March 2011 Archives

Dear America,

On Monday evening, President Obama took to the air waves to explain himself with regard to the American military actions he ordered in Libya. In my opinion, his actions along with the policy statements he had made over the prior two weeks or so were self-explanatory, but there had been all of this Republican hand wringing the whole while. I guess he felt it politically prudent to address the nation so as to preempt the Republicans' obvious effort to do as they have been doing for the past two years: take the position opposite that of the Democrats and of President Obama in particular. I have to say that it seems about time The President decided that passively standing above the fray would not thwart their efforts. Apparently, many of the American people will buy anything if no one points out its deficiencies, so the Democrats have taken a beating, even while controlling both houses of congress and the White House by taking high road...in silence. Maybe this speech is evidence that now, they have-- or at least President Obama has-- learned that the high road is okay, but you have to honk your horn as you turn onto it. That's what the President did Monday night. He honked his horn, and I believe that almost everyone heard it...almost.

Among the Republicans, their dean, so to speak, John McCain, took the President's side and applauded both his speech and the actions it addressed. But he was nearly alone among his party's leadership. A couple of days earlier, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell whined about the extent to which he and congressional leaders had been advised of the President's plans. It seems that the letter the President sent and the closed door meeting he had with senior leadership in congress didn't satisfy McConnell, as if anything would have. I suppose that McConnell would defend his lack of criticism for George Bush because he gave us all plenty of notice as to what he intended to do...us, Saddam Hussein and the rest of the world too. In fact, persistent publicity was what he wanted; he was running for re-election after all. But what neither McConnell nor any of the rest of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) can say is that it made any difference, and more to the point, that it made President Bush's efforts any more defensible. None-the-less, a day after the speech some Republicans have taken out after President Obama like hounds after a fox.

On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Senator Clarence S. Chambliss-- he goes by the name Saxby Chambliss incidentally-- spoke to the press and complained that even after the speech, he didn't see any kind of a plan at work. Notably, Chambliss voted for the authorization of the use of military force in Iraq, presumably because he thought that President Bush had a plan. If you're reading this letter, Senator Chambliss, what was that plan and how did it work out for you...for all of us for that matter? And then there is Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican from Alabama. During a Senate Budget Committee meeting on the cost of this intervention, he felt it necessary to criticize The President's actions because NATO is now in charge of the operation, though he failed to applaud the fact that the costs of this campaign will be borne by an alliance of nations rather than the United States alone (so much for budget austerity, I guess). Apparently, while Chambliss seems to be concerned that we might be ensnared by The President's actions in a long term engagement, Sessions thinks that we should be in charge, presumptively so that we can be ensnared in another long term engagement. Like Chambliss, Sessions voted in favor of the use of the military in Iraq, so at least he can say that he is consistent, though perhaps not too prudent. He seems to prefer that we make the same mistake in Libya that we made in Iraq rather than creating international consensus and then participating in a concerted action rather than unilaterally declaring war and then baring the terrible consequences...and doing so essentially alone at that.

I can't help wondering if the American people are listening, and if so, whether they understand what is happening. The abject lack of intellectual honesty and integrity displayed by these two senators, and probably by many more to come over the next few days, seems so reprehensible and deplorable that reelection ought to be rendered virtually impossible for all of them. But Sessions and Chambliss both are not up for reelection until 2014, and I wonder if that will be the pattern. With four years to dull the electorate's memory, maybe the Republicans feel that these monochromatically conservative dogmatists can survive their hypocrisy even if the voters figure it out. It will be interesting to see if others with the larger balance of their terms in front of them join the pack. But of one thing we can all be sure. As long as there are Republicans in congress, these things will be said and done. For any of you who are Republicans but vote on principle...hint, hint.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

As I noted last Wednesday, I am preoccupied with Social Security and what the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) is trying to do to it. The Social Security Trust Fund contains something on the order of $2.6 trillion--that's trillion with a "t"--but the federal government has borrowed all of it, and the Republicans in congress complain incessantly because now, they have to pay it back as we all might have expected since they played a major role in spending it. The long and short of it is that Social Security is the only federal government program that funds itself and has money on hand for decades of its cost. It is not in any way part of our debt or deficit problem, but the program lent the federal government its money and is now therefore a target because the federal government doesn't want to pay its debt. If we were dealing with a bank, someone would be going to jail for such a scheme, but since we are dealing with Republicans, they seem to have some kind of immunity. Still, we cannot let them get away with this without a fight. So, while I have had to cut back on the frequency with which I write to you by limiting myself to Monday and Friday, I have written to you several times about Social Security, and I feel that comments made about the Republicans and their plans for the program bear repeating. thus, for the foreseeable future, I will reprise those letters on Wednesdays with the thought that someone who missed them might be interested in Social Security too, and in what it means to us as a nation as well. Here is the first of those reprises: my letter of January 5, 2011.

Dear America,

I thought in 2008 that the presidential election was perhaps the most important election that we had or would see for decades. It was not because the Democratic candidate was a man of color, but because he seemed to be a unique kind of candidate: Kennedy-esque, liberal but still pragmatic, humanistic and circumspect in his perception of the American people and of the United States in the modern world. But over his first two years as president, Barrack Obama became more the pragmatist than humanistic, more the politician than the moral leader. Still, despite his new found concern with whether he will be reelected and its preeminence among his concerns, he seems guided at his core by a moral compass that is noble and oriented toward social conscience. The Republicans could possibly nominate someone who could rival the incumbent in those regards, but recent history makes that prospect seem remote. Republican party politics are driven by money and social control in the hands of the wealthy, or at least they have been, not by humanism. But who will they nominate? Now, a new trend is arising in the Republican Party, and if it turns out to be a reflection of the tenor of the electorate at large, we are all in trouble.

The Republicans are in Iowa vying for media and electorate attention, but the issues being emphasized are not those revolving about money and power for a change. The contest in Iowa is not between the rich and the super rich, and the salient issue is not whose politics will create the most jobs by creating wealth to trickle down on us all. The contest is between two other groups who are not guided by greed and acquisition, but something much more ominous. They are at the two poles of the "moral values" contingent in Iowa. They are the sanctimonious on one end and the hypocrites on the other...to personalize the accounts there is the southern Baptist Haley Barbour, whose campaign theme could easily be "Gimme That Old Time Religion," and Newt Gingrich, whose song should rightly be "Me and Mrs. Jones." Barbour, as pure white and spongy as biscuit dough and hominy grits believes that the next president should be engaged in the debate about abortion toward the end of banning it, among other moralistic mandates reflective of his simplistic self-righteousness, and given Barbour's character, that is to be expected from him. But Gingrich seems to want to board the same moralists' bandwagon, and that is something of a surprise. He is a marital infidel who divorced one wife to marry his mistress, and then divorced that mistress while she was fighting breast cancer to marry another mistress, his third wife. He is a former Congressman who lost his power and his reputation in consequence of his venality, yet he unabashedly appeared, with Barbour, at the Conservative Principles Conference, and they as well as others in attendance are claiming the right to reform America in their image, or in Newt's case in the form of the image that he wants us to see now since his conversion to righteousness from the profligacy that he once seemed to believe in.

Barbour addressed the group to make his point that the next presidential election should be about claiming America's future for those who follow Christian fundamentals and Evangelical principles; while I find such sanctimony repugnant, it at least seems sincere. Barbour rose to political prominence through connections forged by his father, but his political conceit in claiming that his rise to power and his future as a national political figure are a function of popular sympathy with his beliefs seems a narcissistic delusion, but it may at least be a reflection of his mandate in Mississippi where he is governor now. On the other hand, Gingrich's newfound virtue is such a sham that it is hard to believe that he could possibly presume to have the moral fiber to lead a nation in the right direction, whatever that direction might be. He is a philanderer, an ambitious demagogue, a prevaricator and a greedy opportunist who cashed in his political success in the early nineties for a few pieces of silver. And now, he stands before a group of perhaps misguided, but at least sincere would-be arbiters of national moral standards, telling them that the next presidential election is a battle for the American soul. He said to them, "I'm here to tell you that if you don't start with values, if you don't start by saying who we are as Americans, the rest of it doesn't matter." That statement is the sequel to his fulminations on Christian Television that his conversion to Catholicism has changed him...that he engaged in some inappropriate conduct the last time he stood on the national political stage, not because of his lack of moral fiber, but because he was too committed to his country and his office. These two, the sanctimonious fundamentalist and the hypocritical would-be sybarite, are the stars of the Iowa caucus process that will coronate the Republican front runner next spring.

There are others of prominence in the field. Mitt Romney created an alternative to universal health care in Massachusetts, though he is doing his best to separate himself from that boon to the uninsured in the state, and there are still others like Huckaby, Daniels and Pawlenty who will throw their hats in the ring. And of course the rabid Tea Party-ers will have a candidate or two, like their poster girl, Michelle Bachman, who in my opinion is the candidate of the mentally unbalanced, skin head constituency, but while they all lie somewhere in the middle of the sanctimony-hypocrisy spectrum, they are all cut from essentially the same cloth. The Republican nominee will be a shill for business and the wealthy plutocracy, or even a member of it if it is Romney, and he will be the voice of those in America who believe that they have the right to dictate morality to the rest of us and that that is democracy rather than tyranny, and it will not be better or worse for the rest of us whether their belief is afflatus or cynicism. And if that candidate wins presidency, we are looking at a long dark age of Puritanical and fanatical governmental control of all our lives that will masquerade all the while as majority rule and thus democracy. But the reality is that democracy protects the right of the minority to be in the minority, not the right of the majority to dictate to it. So we can only hope that our president, who will certainly be the Democratic nominee, is up to the task of pointing that out. He has about a year to develop the gumption to do so.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

On Tuesday, David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times about the role being played by the United States in Libya. The crux of his thoughts on the subject is that what he refers to as "multilateralism" is an impediment to progress in situations such as this current international intervention. He complains about the inefficiencies, vagaries and internal controversy that are inherent in collective efforts, especially between and among nations, and he appears to be advocating, though denying that he is doing so, a unilateral effort in Libya, albeit one masquerading as an international effort. He decries the absence of nationalism as a motivation in the enterprise, apparently failing to see that it may be a virtue under that name, but it is a vice and an evil when it goes by the name chauvinism. But rather than accepting my characterization of his thoughts, I hope you will read them yourselves, so I will confine myself to this one further point about Mr. Brooks' ideas. We are entering a new era in American foreign policy, and thus in world order, and it will take some time before it all begins to run smoothly. But what is happening now is the first sign of a mature American understanding of our place in a diverse world, and we should look at the events in Libya as a new beginning, anticipating errors but accepting that they are made in the good cause of a world system progressing toward peace and universal freedom. Let me explain my reasoning.

I think of human culture as having evolved in three waves. The first wave occurred in Africa and in The East, which comprises what we today call the Middle East and the Far East. We began in Africa and gradually migrated-- the first wave from which the earliest layers of human culture came. Society then moved north and west into Europe and northern Asia where the first principles of civilization were refined, though in some respects they were also corrupted to include the trappings of wealth, societal station and politics, for better or for worse. The human colonization of Europe and north Asia was thus the second wave. Finally, when there was nowhere else left to go in the known world, the second wave of humans sailed into the Atlantic and off the edge of the earth in the third wave, which was the inadvertent discovery and the subsequent colonization of America, both north and south. We are the third wave, derivative of the first two in every respect including our politics, but with the addition of a new kind of brash conceit borne of an also new kind of wealth: vast natural resources and seemingly endless potential. So, for the past five hundred years or so, we have been developing politically, but as yet we have been unable to match the political sophistication that Europeans and Asians have employed for a millennium or two. Thus, it is no wonder that we third wave humans have made the same kinds of mistakes that the second wave made-- wars of conquest and pride, socio-economic systems that foster inequity and end in tumult, slavery, corruption borne of greed and a kind of bumptious and adolescent brashness that has lead us to that kind of calamity, but has also allowed us to manifest our destiny not just in the American west, but on the moon and beyond as well. For all that is good or bad about us in the third wave, our mistakes have been part of our necessary course as have been our adventures as the only way to maturity is through time. But at last, we here in the United States seem to have taken the first steps into that maturity, at least in our international politics.

Fifty years ago, even ten years ago, the Libyan rebellion would have led to an American cadre of politicians decrying the brutality of the Qaddafi regime followed by American soldiers being committed to another face to face war with a tyrant. In fact, ten years ago we did just that. A brash president yielded to his psychological bent and led us into two wars that continue to this day, having cost our nation blood and lucre almost beyond calculation. There were also Korea, Vietnam, Granada and the first Iraq war on the one hand and Rwanda and Darfur on the other as a historical backdrop, and through them all our evolution to political adulthood seemed a far off dream. But now, after all of the travail of two and a half centuries of statehood, we seem to be arriving. The lessons of the past, and especially those of the past two decades seem to have been learned and assimilated into our foreign policy, at least by some of us, with the result that we act now only with consensus, and I mean real consensus, not just a coalition of international toadies and second tier powers. Our president has stumbled upon a timeless truth: an empire, even a third wave empire, has its limits, and that is as it should be. Outside of our borders, we cannot act alone...peremptorily...and expect to succeed, or even to prevail in the long run. In Libya, we act as one of many nations with the consensus of the bulk of humanity...with the first and second waves rather than against them.

This step in our political evolution is the sine qua non for the advance of our world into an era of universal peace, and it has been precipitated by the masses, the majority that people like Rand Paul scorn as incapable of competently determining their own fate. We are approaching an era in which internationalism and universal suffrage and prosperity are going to be possible, all because the bellicose, would-be hero of the world has finally recognized its place as the leader of an assemblage for good rather than as a lone crusader and arbiter of right and wrong. There is an old Chinese imprecation that goes, may you live in interesting times. It is intended to be a curse...a pox upon he to whom it is addressed. But the interesting times ahead may be the exception that proves the rule. There are interesting times that are worth living in, and perhaps we are embarking upon them. At least in this one respect, the future looks brighter than it has in a long time. I, for one, hope that these interesting times are the birth of a new era for our country, one in which we will truly become great by not trying so hard to be great.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

As I noted last Wednesday, I am preoccupied with Social Security and what the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) is trying to do to it. The Social Security Trust Fund contains something on the order of $2.6 trillion--that's trillion with a "t"--but the federal government has borrowed all of it, and the Republicans in congress complain incessantly because now, they have to pay it back as we all might have expected since they played a major role in spending it. The long and short of it is that Social Security is the only federal government program that funds itself and has money on hand for decades of its cost. It is not in any way part of our debt or deficit problem, but the program lent the federal government its money and is now therefore a target because the federal government doesn't want to pay its debt. If we were dealing with a bank, someone would be going to jail for such a scheme, but since we are dealing with Republicans, they seem to have some kind of immunity. Still, we cannot let them get away with this without a fight. So, while I have had to cut back on the frequency with which I write to you by limiting myself to Monday and Friday, I have written to you several times about Social Security, and I feel that comments made about the Republicans and their plans for the program bear repeating. thus, for the foreseeable future, I will reprise those letters on Wednesdays with the thought that someone who missed them might be interested in Social Security too, and in what it means to us as a nation as well. Here is the first of those reprises: my letter of January 5, 2011.

Dear America,

In January, when the Senate first convened for the new, 112^th congress, the body had the option of changing its rules on the first day of the session. As you certainly recall, the Republican minority had for the previous two years essentially controlled the Senate agenda by threatening filibusters...not filibustering, but threatening to. In the old days, a filibuster meant that members had to actually get up in front of the body and speak, thus forestalling a vote on a given bill for as long as they or their colleagues would join them in the filibuster, each in turn controlling the floor for as long as he or she could. But now, all they do is vote to filibuster and the other side concedes the point: no phone book reading necessary. On the eve of that first day, I sent a fax to each of Connecticut's Senators expressing my preference that the filibuster be effectively eliminated because our representatives and senators were sent to Washington to cast their votes, not to avoid doing so, but the Senate decided to only reach a "gentlemen's agreement" on limiting the use of the filibuster, which amounted to nothing at all, and in response to my fax, the now retiring Joseph Lieberman wrote me back. His letter was dated February 2, but I received it more than a month later. It said that he, that is my senator, did not believe that the filibuster should be eliminated, and he cited as his reasons The Constitution's system of checks and balances, which has nothing to do with the filibuster. He then went on to pridefully distinguish the Senate from the Congress and to extol the filibuster as a "tool to promote bipartisan cooperation..." which certainly looked like obstructionism over the two preceding years. He felt that "only by agreeing to legislatively compromise can we address the many challenges facing our nation today," once again code for allowing obstructionism to thwart the will of the majority.

It is the good fortune of Connecticut that old Joe has decided to retire, though it is about twenty years too late if you ask me. When the Republicans were in the process of impeaching Bill Clinton for his personal peccancy because they couldn't seem to beat the Democrats at the polls, Lieberman gave them the cover of bipartisanship by joining them in their effort, then only to oppose conviction when his constituents wrote to him in droves complaining about his political perfidy and apostasy. He joined the conservatives in the Senate time after time to thwart his own party (though he won his last electoral campaign after being defeated in the Democratic Party primary and then running as an independent), which frankly lacked the integrity to lock him out of their caucus and do their best without him. It couldn't have been much worse than the weakness they demonstrated with him walking among them. But this letter he sent me suggests that he thinks we are all fools, either that or that he is just such an excellent liar that none of us can see him for who he is. The casuistry he used to justify his decision not to abrogate the rules on the filibuster and thus make every senator vote his conscience and then live with his constituents' reaction, is insulting to the intelligence, and it suggests that he was listening to Rand Paul when he addressed the CPAC convention.

Paul made some reference to the design of the founding fathers to have a representative republic rather than a democracy because they didn't really believe in what he called "majoritarianism" [sic]. Paul apparently read some of The Federalist, a set of 85 essays published in colonial newspapers to facilitate the ratification of The Constitution by a reluctant group of state leaders who preferred a loose confederation to a strong central government, though in his choice of when and how to reference what he thought he had learned from the few essays that say what he said they did, he demonstrated that he is not capable of understanding either the papers or their significance then and now. In the texts of a few of the essays there were some oblique references to the Senate as a damping influence on the role of the popular will in governance, characterizing that effect as a virtue of a bicameral legislature in which one body gave two members to each state regardless of population with the intention of putting greyer heads in the legislature, with the per capita representatives of the rabble to be elected to the other body, a House of Representatives. The papers were written by John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, not by the founding fathers as a group, and what they said was calculated for political purposes rather than as political dogma, and they worked, which is why we have a Constitution today. But ever since, the actions of the congress have manifested a clear commitment by our leaders to representative democracy, not an oligarchy masquerading as a republic: the amendment of The Constitution to abrogate the three fifths compromise followed by the abolition of slavery, giving women and African-Americans the vote and the repeal of prohibition not to mention countless laws passed in deference to the will of the people. So, the fact that for Rand Paul's purposes, and apparently for Joe Lieberman's purposes as well, being a senator is a license to override the will of the people whenever he feels like rather than acceding to it whenever The Constitution permits is disturbing. Their belief, which in my estimation is diametrically opposed to the fundamental concepts that are the predicates of what I have always believed to be our free and democratic government, are more suited to leaders like Vladimir Putin and the old Soviet Polit Bureau than to members of our Senate and the body at large. It makes me wonder how many more autocrats are impersonating democrats in our congress, and I shudder when I contemplate the answer.

The fact is that what we proselytize for around the world, what we ask our young people to fight and die for, what we invoke as our moral authority throughout the world is the very liberty that Paul and Lieberman disparage as "majoriatarianism." We are, as the saying goes, a nation of laws, not men, and Joe Lieberman and Rand Paul are only men. They do not have the right to substitute their will for ours, nor do they have the virtue to assume that they know better than we what should occur in our democracy. We voted them and others into office so they would do what we want them to do, not so that they could indulge in cloakroom exchanges of quid pro quos to advance their own purposes. The filibuster is an offense against us, the people of the United States, and for that matter, so are Rand Paul and Joe Lieberman.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

I heard an interview on NPR with Paul S. Otellini. In case you don't know-- and why should you-- Otelinni is the president and CEO of Intel and he is on the board of directors of Google: a real multi-tasker who can cash big checks from two huge corporations at the same time. While it's not directly relevant to unemployment, between the two executive roles he made about $15 million dollars in 2009, presumably even more last year. His compensation is however directly relevant to the question of why NPR would seek to interview him. Making computer chips doesn't qualify him to pontificate on the economy any more than making potato chips would. And besides, every year executives are making more and more money compared to their workers, so their insights into life on earth become less and less incisive as the air they breathe becomes more rarified, and their incentive to tell themselves the truth disappears farther into the forest that they can't see for the trees. That's what wealth does to people: it puts them on an existential stratum that removes them from the reality that is the actual economy, thus enabling them to think in theoretical terms about how to augment their businesses, ostensibly so as to improve the economy, instead of thinking about the things that translate into unemployment and foreclosure for millions of others. They can accept the notion that wealth trickles down because it has already trickled on them, and like all human beings, they think about the moral implications of what they do in the terms most favorable to themselves.

In the interview, Otellini was essentially being consulted on what we should be doing as a nation to advance our economic future, as if he has some perspective that is something other than self-serving, and his answers were surprising, albeit in a very predictable way. He complained that half of those who attend American technical institutions of higher learning are on visas from other countries and are not permitted to stay here to work when they graduate. He thinks that we should let them stay because business is having trouble finding qualified people to fill the higher level technical positions that must be filled for progress to be served, and because we need them to start the companies that will create the jobs we need. And then, he thinks that we should give every one of them who starts a new business a five year tax holiday so as to encourage them to expand our economy. But generally, he complained about the same things that the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) always complains about: not enough business financing available despite the fact that American business is sitting on the largest pile of cash in the history of American business; too much regulation of manufacturing and industry, even though the failure to regulate finance has led to the economic catastrophe that has afflicted us and failure to regulate manufacturing in particular led to rivers that took thirty years to clean and air that couldn't be breathed without courting respiratory disease, and despite the fact that failure to oversee deep water oil drilling caused the pollution of an entire sea just a few months ago; and not enough technical talent despite the fact that there are millions of experienced technocrats whose persistent unemployment and inability to convince the Otellini's of the world to hire them rather than the cheap workers in India, Mexico and China swells the rolls of the unemployed that the Rcc harps on as a sign that we need more tax cuts, which is what everything is a sign of to them. He relied in toto on the same old top down prosperity model that got us here in the first place, for the solutions that he thinks will get us out of this mess, thus reifying the old notion that those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. And in general, since these theoretical opinions are just that, there is no way to actually rebut them. One can only say that he disagrees...but maybe not for long.

As the Rcc continually reminded us all for nearly two years, the unemployment rate never went below nine percent from May 2009, approximately the time when the President's stimulus package was passed, until December 2010 when it was 9.4%. You may recall that December was the month of the lame duck session in congress, and that is when the Bush tax cuts were extended, thus extending the status for another two years as well, leading to at least my own apprehension that the economy would also continue as it was. Why would one feel otherwise when as to the economy, despite fulminations on both sides about the extensive changes that had been wrought during the Democratic lame duck congress, essentially nothing changed in the immediate sense...except one thing. During that session, congress also passed a 2% "payroll tax" holiday. In other words, every worker in America who earns $106,000 per year or less got what amounts to a two percent raise, and guess what. In January, the first month of the tax holiday, unemployment dropped four tenths of one percent to 9%. In February, it dropped another one tenth of a percent to 8.9% despite record high food, gas and oil prices. The figures for March aren't in yet obviously, but if they show another drop, one of my favorite basic premises will have been demonstrated: if you want to stimulate the economy, you have to put money in the hands of people who will spend it, not in the hands of people who already have plenty.

Now I must concede that I was very critical of that payroll tax holiday, among other reasons because the Rcc's second favorite complaint is the abject lie that Social Security, among other entitlements, is responsible for the national debt and deficit even though it is the only program the government runs that has money in the bank...$2.6 trillion in fact. But in twenty five to thirty years, depending on whose figures you accept, that money will be used up unless we start replenishing it with higher taxes or lower benefits, so depriving the fund of some of its revenue-- and that's what the payroll tax is: the contribution each of us working people makes to the Social Security Trust Fund so that we won't have to eat dog food when we retire-- seems to me to be a bad idea, and it's fodder for the Rcc's rhetoric on the subject in the bargain. But there are these two benefits that come from the tax holiday. First, with more persistent consumer spending-- presumably two percent more-- the economy should grow and unemployment should continue to fall. And second, there will at last be evidence that the "trickle down" model of economic paternalism that is supply side economics is totally misguided. So, I am looking forward to the publication of the unemployment statistics for March, April and May with bated breath. Of course with the earthquake in Japan and the sudden spike in energy and food prices, all of which exert downward pressure on the economy, anything can happen, but I am still hopeful. Of all the tax cuts that have been given over the past two years-- and it must be remembered that 40% of the stimulus package was even in the form of tax cuts, though primarily to business-- for the first time since the financial industry crisis, a tax cut has directly increased the take home pay of average American workers. I am willing to bet that it will finally prove the Rcc wrong on taxes...not about the fact that they should be reduced, but about whose should be reduced. The irony is that there will be trickling involved as well, but it will be trickling up, not down.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

On Tuesday night I had the disquieting experience of seeing the testimony of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the President's debt commission, before the Senate Budget Committee. It was disquieting because-- and I hate to admit this-- the sanest voices in the room were those of the Democratic chairman of the committee, and those of two conservative eponymous authors of the report, Bowles and Simpson themselves. Outside of them, there were none but partisans in the room. Of course, I favored my partisans over the other partisans, but as the event unfolded, it was apparent that nothing but someone in between would do to solve our fiscal problems. Even Senator Sanders, the independent from Vermont who, even at his advanced age, makes Abby Hoffman look like a moderate in terms of his temperament, looked irrational when up against Bowles and Simpson. The long and short of it is that all three, the chairman, Bowles and Simpson, made it clear that they had considerable aversion to some parts of the report of the commission's co-chairmen, but that encoding it as a bill to be passed into law was the last best hope of recovery from what now appears to be a fiscal crisis that threatens our very existence. Let me be more specific about what I mean.

As might have been anticipated, or better put, as I should have anticipated, the Republicans on the committee focused on absolute numbers from which they drew casuistic conclusions, and upon inculpating entitlements for the debt, which absolutely infuriated me, especially when they pointed to Social Security, the only significant federal program that supports itself. In fact, at one point Bowles was asked about the relationship between Social Security and the debt, and he responded that, while government bonds have been substituted for the assets of the Social Security Trust Fund, they will have to be paid off in order to pay benefits once we get past 2037, and thus they contribute to the debt because the government will have to borrow the money from another creditor to pay off the original creditor, the Trust Fund-- us. I virtually flew out of my chair. By implication, it was like saying that when a bank officer embezzles the depositors' funds, it is the depositors' fault as they left their money in the bank. But to his credit, when he was confronted with another senator trying to impugn Social Security, he stated without wavering that the co-chairs' report dealt with Social Security not to address the national debt, but to ensure solvency for the trust fund for a longer period than is currently the case, so at least he undid much of the damage he had earlier done. And though he and Simpson flew their conservative flag throughout the hearing, they made more sense in the aggregate than did the senators on either side of the aisle. While I would like to see the burden of paying off the debt and eliminating the deficit more evenly split between revenue enhancement (substitute tax increases here) and expenditure reductions (substitute war and tax breaks for big business here), or better yet even more onerously lain upon the doorstep of the plutocrats, it certainly appears that the Bowles-Simpson plan is the best we can hope for, and in that light, it ought to become law, albeit perhaps to be refined later.

Bernie Sanders is a crusty old progressive. He is accusatory in his questioning and blunt when he cites the startling facts regarding wealth in America. Some of what he said astounded me: that four hundred families made as much money as the bottom fifty percent of Americans, for example. Without hesitation he uttered the obscenities of avarice that discredit us and our system, and more importantly he did so without fear of contradiction. He compared our situation with that which prevailed before the depression and after it, and he made the point that the rich in America have way too much money, and more importantly, that they got it at the expense of the rest of us. But Bernie's rant, accurate as it was factually, will serve no purpose in the midst of this crisis. Socio-economic justice is no longer the American strong suit, if it ever was, but even so most of us have much to be thankful for, and thus much to preserve, and indictment of the idle rich is an endeavor that should, and now has to wait. We in the middle class and below have to accept that half a loaf is better than the nothing that the Republicans in Congress are trying to foist on us as if throwing the baby out with the bath water is our only option.

I might be tempted to vote for Sanders if he ran for president, even though he strikes me as something of a loose canon, because he is my kind of loose canon. But we are not choosing a captain for our ship of state right now; we are bailing in order to keep the ship from sinking. David Brooks was at least partly right when he extolled the Bowles-Simpson plan as a starting point for the discussion. It has been that, but the discussion has become irrationally partisan, so it appears that it may be the best end point for the discourse as well, not that I or virtually anyone else would prefer it that way. But if we are to take a viable course, the most prudent one at this time-- the one that will do the least harm-- is the one that everyone hates in one way or another. Bowles and Simpson have propounded a deal with the devil in the figurative, capitalistic sense. But it is the devil we know, and it is very likely better than any of the devils we don't.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

This week in politics, Michelle Bachman rearranged New England's geography-- either that or history-- by placing the shot heard "'round the world" in New Hampshire rather than where it actually occurred: in Massachusetts. She also re-stoked the debate over incandescent light bulbs, which are about to disappear for the most part due to environmental considerations, by claiming that it was not just a question of environmental prudence but rather one of infringement on the personal freedom of all Americans. Of course, she seems to have no such concerns when it comes to the right of every American to marry the person of his or her choice or to have equal access to college education. And she is not concerned about the disparate weight that our health care system gives to the right of medical practitioners to make money versus the right of every American in our affluent society not to die just because he doesn't have the money for the medical care that will cure him of his fatal disease. Those things are secondary when it comes to preserving our rights, but light bulbs...they're at the heart of the American way, especially in New Hampshire where the first primary will be held next year, though the opening volley of the Revolution was fired somewhere else.

And of course there was also Newt Gingrich, another Republican-president-wannabe. He appeared on Christian television to be interviewed about his candidacy, which he also has not announced yet though it is abundantly clear that he is one. He was asked to "talk about faith," and he did. It seems that his two divorces precipitated by his inability to keep his marriage vows of fidelity are an issue that he anticipates will be raised when he claims to be possessed of the integrity to be President of the United States, and he thus wants friendly fundamentalists to ask him about it in the hope that hostile ones won't. He made it clear that his marital infidelity was a function of how busy he was in doing his patriotic duty to the nation about which he was so passionate rather than his dissolute nature. I assume that he will eventually make the same defense of his book deals with fringe benefits like big advances and well paid speaking engagements to conservative audiences when he was hounded out of office for his lack of ethics. And apparently, he thinks that no one will think him hypocritical for pursuing Bill Clinton for his unseemly conduct while Gingrich himself engaged in the same thing, and as the details become more widely known, considerably worse given the circumstances as well as what Gingrich's sanctimony both permitted him to gain and caused Clinton and the nation to lose.

There is also Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who has had a major hand in bringing Indiana back to solvency from a condition that was just as bad as that of other states when he took office three years ago. He is being importuned to run for the Republicans, presumably because they look at the other candidates and recognize in them prime factors in the reelection of President Obama. Daniels himself said that there must be pretty slim pick'ens if they are coming to him. He is being touted by the likes of David Brooks as a stellar prospect, and he is a benign enough sort of man. He seems to have taken conservative budgetary steps in his state that have not resulted in the kind of incendiary debate and public outcry that Governor Walker of Minnesota has precipitated, thus making himself look centrist by comparison even though when he discusses the issues, he is just as far to the right as most of the rest of the current class of Republican presidential hopefuls. And then there is Mitt Romney, who may be the most rational and humane of the lot, but who is making exactly the wrong strategic decisions if he wants to be the next Republican president.

It is becoming more and more commonly known that Romney was the governor who signed into law the Massachusetts law on health insurance reform that was the model for the current federal law, down to and including the penalties for failing to provide your own insurance if you don't get any. I've said this before, but just to reiterate and give what I am about to say context, that kind of health insurance reform is the conservative version of the right thing in my opinion, which you surely recognize as faint praise. In my opinion, some form of single payer system is the only way to ensure that no one dies just because of how much money he has, and Romney and the Massachusetts conservative establishment went another way, but it is better than nothing, both in Massachusetts and in the nation. And as I have also pointed out, as recently as 2007, more than sixty percent of the American people were in favor of some form of universal health care. So, when Romney stood for it in Massachusetts, he was closer to the American people's opinion on the subject than the conservative Republican establishment is today. But he identifies with the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) and thinks he needs them, so now he is trying to distance himself from his decision to stand for what is in retrospect the best that could have been hoped for in the area of health care policy in his state at the time. I think that is a big mistake.

Like many liberals, I have a tendency to characterize both Republicans and conservatives as a monolithic movement. But as time passes, it becomes apparent that such is not the case. The reactionary fringe represented by the Tea Party Movement does not necessarily coincide with the totality of the conservative movement. There are compassionate conservatives, and hence, there are conservatives who agree that allocation of health care should not be based on wealth. Some conservatives are Christians, and I have to believe that their faith can be appealed to not just on the issue of who should be able to marry, but on the basis of who should be cured as well. The biblical admonition that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven is as much a part of their creed as is self-reliance or conventional doctrine on marriage. They are as concerned about the fidelity and integrity of their candidates as they are about the commitment of those candidates to reduction of the debt and the deficit. But what they need is a strong leader to remind them of it. So, I say this to the Republicans who might be reading this. If you want to see a Republican president, remember where you came from...and remind Mitt Romney where he came from too.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

On Tuesday night I had the disquieting experience of seeing the testimony of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the President's debt commission, before the Senate Budget Committee. It was disquieting because-- and I hate to admit this-- the sanest voices in the room were those of the Democratic chairman of the committee, and those of two conservative eponymous authors of the report, Bowles and Simpson themselves. Outside of them, there were none but partisans in the room. Of course, I favored my partisans over the other partisans, but as the event unfolded, it was apparent that nothing but someone in between would do to solve our fiscal problems. Even Senator Sanders, the independent from Vermont who, even at his advanced age, makes Abby Hoffman look like a moderate in terms of his temperament, looked irrational when up against Bowles and Simpson. The long and short of it is that all three, the chairman, Bowles and Simpson, made it clear that they had considerable aversion to some parts of the report of the commission's co-chairmen, but that encoding it as a bill to be passed into law was the last best hope of recovery from what now appears to be a fiscal crisis that threatens our very existence. Let me be more specific about what I mean.

As might have been anticipated, or better put, as I should have anticipated, the Republicans on the committee focused on absolute numbers from which they drew casuistic conclusions, and upon inculpating entitlements for the debt, which absolutely infuriated me, especially when they pointed to Social Security, the only significant federal program that supports itself. In fact, at one point Bowles was asked about the relationship between Social Security and the debt, and he responded that, while government bonds have been substituted for the assets of the Social Security Trust Fund, they will have to be paid off in order to pay benefits once we get past 2037, and thus they contribute to the debt because the government will have to borrow the money from another creditor to pay off the original creditor, the Trust Fund-- us. I virtually flew out of my chair. By implication, it was like saying that when a bank officer embezzles the depositors' funds, it is the depositors' fault as they left their money in the bank. But to his credit, when he was confronted with another senator trying to impugn Social Security, he stated without wavering that the co-chairs' report dealt with Social Security not to address the national debt, but to ensure solvency for the trust fund for a longer period than is currently the case, so at least he undid much of the damage he had earlier done. And though he and Simpson flew their conservative flag throughout the hearing, they made more sense in the aggregate than did the senators on either side of the aisle. While I would like to see the burden of paying off the debt and eliminating the deficit more evenly split between revenue enhancement (substitute tax increases here) and expenditure reductions (substitute war and tax breaks for big business here), or better yet even more onerously lain upon the doorstep of the plutocrats, it certainly appears that the Bowles-Simpson plan is the best we can hope for, and in that light, it ought to become law, albeit perhaps to be refined later.

Bernie Sanders is a crusty old progressive. He is accusatory in his questioning and blunt when he cites the startling facts regarding wealth in America. Some of what he said astounded me: that four hundred families made as much money as the bottom fifty percent of Americans, for example. Without hesitation he uttered the obscenities of avarice that discredit us and our system, and more importantly he did so without fear of contradiction. He compared our situation with that which prevailed before the depression and after it, and he made the point that the rich in America have way too much money, and more importantly, that they got it at the expense of the rest of us. But Bernie's rant, accurate as it was factually, will serve no purpose in the midst of this crisis. Socio-economic justice is no longer the American strong suit, if it ever was, but even so most of us have much to be thankful for, and thus much to preserve, and indictment of the idle rich is an endeavor that should, and now has to wait. We in the middle class and below have to accept that half a loaf is better than the nothing that the Republicans in Congress are trying to foist on us as if throwing the baby out with the bath water is our only option.

I might be tempted to vote for Sanders if he ran for president, even though he strikes me as something of a loose canon, because he is my kind of loose canon. But we are not choosing a captain for our ship of state right now; we are bailing in order to keep the ship from sinking. David Brooks was at least partly right when he extolled the Bowles-Simpson plan as a starting point for the discussion. It has been that, but the discussion has become irrationally partisan, so it appears that it may be the best end point for the discourse as well, not that I or virtually anyone else would prefer it that way. But if we are to take a viable course, the most prudent one at this time-- the one that will do the least harm-- is the one that everyone hates in one way or another. Bowles and Simpson have propounded a deal with the devil in the figurative, capitalistic sense. But it is the devil we know, and it is very likely better than any of the devils we don't.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

The Sunday morning talk shows out of Washington provided their share of comic relief with an appearance by Michelle Bachman and displays of traditional political evasion of issues with the appearances of Bill Daley of the White House and Senator John McCain of Arizona, each of whom appeared accoutered with his own policy suggestions as well as his own facts. And while the tumult in North Africa and the middle east was touched upon, the news there remains quite the same: a runaway train is running through the region. In short, there is nothing new under the sun, or in Washington either. But over the course of the past few weeks, as the various political factions who engage in the national debate on all subjects plied their wares the central issue on the domestic scene became not by its domination of the debate, but by its absence from it. Oh, it has been mentioned, but it has not been talked about...not now and not when it was first raised in earnest in the campaigns for the November 2010 elections. The issue has been framed in such ways as would seem to favor one point of view on any of several other topics: jobs, the deficit, states' rights, democracy as a principle of federal governance, and of course the Democratic health insurance reform specifically. But through all of that, there has been no discussion of the underlying topic to date: the cost of health care.

The Republican conservative complex (Rcc) always couches the issue in the course of denunciation of the health insurance reform law: they call it Obamacare, they characterize it as anti-democratic, they insist it will kill job growth, and they claim it will cause more national debt and will raise the federal budget deficit even though the Congressional Budget Office debunked that partisan notion months ago with a genuine accounting that showed that the law will actually do the opposite and reduce the deficit over ten years. On the other side, the Democratic progressive factions point to the remediation of various social problems by government programs that the Rcc wants to cut and they claim that the budget cuts the Republicans now advocate will cost jobs. They promote futurism and tout the growth in the job market by pointing to the statistics over the past ten months. But no one talks about the real issue: the geometric increase in not the cost of insurance, but the cost of health care itself. No one talks about it anymore, and it has been along times since anyone has. That is because there is really only one way to tackle the problem: a single payer system. And the reason is that there is no unified political will to address the problem on either side of the aisle. But ironically, the debate started and the American people made up their minds during the Bush administration.

In 2007, the polls showed that more than sixty percent of the American people favored universal health care. The Democrats were in control of both houses of congress, and if they had passed a bill then, President Bush would probably have had no choice but to sign it in light of the political current of the moment. But the congress couldn't do it. Why? Because of the Rcc, which actually includes a significant Democrat contingent. No single payer system could become law at that time all the way up through the 2010 mid-term elections because the "Blue Dog" Democrats in Congress, and conservative Democrats in the Senate were opposed. The result was a half measure: a plan to make sure that everyone bought health insurance, either subsidized or not, which cost the progressive movement its political hegemony and actually prevented the emergence of the requisite pressure from the American public to nationalize health care just as virtually all of the industrialized nations of the world have already done. In other words, a rabidly conservative faction within the dominant political party thwarted progress toward a noble goal, and they did so without an ameliorative alternative to propose. The rest is history; the Democrats lost not just the support of the electorate but the majority that favored what they wanted in the first place. We would have universal health care now if it weren't for about sixty Democrats in Congress and a hand full in the Senate: the dogs that bit the hands that fed them. Well, more than half of them were retired from office by the constituency that they thought was on their side when they did what they did, and they were replaced by more rabid conservatives, this time the Republican Tea Party Movement. Thank God.

John Boehner spends most of his time scrambling to placate them now, and my guess is that he is rapidly recognizing the fact that it would be easier impeach them all than it will be to herd them in the right direction. Michelle Bachman is the high priestess of the Tea Party contingent, and she is as intractable as any other delusional fanatic might be. Ideologues like her seldom have anything real to say, and she is no exception. In her Meet the Press appearance, she refused to answer any direct question, instead raising and incessantly reiterating the same crazy point about billions being hidden in the health insurance reform bill while expressing reservations about military intervention in Libya as she doesn't want us to enter upon another war in the Middle East, but criticizing President Obama for not being more aggressive, as if there is actually something he can do other than what he is doing without starting a new war. Bachman and her crew are the Republicans' Blue Dogs. Maybe instead of the Tea Party we should call them the "Red Cat Republicans" because while the Democrats couldn't herd the Blue Dogs, no one can herd cats no matter what color they are, and these Red Cats will be the undoing of the Republican conservative Congress just as the Blue Dogs were for the Democrats. But our recognizing the continuing, though mirror image internecine conflict in Washington doesn't help us get where we want to go, so what will.

I keep coming back to a point I made some months ago. It is up to us to ask pointed questions and not accept evasive answers. The question is, how do we control health care costs. The Rcc always comes back to them as the cause of our ills, driving up workers' wages and fringe benefit costs and thus corporate costs, depleting the buying power of workers, who are the dominant component of the American consumer base, causing business to lay off workers to reduce costs and send jobs overseas because it is cheaper to fill them there. But while they decry the unions' success in getting medical insurance for more and more workers saying that fringe benefits are what makes American manufacturing uncompetitive, they never address the issue of how to bring medical care costs under control, nor for that matter do they say what the working man is supposed to do if he gets really sick, or God forbid if his child does. That is because there is only one way in which to address both sides of the issue: nationalization of health care in one way or the other. Efforts to regulate medical fees have always failed. Regulation of medical enterprises like CT scanners and office condominiums owned by consortiums of doctors have also failed to change anything. And efforts to reduce approved fees for Medicare providers always get shunted aside and overridden as doctors just threaten not to take Medicare patients, thus forcing congress to back off. All that is left is to make Medicare universally applicable or to nationalize medicine in general. Of course, the fact that I can't think of anything else doesn't mean that there isn't anything else to consider. So, in anticipation of the next election, lets initiate the discussion. Let's ask the Rcc what they propose to do about the real problem: the cost of medical care. And when they speak, let's make sure we point it out to them when they try to answer the question they want to answer rather than the one we actually asked.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

It is quite dismaying how completely the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has dominated the political conversation in America over the past two years. We have gone from the Democratic rout of the Rcc in the 2008 election, the second rout in a row, to a political climate that not only permitted the turnabout of the 2010 election, but has led to a one sided debate on the issues surrounding fiscal prudence. I have in the past been a fan of David Brooks, the erstwhile moderate to conservative NPR/PBS commentator and columnist for the New York Times, and while I find him less the voice of reason today than he was a year ago, I continue to read his columns and listen to him on radio and television. He was wrong, I thought, when he praised the report of the co-chairmen of the President's debt reduction commission as the report seemed to focus more on reducing benefits that are intended to create economic stasis in our society-- keeping those with the less from falling farther behind those with more-- and less on the ever more inequitable tax system that not only perpetuates the gap between the rich and the poor, but increases it. But Brooks made an argument for the report that I can now subscribe to as I look at it in retrospect: it will at least inspire a conversation that will lead to addressing our deplorable imbalance of revenue and expenditure, he said. But it hasn't done so. It has been left behind in favor of a discussion of reduced expenditure only, and even Brooks doesn't seem to have noticed.

In his column of this past Tuesday, Brooks talked about the political process of reconciling our unsustainable excess of expenditure over revenue, voicing three concerns about the way in which the Rcc is approaching resolution of the problem, one of which is that everyone should suffer some pain in the reconciliation process. But as he wrote on, he never once mentioned the enormous tax advantages that industries like big oil, and participants in our "capitalist" economic system like hedge fund operators, have accrued over the past thirty years. He never discussed the oil depletion allowance and how it can be justified when it is a tax benefit on top of that which the industry enjoys by being able to deduct the cost of exploring for more oil. And he failed to mention that because hedge fund managers make their money out of investing, and what I would consider unsavory investing at that, they pay taxes at a reduced rate that is just barely above what the working poor pay because what hedge fund managers make is considered capital gain and capital gain taxes are designed to encourage investment, even their kind. But Brooks-- a conservative remember-- went on to say that another of his concerns is the new inclination to target the young in favor of the old when cutting expenditures. He bemoaned the cuts in education expenditure on both the state and federal levels, but he then went on to urge a better balance between the needs of the young, like Head Start, and the prolongation of the last months of the lives of the elderly. If you recall, the health care debate included advocacy for final illness counseling for the elderly and the Rcc quickly followed Sarah Palin's absurd lead in transmogrifying the proposal into "death panels." (I wonder what Palin would have to say about Brooks.) So Mr. Brooks seems to have become an apostate from his own philosophical position, at least as to balancing the ledger by making changes on both sides of it, and only humane changes at that. And that is what concerns me. His flexibility on what seemed like a moral commitment seems to have become the political main stream in today's America. Which brings me to Newt Gingrich.

Politicians are lining up to seek the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential election, and it appears that Old Newt-- you will certainly remember his last period of tenure, which makes him at best a reprise now-- is trying to be first in line. He has announced his intention to explore running, which is a euphemism for raising enough money before it counts for federal financing purposes so that he has a head start on the field. And Newt is jumping on the new conservative juggernaut in that it pulled out of the station without him last time. He is a conservative's conservative, and the newly found legitimacy of evisceration of the American safety net created by the New Deal and the Great Society of past presidents and moderated by the pragmatism of the Clinton political era is like catnip for Old Newt. He has always been in favor of economic Darwinism, once suggesting that the children of the poor be sent to orphanages rather than being subsidized at home with their parents. But now economic Darwinism has lost its unsavory aura, so saying that government is too big, another euphemism for wresting benefits from those most in need, has a new cache to it, and Newt is smiling all the way to the Republican National Convention. But there is suspicion in political circles, and in Newt's own organization as well, that the American people, even the conservatives among them, have not forgotten Newt's contretemps, both political and personal. He is twice divorced, the second time making a much publicized visit to the hospital room of the wife he was discarding in favor of another as she recovered from cancer surgery to ask her how much she wanted from him in the divorce settlement. And there were questions about some cozy arrangements he had with publisher's and think tank patrons who arranged advances on books and big speaking fees for him. In fact he eventually had to resign as Speaker of the House because of it all. So he has rehabilitated himself by converting to Catholicism. I guess he thinks that the righteousness of a protestant hypocrite would not be sufficient to convince the electorate of his virtue, and he is probably right. What remains to be seen is whether a Catholic hypocrite will be more convincing. But whether it will be so or not, Old Newt will continue to utter the Rcc mantra of big government and creeping socialism, and whether he is persuasive in doing so because he is now a Catholic or for other reasons, if he is indeed persuasive, it will be bad for all of us, for his is the siren's call that co-opted David Brooks, and if Brooks can be subverted, who can't be.

Somewhere in the vast colloquy that is our current political scene the real issue has been lost, and Newt's new found religiosity is the perfect wedge with which to reintroduce it to the conversation before he succeeds in expunging it from the agenda. If indeed we are a Judeo-Christian nation, if indeed we are a moral nation, if indeed we are a nation founded on humanity and compassion, the issue is not the size that government is and whether it costs too much. Rather, the issue is what should the government of such a nation as our America do, regardless of the cost. It then falls to us as a moral nation to raise the money to do it, and with the levels of corporate and personal wealth present in our nation today, albeit wealth concentrated in the few rather than the many, it should be no problem to do what should be done...if only we can return to the debate about both sides of the ledger.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com