Israel still gets $10 million a day

Consider some facts in the tempest blown up over President Barack Obama’s decision to allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and the part of Jerusalem occupied by Israel since it captured the territory from Jordan in 1967.

In allowing the resolution to pass, The United States effectively endorsed the position it has held with the rest of the international community, under all administrations -- Democrat and Republican -- that the settlements represent an illegal colonization of occupied territory and a real obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians as envisaged under a so-called two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has done everything he can to obstruct attempts by the Obama administration to get real negotiations going between the two sides, has condemned as “shameful” the Security Council resolution and the U.S. decision not to veto it. And certainly it’s true that his ability to resist real progress toward peace has been facilitated by a militant, corrupt Palestinian leadership.

So what impact will the U.N. resolution have on Israeli settlement activity?  Probably none. It will not stop Israel from expanding colonization. In fact, given the condemnation of the resolution and of President Obama from Donald Trump and his supporters, including some leading Democrats on this issue, settlement activity is more likely to accelerate.

And what of the notion that President Obama’s action represented an abandonment of Washington’s historic strong support for the State of Israel?

Answer: 38.5 billion dollars.

That’s the record amount the Obama administration agreed recently to give Israel over the next ten years in military aid. That works out to $3.85 billion a year, or more than $10 million a day from the U.S. taxpayer to the State of Israel -- $10 million a day, every day for the next 3,650 days. Israel has long argued that U.S. aid is not used to support activity the U.S. historically has opposed, like settlements, but getting $3.85 billion a year from the U.S. frees an equal amount from other revenue sources to pay for the settlements.

How much would that cost be? According to the Macro Center for Political Economics, a progressive Israeli think tank, the cost of support for the  “settlers and local governments running settlements” in 2015 totaled $368 million.

The U.S. gives that much in military aid to Israel in less than 40 days.

Chemi Shalev, a columnist writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, put it this way:

“In recent years, after President Obama desisted from efforts to advance the peace process, Netanyahu, his ministers and settler leaders had behaved as if the battle was over: Israel built and built, the White House objected and condemned, the facts on the ground were cemented in stone.

“You can have your cake and eat it too, the government implied: thumb your nose at Washington and the international community, build in the West Bank as if there’s no tomorrow and still get $38 billion in unprecedented [US] military aid.”

Gilding the tangerine

The New York Times today reports that it takes only six minutes for Alec Baldwin to make-up as Donald Trump for his performances on Saturday Night Live. That brings to mind an obvious recommendation for the Donald, who must spend at least two hours every morning arranging to look like himself:

Stop the Twitter assaults on Baldwin's performances and ask him how he does it. Once you're playing President of the United States you need to devote as much time as possible to the job.

On second thought maybe the less time he spends on the job, the better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/arts/television/a-tangerine-wig-and-a-tightrope-walk-alec-baldwin-as-donald-j-trump.html?

Absurd, you say? What isn't absurd these days?

Annexation blowback

Donald Trump loves people who love annexation. One is Vladimir Putin who -- whether or not Trump noticed -- invaded and annexed Crimea. Others include the far-right of Israel, including most of the governing coalition, who believe they are entitled to annex the West Bank and the Golan Heights, captured from Jordan and Syria respectively in 1967 and illegally colonized in the last half-century by Israelis in large, modern communities called “settlements” as if they were some sort of frontier outposts. In that half century, every U. S. administration -- Republican and Democrat -- has held along with the rest of the international community, that the “settlements” are illegal under international law, specifically the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Trump’s acceptance of the Israeli hardline view on the settlement issue is manifest in his nomination yesterday of his friend, bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, to be his ambassador to Israel. Friedman has been a forceful supporter of Israel’s right to settle and even annex the West Bank . He has compared Jews who challenge that position to “kapos,” as Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in concentration camps were called.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (adamantly not related to David) told CNN Friday morning, the Iranians must be popping champagne corks on Trump’s selection of David Friedman, hugely offensive as it will be to Iran’s bitter rivals, Saudi Arabia and Egypt whom Washington views as important allies.

But here’s a question:

Given Trump’s precedent-setting endorsement of annexation, what would his response be to an announcement by Chinese President Xi jinping that China now will annex Taiwan which after all was a part of China at least as far back as the Qing dynasty more than three centuries ago? And that he would take it back by force if necessary, just as Putin did in Crimea.

Or, how might Trump respond to Xi’s saying to him, “Look, it’s not the South U.S. Sea; it’s not the South Philippines Sea or the South Vietnam Sea. It’s the South CHINA Sea and we’re gonna do whatever we want there. See?!”

What, for that matter, might he say to his friend  Vladimir Putin if the Russian dictator were to demand the removal of all NATO troops from all countries near Russia that Moscow has historically claimed to be in its exclusive sphere of influence: such as the Baltic states and Poland. If we can put troops on the Russian border, why, then, would it not be reasonable for the Russians to put troops on our border with Mexico if Mexico decides it needs protection from Trump’s agents trying to collect on the cost of the wall?

Absurd, you say? Of course, but what isn’t absurd these days?

A suggestion for flag burners

     Don't burn the flag. Just fly it at half-mast for the duration.

Message to America from a Holocaust survivor and his son

     Speaking at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, honoring the late Elie Weisel, one of the Nazi Holocaust's most famous survivors who came to America as a refugee 56 years ago, his son, Elisha, had this to say:

     "When Syrian refugees need our help, we must help them. When Muslims in our midst are made to feel that they won't have the same rights as the rest of us, we must embrace them. When children of hard-working, law-abiding undocumented immigrants fear deportation, we must insist on compassion."

     Elisha Weisel spoke standing in front of a wall etched with his father's observation that "One person of integrity can make a difference."

     True. And as no one knew better than Elie Weisel, one person of no integrity can make a difference, too. Horrifically.

Breitbart flakes v. Corn Flakes

Resist! Buy Corn Flakes. Buy Apple Jacks and Froot Loops (whatever the heck they are!)

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Breitbart News Network is seeing some of its advertisers head for the exit doors and is responding in typical Breitbart fashion: by going on the counteroffensive, labeling one of them as “un-American” and calling it a war on conservatism..   . 

Breitbart is fighting back at one of the advertisers — the breakfast cereal maker Kellogg Co. — by launching a Twitter campaign #DumpKelloggs that encourages its readers to sign a petition and boycott the maker of such favorites as Froot Loops and Apple Jacks.

On Wednesday, Breitbart placed an article about its #DumpKellogs campaign in the top slot of its homepage. By early afternoon, the article had drawn more than 6,000 reader comments, many in support of the boycott.

"Kellogg's decision to blacklist one of the largest conservative media outlets in America is economic censorship of mainstream conservative political discourse. That is as un-American as it gets,” Breitbart said in a statement.

For the full story, go to:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-breitbart-kelloggs-advertisers-20161130-story.html

More twaddle from the twit

Trump twitter twaddle on the discovery that the presidency may be more important than the Trump business empire:

I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my . . .

Great business in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! While I am not mandated to . . .

do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses. . .

. . . The Presidency is a far more important task!

Wow, Donald. Really? Or is it just all about the visuals?

The Latest Dynasty: Duck!

Well, we got rid of the Bush Dynasty. And we got rid of the Clinton Dynasty. And what'd we get? The Duck Dynasty. The Donald Duck Dynasty. Everyone: Duck!

Mencken, Gamaliel and the Donald

    By G. Jefferson Price III

   Almost a century ago, H. L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist and great iconoclast of the early 20th century, predicted that “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

    Pundits remarking on the results of the just concluded presidential election have recalled Mencken’s prediction. “Moron” may be too gentle a designation for the frightening spectre that President-Elect Trump brings to the American political stage. But there are other, striking similarities between the American political condition today and the condition that existed when Mencken made his prediction.

      The moron prediction was the last line of a column that appeared July 26, 1920, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, a newspaper Mencken helped found, excoriating both candidates for president in the campaign of that year:  Republican Warren G. Harding and the Democrat James M. Cox, both politicians from Ohio, where Harding served as a U.S. Senator and Cox as governor.

    As in this year’s campaign, neither candidate in 1920 won his party’s nomination easily. Harding was nominated on the 10th ballot in a back room deal by the party bosses who picked him over 11 other candidates. Cox -- competing against 15 other candidates -- didn’t get the Democrat nod until the 44th ballot. There also was a third candidate in the presidential race, Eugene Debs, running for the fifth time as a Socialist from a federal prison cell where he was serving a 10-year sentence for violation of the Sedition Act of 1918 in his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I.  Debs garnered 3.41 percent of the popular vote that year, similar to the 3.3 percent Libertarian Gary Johnson got this time around.

    And, the 1920 election occurred against a backdrop of events similar in some ways to the American condition of the past several years, including racial strife, fear of  terrorism and a growing trend toward isolationism following World War I.

     As in the recent election, neither of the two top candidates was particularly respected or revered. In that 1920 column, Mencken asserted: “It seems to be quite impossible for any wholly literate man to pump up any genuine enthusiasm for either of them. …  No one but an idiot would argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man.”

    Harding was a favorite whipping-boy of Mencken, who often referred to him by his middle name Gamaliel and the incoherence of his public expressions as “Gamalielese.”

  Mencken’s denunciation of Harding’s 1921 inaugural speech as “the worst English I have ever encountered” could easily apply to the evidence of an unhinged mind manifest in Mr. Trump’s Twitter twaddle: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

     Mencken declared Harding’s comments were, as always,  directed at “the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”

     Harding won the 1920 election by a landslide with 404 electoral votes, and he was a very popular president until he and his administration were wracked with scandals, including the Teapot Dome scandal and revelations of his prolific extra-marital affairs with various women (sound familiar?), including one that produced a daughter a year before he won the presidency.

    Harding died in a hotel suite in San Francisco on Aug. 2, 1923, less than three years into his presidency. He was only 57 but suffered from various infirmities, including a heart condition that his doctors had warned him could be fatal if he persisted in his aggressive womanizing. There was some speculation Harding may have been poisoned. His wife, Florence, who was in the room when he died, refused to allow an autopsy.

    G. Jefferson Price III is a journalist who spent 35 years at The Baltimore Sun where he was a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist.

"Times They Are a Changin'" -- Not

 By G. Jefferson Price III

Fifty-three years ago, in the winter of 1963,  William Devereux Zantzinger , a 24-year-old white tobacco farmer from Charles County in Southern Maryland, appeared drunk at a socialite dance in a Baltimore hotel where he launched into a torrent of racist profanity and lashed several black hotel employees with a carnival-style cane he was carrying.

     One waitress whom he had caned several times, a 51-year-old mother of 11 named Hattie Carroll, slumped against the bar and gasped to her fellow employees, “This man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill.” Later that night she died at a hospital a couple of blocks from the hotel where she had been thrashed by  Zantzinger.

    This horrific moment of shame in Baltimore and American history came to mind last week when it was announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Dylan memorialized the incident in a song titled “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” in his 1964 album “The Times They Are A Changin’”

         Dylan has been criticized for liberties he took with the facts of the Hattie Carroll case in his lyrics writing in the first verse:

“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’ . . . “

    Zantzinger, whose name Dylan misspelled, was originally charged with homicide but ultimately was convicted of manslaughter on evidence that Carroll  suffered from other longstanding health issues that were factors in her death, including an enlarged heart and hypertension. The Baltimore medical examiner ruled she had died of a brain hemorrhage.

    In another part of the lyric, Dylan incorrectly called Carroll the mother of ten rather than eleven, apparently because eleven didn’t fit the meter he wanted.

    Zantzinger, who also was also charged with assaulting two other black hotel employees with his cane, was fined $500 and sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence he served working in the kitchen at the Washington county jail in Western Maryland rather than the jail in Baltimore, where it was feared he would have been killed by local inmates, the majority of whom were black. The trial had been moved to Western Maryland from Baltimore where racial tensions had been running high even before the beatings of Hattie Carroll and her fellow employees.

 The court also showed its concern for Zantzinger’s economic wellbeing by allowing him to remain out on bail for two weeks between conviction and sentencing so he could harvest the tobacco crop at his 630-acre farm in Southern Maryland.

     The death of Hattie Carroll was in 1963, mind you; not 1863, but Zantzinger was of a mindset that never stopped yearning for the past when the white race was the master race, and the black race existed to serve it and to endure physical abuse and, yes, even death, in service to the white man.

   Other stories appearing in The Baltimore Sun alongside the June 20. 1963 report of Zantzinger’s trial offer up a good picture of where Maryland stood in the civil rights struggle. One article headlined “Prison Dining Integrated” reported “Negro and white inmates dined together without incident today as state prison officials went ahead with plans to integrate the Maryland Institute for Men.” Another article reported the owners of a Baltimore area amusement park  “declined an invitation from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations . . . to discuss the park’s segregation policy.”

    Five years later huge swathes of the city were in flames and the National Guard was trying to enforce martial law as protests following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King tore at the city’s economic and social fabric.

     Zantzinger’s  caning of blacks serving in the Emerson Hotel ballroom accompanied tongue-lashings filled with the vilest racist epithets. His appearance with his wife, Jane,  at the Spinster’s Ball, a charity event staged by Baltimore’s social prominenti of the day was preceded by similar behavior at a Baltimore restaurant where Zantzinger threw down double martinis and his wife loaded up on five double scotches, according to court testimony. The evidence that they were both utterly drunk seems to have been a factor in the court’s leniency.

    Nothing much was heard from or about Zantzinger until a quarter century later in 1991 when a local newspaper exposed the fact that he was continuing to collect rent -- more than $60,000 over a five-year period -- from poor blacks living in run-down shacks in a southern Maryland property he had once owned but which had long before been seized by Charles County for failure to pay taxes. These dwellings had no plumbing and did not even have outhouses.

    At a trial, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to more than four dozen charges related to the phony landlord actions. According to news reports of the time, he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison which apparently he served only at night.

    A Washington Post reporter went down to Charles County in 1991 to talk to people who knew Zantzinger. One friend, the late Michael Sprague, then representing Charles County in the Maryland House of Delegates, described Zantzinger as “a regular old Southern Maryland boy. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.”

    The old mindset still hadn’t changed much. And one can just imagine which candidate for president would have been supported in this year’s election by Sprague and his good ole boy friend, William Devereux Zantzinger if they were alive today.

    Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009, 17 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. Wherever he went in the afterlife one can only hope Hattie Carroll was there to make sure he didn’t get into her neighborhood.

    The Baltimore Sun obituary by Jacques Kelly and Frederick N. Rasmussen, noted: “For years, Zantzinger declined to answer questions about Dylan’s song, but he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes in 2001: ‘He’s just a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie.’”

    Sound familiar?

    G. Jefferson Price III worked at the Baltimore Sun from 1969 to 2004 as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist.

    

     

         

    

    

    

  

THE SEMI-FASCIST CANDIDATE

THE SEMI-FASCIST CANDIDATE
The Rev. James Cascioti, SJ, pastor of St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore where my family worshipped when we lived in Maryland, has shared a strong message about the forthcoming election with his congregation which is about as diverse as any in the land, including the poorest to the wealthiest, liberals and conservatives and just about everything in between and beyond the fringes.

"Looking Toward November," Fr. Cascioti reports in his latest pastoral message, "Peter Steinfels, co-founder of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and a former editor of Commonweal, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced article entitled "The Semi-Fascist Candidate."I share a bit of it because so many parishioners of whatever party are among the "elites" - intellectual, religious, cultural, economic, and political - [whom] Mr. Steinfels calls to sober reflection. I am by no means suggesting who anyone should vote for. I am merely reminding us of our duty to form our consciences thoughtfully and with discernment in the coming months. (In the message, Fr. Cascioti does not name Donald Trump, though the Steinfels article does):

    

         " . . . He has built a political movement on a populist nationalism that scapegoats enemy groups both within and without. He will expel or bar alien intruders. He plays relentlessly on a sense of national humiliation, victimization, grievance, and decline. He asserts that the nation faces an emergency that justifies torture and murdering the wives and children of our terrorist enemies, even briefly suggesting that as Commander in Chief he could order the military to violate the laws of war. Unlike full-fledged fascists, he is not explicitly anti-parliamentarian, an idea perhaps too complex for him (or perhaps too multisyllabic); instead he scorns virtually the entire political class as “stupid” or “without a clue,” i.e., unable to make a deal. He takes no note of Congressional procedures and Constitutional limits. He is indifferent to civil liberties except for gun rights, and has spoken ominously about reining in the press. When asked about compromise, he replies by vaunting his own “flexibility,” as though compromise were nothing more than a personal skill rather than an appreciation for distinctive outlooks and interests. If none of that rings an alarm bell, you haven’t read enough about Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. 

. . .  I deliberately choose semi-fascist for its historical resonance. It calls to mind a critical period in the last century. We continue to judge the public figures of that time by the political and moral choices they made regarding a fresh form of venomous politics.

     Fascisms, often inchoate in early stages, have never come to power without the acquiescence or connivance of elites.  American voters, yes, but especially American elites, intellectual, religious, cultural, and above all economic and political, now face a moment of profound choice. . . "
     Everyone: Please read the full article: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/semi-fascist-candidate):

The Wisdom of H. L. Mencken (Cont'd)

“Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged… Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can’t fulfill — that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?

Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start… But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest… They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty.

In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes. They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho. Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves. The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.”

From a Mencken Chrestomathy

Trump scorned by GOP fat cats

One big GOP donor's view of Donald Trump:

"He's an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-fundraising.html?_r=0

Michael K. Vlock, quoted in a Sunday New York Times article about traditional Republican big donors who cannot bring themselves to support Donald Trump, their preferred party's presumptive nominee for president .In the article, Mr. Vlock is identified as a Connecticut investor who has given nearly $5 million to Republicans at the federal level since 2014.

Mark Twain on party loyalty

"Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction . . . "

Mark Twain, "The Character of Man," 1906. 

How Congress Works, Or Doesn't

     "Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees."
           Will Rogers, American humorist 1879 to 1935