Mr. President, perhaps I’m vainly clinging to my belief that you will make the tough choices on a timely basis. I know from experience as a CEO how difficult and discouraging it is to handle several crises simultaneously when any one of them is a full time job; and you’re under much more pressure than I ever endured. However, I’m beginning to worry that your vision is being muddied and resolve is being sapped, perhaps by overload, perhaps by unhelpful and conflicting advice or perhaps by a human desire to avoid obvious failure on any key issue. What keeps me going is a feeling that you might be holding back on some key decisions in the mistaken belief that delay will avoid antagonizing critical votes for Health Care reform; which appears to be your number one issue. If that’s the case, I think you’re mistaken. It is fairly obvious from the outside looking in than none of those who oppose you personally or those who oppose your policies will change their votes on health care reform (I include Joe Lieberman in that group) and they are not prepared to negotiate in good faith. So screw em― and get on with your agenda!
The following are the four tough decisions, besides Health Care reform, that must be made and implemented soon in the interests of national survival. Further delay baptizes the existing, destructive policies.
- Pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq with all due speed; our continued presence is strategically pointless and is supported by your enemies, enemies of our nation, those who profit from war and sophomoric thinkers. Only the last group is partially educable.
- Cutoff funds to private armies like Blackwater and to other blatantly corrupt contractors who have overcharged or whose slipshod work has killed and maimed our military and civilian personnel.
- Begin to restore both manpower and equipment to our military, including our Navy whose undermanned ships are not up to sustained operations and some emergencies.
- Break up the financial behemoths like BofA, Citi Group, Goldman Sachs, etc. They continue to suck money out of the public and the Federal government to further enrich a community of corrupt incompetents. (See related comments by Robert Reich , former Labor Secretary)
- Restore and enact a new Glass-Steagall Act. Massive pools of resources need to be isolated from one another for long term security. (Deregulating the financial community is as patently stupid as eliminating all traffic laws and related safety regulations. Listen to Paul Volker and a chastened but wiser Alan Greenspan, not those self-serving financial gurus. )
- Enact new laws to prevent or to make it extremely costly the top 10 national competitors in any financial area from growing through mergers or acquisitions.
- Make it clear by regulation that no institution will be rescued in the future.
- Get rid of Larry Summers… his perspective is that of Wall Street’s corrupted elite.
- Restore the Bush tax cuts, and impose graduated taxes of up to 90% on incomes (from all sources) in excess of $300 k per year. This will help bring the budget into balance, restore some confidence with our creditors and indirectly frustrate the out-of-control compensation going to the top 1%.
- Please note that compensation is so out of whack that the upper 0.01% (1 in 10,000 thousand), those making over $11 million/year, of people received over 6% of total compensation in 2007, the highest ever recorded and up from a range of 0.8-1.6% for the same .01% of breadwinners during the boom years of 1948 to 1982. (See Fig. 3 of “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States by Emmanuel Saez, University of California Berkeley, Department of Economics, Aug. 5, 2009). The significance of this trend in income and wealth distribution is dire for a healthy middle class.
- Close Guantanamo, bring the remaining prisoners to the USA and either release them or subject them to due process of the law. Those who hold an irrational fear of bringing these people to justice can’t be allowed to dictate policy or we will even further abandon all the higher principles of our Constitution.
The longer you take to back these decisions and push them through Congress, the weaker our nation gets. Bush and Cheney didn’t seem to care, which made it easier for them to govern. I believe you do care.
I know that you know this, but in the overwhelming crush of your responsibilities I’ll offer this friendly reminder: Effective leadership and personal popularity are two different and often mutually exclusive things. Do what is strategically best for the country in a planned and timely process, and then let the political chips fall where they may. If those of us who elected you fail to support you, then we deserve the consequences. However, if you don’t act, we can’t support you.
Your hopeful supporter,
Ed Lee
PS. I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and work some long hours to support you in any or all of these actions. I already work as a volunteer to support health care reform.
