Author: Robert I. Grundfest

I am a teacher, writer, voice-over artist and rationally opinionated observer of American and international society. While my job is to entertain and engage, my purpose is always to start a conversation.

Categories
Democracy

The Weeks Ahead: Pressure, Not Panic

Hoping for something special on Monday when Robert Mueller has promised to unseal the first legal action relating to his probe of Russia’s involvement in the election? Speculation is rampant and the Republicans must be nervous or they wouldn’t be dredging up Hillary stories. My favorites are the ones that say the Democrats are the ones who colluded with Russia. That’s going to be a tough sell when it was members of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign whose emails were hacked.

But by now we know that facts are not the GOP’s, or the White House’s, stock in trade. And this was the week that the Republicans paved the way for a tax cut bill that the rest of the country hasn’t seen and doesn’t allow for much debate because that might open it up to scrutiny. Or debate. Or criticism. Or the very real possibility that many middle class taxpayers will pay more taxes just so corporations can pay much less.

But the Democrats had better be very careful about what they wish for. President Trump will not be impeached, and by calling for such action the left is courting a very serious backlash. After all; it’s one thing to vehemently disagree with the president. It’s quite another to threaten legal action based on what he’s done so far, which is monumentally bad and retrograde and backwards and the opposite of making our country the envy of the world. In fact, the Republicans are already running their 2018 campaign on the premise that a Democratic Congress will seek to impeach the president,which most people do not support.

In short, calm down and let the legal process work itself out. Robert Mueller has the respect of most of the country. Let the news drip for a while. Oppose the policies and keep a sharp eye on what the White House does, rather than on what it says.

On the tax bill, point out where the middle and lower middle classes will lose because of this bill. Remind people that corporations will pay less, but they won’t because someone has to pay for the tax cuts. Talk about fairness, because in  the end, that’s what this bill is all about, and that’s where it ultimately will fail.

And of course, agitate, agitate, agitate.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

[contact-form][contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”true” /][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”true” /][contact-field label=”Website” type=”url” /][contact-field label=”Message” type=”textarea” /][/contact-form]

Categories
Featured

Reality to US: My Condolences

I’m still trying to figure out how you actually mess up a condolence call to a soldier’s family and turn it into a national nightmare when the White House Chief of Staff has to lie to cover up for the president’s lies. And just to make it worse, the White House Press Secretary then questions an American’s right to ask questions simply because the Chief of Staff is a Four Star General.

I’m all for respecting the military and the soldiers who serve our country. What I strenuously object to is the idea that we need to glorify the military and hold it in higher regard than  the rights they fight to protect, among which are the right to freedom of speech and of the press.

Saying that its inappropriate to criticize John Kelly simply because he’s a general shows me how utterly ignorant the present administration is of our history and jurisprudence. It also shows me how dangerous they are when it comes to what people say. Would it not also be inappropriate to question John McCain’s service to our country? The president did not hesitate to question McCain’s heroism and commitment.

Perhaps Trump’s tax returns have a line for moral bankruptcy to go along with his likely other manipulations.

Is there not going to be day when something that used to be predictable, normal, mundane or life-affirming is turned into a sloppy, incompetent, truthless, egomaniacal, psychological endurance test? How much more will the president’s actions cause good, honest people to lose their way and wobble because their moral gyroscopes have been knocked off their axes by his insipid need to be the story? Wasn’t John Kelly the man who was going to bring order to the White House? To stop the internecine bleeding and feuding that was tearing the country apart?

This is not going well, especially because Kelly is now looking a lot less like a pillar of moral strength  and more like a man who is wading into the tide of turpitude that threatens to become a tsunami. None of this is making America look like a worthy ally, governing entity or negotiating partner.

All of this comes at the end of a week that saw the president flip-flop on whether he supports a bipartisan fix for the Affordable Health Care Act that would go a long way towards meeting goals that he’s enunciated, which are to provide comprehensive health insurance to people at an affordable price and to stabilize the insurance markets. Of course, that’s what Trump has said. What he really wants to do is disrupt the law and have the country blame the Democrats, but that’s not going to happen. There are too many people in states that Trump won that rely on the ACA. Does he think that Democrats won’t remind those voters next November that it’s his actions that caused their plight if they lose coverage?

This is also a week that saw the president also try to kill two deals that are not nearly as bad as he says they are: NAFTA and the Iran nuclear agreement. The NAFTA negotiations are not going well, and you can’t really blame Mexico and Canada for wanting to hold the line on the deal because their economies have done well under the pact. Why would they want to renegotiate, especially since this administration has shown that it will destroy any agreement they don’t like. And while NAFTA has done serious damage to many parts of the United States, it has also done some wonderful things to other parts. Scrapping the deal will lead to significantly higher prices, an there’s no guarantee that it will lead to the job growth that Trump has promised.

The Europeans, in addition to the Iranians, are also wary of this administration’s negotiating tactics and are saying that Iran is abiding by the nuclear deal. That Iran is supporting terrorist groups in the Middle East is terrible, but let’s address that separately. The last thing anybody wants is for Iran to support terrorists and have a nuclear program.

Which brings us to tax reform, in which the middle class is going to be asked to give up deductions for mortgage interest and state taxes and, as of yesterday, possibly a severe restriction on how much its members can contribute to 401(k) retirement plans. All because the president wants to give businesses a massive tax break, from 35% to 20%, under the illusion that corporations will use that money to create jobs.

And not to help their stock price.
Which is what investors want.
And is tied to executive compensation.
See where I’m going with this?

If these corporations were so moral, why not use the money they have parked away now, bring it back to the US, and create more jobs. You know the answer.

We are very quickly losing our moral authority as a beacon of democracy, tolerance, openness and responsibility. It will take us years to get those back.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Featured

The Retreat Becomes a Rout

And, no; I’m not talking about Democratic failures in the face of the Republican onslaught. What’s being routed is common sense, practicality, reason, and stability.

The president has ultimately decided that if Congress is not going to strip health insurance from millions of people, essentially box them into buying policies that have unconscionably sky-high deductibles (because they’ll be the cheapest ones) or do not cover essential services such as addiction, mental health or family planning, then he is going to do that unilaterally.

By executive order.
Which Republicans hated when Obama issued them.
But we know what that was all about.
Don’t we.

And he’s planning on having the Democrats take the blame for it. That’s a retreat from reality, but then again, President Trump lives on the banks of denial, and he’ll continue to blame everyone except himself for the carnage that will follow. Of course, I do agree with the president that insurance companies should not get a payoff or have their profits subsidized with taxpayer money, but that begs the question of why he doesn’t really work with Democrats to construct a public option to compete with them.

Yes, I know the answer lies in a maelström of contradiction, ignorance, bombast and cruelty, but still.

This, though, is just the domestic bomb. The one that could get us all killed is in his actions on North Korea and Iran. By backing away from the Iran deal, and again leaving it to Congress to follow behind him and scoop up the mess, he makes a deal with North Korea that much more remote. After all, why would any dictator look at how we treated Saddam Hussain, Muammar Gaddafi and now Iran, and want to enter into any deal with us, knowing that at any time the president could abrogate or ignore its provisions? Further, Hussain and Gaddafi were killed after giving up their weapons of mass destruction. Kim and the mullahs are smarter than that.

Any astute reader of US foreign policy would also see that what the president says is not always what the policy turns out to be. Many of Trump’s secretaries have had to clarify, which means contradict, what he’s said because what he’s said would start a war. Cooler heads have prevailed, but cooler heads have also been seen rolling on the floor after a combustible president decided that they weren’t showing enough fealty. or at least got caught doing something stupid.

The real problem is that the United States is losing its credibility and its influence in the name of empty nationalism and the belief among Trump’s supporters that he somehow has the country’s best interests at heart. I don’t think he has our best interests and I’m rethinking the notion that he has a heart. What the president has is an insatiable desire to be the story, all day every day. And as we know from the media, that requires ever-expanding story lines, exaggerations and shock.

The system will eventually react. It will not be a pretty sight.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Democracy Featured

Shooting Policy Blanks

We learned this week that the Republican Party is so concerned about religious rights that they’ll compromise women’s health and allow people who are supposedly committed to love and compassion to discriminate against fellow human beings who love differently than they do.

We also learned that the only suggestion they can come up with when scores of people are killed by altered weapons is to get rid of the alteration, thereby condemning the country to another mass shooting massacre, which I predict will happen sometime in the next 18 months. A bold prediction, no? Kind of like predicting the sunrise tomorrow.

And then of course there’s the ongoing dismissal of African-American concerns regarding police actions, employment discrimination and voter suppression.

OK, you’re right. We didn’t really learn these things. We already knew them to be true, but having to actually live their reality is a reminder that the party truly does want to undo 60 years of progress for those people in society who have consistently felt the sting of discrimination and hate.

I certainly understand that the Republican Party favors the free market, lower taxes, less government and, shall we say, traditional morality, but under the present administration, those polices have become meaner and less fair than ever before. Add in the gerrymandering that keeps the GOP in power even in states where they are a minority only compounds the problem and the inequity. We can only hope that the Supreme Court rules favorably in the Wisconsin gerrymandering case it heard this past week. Courts have been good at preventing the administration from completely fouling the environment,

There’s word that the president has reached out to Chuck Schumer about fixing the health care law, but that won’t pass the House, so it looks like we’re stuck with the stalling tactics that have made the health insurance market skittish and more expensive. The silver lining is that millions of people will not lose their insurance, but we’re clearly not going in the right direction.

It’s disheartening to know that this administration will not do the right thing when the opportunity presents itself.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
BLM Featured

Tax Cut Pizza Math: How Many Slices Will You Get?

Raise your hand if you thought the Trump tax plan would favor the middle class and the poor.

I see no hands.

Democrats in the House and Senate can fulminate all they want, and the responsible media – and you know who they are – can put banner headlines about economic inequality on their sites and publications, but in the end, cutting taxes for the upper class will always be the GOP’s number one priority.

What’s different this time around is that the deficit hawks who haunted President Obama for his supposed wasteful spending that saved the auto industry and basically the entire economy are…silent. Actually, they’ve defended the multi-trillion black hole that TrumpTax will blow in the deficit, with the otherworldly assumption that economic growth will pay for the tax cuts.

It will not. Yes, economic growth will likely rise in the first few months after the cuts are passed, but at some point the Federal Reserve, with or without Janet Yellin, will raise interest rates enough to cool off the resultant inflation. That will result in some more fulminating from the president who knows less about actual economics than he does about health insurance.

This assumes that the bill is passed as presented today, which also is not going to happen. There are too many moving parts and too many corporate interests that stand to lose for the law to stand. The home building industry is concerned about the mortgage interest deduction. People like me who live  in states where state and local taxes are high will put pressure on legislators to put back the deduction for those taxes. The new proposed 25% tax rate for pass through entities could result in many people listing themselves as pass through entities, which would mean they’d pay a lower tax rate.

And, of course, there are other parts of the proposal (still only 9 pages long) that will come out soon that will benefit other groups. Tax bills run into the thousands of pages. I can’t wait to see who gets the breaks and who gets the shaft.

The real impact, though, will mean the most when the bill is written and the true measure of what each group in this country will get out of it is measured in pizzas.

That’s right, pizzas, as in, “the average person will see a $1,600 tax cut, which comes out to $31 per week, or about 2 pizzas.” Right now, the average middle class worker will get about a $660 tax break per year which comes out to $12.70 per week, which is…one pizza. Are you ready to create a multi-trillion dollar addition to the deficit for your pizza? If we need to, we can pool our money together and add pepperoni. Or an anchovy. After the bill passes in its final form, I would not be surprised to see the middle class share fall from a whole pie to slices. And not fat Sicilian slices either.

No matter how you slice it, though, it ain’t gonna to be much for the voters who thought Donald Trump was on their side or that the swamp would be drained. This bill is already fueling the lobbyists who are anticipating a windfall. And the president will still not show us his tax return, so any of his claims that tax reform will not help him are specious at best.

But this is par for the course for our golfing executive. You know: the one who’s currently blaming Puerto Rico for its devastation.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Democracy Featured

The Dotard Wants War and Concussions

Take that, you John McCain you.

And NFL players who kneel for the national anthem? You need to speak the way we want you to speak. And hit harder, man! Be like Aaron Hernandez.

But what’s happening with Stephen Curry you ask? We don’t want your NBA Championship demeanor and terrific play and ambassador-like personality anywhere near the White House. You’re not invited!

Kim Jong-un should not, in any way, feel singled out. But I certainly understand how hurt he must be that the old man in the White House is yelling at him for having a nuclear program and firing missiles into the air above our allies’ heads. ‘Rocket Man’ is a good song. He should see it as a compliment.

In other words, international diplomacy has been reduced to name calling and 6th grade playground theatrics. Remind me again; who thought it was a good idea to elect Donald Trump? Yes, I’m sure the base loves the muscular response, which they see as a refreshing change from those pantywaist presidents named Clinton, Bush and Obama. Threatening a scurrilous, dangerous, immoral dictator will get us what we want because, after all, we’re the United States and all dictators cower when the president tells them he is unhappy.

Just look at Iran. They can certainly see that Donald Trump is going to decertify the nuclear agreement we signed with them two years ago. What the president doesn’t see is that this is going to make him an unreliable deal-making partner with Iran, North Korea and any other country who might have an interest n United States’ affairs and trade. The simple, elegant “No” will be this year’s most diplomatic response, and one that will not make the White House happy. Not that the past 30 years of State Department public and private efforts have done much about North Korea. They’ve ignored agreements, broken them and generally thumbed their noses at us. But we could always say that we acted in an adult, dignified, internationally-approved manner while it was happening. In short, we were a role model for the democracies we represented. This administration has spent all of that political capital in nine months. Pregnancies should go better than this.

Just to show that a lack of diplomacy should not be limited to the world stage, the president has now picked a fight with Senator McCain for rightly opposing a disastrous bill that’s not really related to health care, but to the tax savings it can generate for the $1.5 trillion dollar giveaway to the rich that the GOP has been salivating over since January.

Our federal system is a wonderful creation, but health insurance should not be subject to the whims of governors and state legislators who have, shall we say, a spotty record when it comes to science, women’s health care, birth control, budget-balancing tricks and recognizing that religious belief will not cure all of our ills. All Americans should receive health care that takes into account their basic needs and doesn’t allow anyone to charge them more for pre-existing conditions, maternity care, mental health or addiction services. What’s worse is that this bill would penalize those states that expanded Medicaid to cover their most vulnerable citizens and give more money to those that shunned Obamacare. 

Which means, in our contradictory world, that those states that despise federal involvement in their affairs will be the largest beneficiaries of…federal largess.

And really, some people, like the president, should just stay away from sports. Yes, the man plays golf. Oh, does he play golf! But in every other way, he misunderstands the professional sports culture in the same way that he misunderstands larger American culture. The athletes and teams that have decided not to visit the White House are doing so because of the president’s words and actions, rather than as a result of some media cabal his supporters blame for his low poll numbers. Because, really, will professional football become a better game by having more players suffer concussions and brain damage and CTE?

As for the national anthem? Until 2009, NFL players used to stay in their locker rooms when the national anthem was played. You’d think the players had stood on the sidelines since 1814, when the song was written, but in fact that is not the case. You’d also think that they were the first athletes to cause controversy around the anthem, but that isn’t true either, if you take Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and a host of other athletes into account. The opposition to the president’s words have come from players, coaches and NFL owners, many of whom are staunchly Republican. They get it. The president does not.

I understand that Trump is angry because it looks like the health scare law will lose, North Korea will not back down and his preferred candidate in the Alabama Republican Senate primary is behind in the polls. He’s not the first president to face multiple crises.

But he’s not helping himself or the country with his shameful responses.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Featured

The New Normal Is Still Not Normal

Is it just me or is the political circus breaking for an intermission?

Yes, I know that the president watched FOX News, then tweeted that the British knew who the suspects were in Friday’s terrorist attack. And he also reiterate his position that civil rights agitators are just as bad as Nazis and Klan members.

But somehow, it feels different.

Maybe it’s that the president struck a deal with Democrats about the debt ceiling and agreed with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi that we shouldn’t deport 800,000 people who were brought here by their parents, have generally lived fine American lives, and now risk having their worlds upended because, well, why? There was speculation that the president was concerned that his poll numbers were just too low or that throwing hard-working people out of the country was too egregious even for the right-wing media, who generally opposed his proposed policies.

Or it could be that John F. Kelly is actually doing a decent job as White House Chief of Staff and was able to get through the haze and appeal to the president on a level that Trump’s children, spouse, past advisers, conscience, sense of decency and humanity, and presidential behavior have not. Or maybe he was just havin’ fun, and next week he’ll go back to ravaging the truth, reacting and tweeting about news stories he hear, and calling for the wall to be built.

In the end, it won’t matter. Another eruption is always just around the corner. But, again, it just feels different.

And this week, the diplomats come calling for the annual opening of the United Nations. The president is scheduled to give a speech and of course anything goes, and will, when he takes the podium. Then he and his staffers must give some kind of explanation as to what his foreign policy will look like, but when you have no clue or knowledge about that it’s difficult to be…cogent.

The great fear among those who oppose the president’s agenda is that his behavior and utterances will become normalized. Perhaps we are seeing that. That’s why this new feeling can be dangerous. This is no normal Republican administration.

And I don’t think it ever will be.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Climate change Featured

It’s Just the Weather. Nothing to See Here, Citizens. Move Along.

No, it’s not the Apocalypse. That happened last November. This is just weather.

Just weather. And the earth. How quaint.

Three hurricanes, and a major earthquake that very few people outside of Mexico are paying attention to, are taking their physical and psychic toll on a country that does not need any more bad news. Add in a cleanup that will be expensive, daunting and political, and you’ll see more partisan bickering in addition to the usual American disaster response which will include astounding stories of bravery, generosity, and poignancy.

Coming on the heels of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the earthly events of the past few weeks are instructive and worthy of reflection. For as a much as we consider ourselves as the vanguard of technology, knowledge, wealth, sophistication and freedom, we need to remind ourselves that nature ultimately holds us to account. There’s just no way to stop a hurricane or to predict an earthquake in time to safely evacuate residents. We are really at the mercy of our own limitations and our uncanny hubris when it comes to assessing risk. Just as we overestimated our safety 16 years ago, and unconscionably put the New York disaster assessment agency in the World Trade Center, so have Houston and, I’m reasonably certain we will find out, South Florida, will find that they were unprepared for events that stretched the vocabulary of every weatherista in the media.

And the political lessons? Please. Just ask anybody in New Jersey who remembers the Texas Congressional delegation’s incomprehensible opposition to federal relief for Superstorm Sandy in 2012, how they view the Ted Cruz FEMA telethon and screechy request for funds to rebuild, and they’ll tell you quite a story. Just don’t stand too close. And I hope you’re not offended by salty language. There’s also more money to be spent on Florida, and in the end I expect that both states will get what they need.

What these storms ultimately should tell us is that we are pretty good at reacting to disasters (right, Brownie?), but we are terrible at planning, execution, building codes and, yes, infrastructure. We simply cannot continue this way. Other countries, such as the European low countries and Great Britain, have made adjustments and not simply rebuilt up the affected areas. Dunes on the New Jersey shore will help, but building more houses on stilts will just set up homes as field goal attempts the next time we are pummeled with a 100-year storm that comes 95 years too soon.

The last piece to all of this is how we react, long-term, to these challenges, and the main component is the effect our activity is having on our atmosphere. Climate change is real. It is being influenced by choices and actions that humans have made since the industrial age. You can’t believe in meteorology and astronomy and physics, but deny the atmospheric chemistry that is making the earth warmer and holding more moisture. It’s time that we realized that we need to make adjustments and to not put people in danger that is avoidable.

That will require leadership that, at present, we just don’t have.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Education Featured

The New School Year: History Will Guide the Future

New school years always bring new challenges for children, parents and teachers. This school year, though, promises to be much trickier, because we are now debating United States History.

Remember history? That’s the class that isn’t tested at the end of the year by the great national testing monopoly, Pearson. The PARCC tests focus on non-fiction readings, which allows for more use of historical documents on the test, but there’s no real history or context that a student has to master in order to answer the questions.

For decades we’ve focused on language arts and mathematics as the key components of K-12 education, relentlessly testing students in those subjects. And what has your school district likely spent a good deal of money on over the last few years? STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) or STEAM (ibid., but add Arts). Coding classes are now part of the curriculum in many states as required business and personal finance courses. They get lots of press. And, yes, United States History is required in all states, but far too many of them require only one year of it. And with no summary test, save for a final exam at the end of the class, history has lost a good deal of influence in the curriculum.

We are now paying the price.

As this new school year begins, teachers will be asked to address the explosive issues that are daily in the media concerning our history and what it means. How should we treat Confederate statues and monuments? What place do hate groups such as the KKK and the American Nazi Party have in a country with a strong First Amendment? What should we do about immigration and children who were brought here by undocumented parents? And of course, we seem to be debating President Trump’s behavior, tweets and spur-of-the-moment policy declarations on a minute-by-minute basis, not to mention his speculative knowledge of historical events.

This is the environment in which America’s school teachers must operate this academic year. We are the ones who will be the first point of contact for many children who are feeling the anxiety and divisiveness that has taken hold in our society. Remember that as much as any adult is trying to make sense of what’s happening in our society, children experience these events on a magnified scale. They have less of the emotional regulation necessary to confront explosive debates that adults have and they have little context by which to weigh the consequences of what they’re learning. Great teachers recognize these deficits and conduct their classes so as to support students, to teach them civil behavior, to make sure students respect differences, and to calmly appeal to their students’ intelligence, humanity, and sense of justice.

Of course, some would argue that if teachers had done this in the past, then we wouldn’t be at this place in our history where there is so much disagreement and division. This would be a tragic conclusion. Did any of your teachers teach you to hate? To insult your classmates? To steal? To plagiarize? Of course not.

The simple truth is that teachers can only be as effective as the communities in which we teach, and if a community, or the country, is dysfunctional, then that will be reflected in the schools. We see students for only a portion of the day. The media, social and otherwise, takes over from there. Together with parents, teachers can only plant the seeds of knowledge; society and common sense have to do the rest.

That’s why this school year will be more of a challenge than most years, but I have no doubt that America’s school teachers will do their best, keep their emotions in check, teach from the heart and the head, advocate for every one of their students, and proudly represent themselves as doing one of the most important and difficult jobs in this country.

I wish all of my fellow teachers a happy new school year full of joy and wonder. May we learn as much about our students as they learn from us.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Featured Racism

Pardon Our Appearance While We Crash and Burn

In the Trump Administration’s best approximation of Friday Night Lights, the president (shudder) treated two of his main constituencies to a Shabbat treat. First by throwing civil rights and equal opportunity to the floor when he banned transgender Americans from serving their country in the armed forces, and then when he pardoned convict Joe Arpaio, a move that sent a solid message to those who believe that medieval treatment of prisoners is not just for the 14th century.

Trump’s defense? That Joe was following the law. We should note that Joe was convicted of contempt for not following the law

The silver lining is that in order to receive a pardon, the person has to admit that they committed a crime. So Arpaio is now an admitted crook. Just the kind of guy that Trump admires.

These actions would be bad in any administration, but for one that is committed to really turning the clock back to 1946, before the armed forces were desegregated, these new twists are simply the method by which this country, ruled by white men, informed by white men, and acculturated by white sensibilities, will be…returned to white men.

Pardon my confusion as we slowly twist in the wind.

While the media focuses on the president’s foibles and twitter follies, he and his minions have done real and present damage to the country. They have sent the message that it’s fine to exclude people from participating in and benefiting from our democracy, opened up public land for economic exploitation, set us back at least 75 years as far as pollution and the environment are concerned, rolled back civil rights protections, and essentially made us a non-player in world affairs. And they’ve shown that they have no shame in perpetrating these policies. In fact, if it’s what the ultra-conservative base of the Republican Party wants, then Trump is eager to give it to them.

I would expect more pardons, more executive orders and more erratic and unpresidential behavior in the weeks and months to come. President Trump’s approval ratings are low enough that he doesn’t have to care about what the opposition thinks. After all, how much worse can things get?

Exactly my point.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Democracy

Why Are We Debating Hate?

Finally, the president has united much of the country. Unfortunately for him, most of the country opposes what he stands for.

Yes, there are still many people who support the president and believe that his equating violence on both sides was appropriate, but a larger majority sees the danger in his saying that the Nazis and the counter-protesters in Charlottesville were morally similar. That the opposition to his words came from around the world and across the political spectrum tells you that this was no victory for Trump. And his decision to stay away from the Kennedy Center Honors program this year is not just a tactical retreat; it’s a rout. He’s not the first president to skip the ceremony, but the reason is different from why other presidents didn’t go: because his appearance would be a major distraction.

At this point, the president has been rebuked by corporate leaders, members of his arts council, and even James Murdoch, who is so afraid that American Jews, and even Israel, will see the president’s words as doing major damage, that he threw a million dollars at the Anti-Defamation League to stanch the bleeding. And where is Benjamin Netanyahu? The right-wing protector of Israeli and Jewish values has been remarkably silent on Trump’s atrocious choice of words. The company you keep, you know.

The point is that Charlottesville will likely be one of those turning points in our history. It will lead to major changes across the political spectrum and in the way that ordinary people view and talk about race. They will have to do this without moral leadership from the White House unless Trump decides that he needs to be more magnanimous and makes a prime-time speech calling for a more united country. OK, I’ll wait until you stop laughing. But I do really wish it would happen.

It is clear that we cannot expect President Trump to act presidential or to stand up and defend all of the citizens of this great country. In such a leadership vacuum, we run the risk that other noxious voices will try to fill the silence. And we also run the risk that violence will be seen as the tactic of choice.

Don’t let that happen. Be the moral voice that says the right words, the courageous words, the words that embrace instead of repel. Do not equivocate. And of course, agitate, agitate, agitate.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Featured Racism

Our President: The Hate That Keeps on Hating

With all that Charlottesville means now and will mean in the future, this much is clear: Donald Trump is probably the most genuine president we’ve ever had.

  • He is a genuine racist.
  • He is genuinely ignorant of United States History.
  • He genuinely believes that there is a moral equivalency between those who hate and those who want to stop the hate.
  • He is genuinely a terrible businessman.
  • He genuinely thinks that he, and only he, can have a correct opinion on an issue.
  • He has genuinely done damage to the office of the president of the United States.
But we should have known, shouldn’t we? After all, Trump ran on a white nationalist platform that blamed the country’s troubles on President Obama, immigrants, foreign countries, multiculturalism, political correctness and amorphous values that it’s clear Trump does not value. The far right-wing groups that include members of the KKK and Nazis are lauding his remarks from Saturday and Tuesday, remarks that placed equal blame for the violence on civil rights, justice and anti-hate groups. He claims to have seen footage and watched it closer “than anybody else,” (I’m not sure how you do that), then determined that it showed an equivalence that ignored reality.
Because people walking down a street chanting “Jews will not replace us” is that same as…people walking down the street in 1935 saying the same thing. In German.
And that brings up another trope of the Trump catastrophe. He says that he’s not racist or anti-Semitic because his daughter married Jared Kushner, who is Jewish and Orthodox, and then she converted. This is, and please pardon the disconnection, hogwash. I married into a Catholic family and while both parents seem(ed) to like me, they both harbor(ed) terrifically ugly anti-Semitic attitudes. They both deny(ied) their prejudice, but it was there just below the pleasant surface. So when Trump talks about his bona-fides, I don’t believe him for a second. And clearly, he has little regard for Kushner’s feelings as evidenced by his refusal to paint racist hate group violence for what it is.
As for history, the president seems to think that Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Stonewall Jackson are morally equal to George Washington because, after all, they all owned slaves. Never mind that the first three allied themselves, as treason, with a government that wanted to break up the United States, enshrine slavery as a constitutional right, and to rip up the laws that George Washington fought to establish and then helped to create. And after the Civil War was over, Forrest and others decided that they could not live in a country where the freed slaves had the same rights as white men. They then created a legal system that ignored the constitution and brutally killed African-Americans for more than a century.
The consequences are already unfolding. CEOs, you know, the people Trump said would help him rebuild the economy, have already left the Manufacturing Council and the Policy Forum as a protest over his remarks. And I’m sure more will follow.
But the real damage he’s done is embolden some frightening sociopaths who want to do damage to me, my relatives, and my friends and acquaintances, who encompass a multitude of races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual choices. He’s said that Nazi ideology is equivalent to civil rights activists.
The President of the United States believes all of this. Think about that!
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Exit mobile version