The Way the Future Blogs

Clockwise, from left: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich.

Question: Who is the best of the four remaining Republican candidates?

Answer: There is no best of these four professional politicians.

None of them has proposed remedial action for, or even shown they know a problem exists with, the most serious problem we and the rest of the world faces, namely the mounting ferocity of weather disasters, caused primarily by global warming. Every one of them, to the extent that they have programs for the future at all, is on a track that will make the problem worse instead of ameliorating it.

Question: Did President Obama speak to these dangerously worsening weather problems in his State of the Union address?

Answer: No, but his options are still open. I do devoutly hope he will, once the election gets close.. He is the only remaining hope we have. If he doesn’t see the danger we are in, and propose measures to minimize it, then we have no hope for at least the next four years, and by four years from now it is very likely to be too late.

Pres. George W. Bush on vacation in a scene from Lions Gate Films' Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).

Don’t the right-wing politicians ever run out of just plain lies? Like the other day Donald Trump babbled that President Obama “takes more vacations than any human being I’ve ever seen,” specifically including former President George W. Bush. But the fact is that at the same point in their presidencies Obama has taken all or parts of 38 vacation days, while Bush had taken 102 days, while days spent at Camp David for Obama were 32, and for Bush 123.

You might think a responsible human being would at least apologize for the fibs. Well, probably a responsible human being would.

If you don't have health insurance, the emergency room may be your only option for medical treatment. (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes.)

Let’s make believe you’re a poor person. (I know that’s a stretch, but let’s go with it.) A member of your family gets a fever and other signs of something wrong, so you want to take him to a doctor. The trouble is the only insurance you have is government-sponsored Medicaid, and good luck trying to find a doctor who will take it. Or maybe you don’t even have Medicaid, so you’re even worse off. So what do you do. Simple. You take your sick one to the nearest emergency room, where they aren’t allowed to turn anyone down.

That’s, for you, a good solution to an otherwise hopeless problem, and over the last thirty years or so the number of people who took that step because they had no better choice in the U.S.A. went up some 35 percent. This put a big strain on the cost of running a hospital, with the result that many hospitals couldn’t afford to keep their emergency rooms open. But they couldn’t close the ERs unless they closed the whole hospital … and now you know why 27 percent of all American hospitals (psychiatric hospitals not included) have closed their doors since 1990.

If Obamacare is allowed to proceed as the legislation directs, that problem should be pretty well solved within the next few years. That’s assuming that the Republican Party doesn’t succeed in repealing it for the sake of higher profits for the medical industry, which they are at present trying their best to do.

There's nothing sure but
The rich get rich
And the poor get children
In the mean time,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
 
—“Ain't We Got Fun?” 1921, music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Raymond B. Egan and Gus Kahn.

Remember that old song? Of course it was just meant as a joke, wasn’t it?

Well, let’s check it out. What the Republican Party* has been telling us for some years is that when anybody’s income goes up, most likely everyone else’s does at the same time. As they put it, “a rising tide raises all boats.”

By gosh, when you look at the numbers, you have to admit they’re right. Well, sort of right. According to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have been looking up the statistics, the average American income — that’s for all of us, from paupers to super-rich — did go up a little in the years from 2002 to 2007. (Let’s not talk about what happened after that just now.)

However, the tide didn’t exactly come in to the same depth for all of. For most of us, the 99 percent of all incomes that includes you and me and the president of the United States and quite a few people who are driving $91,000 Mercedeses, our real income rose just 1.3 percent per year.

That other 1 percent of us, though, they collectively did quite a lot better than that. About seven times better, as a matter of fact. The income of that 1 per cent of the population who are the richest of all went up not a skinny 1.3 percent but a hefty 10 percent per year every year over the same period.

That’s not bad for the super-rich, right? It is especially profitable when you add in the fact that that same Republican Party, or at least those members of it who have been elected to Congress, has been steamrollering hard bargains in return for every concession they make to the rest of us. For example, in return for extending the term of unemployment insurance, as President Obama wanted for the millions of out-of-work men and women whose existing insurance was running out, the Republican negotiators extracted a commitment to leave intact the George W. Bush open-handed gift to the super-rich of most of a trillion dollars in tax forgiveness.

So why are the richest among us so avaricious about getting super-richer and super-richer still? The only fair term for it is overweening naked greed, that’s all. And they’ve got our country’s congressional legislators, the ones that are supposed to be working for us all, busily helping them get richer and richer, as fast as they can.

—
* (Disclaimer. The remarks that appear here are not only political, they are partisan. In this case, I’ve specifically named the Republican Party as the guiltier ones here, but I don’t want anyone to think I am not aware that there are Democrats — in particular, let’s say, the Senate’s Oil Democrats who systematically whittled down the regulations that might have prevented the Gulf oil catastrophe and their Coal Democrat pals who have systematically destroyed a large part of Appalachian riverways and scenic beauty. — who are just as reprehensible. But those sins aren’t the ones I’m talking about right now.

(The sorrowful truth is that there are very few persons sitting in either the Senate or the House of Representatives — to say nothing of all the lesser state and local voting bodies in the country — who do not take money from lobbyists, in sums small and great, and do favors, again little favors or big, for those same lobbyists. We’ll have more to say about lobbyists in the near future.)

Pres. Barack Obama on “The Late Show” with David Letterman.

As you all well know by now, one of the subjects that I spend a lot of time thinking about is politics. What I think about I write about; it’s the way I’m constructed. And what I write about, I am more likely than not to publish somewhere or other, sometimes including this blog.

So I give you warning. This is my notion of what I would like to see in a New York Times op ed, which is to say that it is wholly political. If you have not yet reached the conclusion that politics is our only way of getting good government, you don’t have to read it.
 

Dear Mr. President:

As you know, you are well and truly hated by the people FDR’s generation called “the malefactors of great wealth.” They have found ways to divert an appallingly large fraction of our nation’s treasure to their pocketbooks and they are afraid you won’t let them go on doing that.

These are not decent, honorable people, Mr. President. Your one great mistake since you were elected was believing that they might be, and that once they were saved from Perdition they would help others. They don’t do that. They are busy pumping tens of millions of dollars into spreading fears, worries and outright lies about you into the media., trying to persuade the American people that you are a foreign-born Moslem who is laughing up his sleeve because he’s getting away with stealing the country.

Why don’t you talk to the people, Mr. President?

I don’t mean make a speech. They’ve been inoculated against that. I mean the kind of thing you came close to doing when you were visiting the talk shows. There you did very well, coming across as smart, funny and likable.

The only thing wrong with that is the American public didn’t hire you to be good on talk shows. They hired you to get us out of the nearly hopeless mess a Republican President, a Republican Congress and a Republican Supreme Court dumped us into.

So here’s an idea. Let’s say that next time you hold a news conference, you start out by giving a little civics lesson. You say something to your immediate audience like, “Friends, I’ll try to take all your questions, but this time I want to start by answering two that come from the people I work for. One is from Sam Brown in Pocatello, Idaho. He says, ‘The famous Bill Mediaman (choose examples from your daily mail, Mr. President. These are illustrative only) said on the radio that you weren’t born in America. Is that true?”

“No, it isn’t true, and Mr Mediaman knows that it isn’t because he has seen the proof. Therefore Mr. Mediaman is a deliberate liar. You must do as you think best, but I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the time of day.

“Then there’s this from Leota Durcher, in Schaumburg, Illinois. ‘I am 54 years old. I have cervical cancer and they say that under your plan I can get health insurance, but I have to wait until 2014 to get it. Why did you put that delay into the plan?’

“I didn’t put it there, Mrs. Durcher. Let me explain how a bill becomes a law in our country. The printed copy of the bill, as drawn up by its sponsors, is circulated to all the senators and they are asked to vote for it. Then each senator has a right to ask for some kind of change in the bill in return for voting for it. In this case, three senators got together to require the four-year delay. Since without those three I didn’t have enough votes to pass the bill in the first place, I had no choice but to accept it. So if you want to know why this is in the bill you must ask those senators.

“Thanks. And now, friends let’s get on with business.”

Same thing when you go on a talk show. Tell them you first need sixty seconds to answer a letter from a voter. And repeat as often as necessary.

You did promise transparency in your administration, did you not, Mr. President? Did you mean that kind of letting Americans into the real facts about why all our laws look like Christmas wish lists for very rich people? If so, when does that kind of transparency start?

Want me to tell you a funny story that doesn’t make me laugh at all?

Okay, here goes. First, you have to have seen the movie Wag the Dog or at least you have to know what it’s about. (I can help you there. It’s about an American president who’s congenitally unable to keep from getting caught in sexual messes. So when one of them is about to go disastrously public the president and his Brains Trust cook up an idea to cover it up. If the country began fighting a war, that would put the story of his sexual fling as a newspaper story back on about Page 32, and in small type. So they make up a war that they pretend the U.S. was having, and then they make up an imaginary victory.) It was actually, I’m told, a pretty funny movie.

Now comes the part that doesn’t make me laugh. If you remember, a few days before Election Day, a new terrorist action hit the papers, somebody in Yemen trying to send bombs to synagogues, including small Jewish congregations in Chicago.

And then Richard Roeper, who writes a pretty good column for the Sun-Times, began getting jocular little emails coming in to him, and many of them were saying things like, “Just like Wag the Dog all over again, right?”

As jokes go, that isn’t a bad one under certain circumstances. But when they start coming in numbers, it isn’t funny any more. There’s somebody around who is saying, don’t you believe that our president is capable of doing that if he thought he could get away with it? Or pretending to be a Christian when he’s really a Moslem? Or faking his birthplace so he could become president?

Or any other of those lies that apparently some people believe?

I know who’s spreading that stuff. It’s someone who has no honor or decency himself, and so doesn’t recognize it in any else. He really should at least sign his name.