President’s Gay Decision Waits for the Rest of America
• May 17, 2012

President Barack Obama finally did it.

He maxed out on his evolution on the issue of gay marriage. He’s for it, without equivocation.

This came right as the president revved up his startup activities for his re-election campaign. The announcement–” I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married”–didn’t leave a whole lot of wriggle room.

Whatever the reason for the announcement and decision–Joe “Loose Lips” Biden’s rather casual statement of support for gay marriage on “Meet the Press,” no less, or supporter dissatisfaction with Obama’s slow evolution– it was a historic move, and one bound to affect the presidential campaign.

Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney was quick to respond that he believed that marriage was defined as being between “one man and one woman,” and that’s probably not his last word on the subject, one way or another, or another.

Gay and lesbian rights activists–who cheered the president’s long anticipated and hoped-for announcement– hope that these are not the Obama’s last words on the subject and that words will lead to some sort of action.

What that might be is unclear. Will he provide actual leadership–moral, rhetorical, executive or whatever–on the issue? Obama has said that he prefers the process winds itself out on the state level, where the issue presents itself in confusing fashion. North Carolina, only days before, held
a vote in which voters banned not only gay marriage but civil unions as well. More than 30 states have passed laws banning gay marriage, while only a handful passed laws allowing gay marriage. On the other, national polls indicate that Americans are divided on the issue, on a 50-50 level.

The opposition to gay marriage tends to be conservative, evangelical, religious and skews older, while support for gay marriage skews younger.

It’s not difficult to understand why many otherwise reasonable people might not support gay marriage on theological grounds. The president’s support–the first by an American president ever–is important for its historical nature, but it does not clarify the conflict. Gay and lesbian rights represents a kind of last frontier on the issue of the role and identity of the other in American society, a last line in
the sand on opponents.

The president’s decision, arrived at perhaps sooner than he would have liked in terms of the election campaign, appears to have been based on experience and perception, with the opinion of his children weighing strongly in the decision. I suspect that’s the kind of thinking that also weighs strongly
in the opinions of most reasonable Americans. A majority of Americans, I suspect, do not oppose civil or partnership rights–inheritance, property, wills and other legal matters–but balk when it comes to marriage, and issues of family and children. I suspect that, beyond issues of religious beliefs, that
opposition is not entirely rational, that it’s grounded in fear of the other and a kind of primitive reaction when it comes to sexual matters.

The idea that family–a mother, a father, children–are the ideal and traditional social, cultural and moral norm in the United State is a belief that is clung to almost fanatically and is belied strongly by the statistical facts of an over 50-percent divorce rate, a high number of children raised by
single parents, and so on. I suspect, too, that the idea of gay people marrying and creating family units is a process that brings gays into the American mainstream as opposed to leaving them exiled on the fringes of societal norms. It’s an idea difficult to accept for large parts of American society which may have never encountered a gay person except on television or in movies.

I suspect until most Americans can expand the idea of what an American family may and can look like and accept it, the issue of gay marriage will remain volatile, intense and divisive.

One thing you can tell politically from President Obama’s tortured evolution to a decision point and to
the muted GOP reply–Romney called the issue “a very tender and sensitive topic”– is that the issue is like the fellow or the gal without a date at the prom. Everyone is reluctant to dance with them, but sooner or later, they’re going to be playing their song. President Obama, in his announcement,
appears to have heard the music.

The Tax Burdens on Small Businesses
•

I am Joe the Plumber. It hit me, as I finished my tax return last week and wrote a check to Uncle Sam.
Joe (really Sam Wurzelbacher ) was the guy candidate Obama patted on the shoulder and suggested that taxes should be increased on the rich. Joe surprised Obama, said he owned his own business and would pay more taxes under the Obama plan.

Mine is the proverbial small business, one of those companies known as a partnership, sub-S corporation, or LLC which combines the business income with the owner’s income on the same tax return.

When my company income is added to my salary, I look rich, even by my own standards. Not rich like Warren Buffett or Mitt Romney. To them, my income isn’t pocket change. But to me, the income on my tax return shocks me.

The problem is that small businesses don’t get to keep or spend the income on their tax returns. Most of it stays in the company to buy new buildings (we built a new one last year), to buy more inventory (did that, too) and to support growth (that, too).

Small businesses are mythically – fired employees start most new small businesses – the job creators. For 30 years, Republicans have had a singular tax mantra: lower taxes create jobs. Our company has grown from one to almost 30 employees. Yet we’ve never thought: “We need to hire a new employee, but our federal income tax is too high. So, we can’t afford it.”

Like many small businesses, my company’s profit doesn’t feel like a profit. Last year, our inventory went up by more than our profit. We had to spend our entire profit, plus more, to replace goods on the shelf for tomorrow’s customers. As a drug store, most of our customers have insurance so that they take their drugs today and we get paid next month.

When the ink dried on my tax return last week, we reported a nice profit. Which landed on my tax return. But, because of our growth, we had no cash. So, I had to borrow money to pay my income taxes. In fact, combining my company’s profits and my salary put me in the Democrat’s “rich” tax bracket. My tax rate is higher than Warren Buffet’s secretary, and more than double Buffet’s and Mitt Romney’s tax rate.

For decades, Republicans have argued that lower tax rates encourage job creators (like me) to hire more employees, and that really low, or zero, capital gain taxes encourage the rich to invest more, thus creating even more jobs. President Bush did that, but no jobs were created during his eight-year presidency. Oh, well. Maybe it will work this time.

President Reagan is looking pretty good to me right now. He installed a 28-percent maximum tax rate on all income, regardless of source, by lowering normal rates from 50 percent and increasing capital gain rates from 15 percent.

Operating businesses that generate jobs, like mine, don’t have capital gains. They pay the full freight. Almost half the income in the economy is from finance, earned by investors who pay lower tax rates. The idea is lower rates reward the risk they take. Of course, investors like the Buffets and Romneys can sell their stock and get out any time.

My house is the collateral for my company’s loans. That’s real risk and normal for small businesses. We have to hang in there or lose our homes. Would one candidate explain how small businesses have less risk and pay twice the tax rate as super rich investors?

Both parties agree that the tax system needs to be reformed and made more “fair” by “broadening the base” and lowering tax rates. That means paying a lower rate on more income. Over the past 50 years, history has shown that when rates are lowered and the amount taxed is increased, normal people pay almost same amount while the rich pay less.

Apparently, my problem is that I’m not rich enough to pay less. Maybe President Obama will drop by my store, rest his hand on my shoulder, as he did to Joe the Plumber, and assure me that I should pay less tax. Maybe Mitt Romney will invest in my company and help it grow into a company with 90,000 employees as he did for Staples. Then, I’d be really rich, he’d be richer, and both of us would pay lower tax rates.

And what about the real Joe the Plumber? He’s running for Congress.

No Extending Liquor-serving hours, but yes to Sunday Store Sales
• May 4, 2012

There’s an old operetta song that basically encourages and celebrates the joy of drinking.

It’s called “Drink, Drink, Drink.”
Maybe on Sunday. But to all hours of the morning? Really?

Mayor Vincent Gray, always in search of surplus revenue, has proposed extending operating hours for bars and restaurants from two to three a.m. in the morning on weeknights, and from three to four a.m. on Friday and Saturday, easily the busiest drink, drink, drink nights of the week.

There is also a proposal that liquor stores in the District of Columbia be allowed to operate on Sundays, as they are currently in Virginia and Maryland.

To the first, we say: seriously?

To the second, we say, okay, why not, what’s good for Maryland and Virginia shouldn’t be that bad for the District of Columbia.

But more opportunities to be further inebriated into the early morning hours–is that a good idea? For Georgetown–where the restaurant and bar activity is high profile, as well as for such areas as downtown DC, Logan Circle on P Street, 14th and U, Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle, that just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

All of these neighborhoods feature a bar and restaurant scene that doesn’t always align smoothly with its residential areas. Muggings and thefts, especially at closing time, are often a feature and consequence of that scene, when customers make their way to their cars, or in the case of Georgetown University students, to their dormitories or apartments.

It hardly makes sense to us because extending hours also extends opportunities for mischief and crime and further disturbs the peace of the residential areas. The potential human costs of such an extension, it seems to us, offsets whatever increase in the coffers of restaurants and the District’s tax revenues.

Preparing for a Financial Pearl Harbor
• May 3, 2012

“The present situation is as dangerous as if the United States decided to outsource the design of bridges, electrical grids and other physical infrastructure to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” ? —The Intelligence and National Security Alliance

Cyber-attacks on large banks have never been anything new, but the FBI special agent noticed that the attacks this time are different—large banks in Charlotte, New York and Chicago have reported some kind of virus that has taken control of their computer systems. By midnight, cyber-forensic teams have identified the culprit as a stand-alone malware program– a computer worm.

In the morning, an FBI spokesperson announces “highly sophisticated,” coordinated and targeted attack against banks in Charlotte, New York and Chicago. The attack is well-timed to occur during the holiday season when banking operation centers and response teams were thinly staffed. The machines bombard government and Wall Street websites with incessant network traffic, crashing or partially disabling them.

Media reports that the attack has destroyed hundreds of thousands of computers, and initiates a panic from account holders that has caused the Federal government to impose a sudden semi-freeze on all accounts, with a $500/day individual account withdrawal limit until further notice.

Despite thousands of man-hours, mitigation efforts are only partially successful. U.S. law enforcement and commercial researchers attempt to determine the origin of the attack and find that the worm received its commands from servers in 26 countries. Researchers have seen this kind of sophistication before in attacks on the defense industry, but never in the commercial sector. Investigators still aren’t certain who launched the assault, although many suspect North Korea.

Although this is a fictional scenario, recent testimony on Capitol Hill from a host of cyber-defense experts and national security officials has made it clear that such an event is not only possible — it may very well be inevitable.

It is widely recognized that a strong and well-protected U.S. banking information infrastructure is critical to maintaining our nation’s economic security. But are we prepared for a deliberate and concerted cyber-attack on our financial system?

The cyber domain provides unprecedented opportunities for catastrophic attacks against the banking and finance sectors. Because of the banking community’s heavy reliance on networked information systems, both of these sectors are extremely vulnerable.

The secure networks that banks use every day are the target of persistent hostile activities. To an adept hacker, they are anything but secure. The intrusions are being conducted by a host of adversaries with a wide range of capabilities and objectives. Whether state-sponsored or otherwise, these attacks threaten the integrity and safety of the nation’s financial infrastructure.

To effectively defend itself, the banking industry requires a systemic method not only to defeat these threats, but to also exploit them. Such a method has proven elusive, however. Instead, our financial institutions gravitate toward standard technical cyber security tools that provide a passive defense — but not an active one.

Standard cyber security measures, while always prudent, are largely irrelevant to the most significant threats facing the financial sector today. The prevailing approach of searching for vulnerabilities and applying updated security patches is much like plugging leaks in a badly constructed dam … with a large city situated squarely downstream.

A better approach incorporates some timeless counterintelligence methods that the CIA has long-used to ferret out spies at home and abroad. Using cyber-forensics, these techniques can neutralize cyber-attackers, isolate, manipulate and interdict them.

Behind every virus, mole, worm and cyber intrusion, there are faces — faces of real people who wish to inflict damage on carefully selected targets. But do we know who these people are and what motivates them?

Whether the objective of an attack is theft, money laundering, extortion or indirect warfare, fast-moving attacks are best handled by cyber-forensics, international law enforcement and counterintelligence experts who are empowered to move quickly and seamlessly through the interagency and commercial arena.

Any effort to understand who these actors are, will also ask who they are allied with, the nature of their activities, the purpose behind them, and what can be done to protect against them. A counterintelligence approach, properly applied and adapted can both produce information on cyber-attackers and protect networks in a proactive, targeted way while protecting our national financial networks.

Today, invisible battle lines are being drawn between banks and cyber-attackers. While traditional cyber-security measures against hackers have become commonplace, very little has been done to address the threat of systemic attacks to the banking industry conducted by state-sponsored and transnational actors. Until a comprehensive approach is adopted, scenarios like the one above will be more possible than anyone in the banking industry would like us to believe.

Bartleby’s Books: An Institution Gone Too Soon
•

Given the tumult of activity up and down M Street, it’s always nice to take a detour down one of Georgetown’s side streets and duck into a quaint shop for a brief respite. For many Georgetowners, Bartleby’s Books, with its picturesque rows of antiquarian literature, has been the spot. Home to collectible prints, maps, and the occasional first edition copy of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” (valued at $850), Bartleby’s is a rich, substantive haven for the literary community and history buffs alike. Regrettably, when the store’s lease runs out at the end of July 2011, it will cease to be a part of the community.

Bartleby’s has been in business for 27 years and weathered the last 17 in Georgetown. Four years ago, it made room for Juicy Couture at M St. and Thomas Jefferson St., relocating to its current address on 29th by the Four Seasons. Now the landmark must move again, this time to accommodate a restaurant owned by Eric Eden and Marlene Hu Aldaba, co-owners of Hu’s Wear. Worse news still — the transition is to the Internet.

Bartleby’s owners John Thomson and Karen Griffin watched their business change dramatically with the dawn of the Internet. According to Thomson, those looking for particular books now scour sites like Amazon and eBay while “used book stores are more for browsing.” For this reason, the two are not looking to relocate, instead opting to run the store online from home. It’s no secret that the Internet has been detrimental to the used books profession.

The conditions of antique books are meticulously evaluated at Bartleby’s, but online there is no way to gauge the accuracy of an appraisal. “Many people on eBay can’t tell an original document from a photocopy,” chided Thomson.

Additionally, the owners of online used book sites often lack expertise in the subject areas of the very books they sell. Thomson and Griffin specialize in the history of U.S. presidents and the D.C. area, particularly Georgetown. Now their wealth of knowledge on the materials they possess will be reduced to paragraph descriptions on a website.

No longer will Georgetown students be able to sift through the collections of used paperbacks left outside Bartleby’s on a sunny day. The pleasant surprise of coming across an unexpected novel will be forfeit. Then again, the demise of the independent bookstore has been a long time coming in Georgetown.

Thomson believes a combination of factors are responsible for the decline of stores such as Bartleby’s, including an excess of restaurants catering to tourists and the rise of department stores that take up entire buildings. He and Griffin can list off all the antique bookstores in Georgetown that went before them. They recognize themselves as the last of a type. The Lantern will be the sole rare bookstore of note in Georgetown, when they close shop.

Some members of the community have petitioned to preserve the local treasure. “They’ve been very supportive,” said Griffin. Nevertheless, she and Thomson seem at peace with the fact that their landlord has opted for an arrangement that will bring in more money; the Hu’s Wear restaurant obtained one of seven new liquor licenses in Georgetown.

“The greatest loss is for younger people, who might never see what the depth of this material can be,” reflected Thomas. However, the loss extends far past the students and youths around town.

Up and down M St., where restaurants are a dime a dozen, losing Bartleby’s will leave a gaping hole in our tradition and culture. Such a void can’t be filled by another cookie-cutter restaurant with ethnic flair. In the 17 years they have served the Georgetown community, Thomson and Griffin have acted as archivists of Georgetown’s rich history. Nowhere else in the District will you find a similar volume of works chronicling Georgetown’s past. Yet, in the name of higher revenue, Bartleby’s is being exiled to the realm of book fairs and the Internet — its contents pressed further towards obscurity.

Small businesses like Bartleby’s don’t merely add character to Georgetown; they are responsible for creating the charming, personal atmosphere it became known for. Now, one-by-one they are vanishing. In their place appear businesses less concerned with maintaining Georgetown’s intimate essence as they are with drawing in the rabble of visitors to the area.

When we force out two of our own, Georgetown will only be the worse for it.

1960: Looking Back a Half Century
•

Depending on how old you are, 1960 may not seem so long ago, but the world was quite a different place then. As far a the global scene went, France was busy shedding colonies in Africa, the U.S. was making treaties with Japan, and Nikita Kruschev was acting up at the UN, although the “banging his shoe” incident was probably trumped up and passed along because it made such a good story. The U.S.S.R. already had already initiated the space race, and in 1960 launched a satellite with two dogs on board. This distressed the U.S. almost as much as the Russians shooting down Francis Gary Powers, as he flew over Soviet air space in his U-2 spy plane.

College kids were complacent, although an interesting group called the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was organized by student activists at Shaw University, a black Baptist college in Georgia. American Express issued its first plastic credit card. Marshall McLuhan explained in brilliant theories just how invasive and influential mass media was. There were no cell phones and no PCs; the computers used in offices were huge, unwieldy, and very slow. Oh yes, and everybody smoked cigarettes in restaurants, offices, hotel rooms, and everywhere else. The connection between smoking and lung cancer, while suspected, had not yet been established and publicized.

A new British rock group, who called themselves The Beatles, made their first appearance on stage in Hamburg, Germany. Elvis Presley, who went into the Army to serve his country, was made a Sergeant, and his stint in the military didn’t seem to cut into his singing career. The images on TV were only clear in the major metropolitan areas and grainy to snowy elsewhere, but everybody was hooked on it by 1960. They watched Jack Paar on the Tonight Show, and when Lucille Ball divorced Desi Arnez, it seemed unthinkable to all the fans who loved the zany couple and their antics on “I Love Lucy”. Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking film “Psycho” opened in New York, of which the show scene, fifty years later, is still one of the scariest scenes in movie history.

Washington politics were in for a change. A dashing young senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, decided to run for president, outmatched his opponent Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debates, and won the presidency in November. He and his pregnant wife Jackie moved from their Georgetown house to the White House and brought the fresh air of youth, idealism, and hope to Washington.
Back then, investigative reporters pretty much considered the President’s private life “off limits”. It took years after John Kennedy was assassinated for his affairs with Marilyn Monroe and a mobster’s girlfriend, among others, to make the news. Even if the public had read it in the newspapers in the 1960’s, they wouldn’t have believed it, which is quite a statement on how the media and our perception of public figures have changed.
In December of 1960, the musical Camelot opened on Broadway and its brilliant cast went on to give 873 performances. If there’s one thing that even jaded Americans who were around in the 1960’s remember wistfully about the Kennedy presidency, it’s probably the reference to Camelot and its “one brief shining moment” in the pages of history.

The Iraqi Cultural Center
•

Outside, it was a typical American-style Friday night in Dupont Circle, restaurants and watering holes busy, couples and groups of people wandering up and down the streets; a mild fall-like weekend
night, outdoor dining, indoor imbibing.

In that scene, the outside of 1630 Connecticut Avenue looked like any other night-time office building, but inside and out of view, at the site of the still new Iraqi Cultural Center upstairs, something different
was going on. Culture—in the form of ancient music inspired by and evocative of something as prosaic as coppersmithing—seemed to have had an accumulatively powerful effect on an audience gathered for the first concert offering of the 2010-2011 Embassy Series.

That particular Friday night, Embassy Series founder and director Jerome Barry had something that vividly illustrated what he’s always said the series are meant to be: staged musical events in embassies, ambassador residences, and cultural centers that double as cultural diplomacy.

Nothing demonstrated the possibilities and opportunities of cultural diplomacy more effectively then the merging of audience, performers, and Iraqi officialdom from the ranks of the embassy more than this Friday concert of music by the Safaafir Iraqi Maqam Ensemble, a young group of musicians of Iraqi and American heritage, who played music from, in effect, the Cradle of Civilization, but with new compositions.

An evening of Iraqi music played by musicians, some of them from the American Midwest searching for the roots of the music of their Iraqi heritage in front of an audience of Americans and Iraqis in Washington, D.C. has an undeniably powerful resonance – historically, politically, and culturally.

In Washington, Iraq lies vividly in the contemporary mind, full with memories of 9/11, the invasion, the fall of Saddam Hussein, thelong, violent American military presence, and the ongoing efforts of the country to recreate a viable nation and government. These things are impossible to put aside for any great length of time, but they can be softened by a keen appreciation of cultural opportunities that builds bridges.

“Iraq is not just a country of explosions,” said Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaida’ie, the Ambassador of Iraq, speaking with a moving eloquence. “We are not just a country of violence and problems.

“This concert is about a different side of Iraq. We are an ancient people, part of a great civilization
from the Cradle of Civilization. What you will hear is music that goes back thousands of years. You will hear music made on instruments that presaged all string instruments, like the violin and the lute, as well as percussion instruments. You will hear music which came from the market place in old Baghdad, melodies which men and women, poets and vendors swayed to in that ancient city.”

“It’s a historic night for us,” Barry said. “Iraq is the 57th embassy to have participated in the Embassy Series.”

The group—made up of brother and sister Amir El Saffar and Dena El Saffar, Tim Moore, Zafer Tawil, and Carlo DeRosa—takes its name from a well known market in Baghdad, evoking the sound of the ancient art of coppersmithin. The rhythmic noises, din-like, constant, syncopated almost, result in singular works of beauty. The sound of what’s called Maqam—a kind of classical vocal tradition dating back centuries in Iraq—includes the metallic timbre of the instruments used in making the music, which includes percussion instruments and ancient string instruments, like the Santur and the Oud.

The result is something is so evocative that it’s almost otherworldly, but it persists in the market places and the society of Iraq where the music links up with poetry. In Iraq, poetry is serious business—not in the sense of being published, say, in magazines or academic circles, but as being written on a daily basis and recited at dinner among family members. Consider for a moment Ambassador Sumaidaie’s background. He is almost a quintessential techie, with degrees in electrical engineering and a diploma in computer study. He’s also an entrepreneur, a veteran diplomat, and he writes Arabic poetry in the classical form.

The brother and sister team of Amir and Dena El Saffar were pursuing traditional contemporary
musical studies and careers—Amir as a jazz trumpeter in New York, Dina with a degree in classical music. From the Midwest with an American mother and Iraqi father, they began to explore traditional Iraqi music and the result is the Safaafir Iraqi Maqam Ensemble.

With roots in secular poetry and Sufi mysticism, the Maqam as performed by the ensemble evokes more than anything a quality that is particular to Middle Eastern music. There is a stirring yearning, a building ecstasy achieved by repetition. In his vocals, Amir El Saffar builds a kind of musical mountain from sand. The repetition builds the emotion and it can careen from plaintive sadness to ecstatic joy. Some of the textual material—the words—are old stories about unrequited love. “The last one involved a man who meets a girl he instantly falls in love with,” Amir explained. “She’s part of a caravan. He goes to the caravan, but it’s already gone. So he follows, and they come to a monastery, where he’s just missed her. The monks listen to his story and begin to cry themselves, so sad is his plight.”

Lamentation is likely one of the first forms of music—a keening repetition that rends the heart. In its current musical form, it’s a more embracing kind of music. It pleads for participation.

The concert was the first performance event for the Iraqi Cultural Center, which opened in May. The concert proved to be a bridge to an older place, a better time, and the music made it vivid, where before, amid two wars, it had to be imagined.

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Taxed
•

One of the great literary stories is the relationship—sometimes strained, often competitive—between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Arguably America’s two greatest novelists when that sort of stature meant something.

Fitzgerald—literary posterity judges him to be the better writer in terms of after-life reputation—was a man fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and famous and wrote the best book ever written about the American dream of money and success, “The Great Gatsby.”

According to the oft-told tale, Fitzgerald one day breathlessly announced to Hemingway his great discovery. “Ernie,” he was supposed to have said “the rich are different from you and me.”
“Yes,” Hemingway was supposed to have replied, “they have more money.”

But oh, how much more money. Even Hemingway might have been baffled and not a little awed by the chasm between the very rich and those with considerably less. Hemingway would no doubt retain his irreverent and realistic attitude about such matters. F. Scott, after downing a drink, might have sat down and written “The Great Gatsby.”
Or “The Great Ecclestone.”

One of the great contemporary mysteries, it seems to me, is the absolute worship of the super-rich and the great, rolling-in-profit corporations on the part of the lock-step GOP. The great negotiations or roll overs on raising the debt ceiling will result in a temporary lift of the ceiling, so as to avert an unimagined disaster, or a comprehensive settlement that President Obama and House Speaker John “Weeping Willow” Boehner, the golfing partners, are said to be working toward (probably not), or a default whose consequences people are starting to have nightmares about.

But all this is happening in a flattened economy that isn’t quite a depression but is depressing to average folks trying to pay their mortgage, find a job, or put gas in their tanks and food in their mouths. And yet, all the GOPs, the rank and filers, the leaders, most especially Mr. No-Way-But-My-Way-And-No-Taxes Eric “The Whip” Cantor, and even more especially, the lemmings of the tea party running toward the cliff with moral certitude insist, scream, shout it from the highest hills, that there will be no tax raises, especially on the rich or on corporations. And closing a loophole is: a tax increase. A tax break on private jets is: a tax increase.

But wait. There’s more. Mitch McConnell in the Senate calls such increases “job killers.” Silly us. We thought jobs were being killed in GE’s overseas banks, which allows that company to pay fewer taxes than I do. We thought outsourcing is a job killer practice. We thought targeting public employees for firing and layoffs was job killing. Nope. Regulating corporations with silly stuff like conforming to environmental rules or safe rules or foods safety, those are job killers.

Where do GOP rank and file members-some of them born in bosom of the American People without a silver spoon or any other utensil in their mouths are trying to sell us their belief that corporations and the very, very rich have the best interests of the American people in mind. Reagan thought so: he gave us trickle-down economics which conjured up a picture of millions of Americans waiting (in vain) for the financial leftovers from Wall Street to trickle down to Main Street.

As former President Bill Clinton noted recently, those days are long gone. American corporations are multi-nationals, beholden not to country, community or the American people, but only to profit and shareholders.

Sure, there are anomalies like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, American citizens and world citizens. But many are a lot like Petra Ecclestone, who, thanks to her billionaire dad bought Candy Spellings’ Hollywood mansion for$150 million after already owning a $90 million home in London. She got her money the old fashioned way—she asked Daddy for it and he gave it to her. I believe she is selling her own brand of bags to keep her hand in.

Think of those sums. They could keep Minnesota running for a few days, to say the least, save the lives of thousands starving in Somalia. You get the drift.
No trickle down here. Where is Madame Defarge when you need her?

Digging Deeper Into Pockets, Into Debt
•

Does the government spend too much? Probably.

Are taxes too low? Probably.

Is there an easy or quick fix? Absolutely not.

Tax receipts cover 60 percent of government spending. We borrow the rest, so an inability to borrow means there won’t be enough money to go around. Few households and businesses can cut their expenses 40 percent overnight. Neither can the federal government.

When households and businesses face cuts like that, they go bankrupt. They lose most of what they own and creditors don’t get paid. Their credit ratings drop. Their living standards decline. If they can borrow money, interest rates rise. Anyone with a credit problem knows recovery takes years. It’s not a pretty picture.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, who incidentally was appointed by George W. Bush, said it would be a “calamity.” It will affect everyone. A talking head should ask Congress if it will take a 40 percent pay cut and pay 40 percent of their health care.

Here’s the big picture showing federal government income and expenses last year and ten years ago:

Billions of dollars 2000 2010

Federal Receipts $ 2,025 $ 2,163

Federal Expenditures $1,789 $ 3,456

Surplus (DEFICIT) $ 216 ($ 1,293)

As percent of GDP

Federal Receipts 21 percent 15 percent

Federal Expenditures 18 percent 24 percent

Surplus (DEFICIT) 3 percent (9 percent)

Stop there, and the story is an easy one. Even though tax cuts reduced revenues, and the recession, two wars, and an expansion of Medicare increased spending, no one is discussing that. Instead, the screaming is about “no new taxes” and out of control spending.

Every mechanic knows what to do. Look under the hood and see what’s making the noise. And there it is: we’re getting older and old is expensive.

In the past ten years, Social security has almost doubled from $400 to $700 billion, and federal health care costs have more than doubled from $390 to over $920 billion and continues to rise much faster than inflation.

Yet, it’s going to get worse. Here come the baby boomers and they are a tsunami. Today, 40 million people in the U.S. are over age 65, of which, 19 million are over 75. Behind them stand 79 million people between 45 and 65, so about 79 million are going to replace 19 million in the retirement pool over the next 20 years.

Medicare covers the health care of those over 65 which cost $500 billion last year. Dedicated Medicare tax receipts covered $65 billion, about 13 percent, of those costs. Another $400 billion in federal health care costs were spent on the military, veterans, federal employees, and the poor with no tax source other than the taxpayer.

In 2010, total personal income tax receipts were about $900 billion, enough to cover the government’s health care tab, but that leaves nothing for other government function. No military, no highways, no courts, no environment, no national parks. No Congress! Next year, taxes may or may not increase depending upon the economy, but retirement and health care costs will increase, certainly more than tax revenues. That is a bad formula.

Imagine this Jeopardy question: If the retirement population doubles or triples over the next thirty years, how do we pay for social security and retiree health care? What is the winning answer?
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a plan. First, eliminate Medicare in ten years, give seniors an $8,000 voucher, and let them buy their own policy. (I’m 62 and can’t buy a policy for that amount now. Maybe costs will go down over the next three years.) Second, give the states block grants and let them figure out how to deal with rising health costs. (In other words, let states raise taxes or decline care for the poor.)

Public opinion is divided on whether to raise taxes, but otherwise, public opinion is very clear: reduce spending, don’t reduce social security and save Medicare. Figure out how to do that, and Washington is calling you.

The debate should be addressing health care costs and an aging population. Instead, Washington is playing political roulette with the public’s future.

Washington needs more kindergarten teachers and coaches, those special giants in our lives who taught us to share, to be fair, to give a little and get a little, to be nice, and that we either win or lose as a team, not as individuals. How much we forget as we get older!

Government Rating Sinks While the Heat Rises
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Somebody once said that just because you’ve hit bottom doesn’t meant there isn’t a basement down below, and a cellar below that.

Now I’m wondering what’s below the cellar.

The Washington Post, in its weekly dubious award of who had the worst week in Washington, handed it to President Barack Obama, an obvious choice. I’ll give you another: we, the people.

I don’t think this political city has ever quite seen anything like the performance put on by the astigmatic, irresolute and way too resolute, panic-and-partisan stricken performance by all parties—the two political parties, the members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the administration and the media who read the political and economic tea leaves as if they were written in Chinese.

In short, have you ever witnessed a spectacle like the great 2011 hot-summer-in-the-city crisis over raising the debt ceiling?

The answer—if you discount a southern senator caning a northern senator during events leading up to the civil war—is no.

And boy, were there consequences.

It’s bad enough that this summer produced unprecedented heat waves, crops turning to dust in Texas and elsewhere starvation in Somalia, and rioting in London.

We now officially have a pretty much completely dysfunctional government, according to the financial agency Standard & Poor, which downgraded the U.S. in its list of risk-free borrowers from AAA to AA. If you’re a battery, that’s not so bad. If you’re supposedly the world’s most powerful country, that’s a financial embarrassment and possible disaster.

The S&P announcement, made after the stock market closed on Friday and after a big tumble in the Dow Jones, was made in spite of the fact that in its figures to determine the downgrade, the agency had made a $2 trillion mistake. You could argue that the S&P might have reconsidered, but the agency, like many politicians, lawyers, consultants, preachers and just plain folks, was not deterred by a little thing like facts. They made a political and policy judgment, prompted by the debt ceiling debacle and the behavior of everyone involved and while you can’t disagree with the observation about a “gulf between the political parties” and a lack of confidence in the government and elected officials being able to solve the country’s debt problems, the downgrading itself seemed arrogant and not a little reckless.

The raising of the debt ceiling used to be routine. Not this time. The newly elected Tea Party members of the house and senate made their no-prisoners, no-compromise policies about huge budget cuts in entitlement programs, no tax increases or changes, a part of the resolution of the debt ceiling issue.

President Obama and the Democrats have now continued to blame the GOP and the Tea-ists for the whole mess. You can blame them because they’re all a bunch of little Robespierres, burning the government down and locking the exit doors.

But Obama continued to believe that he could actually negotiate with Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and the gang of Teabags.

He acted like a man who was dealing with a group of outpatients from St. Elizabeth, among them people who believed they were Jesus, Napoleon, Stalin and Charlie Chaplin and says to them “Come to the White House and let us reason together. We’ll have some tea and scones.”

Every meeting, every phone call, or lack thereof, was scrutinized by the media for signs of wonder or resolution. They never came until the very end when both sides, the clock run down next to nothing—cobbled together a deal that everyone swallowed like it was a piece of coal and did not nothing to prevent recurrences or offer true long-range solutions. And don’t you even say the word “taxes,” you just hush now.
When the downgrading, predicted by many economic experts, came, the results were devastating. The New York Times opined that the downgrading “carried few clear financial implications.”

How’s this for a clear financial implication—the Dow Jones dropped 635 points Monday, prompted by the downgrade, but also a continued debt problem in Europe.

Oddly enough, the only stock being bought up was U.S. Treasury bonds, which, even with the downgrade, seemed the safest bet around.

President Obama gave a speech mid-Monday, chiding the S&P, saying “we were still the United States of America,” trying to reassure the American people. Unfortunately, as he spoke, stocks were tanking on a scale not seen since 2008.

Come to think of it, he may yet get the worst title two weeks running.