Neo-liberalism: Rage of the Unempowered 2

Conservative Republican hopes were utterly dashed by Eisenhower. Unions survived as did Social Security. American bases remained open all over the planet. There were more huge governmental projects—like the superhighway system and the beginning of the space race. We went right on participating in the Cold War.
Two interesting points about Eisenhower: his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was trained under Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state—as was Kennedy and Johnson’s secretary of state. It was called—validly—bipartisan foreign policy.
Secondly, Eisenhower offered the conservatives some red meat by naming Dick Nixon (at easterner Tom Dewey’s insistence) as Vice President. Nixon was an interesting study in contradiction: he was a master at “red baiting” (winning by calling the other guy a communist). He had found the contradictions in Alger Hiss’s testimony that sent him to prison for perjury. Yet he was also a very intelligent, bone deep pragmatist.
As President, Nixon signed the law that permitted women of whatever income to buy a car without a husband or father to co-sign. He opened the door to China after 23 years of non-recognition. He allowed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to live after LBJ tried to gut it. (Yes, Johnson did. I was on staff at the time.) Nixon was at home with the eastern wing of the party and, all in all, I would have to place him there.
So the conservative Republicans sat and seethed while the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations presided over an internationalist foreign policy and ever bigger government. They were so far out of power and had been for so long it looked as if they would never see the inside of the oval office or the Speaker of the House’s dais again.
In 1973, the Supreme Court handed them a winning issue. Claiming that the 14th Amendment’s “due process clause” grants an absolute right to privacy, the Court struck down state laws against abortion and made it a federally guaranteed right.
Even some progressive (modern “liberal”) legal scholars were horrified at the court’s reasoning, but, no matter. The issue was on the table. Clever political operatives would use it to forge an alliance between evangelical Christians and economically conservative politicians.
It was scarcely made in heaven. Conservative Christians had basically stayed out of politics since the end of World War II. (They snored through the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, allowing him to lose by the largest landslide ever.) But the long out of power conservative (Neo-liberal) Republicans woke them up by harping on issues like abortion and by flattering the Christians into believing they were the “silent majority” who only needed to begin voting to set everything right.
The Party managed to convince large numbers of evangelicals that Reagan was really one of them—that their issues were his issues. They believed it and poured out of their pews in huge numbers to elect the first conservative Republican since Herbert Hoover.
Of course Mr. Reagan’s issues weren’t really those of the so-called “religious right”. He paid lip-service to issues (especially abortion) dear to the no longer silent minority, but he did very little to advance any of them. HIS issues were economic and governmental.
Unfortunately the evangelicals were unable to recognize this until they had been thoroughly suborned and made to look ridiculous if not vicious. Some day someone will do a real study on the damage done to American Christianity by its dalliance with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But that isn’t our purpose here.
The point is—by using Christian outrage over Roe v Wade and Christian votes—the Hoover/Taft/Dirksen wing of the party returned to power after 50 years. For the moment it was only a limited power, but its impact would grow over the next thirty years. More later.

Neo-liberalism--Rage of the Unempowered

During the 1952 Presidential campaign, columnist Joseph Alsop made an interesting and thought provoking observation. He wrote in a private letter that the campaign had convinced him that Adlai Stevenson (Democrat) was more qualified to be President than Eisenhower. But!
“I find myself constantly blackmailed,” Alsop continued, “by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats [after twenty uninterrupted years in power] but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.” (Halberstam, “The Fifties”, pp 235-236)
He was talking about the rage of those who felt they were unempowered. These were the isolationists, small government people, classic Nineteenth Century liberals who felt run over by events (the Depression, World War II, the new Cold War)—and by the ever bigger government response to these events: The New Deal, the vast new defense establishment.
They wanted their voice back—a sense they had something to say about our national destiny, a sense they had not enjoyed since the first two years of the Hoover administration (1929-30). Their deepest desire was to return to the days of Coolidge or even Grover Cleveland.
It was essentially a “Back to the ‘20’s” movement. Let’s pretend Hitler and Pearl Harbor never happened—that the stock market never crashed, that there never was a day when 25% of Americans were out of work and the GNP never fell 50% in four years.
(It’s first worth noting that, in the 1920s , the Ku Klux Klan was truly powerful—not just in the South but as far north as Indiana and Michigan, with a large membership. About ten years ago, a list of KKK members was found in an attic in the town where Gerber Baby Food is made.
(Included in the list was most of the law enforcement personnel in Western Michigan. It took Roosevelt’s New Deal to take the edge off the pain of the Depression [which began years before 1929 in rural areas] and take the wind out of the sails of angry radicals.
(Had Roosevelt and the New Deal not come along, I am convinced that our political sympathies—at least in Europe—would very likely have been with the Axis. These same people were still unhappy in 1952, and they were increasingly gathered under the “big Republican tent”.)
The Republican Party has always been double minded throughout its history. Industrialists and bankers, Abolitionists, radical racists and Midwestern conservatives [who hated eastern bankers and industrialists] united to create the Party in the 1850s.
That double mindedness was never more apparent than it was in the 1952 convention. On the one side stood the easterners—Eisenhower, the Rockefellers, Dewey, representing everything from Wall Street to the most progressive elements in the Republican Party.
On the other side stood the conservative Midwesterners—represented by MacArthur, Taft, Dirksen, representing everything from denial that the Twentieth Century had ever occurred to a rigid kind of religiosity mixed with horror at the spectre of a government able to function well enough to deal with national and world issues.
Leaving the conservatives to sputter in outrage, the progressive wing of the Republican Party won the nomination and got the “sobering experience of responsibility”. To conservative horror, Eisenhower, the elected Republican, allowed most of the New Deal legislation to stand.
Radical conservatism would be out of power for nearly 30 more years. It would take the Supreme Court to put them back in control of the nation. More tomorrow.

Katrina, New Orleans and Reality

It’s been four years since I was traveling through the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on a delightful vacation when a newspaper headline caught my eye. “New Orleans Evacuated!” That will make you buy a paper no matter how oblivious vacation has made you.
Katrina. We read. We bought more papers (we were camping that trip—no motel TV). Gas prices spiked to the then unthinkable $3.75 a gallon. A waitress told us her brother managed a service station nearby and he had been told he would soon be out of gas.
We filled our tank—not waiting to get to the Indian Reservation where it would be cheaper. We had enough to drive all the way across the Bridge to the Lower Peninsula where there would be more. That was my experience with Katrina.
We were a thousand miles away, only reading about the hell the people in New Orleans experienced. For us in Michigan a lot of water has gone over our dams since then. Detroit’s unemployment has reached 29% (nearly one out of three out of work). The nearby Little Caesars Pizza just closed up for good. The kid next door who had a construction job now works part time cleaning out garbage cans for the local trash hauler. He’s going back to school. A friend just sold his house for what he put into it four years ago. He had to write a cheque to pay closing costs before the deal could go through. He was glad to do it.
I don’t think much about Katrina or New Orleans, I admit. Probably a lot of us here in Michigan or other places caught in the recession don’t. The recession was already starting in 2005. I put a house in Grand Rapids up for sale three months before Katrina. By the time we sold it, thirty days later—were we blessed! Somebody really, really wanted that particular house--the price for comparable homes in the area had dropped over ten percent. The number of properties on the market was rising by the thousands each month.
Katrina did not pick a good time to happen for New Orleans. For the first time in over a century, if the nation wanted to do something it had to think about cost and viability. (The next time this may happen is when a hurricane slams into the expensive homes built on the barrier islands along the lower east coast. We won’t be rebuilding them quickly either.)
What makes the New Orleans situation particularly tricky is the fact that not rebuilding some of the exposed (and thus non-viable neighborhoods in that city) opens you to charges of racism. That makes the whole situation much harder to deal with rationally.
We’re luckier here in Michigan along the flood plain of the Grand River. Most of the folks who insist on building right down next to the river—and who get flooded out every two or three years—are white. We can save their sorry butts by hauling them out and then leave them pretty much to their and their insurance companies own devices.
They aren’t rich, by the most part, but they do somehow manage to have flood insurance and/or the means to rebuild after the water goes away. No newspapers or TV stations yell, “Bigotry!” and no Congressman cries, “Racism!” No one accuses national or local political figures of “just trying to get rid of a lot of Democratic votes”.
Let’s face it, those houses are not in a viable neighborhood. No one’s going to open a Walmart, a McDonalds, a gas station or a hardware store down on the river flats. If you want those amenities, you’re going to have to drive upland to where sane people invest money.
Let’s talk for a second about how New Orleans is situated. On the banks of the Mississippi—one of the mightiest rivers on earth. When it floods, we’re not talking about the little trickle our Grand River can muster. Nope. We’re talking WHOOOOOOOOSHHH!!!
This is a river that over the centuries has twisted and turned, creating whole new channels throughout the millennias it has rushed down the center of our continent. It has flooded the plains of New Orleans since long before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees.
It is wonderfully arrogant of human beings to imagine that they can tame by dyke and levee such a vast force forever. As the character says in the movie “Jurassic Park”, nature will find a way. My Dutch forefathers who have wrested their land from the water still live in real fear of the North Sea—and spend tons of money on the everlasting fight to hold it back—more money than Louisiana ever thought to spend on New Orleans!
The Dutch have to. They live in one of the most incredibly crowded countries on Earth, on land that only barely ceases to be sea floor—they have nowhere else to go. The people of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans do—the rest of the US. THAT’S how we should be helping them.
In all of New Orleans there is only one spot that’s truly viable. That’s the “mound” that stayed above the floods before there were levees. The French built their small city there; that’s why we call it the “French Quarter”. It doesn’t flood; it didn’t flood four years ago.
It’s back in action today. Tourists and residents see little sign of Katrina there. This really isn’t because the people in the Quarter are racists. It’s because, for hundreds of years, it’s been the only sensible place to put a house, a warehouse or a business.
I really have only this to say to those who insist that Bush was heartless, that all the rest of us are racists because we won’t spend billions to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward: when YOU are ready to take all of your retirement funds and invest them in businesses and housing on that flood plain, then I will listen as you castigate me for not doing the same.
I don’t see Walmart doing it. I don’t see McDonalds or Lowes or Sears putting their businesses down in the lowlands. They don’t think it’s rational. I agree with them. Why should I want my tax dollars to go there either? If the 9th Ward insists on rebuilding right where the river wants to come, that’s their business—just like it is along the Grand River.
Sanity and fiscal good sense do not necessarily always equal racism.

Republicans and Post War Neo-Liberalism

We came out of World War II with a whole lot of (primarily Midwestern) Republican Neo-liberals who hated Roosevelt, hated the New Deal, hated the government that doled out Social Security and welfare, were convinced that our war in the Pacific was a Communist Plot engineered by Roosevelt to destroy Russia’s main enemy in the East, the Japanese.
They saw the war in Europe as us pulling British chestnuts out of the fire and destroying another major Communist enemy, Nazi Germany. These throw-back liberals had been out of power for a long, long time and they blamed a lot of that on the more moderate Republicans from the coastal regions who had backed useless candidates like Dewey.
When Tom Dewey couldn’t even beat a machine hack from Missouri who, the polls assured them, had no chance to win in 1948, they were ready to tear something or someone limb from limb.
Big government had grown huge since Roosevelt took office. It had brought electricity to isolated farm houses, it had fed starving and hopeless families. It had supported the arts and planted whole new forests. It HAD to be stopped, to be rolled back.
To do this would mean that two things would have to be accomplished. One, the Eastern—and more “liberal” (in the modern sense)—wing of the Republican Party would have to be supplanted. There had been bitter tension between Eastern Republicans and Midwestern Republicans since Lincoln took office. The easterners had tried to take the presidency away from him—right in his own cabinet room.
Lincoln had repulsed them—even going so far as to offer the Confederates the right to keep their slaves if they would come back into the Union, and Congress, and counterweight the east coast Republicans. He had failed—and died under suspicious circumstances shortly after.
Midwestern Republicans often had a hard time accepting the fact that there was a world beyond their own fields—let alone one on the other side of the ocean. They liked their life, isolated in places like Iowa, Indiana, Kansas and Michigan. They wanted nothing to change.
Eastern Republicans were businessmen. They well understood that there were markets and sources of raw materials far beyond our shores. They understood that as the nation grew and its interests clashed more openly with those of foreign nations, change had to occur.
Even if Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat, he came out of this milieu—as had his cousin, Teddy. These men were empire builders. They were prepared to expand and defend that empire with blood and treasure. The Iowans and Hoosiers were deeply suspicious of this.
Many mid-westerners saw the wars of the Twentieth Century as merely a plot by easterners (and west coasters) to make the eastern banks (that had oppressed the Midwest since before Lincoln!) even more powerful. They wanted no part of it.
These were unabashed isolationists. They refused to see any reason why Americans needed to look or think beyond the ocean coast lines. Even as it became possible for new and hugely destructive weapon systems to rain death upon them from other continents, they wanted no part of foreign involvements.
Dewey had been an easterner. His ineptitude (and arrogance) made the Midwesterners desperate to rip the nomination out of eastern hands. Their champion would be Bob Taft of Ohio—son of a president and a supreme court justice.
A second thing needed to be done in 1952. Some part of the “Roosevelt Coalition” that had allowed the Democrats to rule since 1932 would have to be drawn into the Republican Party. That coalition had four legs: simplistically, the Ku Klux Klan (white southerners) and the three groups the KKK hated, all forged by a political genius (FDR) into a single party.
Three legs were unassailable, Jews, blacks and Catholics. Truman bought the Jewish vote by backing Israel in 1948. Black loyalty had been bought by Eleanor Roosevelt, the integration of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 convention, and Republican distain.
When urban, immigrant Catholics moved out into the suburbs they often became Republicans. But not enough had moved out by 1952. There were also strong memories of the anti-Catholic No Nothings, one of the roots of the Republican Party.
That left the Southern Whites. Historically southerners and Midwesterners shared a common resentment for sophisticated east coast bankers. And there was too much noise being made among the northern Democrats in favor of Civil Rights. Southerners were ripe to be picked.
Conservative Republicans came into the convention ready for bear. Taft, their candidate had a majority of the votes (but not enough for the nomination). It went three ballots. The easterners (with Dewey doing a masterful job of campaign managing) had picked an unbeatable candidate.
General Eisenhower had declared himself a Republican in January of that year. In April he had resigned his post as the first commander of NATO and returned to run for president. His stature and his legend swept the convention. Dirksen glared down at Dewey and spat out, “You led us to defeat before!” Fist fights broke out on the floor. No matter. Once again the easterners, the internationalists, the “moderates” had outdone the Midwesterners.
They stayed in command of the party for nearly thirty more years. Moderates ran and won in 1952, 1956, 1968 and ’72 (Nixon/Ford). Midwesterners got Barry Goldwater nominated in 1964, but he was before his time and the Democrats pounded him into the ground in the greatest landslide in the history of the republic.
In 1980 the Conservative Republicans found a movie actor who could do for them what Ike had done for the easterners thirty years before. (George H.W. Bush actually was a moderate in Reaganite clothing and when he had a momentary lapse and raised taxes, his own party drove him out in favor of Clinton, a Democrat who sounded like a Neo-liberal Republican much of the time.)
In 1994 a Conservative Republican who was as good at infighting as the Kennedys had been, took Congress back for the Republicans for the first time since 1954. Clinton was smart enough not to try to change what he couldn’t and basically let them have their head.
He was, after all, a southerner—with some very deep sympathy with the Midwestern view of the nation and the world. Like a Tsunami, the tidal wave economic excess would begin to build. Even Alan Greenspan, a devote’ of Ayn Rand would try to sound a note of caution. But the wave built on and up until it finally crashed down upon us in the latter have of George W. Bush’s administration.
Let’s look a bit more at the Neo-liberals another time.

Ted Kennedy: Fare Thee Well

Teddy may be the last of the old Irish pols. He drank well, perhaps a wee bit too much. But that’s what God made good whiskey for, did he not? In the Senate they called him the “liberal lion”, but actually he was more of a Nineteenth Century urban Democrat than a modern “liberal”.
His causes showed the man—health care for those who couldn’t afford it, not a far step for a man whose ancestors built political machines by distributing patronage and sacks of coal (or getting a poor lad paroled from a protestant jail cell) to immigrants who couldn’t afford to meet their own needs . Or education—for a poor lad looking to better himself.
He was a last bridge to an era and a type of politician that no longer really exists today. They were bare knuckle political infighters (none of the finesse we associate with Ivy league trained lawyers and politicians today. They kicked you and gouged you until you couldn’t get back up.)
Nixon learned in 1960. It left him so paranoid that he committed a “high crime and misdemeanor” in 1972 at Watergate just to figure out what they were planning this time around. They outmaneuvered Tammany Hall during the primaries of 1960 and left a shattered DeSapio in the dust.
Hubert Humphrey went back to his campaign bus in West Virginia and wept when he realized how many more votes the Kennedys (the Irish Mafia they were called) could afford to buy than he could. Who else but a Kennedy in-law (Steve Smith, who ran the Kennedy fortune after Joe got too old) could forget a suitcase full of ten dollar bills (for buying votes) in a barber shop and have to wire Boston for another case of tens.
Joe Kennedy sent it—along with one of the more immortal telegrams in American political history—“I’m not buying a landslide”! Lyndon Johnson learned what Boston Irish kicking and shoving was all about that same year. He’d been planning on being president since the 1930s. When the Kennedys were through with him, he settled for Vice President.
Johnson was no slouch at kicking and gouging—but the “Irish Mafia” was a different league altogether. They had tons more money, and they wielded it like a Shillelagh. They had connections—in the Mafia, in Chicago city hall—and there was no rule against clipping from behind in their kind of football.
Joe, father to Ted, Bobby, Jack and Joe Jr., was far enough removed from the “shanty Irish” that he went through Boston Latin and Harvard. He made his money investing in stocks, real estate and commodities (there are unproven hints that some of these “commodities” may have been bootleg liquor). There is no question that when Prohibition was repealed, Kennedy was ready with vast stocks of liquor from European distilleries.
He also made lots of money reorganizing and financing Hollywood studios—beginning a dynasty long love affair with movies and movie starlets. He bought the largest office building in America—Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. This gave the family their in with powerful people in the midwest.
As ambassador to England during the Nazi blitz of London, Joe remained Irish enough to let his anti-English and pro-German bias show. After the election of 1940, Roosevelt (who had been a friend of Joe’s since World War I) was forced to remove him.
He had one major ambition politically—to have one of his sons be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. The eldest, Joe Jr., was killed in World War II. Joe then groomed his second son, Jack, for the job. They kicked and scrabbled their way into the White House.
Jack did have to meet with a group of Baptist ministers and promise them he would not, as a Catholic, subvert our very Protestant/Calvinistic constitution. But he made it. He made his brother, Bobby, Attorney General.
Two years later, 30 year old Teddy wanted to run for Jack’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts. The other two boys were not thrilled. They felt it might produce a feeling in Washington of too many Kennedys. Joe told them, “You’ve got yours; now it’s Ted’s turn.”
He ran and won in 1962—picking up the last two years in Jack’s term. By the time he ran again, Jack was dead; Johnson was president, and Bobby had moved quickly to New York to run for senator there. Ted was nearly killed in a plane crash in 1964, but he won anyway.
Johnson did get a bit of his own back in ’64. He dangled the Vice-Presidency (which Jack and Bobby had made him accept in 1960) in front of various Kennedy family members and friends. Sargent Shriver nibbled at the bait. It was a trap.
Needless to say a serious offer never materialized (Johnson resented the Kennedys far too much for that!), but Johnson had opened a wedge in the once formidable Kennedy front that took a while to heal. (I learned this from one of Ted Kennedy’s former staff members.)
In 1968 Bobby made his try for the White House—after Gene McCarthy had shown Johnson could be beaten. Johnson pulled out of the race two weeks later and another Kennedy march to the White House seemed to be on. Bobby was assassinated immediately after he won the California primary. Richard Nixon, Jack’s old opponent, went on to win the election.
People immediately began to pressure Ted to take up the Kennedy banner and run for president in the next race. I sensed very strongly that he did not want to. One) he was comfortable in the Senate, a more collegial environment. Two) he had watched three brothers die violently and had a strong sense that he had a lot of orphaned nephews and nieces to help raise. He may even have had a most understandable personal fear for himself. There was real hatred for Kennedys out there.
Whatever his private feelings, the incident at Chappaquiddick in which a female aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, mysteriously drowned and Ted got a suspended sentence, ended presidential speculation for a few years. He was induced to try the primaries in 1980, ran an inept campaign, and settled down to the Senate for the rest of his life.
Here, securely at home—the last of the Kennedys—he became a giant. He worked across the aisle, with the Republican enemy and against the Republican enemy. We may not quickly see his like again. For me it is a shock to know he’s dead—the Kennedys have been part of my political awareness since 1953 when the “Saturday Evening Post” ran an article on Jack—“the most eligible bachelor in the Senate”.
Of course, telling everyone that he was already engaged to Jackie when the story came out would have spoiled it. So, as the Kennedys were so skilled at doing, that pesky little fact was ignored and never mentioned.
It may indeed be Teddy—the one for whom daddy had to say, “It’s his turn now”—that leaves the most significant legacy. Jack, Joe, Joe Jr., Bobby have all been dead so long it’s almost hard to remember them. But Ted passed some laws that changed lives.
For Teddy, I finish with the old blessing: May ye be an hour in Heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.

Obama and The Neo-liberals

What actually crashed down upon us last fall when brokerages, car companies, mortgages and house prices all came a cropper was the era of “Neo-liberalism”. And, as our current president would no doubt be the first to tell us, Neo-liberals are not going quietly into that good night.
Oblivious to any sign that their own philosophy might have any flaws, let alone be guilty of unsustainability, our Neo-liberal friends proclaim everyone who disagrees with them to be solely guilty of causing the crash/recession of 2008 and early 2009.
Their point of view seems to that of a person caught standing over a corpse holding a smoking pistol, still busily insisting that his gun was merely a harmless instrument, available for the good of mankind—that guns to not kill people.
Classic American liberalism arises out of two strains in American culture. (It must not be confused with the political philosophy associated with presidents like Barak Obama, Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, which rose out of a fusion of the Progressive Reform impulse and classic Hamiltonian/Republican theory in the late 1800s).
The first strain is the historic American lust for the “free lunch”. We got into a shooting war over this as early as 1775 when we demanded the protection of the British government (from the French and Indians) and vehemently refused to be taxed to pay for it.
Ever since this has been a classic liberal (NOT Obama “liberalism”!) position. We demand more and more government services—loans to businesses, loans to individuals, ever larger Social Security cheques, etc.)—and lower and fewer taxes in support of them.
The liberal is thus somewhat like the older dependent child, absolutely needing parental funds for every necessity of life—yet demanding more and more freedom of action in what he does with those funds. There seems to be a disconnect in our understanding of both parts of the old phrase—who has the geld calls the tune.
We want government benefits; we do not want any government restrictions. We repeal laws that keep banks from ludicrous speculation; we demand that government protect our deposits when these speculations threaten to drag the banks underwater along with them.
The second strain is just pure American cussedness. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do!” Historically it showed up vividly when headstrong American settlers violated treaties and moved onto Indian lands, incurring violent reaction from the owners.
The settlers demanded two things: one) government must never tell us what land we cannot occupy and, two) it must send the army to protect us from what we caused. This began in the Virginia and Massachusetts settlements of the early 1600s. It went on to the Pacific coast.
Andrew Jackson personified this attitude. He was the ultimate American liberal. He sent the army to drive all Native Americans west of the Mississippi (your tax dollars at work); he destroyed the only agency capable of maintaining a viable American currency, the national bank—because it also imposed restrictions on land speculators.
From 1836 to the Civil War, we had no national currency at all. Nor did we have any real regulation over land speculation. This is true American liberalism. No government regulation or limits; unrestrained personal freedom in business, banking and land speculation.
This was the fundamental position of the Eighteenth Century Democratic Party. (It strongly reinforced the slave owner’s belief that no one had a right to infringe upon his right to enjoy the benefits of his “peculiar institution”.) From Jefferson through Cleveland, the Democrats were basically the party of total business freedom. George W. Bush, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would have been comfortable in that party.
The fitful impulses toward any sort of cooperation between government and the private sector—few as they were—came from the Whigs and their successors, the Republicans. The Whigs/Republicans had a few Hamiltonian roots among their antecedents.
Admittedly most of this cooperation in America primarily if not exclusively benefitted business—not society in general. By and large, nobody looked out for the “little guy” who labored most of the century for a dollar a day with absolutely no safety net.
That began to change because of appalling corruption among URBAN democrats as new waves of immigrants arrived. The urban Democrats quickly recognized that here—among the unwashed and increasingly Jewish and Catholic immigrants—was a vast pool of votes.
There was no safety net for the injured, the ill, the aged or anyone. The Democratic urban machine provided one. City jobs (some of which you didn’t even have to show up for), a bag of coal, a sack of food, help with a burial bought votes.
The urban poor—who had only one thing of value to his name, his vote—was happy to sell it in return for survival. The Democratic machines soon had a lock on the cities. Republicans may have held power in state capitals; but in city halls, Democrats ruled.
Republicans countered by becoming reformers. No better way to break the death grip the machines had on urban voters than by declaring many of their practices expressly illegal—AND, often just incidentally, by providing a bit of real relief to the voters.
(Ironically, it would be a Democratic president who would break the power of the machines. Franklin Roosevelt would take up the program outlined in Teddy Roosevelt’s last two State of Union addresses [Teddy was a Republican, remember] and launch them as the New Deal.
(With welfare and social security—and legalized unions to force a living wage—available to the urban voter, the machine no longer had any lock on his loyalty. Ten years after FDR”s New Deal, many urban machines were out of business. A few, like New York’s Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine held on into the 1960s)
By the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Republican Progressives were into the reform business full time. Woodrow Wilson—a man who, oddly enough, loathed blacks and southern European immigrants got elected as a Democrat in 1912 and stole their thunder.
By 1920, Republicans had essentially stolen the 19th Century Democratic laissez-faire liberalism and, by 1933, Democrats had switched to a view of government as something heavily involved in our individual lives—and become the reformers, pre-empting Teddy Roosevelt for good..
Politically it was the equivalent of the “X” in a model train’s track. Here one train crosses over from right to left and the other train goes from left to right. By winning five presidential elections in a row and by controlling Congress for twenty out of twenty-two years in that time, the New Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) view of an activist government had become entrenched.
Beginning in 1952, Republicans came roaring back as “Neo-liberals”, Andrew Jackson resurrected as a Whig/Republican as it were. Let’s look at that tomorrow.

Obama--Here a Trillion, There a Trillion

Okay, the White House has quietly conceded that our national debt will rise by NINE trillion dollars over the next ten years—instead of the 7.1 trillion it had projected in January. This is in line with what the Congressional Budget Office has been saying.
That’s because fewer people are working and paying taxes (the White House predicted that unemployment would not go above 8%) and fewer businesses are making big and taxable profits. So there’s less coming in and a whole lot going out.
This can be a problem for anybody’s budget. We all have months like that—but this is years and years into the future. Now, we are told, our shortfall will be 27% percent higher than we thought. That’s like being told by the mechanic that fixing your car will cost an additional 27% more than the original estimate.
We’ve all gotten off the phone after a conversation like that and thought, Omigod. Where is the money going to come from? We can skip the mortgage this month. Or a car payment. We can eat only beans and rice for a few weeks. Maybe we can apply for another credit card?
Our government is backed up into the same kind of hole. China—which has been loaning us the money to live on for a decade—is all of a sudden scared of how much American debt it is holding. The Chinese are dumping American treasuries at an unprecedented rate.
If foreigners stop buying treasury bonds at the present rate of interest, we are going to have to raise the interest rates. That will reset all interest rates—housing, autos, credit cards, college, you name it. You want to kill a housing boom fast? Raise payments (interest rates) a couple hundred a month.
Otherwise we can raise taxes. Probably quite a bit. That cuts back consumer spending and corporate hiring. That doesn’t do a lot to encourage any economic rebound. These are the alternatives if we wish to keep spending at our present rate.
Borrow more, tax more and/or jack up the interest rate. None of the three is going to benefit the American economy in the long run. That leaves just one other option.
We can cut spending. I can hear the Republican side of the aisle cheering madly. Okay, wonderful idea. Just where and what are you going to cut. We’ve been paring back the federal side of government expenditures since the 1970s.
We’ve dumped a whole lot of federal mandates on the state and city budgets. We tell them what programs they MUST put in place—unless they want to lose even more federal dollars—and we tell them to pay for it themselves.
(This is done under a new economic theory called “Neo-liberalism”. Under it, states and cities supposedly have much more freedom of action because they are no longer dependent on federal dollars. You may want to ask how being ever more broke increases your freedom of action. Not a bad question.
(The theory is a reversion to 19th Century liberalism. [In this country, Cleveland Democrats.] Under Keynesian theory—which replaced classic liberalism--government controlled and directed society by mandating programs and paying for them. Under old fashioned liberalism, government made no attempt to direct society and it paid for little more than national defense.
(The new liberalism makes a kind of perverted sense if you understand its intent. Reagan, a classic neo-liberal, spelled it out. He has often been accused of trying to destroy the federal government by slicing off its revenue. In other words, it will eventually have to stop functioning because it can no longer afford to function. The same thing began to be done to the states and cities starting in the 1970s—a decade before Reagan.
(George W. Bush was a dyed-in-the-wool neo-liberal. He essentially out-Reaganed Reagan. His policies—and those of every president since Nixon—may finally be coming home to roost. The federal government may at last be forced to cease many of its functions.
(If the Chinese cut off our credit and we cannot afford to raise interest rates and taxes enough to compensate, Neo-liberalism—the ultimate in “laissez faire” government—will be everywhere triumphant.)
But what will the federal government be forced to cut? Some national defense items—we may no longer be able to go play war in far off climes. (That will cost us. Try oil, for instance.) Big budget items like Social Security will have to be cut back—classic liberals have wanted to get rid of that program since 1935.
Medicaid and Medicare will have to be slashed if not eliminated. (This would be an absolute Neo-liberal wet dream; forgive the crassness. I cannot come up with a better analogy.) Educational programs that are still being funded by Washington will have to go. Another cause for joy in the classic liberal camp! Air pollution abatement, clean water, national parks, medical research, funding for the arts, and other fripperies like climate change studies will have to be cut way back.
We’ll be left with a government that doesn’t do much more than keep a naval presence in the hemisphere, maintain roads needed for business, and service the interest on our HUGE national debt. Don’t be shocked. Lots of Third World countries live like that.
That will start to knock back some of the nine trillion in debt we owe. It will be the final triumph of Reaganomics—and Bushenomics while we’re at it.
Everybody will blame Obama and his stimulus package. They’ll look back to Bush, Clinton and Reagan as the good old days. But it’s the wicked, Keynesian Obama who will take the hit. I do feel sorry for him. I wrack my brain to think of what I might have done differently had someone stuck me with the presidency a year ago.
I honestly don’t have a cleverer solution. His may not have been good—but THERE WAS NO GOOD SOLUTION. He landed up to his neck in a hole other people had dug. He honestly did his best to try to crawl out of it—and to drag you and me up with him.
Would McClain have done better? He would have had the same teaspoon with which to try to empty out the ocean. I don’t hear him suggesting any miracles today—he didn’t suggest any a year ago.
You can, at worst, accuse Obama of having made a bad situation a bit worse. But he, sure as the world spins, didn’t create what’s likely to come.

A Republican View Of Health Care

Yesterday I received a thick envelope from the Republican National Committee. Inside I found the “2009 Future of American Health Care Survey”. (This must be survey “P45” because that was the “name” on the return address envelope.)
I was going to take the survey and send it back to them—but there was just no good way to answer most of the questions. Pretty much all of them were cast in the mode of the classic, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?—Yes or No”. You can’t answer those.
At least you cannot answer them with anything like your actual opinion. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean—straight from the survey.
First question was the only straight-forward one on the survey: Is America’s health care in crisis?—Yes or No. It was simple to say “Yes” and mean what one said. Of course it is; it’s going broke, and nearly 50 million Americans have no health care at all.
Question two was still within the realm of rational response: “What is your biggest concern regarding health care in America as it is today.” I could check “cost”, “quality”, “availability” or “other”. I would have checked “availability” AND cost.
Three, “Does it concern you that the liberal media has gone to unprecedented levels to give Obama’s views…and no one elses?” Yes, No, Undecided. Where’s the box where I get to check “I don’t think this is happening.” I’m certainly hearing other views!
Four, It has been suggested that voter registration could be used to determine political affiliation, “prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democratically imposed health care rationing system.” Does this concern you? Yes, No, Undecided. Oh My God.
At this point I wrote, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” (I am SO discriminated against in my Social Security and Medicare benefits! Both were Democratically imposed. And how much more rationed can health care get than it is under a Republican and conservative Democratically imposed system whereby 47 million Americans are left out of the health care system entirely? THAT’S real rationing!! Why stop at just the scare word “rationing” when you could throw in phrases like “Communist imposed” or “Nazi death squad imposed”…?)
Five: “Do you believe it is justified to ration health care regardless of whether an individual has contributed to the cost of treatment?” I can’t do a “Yes/No” on that because I don’t even understand the question.
Are the Republicans saying it would be all right to ration care if the person were on Medicaid and not paying anything toward it? Are they talking about illegal immigrants? What in the world ARE they talking about in this question?
Six: “Do you believe that your health care decisions should be made by your doctor and you and not government bureaucrats in Washington?” I was unaware that my personal physician—who is paid by Medicare—had to check with Washington first. Or that this happened with Medicaid. My my, who would have thought it?
Seven asks, Can we afford it? If we use a single payer system, eliminate private insurance except for the rich, we can probably afford it better than our present system—but there was no place for this answer.
Eight: “If you have private health insurance”—a huge IF for millions—“please rate your satisfaction level. Okay, I would probably be much more satisfied with a boat or a private plane if I owned one. And, incidentally, a lot of “insured” people have coverage that is so minimal they cannot afford to go to a physician anyway. I doubt if many of them receive surveys from the Republican National Committee—and how will the people who think Medicare is privately run answer?
Nine: “Rationing” under “Socialized Medicine” means people die waiting for an appointment. Would this be “inevitable in the U.S. under the Democratic plan?” You think that doesn’t happen here now? HMO’s weigh the cost/risk/benefit value of a treatment all the time. Am I the only Republican who has ever read news stories about all the “No’s” under the present system?
Ten: Do we approve a Republican plan to subsidize small business so they can afford to make health care available to employees? Nowhere do I get to ask the counter-question—how good will those plans be? Will the subsidy pay for a decent medical plan?
Eleven: Over a third the population get health care through their employers. Should this private sector coverage be preserved? No, we can’t afford it. (There was nowhere to write that answer, either.) The present system is too limited in scope, it is too inefficient (next time you visit your physician, look in his business office and see how many clerks he has just sorting out the dozens and dozens of health plans he has to send bills to each month.)
There is no effective way to regulate costs by forcing the drug companies, etc., to deal with a single payer. This will also cut the physician’s back room costs.
Eleven worried about whether the Democrats would try to “ram health care through Congress” before the August recess. Since I didn’t get the survey until August 20 and Congress has been in recess for weeks, that didn’t seem to be an issue.
Twelve: Should the government “use age and life expectancy as criteria for determining access to medical care?” Today, if you are put on a list for a donated heart or kidney, don’t you think they factor both into their decision? You’re deceived if you don’t! It sounds cruel, but until there are enough spare hearts and parts to go around, that will continue happening—no matter whose plan we live under.
Some of these are very scary issues. Legitimately so—for an aging population in an era of declining revenues and massive debt service. But putting the questions in the scariest and most pejorative form—going so far as to lie in some cases—does not contribute to any sort of rational debate.
When the RNC collates the answers to these carefully slanted questions, they will be able to go before the country and claim that “Americans don’t want real health care reform”. That won’t necessarily be true—but the questions have been framed so that it looks true.
The Republicans will, they hope, get the result they’re hoping for—continued drift toward disaster. As Louis XV put in the Eighteenth Century, “After me, the deluge”. And he was able to hold off the evil day all his life. It was his son he “sent” to the guillotine by refusing to act NOW.
I don’t like the fact that I am holding proof in my hands that my own political party seems to have adopted the same indifferent attitude. What will happen to our sons? Where and how will they get their medical care?

Obama--Now Comes the Lynch Mob

I feel sorry for Barack Obama. I actually do. I doubt if he wants pity from anyone like me—or probably anyone at all—so I won’t extend it personally, but I think the man is getting a bum deal right now. Let’s face it he was the proverbial man up to his derriere in alligators when he took office—two wars, a collapsing banking system, a stock market in free fall, jobs vanishing at the rate of half a million a month and the entire housing industry under water.
He got very very busy. He had no more choice in the matter than Franklin Roosevelt had in 1933. There didn’t seem to be a lot of time for introspection or reflection so he didn’t take any. (I think a bit more reflection might have been in order, but I understand why he didn’t.)
Some of what he did seems to have worked—at least for the moment. Growth in unemployment has fallen to half the rate of February. Many banks are still in deep water, but they seem to be breathing. The stock market has bounced back up a few thousand points.
The housing market is still very sick (a quarter of all mortgages are under water), but here and there a hammer can be heard. Some houses are starting to sell. Retail sales are hurting, sometimes badly, but the reason isn’t entirely lack of money—a lot of folk are paying down debt.
Obama’s first six months in office could have been a lot worse. To those who point out that they could have been a lot better, I answer, “So could Lincoln’s! So could Roosevelt’s!” The man pinned a lot of tails on donkeys. That he missed some isn’t perhaps as remarkable as that he managed to get any on at all.
He put us a trillion more in debt, true. But we were already so deeply in debt when Bush left office, the next trillion almost doesn’t matter. We can’t pay off the debt as of June, 2009. What the heck; we couldn’t have paid off the debt in June, 2008, either.
That’s simple reality. If, God forbid, we were to go belly up on a collapsed dollar in the next five years, there is no way Obama is entirely to blame. He coulda, shoulda done a dozen other things. No doubt. But I give him credit for trying—while flying on instruments only.
Don’t anybody tell this Republican that Bush would have done better. Fiscal sanity was simply not George Bush’s forte’. (Nor was it Bill Clinton’s. And, let’s face it, the term “voodoo economics” still applies to Ronald Reagan. It’s only now that we can finally see the zombies.)
I didn’t vote for Mr. Obama; I wouldn’t vote for him now. He has as much faith in the power of government to fix all ills as I did when I was in my twenties, laboring in the Johnson administration. I learned over the years that I was wrong. Obama may learn too.
Whatever Barack Obama’s mistakes, misapprehensions or good and bad guesses, he does NOT deserve the calumny being heaped on him now!
I just read today that at least a quarter of the residents of North Carolina don’t believe Obama is American born—which would make him ineligible to be president. A lot of people in the rest of the nation think the same thing.
In a lot of minds, he remains simply an “uppity n-----r”. Not just in the south. A lot of people just cannot stand the thought of one of “them” sitting in the Oval Office.
People look at the trillion dollar bailout he got through—a carryover of a Bush policy—and insist he’s bankrupting the nation. (He sure didn’t do it alone!)
He’s called a “socialist”. When the choice was letting General Motors (and its thousands of workers and hundreds of satellite companies) go broke, he stepped in the several billion and gave it another lease on life—as well as continuing a huge payroll and tax base.
I’m not totally sure that was the right move. But it certainly wasn’t a “socialist” move—keeping what was once America’s largest private corporation in business—and you cannot say definitively that George Bush would never have done it. Look at the banks he bailed out!
If he stays in Washington bailing out companies and banks, he’s criticized for doing too much. If he takes his family to look at our national park system, he’s blasted for not being back in the office, hard at work. (Air force One is as tricked out electronically as the White House!)
The egregious lies he faces for his attempts to reform our collapsing health care system are unbelievable. (In some cases they are not lies—they are simply products of unbelievable ignorance, coming from the same kids who sat in the back row, disrupted the class and absolutely refused to pay any attention in school.
Like the guy who shouted, “Don’t let the government get its hands on my Medicare!!” Just who did he imagine runs and funds “his Medicare”? Or his Social Security? Or his Veterans benefits? Who guarantees his bank deposits, his pension? Ye gods!)
But it’s the LIES that make you sick. Death panels, long waits for an appointment (I’m mid-way through a six-month wait right now, at a private physician’s office). Rationing of health care—ever had an HMO or a private insurance company say “No”? I have.
People who should know better—who did pay attention in school—are twisting every word in Obama’s health care bill into something unrecognizable. They are doing it with a straight face and all the appearance of concerned virtue.
They do it in the name of religion. They do it in the name of liberty and freedom. They willingly deny fifty million Americans ANY health care lest dollars should also be spent on abortion—a procedure, however immoral, that is declared medically valid in legislatively and legally.
Pick a different venue to fight abortion than one in which millions are denied life-saving care. Don’t tell me you are denying those millions medical help to “save lives”. At that point you start lying to yourself—which is the worst sort of lying.
This is a firestorm I doubt Mr. Obama ever fully imagined when he set out to run two years ago. I wrote a year ago that he is, in the eyes of his myriad supporters a new “messiah”. I also wrote that those who cheer a political “savior” today find reasons to be disappointed in him tomorrow. Then the cheering turns into something a whole lot less pleasant.
For Barack Obama, tomorrow has come. As I said, I feel a bit sorry for the man.

Guns--Back To The Old West

Oh my. Now there is a discussion about whether or not states ought to have laws preventing people from carrying concealed guns into bars and restaurants that serve drinks. First you give them a gun—then you take away their inhibitions.
I prefer my gun toting neighbors to be as inhibited as possible, thank you. The thought that the chap at the bar who is getting more noisily bellicose by the minute might have a .38 caliber pistol on him does nothing to make me feel safer—whatever the NRA may say.
One of the surest signs that a western town was entering the first phase of civilization was the (enforced) sign by the door of the saloon demanding that guns be checked. Old West sheriffs were under no illusion that guns and liquor mixed well.
The insane thing about our present gun laws is that they license CONCEALED weapons. If we absolutely must have people carrying pistols about, let’s at least insist that they be holstered in plain sight. Then we know what we are dealing with, right up front.
The penalties for concealed guns should be positively draconian. The fellow who carries his armory right out in the open has given me fair warning—he can have whatever parking place he wants, whether I was there first or not. It’s the peevish fellow I didn’t know was packing that scares me.
I don’t want to have to guess whether the person next to me is armed. The thought that people can walk around with a gun secreted on their person—I don’t care who licensed it—is absolutely appalling. Of course I’d prefer that no one in McDonald’s had a gun, but knowing about it is better.
And I am a firm believer that the Second Amendment does grant an unalienable right to bear arms. To take that right away completely would require another amendment that revokes the 2nd. There was good reason for it then.
When the 2nd Amendment was pinned to The Constitution, there was no national army. Nor was there a police force worthy of the name. It was very much up to the citizen (especially in rural areas) to defend himself—against animals that might eat his crops (or his kids), rustlers and marauding Indians. These were all real issues a mile or two out of town.
Hunting was necessary if you wished to eat. My own preacher grandfather was raised on a Michigan farm in the 1800s where he hunted for food. (He was such a crack shot that he would startle his parishioners when he went hunting with them.)
It’s still a major national sport. (I don’t like people who shot animals merely for the trophy—God didn’t authorize that in Genesis; he said we could eat them. I have no objection to people who thin out the deer herd every fall and then eat the venison.) November 15—the opening of firearms season--is the biggest holiday in western and northern Michigan.
Now that we’ve eliminated wolves and cougars, if we didn’t hunt the deer they would overrun us, our crops and our gardens. (I’ve had as many as six deer in my backyard, nibbling at the growing veggies.) Hunters don’t usually use concealed pistols; they carry long guns right out in the open.
But we are stuck with a second amendment that says citizens may bear arms and that right may not be “infringed”. What constitutes infringement? That’s where the argument between gun people and gun control folk really gets vituperative.
Positions range between two extremes. You have the radical gun enthusiasts who feel that anything less than allowing all citizens to own, fire and carry military assault weapons wherever they wish is unconstitutional infringement. Any effort at control, identifying or licensing is downright unconstitutional, the first step to tyranny.
(I find it hard to believe that our founding fathers really meant for home grown militias to arm themselves and play war all weekend with weaponry that would make the Taliban envious. The words “well-regulated militia” also appear in the amendment. The guns were, incidentally, for “the security of the state”—not as a defense against the state.)
On the other hand, you have people—often city folk who have learned, for good reason, to be very afraid walking around at night—who want all guns licensed, identified and off the streets. Period. They basically favor a whole lot of infringement.
I’m sympathetic to people who want guns carefully controlled and regulated, if not outright confiscated. My wife grew up in a “changing” neighborhood where a neighbor boy was shot dead on the front porch next to her house. The best restaurant in the area closed and moved when neighborhood kids began the practice of backing departing customers into the vestibule and relieving them of their valuables at gunpoint. Eleven year olds began shooting it out on the same street.
Unfortunately there are two practical considerations: one, a very popular amendment will have to be repealed first. You’ll have all sorts of scared hunters, collectors and just plain gun lovers voting against you. You’ll probably lose overwhelmingly.
Second, suppose you get it repealed. Now comes the fun part. How do you disarm, say, Los Angeles? How many tens of thousands of politically reliable troops will it take to surround that city and go block by block, confiscated illegal shotguns, pistols and automatic weapons?
Then you’ll have to leave a very large detachment of troops in place to make sure guns don’t sneak back in while you go on to disarm the next city. And all the country folk with extra guns. I think it is safe to say it would require more than a million troops on almost endless duty.
We’d have our own Iraq right here. Throw in a few Afghanistans while you’re at it!
That’s basically impossible. But, for crying out loud, do we have to put our lives even more at risk by allowing people to mix alcohol and CONCEALED weapons? Someone might be able to argue his right to carry a gun into a bar—but let’s make sure it’s right out in the open.
Then the bartender can say, “Okay, check it.”

Aging In America--Help! Anyone?

An Illinois judge just found to sisters, one in her forties the other in her fifties guilty of “criminal neglect of an elderly person”. The few facts in the story make their behavior sound horrible. Their 84-year-old mother was down to 70 pounds with ghastly bedsores. She was so malnourished that she had no resistance left for the pneumonia that killed her.
She also suffered from dementia and dehydration. Her sheets were filthy and she had a history of bladder cancer. The normal reader’s likely reaction will be that the sisters deserve whatever penalty they receive.
Not mine—not without a lot more information. As I’ve written before, I’ve been legally responsible for three adults, two of whom suffered from dementia and a raft of other conditions. As I read stories like this one, I can’t help but think, I could have been similarly charged.
The writer of the story possibly never faced the situations I have—so he didn’t think it necessary to answer a lot of questions.
One) Did the ladies have legal authority—had a court awarded them guardianship—over their mother? Without it, they could not have overridden their mother’s wishes (no matter how demented or simply unreasonable). They could not have, for instance, moved her into a nursing facility where she could receive 24-hour care.
Two) Did the two women have jobs, and did they need the income? If so, between working, commuting and sleeping, they would have had to leave mom alone for up to 16 hours a day.
Three) Were there other siblings with the will to obstruct (“you’re NOT putting mom in a nursing home!”) even if they took no part in mom’s care? That happens!
Four)Were there funds to seek legal assistance or in-home nursing care?
Five) Had the ladies gone to a pastor or a social agency seeking advice and assistance only to be turned away—“There’s nothing we can do”. “We cannot get involved”. Or “Isn’t it wonderful how your dear mother still wants to remain in her own home?”
Six) Did they have friends or sources of information, people who knew what was available in the system—and, speaking from knowledge, could tell them they were trapped, unable to do anything but leave mom in her home?
Seven) How far away did they live?
Our system for taking care of seniors can be a horror. In their elder years, my mother became a complete invalid, dependent on my father for her every movement out of bed. He took pride in caring for her and would allow no other help in the house.
In his late 70s he developed dementia. He no longer recognized his daughter-in-law and his increasingly clumsy puttering in the kitchen put everyone in danger. They refused—as was their legal right—any additional help or intervention. I lived an hour away, and they really didn’t want our help.
Letters from the IRS were piling up on the kitchen counter. Very little food was evident in the house. There were increasing signs that continence had been lost. Still, they refused any help or any thought of moving. I was desperate.
I called their pastor—who visited them regularly. He told me there was nothing he could do—and maundered on about how wonderful it was that they stayed in their home. He also ordered other elders of the church—some of whom called me in alarm and under the assumption that I might be unaware—not to get involved.
I called friends in Adult Protective Services. “There is nothing you can do,” they told me. “If you went into court to get guardianship, old people like that can pull it together just enough to earn the judge’s sympathy. You will lose.” (The judge, they suggested, would be likely to assume I was another greedy heir anxious to get my hands on their money.)
Things got worse. Much worse. I realized my mother was blind—the maid was writing all the cheques. The food situation stunk, as did the incontinence. I was suddenly terribly busy with a third relative for whom I was wholly responsible—and who was actively dying.
I bit the bullet, put out $2500 and went to a lawyer. He had just gone through an identical situation with his mother only a few blocks from mine—and was very sympathetic. He hired a “Guardian ad litem” to inspect my parents’ home.
Her report horrified even me. (When she arrived my father couldn’t find my mother. He had deposited her on the toilet and forgotten where he put her.) There was no unspoiled food in the house, etc. etc.
We went into court. The “Guardian” her observations. The judge wished me Good Luck and had me sign the papers that made me guardian and conservator. Two days later, I was negotiating with a nursing home to admit them when they collapsed and spent a night lying on the bathroom floor. I told the police sergeant who called me to take them to a hospital.
Days later they were in a nursing home. My father was beyond expressing any irritation toward me—but he did try to escape a few times (they altered the entire security system after one attempt). My mother never forgave me and regularly accused me of stealing her money.
I spent some of their money replacing all of their carpeting and some of the wall paper. The rest went to the nursing home. It was money I did not begrudge. The load was off my back!
Based on my own experience—and that of others I have learned of—I read news stories like this one with a lot of questions. And, no matter what these two ladies did or did not do, a great deal more sympathy than the inquest jury or the judge gave them.
Did they have $2500? Did they know whom to call? Did anyone offer to help them—or just offer them some guidance? Or were they left to their own increasingly inadequate devices. The story didn’t mention that. It just reminds me—I was blessed.

Health Care--Tribal Troubles?

A few days ago I watching one of the news channels (I honestly don’t recollect which) when the question came up as to whether or not race was an issue in the national protest against Obama’s health care policies. “Definitely,” said one of the pundits (a black woman).
I hoped not. I’m a product of prewar thinking, and I plead guilty to my share of biases. But I am also a pragmatist. If I’m seriously hurt, I don’t care if the practitioner is pink, green or black—so long as he manages to save my life and limbs.
Save me money, improve my health care—and you can be any color you want. I may not like you; I may not prefer your company, but I’ll pay for your services or vote for you. As far as I’m concerned, that should end any racial issue in health care.
Maybe not. The other day I was listening to an acquaintance talk about several political issues. He is not in the least happy with the present administration. In the midst of his political commentary, he segued into a story about shoeing his horse the week before.
He shows horses all over the country. When he went to the blacksmith, there was a new apprentice—a chap from Texas. They talked politics there, too. The young Texan suddenly spoke up. “We’ve played cowboys and Indians; we ain’t played cowboys and N----rs yet.”
I guess the lady on TV had a point. It’s hard to overcome centuries of tradition and attitude. Canada is an example—two centuries of French resentment of English contempt has not gone away, and nobody can say it ever will.
The Walloons and Flemish of Belgium may never learn to love each other. The tribes of Nigeria haven’t learned to really accept one another. Northern (Lombard/German) Italians still despise Neapolitans and Sicilians. Ireland kept the beacons on to guide German bombers to London. The Basques and Castilians of Spain have no love lost. And so it goes.
I could write several more pages on European, Asian, African, Australian and Latin American “tribes” who go on expressing hostility one to another, sometimes with real bullets. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that electing Obama was a bit like putting a Catholic in charge of North Ireland or trying to make an Ainu prime minister of Japan.
The sub-Saharan black man in “Christian” and “Muslim” societies is up against over 1500 years of bad tradition. Ever since the Eighth or Ninth Century when Arabs began the African slave trade down past the horn of Africa, he has been seen as nothing but a source of slave labor.
Then, in the 1400s, Portuguese traders bought into the slave trade around along the Atlantic coast and then eventually past the Cape along the East African coast. Then, of course, the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese, taking over their slave trading posts. (My wife’s family had what must have been slave traders living in East Africa as early as the 1630s, part Swedish, part Dutch.)
As slavery became unfashionable in European Christian societies (it continues as an accepted practice in Muslim societies today), American slave owners were forced to come up with justifications for keeping black people in slavery.
This they did with pseudo-science and pseudo-theology that “proved” the black man was racially inferior and divinely cursed. For a hundred years, Americans were inculcated with the belief that black Africans were inherently lesser beings than white folk.
It’s hard to outgrow attitudes like that. Attitudes flowing in either direction. There was contempt (and fear) on the part of whites and resentment and self-hatred, leading to deeper resentment and covert hatred on the part of blacks.
Yes, some significant things happened in the 1940s through the 1960s that BEGAN to change this here in America. (It may take historians a while to appreciate what a “favor” the Nazis did for American blacks. As our troops rolled into the German death camps, we had a chance to see the logical outcome of our own racial attitudes—in full page spreads in “Life Magazine”.
We were embarrassed. Rightly so. American history text books were revised—check out one from the 1920s; compare it to the ones your kids study now, or even by 1960. I would contend that the Civil Rights movement could not have occurred without the events of 1945.)
Then, about 1949 or 1950, anonymous persons invented machinery that could pick cotton—thus making it no longer economically necessary to keep blacks on plantations. At the same time, television came into wide use. We could watch Bull Connor, his dogs and whips, over dinner.
With television came a courageous and articulate man, Martin Luther King, Jr., who formed a movement that could not be fought with prison cells and guns. The Supreme Court and Congress altered the laws that regulated black lives.
Yes, the laws are changed. Yes, the twisted science is no longer respectable. But attitudes formed over centuries—flowing both ways—are not so quickly altered.
I have had the sometimes very disconcerting experience of seeing deep into the souls of few (in every case, educated and professional) black Americans—back in the days when I was active in civil rights. It shocked me, occasionally frightened me, to realize how deeply my black “friends” hated ALL white people—a hatred born of an all too often justified distrust of smiling white faces.
One unforgettable instance: sitting at the table of my attractive, talented hostess—whom we had known and been friendly with for a long time—when she was apprised of a situation that had just happened to one of her close friends.
Watching her lovely face contort in rage as she screamed about wanting to set up a machine gun in Times Square and “kill all white people”. We thanked her for the excellent dinner as soon as things calmed a bit and left. We did not return. She did not ask us to.
I could recite several other instances. But that one really stands out.
That is my one big fear of Obama. He was raised a black man in America; he is married to a black woman also raised in American. How could he POSSIBLY not hate whites? Is he really that much better a man than the Texan blacksmith apprentice?
Better educated. Harvard Law trumps blacksmithing, no doubt. But the South Side of Chicago breeds its attitudes just as quickly as do the white parts of Texas.
If I were black, I wouldn’t trust the blacksmith—or me. I’m white. Can I trust a black man not to hate me?

Health Care: Yelling "Fire!"

It works every time. Yell “Fire!” and everybody panics. Doesn’t matter whether or not there is actually a fire. Just yell. That is what our concerned private health insurance companies have done. The panic they have engendered will probably kill any hope of effective health care reform.
It’s more drastic than what they did in 1993to Hillary’s bill. Then they merely whispered, “I smell smoke”. This time the threat was more urgent so they gave a full throated shout. “FIRE!!!” (Illegal in theatres and the like. Okay in Congress and town hall meetings.
What’s the threat? It’s very real. Health insurance companies are fighting for their lives. They are fully aware that the only way universal coverage—that transfers and that cannot be lost with a job or by a company that cancels insurance coverage—can be made at all affordable is by the use of a single payer system. In other words, like Medicaid and Medicare, the government.
When and if that ever happens, private health insurance will go the way of the buggy whip and the black smith. They’ll be left with a very small, select (and rich) market. Universal health coverage—with the looming necessity of a single payer system—is as deadly to private health insurers as the auto was to the horse.
To save themselves, like the people who shout “fire” in a crowded room, they are playing on very real fears among the electorate. Some of what they are saying is a flat lie. Other things have just enough edge of truth to them to strike a note of real anxiety among citizens.
It’s very true—as Republicans point out—that the anger on peoples’ faces when they start shouting and heckling at town meetings cannot come only from a few paid activists. Something there is coming from the gut. Something is terribly real.
If it’s real, it cannot be dealt with by temporizing or backing down on this or that portion of the bill. Somebody in the Democratic camp is going to have to take the terrible risk (and it is terrible—telling the truth in American politics is the quickest form of political suicide) and talk straight facts to the people. They won’t like it, for a time they will scream even louder. But it’s the only chance, however slim, of getting a sane bill through.
We know what the insurance companies are afraid of. When a corporation’s life is threatened, it will—as will an individual person—violate all the rules in the Marquis of Queensbury canon to survive. What are individual Americans afraid of?
In their gut, they honestly fear having their lives threatened. The average American, while perhaps inattentive, is not totally stupid. Anyone who has scanned a paper or a news magazine over the past few decades is well aware we are running out of money to pay for our present patchwork insurance system.
The same American is also aware of a fundamental economic law: when you run out of money for ice cream, you can’t have any more ice cream. In the normal course of events, when there isn’t enough money to buy movie tickets for everyone, somebody doesn’t get to see the show.
If I am insured by a company plan—either as an employee or a retiree—and Medicare if I’m over 65, if we don’t change ANYTHING, there is a fighting chance that I won’t be the one to come up short on movie tickets. So DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.
That may be a selfish concern, but it is certainly an understandable one—especially if the person in question has a disease that might be fatal if left untreated, and he can only afford the treatment through his present health insurance.
So he’s scared to death of change—any change. Immediately the fear grips him: what if the particular drug that keeps me alive is taken off somebody’s new list? Will the cost of the treatments that I need be rationed (a few whispers from private insurers help aggravate this fear).
Will I have to wait longer to see a specialist, especially if my condition suddenly acts up? (I’m waiting six months to see a specialist under our present system—how much worse could it get?)
Where is the money coming from to take care of MY granddaughter with a birth defect or of ME if I become old and disabled. The latter wasn’t an issue when I was a hale thirty-five. It seems more pressing now that I’m seventy.
Everyone senses that the present system is going to fetch up on the fiscal rocks. Everyone hopes that if he or she sits very still we will somehow escape the wreck. That’s the terror you see in the eyes of the people who are disrupting town meetings on health care.
Obama has got to be forthright (the riskiest thing a politician can do. Churchill was being most un-American when he admitted to the British people that all he had to offer them was “blood, tears, toil and sweat”. And he isn’t very popular in England today.).
The President has got to force Americans to face, in their conscious minds, the fact that the present system is teetering on collapse—that rationing will surely come (like no money for ice cream) if we do nothing—that it will be far less unfair if we truly pool the risks.
As to “final solutions” and death committees, I have been through personally what he is recommending in his bill with both parents, a maiden aunt and two in-laws in just the past ten years. The nurse, doctor or social worker sits you down very routinely and asks how much intervention you want—how much pain you wish to inflict on the dying—and when to let them go.
This was in strongly church connected nursing homes—where the issue was to preserve life and make it comfortable. No death squad here. None in Obama’s bill. That’s just unconscionable lying, fueled by fear and the unscrupulous shouts of “FIRE!”
I’m afraid, Mr. Obama, that the time has come to fight “fire” with truth. That’s unfortunately all you have left to work with.
That’s a terrifying thought for ANY politician.

Sarah Palin And (Evil) Universal Health Care

Okay, now Sarah Palin has weighed in on the question of health care reform. “It’s evil,” she says. The whole notion of having a law that provides 37 million uninsured America with adequate medical care is simply “evil”.
Why? Because, she claims, there is a provision written into Obama’s proposal that will require euthanasia for elderly Americans and children like her Down’s Syndrome baby. So she joins a host of conservatives screaming NO to the very notion of insuring the uninsured.
Let’s stop the nonsense. That is precisely what she’s doing: saying NO to the idea of universal health care. If she were seriously concerned about a legal death threat against her child, that is easily enough handled. Obama’s health care bill certainly would not be the first to come with a proviso that certain types of activities/behaviors would be prohibited under the act.
So you just militate for an amendment guaranteeing that no such proviso—euthanasia—may be provided or paid for under the bill. But you don’t hear Palin or any of her more rabid compatriots calling for that, do you?
Incidentally, no one who has read the bill carefully can come up with any such stipulation. The bill would copy a Medicare provision (which no one has yet called “evil”) in that it would pay for hospice care and end of life counseling (on a strictly volunteer basis).
There’s far more to Palin’s stance and pronouncements than her fear for her baby’s life (it’s hard to believe even she’s that dumb). In fact, the cynical side of me doubts that this professed concern is a serious part of it at all.
Remember, she just resigned from the governorship of Alaska two weeks ago. There is the strong suggestion that she did it so she could raise money for a possible presidential campaign three years from now. “BusinessWeeks” cover story this week raises a very interesting point.
The cover headline says, “Health Reform Why insurers are winning”. I’m going to quote quite a bit of the first paragraph of that story: “As the health reform fight shifts [from Washington to the hustings] much more of the battle than most people realize is already over.
“The likely victors are insurance giants such as United Health Group, Aetna and WellPoint.” These companies have so redefined “the terms of the reform debate … that no matter what specifics emerge [in this fall’s bill] the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”
Get that? If the bill fails, they remain at record profit levels. If it passes, they go on to continuing profits. Who loses? That’s a silly question, isn’t it? Either way, by raising horrid suspicions about the very notion of universal coverage—or single payer coverage—the industry wins.
Wouldn’t it be fun to know how much insurance company money has been funneled to spokeswomen like Sarah Palin? Or just promised—for years down the road when she’s actually in a campaign and voters will have forgotten about today’s statement.
So, thanks to people like Palin, you’ll have a health bill—if you get anything at all—run by the same people that are raising your premiums, doing nothing to reign in insane costs, and—yes—rationing health care as they do now.
Yes, there WILL BE “rationing”. For the same reason people buy fewer cars and take fewer vacations during a recession—NO MONEY. That’s the most effective rationing of all. People like Sarah Palin and her fellow conservatives are guaranteeing it.
There may someday soon not be enough money to keep all Down’s syndrome babies alive. People like Sarah Palin will have made it so. (Don’t tell me universal health care will kill your baby! Your fevered opposition to it may well do the trick. And tell me you’re not being paid off.)
Universal health care with a single payer—the same one that pays your Medicare or the Medicaid that keeps your elderly parents cared for in a nursing facility, Uncle Sam—would have the broad enough base and the clout to cut medical costs.
Cutting costs will mean that the evil day when sheer lack of funds forces us to ration health care will be delayed much longer. The notions Palin is militating against are the very ones that can prevent what she says she fears. Even she has to be bright enough to realize this.
I remember back when I left Federal Government employ in 1968—the highest paying private industry job I was offered came from the American Petroleum Institute. What did they want me to do? Go around the US speaking and writing against air pollution controls.
It hurt to turn down the money, but my stomach wouldn’t quite let me do it.
I hope that someday, as she looks down at her own baby—and thinks of all the other parents of Down’s syndrome babies—former governor Palin’s stomach suddenly reacts against what she is doing. Losing the money—and even the votes—will hurt, but she will have done her kid a huge favor.

Obama And Health Care Reform

Resistance to health care reform is cranking up. Shouldn’t surprise us—it’s been shouted down nearly every time it’s been proposed in the last century. There was only one exception—Lyndon Johnson, who created Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.
Apparently there have been some near riots as Congressmen have attempted to hold “Town Meetings” to explain Obama’s proposals. These have been disruptive to the point no debate or explanation was possible.
Outright lies are being told—that Obama’s plan will call for euthanasia of the elderly (it will pay for hospice care and counseling; my own father went into hospice care at the absolute end of his life—when all systems were failing. It certainly wasn’t euthanasia!).
This is a bald faced lie. As are the assertions that Obama’s plan is like Stalin’s eighty years ago—or Russ Limbaugh’s rant that Obama’s plan is like that of the Nazi’s. When this sort of claptrap starts flying about, you know that some ox with big money is being gored.
The insurance companies—making record profits as more and more Americans get fewer and fewer medical benefits—are obviously behind a good bit of this, just as they were in 1993. They are terrified that some form of governmentally insured health care for Americans might become law. It would certainly hurt their bottom line; some might go out of the health business entirely.
So there’s certainly some involvement by the insurance industry in this. But there are other factors involved, too. There wasn’t this kind of near riot emotionalism involved in 1993. Those against health care are intense, bitter and angry.
It takes more than a few lies from insurance companies to generate this kind of heat. So I’ve spent the day listening to pundits opine on the subject. One disturbing question was raised on MSNBC today: to what extent is resistance to Obama’s proposals racial?
The pundits talked about the kind of people who showed up to disrupt the Town Meetings—white, less well educated, small town folk—screaming, “This isn’t America!” No, much of America has changed a bit since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And, in some insular parts, it hasn’t changed much at all—just become more resentful.
These are, after all, the kinds of people that radically conservative Republicans have courted since the days of Barry Goldwater. As the pundits admitted, no one can prove racism as a motive, but there is ground for thinking it just possible.
Historically, we have to remember which leg of the four-legged Roosevelt coalition Republicans went after in 1952 and on. It was the white southerner who, whether a member of the KKK or not, joined with it in hating the other legs of FDR’s coalition: blacks, Jews and urban Catholics.
I can easily imagine that the sons of the men who marched with the KKK in Michigan or Alabama are not thrilled to see “one of them” in the White House. I know where my own parents would have stood—quietly—on the issue. “One of them” is a phrase I heard used often as a kid.
Then there’s another issue—and this really embarrasses me. I am a practicing Christian and I receive Email from all sorts of Christian groups and “news” disseminators. The hostility with which they uniformly greet the thought of universal health care stuns me.
They write nothing of the millions and millions who have no insurance and no health care. All they do is rant (that’s the only word) about the horrors of having government involved in our health care. There is no hint of love, of compassion or even simple decency.
They seem to be approaching health care the way they have approached the abortion issue—with little to back their position but good old fashioned hatred. To me, on both issues, it seems almost mindless. And decent minded folk react to them the same way on both fronts.
It makes it hard to admit one is a Christian among decent folk with kindly inclinations. I am immediately suspect—and, God help us, with good reason.
I have to add one more thing to this poisonous mix: a very strange disconnect. More than one pundit talked of meetings in which people were asked, “How many want your government to stay out of your health care?” Hands went up almost universally.
“How many of you are on Medicare?” Half to a majority raised their hands. What kind of absurdity is this? I have had more trouble with private insurers than I ever have had with Medicare—or my parents ever had with Medicaid. Huh?
And of course there is fault with the Obama camp. Like Hillary and Bill before them, they violated the KISS principle. “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
Hillary went to Yale Law and Obama went to Harvard Law. The fundamental thing law schools teach you is that law is and should be complex. (If it were too simple, what would happen to fees?) (I attended George Washington U Law for a year myself.)
Well taught at their respective institutions, both came out with enormously complex proposals on health care. One pundit today noted that he asked several well educated, liberal Democratic friends in New York if they understood Obama’s health proposal. None did.
This sort of complexity is catnip to conservative hostiles. But those against health care reform would face an all but insurmountable task opposing an amendment that merely proposed to drop the phrase “over 65” from the original Medicare legislation.
It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but the ball would be rolling—and the entire package would be simple and clearly understood. Everybody has a grandparent who would testify to the efficacy of Medicare! This could pass—and, subsequently, be built upon.
That, I fear, would be too simplistic a solution for a Harvard man. It was, after all, for the lady from Yale nearly thirty years ago. The only thing it has to recommend it is that it would probably work.
What’s happening now is in danger of not working at all.

Guess What! Somebody Sold a House!

For the first time in a year there is some motion in the real estate market around here. Of the seven houses (out of about thirty) that have been for sale in the new development across from my house, two have sold in the past week or so.
Nice houses on decently sized lots. Central air, good amenities, both with four usable bedrooms, one built two years ago, the other five years ago. The smaller, five years old, went for exactly what the owner owed on it (I don’t know if the sale was plus fees or not).
He had moved to another city and was paying double mortgages—so he cut it down to exactly what he needed to have. Forget profit, he was happy to be out from under. I don’t think he was planning on this outcome when he bought in 2005.
The other guy—larger house, bigger lot, three stall garage—just needed to get out from under a pile of debt. He had to take a loss on his house—the bank agreed to accept an amount less than the face value of his loan. I guess they considered that a better deal than sitting on another empty house.
This, in a desirable neighborhood—one of the better school districts, about three miles from a super store, less than two miles from the highway that takes you quickly to Grand Rapids, Chicago, Detroit, Lansing or a dozen coastal towns.
But there are still five other houses for sale in that subdivision. These are people who need or want out but can afford to sit—for now—until the long prophesized real estate recovery happens. I noticed that at least one of the “For Sale” signs is getting a little battered by now.
Motion. Not the kind of motion that increases the value of the family estate, but it’s motion. After a year of nothing. It fits with what I am reading in the various business reports I see. We have probably hit bottom for now.
New job losses are declining. There is an actual (if teensy) uptick in home building. People are turning in their clunkers like mad to buy new cars for thousands of dollars off. Business profits are up—even as actual sales volumes are way down.
Companies have laid so many people off that they can make profit on sales at 75% of year-ago levels. Those profits make Wall Street happy. The DOW has climbed a couple of thousand points to be over 9000 these days. That makes Wall Street happy, too.
(I have to say again what I’ve said before about Wall Street—it has been for the past several years, and is now, very close to a Ponzi-like scheme. Business and government have said to millions of Americans, “No more pension—here’s your chance to invest and make your own retirement.”
So every week or month, Joe Q. American finds himself with dollars to invest in order to give himself some sort of retirement security. He really has no place to go but the stock market. So every week or month, millions of more dollars are pumped into the market.
Inflow like this is going to make indices like the DOW go up—whether there is value there or not. This reality keeps me from being terribly impressed when someone says, “Look, the market just went up six percent in the past three months. Wow!”)
Banks have not really opened their coffers to start lending. They are continuing to loan on previously granted lines of credit, but they have not seriously begun to offer new credit. (They are continuing to slash borrowing limits on individual credit cards, too.)
From the founding of this republic, economic growth has required the availability of credit. As new household devices like washing machines and refrigerators came on the market during the Twentieth Century, new kinds of consumer credit grew along with them—or we would not have such devices in every house and huge companies to make them.
Without credit, neither business nor consumer spending is going to grow all that much. Without credit and company growth there won’t be a lot of hiring going on. All of which, the pundits are suggesting, will mean an anemic kind of recovery even if we are at the bottom of the recession.
Already people are starting to suggest that as we come out of this one, we are going to find developing nations like China, India and Brazil to be full size economic giants. They, not the US consumer this time, may lead the way up and out.
That’ll give us a lot less clout in the international markets. The dollar isn’t out of rough water, either. The Chinese, who hold billions and billions of them, are very worried about our deficits and the stability of the dollar. They are starting to preach at us—from a position of strength.
No matter what finally happens, we will emerge from this dust up into a very different world—one we, who grew up in the era of American omnipotence, can hardly imagine.
As to the recession itself, probably all we can really say is what Churchill said to Stalin after El Alamein and Stalingrad, “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.”
If it’s that. Let’s pray it is.

Geography? Did We Go To School Together?

Years and years ago, I toured Maine with a friend. Up around East Port—right across a narrow waterway from Canada, we stopped to sit next to some rocks and admire the coastal view. As we sat, high in the sky above us two vapor trails appeared.
“Why are those planes up there?” asked my friend. I looked up and watched the planes paralleling the American border.
“Because that’s the frontier,” I answered. “Just beyond us is a foreign nation. They are patrolling our boundary.”
She seemed startled. “Oh. I never thought of that.” She like most civilian Americans had never thought of us as having a border—that there was a place somewhere out there that wasn’t American territory.
She was smart—an I.Q. equal to Einstein’s. Her dad had fought in Europe during WWII. He had returned home eventually to head a major government bureau in Washington. After his death, her mom had even briefly dated a former CIA assassin.
So she knew her way around in many spheres. But she had never had to think geographically about this country. We’ve all heard the very funny stories about people from New Mexico applying to Harvard and being informed that, since they lived in a foreign country, they would need a different application. Or more tragic stories—like that of the American campaign in Italy.
The British wanted to land north of Monte Cassino. They knew Italian geography. Americans (FDR, Marshall, Eisenhower) did not. Monte Cassino dominated the one pass that led north to Rome—but the American high command wanted closer air support from Sicily.
So we landed way south of the pass. The Germans were prepared to retreat all the way to the Alps if we had landed north of Cassino. When we hit south, the amazed and pleased Germans dug in and it took us a full year to fight our way to the Alps.
That was a case where a lot of Americans died because we didn’t know the importance of geography in war. (It was this same pass that allowed Pompey to get behind Spartacus and destroy him two thousand years before.) We haven’t had to.
The last people who had to think strategically about American geography were our generals in the Civil War back in the 1860s. They had to understand the importance of the Mississippi, New Orleans, Atlanta and the Atlantic seaports. Most of us haven’t had to think of it since.
We are so big, so powerful and have so few natural enemies on this continent, that it is doubtful there is a single school child who could explain the military importance of places like Guantanamo, San Diego, Seattle, the Hudson River or Vicksburg.
(We identified Guantanamo [and Cuba] almost immediately after our purchase of Louisiana in 1803 as crucial to the defense of our east coast/gulf coast shipping. The British tried to get us to agree not to take Cuba unilaterally; we countered with the Monroe Doctrine which said we’d grab Cuba whenever we could. And Texas, too.
We identified San Diego and Seattle [as well as San Francisco] in 1790 as essential to our dream of controlling the Pacific. The Hudson River cuts our east coast in half. Vicksburg, like the Bohemian Basin (or Sudetenland] in Europe dominates the middle of our continent.)
I couldn’t help but think of my friend of long ago when I took my trip this summer. We started at Albany and then we went north, following an ancient water highway over which French and then British forces from Canada have invaded us time and time again—and over which we have invaded Canada at least twice.
Today there’s a super highway (87) that rushes you from Albany to Montreal. I suspect Amherst, Montgomery, Montcalm, Arnold and Burgoyne would have given an arm or a leg to have such a road in their time.
In those days you went by water. You started from Canada on the Richelieu River and sailed or paddled south into 110 mile long Lake Champlain, cutting like a knife between Vermont and upper New York. Control the lake and you have a lot to say about what happens in both states. Besides that, you are in a position to cut off anyone trying to reach Lake Ontario.
About fifteen miles from the south end of the lake, you pass the once significant Fort St. Frederic at Crown Point. It changed hands several times between the colonies and the British during the Revolutionary War. When you come to the end of Champlain, you have a stretch of land and water between it and 32 mile long Lake George. Here you portage a bit.
Between the lakes, on the north end of Lake George, you encounter the massive fortification of Ticonderoga. (The cannon there today are not the originals. Those were hauled by sled to Boston where they drove out the British in 1776 and ended the Revolutionary War in New England.)
The next few miles south are bloody ground. Here the French and British—and their Indian allies—fought four major wars between 1689 and 1760. Back and forth, push and shove. Battle and massacre. It went on until 1759 when Jeffrey Amherst pushed up Lake Champlain to assist Wolfe in his successful attack on Quebec.
Then it became the turn of the Americans and British to go back and forth up the chain of lakes. Richard Montgomery marched up the lakes, using Ticonderoga (which Ethan Allen had captured the previous spring) as his base, and captured Montreal in fall of 1775.
Back and forth, push and shove. Burgoyne came down the water highway two years later, only to surrender to Gates and Benedict Arnold at Saratoga. He had gotten through half of the sixty miles between the bottom of Lake George and Albany.
Had he reached Albany, he would have effectively been able to cut New England (the most pro-war part of the colonies) off from the rest of the colonies. It would have been catastrophic—a strategic disaster.
In the War of 1812, again the British and Americans went up and down this vital water highway shooting at each other. Both sides built fleets on Lake Champlain. We won—thereby maintaining our claim to border the Great Lakes.
Today, the water highway is tourist country. Full of vacationers, campers, hikers and trucks hauling merchandise between Canada and the US. I doubt that any of the drivers ever reflect that they are on a highway that controls the destiny of the entire east coast of their nation. Of both nations.
We don’t have to. Now, there is a true blessing.
But it wouldn’t hurt to learn about it.