The War in Washington

The shooting wars in Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East embrace genocide and a committed effort to expose the Western world to serial terrorist attacks. Lone wolves join coordinated sleeper cells in mounting explosive challenges across developed nations everywhere. We face serious challenges from Shiite-dominated Iran’s nuclear program, with Israel desperately trying to convince the rest of the world that the ISIS attacks are just a side-show, virtually all the recent slaughter has been the product of Sunni extremists, from al Qaeda (especially in Yemen) which needs to convince the Islamic world that they are as tough as ISIS, to ISIS itself. And remember, ISIS Sunnis hate Shiites more than any other group.  Yet most of this Sunni insurgence was enabled by the two failed wars mounted by the United States, wars that really did not have a realistic strategy for “what happens after we win?” We went from being a champion of freedom to a colonizing power.

As Europe’s economy implodes, Germany-backed austerity programs rapidly losing traction across the EU, as the euro plunges towards a one-on-one parity with the dollar, and as the real earning power for average Americans remains well-below pre-recession levels, as the entire planet appears headed for the American reality of 1% owning 50% of global wealth. Unless you are in the upper-most reaches of U.S. earning power, there is no one on either side of the aisle who genuinely believes in a true restoration of the American middle class or anything remotely resembling the quality of life we enjoyed a decade ago. While some are proselytizing that Americans just have to accept less for the rest of their lives, each party seems to be trying to convince the electorate that they can implement a fix. Instead, they are just making things worse.

With global issues, even with the brief respite from oil prices, the ability of the United States to sustain real quality job growth and solid progress in GDP values is very much in doubt. 2015 probably hangs in there, but beyond that… well, the prognosis is not particularly good, particularly given the costly demands of fighting terrorist groups around the world, who, if not stopped, have clearly indicated a willingness to attack the West with any weapons they can.

Hey, it can’t be that bad, really? Well…  According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “Citing global warming and increasingly dangerous weapons caches around the world, BAS leaders claimed in a Thursday press conference that the ‘probability of global catastrophe is very high.’... ‘In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,’ the group said in a statement.” AOL.com, January 22^nd. That’s all?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (Washington, D.C.), we have a newly installed GOP-led Congress – seemingly committed to moving strongly to the right to satisfy the Tea Party contingent – facing a lame duck president who knows that he cannot get anything he cares about through this new political roadblock. In the earliest months of this new government, we have seen only signs of confrontation. If Obama wants it, the GOP will do anything it can to kill it. And if the GOP won’t act, the President will try and govern by executive order.

Both parties seem to acknowledge the disparity from the top to the middle class, but their solutions are diametrically opposite. Democrats seem to want to level the tax rates between top and middle, open practical education at a community college level to improve job skills with free (federally-supported) tuition and raise the minimum wage to reflect the real cost of living. Taxes for those at the top would fund these efforts, but the GOP calls it “class warfare” even as to huge American corporations paying little or no taxes with clever tax avoidance schemes using off-shore strategies.

Republicans, on the other hand, believe the path to better wages and job growth lies in getting the government out of as many activities as possible – killing environment and financial regulations despite the massive costs of disasters directly traceable to man-induced global warming and Wall Street’s rather abysmal record of financial integrity – cutting taxes for the rich, and resurrecting the disproven “trickle-down/supply-side” Reganomics practices by repackaging the theory by calling it “job creation.” With the exception of Mitt Romney, Republicans hate raising the minimum wage (calling it a “job-killer”).

As the President believes that the best shot at containing Iran’s nuclear program – with the subtext being the need to have Shiite Iran help contain Sunni-ISIS – is diplomatic engagement, Israel has effectively reached into the Evangelical community and the Jewish diaspora to contain a nuclear Iran which they believe threatens their very existence. Effectively, Benjamin Netanyahu has found a home with the conservative Republican Congress (and a few Democrats with large Jewish constituencies), even as most of the rest of the world – particularly Europe – has turned their back on Israel’s never-ceasing admonitions against Palestine and Iran.

Despite strong support from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce and GOP stalwarts like Rand Paul, the Republican Congress seems committed to contain any entente with Cuba… primarily because the initiative came from Obama. Hard to understand how we are friends with Vietnam, Germany, Italy and Japan… nations where we actually fought shooting wars, but cannot effect a rapprochement with neighboring Cuba run by doddering old leaders that we actually never were at war with.

While foreign policy directives reside with the President, and the occasional “advice and consent” of the Senate when it comes to treaties, the new Congress seems hell bent on usurping every policy directive regardless of where it may emanate. As a rather obvious slap to Obama, Republican House Speaker John Boehner has invited Israeli PM Netanyahu to address Congress without involving the President. Boehner is leading a movement to sanction Iran now absent getting an immediate dismantling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, in effect seemingly intended to derail the administration’s diplomatic initiatives. The Israeli PM’s relations with the White House are so strained that the President says he won’t even meet with Netanyahu on this visit.

While those who read the underlying benefits of the Affordable Care Act – constituents from the right and left – seem to approve of its basic thrust, the minute the label “Obamacare” is attached to those descriptions, conservatives uniformly reject the entire bill. And while that legislation is woefully short on cost containment measures (the result of a very powerful lobby from big pharms and insurance companies – big business!), the GOP still seems intent on dumping the entire statute, yet unclear what to do to replace it or deal with those millions now reliant on the program. The has voted well over 50 times to repeal, defund or contract the Affordable Care Act, and seems committed to continue this directive knowing a veto is certain, should a bill even make it through the Senate.

The new Republican Congress appears to have prioritized every piece of legislation, from the Keystone pipeline to the above sanctions, to reject that which the Obama administration holds dear. On January 22^nd, the Senate even added an amendment to the Keystone bill (passed overwhelmingly in the Senate) that acknowledged that global warming was not a hoax. A large contingent of GOP Senators, however, made it very clear that this was just a normal climate cycle that was not man-induced. That all those effluents from coal plants, cars, and industrial facilities have produced massive and very measurable greenhouse gasses must not have had much of impact, I guess.

Knowing that he is a lame duck and that he really has little to lose with his veto pen, President Obama’s response will be to reject every one of these initiatives. Tea Party leaders are fighting hard to go to extremes to stop anything Obama, even if it means shutting down the government and defaulting on our credit obligations. There are too many imperfect storms brewing on the horizon.

What we face is a destabilizing battle in Washington where nothing gets done, and people are more concerned with holding firm to simplistic but ineffective “solutions” and unworkable slogans than in making the country work. The unwillingness from both sides of the aisle to work a compromise will ultimately impact the quality of life for most Americans in a bad way, possibly escalating into a shooting class war (Ferguson?) and perhaps the demise of our entire political system.

We are filing fewer patents, conducting less job-creating scientific research, building and fixing fewer major pieces of infrastructure and killing the quality of education across the board under the guise of fiscal prudence. Unless we start dealing with the highly-competitive world as it really is, finding a path to legislative compromise, if you think the past few years have been ugly, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! A failing, flailing society is never a pretty thing to watch.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the rest of the world will continue to write us off and marginalize our relevance as we continue to self-destruct.