Monthly Archives: October 2018

Pretty Good Work if You Can Get It

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As surprising as this may sound, not everything on the internet is true.

And one of the untrue things that I am really tired of seeing is the repeated claim that members of Congress get their full pay for life and that they have some kind of fabulous, free health care option that the rest of us don’t have.

Twenty-five seconds of research can dispel either myth.  Here are a few facts.

  1. Members of Congress (Representatives and Senators) qualify for pensions based on their age and years of service, just like any other federal employee. Their system is generous, but they absolutely DO NOT receive their full pay for life, as some social media posters apparently believe.
  2. To receive a pension, a member of Congress must serve at least five years. To collect their full pension, members must be at least 62 years of age, or be 50 with 25 years of service.
  3. Vesting after five years is not uncommon in public sector retirement plans. With only five years of service, the member can’t collect anything until age 62, and then will collect about 8.5 percent of their final pay.
  4. Since 1987, Congressional pensions have been managed by the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) which covers, unremarkably, most federal employees. FERS is comprised of Social Security, basic annuity, and a Thrift Savings Plan investment account.
  5. The actual calculation of a member’s annuity is based on the average of the highest three years of the member’s salary, which is multiplied by 1.7 percent for each year of service. (1.7 percent for the first twenty years, 1.o percent for any additional years.)
  6. Pensions are capped at 80 percent of a member’s final salary, regardless of the number of years of service.
  7. Members of Congress are required to purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
  8. Their employer (the taxpayers) pays 72 percent of the cost. The members pay 28 percent.
  9. They can choose from the same plans as anyone else in the capital region.
  10. Unlike you, however, after paying an annual fee, they can visit the Office of the Attending Physician.
  11. Also unlike you, they can receive free care from military medical facilities within the capital region.
  12. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, members of Congress will be enrolled in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which covers nearly 4 million federal employees and is itself a pretty good plan.

With the possible exception of the military care option, Congressional pension and health care benefits are very similar to the benefits other federal employees and employees of large private sector firms receive.  They have a good deal, but it is nowhere near as good as some people apparently believe.

June 1, 2018

Nobody Thought We Would be Here

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As the NBA Finals approach, the home-town Cavaliers are an epic underdog, which, if you know anything at all about their season, is totally unsurprising and spectacularly well-deserved.

So in the event of the expected outcome – a crushing Cavaliers defeat – we should at least be spared the tiresome spectacle of newly-minted champions puffing up their  victory with the standard “Nobody expected us to be here” trope.

It is apparently a requirement that after every professional sports championship, at least one member of the winning team has to call out the doubters – and there are always doubters – with some champagne-soaked spiel about how nobody believed in them, nobody thought they could win, nobody expected them to be here, blah, blah, blah.

For some folks winning the title isn’t quite enough.  They have to inflate it with some nonsense about how they overcame historic difficulties and obstacles, even if their team was heavily favored and they enjoyed huge advantages in in resources, star players, and history.

May 29, 2018

This is Why We Can’t Have Anything Nice

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For a couple of weeks my wife, my daughter, and I enjoyed watching a cardinal family build and tend a nest that was just a few feet from our kitchen window.  My wife especially enjoyed watching the adult birds working together to raise their little family.

But yesterday the nest was destroyed and the hatchings presumably killed by our neighbor’s cat.  The attack was particularly irritating because we had specifically asked our neighbors to keep the cat out of our yard while the cardinals were raising their chicks.

In our little town, cats are not actually permitted to run free.  There is an ordinance prohibiting cats and dogs from being loose.  Of course, this being America, Land of the Free, our neighbors scoffed at the mere suggestion that they should in any way modify their behavior, or their pets’ behavior, in consideration of other persons.  In fact, when my wife asked them to keep the cat indoors – which they are required to do – they became hostile and insulting.

Of course, we see the same selfishness and lack of consideration almost every day when we walk Sammy, our purebred LBD (Little Brown Dog), in the park near our home.  We cannot count the number of times we have been accosted by dogs running loose, even though the park has multiple signs explaining that dogs must be leashed.  We’ve never been seriously attacked, but there have been a lot of anxious moments, for us as well as for Sammy.

Of course, it’s not just pet owners that place their own convenience above the interests of everybody else.  You see it everywhere: neighbors refusing to support a school levy because “my kids are out of school now,”  voters supporting efforts to take healthcare from millions of fellow Americans because ”why should I pay for someone else’s healthcare,” and so on.  But this is not a new problem.

In 1919, in the months before his death, Theodore Roosevelt was planning to run for the presidency again.  A central theme of his intended campaign was to “restore the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.”

May 27, 2018

Roosevelt quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2018.

 

Consistency Counts

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Some Europeans have a reputation among other Europeans for behaving badly on holiday. Germans and the British are sometimes mentioned in this vein. Everyone agrees, however, that Americans do not behave worse away from home; they behave just as badly at home as they do on vacation.

May 26, 2018

Mother’s Day 2018

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In observance of Mother’s Day, we’d like to commend the female cardinal who is zealously guarding her nest right outside our kitchen window.

Over the past few weeks we have watched spellbound as the cardinal pair carefully built a nest just a few feet from our window.  Admittedly, the nest doesn’t look like much.  Apparently, cardinals aren’t the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the avian world.  But it works, and now there are a couple of eggs in there.

Female cardinal on nest.

With eggs to defend, Mrs. Cardinal hardly ever leaves the nest.  And when she does go out, she is back in a few minutes.  Mr. Cardinal also stays close, and he stops by the nest every now and then to see how things are going.

As with everything else, there are two ways to look at this.  One, while Mr. Cardinal is hard at work doing important cardinal stuff, Mrs. Cardinal is home all day sitting around the house.

Or, Mrs. Cardinal is hard at work taking care of the house and the kids all day and night while Mr. Cardinal is out with his bird-brained friends.

Since it’s Mother’s Day, we’ll give Mrs. Cardinal credit for keeping everything running smooth at home.

“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

                                                                – Abraham Lincoln

(Lincoln quote: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/mothersday )

May 13, 2018

A Box of Chocolates

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Like a Foggy Bottom Forrest Gump, American diplomat Joseph C. Grew inadvertently found himself at the very center of two of the most consequential foreign policy efforts in the nation’s history.  From 1912 to 1917, Grew served in the United States embassy in Germany as the U.S. struggled vainly to stay out of the First World War. Twenty years later, as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Grew was a key participant in America’s increasingly desperate attempts to avoid war with Japan.

In the end, of course, German intransigence and Japanese militarism overcame America’s diplomatic exertions, and the nation found itself embroiled in both world wars.

While other American officials served through both pre-war periods, Grew’s presence at the embassies in Berlin and Tokyo in the final days before war is remarkable.

From the start of the First World War in August 1914 until the U.S. declaration of war in 1917, the American government worked tirelessly to keep the U.S. out of the European conflict.  The American public had no desire to enter the war, the U.S. military was completely unprepared, and U.S. vital interests were not obviously threatened. President Woodrow Wilson hoped that by staying out of the conflict America could mediate negotiations that would bring the conflict to a close, achieving peace without victory for all parties, demonstrating the futility of war and leading to an era of collective security maintained by an international organization of nations.

But despite determined American diplomacy, the momentum of events inexorably drew the U.S. into the conflict. Initial U.S. resentment at Britain’s naval blockade was overshadowed by U.S. anger at Germany’s continued use of unrestricted submarine warfare and later by the Zimmerman telegram, which revealed German efforts to enlist Mexico in the war against America.  As a senior aide to Ambassador James W. Gerard, Grew participated in talks with the German Emperor and had a front row seat to the unsuccessful U.S. effort to avoid combat.

Twenty years later, as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Grew again found himself struggling to keep America out of war.  Again, he saw the slow breakdown of the international order and the rise of a militarized, predatory state.  Isolationist, unprepared, and frightened by the rise of Nazi Germany, the United States government sought vainly to avoid or at least postpone conflict with Japan.  Through countless meetings, dinners, conversations, and encounters with Japanese citizens, military officers, and political leaders, Grew sadly witnessed the unstoppable slide to war. From his long experience in the country, Grew understood the motivations and capabilities of Japan. As early as January 1941, he warned the U.S. government that in case of trouble with the United States, Japan planned to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

May 4, 2018

Share this post or die..

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Here we go again. Another social media post challenging us to prove our worthiness by supporting someone else’s favorite cause.

“Who has the courage to share this”

“How many likes can this person get?”

“Which of my friends will post this.”

“If you agree, then share this.”

And my personal favorite: “If you don’t REPOST this, you are the problem.”

Well, I might be the problem, but it isn’t because I failed to repost some uncredited, undated, unsubstantiated social media blast.

To folks inclined to threaten co-inhabitants of the social media universe, here’s a suggestion: If you want people to repost your information, present it in a logical, truthful, and convincing manner.  Credit your sources, support your argument with facts, and refrain from threats or insults. It probably won’t change people’s minds, since no one spends time on social media because they want to actually think, but it will make the internet a nicer place.

May 2, 2018

Ulysses S. Grant and the Ku Klux Klan

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He didn’t free the slaves, but he offered them a glimpse of a better future.

Ulysses S. Grant, who served as president from 1869-1877, is best known as the Union general who finally defeated Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. Grant is also acclaimed for his earlier victories at Ft. Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Grant’s presidency has not been highly regarded, as his two terms were marred by corruption among appointed officials and a faltering economy.

But his reputation is rising.  Grant has always been recognized for his personal honesty, and historians today are increasingly crediting Grant with courage and moral resolve for his efforts to protect the rights of freedmen – freed slaves.

Grant took office following the highly contentious administration of Andrew Johnson. By Grant’s inauguration seven of the eleven Southern states which had formed the Confederacy had been re-admitted to the union and the four remaining states would be re-admitted in 1870. But while southern states rejoined the union, they fiercely resisted efforts by Republicans, both northern and southern, to grant the rights of citizenship to the freed slaves.

Upon taking office Grant began receiving a steady stream of letters begging for federal help in protecting southern blacks and white Republicans from the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations.  Southern Republicans reported that a “reign of terror” was spreading across the south, with blacks and whites being murdered with impunity.

Northern Democrats joined Southern Democrats in opposing any federal action to protect the rights of freedmen, and, of course, the newly formed state governments were dominated by whites who were happy to use intimidation and violence to preserve the pre-war social order.  Meanwhile, Northern Republicans were exhausted by the unending sectional strife and were increasingly content to ignore Southern depredations.

Grant quickly recognized that the governments of the southern states were unwilling to protect blacks and southern Republicans, but he did not believe that current federal law gave him the authority to intervene.  So, he sought and received additional powers through legislation, including the 1871 “Act to Enforce the Provisions of the 14th Amendment,” popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The Act gave the federal government the power to prosecute state officials for civil rights violations in federal courts and to suspend habeus corpus when state authorities were unable or unwilling to protect civil rights.

Passage of the law gave Grant the tools, but he still needed to supply the moral and political will to use that power. That he did so is to his everlasting credit. Grant suspended habeus corpus in nine counties of South Carolina and dispatched federal troops and marshals. Federal forces identified and arrested hundreds of KKK terrorists, while many others fled the state.  Grant’s actions broke the power of the Klan and other violent groups in South Carolina and the demonstration of federal power and resolve crippled Klan efforts across the south. Political violence in South Carolina and throughout the south declined dramatically.

But while overt violence was reduced, preserving white supremacy remained the highest priority of local governments throughout the south, and they eventually succeeded in disenfranchising black voters and imposing a brutal regime of legal segregation. Black Americans in the former Confederacy wouldn’t regain the basic rights of citizenship until the federal government again stepped forward in the 1960’s.

Grant’s impact was recognized by many of his contemporaries, including Frederick Douglas, who wrote, “To [Grant] more than any other man the negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party; hence his place as its head was given to timid men, and the country was allowed to drift, instead of stemming the current with stalwart arms.”

Douglas quote:  http://thepresidentsatbigmo.blogspot.com/2007/10/number-18-ulysses-s-grant.html

Grant photo: Library of Congress / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg

April 27, 2018