CHRISTMAS 2015-- TAKING ONE FOR THE COUNTRY

CHRISTMAS 2015-- TAKING ONE FOR THE COUNTRY

We are in the Christmas season.

The kids have been fine tuning their letters to Santa for months and by now have sent them off. Spouses are discreetly (or not so discreetly) signalling each other on what particular item under the Christmas tree might be more than favorably received.  Relatives are combing through their bank accounts to decide what distant cousins will be the recipients of seasonal largess. And even some of the bosses are figuring out the bonuses.

It is a time of giving . . . 

And receiving.

But, as my wife is wont to point out, usually starting in about September, you can't get what you want if you do not ask for what you want.  So,  I'm asking.

And what I want for Christmas is . . . 

The end of Donald Trump as a viable candidate for President.

This request raises three questions.  The first is whether Trump in fact is a viable candidate for President.  The second is how, if his candidacy is viable, it can be defeated.  And the third is who -- or what -- can actually make this happen.

For months I assumed that the answer to the first question was a resounding "No."  His hairness's penchant for the outrageous and unacceptable knows no bounds and surely would de-rail him.  As Tim Egan put it today in the New York Times, Trump has literally alienated every non-white, non-male group in this country, with the possible exception of non-hispanic Native Americans. "He started with 'the blacks,' through his smear campaign on the citizenship of the nation's first African-American president.  Moved on to Mexicans, war veterans, women who look less than flawless in middle age, the disabled, all Muslims and now people whose grandparents were rousted from their American homes and put in camps."

This last reference was to the Japanese-Americans whose now widely repudiated internment during World War II has been used by Trump to justify  his proposed plan to bar any non-citizen Muslims from entering the country.  As Egan concluded, with about 35% of their voters siding with The Donald, the "Republican Party is now home to millions of people who would throw out the Constitution, welcome a police state against Latinos and Muslims, and enforce a religious test for entry into a country built by people fleeing religious persecution. This stuff polls well in their party, even if the Bill of Rights does not."

Part of me thought that the sheer stupidity of these pronouncements would end Trump's campaign even if the racist, sexist, cypto-fascist and irredentist xenophobia of them did not.  There are about 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.  2.75 million of them live here in the United States.  Trump is proposing to bar all but American citizens from entering the country, or about 99.99% of them. Intelligence services here and in Europe estimate that, at best, less than 1% of the Muslims living within our respective borders are even "at risk for being radicalized," and that an infinitesimal percentage will actually become terrorists.  In fact, between 1980 and 2005, there were more terrorist acts -- 9/11 included -- undertaken by non-Muslims than Muslims.  What, therefore, we lawyers would call the "overbreadth" of Trump's plan is off the charts. At the same time, his proposed ban actually strengthens Islamic extremists, providing them with Exhibit A in their "the West hates all of us" campaign.

So, even if our fears started to overwhelm our values, if -- as often occurs in times of war and emergency (see the Japanese internment during World War II,  McCarthyism afterward, or the Red Scare in the 1920s) -- paranoia became a substitute for principle, I thought common sense might still prevail . . .

I thought, in other words, that Obama's audacity of hope would not be brought down by the audacity of a dope.

But that has not happened.  

In fact, as his "ban the Muslims" pronouncement proves, the opposite is the case.  Trump's share of the Republican primary electorate actually increased after he made his announcement, and even a sizable number of  those opposed to his plan commended him for "starting the conversation," whatever that means. (Memo to the conversants: The only appropriate end to the conversation is to say the proposed ban violates everything our country stands for.)

It is therefore beyond time to take seriously the possibility that Donald Trump may well be nominated for President by the Republican Party.  The Iowa caucuses and first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary are less than two months away.  He is leading by large margins in both states and if he wins them, the race will move south where he is very strong among Republican primary votes. The notion that someone with a consistent 30-35% of the vote could run the table and win among a field of five to ten contenders is not at all far fetched.  In fact, it is the likely outcome. Similarly, the notion that Trump will arrive at the GOP convention in Cleveland next year with less than the required majority of delegates is (a) risky and (b) almost beside the point.  There hasn't been even a species of a brokered political convention in this country for more than eighty years and none since the advent of controlling primaries.  If Trump wins the lion's share of the primary vote, it will be almost impossible to deny him the nomination.

So there you have it.

As of today, the Republican Party's most likely nominee for President in 2016 is the racist, sexist, crypto-fascist xenophobe who stupidity apparently cannot stop.

Now, as a Democrat, there is a level at which I should welcome this result, Trump's  list of nefarious "isms" overcoming any lingering doubts about Hillary's emails . . . or her husband . . . or Benghazi. 

But I don't welcome it.

For two reasons.

First, politics is unpredictable and politics is the face of paranoia and fear even more so.  The actual terrorists --  all "thousands" of them -- would prefer a Trump presidency because it fulfills their worst prophesies about the west and makes more likely the Armageddon they foresee in the middle east.  If, between 2016's summer conventions and fall election, there is another San Bernadino or Paris style attack, paranoia could easily triumph in the form of a Trump presidency.

Which would be an unmitigated disaster.

Second, for all its current problems -- and, from their love affair with the economic austerity that forestalled a full recovery from the lesser Depression of 2008, to their penchant for international folly inherent in violating the nostrum of John Quincy Adams that America not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy," there are many -- the GOP is  a great political party.   As the party of Lincoln, it ended slavery, America's original sin; as the party of Teddy Roosevelt, it championed a regulated capitalism that became the linchpin of progressivism; as the party of Reagan, it helped bring the Cold War to a successful conclusion.  Trump -- therefore --  is doing far more than destroying the GOP's brand.

He is destroying its soul.

And has to be stopped.  

And the only people who can do that are Republican elites.

Trump's viability very much depends on the size of the Republican Presidential field.   As noted, in a crowded field with five to ten candidates, his 30-35% share of the vote is enough to win.  That percentage fails, however, in a race against one, two or no more than a few others.  The majority of sane Republicans understands that Trump as president is a very dangerous prospect.  Dangerous for our standing in the world, and -- given his crypto-fascism -- dangerous to the experiment we call American democracy.  

But at this point there are only three ways to de-rail him.

First, we can sit back and hope the GOP's primary voters leave him in droves, which is unlikely.

Second, the establishment Republican candidates -- Bush, Kasich, Christie, Rubio,  Pataki, Gilmore, Graham,  and perhaps even Huckabee and Santorum -- could get together and choose one of their number to run going forward, all the others agreeing to drop out. This would shrink the field to that one candidate plus Trump, Carson, Fiorina and Cruz.  Carson and Fiorina would draw non-politician votes that would otherwise go to Trump; Cruz would eat into Trump's reactionary, nativist base; and the "establishment" candidate would win. This approach has to be manufactured by the candidates themselves because there is no likelihood given the current numbers that the primaries are going to do the winnowing job for them and certainly no guarantee that the winnowed field will be one from which Trump cannot win.

Third, barring a departure en masse in favor of one viable alternative to Trump, the identified group -- along with all other Republican elites, including the chairman of the GOP, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader -- could simply pledge not to support Trump if he is the party's eventual nominee. This would probably make Trump act on his threat to undertake a third party bid, thus more or less handing the presidency to Hillary.  But my bet is that, in a Hillary v. Trump contest, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, and the Bush brothers (and father) are voting for Hillary anyway. . . 

Because it would be the right thing to do.

So, to my friends in the Republican Party . . .

Rid yourself of The Donald . . .

Take one for the country . . .

And Merry Christmas.

ON THE GREAT SACANDAGA LAKE

ON  THE GREAT SACANDAGA LAKE

So here I am, sitting on the porch at camp, looking through the leaves at the Great Sacandaga Lake, nestled on the southeast fringe of New York's Adirondack State Park.

And wondering how we went so wrong.

The Great Sacandaga Lake is a monument to big government.  So is the Adirondack State Park.  The Lake -- which is actually a man made reservoir -- was built through the '20s by a New York state-sponsored public benefit corporation and completed in 1930.  It was part of a flood control project that damned the Sacandaga River -- creating the reservoir -- in order to control the flow of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers and dry out downstate communities that had hitherto been prone to flooding.  It cost $12 million, or anywhere from $149 million to $162 million in today's dollars.

For its part, the Park was entirely a product of governmental fiat.  In 1894, New York's state Constitution mandated that public lands "be forever kept as wild forest lands" and forbid those lands from being "leased, sold or exchanged" or "taken by any corporation, public or private." Because large swaths of the state had been de-forested throughout the 19th century, creating risks to water supplies and even imperiling the viability of  one of the state's main economic engines, the Erie Canal, the Constitution for good measure also prevented the sale, removal or destruction of any timber on public lands.  The result is that parts of the Adirondack still have old growth forests, some of the few remaining in the United States.

In 1902, the Legislature defined the Park's boundaries.  In 1912, it stipulated that the Park included privately held land within it.  From 1900 to 2000, the area of the Park more than doubled in size, and throughout that period, the state government heavily regulated development, private land use (50% of the park is privately owned), and density, and otherwise preserved the remaining wilderness area. These founding constitutional and legislative acts, along with a century of legal protection developed by New York's courts, then provided a model for the federal government's National Wilderness Act of 1964.

Great stuff.

Too bad we couldn't duplicate the feat today.

As any reader of these essays knows, I am a fan of the past, especially of the progress of the past.  I look back at the 1960s and see the progress made on civil rights, at the '50s  and the interstate highway system, at the '30s and the New Deal.  When I ran for Congress in 1992 and was campaigning on a commuter train running through my district just north of New York City, an inquiring and very skeptical voter asked me what good government had in fact done in this country.  I asked him where he wanted me to start -- with the Louisiana Purchase (which almost doubled the size of the country in 1803), the Morrill Act (which created land grant colleges in 1862), the Interstate Commerce Act (which began the process of regulating the railroads in 1887), the Federal Reserve Act (which created the central banking system in 1913, and allowed for the creation of the modern dollar and the federal money supply), the New Deal  (which created social security to end poverty among the aged, the National Labor Relations Act, to unionize and  generate some economic equality, and the GI Bill, to educate and thus create enormous bursts in productivity)?

Often when I recite this litany of government created progress, I am met with a "that was then, this is now" rejoinder.  One right winger literally tried to refute my argument by claiming the evidence was too old to matter.  "How come," he said, " you always have to go back to the '30s or '60s to find anything good?"

Uh . . .

Maybe because you guys have been either running the show or doing your best to stop my side from adding to the country's litany of progress since then.

Years ago, I wrote to E.J. Dionne, Jr. of the Washington Post after reading one of his columns.  I told him that, in my view, conservative Republicans run for election on the platform that government can do no good and then, once elected, try to prove it.  (Dionne later referenced the remark in a column, attributing it to "a reader.")  The result is that whole swaths of the contemporary American citizenry now think government is nothing but a waste of time and money, or -- in the words of the current GOP presidential front runner -- "totally clueless."  Meanwhile . . .

Our roads are a mess . . .

Our bridges are falling down . . .

Our globe is over-heating . . .

And the middle class is shrinking.

But no one on their side of the aisle wants to do anything to tackle these problems.  They won't pass the bill to fund the highway trust fund to fix the roads, raise the gasoline tax (when gas prices are lower than they have been in years) to re-build the bridges, pass cap and trade (a brainchild of their own designed as a market based alternative to command-based regulations) to combat global warming, or stop voting to repeal Obamacare (whose individual mandate was another one of their ideas they are now against).

The GOP is no longer a party in search of itself.  It's a party in search of some sort of affirmative mission.  It's not even the party of "No" anymore.  Instead, it's the party of "Who cares?"

Take a look at the current front runners in their sardine can of a Presidential field.  The three top candidates, who collectively are getting more than 50% in all the polls, are Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.  None of them has ever held a single elective office, and within the group, only one of them has ever run for something (Fiorina, who ran for the US Senate from California in 2010 and lost by ten points).  They are polling well among self-identified conservatives and Republicans because they are anti-politicians, two business people (Trump and Fiorina) and a surgeon (Carson) who can ostensibly run the country when they haven't so much as run a county.

The rejoinder from conservatives is that businessmen (or women) make better officials and that the good Doctor is smart enough to figure it out once he gets there.   This, however, is a claim long on rhetoric and short on proof.  The only businessman sans elective office who ever was President was Herbert Hoover and he led us through the Depression in 1929 - 1932 as a hard money Mellonite, which was exactly the wrong medicine for that catastrophe but exactly what all his businessmen friends were telling him would work. Even those businessmen Presidents with elective office backgrounds -- Carter and George W. Bush -- are not viewed as great success stories. The former seemed a good natured scold much of his time in office, and the latter became a vehicle through which right wing ideology brought us economic collapse and international folly.  

The problem with business folks in politics is that they are moving from an arena where people can be fired and the measures of progress (profit and loss) are indisputably clear to one where others (i.e., voters) call the shots on tenure and the measures of success are often qualitative (as in, for example, what policy leads to more fairness or justice or happiness) .  Business is about managing to an unambiguous bottom line.  Politics is about negotiating in the ambiguous environment of competing values.  (And though Doctor Carson, of course, cannot be subject to this critique, it does seem a bit off to assume that the Presidency's learning curve is easily climbed merely as a matter of surgical brilliance.  Put differently, I am happy to have Dr. Carson operate on me, but until I see more of what else he can do, I don't want him operating on the country.)

In truth, none of these three could warrant so much as a nod were it not for the swelling crescendo of anti-government hatred that has coursed through America's arteries for the last thirty years.  It is that hatred which is saving Trump from the consequences of his ego maniacal (and, frankly, adolescent) bullying, Fiorina from the incompetence of her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, and Carson from the fact that the Presidency is not a job that comes with training wheels. If they win, however, the party of "Who cares" -- with no new ideas, a host of old ones that have failed, and leading men (and one women) wholly unsuited for the high office they seek --  may well implode.

Because, here on the Great Sacandaga Lake, there is evidence that we once all cared . . .

And used government to channel public energy in the service of those cares . . .

And, in so doing, saved our wilderness, and our world, and our future . . .

And can do it again.

SURGE OR SWOON?

SURGE OR SWOON?

It's been quite a month.

As they finished their 2014-15 Term, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare for the second time and constitutionalized gay marriage. Then the President went to Charleston and brought us all to tears -- and the congregants to their feet -- with his Amazing Grace speech. Meanwhile, Europe remained embroiled in l'affaire Grecque, with Greek voters overwhelmingly rejecting yet another round of fruitless austerity.  This in turn was followed by northern European (principally German) obstinacy and Greek collapse as the former, oblivious to empirical macro realities, insisted on further austerity, and the latter, unprepared to exit the European monetary union, hoisted the white flag of surrender. Meanwhile, the Pope told us climate change was a moral issue and -- in a visit to Central America -- that capitalism without a conscience is a sin.  And then there was the Donald.

As former NYC Mayor Ed Koch would say . . .

How're we doin'?

The answer is . . .

Mixed.

The Obamacare decision was pretty much a no-brainer.  The notion that the Affordable Care Act (ACA)  was written to forbid means-based subsidies in cases where states opted into insurance exchanges set up by the federal government was irrational on its face.  The purpose of  the ACA was twofold: (1) to radically decrease the numbers of uninsured (which had risen to about 50 million prior to its passage); and (2) to bring down the medical inflation rate (which was running, for decades, at rates far in excess of the CPI).  Without means-based subsidies for all purchasers on all the exchanges, state or federal, policies would have been unaffordable for millions and the market itself would have collapsed.  Consequently,  the notion that the wordsmiths in Congress who drafted the Act intended that result was silly.

As was the notion that this Congress would have fixed the problem if the Court had simply made those subsidies illegal.

The gay marriage case was much more interesting.  My own view is that Justice Kennedy's decision missed an opportunity.  It declared that gay marriage was constitutionally required more or less as a matter of substantive due process, namely, the view that there are some rights so fundamental -- marriage being one -- that the state cannot exclude whole groups from enjoying them.  The problem with this view is that the Constitution nowhere mandates what in fact must constitute the "substance" of "due process," which makes those determinations -- so say conservatives -- ones which a non-elected Court should not make.  The dissents in the gay marriage case more or less rode this horse, either in the form of Chief Justice Roberts's measured disagreement or Justices Scalia's and Alito's extremely vitriolic versions.

The substantive due process debate is one with no end.  There really is no way to solve the central problem.  It is simply a fact that the rights which constitute the substance have been found by federal judges.  You can justify or defend that approach, and save it from the charge of illegitimate legislating by a non-elected branch of the government, by arguing that the craft of litigating and judging itself supplies restraints, largely in the form of case by case development and the formation of judicial opinions.

You can also defend the approach by noting that concepts like due process and equal protection of the laws are inherently malleable; in fact, they are products of common law, which was never meant to be static.  Put differently, if one is concerned about being faithful to the original intent of those who put the words "due process" and "equal protection" into the original Constitution or the 14th Amendment, the first concession must be that the drafters of those documents intentionally embraced inchoate terms whose meaning had evolved over time and was expected to evolve well into the future.  So-called strict constructionists become apoplectic asserting that the original intent of the 14th Amendment was to insure due process and equal protection for freed slaves, and that this only forbids race-based distinctions.  The problem for them, however, is that the Amendment could have been fashioned with specific words that ended such distinctions; in other words, it could have been fashioned as a regulatory amendment aimed at a specific group.  But the drafters did not do that.

Nevertheless, there was also another way out of this conundrum.

And that was to declare laws forbidding gay marriage irrational.

Under the equal protection clause, the Court has for more than a century held that it must defer to legislative enactments (or popular referenda) that are rationally related to legitimate state purposes. The ban on gay marriage, however, is not so related.  Those who argued in favor of the ban claim that gender based exclusions protect children and heterosexual marriage from what would otherwise be the adverse consequences of a non-exclusionary regime.  The problem, however, is that there is no evidence to support this claim. Kids raised by same sex parents don't turn out worse than those raised by mommies and daddies, and gay marriage doesn't have any impact whatsoever on the heterosexual counterpart. In fact, and this was made crystal clear in Chief Justice Roberts's dissent, the basis for the claim of rationality is nothing other than longevity; he argued that marriage has "always" been "defined" as being between a man and a women, and that this distinction is rationale because it ostensibly is related to the "legitimate state interest" of "preserving the traditional institution marriage."

Except that it isn't . . .

And, more importantly, never was.

The "rationale basis" test has pretty much been viewed by the federal courts as a free pass to Constitutionality.  This is because, as a general rule, there is usually at least some reasonable basis for a legislative enactment, and un-elected Courts are not really in a position to contradict those claims. In my view, however, the gay marriage cases offered a unique opportunity to take a sober look at the test and treat it with more respect.  Legislatures do a lot of things that are irrational, and thanks to gerrymandering and the current campaign finance laws, they aren't all that representative either.  The notion that courts should call them on that irrationality, especially when it results in exclusions visited upon groups -- like gays and lesbians --  that have been historic victims of discrimination, is not one that will bring down our Constitutional democracy.

President Obama, of course, had a pretty good week when the Court upheld his signature legislative achievement and then dealt prejudice against gays and lesbians a legal body blow.

The same, however, could not be said for the families of the nine victims of the Charleston shooting. They were in mourning.

But in their mourning, they taught us all a powerful lesson in both forgiveness and progress.

Which Obama then reflected -- and even enlarged upon --  in his Amazing Grace speech.

It is one of the ironies of this administration that its cerebral, calm, professorial and non-dramatic chief executive could, in his seventh year, find the right word -- grace -- to dispel the bitterness and polarization of our recent past.

Polarization and division leads to hatred.  From my vantage point, it is more or less one of the very last stops on that road.  How, therefore, do you stop the trip once you are so far down that road? The Charleston victims did it by showing up at an arraignment and forgiving the killer.  Governor Haley -- a Republican -- did it by bucking convention and calling for the removal of the Confederate flag.  One of Jefferson Davis's ancestors -- also a Republican --  did it by voting in the South Carolina House of Representatives for that removal. What made these actions possible?  It wasn't just the shooting.  Blacks have been attacked in their churches for decades and no one before ever tore up the Stars and Bars.

Our Pastor-in-chief said -- and at the end he even sang --  that grace -- God's unearned gift inviting change when nothing else has worked -- makes it possible . . .

To walk in the other guy's shoes.

Which may, in turn, allow us to re-visit gun violence and reasonable gun laws.

Or climate change and the need for economic equity.

Maybe it will even allow Donald Trump to re-visit . . .

Mexico.

Trump's "rapists and murderers" characterization of illegal Mexican immigrants was so wrong at so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin.  The comments themselves are racist.  They are, of course, also grossly inaccurate.  Illegals in fact are more law abiding (allowing, of course, for the initial violation at entry) than the general population as a whole. Nor is the problem of illegal immigration all that much of a problem.  In fact, more illegal immigrants are returning to Mexico and Central America then are now coming, and an enormous number of those remaining are children who had no say in the matter.

The last thing the immigration issue needed was a weigh-in from Donald Trump.  In fact, if we were looking for political outsiders -- those with no connection to the much hated Washington establishment that Trump and his right wing populists constantly bemoan -- to show us the way on this issue, the best candidate was himself in the region the Donald so thoroughly misunderstands. He would be . . .

Pope Francis . . .

Who visited Central America and basically gave the technocrats who now run western economies a refresher course on morality.

For years, I have wondered when the hierarchy in the Catholic Church was going to hold consumer-based capitalism to account for its obvious love-affair with inequality and poverty.  That day has now arrived.  The Church's opposition to Communism has often been read by the right wing as unbridled support for capitalism; the fact that the Church also embraced "subsidiarity" as  a principle, i.e., the notion that policy/political decisions ought to made at the lowest level of competent authority, was deemed to be further support for private management of society's economic affairs.  Now comes Francis, however, warning that inequality and rising poverty are not emblems of competence, and can neither be accepted as a matter of subsidiarity nor ignored in the absence of the threat of Communism.

Angela Merkel and the European Union should take note.  They have collectively put the boot on the neck of Greece, requiring  an austerity policy that will not work (and has not, wherever it has been tried) in exchange for any further loans, and demanding that Greece more or less sacrifice any right to democratic self-government as part of this devil's bargain.  They ignore the changes Greece has made (which, though not complete, have not been inconsiderable either), as well as the fact that it has been running a primary surplus (which is about all that could be expected in the current environment). They also ignore the fact that the monetary union is essentially a northern European creditors club that favors deflation (and hence depression). Before the euro, Greece would have devalued its way out of its current morass (as would have been the case in Spain, Italy and Ireland).  Post-euro, the Greeks (along with the Spanish, Italians and Irish) are enslaved to ideologues who have ignored rudimentary macro-economic principles (the first of which is that you cannot solve a depression with austerity; that only makes it worse) in the service of a pseudo-morality that calls debtors irresponsible even as it bails out the banks who (irresponsibly) lent all the money out in the first place.

Quite a month.  I score it . . .

Good guys -  3.

Bad guys - 2.

REALITY CHECK

REALITY CHECK

A long time ago, thirty-three years ago in fact, I worked for a Reagan appointee.

He was a former Yale Law professor appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Reagan.  He was among the first-wave Reagan appointees -- Scalia, Posner, Bork and Winter -- who were supposed to change the federal judiciary.

I will leave it to the legal scholars to determine whether that, in fact, happened.  On the impact of Reagan, however, my then-employer (and now forever friend) often talked about the impact the new President was having on the nation.  In his view, it was nothing short of monumental.  Reagan -- after FDR and LBJ and the '60s and the explosion of government -- had totally changed the conversation.

So much so, I later thought, that by the mid-1990s a Democratic President proclaimed that the "era of big government is over."

But they were all wrong.

In fact, in 2015, we still live in the era of big government.

And here's why.

First, the conservatives never turned their rhetorical majority into a governing one.  The government actually grew during Reagan's term. Even his much vaunted tax cuts were overcome by his later (euphemistically named) "revenue enhancements."   Reagan at base was a pragmatist.  Anyone who studied him -- especially his two terms as Governor of California -- would have understood that, in office, he lived to pass laws as much as wow with speeches.  In fact, as Governor of California, he signed one of the most liberal pro-abortion laws in the country.

Reagan's history also belied the libertarian idolatry in which he was shrouded.  He wasn't a businessman.  He was an actor, a promoter. He was also a union president.  He knew that life was a negotiation and that labor and management were counter-parties, not adversaries.  He also never confused his self-interest (largely a function of anger at the 90% marginal tax rates that forced him, in his mind, to stop making movies each year at the number four because the rest were more or less being produced for Uncle Sugar) with the larger public interest (even if he said he didn't agree with it).

Finally, and not for nothin', at the time he served, he raised what turned out to be two very liberal kids -- Patti and Ron.

How'd they miss the message?

My guess is that it was never purely delivered.

Second, the problems we now face, and have faced for my entire life, can't be solved -- they cannot even be reasonably confronted -- by small government.  And certainly not by any version of the libertarian variety.  Take a look around.  The unregulated market is not going to confront climate change;  in fact, to the contrary, the market left alone -- in its ubiquitous adherence to time horizons that are always small, because they are ours and ours are small (generally the size, at best, of our lifetimes and, at worst, of our current predicaments) -- will run us into the global warming abyss.

And while the free market marches over the cliff of climate change, this generation's right wing "economists" -- trumpeting Hayek but always ignoring Keynes -- will re-enact in this 21st century the hard-money silliness that led to regular depressions in the last two.  Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, and while his visions of proletarian grandeur were always wrong, his understanding of human nature was not.  The irony -- so my college Professor who taught the course instructed -- was that Marx did not really believe there was any such thing as human nature.

But he was wrong about that too.

There is.

And ignorance is part of it.

Hence our present day farce.

We know why growth in the world wide economy is -- today -- at best anemic.  There is still not enough demand to juice the engines of capitalist production and generate the jobs that put money in the pockets of all those would be consumers.  We also know that we have more or less reached the limits at which monetary policy -- central banks lowering interest rates --  can change this, and that -- in a world of more or less zero interest rates with little growth -- inflation is not remotely the problem.  We know all this because Keynes taught us as much more than eighty years ago, and those in the academy willing to look at the evidence (Krugman, Stiglitz, DeLong, et al.) have confirmed it for us today.

But tell that to the blowhards at CNBC . . .

Or those at the University of Chicago . . .

Or those in the government in Germany. . .

Or those running for the Republican presidential nomination.

They trumpet some version of hard-money, no spending,  limited government when exactly the opposite -- rigorous fiscal policy by big government -- is the needed remedy.

Third, and this may be the realest of reasons, Americans like big government.  In fact, we pretty much like anything that is big.  Big sky (Montana).   Big corporations (Apple).  Big ideas (the moon shot).

Which is why, however much they try, conservative small government types will never win.  No matter how many state governments they run.  

Because, sooner or later, small is insufficient.  

Just ask Kansas.   

Over the last four years they tried the full Monty of tax cuts and shrinkage, and now are facing service implosions and talking about raising taxes.

Sorry, I meant  "revenue enhancements."

Just like their hero.

Ronald Reagan.

SPRING 2015

SPRING 2015

Spring has finally arrived here in the northeast, or at least in New York, where a week of  hot weather is upon us.  We are in the 80s F for the first time this year, and though that is unseasonably warm for this time of year, no one is complaining.  

The winter was just too brutal to look this gift horse in the mouth.

So the deck furniture has been dusted and set out.  The garden clean up -- particularly messy this year in the wake of broken boughs and reformed landscapes given the near glacial ice pack that covered us for long stretches -- completed.  The frost-heaved sidewalks and driveways repaired.  

The baseball season began in earnest almost a month ago.  But here, at least, lots of us were not paying attention.  Night games in early April -- especially this early April -- come with players in the dugouts wearing parkas and wool hats.  By last weekend, however, all had changed.  I went to Citi Field to see the resurgent Mets and basked in sun-splashed warmth along the third base line. 

Which is as it should be.

There is inherent danger in playing baseball in very cold weather.  It's unnatural. 

That's why chilly Aprils are bad for the sport.

And why the World Series should not be played in November.

May, we are hoping, will languish.  Though the season's title -- Spring -- implies sprightliness, this one needs to slow down.  No need to rush our way to the summer solstice. That season doesn't officially begin until June 21, and this year all of us should dispense with the notion that Memorial Day constitutes its "unofficial" beginning.  Especially since Memorial Day is early this year.  Here in the northeast, we need to enjoy the temperate present before we settle into our humid future.

In honor of Spring, I am also taking a seasonal vow to avoid any focus on the Republican presidential campaign.  That party is stuck in a permanent winter.  It longs for the cold war (or a half dozen hot ones) as it works mightily to disguise its cold heart.  In the wake of the failure of austerity worldwide, and especially in Europe where unemployment in many areas remains at near Depression levels, the GOP still worships at the altar of tight money and spending cuts more or less targeted at the poor and middle class.  This, of course, is precisely what ought not be happening right now.  The economists who know (mainly today's Keynesians led by Krugman, Stiglitz, DeLong, Summers and a few others) have over the past seven years consistently refuted the notion that inflation is a problem, or the bond market upset, or the deficit unmanageable.  They have advocated the resurrection of fiscal policy.

Only the GOP -- and in Europe, the Germans and Britain's Conservatives -- refuse to read the memo.

The riots in Baltimore last week obviously can not be explained without the backdrop of Freddie Gray. But the neighborhood that blew up is also one where 45% of the people are unemployed. Destruction is not a cost when that is the case.  It's a state of being. And without a latter day LBJ, it will not be resolved.  The west end of Baltimore needs police accountability, and justice for Gray and his family. But it also needs jobs and money. 

Not tax cuts and spending freezes.

On ISIS and Iran, Republicans have  found new targets for their resurgent militarism, pretending that Obama's measured (and coalition-based) armed response in the first instance, and diplomacy in the second, is somehow a failure before the verdict is even in.  If you challenge their baker's dozen of a candidate class to explain precisely how the new militarism will eliminate or contain either foe, they go mute.

Or talk about how much they love Israel.  

In truth, of course, they really love only a part of Israel --  the Netanyahu-led right and far right. They are not loved in secular Tel Aviv or among the more nuanced leaders of Israel's Zionist Union. That's why Netanyahu was able to use them as mere backdrop to his electioneering . . .

Back in the winter.

Where they reside.

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

Today's theatre-goers -- or, what is more likely the case, readers -- often mistake the meaning of the opening  line.

In Shakespeare's Richard III, "Now is the winter of our discontent" literally refers to the end of Gloucester's depression as winter woes turn into summer sunshine brought on by the punned "sun of York," namely, Gloucester's brother, who has become King.  Instead of deconstructing any optimism, however, we moderns tend to imbue the line with literalness, where winter is a fixed season rather than a mere and passing prelude.  On this view, winter is not the end of our discontent but simply the present period of it.

Maybe we do this because our ears miss the rhythm -- the inherent ornateness -- of Elizabethan English.  Shakespeare, after all, didn't tweet, and his dialogue wasn't wrapped in pictures and surrounded by music.  Whatever narrative force existed was largely made real by the power of the words.

But maybe we also do it because the line had double meaning, the second of which comports with today's often  mistaken understanding.  

For it is also the case that Gloucester's optimism is more than false, his "winter" of discontent hardly over as he bemoans an ugliness that makes him luckless in love, which he then uses to justify his planned villainy.

In any case,  a similarly confusing "winter of discontent" is now upon us in the middle east.

Benjamin Netanyahu has just been re-elected Prime Minister of Israel.  He hasn't actually formed a government yet, but his party -- Likud -- captured thirty seats in the Knesset -- Israel's Parliament -- which, when combined with the seats won by more conservative and Orthodox parties to Likud's right, will give him more than the needed sixty votes to do so.  He beat a re-constituted center-left party called the Zionist Union, which was heir to the Israeli Labor governments of yore and -- truth be told -- the old line founding Zionists of the Israeli state.  Zionist Union won twenty-four seats and represents a now sizable minority of the Israeli population (and a majority in more secular places like Tel Aviv).

Netanyahu also won ugly.  Just before the election, he renounced the two-state solution, and on the day of the election, he juiced his turnout by telling  Israeli Jews that that the "Arabs were flocking to the polls." The latter was to be feared in his mind, even though the flockers were bona fide Israeli citizens.  Today he asserted that he was not a racist and that he had not changed his views on the need for two independent states -- Palestinian and Israeli -- as the basis for peace.  He explained his pre-election comment as merely indicating that the time for such a solution was not now.

So . . .

When will "now" arrive?

According to Netanyahu and many others, now will come only when all the Arab states, the Palestinians, and Iran (i) concede Israel's right to exist and (ii) lack the ability to attack or otherwise terrorize the Jewish state.   If so, now is a long way off and probably will never come.  Indeed, though not a theoretically impossible state of affairs, there are not negative numbers high enough to describe its practical unlikelihood.  Hamas and Hezbollah could cease to exist but the Iranian bogeyman, with or without nukes, would still foreclose a Palestinian state; the sheer proximity of eternal haters would almost certainly render the second condition unattainable; and in the meantime, continued occupation of and settlements on Palestinian land in the West bank will fuel those hatreds. 

The real question for Netanyahu is this -- if Hamas and Hezbollah were eliminated and the threat of rocket attacks gone, would he cut a deal and create a Palestinian state?  Or would he insist -- as he has in the past -- on other conditions under the rubric of demilitarization, such as no Palestinian controlled airspace, conditions -- it should be added -- to which other nations with whom Israel has made peace and whom Netanyahu has praised -- namely, Egypt and Jordan-- never had to agree?

In the New York Times today, Thomas Friedman claimed that Netanyahu was moving Israel in one of two directions -- either to a "non-Jewish democracy" or to a "non-democratic Jewish state."  He reasoned that, absent a two-state solution, Israel will either absorb the occupied territories and let the Palestinians vote, in which case the Arab birth rate will ultimately allow them to outnumber Israeli Jews and the state will no longer be Jewish, or it will not extend the vote to Palestinians, at which point Israel as a Jewish state will have been assured but it will cease to be a democracy.   

A friend later told me that Friedman's choice was a false one because Israel will never annex the West Bank.  I agree that Israel will not do this, but I do not think that undercuts Friedman's point.  As a practical matter, establishing impossible conditions for a two state solution means that the default reality is one state.  Even a state with un-annexed Palestinian territories is still one state, regardless of how it is described legally.  Such a state is also un-democratic as a practical matter in that large swaths of the controlled population have no say in the laws that effectively govern them.

My friend also thought that Friedman's analysis omitted the most likely scenario, which in his view is war or a series of  wars.  This too appears accurate as a matter of fact; Netanyahu never stands down (nor should he) in the face of Hamas's or Hezbollah's  rockets and we can expect more of what transpired last summer.  

As to Iran, however, the option of war will be enormously costly, and here, Netanyahu did his country no favors in accepting John Boehner's invitation this month to speak to Congress.  Netanyahu claimed that the current negotiations with Iran will produce a bad deal; that no deal is better than a bad deal; and that sanctions can ultimately get Iran to give up any nuclear arms program.  The first flaw in his argument was to characterize the would be deal as a bad one.  On the one hand, no one knows its specific terms yet; on the other, what we do know suggests that the Iranians will be foreclosed for at least a decade and will not be able to produce arms in less than a year even if they decide to thereafter.  

There is nothing bad about that deal.  It gives the world time, presumably within which Iranians will enjoy the absence of economic sanctions and some sort of renewed prosperity they won't want to lose ten years hence. It isn't final, and absent effective verification and inspections, Obama won't cut it.  It also won't be perfect, but no deal with a committed adversary is, and in any case, the notion that we should not strike a deal with a non-nuclear Iran is historically obtuse.  We have negotiated and dealt with far more fearful adversaries throughout our history and there is no reason to assume we cannot do the same with Iran.  Nor do we have to "trust" Iran. The deal will provide for verification and without that, it will not occur.

The second flaw is the assumption that future sanctions will bring Iran to its knees and force it to give up its nuclear program.  That type of approach has not worked to date and the sanctions regime already has been fairly draconian; there is no reason to assume that the Ayatollahs will bow to more of the same.  In addition, the efficacy of the sanctions depends on the world -- not just the west --enforcing them, and here, Netanyahu's Congressional speech may have done the most harm, especially if the Russians and the Chinese decide that Bibi and the GOP neo-cons are responsible for killing any deal with Iran.  For, without Russian and Chinese support for sanctions, they are probably useless.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

If you believe Netanyahu and the neo-cons here and in Israel have some sort of war/sanctions strategy that will not create unintended and un-manageable consequences (wars have a habit of doing that) and will ultimately, however long the time horizon, lead to the kind of peace Netanyahu says he is after, that winter may be long but will be followed by a summer sun.

If, however, you believe that the failure to negotiate any deal with Iran, coupled with a frozen status quo in the occupied territories of Israel, is more or less a recipe for war that cannot be controlled . . .

Then . . .

The winter of our discontent won't just be a passing season.

WHO LOVES YA, BABY

WHO LOVES YA, BABY

Leave it to Rudy Giuliani to create a teachable moment.

As we all now know,  Mayor Giuliani went  to dinner this week with a who's who of right-wing muckety-mucks there to assess Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's Presidential bona fides.  When it was over, however, the headlines belonged to New York's delusionally self-obsessed former Mayor . . . 

Who decided to lecture Barack Obama on the art of love.  

According to Rudy, the President doesn't "love America." Elaborating, Rudy claimed that "He doesn't love you. And he doesn't love me."  He then diagnosed this condition as the consequence of an apparently twisted Presidential upbringing. "He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up", barked  America's Mayor.  He was never nursed on the mother's milk of "love of this country."

A day later, Rudy had to go on Fox in an effort to explain himself. Our Presidential son of a well-traveled '60s hippie and frustrated Kenyan college student was, according to Rudy, "a patriot." In Rudy-world, however, Obama's patriotism -- which the dictionary plainly defines as "love" of one's country -- is simply over-disguised.  The President is just too "critical" of America, said the Mayor. According to Hizzoner,  Obama  "rarely" says "the things [he] used to hear Ronald Reagan say, the things [he] used to hear Bill Clinton say about how much [they] loves[d]America . . .[I]t sounds like he's more of a critic than he is a supporter."  Still pressed on Thursday about his comments, the Mayor doubled down.  Not only did he refuse to retract them, he announced he'd repeat them.

All this immediately became the fodder for cable diatribes as Rudy turned his latest fifteen minutes of fame into a rhetorical perp walk. Megyn Kelly of Fox called his statement "incendiary."  Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post weighed in with the view that a "once . . . important . . . player in American politics" had "marginalized" himself into a "rank partisan willing to say the most outlandish things to get attention."  Others called Giuliani "clownish," "unhinged," "vicious" and "offensive."  Echoing concerns about the Mayor's resort to otherness pregnant in his reference to Obama's ostensibly different "upbringing," the DNC condemned Rudy for "bigotry,"  as did other less partisan outlets. The White House just called the comments "horrible."

All this is true.  The last charge, moreover, is one to which Giuliani even copped a plea, beginning his Wednesday diatribe by conceding he knew "this was a horrible thing to say." (Memo to the Mayor: when you think something you are about to say is "horrible," that's your brain telling you to shut up.) But let's for a moment ignore the obvious -- the irrationality, the not-so-disguised racism, the over the top narcissism, the in-your-face ignorance that doubles down on a gross error because to do otherwise is apparently a sign of weakness in our "post-truth" political world -- and ask . . .

Along with the song  . . .

What is love?

And let's start with what it is not.

As anyone who is happily married knows, it is not cheerleading.  The two, in fact, are so opposed that they never travel in the same orbit. Cheerleaders mindlessly root for the home team.  There are no hair-brained plays, blown tackles, missed coverages, Hail Marys, historic failures or noble opponents. Cheerleaders live on the sidelines.  All is right in their world because it has to be, whether or not it is.

Lovers, in stark contrast, are very much in the game.  Mistakes matter.  They need to be noticed and corrected. Not because you are better than your spouse or in amoratum, or want him or her  to fail. To the contrary, it's entirely because you are their equal and want him or her to succeed.

Lovers are often the only persons trusted enough to perform the delicate task of effective correction. I don't listen to my wife because I agree with everything she says about me. I listen to her because I know that, whatever she says, she has no agenda other than my happiness.  The world is full of critics who want to cut you down. She is a critic who wants to build me up.

So, pace Giuliani, lovers are critics.  Sometimes, they turn out to be our harshest critics.  Almost always, they are our best critics.

Lovers are also honest.  In fact, love is impossible without honesty. Then it is just pretense.  And dangerous.

Giuliani's take on Obama ignores all of this.  Indeed, the problem with Giuliani is not so much that he gets Obama wrong (though he does).  The problem is that he gets love wrong.

Obama honestly portrays violent extremism and terrorism as a phenomenon entirely devoid of any legitimate religious impulse.  He rightly refuses to equate the views of two billion Muslims with the distorted claims of a relative handful of terrorists, or to hold one of the three great monotheistic religions responsible for abuses committed by a small handful in its name.  In doing so, he is being faithful to the best values that define American exceptionalism.   We do not condemn Christianity when fundamentalists kill doctors in its name; we should not condemn Islam when terrorist behead captives in its.

The separation of church and state is not simply an institutional divide in this great country.  It is also a moral one, where individuals are responsible for their own acts and cannot hide behind a false religious veil fabricated to justify immoral crimes.  The Enlightenment taught us many things.  One was that morality is too important to be left to the preachers, priests, imams or rabbis.

Giuliani and his supporters have criticized Obama of late for ostensibly failing to name ISIS and our decades-plus fight with terrorism for what they believe it is -- Islamic, or religiously-based and/or sanctioned, terrorism.  Obama, however, is right to do so, and he is right to do so for at least two reasons.  The first is that the asserted equation is wrong; the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic leaders repudiate terrorism in its entirety.  The second is that the terrorists want us to accept their definition of the fight as one between competing religious world views.  They want us in effect to clothe their crimes in the legitimacy of religion.  Their fight, however, is not about the former and cannot be made legitimate via recourse to the latter.

All this Obama has pointed out carefully over the past year, much to the consternation of his opponents.  On this, moreover, he has also been unyielding, again causing frustration in a GOP that thinks it vanquished him last November.

This, however, may be his finest hour.

Because, rather than trumpeting a false view of American exceptionalism that eschews criticism in favor of mere boosterism, he has articulated a compelling vision of moral clarity.  That vision avoids the mistake of equating Islam with terrorism.    It admits the reality of the historic record, where sins committed in the name of religion have occurred with all too much frequency and across the religious divide.  And it condemns ISIS and all violent extremists for the moral evil they practice and preach.

If the question is who loves ya baby, the answer is . . .

Barack Obama.