July 2011 Archives

Dear America,

To the press, it is dysfunction. To the American people, it is absurdity. To Republicans it is unwillingness to compromise on the part of the Democrats, and to the Democrats, it is Republican intransigence. But regardless of who you are, if you live in the United States, you likely have your own name for the problem, and you are probably blaming someone, which is only fair. In my opinion, Steven Colbert said it best when he characterized the current impasse in Washington this way: the Republicans are saying "give us what we want," and the Democrats are saying, "here, take it....just don't hit us." The vitriolic argument over raising the debt ceiling has overflowed its banks to become a debate over how much to cut government programs, including entitlements despite the fact that the American people say in overwhelming numbers when polled that they don't want basic entitlements cut and they do want the rich to pay more taxes. No longer is there discussion of the odious tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans. No longer is there even any discussion about the purported need to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even though Social Security and Medicare are funded in advance, in the case of the former for another twenty five years or more. If this were a forensic debate, a debate just for the sake of displaying rhetorical acumen, the Republicans would have won overwhelmingly with their polemical approach to the discourse, rife with passion calculated to move the dialectic from rationality to fear and loathing. Their performance has brought casuistry to new heights and has turned subtle misrepresentation and prevarication into art forms. When it comes to elliptical citation of facts, the Republicans are nonpareil. But though their mastery of politics is unrivaled by their opposite numbers across the aisles of congress, there are those of us who cannot vote for them; our craven fellow progressives in the Democratic Party are a better choice than the Republicans with their preference for money over people. Still, the beat goes on.

Today's Meet the Press was a display of the warp in American politics that everyone sees. One of the guests was the Republican Tea Party congressman from Idaho, Raul Labrador. He is the apotheosis of the reactionary dogmatist who sees only the tree in front of him and cares not a whit for the forest on fire all around him. Congressman Labrador, who I fear is as sincere as any other zealot, is single minded about the balanced budget amendment, tying raising the debt ceiling to the evisceration of social programs and his intractability on the issue of tax increases, and he takes his positions as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, which to his credit, it probably wouldn't. But his claims of righteousness don't make him any less misguided, nor does his selective observation of the world around him make him perceptive of reality. He cited Ronald Reagan for the proposition that the treasury decides unilaterally which of the country's bills to pay from the funds and revenue on hand, suggesting that President Obama is being disingenuous when he expresses apprehension about our potential default on the debt and the prospect that Social Security checks won't go out next week if the debt ceiling isn't raised. The good congressman seems to think that The President should just promise that entitlement checks will go out and ignore the American people's, and for that matter the rest of the world's, right to be paid the money they have lent the American government. In the belief that he knows better than almost everyone else, he is apparently unconcerned about default...either that or he doesn't add too well. Jennifer Granholm, former Democratic governor of Michigan, was also on the program, and Labrador came prepared with little notes he could pull out at the first opportunity. When Granholm lapsed into standard Democratic dogma about tax reform and creating a business friendly climate even if taxes on the rich are increased, Labrador took out his Granholm card and, apparently reading verbatim, noted that Michigan had lost tens of thousands of jobs while the governor was in office at the same time as Governor Perry of Texas increased employment and prosperity in Texas with opposite policies. Of course, he left out the fact that Perry governs the state in which the oil industry, the industry that is currently raping the American economy, employs tens of thousands of people in the course of their predation while the automobile and other heavy industries in Michigan have been busy sending the state's jobs abroad in the never ending quest for cheaper labor to justify more expensive management. And then there is David Gregory chirping cheerfully at every turn about the need to "reform entitlements" as if he even understands what entitlements are, much less that in the most prominent cases they are financing our nation, not creating its debt and deficits.

The most disturbing aspect of all this is not the character of the debate per se. It is what the Pew Research polls of July 11 showed. Young people are becoming ever more conservative, and thus more likely to vote Republican, and so are independents. But take heart. Pew's newsletter included a graph of Republican and Democratic levels of popularity over the past twenty years or so, and it is remarkably consistent. In sequences lasting from five to ten years, Republicans start out well below Democrats and the two parties' levels of popular support gradually merge until the Republicans equal or slightly exceed the Democrats in public favor. But that favor never grows, nor does it last more than a year or two. Smart as they are, Republicans cannot hide who they are and what they want. It always comes out in short order once the Republicans get hold of the tiller of the ship of state, and the graph appears to be repeating that cycle right now, even though the Republicans control only the House of Representatives. But this time they have not surpassed the Democrats before their upward progress is being halted. Instead of crossing, the graph lines representing public confidence have leveled off about three percentage points apart and appear to be beginning to diverge again. Usually the Republicans have to gain control for the American people to discern their true colors, but seemingly not this time. Apparently the Republicans are great communicators, and getting better all the time, which is good for all of us. There is no such thing as being too clear about what someone else really means, especially when it's a Republicans speaking.

Your friend,

Mike

With the talk of the town, Washington, D.C. in particular, being the debt ceiling, the national debt and the deficit, the one thing that conservatives avoid discussing these days is the cost of medical care, which they have persistently blamed on all the wrong things.  The fact is that we need  systemic change in this country, and probably the most critical need is in the area of medicine.  We pay more for our health care than any other industrialized nation in terms of a percentage of our gross domestic product, yet the Republican conservative complex insists that the free market will address the problem, being apparently unaware that the free market is what got us here.  We have discussed the related facts before when considering the issue of health care reform, but with Medicare's future hanging in the balance, the subject is ripe for continuing discussion in tandem with saving the solution to the future insolvency of Medicare, which I feel compelled to point out is still years away from being a problem given the money in the Medicare Trust Fund. 

Dear America,

Our political system has spawned an attitude that makes political success an end in itself: a small tail wagging an enormous dog. For example, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, has bluntly stated that his goal during the 112^th congress is to prevent Barrack Obama from being a two term president, which is why the Republicans in The Senate united to prevent several things from happening legislatively. But then they allowed those things to occur during the lame duck session, demonstrating that McConnell's docile Republicans had heeded their master's call with the purpose of obstructing the Democratic effort-- not the vindication of any principle, just the thwarting of the Democrats. The Democrats have likewise dug in on issues like the prioritization of tax reform and debt reduction after other social goals, and while I agree with them in large part, the fact remains that something on the order of 40% of every federal dollar spent is dedicated to what those in Washington, D.C. call "servicing the debt," otherwise describable as paying interest on money we have borrowed as a nation in the past, the point being that if we had 40% more money to spend, we would not have to be in constant political disarray over issues of social conscience.

The significance of these facts is that on issues like health care reform for example, the two major parties, and now the Tea Party sect of the Republican Party as well, have dug in their heels and refused to analyze the problem that the recently passed health insurance reform law was supposed to address. Similarly, with regard to Social Security the Republicans have lumped in decremental spending from the Social Security Trust Fund-- which has started already-- with the national debt when there is really no connection between the two in principle. The fund will be exhausted in 2037 and fund revenues from payroll taxes will no longer support current levels of benefits, but we have twenty seven years to adjust and prevent that in order to avoid the insolvency of the fund, and in the interim, we pay for our benefits week to week out of our collective earnings and our savings in the fund. In other words. the federal debt has not increased by a penny on account of Social Security, and it won't until 2037 at the earliest, and even then, the only addition to the national debt caused by Social Security would be federal general fund subsidies to the fund to sustain levels of benefits over and above payroll tax income-- an event that will never occur for several reasons, discussion of which would just confuse the issue now. But discussion of the problems of Social Security solvency and health care reform in general could yield solutions that would be not just acceptable but desirable for both parties if they would only set aside partisan victory in favor of popular wellbeing.

For example, with regard to health care there is no way around the fact that it costs something in excess of 15% of the gross domestic product every year according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, other governmental organizations that have studied the issue have concluded that our health care is more expensive than that of any industrialized nation in the world yet does not make us any healthier than any of those other nations, if we are as healthy as they are at all. While our system is first in responsiveness, we are lagging behind in areas like infant mortality, average life span and broad accessibility, and we pay nearly one and a half times what Germany does for that poor result, even more compared to many other advanced nations like Canada and Britain. In all of the modernized nations that have single payer systems, including those with universal free government health care, the overall result is better than it is here, yet the conservative attitude-- the Republican attitude in particular-- is that the right to choose how to avail oneself of healthcare is more important than universal wellbeing, and that the cost of such health care is prohibitive, which is just not so. But beyond that point is one that no one discusses. If our health care system were supported by taxpayers, business would no longer be the primary funder of health care in the form of insurance paid as fringe benefits for workers. So, while the Republicans rant about corporate tax levels, they could be increasing corporate revenue by 15% if they would only agree to universal public healthcare. Such a change would dwarf any corporate tax reduction that this country could afford, but apparently winning a propaganda war against the liberal political establishment is more important than reason when it comes to this issue.

And then there is Social Security. Even The President's commission on debt and deficit reduction admitted, in its preliminary report at least, that balancing Social Security funds with expenses was an end in itself and was unrelated to balancing the federal budget and reducing the national debt. But the Republicans, and even some Democrats continue to talk about Social Security as a "budget buster" when the fact is that if those hundreds of billions of dollars available to the retired and disabled under Social Security's aegis were no longer being spent in our economy, our current severe economic problems would be far worse. In addition, we would have the kind of pernicious poverty that doesn't just make people miserable, it kills them. However, the simple act of raising the earnings level at which you stop paying additional payroll taxes for Social Security, even on a declining sliding scale, until it quenches the benefit needs of the baby boomers who will be retiring and retired for the next twenty years or so would balance the fund with its obligations. And after that twenty years, chances are that those increases in funding could be reversed as the post-World War II spike in our population declines in its impact on Social Security in consequence of the end of the normal life spans of those beneficiaries. In other words, the Social Security balancing issue could be addressed with something akin to a temporary inconvenience, and in addition, the need for a general fund contribution to the fund would be obviated and the money in the fund could continue to be a pool of capital to be borrowed at a reasonable rate to finance the rest of the nation's fiscal needs. But then, there would be no fire for the Republicans to hold the Democrats' feet to. Again, political victory supplants the common weal as a priority, when all it would take to make everyone happy is a little thought, which makes me wonder. Why can't our politicians play nice like good boys and girls? Wouldn't it make even them happier if they did? Children: what can you do with 'em...except vote for other children.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com

Dear America,

Tonight, our president and the Speaker of our House gave addresses to the American people-- to us. And once again, they expressed the credos of two separate schools of thought. The question is, how, if at all, will people react, and more importantly, in what numbers and how adamantly. What concerns me is the prospect of the continuing ratio of righteous indignation on the two sides of the debate...the battle really. On the side of the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), we have the usual array of opponents of social consciousness who favor proliferation of wealth over preservation of civilized and humane priorities. Grover Norquist, for example, was interviewed on Fox News so that he could pontificate on the subject of fiscal conservancy at any cost. And speaking on behalf of the humanists and progressives among us was...no one with a household name or an identifiable face who had a public persona outside of elective politics. So while The President called for us all to contact our congressmen and senators, it remains an open question as to whether his call to arms will affect a significant number of his supporters in a significant way, and perhaps at its core, the issue is how much we care. It has been the case since the last election cycle that the Rcc and the Republican Party have been many times more effective in galvanizing their numbers than have the Democrats and the progressive movement, if there is a movement oriented toward progressive goals at all. And that really is the problem.

We are on the cusp of a new day. It will either be a vindication of values that those of us to the left of the center of the political spectrum have always held paramount ethically and morally, or it will be the reversal of the movement essentially founded by FDR and carried to its current fruition by him, Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Speakers of the House like Tip O'Neill and civic activists like Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. We will either see the reification for posterity of Social Security and Medicare as we know them or we will see the beginning of their erosion into distant memories of a society that valued the wellbeing of all over the filthy lucre that aggrandizes only the few. And I, like many others, am dispirited by the fact that, while there is a "Tea Party Movement," which is galvanized and vocal to the extent that they drown out the voices of reason, there is no movement like it to advocate for American humanism like that which advocated for peace or for civil rights in the 1960's and 1970's. There are not tens of thousands of us raising our voices in protest as the Tea Party has managed to muster in public places all over our country. They continue to bellow for what they do not understand for the benefit of those whom they have so far failed to identify as the malefactors that they are, and they do so with nothing but irrational zeal as a motivation. Yet we, who have carried our beliefs for decades, some of us for half a century or more, cannot show our numbers for what they are even at the polls.

It is pointless for most of us progressives to contact our congressmen and senators as those who serve us already share our beliefs. It is not therefore likely that they can prevail for us in the halls of Congress. As there was a contingent of conservative Democrats that turned the Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives into an illusion of power, a chimera that tarnished their party rather than burnishing its image as the voice of The People, there is now a conservative contingent within the Republican Party that is either a threat to do the same to the Republicans that the "Blue Dogs" did for the Democrats, or it is the call to a kind of action that hasn't been seen in the world since the 1930's in Germany. And if we are not careful, we will see it again, crystal night and all. For the issue today is not just the social safety net.  Find a way to be heard.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I heard something interesting on the radio today. The proprietor of an energy investment company made a presentation on the subject of speculation in the oil market. He said that the price of oil, and therefore the price of what we buy at the pump, is a function of the value that the market for oil puts on each barrel, and that price is in turn a function of conditions "on the ground" as they say these days. He said that, while it is true that traders, including speculators, sometimes make many trades per second, reaping miniscule profits from each, but making money overall because of the volume, that is only because the market price ranges depending on what people value a barrel of oil at. And since it is the market-- which he never really defined as it apparently is something like the lack of confidence in business that the Republicans are always complaining about-- that dictates the price, it is not the fault of speculators or the volume of trades in a substance that never moves an inch while the trading is being done. It was all very Rcc (Republican conservative complex) if you know what I mean: alchemy pure and simple. But what he said about all the money he and his clients are making by buying oil and selling it, never seeing it or taking delivery of a drop, never answered a few fundamental questions that never seem to get asked.

Starting with the obvious one, where does the money his clients are making come from? The suggestion people like him make is that it is a product of growth, another magical concept. But in this instance, we have a finite quantity of a specific product that somehow puts money in the hands of everyone who owns it, even if he owns it for nothing more than a fraction of a second. It doesn't grow in that fraction of a second. It doesn't increase in volume. It doesn't suddenly become capable of yielding more refined products, so where does the increased value come from. Well, here's the obvious answer. It comes out of the pockets of the last people to own it: us. After that oil gets sold by the producer at one price, the price increases every time it changes hands, which it does often in the options market until finally, a refiner buys it and then has to get paid not only for what he does with it to produce our gasoline, for example, but for what it cost him as well. And he gets the money to pay that inflated price for the oil from us when he sells it to us as a refined product. All of those who owned that barrel of oil profited, and they produced nothing to earn that profit, which as I said, comes out of our pockets at the end of the chain of commerce. So, the speculators' profits are not just the natural growth of the total wealth in the world. They are a reallocation of our wealth, that is of the wealth of the people who do the work, produce the products, provide the services in the world. The speculators get something for nothing, and we get less for every dollar we earn by that same amount.

Then there is the second obvious question, to which I alluded when I began. What is this market that dictates the price of a barrel of oil? Well, there's nothing abstruse about that either. The market is the price that buyers will pay, in this case, forna barrel of oil. And who buys in that market? Well, there are refiners, and perhaps those who sell petroleum products at retail or use them in providing services, like airlines, but they are bidding against the very speculators we are discussing. An airline goes into the petroleum market to buy raw oil-- which it cannot use until it is refined by someone else remember-- just to keep up with the price increases that are going into the speculators' pockets, hence becoming a speculator too, but in self defense. Thus it costs us more to fly because the airlines had to keep up with the speculators in order not to lose money to them...and we pay that money instead when we buy our tickets. Once again, the speculators profit from doing nothing, producing nothing...you know the rest.

And finally there is that last elusive concept: value. Value is what supposedly drives the price up because of fear of what will happen in the middle east, projected shortages of supply for all kinds of reasons, increased consumption and who knows what else. But those phenomena didn't pop into existence in January and then burst like the housing bubble in April, during which period the price of oil jumped to over $140 per barrel and just as quickly fell back below $100 per barrel. And as to the fear about the middle east, the loss of Libyan crude has been made up by Saudi Arabia and Russia. The oil producing nations, and we get more oil from Canada than from any other country including those in the middle east, continue to produce just under 90 million barrels a day, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, which is what the world needs to operate. As to consumption, maybe the Indians and the Chinese are using more, but the supply seems to be adequate, and they are slowing down economically too, just like we are, so that is not likely to change. Finally, as to American production-- we produce nearly half of what we use-- the current caution about issuing drilling permits given the fact that an oil company polluted almost an entire sea just a few months ago did not result in a shortage of supply in January, or February, March or April. In fact, any permits issued this year will not pay off in additional supply for a period approaching a decade. That's far longer than the longest of options on any barrel of oil. So in the final analysis, everything our oil investor said was irrational at best, and a downright attempt to deceive at worst.

In my opinion, the solution to the problem, at least in the oil futures market, is to prohibit anyone who cannot take delivery of a barrel of oil from buying one, but that isn't likely to happen. In the stock markets, the SEC is applying restrictions to curb automated trading, the kind that we have just been discussing in the oil futures market. But regulation of a bad practice doesn't eliminate the bad effects of that practice, so regulation in oil futures won't change much either. Ironically, about a week ago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange stopped trading in pork bellies, that is, slabs of bacon. People don't buy bacon futures anymore. They buy their bacon fresh, so the futures market just dried up. That's what has to be done with oil by the barrel: speculation in oil futures has to just dry up, and barring speculation will do that. I admit that I'm no expert. I'm just saying...

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As those of you who read these letters know, the Republican assault on Social Security has abated, and almost dissolved into thin air, I would imagine because so many people pointed out that despite their fulminations to the contrary, Social Security not only hasn't caused a single dollar of the national debt and deficit, it has actually financed it so that we didn't have to turn to China any more than we did. The truth is a powerful weapon, even if it takes dogged persistence to use it effectively. But the attack on our safeguards against poverty and degradation has not diminished. It has merely been redirected. Whereas the word "entitlements" used to mean all social programs, the hue and cry over the threat to Social Security in particular caused the conservative movement to retrench, having seen that Social Security is an unassailable bastion of safety and dignity recognized by conservatives and liberals alike...at least by those who are in the 90% of our population who will need it someday or who rely on it already. But the Republicans have not retreated from the battle field on which the fates of all the other social programs will be decided. They have just shifted their malice to Medicare, which is an easier target, mainly because people know less about it than they do Social Security.

Last August, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration, announced as trustee of the Medicare Trust Fund with her co-trustee, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, that the Medicare Trust Fund's solvency had been extended to 2029 as a consequence of the Affordable Health Care Act. So, with eighteen years of financial adequacy ahead of it, there is plenty of time to adjust Medicare to address the problems represented by the dramatic and persistent rise in health care costs. In that much time, we should be able to figure out who is making all that money and how to rein them in, or in the alternative how to pay them. But the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) and the Republican Party itself have taken a cynical bead on Medicare none-the-less, arguing that it represents a substantial cause of our government's debt and deficit problems, and that is not surprising, given the history of Medicare.

The idea for Medicare, though that name had not yet been conceived, was born in about 1937 when FDR and his advisors realized that guaranteed income for the elderly in the form of Social Security was ineffectual if the beneficiaries of the program were still vulnerable to ruination by the cost of the increased medical care that we all need as we age. Though the Congress was not of a mind to create such a program at the time, and in fact Roosevelt was in the process of reducing government spending in 1937, prematurely as it turned out when the country suffered a new recession in consequence of cuts in government spending, the idea lived on, and it became one of the goals of the Truman administration when he was elected to his own term after succeeding Roosevelt upon his death. But again, the Republican political establishment opposed socialized medicine, as did Truman's successor, Eisenhower. While the concept of government insured medical care for Social Security recipients was gaining momentum, the elements of the Rcc, including President Eisenhower, were sufficiently opposed that the medical establishment, with the coaxing of the American Medical Association, began to reduce what it charged the elderly for medical care, in effect obviating a government program by giving up just enough of their fees to make it seem that they would address the problem voluntarily. But the problem was not solved by the ephemeral largess of the medical establishment, and during the Kennedy administration, the President advocated for a Medicare type program. None was created at that time, but in 1965, during the first year of Lyndon Johnson's own administration, Medicare passed into law, probably because Johnson was most likely the most adept president at working the legislature that we have ever had, rather than because of any conservative change of heart. And since that time, Medicare has been part of the anathema that social programs, including the entirety of Johnson's "Great Society" platform, have been to the Rcc and the Republican Party. And now that they have momentum in the form of the sudden zeal to address the national debt and the federal deficit-- now at the time when we can least tolerate curtailment of the flow of money into our capitalist system from the American fisc-- the siege is on in earnest again with the Tea Party movement playing the role of townspeople bearing torches and pitch forks. But the threat to our national solvency represented by Medicare is just like that of Social Security. Like Social Security, Medicare needs to be restructured over the next decade and a half, but changing it now will not reduce our debt any time soon, so the immediacy with which the Rcc seeks to make changes is nothing but casuistry, if not disingenuous hypocrisy. Predictable, I would say, but timely as it is a warning for us all and if we heed it all Americans will be well served.

Now that their intentions are clear, we must prevent the Rcc from prevailing on this point as their success would be the thin end of the wedge because if they do so they will prevail in spite of reason, not because of it. And if they can prevail with canards like the so-far-unquestioned assertion that revising Medicare is urgent...if they can elect their own with calumnies like the death panel claims that, given DavidBrooks' column of last Friday seem to be more a Republican idea than a Democratic one...they can sneak almost anything by what they will have demonstrated to be a gullible electorate. It may be the case that if we do nothing for twenty years or so, Medicare will not survive, and I for one believe that we have a duty as a civilized society to provide access to medicine and its practitioners for everyone. So, change is inevitable, whether in the form of altered eligibility criteria, or universality of coverage to bring us in line with the rest of the industrialized world. But however we repair it, Medicare is not inimical to fiscal responsibility. We have a dicey time ahead of us because the progressive movement must somehow hold the Rcc and the Republican Party off until the elections of 2012. But it is a thing worth doing...a thing we the American people must do as our leaders seem to lack the ability to do it for us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The conservative drum beat giving a meter to the recalcitrant and obdurate Republican march toward oblivion continues to sound in the media as people like Senator Jim DeMint focus the colloquy on their goals rather than the problems that face us all. On Meet the Press, the panel actually conceded, except for John Kasich, the current governor of Ohio and former Fox News employee, that the uncertain future in consumer demand, not the uncertainty of tax policy and regulation, was the real damper on business investment. Even the CEO of Honeywell, with its 122,000 employees and $17 billion of profit over the past year, concedes that business will not manufacture what consumers are not both willing and able to buy. Yet, despite that moment of clarity in the debate, which lasted merely seconds while the lobbying for business friendly-- and therefore capital friendly rather than worker friendly-- policy droned on for nearly half an hour, politics was practiced as usual, even in the face of a looming catastrophe. The debt, the deficit, the unemployment rate, regulatory and tax "uncertainty" and many more subjects of partisan sloganeering were all the nearly exclusive grist of the panel's discussion mill. But there is only one issue in our immediate future: the debt ceiling. In reality, the debate-- which cannot possibly resolve the central issue of our time in the United States in less than a political epoch-- is who are we as a nation, and The New York Times editorial page once again elucidated our national dilemma.

The debate between rational conservatism and progressive liberalism raged on between Paul Krugman and David Brooks as the former labeled as "crazy" the Republican fixation on supply side doctrine and the latter pointed to our refusal to accept death in lieu of insisting on resuscitation as a primary cause of the inflation of medical costs, and hence our national debt and deficit. Krugman, on the one hand, opines that business will not save labor but rather it is the other way around, and Brooks avers that we all have to sacrifice, even with our last days and months of life, in order for the future to be fiscally sound. And therein is a manifestation of the real debate: do we believe as a nation that we should see to the wellbeing of people in our political order, or do we focus on things and money with the presumption that more things and hence more money will yield happiness. We are at the historic crossroads where humanism and materialism intersect, and the decision as to which road we will travel will dictate the future of the American experiment: the creation of a nation based on the notion that the people should determine their destiny with votes. And the two potential outcomes are a socially sensitive political entity or one controlled by those who have the most, otherwise known as a plutocracy. The former relies on an educated and compassionate electorate and the latter on the paternalism of business and the rich, and the opinions of these two men add some clarity to the debate.

Brooks, in yet another survey of the literature on the subject masquerading as a synopsis of the truth, bemoans the choices people are now making about the quality versus the quantity of life. His point is that we more and more prolong life at any cost on the presupposition that every moment of life is worth the price. He couches his opinion in the costs of care, especially at the end of life for those who are imminently destined to die of Alzheimer's disease among other things and he quotes one source's projection that such medical care will cost our society $1 trillion per year by 2050, twice the total cost of Medicare right now. But he never considers that fact in terms of percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a measure that is in conservative vogue right now. Our medical care providers take approximately 15% of GDP whereas the nearest percentage in a country in the modern, industrialized world (Germany) pays barely two thirds that amount with socialized medicine. Thus, because conservative dogma rejects outright any socialized program paid for with taxes on the mass of citizens, the more humane, and in the end more effective course of making medicine available to everyone and controlling costs at the government level rather than allowing the vaunted "free market" to allocate care based on economic station is not even something that Brooks considers. While he looks at the statistics about the cost of care in our country, he never considers the fact that after Germany, the next industrialized nation listed by percentage of GDP spent on medical care spends only half what we do, also thanks to socialized medicine. So, while it is easy to agree that the cost of medicine is driving our deficit and debt to ever higher levels, it is too easy to limit the debate to the conservative agenda. In reality, the death panel notion is not a function of health insurance reform, it is a function of the conservative refusal to consider all alternatives to the current dysfunctional, profit driven system.

As to Krugman, his focus is on taxation as the seminal focus of the decision making process. He points out the now usual dichotomy between the Republican beatification of Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of tax abatement and the reality that he did lower taxes once, but then he raised them either eleven or fourteen times, depending on whom you accept as the arbiter of the definition of a tax increase. Krugman's position, as usual, is that Republican dogma vaunts money and service of moneyed individuals as the salvation of us all, while it decries taxation as if it is the arrogation of the rights of those individuals. He points out that the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc's) claim that tax cuts pay for themselves is completely without empirical support, and I might add that it falls into the "if it seems too good to be true it probably is" category. He sights the administrations of both Reagan and the first President Bush for that proposition, and he is not alone in that respect. Even Alan Simpson, an arch conservative during his tenure in congress, sees things Krugman's way, but that doesn't stop shills like McBoehnell (Mitch McConnell and John Boehner) from reiterating the conservative mating call: no new taxes. What remains to be seen is whether Brooks or Krugman will win the day, and for that matter, the century. For, at least in my opinion, we are deciding the destiny of a nation as we approach the election of 2012. We can vote for what I would call enlightened humanitarianism, in which we as a society commit ourselves to taking care of our own, or we commit in the alternative to taking care of ourselves to the exclusion of others. I hesitate to use terms like fascism and humanitarianism to define the dialectical camps in the ideological conflict, but make no mistake. An ideological conflict is what it is. Perhaps the solution is to divide the country into two separate nations as Sudan has been divided. We assume that such things can't happen here, but we had a civil war a hundred and fifty years ago or so, the aim of which was just that. But I hope that it doesn't come to that, and frankly, I cannot foresee it. Rather, I foresee a long term debate about conscience, practicality, economics as an observation of human behavior rather than a predictor of it, and a definition of the American soul, which is a thing we have claimed to have determined each time we say a prayer before we convene to make a law, even though the prayer seems to fall on deaf ears. We are a young nation, and as such, we have much to learn. And among the things we have to learn is who we are. That is why every vote is precious. That is why the decision to vote for anyone in particular should be not just a matter of politics, but a matter of conscience. We are whom we elect. I will remember that in the voting booth if you will.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

On Monday, I saw the end of President Obama's press conference and all of House Speaker John Boehner's immediately thereafter. While the President indicated a willingness to accept entitlement reforms, Boehner made no change to his polemical position on spending cuts and tax increases. He apparently thinks that the American people are so foolish that they will fail to recognize his willingness to accept closing business tax loopholes as long as taxes are not increased for "job creators" (which is code for the affluent in this country) as the intractability and lack of compromise, not to mention the nonsense that it is. But Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor have a lot more to worry about than whether the American people are gullible enough to believe the sophistry that they are peddling, to which I can't believe even they give sincere credence. Decreasing taxes cannot increase federal revenue: it didn't when Ronald Reagan did it, and it turned a budget surplus into a budget deficit in one year under George Bush. But despite the illogic of it all, they assume the malleability of the public consciousness and cleave to the Republican postulate that if you use phrases like "job creator" and "the problem is not revenue, but spending" often enough, the American people will stop thinking and just sign on. However, the most recent Pew Research Poll is proof that it isn't working...not this time.

The poll data and interpretation was released by the Pew Research Center on Sunday, July 14^th , and it related data from prior polls to that most recently collected, thus revealing trends in public opinion as well as the electorate's current prioritization of the issues relating to the national debt and the raising of the debt ceiling. More Americans, by 47% to 42% are concerned first about the implications of raising the debt ceiling as opposed to the prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt. But Americans are more worried about jobs and the economy than they are about the deficit in about a four to three ratio. More importantly, the poll indicated the popular disfavor of the Republicans' priorities when it comes to the deficit and entitlements. By just less than two to one, Americans think that retaining entitlements at their current levels is more important than reducing the federal deficit. And by a full two to one margin, they favor increasing taxes on those whose incomes exceed $250,000 in order to keep benefits at their current levels. Translated into a projection for the 2012 election, the Republicans are looking at another rout unless they stop insisting that the will of the American people is what only one third of us actually want-- a clarion call from the electorate that the Republicans have heard, but have they.

While the poll data should be enough, the Republican Party has demonstrated an obduracy in its fixation on trickle down economics that could bring them to ignore the freshening wind against their sails. But it appears that even they are not obtuse enough to ignore the current tide against them. For there are indications of an acceptance of defeat on these points beyond the poll in the form of Mitch McConnell himself. On Tuesday, he made public his plan to pass a refusal to increase the debt limit so that The President can veto it, and including a provision in that refusal that allows The President to increase the debt ceiling unilaterally by executive order in increments of $800 billion at a time. Thus, McConnell has essentially admitted that he neither has control of his caucus nor does he have the guts to do the only prudent thing-- wrangle his recalcitrant members into increasing the debt ceiling without pre-conditions, even though it would not be politically expedient within his party, so that daily operation of the government can continue without default on our obligations as a nation. Rather, he will just wash his hands of it all and leave it to others to make the decision. It seems that he thinks that in doing so he is being inscrutably clever, but everyone sees it for the pusillanimous scheme that it is, and rather than pulling the clever fast one that he thinks he has, he is actually turning the tide against himself and his fellow reactionaries.

Once McConnell concedes this power to President Obama, it will demonstrate the fact that there is no consensus within the Republican Party, and that the internecine, destructive influence of the Tea Party contingent has rendered the party no longer just dysfunctional, but now non-functional. The Tea Party is indeed the virus that will overturn the Republican juggernaut and send the party, Tea Party and all, back to the political tulles from whence they came just eight months ago. It's hard to believe, but it seems that the Democrats have finally mustered enough fortitude to hold the Republicans' feet to the fire long enough to make them suffer the consequences of their anti-populist creed. Now all that remains is for the Democratic leadership, The President in particular, to come out of the closet and confess their progressive intentions, giving us Americans a choice, and to his credit, The President has already taken the first step in that regard. At yesterdays bi-partisan meeting on the debt ceiling at the White House, Eric Cantor demanded $1.5 trillion in austerity cuts of Mr. Obama along with only a short term debt limit extension, but he persisted in his refusal to consider increased taxes. After a couple of hours of haggling and Cantor leading the pack in the same direction as he has in the past, The President got up and left, tearing a page from Cantor's own book, and lambasting Cantor while doing it. "Don't call my bluff, Eric," Mr. Obama said to Cantor as he vowed to take the issue to us, The American People, which left Cantor sitting sheepishly in silence. It must have smelled like gun powder in that room, and Cantor must have seen his ambition and his petty, political life flash before his eyes.

In reality, there are only two directions we can take: toward an economically stratified nation with the wealthy few at the top and the toiling many carrying them, or some kind of change-- like financial reform including implementation of the law passed last year and tax increases at the top so that the government can, for example, pay its $2.5 trillion debt to the Social Security Trust Fund-- that stops the flow of the fruits of the average person's labors into the bank accounts of people who do nothing but speculate and manipulate our financial system. The latter is the Republican choice, and that is what President Obama is threatening to tell us all, as if we didn't already know. But as the President has now shown himself ready to do, now is the time to present that stark choice, and a comprehensive plan to accomplish the Democrats' alternative as well. The Republicans seem to have finally pushed the wrong button one time too many. Carpe diem, Mr. President. Carpe diem.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The new year has begun and most years we see this event as auspicious. I must admit that I hope for auspiciousness myself, but I must also admit my doubts about the prospect this time. Because as I watched the current events programs yesterday morning, expecting to hear prognoses that I could accept as plausible to the effect that we are embarking on a period of change for the better, and as much as those whose credentials get them invited to make such comments tried to make the case that there would be change in Washington, there was no substance to their arguments, and in fact, no change in what they said from what they have been saying for the past two years. The consensus seems to be that the Republicans will marginalize the congressional Democrats and that President Obama has two choices. First, he can cleave to the progressive platform that got him elected and push on toward fulfillment of additional liberally inclined goals: environmental responsibility, executive orders implementing changes in business practices and energy development that congress will surely resist now that the Republicans have renewed hubris, tax reform and debt reduction. Or second, he can seek conciliation with the Republicans and the Tea Party and pursue what he will claim as more moderate positions, but what will be in reality more conservative positions in the minds of progressives like me who voted him into office. That doesn't sound like an auspicious turn of events to me.

In fact, it is the same kind of turn that Bill Clinton took after the Democrats, Clinton's party, took something of a beating in 1994's election...his first mid-term. By the time of the next mid-terms, surplus budgets were in the offing and actually led to a surplus legacy budget going into the first Bush administration, which Bush and the Republicans-- still the majority party in congress-- promptly frittered away in favor of what were at the time the highest deficits in history by 2008. President Clinton also signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that led to the financial debacle of 2008, and he signed the congressional "reform" of welfare by limiting its availability to a term of years, which may or may not have altered dependence on welfare as a lifestyle, but seems certainly to have widened the gap between the rich and the poor. What I foresee for President Obama in that same vein is the continued dilution of financial reform in the name of "partisan compromise," another concession on the tax cuts for the rich by 2012, a silent endorsement of the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc) central premise that tax cuts are not reductions in federal revenue but are actually returning money to the rich who are entitled to it by virtue of The President's failure to take a stand on such things as the estate tax, marginal tax rates as they affect the rich, punitive tax policy in the case of businesses that ship jobs abroad to reduce costs and maximize profits regardless of the toll that doing so take so the United States' economy and the like. He has more or less the same two choices that Bill Clinton faced, and my guess is that President Obama, who seems to study past presidents to determine how he will preside, will opt for the successful tack taken by President Clinton (the second of his two choices) enhanced by the demagoguery of his other political model for success, Ronald Reagan. And the reason I think so is this.

The Republicans are still poised to control the congress by virtue of their amoral approach to politics and the diffidence of the Democrats in both houses. They will continue to call their position compromise and the Democrats will continue to assume that they cannot prevail in their counter-argument with the American people. The "compromises" signed into law by President Obama will become increasingly the creations of the Rcc, the chasm between the prosperous and those whose labors make them so will grow, and by the end of 2012, President Obama will have been reelected by default because it is better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't. His charisma will sustain him in the polls and he will complete his second term with the nation having taken another significant step to the right. In the end, the Obama presidency will be the gift that never stops costing us. But I could be wrong.

It may be that some time in the next two years any of several things will happen that will allow President Obama to be his higher self. The Tea Party may become a virus within the Republican Party that prevents it from moving...effectively paralyzing the Congress the way the Republican minority in The Senate has paralyzed that body for the past year or so. Or perhaps, the Tea Party will align itself more with the Democrats who will see that Social Security has nothing to do with the national debt but two wars being fought simultaneously do, and that tax breaks for the working class, both blue collar and white collar, go back into the stream of commerce and prime the economic pump for all of us-- including the rich-- while tax breaks for the rich do not increase tax revenue, they decrease it (it's simple arithmetic). And possibly, the Tea Party will be willing to accept the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the health insurance reform law actually reduces the deficit by $100 billion over the course of ten years rather than increasing it as the Rcc keeps urging us to believe. But it seems to me, regardless of which parts of which scenarios one believes most plausible, the Tea Party is the key, and the best we can hope for is that they stick to their guns. Because the Republicans claims that they can reduce taxes and cut the deficit and the debt at the same time aren't even susceptible of classification as a fairy tale since there isn't enough in the budget to cut so as to do both without eliminating everything that the government does for us. Whether they realize it or not, everyone's life is significantly and positively affected by at least one thing the government does, and sufficiently so that when the Republicans go to take it away, their fall from grace will have begun. I think that this is where the immovable object, reality, meets the irresistible force, Republican service to the class to which 98% of us do not belong.

Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham said on national television that the Democrats forced the START Treaty through in the lame duck session without allowing amendments. But the treaty was in Senate for eight months during which they did not offer a single one.

Sooner or later, someone is going to ask senators like Mr. Graham how they can justify it when they say such foolish things. So my bet is on the immovable object because no amount of prevarication, the Republican's specialty, will make it go away.

Happy New Year, America.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@letters2america.com

Dear America,

Let me ask you what will seem a frivolous question. What is the difference between tax deductions for depreciation of corporate jets and tort reform? The answer: nothing, at least in the terms of the current political colloquy.

You are probably aware that the tax treatment of corporate jets has become a political issue in that our President has pointed to them as the fairer alternative to reducing entitlement benefits for the poor and the elderly. Granted, those airplanes are only a symbol of the greater problem presented by the Republican Party's and the Republican conservative complex's (Rcc's) refusal to consider tax increases as a component of any plan to balance our national budget, but they are significant none-the-less. They constitute a potential savings of $3 billion per year, and as Everett Dirkson, the late speaker of the House of Representatives used to say, "a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money." But the private jet industry points out that those savings represent only a fraction of one percent of the federal budget, and the Republican Party concurs. The Party's position is that The President's persistence on the need to curtail or even eliminate this particular deduction-- enjoyed exclusively by those who have enough money that it will be a pittance to them too-- is nothing but political rhetoric without any essential meaning. As to tort reform, recall a moment about a year or so ago when the Affordable Health Care Act was still pending before Congress and President Obama held a bi-partisan, televised convocation on the subject of the law.

I didn't keep the notes I took that day, but the issue of tort reform was raised by one of the Republican participants in that conversation about health care...an issue on which the Rcc had been harping for at least twenty years by that time. That congressman pointed out that tort reform as the Rcc proposes it, capping non-economic damages at $250 thousand for each plaintiff in a malpractice case, would save about $50 billion over the course of ten years, or $5 billion per year, a consensus figure that could be reaped by limiting even the value of an entire life to a quarter of a million dollars (mind you, my life is worth considerably more to me, and I suspect that yours is to you also). But the annual cost of health care in the United States is something between $6,500 and $7,600, a range that is also a consensus. That means that tort reform represents not a fraction of one percent, but just one hundredth of one percent of the total expended for health care...at best. Yet, the Republicans have consistently raved about tort reform as a panacea for the problem of ever skyrocketing health care costs. Do your see the pattern here?

This dichotomy of scale along with the dichotomy of emphasis that each gets from the Rcc is demonstrative of the quality of the arguments being marshaled to protect the interests of the affluent and the powerful by the Republican Party and their patrons in the Rcc. There is no goose, and no gander in Republican politics. What is good for the rich is good for...well, the rich, and that's good enough for the Republican Party. So any rationale that can be employed in the never ending quest to protect and proliferate the personal wealth of the plutocracy is fair as far as they are concerned, which is no surprise. But what is surprising is that no one ever points out to these inconsistencies in the Republican Party's polemics. No one ever yells from the crowd that the Republican conservative who spouts this credo is an emperor wearing no clothes. Where is the Democratic leadership? When the Republicans throw them a soft ball like this, why aren't they hitting it over the fence? But more importantly, why do the Democrats, our President in particular, deem it necessary to capitulate to the Republican will when it is based on fallacies like this one, and like the notion that what business needs is more money in its collective pocket in order to create jobs, and like the claim that the reason that business isn't creating jobs is that it is not confident that after it makes money by doing so this year, they aren't sure that they will be able to next year.

It all makes me think about forensic debating classes in which no one takes the side he prefers. He takes the side he is assigned. The Republicans seem to understand that, and suspended belief is a routine for them. They will make any argument that gets them to the dialectical place that they want to be in, and verisimilitude is enough; the actual truth has nothing to do with it. The Democrats, on the other hand, want to believe in what they say, and that is noble. But more importantly in politics, they have to be able to argue for their position with skill and commitment, which they don't seem able to muster. Frankly, I admire principle and I detest the kind of expediency demonstrated by the Republicans and the Rcc in taking the positions they have in the cause of gratifying acquisitiveness in the privileged few. But I have to admit that they are better at the game than the Democrats, in spite of the latter's principles. The moral of the story is this. It's fine to be high minded, but in the end, the fight is won in the gutter. What the Democrats need is some street fighters, like Hillary Clinton, to protect the nerds, like Barrack Obama, who just want to do the right thing. Maybe next time.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

While the similarity may not be obvious, the cases of Casey Anthony, who was accused of murdering her small child, and Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, the French rogue whose philandering left him vulnerable to a charge of rape, demonstrated for all to see the virtues of the way in which American judicial process, and hence liberty, operate. And if we take the time to understand how our system worked in these instances, we will be glad for it, but that is not likely to occur. I had a law school professor who reiterated an age old notion: difficult cases make bad law. And these two cases are cases in point. Reuter's reports that several Florida law makers are sponsoring a bill that would make failure to timely report a missing or dead child to law enforcement officials a felony, and while I think such a law would be a good thing, that was the case before Casey Anthony went on trial too, which suggests that the legislators' campaign for such a law is less a matter of sound judgment than it is a reaction to the fact that the nearly universally reviled Ms. Anthony was found not guilty of murder. And Mr. Strauss-Kahn's release seems imminent as charges against him are apparently to be dismissed because his accuser is as much a miscreant as he is. But the opinion of the public about the French politician has inspired insinuations of corrupt motives at the top rather than the sense of security in our personal freedom that the failure of the case against him should precipitate. And all this despite the common knowledge of the fact that our criminal justice system is based on the requirement that the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. It all seems incompatible with our national pride about our Constitution and the liberties it guarantees.

But it is not just us ordinary Americans who have lost track of the fact that our criminal justice system has operated not only as it should in these two cases, but as we hope it will if we ever have to deal with it as individuals. Some of our leaders have forgotten about due process as well. This week, it became news that the Obama administration had held a Somali suspected terrorist captive aboard ship while he was interrogated, and has now spirited him into New York for trial in a civilian court. Of course, there has been a hue and cry from civil rights advocates about the defendant's detention incommunicado, and that probably is as it should be though expediency might militate in another direction. However, there is another camp that is criticizing the administration not for failure to afford him his rights but for bringing the terrorist to our shores for trial with due process in a civilian court. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying, "Why is it so hard for President Obama to acknowledge what the majority of Americans already know: foreign terrorists are enemies of America." McConnell then added, "They should not be tried as common criminals, but as terrorists in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay." The issue of whether due process is available at Guantanamo never entered his mind, nor did the fact that this man is a foreign citizen who has essentially been seized and detained without jurisdiction other than that claimed under the purported declaration of war against terrorism conceived by George W. Bush when he was president. That purported declaration of war effectively gave nation status to a criminal conspiratorial organization that should have been pursued by law enforcement rather than the military in the first place, and as a bi-product also legitimated the application of military law to matters properly addressed in criminal courts with a concomitant legitimization of the denial of virtually all procedural rights that matter. Thus, McConnell's position is like the public sentiment against Anthony and Strauss-Kahn that is inspiring a scorn for the values that we not only hold most dear, but that we believe separate us from the very people whom people like Senator McConnell vilify and designate to be unworthy of protection by them. They fail to see that if a Somali citizen accused of terrorism can be denied the rights that protect us from autocratic persecution by a government with the power to prosecute, any of us can be denied those rights. They fail to see that their position is akin not to the belief that we are all innocent until proven guilty, but rather to the proposition that if the government is accusing us, there must be a reason: guilt.

As a nation, we were founded on the proposition that while the government has powers, it has no rights. Only the people have rights. And it is because of the vast power of government that we have imposed on its agents the duty to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt while according to those accused the rights that protect them from condemnation with anything short of such a showing. The Anthony and Strauss-Kahn cases are an affirmation of those principles, and the eagerness of Senator McConnell to deny anyone, even an accused terrorist, of his rights is a demonstration that he really does not understand American democratic principles at all. Either we are all free, even the vilest of us, or none of us is. Either we all have the basic rights that our founding fathers believed self-evident or none of us can be sure of them. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not whims, and to deny them to anyone on our shores is to render them subject to a form of attack far more formidable than plots of mass destruction by the lunatic fringe. When we institutionalize such denials, as we have done in Guantanamo, we put ourselves in jeopardy...and in at least some sense, the terrorists win, not on the battle field, but by changing our way of life.

Your friend,

Mike

As I have previously noted, 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 this Wednesday's reprise: my letter of January 7, 2011.

Dear America,

In Washington, there is always the chance that things will change, but that chance is always remote. In 2008, the electorate sent Barrack Obama to the White House in the hope that he would be able to precipitate change, but the inertia of politics as usual prevented that. Health care reform became health insurance reform and financial reform became a hollow gesture, pared down by the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats in response to pressure from their patrons in the industry. The demagoguery that has kept us Americans uninformed-- or at least not informed in any useful way-- turned out more political mythology than ever over the past two years, in fact enough to convert a substantial 2007majority sentiment in favor of health care reform into a substantial 2010 majority sentiment against health insurance reform, largely because of conservative propaganda that failed to point out that what the people got was not what they wanted, but that that was because it was as close as the Democrats could get in consequence of Republican conservative complex (Rcc) machinations. And of course there is as much dogmatism in Washington as there was two years ago...maybe more...all of which serves to advance the Machiavellian tactics of our politicians, the Republicans in particular, because the longer they argue, the more intently they can claim that their constituents need them in The Capital.

So, it is not surprising that Mitch McConnell would point his senescent gnarled finger at the Democrats and claim that they were practicing politics as usual in spite of what he claims was the November electoral mandate for change from the Democrats' political hegemony, never once reflecting on the fact that according to every poll we Americans have as much disdain for Republicans as we do Democrats. And he never mentioned the fact that even within his own party, this new sub-sect of the conservative oligarchy, the Tea Party, is as ravenous for Republican blood as it is for that of the Democrats. Nor did he mention that if the Tea Party gets its way, we will all be in deep trouble because the cure for our headache that they represent is the equivalent of decapitation, which won't do the patient-- the United States of America-- any good at all. Then there is Rand Paul saying in a group interview with his newbie colleagues that he would gladly go home and return to his medical practice if congress would just pass a debt ceiling amendment to the Constitution and term limits, demonstrating that he either doesn't know or doesn't care what the responsibility of his office requires of him. A couple of those new members of congress are declining to take the health insurance that congress has so magnanimously provided for its members on both sides of the aisle, but virtually all of the rest of them would continue the tradition of congress providing for itself before it provides for the nation as they intend to repeal health insurance reform for us. And if they do, there are going to be some very unhappy constituents at home to whom they are going to have some explaining to do as even the most rabid opponents of the law don't want go give up what they are going to get from it.

So, all in all, despite Mitch McConnell's fulminations to the contrary, the new class of congressmen and senators are just a renewal of the sanctimony fuel supply in Washington, D.C. guaranteeing that for at least two more years, the city will stay warmer than the rest of the nation thanks to an abundant supply of hot air. Meanwhile, we in the rest of the nation will have to sit on our hands and wait until we find out what kind of damage they do to the elements of our governmental system that actually do serve us. They are fond of saying that everything is on the table...everything is in play. Well, that means not just health insurance reform, but financial reform as well, boding a return to a lack of supervision of the greediest oligarchy in the world-- and I do not hesitate to argue that they are actually an oligarchy and not just an oligopoly-- that will put us all back in jeopardy of the depression that the Rcc has been stumbling us into for the past thirty years. It means that Social Security will be slashed in the name of a goal that it has nothing to do with: balancing the budget. (My fear is that they will eliminate the trust fund-- and thus the debt the country has accrued by borrowing the fund's money-- and fund Social Security under the general fund, and then eviscerate the program in the name of reduction of the general fund budget imbalance.) Of course there is also Medicare to worry about, and the support for universal higher education that LBJ's Great Society program started: Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, direct loans from the government, the College Work Study program and the rest.

So, there may be change in the wind, but my fear is that it will be an advance to the past. It has taken a hundred years of enlightened government to increase our normal lifespan by more than half, to cure and eradicate many diseases, to equalize opportunity and access to higher education for all, to bring women up from second class citizenship, to take children out of factories and put them in public schools which, while not ideal certainly beat what preceded them. And now, all of that is threatened by a small group who hearken back to what they think was a better time: a time when government may have been smaller but when catastrophic vulnerability of one kind or another was a worry in 98% of Americans' lives. I just hope that we as a nation can hearken to reason instead. The debt has to be addressed, but better with dollars from a few full pockets than pennies from tens of millions of empty ones. The budget has to be balanced, but better by reducing obscene wealth to just unseemly wealth than by denying millions of people the meager benefits of one kind or another that keep their bodies and souls together. There isn't much time, America. We have to decide who we are and make sure that our politicians know it or they will decide for us. And given their record in the past, I for one don't want to take that chance.

Your friend,

Mike

MichaelWolf@Letters2America.com

Dear America,

Of late, President Obama has been criticized by both political commentators and the Republican Party for not showing "leadership" in the battle over raising the debt ceiling. But the fact is that only congress, including both The House and The Senate, can pass such a resolution while The President has power only to prevent such a resolution by use of his veto power, which he has never threatened to do. What is actually happening is not that The President is not showing leadership, but rather that the Republicans are trying to hang their refusal to allow responsible action on the debt ceiling around his neck. They have demonstrated that they are inflexible on the issue of tax increases, even on those who can easily afford to pay them, and by this tactic, they hope to divert attention from their intransigence and to stigmatize Mr. Obama in the bargain, because they have no intention of compromising their position with or without The President's participation in the process. There is no way for The President to lead because lead the Republicans aren't willing to be led anywhere. What they really want is for him to stamp his imprimatur on their position, which so far at least he has been unwilling to do.

These tactics have become the Republican Party's modus operandi. They refuse to compromise and then bemoan the lack of one. By doing so, they divert blame from themselves and hide behind their opposition, effectively forcing them into either arguing about who is actually trying to be bipartisan, or in the alternative to capitulate if they feel that they cannot win the public debate on the subject. But the Democrats, despite a persistent show of pusillanimity, now find themselves backed into a corner...again, and this time, they may develop the fortitude to fight their way out because they have no choice. And that is an endeavor in which The President can show genuine leadership by using the forum with which his office provides him, or by bringing the Republican leadership into his office and confronting them with what he is going to do to them: explain to the American people who's the real culprit and why. As to the latter, I find myself fantasizing about being The President and doing just that, and this is about what I would say.

I would send McBoehnell (Mitch McConnell and John Boehner) an invitation and I would feed them a baloney lunch, by which I mean that I would be my own cordial self as we ate and I would chat them up on the subject of inter-party cooperation. Then for desert I would serve them a pit bull soufflé . It's this way, I would say to them. You can say what you like, but you have not conceded on a thing during this entire negotiation process over the debt ceiling, and if we don't raise it, the consequences will likely be dire. And what you two vipers should recognize is that I can go on television any time I want, and do so at night when everyone is home rather than in some airplane hanger out in the mid-west at eleven in the morning, and explain to the American people that as The President, not only is the debt ceiling not my responsibility, it is not within my power to raise it, so you won't have me to kick around anymore, if I may borrow a quote from one of your own. Then, it will be just you two and Harry Reid to take the blame for the catastrophe, and as far as Harry is concerned, he hasn't done a damn thing, so he can fend for himself, which he can probably do since he has five more years on his term, unlike the two of you. And as the catastrophe unfolds, I will go on television again, right after the evening news, and remind them about who has the power and the responsibility here, and which party they lead...and just in case you two don't get it, that means you and the Republicans in both houses. You want leadership, you're going to get it-- and it's going to be relentless. Then, as they tried to argue the point with me, I would raise my hand and tell them that I don't want to hear it. There are just the three of us in this room, so there's no one to lie to. We all know what's what, and what's more, you're in my office now, but not for long. Get out and do the right thing. So much for McBoehnell. And if they persisted in their intransigence, I would nail their hides to the television station door.

I would say to the American people, I can't work with these guys. They can call our government socialist if they want, but they open each session of congress with a prayer to The Judeo-Christian God in which all but four or five of them in both parties claim to believe in. That God, The God of the testaments both old and new, counsels compassion, generosity of spirit, charity, beneficence and concern for our fellow men while counseling against greed, materialism and sanctimony. Either they believe in that God and his gospel or they don't, and if it is the latter, they should stop the praying as it is flat out hypocrisy. But if they do believe in that God of mercy and providence, they should stop holding hostage the welfare of those in our society whose need is the greatest for the benefit of those who need nothing as they have it all already. They are running this country into the ground and blaming me for it, so vote for the Republicans or for me, but you can't have both. And the precedent for the moral point has already been uttered by Mr. Obama. Not long ago, he pointed out in one of his speeches that the debate we are having is not just about our budget and our debt. It is about who we are as a nation, but that is not quite strong enough. Our leader-both-moral-and-political should stop looking for reconciliation with an intractable adversary. He should instead imbue them with the fear of God, or at least the fear of the most powerful man in the world.  Happy Independence Day, America.

Your friend,

Mike