September 2011 Archives

Dear America,

I had shoulder surgery on September 27 and I will be unable to write to you for a few weeks, but I want to stay in touch. So, I will be republishing some of my previous letters to you...letters that I think have continuing or renewed relevance. Here is the first one. It was dated June 27 of this year and it is about regulation and the need for it. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry both oppose the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill and environmental regulation as well in Perry's case, but here are some arguments against their positions.

Letter to America for June 27, 2011

Dear America,

When I last wrote to you I was focused on the problem of the sincerity of the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) when they say that their intention is to serve us, especially when they oppose regulation of those who seem to be preying on us and arrogating the wealth of our nation to their own purposes. And I find myself reluctant to harp on such themes as I am the last to know, as I have said before, when my indignation goes from criticism to rant. But I happened to read two pieces in Sunday's papers that piqued my indignation on two counts.

First, there was an article about natural gas and the rush to invest in it that has been inspired by the gas industry and industry analysts over the last few years. The thrust of the article was that the industry's future was not as surely rosy as it projects based on the new techniques and discoveries of resources connected to shale, that is, gas in the rocks below the surface of the land. The first problem is the safety of the technology used to recover the gas from the shale. The process is called fracking, which is the shortened form of the name for the technique of hydraulic fracturing in which chemical laden water is pumped at high pressure into the rock formations in which the gas is trapped and then recovered because the water has been turned into toxic waste that has to be disposed of, sometimes in amounts of a million gallons or more.

The second problem with natural gas from shale is that more toxic waste might be worth it for enough gas to last the thirty five to sixty years that industry experts forecast originally, but it appears that their estimates are at best dubious, and at worst akin to the speculations about the profitability of the market for electricity on which Enron thrived before it misappropriated the money of its investors and failed, and just to be clear, that is not my characterization. It was uttered by a retired industry geologist who worked in gas exploration. It now appears that the long term production of the wells in the fields that were supposed to be so enormous as to constitute energy independence is not escalating as they projected, but is rather declining far sooner on a well by well basis than the technical experts predicted that they would. So the yield from these "plays" as they are called may have shown promise at the outset, but that promise has quickly been demonstrated to have been nothing but an unfounded hope. While proponents of natural gas and shale in particular continue to be optimistic, like T. Boone Pickens who talks it up as the salvation of us all every chance he gets, neither the performance of the industry nor the science of it seems to support their optimism, so much so that some emails from industry insiders used phrases like Ponzi scheme to describe the gas boom. Yet, no one seems interested in regulating the flow of unjustifiably optimistic information about natural gas on which tens of millions, if not billions of dollars are being raised from unwary investors just as they were during the .com era and then the housing boom. Remember credit default swaps?

The third problem is the reason for the eagerness with which this boom was greeted by those in the areas from which our natural gas comes and where the gas shale deposits are located. It was a respite from a steep decline in gas prices half a decade or so ago that resulted in job losses and general hard times in the industry. The price of gas fell, presumably because of the surfeit of supply relative to demand, which should have been welcome news for those who got at least a part of our energy from natural gas...like me. But I saw no decline in my gas bill any time, much less five or six years ago when this period of hardship for the gas industry occurred. In fact, as Enron's stock price soared on claims that electricity was in short supply, the same kind of economy of scarcity pervaded all energy including natural gas. Our bills went up and stayed up, continuing to climb until this day while the prices of gas production and pipeline company stocks declined with the profits they could reap. But again, no one seems to have been interested in the regulation of the gas industry, though the Enron scam taught us all enough to result in competition within the electricity industry in Connecticut. Now, while the power companies continue to be able to use their delivery systems to provide service to the exclusion of all others, they have to allow other companies to provide the current and competition has set in, thus bringing the price of the electricity we use, and hence our bills, down significantly. But apparently the gas industry had a better lobbyist because no such thing happened with regard to natural gas...not nationally and not in Connecticut either. That's what deregulation yields for the consumer: profits for the industry with no need to explain why the price always moves up, never down even when market conditions would seem to merit lower prices.

And then there was an article about a bridge being built in California for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge...by Chinese workers in Shanghai. They are now building the last four of more than two dozen segments of the bridge with a road bed about fifty yards wide. They will be towed across the Atlantic 6,500 miles from where they will be assembled to create an American bridge. And whose fault is it that the jobs making those assemblies onto which the road bed will be poured here in the United States were given to Chinese companies? The government of California, led by former Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who specifically oversaw the choice to build with a Chinese company, that's whose fault it is. They claim to have saved hundreds of millions of dollars with their decision to outsource the construction of the $4 billion bridge's superstructure, but the jobs lost were the price of the savings. A Republican government in an American state oversaw the process of trading thousands of jobs for skilled workers over the course of four years to the country that Republicans constantly tell us all to fear for their assault on the world's economy. A little short sighted, don't you think? Not to mention the fact that the tax revenue from all the wages that those thousands of workers would have earned over the course of the project were lost while the state paid many of those workers unemployment benefits instead of collecting the tax revenue. Let me repeat. A little short sighted, don't you think.

My point is one I have made many times. We should think with our own heads, not someone else's, and that means judging our politicians on what they do, not what they say. The Rcc and the Republican Party tell us that deregulation is the way to go while we see unregulated industries gutting our economy in one way or another over and over again. And with regard to job creation, they favor it only when there isn't someone somewhere else who will work cheaper. And the proof that such is so is in the fact that just before the November election, a bill reported out of a Senate committee to reward companies for bringing jobs back to this country from abroad with tax incentives, and penalize companies who ship their jobs overseas with tax penalties, was prevented from passing by the Republican minority's threat to filibuster the bill. So it is up to us to decide our future. We go back to the polls in November 2012. I can hardly wait.

Your friend,

Mike

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am having shoulder surgery tomorrow, and I will be unable to write to you for a few weeks, but I want to stay in touch. So, I will be republishing some of my previous letters to you...letters that I think have continuing or renewed relevance. Here is the first one.

Letter to America for February 7, 2009

This weeks word is stimulus, as in "Stimulus Package." It is notable that there is consensus on the issue of the need for stimulus-- not unanimity, but consensus. However, as is the case in Washington on every important point, there is no consensus on the definition of the term in issue. The Republic minority, potentially a largely disenfranchised minority if they are not careful, wants to continue in the mode advocated by their patron saint, Ronald Reagan.

They want stimulus to start at the top in the form of tax reductions, and then be allowed to trickle down. But the American people have noticed over the past twenty five years or so that tax cuts do not trickle down; they don't trickle anywhere. Tax cuts just make those who get them, but don't need them, less needy. On the other hand, the Democrats have taken a catch as catch can approach, looking for anything they can spend government money on presuming that the act of government spending is in itself priming the economic pump.

The problem we have now is that "supply side economics" is the dogma that replaced "Keynesian Economics;" in other words, we have replaced one dogma with another and assumed that we no longer have to think beyond invoking the dogma for affirmation. Now, the topic of conversation is how the Japanese use of Keynesian dogma failed and whether Roosevelt's reliance on it was really successful. The claim that both failed is deemed to affirm supply side dogma. It doesn't.

The reason that the Japanese and Roosevelt were not completely successful, if indeed that is the case, is not that government spending on infrastructure (the new Washington jargoneers' version of what used to be called public works), that is Keynesian economics, is wrong any more than it is proof that supply side doctrine is right. It is much simpler than that, and we have had the proof we need within the past year.

When the last stimulus tax checks went out, they went right into the people's savings accounts at the bank. Well, that is partly true. Those of us who have bank accounts with savings in them put them in the bank. Others of us who had too much debt sent the money to our creditors, those very same banks that recently came back to us to borrow seven hundred billion dollars. The money did not have the desired effect, not even for the banks. Again, that is partly true. Some of the money, a very small proportion, probably did just what it was supposed to do, but if so, it was not enough to be counted.

The only people who will spend tax refunds, rebates and reductions are the people who have very little money, so little that they don't have debt either because no one will lend them money. That's right. Give money to people who need food and it gets spent on food. Unemployment? That's right, the unemployed have no money either; most of them will spend the stimulus money they get on food, or rent, or clothes, as well. So if we want to stimulate the economy immediately by giving money to people, we have to give it to the people who need it most. Building infrastructure doesn't do that. Neither do tax cuts.

But if we want to spend money on infrastructure, we also can do that to good effect in the long run so long as it is necessary, for then and only then will it pay double: once when we hire people to build it and once when commerce uses it. But we have to spend and keep on spending, probably for at least a decade. Why? Because all those people who have the skills to build the infrastructure have had jobs lately. They have run up debt, because that is how we have been living for twenty years or so. And until they have paid down their debt to the point at which they feel secure, they won't spend freely either. As to the estimate that we need a decade, ask yourself how long it took you to get your financial house in order the last time you got into trouble.

Copyright © 2009 by Michael Wolf.

Dear America,

Rick Perry has now deemed it appropriate to comment on the Obama administration's foreign policy as if he knows anything about it. He characterized it as "disastrous" without once acknowledging that it started with President Bush's decision to invade two sovereign nations, one on a pretext and the other in lieu of something more appropriate like either a covert operation to catch a fanatical conspirator or a police action to apprehend the leader of an international extremist group like the mafia or some of those posse comitatus types out west, thus giving al Qaeda the status of a nation by declaring war on it. True, the Obama administration's decision to expand the war in Afghanistan by adding troops seems ill-advised in retrospect, but it was logical in that a similar strategy in Iraq had previously yielded some at least colorable success in the American effort there. But Rick Perry, who seems to think that the policy of The Fed as propounded by Ben Bernanke-- originally an appointee of the Bush administration-- is not just improper but treasonous, presumes know better. We have a man leading the Republican race for the presidential nomination in 2012 who thinks that the mentality of a cowboy qualifies him to opine on any subject regardless of how remote from his experience or acumen. And what are the Republican alternatives.

There is Michelle Bachman, who appears to be the paradigm for the Perry candidacy, both in terms of intellectual overreaching and outrageous political hyperbole. Her continual gaffs on the subjects on which she chooses to pontificate demonstrate how egregiously unqualified she is to be president. Imagine her making policy decisions on public health when all it took was for someone from the audience at a speech she made complaining that her daughter had become mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine to conclude that the vaccine actually caused mental retardation...a proposition for which there is absolutely no evidence whereas the risks incurred by failing to get the vaccination-- specifically cervical cancer in women-- is documented and scientifically demonstrated.

But even the more mainstream candidate, Mitt Romney, is no prize. Perry is constantly bragging about his success in creating jobs in Texas, but he never gives any details. For example, the Texas oil industry hired a large number of Texans in the years when Perry has been governor of the state, and that had nothing to do with him; it had more to do with outlandish profiteering by those oil companies, which were there when Perry got elected and will be there when he's gone. There was also a 42% increase in employment in the Rio Grande Valley when employment in the nation as a whole grew by only 1%, but the median wage of those workers was just $8.14 per hour, and twenty five percent of them earned less than $6.19 per hour. The Dallas Fed reported that per capita income in the two metropolitan areas in the valley was the lowest and the second lowest in the nation. So the employment boom that Perry claims to his credit was no bargain for those employed in it. And you would think that Romney would be pointing these things out, but it seems that he is not too eager to have his own record of job creation scrutinized. For one thing, during Romney's tenure as Governor of Massachusetts, the state ranked just about dead in the middle of the fifty states for job creation: not much of a record to stand on unless you think that being average is a qualification for the presidency. And then there is his claim that he knows how to create jobs because he has been in business. The business he was in was taking over companies, and sometimes liquidating them, thus destroying jobs as well as creating them, if he created any at all. And all the while, both Romney and Perry complain that President Obama is incompetent and that they know what should be done, whichthey generalize as more of the same supply side malarky that got us into this mess. Unfortunately, they seem to be keeping the details a secret.

But the Republican Party is not totally devoid of rationality and public spirit. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has announced that he is resigning his Republican leadership posts in The Senate so that he can accomplish more. However, since the power of party leadership is key to getting what they want for their constituents, Senators struggle to gain more of it as they work in Washington, and they protect it zealously when they get it, so Alexander's claim that he wants to get more done seems dubious as a rationale for giving up his power. And when he is interviewed, the encoded responses he gives to inquiries as to his underlying motives make it clear that he has had enough of partisanship as a motive for casting votes in congress, and he wants to continue in his bipartisan mode of operation rather than be cowed by the rest of the Republican leadership, whose sole motive in every debate of issues is to gain power in both congress and the White House. I suspect that the Republicans were threatening to take his leadership posts away, and he finally decided that enough was enough. So it's too bad that Alexander isn't the choice of the Republican Party: someone both competent and fair minded. But now that I think about it, that probably disqualifies him if you're a Republican.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am loathe as a matter of general principle to criticize even conservatives on the basis of religious doctrine for their political leanings and behavior...not because it is unjust, but because it is unbecoming to do so. However, now that Rick Perry has emerged as the force with which to be reckoned in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, unbecoming or not it seems necessary. After all, the platform from which he runs started out as the podium of a "Day of Prayer" revival meeting in which the religious right displayed not its righteousness, but its unctuousness, and about a thing like that something needs to be said. Perry subscribes to the "live by the sword, die by the sword" doctrine when it comes to justifying capital punishment, and he claims Christian virtue for himself and his supporters every chance he gets, so if The Bible is to be his strength, he will have to live with all of it.

As I consider his position on the death penalty, I can't help thinking about Genesis. Genesis is one particular part of The Bible that is singularly pertinent to Mr. Perry's philosophy. In particular, there is that part in Genesis (4:9) where God asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain replies, "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" As we all know, God didn't like that, and he was especially upset when he heard Abel calling out from under the ground, so much so that he exiled Cain so that he would be scorned everywhere he went on the earth, and the earth itself would yield nothing up to him. But when Cain adjured God to protect him because everyone he met would surely want to kill him, God put a mark on Cain to warn all the world that anyone who killed Cain would have Cain's fate visited on himself seven fold. So, I guess The Bible stands for the proposition that God can take a life, but no man has the right to do so. So much for support in The Scriptures for capital punishment. And then there is the "...am I my brother's keeper" part, which has more than one significance it would seem.

The Affordable Health Care Act-- "Obamacare" as Perry and his party...the Tea Party...prefer to call it-- brings to mind that phrase as well as "and the meek shall inherit the earth," just to reiterate a couple from a Bible-- especially the Gospels, which are accounts of Christ's life and teachings-- that is all about such principles. You know, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," and the Beatitude "Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth"...etc. The plan is intended to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, and to penalize those who can but decline to do so, so it seems very Biblical in its conceptual framework to me, like the parable about the toilers in the vineyard, but not to Perry and the Tea Partyers. Most important to them is that The Government be stopped from dictating to them, even for the collective good. Of course they don't mind when The Government kills someone in their name. (Apparently their Bibles don't have the story of Cain and Abel in them.) But when that same government requires that someone's health be provided for, that is tyrannical to the Tea Party. And what about the story of the Good Samaritan. The Tea Partyers who tend toward red neck-ism should love that one; it's kind of a barroom tale. A Jew, a Christian and a Samaritan walk by a guy bleeding and dieing by the side of the road... Of course, we all know that the Samaritan stops to help, and Jesus recounts this tale with favor in the Book of Luke. He means it to be instructive to all those who follow Him. But apparently Perry and the Tea Party haven't heard that one, or perhaps they just don't see the parallel between us seeing to healing each other as a society, that is through our government, and the Samaritan seeing to the healing of a dieing man he doesn't know. Incidentally, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? What about them?

Perry and his supporters should be thankful that the United States is a secular nation. If it weren't, it would most likely be a Judeo-Christian theocracy, and the story of the Samaritan would not be just a homily, it would be the law. And the story of Cain? Governor Perry would be suffering seven times about 234, that being the number of people he has presided over executing. But in Governor Perry's defense, I have to assume that he just doesn't have the time to read the Bible. He can read, can't he?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has come to a collective realization that the Democrats have not yet reached as a group. The Rcc has been clamoring for tax cuts to stimulate business ever since the first stimulus package was put together, on which occasion they succeeded, but now they are resorting to a classic tactic of their business constituency on the subject of business taxation: bait and switch. More of their tax cuts have now been proposed by the opposition, specifically President Obama in his most recent stimulus proposal, but the Republicans are now discounting the effects of those tax cuts and demanding deregulation instead. The Rcc is now demonstrating why conciliation is never a good tactic when they are involved.

In an interview with NPR, Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesar's Palace, the strategy was unveiled. He was asked about President Obama's stimulus proposal, and specifically about the tax cuts for business in the context of what business needed to stimulate job growth and the economy. Loveman made the point that many of us have been making for quite a while-- that business and industry are already sitting on mountains of cash and giving them more won't accomplish anything. To his credit, he added that business now had the responsibility to innovate, as his company is doing with its multi-billion dollar entertainment complex in Las Vegas, which will add all kinds of leisure activities to the gambling franchise that has been the company's mé tier in the past. Corporate America must diversify its activities according to Loveman, and thus find new ways to generate profits, and hence employment opportunities. But taxes, and even cuts in taxes, have nothing to do with it.

Then in the New York Times a few days later, William Walker, CEO of Walker & Dunlop, a commercial real estate financing company, stated his opinion in a piece on the subject, and like Loveman, discounted the effects of tax cuts on growth. He pointed out that the Fortune 100 have killed 2.5 million jobs in this country over the past decade while creating 2.4 million abroad, thus increasing their profits-- profit being the primary measure of the economy when things like GDP are calculated as opposed to using the economic well-being of the average American as the standard for economic health-- while depleting the wealth of the rest of us. Thus, he implies, President Obama's decision to rely on the advice of people like GE CEO Jeff Immelt may be ill-advised, and some of his other suggestions, like infra-structure projects galore and resurrection of Glass-Steagall rather than perfection of Dodd-Frank regulations, and alleviation of the mortgage crisis so as to reconstitute the value of home equity, are bravely counter-conservative. Mind you, while Walker demonstrates his preference for reason over venal advocacy of Rcc orthodoxy in this regard, he is full of self-serving opinions on other topics like health care, Medicare and Medicaid in particular, regulation and claims of business uncertainty. But as far as tax cuts for business are concerned, he like most other conservatives seems to recognize that, as Bill Clinton and every other good old boy says, that dog won't hunt in light of the record profits flowing into business coffers. That leaves him and the Rcc in general free to pursue those other conservative goals involving entitlements and regulations without the millstone of more tax relief for the rich hanging like a millstone around their necks.

So now, enrichment of business having been accomplished with the tax cuts in the first stimulus package-- which comprised about 40% of that program-- and the de facto defeat of Dodd-Frank via the Machiavellian political maneuvering of the Republican Party, business men no longer need to importune for tax relief or the repeal of a law that they stripped of its effectiveness in committee and thwarted in the process of implementation through their political surrogates in Washington. They can concentrate on the rest of their program. And where does that leave President Obama? He is now the proponent of a tax relief program that the Republican Party realizes it cannot sell without losing seats in congress, so the Democrats will lose those seats instead and the Republican business constituency will get more tax breaks than they can use...and of course they aren't going to give the money back. They're going to give out bigger bonuses this year after the Democrats overcome Republican resistance to give still more money to those who already have too much.

There are good ideas in The President's package: mortgage relief, infra-structure projects, reinvigoration of schools and public services like law enforcement and public safety and the FICA tax reduction for employees, though FICA relief for business is something that even business men admit will not create jobs or stimulate demand. But the tax issue, which the liberal constituency will abhor eventually after the Republicans have at them, will be just one more piece of bad news emanating from the Oval Office. The Republicans can't even lose for losing. Unfortunately, the Democrats can.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Just a note today in honor of the Republican presidential candidate debate of September 12. It was the first time that I have seen them, that is the cream of the Republican Party, in action together. And I must say that the quality of the Republican field, assuming that it was more or less complete last night, is woefully lacking-- a problem for the Republican Party-- but frighteningly reactionary, which is a problem for all of us. At one point, the moderator, Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked Congressman Ron Paul a hypothetical about a thirty year old man who elected not to buy health insurance but then became desperately ill and went to the hospital. He asked the congressman what should be done, and Paul's response was that we, as taxpayers, should not have to be responsible for the choices of others. Blitzer then asked Paul if the hospital should let the man die, at which point there came from the raucous audience the answer yes from several people. The shock and embarrassment of those on the stage, including Blitzer, was palpable, and Paul, whose initial response had invited that callous display from the Tea Party audience, stumbled all over himself to find an alternative solution until he finally came up with the claim that in his day as a young physician, the churches took care of people who had no insurance.

It has been my opinion for a long time that there is some poor quality thinking going on in Washington, but that moment in the debate, and the debate as a whole, changed that notion painfully to a demonstrable, or I suppose I should say demonstrated, truth. The Tea Party and these people who are running for president by pandering to them for their votes, are the worst of what we Americans have become as a nation. I respect and rely upon the right of the American people to diverse opinions, but there comes a point when by right or not, our opinions are ugly, if not vile. Between Newt Gingrich evading every issue with a convoluted exposition on what ever topic he thought close enough to the area of the question to suffice without being subject to argument by rational people and Rick Perry telling Michelle Bachman that he was insulted by her claim that he had been corrupted by a mere $5,000 campaign contribution when he had raised millions, apparently as a matter of the scale of the bribe required to corrupt him rather than his corruptibility in general, the quality of thought displayed was an embarrassment to the nation. These are the best of the Republican Party? Bachman castigated Perry for requiring all female children over twelve to get the HPV vaccine even though Perry's executive order to that effect allowed anyone to opt out if she or her parents wished. Bachman thought it was unconstitutional, presumably because the vaccine is aimed at preventing socially transmitted diseases, including certain cancers, rather than typhus or whooping cough, the vaccines for which apparently don't offend The Constitution in her little mind. And Perry conceded that his order had been a mistake because the reactionaries in the audience applauded when Bachman held forth on the topic.  And then there's Perry's complete lack of understanding of what Social Security is and what it has done to improve the quality of life in America all these years...for all of us.

What frightens me most is that one of these people might become our president because of a rising tide of callousness, materialism, and while I hesitate to say it I feel I must, ungodliness obscured by the fact that these people all go to church every week. I don't know about you, but I'm keeping my passport current.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

After The President's speech of last Thursday, I am tempted to speculate as to whether the Barrack Obama who showed up in the well of The Congress to give the speech is the one who will finish out the first two terms of the Obama administration, or the one who went to the oval office every day for the previous twenty months and will finish out the one and only term of his presidency. If the latter is the case, the force and merit of the arguments made that night will have all been for naught. But if it is the former-- if the Barrack Obama for whom a majority of the American people voted in 2008 finishes out the next two years of the Obama administration-- history may well be made as it was in the Johnson years, the Clinton years, and even those of FDR. If Congress doesn't respond to The President's admonition that it should pass his bill, and if he does go forth from The White House to explain to the American people how The Congress has failed them when the opportunity to serve was laid in their collective lap, the composition of Congress will change in 2012 and the Democrats will have their second chance in eighty years to renew American hegemony in the development of evolved political philosophy. As Mr. Obama said, what we have become is not who we are quintessentially. We are a nation of compassionate people who take responsibility for one another's well being. We respect the virtue of collective effort toward a single goal: that of enhancing the common weal. We do provide for one another when necessary while encouraging independent action for self-preservation and self-betterment. That is what made this nation a success. That is how we made to work in the modern world a form of government that hadn't been seen since Sparta and Athens were city-states...as an alternative to aristocracy and autocracy. And that is what it will take for this nation to perdure. But if the other Obama keeps showing up in the Oval Office every day, the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) will preside over the dismantling of what may have been the greatest social experiment ever to occur...and fail in the end. It is daunting to realize that one man may make all the difference. And if the great man finishes out the first Obama term, it will be tempting to wonder what he would have done if he hadn't gone astray at first.

To start with, he could have confronted his own party before confronting the Republicans. In the first months of his administration, he could have gone to Nancy Pelosi and cajoled her into shepherding the middle class portion of the Bush era tax cuts through a massively Democratic Congress without the $70 billion per year cuts for the richest 2% of Americans. He then could have gone to Majority Leader Harry Reid in The Senate and cajoled him into doing the same, and it would have passed both houses if the same hammer lock had been applied to a couple of Democratic Senators (like Ben Nelson of Nebraska) and Congressmen (like Bart Stupak, the ring leader of the self-styled "Blue Dogs" of the Democrats in Congress) that the Republicans use to keep their members univocal with the party on their agenda. Doing so would have reduced the deficit by $700 billion over ten years, and the national debt by the same amount assuming that the middle class tax cuts could survive that long. Then, with that political victory on his resume, The President could have pushed the same contingent of senators and congressmen to pass a single payer health care plan, and he might well have succeeded given the momentum that the victory on taxes would have provided. Over that same ten year period, the percentage of our GDP spent on health care would have dropped from the 15% that it constitutes now to the 10% spent by the nation with the next most expensive health care in the world, Germany. And with commensurate tax increases to offset relief from the burden of paying for care directly or through government funded private health insurance, 5% of our GDP would have been liberated for the creation of greater wealth for all of us, not just those who already have more than they can use. At that point, a juggernaut would have emerged, and the pursuit of a humanistic agenda would have been almost unstoppable. With universal healthcare in the style of Medicare and a tax structure that was equitable and inimical to the accretion of Sybaritic amounts of wealth, the broadest and deepest distribution of well-being possible would have been guaranteed. And all it would have required would have been a couple of summonses to the Oval Office.

But that is all fantasy. The real question is whether Mr. Obama will now call on the American people to make sure they understand what still can be. I hope the real Barrack Obama stands up.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I was dismayed, and frankly angered, by what I read in a commentary by Jonathan Chait in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. Mr. Chait is the senior editor of The New Republic, a liberal journal that has been respected for at least two generations. I read The New Republic when I was in college in the sixties. My father subscribed and he would send me his copies the week after he received and read them. In my formative years, it was illuminating to read the ideas of what could be called the progressive establishment of the day, but as I got older, I found myself craving more hard facts and less opinion, so by the time I graduated from college I was reading other things. None the less, to my thinking The New Republic has been a voice for informed humanism and liberal thinking, inclusiveness and egalitarianism, but Mr. Chait has now disabused me of that notion. And unfortunately, it seems possible that our President is of Mr. Chait's mind as to who and what matter in our society.

At this point, it seems appropriate to quote Mr. Chait. He took up a discussion of the $800 billion stimulus package passed by congress in 2009 just months after President Obama was inaugurated. He said,

The list of disturbing aspects of that statement is rather long, but I'll start with the obvious: who told Chait that "Congress, pundits and business leaders" are everybody who matters. To start off slow, I think I matter, and I think you matter. I think Robert Reich and Paul Krugman matter, and even David Brooks matters in my opinion. And then there're the rest of the American people, by whom Mr. Obama and Congress are employed in their current occupations, I believe. But let me set aside the snarkiness and be direct. The problem today is that those whom Mr. Chait deems to matter, those whom he considers moderate, are really the advance cadre of the conservative ethos: Bill Daley, Jeffrey Immelt and the like. (Daley was a vice president at J.P. Morgan before becoming President Obama's chief of staff and Immelt is the CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal income taxes in 2010, and he is the chairman of President Obama's Jobs and competitiveness commission.) They come from business...big business, and they are rich, which doesn't necessarily make them conservative toadies though I think many of them are. But it does cloud their judgment with conflicts of interest, and then-- at least in the cases of Immelt and Daley whom The President brought into the White House as advisors-- they are proliferating those conflicts and involving The President. These are people who think that the free market comprises plutocrats in board rooms and CEO's meeting on the golf course at swanky hotels in Cabo. But the free market is not about controlling regulation or freeing business from constraints that have been a century in the creating...out of necessity, mind you. The free market is the consumer buying goods and services that provide the best value for the cost, and frankly, but woefully, the free market doesn't work anymore. It is self-destructive, which is what is happening now. We are eating ourselves. We buy foreign because it is cheaper, though most often not better, and then we moan when American manufacturers send their jobs overseas, leaving no one but the unemployed to buy American products, which they can't afford, resulting in more unemployment and more jobs going overseas. Nor do the executives who send those jobs overseas have the best interests of the nation in mind. Their interest is in the profits of their companies, which do not translate to universal wealth though they would have us believe that they do. They go into a few pockets and reinforce all of the bad behavior that got us here, most of which derives from corporate power. President Obama will not learn how he can help us all by consulting these men, whether they are the ones that matter or not, but they are the ones from whom he has chosen to take counsel. And now comes Mr. Chait, elliptical in his citation of recent history to suit his purpose of chastening the liberal establishment, suggesting that President Obama is doing the right thing by following the conservative, supply-side star to the promised land. But history demonstrates that regulation is necessary to prevent corporate predation. And statutory restraints on business to, for example, encourage them to keep jobs here and penalize them for sending those jobs abroad-- a bill that the Republicans in The Senate killed-- are necessary as well, as are more egalitarian taxation, collective bargaining, reform of the financial system and corporate governance, and many more things that the plutocracy that actually runs our country from the board room does't want.

Ironically, what Chait started his criticism of liberals and progressives with is, contrary to his purpose, the undoing of his argument. It is true that the Pelosi congress proposed a $500 billion stimulus package, but the Republicans in The House and a handful of "Blue Dog" Democrats resisted, demanding tax cuts in exchange for the proposed spending package. Thus, $500 billion of infra-structure-based stimulus became stimulus plus a sop for the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) in the amount of $320 billion in mostly business tax cuts. And that was the objection to Mr. Obama's plan...not its size, but its constitution. Business didn't need another $320 billion in its collective pocket, and the United States didn't need another $320 billion added to the deficit and the debt about which the Rcc was already complaining. And the proof that business didn't need the help is the fact that there is now $2.5 trillion in profits sitting in corporate bank accounts waiting not for the rainy day that is here, but for a sunny one that will only enhance their already gilded assets. Business has not used the largess of the American people to benefit us all and stimulate our economy. It has used the money to stay rich and get richer still. The Obama stimulus was excessive because it gave hundreds of billions of dollars to people who didn't need it, and it was inadequate because it didn't give enough to those who did.

There is plenty for which to find fault with the liberal establishment, and specifically there is much to discredit the Democratic leadership of congress. Like The President, they have been timorous in their pursuit of the Democratic agenda. But that doesn't absolve Mr. Obama for his apostasy regarding the progressive goals attributed to him that led all of us who thought he stood for them to vote for him in 2008. I guess that's why I'm not going back to reading the New Republic. It's senior editor seems to have gone that route too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last week we were treated to the spectacle of our President being rebuffed by the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives when Mr. Obama asked to address Congress this coming Wednesday. When asked, The Speaker apparently said maybe, but then he thought about it and realized that he was in the cat bird seat: an opportunity that the chief pettiness officer of the Republican Congress found too good to pass up. So, in an attempt to show President Obama that he was not the boss of him, Speaker Boehner told The Commander in Chief of the United States that he might be mighty elsewhere, but in the Congress he was just another president. "Barrack who?" Boehner effectively said, and with that the speech was set for Thursday, hardly a difference worth arguing over, and The President took it that way, but Boehner got the last laugh-- the last snicker, really-- while The President walked away from the skirmish with nothing but one more small wound to lick. And there is a sense in which President Obama got what he deserved. He is going before the congress to supplicate. He wants to proffer a job creation program...at last...and he seems to feel the need to go down the street to their house to ask for their permission and cooperation. He thinks that doing so is a display of the spirit of compromise, but there has been no compromising with the Republicans, so all this really is is a show of weakness...one more time. It is like a child going to school every day and offering the class bully his lunch money in the hope that he won't get punched, which he always does, and deciding that tomorrow he is going to try something new. He is going to go to the bully's house and offer him the money before school thinking that such a gesture of goodwill will mollify the villain. There isn't a chance in hell, nor in congress either, but unlike that school child, Mr. Obama should know better.

Besides, The President has no business going to congress with his plan to ask them if it's okay. He should be asking us. But, let's concede-- for the sake of argument and the benefit of the doubt-- that asking to speak to congress was a courtesy extended by the chief executive. If he had any fortitude, he would have said to them, "I have a major proposal to make, and I would like to come down to present it to you in person on Wednesday...to speak to you directly and to the American people at the same time," and left it to them to accept. Then, when they said that wasn't good for them-- they might have a vote to take at 6:30 that night-- he should have said, "Well then, you can watch the speech on television when you get done, because I am addressing the American people on Wednesday evening whether it's from your house or mine." Capitulation is not the only way to stand above the petty fray, but it's a damn good way to show timorous deference.

And then there's the content of the speech to consider.

Of course, we haven't heard it yet, so there is no way to be sure that it is more of the same that he has been giving us for the past year or more, but last week there was an indication that it will be. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) determined, based on the work of its scientists, that standards for emission of ozone-- which by the way is toxic to human beings and other living things-- needed to be tightened for the benefit of the American people, and they promulgated a regulation lowering the amount of permissible emissions of ozone, this after the Bush administration had raised it in deference to the Rcc's (Republican conservative complex's) business-first wishes. But President Obama overruled the EPA, against the advice of its Secretary (an Obama appointee), and decided to leave the ozone standard as it is citing what he presumed to be a negative impact on job creation. All his announcement left out was the favored Rcc phrase "job killing regulation." Our "Republicrat" president, in a pragmatic (and I use the word in its most contemptible sense) attempt to prevent the Republicans from campaigning against him on this issue, conceded to them instead. But President Obama fails to recognize-- and I think this is why he will not be reelected-- that he can't win an election against a Republican opponent by being more of a Republican. He beat John McCain by being more of a Democrat. And by coincidence, David Brooks said something similar last Friday on NPR.

Brooks was talking about Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, and he was responding to the observation that Perry was now the front runner. He said that if Romney wants to beat Perry, his best bet would probably be to pledge to preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid rather than taking the Norquist pledge not to raise taxes, and I have felt something similar to be the case for a long time. If Romney were to take credit for the idea that became what the Rcc derisively calls "Obamacare," and it is an idea that came out of his administration as Governor of Massachusetts, he could appeal to the more than 60% of Americans who favored a single payer system during the Bush years. By sacrificing the support of the Tea Party, he could win over everyone else. And though I deplore Romney's supply side mentality, we're getting that with President Obama anyway, which would make it that much harder to vote for Mr. Obama again. So if Romney wins the Republican nomination, our president will have only one way to distinguish himself from the Republican candidate: that he subscribes to consumer side economics rather than supply side. He might as well start now...and he'd better if he wants my vote.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Politics in America never ceases to amaze me. I cannot understand why so many of us are willing to let so few do so many bad things to us. The Republican constituency on the "Super Committee" established when the debt ceiling was recently raised is starting to meet and to leak its preliminary positions on the issues. It is no surprise that their minds haven't changed. And from all appearances, it seems likely that the Democrats will roll over again to allow themselves and the nation to be dictated to by the plutocracy comprising the big banks, the executives in control of heavy industry and the super rich who are in the business of making money out of money rather than producing anything or providing any services, that in reality controls governance in this country today. The Republicans are now focusing on "tax reform," which is a euphemism for lower taxes for those who least need tax relief, and it should be no surprise that this is the wave of the future. Many of you may remember when Steve Forbes, the son of Forbes Magazine's eponymous founder, Malcolm Forbes, ran for president. He ran on only one real issue: what he called the flat tax. It came to about 17% for everyone, which frankly is about what most middle class taxpayers pay after deductions for mortgage interest and state taxes. But the rich pay a higher percentage of their income, and thus their taxes will be reduced by a flat tax. Once more, the rich will be rewarded for being rich and the rest of us will have to pay more because the reduction in federal revenue created by the flat tax will require reduction of government services and benefits. If they succeed in foisting the flat tax uon us, Social Security will ultimately be merged into the general fund and benefits will be reduced to prevent budget deficits. Similarly, Medicare and Medicaid will be sharply curtailed, all of this being the goal of the Republican conservative complex all along. They will have succeeded in eroding the social safety net-- created by The President elected when the last depression struck-- to recreate the socio-economic order that prevailed in 1929 in which the vast preponderance of wealth was in the hands of a tiny minority of Americans, who controlled our society from bottom to top. Once again the rich and the sanctimonious will dictate our moral and ethical code as a nation as well as the allocation of the resources that we all have played a role in producing-- a dark augury, I know.

Still, there is a chance that our President can save us. The tax reform that is in the offing runs parallel to the proposal in the Simpson-Boles report, which President Obama rejected as did most all Republicans and Democrats alike. But disturbingly, Senator Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington State, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican self-promoter, released a joint statement revealing the appointment of Mark Prater, who currently serves as deputy staff director and chief tax counsel for the Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee, to be the staff director of the new committee. I would imagine that Murray was appointed to the committee to counterbalance another of Senate Majority Leader Reid's appointments, Senator Max Baucus, but she has already let the Republican leadership put its nose inside the tent with this concurrence on the appointment of Prater, an aid to Senator Orin Hatch, who is no friend to progressive causes. So it appears that the Democratic Party is once again preparing to hand the keys to the country to the Republicans, and if anyone can save us from ourselves, it will have to be President Obama...or it could be events themselves.

Fears about a second recession in our immediate future are now being bandied about by some well known economists, and with their comments goes the usual hand wringing. But in my opinion, a second recession is just what we need. Things are not getting better for us common people, though business sits atop a constantly growing pile of money. So, what do we care if a recession hits in light of the fact that all a recession is, after all, is two consecutive quarters of "negative growth." In the final analysis, the negative growth in question is nothing more than corporate losses instead of profits, and just as the profits went into corporate coffers, the losses will too, but we will be no worse off. The profits weren't going in our pockets anyway, not even indirectly. Corporate money is sitting on the sidelines waiting for a sunny day rather than funding expansion of manufacturing or services that would create jobs for us, so let the corporations experience our rainy day with us. A second recession won't make anything worse for working America...or perhaps I should say out-of-work America. It will hurt only business, and once corporations start feeling the need to do something, perhaps something will be done...by them since they are holding all the cash. Once they understand that by withholding they diminish their own prospects, they will stop withholding. There is no lack of self-interest in corporate America. We've been kicked in the teeth, but so far they haven't felt any pain. Maybe now's the time. Maybe they will finally realize that the consumer's wealth is the source of their own, and without either corporate public expansion or government stimulation of our economy-- which the Republicans are preventing with their obdurate insistence on spending cuts as opposed to stimulus spending-- corporate America has nothing. And another recession may be just the proof of that point that they need.

Your friend,

Mike