Another Close Call

A deal is done……temporarily. But other than this latest temporary deal, what has changed in the last 24 hours that would suggest this isn’t going to replay itself over and over again?  Maybe it’s time for a shakeup over in the Looney bin, which is sometimes referred to as the House of Representatives, although that title is being used less and less by ordinary Americans. The members of the tea party have acted like spoiled little brats as they held our government hostage during their latest tantrum.  At last Speaker Boehner brought some of the adults together and they were able to narrowly avert what would almost certainly have been calamitous for economies worldwide.  Now I think it’s time that the children were punished. When one of my sons throws himself on the floor and holds his breath, he doesn’t get his way.  I let him know in no uncertain terms that behavior like that will never be rewarded and will always bring negative consequences. It’s time for the Speaker to break out the paddle or the switch and paint some back porches red.  Why not strip some of the more vocal dissenters of reason of their coveted committee chair positions.  Let them know who is in charge of your caucus and maybe we can prevent more of these homemade political fiascos.  I have been a republican for over 20 years and lately I can’t figure out why.  It seems that every election cycle my party gets farther away from anything I believed it represented.  The Republican Party doesn’t need rebranding, it doesn’t need to broaden its tent, but it does need to stop catering to the extreme fringe.  It’s terrible for the party but more importantly it’s terrible for the country. 

Skin in The Game

How many times are we going to sit and listen to politicians from both party claims their interests lie with “the good of the American people” before the American people are completely fed up?  Night after night the Democrats fall back into their comfortable, ergonomically designed chairs at their friendly cable channel at MSNBC and assign the responsibility to their Republican counterparts who are sitting comfortably on the set of FOX news doing the exact same thing. However this particular wound appears to most Americans to have been created exclusively by the far right Republicans.  I find it insulting and disgraceful that almost to a person they can claim they are trying to work for the American people when it’s obvious that they are doing no such thing.  They sit in a bunker, draped in Kevlar while firing shots at the American economy. If it can help them avoid a primary and secure their own political ambitions, why not?  They have no skin in the game!

  There is actually an amendment to the constitution that provides pay and benefits for members of congress in the event of a government shutdown.  Can you believe that?  They cause a shutdown due to their own selfish political goals and they still get paid.  What do you think the consequences would be if their productivity was this low in the private sector?  My guess is that they would be searching the help wanted ads, hoping to find something with a job description that offers great pay, great benefits and expects nothing to be accomplished. Fortunately for them it works differently in Washington D.C., they all know that regardless of how ineffective they may be as members of congress, regardless of the damage they have caused countless American families, when they leave office they will be firmly on the path of financial security.  Speaking fees will be pouring in and lobbying firms will be knocking on the door.  I am sure there are measures we could enact to prevent this type of self serving, childish behavior; term limits, production evaluations, campaign finance reform, responsible lobbying laws, to name a few, but it would never make it through the congress.  It seems that anything that makes even the slightest bit of sense has little or no chance of being signed into law.

So here are the choices confronting republican leaders in the house and senate; stand fast on their extreme ideology, which every economist claims will completely tank the economy or make a deal and risk the dreaded primary from the far right wing.  Career first or Country first?  Some of these so called leaders will hide behind their conveniently gerrymandered districts, but just maybe a few of them will take their job title seriously and actually lead.  We Americans aren’t merely hoping you solve this self inflicted crisis, we expect it. Earn your money!

Nothing To Lose

                Watching the members of congress attempt to deal with this latest Washington fiasco is like watching my two little boys explain how the milk got onto the floor.  They will adamantly point the finger at one another until they both wind up getting punished.  These are elected members of our government yet they continue to act like children.  Sadly that isn’t the main problem we need to address.  Members of congress have been acting like spoiled brats since I began following politics, but this group of over indulged gray haired children have taken it to new levels of selfishness.  This isn’t about ideology and it certainly isn’t about what is best for the country.  Each night we sit in anticipation of some type of compromise, some type of bargain that would relieve the stress that regular Americans feel every time the congress decides to throw a tantrum, but instead it becomes more and more evident that the people who freely roam the halls of our capital touting their concern for the American people will without conscience, send the economy into yet another downward spiral if it means they can satisfy their own political needs.  They can do this because we the people have allowed them to create a system where they can profit regardless of how well they perform.

The issue we need to address is accountability.  We need to hold them accountable when they accomplish nothing or as in this current crisis, when they actually make matters worse.  Suspend their pay when the government shuts down; suspend their health benefits when they can’t work out a budget.  When members of our armed forces can’t even get death benefits serving in defense of our nation, how do we allow the men and women who sent them there to continue to receive theirs?  How do we deal with our children when they don’t do their chores, when they throw themselves on the floor in the supermarket, when they refuse to get along with their siblings? Maybe we should consider sending them all to their rooms without dinner, take away their toys and threaten coal in their Christmas stockings.  Can anyone recommend a child psychiatrist that we can send to the hill?  If that doesn’t work maybe we can tackle campaign finance reform and gerrymandering!

SENATOR CRUZ IS NO MR. SMITH

This recent attempt at a “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” moment, perpetrated by Sen. Cruz is beyond insulting to those of us who work for a living.  Why does it seem like every member of congress uses their time in congress as a perpetual interview for their next position? It is the only career where you can do no work, accomplish nothing and still collect a paycheck.  I’d like to put this into my perspective for some of you in Washington who just don’t get it.  Let’s say I go to my next job constructing a new building, where my fellow ironworkers and I I feel the architect has made some bad decisions, so we bring it to the attention of another group of architects who subsequently take a vote and determine that the original plan was acceptable and we should continue with the project.  It still seems wrong to me so I bring it to the attention of as many architects and my peers as I can muster and again the consensus is to move forward.  As the deadline to finish the construction looms, I decide that I am going to start welding some beams that I KNOW will have no chance of ever becoming part of this building. After numerous pleas from my co-workers to stop wasting time and money, to start working on the actual project, I continue welding for 21 hours.  How do you think the contractor who hired me, my boss, is going to feel when they have to pay for work that I claimed I did, despite the fact that I and everyone else knew my renegade welding was just a waste of time?  It would seem obvious that my sole motivation was to show off my welding skills? Will it be any consolation to my employer to know I wasn’t really wasting time; I was merely auditioning for my next job on his dime.  Do you think I would still be employed by that contractor, now or in the future?   In the case of Sen. Cruz and his runaway welding, we Americans are the contractor, and I can’t see how any of us can possibly feel we are getting our nickel’s worth.  You are being paid to do a job Senator and you are not doing it. How is it you feel you have the right to rail against Washington waste and so freely waste time?  You rant against the dysfunction of Washington as you do all that you can to keep it that way. Stop campaigning for your next job and start doing this one.  Remember Senator; you work for us!

The Middle Class Has The Koch Flu

When unions catch a cold the middle class catches the flu, and right now the middle class is on life support.  Unions have been in the cross hairs of the Republican Party for over three decades but lately they have made serious ground, convincing hard working Americans who would benefit the most from union membership, that unions are the reason the economy, is struggling. The carefully crafted, but patently false, P.R. campaign would have you believe it’s the pensions and health care costs that are dragging us all down.  It couldn’t possibly be the enormous compensation packages that are commonplace amongst CEOs at every level of business. How about NAFTA?  Need to raise profits?  The answer is simple; cut labor costs.  The game plan is always the same.  Step one; crush unions, step two; crush unions. In the event that step one and two fail, step three; outsource the labor.  

 These strategies have succeeded in accomplishing one major achievement;   an income gap that is larger than anytime in modern history. That is a fact supported by a variety of accepted data.  As union membership has gone down the income gap between business owners and the people that work for them has grown to unsustainable proportions.   As middle class Americans we need to ask ourselves one question; who benefits from the destruction of unions?  The first time I ever considered that question I was around 10 years old.  My father was an Air Traffic Controller during the 80’s.For those of you that don’t remember how Reagan handled that, let me say it changed my family’s financial path forever, and not for the better.  I was too young to understand the political ramifications of the battle that had taken place at the time, but I was old enough to understand the practical ramifications. My father lost his family health care, my mother got sick, and eventually my father lost the house that I had grown up in with my 2 brothers and my little sister.  Thank you Mr. Reagan, but at least you tore down that wall.

  The next time that question would affect my life came in my 20s when I made the decision to join the International Brotherhood of Ironworkers, leaving the non union company I was working for at the time.  It didn’t take me long to figure out that I had made the right choice.  Within a year, I was able to qualify for a mortgage which I found out was fairly common with union members.  During my time as a non union man, the norm was completely the opposite, in five years with the same company, the only person who was able to afford a home was; surprise, surprise, the owner of the company.  He had new cars and lavish vacations while rarely even showing up on the job.  The men who worked for him drove clunkers and rented apartments with little or no forward progress toward anything better. 

  So the question is; who benefits if unions go away?  Why would billionaires like the Koch brothers spend millions to make sure Scott Walker of Wisconsin, was victorious in his battle with unions?  It’s because they know that once unions are gone there will be little resistance to their vision of low wages, long hours and no health care. Strip workers of their right to bargain collectively! Profits will soar and all will be right with their vision of the world.  Is that your vision of the world?  If it is, support your local billionaire, if not, support your local union!

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

                It seems like every couple of months we sit and watch as one political party or the other attempts to extort and hold hostage the opposing party, demanding one thing or another .Always in an attempt to secure future election victories. The pundits, politicians and experts explain it away as business as usual in D.C...  I don’t accept that explanation, and try to wrap your brilliant minds around this; the vast majority of regular Americans don’t accept it either.  We know what the game is, we know that regardless of how the self inflicted crisis is resolved, members of congress will still have health care, they will still receive their pensions, and their financial security is all but assured.  It must be easy to vote against health care for the poor, benefits for our soldiers and our elderly when it doesn’t directly affect you.  If the tea party keeps congress from raising the debt ceiling in their latest attempt to defund or block the Affordable Care Act, which they affectionately refer to as Obamacare, will they still receive their paychecks, will they still have the best health care money can buy, will their pensions still be guaranteed? I think we all know the answer to that question.  If those “entitlements” could be stripped from members of congress as easily as congress is willing to strip them from the people who need them most, would they so adamantly adhere to their sacred ideologies? I think we know the answer to that question as well.

                Let us ordinary Americans imagine for a minute an America where we the people, D.C. outsiders   vote on a minimum wage or “living wage” for members of congress.  Where we get to vote on their health care package, and whether or not to cut their pensions based on how well Wall Street is doing.  We can assemble panels of mathematicians and actuaries ,label them with some official sounding alphabet soup titled agency ,all with their own politically motivated  agendas ,in order to determine whether  the country can afford to pay them. Then we could break it to them via press conference that we just don’t have the money to pay their well deserved salaries. Or better yet, we can base their pay on their performance.  We can tally up a list of actual accomplishments during each members tenure in congress and tie it directly to their compensation package. Exactly how many campaign promises have you fulfilled versus how many you made in order to get the job? How much time have you spent trying to raise money for your political war chest? We can deduct that right off the top.  Get nothing done-get no benefits.  How tan do you think Speaker John Boehner would look?  How many days would he spend lazily pursuing his passion for golf if the threat of a possible government shut down and default actually affected him?  The fact is that it won’t affect him or any other members of congress financially.  Allowing the country to default would undoubtedly damage the economy; even blue collar brains like mine can understand the ramifications of such a selfish move.  All the evidence would seem to support not playing with our country’s economy as a future campaign slogan, and until the women and men that make up our congress have their own economies tied to the economy the rest of us live with, nothing will change.  This whole episode reminds me of the movie Titanic, only in this version; Billy Zane’s character is played by congress, and he is on the bridge shouting “Faster...Faster”. Billy knows he has a seat in the life raft, while the rest of us are in steerage hoping someone hears our pleas.   How many times are we going to watch this scene play out before we all yell “CUT!”?

                In an effort to be clear and of course not wanting to offend the wrong people, I feel I should do two things. The first is to explain my usage and definition of “regular or ordinary” Americans, which is very simple; those Americans that are not involved in the dysfunction in Washington D.C., but are expected to live with the consequences of that dysfunction. And the second is; to make sure the right people are offended, which is also simple; everyone who doesn’t fit into the definition of “ordinary Americans”.

               

SYRIA, IT'S NONE OF OUR BUSINESS!

                It was my intention to dive right into the domestic policies that have created the largest financial gap between the haves and the have-nots since the times of nobility and of peasants, but I feel compelled to discuss the conflict in Syria. We have heard from all the pundits and politicians, the military analysts, and lobbyists.  We sit day after day and watch as each side, the hawks and doves, parade their advocates across the stage of any and every political talk show, desperately trying to convince us that the world is in peril, our very way of life is in jeopardy, and the only way to stop it, is by “stabilizing” Syria.  Now I don’t want to sound distrusting of our elected officials, but this reminds me of baseball, and one of its most famously quoted stars, Yogi  Berra . “It’s déjà  vous all over again”. Americans are known for short memories, but I think we can all remember when Colin Powell, one of this country’s most respected military minds, took to the talk show tour and convinced us that if we didn’t send our young men and women to Iraq, we risked massive proliferation of WMD and a possible nuclear attack. It was easy to believe Mr. Powell, after all he was a bona fide war hero. He had seen the evils of war and understood the toll it would take on the lives of so many American families, and still he insisted it was the right thing to do. I can’t be the only American who remembers ,then private citizen Kerry, throwing his war medals over a fence in protest. What was he protesting? He was protesting the involvement of American military might in a sovereign nation’s civil war. Now as Secretary of State Kerry, he sounds  like a used car salesman desperately  trying to make one last sale before the yearly contest ends. He is selling us the same old clunker, the” Iraq sedan”. Only he painted it a different color and renamed it the” Syrian economy car”. Just a few dollars worth of gas and the trip will be over. We still haven’t paid for the first car! In addition to Kerry’s sales pitch we also have Senator McCain doing his best to convince the American public that it is our responsibility to arm the Free Syrian army. All in the name of humanitarianism and morality. How would he feel if the Russian navy sent an air craft carrier group to the Gulf of Mexico and threatened to launch a few missiles into Mexico, because the death toll of civilians offended their sense of morality.  We need to stop worrying about the refugees across the globe and pay some attention to the flood of Mexican refugees crossing our border .  I have taken my own unofficial public opinion poll and I can’t find one single person who wants to get involved in this conflict.  It’s time for the United States to focus on our own domestic troubles and to put it in blue collar terms, it is time to mind our own business. It  took around 600,000 deaths in our civil war before the United States were able to be” United” and during that horrible struggle one of the biggest concerns for the leaders of both sides was the fear that other countries would pick sides and tip the balance one way or the other. Let’s learn from our history and keep out of this mess. It wasn’t too long ago that we armed and trained a local militia, the mujahidin, to help defeat the Russian Superpower, only to have those same freedom fighters turn those weapons and tactics in the direction of U.S.  Servicemen and women .  It is truly mind blowing that we are even considering falling into the same trap.  Let’s care for our heroes and tend to our crumbling finances before we spend billions on a problem that has little or nothing to do with the U.S.   It’s the same old song and dance my friends!