May 2010 Archives

Dear America,

Yesterday, the federal government announced some economic statistics, including the savings rate and consumer spending figures. The savings rate was up .2% to 3.4%, but consumer spending did not increase. While the savings increase is a positive indication for the future, it is not a measure of anything that has implications for the economy. The real news was the lack of an increase in consumer spending, which is a reflection of a contention that I have pointed to several times in these letters. You could look it up. Our economy will not completely emerge from these doldrums, and the recession has now become doldrums rather than the depression that the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) was offering, until consumer spending increases significantly, and that won't happen until almost everyone has put his financial house in order again: perhaps as much as ten years-- eight and a half years from now. Until we have paid off the majority of what we borrowed as a society, spending will be constrained. That is a point apparently not lost on the Chinese.

There have been major labor actions in China, where they would not have been tolerated a few years ago, and the press has covered them vigorously. Apparently, the government has also been somewhat forthcoming as to its newly open policy, at least on this subject, by admitting that in the halls of power, there is a general acknowledgment that labor deserves more of the incipient wealth being generated by the Chinese economic juggernaut, and the reason for that revelation has now dawned on them as well: without spending, the wheels fall off the juggernaut, so unless you want to share the wealth, you might as well park it in the garage. Put concisely, for spending to be sufficient to sustain the momentum, there has to be a lot of it, and that requires spreading the wealth downward, not upward. Once again, labor must be marshaled to play its role: give them more and hope they spend it so that the rich can get richer. So, while the new form of Chinese egalitarianism is not the idealistic drive that communism in its purist form might have been when it dripped from Marx's pen onto the page, there is nothing better than necessity to drive good works. It beats idealism every time.

While the Chinese concern for the masses may be less noble and more mercenary than might be hoped for, it will still work if it yields a better life for the average Chinese citizen. All of the indications coming out of the Chinese decision to meld their old school communist theory with a kind of faux capitalism were that they were going the same way we had, only they were doing so as the Russians have, too fast and in the same dubious direction in which we allowed our capitalist experiment to go. But this new epiphany is a positive sign that the Chinese recognize the need for synergy in economics. No one hand can wash itself. If someone is to get rich selling something, there have to be people making enough money to buy it. It aint supply side economics; it is so obvious that even the Rcc is beginning to get it. As I have said many times before, somebody has to do the work, and in order to get volunteers, those who have must make it worthwhile for those who don't. Financial regulation and tax scheduling to place a higher burden on the rich may be distasteful to them, but that is what the rest of us need in order to give them what they want. Just ask the Chinese.

I noticed that David Brooks made some of the same observations in his Friday column that I made in my letter to you the Tuesday before, America. He even saw the same significance in the Three Mile Island addident. While I found his expression of the notion to be somewhat nebulous, he was making the same point I was: technology is both the tool with which we will build our future and the beast at our door trying to get in and ravage us. We must learn to look ahead so as to prevent its ravages and predation, but we need it if we are to move into the future with the same positive effects on our lives that we have enjoyed in the past, especially in the recent past. So I hope he is reading both the New York Times and my letter today, because while it is significant that the Chinese are making my point about consumer spending, more people will probably get it if they hear David Brooks say it.

I'll speak to you Tuesday, America. In the meantime, have a good Memorial Day. Even an old conscientious objector like me honors the fallen soldiers. I may not agree with the choices they have made, but I see that they made their sacrifices for us. A picnic in their honor once a year is not too much to ask. I hope we all can ponder, at least for a moment on Monday, that there were a few who paid a price for us. Enjoy your hot dogs and hamburgers, America, but don't forget those who died trying to make it so. It matters not whether they died in vain or out of necessity, whether they were politically correct or misguided; they are our heroes. Virtue demands no more of us than that we try to do the right thing, and try they did.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The BP oil spill can yield little of benefit, but it is going to lead to discussion of some surprising subjects in the coming months. Like most other events with negative implications, it will precipitate political criticism and fingers will be pointed in all directions, but some issues will have more far-reaching implications. One such issue, and it may seem unlikely at first blush, will be tort reform.

In the law, a tort is a wrong done to someone: in the case of negligent torts, violation of a duty of care to a person injured by the failure to take precautions that a reasonably prudent person, or in this case a reasonably prudent corporation, should have taken. While the workers' compensation laws generally preclude tort claims by employees or their survivors against the employer involved, this case may be an exception to that rule in light of what may have been a willful failure. According to ABC News, BP has been cited for more than seven hundred safety violations during a period in which the next worst offender was cited for only eight-- not eight hundred, eight. Even Exxon-Mobil was cited for only one. The way in which that bears on tort reform is that BP paid more than $100 million in fines for just two of those violations, and one of them, which also led to deaths at a distillery in Texas, still has not been corrected. In addition, they paid millions in damages to those injured by their willful failure to take due care. Apparently, internal memos demonstrate that the company determined that it was cheaper to pay those fines and damages than it was to save lives and property, so they expended the lives and paid the bill-- in the name of profit. That is where tort reform comes in, and the debate will run along the same lines as did the debate over tort reform in medical malpractice law.

In many states, egregious conduct can justify the awarding by the court of punitive damages, and in every state, the loss of one's life is compensable, albeit only to his estate, in terms of economic loss, pain and suffering damages and also in the form of the value of his loss of life's pleasures: love, recreation, rearing children and the like. The loss of a life, especially a good one, can be worth a lot of money, but in the total scheme of things, the cost of doing the right thing can be much more. Punitive damages on the other hand are often worth "much more" and then some. That is where tort reform comes in. As advocated by the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), tort reform has always been based on limiting one or more aspects of damages, but particularly pain and suffering. Most recently, during the debate over medical malpractice costs, they floated the figure of two hundred fifty thousand dollars as a cap on "non-economic" damages. Economic damages are actual costs incurred by the injured party: lost earnings, lost earning potential, medical bills, property damage and the like. But non-economic damages are where the money is; that's why the Rcc is against them-- money. However, with BP as the poster child for choosing profit over due care, and considering the amounts involved and the lives lost in consequence of a calculated decision not to take due care in the case of the Gulf spill, how can there be a legitimate argument against punitive damages, much less non-economic ones, in the oil business, the medical profession or in any other area where profit sometimes suffers in consequence of virtue.

The justification for such limits in the case of medical malpractice cases has always been that awards of damages, which, by the way, usually come from juries of our peers rather than from judges and lawyers, inflate the cost of medical care. But what gets left out of the debate is that the amount by which malpractice suit damages inflate the total cost of medical care in this country is a fraction of a tenth of one percent.: something on the order of fifty billion dollars over any ten year period while the cost of medical care for such a period is a trillion or more. That seems a small price to pay for deterrence of carelessness when lives and limbs are at stake, so it seems apparent that tort reform is nothing but a token gesture used to pander to an uninformed, sanctimonious constituency. Doctors don't want to be sued because their other patients might find out, and they also don't want their insurance premiums to go up, so they have an incentive to be sober in all respects when they cut someone open. On the other hand, there is the experience we have had with tort reform in the oil industry. It has gone unnoticed until now that in 1990, congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, a law limiting environmental damages for oil companies to seventy-five million dollars, a trivial amount when compared to the $19 billion in profits that BP collected last year. But now, that chicken, effectively a tort reform law, will come home to roost and with it will be flying tort reform in general.

In the case of the BP spill, tort reform, that is the cap on damages imposed by statute, probably won't be even a tenth of the total value of the devastation that will ultimately occur. Even when you throw in the fines, costs and the civil damages they have paid and will no doubt be required to pay, BP will still come out ahead. In fact, there is already a bill in congress that would raise the damages cap to $10 billion if it passes, and if it does it will be a repudiation of the whole concept of tort reform. The question is, will the Republicans have the audacity to stand against it, because if they fail to do so, the argument in favor of tort reform in general will disintegrate. A Democrat controlled congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which did a lot of other things besides cap damages, and a Republican president, George Bush the first, signed it. And the rejection of the effective tort reform aspect of the Oil Pollution Act will be bipartisan this time too...unless...

If the Rcc is not tired of foot shooting yet, they will again fire off a round at their own. They will take BP's side and oppose essentially open ended tort damages for big oil. And if the Democrats have sworn off foot shooting, they will make the Republicans in congress go as public as possible with their affinity for money over people. Of course, there is no guaranty that either party will swear off self destruction, so the outcome will be in doubt for some time. But as this issue piles on top of health care and financial regulation, the Republicans in congress will have to make a choice. Fortunately for us, it is likely to be to either continue on in the minority, or face complete oblivion. We can only hope, America.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There is something trivial about Washington, D.C. today. Before I was born there was the New Deal. Then, in my youth there were the New Frontier and the Great Society. And while I found it then and still do find it nothing but demagoguery, even Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least imaginative president in my lifetime, had things like the Star Wars initiative, a purported new American Revolution with regard to taxes, and the Trickle Down Economics that continues to plague us as the most preposterous idea that ever lasted thirty years. Now all we have is "yes, we can." Trivial as it seems, that is an indication of where we are going wrong as a society.

Our culture is changing, and that is to be expected. A culture that doesn't change is mired in dogma. But the kind of change we are seeing is not all good. Technology benefits us more each day in the areas of medicine, farming, data usage-- across the entire panoply of our activities, albeit technology also does its share of damage as we are now seeing in The Gulf. And while I have questions about some of the choices that are being made in public education, the level at which young people think today is surprising considering the evidence of thought, or the lack of it, that we are seeing in the way in which they live their lives. Even business, which is often going in the wrong direction morally, is being done more efficiently and productively every day. However, another type of change is occurring as well, a kind that I believe cannot be viewed as anything positive, and we are immersed in it every day, all day long.

We confront adversity only under duress today. The BP spill is a demonstration of that point in that we put about thirty five hundred oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico while we pretended that there was little hazard to consider, and that if something occurred, it would either be insignificant or manageable, neither of which turns out to be the case. Similarly, we have allowed agglomeration of banks and since 1999 with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed in part the Glass-Steagle Act, it has been permissible for investment and commercial banks to merge, sometimes even with insurance companies, thus institutionalizing conflict of interest as an acceptable way to do business while you are managing other people's money. Incidentally, President Clinton signed that act into law, not some supply-sider. The blithe intentional overlooking of potential consequences has become a pattern, not just in Washington, but in my house...your house...everyone's house. And if you listen to how people talk, you can see how this all happened.

I was watching a discussion of childhood social interaction, which includes sex these days, and one of the speakers had done some research among parents, she said, to see what they were doing. When she was asked at what age parents should begin talking about such things with their children, her response was to explain what the "Moms" said-- the moms, not the mothers. Setting aside the fact that she apparently didn't ask the "Dads," that is a problem that is more serious than we realize. The informality of such expressions evinces not just a cute "dumbing down" of our discourse, it demonstrates a decline in the quality of our thought as well. We no longer face the difficult aspects of life without euphemism and minimization, and perhaps more significantly, we diminish each other's importance with informality that makes us all peers, including parents and their children. But we are not all peers. Some of us have to take responsibility, like parents, so that others can rely on us, like our children. Just as importantly, some of us must accept the imposition of duty if we want to be trusted, which requires being responsible for what we do and accounting for what we take, like in the case of the Goldman-Sachs cadre of super-rich, post-adolescent narcissists who felt entitled to huge compensation for running our economy, and for that matter, the wealth of their clients, into the ground. And when businesses take big risks in the name of profit by reducing overhead, they must be held accountable when safety is sacrificed, which means more than making a public apology and saying that they will do better next time as BP is about to find out.

The remedies for our problems proposed by the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), The Tea Party Movement for example, will push us further in the wrong direction, because government is one of those groups of people who must take responsibility so that the rest of us can rely on them. The Gulf oil spill is at least in part a failure of government to live up to its responsibility. Had the agencies involved been diligent about not just monitoring drilling operations but about mandating safety procedures and enforcing them, drilling in The Gulf might have been safe, but they didn't, and it wasn't. By the same token, had the "moms" and "dads" of the Columbine killers acted like mothers and fathers and been willing to risk the disapproval of their children by actually giving them the parental supervision that they needed, they and all of the other childhood murderers whose lives along with those of their victims are now lost or ruined might have been saved.

The comparison is more apt than it seems. Both types of disasters are manifestations of a shirking of responsibility for which we excuse ourselves in all kinds of ways. When we diminish our duty to our children by being moms and dads instead of mothers and fathers, we are abdicating our responsibility as parents. When our civil servants minimize the impact of their failure to act as standard operating procedure rather than self-indulgence and cupidity, they put us all at risk. When business executives excuse themselves for their lack of ethics by thinking in terms only of how much money they can make and ignoring the impact of their acquisitiveness on those who were supposed to be able to rely on their probity, they undermine a system on which we are all forced to rely. As individuals, we must abandon cute little sobriquets and begin to face our personal responsibilities, recognizing the consequences of our failure to do so. I am not my son's dad any more than I am his fraternity brother.  I am his father.  And we must demand the same level of diligence from our institutions, including our government. We don't need government to go away as the Tea Party Movement would have us do, leaving us to hope for the best. That is just a cute little drollery, and to paraphrase what Mark Twain is alleged to have said, it is a solution that is obvious, simple and also wrong. Their energy would be better devoted to the hard work of compelling government to do what it is supposed to do instead of relying on a self-serving little analogy to an eponymous historical event for credibility.  We should point that out to them when we vote in November, America.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I bought a three hundred gel-cap bottle of vitamin D a couple of days ago, and when I got home, I opened it to find that it was only about one quarter full. I took the gel-caps out of that bottle and put them in the previous bottle I had, which had only one hundred in it originally, and even that bottle was only two thirds full. Those bottles were made of plastic.

Since 1994, the European Union has promulgated and enforced with varying levels of success regulations regarding packaging waste and recycling. Among the areas of regulation is the relationship between the form of packaging and the requirements for packaging the product in question, in other words, is the package the right shape and size. I can't say to what extent the European effort has reduced waste and unnecessary consumption of resources, but my guess is that no such effort has been even initiated in this country. If I were wrong, I think the bottle that my vitamin D came in would have been one quarter the size that it actually was.

This may seem a trivial point: just another one of my pet peeves, but it isn't. You know why? Because the bottle in question was made of polypropylene, which is made from...you guessed it...petroleum. The implications of that fact are so diverse and wide reaching that I can't conceive of enough of them that I can't think of at least one more. I start with the obvious: our consumption of petroleum.

As a nation, we consume billions of barrels of petroleum every year, and we produce less than half of it. Recently, I saw this figure about bottled water: sellers of such water use approximately 17 million barrels of oil to produce their packaging each year. So, while a barrel produces a lot of other things besides water bottles, such as 18-20 gallons of gasoline, various chemicals, and other forms of plastic, if we could save 17 million barrels of oil by all drinking tap water, that would be worth considering, I think. Of course, that won't happen. In this country, which is widely regarded as having the best quality drinking water in the world, people seem to think that they can taste some kind of difference. Someone in my life who shall remain nameless in deference to keeping my marriage together thinks that she can tell the difference between the supermarket brand and the one she drinks, so ending the production of water in bottles by introducing sanity into our culture on this point is obviously a pipe dream. But consider the number of products you use that also come in plastic containers. Imagine the volume of plastic that could be saved if we reduced that form of petroleum consumption by half. The implications are staggering.

There is of course the obvious: we would be able to import less oil. But like all such phenomena, there is a rippling effect that follows. The incentive to speculate in the petroleum market would be reduced by the reduced need for related products. The weight of what we recycle would be reduced and the cost of recycling our waste would go down, which would in turn result in the use of less petroleum for the production of the electricity and fuel required in the process. Then, the gasoline used in delivering the fuel involved would be reduced as would the consumption of the tires on which the trucks ride. The number of bags we need to get our groceries home would be reduced, and so on and so on. It would not even require sacrifice for us to do these things. In fact, it would make life easier by giving us less useless weight and bulk to carry around. But it probably won't happen, that is unless you, America, make it an issue and make your representatives in congress take notice of it. Even then, there will be a fight.

First, the petroleum suppliers will resist, even though they will publicly endorse the idea. The less they sell, the less they make. And manufacturers will resist because they know that in the eyes of many people, the bigger the package, the more they are getting for their money. Then they will raise free speech issues by saying that the size of the package is an expression of the quality and quantity of benefit the product represents. Blah, blah, blah. Still, there is a way for us to accomplish this noble end, and it has to do with voting at the polls: we can vote with our credit cards and our cash.

If we make our opinions on this subject clear to those who create the problem, they will eventually listen if it costs them money not to. Complain to whoever will listen or read your letter or your email. Then, consider your choices and buy the product that has the least waste in its packaging. Buy the pills that are in the bottle closest to the volume that is needed. Buy products that come with one layer of packaging instead of two. Buy hardware that comes attached to cardboard rather than being encased in those plastic bubble wraps that cut your hands when you try to open them, and do your best to tell at least someone every time you make such a decision.

To paraphrase something I have said so often that you probably don't want to hear it, buy with your own head, not someone else's. Votes count, but dollars motivate. Tell your congressman to put his vote where your money is. Between us and those congressmen, we should be able to get someone's attention, right America.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I heard a little piece of economics wisdom on the radio this morning. An "expert" on such topics as banking explained how "derivatives" are not only a useful, but also a necessary part of our economy. His claim was explained by his interviewer this way. Suppose you have a construction company that is taking out financing on a big residential development. But if interest rates go up, his ability to sell the houses he builds at a profit declines, maybe even resulting in losses. Also suppose that there is another business that will be harmed if interest rates go down. (Set aside the fact that outside of banking and the business of lending money, there probably isn't such a business.) By selling derivatives to both sides, a banker can help them both to minimize the financial consequences of the interest rate risks they face respectively. In other words, according to this expert, the banker puts these two risks together, and makes of them a net zero problem. No one can lose because they effectively offset each other's potential losses.

The expert didn't seem to understand that he was essentially describing the same alchemy that the bankers used to justify derivatives in the first place. It didn't seem to matter to him that the scenario he described seemed to create mutual wealth from the loss of one of the two parties while allowing the banker to take a profit. It was all based on that same old myth that there is enough wealth in the world that everyone can be rich if he just makes prudent decisions and works hard. Unfortunately, while the myth has its appeal, it is not the reality, especially in a capitalist world. The problem with the example the expert gave to justify his claim that derivatives are not just a form of betting, but rather that they have a beneficial use, is as comprehensible as the addition of two and two, which by the way does not equal five. Once again, the attempt to make something more complicated than it is so as to obfuscate the simple truth fails upon closer scrutiny.

Start with the fact that each side to the transaction has to pay the banker a certain percentage of his debt for the insurance that he won't suffer losses in consequence of a change in interest rates. The effect is that both sides have already paid for such a consequence, only they gave the money to the banker now instead of later when interest rates change. And, if interest rates don't change, the banker gets to keep the money that both sides gave him. In other words, the bank keeps the vig, as I tend to call it. The banker has provided a service that is dubious in my mind, but if I think of it as insurance, it doesn't seem so bad.

However, suppose that interest rates go up and the contractor then has to go to the bank to cash in his derivative and be made whole. Well, the banker has to pay him back what the contractor paid for the derivative, and if costs go higher by more than that, he has to pay the contractor our of the money that the other side, the guy who wanted to be protected from declining rates, paid to the banker for his protection. That's fine as long as the aggregate of the money paid by the two sides is equal to or greater than the increased cost of credit that the banker has to pay the contractor for, but what if the contractor's loss is more. Then, the banker has to pay the contractor with the money of his depositors, or that of the people who financed the derivatives of the two sides to the transaction in the first place. Guess who they are. They are us, America, in one way or another.

The first possibility is that the depositors, or the investors in the bank business, pay the loss in the form of reduced profits, or even losses if the banker has written enough of these derivatives. Personally, I feel no empathy for most of those guys. They have plenty more money where that came from. But wait, aren't those the same guys who lost millions when Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went belly up because they had invested so heavily in derivatives? When they lose money, where does it come from? That's a rhetorical question for the expert who no doubt is not reading this letter. To put my point concisely, someone gets hurt, even if it's a rich guy, though most likely, that loss will be passed on somehow...to us, like when the FDIC has to pay us for money we deposited that has now been lost, which brings me to the second possibility, and this one is even more obvious than the first because it has already occurred.

The second possibility is that the banker can't come up with the money, even from his depositors and investors, to pay off the contractor. Now, not only has he lost the profit from the derivative he sold, he has lost his investors' or depositors' money and is in debt, and if there were enough derivatives involved, the debt amounts to billions. Sounds familiar, doesn't it. That's how the loss comes back to us no matter how it is explained, because in this case, the taxpayers have to step in in order to avoid a collapse of the bank, and that is what we did. You remember the bail out, don't you, America?

My point is this. An expert gets on the national news and tells us that these things that just wrecked our economy are necessary, and that while we should regulate them, we need them, and we shouldn't interfere with the trade in them because they are not betting; they are just finance, which produces wealth for everyone. He says this with his bare face hanging out in a time in which that basic premise, that there is enough wealth for us all to do well if we work hard, has just been demonstrated to be false on a trillion dollar scale. Of course, the single mother who works three jobs already knew that.

The medicine our expert is prescribing for our economic and financial ills is more of the same thing that damn near killed us just yesterday. That is the kind of head that wants us to let it think for us, America. Mind you, I don't think that this expert was some nefarious bank enthusiast who was trying to enhance his own wealth by foisting what is essentially a Ponzi scheme on us all, though I may be wrong. I think that he is actually a guy who has allowed himself to think in terms of dogma from the supply side era, which gave us the proposition that if the rich are allowed to get richer, it will be good for all of us because it will trickle down. That's how you become a professor at an Ivy League university: you think like the big boys do. Unfortunately, the supply side guys never bothered to think about what was going to trickle down on us, and it turned out not to be wealth. The bottom line, is that paternalism is only beneficial if the father in the equation cares about the people he is father to, and even then he has to have what it takes to provide for them. A convenient theoretical fiction won't feed the masses.

Which all brings me back to a point I have tried to make over and over again. It isn't class warfare to say that we should think with our own heads, not someone else's. If someone gets rich by curing a disease, I say good for him or her. It someone writes a book that everyone wants to read, good for him. But if you want to make money by making something from nothing, you'd better be able to come up with the goods. Otherwise, it's just fraud, and you can go to jail for that. Just ask the guys at Enron, or maybe the lawyers at Goldman Sachs.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's Saturday again, and tomorrow is a day of rest, for me at least. But before we go our separate ways, it seems appropriate to note that the nomination for the next Supreme Court justice seems imminent. Reports are that The President is striving to have the appointment confirmed by late summer, and that is probably a priority shared by most people to whom the status of The Court is meaningful, which should be all of us. As President Obama weighs his options, one of the issues that he may be considering is the extent of executive power that his nominee favors. And I am surprised at the talk about the Obama administrations inclinations in that regard.

Under the Bush administration, virtually boundless executive power was claimed by the president and his most visible and vocal acolyte, Dick Cheney. They worked behind closed doors and gave us intrusive intelligence gathering, an energy policy formulated in the inner sanctum of presidential power and in secret by oil men, including both Bush and Cheney, and Halliburton, which made billions, some of which found its way into Cheney's retirement fund by virtue of his prior affiliation with the company. But all of that is susceptible of at least some form of argument both pro and con. What is not arguable in my opinion, America, is that The Constitution endows only congress with the power to declare war, and that provision of The Constitution has been virtually repealed by all three branches of government. And it endows no one with the power to deny due process before imprisonment. The Republican conservative complex (Rcc) bellows with quasi-religious conviction about strict construction of The Constitution, but when it comes to executive power, these in particular, they seem to favor a virtually monarchist approach, and look what it has done for us over the past forty five years.

In the case of Vietnam, the closest thing to a declaration of war was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which declared that a minor incident that may or may not have occurred as it was recounted to the congress was an act of war against the United States. It served as the license to convert what had been little more than an intelligence-training operation on the other side of the world into a full blown war with troop deployments numbering something over half a million. And the aftermath was the victory of our adversary, an indigenous force, fifty five thousand dead and hundreds of thousands of injured, all as precursors to the commerce in which we now engage with Vietnam. That was followed by the Iran-Contra affair, Panama, in which we invaded a country so that we could arrest its drug running president, Granada in which we spent billions for a twenty minute war and no one knows what it was about to this day, Afghanistan, which was intended to be the apprehension of a megalomaniacal religious fanatic and turned into a liberation attempt for people who seem less and less interested in being liberated, the "War on Terror," which is just a euphemism for the unrestrained use of power by the executive in the pursuit of a master criminal and his henchmen justified by a claim that war permits anything the Commander in Chief decides to do, and ultimately Iraq, which was George Bush's version of his father's attempt to get reelected as a wartime president because he knew that war was the best campaign issue for an incumbent, and because, as I heard Bush the younger say one day of Saddam Hussein, "he tried to kill my dad."

So we have allowed the loss of tens of thousands of our young men and women, the depletion of our treasury to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the reelection of presidents who might well have been single-termers for reasons that vary in merit from a perceived threat by a country whose navy was little more than a bunch of fishing boats to the insult of a half hearted, ill-conceived assassination attempt by a tin horn dictator of dubious competency even as a dictator, because of the school yard petulance of a president who presumably was a grown man. Our people died in all these causes, and neither The Court nor our congress did anything about it, much less did they sanction the carnage in the name of national security or for any other reason.

It comes to this. Presidents have sent us into war for doubtful reasons, and they have done many other things, like the detention of people indefinitely without the benefit of trial because someone says that they are dangerous, what is called in constitutional law "prior restraint," and even their torture. Note that we do not permit the courts to enjoin even the publication of news with prior restraint, but deprivation of freedom and rights seems alright when we raise certain questions about a person. This is a test for the Obama administration. Will The President attempt to perpetuate the ill-gotten legacy of the Bush administration and its primarily Republican progenitors, or will it cleave to The Constitution, which protects us all, not just those of whom we approve. There are legitimate ways to accomplish what needs to be accomplished, like in camera review of evidence if national security is involved in a trial, but as to the need to afford trial to everyone accused, as to the need to have the decision to go to war considered by more than just one man or woman, there is no middle ground. We will see, America, which way our President turns, and it may well define him as a leader.

Speak to you Monday.

Your friend,

Mike