Republicans in Congress, having failed at healthcare “reform”, that is – taking away health insurance from some 20 million people, are now getting ready for “tax reform”. Yes, the pundits and the Party are somehow calling it “reform”. Interestingly, this word is defined in my Oxford Reference Dictionary as “make or become better by removal of faults and errors” and in my Apple computer dictionary as “to make changes in something (typically a social, political or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it”. And if Republican “healthcare reform” is actually making it worse for the country rather than better, we all know what Republican “tax reform” will be – reducing taxes on the rich and on corporations. So, writers and reporters, pundits and talking heads, let’s be honest and stop calling this pending Republican-sponsored legislation “tax reform” and call it what it is – “tax cuts”, and to be even more honest – “tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy”.

Our country seems to have truly lost its mind. First we elect Donald Trump, then try to pass legislation that would cause over twenty million people to lose health insurance and now we are trying to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Why would we want to reduce taxes when we suddenly have huge bills to pay for the extensive damage wrought by the three monster hurricanes striking Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, and record breaking wildfires in northern California, together estimated at upwards of a half trillion dollars? Also, why would we reduce taxes when the cost of fighting two wars and maintaining our American Empire with 240,000 troops overseas in 70 different countries continues to accelerate? And why would we want to reduce taxes on the wealthy when we already lead the world in income inequality and lack of upward mobility, both proven drags on any economy? And why would we want to cut taxes during a time of economic growth when there is little room for additional expansion? And finally, why would we want to cut taxes on corporations when corporate profit is at an all-time high and they are rolling in seas of cash?

Well, we’re cutting taxes on the wealthy and on corporations because their donors have bought and paid for it. And cutting taxes, especially for the rich, is an old and honored Republican tradition. The dismantling of our formerly progressive income tax structure with the top bracket of 91 percent, began with little nibbles under presidents Kennedy and Johnson (remember Kennedy’s “a rising tide lifts all boats”?) and then Reagan’s gigantic reduction of the top tier down to 28 percent.

According to economic researchers Picketty and Saez, the destruction of progressive taxation of income is not only the most significant cause of U.S. economic inequality but also the cause of stunted economic growth. But never mind – the economy be damned – it’s full speed ahead for Republicans obliging their wealthy donors – 80 percent of intended cuts will go to the top one percent of earners. And another Republican tradition will be honored – when their tax cuts cause the budget deficit to explode, their solution will be to cut “entitlements” – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to restore taxes to required levels. Nor will the Republican Party ever cut the Pentagon budget, which continues to relentlessly expand. Republicans pretend to care about the deficit when Democrats try to improve the welfare of our citizens and the healthcare and retirement of our elderly, but care little about the deficit when it comes to cutting taxes on the rich or funding the military.

And Republicans continue to bray several myths to justify their folly. First is Trump’s blatant lie that “America is the highest taxed nation in the world”. Actually, as a share of GDP, the most accurate measure of tax burden, the United States is among the most lightly taxed nations in the world, ranking near the bottom of all the advanced nations of the world and well below the median.

The second blatant Republican lie that they have claimed for years is that “tax cuts pay for themselves”. No, they do not. There is absolutely no evidence that this is true on a national level. And on the state level reckless tax cutting, mostly in the form of abolishing progressive income taxes and relying on regressive sales taxes, in Kansas, Wisconsin and in my own state of Arizona, have seriously reduced state revenue and economic activity, causing serious harm to education and other state functions. This silly claim has been discredited again and again, yet still is the rallying cry for Republicans doing what they do best – cutting taxes and exploding the deficit. Just as George W. Bush put his trillion dollar wars on a credit card, the Republicans will be charging their tax cuts – feels good now but it won’t to later generations who will have to pay the bill.

Conservative economist and Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson asserts in a recent column that “we need higher taxes”, are “undertaxed” and should not be considering tax cuts but tax increases instead. Our obligations and commitments require more revenue, not less, and furthermore, as noted above, we are pretty much at full employment right now, rendering increased economic activity from tax cuts unlikely.

The third flagrant lie in the Republican tax cut scam is, in Trump’s words – “…ending the crushing, the horrible, the unfair estate tax…” This fictitious claim that ending this tax would “…protect millions of small businesses and the American farmer…” is absolutely false. Ending the estate tax, or “death tax”, as Republicans have chosen to call it, is a time honored canard of the Republican Party. The estate tax will affect very few of the country’s estates as the following table makes clear. If anything, the estate tax needs to be increased because it is failing in its original justification – to break up huge fortunes and prevent the formation of oligarchies and plutocracies. Furthermore, since charitable contributions reduce taxes on any given estate, this tax is not only an important source of federal revenue from people who can easily pay but a valuable source of induced charitable giving.

The fourth blatant lie from the Republicans is that cutting corporate taxes will create jobs. This is totally untrue. Corporate tax cuts will result in higher executive pay, stock buybacks to increase stock value or larger dividends to stockholders. As I asserted in my “Economics 101” article, corporations invest and create jobs when there is increased demand for their products or services. Corporations are right now sitting on massive amounts of cash. They don’t need more. What is needed is more money in the pockets of consumers – this would increase demand, increase hiring and job expansions. Additionally, as noted earlier, with the economy doing well and corporate profits at an all time high, why the big push to reduce corporate taxes? Also, the corporate income tax, as a percentage of federal revenues has been steadily dropping – from 33 percent in 1952 to about 9 percent today. Corporations are simply no longer bearing their fair share of the expense of running our nation. There is very little substance to the steady Republican drumbeat that U.S. corporate taxes leave our country at a competitive disadvantage to foreign businesses. With all the loopholes available to corporations and their tax lawyers, the much-decried 35 percent top rate is in reality less than 20 percent. Among profitable companies from 2008 to 2015 there were 100 companies that paid zero or less in federal income taxes for at least one year, and many of these companies received some form of federal tax rebate, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, do we need real tax reform? Of course we do. We need to close loopholes that have enabled huge corporations like International Paper, Verizon and General Electric to pay zero corporate income taxes. We need to find a way to stop corporations like Apple, now storing more that $230 billion in profits overseas, from avoiding taxes on that income. We have to close the estate tax loopholes that have allowed the Walmart fortune to be handed down almost intact to all its worthless heirs. The estate tax should be increased, not decreased, and the amount protected from taxation should be decreased, not increased. Republicans plan not only to not only raise the amount protected for now but phase out the estate tax entirely, leaving oligarchic fortunes intact.

We should establish a sales tax on security transactions. Why do I pay sales tax on a $75 pair of shoes and huge multi-million dollar stock transactions among wealthy investors escape tax altogether? Senator Bernie Sanders and others have suggested a small tax of .01 percent on such trades that would raise a significant amount of money for our treasury – and from the investor class, the people who can most afford it. Furthermore, we need to establish a tax on carbon – this would accomplish two important objectives: raise additional revenue and reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

On the state level we have to prevent the ALEC-sponsored, Koch brothers-backed weakening of progressive taxation, by eliminating graduated income taxes to exclusive reliance on regressive sales taxes. Several states have already fulfilled this cruel promise and a dozen or so have placed it on their legislative agendas and are well on the way. Progressive taxation needs to return to states, not be reduced.

Well, late in this writing, the news is out – the House Republicans have approved and gleefully presented their “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” bill. We have been subjected to an avalanche of Koch-supported TV commercials touting “middle class tax cuts” and and begging us to “support tax reform” and to “bring the middle class back”. As you can easily tell from what I have presented above, this bill is simply one more Republican effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The truth of what this ill-advised program will do to our people and our economy is coming out daily from nonpartisan organizations like ITEP (Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy), TPC (Tax Policy Center), CTJ (Citizens for Tax Justice) and others. And that truth is that this program is just another massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations program with a few crumbs tossed at the middle class.
If ever approved in something near its present form, this horrible bill will dramatically increase inequality in our country, a shameful measure in which we already lead all the developed countries in the world. Furthermore, it will explode the deficit, significantly increasing the bill to be eventually paid by our progeny. Additionally, it will not create jobs. Demand creates jobs, not tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

More importantly, this bill flies in the face of American public opinion. Results of a recent Pew Research Center poll make it crystal clear that a majority of Americans think that taxes on the wealthy are too low, not too high. Similarly, Americans feel that corporations should pay more in income taxes, not less. But, American public opinion be damned, its full speed ahead for Republican tax cuts.
The details of this plan can be found in many places. One of the better is William Gale’s very balanced description on the TPC website. Another, more concise and succinct list is that presented by Howard Gleckman, also from TPC:

• It is a tax cut, not tax reform.
• It is not the biggest income tax cut in history—not even close– despite President Trump’s repeated promises that it would be.
• For households, it will almost surely create winners and losers. Many middle-income households are likely to pay more under this plan, not less.
• It is not tax simplification. Indeed, for many taxpayers the House bill would make filing more complicated.
• At the end of 10 years, it likely would end up increasing the deficit by far more than the advertised $1.5 trillion.
• It will not lead to a 3 percent permanent economic growth.

And from ITEP’s website, “Richest Americans Benefit Most from The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” lists and elaborates on the major provisions of the bill. The most egregious giveaways to the wealthy and corporations are without doubt the following:

• Repealing the alternative minimum tax (AMT).
• Reducing and eventually repealing the estate tax.
• Establishing a special 25 percent rate for pass-through businesses.
• Reducing corporate tax rates from 35 to 20 percent.

The Senate is now working on its own “tax cuts and jobs” bill. You can bet, since it’s being written by Republicans, that it will contain virtually all of the what the House bill contains. The American people neither need nor desire either of these bills. We need to fight this dreadful and disastrous proposed legislation in every way we can.

And when they’re defeated, we need to work to elect a Congress and a President who can create a fair tax system that yields the revenue we need to provide for the health and welfare of the American people, provide a well paying job for every person willing and able to work and repair our crumbling infrastructure.
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Yes, just the other night, watching Monday Night Football, there was that horrible TV commercial featuring a pathetic Joe Namath and his “Medicare Coverage Helpline”. And early this morning, while working out at my local gym, three of the six TV screens displaying programming from six different channels were simultaneously showing similar commercials in various stages of play.

Are you as sick as I am of these TV commercials featuring Namath or other washed-up celebrities like former “Good Times” star J. J. Walker of “dyn-o-mite!” fame, long-retired boxer George Foreman, or now bonafide Blue Origin “astronaut” Willian Shatner, (for whom no testimonial fee is too small, having shilled for dozens of corporations over the years) offering to “eliminate copays, provide eyeglasses, dental care, dentures, transportation, meals, even to put money back into your Social Security check”? 

 And these irritating TV commercials have only scratched the surface of the flood of other invitations to call the “Medicare Advantage Hotline” or to obtain your Medicare through Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, Humana, the healthcare corporate behemoth, United Healthcare, or a mere upstart like WellCare, based in Florida. Even in little old Vermont, our second “home state”, another upstart is soliciting for medicare advantage enrollment. Yes, “from two trusted names – UVM Health and MVP Healthcare” comes “a new kind of Medicare Advantage plan” – UVM Health Advantage, bolstered also by the tired cliche trope “You spoke. We listened.” I seriously doubt that any opinions were either solicited or heeded and I don’t think that the healthcare vultures are listening. This new Vermont company  was simply intent on grabbing yet another chunk of the  hefty profits accruing to companies offering Medicare Advantage plans. 

I have received a flood of Medicare Advantage invitations in my daily dose of junk mail, random emails and even the other day, an invitation from my own credit union:

IT’S A GREAT TIME TO REVIEW YOUR MEDICARE PLAN

Many major carriers have lower rates and Desert Financial makes shopping for your Medicare easy. Some of the reasons you may want to switch to a different policy include:

Your plan premiums have become too expensive. You’re paying for benefits you don’t need. Your benefits needs have changed since you turned 65. You’re dissatisfied with the service your current insurance company provides.

Desert Financial Insurance Services is here to help you review your individual situation. We’ll shop the market to help you find the right coverage for your needs at the best price available.

Since 2003, we have helped over 6,500 members find better solutions for their Medicare insurance needs. We promise to do the same for you!1

Call (602) 336-5531 (Option 4) or click below to put one of our licensed and certified advisors to work for you.

CONTACT US

And a pop up ad on my computer this morning invited me to “Compare Medicare”, that is, to “compare top rated medicare plans”. What? I thought that Medicare was a government program started by President Lyndon Johnson and his Democratic majority back in 1965. I thought that everyone when turning 65 or whatever the age is now, could stop worrying about medical insurance from their employers, or worrying about ceilings on coverage, pre-existing conditions and all the limitations that private insurers place in their plans. I thought that Medicare was a government program which we all helped pay for through our income taxes and deductions from our Social Security stipends. How on earth did private insurers get into “providing Medicare”?

Why this flood of solicitations and advertisements, obviously quite expensive, to solicit your purchase and enrollment in Medicare Advantage? And what is medicare advantage anyway. Why are we taught to think that now, rather than enrolling directly in Medicare when we reach the qualifying age, we should instead rush to Humana, Aetna or any one of hundreds, now maybe thousands of companies advertising “Medicare Advantage”? How did a Federal program become so corporatized? Well, there’s an easy answer to that question – profit. And moreover, it’s profit from direct government subsidies, the best kind – not properly earned profit, the result of comprehensive research, increased investments, new products or a daring business plan – just government money – direct from taxpayers to corporate coffers. 

How did Medicare Advantage begin? Well, the seeds were planted by President Clinton with his “Medicare Choice” legislation, part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Then after spending much of his two terms trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare, George W. Bush did the next best thing to Medicare with the “Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, formalized Medicare Part D and replaced “Choice” with “Medicare Advantage”. Accordingly “risk adjusted” large batch payments then began a year later, paying private companies to take care of Medicare-eligible enrollees. So this semi-privatization of Medicare has thrived, enrolling more and more people because of the massive advertising blitz described above.

But these seemingly interminable flood of advertisements are essentially dishonest and purposely deceiving. When you enroll in a Medicare Advantage program you are essentially dis-enrolling from Medicare itself, giving up all the protections of this government program and placing yourself at the mercy of a health insurance corporation whose sole objective is profit, not keeping you well, although indeed your continued good health means profit for them since they will not be paying very much on your behalf from the money they are receiving from Medicare. However, if you get sick, it’s another story. Let’s look at how Medicare Advantage works.

When you leave Medicare, yes, you have to file your treasured Medicare card away, that card that you waited your whole life to obtain, that card which banished all worries about the effects of chronic illness and fears of potential bankruptcy, that card which finally rescued you from the vagaries of employer provided private insurance and made you more like a Swede or a Dane or a Canadian in that finally, with Medicare your healthcare became a right, not a privilege. Finally, that government which you supported all your working life with your tax dollars is going to return the favor and take care of you and your health with Social Security and Medicare.

So….you file away your Medicare card and sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan. Technically that private insurance company is supposed to provide everything traditional Medicare gives you – that’s part of the bargain. But read the fine print, dig into the details and you will find caveats for your care: huge out of pocket maximums, limits on which doctors you can see and the areas in which you can see them. And God help you if you get seriously ill. This is when medicare advantage enrollees discover the real limitations of the program they are relying upon. Forget the promise of “0 copays” – you will run up a huge bill seeing specialists. Diagnostic tests and lab services will cost a lot. And surgery and hospital costs are exorbitant as well, all totally glossed over in the commercials we see. 

You see, when you are in Medicare Advantage, instead of Medicare taking care of you, Medicare pays the corporation for taking care of you. And how much do they pay? Well, it averages about a thousand dollars per month so if you stay healthy, the corporation puts this into their pockets, sends dividends to its investors and provides bonuses for its executives and CEO. Great business plan. 

But this amount can vary based upon what’s called a “risk score”. If the Medicare Advantage company can claim that a percentage of its enrollees are high risk, maybe chronically ill, maybe showing signs of heart trouble or at risk for diabetes or kidney problems, then they can increase the risk score and obtain more money from Medicare.

Many Medicare Advantage programs provide a once a year “home visit” by a registered nurse as a “benefit” of the program. However, these often redundant visits, ostensibly to keep you well, have another purpose – to discover previously hidden conditions or propensities with enrollees so that the overall risk score can be raised. And many of these visits do exactly that.

Okay, you find yourself quite ill, needing repeated tests of all kinds, repeated hospital stays and multiple visits to specialists and you are going broke and approaching bankruptcy, even while enrolled in a Medicare Advantage program, and you wish to return to traditional Medicare. Well, it’s really not that easy. First, you have to wait until the next “open enrollment” season rolls around. Second, you need a “medigap” policy that will cover what traditional Medicare does not, and if ill, it could cost you much more than if you had purchased the coverage when you first enrolled in Medicare.

And what about the other benefits promised in the myriad TV commercials we’re forced to watch.Yes, dental, vision and hearing coverage, plus “transportation and meals”. Well, all of these are quite meager and subject to severe limitations, such as a maximum amount per year, or per procedure in the case of dental. And the hearing benefit may cover tests but hearing aids may be limited to a specific amount per multiple year period which comes nowhere near paying the full cost. “Transportation and meals?” Read the fine print.

Other problems with Medicare Advantage are simply that it costs taxpayers far more than traditional Medicare, even factoring in the monthly premium most enrollees pay. And this significant step toward total privatization of Medicare again exposes, just like Obamacare, the folly of using government money to pay corporations for what the government could do much more cost effectively. Basically the question to ask is this – why should taxpayer money be devoted to providing profit for corporations and filling the pockets of their investors and CEO’s? Again, it’s a pretty simple procedure – moving money from Medicare to hospitals and health providers to take care of the elderly. Why have the middlemen raking in their profit to do exactly the same thing?

But all these millions of dollars invested in the TV ads, the print ads, the mailings, email pop-ups and the rest, have really paid off for our for-profit healthcare industry. In 2020, private insurance companies offered an estimated 3,148 Medicare Advantage plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). And of those that Kaiser reported, the following are the companies that welcomed the most Medicare Advantage enrollees in 2020:

• UnitedHealthcare: 26%
• Humana: 18%
• BCBS plans: 15%
• CVS (Aetna): 11%
• Kaiser Permanente: 7%
• Centene: 4%
• Cigna: 2%

So this tsunami of advertising has really paid off and after this year’s inundation during “open enrollment” we can rest assured that next year’s will be worse. And we can also assume that millions more elderly qualifying for Medicare will have signed over their healthcare to a for-profit corporation.

But guess what, many of these deceptive ads will not stop, even though the Medicare “open enrollment” period ended December 7. Because for the next few months, although those eligible for Medicare cannot any longer register for Medicare Advantage or move back into original Medicare, if already enrolled, you can switch from one “advantage” program to another. That period is until March 31. So I do expect many of these deceptive ads to continue. We shall see.

Addendum

For those concerned with continued privatization and corporatization of the already largely for-profit US healthcare system, there is another nefarious plot being carried out as I write and as you read. 

Near the end of the Trump administration the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) decided to begin a program, with no input from Medicare enrollees and no oversight from Congress, a program called DC (direct contracting). In fact, this program has provoked barely a whisper in the media, though it has healthcare corporations and Wall Street private equity firms “lined up like pigs at a trough”, all eager to get their filthy hands on some more taxpayer money and further privatize our healthcare systems. So far 53 companies have signed up as DCE’s (Direct Contracting Entities) to administer the program – a mix of healthcare corporations and private equity firms.

Already, without them realizing it, thousands of Medicare enrollees who thought they were enrolled in traditional Medicare, have been quietly and subtly moved into this program, along with their primary care physicians, with the promise of greater Medicare reimbursements for the doctors and more “managed” and “focused” care for the patient. In reality, the program does little to nothing to improve care. What it clearly does is raise the Medicare price for taxpayers and give money to private companies.

What all this boils down to is just what do the American people want for a healthcare program for the elderly. Do they want a no profit government program or do they want a program farmed out to corporations who make profit from the government funds they receive. I know where the American people are. It’s their legislators in Congress who are the problem because private healthcare corporations have been contributing to their PAC’s and reelection funds for decades, corruptly buying their support. We should be furious about this – our legislators should be fighting for us but they’re not. What a country! What a political system! Thank God for the few legislators and the organizations that are fighting back on our behalf – organizations like PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) and legislators like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal.

And we need to ask about the role of this special Medicare office, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Truly it seems that their role is simply to surely and steadily turn Medicare over to corporations, while increasing the outflow of Medicare money to pad their pockets and increase their profits. What kind of “innovation” is this anyhow? This office needs to be investigated by Congress and I guarantee that they’ll find that the office is populated by ex- corporate healthcare executive doing everything they can to help their former employers and waiting until the Washington revolving door spits them out again to repopulate the healthcare industry.

Many of my articles have been based on what I perceive as something wrong with our society, politics, priorities and the like. But sometimes the complaint, problem or suggested solution is too limited for a whole article most of which seem to be in the 1500-2500 word range, so I include it in an article about several topics which I have called my “rants”: the first one and the second. And, having made a little list of my latest complaints and issues, each too limited for a full article, I am offering to my reader(s) “yet another rant”.

First, I have to complain about the the sorry state of health information in the US. We saw this early in the pandemic from the Trump administration’s disgraceful handling of essential information. First, we experienced the cover-up of the severity and deadliness of the pandemic from the chief executive himself, then during dozens of presidential press conferences we were treated to exhortations to treat infections with disinfectants and the like while qualified medical personnel stood by, mentally rolling their eyes in disbelief and wringing their hands in frustration, never themselves offering us anything more concrete than masks, “social distancing” and hand washing. And they couldn’t even agree on the best kind of mask or tell us where they were available. I clearly remember the panic my wife and I felt when absolutely no masks were available anywhere and we were reduced to madly fashioning some from whatever we could find, including sewing a few primitive cloth masks on her sewing machine. In retrospect I don’t know why medical authorities could not have sent several good masks to every citizen, certainly preventing a significant number of infections and saving many lives.

And smooth-talking HHS secretary and former Eli Lily big pharma executive Alex Azar (a perfect example of the “revolving door” between government and private employment) frequently disagreed or talked over and around Trump CDC director Robert Redfield. Then we cringed to see how Redfield sacrificed himself and the lofty reputation of his agency on the altar of Trump by acquiescing to politics, watering down recommendations to mere suggestions, overruling scientists and generally destroying the integrity of his agency and public trust in it.

And we aren’t a whole lot better off right now, with obscenely wealthy corporations like Pfizer apparently running the show and hapless and helpless CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stumbling through her public pronouncements. Early on, with reckless and needless hyperbole, she warned that COVID may be “just a few mutations” away from being able “to evade our vaccine in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death.” Then she decided to overrule her own agency’s advisory panel and recommend boosters for workers whose jobs require often interacting with the public.

On related matters with booster shots, she first called for boosters for vaccinated people who were over 65 or who had compromised immune systems or other chronic conditions. Now it’s boosters for everyone except children. Oh, I forgot, first it was Pfizer boosters only – then eventually, after panicking those who had received Moderna or Johnson & Johnson, approving those boosters, or, without supporting detail, it was okay go ahead and “mix or match”. Of course with Pfizer calling the shots (pardon the pun) one might wonder what CDC’s relationship with Pfizer really is. In fact, it’s interesting to note that the entity first calling for boosters at all was Pfizer itself, not the CDC. And it was Pfizer and not our government that first announced suitability of their vaccine for children. Hmmm, lots more shots…lots more money for profits, stockholders and CEO. And I’ve already noted in an earlier article that Pfizer fancies itself a quasi government entity, bustling all over the world making deals with foreign governments for vaccine sales, totally independent of the US State Department or federal health agencies.

But it’s not only during the “covid age” when we’ve been misled by our well funded and supposedly brilliant and far-reaching health authorities. Remember the “low fat” recommendations that were supposed to save us from cholesterol, clogged arteries and heart attacks? What happened to that? All of us scrambled madly to avoid fat in our diets. But not a word was said about sugar, the much more likely cause of heart problems than fat as I recounted in my article about sugar. And we suddenly found out that many fats were actually good for us. Really? Why did that take so long?

And then there were the warnings that one of the most nutritious natural foods available to us – simple, everyday eggs – were responsible for cholesterol and clogged arteries, so many of us, including myself, compromised our nutrition by dramatically reducing egg consumption. In fact I recall foolishly boasting to my cardiologist (back when I had one) that I was down to eating just one or two eggs a week.

Yet another example of bad information was the almost universal advice that all of we older people who feared heart attacks should consider taking low dose aspirin every day. Yes, I’m sure the king of aspirin manufacturing, Bayer, influenced this decision – look at all the money they made. Well just recently the CDC reversed itself on this too, because apparently the potential harm of daily intake of low dose aspirin is likely to outweigh any benefits. And why did they just discover this – now, after all these years?

And remember the old “food pyramid” published by the Department of Agriculture to help us with wise food choices? Debuting in 1992, its broad base suggested lots of refined carbohydrates, the middle recommended meat and milk items and fats were confined to the narrow pyramid tip – all of it lousy (and dangerous) advice since we know now how beneficial many fats are and how dangerous refined carbs are. After many revisions over the years, most very misleading and ultimately useless, it’s been replaced by the “plate” – introduced by Michelle Obama and corporate farm advocate Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsak (incidentally now still plying his corporate craft in the same position for the Biden administration) – perhaps a slight improvement but ultimately of only marginal utility. Yet both the succession of “pyramids” and “plates” were presented to millions of school children as the nutritional gospel. Poor, innocent kids.

Another issue I have to complain about (again? I think I complained in another recent article) is our corporatization of the fight against the covid pandemic. The worst aspect of the behavior of these corporate behemoths raking in billions in profits is that they have refused to share their patents or formulae for covid vaccines with the world, choosing instead to market them to countries willing to cough up the millions necessary to buy enough doses to vaccinate their populations. Especially egregious is Moderna’s refusal, since their vaccine was developed with the support of millions of federal dollars from the NHA, along with the knowledge and expertise of many NHA scientists. This might be a good place to note that in a 1955 interview, American virologist Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine, was asked who owned the patent. He replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” No one became fabulously rich developing, distributing and administering the polio vaccine. And now?

Moderna, the company that never manufactured anything of consequence before the pandemic, has now placed five newly minted billionaires on the Forbes 500 richest list. And guess what, a full forty new billionaires from other companies have been created from the fight against the pandemic. What should have been a cooperative nonprofit effort by governments all over the world has turned out to be a wild corporate competition for riches and a bonanza for these greedy forty.

Why on earth didn’t we nationalize these greedy corporations and have the government manufacture the masks, the personal protective equipment, the billions of vaccine doses needed all over the world and send it all to poor nations completely free? We all knew that if the whole world did not get vaccinated we would see deadly variants emerge. And sure enough, South Africa, with its less than 30 percent vaccination rate, has presented the world with the Omicron variant threat. Will we now shift into high gear and vaccinate the world? As long a corporations are calling the shots (again – pardon the pun), I think not. Rich countries are at fault for the formation and spread of this latest covid variant – failure to curb corporate greed, read Pfizer and Moderns, and vaccinate the whole world. We could have stopped it and did not.

It might be worth noting that poor, humble little Cuba, wracked by cruel unnecessary US economic sanctions, has all by itself, manufactured effective covid vaccines that it plans to share with the world. Yes, Cuba’s public medical sector, note “public”, no corporations or profit involved, with its strong commitment to public health, has successfully manufactured its own vaccines. One hundred percent of its population has now had at least once dose and the country has reopened its schools and businesses and is now open for tourism as well. What a contrast to our own country where public health and vaccines are a commodity, to be bought and sold, and to be profited from.

Also related to the sorry state of health matters in our beloved country is the fact that the cost of Medicare, deducted from our Social Security checks, is going up. Yes, because the FDA has recklessly and irresponsibly approved a frightfully expensive and likely useless drug, Aduhelm, to treat Alzheimers, which will cost $56,000 a year, Medicare Part B is increasing its monthly premium from $148.50 to $170.10 in 2022, in case prescribing this drug, which experts say should cost no more than $8000 per year, causes a huge bump in Medicare drug spending.

And another item – Republican obstructionism. I can visualize Republican Representatives and Senators getting up in the morning, getting ready for work, and going in and having a simple and stress-free day – not much effort, no thought – just obstruction. If you are a Republican legislator, you don’t really have to come up with ideas, programs or policies to help the country or to assist your constituents. You just have to come into your office and decide what and how to obstruct that day. Pretty simple job description, isn’t it? Honestly, when is the last time you heard or read of a big Republican legislative program? You’d pretty much have to go back to Trump’s infamous “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” in 2017, which did not help anyone except the wealthy and corporations. Otherwise it’s been obstruction all the way. Yet amazingly this intellectually bankrupt political party, a minority party mind you, is poised to take over both houses of Congress in 2022 and because of voter suppression and gerrymandering I am sure will assume the presidency in 2024. 

As part of this obstructionism and non-governing, I have to add the question of why we seem to be the only industrialized nation on earth that regularly brings itself to the point of financial collapse by threatening to refuse to raise the “debt ceiling” or “pass the spending bill” or whatever, potentially leading the US government to default on its debts and cause an implosion of world credit markets. This unrelenting political and financial brinkmanship is practiced periodically by Republicans as blackmail to achieve certain objectives, this time to prevent Biden’s vaccine mandates from being imposed.

And I have a few things to say about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Why is she so revered, worshipped and venerated? If I read another article about how wonderful it was that she shared a love of opera with and even attended performances with fellow justice Antonin Scalia, I’ll be sick. In spite of her notable work as a jurist on issues like gender equity and women’s rights, to me her greatest legacy is her arrogance resulting in opening the door and keeping it open for a generation long conservative majority on the court by staying on the Court for far too long despite her body telling her again and again that she needed to retire. Her first encounter with cancer came in 1999 and even after several more bouts and declaring herself “cancer free” in 2020 she finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer later that year, enabling President Donald Trump to appoint Amy Conan Barrett, his third Supreme Court Justice. 

If Ginsberg had been a little less arrogant and had listened to her body and her doctors, President Barack Obama could have appointed her replacement. Thus to me, Ginsberg’s most lasting legacy was her sense of superiority, of her indispensability. “I’ve said many times that I will do this job as long as I can do it full steam,” Ginsburg said in RBG, after she was asked about the calls for her to retire. “And when I can’t, that will be the time I will step down.” Well there were many times during her struggles with cancer that she could not do her job “full steam” and should have stepped down but her insufferable pride and hubris kept her there long enough for her replacement to be named by a Republican president. So when I think of Ginsberg, I don’t think of her legal ability or her importance on the Court. I can only see her foolish self-centered pride.

On another very important current issue, I cannot believe that my own Democratic Party is messing around with the SALT deduction. This limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income was the sole progressive element of Donald Trump’s infamous “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, likely included in the legislation to “get back” at high tax blue states where state and local taxes were high enough to make a difference on some wealthy taxpayers federal income tax obligations. But now, to appease effected high income taxpayers, donors I am sure, in their states, many Democratic senators have proposed canceling or adjusting this limit. Corporate Democrat Senator Bob Menendez has even referred to it as “the SALT cap nightmare for 99% of NJ families”, a blatant lie, since the cap effects just the most wealthy. But I am furious that any Democrats at all are behind the push to raise or abandon this limit since doing so is quite simply a tax cut for the wealthy.

Another long standing gripe I have is with our Congress pouring money into the Pentagon. The last insult was a short time ago when Congress gave our reckless and feckless military not only all of its latest budget request of $715 billion but also added an unsolicited allotment of another $25.5 billion. And these are the same people that cry about the deficit and wring their hands because there’s no money with which to expand Medicare or provide paid family leave or free community college. The United States spends more on its military that the next 11 highest nations combined, an absolutely incredible fact. And our Pentagon spending is never audited. Our mindless largesse is pretty much a blank check for these uniformed fools to spend any way they wish. And has our vaunted military won any wars recently?

And also making me quite angry is that this monstrous bill for “defense” is deemed a “must pass” by our Congress, while Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill is being whittled down to nothing in an effort to please “King Coal” Manchin and self-styled “maverick”, Kyrsten Sinema. 

And related to the military, I have had to sit through the few NFL games I chose to watch recently and look at a host of coaches, Gatorade boys and various other hangers-on sporting expensive military garb for their “Salute to Service”. What nonsense. Precious few players, coaches and other personnel have ever served in the military. That “privilege”, since the military abandoned the draft, mostly falls to the poor, the marginalized, immigrants, Native Americans and people of color. So is all this hoopla to ease their guilty consciences? What about the cost of the military jet flyovers, the cost of all the clothing? I wrote about this deplorable practice a long time ago, December 2017 to be exact, and can’t believe the NFL is still doing it. Again, as my article suggested – why not give this monstrous pile of superfluous clothing or the money it took to buy it to the needy or to the Salvation Army or other worthy charity? Or why not honor some segments of society that are involved in helping and building, not killing and destroying – like perhaps teachers, Doctors without Borders or Peace Corps volunteers. What a terrible waste of resources….and it is still going on. 

I would also like to say a few words to Republicans who are so concerned about government spending and inflation. Interesting how no one was concerned when a gaping hole was blown in the budget with Trump’s “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, a piece of legislation which really cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, not you and I and which did not create any jobs. Instead of investing and hiring more people, corporations indulged in stock buybacks with their newfound bonanza. It’s demand that induces corporations to invest and hire anyhow, not enormous profits.

I’m no economist but here’s my take on the causes of recent inflation and how to rein it in. First, there was a huge amount of pent-up demand stored in the economy because of the covid pandemic. People didn’t go to restaurants, to the movies or to live performances. Shopping malls were dead zones. While they still ordered some hard goods over the internet and kept the “essential workers” at the post office, Fedex and UPS busy, the net result was that they had tons of money left over, augmented by the checks from the federal government covid relief programs, sitting in their accounts. And as a result, production of all sorts of goods, even agricultural products, slowed. Now that things have loosened up, people are trying to spend this money, putting a serious strain on production and distribution of goods and thus temporarily raising prices. 

Another reason we are wrestling with inflation now and Republicans and Larry Summers are gleefully pointing their fingers at Democratic spending bills, is that indeed we have spent a great deal of money on fighting the pandemic and on keeping the economy strong. But we have not raised taxes at all to pay for these programs. Thus, yes indeed, there is a great deal of money sloshing around the economy chasing too few goods right now. Increased taxation, particularly of corporations and the wealthy, would reduce it. But curiously, the Democrats seem reluctant to raise taxes on those most able to pay, on those who have profited mightily from the pandemic. I find it quite interesting that after the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the Trump “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” of 2017, the Democratic Party, even when in power, has never chosen or never been able to restore them to their former levels. Even Biden’s much ballyhooed Infrastructure and Build Back Better bill, have not been funded anywhere near completely but instead by a few half hearted inadequate increases on corporations and the wealthy and some wishful thinking about what a boost in IRS funding would yield from wealthy cheaters.

In addition, vastly more industries have monopolized in recent years, making it much easier for them to raise prices arbitrarily to increase their bottom line for their investors and their overpaid CEO’s. It’s absolutely astonishing that our government has given up on fighting monopoly and concentration of production and distribution. As a sample, check out the stats in this important publication.

Another thing that really annoys me and should upset everyone else are the continual attacks on the US Postal Service mostly by our Republican friends. The complaints about subsidies for this essential service and calls for it to be “profitable” do not make any sense to me. The Post Office performs an essential service for us. What it charges via stamps and fees for mail processing and delivery defrays a significant portion of that expense and if that’s not enough to pay its bills, the federal government plugs the holes. And why shouldn’t it – the post office serves the whole country. In small towns it serves as place where people meet, chat and gossip while they deliver or pick up their mail. I oppose the continual shrill Republican calls to privatize the Post Office, as if that were any kind of solution. Oh sure, let’s privatize the post office and stuff the pockets of a “Post Office Corporation”, its new stockholders and CEO.

If we are serious about increasing Post Office revenue and making it more self sufficient, we need to consider restoring a role it enjoyed from 1911 to 1967 – providing banking services to customers through the Postal Services Savings System. Many other countries still provide banking services through their post offices. We also need to take a look at how domestic shipping prohibitions and restrictions limit revenue and provide opportunities for competitors like Fedex and UPS. We do not need to reduce costs and increase revenue by cutting personnel and slowing down delivery, as Trump holdover Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is trying to do.

Another item – I am so overjoyed that we now have a “Space Force” general – yes, replete with uniform, lots of medals and a high salary. Don’t believe me? Check out a recent Washington Post column by Josh Rogin. Yes, we not only have divided the entire world into “Combatant Commands”, like European Command, Central Command and a bunch of others covering the entire globe, but, lucky for us, our Defense Department has added a “Space Force” command and now we have a real Space Force general. I am sure before too long we’ll be conducting yet another cold war with China and Russia in outer space as they “attack our space assets” and we have to stock space with bigger and better “assets”. Really I had a hard time telling whether Rogin was writing his article with tongue in cheek. But I guess he was serious, demonstrating once again how sacrosanct the military is to both our Congress and our media. Oh, my God, Space General David Thompson cries that “US satellites are being attacked every day!” We need to retaliate!

And yet another example of Republican hypocrisy – individual rights and sanctity of the body when refusing covid vaccines, yet not where abortion rights are concerned. A woman’s right to control her body is okay if she’s refusing a vaccine and endangering herself and those around her, but is not acceptable when she’s pregnant by rape or incest or her health is threatened by pregnancy or childbirth. Incredible how the far right so selectively yells, “My body, my choice”. And furthermore, how is it that the far right is so reverential about life from conception to birth, yet so non-caring about supporting life afterward – promoting a culture of violence, flooding the country with guns and the world with military weaponry, supporting an obscene Pentagon budget and cheering the death penalty, while making war on medicine and universal healthcare, popular gun safety laws, housing for the indigent and a most spare and basic safety net for our citizens. 

Thus concludes my latest “rant”. Yes, of course, I’m angry and upset about many other things that I experience daily or read or watch in the media but I’ll have to save those for another time. Oh wait, sorry, I have to mention this one. Recently my wife and I have summoned the courage to purchase tickets and venture out for a couple of concerts, our first since the pandemic began. And while announcements were quite consistent in requiring proof of vaccination to enter and mask wearing during the concerts, we were both terribly upset to see about half of the audience remove their masks upon finding their seats and sitting down. Why? And why didn’t the concert authorities insist that masks be kept on. These unserious and careless acts permeate other activities as well. Simple shopping trips in our area have also revealed a reckless mix of mask wearing or not, both by employees and customers, confounding and contradicting what should be a collective unified struggle against this dreadful pandemic. Very disturbing indeed. But what to do? Where to start?

On the day I plan to publish this article, I was subjected to a news report that again made me very angry, so I have to end with a comment on the issue it raised – that of human rights. The US has decided not to award diplomatic recognition to the Winter Olympics in China, although our athletes may attend and compete. Why? Because of China’s “human rights record”. Please… spare me. How dare we condemn the human rights record of any nation while we turn a blind eye to the everyday human rights abuses of our “staunchest ally”, Israel. This rogue nation goes on murdering and maiming Palestinians and stealing their land, homes and livelihoods every single day, with complete impunity. American politicians at every level remain two faced and hypocritical about human rights, fearing that by raising a voice or finger against Israel might turn off the money spigot that funds their campaigns. So no more talk about the human rights abuses in China unless we also talk about them in Israel. 

There, I’m done.

I was disturbed by the worshipful reverence implied in the smaller news item inserted into the story of President Biden’s inauguration on January 20 of this year.

Sure, most Americans were happy to see the end of the chaotic, disastrous and disgraceful presidency of Donald Trump and happy to usher in what we all hoped would be a much more deliberate, thoughtful, honest and transparent presidency. Although Joe Biden’s tenure has yet to be judged, the end of Trump’s certainly has caused a national sigh of relief.

And I assume to help make that point we were treated to a dramatically posed and videoed meeting among three of our ex-presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, where we could hear them reminisce and ruminate about the “peaceful transfer of power” in which they all participated and position themselves as contrasts to the last four years. For many viewers and observers perhaps it worked. I mean, who wouldn’t look good next to Donald Trump. Whose administration would not shine when compared to the destructive wrecking crew of ne’er-do-wells who populated Trump’s cabinet – from Betsy DeVos to Scott Pruitt – all bent on destroying that which they were appointed to protect. 

But I had a problem with this video – not with the sentiment expressed by these ex presidents about the peaceful transition of power, which was quite appropriate, but with being reminded as I looked at each one and remembered their respective eight-year presidencies, of how flawed our recent presidents and their legacies have been. The reflective gathering of these three should have been not a celebration but a commiseration. All three have huge black marks on their respective administrations that will define them forever and that history will not erase.

In order – Bill Clinton and his “triangulation” strategy caused no end of misfortune for America. His “middle ground” abandonment of principles of the Democratic Party that got him elected and embrace of right wing policies to ingratiate him with the Republican Party resulted in some disastrous legislation. His crime bill, in the words of NYTimes columnist Charles Blow, “…flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons….”. 

And then there was Clinton’s welfare reform bill which would “end welfare as we know it”, when he took another page from the Republican playbook by changing welfare to a block grant program for each state, inadequate to begin with, and which assured significant disparity among more and less generous states. His program also dictated onerous work requirements which presented impossible transportation burdens for poor families and, worst of all, ran out at an established point, depositing many one parent and struggling families right back into the gutter of despair and hopelessness from which they were trying to escape and where they remained. 

Then there were Clinton’s clumsy foreign policy forays, which included “Operation Infinite Reach” – the bombing of purported terrorist havens in Afghanistan and a western built pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, claimed to be manufacturing nerve gas. These attacks were violations of international law and failed to achieve anything except enhancing Osama bin Laden’s reputation and strengthening the terrorist resolve that resulted in the disaster of 9/11. Along with his ill-conceived assault in Somalia culminating in the infamous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993, our friend Bill should be forever contrite and repentant.

Another signature bill of Clinton’s presidency was the oft-touted North American Free Trade Agreement, known better as NAFTA, which accelerated the departure of  manufacturing from America to low wage countries like Mexico. Why the hollowed-out cities of Michigan and Ohio with boarded up factory buildings? NAFTA is the reason. The loss of well paid, unionized manufacturing jobs was a huge contributor to destroying the middle class and making the United States the most unequal country among OECD nations. With NAFTA the corporations, their CEO’s and their stockholders got richer and their former employees got poorer.

The corporate takeover of Medicare also began with Bill Clinton. It was during his administration that private healthcare corporations were first allowed to administer Medicare programs to seniors. First called Medicare “Choice” programs, they eventually morphed into the myriad “Medicare Advantage” programs of today, which offer “enhanced” medicare providing additional benefits like dental care, hearing and drug coverage and so on at great taxpayer cost through requiring Medicare to pay a hefty annual coverage cost to private companies, who then profit by limiting coverage (See my upcoming article on this subject).

And then, of course, Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern forever blemished the US presidency. Yes, one might argue that other presidents had their weak moments too, certainly FDR, Eisenhower and Kennedy come to mind. But Clinton’s were not tastefully hidden but blazoned in the headlines for all of us to see and feel. 

So perhaps President Clinton, standing so dramatically with those two other ex presidents, should have been apologizing to his colleagues and to the American people instead of discussing the “peaceful transition of power”.

Then there was George W. Bush, the biggest failure of all, standing in the twilight with Bill and Barack. He manipulated intelligence and initiated a catastrophic war of choice with Iraq which should be described with terms like “illegal. war crime, deception, lies, immoral, mass murder” that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while making the world a more dangerous place. In addition to the money, now calculated by Brown University’s Cost of War project at $1.922 trillion (averaging about $8000 for every US taxpayer) and the lives lost, estimated to be more than 300,000, we left a dreadfully unstable and still struggling Iraq. Plus our friend Mr. Bush gave the ok for “black sites” and legalization of torture, leaving a most shameful and permanent blemish on the character of our nation. Actually, the costs of Bush’s entire “War on Terror”, which would include not only Iraq, but also Afghanistan and military actions in more than 80 other countries all over the globe, and which accomplished little but further deterioration of our reputation, have tallied an astonishing cost of $6.4 trillion and 601,000 precious lives lost. Thank you, George W. Bush.

 And of course, we remember “W”’s disastrous reaction to Hurricane Katrina. It’s really hard to imagine a more detached, uncaring posture in the face of such a huge disaster, but there he was, after interrupting an already disgracefully long 27 day vacation on his Texas ranch, disdainfully viewing the deadly catastrophe from the distance and safety of Air Force One. Then, eventually on the ground and finally trying to lead, he comes out with his immortal statement to inept FEMA director Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”. This dismal performance as president in the face of terrible disaster will long be remembered.

And guess who privatized and deregulated the Texas power grid, severed it from those in adjacent states to prevent any federal oversight, and placed it under the control of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)? Yes, George W. Bush did all this while serving as governor of Texas, calling it “The nation’s most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation” – an extraordinarily expensive and deadly experiment, with Texas residential consumers paying ten of billions more for their power than state’s traditional utilities, most of it going into the pockets of investors, power company CEOs, and the campaign coffers of Texas Republican politicians. And we all know what happened when the changing climate sent a huge cold wave to Texas this past winter – approximately 800 people died and the the state sustained billions in property damage. Thank you for that too, George W. Bush.

So Bush, as detailed in a superb New York Magazine article the “painter”, the “artist”, is trying to launder his reputation and sanitize his legacy with his vapid portraiture. Oh yes, “inspired by Churchill”, he is painting portraits of immigrants, including fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger and marketing a  book celebrating his “artistry” with all the power he can. Why? Does he need the money? Hardly – he’s been a multimillionaire for decades for whom politics and now art have been a hobby. He’s just doing everything he can to make us forget his disastrous presidency and unfortunately we’re mostly going along with him. And George W. Bush, war criminal, had the gall to appear on BookTV being interviewed by none other than his own daughter and expounding  on his new career and book. 

Oh, and let’s not forget that like every good Republican president, “W” also cut taxes for the wealthy in 2001 and 2003 under the guise of “tax relief”, a Frank Luntz term that I illustrated in another article. So George W., paint and pontificate all you want. You will never live down the legacy of being one of the worst, most disastrous of all US presidents.

And good old President Barack Obama, now basking in the riches obtained by he and Michelle’s movie production deal with Netflix and the considerable royalties from the first volume of his presidential memoirs, should be sadly looking back at a failed presidency. Oh sure, he was a distinguished leader on the world stage, might be the most eloquent of all of our presidents, and indisputably was our first black president, but he could have done so much more, were he not locked in the embrace of neoliberal orthodoxy. His vaunted “hope and change” never materialized – we all hoped but nothing much changed. 

Surrounded by advisors recruited from the ranks of Goldman Sachs he chose Wall Street over Main Street, bailing out the very same big banks that caused the financial crisis of 2008 instead of prosecuting them and failed to help the millions who lost their sole store of wealth – their homes. Yes, President Obama refused to prosecute those who caused the crash of 2008, in contrast to the thousands of prosecutions following the savings and loan debacle of the ’80’s and ’90’s and chose instead to bail out the big banks, the real culprits, instead of common people who were losing their homes. And the stimulus finally passed to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs and livelihoods was far too small, causing the recovery to drag on for much too long. Furthermore and very important, this choice fueled an era of populist rage and resentment that infected the country and paved the way for  the election of Donald Trump.

And while all of us hoped for something better, President Obama forever doomed American medical care to be a for-profit corporate “product” by allowing the Affordable Care Act to be virtually written by the health care and pharmaceutical industries. True, it extended “affordable” healthcare to additional millions of people but at the huge cost of government subsidies to healthcare corporations. “Obamacare” – ostensibly a compromise between liberals and moderates, was in reality a giveaway to the already corporatized healthcare industry. And Biden’s much touted “enhancement” of Obamacare and the aforementioned Medicare Advantage programs have tightened corporate America’s grip on American healthcare and have made transition to a much less expensive and far more efficient single payer government run program which would cover every single person in the country from birth to death increasingly difficult and now maybe impossible.

Also, it was President Obama who, perhaps unwittingly, signed the deceptively named Ensuring Patient Access and Drug Enforcement Act, which stripped the DEA of power to staunch the flow of opioid pills outside of normal avenues of prescription and distribution, protecting drug manufacturers and their distributors and making it easier for them to get away with exacerbating the epidemic of overdoses and death. And it’s interesting to note that the bill’s most passionate advocate, Representative Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, was later nominated by Donald Trump to be his “drug czar”.

Plus while president our friend Barack Obama embarked on a series of ill advised and illegal executions, an example of which certainly was the much ballyhooed “capture” of Osama bin Laden, who actually was murdered extrajudicially instead of being brought back to the US to face justice. Yes, our “constitutional scholar and professor” president who campaigned against the death penalty, actually kept a “kill list” and was only too happy to execute any number of Muslims without charges or trials, some of whom were US citizens, along with dozens of innocent bystanders, who likely were deemed mere “collateral damage”.

Another shameful feature of the Obama presidency was his treatment of whistleblowers. Of course, Mr. Obama, boasted of his administration’s “transparency”, promising “a new era of open government”, but betrayed that pledge time and time again, spearheading eight Espionage Act prosecutions, more than all US administrations combined. The Obama administration’s treatment of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, James Risen, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Donald Sachtleben, Stephen Kim and the very latest, Daniel Hale, whose prosecution began under Obama, continued through Trump and will conclude under Biden, was shameful and contrasts shockingly with the preferential treatment of David Petraeus, guilty of the same sharing of government secrets.

When considering the aforementioned, why President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize remains a mystery. Conjecture suggests that this award was perhaps a veiled repudiation of the previous administration, or perhaps some “hope” based on Obama’s overtures to Muslim countries. But it is amazing that so many of his administration’s actions violated the honor of this recognition. Quite contradictory also, especially in view of his promises to work toward a “nuclear-free world”, which probably helped him win the Prize, was his authorization of a trillion dollar program to “modernize” the US atomic arsenal with its 5800 warheads already capable of destroying the world and everyone in it several times over. And, like presidents before him, he continued the coverup of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. In 2009, when a journalist asked him if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama responded, “I don’t want to speculate”, making his efforts to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons to maintain a “nuclear free middle east” disingenuous at best.

I should add that President Obama and his pompous blowhard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, repeatedly betrayed and damaged my precious chosen profession, public education. Obama and Duncan, both private school products, demonstrated little knowledge of public education and its important role in American democracy and displayed little awareness of the causes of its problems. They continued the detached and useless tenets of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” involving standards, test scores, competition, and school reward and punishment, simply using different names – “School Improvement Grants” and “Race to the Top”. And both presented charter schools and “choice” as solutions to public school struggles, sucking away precious public school resources and depositing them in private pockets. 

And one more thing – as a dedicated Democrat, I was terribly upset to see President Obama, the leader of my Party, and his dedicated supporters, throw virtually all of their effort and resources into his 2012 reelection, to the detriment of national Democratic concerns. During President Obama’s eight years in office, when Democrats like me could feel some pride in a Democratic presidency, the Party lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governor seats, a net total of 13 governorships and 816 state legislative seats than under any other president. Among the states lost by Democrats were Wisconsin, North Carolina, Iowa and West Virginia, all key to the victory of Donald Trump in 2016. 

And finally, the great humanitarian, President Obama, who so sensitively and eloquently reflected the grief and concern of the nation at at mass shootings in schools and churches, even singing “Amazing Grace” when he “ran out of words”, did absolutely nothing to impede Israeli land theft, settlement expansion and human rights abuses, all violations of international law, during his presidency and worse, sat by while the US funded Israeli war machine killed thousands of Palestinians during the Gaza “war” in 2014 including 551 children and 299 women, while injuring over ten thousand and orphaning more than fifteen hundred children, all the while mouthing the same tired platitude, “Israel has the right to defend itself”. Instead Mr. Obama rewarded this criminal nation by signing a 10 year, $38 billion aid MOU with Israel. This $11 million per day “tribute” to Israel has recently ballooned to $20 million per day as our politicians stumble over each other in their eagerness to “help Israel”. “

So President Obama, enough with your well honed speeches and sanctimonious and thoughtful demeanor and enough with your “presidential memoirs” which gloss over your mistakes and failures. If you really want us to forget, why not impress us by trying your hand at building homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity like President Carter did, or maybe join Stacey Abrams knocking on doors to expand voting opportunities for poor people of color. Oh, and one more thing –  it was Obama’s EPA that approved toxic chemicals for the fracking industry, that break down into deadly “forever” poisonous compounds called PFAS which threaten people and wildlife through soil and water contamination.

Before publishing this bleak assessment of our last three presidents’ legacies, it might be only fair to consider a few of the best things to emerge from their respective administrations. Hey, it wasn’t all bad.  However, what most consider to be Bill Clinton’s major achievements – NAFTA, his crime bill and welfare reform, I have asserted to be major failures. Yet he can be proud of the first balanced Federal budget in many years. George W. Bush has been lauded for PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDs relief),  a successful humanitarian effort to combat AIDS in twelve African countries. And ironically, what’s commonly viewed as Barack Obama’s greatest achievement, the Affordable Care Act, I include above as a major failure. But he should be recognized for the DACA program, his Consumer Protection Bureau, joining the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear deal, reaching out to Cuba and for his active support for LGBTQ rights. But, all considered, in my view the achievements of these three remarkably flawed presidents were far outweighed by their errors, mistakes and failures.

I mentioned Frank Luntz in my article “Shared Values” , in which I willingly gave him credit for the clever term itself – I mean what could be more effective in garnering American support for rogue nation Israel than hearing about how similar it is to the United States? While my article made clear that these “shared values” are  fallacious, I do, however begrudgingly, give Luntz all the credit. His talking points for defense of Israeli aggression and human rights abuses have indeed been effective, as noted by Patrick Cockburn writing in British newspaper The Independent. He was masterful in his Israel Project handbook, for example after the Gaza slaughter of 2014, advising Israel supporters to always appear empathetic, “no Palestinian mother should have to bury her child” (even though that child was killed by Israel) and describing Palestinian negotiating points as “demands” because Americans dislike people who make “demands.”

Dr Luntz has always claimed, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear”. And he has masterfully put that knowledge to work on behalf of Republican conservative causes for  decades. He was responsible for all the clever Republican soundbites during the election of 1994 wrapped in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America”, the title of which was also Luntz’s idea. Here we find all kinds of examples of his ingenuity, from the use of such terms as “tax relief”, “job creation”, “personal responsibility” and “taking back our streets”, to the undeniably worthy goal of imposing term limits on “career politicians” so that they could be replaced by “citizen legislators”. In addition he advised Republicans to “talk like Newt” by describing Democrats in pejorative terms like “corrupt,” “devour,” “greed,” “hypocrisy,” “liberal,” “sick,” and “traitors.” 

Luntz’s work for the Republican Party in the area of taxes has been particularly effective. It was he who suggested always using “death tax” instead of the perfectly reasonable and accurate terms “estate tax” or “inheritance tax”. In a memo to Republicans, he even recommended staging press conferences about opposing or reducing this tax “at your local mortuary” to dramatize the Issue, stating that “I believe this backdrop will clearly resonate with your constituents….death is something the American people understand”.

Dr Luntz’s term for reducing taxes, “tax relief” is brilliantly conceived, cloaking our very necessary contributions to common safety, order and the public good as nasty unfair burdens. Employing the phrase “tax relief” suggests that taxes are an affliction that Americans need to be rescued from and ensures that those proposing the taxes are portrayed as villains, while those fighting against them become heroes. Use of this term was employed by George W. Bush promoting his tax cuts, primarily benefitting the wealthy but advertised as something quite different, nicely illustrated in this incredibly deceptive photo-op. Right there in front of all these cute, struggling American families is Frank Luntz’s term and sitting down to sign the bill providing that “relief” is our hero, George W. Bush. 

Republican talking points about health care are also representative of the influence of Luntz. A favorite term used by Republicans to describe “Medicare for All” or any other government program covering all Americans is “government takeover”. Dr Luntz earned the 2010 Lie of the Year award from Politifact for his promotion of this phrase starting in the spring of 2009. “Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.” Right, and added to this are always the buzzwords “choice”, where health care is concerned, and “competition”, as if anyone seriously ill or facing a medical emergency has the time and the information to properly “choose” the right doctor or hospital, or examine some kind of list and find the most cost effective providers. While I’m not sure of its origin, it certainly could be Luntz, another favorite term employed by those fighting single payer programs is “rationed care”, totally fallacious but quite effective, like the others mentioned above.

Luntz enjoys putting together his “lose” and “use” lists of words according to the topic at issue.  For example, about climate change and green technology, which he opposed, he suggests the following:

• USE: Cleaner, safer, healthier. LOSE: Sustainable/sustainability.
• USE: Solving climate change. LOSE: Ending global warming.
• USE: Principles and priorities. LOSE: Values.
• USE: Reliable technology/energy. LOSE: Ground-breaking/State of the art.
• USE: New careers. LOSE: New jobs.
• USE: Peace of mind. LOSE: Security.
• USE: Consequences. LOSE: Threats/Problems.
• USE: Working together. LOSE: One world.

Anyone can see how cleverly selected or rejected these words are. For example “peace of mind” instead of “security”. He’s right – the first suggests a threat of some kind and therefore has negative connotations, the second does not.

And here was his “lose and use” list for Republican before the 2006 midterm election: 

Other “use and lose” pairings that he has suggested more recently are rather than “undocumented worker”, use” illegal alien”, a much more negative and threatening term. And when discussing school vouchers, putting public money into corporate pockets, never use “school choice” – always say “parental choice”. And Luntz urged Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to move away from the dry phrase “funding the border wall” to the more evocative term “border security” — a language tweak the White House has obviously adopted.

As a very successful pollster, Dr Luntz has tested all kinds of political slogans and catchphrases. One of his most successful was used by now Senator Rick Scott in his last run for Florida governor and was likely responsible for his narrow victory – “let’s get to work”. In an oft-used commercial Scott was depicted heading down an alleyway while putting on his jacket, appearing like he was looking for a fight, with the words appearing – “Let’s get to work, let’s get it done”. Certainly much more effective than defining problems and suggesting solutions or plans. And clearly it worked. And presently billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloom has adopted Luntz’s phrase for his multi million dollar TV ad blitz – “Mike will get it done”.

I would like to add a few more examples of clever use of language in politics. Certainly the Democratic members of Congress took a page from Frank Luntz’s book with their extremely effective use of the term “kids in cages” to help describe the dreadful situation on our southern border. And although it cannot be attributed directly to Luntz, the Bush/Cheney administration’s deceptive use of the term “enhanced interrogation” to describe what was clearly and plainly torture, in dealing with captive suspected terrorists during the Iraq War. And just the other day I read a description of how corporations get away with paying little or no taxes on their billions in profits – it’s their use of ‘lawyers, lobbyists and loopholes”, a very definitive and resonant phrase to be sure.

Also I should add a few examples of political language employed today to cast doubt on much needed debate and embrace of tenets of dominant candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. In a brilliant article for Truthdig, R.J. Eskow dissects and defines some favorite phrases being bandied about by most of our “moderate” (read “corporate”) Democratic candidates. Several of the more striking are “free stuff” which Eskow defines as “A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries and which any decent society would make available to all human beings”; ‘I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas” really means “I don’t have any bold ideas”; and “I know how to get things done”, (of course trumpeted constantly by Joe Biden) really means “I intend to use a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done in years”.

And finally I would like to add a few oxymorons to this discussion of clever use of words. A favorite of mine that I use as a definitive example of an oxymoron is “military intelligence”. Others that are used in political discussions are “fighting for peace”, “bureaucratic efficiency” and “congressional ethics”. And George W. Bush enjoyed describing himself with the fallacious term “compassionate conservative”. Certainly, in this time of striking divisions in politics, it might be illustrative to suggest several that define our times. “Moderate Republican”  and “billionaire Democrat” are certainly oxymorons today. Obviously there is no such thing as a moderate Republican presently and the very existence of billionaire Democrats like presidential candidates Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, are contradictions in terms as repudiations of what a Democrat is expected to embrace. And I will add my own original contribution to the lexicon of  political oxymorons, one which circles back to my first paragraph and Frank Luntz’s work for the Israel Project – “Israeli justice”.

And one more thing, after his house was narrowly saved by valiant Los Angeles firefighters from being burned in the Skirball fire, Frank Luntz has seen the light (and felt the heat) and has joined the ranks of climate change believers, offering passionate and personal testimony recently to Congress on the urgency of dealing with its effects. Also, observing that “It’s hard to be partisan when you see the damage being done”, he has abandoned his long standing association with the Republican Party. Who knows, he may decide to share his devious and devastating talent with all political parties.

Taxes

I’m furious. Why? My income taxes went up while corporate taxes and those of millionaires and billionaires went down. How do I know? This realization has nothing to do with the size of my refund – I know refunds vary with how much money was withheld and that my withholding may have been adjusted with the passage of the new tax law. No, my tax preparer provides three columns for me to examine – my income, deductions and tax totals for the last three years. And while my  income and deductions have remained static, my federal tax has gone up. I find this incredible – we are just barely clinging to middle class status and here I’m being dinged for more money to fund our reckless and wasteful military and provide more billions for Israel, while corporations, the wealthy and ultra wealthy are contributing less. 

As I noted in my article on taxes, we were scammed by the Republican “tax reform” law – the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”. This law not only reduced taxes on corporations and the wealthy but even further reduced the estate tax (oh, how Republicans enjoy calling this the “death tax”) and actually abolished the alternative minimum tax, which previously had prevented many wealthy taxpayers from escaping the income tax altogether. So certainly the hideous grin of Texas Representative Kevin Brady, one of the major authors of the law, the joy of then “Squeaker” of the House “Lyin’” Paul Ryan, the delight of our “chinless wonder” Senate Majority Leader  and the braggadocio of our grotesque lying president were well placed – lots more money for their wealthy friends and less for the middle class, despite their disingenuous claims to the contrary. And filing your tax return on a postcard? Another lie. Oh well, we all knew what this tax bill really was, didn’t we?

And to make me boil with rage and helplessness even more, can you imagine how I felt reading that Netflix, fresh from its best year ever – the most subscribers, the highest profits the company has ever had – $845 million, paid no federal or state taxes at all. In fact, Netflix received a $22 million rebate from the IRS. And to add insult to injury, one of the world’s most valuable corporations, owned by the world’s richest man, I’m talking about Amazon here, not only paid no taxes on income of almost a billion dollars, but actually collected a refund from the IRS. Specifically, the company virtually doubled its profits in 2018 from $5.6 billion the year before to $11.2 billion and for the second year in a row did not pay a single penny in federal income tax. In fact Amazon reported federal income tax rebates for 2017 and 2018 totaling almost $270 million. What’s going on here? What kind of a country is this?

And perhaps you can share my anger when you see that Amazon and Netflix were but two of many huge and profitable corporations that paid no Federal tax last year.  The revelations in this article from ITEP (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) really upset me. Not only are its facts surprising and shameful but they underscore another Republican lie concerning this terrible tax bill – that, while corporate taxes were to be reduced, loopholes would be plugged. Nope, the loopholes are still there, as this article clearly indicates. And the number of profitable corporations paying zero taxes has dramatically increased.

Also, while we are talking about taxes, I should mention that bipartisan legislation is now being considered in our Congress to make it illegal for the IRS to provide programs to enable taxpayers to file their taxes for free. It would be so easy for this agency to virtually complete the returns for most taxpayers, as is done in most developed countries. After all, the IRS already has our salary and withholding information and practically all deductible figures are sent from the banks and mortgage companies directly to the IRS. Well now, despite the IRS having virtually all of the information required to file a tax return for most taxpayers, the Congress, instead of letting the IRS make this process easy and inexpensive for us, is guaranteeing profits for H & R Block and for Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. So it’s clear that the lobbying efforts and campaign contributions of these two tax preparation companies have really paid off. Tell me that this isn’t a “quid pro quo”. Oh, and incidentally, H&R Block’s new CEO Jeff Jones will collect a $995,000 annual salary and a $950,000 signing bonus to join the Kansas City-based tax preparation company. Plus bargain stock purchase options.

Insurance

And if these revelations were not enough to provoke paroxysms of anger and rage I sat down a couple of months ago to pay my auto insurance bill on two cars. As AARP members and elderly retirees, we insure both of our cars, a 2016 Honda HRV and a 2009 Toyota Corolla (now replaced by a car of similar value, a 2008 Ford Taurus), with The Hartford, assuming we are getting the best rates. Well, despite accident-free records, both drivers a year older and the cars a year older, I found that our insurance rates had increased. Again enraged and upset, I called Hartford to inquire and was given some nonsense about accident rates, repair and replacement cost algorithms and so on that had “forced” them to increase their rates. Right, and still angry I looked up the salary of the “president” of The Hartford, whose printed signature was all over my policy papers. Douglas Elliot’s salary is $8 million per year. But he’s not the highest paid executive at this ripoff insurance company. Hartford CEO Christopher Swift makes $13 million per year. And The Hartford paid annual dividends of $1.20, 2.5 percent of the stock price, pretty good for its wealthy shareholders. And of course these dividends are taxed at long-term capital gains rates depending on your bracket (federal rates are 0%, 15%, or 20%). A chunk of my meager income was taxed at 22 percent. 

Why is it necessary to pay executives like this? What exactly do they do that makes them so valuable? Either salaries like these need to be reduced to make them line up with executive salaries in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s or they need to be taxed away with rates that also existed then. And when discussing this, let’s stop using pejorative terminology like “soak the rich”, “tax the wealthy” and “raise taxes on the rich”. We should use more neutral terms like “paying their fair share”, “progressive taxation” or “restoring taxation to 1950-1970 levels”.

And while I have touched on the auto insurance problem in this great country of ours, I’d like to say a few more things about it. Have you ever wondered how much auto insurance companies pay for their plethora of TV ads? Well right now they invest over $5 billion a year on advertising, instead of using that money to reduce rates. Yes, your rates pay for “Mayhem” and “Good Hands” from Allstate, “Flo” from Progressive, the “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two” from Farmers and of course, our winner, the clever ads from Geico, to which this one company devotes over $1 billion per year. And yes, we pay for all those ads with our swollen insurance premiums. 

While living in Kuwait from 1996 to 2000, I was pleasantly surprised by how inexpensive insurance for our car was. As I recall, we paid about $50 a year for our insurance. Why? The entire program was administered by the government. There were no private companies advertising and “competing” for our business; no one making profit or seeking to “increase profit”; no CEO’s pulling in multi million dollar salaries; no stockholders; no advertising; there was no one “at fault” in a collision (the police took care of that and assessed appropriate penalties) and there were no “ambulance chaser” personal injury lawyers. There was just a single, simple state-run company providing an essential service to the people of Kuwait. If you were in an accident, the state insurance company paid to have your car and you fixed and the other guy and his car repaired. Simple. You know, auto insurance…. and home insurance….and medical insurance….in fact all insurance, should be non profit and state run. And yes, if this is socialism then God bless socialism. Private enterprise, profit, stockholders, TV ads and multi-millionaire CEO’s should have no role in enterprises necessary for the public good.

Venezuela

And a couple of other issues in the news lately deserve comment and a dose of outrage – first, the situation in Venezuela. The problems in Venezuela are not the result of “socialism”, as our president and his supporters would have us believe. The major problem is corruption, which ought to be up to the people of that country to address. And the other problems are the result of cruel economic sanctions instituted by the United States which have destabilized the country and have hurt the people of Venezuela far more than has its political corruption. Nicholas Maduro, who appears to be successfully hanging on to power, was elected president by the people of Venezuela. The imposter, “head of the opposition” Juan Guaido, was not. Yet this pretend head of state has been feted and awarded legitimacy by the likes of Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo and is presently seeking “direct communications” with Pentagon officials with the goal of establishing greater military ‘coordination’ with the United States”. 

The US conveniently forgets that the policies of the revolutionary governments of Hugo Chavez and his successor Maduro were embraced by the common everyday people of Venezuela who elected them. American efforts to “restore democracy” to the people of Venezuela are thinly veiled schemes to restore the country’s vast oil reserves to the multi-national oil companies who were thrown out of the country with the accession of Chavez. Head “regime change” hawk, national security adviser and “Mustache of Doom” John Bolton stated unequivocally for Fox News – “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” Oh, and creepy convicted war criminal Elliott Abrams has been resuscitated and appointed Special Representative for Venezuela to coordinate the efforts to destabilize the country with sanctions, starve the Venezuelan people and make sure that quisling Juan Guaido becomes president and the multi-nationals pump and profit from the oil instead of the state. Nice. By the way, until he named himself president, 81 percent of Venezuelans didn’t even know who Guaido was. And he won his own assembly seat with only 26% of the vote. 

Ilhan Omar

And regarding Michigan Representative Ilhan Omar – I cannot believe how courageous this young lady has been in the face of the massive onslaught by corporate media, especially Fox News, and pro-israel members of Congress. All Representative Omar has done is tell the truth, unfortunately a truth that we are not accustomed to hearing in Congress or in the media. She has criticized the power of AIPAC, which does have the power and has used it to bring down members of Congress who have dared criticize Israel. Representative Omar has dared imply that it’s “the Benjamins” that our politicians covet while sucking up to Israel. Again – the truth. It is likely that the the money of billionaire Israel acolyte Sheldon Adelson was responsible for the election of Donald Trump – a massive last minute ejection of millions of dollars into crucial states. 

Mark my words – as we speak, money is being accumulated and targeted to “primary” Representative Omar, and to consign her to the ranks of others who have dared criticize Israel – Senators Max Cleland, Adlai Stevenson III and Charles H. Percy;  Representatives Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, Earl F. Hilliard and Paul Findley. Want the full story?- read Findley’s book, “They Dare to Speak Out: People and  Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby”. And the latest AIPAC casualty, distinguished award winning journalist and filmmaker Leslie Cockburn who with her husband, journalist Andrew Cockburn, had written a book critical of the US/Israel relationship, lost in her 2018 campaign to represent Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District after being accused of “virulent anti-Semitism”. She was beaten with significant help from Jewish organizations by nonentity distillery owner Denver Riggleman whose only claim to fame was “Bigfoot Erotica”.  In her and Mr. Cockburn’s 1991 book, “Dangerous Liason: The Inside Story of th3 US – Israeli Covert Relationship” Ms. Cockburn had committed the cardinal sin of being critical of Israel.

How dare someone like New York Representative Eliot Engel, himself, as an Israeli citizen, a walking attestation of Omar’s suggestion of a “dual loyalty” problem among some members of Congress and many in our government, accuse her of “anti-Semitism”. This is the problem –  the reaction of so many Jewish politicians, full of bristling paranoia, crying antisemitism at every little criticism of Israel or its mighty US lobby, AIPAC. The whole Ilhan Omar controversy is simply a perfect example of the old maxim “the truth hurts”…..for some people. And thank you, Representative Omar, for being brave enough to share that truth.

Well, AIPAC is right, their massive operation – a staff of 200 lobbyists, researchers and organizers; a $47 million annual budget; 100,000 grass-roots members, almost double the number of five years ago; and a recruitment drive on 300 college campuses – is for lobbying only – the organization itself does not give directly to candidates. But…AIPAC does marshal the donors, obtain the commitments and makes sure the collected totals get to the right people. AIPAC is probably the most successful and efficient “bundler” of campaign dollars of any lobby in Washington. As noted in a recent Haaretz article “AIPAC mobilizes an army of supporters who are inclined to support pro-Israel candidates with their votes, time and money” and “trained its activists to cultivate friendly lawmakers by donating to their campaigns and campaigning for them.” So, Representative Omar is absolutely correct – it is about the Benjamins, baby. And the “Benjamins” keep coming. At one recent AIPAC dinner in Boston a minimum of $5 million was raised in a single evening. 

And how successful is AIPAC’s lobbying effort? According to Josh Block, spokesman for the premier Israeli lobbying group, getting in to see Congressmen “is like pushing at an open door.” And guess what, there’s even an AIPAC chapter here in my own home city of Phoenix, headquarters of the Southern Pacific Region. They even held a formal dinner in Phoenix which I would have liked to attend but didn’t get my invitation. It was likely lost in the mail.

Oh and by the way, most Americans don’t know that AIPAC is probably operating illegally – it really should be registered as an agent of a foreign government. In a remarkable Huffington Post article published a couple of years ago, journalist M. J. Rosenberg makes the strong case that AIPAC is violating US law by not registering as a foreign agent.

The author reminds us that the “abnormal” spectacle of prominent politicians from both parties echoing the unseemly sentiments expressed by Vice President Mike Pence -“every freedom-loving American stands with Israel because her cause is our cause, her values are our values and her fight is our fight”- directly violates the principles promoted by none other than George Washington in an incredibly prescient passage from his Farewell Address – “…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils...” and so on. Every word, written long ago in 1797, seems to predict and indict and rebuke our tolerance and veneration for Israel and its AIPAC lobby.

Presently every foreign nation that lobbies in Washington must register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act…..except Israel. And why is Israel the privileged exception? Well, Mr. Rosenberg reminds us that AIPAC’s founder came up with a legal trick – he defined AIPAC “not as a lobby for a foreign state but for Americans who support that state”. This is a spurious distinction, to be sure, but is evidently sufficient to allow AIPAC to meddle in our elections, fund or defund candidates and take a stand on crucial US foreign policy issues with absolute impunity.

And you can be absolutely sure that if Congress or the President would try to withdraw this privilege and treat Israel like any other nation with a promotional presence in Washington, the cries of anti-Semitism would be deafening.

More about word choices

And before I conclude this article I would like to add a bit more to my prior observations about how we choose our words. The media seems to choose carefully when describing wealthy people of different countries. Here in the US, we commonly use “billionaire” or “successful businessman” to describe certain individuals like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But it’s always “Russian oligarchs”, not “Russian billionaires” or “successful Russian businessmen”.

And when we describe armies and government departments that oversee the military, we choose our words selectively as well, depending on what’s being described. The third most powerful military in the world that has fomented violence on defenseless civilian populations, illegally and violently occupied “captured” territory and  violated the borders and airspace of other countries hundreds of times is called the “Israeli Defense Forces”. Controlling the US’s 700 military bases around the world and dividing the entire world into “commands”, starting unprovoked wars and “military actions” in dozens of places in the world is the US “Defense Department”. What “defense” – who’s attacking us, pray tell? At least Germany and Japan were honest in World War II. Japan called its armed forces “The Imperial Japanese Army, Navy and Air Forces” – no “defense” at all.  And Germany’s “Luftwaffe” translates to “air force” pretty straightforwardly, but its “Wehrmacht” does translate into “defense force”. Hmmm – some defense force. However, the highest level did not mince words – Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), “High Command of the Armed Forces”. Nothing there at all about “defense”.

And take a look at how we discuss what I would call a man fighting to defend his family and reclaim his house and homeland against tyranny and occupation – a freedom fighter. But it’s never a Palestinian freedom fighter – instead it’s always “Palestinian terrorist” or “Palestinian militant”. Or in other countries subjected to American hegemony, like Afghanistan or what’s left of Iraq, such a person, fighting for his family and home and his own agency is not a freedom fighter or a patriot but an “insurgent”. And I think I mentioned in my article about “shared values” between the US and Israel how inappropriate it is to describe the land thieves, the serial violators of international law who have stolen and continue to steal Palestinian land “settlers”. Please – this word connotes courageous clearers and tillers of wild untamed land – “pioneers” as it were. These interlopers, generously subsidized and protected by the state of Israel and their international supporters, are thieves, pure and simple, not “settlers”.

And finally

Jeffrey St. Claire writes in a recent issue of CounterPunch:  On Saturday, Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert announced that her office would not bring charges against the two police officers, Terrence Mercadal and Jaren Robinet, who shot and killed an unarmed Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard last March. Clark was shot 20 times. He was holding a cellphone. The decision is appalling, bur scarcely surprising. Between 2005 and 2017, there were more than 13,000 fatal shootings by police, but only 80 cops were ever charged with manslaughter or murder. Of those 80 charged, only 28 were convicted of a crime.  And for more on this issue you should read the following article from the same journal 

All of us, well most of us at least, have a strong sense of justice. Those who do wrong, who violate the law or commonly accepted norms must be held accountable and punished. When we see criminals unpunished and thieves enjoying their ill gotten gains and never brought to justice, we feel very frustrated. We manifest anxious anger and indignation at these outrages and our powerlessness to correct them and feel that society has let us down. Where is the law? Where are the police? Where are the courts? Why is there no justice? Where is this “rule of law” that is supposed to be fundamental to our society?

Conversely, we get a great deal of satisfaction when we see those who have violated the law brought to justice. We feel that the rule of law is still being applied and that we still live in a just society where there are laws, rules and norms that are still being taken seriously, applied and heeded. Once while driving on Arizona 377 approaching the town of Heber in a no passing zone, a huge black BMW sedan passed me at a very high rate of speed, seriously endangering my life. After collecting and calming myself, and muttering something about where are the cops when you need them, you can imagine my feeling of intense satisfaction when a couple of miles ahead, I came upon the flashing blue and red lights of an Arizona State Police cruiser pulled up behind that same black sedan. That reckless and dangerous driver will likely pay a hefty fine. Wow, there is justice, after all. 

But in spite of these occasional incidents that satisfy us and remind us that there are some laws that are being fairly applied and that there is some justice, we are daily reminded of significant injustices and violations of the law that go unpunished. The feeling of injustice leaves us wanting, creates of feelings of frustration and helplessness and feelings of distrust of those institutions in our society that are supposed to provide justice by arresting the bad guys who have bilked us, trying them and tossing them into prison so that they pay their debt to society.

Right now, taxpayers in states where the opioid epidemic has hit the hardest – states like New Hampshire, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, have been asked to pass legislation to fund programs to counter this epidemic. In fact there is now a Federal bill that will soon ask all of us to pay. The pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession that have manufactured, distributed and prescribed these dangerous and additive pain medications have raked in millions of dollars. So why are they not being asked to foot the bill for this terrible calamity. Why are taxpayers asked to pay for the ruinous greed and recklessness that have enriched a few? The facts are there – for example, over 22 million doses were shipped to one West Virginia town. Perdue Pharmaceuticals, the major manufacturer of opioids knew about he dangers yet continued to manufacture and market millions of these deadly pills.  But today I know of no efforts to prosecute this company or others or the medical profession for their glaring malfeasance.

And just consider the money that diabetes and heart disease has cost all of us as individuals and taxpayers. So much of this has been caused by our consumption of sugar. But big sugar has done a marvelous job of advertising over the years – “only 18 calories per teaspoon” (recently reduced to “16 calories” – why – have teaspoons shrunk?), “sugar for quick energy” and on and on. And the industry has packed “added sugar” into three fourths of all packaged food and has fought  against taxation of sugary drinks, a major cause of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. So the sugar industry has profited mightily over the years from this irresponsibility. Yet it has never been asked to pay one penny toward  the serious health problems which its ubiquitous product has caused.

And what about Monsanto and Bayer poisoning on our soil and farms with their deadly chemicals. Cloaked as “increasing productivity”, “feeding the world” or other euphemisms, these corporations continue to persuade our farmers to inject dangerous chemicals into our soil and our food. The recent revelation of traces of glyphosate, Monsanto’s Roundup, the most heavily used herbicide in the world and a cash cow for the corporation, in Quaker Oats and Cheerios, has recently received attention in the press. This revelation has revived the old argument of whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. Whether it is or not, this terrible chemical should not be in our food. If not causing cancer, which perhaps indeed has not yet been proven, then what about other potential effects – like damage to the endocrine or nervous systems? When serious harm to human health from this chemical will surely be proven one day, who will pay – the people or Monsanto? You know the answer.

The meat industry, the very epitome of inefficient use of foods, continues to thrive as the domestic and foreign markets for beef, pork and chicken continue to grow. Yet the the poisoning of our groundwater and waterways by manure lakes from feedlots and other concentrations of industrial strength cultivation of animals continues to grow unabated. Perhaps the massive profits of these industries should pay for the proper disposal of this waste instead of taxpayers. After all, years ago the tobacco industry was held accountable for the health problems resulting from its use and was required to not only place warnings on its packages but to pay billions of dollars for anti-tobacco advertising and to combat lung cancer. Where are the similar rulings against industries that are a threat to health today?

Also consider the dreadful attack on human health that has occurred in Flint, Michigan when someone decided to save the state money by changing the main source for the city water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. This dreadful chain of events has caused irreparable harm to the health of thousands of adults and children and has cost taxpayers close to a half billion dollars so far. But yet no one has been punished – not the Republican governor, not the city officials or anyone else. Where is the justice here, pray tell? Again, there is none, and taxpayers are left holding the bag for the unpunished crimes of a few.

What is going on in our country today? The savings and loan debacle of the 1980’s ended with over one thousand officials and owners going to jail for their part in the collapse. And in the early 2000’s the Department of Justice even set up a special unit to prosecute and punish the crooked executives responsible for energy trader corporation Enron’s abuse of privilege and power. Yet how many bankers and Wall Street executives have gone to prison for their part in the crash and near-depression of 2008, when $10.2 trillion in wealth disappeared, including $3.3 trillion in home equity causing thousands of people to lose their homes? That number is one – Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, has served a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio. No, instead of prosecution and prison, the executives and their banks and corporations got bailed out by us taxpayers. If the Justice Department prosecuted at all, mere fines were assessed. An example – in early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank’s board of directors gave him a 74 percent raise, bringing his salary to $20 million.

Another issue – why have reckless banks and corporations who have broken the law in myriad other instances never been punished with anything more than just a “slap on the wrist” fine. Banks and corporations being fined for serious violations of the law has become so commonplace that they are actually budgeting for these serial transgressions – yes, actually establishing a budget line for fines imposed for illegal activity and violations of regulations. What about prosecuting the people who made these decisions and sending them to prison? Perhaps with personal risk instead of fines, these serial transgressions could be reduced.

And related to this, a series of recent pieces in the media relating to the machinations of Paul Manafort to hide income in overseas havens to avoid taxes on millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains, gives rise to consideration of how he got away with this kind of thievery for so long and how many others there might be who have done exactly the same thing but have not been caught. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell examined this issue passionately and eloquently in several of her recent columns and reminds us as well that prosecutions for white collar crime and tax evasion are at a three decade low. Yes, we have virtually stopped investigating and prosecuting these kinds of crimes so wealthy people are still getting away with tax avoidance, storing their wealth in overseas bank accounts and money laundering.  We prosecute people right and left for shoplifting or for driving without a license or for any number of other petty crimes. But the wealthy who park their millions in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes or who don’t report millions in income, are rarely brought to justice and the crimes go on and on. According to one study, every year the United States loses $400 billion in unpaid taxes, much of it hidden in offshore tax havens.

Another well known example of no justice – no one has yet paid any kind of penalty for the lies and fabrications that were used to justify the Iraq war that resulted in countless deaths and trillions of dollars in destruction. Again, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the liars and fools who perpetrated this war and sold it to the world and the American people, are now enjoying cushy retirements or life jobs on corporate boards. Many Germans did pay the penalty at Nuremberg for their crimes in prosecuting World War II, yet we have not lifted a finger to provide justice for the thousands of lives and the trillion dollars that the war in Iraq and the never ending war in Afghanistan have cost us.

And what about the terrible injustice of police brutality today? Black people get murdered right and left, and the perpetrators go free. Yes, no matter how blatant the act or how preponderant the evidence in police shootings, it seems that no one is ever punished with anything more than suspension with pay or banishment to a desk job. To mention but two of hundreds of incidents, although a wrongful death lawsuit was successful, no charges have ever been brought against Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer murderer of Eric Garner, whom we witnessed on video being throttled to death. Our warped justice system has focused instead on the guy who took the video, Ramsey Orta, who has since suffered prosecution and conviction for petty drug crimes. And Panteleo himself recently got a $20,000 pay raise while consigned to desk duty and interestingly, some $13,000 of this killer cop’s income last year was from “unspecified sources”, maybe bonuses? And  similarly, even though a lawsuit by the family was successful, the officer who shot Philando Castile, whose life ended as the world watched him bleed to death on cell phone video, was acquitted of second degree murder charges brought against him. And the list goes on. Reckless shootings, blatant killings by those charged to “serve and protect” us. Yet these renegade cops are the ones being served and protected. Where is the justice?

And how about our international best friend and “only democracy in the Middle East”, renegade nation Israel, which continues to flout international laws and basic morals? The world stands by and watches the Israeli Occupation Forces conduct target practice on unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and does not lift a finger to bring the perpetrators of these terrible crimes to justice. Instead the world looked the other way and focused instead on the rescue of 13 soccer players from entrapment in a cave. Where were these people, all the media, all the reporters, all the stories, all the TV coverage, as 120 Palestinians were murdered and 3000 wounded, many in a horrid, life altering manner because of special expanding bullets. Where is the anger and indignation about these killings of unarmed innocent people, including medics, children and the elderly? Why hasn’t this renegade nation been brought to justice or punished by the UN or the ICC? At this writing the number of unarmed Palestinians demonstrating the Gaza border killed by Israel is 174 and more than 18,000 have been wounded. Yet the corporate media doesn’t cover these atrocities, no talking heads take notice and the world does nothing – where’s the justice?

And while I am shaking with anger and a horrible feeling of powerlessness about these injustices, how about the damage wrought in Israel’s “wars” with Gaza, the world’s largest open air prison? Israel destroys infrastructure, homes, offices, hospitals and schools in Gaza in 2009 and 2014 with arms provided by the United States taxpayers, yet contributes not one shred of this largesse for reconstruction. What little of this that has occurred has come about through contributions from the UN, EU and a little from Arab countries, but not from the US or Israel. Why? Where are the laws and enforcement that are supposed to regulate nations’ behavior and their dealings with one another? Israel throttles Gaza, rations electricity, chokes economic activity, severely limits fishing, import of building materials and who pays for the privation caused by Israel? The UN, the US and the EU.  And while these insults to morality and international law go on, the US supports it all with $11 million per day of taxpayer money for Israel. Where the hell is the justice here?

And finally, the feeling of powerlessness, of helplessness in the face of the injustice wrapped in  corporate media’s purposeful neglect of facts and the truth, continues to haunt me when I read ad nauseam of “attacks on our democracy” by Russia toying with our elections when far more egregious harm is done to our increasingly frail “democracy” by ourselves. It is we, not Russia, who are constantly suppressing the vote through gerrymandering, voter ID laws, the reduction of precincts, removing names from voter lists and so on. It is ourselves, not Russia, who have allowed money to distort the election process and who have allowed oligarchs like Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson to call the shots in our elections. Our own United States Supreme Court has been complicit in doing grievous harm to American democracy by equating campaign donations with free speech, allowing floods of secret money to distort our elections, dialing back the Voting Rights Act which permits states once again to discriminate against black voters, allowing states to purge voter lists and refusing to rule against gerrymandering.

Certainly I could go on and on about injustice in the world – US support of Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen in which five million children face starvation and a cholera epidemic; our rigged economy which has stifled the middle class and enriched the one percent; the Republican party’s exacerbation of inequality through their “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”; our baseless demonization of Iran on behalf of AIPAC and Israel; our heartless and inhumane treatment of refugees at our borders who are fleeing for their very lives; rejection of the Paris Climate Accords consigning future generations to struggle with the far reaching results of an inexorably warming climate; a young Palestinian man beaten to death by Israeli soldiers in his own home while family members listened. There is no justice.

The tension and anger persist and tear at my insides, exacerbated by my own powerlessness to change anything. But what I have recorded above will have to do for now. I have at least given voice in print about how I feel in a world heavy with injustice but light on accountability. And so I guess that I have done what little I could.

 

The Democrats will not take the House back this November, nor will they win enough seats to become a majority in the Senate. I make this prediction confidently but sadly, with the hope I will be wrong. By predicting losses, perhaps I will jinx the election and the Democrats will actually win. But no, I have seen my political party do some really stupid things over the years and this is simply another year of stupid. 

If ever there was a time to win, it seems to be now. This horrible president and his millionaire minions and base iconoclasts have made a mockery of government, of decorum and dignity, of preserving the environment and of foreign affairs. You name it, they have messed it up. And now just the tip of a huge iceberg of corruption has been revealed. This should be easy but I fear that the Democrats will again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Why? It’s pretty easy, actually. Look at the recent record – Democrats haven’t exactly set the world on fire over the last couple of presidential terms. The “Hope and Change” of Barack Obama was meaningless. Oh we dared hope, kind of a lazy, useless concept anyhow, but very little change followed. Mr. Obama continued to represent big money, not the working person. He made deadly wrong decisions after the crash of 2008, doing all he could to rescue banks and corporations but very little to rescue everyday people. Under his watch the Afghan war continued and Guantanamo remained open, unions continued to die, wages continued to stagnate or even to diminish, the rich got richer and inequality dramatically increased. Working people felt ignored and forgotten by this president, but they reminded us that they were still alive and cared when they voted for Trump in 2016. Yes, Obama had dignity and class and in contrast to who now occupies the White House, we’re so thankful for that. But a president’s style and eloquence do not make the mortgage payments or put food on the table.

And “Stronger Together” Hillary was another dud. She had no direction, no underlying reason for running save the “glass ceiling”, and to so many voters, was just a continuation of the Obama emptiness. Moreover, she would have been an extension of husband Bill’s financial and corporate chumminess, which helped speed the downfall of unions and the rise of corporate power.  Bill had wedded his party tightly to big money and Hillary followed suit. And most important, Hillary had no policy depth or breadth in her campaign and said absolutely nothing about strengthening unions, reining in big money and increasing taxes on corporations and billionaires. If the Democratic Party had allowed Bernie Sanders to be nominated, he would have become our president, not Trump, for he genuinely addressed the long neglected concerns of working families. 

And look who’s leading our Democratic Party in Congress – Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. My God, did you ever see such an uninspiring pair? From their shaky introduction of their lame “Better Deal” program to their failure to address inequality issues and reshape their party in the formerly successful image of the American worker and farmer, they have been utter failures as leaders. These big money establishment Democrats have weakened the party, not strengthened it. 

And the DNC and DCCC still haven’t seen the light and are still trying to run middle of the road Democrats that are not that different from their opponents. The success in Democratic primary elections of honest, passionate and compassionate candidates like New York’s Alexandria Occasio-Cortez and Florida’s gubernatorial primary winner, Andrew Gillum, still fails to register with the Democratic establishment. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is overjoyed to back Arizona’s moderate Kyrsten Sinema to take Jeff Flake’s Senate seat, but really she’s not so different from her Republican opponent, Martha McSally. Therefore, because the candidates are virtually indistinguishable except for the “D” or “R” after their names, Sinema, her dramatic personal story notwithstanding, will lose because Arizona is still very much an “R” state.  If Sinema had the political convictions of an Occasio-Cortez or a Gillum, to go along with her story, she would win.

Another reason that Republicans will win is that voting is still rigged in their favor. Since Trump was elected by narrow majorities in key states which tipped the infamous electoral college in his direction, has it become any easier to vote? No, many states continue to be hopelessly gerrymandered, which our Supreme Court has refused ruling upon, while upholding efforts to restrict the Voting Rights Act and to purge voter rolls of people who have chosen not to vote in recent elections. Some states continue to require picture ID’s while others have cancelled early voting or same day registration. Others have outmoded voting machinery in place that is vulnerable to hacking or other abuse. None of this bodes well for Democrats because the voter groups affected by these repression efforts are those that lean Democratic – black, Hispanic, immigrants and the poor.

Ah, and then there is the simple but crucial issue of money. In short, the Republicans have the billionaires and the Democrats do not. Democratic candidates who have famously relied on individual donations rather than corporate super PAC money will soon drain the well. If I am any kind of example, I am completely tapped out and can no longer respond to the literally hundreds of email solicitations from many Democratic candidates which have cluttered and clogged my inbox. Citizens like me, barely clinging to middle class status, simply do not have the money to continue contributing to candidates, no matter how worthy. 

But the billionaires whose last minute infusion of millions of dollars put Trump narrowly over the top in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, awarding him the electoral vote, have plenty of money and are still hard at work. Don’t think for a minute that the recent kerfuffle between the Koch network and the Trump administration will reduce the flood of money being poured into the Republican side of these midterm elections. The stream has not been reduced one single bit, but has instead increased. The Koch network pledged 400 million dollars for the midterms. That’s not changed and has been augmented by other billionaires not now in the Koch mix. 

And guess what – the Republican tax cut for the rich and for corporations will considerably increase the dollars contributed to support Republican candidates. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC closely aligned with Paul Ryan, is flush with contributions. Sheldon Adelson, whose company reported a nearly $700 million windfall from the tax law, has contributed $30 million; Timothy Mellon of Pan Am Systems, another Republican tax cut beneficiary, has tossed in $24 million, and the list goes on. Dark money spending has more than doubled over the same period during the 2014 midterms and is responsible for roughly two thirds of pro-Republican television ads. Conservative leaning groups, including the Koch supported advocacy groups, Americans for Prosperity and Concerned Veterans for America, account for four out of the five biggest secret-money advertisers. Democratic candidates simply cannot match this kind of money and the result will be more Republican wins and Democratic losses.

Another reason that the Republicans will retain their majority in the House of Representatives and in the Senate is that the Trump economy, whether he is responsible for it or not, is doing very well. Remember the old campaign quote, “It’s the economy, stupid”. Like it or not, the economy has always been the most important factor in election years. When things are relatively good, which they are now, voters are more complacent and do not feel the urgency to vote. And now, with unemployment at a decades low and with workers still failing to realize that the Republican tax cut was not really for them but for corporations and the wealthy, people will simply not bother to vote. There is little reason, Trump’s character, corruption and chaos notwithstanding, for people to come out in droves and vote to change anything. This midyear election will remain typical, with less than half of qualified voters participating, as usual. And this spells doom for the Democrats, who cannot win without markedly increased voter involvement.

And while there is no economic urgency to drive Democratic voters to the polls in November of 2018, there is considerable urgency of another kind for Republicans. A Democratic House will have subpoena power. Trump’s tax returns will be opened for all of us to see. Our president will be revealed as the corrupt crook he is and we can finally see why he is so enamored of Russia. A recent revelation by AXIOS of a spreadsheet being circulated among Congressional Republicans which lists potential investigations should Democrats take the house, will galvanize Republican donors to increase their contributions and congressional Republicans to redouble their efforts to retain their seats. When you’re cornered or your back is to the wall, you fight more fiercely. The threat of these disclosures will result in more Republicans coming to the polls in November, not more Democrats.

And finally, Democrats will not take back the House this fall because of the powerful voices of the pro Trump media. First, the network that has truly become “state television”, Fox News, now augmented by Salem Radio and Sinclair Broadcasting, will continue to back Trump and the Republican Party to the hilt, no matter what. And these voices completely drown out the less strident corporate opposition voice of MSNBC and the middle of the road noise from CNN and the other networks. And nobody much watches the most honest and factual news program on television – Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now”.

And one final comment. For those Democrats who think that the recent revelations of more Trump associated corruption will sway voters, think again. The more bad stuff that is revealed, the more the Republican Party closes ranks around Trump and his approved candidates. So the president is not only a corrupt liar but also an “unindicted co-conspirator”? Well, we voters still have jobs, our 401K’s are doing great, we still have our iPhones, get any news we want from Facebook and can still go out and have fun, so who cares?

Traditionally the party out of power has always done well in the midterm elections. But like everything else in Washington, this time it will be different. And again, concerning everything I have written above, I fervently hope that I’m wrong.

This article had its genesis in three unrelated events – scrawled notes after attending a charity event with my wife in Phoenix a couple of years ago, similar impressions and a few jottings while watching, yet again, “Scrooge”, the wonderful 1951 Alistair Sim version of Dickens’ classic last Christmas Eve, and on the holiday itself reading a New York Times column which, in describing certain charitable acts, underscored my own convictions about charity. Unfortunately the article was never finished so I will attempt to finally sew the pieces together to successful completion. 

Have you ever read an article on the society pages of a newspaper about a multitude of befurred, bejeweled, betuxed and perfectly coiffed wealthy, arriving in their chauffeured vehicles, gathering for an event dedicated to some high profile charity? I am sure you have. There are the pictures of different couples, yes, dressed in their finest, happy to be there to help the sick or the poor. And the final tally of money raised through their pledges and contributions is supposed to invoke paroxysms of appreciation and gratitude among the eventual recipients of that generosity and among us sympathetic observers not blessed with the ability to give so much.

Yes, these people, so rich that they cannot possibly spend what they have, make themselves feel so good, having contributed a particle or dash of their wealth to a particular cause. They do not think of erasing the conditions or circumstances that cause the deprivation or impoverishment of people in our society, but conspicuously contribute a shred of their vast fortunes so that they can go home, look in the mirror and tell themselves how generous they are and that they have “done their part” in “helping the poor”.

These people do not think of changing their government or their laws so that poverty and illness can be addressed and eradicated. They do not think of going to the source of a problem to find a solution. If they really cared they would put that wealth to work electing new politicians, passing laws and regulations, that would change the tax and welfare systems so that these problems could be prevented. Oh, but that would deprive them of this opportunity to step out on their little stage and show the world how benevolent they are.

But this is the problem, is it not? We spin our wheels, raise money, give to charities and maybe offer a prayer or two. Charity is a poor substitute for government action to solve problems of need. Charity and poverty – how inadequate one is to cure the other and temporary amelioration is not a cure.

A couple of summers ago my wife and I attended the “Circle the City Garden Tea”, an annual gathering of well-intentioned charitable givers whose efforts support medical care for the homeless. I felt very uncomfortable there among the many bejeweled, expensively dressed minor league philanthropists. While I try to give as much as I can to worthy organizations, charity makes me nervous because what I can give is so limited. While there that morning surrounded by people feeling very good about themselves for having bid on “silent auction” items, buying lottery tickets for other donated items and filling out pledge cards, I couldn’t help getting the feeling that all this giving was a cop-out of sorts. Most of the people present, it seemed would rather give some money and a little time, pat themselves on the back, go home feeling smug and superior (another nice charitable tax deduction to reduce their taxable income at the end of the year), rather than see their taxes raised to ensure medical care for everyone including the indigent and a floor under everyone which would provide security for them.

The very worthy and admirable founder of Circle the City, Sister Adele O’Sullivan, herself a medical doctor who has spent much of her life treating the poor, presented a welcoming talk during which she exclaimed “Oh, I wish poverty would just go away”. Well, Sister Adele, in western European countries people really do believe in helping their fellow man, put their money where their mouths are and do pay the taxes necessary to alleviate hunger, lack of medical care, and lack of shelter….for everyone. Yes, in countries like these poverty does indeed “go away”. 

Do any of these people with the designer clothes, jeweled eyeglass frames, expensive hairdos, gushing about how happy they are to be there at the “Garden Tea”, really think that there will be fewer poor people, fewer homeless in need of shelter, medical care and sustenance on the streets because of their efforts? Yes, of course, every person who is helped, every person lent a helping hand to cure their addiction to alcohol or drugs and put on a path to a job and a secure future is a worthy achievement. But do these isolated successes cure the problem? Why don’t these people try to provide homes for the homeless? Or jobs so that they can obtain homes. Or if they are unable to work, provide reliable monetary support so that they can provide a home and sustenance for themselves? People in need should not be dependent on the vagaries of charity. If Sister Adele really wanted poverty and need to “go away” she needs to support a floor under us all beneath which no one could fall.

But unfortunately we aren’t doing this – the government, thanks to Republicans, is doing even less to break the cycle of poverty and homelessness, attaching “work requirements” to virtually every benefit from food stamps to Medicaid. The best seller “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance has been seized upon by the political right as ammunition to further cut assistance and support for the poor. Vance attributes his “escape” from poverty to “hard work”, not “government handouts” and this is music to right wing Republicans’ ears. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough. People are poor because they grow dependent on government “handouts” that deprive them of ambition. 

Yes, hard work is important but sometimes there are simply no jobs or if there are jobs, they don’t pay a living wage. One of the greatest ironies of modern life in this country is that so many full time jobs don’t pay enough for people to support their families. The greed of so many companies today that have chosen not to pay a living wage to full time employees is deplorable and should not be tolerated in “the wealthiest country in the world”. All employers should pay a living wage to full time employees. If they claim they cannot or else they will go out of business, let them fold. If the product or service they provide cannot generate living wages for employees, that product or service does not need to be provided. Paying a living wage to employees needs to be just as important as making a profit on that product or service, having your stock price increase and paying dividends to stockholders. And paying employees properly should be required by law.

My wife attends weekly Mass at St Patrick’s Church in Scottsdale and to keep peace between us, I usually try to attend with her. I enjoy many aspects of the experience – observing the centuries-old ceremonies and rituals of the Catholic church and appreciating the dedication, energy, leadership and humor of Father Eric Tellez, the priest who is chief pastor of the church. I also enjoy the beauty and grandeur of the church itself – its really a beautiful edifice, reflecting the faith and generosity of its huge congregation. But at certain times of the year I am disappointed to see this lovely church become an example of what upsets and troubles me, by collecting socks for the homeless and indigent. Okay, it’s better than nothing I am sure, but bringing socks to church is just another exercise in ostentatious giving. If it genuinely cared, the congregation would be politically active and elect the right politicians to raise their own taxes in order to provide decent paying jobs and eradicate poverty, rather than making a show of bringing socks to church. But there we are, parishioner after parishioner, including us, strutting up (or slinking up in my case) to deposit a package of Target or Costco socks in a bin. Wow, how generous, how selfless. We are now absolved of any guilt about not caring properly for our fellow man.

It’s Christmas 2018 and I am striving to deal with feelings deriving from two sources – our annual family viewing last night of the wonderful 1951 Alistair Sim version of “A Christmas Carol” and a column I just read from the New York Times this morning. In “Scrooge”, The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge what has become of his beautiful lost love, Alice, whose affection he tragically  traded for his selfish pursuit of wealth. Alice is generously and joyfully tending to the sick and needy in a poorhouse on Christmas Eve. The final revelation of this Ghost shows him dramatically opening his robe to reveal two gaunt, sickly and ragged little children. “This boy is Ignorance, this girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy…” he intones. Through the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens’ wonderful story reminds us of the real meaning of Christmas and impresses upon us our responsibility to care for those less fortunate. But just like the benevolent organizations to which I have alluded, this lovely Christmas story stresses that we do so through the unpredictability and unreliability of individual charity, rather than through the responsibility of societies and their governments. 

And in the column noted above, the author, Margaret Renkl, whose work I generally admire, begins by considering the contradiction of evangelical support of Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama and of a U.S. president who violates virtually every Christian precept imaginable. She then then exhorts Christians to rally around the teachings of Jesus in which all Christians should believe: “Jesus had nothing to say about birth control or abortion or homosexuality. He did have quite a lot to say about the poor and the vulnerable… Surely Christians across the political spectrum believe we’re called to feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the weak and welcome the stranger.” Great stuff so far, but rather than urging us to elect politicians and pass laws that would help wipe out poverty, Ms Renkl loses herself in describing the wonderful things that she and her fellow Christians are doing to help the homeless.

During the winter months, members of “Room in the Inn”, a group involving Nashville area churches, go downtown and collect homeless people, take them to their various places of worship or shelters for a hot shower, a wholesome dinner, a good night’s sleep in a clean bed, a healthy breakfast the next morning and a sack lunch for later. But then, these same people take their one-night guests downtown and dump them off again on the same streets upon which they are homeless! What does this do, pray tell? Are these selfless and generous Christians of “Room in the Inn” doing anything to eliminate the root causes of homelessness? These people are homeless – they need homes and jobs, not one night stands of temporary shelter. No, just like charities such as Circle the City, and just like Ebenezer Scrooge’s lost love Alice taking care of the poor, they’re just playing round the edges, treating symptoms and not addressing causes.

 If the reader will allow me the privilege of some divergence, I would like to conclude this piece with another quite different example of “sanctimonious hypocricy”. In the same way I am disgusted by charities beating around the edges of serious problems without attacking the causes, I am sickened by the way do-gooders ostentatiously go through the motions of demonstrating understanding and sympathy for one of the greatest injustices of our time – the stripping of the dignity, welfare, safety, livelihood and land of the Palestinian people in their native country, without ever saying anything about the root causes.

As I noted in my earlier article, there are countless stories in the media of the little efforts and little events that are purported to “bring Israelis and Palestinians together”. Maybe it’s a story, like the one I described in the afore-mentioned article about Israeli and Palestinians women temporarily shedding their enmity to gossip in a beauty salon, or it might be an isolated effort to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together in some school, playground or sporting event, so that they can show the world how they can get along. Maybe the story makes the nauseating feel-good final entry on the network evening news, or makes it into a similar area of the print media. But it always produces the same feeling in me as do charity events attended by the wealthy. 

Because these weak efforts are really obfuscations masquerading as solutions, only window dressing, covering and disguising the real problems. Oh, these innocent little Palestinian and Israeli children are joyfully playing together and loving each other, oblivious of the real factors and actions that keeps them apart. The daily insults, humiliation, attacks, beatings, deaths and  land theft go on, aided by the 11 million dollars a day US taxpayers provide to collude in these crimes. And our politicians of whatever party continue with their unqualified  praise of Netanyahu and his minions for their “only democracy in the Middle East” and “shared values”  with the United States, just to keep the money flowing into their election coffers. Please save me from the platitudes and the sanctimonious hypocrisy and let’s attack the root causes of these crimes with an arms embargo, cancellation of our $11 million per day support and hauling these Israeli criminals into the World Court for trial and sentencing.

So concludes this article about the sanctimonious hypocrisy of our many institutions which, while they might do some good, refuse to expose and address the real causes of poverty, deprivation and injustice and seek real solutions. But before we part company, it might be useful to share some reminders from notable people about our responsibilities and how to fulfill them.

“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.” 

— Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” 

― Eugene V. Debs

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” 

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” 

― Hélder Câmara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” 

― Dwight D. Eisenhower

Our Interstate Highway System is an engineering marvel, now consisting of almost 48,000 miles of divided, multi-lane, limited access highways for vehicular traffic. Approved and funded by Congress in June of 1956, the original plan finally completed in 1991 and extended later, this transportation network was the realization of the dream of President Dwight Eisenhower. The need for such a system was planted in his mind when as a young officer in 1919 he participated in a slow, ponderous two month effort to move a military convoy across the country on the “Lincoln Highway”, now US30 and later when as the Supreme Allied Commander in 1945 was dazzled by the German autobahns. Embraced originally as a Cold War requirement to move weapons and armaments quickly across the country if necessary, the Interstate system has also proven to be not only a blessing for the auto traveler, but a boon to the trucking industry and as such, a perpetual thorn in the side of the railroad industry.

I remember traveling by car in the late 1950’s during early phases of construction. Interstate 44 was still mostly US66, I-70 was mixed with lengths of US40, and the only really significant length of speedy limited access expressway at the time was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “The Turnpike”, completed in the early 1950’s and now designated also as Interstate 76, demonstrated what travel across the country would ultimately become when the Interstate system was finally completed. And although a toll road, truck drivers and motorists were always happy to pay since the Turnpike made a formerly tedious drive across the Appalachians very quick and convenient.

While traveling across the country so much in recent years, I remain more thankful than not for these highways. Moving along quickly, munching on snacks, stopping only to fill up the vehicle and empty its occupants, making the time go by quickly by listening to recorded books, and arriving at that planned motel stop before dark, one can easily cover six or seven hundred miles (over 1000 km) a day, reaching the final destination with far less stress than when such a journey was predominantly on two lane highways.

However, in recent decades, this renowned network of high speed multi-lane roadways has become a mixed blessing. Even though I am still mostly moving along quickly, the thousands of huge trucks on the road are making the drive much less pleasurable and far more stressful and dangerous. Sometimes it seems as though our little car is the only such vehicle on the road. Looking ahead, all I can see are trucks and, glancing in the mirrors, that’s about all I can see behind me as well. And coming toward me in the other lanes are again….mostly trucks, with only a few cowed cars mixed in. There are about 15 million trucks on the road, and of these about two million are tractor-trailers. And while big trucks officially make up only a small percentage of all highway vehicles, they all unfortunately seem to travel the same Interstate highways that I do.

Often, when passing a line of these behemoths, I am forced to suddenly brake, take my car out of cruise control and destroy my momentum when one of them suddenly pulls out in front of me to attempt to “pass” several other trucks. Then I sit angrily behind it, poking along at far less than the speed limit, waiting for the truck to slowly, gradually pass the others and finally pull in so that I can regain my speed. So many times, I have been tempted to lean on my horn and render an obscene gesture to the offending truck driver as I resume my speed and momentum and pass him. But I angrily have to remind myself again that these guys really control the Interstate highways, not citizen motorists in little cars like me. Truck drivers pretty much do what they want because automobile drivers cannot challenge a 40 ton, multi-axled, 18 wheeled vehicle barreling along at better than 65 miles per hour.

Rest areas along our interstate highways are getting increasing frustrating to use. When the interstate system was first planned, rest stops were constructed at proper intervals as places for motorists to stretch, relax, shake off driver fatigue and drowsiness, visit a clean restroom and maybe eat a sandwich or two at a shaded picnic table. That’s all changed significantly with the advent of long haul trucks with built in sleeper cabs. Now, roadside rests look a lot more like truck stops, with rows of semi’s parked, day or night, with the drivers snug in their sleeper beds grabbing a few winks. Rest stops are now made more convenient for trucks, with “trucks only” parking areas, replete with elongated parking spaces for one way entry and egress. In fact, the most recently constructed rest areas that I’ve observed along the Interstates appear to be planned more for the accommodation of trucks rather than for automobiles. Also, entering or exiting a rest stop is increasingly difficult since a driver must often navigate among trucks which could not find a spot in the rest stop so are now parked on both shoulders of an exit or an entrance.

Truckers have not only taken over rest stops but also any other spaces available to them. For example, Interstate 40 through Texas and Oklahoma is interspersed not only with rest stops but also by “picnic areas”, more modestly sized spots where motorists and their families can ostensibly park and have a picnic at one of several nicely shaded tables. Well, forget it – any “picnic area” you see is packed with trucks, their drivers relaxing in their sleeper cabs. Horrible conditions for a family picnic for sure – the expensive tables and shades totally wasted. I have never observed a family having a picnic at one of these facilities and have never wondered why.

The same disorder also now infects “scenic overlooks” along the interstates, where special parking areas have been constructed so that motorists can stop, gaze at and perhaps photograph a scenic valley, mountain vista or village. Well forget that too – it’s not worth stopping to gaze enchanted and enthralled by a picturesque scene when you have to first weave your way among parked trucks to maybe find a parking place, then endanger your life by crossing the right of way, then shorten your life with lungfuls of diesel exhaust. The “scenic overlook” is packed with idling trucks and sleeping drivers.
Along some stretches of interstate highway, especially in the west, there occasionally are what I call “dead exits”, where interchanges have been constructed but are not connected to any existing highway or road, presumably waiting for a time when they will be needed. These are quite handy if you need to relieve yourself for you can get off of the highway, stand on the other side of your car and go in relative privacy, then hop back in, easily get back on the highway and be on your way. However, now these interchanges are populated by trucks arranged along both shoulders of the exit and entrance, with drivers sleeping. So my convenient “dead exits” now have joined roadside rests and picnic areas as rest spots for big trucks.

I used to see a sign painted on the back of the trailers of long haul semi’s – something like “This vehicle pays $6000 a year in highway taxes”, as if we are supposed to feel sorry for the transportation company bearing such a burden. What the company’s sign doesn’t tell you is that, while indeed paying federal and state taxes as part of the cost of fuel they consume, their trucks cause far more damage to the highways than these meager fees could ever conceivably compensate for. It so happens that as the weight of a vehicle rises, potential road damage does not increase linearly but exponentially by a power of four. Thus a fully loaded rig does about as much damage as 9600 cars. When trucks are overloaded, as quite a few of them are, the damage is exponentially worse. For example, increasing a truck’s weight from the maximum 80,000 pounds to 90 results in a 42 percent increase in road wear: pavement designed to last 20 years wears out in seven. Trucking companies claim that while they represent only 11 percent of all vehicles on the road, they pay 35 percent of all road taxes. Big deal, because they surely cause 99 percent of all road damage. Clearly, if anything, big trucks should pay far more in road taxes than they do now. The highway taxes that I and millions of other motorists pay actually provide a gigantic subsidy to transportation companies. It should be noted that railroad trains do far less damage to public infrastructure. And furthermore, their fuel taxes don’t pay for the maintenance of railroad beds and rails. The railroads themselves do.

Another problem related to big trucks on the Interstate highways is the threat presented by the chunks and strips of cast-off tire tread that litter highway shoulders and right-of-ways. When my vision of the roadway has been limited by dusk, darkness or a huge truck in front of me, I have occasionally hit these big hunks of rubber and thought I had hit a two by four and seriously damaged the car. These unsightly road hazards are routinely cast off from improperly retreaded truck tires, purchased by an owner/operator presumably too cheap to buy proper new tires for his rig.

And there are serious problems with truck drivers themselves. When I was young and my mother and father would drive us children on long cross country trips to visit relatives, we were taught to think that truckers were the absolute best drivers on the road. Yes, back in the days of two lane highways, I guess we felt a camaraderie with truck drivers when after a big truck passed us, we would flash our lights to signify that he was clear to pull back in and he would blink his deck lights in acknowledgement – a pleasant little roadway “conversation” and exercise in highway etiquette. Unfortunately those days are long gone. Truck drivers today seem to instead exhibit a much more arrogant and aggressive attitude and very little politeness and consideration, much less any behavior that could be described as “highway etiquette”. And furthermore, they don’t seem all that competent or skilled. I have followed trucks that couldn’t seem to stay in their lanes and have veered into the left lane, then, overcorrecting, onto the shoulder. I have seen them pull in front of me without signaling and I have been cut off by truck drivers. Were they inattentive? Drowsy? Exhausted? Unskilled? Or maybe just plain stupid?

I have seen the mangled results of dozens of horrible collisions involving semi’s over the last several years and I have read about some very grim ones resulting in death, always of the people in the smaller vehicles, almost never in the trucks. Usually the truck driver, protected as he is, escapes injury or death, even if he is at fault. A recent well known example is the 2014 accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when a Walmart tractor/trailer moving at 65 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, rear-ended comedian Tracy Morgan’s travel van, killing comedian James McNair and causing severe injury to Morgan and several other passengers. Walmart driver Kevin Roper, who had driven from Georgia to Delaware to pick up his load and begin his shift, had not slept in 28 hours, survived the accident unharmed.

A few pertinent statistics – tractor-trailer crashes kill nearly 4000 Americans every year and injure more than 85,000. Since 2009 deaths involving big trucks have increased 17 percent and injuries by 28 percent. Six million vehicle crashes occurred in the US in 2014. Of those, 476,000 involved large trucks and buses – a 22 percent increase from the previous year. And there have been a steadily increasing number of truck driver violations. There were 326,818 violations noted during big rig roadside inspections in 2015. One of the most numerous was of truckers who failed to log, update, or provide accurate information regarding their record of duty status. Also there were 136,585 hours-of-service violations, where drivers violated their time limits. Many fatal truck crashes involve rear-end collisions. The Department of Transportation reported that in 2015 large trucks were involved in 27 percent of all fatal crashes in roadway work zones, even though they represent only about 10 percent of all highway traffic. These crashes are usually caused when trucks come up on vehicles stalled by the road work.

Part of the problem today with truckers is how they are paid – usually by the mile. And when you are paid for the distance you travel, you will do everything possible to drive as far as you can as fast as you can. Pay rates for a truck driver range around 50 cents per mile so covering four or five hundred miles a day yields a fairly decent day’s earnings. But again, payment by the mile induces drivers to abuse speed limits and the rules requiring rest stops at established intervals, thus dramatically increasing the chances of an accident.

With the trucking industry booming and always looking for drivers, I fear that they are scraping the bottom, as far as the ability and skill potential of drivers is concerned. And I am always surprised to see so many women driving big rigs today. So, admittedly sexist driver that I am, I do notice many “woman driver” characteristics exhibited increasingly by drivers of long-haul trucks, such as driving too slowly, or being indecisive and overly cautious or braking too often. Many times I have remarked in frustration, “that has to be a woman truck driver”, and, upon passing the offending truck and glancing at the driver, I see that I was right.

 

While large truck fatalities have been skyrocketing — jumping 26 percent between 2009 and 2015, the American Trucking Association and the transportation industry have tried to make things worse instead of better. As part of the 2015 highway funding bill, they tried to include an amendment allowing states to raise the present 80,000 pound limit for trucks to 91,000 pounds. In addition, to meet their perennial driver shortage, the trucking industry proposed lowering the minimum age of interstate drivers to 18. Highway safety advocates came out decisively against this proposal citing Transportation Department statistics that show drivers ages 18-20 are involved in 66 percent more fatal crashes than those above 21.

In a rare demonstration of common sense, the weight increase proposal was defeated and a compromise was struck on lowering the minimum age. Eighteen year olds were allowed to drive trucks within state boarders, maintaining the 21 year old age minimum for interstate driving. However, a pilot program proposed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)was approved that will allow a limited number of individuals between the ages of 18 and 21 to operate commercial motor vehicles in interstate commerce if they have received specified heavy-vehicle driver training while in military service and are sponsored by a participating motor carrier. So now that the door for teenage long haul truckers has been cracked open, I am sure that the lobbying power of the trucking industry has the clout to open the door completely in the near future. Wow, teenagers driving tractor-trailers cross-country on the Interstates! Brilliant!

Yes, to me, there are far too many trucks on the road, and with the price of diesel fuel staying low, I feel there will be even more as time goes on. But when driving on Interstate 40 through New Mexico, I can’t help but contemplate the irony of the dozens of trucks carrying cargo right along side of Burlington, Northern and Santa Fe trains carrying so much more at a much lower cost. A freight train can move a ton of freight 484 miles on one gallon of fuel, while a truck can move the same ton only 80 miles on the same gallon. If so much more expensive then why is 70 percent of all freight transported by trucks? In addition to loading and delivery convenience, I am sure that massive government subsidy of highway infrastructure as exemplified in the Interstate System is a major reason.

In addition, because of this inefficiency, the carbon footprint of railroad transportation is one tenth that of trucks.

A John Steinbeck fan in my twenties, I happily added “Travels With Charley” to the list of his books I read. I later lived some of this book when I traveled with my “rez dog” Seymour, from New Jersey to Colorado, by way of Michigan’s upper peninsula, Duluth, Minnesota, across North Dakota to Miles City, Montana and then down through Wyoming to Denver, Colorado. I enjoyed the trip very much, enjoying wonderful scenery along the way, and couldn’t help thinking about Steinbeck’s statement (sometimes attributed to CBS’s Charles Kuralt https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/first.cfm ) about the Interstate Highway system. “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” How prescient he was, because that’s unfortunately true in my own experience. My seasonal 2500 mile trips between Arizona and Vermont have become incredibly boring, perhaps because of familiarity or the Interstates themselves, or maybe both. But when traveling either east or west, really, Steinbeck (or Kuralt) is right, I really don’t see a damned thing except the miles and miles of four or six lane highway stretching out in front of me, the thousands of trucks and that scattering of cars in front of me and behind me. The number of trucks will inexorably grow and our Interstates will become ever more crowded. Thank God for recorded books!