Aiming at the Wrong Target

In the public discussion on the tragedy at Newtown, Ct. I’ve heard a phrase delivered several times, and it makes me grimace.  It’s not new, used after similar, albeit less horrific, heartbreaking events.  It calls for action so this “will never happen again”. This goal or target not only holds within it instant and prolong failure, it causes the corrective action, whatever that might be, to point us in the wrong direction.  It does more harm than good. I use a target or shooting metaphor here because this particular problem is a paradoxical truth about guns in America: that the collective ownership of these weapons is not bad, but how we as a society feel about them is.

Once again the argument that guns don’t kill, people kill is trotted out.  On a national evening radio talk show I even heard, to my astonished ears, the featured guest suggest the massacre was part of an ongoing left-wing conspiracy (without challenge from the radio host).  We will also hear the proposed solution that if most everybody was “packing” such nut cases as (the now temporarily infamous) Adam Lanza could not have carried out his plans, or at least not with the same carnage. The fact that there are countries that have higher per capita gun ownership than the US yet effectively no such large scale incidents (such as Canada or Switzerland) are also given to bolster the only people kill argument.  There are parts to many such arguments which are valid, but it is also a fact that it is bullets, not ill will, which are passing through the bodies of the victims.

What is different about today regarding mass gun killings than in prior generations?  Conservative columnist David Brooks argues in the New York Times that at least since the beginning of the 1900s such gun killing sprees have appeared with regularity worldwide, if not in some cyclical fashion. He essentially says that we might be experiencing an uptick in such events now, but such variations have precedent going back a century or more.  Given that the US population today is 4 times that of 1900 there is argument to be made for consistency, even if the raw numbers have accelerated. What Brooks doesn’t clearly address is the nature of the shootings, which with the death of 20 children under the age of 7 is so devastatingly demonstrated.  It also doesn’t address the bigger issues, which are 1) the countless smaller gun killings which make news, but quickly vanish from the public memory, and 2) that in recent decades the vast majority of such major massacres in the world, almost 2/3, occur in the United States.

A 101 years ago last March, 143 women were killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City.  This was a pivotal event, which is why it has retained its historical significance.  It tipped the scale on what had been an ongoing problem; workplace conditions.  There had been many incidents of injury and death in the workplace throughout the Nation over many decades but little accomplished as a society to deal with it. There was a high level of resigned acceptance. The “injury” from workplace regulations, such as restricted freedom of the employer or compromising free and competitive enterprise kept even common sensible actions from taking place.  The Triangle fire altered the landscape.  The changes, which included new regulations, didn’t eliminate workplace disasters small or large. It did start something new though; a change in attitude on a national scale regarding working conditions by employees and employers alike.  The impact was far reaching even if the actual number of people whose lives were saved or improved over the years cannot be known.

The target in trying to curb wholesale gun violence is our national attitude about it and our inability to address it in a demonstrable way.  This nation, federally and locally, needs to enact a series of gun regulations, not because we expect that the inhabitants of the lunatic fringe will no longer unleash their insanity from time to time on the innocent, with guns or other means.  We need to do it to generate a different national consensus about guns that will affect new generations and subsequently shrink the size of the lunatic fringe - at least as it relates to gun violence.  Unfortunately, not only will the full extent of such regulations not immediately be felt, but the positive impact (how many killings avoided) will never be known. However, that is no excuse for not beginning the process. Perhaps these 20 children, like the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, will help start it.

The wrong course is to aim at the tragedy itself by elevating national fear, fear which is grossly disproportionate to the actual danger - thank our new informational age for that. We cannot build walls high enough, alarms loud enough, guards numerous enough, or personal intrusion deep enough to stop all Adam Lanzas from carrying out their sadistic fantasies or frustrations.  Those efforts only create a different, more invasive insanity for many, many more people.  We can only attempt to produce less Adam Lanzas by making the use of guns less acceptable to subsequent generations. If Adam and his mother had grown up with different attitudes toward guns, how might things have been different? We start by restricting gun availability, which is simply a social statement of where we want to be.

The General's Lover

The wonderful thing about a DVR connected to the TV is, once a program is copied, you can skip through what you don’t want to view…truly lovely.  Dodging commercials alone is worth the cost of the unit.  If I could only dodge pharmaceutical commercials it would still be worth it.  It also allows me to skip through parts of news or commentary programming I find less meaningful or redundant.  As it happens, with me being a bit of a news junkie and using the DVR accordingly, I have found myself fast forwarding through such programs so often over the past few days that I have stop watching the news at all. That’s probably a good thing.  However, the reason behind this motivation is fascinating and worthy of reflection.

After the historic re-election of Barack Obama, and I believe it will be viewed as having more historical importance than most Presidential elections (including Obama’s first), there was much for the news media to consider, things that have major importance to nearly every person in the country, whether they know or care about it at all.  Instead there has been virtually days spent reporting on General/Director David Petraeus’ affair with his young biographer and how the knowledge of that affair found its way into the public and political domain.  My point is that there is not a dearth of things to talk about and yet the discussion and analysis of this event, which in its most basic form is simply the resignation of a Federal agency’s director, dominates air time.  There are territorial fights and pissing contests over who should have known what and when. So far there has not been any suggestion of a breach of national security. Considering the FBI has had months to uncover such, it leads one to surmise none will be found.  So what warrants this story transcending ordinary news about a fall from grace?  Quite possible the answer to that is nothing.  Rather, it is more likely to be characteristic of our age and a new formula that mixes human behavior, media ratings, and, of course, cyberspace.

Petraeus’ infidelity has real and honest consequences to himself and his family.  It is not a rare behavior, but the meaning of it falls exclusively within the realm of his personal life.  No one outside that circle can know how judgment might or should be applied - speculate as they might.  So what is it that currently generates a seemingly endless commentary?  Was this always the case?  Hardly.

I am quite willing to make the leap, without statistical evidence, that Petraeus’ affair happens plenty often in the rarefied air of political hierarchy, just as it does with the wealthy movers and shakers in the private sector.  When Bill Clinton was asked why he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinski he simply and profoundly answered “because I could”.  When it comes to older, powerful (often wealthy) men having sexual affairs with attractive younger women it’s hard to find a more compelling enabler.  None of this is new, but the times have definitely changed.

Certainly as late as the Presidency of John Kennedy, the clandestine sexual trysts of powerful politicians were not considered relevant to their governance.  This attitude was not only held by the participating bureaucrat and his aides, but also by his rivals and the media.  How Kennedy’s affairs were handled by those around him and the media is astounding in light of how such is handled today.  Franklin Roosevelt managed to partake in a wheelchair for god sakes. Even Eisenhower, beloved Ike, as General and Commander of Allied Forces (and perhaps later) could dally about without scrutiny.  Fast forward to Bill Clinton whose few very un-romantic, back hallway encounters nearly brought down the entire Federal Government. This is the world David Petraeus chose to carry out his age old rite of the elites.

The Theocons (faith based Conservatives) of this age relish in expanding their ethical judgments, regarding sex in particular, to the general public, attempting to identify such behavior as the kind of deprivation which is everything they’re not.  The popular media runs with it because they believe the general public’s appetite for scandal is insatiable and profits are just way too important.  Add to that the new reality that these powerful dabblers are not smart enough to realize that email sent across cyberspace is about as secure as their zippers and provide an accounting of their activities in (duh) written form.  All the conspiracies and politicking that surrounds these circus events are just bad noise.

I liked it better the old way.  Let these men (and sometimes women) be judged by the policies they promote and enact.  If their behavior calls for them to impale themselves, let that lance be held by their spouses.  I’m just glad I’ve got a DVR.

The Referendum

A debate could rage for another year regarding the qualities of one presidential candidate over the other.  I certainly see an obvious outcome to that debate as the weaknesses of Mitt Romney and the radical Republican philosophies are profound.  However, the real identifiable outcomes of this election can be boiled down to three distinct choices, which are the true referendums of this election:

1)     The Supreme Court – The choice of the next President will determine whether the Supreme Court will become a socially Conservative judicial body or remain balanced.  Elect Mitt Romney and likely justices Ginsburg and Kennedy will be replaced by men or women more resembling Justice Alito.  This will impact a host of social and security decisions from abortion to marriage to privacy to drugs to regulations to political funding and beyond, and it will do so indefinitely. The ramifications could be immense.  

2)     Health Care – Although Romney has proclaimed like a conquering Caesar that “on day one” he will remove the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA), it is unlikely that he would or could.  Still, Obama during this election process has repeatedly failed to point out what was really important about the AHCA. The real importance is not where the Act has taken us to; rather it is where it has taken us from.  It is a flawed insurance reform law created with senseless compromise, failing to adequately address the most difficult problem – cost.  However, where this country was prior to AHCA was truly insane and getting worse (see this blog Health Care…No Relief in Sight Aug 26, 2008) and the AHCA at least got us to take a step out of the crazy house.  The election of Romney would begin to work us back to reinforcing a dominant for-profit health care system, which primarily benefits a select minority of the Country, and delaying by many years the necessary evolution to universal and affordable healthcare.  Such health care is simply not possible without centrally controlled costs in lieu of massive debt and/or services denied.

3)     Taxes – This is the only referendum that is a quantitative reality immediately after the election.  If Romney is elected the Bush tax cuts will be extended, if Obama is reelected they will be modified to lapse for upper income Americans.  It doesn’t matter what the makeup of Congress will be, as nether party will allow taxes to rise in the short term for lower income families.  The bigger and less definitive referendum, though, will be in how we address the use of taxes going forward. Unless Romney got working majorities in both Houses (including a super majority in the Senate – which is hardly likely) he would not be able to carry out his ridiculous 20% cut plan. He’s probably hoping he couldn’t. However, he would hold back any increase in revenues from income.  Instead, as he did in Massachusetts, he will start generating revenue through fees and excise taxes targeting his famed 47% as well as massive cuts to services.  To do otherwise would continue to balloon the debt.  Despite his political saber rattling, he won’t increase the military budget.  That’s just more cubic feet of what Jon Stewart calls Romney’s bullshit mountain.  If Obama is elected he needs to make the case for expanding the progressive tax system we have and that the public services we purchase with those tax dollars have at least the same value to the average citizen as anything they purchase in the private sector, and perhaps more.

So that’s it, the real choice with this election.  Most other issues, including jobs, gas, wages, energy, crime and birth control, to name a few, overstate the power the President has to effect change. The rest, such as character or honesty or personality or leadership are just subjective enough to keep the debate going, but I’m tired of the debate…how about you?

Why?

With this political season closing I am confounded.  Not only has reason decided to pick this season to go on vacation, but I’m left to conclude that the dynamics which may decide the political and judicial future of this country are found in the darkest corners of our National consciousness.

Barack Obama is at best holding a barely distinguishable lead in this contest.  Mitt Romney is potentially the next President. That’s right – Mitt Romney; a man whose only political leadership was that of a one term governor so divisive and unpopular that he couldn’t have been reelected, a man who has been rejected across the political spectrum as Presidential timber for seven years, a man who treats pragmatism as an art form – that Mitt Romney.

There is practically nothing real that has occurred in the past four years that should lead to this outcome a week before the election.  The only reason Romney is the Republican candidate at all is because the field of heavy-weight Republican politicians decided two years ago that the race was not winnable. The clown-like Republican Primary has clearly vanished from the collective memory of the American electorate. 

No one denies what the Nation was left with at the end of the Bush presidency.  Although not the direct cause, the Bush Administration and Congress had cultivated an atmosphere where politically connected financial barons, and the institutions they ran, could advance their self-interest with impunity.  The greed that evolved based on ever magically rising real estate values made no correction even as the cataclysmic outcome of falling housing values on derivatives became obvious to the major players. 

The resulting meltdown had the potential of eclipsing 1929 as a financial black hole.  Yet the Obama Presidency held court over a recovery which avoided anything like what was experienced in the 1930s and did so in spite of more obstructionist opposition than any President has faced since the Civil War.  Even if Obama’s failures as a communicator (see this blog – Handling Depression  9/9/12) hurt his ability to make his case, he still should be comfortably ahead in this election because of his successes and the actual outcomes.  His and the Democratic Party’s premier accomplishment, The Affordable Health Care Act, was used as a tool to drum the Democratic House majority into a minority, despite it being a major step away from the most dysfunctional health care system in the industrialized world.  Reason be damned.

We need to get real. Obama is barely holding onto his Presidency because he is so profoundly hated (not disagreed with – hated), and primarily by white men.  He has been vilified as a Communist, Socialist, Anarchist, radical Muslim, non-American (legally and emotionally), traitor, a Hitler, a Stalin, an anti-capitalist, anti-energy, anti-freedom, and (on occasion) anti-Christ  - who probably shoots kittens to get them out of the trees their stuck in, while still being anti-guns.  It makes no sense. Aside from some social issues, Obama is far closer to Ronald Reagan than he is to Jimmy Carter on all matters regarding the economy and National security, including health care. What really makes a significant majority of white men hate Obama is as simple as it is impervious to discussion – race.   

It is obvious that a large majority of African-Americans support and will vote for Obama based strictly on race.  Obama is projected to receive 95% of the black vote which carries with it no more legitimacy than race voting by white men.  The difference is in the numbers and intent.  According to the 2010 Census, white males in the US consist of numbers 3 times that of all Blacks in this country.  The ratio could be 4 or 5 times as many if one only considers those who vote. 

White men, especially with limited education, don’t see what Obama was handed and what he has accomplished because they don’t want to see it, or perhaps, more realistically, their bigotry won’t let them see it. Sure the Nation elected Barack Obama in 2008 because he appeared to be a young engaging leader who happened to be Black to boot, which some of those white men still encumbered with bigotry felt well about accepting.  However, it has now become obvious that we are much closer to the decades prior to 1960 than we thought.  When Romney Co-chair Gov. John Sununu suggested this week that Colin Powell had endorsed Obama due to race he (Sununu) was saying something far more telling about himself (and his peers) then about Powell.

Given time over these past 3 years and a concerted effort by a neo-conservative movement, tens of millions of white American men are allowing themselves to embrace their fears of lost supremacy.  To those who would argue to the contrary I offer as evidence Mitt Romney…their chosen alternative.

American Women - Pay Attention

The War on Women may seem more like the War for Women if one just stands back and listens to the rhetoric.  Sure, it’s about votes, but there is something else going on as well and American women need to pay close attention.

There is history, but it’s a history which isn’t very old.  The 19^th Amendment to the Constitution which gave women the right to vote wasn’t passed until August of 1920, a mere 91 years ago.  Think of it, there are still plenty of people alive today whose mothers lived at a time when they simply watched their husbands, fathers, and brothers march off to the polls to decide the future for them and their families.  That Constitutional milestone was hardly the successful culmination of the fight for equal rights. Rather, it was more like the first door being unlocked.  Since then women have continued to face locked doors, whether it be in employment, health care, social mobility, finance, and even property rights to name a few, and men have reluctantly given up the keys.  The end is not yet in sight; in fact it may actually be slipping away. This is a reality which can be hard for women to see beyond the attention they must give to their lives on any given day.

The origins of patriarchal societies covering the planet are irrelevant.  The relevancy is what has perpetuated this inequality between men and women throughout recorded history and up to this present day.  It is the use of faith based doctrine and theocratic governance which has provided men the justification to retain legal power over women.  It is no accident of history that the United States was one of the first countries to accept women’s suffrage in 1920, and in fact provided a model for countries around the world.  The crack in the hold men had over women in the US, leading to Women’s Suffrage, began with the creation of the Nation itself, which drew a strong distinction between the rule of law and religious doctrine.  Yet still after 236 years the glass, although covered in cracks, is still not broken.

This clear movement to resist the equality of women is evident in the rise of Theoconservatives championed by the Republican Party. They would have you believe the debate is simply about abortion.  It is not. Abortion is a tragic occurrence by essentially everyone’s standards and no one can fault a person’s emotional response to it, but if there is a God and he didn’t want women to make the decision as to the use of their bodies he would have designed them to lay eggs like chickens - then men could decided what went into the hatchery and what didn’t.  

No, it is not simply about abortion.  It is about the continuation of a faith based definition of what a woman is, how she should act, and is manifest in the powerful, extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. It’s not just in rhetoric you hear about God deciding who gets pregnant from a rape or designing women’s bodies to differentiate good sperm from evil sperm.  That’s just the tip of the testosterone iceberg.  It is the movement to an Old Testament, faith based creation of law which is threatening the gains women have made over the past 100 years. It should be no surprise that almost all the Conservative rhetoric you hear regarding women comes from men, that Congressional hearings lead by Republicans are testimonies primarily of men, and that a woman who seeks to argue her case for women can acceptably be labeled a slut.  Those are all echoes of 1919.

These are the same people, Romney, Ryan, and the male Republican leadership, who attack Islamic nations that use a faith based rationale to subjugate women.  Although they may rightly describe Islamic fundamentalist attitudes toward women as Neanderthal, American women need to wake up to the fact that even though this Theoconservatism carries a smaller club, it still lives in the same cave as their Middle Eastern brethren.

Are Americans Stupid?

Mitt Romney has proven himself to be what anyone with a pair of lazy eyes and one good ear could discern with ease. He is a master pragmatist like none other I have seen in my lifetime nor studied in history, and politicians generally are hopeless pragmatists.  He is a product of late 20th Century American business which chooses short term goals in the pursuit of increased shareholder equity over long term structural integrity, and by any means possible.  His almost dizzying display of changing positions, which has been correctly observed by commentators, pundits, opponents, and supporters, is only eclipsed by how little a difference this tact of Romney's has impacted American opinion. Combining with such things as his matter-of-fact refusal to release prior tax returns has made him the most opaque Presidential candidate in many decades. Yet it seems to make little difference, especially to white male voters. Is this the result of his campaign's cleverness, the incompetency of the Democratic opposition, or the revelation of a troubling ignorance on the part of the American people?

Without a doubt, the Democrats and the Obama Campaign have failed to address and convince the American electorate on the negative aspects of a leader of the Free World taking a unique position that compliments every group he speaks in front of. Romney has said the most outrageous things, sometimes repeatedly to fit the sales pitch he's giving at the moment and yet seems rarely to be challenged by the opposition. Therefore, the media takes little notice as well. Take numbers, which are simple to expose.

In all three debates Romney said definitively that 23 million Americans are unemployed (a statement made several times at the Republican convention as well) and that Obama's failure to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.4% (as Mitt said Obama promised) equals 9 million unemployed. Take the second point. If the difference between our current unemployment rate of 7.8% and 5.4% (or 2.4%) equals 9 million people than you must accept two conclusions: first that the population of the US is approximately 375 million (about 68 million more than reality) and that everyone other than the 9 million unemployed has a job, everyone - every child of all ages, every senior, every mother, every disabled person, every everyone has a job, including the 5.4%. The number of working Americans is a moving target, but if you take the estimated number of 155 million working Americans provided by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) it lowers Romney's proclamation down from 9 million to 3.7 million. That doesn't even take into consideration that 5.4% is deemed full employment for the nation. Has Romney been challenged on his ludicrous number by anyone? Not that I'm aware of.

The popular Republican number of 23 million unemployed has a few more subtleties. Although it was stated clearly as "unemployed" at the Republican convention and later by Romney, it has more recently been described as 23 million "looking for work". That's because the number was concocted by far right wing "fact-ories", using bias statistics to represent not just those unemployed, but also those who have stopped looking for work (which includes retirees - the largest subgroup in that category), those new workers who haven’t started looking for work but presumably would have had more jobs been available, those deemed "under-employed", and also those who feel their jobs unsatisfactory (a factor that arguably could included half of all working Americans). The BLS sets the current unemployment numbers at less than 12 million of which more than half is, again, unemployment you would expect to find in a deemed fully employed economy. Has Obama or the limited number of his "spokesmen" ever challenged this deception by Romney and the Republicans? What have you heard?

In the first debate Romney whimsically presented, unchallenged, that he has five sons who believed (at some age) that saying the same thing over and over was a path to creating reality. If so, it appears the teacher became the student. His repeated use of ridiculous assertions, not just with off the wall statistics, but with his plans to balance budgets, maintain revenues, or even his decision to withhold the release of his taxes as a means of keeping the opposition honest have been facilitated by the apparent inability of that opposition to take strong issue with any of it. Obama's campaign has attempted to shoot holes occasionally in Mitt's allegations, but the agile Romney has kept the targets moving and added new targets daily. Obama and the Democrats successfully painted an accurate picture of Mitt Romney the business man. What they have been failing to do is to show that the man who will do and say anything necessary to close the deal, slash & burn, and harvest the short term profits in business is the same man who is a couple of percentage points away from becoming the Head of State, Commander-in-chief, and leader of the Free World.

Obama's extraordinary performance in office against both devastating economic conditions and psychotic obstructionism on the part of the new Neo-Conservative Republicans has earned him reelection. It should be earning him an easy reelection. If Mitt Romney is elected, with all the elitist baggage he carts around with him, then this nation has learned nothing from its gross ineptness of reelecting George Bush in 2004. That would be either collective dementia or tragic stupidity.

Handling Depression

In 1936 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for re-election.  He had taken over four years earlier from a Republican President who had struggled for three years trying to contain a financial crisis. The unemployment rate through 1931 had risen steadily, mushrooming in 1932 till it topped 23%. 

The Hoover administration and the Federal Reserve did all the wrong things in 1930, which is now a part of US Economic History 101.  Motivated by business and financial interests (that had caused the birth of the Great Depression) Hoover’s policies vacillated between meager Federal programs in an attempt to spur growth and attempted policies to stabilize the currency for the financially powerful.  What ended up happening by the end of 1932 was a devastating contraction of the economy so deep that it resulted in deflation, the only such time that occurred in modern US history.

Once Roosevelt took office in 1933 the unemployment rate continued to rise during his first year as President, spiking to as much as 25%.  After his third year in office the unemployment rate had dropped in the 16% range, but by the time of the 1936 election it was creeping back up near 20%.  That was the economic backdrop that Roosevelt took to his bid for re-election against the two term governor from Kansas, Alf Landon.  In that election of 1936, where little the Federal Government had done showed dramatic improvement, Roosevelt won every state in the Union except Vermont and Maine and won the popular vote by almost 25 percentage points.  How did this happen and why under strikingly similar circumstances is Barack Obama just barely staying even with a truly hapless challenger?

The complexities of 1936 and 2012 are not identical.  The Nation economically was far worse off after 3 years of FDR than after three years of Obama.  Taking over the Nation at the beginning of the financial meltdown in 2008, the Bush and Obama Administrations, and the Fed did not make the same mistakes that Hoover had. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and TARP the following year dedicated about $1.3 trillion to stop the financial collapse then bolster the American economy.  What it did at the very least was to halt the slide of unemployment and avoid the kind of financial quagmire that Roosevelt found himself in. At best it brought a full recovery to equity markets and helped major corporations to begin operating in the black almost immediately.  

Both FDR and Obama had to operate under fierce opposition from Conservatives.  In the 1930’s (also before and after for a time) Southern Democrats were generally more Conservative than Northern Republicans, so partisanship of political parties was less defined.  Both Presidents used the leverage of the popular desire for change to advance major social programs.  They were/are both extraordinarily articulate men and master communicators.  So what did Roosevelt do that Obama has not?

Roosevelt was willing to powerfully engage his opposition.  However, he did so as a declared champion for the people.  He willingly took on the risk of confrontation, but made the average American believe he was taking that risk for them.  He famously said; “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made”.  At the time it was a conflict between the haves and the have-nots, no surprise there, although he himself had substantial family wealth.  As a result he became a Populist President, won two more re-election bids with little opposition, changed the course of American society, and was the leader America needed as it engaged in global war.

Barack Obama’s failure to become a truly populist President has not been due to his policies and in spite of his numerous accomplishments; it is rather due to his misunderstanding of just what is a Populist leader.  In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama essentially described a populist leader as someone who brings all people and divergent ideas together based on a belief that there is enough commonality among all Americans to bridge conflict.  Nice idea…wrong universe.  That Republicans chose to block his Administration for three years by simply saying no to virtually everything, only confirms that they read his book.

Franklin Roosevelt was not afraid to admit that the loyal opposition wanted him out, and that their desire to depose him was not a failure on his part.  In 1936 while campaigning for re-election he said; “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred”.  He rallied such incredible support from a Nation wallowing in economic despair because he conveyed a sense that his fight was their fight even as he failed, while Obama is struggling to dissuade the Nation from feeling like his failures are their failures, even as he succeeds.

Post RNC Interview

Paul Ryan Interview
With Newsweek Magazine (NM)

NM:    Thank you Congressman Ryan for talking with us today.

PR:      (face in a Newsweek Magazine – suddenly looks up) Oh yes, my pleasure.  You know I just love this magazine.  Aside from its radical-Socialist, centralized big government, organized labor leaning, anti-individual, groveling American, business busting rhetoric…it really is informative…and pithy!! 

NW:    No, but thank you Congressman, we appreciate your views.  So now that you’re the Vice-Presidential nominee, and perhaps next January only a heartbeat away from the Presidency, how do you view this potentially awesome responsibility?

PR:      I owe it all to my mom…well, my mom and my beautiful, inspirational wife.  Actually, my mom and my wife and my great kids, who remind me every day that being a dad is what’s really important.  In fact, it’s the most important job you can have…unless, of course, you’re a mom…which is even more important because…well, you’re a woman, and being a woman is what it’s all about. Right?  I LOVE YOU WOMEN…I mean, Republicans love you women…

NW:    Regarding Medicare, you and Governor Romney have advocated a voucher system which you believe would solve the potential crisis that may occur with Medicare sometime over the next 20 years; however you have exempted people who are 55 and older, allowing them to remain with the current system.  If your voucher idea is such a good one, why do you suggest waiting ten years to implement it?

PR:      GOOD GRAVY, do you think we could get any of those old people to vote for us if we said we were going to be messing around with their precious Medicare next year?  A good venture Capitalist like the Mittster will tell you, ya gotta sell the idea first, take control, then go in to slash and burn.  But please, don’t misconstrue what I’m saying: we LOVE OLD WOMEN…especially the moms.

NW:    Congressman, some questions have risen regarding your qualifications, that you have virtually no foreign policy experience.  It has also been said that you are hardly known even in your home state of Wisconsin.  How do you respond to these critics?

PR:      (now with a cheese wedge hat on) No one can deny that I have been a significant presence in Wisconsin, have you asked my mom?  Hell, I managed to weasel them a ton of that TARP money…what do they want?  As far as foreign affairs…well, let me tell you this: from where I have stood in Northern Wisconsin you can see…Canada.         

NW:    Now about the serious issue raised by your friend and colleague Congressman Akin; you had sponsored a bill with Congressman Akin which sought to deny public funding of all abortions with an exception of, quote, forcible rape. Why did you use the term “forcible”, doesn’t the use of such an adjective imply there are other types of rapes that wouldn’t be exempt?

PR:      (cheese hat gone) Now let’s get this straight; a rape is a rape is a rape…end of story.  Although…that would be three rapes wouldn’t it?  That’s pretty darn forceful even without the adjective.  Anything less and I’d been inclined to call a...ahh…a “rip”, the progeny from which should be fully inclusive of rights under a rule of law from the moment of conception.  I’m proud of my record on this…and so’s my mom.  My mom loves women.  Did I mention that?  By the way…every picture you see of me standing arm and arm with Todd Aiken was photoshopped by radical Socialist Liberals. I don’t believe I’ve ever met the man.

NW:    You take a great deal of pride in your physical fitness program and have suggested that fitness makes you uniquely qualified to represent a new generation of young Americans.  Is that correct?

PR:      (now with shirt off – on his chest are the words I BUILT THIS)  It is incomprehensible to me that Joe Biden can give interview after interview with the  mainstream liberal media and never once has to mention anything about his fading hair transplants.  This (beats his chest) is real, and as rock solid as Mitt’s doo.  I think this (pointing at his body) is something the youth of America can follow.  Sure, Obama can play a little B-ball, but really…some people (leans in softly) are just born that way - you know what I mean. Anyway, I think this is what America is looking for, but don’t get me wrong…sure P90X rocks, but…I LOVE YOU FAT WOMEN!!

NW:    Very…ahh…nice Congressman.  Like Mitt Romney you have criticized the President for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the GM/Chrysler bailout, yet you voted for both those bills.  How do you reconcile that with Mr. Romney who feels neither should have been passed?

PR:      (back to white shirt, no tie and oversized suit jacket) That’s simple; the Democratically controlled House and Senate originally submitted these bills written entirely in Ebonics.  By the time I and my other Republican colleagues realized that phrases such as: Got me a supakool layin' in da free-idge didn’t have to do border security it was…well, too late.  The Mitt got it right, of course. I believe he is fluent in both French and Ebonics.  Did I mention that Mitt LOVES ethnic women?

NW:    Actually no…I’m not even sure what that means?  Now a final question Congressman Ryan.  Governor Romney is a Mormon.  Do you see this as a potential problem with yours and his bid for what has always been a secular political office?

PR:      Not at all.  You may not be aware that when a baptized Mormon dies only they get to ascend to the highest level of heaven where each Mormon gets to have their own planet.  I can assure you that Mitt is not the least bit interested in this one and is perfectly willing to wait.  Let’s face it, Mormons love women, and Mitt Romney is no exception…even if he only has one.

NW:    Well thank you Congressman Ryan.

PR:      Thank you.

Hard Times??

We are experiencing something historic today in America and it has nothing to do directly with the economy.  Our Nation has succumbed to a kind of mass brainwashing engineered by those who, among other things, control the Republican Party.  I have no evidence regarding the Republicans other than what I witness every day. I accuse them (with bias) primarily because they are the direct beneficiaries of the brainwashing. 

Regardless, all corners of the general population, including media and pundits, now accept as conclusive that times…these times…are bad – end of story.  The Nation believes this because they are relentlessly told it is a fact.  They believe it even in the face of their own personal experience.  Further, by convincing the population that hard times are what we have and fear is the appropriate reaction, the proponents have wisely calculated that empirical statistics to the contrary won’t get in the way.

Today on ABC’s Sunday news program This Week, senior Obama advisor and one of the architects of Obama’s 2008 campaign, David Plouffe, awkwardly avoided commenting on the hallmark question made famous by Ronald Reagan and used repeatedly at the 2012 RNC: Are you better off now than when Obama took office?  His inability to respond had little to do with a loaded question and everything to do with an inability to expose fantasy.  He is as brainwashed as the rest.

He delivered what is becoming a tired line about how the President knows that times are hard and is committed to improving them. He should of said; “if taken from the time Obama’s policies began to take effect in the late fall of 2009, then hell yes the Nation is better off: out of a recession, large corporation profits at record levels, private sector jobs rising for two years straight, a first step taken toward universal health care, a stock market fully recovered, housing prices stabilized, a financial sector stabilized, an auto industry stabilized, a war ended, and Osama Bin Laden’s fookin’ head blown off”.  It is worthy to note that had McCain been elected President in 2008 none of that would have occurred, including Bin Laden.

Republicans point to unemployment as the key benchmark to prove that we are living in an economic black hole of despair. Some Economists estimate a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated "structural" unemployment rate, (the unemployment when there is full employment). In other words, the number of unemployed at those rates is driven mostly by the choices of the employees and not the lack of available jobs.  It also means that the true unemployment rate in July 2012 was not 8.3%, but rather something more like 3.3% (assuming average full employment at 5% unemployment).

Further, as stated over and over by Romney, Ryan, Fox News, Republicans, Republican pundits and probably brainwashed Democrats, they set the number of unemployed at 25 million.  This number was used more times than I could count at the RNC.  They get this number simply by multiplying the unemployment rate by the total US population.  Why doesn’t anyone (news media or Democrats or…well, just anyone) challenge these claims?  The Bureau of Labor Statistics set the 8.3% unemployment rate in July at 12.8 million unemployed workers, or 8.3% of total workers looking for jobs.  As the true unemployment rate is closer to 3.3%, the actual number of workers forced to be left unemployed by the economy is really 5.1 million, or about 1.5% of all Americans.  This reality however doesn’t fit with the drip…drip…drip of how incredibly bad your life is.

The problem today is not unemployment, it’s under-employment, workers feeling the lack of mobility that is characteristic of a slow growth economy.  Republicans endlessly claim that by injecting a hypodermic needle of cash into the rear ends of the wealthy, successful, “job creators” their entrepreneurial spirit will just have our economy taking off.  This, of course, is beyond ridiculous.  Would someone please ask Mitt Romney this question: If you get an additional $300,000 added to your many millions, just how will that result into more jobs than your other accumulated millions are already producing? The truth is that markets create jobs, and markets are created by people spending money. That includes the markets for public services.  Increasing our insane concentrations of wealth in this country only exacerbates the problem. 

The real question is how things get better from here. If I had a magic wand I would tax the bejesus out of the top 2% of the Nation’s wealthy, pour money into public services (not entitlements or defense) and eliminate the deficit.  The resulting demand would not only spur growth, stabilize the economy, eventually reduce the national debt, and increase revenues, but, ironically, would make the well-off even wealthier.  The top 2% already own more than 50% of the Nations non-residential assets…I don’t think they’d be suffering.  

I don’t have a magic wand, so the best thing that can be done in the short term is not to let Romney and Ryan get their Bush-like hands on the economy, and you start by praising the American people by what they’ve accomplished in just four years after exiting the asylum back in 2008.

I Love You Women

Ann Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention had a well conceived message and she performed it generally without the kind of nervous, mannered delivery that typifies political spouses.  The primary theme was (directly stated) love and how that broad concept relates to women generally, but especially for women under stress.  What that stress might be was less defined, certainly including financial stress but also touching on everything from rearing screaming kids to eating off of ironing boards to breast cancer.  I was quite broke during college and shortly after, hardly received a penny from my parents, but I never had to eat off an ironing board – I feel incomplete.

The fact that Romney polls so poorly among American women, which is as much a malady of the Republican Party as it is for him, was the obvious motivation for the message she gave.  Like predictable movies; that message was expected and at the same time a bit boring, primarily because it didn’t equate the least with the reality of whom she is and what her husband supports.  With such a movie, one considers at the end that his eight dollars and two hours might have been more wisely spent.

However, her embrace of women on behalf of her husband wasn’t what interested me.  What fascinated me was how she continues to demonstrate a critical aspect of what she and her husband represent and how that may be a window on a Romney presidency.

In July I wrote of an important response Ann Romney gave to ABC news entertainment personality Robin Roberts during a special interview.  When asked about why her husband would not make public prior year tax returns (she files separately from Mitt) she said with some ire “we’ve given all you people need to know”.  I believe this was one of the most important statements made thus far in this presidential year.  What she meant by “you people” might be argued several ways, but I believe that “you people” to the Romney’s has no specific definition. I feel that to the Romney’s “you people” is anyone who isn’t “us”.  This reality has surfaced time and time again with Mitt and generally has been laughed off as his bumbling inability to relate to the so called common man.

Republicans argue repeatedly that the effort to increase top income tax brackets, even just slightly toward what they have historically been, is class warfare. What makes that such an interesting retort is that the concept of “class” doesn’t really exist in the US for a majority of Americans.  Throughout this Nation’s history the model of individual achievement has chipped away at a class structure that existed in western culture into the 20^th century, as nearly defined as the Indian caste system.  It was manifest in many ways not the least of which was who was eligible for financial resources and who was allowed to vote.  With the rise of the great Middle Class after the depression of the 30’s, class identification essentially disappeared for those Americans in that Middle Class.  In fact, the term “middle class” is really an oxymoron since the term middle more accurately describes a lack of social and economic class. The truth is that the only Americans who still view themselves as a distinct social entity are the financially privileged, and especially those who are second or third generation.  There is an irony that those who repel at “class warfare” are the only ones who believe there is “class” at all…or at risk.

When Ann Romney said with heightened passion “I love you women” she really wasn’t saying; I love you..women, she was saying I love..you women, conspicuously leaving herself out of the group.  Her husband is the same, quite a bit different than John Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt, the two previous second generation privileged Presidents, who successfully became populous leaders even before their elections.  You’d have to go back to Howard H. Taft to find a second generation upper class President who embraced his elite stature, notably with little success as a President.

Mitt and Ann Romney have difficulty in connecting with average Americans because they themselves in reality feel no connection, no honest empathy.  The exclusivity and hierarchical nature of their Mormon Church and Mormon faith only intensifies this them and us attitude.  We can laugh and make fun of Mitt’s comments about his connections (NASCAR), his matter-of-fact consumption, or that “corporations are people”, for example.  We can squint at Ann Romney’s subtle “you people’ comments.  The reality is that their governance will be elitist; they will reign more than lead. They will also surround themselves with those of like kind, since their perceived class has always been fearful of those who don’t know the difference.   

The Gift

Where I work in a fitness center there is a member that caused me to pause the first time I saw him.  I had only been working there a short while when he crossed my path.  He didn’t recognize me, nor did I expect him to.  I recognized him immediately and just as immediately had to deal with unpleasant emotions.  This member had been my doctor at least one and a half decades earlier.  He called himself an internist, but he was really just a GP with a one man practice. I’ll call him Bob, not his real name of course.  I’d guess he’s currently in his 70s and likely retired.

He puts an immense importance on detail, at least when it comes to his workout, walking around with a virtual notebook in which he records every set, repetition, weight, and probably heart rate – every visit.  I would suspect that he is not a particularly spontaneous individual and likes the control that comes from compartmentalizing specifics.  He wasn’t my physician long, maybe 3 years or so.  I saw him infrequently and therefore cannot honestly say whether he is (or was) good at what he did relative to his peers.  I do know his one employee, his nurse/receptionist, was so unpleasant that we’ll just refer to her as nurse Ratched.

My animosity toward this man (and his sidekick) evolved from my last communication with them both.   I got sick – very sick.  I had flu-like symptoms which over a period of a couple of days would crescendo to levels of crappiness I couldn’t recall reaching before.  I resisted but finally called Bob’s office and asked to come in.  Miss Ratched receptionist switched to nurse Ratched and said coming in probably wasn’t necessary and I should first try a liberal application of aspirin and clear liquids.  At that point I was actually getting too weak to consider arguing. 

After another half day of feeling really bad I called back and asked if I couldn’t come in to see Dr. Bob as soon as possible.  I was rebuked for not waiting long enough to give aspirin and soup time to work.  I then started to plead (an embarrassing thing to recall).  Ratched finally said she’d talk to the Doc and he would call me back.  He did and essentially continued to rebuke me for my insistence and lack of metal, I suppose, for not dealing better with a simple flu.  He ended by saying I could come in…if I really had to.  It was the last words I would ever hear him speak.

Going to an emergency room didn’t seem like an option at the time.  Bob had convinced me that it was an ordinary illness and, besides, there isn’t too much in life I hate more than a hospital emergency room.  I felt lost and decided to ride it out. 

I stayed in bed maybe a couple of more days before I started to feel better, with one notable condition – I lost most of my hearing.  More accurately I lost some range to my hearing entirely.  This continued a week even as the rest of me began to feel quite normal.  I remember driving around in my little Ford pickup and having it sound like I was driving a Mercedes C-Class.  I wasn’t worried assuming the hearing would come back in time, which it did.  However, when it did come back something remained:  a loud “ringing” in my ears.  I had developed Tinnitus (pronounce tin-ah-tus or tin-eye-tus, either way).  It’s a non-threatening malady which is relentless and incurable, and can drive some people into mental illness.

There is also no magic pill to make it go away.  The only method that had any success was an odd one: it suggested that the victim of the “ringing” simply not listen to it.  It was odd because it isn’t a ringing that you actually “hear”.  Rather it’s an internal noise, not unlike that sound you hear by placing conch shells on both hears…only louder.  The idea was to accept the reality of the noise, then just pay no attention to it.  That sounded absurd.  Yet it wasn’t.  It took me months, but I learned to do it.  The hardest part was, of course, accepting it.  Now when it’s quiet and I’m suddenly aware of the loud “ringing” I stop, listen for a while as an observer, then get on with life.  The ringing has no power over me, so it’s pretty much the same as not being there at all.

More importantly, it taught me, in a very dramatic way, the importance of both accepting and not resisting.  One can intellectually know that not resisting and consequently accepting robs the force behind misfortune or conflict. Therefore, not being controlled by circumstance frees one to find solutions to deal with it.  However, it sometimes takes a real experience to make such knowledge intuitive.  This happened to me with my tinnitus and it was a gift.  It allowed me to have a multitude of similar experiences since and life, in general, is just plain better. 

Now when I see Dr. Bob I still think of him as a horse’s ass, but I also smile as he passes me with all his little notes and figures and silently say thanks.

Why Romney Won't Reveal His Taxes

(A reader of mine informed me that my blog of Aug 17^th, as it regarded taxes, was confusing.  I thought about it and concluded that writing a clarification was in order.  When a person is reasonably knowledgeable of a particular discipline or field  they can have difficulty in seeing the complexity of that which to them appears simplistic.  I don’t consider myself an expert in the tax field.  In the 31 years I worked either directly or indirectly with taxes I learned to respect, if nothing else, the vast amount tax information I would never have the chance to know.  Still, there are some things I’m comfortable in sharing and will try to do it better here.)

As much as he would like to tout it, the fact is that Mitt Romney was not a business man in the traditional sense.  He was a financier.  There is a difference.  Even the Bible differentiates the money lenders from the merchants and carpenters. The fact that he used the structure of a corporation to profit from his labors and that he and the other principals of Bain Capital employed staff to help him does not change anything.  He and his breed used an extraordinarily complex set of laws that enable “investors” to acquire, manipulate, and dispose of vulnerable businesses with very little downside risk to themselves.  Romney himself became a recognized master at it. In a simple Ron Paul-ian world of free enterprise I’m not sure a Bain Capital could have succeeded. My logical contention is that Mitt Romney has handled his own private finances in the same way, at least up until this run for the Presidency. The little he has revealed about his personal finances also supports that conclusion.

The complexity of US (and State) tax law is born of the fact that tax legislation alone cannot deal with the detail.  Certainly the legislation is voluminous and complex on its own, especially as it has been used for a century as a means of economic and social engineering.  It is the detail though that really makes one’s eyes roll.  The tax laws cannot address every type of human activity that involves money, not even close. The net result is the volumes and volumes and volumes of subsequent regulations and rulings that try to bring specificity to the tax laws.  It is a moving target and targets like Mitt Romney move pretty darn fast.

This complexity only benefits the wealthy who aggressively seek to minimize their tax liability. It is because our system is an honor system and the taxpayer is the first one to determine what is or isn’t taxable under the law. The wealthy (or wealthy corporations) have the resources to hire armies of tax attorneys whose sole jobs are to figure out ways of interpreting tax law for the benefit of their clients.  In doing so they weigh risk vs. tax benefit, and because the risk more often is just the tax that would have been owed and interest (plus a pitifully low tax penalty which is often waved) financiers like Mitt more often go aggressive. Why wouldn’t they?  It is a benefit that is available to everyone, yet exclusively theirs – the perfect paradox.

The only way aggressive tax interpretations by the taxpayer can be reigned in is through an IRS (or state) audit and, possibly, the subsequent fighting it out in Tax Court.  The IRS (and most states) must do that audit within 3 years of the date of filing. After that the taxpayer (barring negligence or criminality) is home free.  Given the nature of his value structure as demonstrated through Bain Capital, Mitt is likely to be one of those super rich who has interpreted tax law to his benefit and has done so aggressively. 

He is not overly worried about his effective tax rate, that embarrassment would be temporary, as it already has been for the one year he did publish.  No, he’s worried that Brian Williams will be interviewing respected tax authorities who will point out that Romney’s tax interpretations would have failed under an IRS audit.  What the public would take away is that he more than dodged taxes, he benefited by the vagaries of our laws at the expense of the American Taxpayer.  Not particularly Presidential or even laudable, except to the select few of the super rich who chuckle at sticking it to the “Government” (aka the American People or as Ann Romney puts it: "you people").  I have personally seen this, and it is not pretty.

Hooray for Harry

With the addition of Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket the Democrats seem initially to be making a mistake in judgment regarding their campaign.  Ryan may energize the far Right or Tea Party crowd, but it’s unlikely he would impact the election anymore than Biden has. More importantly, by redirecting attention to the multitude of Ryan ideological pronouncements they may let an important issue languish, if not die.  That issue is Romney's tax returns, which he is refusing to disclose. 

 Mitt has managed to dodge this criticism throughout his political life and he has apparently felt (to date) that he can do the same with this, his current contest.  If the issue is allowed to linger, especially by the media, Romney may again be able to neutralize it from being a relevant factor. He is hoping that people (and therefore the media) may generally just take it as a given that he will not release them and go on from there.  That would be a shame because this is a substantive issue, not just a source of embarrassment for Mitt.  It is the quantitative reality that the tax treatment of Mitt's wealth is a parallel for the constituency that likely benefits from a Romney administration. That reality is difficult for the average citizen to understand, and therefore it is extremely important that visibility be kept on the issue

Why is Mitt afraid to release the returns?  It's anybody's guess, but let me tell you mine. His fears are pretty practical, and it isn't simply the chagrin he might face from paying low taxes during any particular year. 

The US Tax Code is anything but black and white.  If the complexities of intimate relationships can be 50 shades of gray, the tax code is in triple digits.  The Code itself is thousands of pages alone, but much of how income and asset transfers are taxed has also been determined through thousands of court decisions which have created the US Tax Regulations and tens of thousands of IRS Letter Rulings, all of which are many times the size of the Tax Code. 

The US Tax System is essentially an honor system. Individuals are required to file with the Federal Government as tax law requires, but are allowed individual interpretations if the law is presumed unclear. Their interpretations remain unchanged unless an individual is audited and the taxpayer must defend their interpretation.  That audit must take place within 3 years of the due date of the filed return.  Barring a grossly unjustified interpretation (which might even be criminal), after those 3 years the taxpayer is free and clear. If Romney releases his returns with any time left for the army of Obama tax experts to review them I feel they would undoubtedly find errors and/or aggressive interpretations by Romney which would show he effectively (and possibly illegally) dodged a substantial amount of tax. This is a simple reality for individuals who have significant income earning assets and the means to employ expert and aggressive tax attorneys. It would be devastating to the Romney campaign and possibly a show stopper on the whole contest.

The importance of this disclosure is not simply the means to torpedo Romney’s chances at the White House.  There needs to be a demonstration to the American people just how extraordinarily vast the distance is between the wealthy and “middle class”.  Romney is a living metaphor for this problem that reaches much more deeply than a simple “class” struggle.  Nothing demonstrates this more than the way our tax laws have been weighted.

The absurdity of Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans to embrace the idea that to increase wealth for the super rich will increase jobs would be laughable in Econ 101.  Published statistics and research by scholars such as Edward Wolff of NYU show: the top 1% of households own more than 50% of all assets in America, if you factor out residential housing.  The top 20% own nearly 90%!!  The bottom 40% own about one-half of 1%.  Increasing this concentration will do absolutely nothing for the economy.  Yet, like the morbidly obese, Republicans don’t want to see that stuffing more money in their wide mouths only worsens an already dire situation.  

The primary origin of this so called “Great Recession” was the collapse of the housing market, which was quickly followed by a collapse in commercial real estate. It is also the reason for it lingering over the past 3 years.  Conversely, the great real estate bubble that extended from the late 90s to 2007 is what powered the growth in the US economy.  Why?  It did so because the driver of economic growth, and therefore employment, is a great number of people spending money, put simply. To do that a large segment of the population needs two things; a feeling of financial well being and a reasonable degree of predictability about their future.  Expanded real estate values accomplished both.

To push us in the right direction the Federal Government should force, if necessary, providers to refinance of home mortgages to current interest rates regardless of any other factors, flatten the tax rate of the middle class (not necessarily reducing taxes), increase top income tax brackets, and increase the holding period for long-term capital gains from one year to three years and disallowing long-term losses to offset short term gains (thus increasing short-term gains to be included as ordinary income).  Do you think this could happen with Romney in the White House?  The irony is, of course, by doing these things we would not only increase spending growth, more jobs, and improved budgets, but the rich (interesting) would do better themselves…but expecting Republicans to stop concentrating wealth would be like expecting Homer Simpson to ignore the plate of doughnuts laying on his belly.  By increasing the size of the pie and have most of that increase go to the middle class, everyone wins.

So when Harry Reid makes a wild accusation about Romney’s taxes keeping the issue alive I say hooray for Harry.  If it were me I’d be saying Romney earned income from child sweat shops in Malaysia, donated money to fund Gay Pride Day in Provincetown, MA, or takes child care credits for his six Mormon wives and eighteeen children in Utah – anything to keep the pressure on and the issue alive.  Forget about Ryan…he’s a jerk.