes substantial numbers of their own party members--has demonstrate its disdain for all of them and for the policies they are pursuing, the three of them persist.  What is worst about all this is that the damage the Republican Party has suffered is self-inflicted, starting with assigning the sobriquet "Obamacare" to the Affordable Care Act, which is really the root of this problem with healthcare legislation.  As it turns out, they might just as well have named it "mother's milk."  And now, they have to dissemble something that a current majority of us like and replace it with something that so far has been nothing short of anathema to the vast majority of Americans.   Talk about falling on your own sword, the ACA's concept was originated at the Heritage Foundation in response to Hillary Clinton's inquiry in the early nineties about a single payer alternative to our "free market healthcare system."  They could have just voted for it and claimed it as their own and then everyone would have been happy with the prospect of improving on a very flawed idea ahead of them, but n-o-o-o-o.  They had to make it out to be an albatross and hang it around the Democrats' collective neck.  Well, the albatross has come home to roost, and to be blunt, I can't see a way out for the conservative Republican Party. 

But as if to add insult to the self-inflicted injury, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump for president, and as if God was looking to play a cruel joke on us, he lost the election but won the office.  That by itself would have been bad enough, but it turns out that emotionally, Donald Trump is still in the throes of his own puberty.  He stamps his feet and spuriously demeans his opponents and his predecessor because his pride forces him to believe he is better than everyone else, but he's not.  He displays the petulance of a jejune big man on campus even when he deals with foreign leaders, and he is rapidly becoming a bad joke both at home and on the international scene.  Our only hope is that the Democrats will find ways to interdict the destructive momentum that Trump and his party are gaining, and I have a suggestion.  It's not the first time I've mentioned it, but it seems more urgent than ever. 

What the Democrats need to do is draft a bill in either The House or The Senate...or maybe both...that reforms Obamacare and submit it for consideration.  It should include what was originally intended: a public option like making Medicaid or Medicare universal, or turning Medicaid into a kind of federal insurance program for which each participant pays according to his or her ability to do so.  Or, it could include a provision to require the federal government to pay the subsidies that were originally intended and to create a federal Medicaid system that runs parallel to the current system run by the states.  There is even precedent for that in that the original 1935 Social Security Act included four programs--retirement, disability benefits, support for the dependent spouses and children of the deceased and unemployment compensation--to be run by the states and funded primarily by the federal government.  But four years later, it was partially federalized by the Social Security Amendments of 1939 and worker-funded trust funds were created to separate at least the retirement system from the federal budget.  The framework for a plenary healthcare system could be as simple as duplicating the successful histories of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and it should be a simple matter for the Democrats to draft a bill capitalizing on that fact.  Let the Democrats submit the bill and let the Republicans oppose it.  Then the voters will know who is on their side.

The Democrats could put the lie to the entire conservative Republican myth in one fell swoop if they just put their minds to it.  The progressive agenda could become the American creed if they would just act instead of reacting.  Maybe there's something I don't understand about all this, but if so, I wish someone would explain it to me.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

This week, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, released his alternative to the American Health Care Act sent to The Senate by The House about six weeks ago.  Yesterday, McConnell touted the bill as follows:

"Americans are no longer forced to buy insurance they don't need or can't afford."

 But is that what he really meant?  Consider this.

The purpose of health insurance is to make sure that when you need health care, you can get it no matter how much it costs.  What other purpose could health insurance serve.   So, if we can agree to that proposition, we can also agree that wherever the phrase "health insurance" appears in McConnell's self-serving panegyric, we can substitute the phrase "health care."   Thus, if McConnell had been less cynical, and candid instead, his description of his bill would have read:

"Americans are no longer forced to buy health care they don't need or can't afford."

That sentence reveals the real motive behind the Republican effort to repeal what they themselves dubbed "Obamacare," a mistake they are about to pay for; that sentence and the history of their efforts to sabotage every effort the Democrats made when they had control of the federal government.

Since that appellation for the Affordable Care Act was introduced by them, the membership of the Republican Party has defamed the law and done everything it could to vitiate the law and render it a shell of what was intended, and they have often succeeded to the detriment of the American people.  Concomitantly, the Republicans endeavored to vilify the Democrats as usurpers of states' rights and civil liberty while painting themselves as the benefactors to the people for fighting them.  They have done this dirty work because instead of cooperating in making the Affordable Care Act a success, their real purpose was to regain hegemony in the federal government by making the Democrats...Barrack Obama in particular...look bad by whatever devious and dubious tactic might work because allowing success would be inimical to their return to power.  They undermined the subsidies intended to make insurance affordable and the mandatory aspect of the Medicaid expansion in court, for example; as a consequence, some 31 states have opted for the expansion, which means that 19 states have not.  They also did what they could to undermine the strategy of putting separate insurance exchanges in the states by refusing to create their own in Republican controlled states and outlawing the federally funded administrative assistance effort intended to help new insurance applicants to "navigate" the exchanges.  All the while they were gravely intoning an intention to relieve the American people of this usurpation of their rights as they crooned that such was in their best interest because they could do better...but they never did until, they claim, now.  But McConnell admitted the ugly truth yesterday.  The American people weren't the intended beneficiaries of the Republican sabotage...at least not the vast majority of them.  The American rich were intended to benefit so that their largess could trickle down on us like a cleansing rain.  Unfortunately, it isn't rain that would trickle down on us under "Trumpcare."

The Republican alternative to Obamacare is really an attempt not to unburden the American people, but to take from those of us who "can't afford" healthcare what they have finally enjoyed for the past four to six years: necessary assistance in getting health care and the peace of mind that goes with it.   So, since these letters are addressed to you, America, and since Mitch McConnell is an American, I want to address this suggestion to him with the rest of you as witnesses.  Look in the mirror, Mitch.  How can you stand to be that guy you see? 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The day before yesterday, a relatively inconspicuous man walked onto a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia and shot five people.  Not by chance but by design, the scene was a baseball practice for Republican congressmen, and one of those shot was the third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives; he is still in critical condition though the other victims are well on the way to recovery, at least one of them already released from the hospital.  Less than five hours later, a man walked into a UPS facility in San Francisco and shot to death three men, then killing himself.  Then yesterday, Paul Ryan stood before the Congress and sanctimoniously proclaimed that the members of congress were a family.  "An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us," he effused.  He never mentioned the victims in San Francisco, not the fact that an attack on three of us, America, is also an attack on all of us.

In events of the previous day, a young college student named Otto Warmbier arrived in this country on a plane.  He was coming back from North Korea where he had been brutally imprisoned and left comatose for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster from the staff quarters of the hotel in which his group was staying.  Even if the offense was committed, the punishment was an inhumane atrocity perpetrated by what the victim's father called a "pariah nation," and he was right of course.  But young Otto Warmbier's father also said that he was "so proud" of his son and that their spirits were together.  How pride came into this I do not understand, but that is what links the two shootings to a panegyric for a victim of the North Korean government.

We have become so prideful as individuals, and thus so self-absorbed, that all we can see is what is immediately in front of us.  Paul Ryan spoke and his fellow representatives, including opposition leader Nancy Pelosi, all stood together, some of them embracing and shedding tears for one of their own, without dedicating a thought, much less a word, to the three people shot in San Francisco.  And Otto Warmbier's father, speaking to the press as his son lay in a state of "unresponsive wakefulness" nearby in Cincinnati, thought first of pride when he spoke of his son, who apparently went to a dictatorial country on a lark after a tour of China out of a "spirit of adventure."  Whether or not it is true that he attempted to steal something for which he purportedly was promised $10,000 toward the purchase of a car by some church organization representative,  Otto didn't do anything to be particularly proud of...at least not in North Korea.  And as to the members of our congress, if ego were capable of reaching a critical mass, the United States Congress, not to mention the White House, would have been vaporized in a self-inflicted mushroom cloud centuries ago.

As a nation, we have institutionalized pride, which I was taught was the worst of the seven deadly sins.  We speak of ourselves as exceptional, and we tout our accomplishments world-wide.  We use our military to impose our values on other nations and then expect them to be grateful when in nations like Afghanistan, the people don't want us there just as they didn't want the Russians before us and many other empire builders before them going back farther than Alexander the Great.  Tens of thousands have died in Iraq because we invaded the country to remove one oppressor only to find that those whom we installed to take his place are just as vitriolic and oppressive in their sectarian hatred as was their predecessor.  The list of our prideful misadventures is long, and in spite of it, we never learn.

No doubt, the Warmbier case will be an international issue, as it should be, but it is hard to see what there is in it that is worth taking pride.  And though our last president expended enormous political capital to reduce our troops' exposure to harm in Afghanistan, our current president has authorized sending back into harm's way four thousand of those whose well-being has just been extricated from it.  As to the shooting of the UPS employees and the Congressman, those are things that should never have happened in a civilized nation, but you can be sure that if gun control comes up, some weak link who managed to get elected to The House will stand up and unleash a diatribe against those favoring universal background checks.  He'll start with the phrase, "Every time there is another mass shooting..." not realizing that by starting his remarks that way he only reaffirms that there are so many that the subject keeps coming up.  What we need is recognition of the fact that rampant gun violence requires a solution because there is an "every time."  What we don't need is another conceited, stentorian, egotistical ignoramus claiming to be sage enough to tell us what the constitution means, but who doesn't realize that the first four words of the second amendment are, "A well regulated malitia..."  We'd better get over ourselves and start thinking with our own heads instead of those out of which come the loudest voices.  Our lives depend on it. 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's probably time we started talking about something other than Donald Trump.  He may well orchestrate his own political demise, but if he doesn't there's really nothing we can do about it, and dousing his absurd acts with the truth every day doesn't seem to change anything.  So let's move on to something that someone else is doing to us.  Jeb Hensarling, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee is trying to essentially repeal the Dodd-Frank Act, and that would effect us all.  It is important to remember that Dodd-Frank was enacted to replace the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which was formerly repealed under the auspices of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a law passed in 1999.  It is also important to remember that the principles involved essentially kept investment and savings institutions separate, only the latter being insured by the federal government to prevent those with savings in banks from being ruined by another financial debacle like the Great Depression.  It is also true that Glass-Steagall had been undermined by conservative, some might even say nefarious forces in the financial industry over the course of the sixty-five year existence of the act to the extent that it was essentially entirely vitiated by the time of its repeal.  But even Newt Gingrich admits that the financial crisis that started in 2007--the disaster that probably changed our economy forever to the detriment of those of us who are down here on earth rather than up in the rarified atmosphere of the 1%--probably never would have occurred but for the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  Glass-Steagall had been undermined into meaninglessness by the obsession with deregulation that started in the Reagan administration and continued through the nineties, but the fact is that both the form and the essence of Glass-Steagall protected us from the bank failures that occurred in the thirties, and the evidence is plain.  The federal government enacted the TARP--Troubled Asset Relief Plan--out of fear that the big investment banks would go under and take the savings of not just their investors, but of their regular depositers as well with them, leaving the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...the FDIC...to make good on the losses that the investment bankers had wrought.  In order to protect us regular Americans from losing our life's savings, the federal banking system forced those big banks to take on loans that would cover their exposure under what is essentially part of a legal gambling ring for millionaires and billionaires: the "derivatives market."  

In light of all this, Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd got together and formulated the Dodd-Frank Act, which in its original configuration required all those banks that were too big to allow to fail to fund an insurance account of their own so that if one greedy institution got into trouble, all the other greedy institutions would have to bail them out instead of the American taxpayers.  But the Republicans...conservatives who think that anything business does is good for all of us...killed that provision in The Act, and attempted to thwart the entire purpose of Dodd-Frank with parliamentary procedure in congress during the regulatory process that was to take place there.  But some things remained, among them being the "Volcker Rule," which keeps investment and savings institutions separate, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which regulates the conduct of banks' and other financial institutions' interaction with consumers.  The latter is what you complain to when a bank, like Wells-Fargo, foists services on you that you don't want and then charges you for them (that actually happened and the CFPB caused them to refund millions to cheated customers just a couple of years ago).  That's where Jeb Hensarling comes in.  He wants to essentially eviscerate the CFPB and eliminate the Volcker Rule, which in essence would be a repeal of what's left of Dodd-Frank.  Remember that Dodd-Frank, like Glass-Steagall before it, is the only thing that protects us from predation at the hands of the big banks, and Hensarling wants to render it meaningless.  And the Republicans in Congress will likely go along with him, though the Democrats in The Senate will not allow it in the end.

All of this precipitates the question, how did we get to this point in time at which people elect and reelect representatives--Hensarling has been a Congressman from Texas for over fifteen years--who are hell-bent on allowing their patrons to shaft us.  Actually I have an answer, but that's for another time. 

Your friend,

Mike