February 2011 Archives

Dear America,

As every American knows, the November 2010 elections swept a tidal wave of new Congressmen and a few new Senators as well into congress. The preponderance of them represented a swing toward conservatism in the House of Representatives with over eighty new votes in favor of the conservative legislative agenda. They supplanted politicians of many stripes and vintages including conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats and long serving Republicans who had characterized themselves as conservatives, and mostly were viewed by others as conservatives, but who were not conservative enough in the new political climate. Many of the new Congressmen and Senators were of a particular affiliation, that is they were Tea Party members, and they claimed an allegiance to "The People" with an expressed intention of taking control of the government in that constituency's name. But the actual identity of "The People" is becoming somewhat murky, thus rendering the Tea Party movement's purpose open to question, because there are really two Tea Parties.

The first is the one of which Rand Paul, the new Senator from Kentucky, is a member. He appeared before the CPAC convention a couple of weeks ago, basking in his new notoriety as a leading light of the Tea Party movement, and he bemoaned the tendency in this country toward what he called "majoritarianism," otherwise known as democracy. And though majoritarianism is a word that I have not yet found in the dictionary, Paul's use of the term made his intentions vis-à-vis The People clear. Whether he knew it or not, he was citing an opinion held by many of those in pre-constitutional America who called themselves Federalists. The Federalist papers included references both specific and veiled to insulating government action from the influence of the majority, which they feared was as capable of injustice as it was of defense of the principles of political and human liberty. And those opinions are in part a prediction of what the Senate would become and what it has presumed itself to be with the development of things like the filibuster and the blocking of bills and high level executive nominees by individual politicians for perhaps no reason other than that they have an axe to grind. But regardless of the intentions of the federalists, the United States of America was conceived as a democracy, albeit in the form of a republic, that is, a representative democracy. Thus, Paul's meaning, his stated intention to supplant the will of the people with what can only be presumed to be the will of those who agree with him, and of he alone if no one does, was abundantly clear. The problem for the Tea Party is that either it is what it professed to be-- a populist movement intended to re-assert the will of what they believe to be the majority-- or it is what Paul advocates, which is an oligarchy controlled by conservatives instead of liberals, not the purported mainstream that elected him.

The second is a more humble group who actually believe in what they professed when they were seeking votes: that the majority of the people should be heard and heeded in the halls of congress. Congressman Stephen Fincher of the eighth district of Tennessee is just such a congressman. He continues to go home every weekend to participate in church, family and farm life. He pledged to forego congressional health insurance in favor of the insurance he already has since he opposes the health insurance reform act, and he insists on staying connected to his life in Frog Jump, Tennessee, including singing in his gospel quartet on Sundays. He wants to restore America to what it was in the past, though it is not clear whether he is referring to the 1950's or the 1850's. And he defeated a conservative-- a self-styled Blue Dog Democrat named Tanner-- who had been in Congress for more than fifteen years. In other words, he out-conservatived an inveterate conservative, which he seems to have done with a lack of guile or ambition, though arguably carrying a gargantuan load of naiveté on his shoulders at the time. Still, the creed that he appears to profess to follow is the Tea Party creed that I think the rest of us heard in their campaign rhetoric: power to the people, not power only to the people who think they know what is best for the rest of us. We already had that.

So now, the Tea Party is on the horns of a dilemma. Senator Paul represents the rabid and single minded pursuit of goals advocated by them-- tax reduction, deficit reduction, debt reduction, government action reduction, government size reduction and a libertarian system of belief-- and he is willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish those goals, even if it means thwarting the will of the majority of the people, whom he admitted in his speech to thinking of as a mob. But when that majority begins to realize that every government program has some of them in it, they may think twice before voting Tea Party again because if the Tea Party movement is Rand Paul's movement, populist is the last thing it is. And Congressman Fincher is about to find out that very thing himself; when farm subsidies come up for consideration because, according to the Tea Party everything should be on the table, some of his friends-- you know, the ones who elected him-- may not think he is such a good ole' boy after all. To put it concisely, when the reality that the majority of The People have a profound stake in government just the way it is, he will have to confront a profound dichotomy between righteous beliefs that are often mutually exclusive: populism and conservatism. And the Tea Party will have to also if Fincher, and for that matter those like him, is their man.

It comes to this. Because of the decisions that have to be made-- do you vote to buy a jet engine that no one wants because it is made in your state, do you vote for millions to allow the Army to sponsor a NASCAR racing team while you vote against Pell Grants for college students who are the first in their families to seek college degrees and do you vote against community health centers simply because they are part of "Obamacare," which the conservative movement has condemned for reasons that become more dubious with each benefit of the law that takes effect-- the Tea Party-ers will have to decide who and what they are, and when that happens, they may realize that not only are they not Rand Paul, they really aren't anything new at all. They are just what we have all been all this time: hard working people who are just trying to get over, and then they'll have to realize that that's not such a bad thing.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

As the Middle East explodes, we enter a period of tumult even here in the United States. The Tea Party movement is sowing the seeds of hardship with its immoderate demands and state governments, the government of Wisconsin most prominent among them at the moment, are also pursuing immoderate remedies with which to address dire financial situations, imposing most on those with the least and demanding the least of those with the most, and doing so without compunction. Scott Walker, the Eagle Scout former IBM salesman without the benefit of a college degree has determined what he thinks to be the best course for his state, and the majority of Wisconsinites seem to agree with him, primarily, I would argue, because he has united them against a convenient target: government employees. But all of the bumptious politics of this era have far outstripped any rational relationship to reality, lapsing into rancor directed at convenient targets everywhere: homosexuals who want to marry, teachers who work only ten months a year, those who have earned entitlements of one kind or another including Social Security and Medicare recipients. And during all of this mania, the plutocracy has managed through the misdirection of our attention to avoid scrutiny. A "hedge fund" manager testified before Congress that he felt the tax system and the most recent renewal of the Bush tax cuts were appropriate, and understandably so in that they probably netted him several hundred million dollars in tax relief in the tax year 2010 alone, and no one seems much bothered by the fact that a man who makes money by making money while producing nothing seems to avoid the questions about where the five billion he put in his pocket came from. Parents tell their children that there is no money tree in their back yards, but apparently there is one in every hedge fund operator's, and that doesn't even raise any questions. No one asks how hedge fund managers can make money from nothing, though it really is coming out of all of our pockets in one way or another.

So, while it is true that teachers make what seems like pretty good money, and the fringes are usually great, they do show up every day and teach our children, so at least we get something for our money. And as to homosexuals getting married, I can remember when AIDS first appeared how promiscuity was blamed for its spread, especially among homosexual men. But now, the movement toward marriage, and thus toward long term monogamy for homosexuals is a source of controversy when if anything, those who condemn homosexuality should be applauding single sex matrimony, if not for its egalitarian validity then at least for its impact on what was seen as the cause of AIDS and AIDS related disease, and thus on public health. And while the majority begrudges the teachers and other municipal and state employees their compensation and thus agrees with Governor Walker in his commitment to eliminating collective bargaining rights for them with regard to fringe benefits, everyone seems to ignore the fact that the fringe benefits are the reason that most public employees elect government employment as a career, which has a broader implication when considered with all the rest.

What all of this demonstrates is the existence of a concerted effort from the conservative end of the political spectrum to undermine, and if possible to eliminate the security that most of us enjoy in the form of guaranteed rights, Social Security, Medicare, government retirement of one kind or another and the provision of vital services to those who would otherwise have to do without. And the irony of it all is that those whose voices are raised the loudest probably have more in common with those whom they condemn than they do with those who lead them. Governor Walker, for example, has been in Wisconsin politics, in other words he has been a state and municipal employee, since 1994, and he will no doubt take his pension when it is offered. And while this internecine conflict rages among those of us in that group that earns less than the $250,000 per year that our president has designated as the point of demarcation between those who have more than they need and those who have enough or less, those who do have more than they need continue to prosper and thrive while our lot continues to decline. Business is sitting on over $2 trillion in cash, waiting for an opportunity to turn it into $4 trillion while nine percent of Americans can't find work. Callaway Golf closes its golf ball factory in Worcester, Massachusetts and sends the operation to Mexico at the cost of 300 American jobs, and it barely gets noticed. Gasoline is selling at a price approaching $3.50 per gallon even though there has not been a single interruption in the production of crude oil or the refining of gasoline, all because people and entities, like hedge funds, are buying and selling derivatives in oil thus driving the price of crude oil through the ceiling, and again, it barely gets noticed. And the big oil companies will once again report huge profits when they appear before congress to explain themselves a year or two from now, but nothing will happen...again. And no one will ask them how they did it, even though their profits come mainly not from the gas pump but from the well head when they pull oil out of American public land and sea floor pursuant to oil leases that favor them, in some cases because of drafting errors in those leases that they refuse to reform even though they know that they are getting huge windfalls out of a typing error.

I realize that this is a desultory complaint, touching on many things that seem on the surface to be unrelated. But in the final analysis, they all have one thing in common. They are a function of misguided indignation on the part of the American people. We are more concerned with whether someone gets married than we are with the public health issues implicated by our meddling in the lives of others. We resent public employees for earning a decent wage but ignore the gratuitous wealth of people who do nothing but manipulate money in order to make more money. And we allow big business to demand more out of us even though they already benefit from record prosperity. Well, America, we have less than two years to figure it all out and change direction. Because if we don't-- if the Republican conservative complex imbeds itself even further into our political process and our social fabric-- it will be because we are all sheep, and no doubt they will lead us all to the figurative slaughter.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com

Dear America,

I don't know if you noticed, but the entire fiscal debate has shifted dramatically in response to the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc's) strategy. Their basic premise has been that "everything is on the table," but that is just a euphemism that masquerades as intellectual integrity. We do have an enormous national debt and an enormous annual budget deficit as well, which increases the debt exponentially lately. We do have to reduce those disparities between what we have and will receive on the one hand, and what we have spent and will spend in the future on the other. So the fact of a continuing, even raging debate is not only completely understandable, but is fundamentally necessary to our future well-being. But it is disturbing that we have all accepted the Rcc's disingenuous terms for this discussion, and it is all because of the lame duck session of congress this past December, which the Democrats have characterized as a political victory-- not so.

The national debt has increased dramatically and persistently in the modern era, and since the ascent of George Bush to the presidency, there has been an annual budget deficit-- he inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton mind you-- and that deficit increased from that initial surplus to a budgetary deficit of almost one and a half trillion dollars in 2009, the last budget created during a Bush presidency. And the causes were primarily two wars, both elective, and tax cuts that favored the most wealthy Americans most. Personally, I am against the persistence of the war in Afghanistan, which continues basically full throttle to this day, but that is the smaller component of our financial distress. The tax cuts however have added trillions of dollars to our debt, and they represent the preponderance of the budget deficit we will face for the next two years thanks to the "compromise" of the lame duck session-- a deficit that the Rcc wants to address only from the other side of the ledger in the form of spending cuts. And in the bargain, those tax cuts will be up for debate in 2012 during the next presidential-congressional election campaign, and there is no reason to believe that either the rhetoric or the debate then will precipitate a different result from the one that took place during the last congress. But in the interim, taxes-- that is the revenue side of our budgetary crisis-- are not even on the agenda despite the Rcc's "everything is on the table" fulminations. According to them, the expense of maintaining a socially just society is the only area in which we can address our fiscal imbalance. In other words, the Rcc wants to balance our budget at the expense of those who need the most help in our society. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina demonstrated that strategy on Meet the Press yesterday.

There was a discourse between Graham and Senator Dick Durbin about the current process of budget creation in Washington, and the finger pointing was of the usual character. But at the end of the debate, David Gregory raised the persistent claim that "entitlements" were at the heart of the problem. Graham insisted that, among other things, Social Security had to be addressed, and Senator Durbin replied. He pointed out that Social Security is fully funded until at least 2037, and that it does not add a single dollar to the national debt or the deficit. That is not myth or canard. It is fact. But Graham, not addressing the verity of Durbin's analysis, responded by harping on the imbalance in Social Security that will not have its first effects on the program until either 2037, or in 2042 if the most recent accounting of the Social Security Trust Fund is correct. And the fact is that at present, nearly a dollar is paid into the Social Security Trust Fund for every dollar that is paid out, and the fund has a balance in it of trillions of dollars. So Graham's return to Social Security when it is a non-issue with regard to the debt and the deficit showed his true colors. The budget controversies this year are a tactic that is part of a larger strategy of the Rcc to eliminate the social safety net in the United States. This is not a fiscal battle. It is a philosophical and moral war.

The real question, America, is who have we become. Will we allow the Rcc to garrote the progressive movement one turn at a time over the next twenty years or will we remember how FDR got us to the point at which the elderly are not starving in our streets and children are not infirm in consequence of their lack of food. The alternative to laying back and waiting for that to happen is to begin asking questions. For example, we should ask the agents of the notion that Social Security is producing our national debt how a dollar paid into an account with trillions of dollars in it so that a dollar can be paid out of that multi-trillion dollar balance becomes a dollar of debt? We should ask how a reduction from the top tax rate of 39% will produce prosperity and jobs when it hasn't done so yet, and when our greatest years as an economic power, those years that included the years of WWII and the ensuing decades, were years in which that tax rate was 90%? If we do not confront the illogic of removing higher taxes from the process of balancing our budget, the Rcc will dismantle our humane society. It's our choice America. Start asking the right questions or suffer with all of the wrong answers.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

I heard a small portion of the speech that Rand Paul, probably the most visible and prominent of the Tea Party candidates from the November elections to win office in the Senate, gave at the CPAC convention last week and the one part I heard made the nature and goals of the Tea Party movement abundantly chillingly clear. Paul was talking about his concerns over the nature of main stream politics and the excessive spending in Washington when he said,

It was a complete non sequitur: a gratuitous expression of his contempt for democracy as we know it having nothing to do with what he was talking about, not to mention a demonstration of his inability to understand complex ideas. Of course that is to be expected; Paul is best known by non-Tea Party Americans for his belief that the federal government does not properly have the power to regulate who will be served in a privately owned, public restaurant...that racial inequality is permissible as long as it is committed behind the line that demarcates private property and organizations, even if they are what the law calls "public accommodations." It is important to understand that where those sentiments about the majority and the mob appeared was in The Federalist papers, which were not written by Jefferson. Jefferson is unlikely to have agreed with Paul about the rights of African Americans even though he owned slaves, however he certainly did not share the good doctor's apparently low opinion of the American people and democracy. But regardless of what Jefferson thought and who made those remarks first, what is disturbing about Dr. Paul making them is that he openly admits that he is not in favor of majority rule because the majority is just a mob to him, which necessarily implies the belief that if the majority is a mob then the minority is too...just a smaller one, leaving only him and his ilk to govern competently. And the Tea Party and the conservative main stream, which in my opinion are the mob of which the Federalist was actually afraid, accept this guy as one of their own. That should tell us all what they are really striving for.

If the Tea Party embraces Rand Paul as one of their seminal thinkers, then ipso facto they do not want majority rule. They want minority rule provided that the minority in question is them. They don't want democracy, nor do they want to do what "the people" want, as Mitch McConnell says his Republican caucus in the Senate wants to. The Tea Party wants to do what the Tea Party wants regardless of the will of the vast majority of both the American people and their representatives in the republic that Jefferson, whom Paul purported to cite as authority, and its other founding fathers created. The Tea Party is not just conservative, it is the reactionary right, and they do not want freedom for the people; they want control of the people. It was not until I heard Paul's speech and the reaction to the absurd things he said that I fully recognized the threat to our democracy that the Tea Party represents. They want to believe that they know best, and on that basis, they are willing to force their beliefs on the rest of us if we allow it. It is not President Obama, and the Democratic congress that passed health insurance reform, who want to deprive the American people of their liberty. It is those who say that they do. It is not our senators, who have spent all of our Social Security money and squandered much of it, who are robbing our children of our future. It is those who would substitute their own views on what should happen next for those of the men and women who legitimately control our republic by dint of their electoral mandate.

The Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has been tossing around words like "Marxist" and "socialist" without even thinking about it, and they do so just because demagoguery is their style. Still, I hesitate to reciprocate by using words like "Nazi" and "fascist" to describe those who have ideas different from mine. But when it comes to people like Rand Paul, there is danger in failing to recognize them for what they are, and I cannot banish such words from my thoughts about them. My father was a Jewish refugee from Austria, who told me that he got on a train to Paris as the Germans were marching into Vienna because he knew what was going to happen next. He told me during the Nixon years that the tone that prevailed in the United States-- the emergence of the "moral majority" that collectively asserted itself in the attempt to exert control over our politics, and succeeded in doing so-- reminded him of how Hitler had won over the German people and established a Nazi dictatorship. But he was wrong in his analogy. The danger is not the moral majority. It is the arrogant minority that thinks itself more moral than the majority and thus aspires to oligarchic control, and that is what the Tea Party movement is.

Until now, I have been able to believe that the Tea Party movement is just a fringe reaction to the fact that our politics have become sufficiently fractious that gridlock has set in. While I blamed that gridlock on a different contingent in our government from that which they did, I considered it only a divergence of opinion on a relatively fine point. But Rand Paul and CPAC have just shown us that we have been naïve in dismissing them as too few and too quaint to be a menace. A menace is exactly what they are. So I exhort all Americans, whether of Democrat or Republican stripe, to beware. Our democracy is being stalked, which means that we are all being stalked as well. If we are not careful and we do not act now by voting for what we believe in whenever we get the chance, it will be us in Freedom Square chanting, "Leave now! Leave now!" Only we will not be admonishing a military man like Hosni Mubarak. More likely it will be an ophthalmologist with an expensive toupee, or the governor of Wisconsin.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com

Dear America,

After watching a little bit of the C-PAC convention here and there on television, I am stunned by the realization that there is a fair sized segment of the American population that will believe anything if the right person says it, and without even the need for a rationale to justify it. I saw a few minutes of Mississippi Governor Hayley Barbour's speech to the convention in which he alternated between cheerleading for the conservative cause, maligning the Democrats and President Obama, and postulating the same old notions about taxes and prosperity that are articles of faith in the conservative camp, but that seem preposterous when examined. He said that a dollar that an entrepreneur is taxed is a dollar less that he will spend on job creation, necessitating the corollary that a dollar by which his taxes are decreased will be spent on job creation. But during the Bush administration over the seven years of the Bush tax cuts, and for the first six months of the Obama administration during which those tax cuts were still in effect, the country lost eight million jobs. And now that the tax cuts have been renewed, while some jobs continue to be created, they are not nearly enough to even match the increase in the need on account of growth in the population of work-desiring Americans, much less to offset the number of jobs we have lost. Barbour's explanation apparently is that it is anxiety over what tax rates will be in two years that keeps business from getting off its $2 trillion pile of cash and creating jobs, presumably because business would rather hold on to money than make more of it for the next two years in light of the fact that they might make less starting then. Well I don't know about your understanding of the wealthy in America, but I never heard of them foregoing an opportunity to make more money now because they might make less money later. They are not creating jobs because they find that they can do just fine without doing so by breaking the backs of the workers they already have.

Barbour, the dough faced Yazoo, Mississippi lobbyist and lawyer-cum-career-politician son of a lawyer father who has been a Republican operative since the mid-60's, doesn't seem to realize that the fact that he has had his prosperous life handed to him doesn't mean that everyone can be prosperous. It never seems to occur to a person like him that he was able to get the job of running the Mississippi census at the age of twenty two not because of any particular talent but because of patronage and nepotism devolving from a hundred years or so of his family's participation in good-ole-boy politics. And further, like most Republican conservatives, his ostensible belief that the rich will take a paternalistic interest in the rest of us and make sure that we get what we need never seems to get any scrutiny from him. That's probably what made him an effective lobbyist. He never feels the need to say I'm sorry. But Barbour is just one of many conservative politicians who are as much caricatures as they are anything at all. Their rah-rah, summer-camp-counselor style of politicking seems more like a skit on SNL than it does a real political campaign, but it is a menace to this country none the less. Barbour will not be the Republican candidate for president in 2012, though that might well be what the Democrats would hope for. And neither will Michelle Bachman, whose what-we-need-is-to-make-Barrack-Obama-a-one-term-president speech and the response to it made it clear that the CPAC convention is a pep rally, not a serious political event. But those two plus Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and a few others are a harbinger of the tidal wave of materialistic self-interest and presumptuous didacticism that is about to wash over the United States of America. They are the advance force of an army of the sanctimonious who want to tell us all what to do and how to live in the name of liberty and democracy. They feel they have the right to wrap themselves in the flag, and thus they would make it unpatriotic to challenge them and their beliefs, but in reality, that is the greatest threat to American democracy. It always is, and that is why there is a constitution in this country. What they do not understand is that it exists not to protect their effort to dictate that the rest of us subscribe to their pedantic beliefs, but to prevent them from punishing us for refusing to allow it. Still, behind that curtain of moralistic certainty sits the real danger. The wizard of Oz is not Hayley Barbour, it is the hedge fund managers, the real estate moguls and the "captains of industry" who actually guide our course. The plutocracy is the danger, not the self-righteous minions who think they are doing God's work. The monied oligarchy will use the Barbours and the Bachmans as foot soldiers, and before the rest of us know it, Social Security will no longer have a trust fund that fully funds the program decades in advance. Medicare will be a luxury that we can no longer afford despite the hundreds of billions that the government has borrowed from its trust fund. And the funds that have been paid by all of us in advance for those programs will be absorbed into the general fund so that the money borrowed from the trust funds will no longer be part of our national debt, thus solving a big part of the our national bookkeeping problem by simply tearing a page out of the ledger.

On Friday, Mark Shields and David Brooks, the former a liberal and the latter a conservative, appeared as they almost always do on the PBS news program to offer their comments on the week's events. One of the topics was the reinvigorated debate over the national debt and the federal deficit. Brooks expressed his opinion that there had to be serious discussion about reducing "entitlements" before there could be an earnest effort to address our fiscal problems, Medicare and Social Security in particular. And when Shields responded, he pointed out to Brooks that Social Security was self-funded for decades, and thus has no role in the discussion, which ironically is what Bowles and Simpson said in their report for the President's debt commission though Simpson seems to have forgotten that just as Brooks has, assuming that he read the report. But I am willing to bet that Brooks will go on citing Social Security and Medicare as part of the debt problem without ever explaining, or even asking himself, how a program that is so well funded that it has been able to lend the federal government trillions of dollars can be an element of the national debt. His mind is set and his heart is following, just as all of the cheering soldiers at CPAC were doing last week. America, we have a problem.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

It is remarkable how little the Republicans perceive of their own political situation. They have consistently read the election statistics as castigation of the opposition when they were actually a rejection of all national politicians, and all for the same reason: lack of results. While living in their fantasy, the Republicans have convinced themselves that their mantra-- less taxes, less spending, less government-- has resonated with the American people, and thus they persist in droning it on and on, when even the viper in their bosom, the Tea Party, is telling them that they now have to do what they have been saying that they wanted to if only they had the power. Now they do have the power, at least in the House of Representatives, and they are discovering that it is impossible to deliver on those fulminations that they think put them in that position of power. They committed to cutting $100 billion from the 2011 budget, which by the way has still not been passed, but even the most ardent critics of "tax and spend" politics, Congressman Paul Ryan being their leader, have been able to come up with a mere $32 billion in budget cuts though they have been unencumbered by bipartisanship in the effort. Ryan advocates privatization of Social Security and Medicare, which is a euphemism for eliminating them, so he is not shy about wielding the budget cutting axe, but as he surely now realizes, governing a country of more than three hundred million people is not cheap. Talk is.

But the budget is just one instance of Republican incongruity when it comes to matching what they do with what they say. The Patriot Act is up for renewal, including provisions that permit the government to apply to the FISA court for a warrant-- FISA requires the approval of a special court in such cases-- to tap the phones of people without identifying the people specifically or even specifying the phones they wish to tap. The Republicans and the Republican conservative complex have no problem with giving the wire tappers in the government that kind of carte blanche, but they think their freedom has been infringed if the government requires that everyone have health insurance. And consistent with all of that inconsistency is what we can expect to be the next glory play in the Republican controlled Congress: repeal of the Dodd-Franks financial regulation law. Fortunately for us, there is J.P. Morgan Chase.

The bank never seems to recognize excess, even when its executives and principals are among the richest business people in the world. They will stoop to anything to get more, even though they already have more than they can ever use. And it isn't just the lefty newspaper The New York Times reporting these miscues. ABC news has reported that J.P. Morgan has gouged those to whom they gave mortgages for fees, and even foreclosed on some of them, while they were overseas in the military, and there is even a law to specifically prevent such practices. On the network's nightly news was the case of a couple who spent five years fighting J.P. Morgan over the bank's claims that fees had not been paid when they had, threatening foreclosure all the while even though the husband was overseas. And The New York Times also reported on J.P. Morgan's misfeasance, if not malfeasance. While taking profits from Bernie Madoff's sham mutual funds, they were demonstrably aware that something was not right, and they were even emailing one another about it. It was too good to be true and they knew it, but they took the money anyway, and kept on taking it. And joining them were the principal owners of the New York Mets. They made hundreds of millions from Madoff "investments" and now the trustee for the other investors, those who lost their money with Madoff, are looking to Mssrs. Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, the Mets principal owners, to return some of their ill-gotten gains. So now, even with all of this recent high profile amorality in the press, even with a national economy in ruins (except of course for business owners who are sitting on about $2 trillion rather than hiring the unemployed because federal regulations supposedly represent such uncertainty for poor them) because of financial industry fast and loose dealings, even with a hedge fund owner earning $5 billion all by himself last year while kids were going hungry in many households because their aren't enough jobs to go around, even when Callaway sent the jobs in its Worcester, Massachusetts golf ball factory to Mexico so that it could save a few bucks at a time when those 300 former employees will have to go on unemployment while the executives who came up with the plan will probably get raises, the Republicans will soon try to sell to the American people the notion that business is being oppressed by federal government regulations.

American free enterprise may be the model the rest of the world follows, but of late it has really disgraced itself, and us as well. The plaints I have just mentioned are but a few of many on the subject of business ethics and morality, but even so, I don't know how this Republican effort will turn out. I still can't believe that the American people thought that the Republicans and the Tea Party were a better idea, so I find it hard to rest easy when this new assault on the American people is at hand. I would love to take heart in the protection of the Democratic Party, but who would I be kidding if I tried. They were too afraid to do away with the filibuster that the Republicans used like a bludgeon for the past two years because the Republicans might retaliate, though what more they could do to the Democrats I do not know. And our president has deemed it appropriate to pander to business because they don't seem to be getting what they need, according to them at least. And even with the majority that they held for four years, the Democrats couldn't give us true health care reform; the best they could do is to require everyone to buy health insurance and the insurance companies to sell it to them. So, we are out here by ourselves, America, and we have no one but ourselves to rely on. We have nothing to lose by expressing our outrage since no one else is looking out for us. After all, how many of these debacles can we be expected to tolerate. I wonder how the Egyptians would feel about it, or the Tunisians for that matter.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com

Dear America,

The Republicans have been celebrating themselves since they found themselves empowered by the Democratic majority in The Senate to impede the progression of any liberal plan with impunity. They were emboldened by the power of the filibuster, and they have been unbearable in their hubristic pronouncements since the elections of last November, and now, we have the coup de grace: the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. There was a line in an old movie, Chinatown, in which an evil character makes an observation about growing old and respectability. To paraphrase for the sake of delicacy, he says that ugly buildings, politicians and ladies of the evening all get respectable if they last long enough. That's how it is with Ronald Reagan, and the media are living off it.

The Republicans and the Republican conservative complex intone Reagan's name with a veneration usually reserved for heroes and saints, proclaiming him to be the embodiment of the conservative ideal. The media show clips of him telling Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" as he poses for a photo opportunity near the Brandenburg gate. They show him decrying the size of government and the amount of money it spends. They whisper his name in reverent tones as they show him eulogizing the Challenger astronauts by noting how they had "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." And as is the case with most historical figures whose names continue to be mentioned with prominence after death, the things he said become pearls of wisdom and grace, including in Reagan's case that famous line, which was attributed to him even though the first half of it comes from the poem High Flight by John G. Magee, Jr. And that is not the half of the post-mortem beatification that Reagan has enjoyed without earning it.

In the twelfth century, Henry II of England was in need of money, so he tried to levy taxes on the lands of the Catholic Church in England and to make his secular authority in general preeminent-- superior even to the law of God as propounded by The Church. So he appointed his friend and fellow cavorter, Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury in furtherance of his plan. But Beckett turned out to be surprisingly principled and he opposed Henry's attempt to assert his authority and taxing power over the church, which by some accounts prompted The King to utter to a group of his nobles, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" It was not an order, so the king's hands were clean, but before he knew it, Henry got his wish and Beckett was dead. Similarly, Reagan seems to have said in a meeting of some kind, apparently attended by Oliver North, that it would be a cool idea to sell weapons in Iran and use the money to finance a rebellion by reactionary forces in Nicaragua against the socialist government of Daniel Ortega. And North arranged and pursued just such a plan.

And no one talks about what Ronald Reagan called a new American Revolution: his tax revisions. What they forget is that, while tax rates were reduced for everyone including the rich, the amount of deductible medical expenses was reduced from seven percent to two percent. And as to the interest paid to banks for consumer debt, the deduction of that expense, which was taxed as income for the banks, was eliminated for you and me. So, the tax reform did change what we paid as individuals, though not entirely for the better. However, business and the rich loved it. And then there is that whole Berlin Wall thing. The conservative idolaters of Ronald Reagan and the Reagan legacy like to claim that he ended the cold war, primarily with that one remark: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" But they never mention the fact that Mickail Gorbachev as the Premiere of the Soviet Union had been pressing the liberalization and transparency of his nations government for quite a while when that speech was given-- as it turned out to his ultimate detriment and consequently his ouster from office in favor of a drunken loudmouth who enabled the corruption of what would become the Russian government, which Gorbachev had been trying to reform. The Rcc also chooses to ignore the fact that Gorbachev participated in a summit meeting with Reagan in Rekjavic, Iceland on the subject of reduction of nuclear arms in both country's arsenals just eight months earlier than the Berlin Wall visit. At that summit, Gorbachev proposed the total elimination of nuclear weapons, but Reagan declined to discuss it, so what could have been a nuclear bomb free world today, but isn't, is also something for which the Rcc should be telling us to thank Reagan.

And now, the final victory. President Obama admires Reagan and apparently lets it be known that he has learned many lessons from the late former president. Well, here's one in particular that he appears to have learned. At one point, there was a proposal for development of a new nuclear missile system that was more powerful and effective than anything that anyone on earth had: the M-X missile. It was a multiple reentry vehicle that could carry as many as ten warheads. In 1981, Reagan announced that the development of the missile was to commence, and he called it the "Peacekeeper" missile. I suppose that such would be an apt name...if escalating the arms race so that we could kill everyone ten times quicker can be called peace. So, while the Rcc characterization of Reagan's greatness is one way to look at it, there are many of us who see him as a demagogue and a hypocrite. He complained about the federal budget, but tripled the deficit in his eight years. He claimed that he would reduce taxes, but he actually raised them on most of us, six times in his two terms. And then there is calling an implement of mass destruction a "Peacekeeper." Sorry, but calling it a handshake doesn't make it an act of friendship to bury a hatchet in someone's forehead. And now President Obama calls health insurance reform health care reform. He claims that the Democrats have addressed the problems created by the financial industry with a new regulation plan, which was so watered down in committee that in reality, nothing of substance has changed and he invites financial executives into his inner circle because they haven't yet gotten a big enough piece of the pie. So, if Mr. Obama is looking to Ronald Reagan as an idol, he is doing all the right things. I didn't vote for Reagan...either time he ran...hint, hint.

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

One of the unfortunate benefits of being a lawyer is that one can be enthralled by things that are not even of passing interest to anyone who isn't a lawyer. I say it is unfortunate because there are times when my friends are getting ready to watch something like the Super Bowl and I am monopolizing the television right up to the kickoff with a televised debate in the Connecticut Supreme Court about a workers' compensation claim. Because the law requires parsing not just of issues or sentences but even of words, much of what we lawyers do seems to the layman to be much ado about nothing, and hence, what interests us interests us alone. An example of that disparity of interest occurred last night. My wife went to bed and as I was channel surfing one last time before joining her, I came across a C-span rerun of a hearing held in The Senate regarding the constitutionality of the recently passed health insurance reform law, known variously as the Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare, and if you are in the Tea Party something that probably doesn't bear repeating. The senators were questioning a panel of five constitutional law experts including a state attorney-general, a former solicitor general cum federal judge, a Harvard Law professor and some hack who worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan. The questioning was about the commerce clause of The Constitution and whether it empowered the federal government to enact a law that required citizens to buy health insurance, and opinions on the subject were mixed with supporting and opposing arguments that ranged from simplistic to Byzantine.

The commerce clause has been a kind of catch-all empowerment of the federal government that our Supreme Court and congress have relied on for about a century to enable the government to do a whole series of things that are controversial to one faction or another. For example, the ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) has a provision in it that allows an employer that funds a health insurance plan for the benefit of its employees to collect a reimbursement of benefits paid to an employee injured by the negligence of a third party if the employee collects damages from that negligent party. The issue is much more complicated and steeped in legal history than I can cover here, but regardless of how you feel about it, the constitutional provision on which that provision and all of the ERISA rely is the commerce clause. How is what is called in the law a "collateral source lien" a matter of interstate commerce, and well you might ask. But our Supreme Court says it is, and that's that. Now, the people who oppose the health insurance reform law have seized on the provision in the law that requires everyone to get health insurance or pay a fine, so what are the proponents of the law relying on? You guessed it...more excessive use of the commerce clause. And what does the commerce clause have to do with mandatory insurance? Again, well you might ask. But that is what the debate over the law is centering on. However, if the advocates of reform are smart, they will see an alternative: eminent domain and the fifth amendment's taking and compensation clause. I recognize that this is the point at which I have probably lost all of you who are not lawyers and I assume that you are at this very moment turning off your computers and going to see what's on television. But to me, and to you, and to all of the rest of us, this is important, so I'll proceed on the hope that there are at least a few of you who will read on.

Mind you, I don't say that this is anything more than my opinion, this reliance on eminent domain as the power to pass the health insurance reform act. But those who will decide the matter need an alternative to the overused commerce clause rationale, among other reasons because the opponents of the law will argue that if that clause justifies this federal action it will justify anything. That would be dangerous...designating one clause in the constitution as the plenary enabler of the potential abuse of federal power, and the Supreme Court will understand that risk, and thus perhaps retrench its stance on several issues, like child labor, universal access to higher education and who knows what in order to avoid the threat it represents. So those of us who support the law, despite the fact that the majority of us actually want universal health care and not universal insurance coverage, need another theory that will not pose such a threat to the stasis between the powers of the states, the people and the federal government. That is where eminent domain and the case of Kelo vs. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 comes in.

Kelo was the owner of property in the Fort Trumball area of New London, Connecticut, an area that was to be redeveloped by a private developer as part of a redevelopment plan propounded by the City. The City's purpose was to improve the tax base and create jobs for the citizenry at large, but at its roots the development was a private enterprise undertaken by commercial entities in pursuit of commercial gain, the City's purposes being only ancillary as far as those corporate interests were concerned. While many home owners in the area were willing to sell to the City's "redevelopment agency," some weren't, including Ms. Kelo who refused to part with the home she purportedly loved. So the City utilized its power of eminent domain-- the power to condemn private property and take it with compensation to the owner-- to forcibly "buy" the property from Ms. Kelo, who then sued and took her case to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to prevent that purchase. Her argument was in essence that the actual beneficiary of the forced sale of her property would be another private "person" (corporations are persons under the law) not the City, and hence, the condemnation was not in furtherance of a "public use" as required of the federal government by The Constitution's Fifth Amendment when it condemns property, and by extension of the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, but rather it was the privation of her property rights, which would then be conveyed to another private entity.

While previous cases in which condemnation had been allowed for the purpose of ameliorating slums-- declaring such projects to constitute a public use-- Ms. Kelo's case was about a less immediate goal than eliminating urban blight. The City argued that the condemnation of her property was not distinguishable on the facts from those previous cases on that point, but Ms. Kelo argued that the project being coordinated by a "redevelopment agency" did not make it a public use regardless of the stated purpose as the agency was actually the surrogate for this other private entity; as Kelo argued, the City's condemnation of her house was for the private use of another person, not the municipality. But the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the City could take property from one person and give it to another to pursue legitimate municipal goals...that doing so for such a purpose as the City was pursuing could be a public use even though the City was pursuing that purpose through private entities that would benefit from the condemnation.

So now comes the federal government saying that it is going to require each of us to have insurance (taking money from us and directing it toward insurance companies) so that the public purpose of universal access to health care can be accomplished. Under the Kelo holding, I would argue, that is a permissible use of the power of eminent domain as using our money that way is a public use, and the commerce clause become irrelevant. And I must say, that while I don't necessarily agree that the health insurance reform law is the best idea, at least it is a step in the right direction. So, I would argue that the Kelo case is the petard by which the Supreme Court has hoisted itself into affirming the constitutionality of the health insurance reform law, and the interstate commerce issue is moot. In this case, a petard is a good thing.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com