My quest for sane adults in Congress

In this time of national need, I have recently embarked on a search for sane adults in Congress.

The logical place to look seemed to be among the dozens of Congressional caucuses.

In particular I was looking for a few legislators devoted to adult, sane, non-partisan behavior.

The Senate, I have learned, has no caucuses at all. In the upper house, gatherings of like-minded solons are called “coalitions.”

So let’s mine the lode of caucuses in the “People’s Chamber” in our quest for sane adult nuggets.

The Wikipedia entries were instructive but not particularly reassuring. Vis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucuses_of_the_United_States_Congress

There were the predictable “single-issue” caucuses. So we have “The Atlantic Offshore Energy Caucus,” and the “Carbonated and Non-alcoholic Caucus,” the “Direct Selling Caucus,” the “Electromagnetic Caucus,” the “Cut Flower Caucus” and the “Hockey Caucus.” There’s even a “Baby Caucus,” which is bracketed alphabetically by the “Azerbaijan Caucus” and the “Bangladesh Caucus,” which itself is followed “The Baseball Caucus” and “The Battlefield Caucus.”

As Dave Barry would say, I am NOT making this up.

If this swarm of caucuses are anything more than accounts for campaign contributions. it’s a wonder that Congress gets anything done at all.

Here’s the closest I could come to a caucus for adult sanity:

Congress has three mental health caucuses. The generic “Mental Health Caucus,” the “Men’s Mental Health Caucus” (particularly useful in weighing Trump cabinet nominees and Trump himself) and the “Military Mental Health Caucus” (also known to insensitive, politically incorrect wags as the “Catch-22 Caucus.”)

There is also the timely “Sexual Assault Prevention Caucus” and the “Caucus to End Bullying.”  In a just, sane and adult world, much needed presidential impeachment initiatives would emerge from these groups.

Other promising groups are the “Problem Solvers Caucus” “the Peacekeeping Caucus,” “the Innovation and Human Condition Caucus,” (“innovative” hacking alert!} and, the “Invasive Species Caucus” including, one would hope, invasive species of the human kind.

One obvious problem exposed by my research is a lack of focus. Accordingly I’m recommending an emergency consolidation of some of these groups into the “Sane, adult legislators caucus.”

I predict it will be a small group, but you have to begin somewhere — and FAST!

Four more years....

I’m looking into the future, to August 2016 to be exact.

It is not a pretty picture.

Sure the unexpected can happen (and likely will) but assuming the “normal” course of events given what we know, the government will either be hamstrung or following ruinous right-wing policies.

The hamstrung scenario has Barack Obama as president and the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. Yes, governing will be even more difficult than it has been for the last four years. At best, the nation and the government will be on hold. The question in August 2016 is, who will the Democrats choose to run for the presidency and will they be able to take back Congress? The answer to the first part is most likely Hillary Clinton. And, no, the Democrats will not be able to take back Congress, whose major function will have become to blame everyone, including fellow members of Congress.

The economy will be even worst than it is today and the Republicans will still be in their Grover Norquist, drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub mode. The Republicans will no doubt choose, yes, Paul Ryan to head their ticket. He’s such a nice, “refreshingly thoughtful” man. At some point the GOP might change its name to the “Tea Party.” Perhaps a real Republican “party of Lincoln (and, Oregonians please note, Hatfield and McCall)” might re-emerge.

On to scenario #2. The country is run by the Romney/Ryan administration with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress (Okay, they might lose one or both in the 2014 mid-term elections, but you get the idea.) The rich get even richer (anyone want a sixth Caddy and a seventh home?) and everybody else tanks. Under this scenario, Bernie Sanders decides to run for president (as a Republican Socialist?) and the Democratic nominee is...hmmmm. Your choice. Could it be that no one wants the job?

Pulling the levers on all the above will be the very, very rich and the very, very secretive. Casino owners, TV wrestling magnates, defense contractors and corporate carbon-belching global warmers. (Did I mention that the drought and weather extremes will worsen over the next four years?)

Meanwhile, in the streets, expect food riots, Romney-ville or Obama-ville homeless camps. The Occupy movement of 2011 will look like a picnic in the park compared to what’s coming.

If reviving the economy means declaring yet another war, we may finally see veterans take to the street to demand an end to the madness. It is a madness that is literally leading them to take their lives in appalling numbers. This too will not abate.

Back in the world of electoral politics (if it can be called that), the options are grave. Of course someone will chime in to say that at least scenario #1 is likely to produce a more moderate Supreme Court. When the choice boils down to the future of the Supreme Court, you know we are in trouble.

The best way to spend the next four years is to do some serious blank-slate rethinking about the state of the nation, its constitution, its values and its role in the world. What say devolve into very small, autonomous manageable states? Switzerlands come to mind. Split Oregon down the middle, East and West.

Ecotopia anyone?

At the very least, the thinking might provide political talking points as the election campaign gets serious in late summer of 2016.

Obama and Lincoln: Myth and Reality

President Obama’s State of the Union address created its own context and successfully addressed it.

Unfortunately, the context had nothing to do with reality.

Obama portrayed the task before Congress and the government as being an effort to move the nation forward, primarily economically but also strategically.

What American, Democrat, Republican or independent could disagree with that?

The problem is that Congress's real context is political, and it is all about power, not progress.

Sweet reason and cooperation has little to do with keeping, or seizing, power.

Republicans have to disagree to make themselves an alternative. Democrats have to defend themselves and push forward to be distinctive.

In a polarized political world, both can’t win, but both can lose, taking the rest of us down with them.

The reality is that both parties must raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the next year so that they can successfully hold onto or grab more power in 2012.

How do you raise that kind of money. You put forward a program that is “worth it.”

Worth it to whom?

Worth it to those who have the money. That's money to throw at a media-driven political system of attack ads and irrelevancy. Buy the propaganda system and you gain the power.

The political appeal now is not to the people, but to vested interests, primarily multi-national corporation executives and the financial market and hedge fund managers.

Obama’s speech was largely nationalistic myth-making. It shared the theme found in Lincoln’s First Inaugural address in which he sought to heal the ominous and growing divisions between North and South.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The words didn’t work for Lincoln, and they aren’t going to work for Obama. We have no “better angels of our nature.” Until “our nature” is fundamentally changed, it will be devoid of angels and inhabited by very human demons — greed and the lust for power.

If there is good news, it’s that President Obama is fully capable of identifying and addressing the problems of reality. The bad news is that if he does, he will be instantly unelectable.

HERE is another commentary that takes a similar, but not identical, tack.

Greed: The word they dare not speak

As the House takes up the debate about extending tax cuts for the very rich, our elected representatives shouldn’t shy away from the word “greed.” It is central to the debate.

And yet as they stand to speak, they are unlikely to ever use the word. To do so, they may conclude, may be seen as unseemly moralizing. Moreover, talk of greed intrudes on individual rights, the holy of holies.

Further, for elected politicians to raise the question of greed might seem hypocritical. The greedy are the very people who elected them to public office. Massive political donations come from the very wealthy and their political arms. Secret political contributions ensure that political discourse never addresses the question of greed.

Greed is off the table.

It shouldn’t be.

We must free the word “greed” of its moral connotations and look it square in the face as a pathology. Only then can we examine what it is and does. Try treating the word as you would “cancer” or, better yet, “drug addiction.”

Greed, shorn of questions about its morality, is clearly the driver of the vast inequities in our society. It is what compels the susceptible to accumulate vast sums of money they clearly desperately want but, just as clearly, don’t need. And all this is happening at a time when the wealthy live in a society of dire, real needs that their hoarded money could address.

I won’t review the statistics on inequality here. They are well known and documented. Just search “inequality” on your computer. You will not come up wanting.

This is not about numbers. It is about resources wasted on a all-consuming, destructive addiction.

Sure, this can be seen as a moral issue, but arguing about morality narrows the debate to individual moral choices. “Look, if that guy wants to pay himself $15 million a year, that’s his right.” “She deserves that kind of reward.” “It’s a question of what the market will bear.” “Greed is in the eye of the beholder.”

You aren’t going to shame the greedy to change their behavior any more than you are going to shame an addict out of his or her addiction.

To couch the debate in appeals to individual rights misses the point: Greed is a disease that infects and destroys the entire society.

The debate the House of Representatives should have over extending or ending the tax cuts for the wealthy must expose greed as bad for America. It’s a drug. It’s like tobacco or alcohol. It destroys not just the person afflicted with the addiction (in this case some obvious symptoms are obsession, denial, secrecy, need for more, and elitist isolation). Greed damages through “second-hand smoke” those who are nearby. The children of the wealthy become addicted to greed too. With rare exceptions, they display the same symptoms.

The damage caused by greed spreads to the society as a whole. We pay the costs of someone else’s greed, just as our health insurance rates go up to pay for the disproportionate health costs associated with smoking or other addictions.

How so? We live in a society whose health is dependent on rational, open civil discourse. Without it, democracy dies. If we elect our leaders (who set our priorities and create our laws) based on expensive, evocative, emotional, irrational appeals, the foundations of democracy wanes and we are left with a government ruled by those who control and manipulate mass communication.

That control belongs to the very rich, and their goal is to support and protect their habit of greed.

Moreover, the money spent to support their habits and hoarding, is money not spent on the very real problems of our society. Greed’s damage spreads to the larger society. For millions in true need, it slams shut the doors to health, education and opportunity. For a growing number, it denies them food and shelter.

Of course in a democracy we turn to our elected representatives to address those problems, but, as we’ve seen, those representatives aren’t answering to us.

Most elected representatives have been put in office by the greedy, for the greedy.

(A reminder: When I use the word “greedy,” I’m not making a moral judgment. I’m describing a pathology.)

And so our mounting social problems go unaddressed, and society enters a kind of death spiral as the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. The failure to see greed as the source of our problem is part of the same self-destructive, avoidance behavior that began with those individuals originally addicted to greed.

This is the state of our nation as the House debate begins. Greed should be front and center in the debate. The issue is ultimately about the social and political health of America.

Showing greed the door

I have this absurd fantasy of being elected to Congress to replace our underwhelming representative, Democrat David Wu.

There I am in my office and the lobbyists are lined up to make their get-acquainted pitches.

I’d follow a mental script that I would read to every one of them.

“Nice to meet you. How much does your CEO make? And, by the way, how much do you make?"

Or, in the case of industrial groups or trade unions, I’d ask, “What is the average compensation for your chief executive or union president?

“Don’t know? Come back when you do. Oh, and when you do return, bring the compensation of the lowest paid worker in your company, trade group or union.”

“By the way, you can save yourself some time setting up a new appointment. Run the two numbers through a calculator. Divide the CEO compensation (and your own compensation) number by the lowest pay and if it comes to more than 10, you needn’t call because we will know that your industry/company/trade group/union's leadership is essentially motivated by greed.

"I’m sure you agree that our government has more important business than promoting greed.”

(Example of greed: the lowest paid worker makes $30,000 and the CEO makes $3 million, which is common, unfortunately. The ratio is—ready?—one to 100. Under my "times ten" rule, if the CEO wants $3 million in compensation, the lowest paid worker get $300,000. Now that's a minimum wage law! Here's another example. Under the "times ten rule" if the lowest paid worker gets $50,000, the CEO gets $500,000 — tops. That seems to me to be beyond fair compensation.)

Back to my D.C. office chat. “One more thing," I'd say, "don’t tell me that competition for these stuffed shirts (I'd probably use the term 'executive talent') forces you to pay CEOs mega-bucks. If they are so smart, why has the economy tanked? One reason is grotesque income inequity.”

I would organize a caucus of like-minded Congressional members who would join me in putting lobbyists through the same drill. Call us the "Ten Times or Less" caucus.

By the way, in my own Congressional office I’d make sure my staff salaries fell well within these parameters. Members of Congress are paid $169,300. I’d use a one-to-three ratio. The lowest pay would be roughly $57,000.

David (and Earl and Peter and Greg), are you listening?