How to Handle Congress: A Plan for Amb. Pickering

Retired Amb. Thomas Pickering wants to testify before Congress on the report that he and retired Adm. Mullen oversaw on the State Department’s review of the attack on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. There is a point of contention between the committee lead by Rep. Issa wants closed-door testimony and has relented to allow public hearings only after a closed-door session. Pickering does not believe that it is appropriate or in the public’s interest to have the closed-door interview prior to the public. This contention on what the ‘proper’ course of action is has now ratcheted up to Issa issuing a subpoena for Pickering to be deposed in private before any public hearing.

Issa might have the power to compel such an interview but Pickering has the ability to control the communication. He should request that the interview be taped, or at least transcribed verbatim, that he receive an unedited and untouched copy of the recording, and that he would insist upon the right to use the information in that recording as he sees fit in insuring that his views and statements are properly and accurately represented by any individual who makes claims related to them. There are many advantages to this for Pickering, some obvious and some not so. On the obvious side would be his ability to clarify any representation made that is either factually inaccurate or lacking in sustentative intellectual comprehensive skills on the part of an individual who could not understand his testimony. In another context, it would permit him to assess such incongruous interpretations as indicative of someone who is either duplicitous or less than intellectually up to the task required or expected of a representative of the people.

On the less obvious side, the recorded testimony would become an ideal tool to be used by Pickering in conducting his public hearing testimony, assuming that after the closed-door interview the public hearings were not deferred or cancelled. That possibility of the public hearings being postponed for the equivalent of an infinite amount of time would then permit Pickering to conduct the equivalent of a public hearing independent of the Congressional committee.

Now Issa and the Committee may not agree to the recording of the closed-door proceedings, granting those recording an official status; but there are recourses to that also. You just need to be flexible and creative.

Rather than viewing Issa’s committee demands for a closed-door hearing, Pickering should be welcoming it. People are to often assessing situations in a much narrower context than they should. When the conditions are not to your satisfaction, that is the time when you need to step back and expand the strategies and tactics that you employ in dealing with the problem facing you. When you see people testifying before Congress, more often than not, they are of the opinion that Congress holds all the power in those situations. For that statement to be true, Congress would also have to be better informed, more knowledgeable and smarter than the people being questioned. Statistically speaking you would assume that that should only be true about half the time; and with our familiarity with Congress I think that most people would probably assess that that would be true less than ten-percent of the time.

Engineering Medicare and Medicaid

Politics as usual has corrupted, distorted and damaged the well-being of the healthcare system. Now don’t jump to your particular partisan view that this has been done by the Democratic/Republican party that you automatically, reflectively and unthinkingly attribute all evils in the world to. Both entities have through their active agents served as the viral vectors to distribute and incubate the deadly political pathogens that infect the healthcare system, policies and participants. So it can come as no surprise that the carcinogenic consequences of these malignly mutated muddleheaded agents of waste will lead inevitably to the demise of the healthcare environment and societal goals that these same malcontents are responsible to the country’s citizenry for promoting.

You must by now be fully aware of the identities of these toxic agents or at least a number of them as some are rarely seen and often go undetected and undiagnosed even as and after they damage the body of the healthcare system. So what are we to do with Congress, our political parties and the political industry (lobbyist being only one facet of this) that are spreading their epidemic diseases to the nation’s healthcare? How do we triage the damage and the risks that they are imposing on us all?

The answer of course is that we need to change the carrier and the carrier system of these destructive pathogens: Congress. The change will require American voters to seek and support only candidates that are willing to not be for or against healthcare, but rather that are committed to imposing requirements on our Government’s programs and policies that produce efficient and effective healthcare, that use informed and intelligent methods and approaches that guide and adapt the administration of the components of the system, and that are indifferent to the partisan views by favoring and rewarding achievement over adherence to a political view.

Healthcare can be better, cheaper and more vital as a US industry and social value than any currently proposed or current program is capable of being. We are watching healthcare suffer from the indifference and carelessness typical of endeavors managed by Congress.

The Wondering Whiz-herd of Washington

Sometimes it’s easy to relate an allegoric story and its characters to its intended subject. Sometimes it’s not even recognized that the characters in a story are meant to be symbolic representatives of anything.  So when attempting to use a story or its characters to convey an allegoric relationship to another context there is the potential for the misapplication of the intended dimension of the character’s quality with the perceived dimension. Despite the hazard of such mismatched meanings between writer and reader, the attempt is justified on the “nothing ventured” principle.

As we journey down the crumbling brick road to the infamous ‘Embattled City’ of DC, we encounter many tales about the denizens of that city and of the strange and damaged creatures that inhabit the land of US. The citizens of US look to a collection of individuals collectively known as the Whiz-herd of Congress to provide the solutions to all their problems. These Whiz-herd representatives of the people are themselves characteristic of the creatures in US, and we gain an understanding of the US by understanding these Whiz-herds themselves.

What personalities, abilities and attitudes then do we find amongst the Whiz-herds revealing the explanations for the failures, dysfunction and problem producing actions that they impart upon the nation?

The Whiz-herd includes a number and a variety of scarecrow types. They range from those whose standard persona are the harbingers of doom to those who, like the reeds that famously stuff their heads, bend and twist with every wind that blows through the political fields. There is not much difference between the motivations at work within these effigies of political ineptitude that burn so brightly within their Party. Whether these Whiz-herds are fanning the flames of fear or of hatred or are simplistically following from the front of their constituencies’ anxieties about and toward the future and change, they are doing so with the intelligence and rationality that would be expected from someone with a brain made of desiccated pasture fodder. It is this deficiency in insight, comprehension and reasoning that most informs us about these Whiz-herds’ inability to serve the public and accomplish productive, efficient and important service to the nation. Can we really be astonished about the non-functioning of Congress when considering the composition of the compost that most assuredly is fermenting within their cranium and which, like its gardening counterpart, will only be useful when deeply buried within the ground and far out of sight.

The scarecrow dimension of the Whiz-herds is not the only or even necessarily the dominant characteristic among our members of Congress. There are plenty of Whiz-herds with the tin-man property incorporated into their construction.  Those Whiz-herds most embodying these mechanical and rigid approaches to every situation and problem are the proud and pompous promoters of unfeeling compassionless non-solutions that reflect their stifled visions of America.  And the public suffers from these Whiz-herd solutions that are built as inflexible and intolerant programs into the operating system of our society inflicting the dehumanizing philosophies imprinted upon the central processor of these tin-men.

Continuing in this allegoric line of references are the cowardly lions of the Whiz-herd coterie. We will recognize the bellowing, blustering, bombastic bullies who believe that their pontificating positions of power in the pride endow them with an automatic authority that is part of the natural order of the world. They operate from a mind-set of fear either in themselves or their supporters which they translate into the need to attack every movement or shadow in the hope that it will scare off anything that might require real courage to stand up and challenge the established herd or Whiz-herd mentality.  These lionized representatives who cower before a media poll statistic that to act against would require them to fight for an idea or ideal that serves the nation’s interests but directly challenges the inferred public position of any group from which they receive support.  We find in our safari through the Congressional savannas these officials who tremble before a pledge requiring their submission to the alpha-males that control the pride. And so are left with Whiz-herds who can only operate within the pack’s political policies because any attempt to challenge the status quo would mean actually taking a risk of becoming a powerful king of the political jungle.

It is from these qualities and personalities that we are left with the Congress of Wondering Whiz-herds. Those purveyors of politics that are more involved in misdirections, sleights of hand, and flash over substance displays that are performing their role not to serve but to placate, entertain and deceive the public so that they can continue their tenure in the halls of power.

So don’t look behind that curtain and witness the Whiz-herds’ true nature. If you start examining what the Whiz-herds are doing or are not doing, you will begin to realize that they are not doing the peoples’ business, they are not solving our problems, they are not leading or protecting us. The Whiz-herds are desperately working to prevent anyone from demonstrating that they don’t have the answers and can’t address the real national problems.

The denizens of US must look away from the media theater of personalities and pointless principles of platitudes, and stay out of the enticing political poppy-fields cultivated by our Republican and Democratic parties. The time has come for a great political tornado to rid the halls of Congress of these Whiz-herds and return us to a land of the people, by the people and for the people. We have always been able to return there, we just seem to have forgotten that we must do it.

Principles for Dealing with an Issue

The “fiscal cliff” provides a national stage on which the Democratic or Republican party could demonstrate their skills and abilities for leading the nation through a crisis during difficult times. Given the starring role opportunity that this dramatic production offers you might think that someone in one of the parties could rise to the occasion and take on the leading role. But it seems that the current casting auditions have only brought forth political actors that are only able to mimic and re-interpret the same old styles that past politicians have displayed before; however, the current contenders for effective leaders are not even able to bring off those reprisal roles. Lacking energy, devoid of passion and replete with uninspired dialogue these inept performers are failing not only to put on a good show; they are failing to serve the public interests and to lead the nation forward.

Pivotal to these failures is I suspect that they don’t have the training or tools for solving problems in their own careers’ chosen arenas nor any other arena from which they can attempt to transfer learned skills. The absence of effective methods and techniques in our political leaders may not be that surprising in as much as the general public seems caught up in showing no recognition that our leaders are trapped in nonproductive, incompetent and uninspired routine approaches for dealing with the nation’s most important issue. Just like the politicians, the public and the media by and large seem to think that the most effective technique for addressing the issue is to blame the ‘other’ side.

In an effort to help our ‘leaders’?, here are a couple of rules that they can use to change the dynamic in the problem-solving or as they refer to it – negotiations.

First, open up the next negotiation discussion with an acceptance of “total and complete blame”. To help the other side get out from under the trap of seeking some way to make sure that they aren’t blamed for anything that has happened before, just tell them that “It’s all my fault. So no one needs to worry about whom to blame, or how to find someone to blame. Everyone can blame me.” This will either result in everyone being stunned and not knowing what to say, or someone may try and come to your rescue and state that it’s not all your fault. Stop that person immediately and insist that there is no point is further discussion on whose fault it is or isn’t, you are taking on that responsibility. Now this is where you follow-up with the next step in move the negotiations forward.

Now that the “blame game” is off the table (note: you may have to remind some folks occasionally that you’ve already taken the blame so let’s not go back there to revisit a resolved issue), you ask if the group can now agree to work together to find a solution to the problem. It’s the problem that is important after all, and that’s where the focus needs to be.

This is where the more difficult rule comes in. In working on the issue and the proposals and positions that are still points of discussion, the leader needs to step back and let people discuss and argue their various plan and recommendations for a little bit. At some point it will be clear that the group has either settled on a path forward or are still caught in some impasse. If they have a consensus then make sure you understand and agree with it, if you do then simply ask: “So do we have an agreed solution?” If you don’t support the decision then ask some well thought out questions to see where there are disconnects with your position. At this point it’s up to you to frame a proposal that will resolve those disconnects. If you can’t get a negotiated settlement then you need to consider how to offer an ‘If Then - If not Then” solution.

At this point if you know what you’re doing you have what you need and a solution.

A Promise, Not Some Inane Pledge

With Congress and the administration so bumfuzzled about how to achieve a reasoned and rational agreement (expressly avoided using the sane and intelligent ‘compromise’ terminology) for addressing the self-imposed fiscal cliff, the American public needs to stand-up for their interests and make a promise to themselves. While “failure is not an option” on the fiscal cliff makes a nice sound-bite, I don’t really have any confidence that Congress (the Constitutionally responsible player in this game) will find a way off the cliff. Therefore, I think every voter should make a promise to their self should Congress fail yet again to do what the country needs; that is Congress must take some action to address the crisis besides inaction.

Now I also don’t believe that Congress is capable or competent enough to actually take the right actions, but I do at least expect them to try within their limited abilities to make the efforts necessary to address the nation’s issues, particularly those that affect the economy is such basic ways. Congress must decide and deliver a federal budget, tax policy and a program reform plan to resolve the budget versus spending gaps caused by their approved budget. If they don’t or can’t do that then what exactly are our Congressional representatives actually doing for you?

So what is the promise that you need to make to yourself? Well, be they Democrat or Republican (or an Independent) you need to promise to not support, fund or vote to return them to office in their respective next election cycle. You should make it abundantly clear to any party official that you come in contact with that you will not and are not going to vote for that member. It’s ok to vote and support another member of your preferred political party if you are so inclined to what to be affiliated with a political party; but not the current member.

If you do make that promise to yourself, then you should convey that promise to your current representatives in Congress; be they a member of your party or not. Just like your employers would do at your job, you should let under-performing workers know that their jobs are at risk due to poor-performance but that with a demonstration of improvement their jobs might not be at risk.

This isn’t a pledge that someone else defines and dictates to you. It’s a responsibility you have to yourself. You decide, you assess and you act. You don’t give money and power to someone else who will use your influence to their ends. It’s almost like being a free individual who is willing to participate in their democratic process.

Aspiring to Not Expire with the Expiring Tax-Cuts

Holly tax-rate Tax-man! The Bush-era tax-cuts are going to expire unless Congress does something.

We can conclude from this that even in Congress the laws of physics hold despite their wishes, desires and efforts in hoping that they don’t. There are cause and effect relationships in the actions or the in-actions that Congress takes, and time mores forward in its unrelenting and uni-directional passage into the future. And the expiration of the tax-cuts that expire on January 1^st will happen if Congress doesn’t explicitly act to re-create or restructure them.

But just because the current law expires and the tax-rates will rise doesn’t mean that the consequences are fixed and unalterable. The expiration date is a point in time on which the conditions are set to change the rules, but they are not violating any physical laws. Light will still travel at a constant speed in the universe. The hardships that the tax-rates would impose are only required to happen if Congress does nothing. Yes, Congress usually does nothing, at least nothing useful and nothing that serves the nation; but in this case Congress has to do something if they are correct that increase in taxes will be more harmful to the economy than taking some steps to mitigate that situation.

Now as long as we are going to expect Congress to act to some advantageous purpose for the country, we might as well expect Congress to act intelligently. It is a lot to expect, but with some help Congress might be able to react in a manner that will at least feign intelligence.

If the tax-rates are allowed to rise and go into effect on January 2^nd 2013, the impact to tax-payers is still capable of being adjusted. Congress could pass a tax-rate bill on January 7^th that reduced taxes to levels lower than they had been, to the same level as they were, or somewhere else. Net result is that tax-payers don’t have to be punished because Congress couldn’t get their job done.

So why can’t Congress just avoid the expiration boogey-man issue altogether and pass the same bill before the deadline? Isn’t this the simple solution? Well, no actually it’s not. To pass a bill that will pass before the deadline requires that compromises be made between the parties; and to some this is a dirty word. So before hand the leaders are afraid of their backers being unhappy with Congress acting responsibly. Because their electorate is no more intelligent than Congress itself is.

It’s much easier to wait for the current law to expire, create a ‘now you have the actual problem’ condition and reacting to the problem rather than just to the threat. Now to an intelligent person this is a stupid strategy, but to Congress this is one of the smartest things that they can deal with. What politician would have a problem promoting how they championed the restoration of a new tax-cut policy once the public is actually exposed to the taxes that they so don’t want to have to pay. Additionally, those in Congress who refuse to allow any accommodation to higher rates for any segment of the public do not have any ground to stand on once the higher rates are a fait accompli.

How do you avoid the fiscal cliff? Simple, you turn it into step toward your strategic objective.

Fiscal Cliff for Idiots (Think Congress Here)

The politicians are franticly seeking a path for avoiding the ‘fiscal cliff’ so that they can be the saviors of the nation. Republicans are beginning to explain how they are willing to consider abandoning their pledge against any new taxes in the context of thinking about raising the tax-rates as being their duty and responsibility to the nation and the public. Democrats are making their case for having to address changes to the entitlement programs that are a major factor in America’s spending deficit. The entitlement programs include not only Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; but also the Defense Department budget.

The politicians are ranting and raving about the impending disaster, catastrophe and Armageddon that will surely destroy the economic recovery, plunge the nation into a recession and produce wide-spread misery and suffering across the nation. Yes they are up to their old tricks, preparing the masses for the political brinksmanship that they will tout simultaneously as both a partisan and bi-partisan victory that they managed to accomplish to save us all.

 Now here’s the part that the politicians aren’t promoting. The fiscal cliff was the bi-partisan agreement reached last year in order to prevent the doom and gloom scenario that we were all collectively facing. And by the way the financial world has indicated that the prior cliff that the politicians caused because well their just incompetent cost the country even more in interest charges due to their inability to compromise on a good solution. The politicians aren’t explaining that this is a crisis of their own making and is a direct result of their not finding solutions to the obvious problems because their ‘principles’ and ‘values’ get in the way. In other words, they can’t do their jobs because they have to adhere to some strict code that is at odds with their duty and responsibility to the country and the people.

So let’s examine one of the ‘principles’ that prevents success: no increase in tax rates (even for a small select group of citizens). Many of the Republicans took a pledge to not raise taxes as a central tenet of their political philosophy and commitment. Now some Republicans are explaining that they may have to terminate their commitment to their prior oath to this principle, for the good of the nation. Considerations of some limited increase in tax rates may be necessary to address the problems facing the country. This would all be reasonable if there wasn’t a flaw in the logic. Now perhaps they will claim and argue that there is no flaw, no error or self-denial at work here; but it’s not what they think or claim at this point, it’s what you think.

In 2011, Congress passed the Sequestration bill that committed Congress to reduce the 2013 budget if they don’t come up with a plan to replace the $900 billion in cuts with which they threatened themselves. Now are approaching the deadline that will evoke the Sequestration consequences because Congress is demonstrating their inability to do their jobs. So the ‘Bush era’ tax-cuts will expire and tax rates will rise across the board for everyone in 2013. Let’s get this straight, Congress agreed to allow the tax-cuts to expire for everyone. So the difference between letting the current tax rate cuts expire and raising tax rates actively is that in one case the public will pay more in taxes and in the other the public would pay more in taxes. This distinction is a very important and significant difference indeed.

So Republican Congressmen/women voted on a bill that would not raise tax rates it would only allow tax-cuts to expire. How exactly do you think they can show the financial difference, or the difference in costs to the tax payer, or the difference in its impacts on the economy? Wasn’t Sequestration a vote for raising taxes? I am not saying it wasn’t for a good reason or that it’s not something that they shouldn’t have done; but how is it not doing the very thing that supposedly they would not do? I suppose that they perhaps made a mistake and in the spur of the moment they thought first about the needs of the country before they thought about their party’s political rhetoric.

So now we have tax rates about to rise, and Congress is desperately looking for a solution that doesn’t make them have to accept the consequences of the unthinkable agreement that they made.

Tomorrow, a simple view of how easy it is to deal with this particular problem.