Reflecting on the Fourth of July

 "The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

Somewhere along the way we stopped calling our most popular summer holiday "Independence Day" and went simply with "The Fourth of July".  We love our Red, White and Blue, but this is the day we pull out all the stops.  Flags fly everywhere, the stars and stripes adorning everything from porches to paper plates to Uncle Sam hats to the holiday advertising pages of every newspaper.  Flags dress floats and bicycles and baby carriages in every parade in every little town in America.  

We love this day--the day to remember our liberty, our exceptionalism, our prosperity.  Those were the days, weren't they?

So what happened?

Not to be a downer on our favorite summer day, but I can't shake the feeling that "independence" is one of those words we're starting to look back on with nostalgia.   Does anyone even care that we're not that independent anymore?

Our dependence on foreign oil and on anti-American big business and on the production and importation of goods from dubious nations across the globe is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they declared us an independent country and gave us our working papers.

It started on July 4, 1776 when 56 men signed a paper declaring the independence of the thirteen united states of America from Great Britain, the mother country. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")

Eleven years later, in 1787, a constitution, the wording hard-fought and brainstormed to death, became the law of the land.   The Preamble read like this: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

They didn't start off with, "We, the wealthy landowners, in order to keep our fiefdoms going. . .", or "We, the 39 undersigned, in order to preserve our station and ensure a healthy profit margin. . . ".  

No, they began it like this:

WE, the people. . .of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America  

It came out of a yearning for independence so strong an entire nation was created, and in the course of a couple of centuries we became a model for democracy throughout the world--a force to be reckoned with.  You couldn't find a prouder nation anywhere.  We were going places.

That was then. 

Today, we're in turmoil. It's as if the promises made, the lessons learned, the reasons to form a more perfect union are long gone and long forgotten.  We are as divided as we've ever been since the days of our Civil War, 150 years ago.  We cannot, it seems, find common ground.  We see our America through different eyes, with different fears and different goals.  We don't like what we see, but from entirely different angles and for entirely different reasons.  We try to interpret what our Founding Fathers had in mind for us, but we come at it with our own biases, our own prejudices, trying to mold our purposely vague constitution to fit our own wants and needs.

But on this one day we come together, and it's our love of this beautiful, challenging, imperfect country that brings us to detente.  It's a day when, no matter what's going on outside, the sun is warm, the breeze is balmy, and the shade of the old oak tree brings a delicious coolness.  A lemonade day.  A day for feeling good. The parades are about to start and there is no more beautiful flag in the world than the American flag.

Come Tuesday we'll begin again. Toward a more perfect union. Toward domestic tranquility.  Toward the society we, the people, have promised to promote and preserve.

Until then, be well and be kind on this day that is ours and ours alone.

Our Employees are Revolting, In More Ways Than One

Here's the thing about those occupants of the White House, the Capitol complex, and all other elected taxpayer-paid tenants of taxpayer-built edifices all across the country. Once they're in office they tend to forget their place on the organizational chart, so here's a reminder: 

We, the people, are on top.  We are the employers and they are the employees.  We pay their wages and their benefits, give them cushy offices and take care of their every need.  We pay it all, knowing that to do so is, ipso facto, giving them serious control over our lives.

Freshman members of the 112th Congress pose for a class photo on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

(Photo by: Jeff Malet. Photography/Newscom)

In Congress,  if the electeds are still employed by us after five years in office, we are required to pay every solitary cent that goes into their retirements.  Consider that:  They only have to work for us for five years to get a guaranteed lifetime retirement based on an average of the best three years of employment.  That means a House member would have to be re-elected twice to qualify, but a first-timer serving a full six-year term in the Senate will thereafter be eligible for retirement at our expense until death or until the coffers run bone-dry, whichever comes first.

There's no chance that their employers -- that's us -- can arbitrarily decide that we don't feel like paying it anymore.  We can't say we want more of our money to go to us and not to them.  When it comes to shared sacrifice, we seem to have exempted them.  We're locked in.  We will pay their retirements, no matter what we might have to let slide in order to do it. 

This one crucial fact sometimes gets forgotten in the day to day back-and-forth about whether or not our elected officials are doing their jobs in a way that the majority of the employers -- that's us -- will find acceptable:  They don't have to do their jobs well.  Once they're in, they're in.  We can't fire them for laziness, carelessness or insubordination.   There's no such thing as chronic tardiness or too many sick days.   They can even vote to strip jobs and take away retirements from the very people who have put them in office, all the while knowing they're safe from the same kind of unfair action.  Once they're there, sitting comfortably in their catbird seats, they can, in fact, make and/or enforce laws that will actually damage and/or destroy a good segment of the very people who pay their way

It's as if they have the best damned labor union in the country (that's us) looking out for them.  Ironic, isn't it,  considering how little use most of them have for labor representation?

Under both CSRS [Civil Service Retirement System] and FERS [Federal Employees Retirement System], Members of Congress are eligible for a pension at age 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. Members are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age after completing 25 years of service. The amount of the pension depends on years of service and the average of the highest three years of salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member’s retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.
As of October 1, 2006, 413 retired Members of Congress were receiving federal pensions based fully or in part on their congressional service. Of this number, 290 had retired under CSRS and were receiving an average annual pension of $60,972. A total of 123 Members had retired with service under both CSRS and FERS or with service under FERS only. Their average annual pension was $35,952 in 2006.

Like most of us, they now pay into Social Security and will be eligible to collect on it after age 62 -- unless that changes, too.  (The young'uns might want to remember that before they get too hasty about killing it.)

Today regular members of the House and Senate each make $174,000 per year, with additional funding going toward staff and office wages, travel and other incidentals. (The leaders, of course, make more.)  Their staffers can make almost as much as they do, and they're entitled to anywhere from 20 to 60 support staffers.  We pay to keep all of them working.

• Representatives' staff allowances can be used to hire up to 18 permanent and four non-permanent aides divided between the members' Washington and district offices. Up to $75,000 of a representative's staff funds can be transferred to his or her official expense account for use in other categories, such as computer and related services. The maximum salary allowed House personal staffers in 2005 was $156,848 (2001: $140,451)..

• Senators' personal staff allowances vary with the size of the members' states. Senators may hire as many aides as they wish within their allowance; typically this ranges between 26 and 60, depending on the size of the state and the salary levels offered to the staffers.
  • The maximum salary allowed to Senate personal staffers in 2003 was $150,159 (1999: $132,159); for Senate legislative staffers the maximum salary in 2005 was $153,599.

Capitol.net, has a full compilation and history of wages and perks going back to 1789, when Congressional salaries were six dollars a day, with no limit on honoraria.  They could accept all the booty and swag they wanted in those days.  Now they have to choose between booty or swag.   (No, I'm kidding.  Actually, it says they cannot accept honoraria these days.  Absolutely verboten.  No can do, people.  Forget about it. Got it?   But corn dogs are okay.)

As employers go, we're really lousy at this.  Knowing how committed we're going to have to be toward ensuring a lifetime of benefits to our electeds, we really ought to do a better job of hiring them in the first place. It's not like we haven't studied their resumes.  It's not like we’ve neglected the interview process.  It costs us millions of dollars and requires a multitude of days bringing us interminable boot-licking, back-slapping, chest-thumping speeches to get us to the point of hiring these people.

Could we just try and remember these four magic words before we give any of them the honor of a job with lifetime benefits?   

For the common good.