To the Hitler Station

        Last Friday's Republican debacle as their health care strategy collapsed was momentarily delicious but all the familiar pieces are still on the chess board: a Wall Street cabinet, a divided Congress, a Supreme Court turning to the Right for years to come and a president with no loyalty to truth or moral principle. Our danger continues unabated and in some ways is worse.

        David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has been one of the sharpest conservative critics of President Trump and recently noted in a national conference call on March 11 that we have a number of station stops before we get to the Hitler station,” but in the March Atlantic he described how that train could travel on down the line:

“Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency…Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it…conservative outrage…will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing anti-police slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see…. nobody in the history of American politics has deployed it as aggressively, as repeatedly, or with such success as Donald Trump.”

And the shift to autocracy, in many instances, won’t be that obvious: elections will still be held, just not quite as fairly; the press will remain free, but its standing will be undermined; life will go on as normal for most, but the economy and culture will slowly bend toward corruption.

       If you follow the news from North Carolina you know that no one can vote there without a photo ID.  News stories over last weekend described pro Trump parades violently attacked by Trump opponents. Last November (2016) CBS anchor Scott Peley observed that “The quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information.”  

       Corruption abounds.  The New Yorker reported on March 7^th that their business reporter Adam Davidson spent months investigating the Trump Hotel deal in Baku where “Trump did business with corrupt partners who also did business with Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This would be in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

        The money-making schemes of Paul Manaford, today a senior Trump aide, range from managing the abrupt rise of the pro-Russian oligarch, Viktor Yanukovich, to the presidency of Ukraine (subsequently forced to flee from office by outraged Ukrainians) and selling his services to Putin during the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine two years ago. 

        This is without mentioning that the concentration of wealth in the U. S. and the weakening of regulatory controls and leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission create the easy means for big money to buy the loyalty of legislators and judges at both state and national levels.

       There’s one big  thing that could slow the Hitler train. It’s the churches and their interfaith colleagues who could pick up the mantel of Moses who defied Pharoah, of Jeremiah who opposed state corruption, of John the Baptist who called the chief priests and scribes of the Temple a “brood of vipers,” of Jesus who drove the money changers out of the Temple, of Paul who got tangled up with the Roman Empire.  If modern history is any teacher we know that great religious leaders have emerged to combat racism, the Vietnam War and globalization’s inequality; BUT we also know that the rank and file believers resisted losing their comfortable religion and its walled enclosures and so they withdrew, stranding their leaders and leaving society to make war, practice racism and accept unjust economic life as an act of nature.

        If good people----clergy and congregations----do nothing now, bowing to their local church or synagogue board, it is these nice people of faith who will be responsible for the triumph of evil as the Hitler train moves on to the next station.   

Thin Ice

        Recent reports that the Republican priority for repealing Obama Care, overhauling the tax code, and securing the U.S.-Mexico border will delay the trillions promised by President Trump for infrastructure projects until 2018 signals that the people in small cities and towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Trump signs are still pegged into front yards, face the hard reality—along with the rest of us—that modern governments serve as executors for Wall Street’s priorities. Remember, the Obama Attorney General, Eric Holder, never prosecuted a single bank CEO for the catastrophic mortgage finance collapse of 2008 that drove millions of people out of their homes.

        This agenda of Trump’s Wall Street billionaire cabinet is unfolding rapidly. The Republican replacement for the Affordable Health Care Act announced yesterday turns health policy into a money-making sorcerer for the Wall Street-based private insurance industries, the pharmaceuticals and the health technology companies. Dodd-Frank and SEC regulatory functions are slated for downgrading along with weaker EPA enforcement.

        The furious U. S. airstrikes underway this week against Yemen and Syrian dissident groups (whatever their merits may be, or not) are self-fulfilling strategies requiring huge increases in the military budget to replace the expended munitions; and of course North Korea and China loom.

        Meanwhile Trump-inspired ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) sweeps are terrorizing  the eight million unauthorized immigrants in the U. S. labor force-- 2 million of them doing migrant farm work. (Pew Research Center, November  2016). The political lie feeding anti-immigration sentiments today belies the reality that much of the U. S. agricultural economy would collapse tomorrow without a steady supply of these migrant farm hands, who often have no legal status.

        This scene of moral desolation is reminiscent of the remark, attributed to William Faulkner, that the essence of racism in the South was the failure of the white man to call his darkly-born child, “my son, my son.”

      All of this is very serious penultimate business as Trump forces fight back against the image of Obama’s purity on wire taps and the secret worlds of government intelligence that leak.  Claiming “everyone does it” opens the door further to the demons of a daily kleptocracy. Here’s one example: The Yarborough case in Arizona. He’s President of the Arizona Senate:

        The Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization (Acsto) is one of the state’s largest voucher-granting groups. From 2010 to 2014 (the latest year recorded in federal tax filings), the group received $72.9 million in donations, all of which were ultimately financed by the state.

        Arizona law allows the group to keep 10 percent of those donations to pay for overhead. In 2014, the group used that money to pay its executive director $125,000. His name? Steve Yarbrough. Forms filed by the organization with the I.R.S. declare that he worked an average of 40 hours per week on the job — in addition, presumably, to the hours he worked as president of the State Senate.

       Yet the group doesn’t do all the work involved with accepting donations and handing out vouchers. It outsources data entry, computer hardware, customer service, information processing, award notifications and related personnel expenses to a private for-profit company called HY Processing. The group paid HY Processing $636,000 in 2014, and millions of dollars in total over the last decade.

        The owner of HY Processing? Steve Yarbrough, along with his wife, Linda, and another couple. (The “Y” in “HY” stands for “Yarbrough.”) According to The Arizona Republic, Acsto also pays $52,000 per year in rent. Its landlord? Steve Yarbrough. In June 2012, Mr. Yarbrough bought a car for $16,000. In July 2012, Acsto reimbursed him the full amount.    [NY Times March 2, 2017]

        But this is chump change compared to Wall Street where hedge funds engage in trading deal in trillions of dollars. Not just a few trillion, but many, many trillions of dollars.

       Don’t worry. We’re still needed.  Wall Street still needs the people’s money to buy retail, to borrow in the rental and mortgage markets. The reason the new White House squad of Bannon, etc. are filled with joy is that they are embarked on dismantling and  taking hold of an economy filled with the people’s money to provide collateral for their “puts” and hedges.

      Take this lesson to your Sabbath school next week.