Letter to Sen. Bennet re Social Security

I received your email and signed your petition about Social Security, but it is a sore point for me.

I am retired from the State Department Foreign Service.  I also earned enough quarters working in the private sector to qualify for Social Security.

Because of my Foreign Service retirement, my Social Security is reduced from a normal benefit of over $400 per month to an actual $48 per month that I receive from Social Security.  This amounts to a tax of about 90% on my Social Security benefits because I served my country in the US Foreign Service.

I am willing to sacrifice for my country.  I am also a Vietnam veteran who served in the Army artillery on the DMZ from 1969-1970.  I know that Social Security is underfunded, and am willing to do my part to preserve it.

But it makes me mad that rich people pay only a small part of their income into Social Security.  Contributions are capped at the first $117,000 of earnings.  For many rich people, this means that the Social Security tax is negligible, while for poor people, the Social Security tax is much higher than their income tax.  Meanwhile, for many investors, such as hedge fund managers, even income tax is capped at 20%, which may be a lower rate than the Social Security tax on the working poor.  Wall Street investors would scream bloody murder if they were taxed at 90%, as my Social Security is.

This is an example of extreme income inequality legally established by the United States Government.  I am happy to do my part to help save Social Security, but why should I contribute to government welfare programs for billionaires on Wall Street?

Something is rotten in Washington!

Middle East Policy Failures

ISIS’ success against the Kurdish Peshmerga highlights the failure of US Middle Eastern policy.  Our actions may have been better than nothing, or in some cases worse than nothing, but in any case they were not worth the cost.  Iraq and Afghanistan, where we fought hot wars, are absolute disasters.  We destroyed Iraq when we killed Saddam Hussein and Paul Bremmer disbanded the Iraqi army and ordered the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government.  In our Congress, Republicans have been screaming to do the same thing to Syria’s Assad.  They want to kill Assad and give military aid to his ISIS enemy which is killing everyone it doesn’t like in Iraq.  The Republicans and Obama worked together with the Europeans to kill Kaddafi and shove Libya into a rapid descent into a chaotic hell, killing an American ambassador in the process.  We didn’t kill Egypt’s Mubarek, but we did get him deposed, putting Egypt through years of turmoil, first under the Muslim Brotherhood and now under al-Sisi.

We didn’t create all of this instability.  Saddam, Mubarek and Kaddafi were all getting old and were going to have to leave in a few years.  We moved up that transition, but in retrospect we did not provide for a good transition; they have all gotten worse rather than better.  If we had left these leaders to their own devices, they might have arranged for a more stable government succession, or maybe not.  But for us, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives have been largely wasted.    The country that has probably gone through its transition better than the others is Tunisia, where we have been the least active.

ISIS’ savage, inhuman conduct in Iraq and Syria illustrate how awful our opponents in the Middle East are, but maybe this is neither the time nor the place for us to intervene in what is a regional conflict.

Of course, while all this is going on, the Israelis and Gazans are still fighting each other.  The Israelis face the same moral dilemma that the US does in trying to deal with this Middle East problem.  The more children and non-combatants Israel kills, the more horrendous it , and Jews in general, appear to the world.  The real anti-Semites are the Israelis; they are besmirching the reputations of all Jews everywhere.  When Jews invoke the Holocaust on behalf of Israel, it is an insult to the Holocaust, and makes Israelis look like foul hypocrites.

Oren WSJ Op-Ed on Zionism

I am not convinced by the WSJ op-ed of former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren that Zionism is or was a good thing.  He has a lot to say about how wonderful Israel is economically and politically, but he ignores the most important aspect of Zionism, the creation of Israel.  He also glosses over the fact that Israel’s wonderful democracy treats a number of people very badly, starting with the Palestinians in Gaza.  Gaza is not a country, but most Gazans are not Israeli citizens.  This is a “democracy” with a heavy strain of apartheid or at least very poor treatment of second class residents.

The problem goes back to Israel’s founding.  It was one of the first acts of the new United Nations after World War II, but I think it has turned out to be one of the worst UN mistakes.  The Palestinians were living in Palestine, albeit under some kind of British protectorate, rather than as an independent nation.  Nevertheless, the Jews had not lived in Palestine as a nation for at least 1,000 years.  It is as if someone came to your house and said, “My great-grandfather used to live in this house 100 years ago; I’m taking it back.  Get out!”  The Jews claim they have title to the land because God gave it to them 4,000 years ago, but I’m not sure that non-Jews have to take this title at face value.  Jesus, Paul and Peter made the Jewish God available to Christians; so, it’s not clear that the Jews are still the only people chosen by God.  And what about other gods, the Muslim God for example?   I don’t think the Palestinians agree that the Jews are God’s only chosen people, even if the United Nations said they were.

If the Jews are God’s chosen people and the Palestinians (and everybody else) are not, they have God’s approval to slaughter non-Jews occupying the Promised Land, and that’s what they have been doing.  But if this is truly a racial thing, how many Jews today are blood descendants of Abraham?  Do converts also acquire God’s permission to slaughter infidels on the Promised Land?  Is the right to slaughter non-Jews in the Promised Land acquired by race or religion?  Or was it simply granted by the UN’s creation of the state of Israel?

Zionism predates the Holocaust, but Israel is inextricable tied to the Holocaust.  It’s unlikely that the UN would have created Israel if it had not been for the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust.  To some extent the UN said, “Let the Palestinians make reparations for what Hitler did to the Jews.”  Not surprisingly, the Palestinians were not too happy about being designated to pay Europe’s debt.

The bottom line: I’m not convinced that Zionism is/was a good thing.  Israel may be the most democratic country in the Middle East, but given the Jews history, it should be more  understanding and forgiving of the hardships of the countries surrounding it.  The Jews are criticized (with justification) for meekly walking into the death camps, with some exceptions, such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising.  In Israel they fought to preserve Israel from Arab attacks like they never did to defend themselves in Europe.  But now they begin to become the oppressors, appearing to be getting revenge for being oppressed in Europe.  Thus Zionism begins to look like a way to get revenge, not a way to establish a Jewish nation.  And as the Israeli Jews lose the high moral ground, Zionism loses the high moral ground and becomes just some kind of racist, oppressive regime like those under which the Jews suffered for centuries in Europe.

Putin, Obama, Reagan, Gorbachev and the INF Treaty

The US allegation that Russia is violating the INF Treaty limiting intermediate nuclear forces comes at a worrisome time with the unrest in Ukraine already roiling European waters.  From Russia, intermediate range weapons threaten Europe rather than the US, which can only be reached by longer range, strategic weapons.  It is probably to Putin’s advantage to make Western Europe think twice about whether he is really serious about building a new cruise missile that threatens them, and puts Obama in the position of possibly looking weak if he doesn’t react strongly.

No doubt the Republicans will wax nostalgic for Reagan who negotiated the INF agreement with Gorbachev.  However, in Putin, Obama has a much stronger and wilier opponent than Reagan had in Gorbachev.  Gorbachev was interested in bringing Russia in from the cold and warming up to the West.  He responded when Reagan taunted him with “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  Would Reagan have gotten the same response if he had said in earlier years, “Mr. Stalin, tear down this wall,” or today, “Mr. Putin, tear down this wall.”  Putin sees Gorbachev as a failed, wimpy leader who gave away Russia’s international position.  He doesn’t want to give away Ukraine, as Gorbachev gave away most Soviet satellite countries.  The losses of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are particularly grating to Putin.  If Putin thinks Gorbachev gave away the store, he may be strongly opposed to doing the same thing in Ukraine.

The desire of the majority of Ukrainians, and particularly those of western Ukraine to join the West and the EU is understandable and laudatory.  However, they may be victims of the history of Ukraine and Russia, just as are many Russians who desire stronger ties with the West than Putin does.  It is not irrelevant that the Russian nation was created in Kiev about 1,000 years ago, before the rise of Moscow and St. Petersburg.  While the loss of some former Soviet satellites, particularly some of the “stans” to the south is more like the UK’s loss of its colonies, the loss of Ukraine is more like the UK’s loss of Scotland.  The divorce may come, but not without some wailing and gnashing of teeth, in both cases.  Although a replay of “Braveheart” is unlikely in Scotland, war remains a possibility in Ukraine.  Putin would no doubt like to keep control of Kiev, the birthplace of mother Russia, but if he finds this too challenging, he try for a land corridor to Crimea by annexing some of eastern Ukraine which favors Russian over the West.  On one of the political talk shows this morning, New Yorker editor David Remnick pointed out that there is still a lot of old Soviet heavy industry left in eastern Ukraine, another incentive for Putin to try to hang on to it.  

In any case, Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech is largely irrelevant.  It was made to a weaker Russian leader at a time when Russia was in great turmoil.  Russia may have lost ground economically and industrially since Gorbachev’s time, but Putin wants to reverse that trend, and keeping at least part of Ukraine may be important to that objective.  Obama has a much more formidable opponent.