The Threat of the Alt-Armed Wing

I spoke last week about Trump’s intentions. His intentions are particularly scary because of the growth of wrong-wing violence. Time Magazine published an excellent summary as The Terror Within, in its August 19 issue.  Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan first broke their story on Time’s website. They explained that white nationalists are responsible for a multiple of the deaths and injuries from any other causes of terrorism in the U.S. since 9/11, more than all other causes put together. But Congress and this Administration frustrated FBI efforts to assign more agents to stop mass killers from mowing us down. As a result it gets worse.

Violence has spread as copycat crimes. Potential killers are separated from others like Communists who used to work in cells. That makes them harder, though not impossible, to find. The FBI has a good record of stopping more Muslim terrorism in the U.S.  But, what I refuse to call the right-wing because there is nothing right about them, feasts on assault weapons newly made available courtesy of the wrong-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court. And, as the authors of the Time article put it, we now have “a Commander in Chief whose rhetoric appears to mirror, validate and potentially inspire that of far-right extremists.” Nothing has been a better predictor of armed revolution and dictatorial takeover than the spread of weapons among the public.

The president elides the necessity of blaming killers by referring to good people on both sides and attacking Antifa, which stands for Anti-Fascist, as if there is an equality between those trying to take our democratic institutions down and those standing up to the Fascists and trying to stop them.

In a prior era, the House Committee on Un-American Activities would have challenged the president’s loyalty. But conservatives and their wrong-wing-nut allies insist on a correspondence between investigations of the left and right as if illegal activity on the alt-wrong means that there must be at least equal and opposite illegality on the left – no evidence required. The Court has barred removing American citizenship from American citizens. But that might be the best way to protect ourselves from a disloyal president before he has the opportunity to do serious damage.

A second problem traces back to how we handle armed might in this country. Trump invited many members of the military into his Administration and then fired them. They had the backbone to resist some of the nonsense being cooked up in the White House. But they are no longer in the military. How deep can Trump get into the loyal ranks of the military before putting people in charge willing to do his bidding. Dictators have followed that dangerous pattern to power in many countries. The NRA claims it’s prepared to protect the country against governmental abuse. But their definition of abuse is public servants trying to enforce the laws about grazing cattle on public land, not presidents trying to engineer a wrong-wing takeover.

The country switched to an all-volunteer military at the height of the war in Vietnam to calm some of the controversy over that war. But if the military installs a dictator, we will see the mistake after it is too late.

Trump must be removed from office before it is too late.

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Hitler’s Acolyte – Trump’s Dangerous Motives

I spoke last week about the importance of the whistle-blower’s complaint. It’s also the tip of the iceberg. Burt Neuborne was ACLU legal director and a founder of NYU’s Brennan Center.  I’ve known Burt for decades. His publisher accurately describes him as a leading constitutional lawyer who’s sued every president since LBJ.

His new book raises very serious concerns about Trump’s dictatorial intentions. As Burt notes, we’ve known since 1990 that Donald Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches by his bed and studied them carefully.

For those born later, Adolf Hitler initiated World War II and the extermination camps that were responsible for the deaths of seventy to eighty-five million people, from all continents. More than a million American soldiers were killed or wounded. That’s Trump’s idol.

Burt goes further, comparing the themes that both Hitler and Trump emphasized. Whatever else he hasn’t figured out, or doesn’t care about, Trump has been a good student of Hitler’s.

There isn’t time to lay them all out. Like Trump, Hitler fired his supporters up with racial and religious hatred, extreme nationalism, closing borders, mass detention and deportation. Almost every word from Trump is about hostility based on race, religion, national origin, closing the southern border and extreme nationalism, stirring a recipe for violence.

Hitler and Trump insulated themselves from criticism by denying the press any credibility and found ways to reach the public without going through the media. Reporters spend their days interviewing people, checking documents, records and participants in the news. Trump simply calls everything fake, and attacks the media in its entirety, though he’s obviously the biggest liar among us. Everything he says is reduced to single adjectives – fake, terrific, good, bad, etc. – without evidence or explanation while denying the obvious. Unhinging his audience from the work of everyone else means he can speak without fear that contrary argument will reach his audience’s ears, until truth becomes meaningless.

Both Hitler and Trump cemented their rule by enriching the wealthiest, giving them outrageous gains, tax cuts, and exemptions from rules meant to protect the public from death, destruction and deceit.

Both thumbed their noses at democratic, judicial and legislative processes and powers. In other words Trump cares only about himself and his ability to become a dictator in the style of his idols. Encouraging people to use what he labels their “Second Amendment rights” in politics is what Hitler did with his Brown Shirts, substituting the nozzle of their guns for ballots and elections. That’s the path to hell but it is a path, with the trappings of dictatorship, that looks good to Trump.

I’ve hesitated to call for impeachment because my priority is to oust Trump from office, however possible, before he can get further with his obvious desire for unchecked power.

That said, Trump’s refusal to obey constitutional limitations on using his office for personal gain, and to abide by statutes and congressional subpoenas, are clear indications of his thirst for power and disrespect of the work of the American Founders, the Constitution, its meaning, original or otherwise, and the system of checks and balances set up to control people like Trump. The emoluments clause was intended to limit opportunities for presidential disloyalty to America. But rather than make America great again Trump is intent on destroying America for personal gain, the ultimate form of disloyalty.

He must be removed from office.

The Seriousness of the Ukraine Meeting

Let’s clarify the problems with Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

First, restrictions on foreign contributions to American elections protect American control over our government. If foreign countries can influence American elections, they can deflect the benefits of American wealth and power for their own advantage and the disadvantage of the rest of us. Restrictions on foreign contributions to American elections also keep candidates’ and office-holders’ loyalties home. More than that, if a foreign country can influence American elections, it can undermine American national security, preventing us from responding to the dangers from abroad.

Second, American foreign policy should not be for sale for personal benefits to American presidents. Corruption is not just a minor flaw. It sacrifices public to personal advantage. Corruption means that politicians are shirking their duty to the public in order to gain benefits for themselves.  Numerous provisions are in the Constitution to help stop that misbehavior, including the emoluments clauses. Of all types of corruption, none can be more serious than disloyalty, making deals with foreign countries at the expense of the American public. That is a particular risk of presidential power, which is why the emoluments clause outlaws the president or any other office-holder from gaining any personal advantage in dealing with foreign powers. The Constitution does not permit the risk that the president might deflect American foreign policy for personal advantage.

Third, it’s against the law. Federal statutes prohibit candidates for federal office from accepting contributions from foreign nationals.[1] That applies to the president and everyone else. They should be responding to American, not foreign, incentives. And the Constitution, though written in eighteenth century language, underscores that prohibition. It forbids any “person holding any office or profit or trust under … [the United States], without the consent of the Congress, [to] accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” In other words the president could not accept anything from the Ukrainian President individually or from his government.[2]

This whistle-blower complaint, about selling American foreign policy to a foreign government for personal advantage, is about disloyalty, about selling American “security assistance to Ukraine.” No president in American history has been as corrupt as Donald Trump. Since he took office, Trump has been determined to use his position to advance his personal financial interests. And before Donald Trump, no president in American history has ever been found guilty of putting American interests up for sale for personal advantage.

Let me end with a word to Trump’s supporters, both in and out of government. This is not a time when you can simply dismiss what everyone else sees and knows, indeed what the majority of America understands. The consequences are just too serious. Supporting a man whose corruption and foreign allegiances are so obvious is the most disloyal thing you can do short of pulling the trigger. It’s time to wake up and discover what the rest of the world knows.

[1] 52 U.S.C. 30121(a).

[2] U.S. Const., Art. I, sec. 9, par. 8.

We Have Trump to Thank

The President has been taking apart all previously made progress handling the environment and global warming. His actions will contribute to what has been called the sixth extinction – the premature death of billions of people on this planet, large proportions of our children and grandchildren and the shrinking of any remaining habitable portions of earth, so that few can survive and those who manage to live on the meager remainder will have had to survive the bloodiest war of all against all just for the scraps remaining.

We have Trump to thank for trying to stop California from regulating its environment so that people can breathe in Los Angeles. We have Trump to thank for reversing the decline in greenhouse gasses from car engines and coal driven power plans. We have Trump to thank for encouraging the pollution and garbage that destroy fish and marine life, and poison the water we need to drink. We have Trump to thank for doing his best to put us out of our misery by making sure most of us cease to exist.

We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of those who supported him, putting all the resources which could have provided good jobs, into the hands of the richest among us, people who did everything except spend money on workers, who spent their tax breaks instead on stock buy-backs, dividends, McMansions, and outsourcing. We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of the people who thought he’d rebuild their jobs, their towns, their cities and their ways of life, and sacrificing them instead to twits about foreign countries.

Americans were famous across the globe for our ability to work together in everything from sports stadiums to armies and industry. America built its success on teamwork. But the President’s ego couldn’t stand it because he doesn’t get the credit. So, he found a way to destroy all those accomplishments by dividing us in order to conquer us.

So, we have Trump to thank for encouraging a war among Americans over race, religion, parentage and national origin. Alt-wrong mass killers have murdered a multiple of the Americans killed by any other source of domestic terrorism. They work individually as copy-cat killers, to defy blame and prevention, much like the Communists worked by separate cells. Yet the President praises and encourages them and prevents funding and enabling the surveillance the FBI should be doing to defend us.

We realize it’s very important to him to destroy all the strides we have been making to recognize each other’s strengths, talents and decency, to embrace each other as brothers, sisters, cousins and children of God so that he can stay in power riding a crest of hatred.

Instead, for Trump, only Trump counts. He has become the most corrupt president in the history of the country, the only one whose very loyalty is in doubt, who encourages violence against the public instead of protecting it from violence, and does all he can to weaken, not strengthen America.

I wouldn’t have thought it a good idea to lock up presidents and presidential candidates. It’s dangerous for democracies to do that. But Trump put it on the table by encouraging the chant to “Lock her up” directed against Hillary. It would be better for the rest of us to give him some of his own medicine, locking him up as he would have Hillary, but I’ll be satisfied by any legal means of getting him out of office. Then we can get back to saving our environment, strengthening the position of our workers, and protecting Americans from descending further into violence.

Democratic Presidential Candidates, Voters and Media

Commentators are scoring Democratic candidates by how “moderate” or “far left” they are. That’s nonsense. Let me count the ways.

Perhaps most important is that most voters don’t have a worked out platform. They are actually trying to judge sincerity. Some of us may prefer to choose policies. But most voters feel much more comfortable judging sincerity. So while commentators think Warren is too far to the left, the voters like her. What they are seeing is that she cares about them. That’s important. They want the winner to work for them and they figure that if the candidate cares, they’ll choose the right policies. That after all is the elected leaders’ job. Voters never aligned with Reagan’s policies but they liked and trusted him. That’s one of the reasons Republican appeals to what Reagan did seem hollow. They aren’t Reagan.

There’s another equally important reason. Presidential candidates’ policy preferences tell us what they will try to do, not what will happen. That’s partly out of any official’s control. Legislators, administrators, judges and changing circumstances have a large hand in that. Obama wanted a public option. I still do. But he couldn’t get it. What mattered is that he wanted medical coverage for all of us and he did his best. I appreciate that. And it is a big contrast with the absence of any Republican plan.

So it’s sensible for us as voters to ask whether this candidate will move the political system in a good direction, pulling and pushing despite opposition to get the best possible result. So a candidate like Warren is to the left of the Congress and thank heavens!

What I think the details really can show is whether the candidates are able to think things through. I do understand why she wants Medicare for all even though, if I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t push for it. Medicare for all guarantees a good plan for all of us because equality means that if it’s going to be good for us, it has to be good for them, too. And of course a single payer system is cheaper to administer. So I admire her dedication to getting good care for us all even if I can see disadvantages. But no candidate will get everything they want. So we’ll get a compromise between “moderate” ideas and caring motives. A president isn’t a monarch, and shouldn’t be.

One more reason: moderate and left are sloppy terms. If I like one leftish idea that doesn’t make me a leftist. If sometimes I support competition like Republicans do, that doesn’t make me conservative. Voters might disagree about one thing or another but like and trust a candidate. Or they might mislabel a candidate’s whole platform based on one idea and jump away. The media are being sloppy. There are ideas to the left of current American politics that Americans like and some they don’t. They do like medical care. They do want government to make sure that we all have access to important and essential services, whether or not the proposals started out on the left. Sloppy characterizations don’t help. Clarity and precision are much more useful.

 

Never Again Means Never Again

I joined a demonstration Sunday afternoon. It was called partly to make clear that Jews are not slaves to Trump regardless of his policies toward Israel. It was part of Never Again Action across the country to protest the use of concentration camps to hold people fleeing from persecution, now most urgently on our Mexican border. We were joined by good people of all colors, origins and faiths, many of whom I know and admire.

Justice Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, told the world in his opening statement that “civilization cannot tolerate … [the Nazi’s wrongs] being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”[1] Never again and condemnation of the Holocaust was never just about Jews. These were crimes against all humanity. ICE, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Trump get no atrocities pass.

Never Again protested holding kids in cages, separating children from their families, keeping immigrants in concentration camps, plus denying them everything from soap to medical care. It is not OK to do that to people whatever they look like or the language they use to speak or pray. It’s not OK to refuse to help people who are fleeing for their lives. It’s not OK to rename refugees “illegals” and treat them as if they have no rights even to the basics for survival. And it’s not OK for Sheriff Russo to assist ICE to round up decent, law-abiding people fleeing for their lives to the country that promised the world to advance life, liberty, freedom from fear and freedom from want. And yes, I did call them law-abiding – it’s not a crime to cross the border.

So we congregated at a park in South Troy and then marched to the Rensselaer County Correctional Facility. Rabbi Gordon reminded the crowd that when Rabbi Heschel was criticized for marching on the sabbath in the Civil Rights Movement, he responded, “I prayed with my feet.”  We prayed with our feet, as appropriate when our voices are not enough.

When we reached the jail, we were reminded of the names of people who died in US custody near the Mexican border. We remembered them with the Kadish, the ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. It’s a prayer I recite tearfully as I have recited it for my parents and others I held dear.

The march was peaceful and we had been instructed to obey the laws. But a group sat across the road leading to the jail and eventually people from the county police came to talk to those blocking the road. I saw Mark Mishler, as attorney for the demonstrators, come to join the discussion. I heard them discuss alternatives available to the police. When they got to the possibility of arrest, I heard Mark tell the officer that “There are people here who lost their families in the holocaust…. As Jews we have seen these things before and we are not going to be like the ‘good Germans’ who stood by and let it happen in Germany, that we will not allow detentions and family separations happen in our country without taking a stand. And, that’s why the people blocking the road are not going to leave.” If they left, they would be tortured by the thought that they had not done everything they could to stop others from being confined in inhumane conditions as their families had been.

Never again means never again, anywhere. It means that at home as much as anywhere else. We will not be complicit.

[1] Opening Address to the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials (10 November 1945).

The irony of excluding Iran

Paul Barker sent me a wonderful note about the latest Iran-related news:

“And in the irony of ironies, via Khalilzad [an Afghani-American diplomat and Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department ] the Trump administration is effectively negotiating terms of surrender with the Taliban — and it is the US that is surrendering.  Yet Trump wants the flexibility of the 2001 AUMF to justify totally unrelated action against Iran which is a natural enemy of the Taliban, al-Qa’eda and ISIS

“If Trump wanted a responsible way out of Afghanistan, he’d find a way to work with Iran.”

Absolutely right. Yet another cost of isolating Iran.