22 December 2017

Dear Interested Readers,


I Guess we Ran Out of Miracles

I was delighted last Sunday by yet another last minute miracle pulled off by Tom Brady and his Patriot teammates. The Patriots beat the Pittsburgh Steelers with the combination of two miracles starting with incredible catches in the last two minutes of the game by Rob Gronkowski coming from the golden arm of Tom Brady. Those happenings are almost taken for granted as a certainty by Patriots fans and are not really a miracle since over the course of his career Brady has lead his team to victory in the last two minutes 51 times! The real two miracles occurred after Brady had worked his magic when the much less stellar defense almost blew the game by allowing a 69 yard pass play to put the Steelers in position to either tie or win the game with only seconds left on the clock.

What followed the defensive failure was a miracle in two parts, or two miracles. First there was the heart stopping pass to the Steelers’ tight end, Jesse James, that looked to everyone like a touchdown until the referees examined the video and were able see just a little wiggle to the ball as it touched the turf of the endzone. What followed is now deemed the “immaculate interception.” It was a second play in the endzone that was the product of a sudden lack of good judgement by Ben Roethlisberger and his coach. Big Ben faked spiking the ball which would have stopped the clock and set up a game tying field goal that would have put the game into overtime. Instead he attempted to win the game on the spot by faking the spike and then throwing a pass that was first tipped and then intercepted by Duron Harmon of the Patriots, making the Steelers victims of their own attempt at cleverness. Other teams just don’t get it. Add the Steelers to the list that already includes the Seahawks and the Falcons.

That must have been enough divine intervention for one week in affairs of interest to me. Any remaining favor from the gods was used up with the last second steal and basket that gave the Celtics a one point victory over the Pacers. Terry Rozier stole a pass and scored with a dunk. It seems that after all those miracles there was no pixie dust left to use to foil the Republican drive to pass their obnoxious, destructive, and self serving tax bill that is constructed on fabrications and a reversion to alchemy to justify its blatant disregard for the middle class and its financial mugging of the poor.

In my heart I have known for a few weeks that a miracle would not emerge and the tax bill would pass. I guess that even divine intervention can’t balance a situation where the driving motivation is to pay off donors. Senators who are willing to make deals, or pull off the appearance of making deals for the benefit of their constituencies, or are pursuing personal interest to the detriment of those dependent on the mercy of public support to healthcare, are low on my list of those due for respect. Put Lisa Murkowski and Bob Corker on that list.

Poor John McCain gets a bye. He was not physically able to vote; so, there would be no thumbs down on tax reform to match his performance on the repeal and replacement of the ACA. Susan Collins deserves special consideration. She voted for the tax bill based on nothing but “assurances” from Mitch McConnell that he would get her concerns for healthcare turned into law that would protect the poor from some of the losses engendered by the bill. How naive is that? Did she not remember that the Senate alone does not make laws, and that Paul Ryan was saying, “No way!” David Leonhardt of the New York Times postulates that she is too smart and experienced for her story of a deal to fly. He thinks she voted for the bill because she liked something about it even though over the next ten years many of Maine’s citizens will lose, big time.

The whole process has left me weak and weary, and I was just a spectator. I do not know if I, as a private citizen, will be a winner or a loser when the dust settles. That is not the origin of my disgust. I am most certain that my country will lose. The individuals who will lose the most are the ones that always lose. The poor who have very little left to lose will see the meager supports that provide them minimal assistance converted to payments for the very wealthy. The large majority of the 1.5 trillion dollars of the deficit that is generated by the bill will be new debt and resources transferred from public coffers to corporate assets and the personal bank accounts of those who are the financially most fortunate among us.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message was larger than a discussion of the issues of racism and the injustices that it perpetuated. He understood that those injustices perpetrated poverty and that poverty was the product of economic inequities that existed for the poor of all races.. In his 1964 speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize he said:

“A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist.”

Dr. King, Nobel Peace Prize address, 1964

You may say, “That was a picture of the third world in 1964 and not a fair representation of America in 2017. We are past that.” I am not so sure, and think what he said in 1963 is appropriate to this moment.

“God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

Dr. King, “Strength to Love”, 1963

Perhaps referring to what God wants is inappropriate, but the truth is that any law that aggravates poverty risks undermining the future of America no matter what you think about God. It is just destructive social policy. In the long run such moves are temporary wins for a minority flush with resources. In time these actions will assure that problems like increasing domestic violence, street crime, and substance abuse will be the opening act for a society in continuing decline.

Republicans say to just wait, everyone is going to love what happens to their paycheck and there will be lots of new jobs. I believe that there is a higher likelihood that the bill will be a burden on the underserved, and is more likely to aggravate poverty and reduce the health of the nation than create jobs. The Senate parliamentarian apparently ruled that the bill could not be called the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” and be passed by the “budget reconciliation” process that allows a bill to pass with a simple majority. I can’t find any reference on the Internet that actually states the new name of the bill.

Where I come from babies are often born before their parents decide their name. Those children often get called Bubba or Sis while their parents finally come up with a name. Bubba, and less often Sis, sometimes sticks no matter what the final decision on the name is. In general “Bubba” suggests a pejorative picture. Since there was a lot of fuzzy thinking and not much analysis in the birth of this bill, I think it should be called the Bubba Tax Mess.

The perversity of this moment when the majority of our elected leaders pay off their donors is underlined by the quote of Dr. King that speaks most directly to me this week:

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

Dr. King, Nobel Peace Prize address, 1964

That is the point I want to make. We really did have a choice. I’ll accept that we needed a new tax bill, but not this one. The real issue was that a better bill might have improved the tax environment of business in a way that could have been a stimulus for employment, and our collective resources could have been allocated in such a way as to have improved the lives of the poor as well as the middle class. We could have chosen policies that supported higher education, infrastructure improvement, housing and better healthcare that would have made us a greater and more equitable nation. It could have been done with collaboration, consultation, and creative problem solving, but that would have required different leadership. It is amazing that Republicans can joyfully pass a bill that has less than 40% support. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell deserve a release from the responsibilities that they clearly demonstrate they are not equipped to manage when they suggest that the over 60% of Americans who fear what will happen because of the bill, in time will come to like it.

Now that the bill is a reality, the obvious question is what is next? The best way to answer that question is to ask yourself what after taxes do Republicans hate most? The answer is entitlements and deficits. It appears to me that with their fuzzy thinking they see taxes, deficits and entitlements as an unholy trinity. I have been writing for sometime that the tax bill was best understood as the justification for cutting the expense of entitlements. Even before the tax bill is signed there is evidence that the deficits it will create will lead to an automatic cut of $25 billion in Medicare.

Every warm hearted Republican Senator claims to love children and yet the CHIP program that is currently dying for lack of renewal leaves 9 million children without access to the care they need. Their coverage is being used as a bargaining chip in the complex issues of the federal budget. This game is not over. It has just begun. Money is back in the pockets of those who do not need it, and now we are into deciding which programs for the poor and needy will be cut to pay for the transfer of capital. Look at any reputable newspaper of the last two weeks, or more practically copy and paste into your Internet browser: Programs and entitlements to be cut because of the tax reform law. You can pick your own favorite article. They all say the same thing. Entitlements are next on the Republican “to do “ list. They are just beginning and the direct impact on healthcare finance will only be the tip of the iceberg. The huge piece of ice that will damage or delay our voyage toward the Triple Aim lies below the surface where efforts to improve the social determinants of health are vulnerable.

It is hard to calculate just how damaging this bill will be to the struggle to improve the social determinants of health which are the real drivers of cost to our fragile system of care, but rest assured the damage will be huge. At the individual level before this is over there will be children who needlessly die, mothers who will not get the support they need during pregnancy, and grandmothers and grandfathers who have strokes that could have been avoided. Poor and lower middle class Americans will pay a high price to increase the inheritances of people like the president’s children. We had made a little bit of progress, and now we will begin to see those gains lost to a new philosophy of entitlements, not for the needy, not for the poor, but entitlements with a capital “E” for the wealthy.

To explain how all this has happened will take decades. Historians, social scientists, and economists have plenty of work to do. We need to ask why at this moment it is our comedians and not our clergy who must hold up the mirror for us to see how strange we are. We did not get to where we are in the less than the two months it took to birth this awful bill. We will not get back on the path to a better and more equitable America just by electing Democrats in 2018 and 2020. There is much analysis and then work needed before the far reaching changes that must penetrate deeply into our communities can take hold. We need to continuously ask, “What part of the problem am I?” and, “What can I do differently?” There is much that needs evolution and transformation and those processes are dependent on the efforts of individuals and individuals, need the advice of wise and humble counselors and leaders.

There are many places to begin to ask questions and explore possible answers about the origin of this moment. My suggestion is that rather than just shake your head in disbelief or hunker down in your sorrow, you begin a personal journey. There are many places to start. On Wednesday there was a thoughtful OP-ED in the New York Times by Will Wilkinson reading that piece is as good as any starting point. Wilkinson is a new voice for me. He is the Vice President for policy at the Niskanen Center which I had never heard of before. On their website the center is described as a think tank where I might feel at home:

The Niskanen Center, which launched operations in January 2015, is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) think tank that works to promote an open society: a social order that is open to political, cultural, and social change; open to free inquiry; open to individual autonomy; open to the poor and marginalized; open to commerce and trade; open to people who may wish to come or go; open to different beliefs and cultures; open to the search for truth; and a government that protects these freedoms while advancing the cause of open societies around the world. The politics of the 21st century increasingly pits defenders of the open society against a new breed of populists animated by a vision of a closed and exclusive national community.

I share the opinion and analysis in the article which is a much better piece of writing than I could ever pull off. Here are some key points that I hope will stick with you.

The link between the heedlessly negligent style and anti-redistributive substance of recent Republican lawmaking is easy to overlook. The key is the libertarian idea, woven into the right’s ideological DNA, that redistribution is the exploitation of the “makers” by the “takers.” It immediately follows that democracy, which enables and legitimizes this exploitation, is itself an engine of injustice.

Wilkinson brings up the influence of the novelist Ayn Rand on Paul Ryan. It is something that I have noted before. Ryan reads Rand like the Bible and gives copies of “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents, and requires all of his interns to read it. Most of us read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” in college and moved on. We recognized Rand’s point of view for what it was, a self protecting, self serving worldview that was understandable in the context of her personal history, but not a philosophy transferable to the management of a society. Wilkinson quotes her.

“one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority.”

That mindset could be the origin of fear if you believe in white supremacy or are part of the minority that has generational or personal wealth that was siphoned off from the sweat of others. Controlling the unwashed masses has always, and will always, be a critical concern of the minority who prosper by laws like this “tax reform” bill. It’s why they prefer gated communities and perhaps why they like guns.

Perhaps the most consistent practitioner of Rand’s libertarian philosophy is Senator Rand Paul. [Did his Dad, Congressman Ron Paul, name him for Ayn Rand?] Wilkinson quotes Rand and then expands:

On the campaign trail in 2015, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, conceded that government is a “necessary evil” requiring some tax revenue. “But if we tax you at 100 percent, then you’ve got 0 percent liberty,” Mr. Paul continued. “If we tax you at 50 percent, you are half-slave, half-free.” ...If the big-spending, democratic welfare state is really a system of part-time slavery, as Ayn Rand and Senator Paul contend, then beating it back is a moral imperative of the first order...The idea that there is an inherent conflict between democracy and the integrity of property rights is as old as democracy itself. Because the poor vastly outnumber the propertied rich — so the argument goes — if allowed to vote, the poor might gang up at the ballot box to wipe out the wealthy.

In the 20th century, and in particular after World War II, with voting rights and Soviet Communism on the march, the risk that wealthy democracies might redistribute their way to serfdom had never seemed more real. Radical libertarian thinkers like Rand and Murray Rothbard (who would be a muse to both Charles Koch and Ron Paul) responded with a theory of absolute property rights that morally criminalized taxation and narrowed the scope of legitimate government action and democratic discretion nearly to nothing. “What is the State anyway but organized banditry?” Rothbard asked. “What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked scale?”

Wilkinson counters these Libertarian thoughts and fears about the perils for the rich or for the individual trying to become rich in a democracy:

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights.

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

That statement lines up nicely with Bryan Stevenson’s concept that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but rather it is justice. This tax bill is not an expression of justice. It is an expression of the continuing reality that the wealthy have been a well organized minority that has used the courts with decisions like “Citizens United,” coupled with a little bit of their wealth, to protect themselves from what they fear. Wilkinson concludes his piece with an indictment of the Congressional Republicans that focuses my concerns at a higher level than the short term impact of this lousy, awful, unjust bill.

At a time when America’s faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. It’s easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than what’s in it. Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

When, as a child, I was caught doing something wrong, my grandmother always counseled me with a piece of wisdom that is about as reliable as the law of gravity. She would say, and my experience in life has confirmed, “You can’t do wrong and get by!” In the end there is always some form of accountability. It is hard to know now when the reckoning will occur, but someday we will see the grinning faces of Ryan, McConnell, Trump and company turn to frowns.

This is not where I want to leave a letter that will arrive a few days before a holiday that is historically rooted in the hope that there will be a reprieve from darkness and the emergence of hope for warmer, better days that might grow into a universal benefit for all humankind. I am hopeful that we will eventually save our planet and save ourselves in such a way as to make the comforts available to the fortunate available to all. I think Dr. King was right when he said:

“The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty”

Dr. King, “Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community”, 1967

Again as he said in Stockholm a half a century ago,

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

Dr. King, Nobel Peace Prize address, 1964

My Holiday wish is as always, peace on earth, goodwill, and opportunity for all. My New Year’s resolution will be to continue to explore what I might do and with whom I might collaborate to make a difference toward the objectives of the Triple Aim and the larger agenda of justice of which it is a part.


Color My Holidays White As I Sing “In The Bleak Midwinter” While “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”

The scene in the header for this letter is one that I pass on eighty percent of my walks from home. It is the outflow from Little Lake Sunapee, and is about three quarters of a mile into my walk. This water is headed downhill to Goose Hole, a small pond created behind a dam that once provided power to some kind of nineteenth century mill. From Goose Hole it is a short step down to Otter Pond, and from there to Lake Sunapee which is less than a mile away. The Sugar River connects the water of Lake Sunapee to the Connecticut River and from there it is only about 150 miles to New Haven and Long Island Sound. I enjoy the view this time of year sitting upstream from the larger world.

As the picture shows, we have about a foot of snow, and the weather report suggests that we will have a fresh six inches by the time you read this letter. The picture shouts winter and strangely thrills me. I know lots of folks who plot their escape from winter, but when I pass a scene like this I embrace it and the phrase “In the Bleak Midwinter” as the first verse rolls through my head.

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

James Taylor sings my favorite version. Until I moved to New England fifty years ago, I had never heard “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which was written originally as a poem by the nineteenth century English poet Christina Rossetti. Perhaps the reason was that in the South and Southwest where I grew up there was no bleak midwinter. At the worst, or best, we only had occasional winter. The golf courses never closed. Thirty years after the poem was written it was set to music. I have read in Wikipedia that in 2008 it was chosen “best Christmas carol in a poll of choirmasters. That means it topped “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger.” My very favorite secular tune of the season is “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” but you probably could have guessed that.


Wherever you are and whatever holidays you celebrate I hope that the Holiday season is a joyous experience for you and your family and friends. It is a good time for all of us to re dedicate our efforts to something as inclusive as the Triple Aim.