Dear Mr. President Barack Obama:
Hi, I’m back. After taking a break while I was preparing income tax returns for my clients, I have now decided to get back into the fray.
Item 1: I am happy with your decision to cautiously withdraw from Iraq. That is a major step forward.
Item 2: I am happy with your decision to change direction in Afghanistan. I feel it is necessary to rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan and to rebuild our image with the local leaders. The central government in A. is, I think, not very strong, as is true of it historically.
Item 3: Pakistan is the place to watch very carefully. As I have written in regard to Afghanistan, the local population crosses national borders at will. This applies to all borders in the region and especially to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same strategy that you have approved for Afghanistan will work, I think, in Pakistan. Pakistan’s central government, too, is very weak and we need to rely on the local leaders to rebuild the infrastructure and our image.
Item 3: Thanks for deciding to close Gitmo. Our enemies, as well as our citizens and friends, should expect to experience the fairness of our justice system. Bring those detainees into our court system and deal with them fairly and according to the law of the land.
Item 4: In regard to our financial system, when an organization is too large to fail, then it is time to disassemble them and make each part of their organization "not too large to fail!" It has been done before and should be done now. Under T. Roosevelt, Standard Oil, for the good of the consumer, was broken up. In my time, AT&T was broken up and in the last couple of decades has rebuilt itself. First, Congress should reenact the anti-usury laws. Second, Congress should enact a law that separates commercial banking from investment banking. Third, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has to get some backbone. I realize that trying to decipher the true facts out of prospectuses is difficult. However, if the experts at the SEC have difficulty understanding, how does the ordinary American investor understand them. Congress should enact a law that requires financial auditors to be free of conflicts of interest, in all respects (even from appearance of conflict of interest), when expressing an opinion on financial statements of firms. Also, it is one thing to opine that the financial statements reflect fairly the financial condition of an organization and it is another thing to explain what those financial statements say and /or mean, which CPA opinions don’t do. AIG, JPMorgan, et al are too big to fail and should be disassembled and reassembled so that they aren’t too big to fail. I think TARP has been a problem in that it hasn’t been monitored properly. That isn’t your problem; it harkens back to the Bush administration, because from the beginning no definite oversight was included in the proposal. Throwing money at a problem is not the answer. But, that is what we have done and it is time for it to stop. The financial organizations should be given a time certain to come up with plans to continue business in a responsible manner, just as has been required from the auto industry.
Item 5: Keep up the conversations with Iran, Ecuador, North Korea and other countries that appear to aggrandize themselves and simultaneously threaten the security of the world.
Item 6: The $687 billion economic stimulus package is, in my view, working well. Jobs and our infrastructure is our foremost goal for the economic recovery. Your budget is also a good beginning for economic recovery.
Sincerely, Don Cleven
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