RWNorman's Beer, Food and Politics

Bump: Monday Morning Quarterback 03/23/09

I am bumping this blog post because I can't get through writing such posts yet in my recovery, but this was originally posted on 13 Mar 2009, and it is rather pertinent to my response to Paul Klugman this morning, 6 May 2013, particularly when it comes to either learning something or not from our history.

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As I watched all the talking heads from both sides of the aisle bob and weave through questions more pertinent than they wished to accept I found some interesting ideas and comments from a March 16th, 2009 interview by Matt Renner on Truthout.org of Dr. Ravi Batra (Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy), Monday 16 March 2009, an economics professor at Maverick Southern Methodist University. Hence, today I will not be talking about the bobbing and weaving but about a week old interview I found to be far more astute than all the hand wringing of Congress and the reports of people rising up in protest of minimal bonuses when they should have risen up years ago in response to an exorbitantly expensive invasion of Iraq that never should have happened.

I have been saying for at least 10 years that our (now) current financial crisis was foreshadowed by policy and regulation changes which preceded the S&L collapse in the late 80s. I've also said that way too many "important" people benefited from the government bailout without any legal ramifications, but I digress.

Not only that but I've directly laid the problem of today at the feet of Ronald Reagan's economic policies. I'm glad to find an economist with a doctorate who actually agrees with me.

Dr. Batra begins:  It started off with [President Ronald] Reagan. The wage-productivity gap started to develop in 1981. Reagan's economic policies increased productivity while restraining wages. One example is "free trade," which increased productivity but also reduced the real wage in the United States.

Also, the policy of regressive taxation. Reagan raised every tax that burdens the poor, but sharply reduced the income tax; all this caused a fall in consumer demand. Economic growth fell after Reagan's policies were introduced. Slow economic growth leads to pressure on wages because low growth means low demand for labor relative to labor's supply, so wages fall.

The third reason the wage-productivity gap grew as a result of Reagan was the "merger mania." Big firms were permitted to merge with each other. Each time there was a merger, there were layoffs, which also exerted downward pressure on wages. Mergers also increase productivity, further widening the gap. Reagan's anti-union policies were also responsible for the falling wages.

MR:  If the wage-productivity gap was widening, how did policy-makers prevent the inevitable overproduction and economic contraction? 

RB:  Each time the wage-productivity gap goes up, the economy will contract because of overproduction. What they did was come up with a scheme to create debt in the economy because, by creating debt, they could raise demand to the level of supply.

Initially they started off with increased government debt. The deficit went up under Reagan, which raised demand to the level of supply. Then Greenspan took over as Federal Reserve chairman and whenever there was the threat of overproduction, like when the stock market crashed in 1987, he brought interest rates down sharply. By bringing interest rates down, he lured people into borrowing. This began to create private debt on a larger scale.

This really postponed the wage-productivity gap problems for the future because under these policies, productivity rose every year, so debt had to increase every year unless wages were to rise. Since productivity rises exponentially, debt had to rise exponentially as well. In such a situation, it is not hard to imagine a day when the credit system would simply explode. That's what happened starting in 2006 or 2007.

 

I'd also extend this part of the problem to Health Care and Education, neither of which I've ever believed should be a For Profit private enterprise. These two factors increased the actual class warfare being fought against the middle wage earners since Richard Nixon declared that the HMO was the new health care policy of the United States. This fact and its attendant decision making documentation can be found in the Nixon tapes in a conversation with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman in 1972 (also presented in toto by Michael Moore in his documentary "Sicko"). The concept of public health care was abhorrent to Nixon, and the Republican disgust in the publicly funded health of the American people has continued to this day. It seems to me that a healthy America is a productive America, and one, by the way, which would be even more inclined to be a part of the overall health of the country.

Education has moved from being a requirement for American citizens to somewhat the same level as laissez-faire economics promoted by economist Milton Friedman and resulted in money management firms becoming lenders for student loans while in-state free college has moved towards $60k per year tuition fees. These fees stop many middle wage earners from being able to pay for college or require them to take on debt loads of a quarter of a million dollars before they even graduate and receive a job offer.

In fact, there is a certain benefit for the more prominent of our citizens to have a workforce that does not have the same level of education, thereby continuing, and even increasing, the disparity between the richest of citizens and those of the lower middle wage earners and even to the poorest of our citizens.

The concept of the middle wage earners using their homes as an ATM, drawing out equity in the dollars of today isn't a cause for the failure of the financial system, but rather a symptom of the inequality of the ability to garner increasing wages. This follows Dr. Batra's observations on increased productivity VS real wages being the main factor in today's financial crisis.

Let me explain. Whilst a person's value to a corporation is minimal at the onset of their career, it is incumbent upon that person to make themselves more valuable to the corporation by learning how best to perform their duties, else they would be fired and replaced. The wages should follow the person's learning curve, growing earnings as the person becomes more valuable to the corporation. This has not happened since President Reagan took office. In fact, the opposite is true. As an employee gained more knowledge on how to be more valuable to the corporation they became more of a threat to that very corporation (increased wages, retirement and health care costs).

Thus began the concept of a person never having a single job over their entire career, which kept the cost of the workforce down through competition and through fear of losing one's job (illustrated by right winged political distrust of the longevity of professional government bureaucracy). During this time the concept of a person having a retirement or pension plan was virtually taken away from the workforce due to a little section of tax code in the massive $1.2 Trillion tax cuts of 1981 called Sec. 401(k). A small amount of employee set aside with some level of matching funds from the employer suddenly became the primary method for an employee to have any hope of retirement. This was never the concept behind Sec. 401(k) but was quickly advanced by corporations as the only possible methodology for employees to save towards retirement. This was also a long term strategy for use in moving Social Security from an entitlement program to a private fund circumstance presented by George W. Bush on the day after his second term election. It is amazing just how bad our 401(k) funds have fared today, much less just how bad our retirement outlook would be if Bush43 had succeeded in his efforts.

Another ancillary matter which continues to prove the point is the establishment of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in 1974 which currently handles the pension funds for more than 44 MILLION Americans because corporations largely abandoned their pension plans in droves, in a surprising number of cases by declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization and divesting themselves of the pension responsibilities and placing the administration and maintenance costs on the American taxpayer. Within the past 6 months this public corporation has taken on the responsibility to administer the pension plans of such failed institutions as Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns.

So now major corporations could abandon any pension funds and switch to a far less costly 401(k) matching funds policy through bankruptcy laws which were conveniently altered by, again, the George W. Bush White House and Republican controlled Congress.

In reference to President Obama's efforts to resuscitate the economy, Dr. Batra continues: 

"First of all, they are confusing cause with effect. They think the cause is the financial crisis, but actually that is the effect. The cause is the rise in the wage-productivity gap. The gap between supply and natural demand [as opposed to artificial demand created by easy access to debt] is so vast now. That gap cannot be plugged easily, especially if you're not looking in the right place.

Freeing the credit markets won't end the recession, because why would a bank lend money when it's afraid that it won't come back? When the borrowers are not creditworthy and have no collateral, why would a bank want to lend them money?

The Obama administration should focus on trying to help the economy grow. The stimulus package will help in the sense that it will slow down the bleeding, but it won't stop it. If all the policies that led to the growing wage-production gap remain in place, the stimulus package will not end the recession. Balancing trade - reducing the trade deficit to zero - would be a huge step in the right direction.

Look at the economic policies of the 1950's and 1960's - balanced trade, breaking up monopolies - for example, Exxon-Mobil will have to become Mobil and Exxon; raise taxes on the wealthy and cut them on the poor. Those economic policies will close the wage gap. Those were the decades in which growth was very strong, between four and four and a half percent every year. Since Reagan took over, growth has been three percent or less."

These words are not a construct to be dismissed as revisionist history, but rather an excellent viewpoint to start formulating a plan of recovery that simply disallows manipulation of individual debt as a manner to supply continued growth.

When the robber barons can only make additional money on packaging debt and don't realize that there CAN BE NO MORE MONEY made from money which no longer exists as an asset, then there really isn't very much more to be said.

To many, the concept of living within your means has no actual meaning because they have lived their entire lives within a system where debt equates to having the most toys. Even our advertising suggests that you will be happy with one large flat screen TV, but that you will be happier if you also have one in your bathroom as if electronics and water ever made good sense, not to mention the concept of whether one really gives a good sh*t because the T V is turned on in the bathroom.

Well, I give a good sh*t, and in those private moments I think about whether our country and the world would be in this situation if we had maintained the economic norms of the 50s and 60s. Others have already decided that the burden of America and the world should be born on the backs of those least able to take the time or have the knowledge to think about such lofty questions. And those who do have the time and the knowledge seemingly continue to think about ways to maintain the norm so that the burden won't be theirs to bare.

After Three Tries, Does Paul Ryan Believe Anyone Is Paying Attention?

It really is sad to see a young man such as Paul Ryan, US Representative, State of Wisconsin, badly repeat the same mistakes he has made throughout his tenure in the House.  If he is the indicator of what the Republican Party is like in the 21st century, then he is also the indicator of why the Republican party has become the losing party.

It's not that they aren't steadfast in their policy decisions, nor that they have to use gerrymandering in order to get their party in the majority of the House, but rather that they are doing these things in spite of what their own electorate has told them it wants.

You cannot tell the people, the majority of whom are either on Social Security and Medicare, or at the cusp of becoming eligible for both, that you plan to tear apart the only social engineering which has saved millions of people from living in total destitution during their latter years.

But for some reason the Republicans have wanted to kill Social Security since the day it was signed into law, no matter how many lives the program had a positive effect upon, and regardless of an entire generation of people who have been paying into Social Security every working day of their lives with the expectation that they would receive the benefits for which they had paid.

Yet here is this young man trying not one, not two, but three times to throw Social Security and Medicare to the wolves, not recognizing there aren't as many wolves these days as there were 40 years ago.  Which just goes to show that the Republican Party is still employing many, if not all, of their party plans from the days of Nixon's demise.  It was right around this time, the late 60s to the 80s, that the Republicans decided that playing politics wasn't the way to win.  The way to win was to destroy everything put into place over the previous 40 years, and start the lying and deceptive electioneering they put into practice in a big way.

Think not?  Then explain to me the continued efforts at gerrymandering, which has given them a majority of Republican friendly white voters who are pretty much wrapped into their voting districts due to having lived in the same house for 50 years.  Whites who were Democrats, Blacks who were Democrats, even Latinos that could vote, also were clumped into little gerrymandered districts, but those districts were outnumbered by two to one when all was said and done.

The problem is that the Republicans have forgotten how to count, like counting the years its taken to implement their election strategies, like counting just how many older whites still own houses in those gerrymandered districts, and just how many young people, white, black and Latino, are coming up and replacing those aging white people that strictly vote a straight party ticket and whom the Republican party has so depended upon.

As our society continues to evolve, to grow into a new group of people with wider connections to other people from different backgrounds, a political party that has a generational party plan, encompassing 25 to 50 years of our changing American society without taking those changes into consideration, is bound to end up a loser.

The easiest way to see what I'm talking about is to simply pick some strongly felt party policies, such as a woman's right to have an abortion, or a woman's right to really exercise her rights or any number of other party platforms the Republicans had used to generate some level of hate or derision enough to get the votes to go their way.  Well, ultimately these things did not go their way because the Republican party continually tried to create laws which impinged upon an individual's rights.

And when the US Supreme Court came down on the side of the rights of individuals, primarily based upon the 14th Amendment, the Republicans were taking blunt force trauma types of political blows.

But the Republicans did not learn anything from their losses, as they continue, to this very day, to force these old, already fought battles to the forefront of the court, again only to be dashed into the wall of old ideas in a new world.

It is pretty plain and simple.  If everyone cannot exercise the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and again by the US Supreme Court, then everyone is not free in this country, and the Republicans appear to be on the side that does not want every one to be able to exercise their rights.  Why this is the case I have no clue, but certainly over the past 40 years the Republicans have shown, time and again, just what I have been saying is true.

So since the Republicans are not creating laws that benefit the citizenry of this country, even largely those amongst its own party, then just whom are they working for, and how is it that more people don't notice?  All that I have spoken of is, in fact, public knowledge available from numerous sources in the government.  Their history is plain to see, and the real disturbing thing about it is that many of their young, up and coming party leaders have the exact same political aspirations, even if such aspirations go against the wishes of their constituents.

Again, if the Republicans plan on sticking to their publicly released party platform, they will continue yet for even more years to come, with a dead end party.

It is such a waste, for if Paul Ryan is talented at all, he has lost most of the shine he had prior to being picked as Romney's choice for Vice-Presient, partly due to being a little more enthusiastic, but mostly due to his first and second Budgets that simply killed Social Security and Medicare, and also promised far more jobs than can be created in a continued slow recovery under his austerity plans.

And even as the voters, many of them his constituents as the VP candidate, have told Mr. Ryan and the Republican party that their platform is unacceptable, that their efforts to curtail the people's rights is unacceptable, and that a 50 year plan for a quickly changing society is an untenable and unacceptable plan.

Somehow the Republicans need to recognize that our society is changing, and it is for the betterment of the people and the country, and they need to be a party that helps that society, not hinders it.  But they cannot do so if the new leaders are going to do the same things the old leaders did.

I don't want to see a BIG TENT party.  I want to see a BIG COUNTRY party, and I verbally throw down the gauntlet and dare them to tell the truth to their constituents and work within what reality gives them, not tell lies suggesting that their way is the only right way.  There is no such thing.  Ever.

An Apology

I have to apologize to those who have followed my writing over the years here, and have come from the New York Times following some of my comments, but I haven't been well for a couple of years now and although I have kicked cancer for right now, some new things have popped up, which often happens to us old foggies.

Anyway, I have a good bit of writing on most of the topics I tend to comment upon in the New York Times, so I invited you to stay and browse through the archive.  A lot of what I wrote even 10 years ago (not available here yet) is pertinent today, so I presume that what I have here from the last four years at least is consistent with what I continue to write about in my comments, only more inclusive of some of the history involved at the time.  Most of it suggests that we, as a country, don't really learn to much in terms of how to grow so that all gain from the growing pains.

I hope to gain in my stamina and get the feeling back in my hands (would be nice to play guitar or piano again, too) soon, so that I might restart this blog, but for now I don't expect to restart for at least a month or longer.  I still have 10 therapy sessions with low dosage radiation treatments to my brain and I understand that will make me stupider than normal.

Roger

 

Just How Much Can a President Be Held Responsible For?

I keep seeing comments in the NYTimes and elsewhere essentially saying that it is time to stop blaming the previous administration for the troubles we've been going through as a nation.

I have to seriously disagree with that point of view, and obviously with the type of personality that would allow the degradation of the United States throughout the world and suggest that people who weren't even involved with the decision making at the time somehow hold all the responsibility.

I say it's about time to take a total and true assessment of our nation by connecting the dots through all of the people who set these past 4 years up by their actions and their ideology.

But I'm going to go back even further so one can only see the facts rather than the hyperbole usually fed up to the starving masses.  That is the starving for a hero or a great leader, particularly if one can have the feeling that they, in some small way, played a part in the rise of that great leader if only by voting for them.

This isn't going to be a history lesson, for that would take way too much time and way too many footnotes to do the job approriately.  But surely we have numerous examples of this hero worship, the leader who could do no wrong, and just how that can be used by the White House for the "good" of the nation and how this "good" was implemented on the sly and often had repercussions throughout the following years.

Let's start with something that sticks with us for not just years, but often a generation, particularly if the nominee is in his early 50s, which is what happened with both Alito and Chief Justice Roberts.

Now both of these nominees testified before Congress via the Judicial Committee, that they would be restricted in what they could do by Stare Decisis, which means essentially to let in place laws to stand unless there is some extenuating circumstance which says it should be changed.

Well, that's the way they testified, but they didn't mean it, and have shown Stare Decisis is not the basis for their votes, but rather something different which leans towards ending a lot of what the Warren court left in place 50 years ago.  They and Justices Thomas and Scalia are extremely conservative and not worried about the people in general knowing that they aren't likely to vote for progressive laws, even though Chief Justice Roberts tipped over the conservative apple cart, but also left enough room for the entire Affordable Health Care Act to be overturned if the right case comes before the court.

The court is likely to vote FOR Business and AGAINST the private citizen.  But when it's government v citizens, the citizen will be the winner, but when it is state government v citizens, then the state will win.  Overall the federal government will win, even against the states, but business will be the big winner, virtually ending any possibility that people, harmed in the act of a corporation doing business, will be the big loser.  The court has already set this last outcome up by some of its rulings where the citizen had a proper grievance against business, but lost the ability to even bring the suit to court because it couldn't PROVE the injury BEFORE bringing the case to court.  The requirements are too onerous on the citizen and business will make out by being allowed to harm the citizenry without the fear of any monetary remuneration.

This is just one example, in general terms, that the results will be with us for the rest of my children's lifetime and perhaps even theirs.

And it's just one example, as I say.  There are tons of examples.  Financial regulations applied during the Great Depression that helped reel in the wild financials gyrations which brought down the economy during that period and managed to keep the banks from making the same mistakes until the banks lobbied for the repeal of Glass Steagal, and then the banks went bat-shit crazy and screwed up the economy again.  Eight years of Bush43's bad decisions will be with us for years yet to come.

And talking directly about George W. Bush and bad decisions, I can use the gutting of Habeas Corpus because, under the Bush Supreme Court, ultimately eviscerated the power that Habeas Corpus gave the people over the government.  They did so by demanding that Habeas Corpus was supposed to be granted to all of enemy combatants, but because they were in Gitmo with minimal legal power to aid in their defense, they were simply given their day in court, and thrown back into Gitmo.  There are people in Gitmo known to be innocent of any charges (if they were charged at all), and yet we cannot figure out how to release them back into the world, because we've probably already created another terrorist.

What a piss poor excuse for not releasing them.  By law they should be released, so release them but keep and eye on them.  If they decide to aid terrorist organizations, then throw them back in Gitmo WITH charges and allow them to fight for themselves in court using all the right laws.

Instead, we're going to be breaking our own laws every day we don't release these prisoners the courts have said we had to release.  Americans simply sit back and allow it, which means that George W. Bush's decision has degraded America's place in the world and it may take yet another generation before we can rebuild the trust we used to have, even with our enemies.

If America has become weaker in the world today, it is due to the continued abuse of the rule of law America so steadily held fast upon.  Without the rule of law, there is no basis for making any claims against other countries who might need a little moral guidance.  Instead, George W. Bush made it clear that he had intentions of using the military might of America in order to create a world that the Neo-Cons demanded.  And if one believes that the Neo-Cons have been defeated and thrown to the side of the road, well, a lot of those Neo-Cons are now working on the Romney campaign and trying to secure some political stronghold from which to continue their policies which brought us a war of choice in Iraq, which we didn't win.  We couldn't win because we were fighting a war with a country that should have been a great partner with our efforts in the Middle East.

Instead, we killed a hundred thousand Iraqi, we created millions of Iraqi refuges, stole billions in war profiteering, and in the end showed the entire world, allies and enemies alike, that America can be defeated.

This is obvious by the response the Taliban have come up with in Afghanistan.  At the absolute best, we have only given the Taliban a legal seat at the table of government.  When it all settles down and the dust clears, the Taliban will be as strong as before and have the legal standing of a political party.

Now regardless of how one wants to spin it, such as suggesting that it is all Obama's fault, one has to realize that every step along the way has been to try to manipulate us out of this nasty truth of our failure and the legitimate rise of the Taliban.  This is the result of the Neo-Cons programs which have failed and directly attributable to the Bush administration and it's reliance on the Neo-Cons.

The financial problem we find ourselves in right now also shows the marks of being a Bush Administration's efforts, and the manipulations of which the Neo-Cons played a large part.

Now I'm taking great strides in trying to maintain some glimmer of a difference between the Bush Administration and the Neo-Cons, which were not the only people in the Bush Administration.  But their power started at the vice-presidential level, with Dick Cheney running a virtual hidden government and where decisions made at that level were automatically approved by President Bush because he didn't have the mental capacity to see how much he was being used.

The Neo-Cons weren't then nor now an elected group of people doing the work of the people.  They were a group of people who insinuated themselves into positions of power, some of whom still reside within the executive branch, and continuing to build even more support for implementing their own ideals when they can get yet another Republican President.  Unfortunately Mitt Romney appears to be the perfect candidate for these people, as he seems to be one that will allow others to appoint themselves responsible for items on an agenda which Mitt does not want to contend.

Sorry, but I simply do not believe that Mr. Romney has enough strength of character to not be swayed by internal political pressures, nor do I believe that he's really a follow-up type of guy.  I could be wrong on both but the question is whether we want to find out if Mitt Romney is another George W. Bush or not.  We'll be able to delve into that problem after Romney's Foreign Policy speech at VMI today.  My guess is that once he actually makes these pronouncements on foreign policy all at once, we'll find Neo-Con fingerprints all over it.

Now don't get me wrong, and I admit I will be using George W. Bush as an example in a lot of this article because there is so much that is still outstanding and never been addressed, much less resolved with him, but believe me, we're not talking about a new Republican guard that might come into power.  We're talking about a man who can be manipulated without much in the way of direct overt power being exerted and still coming up with the same results.

And what results, you ask, might those be.  Well, let's take a look at today's Republican Senators who have used the filibuster for a record one hundred times in a single election cycle, most of those denying President Obama's choices for running major parts of the executive branch, and only allowing votes for the Bush remnants still within the government.  The acting director of the AFT, who instituted Fast and Furious, and then oversaw it well into Obama's first term because the President couldn't get anyone's nomination through the acceptance process.  So a Bush program, giving weapons to the bad guys to follow back to the leaders, supposedly like following cookie crumbs left behind like Hansel and Gretel, and like Hansel and Gretel, the entire thing backfired just when it would be use by Darrell Issa against President Obama instead of pointing the finger at the real culprit, George W. Bush.

Now while this isn't a generational influence thing, the above was only an example of how the Republicans can keep the President from getting his own players into positions where they can do the work the President assigns to them.  The same can be said for the Acting Director of the DEA, who, while being appointed by George W. Bush, was the only person the Republicans would approve to run the DEA, so another example of how the political parties actually interfere with the operations of a sitting President, and operating against the expressed desire of a sitting President.

All of this is within the law, although I don't recall the Democrats actually trying to kill the ability of any Republican President to use the power he is granted by the Constitution, but it has been very effective against Barack Obama, so you can expect it to be a part of the game plan for the next 50 years unless the Senate changes the rules of the Senate and fixes the Filibuster.

Any of these "little" things, all above the legal line, have lasting effects for years, and sometimes through Presidential successions, for one thing you can believe is if the Republicans can throw enough monkey wrenches into the mix to cause Democrats problems, they will do so and have already figured out how to use it to their advantage.

And the Winner Is....

Mitt Romney, but not because his "plans" are better than the President's, but rather because he had the audacity to step on the toes of Jim Lehrer and thereby of President Obama also.

OK, so stepping on the toes of an opponent no matter what the ring is exactly what one should do.  But the rules on the floor aren't what most people expect.  Ultimately Romney looked like an oaf, willing to continue to speak even if what he said didn't make any sense.

And a lot of it didn't make any sense.  I still don't know what Mitt Romney plans to do if he gets elected.  What I heard tonight was not what I've heard Mr. Romney say for the past year.  In fact it seemed as if Mitt was thumbing a ride on what President Obama said, often trying to say that his plan was "much better than that" when we still hadn't heard word one of what his plan actually includes.  But he somewhat looks good being a "but I'll go you one better", which, of course, he did not do.

For every attack Mr. Romney made against the President, Mr. Obama came back with irrefutable facts and figures, all of which are immediately available on www.whitehouse.gov.

Still, after being beat about the head and shoulders with the fact that Mr. Romney could only talk about a plan when he had still presented nothing of facts and figures of his own, he continued with new gusto to site his plans without saying what his plans included.

And this, my friends, is what the entire debate consisted of.

Now a lot of people are going to say that Mitt was combative, incorrectly assuming that this suggested that he was "Presidential".

Unless Presidents lie every time they open their mouths, Mitt did not seem Presidential to me, he seemed afraid that he wasn't Presidential at all.

Mitt, if he wanted to appear Presidential, should have had all of his ducks in a row, facts and figures to which he could use to support his ideas, and, in fact, he could have had some concrete ideas that didn't change depending upon whom he was talking to.  Well, this time he was talking to the nation, and he was failing to come up with anything that the American people could embrace as something they felt comfortable about, something they could lay claim to well enough to get onboard the Romney Wagon as happy travellers.

I think we're still talking about an "anybody but Obama" strategy, hoping that Mr. Obama incapable in explaining his record, which, btw, he created over 4 hard years of governing.  And that's one of the reasons that Obama has the answers, facts and figures.  He created the answers, facts and figures.

Mitt Romney has been running for President for years, and yet somehow he still doesn't have a viable enough plan to do the job the way he sees it to actually lay it out in black and white for the American people.

Mr. Romney also spent most of the night walking back virtually every statement he had made in the past 20+ years of running for office.  If Senator John Kerry was a flip-flopper, then one has to wonder what word will be invented for the man who made just about every statement he's ever uttered turn to dust in the air.

One has to question, in their hearts, if this man, Mitt Romney, is either too politically stupid to exist in this environment, or simply a pathological liar.  Now for those of you that do not know, a pathological liar is a person who lies even if there is no cause to lie whatsoever.

Which ever way it works out as far as the electorate is concerned, everyone should be concerned that the man, Mitt Romney, could stand on the stage in front of 80 million Americans and essentially pull the wool over their eyes if they thought they'd get an idea of what Mitt Romney's Plans for America are, because he presented not one iota of information for you or I to make any assessments.

The best we can say is that we know Mitt Romney can somehow not shut up even when he actually has nothing to say.  In fact, the thing that scares me is the possibility of people assuming that one without plans, without information, facts and figures, and timelines this suggests he is of Presidential caliber.

At the best my analysis has to be that this was a simple clusterfuck.  The President looked somewhat off balance as he patiently waited for Mitt to shut the fuck up, and Mitt was more and more willing to talk as he saw the President being more of the gentleman than he should have been.

A New Presidency and a Fiscal Cliff

Not only do we have an election this year, of which it is expected to see the continuance of the Republicans ruling the House, but the Senate itself is under assault with the balance only one strange event, such as Rep. Akin's continued resistance to being removed from the race by questionable Republican party "officials".

Now while all of this is going on in the election, and the changes will become effective 1 Jan 2013, little do they realize that they step into a situation where no one has the ability to actually predict the changes coming, nor just how these newly elected Representatives and Senators are going to be slammed against a wall of absolutes they didn't really anticipate even though everyone with knowledge has already predicted.

We're talking about the tri-fecta, the perfect storm of budgetary responsibility, and a lack of the Republicans desire to act, the result of Republican negotiations on other situations such as the otherwise standard raising of the debt ceiling, allowing America to pay its already borrowed debt, and the failure of the Republicans to actually take part in President Obama's moment of extinguishing some 4 Trillion dollars of America's debt through long term planning and a combination of cuts in spending and increases in revenues.

The entire fiscal cliff stands before us because the Republicans would not allow, no, not now, not ever, the increase of revenues.  Any increase of revenues must be spent in curtailing the debt through applications of the cuts in deficit spending.

So now we stand to end up with austerity measures, the size of which the average American cannot begin to comprehend even as the Republicans themselves cannot comprehend, having foisted this problem upon the American people without one iota of concern.

My problem isn't with which way the Presidency goes as pertains to this particular problem if my perception of the outcome of the election is correct, but rather whether such a man as Mitt Romney is capable of walking into office after the transfer of power at 12 PM on January 20th, 2013, can suddenly grasp that the job he has to attend to has nothing to do with his promises to the people of repealing Obamacare, and all of the other promises he cannot keep.

No, my concern is what does the man do when he realizes that the functions of the government of the people goes on regardless of whether he is aware or capable of actually implementing any of his plans when three massive programs have ended on January 1 and he's already 19 days behind the eight ball.

Now, of course, the Republicans will do their lame duck best to kick the can down the road as they have been so good at over the past 40 years or so, but it is conceivable that President Obama could really be a nasty player and veto any measures presented by the Republican held House, thus laying the problem on the table in front of Mitt Romney.  This would, however, be a burnt ground policy of which President Obama would never stoop, particularly not with the harm it would cause the American people.

The reason I bring this up is that Mitt has not proven himself to be the leader of the Republican party, as evidenced in the past two days by Missouri Representative turned Senate candidate, Mr. Akin, who only two days ago was asked by the Republican party to step down from his leading attack on Senator Claire McCaskill's current seat due to giving Republican backroom policy away to the public.

And the reason I bring this up is that if the Republican party members don't recognize Mitt Romney as their erstwhile party leader, then who does recognize Mitt Romney as the Republican party leader, and just how much can he do on day one if he doesn't have all of his Republican ducks in a row?

After all, Mitt virtually commanded Todd Akin to step down from the race so that another, less verbal, candidate could be placed on the card, but alas, Mr. Akin, bless his heart, simply said no and refused to abdicate his now leading position.  It is highly possible that he will continue to hold his lead and take Missouri's Democratically held Senatorship, undoubtedly bringing about a change in the majority of the Senate in his wake.

Now why was this a problem?  No, not because Rep. Akin said what he said, because he's been saying the same thing for 35 years now, which is that rape isn't the problem that the rest of us perceive, but a problem with women who are obviously out about town looking for a good penis.  No matter how you try to read around it, he has a problem with women who have been raped because he believes that they are looking for it.

This man is not by any means a strange anomaly as even after having said the term "legitimate rape" and then never having backed off of the statement as it stood, but he is simply one of some 122 House Representatives, including Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's anointed running mate, who have voted to keep federal funds from paying for any abortion, including cases of incest and/or rape.

Now in order to substantiate the importance of a case that still won't be paid for by federal funds, these people have defined levels of rape that are apparently somewhat acceptable to the entire Republican party.  Legitimate rape, as far as I can tell, is a real rape, perhaps of your sister who was actually minding her own business and not dressed up in a manner that broadcast her intentions, or, in their minds, looking for "it", ends up getting raped.  But then again, why was she out that night?  What were HER motives?  How dare she go out with a rape-able orifice at night, or even be alone in her apartment, or going to the corner drug store for medicine?

Somehow these people have tried for 45 years or more to negate rape as a crime against a woman and made the entire situation a woman's fault, apparently for simply existing.  These are the same guys who, year after year, were able to get the law to look the other way as their own sons forced young girls and college co-eds to have sex with them and hid behind their names and their father's position.

And somehow this whole "old boy" network of protecting their sons became seated in the Republican definition of rape, thus protecting yet another generation or two or three from real consequences in having to admit guilt and paying for child support until adulthood.

No, see it is more simple to explain away the problem of randy young men by blaming it on women who really "want it" and yet, when they say no, are simply dick teasers and deserving of whatever they get, including a child and possibly any communicable disease the man may bare.

Now many may well say that I'm making this all up, that such happenstance does not occur, that small towns of yesteryear don't influence the politics of today, but I'm telling you that such is exactly the case and that any RAPE is exactly that, RAPE, and as such is a Legitimate rape, regardless of voodoo doctoring by idiots who believe that a human body knows something about distinguishing between a rapist's sperm and that of a caring lover.

For these same men, so absolute in their beliefs and their arguments, also tell us that women under "legitimate rape" assault have bodily functions that automatically negate the sperm of their assailant and therefore they cannot get pregnant.

Therefore any woman claiming the need for an abortion due to being raped is a liar and was out looking for "it" and became pregnant.

Now follow me here because this is important.  By these people's statements there has never been a bastard child born to a woman raped "legitimately", and therefore any pregnancy involved with a claim of rape cannot be possible.  Therefore no Federal funds may be used to provide an abortion for a woman so claiming rape because she really wanted it in the first place.

And this belief structure is the pre-eminent belief structure of the entire Republican Party that supports "no exceptions" abortion and thus forces woman forcibly raped to bare the child.  How do I know?  Because the entire Republican Party supports the "no exceptions" rule to the Federal prohibition of payment for an abortion, which has now been added as one of the planks of the Republican Party's Platform.

Paul Ryan is not only guilty of voting FOR this bill, but he is one of the 122 House Republican members who co-sponsored this bill and thereby admit to all of what I have outlined above.  They apparently honestly believe that any woman claiming to have been raped is a woman of ill repute, as Rush Limbaugh cast Linda Fluke for desiring to have her birth control pills covered in her medical insurance.  Just another whore as far as they are concerned.

The Republican Party apparently believes that any woman is either a whore, or capable of being a whore, or probably was a whore at some time in her past or most certainly will be a whore in the future.

Such ideas make me wonder how they distinguish between a woman of 81, beaten to death for her Social Security money and raped by some 19 year old thug, as a whore, and a poor, downtrodden lady who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As far as I can tell, they don't make the distinguishment at all.  They simply cast all women in the same light and make assumptions that all women aren't worth the flesh that God gave them via Adam's rib, and therefore are all liars as Eve was.

Could God have gotten it so wrong as to make all women whores, or is it that all Adams are so stupid?

My vote is for the latter.

A Do Nothing Congress Means a Do Nothing Country

I'm not telling you anything new when I say that we have a stalemate in Congress, largely based upon the hopes that by not supporting anything the Democrats want, and specifically by President Obama, we will have a change in the Presidency in this 2012 election cycle.

But if they fail, will they stop there?  Are they willing to continue to abandon the people for another 4 years?  My gut says yes.

The problem is that I'm not telling you anything new, and you aren't doing anything about it.  I'm saying you because I'm doing whatever I can, so it must be you that aren't doing all that you can, and the fault falls to you.

It has become perfectly acceptable for a large portion of the electorate to turn their heads, avert their eyes, and approve of new blood being voted into Congress whose only promise is to ignore doing the job our Senators and Representatives historically have been elected to do.

One of the problems in electing our Legislative Branch representatives to do nothing means nothing gets done.  The requirement is for people to understand the functions of their government, which, heretofore has been to make and execute the laws of this country.  Those laws, for better or worse in the view of some, are the foundation of how our country operates, not just our government.  The operation of our government by fiscal strangulation isn't just something one can ignore.  We have trade agreements with other nations, we have laws that have been enacted within other agreements with nations, ratified and now part of our own law.

Our economic health is dependent upon the economic health of other countries, and in fact their economic health is dependent upon ours.  Most countries not just specifically of the West, but on every continent wouldn't even have an economy without the United States.

I can't say that I'm proud of how America has handled some of their economic dealings with other countries, particularly in Africa and South/Central America, but still the financial ties exist well outside of our fair borders, and when our Congress fails to act for the good of our people, such inaction has adverse affects on many others in the world, like ripples spreading in a pond.

We have to get one thing straight.  There has been a lot of big corporation agitation for Globalization, particularly over the past 15 years resulting, again, in highly intertwined economics, but remember this, it is their economy that rises and falls based on what we do, not the other way around.  If our economy is doing fine, most of the countries in the world feel the effect and prosper.

A good example in today's world is Europe and the EU, where all of these countries have been having problems, largely due to an over-exuberant amount of questionable investment that pulled out of Ireland, Greece, Spain and Italy even before our economy ran aground, which was a major sign of the serious misfortune about to befall us.

And Europe is going to continue to bring down the US economic outlook if our representatives in Congress don't start learning just some of they stuff they need to know in order to bring America back further from the precipice the Republicans drove us towards during 8 years of uncontrolled spending, including Billions of dollars just going missing in Iraq alone.  Somebody has the money, and it came from you and me, the taxpayers of this country.

Even John McCain, during and after the run up to the invasion of Iraq said he smelled war profiteering, and he was right.  To bad we no longer have that John McCain available to us to help this country right itself.

But then, we don't have any Republicans to help us right this country and get back to full employment and prosperity.  They won't help us because, as far as I can see, they don't want a black man for President, but even during the Clinton administration, when 22 million jobs were created, they fought tooth and nail to distract President Clinton from doing HIS job.

And if one looks it is easy to see that they chose the path of obstructionism, but more like a test run, charging that Clinton was supporting cronyism,  supposed illegalities in the Whitewater real estate case, murdering Vince Foster, you name it.  Doing anything, in fact, to slow him down from accomplishing his sworn duties as President.  When that didn't result in his losing office in 1996, the Republicans sank to the depths of strict party politics and the House impeached him.

Even though the country didn't want to see the President impeached, and the Senate simply wasn't going to convict him, the Republicans were willing to throw a 22 million-job presidency under the bus, and for what?  The possibility of a 1998 Congressional marjority?

They got their welfare reform.  Essentially there is no longer any welfare, not only in name, but in fact.  And while it is entirely possible that the economy was in motion to continue, it didn't and by the time George W. Bush was in office, we were again losing jobs as we had under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.  And don't you let those talking head Republicans tell you that the greatest employment comeback was under Ronald Reagan because it wasn't.  And even though the great orator was cutting taxes early in his Presidency, he had to raise taxes 11 times AND borrow money, showing Republicans how to ignore deficit spending's costs and the unproven hypothesis that tax cuts pay for themselves.

Now how does this history go towards a Do Nothing Congress?  Well, to a large degree it follows the Republican mantra of no new taxes, which at a time like now doesn't help.  We don't need new taxes, we need higher revenues, which means that those who can pay higher taxes should, but it shouldn't be NEW taxes, it should be well reasoned elimination of tax shelters that fits with the burden the rest of America is handling, and if there are any tax breaks for the wealthy, then the middle class should be able to take advantage of them too.

And all the above paragraph is bull just to see if you were paying attention.

There are some facts here that need to be explored.  One is that we could tax all rich people at 100% and that still wouldn't pay off our debt, but most people think that means we take 100% of what they earn.  No, it means what I wrote.  We tax people at 100% meaning they cannot hide 50% of their income through what turn out to be subsidies to the rich or tax shelters that reduce our revenues whilst the greatest corporate and personal profitability for the 1% in our history is happening all around us. 

For anyone who hasn't read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, we are in the beginning days of this coming true.  So give Ayn some money (you can't, she's died even as all of her adherents just got into the White House), and buy the book.  It will certainly be an eye opener.

As I said, back to the topic, but it's only going to come in drips and drabs.  I will try to tie this all together and if I do you can thank my Western Civ professor.  He left me (and the entire lecture hall, one presumes) wondering just what the heck he was talking about until the last minute of his class and then BOOM he brought it all together with the speed of a thunderclap.  Alas, I'm probably not that good.

There is a serious problem with this new election cycle when we start hearing about Tea Party backed candidates whose only plan is to ignore the call they are supposed to feel to serve the people.  I'm not certain, but if you don't get your money's worth for the fulfillment of a contract, you should be considering bringing charges of fraud, however, in today's world, and I literally mean today's world, the news is that a new Tea Party candidate has stated that he will literally do nothing in Congress if the Democrats regain power.  He's told his possible constituents that he not only won't do anything, but that he won't do anything no matter what happens.  He plans on spending his time taking money for speeches even as he takes money for being a House of Representatives member.

Now I don't know, but if someone tells you they are going to steal your money by not doing the job you hire them for, and you acquiesce by still hiring them, then I can't see any fraud involved at all.  Perhaps this man who declines to do anything if the Democrats wins is a new type of honesty in politics, but I can't help but feel that he's being dishonest by taking the opportunity away from someone else who wants to get into the fray and do some good.  In other words, to serve the people.

But I've grown up learning my ideals from my parents, even though we had different ideals at the time.  I still hold that my government is not all powerful, able to break the laws of the land and hide behind secrecy when it isn't necessary.  And irony breaks out in all aspects of life making one wonder just how good we are at anticipation.

After 9/11, George W. Bush went so far as to cover up 20 years of open unclassified government information by re-classifying it, and then turns around and publishes ALL of the files supposedly recovered from Saddam Hussein's trove of nuclear research for all the world to see.  Even if it was mistakenly, after the whole world knew about the mistake, the information still stayed up on the Internet for two weeks.

Who is on whose side?  Perhaps Bush wanted his buddies, the Saudis, to have the information, but the Saudis have us on their side, even if we do pay $750 Billion in gas purchases to the ones that attacked us on 9/11, as many Republicans continue to say.

Then the realization hits you.  These guys aren't playing politics, they're playing POLITICS.  To them it isn't a game, it is a way of life, a certain level of driven effort for purposes that do not help the many, but are strictly for sale to the few. 

For truly, a man must have purpose, and if that purpose is to help others, then who is to tell them whom those others are?  And just as surely, if they do have to help others, and they get their choice, then it is just as obvious that the lesser number of people they help means a more concentrated level of effort to help and a greater success in helping. 

Therefore, ipso facto, etc., by helping as few as possible means you are more successful in your level of help than if you take on trying to help the masses, who, in the end, will fall into argument, demanding more than you can give, and then you've just wasted your time.

Who knows?  This may well be a modus operandi, but it seems to be so shallow as to be impossible.  And yet there is evidence to suggest that this may well happen, may, in fact, have a basis in fact.

For we have 310 million people in this country, and we have some 241 Republicans in the House of Representatives who are helping to steal these lives away. 

We have some 25 million people out of work or underemployed, and yet we cannot find ONE Republican Congressman willing to help them. 

We have 50 million people without health insurance, and yet we have 241 Republicans who have voted to repeal a law that will insure the majority and offer nothing in its place.

We probably have over 50 million people in poverty, and 241 Republicans that will not give them a helping hand, but rather castigate them for not looking for a job.  Yes, castigate them for being lazy on the floor of the House and for everyone to read in the history of the Congressional record.  These are their words, not mine.

If you add in the US Senate Republicans, we have 288 Republicans who will not help any of the 310 million Americans that aren't rich.  In fact, it looks, just by the numbers themselves, that there's close to a 1 to 1 relationship between Republican legislators in Congress and the number of the people in the 1% of the wealthiest people in the country.

Who knows, there may be a corresponding set of numbers in each state, in each county, perhaps even in each township, each with their own personal Republican making certain that they are doing the job of helping only the rich, and basking the personal knowledge that they are helping exactly the right person.

And perhaps this is the reason they need not help the country, because, from what they see, everyone they are helping is doing just fine.

I don't know.  I have no crystal ball, and if I did, perhaps I wouldn't know how to use it properly, so I don't depend upon things I cannot equate to others, things I cannot observe and report.  By eliminating things that can only be speculation, I have to turn to the facts, and the facts tell me that a country which has duly elected representatives to do the work of the people, and yet refuse to do the work of the people, are a do nothing Congress, and the health and well being of the majority of the people of the United States are of no consequence and our system is at severe risk.

In this lack of helping the people of their own country, they are also creating a worldwide program of defeatism.  By ignoring the masses here, they present what they perceive to be a paradigm of pragmatism, assuming that the people will forget that their problems began because the Republicans held abolute power and wielded it badly.

So they do nothing.  Not because they can't do something, but that they don't know what to do and in doing only for the few their failure for the masses cannot be their fault. 

It is the fault of being a member of the masses.

What Do You Mean, It's Absurd?

From the New York Times, 07/14/12, Enlisting Economists, Bush Adds Book to Fiscal Debate

WASHINGTON — His entire involvement in the presidential campaign has consisted of four words uttered to a reporter as elevator doors were closing: “I’m for Mitt Romney.” But former President George W. Bush gingerly enters the fray a little more this week with a new book outlining ways to rebuild the economy.

I almost blew beer all over my monitor when I read this article.  Hey, Georgie Boy, you're a little late and about 10 times wrong if you think you can fix your own problem.

If the man could give this country a 4% growth in GDP then why the hell didn't he do so when we needed it?  And to be brutally honest, he and his ideologically resolved people couldn't do it today.  I'm not saying that turning the country around and having a 4% growth in GDP isn't possible, I'm saying that these guys don't even have an inkling of what the problem is, much less having some total epiphany now when it is 3 1/2 years late.  I mean, if Bush had ever really felt bad, it had to be when the whole economic structure of America was falling apart and he was watching even more jobs going into the toilet.  How is he supposed to be considered the Moses of the masses held slave to bad business dealings by all of his friends?

I'm not just wildly casting aspersions, I'm saying directly that George W. Bush is responsible for what we see playing out right before us.  Not on the TV, but in the spaces right outside of our front doors.  And if he wants to offer more economic suggestions for America he must really either hold his prowess in understanding economics in high regard, or he simply cannot admit that his policies and his actions during his administration play a part in millions of new poor, millions of homeless, and tens of millions of people that lost their entire hope for the American Dream.

Now I admit this might seem pretty harsh, and I know that my friend Bill Perkins is going to jump right in, but how can it be stated in any other manner?  If George W. Bush really has the Magic 8 Ball that answers all of the questions correctly then I'd have to ask him to predict which direction the next 7-11 store door was going to open, because my guess is that he still pushes doors that clearly say PULL on them.

I do admit, however, that not everything is actually his fault.  He's just the culmination of a series of political decisions that have been made over a generation that gave us lousy education (of which he was proudly a charter member), and lax rules in virtually every economic decision over the past 30 years.  But I'll also lay a lot of the claim for those decisions on the Republican party that has prospered by moving people such as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney up through the party ranks, becoming political players and making policy decisions for the party whether they liked it or not.

Bush's own daddy, George H. W. Bush, fired Karl Rove from his campaign, but that didn't stop the party from keeping Rove around, nor did it stop Dick Cheney even though the party's leader was ostensibly Bush41 for all of those years, and who had serious problems with Mr. Cheney, which makes me wonder why Dick was chosen for the Vice Presidential candidate search.

There's no lack of knowledge that Bush41 and Dick Cheney weren't the best of friends.  Most of Bush41's inner circle considered him of dubious usefulness, but somehow this now "paragon" of Republican viewpoints has gained a level of stature he couldn't possibly be worthy of.  His own view of gays says he doesn't fit the party anymore.

And judging by the way these people act, they honestly believe that they have the answers to all of the problems, when they didn't prove that they knew all of the problems in the first place.

It would be one thing if an ex-President came out and said, well, that didn't work, so maybe we should look that this, but no, here is a blueprint for another Republican methodology to fix the ills of the nation when they created the problems.

Now I don't take it upon myself to just believe that this is an all Republican problem, because I know a lot of the people in positions of power were taking the same Kool-Aid, but I'd have to say that it was a Republican with the cup of Kool-Aid in their hand when the misappropriation in trust started. 

You know, when the Republicans started really doing stuff in secret and suddenly that became a part of the agenda.  The original culprit was Richard Nixon, but even in the shame of his forced resignation he never believed that he would have opened up an entire generation of Republicans believing that they knew better than the constitution.  Or in Unitary Executive power, or committing Treason by dealing with terrorists using Millions of dollars from donations of our ally countries such as Saudi Arabia to fight an illegal war.

War suddenly became a necessary evil, and there is always a place to have war.  It only takes lying to the American people in order to commit 5,000 people to dying in an unnecessary war to help cover up the lies.

Name me something good about Republicans (and I don't mean a republican).  Really.  Just name me something over the past 50 years that doesn't have some taint of immorally executed policies by the Republicans.

Jerry Ford.  Now there was a real American President, Republican by choice, and humanist by choice.  He fought a war and wasn't by any means a Republican Hawk.  That didn't make him a pansy, it made him a very deliberate man.  The same as his replacement, Jimmy Carter.

Both outstanding in our recent history for simply not having a war going on during their terms in office.

Oh, people may say that Reagan didn't have a war, but yeah, he did, which he expanded from the war against communism, which was economically failing, and from there apparently it was just up to those in charge, and they decided that South America was a good place to hide a war.

And they did.  For a while.  And almost everyone involved with these American commitments not authorized by the Congress, involved people who got Presidential Pardons from George H. W. Bush.  These people ended up in very high positions within the George W. Bush administration and some are even being considered for a Mitt Romney White House, whilst other Neo-Cons are already in the loop.

What I'm trying to show here is a certain level of consistency, which suggests a level of misunderstanding about neither the problems nor a clue on real solutions.

And yet this country's greatest half-century failure of a President wants to discuss with the American public his ideas on saving the economy?

How absurd is that?  It goes beyond the level of Absurd and into the Mel Brooks level of Ludicrous drive.

Why would even ardent Bush supporters want to support a book that supposes to be all of the level of Paul Ryan's Budgets?  Even rich people took baths under Georgie's gentle ministrations.

What the hell?  Borrow $4 Trillion over the next ten years and expect it to pay for itself.  You just borrowed $4 Trillion.  There are no taxes, no realistic revenues, no possible ways to be able to afford $4 Trillion over ten years.  It was a blatant effort at robbing everyone else to give some people money.

Think not?  Think back to 2003.  What did you get?  I got a one time "rebate" of $1200.  Payroll taxes went down a bit, but not really.  And I offer our tax check back directly in an email to the Office of the President.

After that, well let's see what I remember.  I remember that Dick Cheney, who hadn't taken any money from Halliturton, still got over $69,000 per year in refunds.  I can't imagine what friends of George W. Bush got over the years individually, but I know exactly what they got as a whole.  They got the whole shebang.

And yet this man wants to tell Americans what his (now apparently well  considered) answer is to the problem? 

However, the question still arises.  How the hell do you have the balls to even write a book with any suggestions on what people do with their lives, or with the country's pocketbook when your best achievement is getting the Texas Rangers a new stadium on the taxpayer's dollar?

Please, no more amateurs.

We Were Soldiers Revisited w/Addendum

I just got to thinking about this article I had written for my blog a while ago, initially titled We Were Soldiers.

Now I know that July 4th is the day to celebrate the birth of our nation, but I have to say that without our Soldiers we would never have July 4th to celebrate.

Of course, my article has had an addendum added due to circumstances related in  a NYTimes Op-Ed article by Dr. Sally Satel, but here it is again because I believe we need to bring these things back up again, and if I'm learning anything from the actions of our Republican party, re-hashing things seems to make them right.

In my case it happens to be that the situations hasn't changed enough yet to make a difference, hence we need to learn how to make our voices heard so that the vast number of differences somewhat start to diminish.

This article got referenced in Foreign Policy Magazine at the time and a lot of Vets have had the chance to read it.  Nobody griped.

So here it is:
________________________________

I just watched a House hearing on the VA and PTSD patients, of which much was quite informative.

However, I have to say that Dr. Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institute threw me for a loop with her testimony.  Admittedly such testimony had to be extricated with a pair of verbal tweezers by the ranking Democrat, but the point was that she had written a number of treatises on how (or more appropriately, how not) to treat PTSD soldiers.

Admittedly, she does have an MD from Brown so she's not stupid, but her concepts were, and it just goes to show that one cannot trust a Republican held House to bring in people to testify without taking into consideration where they work and whether that institution has ulterior motives.

I spent two years as Eastern District Commander of AmVets for the state of Virginia two years before she got her degree.  I had already been working on such problems as PTSD, Agent Orange, and changing the Bureau of Veterans Affairs to a Cabinet level position before this woman finished her schooling.

For you see, Dr. Sally Satel works for an institution which promotes all of the Republican talking points, and even extrapolates those talking points to include things that the politicians never even thought of.

In this instance, she has written extensively on why there are extenuating circumstances that should allow the VA to simply ignore the health and welfare of a qualified veteran.  Her idea is that after a certain amount of time before a Vet comes forward for treatment, it is possible and likely that they no longer qualify for treatment because of the time lapse, suggesting that such ancillary problems as drug or alcohol addiction place these deserving Vets outside of the support structure the VA was designed to accommodate.

I absolutely refuse to accept this.  I don't think there is a veteran alive who would accept such a concept unless they had never seen combat because all those who have know that you don't leave a brother behind.

Not on the field of battle, nor in American society.  The results of our efforts and redeployments of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve better than a treatise that suggests mental problems are easily recognized by those that have the mental problems.

We don't leave our brothers behind.  Our military has designed systems to evacuate our wounded because they know a couple of things that Dr. Satel apparently doesn't know.

The military only moves as fast as the slowest person, which means you either leave your wounded brothers behind, or you hunker down to protect them, even if it means the death of all.

Hence we developed solutions that move wounded out of the field of combat as quickly as possible so that the mission can continue.  But it's even more than that because the military understands that the psychological well being of the team is adversely effected if one is left behind to die a lonely death or perhaps be captured, tortured and killed.

More than one soldier has died in order to allow the mission to go forward rather than slow the unit down waiting for that soldier to die.  We're not talking about a criminal offense, we're talking about war, and we're talking about relief from imminent death, pain and possible capture.

Other than these extenuating circumstances, the military has made tremendous strides in making certain our wounded get to medical care as soon as possible, which is evidenced by the number of surviving wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan as opposed to the dead in Vietnam.  We lost 58,000 lives in Vietnam, and more than 4400 in Iraq.  We traded severely wounded for dead, and in doing so, we have no right to assume that those psychologically and adversely affected by being in a war zone aren't qualified to receive treatment, at any point in their lives.

Dr. Satel doesn't believe this to be the case, and as she is a member of AEI, I understand her position.  I simply reject her position and her opinion.  She has no basis in fact to assume that any Vet should be allowed to be left behind here in America when we won't leave them behind in a war zone.  Her opinions negate the best about the military in favor of containing costs at the risk of losing yet another Vet to PTSD, despair and suicide without a second thought.


Don't get me wrong.  The military needs to have cuts, but the VA isn't a part of the military and needs to have a massive infusion of dollars in order to help our Vets who have had two, three, four or more tours of both Iraq and Afghanistan.  After all, we sent them off to war, and we did so when we weren't prepared with the best equipment and parents were buying body armor for their children, much of which was confiscated with untold numbers of dead due to the lack thereof.

When a soldier has to ask the question of the Secretary of Defense about why they have to scrounge up metal to provide some armor for their vehicles, one doesn't need to hear "you don't go to war with the Army you want, you go with the Army you have."

Obviously Donald Rumsfeld never read Sun Tzu.  If fact, you never go to war unless your ability to wage that war with the least cost in lives is the consideration.  Otherwise, you build up your systems, hone more swords, load more bullets, provide armor, and send people into war with good boots, food and qualified medics.

Ten years after 9/11 we have allowed the warriors to be called into question for their service.  Some apparently think that cuts in spending might be extended to the VA because not all of our returning warriors are cognizant of their ailments.

Dr. Satel doesn't recognize the fact that one day, when these guys signed up for military service, they were one person, and when they came back, they were somebody else.  Why would they recognize such a condition?  They came about that change honestly, having lived the life, day by day, required of them by their government.  Is it required that they also recognize that they might not be the person who jumped on the plane to go to war?  I don't believe it's possible to recognize the difference between point A and point B, simply because the person has a consistency of "self"  for which must be accounted.

However one wishes to view it, there are no acceptable reasons to allow treatment for our veterans to lapse based on some outside imposed concept of when a soldier should recognize his or her problems.  If it takes 20 years, then fine, they qualify, regardless of what the American Enterprise Institute would like to claim.

 

Addendum

After I had posted this article on 8/16/2011, I was surprised by this Op Ed in the NYTimes on the 20th, by Dr. Sally Satel.  Below is the reference URL.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/opinion/the-wrong-way-to-help-veterans.html?hp

I doubt seriously that her NYTimes Op Ed was any way in response to the previous portion of this article, but one does have to wonder how her response answers some of my questions about her desire to promote the American Enterprise Institute's Republican agenda.

For instance, her article states

"Consider a real-life case, a young soldier returning from Afghanistan, whom I’ll call Joe. He is 23 years old and suffers from classic P.T.S.D. He is plagued by bloody nightmares. When awake, he can barely concentrate, twitches with anxiety and feels emotionally detached from everything and everybody. He fears he’ll never be able to hold a job, have a family or fully function in society. He applies for “total” disability compensation for P.T.S.D., about $2,600 a month. The only humane thing to do, it would seem, is to grant the poor man those benefits.

But it’s more complicated than that. In fact, total disability is probably the last thing Joe needs, because it will confirm his fears that he will remain deeply impaired for years, if not for life."

I hate it when a professional describes a "real life" situation and then prognosticates upon it with speculation.  How real life is the situation, and how much of her time was spent on the "In fact, totaly disability is PROBABLY the last thing..." (emphasis mine).

I'm sorry, but I don't know many professionals who utilize "real life" situations when they apparently aren't personally involved with the case.  The normal situation would be to apply an analysis of a published "real life" case, which still makes the assumption that real world analysis was applied using all the available information on that case, including originating circumstances including battle field conditions, any psychological evaluations included in the field files, seperation counciling and recommendations, amongst other factors.

So if Dr. Satel has access to all of this material to suggest that it is "probable" that approved full disability payments could be detrimental, it is likely that she would be guessing.  And that is what she is doing.

One doesn't surmise a likely outcome based on some few circumstances or statistics.  One does field study, one follows after action reports and medical paper trails, and one continues through the problem until all the facts are incorporated where "real life" solutions can be determined and applied.

Her methodology also applies a one size solution fits all in her Op Ed, but really she doesn't address any of the problems in determining who needs care.  She suggests that immediate care be applied for some ficticious period of a year or so, as if any or all of the treated will respond favorably during that period, and then they can be turned out, miraculously cured, to a valuable life as a member of society.

Yeah, a member of society whose only job has been killing human beings.  I'm not arguing about the necessity for war one way or the other.  Once we moved to a voluteer military, all of the ancillary support jobs our military supplied were contracted out, and the focus has since been to take a normal person and make them a killing machine.  Then we're supposed to put them on a plane home, and the next day they are happily playing with their children without a care in the world.

These are all false assumptions made by people without the knowledge of war.  The assumption that maybe 20% of the returning troops have PTSD is widely off the mark.  Better to say that all of them have PTSD, but the difference is how they handle their personal situations.

It is one of the reasons that most soldiers with career considerations usually don't have a wife and kids.  They are so well trained for a war environment that normal everyday life seems a little off to them, and being as they are trained for conflict, is it any wonder that family conflict is the first cause for concern for coming home?

You can't have it both ways.  Either every returning troop has some level of PTSD and simply has different levels of observable effects, or the concept of PTSD isn't true.  We know with 40 years of PTSD study that it does exist.  We know the results from the Vietnam War, and we know the differences in a drafted military and a volunteer military.

Add them up and make up your own mind.  Do you trust Dr. Satel's statements?

Sorry, but I find nothing real world about them.  Nothing at all.

Don't Be So Sure Unconstitutional Means The Same Thing Today

This week we will find out what the U.S. Supreme Court thinks about whether the Affordable Health Care Act signed into law by President Obama after a year and a half of debate and development of the rules and policies, is Constitutional.

This court, unfortunately, doesn't have a good track record on Stare Decicis and unfortunately, we may well end up going back to allowing people, supposedly covered by health insurance policies and having paid all their premiums to still be allowed to die because these insurance companies continue to have the ability to refuse to pay for needed medical treatment.

The cost of this political battle in the court of absolutes of US law will take its toll if just the question of constitutionality is ruled upon without bias, but the likelihood is that bias has already supplanted the possibility of a finding one way or the other to the original question applied by 26 states.

For we find that prior to the original Supreme Court verbal arguments, the court found it necessary to basically throw out all of the written arguments and re-define what the question should be.  This is somewhat reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld's method of listening to a question, asking a question he would rather answer, and then answering that, leaving the original question to flutter to the floor unanswered.

As so the Supreme Court defined the question they would prefer to answer rather than hold the 26 states to their arguments about the validity of the Affordable Health Care Act.  Just what the court was trying to elicit from the plaintiffs is hard to determine, but whatever they were looking for the answer will certainly be different than whatever the original one might have been.

This is a business friendly court, and as such, may well look outside how the law itself affects the states when considering whether the federal government's laws actually trump the rights of the states.  But then it comes down to business vs. business because the insurance industry will certainly get a boost with 50 million more people in their pool.  But the possible negative impact is upon all the other industries as they will be paying more money to insure all of these additional people in the universe of insurance.  And of course there is the original question of the personal mandate's constitutionality and whether the federal government can require people to buy a specific type of product.

Personally I see evidence that such is the case all the time, and in one simple small community type of law that never would see the light of day in the Supreme Court.

Take clothes lines in people's back yards.  Well, somehow about the time that manufacturing made clothes dryers somewhat a reasonable purchase, we had a ton of local laws killing the back yard clothes line because it was an "eye sore" adversely affecting the property value of neighbors.

So, without really saying the words, small communities across the nation forced people to buy clothes dryers, which not only ate into their livelihoods, but also took away the people's right to use their yard as they saw fit.

Such mandates have been considered constitutional across the board from community by laws specifying just what colors one may paint their house to the size and construction materials which may be used to build a fence.

Similar laws have been passed about such things as maintaining chickens on a person's personal property even though we have since found that such small personal farming is a smart thing to be able to do.

At my sisters-in-law's house parking is limited to the driveway, which means with a big ole house just built for entertaining, no one may attend if their car won't fit in the driveway.

So we have plenty of laws and by laws and rules and regulations that consistently and adversely impact the rights of people to use their personal property as they see fit.  Many of these actually force people to spend money on specific products without the ability to even fight for their rights in court.  Just buying the property means you will abide by a few people's decisions on what you may do with your own property.

Now in business this is called a contract so the court would never intervene in any such disputes, so one might have reason to suppose that if small local rules would be upheld by the courts, then this law about equalizing our health care system so that all Americans aren't paying for the few who regularly use hospital emergency rooms as their personal physicians would be a positive to our society.

The questions which should be asked as a society have now been relegated to a court of nine justices who's political affiliations have to be a part of the equation these days as this court has defiantly laid out an apparent direction they wish to take the country in what can only be described as the most activist court we have seen. 

Certainly the Warren court played what many may call an activist part in civil rights, women's rights and education, but in all of these cases the outcome has been a major positive for the development of our country's society.

I cannot see the same happening no matter how this court rules on the question of the Affordable Health Care Act.  It's bad enough that such a ruling will precede this year's election and may actually throw the election one way or the other, but that's just going to be a side effect of this challenge to the court.

No matter how it rules I can see nothing positive coming from this week's ruling.  Haven't we already had enough negatives over the years?