letters2america

Letter 2 America for May 18, 2012

2012-05-17T16:22:59Z

Dear America,

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 01: U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) (L) speaks during a news conference on the debt limit impasse with Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) (C) and Conference Vice Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) (R) at the U.S. Capitol on August 1, 2011 in Washington, United States. The House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate is expected to vote today on an agreement to extend the federal debt limit and enact spending cuts. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

The other night, I was going through the channels one more time before turning out the lights when I came across C-SPAN, and there behind a podium was the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, resplendent in his tan and his contrasting pastel tie, speaking to a small crowd at a Peter Foundation forum. I didn't know this, but the Peter Foundation is a "foundation" in the sense that someone named Peter founded it in 2008, but it is primarily an advocacy group for conservative fiscal policy. But it really doesn't matter where Boehner is speaking, his message is always the same...you know, no new taxes, cut benefits to the poor and the elderly, more guns less butter, etcetera. Still, I try to listen when people like McBoehnell (McConnell and Boehner) talk because they are the voice of the opposing camp if you are an old progressive like me. It's good to know your adversary even if your skin crawls while you are listening to what he says, and I thought that this speech, followed by an interview, was an opportunity to hear anything new that might be coming out in the way of conservative casuistry. Boehner's speech was as bland as usual but the interview quickly turned incendiary. He answered a question about how dire our fiscal situation really is by deriding President Obama for failing to lead in the resolution of our debt problems, which is code for refusing to see things the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) way on debt reduction, government regulation, "job-killing tax hikes" and entitlement reform. If he had left it there, I would have been able to tolerate it, but the next thing he said made me turn off the television and go to sleep. He said that we, meaning the government, should level with the American people and tell them that there is no money in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. "It's been spent," he said.

Those of you who read these letters regularly, if there are any of you, know that Social Security is something of a preoccupation for me. I have written about it many times, probably too many, but the issue keeps raising its ugly head, and by issue I mean the nature and existence of the trust funds from which both Social Security and Medicare are paid. So when I hear a remark like that, I am filled with foreboding. The reason is that it is the opening line in the argument that Social Security should be merged with other federal programs funded by the general fund. The next step in the argument is that the general fund is operating with a deficit and the debt is soaring, so let's reduce Social Security benefits, which then transmogrifies into, while we're at it, let's get rid of it altogether and have private retirement accounts, which is code for, let the individual provide for his retirement because I can afford it even if you can't. But setting the future of Social Security and Medicare aside, Boehner's off hand claim that there is no trust fund for those programs was an attempt to toss off a lie so casually that it is presumed by the audience to be the truth. It is an insidious first step in a strategy for achieving a dastardly end. So, let me take this opportunity to put the lie to Boehner's claim that there is no trust fund.

The Social Security program fund was created in 1935 when Social Security was created under FDR. We had income tax already, so this program had nothing to do with revenue for the federal government. It was conceived as a separate program funded exclusively by its potential beneficiaries, who might not otherwise provide for themselves in their old age when they could no longer work largely because when you have to worry about eating now, you ignore the problem of how you are going to eat later. Thus, the funds for the benefits to be paid needed a place to be kept and administered, so the law creating the program was supplemented by the creation of the Social Security Trust Funds in 1939 and "payroll taxes" began being deposited into it, regular benefit checks starting to be paid out of it in 1940, not out of the general fund but out of that trust fund, which is maintained by The Treasury though the IRS collects the funds from our pay checks and every month writes a check to The Trust for the amount collected. Also, the law creating the Social Security Trust Fund permitted the funds to be invested; however only in U.S. Treasury instruments like bonds and notes. Those bonds purchased are the assets of The Trust, just as they are the assets of individuals who buy treasuries, and just as they are for the Chinese, JP Morgan's bond funds and anyone else who lends money to the United States. We own those bonds, not John Boehner and the Rcc, and not the United States either, and the notion that the United States has walked away from its obligations under those bonds is just as detrimental to the standing of the United States in the international credit market as the fight over the debt ceiling was. If Boehner had said that the trillions of dollars in bonds held by the Chinese in reality had been spent and that their holdings didn't exist, there might have been a world war, but he thinks he can get away with saying that to us, his own people. If Jamie Dimon said that $2 billion of the money deposited with the bank no longer existed because he and his management team had just lost it--which in fact he just did say--so they weren't going to pay it back to the bank's customers who made those deposits, he would have gone to jail for fraud. Maybe Boehner should go to jail, because what he said was tantamount to the same thing, but even that wouldn't help us if he and his cohorts succeed in foisting on the majority of us the canard that the Social Security Trust Fund is just a fiction.

So, there you have my most recent rant on the subject of Social Security. The Trust Fund does exist just as your savings exist even though the bank lent them to someone to buy a house. Your treasury bonds exist even though the federal government has spent the money you lent it to get the bonds, and the Social Security Trust Fund's bonds exist the same way. Our money is safe in spite of John Boehner's claim. But it is clear from the position he is taking on the subject where he and his fellow conservatives want to go: they want to nationalize our trust fund and forgive themselves the $2 trillion debt to the American people that they have run up so that they can pretend to have reduced the national debt. So, when you go to the polls America, think in the long term. Most of you have already paid into the Social Security Trust Fund and are entitled to benefits on account of doing so. Do you want your money or not?

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for May 15, 2012

2012-05-14T18:38:53Z

Dear America,

Jamie Dimon - Caricature (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

I often find myself wondering how the Republican Party survives. This past week, so much of what they have claimed to stand for since 2010 has been undermined, yet they persist in their blatant tactics and no one seems to call them on them. Worse still, there are still Republicans among the electorate who seem willing to tolerate their chicanery. The Republicans in The House voted on a bill to cut $310 billion from the deficit over the next decade by reducing, among other things, food stamps in order to avoid the cuts in the defense budget scheduled automatically for the beginning of 2013 because of the deal they insisted on when they held the increase in the deficit limit hostage last year. That deal created the "Super-committee" that was supposed to find a certain amount of budget savings, though it was populated by only two types of people: those who favor tax increases along with spending cuts and those who will not approve any tax increases for any purpose, the less fortunate among us be damned. Of course the committee accomplished nothing but to give the conservatives on it--the no new taxes people--a grandstand from which to posture and look pious, and the automatic cuts thus became automatic. But now, the Republicans, who wanted all of the other automatic cuts but didn't want cuts to the defense budget, are trying to get what they wanted but couldn't get legitimately by passing it into law after the fact, leaving the cuts to social programs but deleting the defense savings. It was essentially that inflexible position that caused the debt ceiling crisis in the first place, and now they are attempting to go around the deal they insisted on. And what's worst about it is that they seem to think no one will notice that the deficit cutting bill they have now passed without a single Democratic vote and also without nineteen of their own is purely an act of bad faith and shameless partisanship. But as if that weren't enough to tarnish the Republicans' claims of integrity beyond redemption, it has now come out that Mitt Romney was something of a frat-boy bully when he was in prep school with the other rich kids.

There has been a report of an incident in which one of Romney's classmates bleached his long hair, and this was back in the day when the conventionality of the 1950's ruled. Romney picked up a pair of scissors and with a few of his prep-school buddies held the boy down and cut his hair off. Of course Romney, the great panderer, claimed that he didn't remember the incident, as if he expected anyone to believe that he could forget having his friends hold another kid down while he himself wielded the scissors that cut off the kid's hair. And frankly, I did some dumb things myself when I was a kid...things I am not proud of today, so the fact that he was that callous doesn't surprise me, nor is it unexpected for a prepster like him. I doubt that anyone would have held it against him to any greater extent than to shame him into apologizing and moving on. But he lied about it, and that is a reflection not on who he was when he was a dumb rich kid. That is a reflection on who he is today, half-hearted blanket apology to anyone he may have hurt or not. No one can confirm the event with the victim as he is dead, but Romney's friends of the day have verified that the incident occurred, and they vouch for Romney as a good and decent guy. Of course, the endorsement of the kids who held Romney's victim down doesn't go too far. As in the case of the Republican apostasy on the defense budget cuts, no one seems to care that Romney would lie about remembering the incident, and I don't understand that either. And now there is Jamie Dimon.

Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan has been arguing vocally and publicly against regulation of the big banks under the Dodd-Frank Act, and specifically, he has vociferously opposed the Volker Rule, which limits the extent to which those big banks can speculate and the amount of risk they can take. The Volcker Rule was propounded by Paul Volker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a universally esteemed leader in the world of finance, in response to the financial crisis of 2008 that led us to our current economic nadir; the causal relationship is his conclusion, not mine, though I can see no way to disagree with him. Still, Dimon has been banging away at regulators with a cadre--more like a large multi-million dollar gang actually--of para-legislative thugs in five thousand dollar suits to effectively stifle Democratic and democratic efforts to promulgate regulations pursuant to the act. Recently, it came to light that one of J.P. Morgan's traders, who was referred to in the industry as "the London Whale," and sometimes even as Voldemort, the arch villain from the Harry Potter movies, was making enormous bets in the derivatives market, which is what collapsed around AIG's corporate ears to precipitate the bail-out of the banks (TARP) and the recession cum depression that we are still suffering. And as it happens, J.P. Morgan had to admit last week that it lost $2 billion in those trades, which only a week earlier when controversy emerged as they first came to light Dimon had characterized as "a tempest in a teacup." So now, Jamie Dimon, the face of the tortured concept of capitalism that says that gambling on the failure of others in the economy is a legitimate business that shouldn't be substantially regulated, has some explaining to do. And once again, the conservative, supply-side, Republican conservative complex (Rcc) view that any way to make money is a good thing even if it isn't productive in any way has been demonstrated to be not only morally bankrupt, but tending toward financial bankruptcy as well. The argument that Dodd-Frank was unnecessary is under water now, just like the foreclosed mortgages that made "derivative" a dirty word.

So, over the past week or two, three pillars of the Republican plan to retake power in Washington have been demonstrated to be casuistic, self-serving, and perhaps even dangerous. They have tried to take back a demand that they themselves made and prevailed on, in effect reneging on the trade they made during talks on the debt ceiling, their presidential candidate and ostensible leader has demonstrated that memory and fact are matters of convenience, not substance in his eyes, and the theory that big finance is good for us, and is an respectable business run by honest people in the bargain, has been belied in spades...two billion of them. It's proof of disingenuousness at best and tawdriness at the very least, and at the worst of sheer turpitude. It's all so...so...Republican.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for May 11, 2012

2012-05-11T14:36:26Z

The Chen Clan's Academy in Guangzhou, China.中国广州陈家祠。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear America,

Over the past couple of weeks, the news media have demonstrated the impact they have on politics in America, if not by what they include in the news they report then by what they omit, including the questions they don't ask. A Chinese dissident named Chen made international news when he purportedly escaped from house arrest and sought sanctuary in the American embassy nearby. If that were all there was of the story, it would seem credible by virtue of the frequency with which such stories about people in repressed countries come out. But that was only the beginning and what remained of the misadventure--which spooled out over the course of the next ten days or so during a diplomatic trip by our Secretary of State to China for talks on some unrelated issues--raised more questions than it produced in the way of answers...largely because the media never asked them.

The story went that Mr. Chen was a blind Chinese dissident who had taught himself the law and was widely known, if not renowned, in China. One night, Mr. Chen escaped house arrest and found his way, alone, to the nearest American embassy where he was admitted with a foot wound...much to be expected if a blind man wanders through the night on his own in flight from arrest. Of course, the Chinese were not very happy about Mr. Chen's conduct, and negotiations ensued for some disposition of the Chen affair, which eventually, again purportedly, involved threats against his family and the beating by authorities of his wife, all toward the end of coercing Mr. Chen to go back home. Eventually, he decided to comply with the demands of authorities by reporting to a hospital for treatment of his foot, at which point he had never requested asylum in the United States. All he wanted, it was reported, was to go to law school somewhere near Beijing. Reports at that time indicated that he was being held in isolation from American officials, which seemed tantamount to police custody from what was being said in the media. Now the media began to report that Chen did want to go to the United States as a student to pursue his law education, and that was the outcome that all parties were urged to accept, I suppose to avoid the embarrassment of the Chinese by allowing Chen to have political asylum in the United States and to avoid embarrassment of the American diplomatic corps as well by sending Chen back to the repression that he now wished to escape, or at least that was the implication of his new wishes. But there were some fairly incongruous aspects of the whole thing.

First there was the issue of his escape from house arrest, a feat accomplished by his wife after him, which is how the reports of the beatings came out. Is it really that easy to escape arrest...of any kind...in a country like China? And then there is the question of how a blind man could find his way in the middle of the night to the American embassy...alone. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't know where to look for a Chinese embassy if I wanted to find one, but American embassies apparently are easy enough to find that even a blind man can find them in the dark...and alone. And then there was this bizarre turn: he got on the phone to publicly discuss the whole affair with a Republican lynch mob holding an impromptu congressional hearing despite the fact that he was under some kind of detention at the hospital. It makes you wonder how the Chinese tyrants stay in power, doesn't it. They can't even prevent their detainees from making or receiving overseas calls with the Republicans. And now, the New York Times reports that Chen's extended family is being harassed and maintained in various forms of detention, his nephew even being under arrest in jail. But as it turns out, he is under arrest for threatening police with a meat cleaver...a charge that even family members confirm to be valid: a thing that'll get you arrested even in a free country...like ours. At least The Times, which entitled its article "Relatives of Dissident Said to Face Harassment" ended the piece with a note of integrity. They observed that Chen reported that the Chinese police were "going crazy with reprisals" against his family. But they also consulted Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a legitimate human rights group, which reported that while some family members have been taken in for questioning and told not to leave town, only the nephew was incarcerated. Such tyrants, those Chinese...arresting people who threaten cops...actually much the way we do.

But with all of the paradoxes in the story, no one, not even NPR, seemed willing to ask any questions about the events or Mr. Chen's history as a dissident, or even in any other respect. And because of that fact, the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) had a field day criticizing the administration for, among other things, sending Chen back to the Chinese at the hospital without ensuring that the American embassy staff would have continuous access to him. Ironically, the Republicans in congress seemed to manage that with an international phone call played over a speaker without even planning it. So we had a Chinese dissident under arrest in a hospital talking to an ad hoc Republican committee on an open phone line from his room about the fact that he was incommunicado, and when that story ran on the evening news, no one even asked how he could have either made or received the phone call if indeed he was incommunicado, and further, in jeopardy. No one ever asked what he went to the embassy for if he didn't want to seek asylum in the United States. No one asked how his wife, who purportedly had been beaten while under house arrest, escaped the same way her husband had, apparently without any resistance from the people holding her in custody. No one asked what made Mr. Chen a dissident in the first place or what he stood for, or for that matter what he had ever done to deserve the sobriquet "dissident."

What I take from all this is that someone isn't doing his or her job. The media just roll over and report negative news about China without question or even healthy skepticism. The Republicans believe anything that works against the Democrats, and the Democrats just take it. I guess politics and the reportage it generates are something like the Chinese police. They control everything absolutely...except what they don't.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for May 6, 2012

2012-05-08T14:45:09Z

Dear America,

MONROVIA, CA - MARCH 2: General Motors cars are displayed at the Sierra Chevrolet auto dealership as storm clouds build in the distance on March 2, 2010 in Monrovia, California. A power steering problem that has been linked to 14 crashes and one injury has prompted General Motors Company to announce that it is recalling 1.3 million compact cars throughout North America. An investigation of approximately 905,000 Cobalt models in the United States by US safety regulators reveals more than 1,100 complaints of power steering failures. Models being recalled includes the 2005-2010 model year Chevrolet Cobalt and 2007-2010 Pontiac G5 in the United States as well as the 2005-2006 Pontiac Pursuit sold in Canada, and 2005-2006 Pontiac G4 sold in Mexico. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

This has been a week for numbers regarding our economy. 2011 corporate profits for the top 500 corporations in America were announced by Fortune Magazine and it was a record setting year for them: the total approaches a trillion dollars, up more than 16% over 2010. And at the top of the list is Exxon-Mobil with earnings of over $40 billion, and Exxon-Mobil is not the only oil company that did so well. Three of the top four earners were petroleum companies, but coming in at number five was General Motors. It seems that business is doing well in America despite the puling of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) about the business climate created by the Obama administration. The oil companies are making record amounts of money, and their executives and shareholders made their money as they took more and more out of every one of our pockets while generating those record earnings with near record gas prices. It seems that at least in the oil business, which takes its stock in trade largely from under public soil and ocean, prosperity doesn't trickle down, it trickles, or perhaps more aptly gushes, up. Of course, the Rcc isn't mentioning the apparent paradox of these record levels of profit generating earnings at a time when they claim that the Obama administration's policies are inimical to business success.

And then there's the success of General Motors to explain. You may recall the hue and cry that rang out when the federal government "bailed out" GM and Chrysler, most recently reiterated by Mitt Romney, who says that he wouldn't have done it but would rather have let both companies go into bankruptcy. But the decision of The President to spend TARP money on the auto industry instead of pumping it into the banks so that they could get richer still as Larry Summers did during the last months of the Bush administration, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs. In fact, GM--at number 5 on the Forbes earnings list--is forgoing its summer two week shut down this year because of demand, whereas serial bankruptcies like those seen in the airline industry over the past couple of decades have led to defunct companies and customer gouging in the guise of economy. Under prodding from the administration, GM refreshed its model designs, closed unprofitable brands and dealerships, and updated its technology, and thus began selling more cars again to the end result that it is once again the biggest car company in the world. Imagine how the Rcc would have howled if there had been a couple of hundred fewer jobs in our economy than there are, which would have been the result if bankruptcy had been the path chosen rather than restoration of an industry, one of the few still thriving in our nation.

At the same time, the creation of jobs in the private sector has slowed and municipal employment has become harder to find over the past month, though the unemployment figure went down from 8.2% to 8.1%...the second .1% monthly decline in a row...nothing to brag about, but progress in the right direction it seems to me. But the Rcc can't have that so close to the election, and all of a sudden--that is since the creation of jobs has been a reliable monthly event and unemployment has gotten ever so close to the magic 8% that the Rcc has been dwelling on as a campaign promise made by Barak Obama--the topic on which they want to focus is the decline in participation of unemployed people in the labor market. They don't mention the record number of people--baby boomers--retiring from the labor market, nor do they discuss the college graduates of two years go and earlier who haven't been able to find anything but minimum wage jobs since the supply-side recession began when they harp on what have been reported to be record numbers of disengaged members of the work force, especially among men. Nor do they discuss the obstruction of Obama policies that has kept their effects limited for nearly four years now, and they never have wanted to mention the fact that in the original stimulus package, 40% of expenditures were the tax cuts, mostly for business, on which they insisted while they resisted the Social Security tax holiday that put so much consumer spending back into our economic cycle.

What we are witnessing is the approach of a benchmark in our emergence from the great recession we are still going through. President Obama said that his stimulus package would keep unemployment under 8%, but it didn't, and it didn't for a lot of reasons. But now we are nearly there, and the Republicans...the Rcc in general...are saying, now what are we going to complain about. It seems ever more likely that unemployment will be below 8% by November, and maybe nearer to 7.5% while it was at about 10% when Barak Obama took office in January of 2009, thanks to the policies that the Rcc is still recommending to the American people. The Republican sell of conservative economics...of an economic system akin to feudalism in which a few at the top assume a paternalistic duty to the rest of us that they fulfill or not at their whim...is becoming harder to make as the days pass. The specifics of the debate on the numbers will become more fulsome as the election nears, but you can be sure of one thing. At the core of the Republicans' campaigns will be something we have all become familiar with: evasion of the essential truth.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for May 4, 2012

2012-05-03T16:08:06Z

Dear America,

Michael Dukakis at a campaign rally in UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, the night before the US presidential election of 1988 (Mon, 7 Nov 1988). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Amidst the popular pule about what has become the base nature of our politics, baseness continues to be the sine qua non for electoral success. In keeping with the dubious plaints about the tenor of our campaigns, David Brooks--whom those of you who read these letters know I hold in high esteem--wrote about it in his column of May 1, bemoaning the no-holds-barred nature of what there has been so far of the Obama-Romney contest and exhorting the candidates to a higher level debate on the issues as well as a nobler posture overall for both of them. But the fact remains that negative campaigns seem to work despite the disgruntlement of the electorate whenever it is polled. Newt Gingrich disavowed it, but eventually capitulated to the expediency of negative campaigning, though too late and to no avail. And Mitt Romney will do and has done anything to get elected, including not just pandering but calumniating as well. Now, even the Obama campaign is dabbling in negative advertising, though with a lighter touch and at least a modicum of subtlety. It evokes the sentiment reflected in what I always say about election day, that is, the majority always gets what it deserves on election day, and the rest of us just have to accept it. Similarly, as to the fabric of the election process as we see it--and as David Brooks complained about it--the majority gets the election that it asks for, and that is the real problem: the majority. Elections are popular enterprises, meaning that they are for the people, and they are necessary in a modern democracy. But even the founding fathers of our nation had their reservations about leaving decision making to the people at large. We do not rise to the level of our most noble constituents. We sink to the level of the least of us, and the evidence that such is the case is abundant. But still, there is hope that the American people will decide wisely in that they may attribute responsibility for the degrading of our electoral processes and punish the perpetrators of the ignominy. It just isn't very likely considering recent history.

I think back to the election in which George H.W. Bush--Bush the elder--ran against Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was the kind of governor in Massachusetts who stood above the partisan patronage politics of his state. He rode public transportation to work every day, and he was a plain spoken if not humorless, sincere man. Unfortunately, he looked rather foolish riding in a military tank with a helmet on, and apropos of what we are discussing now, he didn't stoop to the level of his opponent in his campaign. HW ran ads about one Willie Horton, a paroled felon who committed murder while out on parole while Dukakis was governor, and attributed responsibility for that murder to Governor Dukakis being "soft on crime" even though it was a parole board that made the decision to let Horton out, and it did so according to the law. Dukakis never overcame the stigma...the calumny really...of the Horton ads. He lost and HW became president after Ronald Reagan instead of Michael Dukakis. I'm not saying that HW was or is a bad man, though I can't say otherwise either. But his campaign tactics were dubious at best. Incidentally, HW was the Republican candidate in that election. And then of course there was the George W. Bush campaign against John Kerry. A verb even came out of that campaign: Swiftboating. And that doesn't mean punting to one's picnic with the current. It is true that campaigning had become a bit more sophisticated by then and W had henchmen, whether by design or just in fact, who did the hatchet work for him. But the end result was the same. And W never did disavow the Swiftboat campaign. Incidentally, W like his father was the Republican candidate.

What is notable in all this, at least to me, is that all the despicable election tactics of which I am aware came out of Republican campaigns. When quotations are clipped and twisted, it seems to be Republicans who do it. And when characters are assassinated, again...Republicans. Even among themselves they engage in such tactics, which suggests a certain lack of moral fiber to me. But what I think about it means almost nothing. Mine is just one vote's worth of indignation. The question is, what do the majority of voters think, and that's where David Brooks comes in. Every Tuesday and Friday, thousands, if not millions, of voters read his thoughts on such subjects as the quality of our electoral process. And all those thousands, or millions, are affected to a greater or lesser extent by what he says. So, while I doubt that his opinion on who is responsible for the decay in the decorum of our elections will determine our next president in and of itself, it will have an effect...maybe on one voter, maybe on thousands...but it will have an effect. So it matters that someone points out to as many people as possible that at least to some extent, and to the extent that Mr. Brooks is a Republican and a conservative, the critique of politics he has offered is a little like crocodile tears. In my opinion, Republicans don't get to complain about modern American politics. If what has happened to our electoral process is criminal, they are the ones who should be doing the time. Unfortunately, it is usually the rest of us who have to...with a Republican administration.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for May 1, 2012

2012-04-30T17:16:10Z

This is a chart illustrating the future payouts of Social Security Benefits in the US from 2009-2083. The source of the information is the Social Security Administration's website. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear America,

It is disconcerting to see and hear even those who are touted as pundits making assertions about Social Security that are ill conceived and lacking in circumspection. The value and significance of Social Security in terms of our economy, national lifestyle, stability and weal is too profound to be so misunderstood and ignored. In fact, it is my belief that without Social Security, the financial maelstrom we have just barely survived would have been a depression like that of the 1930's, and quite possibly even worse, and for several reasons.

First is the effect of the destitution of our elderly and disabled that would have ensued upon the unraveling of the web of hollow promises that our financial system was ultimately unable to keep. When jobs became scarce and houses lost their values, the support systems that most elderly and disabled people would have to rely upon in the absence of Social Security would have been direly undermined. Foreclosures are bad enough when the people put out of their homes are young and able, but when they also dispossess the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, something has to be done or people starve and are forced to live on the streets. Palliative programs like the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, were created during the depression, but they were costly and in this day and age--with the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) constantly carping that the capitalist class needs more and the rest of us should have less--getting such programs enacted today would have been virtually impossible. It is difficult to imagine this country without the part of the social safety net that is Social Security in circumstances like those with which we have been dealing and continue to deal. But mitigating hardship once it occurs is not the only value of the program.

On ABC's This Week this past Sunday, George Will suggested that one of the ways in which reform of Social Security could be effected would be to increase the retirement age by indexing it to the average life span, which he said would put the retirement age in the mid-seventies rather than at sixty two as it is now. But if he had considered unemployment before making his suggestion, he would have realized that the longer people hold their jobs rather than retire, the longer those jobs are unavailable to those just coming into the job market. And the longer young people are unemployed, the longer they must be provided for under unemployment insurance programs, social services like those of Medicaid, welfare and food stamps. And some are provided for by parents, which is not the minor consideration it appears to be on the surface. Not all of what parents spend to support their children even after their educations has the same effect on our economy as spending on leisure activities, home improvements, new cars and other major consumer goods does. Paying for a child's car insurance doesn't have the same impact on our economy as buying landscaping materials and going to Vermont for the weekend, which brings me to my next point.

Virtually every dollar of Social Security benefits gets spent in the month in which the check comes. People living on Social Security live on their benefits, and often out of necessity, they even supplement them with part-time work in order to lead satisfying and reasonably comfortable lives. As that money gets spent, it has the same effect on the economy as any other spending, including government stimulus, but it has the advantage of having been paid for in advance by the working people who now live in retirement. And almost perversely, it creates that pool of part-time workers on which many small businesses rely because they can't afford to pay a reasonable wage to a full-time worker who has to support his family. It costs the government nothing to pay Social Security, and it never has. The program has been self-sustaining since its inception in 1933, and thus represents an enormous stimulus for the economy that is constant and results in a modicum of economic stability in that it funds consumption that constitutes a baseline for our economy. Thus, reducing benefits, either in monthly terms or in terms of the age at which benefits become available for retirees, also reduces the flow of consumer dollars into the very small business people that the Rcc vaunts as the life's blood of our economic system: the very people they most want to favor.

All in all, Social Security is not just a lower limit below which the quality of life of our working people can never fall. It is a monthly infusion of cash into our economy that pays for itself and is one of the things that makes the United States the envy of the world. It needs adjustment within the next 33 years, which is the revised duration of the lifespan of the current $2 trillion Social Security Trust Fund, but we should be able to figure something out over the course of three decades, so the faux Rcc urgency shouldn't scare anyone into vitiating one of the best things we do as a capitalist society. In the interim, it is imperative that those who will ultimately make the decisions as to how to change Social Security so as to ensure its solvency look more carefully at the ripples that will emanate from whatever solution they throw at the problem. It is the source of almost fifteen percent of what the federal government borrows at very favorable rates, and it is a major tributary in our stream of commerce. And in the bargain, the government doesn't have to pay for it; we do as individuals. So people like George Will ought to realize that their cavalier suggestions about compromising a benefit on which the vast majority of Americans do or will rely at some point in their lives are not helpful. It's the golden goose in our system of entitlements, not the albatross around our necks.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 27, 2012

2012-04-27T14:09:32Z

Dear America,

Minwage3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This past Saturday, a letter to-the-editor from one Michael Saltsman, a fellow at Employment Policies Institute (EPI), appeared in the New York Times. EPI, not to be confused with the Economic Policy Institute, which was known as EPI first, is a business backed nonprofit research group according to The Times. But that description is somewhat elliptical in that the founder of the institute, Rick Berman is the Berman in Berman & Co., a lobbying firm mostly for the hospitality industries that shares its offices with EPI along with other organizations opposing such things as the Affordable Care Act, all supposedly paying Berman & Co. for the space. Just coincidentally, Saltzman also works for Berman & Co. EPI was founded by Berman in 1991 to proselytize against the minimum wage, arguing that low wage jobs--even if the don't bring workers above the poverty line--are actually a boon to those working poor who have them and that the minimum wage is a disservice to the unemployed poor, and also to obstruct the effort at health care reform of the Clinton administration. True to form, Saltzman wrote last Saturday that there are fewer jobs available to low paid workers when the minimum wage rises, and that the majority of people making the minimum wage either don't live in poverty (I would guess college kids and the children of suburbanites and sybarites) or they don't work in the first place. Mr. Saltzman apparently never heard the phrase "working poor." By coincidence, an organization with the acronym ALEC has been in the news lately by virtue of allegations against it that it too is really a shill for the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) rather than the non-profit think tank it purports to be. But what they want to be called or characterized as is of no consequence in light of what they do. They oppose policies that are designed to assist those who cannot afford the benefits of the American economic system--a living wage, health care, an ample diet--because they work for those who can afford those things...and most anything else for that matter.

The reason I bring up these two organizations and their favored political issues is that the Republicans and the Rcc in general continue to harp on this notion that the Democrats and the Obama administration are waging class warfare. Yet, in all the finger pointing rhetoric there is never a definition of class warfare. That is where we should start so that we can determine who is actually waging war on whom, and ALEC and EPI are exhibit A and B in my definition. They are organized and dedicated to the task of undermining the notion that in a country as rich as the United States, there is no excuse for anyone living below a certain lowest acceptable level at which body and soul can stay together...and dignity along with them. At a compensation level like the minimum wage, that is possible only if more than one person in the household works and all the members of the household do without many of the things that even average Americans take for granted: health care, brand name food and clothing, home ownership, car ownership other than for vehicles so worn out that they are as disposable as plastic lighters and the like. But the employers of such workers--those vaunted entrepreneurs who start small businesses according to the Rcc--get to take home the profits from their businesses, and often lead lives of luxury though there are obviously also small business people who barely make ends meet, and sometimes fail because of it.

In the final analysis however, in both cases and in all cases in between, people who work for minimum wage are subsidizing the effort of the business people for whom they work by providing labor at a price that is insufficient for all but the most rudimentary purposes. If after succeeding those business people tended to increase compensation to share their success with the people who subsidized it with their labor, the arguments of organizations like ALEC and EPI might carry some weight, though a business plan that doesn't allow compensation of workers at a living wage is suspect in the first place. But when corporations like Apple send low wage jobs to China rather than share their enormous wealth with American workers who might want a union to guaranty them working conditions and wages that are fair (as do countless other big businesses that started out as small ones), it seems quite clear that the war that is being waged is being prosecuted not by the working poor but by the owners of the businesses that employ them. The minimum wage is not a boon to the workers who are compensated at that rate. It is a modicum of compensation, not a surfeit, and probably not even fair to the worker in the end. It is in effect a tax on those who cannot get anything else levied by those who have all they can use and much more. It is taxation without representation, and we all know where that leads.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 23, 2012

2012-04-22T14:19:03Z

Dear America,

Cover of Bill Clinton

After a two year grace period for the college students of America who took out Stafford Loans during which their interest rate was halved to 3.4%, the program is lapsing and the Democrats are trying to get it renewed. The Republicans are saying that it is too expensive to renew, costing something on the order of $6 billion per year, but just to demonstrate how significant the interest rate is to young people trying to weather these hard times as they start their adult lives by working to pay off their debts among other things, college students now owe approximately $1 trillion in student loans. At the same time, they have passed in the Republican controlled House of Representatives a tax relief bill for small business owners--that is, businesses with less than 500 employees--shielding 20% of their domestic corporate income from taxation. That bill will cost $46 billion over the course of its one year life. The irony in these priorities is that the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) justifies its exaltation of free enterprise with the admonition that anyone can be successful if he puts in the time and effort. But here are some of the infuriating inconsistencies in the conflation of all these facts and ideas.

A college degree is worth something on the order of $675,000 over a working life. Thus, having one would seem to be advisable if not a sine qua non for that very success that the Rcc extols as available equally to all. But if you have to borrow the money to get one, you start out with a sometimes staggering debt well into five figures and sometimes six, which stifles your ability to live independently, much less to spend to stimulate the economy, and with that in mind, the value of a college degree becomes somewhat dubious. And as to the definition of small businesses that will receive this new tax windfall in the name of job creation, there are several things to consider. For the expenditure of that $46 billion, about 39,000 jobs will be created: an optimistic estimate propounded by Gary Robbins who created Herman Cane's 9-9-9 plan and drafted this bill for its sponsor, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. That means that each job will cost $1.2 million in tax revenue. In other words, we could pay unemployment compensation to those 39,000 to be hired for about thirty years instead of putting that money in the pockets of people rich enough to own companies that employ up to 500 people. And in addition, people like Paris Hilton--she employs only five people--will get the tax break. So apparently, Eric Cantor and the Republicans in The House put a higher priority on helping an heiress whose only visible employment is going to parties and appearing on reality television...and major league sports franchises, big time law firms and Rodeo Drive boutiques as well...than they do on relieving hard working college graduates of some of the debt they are burdened by as they start their adult lives. What frustrates and disturbs me the most about all this is that all these guys are up for reelection in seven months and they aren't afraid to do these things. Think what that says about the electorate.

Of course, I have no choice but to reiterate here what I consider to be the core of my political creed. We all have to think with our own heads, not someone else's. That means...I hope...that everyone who hears about this--and we all should...it was in the papers--will scratch his head and then make up his mind how to vote as his ears catch fire. But what if most of us don't do that. That's what happened in 2010. Somehow, most voters bought the Tea Party rationale for cutting government programs to the bone regardless of whom it hurt while ensuring that the rich continue to pay some of the lowest tax rates they have experienced since World War II, all in the name of fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget. Well to punctuate my point let me make a suggestion. Why don't we take the last budget that was balanced and just update it with figures adjusted to accommodate inflation from that time to this. In other words, we could pass the Clinton budget for fiscal year 2001--the legacy budget for first year of the Bush administration in which there was actually a surplus of over $200 billion--and we would not only balance the budget, we would make a first payment on paying down the national debt. Of course taxes would be higher by a few percent, but not by much. And the balance of cost reduction and revenue increase, or enhancement as they say in Washington, would be something that would lead to a booming economy, which is what Bill Clinton handed to George Bush so that he could wreck it by reducing taxes to an extent that we couldn't afford, especially for the rich, and trying to ensure his reelection by embroiling us in two wars on the other side of the world whose end results are not looking promising at all.

It's a simple idea, and it makes sense, at least to me. So, if you are as concerned about some sort of moral balance in our decisions about what to spend money on and what not to, do me a favor. Call your Congressman and Senators and make the suggestion that we go back to the Clinton budget as a model and forget about all this posturing about who has offered a budget or passed one over the last however many days or years. Let's forget about making political hay and the automatic across-the-board cuts in defense and everything else that the Republicans extorted out of us when the debt ceiling was increased. And the Republicans thought that budget was fair. It was a compromise from their perspective, though many of us liberals thought then and think now that our side gave much more than it got. The work is already done if we take this option, and we can all sleep soundly tonight. So what do you think, America? Do we have a deal...again?"

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 19, 2012

2012-04-19T14:14:52Z

Dear America,

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, 2008 US presidential candidate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now that there is virtually no more speculation about the Republican presidential nominee, we can start speculating on the vice-presidential nominee. The polls evince national ambivalence about both candidates for the presidency, but the Democratic vice-presidential candidate will almost certainly be the incumbent, Joe Biden. But the Republicans will rely on their candidate to anoint his running mate, and thus Mitt Romney will chose the person who will most likely bring votes to his ticket, though I have always believed that while a vice-presidential nominee can hurt a presidential aspirant, he or she cannot help him; the fear of a person of dubious quality assuming the presidency is significant but the optimism that a vice-presidential nominee can generate has to be based on something else, and even vice-presidents agree that the office is generally ceremonial. Still, conventional wisdom is that the choice is important, and Mitt Romney will need all the help he can get. The polls show him to be in a dead heat with President Obama, but the public is flush with news of Romney's victory in the primaries, and the blush will be off that rose in a matter of minutes. So who will he chose and why.

The first person we can eliminate is Newt Gingrich. There have been obnoxious, self-aggrandizing vice presidents before--and when I think of Newt I think of another odd name: Spiro--but Gingrich is such a loud mouth and so out of control that he would be a day-to-day hazard for anyone who took him into his administration. What pass for "futuristic" ideas with Newt Gingrich are usually nothing more than half-baked ones that would astound readers of comic books but raise nothing but questions in the minds of those who live here on this planet. And right alongside Gingrich is Ron Paul. He is as eccentric as his son, and his lack of contact with the realities of life in America would make him a different kind of liability. He would do as he pleased, and thus be the camel inside the tent for the president he served...and whose camel would be anybody's guess. So, those two are out.

There will be a lot of enthusiasm for Rick Santorum from the ultra-conservative, Evangelical right. Santorum is sufficiently self-righteous to appeal to them in their belief that only they have the right to define virtue, but that very quality would alienate any thinking person who values his right to chart his own course through life. In addition, most vice-presidential nominees are chosen for, among other things, their ability to deliver at least one state: their own. Santorum has been repudiated by the citizens of his state, and it is even in doubt whether the conservatives of Pennsylvania would vote for him since they didn't turn out in sufficient numbers to reelect him the last time he ran for the U.S. Senate. Add to that the friction between him and Romney and the odds in favor of sanctimonious Santorum become slim to none. He wasn't liked when he was in The Senate, and the Republican Party faithful who tried to rein him in probably don't like him any better now. The vice-president cannot be a loose cannon, and he also cannot be the voice of a vociferous, recalcitrant fringe within his party. Santorum is both.

Then of course there is Sarah Palin. How she got to be regarded as a serious person escapes me, but there are many who do think highly of her. However, she probably can't deliver Alaska anymore since she resigned without completing her one term in office, and anyone who actually listens to what she says rather than nodding in agreement because he doesn't really pay much attention to anything but conservative absolutism and Sunday-go-to-meeting boosterism and righteousness has already dismissed her as shallow, uninformed, and in the final analysis not very bright. Some people used to impugn George Bush's qualifications to be president in that they were used to having a president who they thought was smarter than they were. The voters are not as interested in a candidate who is one of them as they are in one who is better than they are, though young George managed to get elected twice even though he couldn't put a decent sentence together unless someone wrote it for him in advance. Still, I don't have any neighbors worthy of the job, and chances are you don't either. The vice-president likewise has to function on a higher level than the person who votes for her, and Sarah Palin doesn't look like anything more sophisticated than a check-out counter tabloid reader. You need more information than you can get that way in order to run a country. But though she will not be the vice-presidential nominee, she does have one virtue that almost no other potential nominee for vice-president has. She is a woman, and just like Mars, Romney needs women.

So the obvious choice of a nominee, it seems to me, is Michelle Bachman. She is as prone to platitudes and trite phrases as Palin, but she is smarter, and she has actually met the obligations of her elected office. She is educated...after a fashion...and she is so practiced at regurgitating the party line that it seems like real ideas when she repeats it. The portmanteau word "Obamacare" sounds like the name of one of her children when she says it given her eagerness to get it out and the glee with which she mouths her Minnesota version of the word. And the phrases she uses to condemn the Dodd-Frank Act and "big government" never vary. She is anything but a loose cannon, and little more than a brass monkey who will dispense the party line and be nothing but a utility for the candidate while holding his ammunition, rather than a threat to say the wrong thing. And she is such a true believer that there will never be any fear of a palace revolt regardless of how apostate Mitt Romney gets, and he is bound to renege on a great deal of what he has said. He always does.

So, there you have it. The Republican ticket for 2012 will be Romney/Bachman, and with the polls showing the race to be as close as it does right now, they might have a chance. God help us.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 16, 2012

2012-04-16T14:29:22Z

SIMI VALLEY, CA - FEBRUARY 6: The grave of President Ronald Reagan is seen during a birthday celebration for him at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library February 6, 2011 in Simi Valley, California. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, would have been 100 Sunday. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Dear America,

I was speaking with my son yesterday about his future. He is about to graduate from college with a bachelor's degree in philosophy as a function of a desultory path through his undergraduate education, and to some extent, he is paying the price for his lack of direction. There is very little call for philosophers these days, unless of course someone is looking for a person to teach him philosophy. Certainly, majoring in philosophy is the cultivation of a kind and level of critical thinking that has intrinsic value. He could debate with anyone about anything, even if he didn't know what he was talking about. He understands the structure of ideas and reason very well. But when it comes to applying that ability to something other than barroom debate, there isn't much lucre involved in a career as a philosopher. So he is considering other things, like becoming a lineman for the power company: probably as secure a job as one can get, and the pay and benefits are probably pretty good too. But he'll never get rich that way, and he probably won't derive much creative satisfaction from his career either. That's what he wants: creativity and wealth, which is what all of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) types tell us we all can have if we just show up to work and work hard. But it is becoming obvious to a whole generation that hard work and diligence are not sufficient to make one healthy, wealthy and wise, much less happy. There are all kinds of aleatory factors involved in getting from here to there when it comes to career and work...and certainly success...even at the best of times. But right now, even with luck there seems to be only a tortuous route to success unless you are in the business of making money out of money, what I think of as a cross between modern alchemy and reliance on the postulate propounded by the greatest showman ever, P.T. Barnum...you know, "there's a sucker born every minute:" in other words, finance.

But even after we acknowledge that the robber barons are not letting many into their club anymore, why is it that there is so little room at the top, or even in the middle these days. What is the systemic problem that has created this stagnation for the young, and for all of the unemployed for that matter. Why is it that the turgid Rcc creed has met with so little resistance or question among those whose lives amply demonstrate that it doesn't work. The answer is one that those of you who have read these letters in the past are probably sick of hearing: dogma. In my opinion, the advent of supply side economics as the American capitalist's doctrine of choice, and the eventual subscription to the doctrine by even economists who were educated in the Keynesian tradition has been the ruination of American capitalism. It is not just an alternatate view. It stands reality on its head and gives cover to those whose motivation is self-enrichment at the expense of others, not the pursuit of the highest economic use of capital, which is the sine qua non for true capitalist success and the only way to effectively utilize capital in such a system. The consequence is that those who take for themselves without producing commensurate economic good for the society as a whole effectively skim the system and reduce the capital that is in use rather than increasing it, increasing capital being what is required for all of us to have a shot at prosperity. In reality, supply-side doctrine works toward growing bank accounts for the few who accomplish that end by taking a little from a lot of people, justified by the promise to make sure that the victims will get more than they have, a promise that hasn't been kept.

I know that sounds like envious rhetoric, but for the past thirty years since Ronald Reagan sponsored the supply-side revolution, the effect of unbridled capitalism has been just the opposite of trickle down prosperity, and all of the statistics demonstrate that such is the case. The rich have as great a share of the total capital in the American system as they had the day before the stock market crash of 1929, and they do better every day. And those of us who fix their cars and wait on their tables? Our wealth has stagnated and real wages-- that is earnings after adjusting for inflation--have not increased in decades. But the implications of this imbalance are far more profound than the inequity that the supply-side has built into modern America's economy. It is even more profound than the social Darwinism of which President Obama has accused the Rcc lately. Supply-side economics has ignored the most basic rule of capitalism after highest economic use: the other side of the supply/demand equation. As the wealthy take more of the money that flows like an essential fluid through our system, they pay less in wages to those who work in their factories and thus, less gets spent. And regardless of how much supply there is, consumption goes down, and with it, demand since people no longer have money sufficient to consume what they produce. Without demand from the American working man and woman, consumption by someone else must be cultivated, but who's left. So while this is going on, the capitalists endeavor to increase their wealth by sending American jobs overseas where workers will work for a fraction of the wages that Americans will take. The result is fewer jobs for Americans and lower wages for those who must take what jobs are still here, and again the result is downward pressure on demand. If that results in lower prices, the cycle can be reversed as long as it is properly managed, but downward pressure on demand translates into something else just as often: deflation, which we are very near right now.

If prices begin not just to remain stable but to fall, revenue for the supply side begins to shrink, and the first thing the rich do when there is downward pressure on their wealth is lay off the rest of us. That is why unemployment insurance is so important. It bolsters demand rather than letting it decline, but the rich have to pay more taxes to keep it going, and they don't want to do that. Nor do they see that every job they send to China is one less consumer here in the United States for the goods they produce. Gradually, our currency shrinks and foreign demand for our goods goes up so those at the top make more money, but domestic demand continues to decline, and before you know it, the United States is a parking lot for the rich whose businesses are all overseas where their workers are. Of course that is hyperbole...now. The question is, will it be hyperbole in 2112 as well.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 13, 2012

2012-04-13T15:31:57Z

Dear America,

Mitt and Ann Romney on December 22, 2007, at a campaign event in Londonderry, New Hampshire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday, the Democrats demonstrated that the Republican Party does not have a monopoly on political miscalculation and bloviating operatives. A woman whose name virtually no one knew, and by tomorrow no one will remember, Hilary Rosen, criticized Ann Romney-- Mitt's wife in case you didn't know or hadn't guessed--for expressing her opinions about working mothers while "never [having] worked a day in her life." The frenzy over the remark was immediate and indignant, not to mention politically opportunistic. Of course, Ms. Rosen may do some fund raising and occasionally express the point of view of Democrats on CNN, but she is not an official member of either the administration of President Obama or the Democratic Party. However, that hasn't stopped Mitt Romney and his campaign from milking the remark for its political incorrectness and vilifying President Obama and the Democratic Party for the contretemps of this single, low-level Democratic operative. And in the bargain, they have managed to obscure the real substance of Ms. Rosen's remarks, probably in an attempt to deflect public attention from what was most likely a valid criticism: Ann Romney may have been a stay-at-home mother during the youths of her now-grown children, but the extent to which she got her hands dirty doing the job is unclear, and that was Ms. Rosen's point. Ann Romney knows as much about the travails of working mothers as her husband, Mitt, knows about the travails of working men. That is, they are rich people who have elevators for their Cadillacs. They are not working mothers or working fathers who fret over whether they can pay for their children's medicine if they get sick, and that is the crux of the difference between not just Mitt Romney and President Obama, Ann Romney and Michelle Obama, but between Republicans and Democrats as well.

You may recall Mitt Romney's campaign staffer's "etch-a-sketch" remark a couple of weeks ago. On that occasion, the Democratic campaign machine did make something of Romney's campaign's latest misstep, but they didn't take half the number of shots at the candidate himself that his Republican opponents did. For the most part, the Obama administration just let the remark lie. In fact, I cannot recall hearing President Obama even mention it. But Mitt Romney couldn't lay off Rosen's foot-in-mouth moment. He tied the remark, taken out of context mind you, to all Democrats, and even tried to amplify the effect by claiming that the Obama administration--which Romney had most recently criticized for requiring provision of birth control to women who want it even if they worked for Catholic organizations--was at war with women. And he used some creative math to support that claim, alleging that 90% of the jobs lost under the Obama administration were women's jobs, and he did it with his usual unctuous smile. That's the main difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans say foolish things that are unsupportable because they assume that Democrats will be too diffident to confront them, and Democrats are too diffident to confront the Republicans over those foolish, unsupportable remarks. But this time, Romney--and even Carl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, who took the same posture even though I never associated him with defense of women in the past, much less since his confusion over the definitions of words like "slut" and "prostitute"--may have overreached.

Apparently, there are just less than 700,000 fewer women working now than were working when President Obama took office, and during The President's first term, the nation has lost just over 700,000 jobs net. When you divide the number of women who are still not working by the net number of jobs lost over the past three and a half years, you get approximately 90%. But if that's true, it is also true that there are only about 70,000 men who are unemployed today over and above the number unemployed on January 19, 2009, Mr. Obama's inauguration day. So, considering that two and a half million jobs were lost during the Bush administration, the unemployment suffered by the nation under President Obama is miniscule by comparison, and that's based on the math of his likely Republican opponent in next November's election. In other words, the recovery strategy of the Obama administration has been phenomenally successful in averting the effects of the financial meltdown caused by a bunch of Mitt Romney's peers, some of whom apparently own NASCAR teams and many of whom are CEO's and bankers with a couple of Cadillacs in their garages too.

The upshot of all this is that Mitt Romney is trying to capitalize on the gaffe of a Democrat whom no one knows by ignoring her point--that the Romneys are patricians who don't know much about the trials of the common men and women among us--and claiming that his wife, and by extension he himself, understand working parents' tribulations. But I predict that some of the details of the Romneys family life will come out over the next few days and weeks, such as how many nannies they went through and whether Ann Romney cleans her own toilets or hires someone to do it for her. That's going to be Mitt Romney's undoing. He can try all he wants, but he won't succeed in coloring himself as one of us. You're a patent leather loafer, Mitt. You'll never be a plain old work shoe like the rest of us.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 11, 2012

2012-04-11T15:28:19Z

Dear America,

Cover of Rush Limbaugh

I've been out of touch for a couple of days visiting my 88 year old mother after she took a fall. My sister, a retired letter carrier, has been caring for my mother for about twenty years in one way or another, largely because she talked her up to moving to Rochester, N.Y. away from the rest of the family, then in Connecticut. But now my mother needs twenty hour a day care after her fall, at least for the near term future, and my sister has to be there because there is no money over and above my mother's Social Security and Medicare eligibility to rely on. My mother has been unable to do much more than go from her chair in her living room to her bed for a couple of weeks now, and my sister has even had to stay overnight, as I did for the past three nights, to make sure that my mother is taken care of. I haven't seen my wife and kids since last week as she is at home three hundred fifty miles away. And one of my siblings lives in the same town as my wife and I do while my other two siblings are even further away, my step-sister in Florida. We met with a social worker today, my sister, my mother and I, and we are looking into the possibility of qualifying her for Medicaid to supplement her Social Security and provide her with support services that would make her safe even without full time, 24 hour care from my sister. It remains to be seen whether we will succeed, but this all raises issues related to health care in general. The less we can do for my mother under Medicaid the more my sister will have to do, even if it includes forfeiting her life with her husband. It seems somehow unfair that such a thing could happen, but it does happen to some people every day. So what is the alternative?

That is really what the current debates in our politics are about. It is not just a matter of universal health care. It is not just the issue of how much our government is going to tax which ones of us in order to provide us with the care we need to keep body and soul together, either through universal health insurance coverage or socialized medicine or anything in between. This is a matter of who we are. Are we a society that puts its elderly on ice floes and watches them float out to their doom on the open sea or have we developed our society to the point that we no longer need to yield to the pressures of efficiency in a hostile environment when we deal with issues like the inability of the elderly and disabled to contribute to society's wealth. It is not the Supreme Court or The Congress, Antonin Scalia or Paul Ryan. It is you, and it is me. And we will show our true colors in the elections coming in November. In the meantime, we will all have to live with the consequences of the decisions we have made at the polls for the past thirty years. And who is advising us as to what to think on these profound points? It is people like Rush Limbaugh.

As I was driving home from Rochester yesterday, I happened upon his program. I try to listen to such things, odious as I find them to be, just to ensure that my mind is open and that I understand what the other side is thinking, but even with that in mind, I could stand no more than about three minutes of his bombast. His point on that occasion was that the conservative movement, flush with the victories of November 2010 had been optimistic about the next election, hence the rise of candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. But now...now that the Republican establishment has coalesced behind Mitt Romney, the conservative phalanx within the Republican Party is feeling disheartened and daunted about the future of the nation. The thought that ran through my mind as he spoke was a description of a nation in which Rush and his cohorts had actually prevailed, and in addition, their candidates had prevailed at the polls in November. In 2013 we would get the Ryan budget, tax cuts for the rich and reductions in the assistance available for the less fortunate. We would have a regeneration of the anti-intellectual current that spawned the McCarthy era with a mindless jingoism and chauvinism born of blind loyalty...something like what developed after a decade or so of the Hitler Jungen in pre-war Germany. We would be on our way to a state dominated by unquestioning drones and children more loyal to the state than to their own parents and siblings. That is the nation that is suggested by the philosophies and attitudes of people like Limbaugh.

There may be some who will read the description above and ask, what's wrong with that. I would direct them to consideration of eras we have been through in which we have been led politically by a "silent majority" with slogans like "my country right or wrong." The consequence of such blind fealty to people and entities who in reality never show their true colors is a state in which tyranny masquerades as liberty when in reality the only liberty is to conform to a norm prescribed somewhere in the corridors of power from which the rest of us who have no power are excluded. That is the nature of the old Soviet Union...of Maoist China. That is what people fled Cuba for, even though such people seem to prefer the conservative politics of the Limbaugh Luddites over enlightened skepticism and the kind of loyalty that is to the people, whom the nation should serve, rather than to the nation that such people choose to serve. There is a contingent in our electorate that pines for the certitude of the fifties, when material goods were king and conscience was in hibernation. And if the rest of us are not careful, their vision of the future--Rush Limbaugh's vision--is what we will all suffer.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 6, 2012

2012-04-06T02:15:55Z

Dear America,

Orthographic illustration of an oil/petroleum barrel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Something has just occurred to me, and it is a function of various pieces of information about the petroleum industry that I have seen over the course of the past several months. Let me give you the information first. According to an industry expert interviewed on NPR--so we're not talking about some liberal with an axe to grind--our refining capacity for petroleum has been reduced by about 600,000 gallons per day because various refineries have shut down since they were obsolete in that they could not refine gasoline out of petroleum in a cost effective manner. It is also the case, based on an article in the New York Times, that our petroleum companies export 116 million gallons of gasoline per day because they can get more for it in other countries than they can get for it here, even though they drew about half--maybe more--of the oil used to make that gasoline from under our public and private land and seas. A 42 gallon barrel of oil produces about 23 gallons of gasoline. The nation as a whole uses about 386 million gallons of gasoline per day. The military, which accounts for 93% of government energy consumption, uses about 360,000 barrels of oil per day, which suggests gasoline consumption of something on the order of 7.3 million gallons at 23 gallons per barrel of oil. And finally, the price of gasoline has doubled in the past three years without even a hint of a shortage of supply other than the perennial fears of this thing or that, most recently the fear that Iran's navy could and would shut down transportation of petroleum through the Straights of Hormuz, as if the navies of all the oil consuming and producing nations of the world would let that happen. And that brings me to what has occurred to me.

According to oil experts, who are usually representatives of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization funded and populated by the oil industry's insiders, the price of oil is set on international markets and nothing we can do here will change that price. Yet, last year when there was a spike in prices, The President and several other countries authorized release of near a hundred million barrels of oil from their strategic petroleum reserves, and low and behold, the crisis of the moment, which was then the loss of oil production from Libya amounting to only one or two percent of the entire world production, didn't matter anymore and the price of crude oil began to sink like a stone. Apparently the fear of shortage is not as great as the fear of getting caught with a bunch of oil futures when there is suddenly a guaranteed source of petroleum coming onto the market at a reasonable price. And if you combine that with the fact that the military pays what we pay for the gasoline it uses, which includes a healthy profit for all kinds of people from agents to speculators to suppliers and refiners, you have to ask yourself why we don't cut out the middle man. So here's my idea.

There are these refineries out there that no one wants, so why not let the military buy them. Then, the military can bargain for the gasoline it needs and if the price isn't right, it can take petroleum from the strategic energy reserve as long as it is safe to do so and make its own. That way, the military cuts its costs, the U.S. government cuts the deficit and hence, the national debt, and as a bonus, there is downward pressure on gasoline prices in the market place because the demand for gasoline has been reduced by the amount that the military usually consumes but now is making for itself, which is in the millions of gallons per day. And the military doesn't have to refine its own gasoline if the price is right on the open market, which means that some greedy oil company will reduce the price to get that several million gallon per day sale, and we all get a better price as a consequence.

There is a certain symmetry to that plan. There is no interference in the market. There are no price controls. The government saves money, and it continues to provide a market for an enormous amount of private business if business is reasonable about it, but it doesn't leave itself vulnerable to the whims of a market that the petroleum industry claims is controlled from abroad, which enhances national security. Everybody wins except...uh oh. I don't think the Republicans are going to like this plan, do you?

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 4, 2012 (reprise)

2012-04-04T13:32:31Z

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 08: Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction Co-Chairs U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) (2nd R) and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) (R) shake hands after the committee's first hearing September 8, 2011 in Washington, DC. This was the first meeting of the so-called 'Super Committee' formed to make further cuts in the U.S. deficit. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

It appears that nothing has changed since last April 15, but at least The President is now calling the Republican plan for our future what it is: social Darwinism.

Dear America,

On Wednesday, The President addressed a gathering that probably included a few student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I say that it probably included a few students because the front row was populated by several members of Congress, including five Republicans who consider themselves the voices of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) as I define it. There were Representatives Dave Camp, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, and Jeb Hensarling, a conservative "rising star" for years now by all accounts, which I can believe given his obvious tendency toward self-servingly elliptical remarks. It's hard to be a rising star for so long, and his blatant politicization of his every thought doesn't reflect intelligence, but rather does reflect that he is desperate to stop rising and be risen. He isn't even a joke anymore. He's just an irrelevant punch line. There was also a Republican Congresswoman there, but her remarks in the aftermath of the speech were so lacking in substance and so replete with partisan generalities that I didn't even make note of her name. But as to The President and the other Congressmen, there is really quite a bit to say, though most of it has been said already.

I thought President Obama's speech was excellent, and though the Rcc Congressmen who spoke afterward characterized it as partisan rhetoric, it seemed just the opposite to me. The President made a point of crediting three of his predecessors--two of them the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush--with shepherding bipartisan efforts conjointly with Congresses of the opposite party through the processes of enacting reform of Social Security and passage of contentious budgets that reduced the deficit, in Bill Clinton's case even leading to a budget surplus. Though The President also made oblique reference to the fact that the younger President Bush squandered that surplus and turned it into a deficit with his very first budget, to me it all seemed like credit generously given out of conciliation and solicitude...frankly a much more conciliatory effort than I would have made given the rigidity of party affiliation among Republicans and their demonstrated willingness to put their party's success ahead of principle. And while he criticized the budget propounded by Congressman Ryan as harsh and too broad in its excisions from federal spending while lacking tax increases for those who can afford them, he didn't seem to me to be making his criticism personal, or even vituperative. But the Republican budget is contrary to Democratic principles, and the Republicans would have to have been disingenuous to claim that they expected The President to demur on the subject. So when they spoke, that's exactly what they were: disingenuous. Which leads me to my criticism of The Presidentone that I have made previously: he spoke at about 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. It was my day off, so I heard the speech, but we all needed to hear it, and once again, all that most of us in America heard was the sound bites that the evening news anchors chose to give us, though there was plenty of "human interest" to go around. As far as the networks are concerned, pap is good; news is superfluous. But I digress. To put it in a nutshell, The President needs to move his bed time back so that he can stay up with the grown ups after dinner some nights.

As to the Rcc Congressmen, I think that all of us Americans needed to see their real stripe as well, but like The President, they were on in the afternoon rather than after dinner when we all could have, and should have, seen them in action. Congressman Camp, the Ways and Means Chairman, seems a reasonable man, and though he took issue with The President, he did it civilly and professionally. But Hensarling is as dogmatically conservative as anyone I have ever heard speak, and he is a champion prevaricator as well as a peremptory buffoon. He yapped like the other Congressmen's irate lap dog about what he characterized as The President's failure to make a specific proposal about Social Security reform, claiming that the Republican budget did so. And while he complained about The President using "scare tactics" and demagoguery in his speech, he himself feigned alarm about The President's statement that Social Security is not causing the debt or the deficit that we are suffering with today, which is the truth, he inadvertently admitted it to be so a few minutes later. At first he claimed that Social Security needed reform now despite Mr. Obama's statement that while it needed reform, it was not an emergency; since the program is solvent until 2037, that seems like a pretty accurate assessment. But within five minutes, he reiterated his claim that something had to be done about Social Security in order to ensure that his children would get their benefits. Hensarling is fifty seven, and I assume that his children are about the same age as mine, which means that in thirty years or so, there will be a problem unless it is addressed...some time within the next twenty five years. Considering the problems we have on our plate right now, I agree with President Obama and his debt commission that the program needs reform, but it can be done gradually and it has nothing to do with reducing the debt or the deficit.

Of course, the hyperbole-prone Eric Cantor had his say to the effect that The President's speech contained no suggestions but tax increases, and that they would harm the recovery, never addressing the facts that the extension of the Bush tax cuts didn't stimulate the creation of any new jobs and that despite the $2 trillion cash pile that business is already sitting on, they still aren't doing the right thing, and won't until there is demand for what they sell. Cantor doesn't seem to have the common sense to realize that demand comes before production, not the other way around, and more cash for the rich doesn't stimulate demand. But Cantor is a Republican shill, so I don't really expect anything more from him. Ryan, on the other hand, seemed like a guy who, though captive to Rcc dogma, is intelligent enough to be reasoned with...at least until he spoke after the speech. In response to a reporter's question as to what specifics his budget included on the subject, he agreed with Hensarling that President Obama had not put forward a specific plan to correct Social Security's cash flow problems, which don't start until 2037, but he did claim that he had. Then he described that proposal: if congress doesn't do something within a set period of time, they will have to sit down in a room together and hash something out because that's his budget's solution to the problem. And, as if that didn't demonstrate his insincerity, he went on to criticize The President for forming his debt commission and then not advocating the changes it, or at least its co-chairmen, recommended. I guess since Ryan did not actually use the term "commission" in his budget, he doesn't think that that is what he proposed.

It comes to this. On Wednesday, President Obama took a good first step toward redirecting the debate on how to address the nation's fiscal woes toward Democratic humanism tempered by fiscal pragmatism and away from Republican materialism and social Darwinism. Despite the puling of the Rcc Congressmen, his speech foreshadowed what will be some rational and productive changes that will be painful, but even handedly so, and the specifics of The President's proposals will hopefully begin coming out for public consumption directly. But I hope that in the future, Mr. Obama will talk to us about them when we are home rather than leaving us a message while we are at work, hoping that the news media will deliver it. Because they almost never do.

Your friend,

Mike

Letter 2 America for April 2, 2012

2012-04-02T16:53:47Z

Dear America,

Cover of Oliver Hardy

Constitutional law is extremely complex. It stands to reason that the layman listening to legal argument before the U.S. Supreme Court would be perplexed...almost as if the lawyers and justices were speaking a foreign language. But much of the argument that transpired before the Supreme Court this past week over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, which apparently even President Obama is calling "Obamacare" now, failed to rise to the Olympian level of discourse that it should have. And the reason wasn't just that the quality of the questions asked by some of the justices was so poor, demonstrating their political interest in the issues and their willingness to yield to it rather than resolve the issues under the law, but more because some of the justices themselves demonstrated that they lacked two qualities that are supposed to be the hallmarks of the judges in sitting on the highest judicial bench in the nation. The first is vigor. When an issue goes before the Supreme Court, it is chosen by the justices for its importance, and thus they have implicitly dedicated themselves in making the choice to applying the energy needed to resolving the outstanding issues. Yet, the leader of the conservative wing of The Court, Antonin Scalia, was heard to rhetorically ask a lawyer at one point if he really expected the justices to go through the entire 2700 page bill to separate provisions that could be severed from the most controversial element of the law--the "individual mandate" under which people either buy insurance or pay a tax or fine for their decision not to do so--if The Court decided indeed that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Put another way, Justice Scalia was declaiming that if it is too much trouble to do the whole thing and do it right, the Supreme Court will do what is easy rather than what is just. The Supreme Court is not for the lazy, and if Justice Scalia is not up to the day's work required of him, if he no longer has the vigor for the job, or if as in my opinion he never has, he should retire since he is no longer capable of doing the job for which he was hired.

The second quality with which a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to be endowed is a kind of insularity, guaranteeing that political influences will not taint the pristine law that is supposed to emanate from The Court. What I mean is best simplified in this way: the law is the law. We are a nation of laws, not of men...meaning that influence will not insulate a person from the effects of the law, nor from its sanctions and proscriptions. None of us is above it, and neither is any institution. The purity of the law decided by The Supreme Court is supposed to be so indisputable that it is unimpeachable. But it seems that at least some of the justices are capable of making decisions that do not rise to that standard. When Justice Scalia, who is supposed to be the great conservative intellect and purist on The Court, made a political calculation as to how The Congress would react to a decision striking down the individual mandate and thus exposing the insurance industry to costs that amount to deprivation of their income and perhaps their profits, he indicated that he would figure into his decision what he thought The Senate would do...filibuster any changes and thus prevent rectification of the problem. The reason such a position is unacceptable is that the law has a kind of symmetry built into it to compensate for such political pettiness and intractability. If the individual mandate is severed from the rest of the law and stricken down, the insurance industry will have its own remedy under the fifth amendment, which requires due process before the government takes anything from anyone, and just compensation if they do so. It is not for the Supreme Court to take the expedient step of assuming an appeal by the insurance industry and deciding that case before it even arises any more than it is The Court's prerogative to assume facts that are not proved on the record before them. In other words, the law that derives from The Constitution is not supposed to be made up as we go along. Supreme Court decisions are supposed to be almost academic in the sense that they are the forensic analysis of issues and facts on the record, not political speculations and naked expediency in pursuit of some political goal.

There are also elements of the issue that seem not to be under consideration at all though it is the prerogative of the justices to bring them up either at argument or in their opinion when it is issued. For example, there is the issue of eminent domain, that is, the power of the government to take private property from the individual in service of the greater good of the society at large, so long as the right of due process is observed...a power specifically expanded in a way that I believe could be used to justify the Affordable Care Act as the law was stated in Kelo vs. City of New London. See Letter 2 America for February 4, 2011. That case caused considerable consternation among liberal, who also believe in The Constitution, and it was an example of conservative judicial activism that belied the fulminations of conservatives everywhere against such judicial intervention by the use of one's juris prudence, that is the jurist's own legal philosophy, as an implement not just for the formulation of the law, but of social policy as well. Together, all of this points to a decision of the quality of the one in Citizens United that allowed corporations to dominate the electoral process with money: judicial activism if ever it existed though conservatives decry it when liberal decisions come out of the court. But the fact is that the United States government has what is called a "compelling state interest" in this case, and the Affordable Care Act bears a "necessary relationship" to that interest, which raises the discussion to a matter of what is right for the country, not just what is constitutional. Decisions based on that doctrine, known as "strict scrutiny," are complex and nuanced with morality and subjectivism. And that is the ring in which the fight should be fought. But with jurists like Antonin Scalia on The Court, such decisions, which often rise to the level of Solomonic justice, probably won't get past the level of Hardy, Oliver, not Thomas.

Your friend,

Mike