Letter 135: a letter to President Trump

"You have to think anyway, so why not think big?"

-- President Donald Trump

"Oh, good grief..."

-- Charlie Brown, American philosopher

The Honorable Donald J. Trump

President

The United States of America

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20500

Friday, January 20, 2017

Dear President Trump,

First of all, I confess to being surprised not only by your nomination, but also your election. Accordingly, I congratulate you for both feats. Mr President, you led a repudiation of what many view as a corrupt establishment at the beck and call of Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Republican counterparts of Senator / Secretary Clinton (e.g., Governors Kasich and Bush) stumbled badly and quickly in the primaries.

Mr President, you and the other ‘change’ candidates from four peripheral parties or movements obtained four million more votes than did the quintessential candidate of the establishment. Your clarion call of ‘Lock her up!’ was inappropriate at best and yet it engaged people across the Republic sufficiently for you to eke out a victory in the Electoral College. While your hard-earned victory was far from the mandate you claim, it serves as a wake-up call to people across our country.

Nevertheless, you are failing to be transparent, Mr President. You have failed to acknowledge the blatant manipulation of the Trump family charity to pay down personal debts. Mr President, you have yet to release your tax returns, at least to a bi-partisan group of Congressional leaders meeting in a confidential setting. Sir, you continue to defy not only the will and sense of the Congress but the tradition of Presidents freeing themselves from competing personal financial interests prone to corruption.

Specifically, Mr President, Article-1; Section-9; Clause-8 of the Constitution clarifies that, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Such off-shore emoluments may include subsidized interest rates, waived fees and / or permissive loan terms from foreign banks, especially state-owned banks, on which you have built at least a significant part of your personal wealth. Such subsidized borrowing costs, increase the cash-flows generated by your projects. That incremental increase of cash flows from subsidized costs, Mr President, would arguably represent an emolument.

Mr President, you may argue that private banks or investors based overseas do not violate that clause designed to prevent corruption since they are non-governmental actors. Many, perhaps most, of these lenders are based in countries with authoritarian régimes. Under such régimes, companies that surpass certain asset levels – as your banks almost certainly do – are subject to the highly intrusive and influential scrutiny of their operations by these régimes. In a sense, such ‘private’ financiers are de facto state-managed entities.

Mr President, your insistence that you need not be bound by the uniform practice of governmental ethics, in place for at least a half-century, remains troubling. The preliminary evidence adduced against you may indicate the commission of an impeachable offense from Day-1. Mr President, this situation is not just another law-suit to contest but your personal contest of the rule-of-law. Please take a page out of your predecessor’s play-book and stand tall for integrity as the Spirit of the law and not as a matter of law.

Sir, as a fellow Republican, I request that you apologize publicly to President Obama for the calumny you have directed his way, starting with your utterly bogus accusation about his birth status. Additionally, I request that you apologize publicly to President Peña Nieto for your heated rhetoric against his country and the people he serves, especially as you look to be following President Obama’s policy of deporting jailed (likely criminal) illegal aliens.

The next stride toward reconciliation is to visit a leading Islamic Cultural center to assure the great majority of our Muslim compatriots, who practice and actively promote peaceful citizenship, that they, too, are afforded the protections of other Americans or resident aliens of good standing. As a private citizen, racism was a regrettable luxury; but you are the President, now. 

Lastly, Mr President, I would like to indicate my support for many of your trade and economic policies. Several of your foreign policy ideas are also refreshing. Please, Sir, consider taking the following actions.

• Instituting an investment tax credit will help spur basic manufacturing.
• Going slow on dismantling the Affordable Care Act may indicate that only a few changes are required:

1. amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to exclude exemptions with respect to health insurance;
2. permit inter-state sales of health-care without repealing McCarran-Ferguson;
3. allow British, Canadian and AustraZealand carriers to compete;
4. limit punitive damages under law suits and cap pay-outs under mal-practice claims;
5. penalize doctors for practicing defensive medicine;
6. provide or subsidize end-of-life insurance;
7. federalize malpractice insurance; as well as,
8. eliminate tax breaks related to the provision of health insurance by corporations.

• Waiving all IRS penalties outstanding for early retirement fund withdrawals after 2007, when people's net worth plummeted, needed to care for elderly parents and / or sending children to college will benefit the middle class.
• Deferring tax cuts in favor of refunding penalty payments made on early retirement withdrawals between 2007 and 2012 will benefit the middle class.

Mr President, my fervent hope is that you succeed. Much of that will rest with you and the example you choose to set for the rest of us.

Thank you and best regards,

Ned
Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA PMP
Birmingham, Alabama.

Letter #134: a thank you letter to President Obama

"Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake."

                                                                         -- Saint Matthew; Chapter 5; Verse 11

"The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on."

-- President Barack Obama

The Honorable Barack H. Obama

President

The United States of America

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20500

Friday, January 20, 2017

Dear President Obama,

Today, I write you as an American who is deeply ambivalent about some of the policies you have pursued and still who gives you a well-merited ‘two-thumbs-up’ rating. Why? The answer is simple, I am now old enough and have been around long enough to know that the majority of those ideas I deem innovative today will either be refuted in the short-to-medium term or change over the longer term.

Elements of your troubling foreign policy – in Syria and Ukraine --provide apt examples of why my ambivalence has not faded. For years, Mr President, I have come to fear that your behavior appears to be one of appeasement in the face of direct assaults on democracies – whether in place now or inchoate – in Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well as one of turning a blind eye toward appalling carnages, such as those in in Syria and México. 

Mr President, I truly do not believe you are weak or prone to appeasement when I remember to recall the following factors. 

1. The interventionist ideas I support, as opposed to yours, are really nothing more than best-case scenarios. 
2. Mr President, I supported the invasion of Iraq, a war of aggression that failed to follow its evident best-case script; you tried another path for obvious reasons.
3. You probably did not favor interceding in Libya but deferred to your Secretary of State and your top National Security Council expert on multi-lateral initiatives.
4. When the Libya initiative collapsed under the weight of mission creep, you harboured an understandable skepticism of the policy prima donnas and chose to follow your less hawkish instincts. 
5. Though tearing up the Buda Pest memorandum and failing to intervene decisively and early in Ukraine appears to be an act similar to the Munich accord of 1938, the American people clearly did not support risking war over Crimea.

In Syria, the intervention many of us viewed as worth the risk may well have landed us in another military quagmire through mission creep with thousands of sorties and boots on the ground to push it along. Nonetheless, Mr President you have taken action – a fact that many of your gainsayers (e.g., me) fail to note -- in Iraq and Syria, while simultaneously ejecting a Shi´ite strongman in Baghdad.

Additionally, Mr President, you have also displayed the diplomacy, founded on humility, to defer to Russia’s leadership in removing the chemical weapon stockpiles of President Assad, the dictator of Syria. There are other policies that I could criticize, Mr President. That is not the point of this letter. My mission here is to tell you why I give you two-thumbs-up. Policy has little to do with my assessment as admitted earlier.

The fine example you set each day, Mr President, has made you an incontestably decent leader, one that makes me proud of my country. And, for that, Sir, I thank you. Mr President, I sincerely hope your successor understands this reality of modern leadership by example. There are so many trait-based actions of yours that I admire so deeply that I can merely cite a few with enthusiasm:

• the first significant attempt at reform of a dysfunctional health-care distribution and provisioning system;
• your humility in calling on the rest of us not to rush to reaction on instances of police violence or shootings of police and children;
• working in soup kitchens and veterans’ homes on holidays;
• your compassion in pardoning Bradley / Chelsea Manning, a young person driven almost to suicide by twenty-three months of solitary confinement before facing a military tribunal for charges already confessed;
• engaging us in meaningful discourse on the trade-off between liberty and security, thus implicitly showing us respect as citizens;
• providing a consistently conciliatory and reasoned view amid bitter partisan debate;
• your gracious demeanor toward President George W. and Mrs Bush;
• taking decisive, if measured, steps toward helping those who are most vulnerable such as LGBTs, Muslims, undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, etc.; as well as,
• so very much more, Mr President.

While your record is mixed, I fear that you will never be fully appreciated as a great man, which you most assurèdly are. History tends to hang the greatness of Presidents on their performance during crises – often wars or economic cataclysms. As far as I can see, you have not displayed such high-profile leadership. What matters here is why you haven’t.

Mr President, many reasonable people will point toward your work to revive the American economy as proof-positive of your leadership in a crisis management mode. Unfortunately, I can not agree with that assessment. Again, I do not want to pursue that thread. Far more important, my political party, the Republican Party, dominated Congress throughout much of your tenure.

lnstead of answering your repeated and conciliatory overtures for compromise, these Republicans did everything they could to undermine your opportunity for greatness. Mr President, I do not understand how these political rivals can put their private – often Tea Party – interests so far ahead of the public good that they conspire to deprive you of your opportunity to lead us – all of us – forward toward a brighter day.

What my thoughts really boil down to, Mr President, is my awe in your teaching us how to behave with civility and restraint in the face of vituperation, much of it racist or implicitly anti-Muslim (based on your name sounding like a Muslim name). Frankly, Sir, your greatness lies in what you did not do:

• abuse your powers to harass Republican politicians, particularly those of the Tea Party;
• lash out at the increasingly palpable racism directed at you – and other minority officials in your Administration;
• throw Mexicans and LGBTs under the proverbial bus; as well as,
• compromise your integrity at the expense of the FBI Director during the campaign.

All that is to say, Mr President: you provided 318 million people with adult supervision. My fondest hope remains that future historians will detect these subtleties of your greatness. In closing, Sir, I salute your service to our country as well as that of the elegant and lovely First Lady.

Thank you and best regards,

Ned
Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA PMP
Birmingham, Alabama.