Everyone complains about the debt ceiling.  And, yes, there’s plenty about it not to like:

• Red Ink:  First, there’s the debt itself.  Today, the US government owes over $14.2 trillion to creditors and bondholders.  This is a remarkable amount of money — over $47,000 for every man, woman, and child in the USA, and higher than the country’s annual gross domestic product.  In its  235-year history, America has run up tabs this big only twice: during World War II and during the Civil War.  

          This time, we dug the hole with no war at all, with little or nothing to show for the money.  Still, it
          threatens to bankrupt the government and wreck the economy for decades.  Even more galling is 
          the fact that we licked this problem in America just a dozen years ago in the 1990s and stood on 
          the verge of endless surpluses.  How did we screw things up so badly and so fact?  

• Legal tricks:  Then there is the ceiling itself — what looks like an arbitrary legal trick designed to embarrass politicians.  Unless Congress raises this legal limit from its current $14.2 trillion (which we reached a few weeks ago), the US Treasury is banned from borrowing any more money.  By early August, we will have emptied all the “rainy day” funds.  After that, when the next interest payment comes due on that enormous debt, the US government must default — something never done before in US history.  (Note the one technical exception: FDR in 1933 refused to pay interest on US bonds in gold, but paid instead in cheaper paper dollars.  See Perry v. United States, 294 U.S. 330 (1935)).  

           What will happen?  Calamity?  A stock crash?  Nobody really knows, but it won’t be pretty for 
           our collective credit score.

Cartoon by Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

• The Circus:  Finally, there is the political circus in Washington, D.C. as leaders pontificate, posture, and generally fumble trying to avoid calamity — or at least prepare to blame someone else if it happens.  “No new taxes!!” say Republicans.  “Don’t persecute poor and old people,” say Democrats.  No retreat.  No compromise.  Damn the torpedoes.     

So why is this a good thing?


Yes, this is all bad, very bad.   But look more closely.   Is that not a silver lining I see amid this formidable bank of dark clouds?  Have you noticed that, as crisis looms, Congress, with the White House, is actually starting to do it’s job?


Some history

Here’s the point.  The debt ceiling is not just some crazy trick created my one group of politicians to embarrass another, while playing Russian Roulette with global finance.   The US constitution gives Congress, among other things, one very specific job: the “power of the purse” — that is, the responsibility  to keep the country solvent by (a) controlling spending and (b) controlling debt.  


This is no small thing.  Congress’s power over borrowing is written right at the beginning in Article I, section 8, the enumerated powers of the national legislature.  The very first one states:

• “The Congress shall have the Power … to pay the debts… of the United States… To borrow Money on the credit of the United States.” 

Then, the very next section (section 9) makes Congress responsible for spending: 

•  “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money, shall be published from time to time.” (sec.9)

[Don’t be fooled!  Some people claim there’s a “nuclear option,” language in clause (4) of the 14th amendment, that lets the President short-circuit the process and pay the debt by himself.  This is baloney.  Look it up.]


Up until World War I, Congress did its job very carefully.  It took the trouble to approve every single issue of bonds by the US government.  But in 1917, at the height of World War I, when credit needs were skyrocketing, Congress decided to simplify things by creating a single unified debt ceiling, allowing Treasury Department accountants to manage all US borrowing under a single umbrella.  

This was a fine idea.  But, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.  


Over the next decades, Congress (pushed by Presidents) began changing the way the US government spends money.  Instead of approving specific line-by-line appropriations (which now account for barely 20% of Federal spending), it began making open-ended mandatory legal commitments, like medicare, medicaid, farm programs, and the other so-called entitlements.  If you qualify, then the government must pay — no matter how many of you there are.   As a result, when Congress passes a new entitlement, it has no idea what it will actually cost — just an educated guess called a “budget score.”


As a result, rather that knowing exactly how much borrowing to authorize each year when it passes an annual budget, Congress has gotten into the lazy habit of simply raising the debt ceiling whenever it happens to run out.  In fact, Congress has failed to enact any governmentwide budget at all for several years.  It has simply raised the debt ceiling.


Add to this chaotic process three final indignities: (a) the massive Bush-era tax cuts primarily for wealthy people, (b) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and (c) the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and related Great Recession, and the result has been a fiscal train wreck — from surplus to bankruptcy in the relative blink of an eye.


Doing their jobs?
  
So what can possibly be good about this?  Now, with disaster looming, leaders of Congress, along with Obama and Biden in the White House, finally have started to meet in order to try and cobble together a coherent budget plan: a way to control spending, control debt, and raise revenue.   Yes, they look too often like a dysfunctional circle of cranks, short-sighted, hand-cuffed by ideology, each side terrified of blinking first or looking weak. 


But at least they are doing their jobs as assigned by the Constitution.   Conservatives are right to refuse to expand debt without a plan to control spending.  Liberals are right to refuse massive program cuts without a plan to increase revenue and include the wealthy and corporate giveaways.  Both sides are right to bargain hard.   That’s what they’re elected to do.


At the end, though, comes the hard part: The art of coming together and finding common round.   Are they still capable of it?   


My own view is that Republicans, by signing iron-clad advance commitments against any change in taxes, no matter how small, are the main culprits in this stalemate.  And Obama hurt himself badly by caving to them last November and blessing an extension of the ruinous Bush-era tax cuts.  But that’s just me.


Success will be easy to spot in this drama: A large deal cutting debt and deficits over 10 years, fixing long-term programs like medicare and other “entitlements,” and including a rational tax provision.   Failure will be even easier to spot:  A default on the debt in early August, or a limp deal that fails to solve anything and simply extends the debt ceiling a few months, so the circus can start all over again.

What will it be?  I think they’ll reach a deal, but only after a default.  The debt ceiling can force politicians to do their job, but it can’t make them do it well.   Till then, enjoy the show.

Fireworks, watermelon, hot dogs and beer may do it for everyone else, but no self-respecting history fanatic can survive the 4th of July without a good smash-bang reading of the Declaration of Independence, presented first on this day 235 years ago,  in 1776.   I give you three choices.   Pick your favorite and enjoy:


First, traditional, by an unidentified (though heroic) re-enacter in Philadelphia:

Next, jazzy, by The Fifth Dimension (1970):

Finally, Hollywood, by actors including Mel Gibson, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and others.

Our 1952 Ford Customline Tudor sedan.  (Click on image for full size.)

This is a very special car.   Not many were sold and few survive.  But what really makes it special is its chain of ownership over 55 years: my father and me.  This was my father’s first new car, it became my first car, and it still runs today.

Ken (2nd from right, in cap and gown) standing with family, including brother Karl (also in cap and gown), parents Helene and Roland (standing between their sons), and uncles Gordon and Kenneth Briers (far left and right), at the 1969 graduation from U. of Maryland.

I drove the Ford through high school and part of my college years.   When my brother Karl learned to drive, I gave him the Ford and bought myself a new 1965 VW 1200 Beatle.  A year later, we both transferred to the University of Maryland, and my brother bought a 1957 Chevrolet.  At that point, after owning it for 14 years, we all decided to keep our original 1952 Ford, but to store it in a rented garage.  

Instead of differences, though, what shows through this unvarnished window into the past is a wonderful common thread of humanity: people laughing, joking, having fun, playing in the snow, enjoying their friends and lives on a crisp winter day.  They are the age of our great-great-grandparents facing a future of multiple world wars and strife — but that’s no concern right now.  They are no better than us, no worse than us, not very different from us.  To me, that’s one of the amazing constant re-discoveries of history.   Enjoy– 

My sister Phyllis found it about six months ago — a creased, crumbling yellowed page covered with smeared ink handwriting. Each side had what looked like a cross, the stained remains of glue from rotted scotch tape. Unfolding it risked destroying the pages completely. The back bore what looked like an official government stamp in faded purple. We recognized the words as Polish, but had no idea what they meant.  Still, three things jumped off the page: the year 1888 and two names repeated throughout: Zys and Acierman (or Akierman).


We found a Polish speaker who translated the title. It was a marriage certificate (Akt Slubu), signed and sealed long ago in the faraway town of Modle-Borzyce (pronounced Masel-Budgets) in southern Poland, far away from upstate New York, USA. It could have been from another planet.

Click on image to make full size.

What was the point of these rotting old pages? Somebody, in fact several people — parents, grand parents, great grandparents – clearly had made a huge effort to hold onto them, carrying them across the Atlantic Ocean when the family emigrated to the US, keeping them safe during decades of poverty, and passing them down now to three generations over a span of 120 years. Still, this was no fancy certificate to frame and put on a wall. And a Jewish wedding, even back in autocratic Russian-dominated pre-independence Poland, needed no official government stamp to be recognized in the Shtetl. Who would care?

The answer lay in a family story, obscure and half-forgotten. The particular marriage sealed by this paper had come as a shock. It had defied the rules and the odds. The bride, a young Yetta Zys, was the daughter of a very rich man, doctor Chaim Zys, who owned the biggest house in their little town. The groom, a young man named Sheah (or Sam) Akierman (later Ackerman), was a nobody, a destitute shoe-maker from a poor family.


Jews in Poland back then had rules on these things. Children were not allowed to chose their own husbands or wives. Instead, it was the parents who arranged marriages for them, often when the children were barely in their teens. A family hired a matchmaker (or yentl) who made sure that rich daughters married rich husbands, poor daughters married poor husbands, and so on.


Yetta and Sheah broke this rule. They refused to wait for a yentl. They fell in love.

Modle-Borzyce town square on market day, late 1800s.

Modle-Borzyce in the 1880s was a tiny hamlet of about 900 people, made up of small buildings around a square that served as a marketplace. Young Sheah Akierman came to the Zys home one day around 1887, apparently on business, to fix someone’s shoes. He was amazed at what he saw. “My father was a good looking young man, blond and blue-eyed,” my Aunt Rachel (Sheah’s daughter) wrote about him years ago. “The first time he came to visit my mother’s house he was so shocked he couldn’t move. He had never seen such a rich house. All the walls were covered with mirrors and paintings.”


Then he laid eyes on the rich doctor’s beautiful daughter. She happened to come in at that moment while he was standing in a corner. He remembered her wearing a white ermine coat and carrying a white muff in her hands. “He told me that he’d never seen such a beautiful girl,” my Aunt Rachel went on. “He fell in love with her immediately. The next time he saw her was at their wedding.”


But it wasn’t so easy.  Love mattered back then, but not very much. We don’t know what actually happened behind closed doors — the arguments, the threats, the diplomacy, the shrill voices. Why did Dr. Chaim Zys finally relent and permit his beautiful daughter to marry a penniless cobbler? It’s a mystery, but somehow, Yetta and Sheah had insisted on having their way, on demanding their own choice in who they marry, and they were stubborn enough to win.


“If anybody got married the ceremony was in the square under the stars,” my Aunt Rachel wrote of Modle-Borzyce. “The whole town — the Jewish part — went to the wedding. Everyone came even if they were not relatives.” So it was with Yetta and Sheah Akierman.


They had their beautiful day, but life for them would then prove terribly hard. “My mother started with a dowery of jewels and furs but these items soon disappeared as they had one child after another,” Rachel wrote. They would have seven children altogether. Sheah, always described as outgoing, generous, and surrounded by friends, could never hold jobs very long. Reaching New York City in 1908, they were poor even by lower East Side standards. The family lived for years in a 5th-floor walk-up apartment with no hot water and only a coal stove for heat. Yetta and the little children had to carry the coal by hand in pails from the basement up the six flights of stairs. For money, Sheah did everything from cobbling shoes to selling goods from a pushcart to making whiskey on the kitchen stove (it was during Prohibition) to sell for a few dollars. (Click here for more on the neighborhood.)


These were tough times, but though it all, they had their lodestar — that yellowed, ink-stained piece of paper, the Akt Slubu or marriage certificate. It was their reminder of the love story that had cemented their marriage, proven their commitment, and made it possible to carry the later burdens.


These were my father’s-side grandparents, Sheah and Yetta Ackerman. Sheah died before I was born and Yetta when I was far too young to remember her. Their youngest son, Bill, my father, born just before leaving Poland but raised in America, would establish himself as a lawyer in depression-era New York City and ultimately move our family to the relative splendor of upstate Albany (about 150 miles north of NYC). He too held on to that old Polish marriage certificate, passed down from his parents, for the rest of his life, though he never mentioned it or showed it to us. When he and my mother died years ago, this old scrap of paper landed in an ignored folder in my sister’s house. By then, it had been forgotten.


Until now. There’s value in these mysterious old things – especially the ones that people hold on to at all costs. They tell the best stories, and remind us of their best sides.


Confused about the dates? Here’s the math: I was born in 1951, the youngest child in our family, when my father, Bill Ackerman, was 44 years old. He was born in 1907. My father, in turn, was the youngest child of Sheah/Sam Ackerman, born when his father also was about 40 years old. As a result, Sheah, my Grandfather, was born in 1867 — two years before Ulysses Grant became president of the USA. If you ever wonder why I’m a history fanatic, think of how close you are in age to your own grandparents, then try wrapping your head around this little calculation.


My Aunt Rachel compiled her family memories in a quirky, funny, self-published little book called Horseradish: Jewish Roots. It’s a great read. In a perfect world, it would be a best seller.


Visit modern Modle-Borzyce on this very cool road trip through the neighborhood, courtesy of YouTube–



Doug’s mom, Gail Bradford, standing between her parents Wheat and Maude Yett Bradford.   Doug is the cute little kid standing in front.



[Doug Leslie, a loyal reader, sent us the photo above.  Doug always got a kick out of the photo I keep here of me as a Cub Scout back in the 1950s, so he decided to share his own.  Here’s the description:]


Ken, in celebration of women’s history month, I’ll trade old photos with you.  


In the photo above are my maternal grandfather, Wheat Bradford; my mother, Gail Bradford Leslie; and my maternal grandmother, Maude Yett Bradford.  Yes, I’m the little guy down front.  It was taken out on their ranch in Edwards County, Texas, between the little towns of Rocksprings and Junction.


Maude was first a deputy sheriff, then a school teacher in the Texas Hill Country.  Maude wasn’t a college graduate.  At that time, you could be a teacher with just an extra year or two of training past high school.  I don’t think my grandfather finished elementary school, but apparently he knew the value of education because he decided the new school teacher was just the woman for him.  His proposal to her may not have been eloquent, but it was direct.  As my grandmother laughingly told me years ago, he said, “I ain’t a goin’ back to that ranch alone.”  


Together, they raised three daughters on their ranch that, in the 1920’s, was a small piece of land, with no running water and no electricity.  Over the years they bought land, got electricity, and eventually in-door plumbing.  Things were hard and Wheat and Maude never really got to enjoy the what we consider the good life.  Nevertheless, Maude always kept her faith in the value of education.  In the early days, she sent her three daughters off to school each day on a single horse.  


Later, two of her daughters went to the University of Texas, including my mother, who was  was one of those rare women who dared enter college engineering.  (She got me instead of a degree, but later finished her bachelor’s degree in business the same year I got my BA.)  Her older sister, my Aunt Del, was an early female law student.  The oldest sister Lana became a beautician and rancher, and her son became the doctor in the family. 


Me, I was born in 1948, so my guess is that the picture dates from ‘50 or ‘51.  I never lived on the ranch and it was a really long drive from Scotia, NY, where we lived when I was a little kid.   On the few trips that we did make it was a great adventure. 


Doug Leslie is a friend and reader who lives in northwest Washington, D.C.

Emma Goldman, seen in her police mug shot after being arrested in 1894.

                      
             “Most of you left Russia, where you had a Czar who acted in as brutal a way as any man on
               earth.  Here in America we have capitalistic czars … We have Gould and Astor and Sage
              and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. … You built the palaces and others are living in them. The
              politicians are misleading you… We are told God will feed the starving, but that is humbug
              in the nineteenth century.”

             “I will speak, they can arrest me if they please, but they cannot shut my mouth.”
                                                                                       Emma Goldman – 1893.

Over three thousand people crammed themselves into New York City’s Union Square on that hot, sticky summer day, August 21, 1893. They carried red flags – symbol of socialists, nihilists, anarchists, and laborites around the world.  Most of them wore rags and smelled from sweat.  Most still spoke immigrant languages — German, Russian, Yiddish, Polish, and Italian — that sounded like menacing gibberish to native Americans.


Three months earlier, Wall Street’s Panic of 1893 had sent the US economy crashing into depression, throwing hundreds of thousands of men – bread winners – out of work.  In 1893, long before government safety net programs, this meant starvation, poverty, disease … and anger!!!


The people in Union Square that day wanted to scream rage and demand their rights. They wanted a voice, no excuses, no apologies, no whitewash. And they knew they could trust finding it in their favorite rabble-rouser, Emma Goldman.




Emma Goldman speaking in New York’s Union Square, 1916.

Just 24 years old then, Emma Goldman pounded the air with her fist when she spoke. She threw back her head and shouted – in their languages. She often preferred using Russian or Yiddish to confuse police detectives.  She always looked striking.  A reporter described her at one rally as appearing in a “cheap blue and white striped dress” and “her hair was as much awry as if it was 2 o’clock in the morning.”







Emma Goldman’s first encounter with American prisons was about to begin…

What happened next?  Click here for Part II, The Trial.


                

By this second clip, also from the New-York Times, March 7, 1879, the Purim Ball had grown more upscale.  Notice the Rothschilds, Seligmans, Schiffs, and other financial types in the box seats.