Kristallnacht

Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head with depressing regularity in this country and elsewhere, and we’re seeing a still relatively small but nevertheless ominous resurgence in 2017. Here’s a bit of history that shows how relatively isolated incidents can coalesce and lead to calamity in an atmosphere of tacit acceptance.

On November 9 and 10, 1938 a wave of violence aimed at Jewish people, institutions, and businesses took place in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. The events of those days and nights became known as Kristallnacht, a German word loosely translated as the night of broken glass because of the shards of glass in the streets from the broken windows of homes, hospitals, schools, Jewish-owned businesses, and synagogues destroyed by paramilitary forces and German civilians as German authorities looked on without intervening. Estimates vary, but it’s believed that hundreds of people were murdered and thousands arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Over 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed or damaged.

Kristallnacht is widely understood to be the event that signaled the beginning of overt anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Germany which evolved to the “final solution” and ended in the murder of 6-million people in what became known as the Holocaust. Full accounts of Kristallnacht and the events leading up to it and flowing out if it are here and here.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 917 hate groups currently operating in the United States. It defines them as groups having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Not all of them are specifically anti-Semitic but all have that potential. Of the 917, ten are specifically holocaust deniers, 99 are neo-Nazi, 79 are racist skinheads, and 100 are white nationalists. The SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, and others report hundreds of anti-semitic incidents in the past few months and thousands in the past year or so, including vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, spray-painted swastikas in public spaces, slurs on social media, and so on. The AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitic incidents at American colleges and universities, reports 185 such incidents so far in 2017 and 430 in 2016. Are these incidents a collection of small Kristallnachts – precursors of a larger uprising of people and groups who are encouraged and emboldened by the current political climate?

We know this much: History tells us that anti-Semitism is always bubbling just below the surface and has been for centuries, and that it erupts and becomes virulent and toxic particularly when demagoguery and despotism give people license to blame a hated “other” for their own problems, failings, and disappointments or for a lack of general prosperity. We see a lot of that now, including the resurrection of ageless tropes having to do with Jews controlling the banks or the international financial system or the media.

During the debates, Donald Trump said this: “[Hillary Clinton] meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers…” In addition to being another entry in the lengthy and ever-growing catalog of ludicrous Trumpian pronouncements, this statement, while not overtly anti-Semitic, has been very much a part of the anti-Semitism vocabulary over the decades.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust. But Kristallnacht, the event that foretold it, is not as well known. It seems important now, as anti-Semitic activity seems to be ramping up once again, that younger generations be made aware of it and of the ominous warning it carried. 

If only people had listened.

Chest Deep in the Big Muddy

There was a time when America was only hip deep in lies and misinformation about Obamacare and what it does and does not do. Now, because of the surreal Republican comedy act that masquerades as a search for something to replace it (or amend it or whatever) we’re chest deep and sinking fast. What Republicans should do, of course, is stick to their religion and advocate for not only the repeal of Obamacare but for a complete and total absence of government involvement in health care. That is GOP orthodoxy: Get medical insurance from your employer, buy it on the open market, get it from the man in the moon, don’t get it all; just keep the government out of it. You’re on your own.

Republicans should step up to that, own it, advocate openly and vigorously for it, and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t because they know what those consequences would look like. That is most emphatically not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the incredibly burdensome cost of health care in this country. (The U.S. health care sector is larger than all but five national economies in the world). So, for political survival, the GOP is left with cobbling together something that does what people want but which they can plausibly say is not Obamacare. But, of course, it will be Obamacare. Here is columnist George Will’s concise explanation of why that is:

“If you begin by accepting, as the country does, the Barack Obama premise that the chief metric of health care reform is universal access, and then if you add to that you’re going to have a system in which pre-existing health problems will not preclude you from purchasing insurance, and then you add to that you’re going to build this around a system in which 147-million Americans get their health insurance from their employer with special tax preferences for that…if you start like that you are bound to create a system of regulations and subsidies that’s very complicated; different regulations than Mr. Obama had and different subsidies, but the same basic kind of architecture.”

Noticeably absent from Republican deliberations on this matter, as they go about the business of assembling a program with the “same basic architecture” as Obamacare, are characterizations of it as “socialized medicine” and a government take-over of health care, both of which were flung around extravagantly during the original ACA debate. That debate, by the way, demonstrated that health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives were fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. Although those people enthusiastically endorsed the idea that something needed to be done, what they thought that might look like they didn’t say. They only said Obamacare wasn’t it. For eight years.

No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts was, and is, essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders. People who think the mandate can be cherry-picked out because it’s the one provision of Obamacare that everyone hates, don’t understand how insurance works. Paul Waldman of the Wasgibngton Post explains it this way:

“The ACA’s individual mandate wasn’t popular, but it was necessary to solve a key problem, which is that if you want to guarantee coverage for those with preexisting conditions, you need to spread costs as widely as possible. Get everyone into the risk pool, and you can do it. So the law required people to carry insurance, fining them if they don’t. The GOP plan says that if you maintain ‘continuous coverage’ then you’ll still be insured despite your preexisting condition. If you go without insurance for two months, then you’ll have to pay a penalty once you start getting coverage again. But you’ll pay it to the insurance company, not to the federal treasury.

“Here’s the thing, though. If you’re healthy, and especially if you’re young and healthy, this system actually incentivizes you to wait until you get sick before getting insurance. You can say, why bother with insurance now? Sure, I’ll have to pay a 30 percent penalty on my premiums when I buy coverage again, but only for the first year. If I can get away with 10 years of having no insurance, and only get it when I’m faced with high expenses, I’ll still come out ahead. If young people make that calculation en masse, the risk pool winds up confined to people who are older and sicker, premiums skyrocket, insurers flee and the whole thing collapses.”

The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guaranteed continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem many millions of Americans share.

Whatever the Republicans cook up, it will be Obamacare -- just a less effective version of it – one that many believe will lead to large numbers of people losing their health coverage and to increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. (There is speculation that House Republican are afraid the Congressional Budget Office will “score” it exactly that way, which is why they’re hustling the bill along so quickly, hoping for passage before the CBO can give them and the American people the bad news, and why they’re making remarks aimed at de-legitimizing the CBO and its work.)

Trump supporters: This will be the “something terrific” with which your man said he would replace Obamacare. He said, you’ll recall: “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

Hmm.

 


 

Another Shooting on 5th Avenue?

Donald Trump’s assertion of a year or so ago that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters was an eloquent articulation of the total contempt he has for the intelligence of his followers. So slavish are they in their adoration of him, he believes, that nothing he says or does, no matter how ludicrous or contemptible, will turn them away. And that has proven to be the case.

Another phenomenon at work here is that even the more reasonable people among the Trump coterie don’t know about those ludicrous and contemptible things because, in their paranoid distrust of the press, they don’t read about them. They hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when Trump is spoken of critically, lest their comfort bubble be penetrated. Or, inexplicably, they are so convinced of the blessings he will cast upon the land that they’re willing to ignore daily displays of his wrong-headedness. What great changes they think he will bring to their lives -- changes worth embracing such a fool as their leader -- is anybody’s guess.

But there is a more ominous explanation – other than his contempt for his followers’ brainpower -- for two recent assertions by Trump: That Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and that long-ago public photo-ops of Schumer and Pelosi warrant investigations of ties they may have to Russia. That explanation: That he is becoming untethered from reality. 

These ideas are, to use the vernacular, crazy. And the fear is that he’s saying these things not because he thinks his followers will buy them, but because he actually believes them. This is dangerous territory -- ominous because of what it could mean should he have similar paranoid fantasies about, say, N. Korea or China.

For the record, let’s take a look at the idea that pictures of Schumer and Pelosi in the company of Russian officials could mean they have any ties to Russia, let alone ties that are comparable to Trump’s. In Trump’s view, if an investigation of him is warranted, and investigation of them is warranted. The evidence against them: public widely circulated and utterly inconsequential one-off publicity photographs. The evidence against him: For that, we turn to a recent column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post…

Having trouble following the fast-moving developments about the Trump team’s ties to Russia? Here’s a primer to get you up to speed:

President Trump got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin "very well,"  but he doesn’t “know Putin.” Putin sent Trump “a present” and they spoke, but Trump has “no relationship with him.”

Trump has “nothing to do with Russia,” but his son has said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Russia definitely hacked the Democratic National Committee, unless it was a 400-pound man in his bedroom or a guy in a van down by the river.

U.S. intelligence agencies allege that Putin meddled in the election to try to get Trump elected, but this was all a “ruse”and a “fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.”

There was “no communication” between Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign and transition, except for communication with Russia by Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not have communications with the Russians,” except for the two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he neglected to mention under oath. Sessions then said he never discussed the campaign with Russians, which is not what was alleged. Sessions had “no idea what this allegation is about” regarding his Russian contacts but had enough of an idea what it was about to declare “it is false.”

Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but this decision is unrelated to the discovery that he spoke twice with the Russian ambassador despite his claims that he had no such meetings. Sessions cannot confirm the investigation he recused himself from exists or will exist in the future.

Sessions believes that perjury is one of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “goes to the heart of the judicial system,” except his false testimony under oath to Congress was not a false statement but a case of speaking too quickly.

Sessions met with the Russian ambassador during the time Sessions was serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, but not in his capacity as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.

Sessions remembers nothing of his meetings with the Russian ambassador, except that he remembers clarly talking about terrorism and religion and Ukraine and he’s sure they didn’t talk about the campaign. It was a total coincidence that around the same time Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador, Trump gave an interview that ended up on Russian state-owned TV saying he didn’t believe reports of Russian influence in the U.S. election.

Trump, Trump’s press secretary and a broad swath of Republican members of Congress said there is no reason for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation from which Sessions recused himself.

The incendiary and salacious “dossier” by a former British intelligence official on Trump’s involvement with Russia was completely unverified, but U.S. authorities were prepared to pay the man who wrote it.

Carter Page, who has extensive ties to Moscow, had “no role” in the Trump campaign, except that Trump, meeting with The Post’s editorial board, listed Page as an adviser.

Reports of the Trump team’s ties to Russia are “fake news,” yet those who leaked the information for those articles need to be found and punished.

Trump ousted Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, who Trump says did nothing wrong. Flynn, who spoke several times with Kislyak on the day President Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia, told Vice President Pence and the FBI that the discussion that intelligence officials heard them having about sanctions was not a discussion about sanctions. The sanctions that Flynn reportedly discussed with Kislyak, in the conversation he can’t entirely remember, were not really sanctions.

Former Trump campaign manager Paul manafort had “absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia,” except for his extensive work for Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. Manafort declared in the fall that “there’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of” into his contacts with Russia, months after that investigation began.

Sessions previously asserted that “no one is above the law” and that failure to punish people for being untruthful under oath “will weaken the legal system,” and he proclaimed that “I’m very careful about how I conduct myself in these matters.” Except when he isn’t.

Manafort is a close Trump associate whose background is of particular interest when it comes to discussions of Trump and Russia, as explained in this article in Slate Magazine.