Echoes of Nach Hitler Uns?

"Not Chicago 1968, but Berlin 1932"
ROBERT J. S. ROSS -- MARCH 28, 2016
http://prospect.org/article/not-chicago-1968-berlin-1932

Robert J. S. Ross is a Member of the Board of Directors and Vice President of the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

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Listen up Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, and pay close attention, those who think of themselves as being to Sanders’s left: History will judge us sternly if we fail this moment.

Earlier in 1932 Adolf Hitler’s Nazis had become the largest party in parliament, with about 37 percent of the popular vote. The Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD) together had about 36 percent of the vote, but were in fierce, mortal competition. The traditional German nationalists could not form a stable government without so they called new elections. Now, in November, Hitler lost seats and the combined vote of the SPD and the KPD was larger than his, as were their combined parliamentary seats. While the KPD was hostile to the Weimar arrangements, it nevertheless proposed to the SPD a common front against the early 1933 power grab by the Nazis. The hostility between the two working class parties with egalitarian visions was too deep.

The split that had created the Bolshevik-Menshevik divide in Russia and had divided the German working class parties over the Great War now prevented a united front against Hitler.

The Communists characterized the SPD as “social fascists”—no better than the Nazis. In a similar vein, leftist commentator Chris Hedges and others have recently written that Hillary Clinton is no better than Donald Trump: “Voting for Clinton and supporting the Democratic Party will not halt our descent into despotism.”

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If left leaning activists are serious about their characterization of Trump as a fascist, a comparison recently made by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, then they better get serious about the problem of unity. It is all very well for Hedges to tell us to vote with our feet in the streets, but as the last century teaches us, the ability of authoritarians to resist popular movements is robust. After the election of November 1932, Hitler came into office as Germany’s largest party (though a minority). And while working class parties together neared a majority, they were two divided to oppose him. The center parties—ostensibly committed to constitutionalism—succumbed to a fear of Hitler’s retaliation and a fear of the left. They cooperated in the formation of a government that would ultimately eliminate them.

The German elections in March 1933 were held under repressive and violent conditions and the concentration camps were next.

* * *

There is some value in thinking about 1968. Unable to countenance support for the administration which had made war in Vietnam, I advocated a boycott of the Humphrey-Nixon contest, while friends in California and elsewhere chose Eldridge Cleaver over Humphrey. In the meantime, the law and order backlash against our demonstration tactics in Chicago also helped Nixon win a razor thin victory over Humphrey. What we got was more bombing in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and a shameful episode of presidential abuse of power.

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REEFER TO:

"Bernie, Hillary, and the Ghost of Ernst Thalmann" -- HAROLD MEYERSON -- JULY 13, 2016

In campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders will be making sure his voters don’t suffer from the blind spot that plagued Nazi-era Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, who argued that the Social Democrats posed a greater threat than Adolf Hitler.

http://prospect.org/article/bernie-hillary-and-ghost-ernst-thalmann

Of shoeboxes, Illinois politics, Paul Powell, Gov. Joel Aldrich Matteson (1853-57) and some modest reforms proposed by state Sen. Daniel Biss, D-Skokie

Several years ago when each state got to design its own quarter, I wanted Illinois' to feature a shoebox. I was reminded of that today by a well-produced video titled "THE ROAD BACK: Culture of Corruption," state Sen. Daniel Biss, D-Skokie. I first saw it on my Facebook feed, but it's available on Biss' website at this address:

https://roadbackillinois.com/an-innocent-trip-to-the-dry-cleaner-35c33b8fda38#.57czl8hdm

(The video is in a June 29 blog post titled "An Innocent Trip to the Dry Cleaner," in which Biss discusses some of the differences -- and occasionally the very close similarities -- between bribery and constituent services. It's nuanced and clearly written, and well worth reading, as the video is well worth watching.)

At any rate, Biss taught math at the University of Chicago and he knows how to hold an audience. The video outlines practical reforms, starting with voter registration and consolidating the welter of special earmarked funds in the state budget, and it does so in an engaging, even entertaining manner. Biss sounds like he must have been good with undergrads at the U of C.

Which is where the shoeboxes come in.

Shoeboxes and Illinois politics, they just go together. And Biss milked the connection for all it's worth.

Everyone knows, or feels like they ought to remember, the story about the shoeboxes stuffed with $800,000 in cash that turned up in Secretary of State Paul Powell's Springfield hotel room after his death in 1970. No one knew how it got there, and Paul Powell's shoebox got to be kind of an Illinois political icon.

Which is why I wanted a shoebox on the state quarter.

Biss' contribution to my knowledge was to begin with a tale of the chicanery that went with the bond issue for the Illinois & Michigan Canal in the 1830s, and a scandal that arose when Gov. Joel Aldrich Matteson, governor from 1853 to 1857, was caught with as much as $200,000 in I&M Canal scrip -- a kind of banknote -- that had somehow been removed from a shoebox in the basement of the old State Capitol in Springfield. A grand jury investigation followed, but Matteson made restitution, no one was indicted and no one ever found out exactly what happened to the canal scrip.

This kind of stuff can be deadly, except to historians and Illinois political junkies, but Biss got my attention.

I'd never heard of Matteson before. But here's some information I tracked down:

• Claire Suddath "A Brief History of Illinois Corruption," Time magazine website Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 at http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1865681,00.html.

  Suddath says:

  Reach as far back into Illinois history as you like and your hands will likely come out dirty. Blagojevich is the sixth Illinois governor to be subjected to arrest or indictment — seventh if you count Joel Aldrich Matteson (governor from 1853-1857), who tried to cash $200,000 of stolen government scrip he "found" in a shoebox. Matteson pulled a "how-did-that-get-there?" excuse and escaped indictment by promising to pay it back. (Oddly, this isn't Illinois's only shoebox-full-of-money scandal; after former secretary of state Paul Powell's death in 1970, a search of his home revealed shoeboxes full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks made out to him by unsuspecting Illinois residents who thought they were paying license plate registration fees).

• See also James William Putnam, The Illinois and Michigan Canal: A Study in Economic History, Chicago: U of C Press, 1918. Chicago's Historical Society Collection, 10: 88 Google Books.

• John M. Lamb. “The Great Canal Scrip Fraud,” in the December 1977 issue of The Magazine of Illinois 16.9: 57-60 at https://www.lewisu.edu/imcanal/JohnLamb/section_6.pdf.
  
  

Lee Atwater interview on dog-whistle politics -- how and why talk of "cutting taxes ... is a lot more abstract than [racial slurs]"

CONTENT ADVISORY -- offensive racial slur in Atwater quote below ...

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Rick Perlstein. "Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy" Nation Nov, 13, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

From a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, a Republican political operative from South Carolina who helped design Pres. Nixon's "Southern strategy" and later was Pres. George Bush Sr.'s campaign manager in 1988. At the core of the strategy was appealing to white Southerners who had opposed integration after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and were leaving the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.

Still later, after Atwater's death in 1991, it morphed into today's racial "dog whistles" that don't specifically mention race but are heard in racial terms by people who accept the stereotypes behind them -- for example Reagan's "welfare queens" or the common stereotype in downstate Illinois that "Chicago thugs and gang-bangers" are African American. This one paragraph sums it up in Atwater's words:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

But Atwater's context is important, and the quote really is best understood in the context of the entire interview. Another verbatim excerpt from article:

The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.

Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.

Carter is " the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks," James Carter IV,"

Irish Times editor the day after Brexit vote: "English nationalists have placed a bomb under [Northern Ireland] peace process"

English nationalists have placed a bomb under peace process" Irish Times Sat, Jun 25, 2016 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/english-nationalists-have-placed-a-bomb-under-peace-process-1.2700068

Recklessly, casually, with barely a thought, English nationalists have planted a bomb under the settlement that brought peace to Northern Ireland and close cordiality to relations between Britain and Ireland. To do this seriously and soberly would have been bad. To do it so carelessly, with nothing more than a pat on the head and a reassurance that everything will be all right, is frankly insulting.

Just five years ago, when Queen Elizabeth became the first reigning British monarch to visit southern Ireland in a century, there was a massive sense of relief. It was not just relief that the visit went off peacefully and well. It was much deeper than that: it was relief from centuries of both British condescension and Irish Anglophobia. A long story – often nasty, sometimes merely tediously wasteful – was over. There was a dignified, decent, democratic settlement that allowed the natural warmth of a neighbourly relationship to come fully to the surface.

I never imagined then that I would ever feel bitter about England again. But I do feel bitter now, because England has done a very bad day’s work for Ireland. It is dragging Irish history along in its triumphal wake, like tin cans tied to a wedding car.

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What will now happen is not that the old border will come back. It’s much worse than that. The old border marked the line between neighbouring polities that had a common travel area and an intimate, if often fraught, relationship. It was a customs barrier. The new border will be the most westerly land frontier of a vast entity of more than 400 million people, and it will be an immigration (as well as a customs) barrier.

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Irish Times view: Brexit a bewildering act of self-harm
Fintan O’Toole: Brexit fantasy is about to come crashing down
What does ‘Brexit nightmare’ mean for Ireland?

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It will, if the Brexiters’ demands to take back control of immigration to the UK are meant seriously, have to be heavily policed to keep EU migrants who have lawfully entered the Republic from moving into the UK. And it will run between Newry and Dundalk, between Letterkenny and Derry. The Dublin-Belfast train will have to stop for passport controls. (Given that the border could not be secured with army watchtowers during the Troubles, it is not at all clear how this policing operation will work.)

Meanwhile, the cornerstone of the peace settlement, the Belfast agreement of 1998, is being undermined. One of the key provisions of the agreement is that anyone born in Northern Ireland has the right to be a citizen of the UK or Ireland or both. What does that mean in the new dispensation?

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This fecklessness in turn is deeply unsettling for unionists in Northern Ireland. It suggests that the new English nationalism is completely indifferent to their fate. During the referendum debates, a few pro-remain voices, such as the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady (herself of Irish descent), tried to make a gentle plea to voters to think about Ireland and the Belfast agreement. They went unheard. English nationalists, it turns out, wouldn’t give the froth off a pint of real ale for the Irish peace process.

And if they don’t care enough even to talk in any serious way about the consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland, what grounds are there to believe that when they come to power in their own little England they will care about (or pay for) a province they clearly regard as a closer, wetter Gibraltar, an irrelevant appendage of the motherland?

Northern Ireland desperately needed a generation of relative political boredom, in which ordinary issues such as taxation and the health service – rather than the unanswerable questions of national identity – could become the stuff of partisan debate. Brexit has made that impossible. Sinn Féin’s immediate call for a referendum on a united Ireland may be reckless and opportunistic, but no more so than the Democratic Unionist party’s failure to understand that Brexit is the best gift to Irish nationalists. It is the beginning of the breakup of the union and the rise of an independent England for which Northern Ireland will be no more than a distant nuisance.

Early warning?: An English major wonders if Trump's behavior threatens the rule of law and the basis for constitutional government

D R A F T

I hope I'm wrong about this, but I'm really worried about "presumptive [GOP presidential] nominee" Donald Trump's latest outburst. For several months I've been noticing echoes of neo-fascism in his rhetoric and his appeal to working-class voters who have lost ground in today's economy -- compare them to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s or lumpenproletariat of the 1930s -- but this week's personal attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel crosses a new line. I think he threatens our historic commitment to what constitutional scholars call the "rule of law," in a way I hadn't seen before.

Maybe I'm over-reacting, but I take it almost personally -- I wrote my doctoral dissertation on it. It was a spellbinder titled "The Idea of Limited Government in English History Plays During the Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558-1603," and it's been gathering dust (unless the hard copies has been retired and it's now available only in microfilm) in the University of Tennessee library at Knoxville since 1975. To my mind, Trump is playing fast and loose with principles that were already settled law in the 1500s.

But, you're wondering, how do we get from Donald Trump to the idea of limited government? Isn't that kind of a stretch? Well, yes, I hope it is. But in Queen Elizabeth's day, the formula was that "the king is under the law because without the law, there is no king." It dates back to Henry de Bracton, an adviser to King Henry III in the 1200s, and it means -- translating it into today's language -- the royal government was bound by the law of England because without the law any warlord with a big army could overthrow the king.

In other words: Laws, not the whims of the people who administer the law, are the controlling authority.

So at the end of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV, when Prince Hal just become King Henry V, his old drinking buddy Falstaff comes up to him, and this dialog ensues:

FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy!

KING HENRY V My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man.

LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE Have you your wits? know you what 'tis to speak?

FALSTAFF My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING HENRY IV I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

In other words: Prince Hal is now king, and the law -- here personified by the Lord Chief Justice -- rather than personal friendship is the controlling authority.

Bottom line (to my way of thinking): When Trump, as a presidential candidate with a real chance of winning the presidential election, injects personalities into a court case and makes ominous, if vague, remarks about might happen to the case if he wins in November, he's stepping all over legal principles that are as old and as basic as anything we have in the Anglo-American system of law. It's the Donald being the Donald, sure, but it's also way beyond troubling.

Some verbatim excerpts from news coverage and editorials follow below:

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LATER (June 4): This editorial in yesterday's Washington Post isn't as English major-y as what I wrote, but it goes part-way there.

"Trump wants to put himself above the law — and that is dangerous." Editorial. Washington Post. 3 June. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-wants-to-put-himself-above-the-law--and-that-is-dangerous/2016/06/03/3181b6c6-29aa-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html.

LET US assume, contrary to the known facts so far, that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel does harbor some bias against Donald Trump, the defendant in a class-action lawsuit brought to Judge Curiel’s Southern California courtroom by aggrieved former customers of the Trump University real estate school. Let us assume, further, and also contrary to known fact, that this bias even has something to do with Judge Curiel’s Mexican American heritage, as Mr. Trump venomously insists. The thing to do would be for Mr. Trump to file a motion with the court, urging the judge to recuse from the case and spelling out the reasons why. If the motion’s denied, he can appeal to a higher court.

The fact that Mr. Trump has not filed such a motion says a lot about his attitude toward the rule of law and stable political processes — more, in a sense, than his bigoted attacks on the judge themselves. When things don’t go his way, Mr. Trump’s first resort is not to use options for redress the system provides; it is, rather, to blame his problems on an enemy and whip up public hostility against him, in crude ethnic terms, if it seems advantageous. One implication of Mr. Trump’s words, that he is the one with a bias, against Americans of Latino heritage, is bad enough; possibly worse is the ominous signal his behavior sends about how a President Trump would deal with any sort of opposition he might encounter.

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Jose A. DelReal and Katie Zezima, "Trump’s personal, racially tinged attacks on federal judge alarm legal experts" Washington Post 1 June 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/06/01/437ccae6-280b-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html.

Donald Trump’s highly personal, racially tinged attacks on a federal judge overseeing a pair of lawsuits against him have set off a wave of alarm among legal experts, who worry that the Republican presidential candidate’s vendetta signals a remarkable disregard for judicial independence.

That attitude, many argue, could carry constitutional implications if Trump becomes president.

U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is handling two class-action lawsuits against Trump University in San Diego, has emerged as a central target for Trump and his supporters in recent weeks. The enmity only escalated after Curiel ordered the release of embarrassing internal documents detailing predatory marketing practices at the for-profit educational venture; that case is set to go to trial after the November election.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a campaign rally in San Diego, adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.”

He also suggested taking action against the judge after the election: “They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace. Okay? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case? Where everybody likes it. Okay. This is called life, folks.”

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Trump’s attacks on Curiel stand out for their personal nature, for the racial remarks and for the suggestion by a potential president that someone “ought to look into” the judge.

Charles Gardner Geyh, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, said he has no problem with presidents or presidential candidates criticizing judges or judicial decisions. But, he said, “there’s a line between disagreement and sort of throwing the judiciary under the bus that I think is at issue here.”Trump’s attacks on Curiel stand out for their personal nature, for the racial remarks and for the suggestion by a potential president that someone “ought to look into” the judge.

* * *

Katrina Pierson, a spokeswoman for Trump, has expanded on the accusations of bias, wrongly suggesting Curiel is part of a group organizing protests at Trump rallies around California. Curiel is a member of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, a professional group that she appeared to confuse with the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group.

Luis Osuna, the president of the lawyers association, said the group is not an advocacy group and supports candidates on both sides of the aisle. He said Trump’s attempts to discredit Curiel should give voters serious pause, not least because his comments reduce Hispanics in the legal profession to their heritage.

“Every time there is a comment like this, it is disheartening,” Osuna said. “It is not, unfortunately, surprising, given the source of the comments. But it displays a complete lack of understanding of the role that we have as attorneys and judges and the role that we have in upholding the Constitution.”

“He’s definitely using it as a dog whistle to his supporters,” he added. “Obviously, I don’t know what is in his heart. I can only judge based on the way he has acted in the past, but this has been a recurring theme in his campaign.”

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"Donald Trump and the Judge." Editorial. New York Times 31 May 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/opinion/donald-trump-and-the-judge.html.

One would think Mr. Trump, whose sister is a federal appellate judge, would know how self-destructive it is for any litigant anywhere to attack the judge hearing his or her case. But Mr. Trump is not any litigant; he is running to be president of the United States — a job that requires at least a glancing understanding of the American system of government, in particular a respect for the separation of powers. When Mr. Trump complains that he is “getting railroaded” by a “rigged” legal system, he is saying in effect that an entire branch of government is corrupt.

The special danger of comments like these — however off the cuff they may sound — is that they embolden Mr. Trump’s many followers to feel, and act, the same way.

For good measure, Mr. Trump added that Judge Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” False; the judge is from Indiana. But facts are, as always, beside the point for Mr. Trump, who reassured his audience that “the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump when I give all these jobs.” (Presumably he was not referring to those he has promised to deport if he is elected.) In a masterpiece of understatement, Judge Curiel, who is prevented by ethical rules from responding directly to comments like these, noted in his order that Mr. Trump “has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue.”

Adam Gopnik takes on Trump in another New Yorker piece -- with some background on World War II on the Russian front

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer who does a lot of book reviews for the New Yorker and is one of the most literate journalists in the business, weighed in today on a recent piece by neo-con thinker Robert Kagan in the Washington Post says Republican "presumptive nominee" Donald Trump is some kind of fascist, and a response to Kagan on Vox.com quoting five experts who say no, he's not a fascist, he's a right-wing populist demagogue or, in the words of Robert Griffin of Oxford Brookes University, "... a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard."

Gopnik argues that no matter whether he's none of above or all of above, Trump is dangerous.

"If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over," Gopnik says. "This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump."

I've read Gopnik on everything from Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin to Harper Lee, atheism, Shakespeare, the vagaries of translation, Edmund Burke, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the synoptic gospels and the origin of Christianity. I've always known him to be a thoughtful, considered writer, and I don't think he's just blowing political smoke here.

Some excerpts from today's post, on the New Yorker website:

... One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’

No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.

When Gopnik talks about Trump's "blizzard of lies ... made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture," it would be easy enough to dismiss it as campaign rhetoric. We always stand at Armageddon around election time, and we do battle for the Lord every four years like clockwork. But Gopnik has something entirely different in mind when he says this:

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.

And this:

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate. ...

Source: "The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump." Daily Comment, Newyorker.com May 20, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump.

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As a book reviewer for the New Yorker, Gopnik has read widely in the history of World War II and the Holocaust. In one review, of a book titled Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, he provides a glimpse into his opinion about Hitler's articulation of dark impulses felt by the German people.

And in one passage, Gopnik speaks of atrocities committed on the Eastern Front in terms that call to mind precisely, if ever so distantly, Trump's rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims even though he nowhere mentions Trump by name.

"In a period of fear and panic," Gopnik says, "it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature."

I think it's important to understand here that Gopnik is not issuing a blanket indictment of all Germans. As a book reviewer, he's careful not to let his own opinion overshadow the content of the book he's reviewing. But he suggests what happened in Germany was not unique to that time and place. It happened in Rwanda in the 1990s, it happened in Vietnam, in isolated instances, and it can happen anywhere:

Surely Snyder is right when he implies that the well-meant “Godwin’s law,” which, beginning as an observation about Internet arguments, has come to be shorthand for the rule that the Nazis should never be introduced into ordinary political arguments, is miscast. In fact, we should keep the image of the Germans and the Nazis in front of us—not to show how close the people on the other side of an argument are to unutterable evil but to remind ourselves that we, too, can become that close in a shorter time than we like to think. In a period of fear and panic, it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature. The Germans listened to Mozart and Beethoven and then murdered children, and this was not a cognitive dislocation from which we couldn’t suffer but the eternal rationale offered by the terrified: we can’t protect what really matters if we don’t do things that we wish we didn’t have to.

War makes ordinary people do horrible things. If there is a point that perhaps Snyder does not underline enough—it comes through vividly in Antony Beevor’s books on the Battle of Stalingrad and other campaigns—it is that the Germans who killed were dying, too, in increasingly vast numbers and in cold and fear of their own. Wars make atrocities happen. Americans have still not come to terms with My Lai, a Vietnam atrocity not unlike the acts of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, though thankfully more isolated. To engage in political or procedural or even geographic explanations of these histories misses their history. Once panic sets in, for an army or an occupier, then the persecution—indeed, the slaughter—of the population seems a necessity for survival. Frightened soldiers in foreign lands murder the locals without mercy or purpose. One wishes that this happened rarely. In truth, it happens all the time.

Source: "Blood and Soil: A Historian Returns to the Holocaust," New Yorker 21 Sept. 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil.

Gopnik of The New Yorker goes there, comparing and contrasting Trump's "crypto-fascist" appeal with Hitler, Peron and Huck Finn's Pap

"Going There with Donald Trump" -- posted May 11 to Daily Comment on the magazine's website --

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/going-there-with-donald-trump

... There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word “fascist.” The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist, or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same. Future political scientists will analyze (let us hope in amused retrospect, rather than in exile in New Zealand or Alberta) the precise elements of Poujadisme, Peronism and Huck Finn’s Pap that compound in Trump’s “ideology.” But his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum’s or Barack Obama’s, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and “success.” It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.

* * *

Hitler’s enablers in 1933—yes, we should go there, instantly and often, not to blacken our political opponents but as a reminder that evil happens insidiously, and most often with people on the same side telling each other, Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him. (Or, on the opposite side, I’d rather have a radical who will make the establishment miserable than a moderate who will make people think it can all be worked out.) Trump is not Hitler. (Though replace “Muslim” with “Jew” in many of Trump’s diktats and you will feel a little less complacent.) But the worst sometimes happens. If people of good will fail to act, and soon, it can happen here.

Madigan's April 13 floor speech on Rauner's budget crisis

Verbatim excerpts:

... Every other governor that I have worked with has negotiated with the General Assembly in good faith to help the people of Illinois and to insure that the people of our state would not needlessly suffer.

The fact is the current budget crisis was completely avoidable. While this crisis was avoidable, Governor Rauner has refused to put an end to the crisis. Some of his remarks in recent years clearly indicate this has been his plan from the very beginning.

Source: http://capitolfax.com/2016/04/13/madigan-rauners-impasse-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/

Under comments:

- Lakeview J - Wednesday, Apr 13, 16 @ 9:50 am:

If you want to see how strong the governor has made the Speaker’s position in the Democratic caucus, watch who is among the first to shake his hand after the standing ovation. Rep. Will Guzzardi, who just two short years ago was on the receiving end of the full Madigan treatment.

Blueroomstream has it at http://livestream.com/blueroomstream/events/5138704 linked to Capitol Fax of that date.

And the conservative blog Illinois Review has a transcript, for reasons that are obscure to me since you'd think it undercuts their editorial policy, at

http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2016/04/speaker-madigans-explanation-as-to-why-illinois-budget-remains-stalled.html

Over 30 years, I have worked with six governors from both political parties – twice as many Republicans as Democrats. We didn’t always agree on the issues. We didn’t always agree on the best approach to passing the state government. I had differences of opinion with all the governors I’ve worked with, including governors of my own party.

And let me repeat that – including governors of my own party. Many of you will recall the very strong differences I had with former Governor Rod Blagojevich.

However, we found a way to compromise. My record over the years is one of compromise. Regardless of the governor or his political party, to pass a budget that does not withhold the services that the people of Illinois depend upon. It is my openness to compromise that I stated more than a year ago, and why I continue to believe that to solve the state budget deficit, we must take a balanced approach.

* * *

The fact is the current budget crisis was completely avoidable. While this crisis was avoidable, Governor Rauner has refused to put an end to the crisis. Some of his remarks in recent years clearly indicate this has been his plan from the very beginning.

At the Tazewell County’s Lincoln Day Dinner in March 2013, Governor Rauner said, and I quote, “Even if the Democrats got a major majority against us, you know what? They can’t stop us. They won’t stop me if I want to dramatically spend less. You need the legislature if you want to spend more. If you want to spend less, they can’t stop me. And I apologize, we may have to go through rough times. If we have to do what Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers, if we sort of have to do a do-over and shut things down for a little while …” – like university and social service providers – “that’s what we’re going to do.”

My view of the important role of state government, which I have argued, stands in stark contrast with Governor Rauner’s view of the role of state government as shown through his comments, has not changed since I first took office.

Beyond Inside Higher Ed: Directory of blogs for academics at guardian.co.uk

My own little portal ...

On the Guardian's website -- veddy British, but it has plenty of links to blogs, Twitter accounts, etc. Even an annual Academics with Cats competition.

University life often involves being stuck at a desk; writing articles, marking and planning. Lucky, then, that this usually means there’s an internet connection nearby, offering an escape into the wide world of university-related advice and humour on the web.

Here are some of our favourites (and we’d love to hear yours in the comments).

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/mar/23/follow-the-leaders-the-best-social-media-accounts-for-academics?CMP=share_btn_fb

Connecting the dots -- ALEC and Milton Friedman provide missing link to Reaganite school reform in 1983

D R A F T

Surprise! Surprise! ALEC and the Koch brothers have been heavily involved in it since 1983. Remember Milton Friedman? Him, too.

Cashing in on Kids: 172 ALEC Education Bills Push Privatization in 2015 - See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015 http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015

Submitted by Brendan Fischer on March 8, 2016 - 8:57am

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf

Until recently, ALEC boasted on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983, taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC ally, Milton Friedman, who was an economist with the University of Chicago.

Although ALEC and other school privatizers today frame "vouchers"—taxpayer-funded tuition for private, and often religious, schools—in terms of "opportunity" for low-income students and giving parents the "choice" to send their children to public or private schools, the group was less judicious in its earlier years.

The commentary to ALEC's original 1984 voucher bill states that its purpose is "to introduce normal market forces" into education, and to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions by directing money from public institutions to private ones that were less likely to be unionized.

Friedman was more explicit when addressing ALEC's 2006 meeting. He explained that vouchers are really a step towards "abolishing the public school system."

"How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" Friedman asked the ALEC crowd.

"Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you're not gonna do that."

Instead, Friedman said, the politically feasible way of moving towards an entirely private educational system is through vouchers:

So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion, is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.

Thanks to the work of the Koch-funded ALEC, David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted a basic voucher scheme.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015#sthash.pZHGFCqD.dpuf

Sarah Silverman trumps Godwin's Law in full Hitler drag on Conan O'Brien's show

Sorry about the pun -- I can't let go of it, and I can't help myself!

More and more pundits have hinted lately that Donald Trump has fascist tendencies, and a New York Daily News cover flatly says, "Trump is Hitler."

Not much nuance there.

And it's a violation of Godwin's law, which holds that "sooner or later [in an online discussion] someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism" and "once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress."

So I guess it was inevitable that Hitler would appear on TV to clear his name.

Or, more accurately, that comedian Sarah Silverman, dressed as Adolf Hitler, would appear on Conan O’Brien's late-night talk show Thursday to say her character resents being associated with Trump.

Screen grab of Silverman as Hitler

Reports The Daily Beast this morning:

Out walked Sarah Silverman in full Nazi attire to a wild ovation from the audience. “That’s more applause than I expected,” she deadpanned. Silverman’s Hitler wanted to “clear the air” over what he viewed as “unfavorable” comparisons to Trump.

“Don’t get me wrong, Conan, I agree with a lot of what he says. A lot. Like 90 percent of what he says, I’m like this guy gets it,” Hitler admitted. “But it’s just, I don’t like the way he says it. It’s crass, you know?

“What kind of person talks about his penis size on national television?” Hitler asked. As someone who “famously has a micropenis,” he added, “that’s what makes a tyrant.”

“All these comparisons to Trump, it’s like, it bums me out, you know what I mean?” Hitler continued. “Sometimes I watch him and I’m like, ‘Is that how people see me?’ And I have to be honest, Trump, he’s starting to make me rethink some of the things I’ve done.” After a pause, Hitler added, “Ah, who am I kidding? I got to be me!”

Godwin's law trumped by GOP candidate's "fascist double whammy"

D R A F T

I've suspected for a while now that Donald Trump has a lot in common with the fascists of the 1930s, not so much in Hitler's Germany as Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain. I'm reminded of something that apparently Huey Long of Louisiana never said but still embodied -- if fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag.

But comparisons with Hitler are considered out of bounds, not always without good reason. And "fascism" has been treated like another "f-word" in our political discourse.

Well, it does begin with "f."

There's even an internet meme for it -- it's called Godwin's law, and the version I've heard says you automatically lose an argument if you call someone a fascist or mention Hitler in a current political context.

Well, with Trump, we're beginning to see Godwin's law broken. I don't know quite what to make of it, but I think it may be significant.

Some unedited notes on the phenomenon, whatever it is, follow:

"Godwin's Law." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies)[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"[2][3]—​​that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.

Promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[2] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.[4] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric.[5][6]

* * *

There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself)[3] than others.[1] For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.

------------

Ashley Young, "Ex-Mexican President Fox: Donald Trump reminds me of Hitler" CNN Feb. 27, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/26/politics/vicente-fox-donald-trump-hitler/

(CNN)Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday kept up his withering criticism of Donald Trump, saying the GOP front-runner reminds him of Adolf Hitler.

"Today, he's going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That's the way he started speaking," Fox told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a phone interview on "Anderson Cooper 360."

"He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody."

Fox's comments come one day after he delivered a scathing response on Trump's plan to make Mexico pay for a wall between the Mexico-U.S. border.

"I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall," Fox said in an interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos.

-------------

Roger Cohen, "Trump’s Il Duce Routine" NYT Feb. 29 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/opinion/donald-trumps-il-duce-routine.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

LONDON — Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm. Europe knows that democracies can collapse.

It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.

It’s the echoes, now unmistakable, of times when the skies darkened. Europe knows how democracies collapse, after lost wars, in times of fear and anger and economic hardship, when the pouting demagogue appears with his pageantry and promises. America’s Weimar-lite democratic dysfunction is plain to see. A corrupted polity tends toward collapse.

Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.

He has emerged from a political system corrupted by money, locked in an echo chamber of insults, reduced to the show business of an endless campaign, blocked by a kind of partisanship run amok that leads Republican members of Congress to declare they will not meet with President Obama’s eventual nominee for the Supreme Court, let alone listen to him or her. This is an outrage! The public interest has become less than an afterthought.

* * *

This disoriented America just might want Trump — and that possibility should be taken very seriously, before it is too late, by every believer in American government of the people, by the people, for the people. The power of the Oval Office and the temperament of a bully make for an explosive combination, especially when he has shown contempt for the press, a taste for violence, a consistent inhumanity, a devouring ego and an above-the-law swagger.

As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.

-------

Adam Gopnik, "The Clothespin Campaign: A French History Lesson for Anti-Trump Republicans Today [March 3] 12:00 a.m. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-clothespin-campaign-a-french-history-lesson-for-anti-trump-republicans

... It was no surprise last week when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of France’s far-right National Front, endorsed Donald Trump. (“If I were an American, I would vote Donald Trump,” Le Pen tweeted.) The shared identity of the two political movements was merely being affirmed: extreme right-wing authoritarians whose core ideology is racist and anti-immigrant, coalescing around anti-Muslim rage (in Le Pen’s case, with the previous addition of anti-Semitism), and both strongly “corporatist,” i.e., not at all liberal but also not at all unfriendly to government welfare programs. It looks like the classic fascist double whammy, in plain English.

* * *

No, this is what one might call a unicameral breakdown: one, and only one, of our major parties has been going crazy for twenty years and is now having a full-fledged gibbering, I’m-The-Emperor-of-Antarctica breakdown. It is hard not to feel just a touch of schadenfreude about this. The Republicans have served up eight years of hatred and nihilism—and now they are surprised to find they have inherited hatred and nihilism as they actually appear in the real world, not neatly blown-dry and smirking but red and orange and heaving, cursing and swearing and contemptuous. Republicans four years ago saw Trump offering the raw sewage of racism called “birtherism” and they giggled timidly and thought that, if diluted sufficiently with moderating water, it would somehow become potable. The chance to drive out Trump for good was Mitt Romney’s when, at no cost to him—and with the additional certainty of getting a disproportionate share of approval for minimal political courage—he could have rejected Trump’s support, instead of going to his hotel in Las Vegas to thank him for his endorsement. That tiny price proved too much to pay. And now they are surprised?

* * *

... The same hysterical urge not to oppose or criticize Obama but to expose and humiliate and render him illegitimate is present in the conservative conversation about Hillary Clinton—she’ll be arrested! She’ll be indicted! She’ll be spanked!—this time with the sexual dimension embarrassingly blatant. It overwhelms rational calculation. Seeing this politicking as a theatre of shame and humiliation is probably smarter than seeing it as an efficient market of interests.

-------

LATER:

Jacob Weisberg. "An Eclectic Extremist" Slate.com March 4, 2016 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_s_terrifying_and_distinctly_american_authoritarianism.html

Though the novel is in truth not a very good one, Lewis develops it around a key insight: that if fascism came to the US, it would be as a variation on American themes, not European ones. The American man on horseback would be more Huey Long than Benito Mussolini, a folksy opportunist rather than a red-faced ideologue. Lewis was shrewd in guessing that an American fascist leader would likely declare himself an opponent of European fascism. This is a point that some of those accusing Donald Trump of fascism—including many on the right—misunderstand. Sure, Trump may retweet the odd quote from Il Duce and wonder why anyone would object. Admittedly, his rallies teeter on the edge of racial violence. Again this week, black protesters were forcibly ejected from his events with the help of white supremacist thugs. True, the world leaders Mr. Trump admires are the dictators, not the democrats. Certainly, he sounds like a dictator himself.

* * *

This is why those arguing that Trump’s policies are more moderate than those of his rivals Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio miss the point. Trump’s authoritarianism is an amalgam not of left and right but of wacko left and wacko right: He thinks that George Bush was to blame for 9/11 and that Muslims should be barred from the U.S. Believing both of those things does not make Mr. Trump a centrist—it makes him an eclectic extremist. When it comes to policies, he actually has none in the conventional sense.

The conflict in the 2016 campaign is no longer Trump versus his Republican opponents; it is now Trump versus the American political system. That system is on the verge of missing its best opportunity to spit him out. Since Super Tuesday, the GOP’s reaction to Trump has been mildly heartening, with anti-Trump ads on television and principled politicians like Mitt Romney denouncing him amid torrents of personal abuse. Three cheers for Sen. Lindsey Graham, who says Trump is a “nut job” and that the GOP has gone “batshit crazy.” Fellow Republicans have taken to calling Chris Christie, who cravenly endorsed Trump last week, a “Vichy Republican.” But this is all probably too little, too late.

TOP COMMENT: "At least Hitler didn't inherit Germany from his dad."

Busting out human services providers in the not-for-profit sector? If so, you read it here first --

Until just lately I would have said it's absolutely incredible -- in the original root meaning of the word -- but knowledgeable observers of Illinois government are beginning to suspect an orchestrated effort to privatize the human services typically provided by 501c3 not-for-profits. That, according to this new line of thinking, is one reason why they are suffering so much under Gov. Rauner's failure to negotiate a budget with the legislative leadership.

I'm still shaking my head in disbelief. But I never would have seen busting out inner-city neighborhood schools and replacing them with charters as an investment opportunity, either ...

And that is how Rauner made his fortune in the private sector.

As a bust-out artist.

So people are beginning to connect some of the dots.

I'm hearing it with higher ed, too, as Republicans in the state Legislature begin to speculate that downstate regionals like Eastern Illinois University or Western might want to think about consolidating. But let's stick with the 501c3's for now.

Here's the windup ...

Posted yesterday, Feb. 1, to Capitol Fax was an Associated Press story reporting that Ashley’s Quality Care in Chicago, which provides in-home care workers to keep seniors out of nursing homes, "has not met its payroll for 14 weeks, forcing the departure of 40 percent of its previous 1,000 employees; clientele has dipped by one-third, to 800, slicing revenue." It is owed $2 million due to Rauner's budget impasse.

To which a commenter suggested the damage is intentionally inflicted, quoting Bernie Schoenberg's column Oct. 24 in the State Journal-Register (which apparently insists on those annoying first references in all-caps):

Rauner was among panelists at a 2012 tax policy conference in Chicago, sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute. Moderator MARGARET SPELLINGS, former U.S. secretary of education, asked him how people could build a “political constituency for change.” […]

“We will crush our economy if we try to spend money on both high-cost, inefficient, bureaucratic, heavily unionized government and a social safety net to help the disadvantaged,” Rauner said.

“We can’t afford both,” he said, and “wealth creators,” like JIMMY JOHN LIAUTAUD, founder of Jimmy John’s sandwich shops and another panelist, would be forced to leave the state.

“I think we can drive a wedge issue in the Democratic Party on that topic and bring the folks who say, ‘You know what, for our tax dollars, I’d rather help the disadvantaged, the handicapped, the elderly, the children in poverty,’ ” Rauner said, instead of directing tax dollars to the Service Employees International Union or “AF-Scammy,” an apparent reference to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, known as AFSCME for short.

So that explains the partisan politics at play here. But there are more dots to connect.

Another commenter quoted Senate GOP Leader Christine Radogno as saying there "needed to be a shakeout" in human services, that "[s]ome of these very small, very weak agencies, where their clients were being taken over by larger agencies. … I think not all of that was a horrible thing" (also quoted in a Jan. 30 article by Bernie Schoenberg (but this time a news story without the annoying all-caps).

Also in Schoenberg's article, Radogno, R-Lemont, said a shakeout might not be a bad thing in higher ed, too. She spoke with editorial board of The State Journal-Register a day before Rauner’s State of the State address.

Lack of funding for higher education creates “uncertainty if you’re a student,” she said. But, she added, “some of these universities have cut some of their administrative costs –- sort of squeeze-the- beast theory.”

She said “global questions” about higher ed could now be asked.

“Should we have six, eight schools of education, everybody having a program and everything? I don’t know,” Radogno said. She noted a couple of two-year colleges went to four years, including what is now the University of Illinois Springfield.

“Maybe we ought to have more going from four to two,” she said.

And the pitch ...

The AP story was included in a CapFax post headlined "Another hostage clings to life" -- an update quoted a reader, who said "this is a feature, not a bug," and elaborated:

Rich, here are a couple things to think about. One is this article from the Quad Cities, LSSI’s adult daycare is being taken over by a multi-state company backed by a wall street firm. This happened really quickly.

http://kwqc.com/2016/01/27/new-company-plans-to-fill-void-left-by-closing-of-intouch/

Then there is the email all of us got from DHS last week. Add in Radogno’s comments after the SoS, and Bernie’s column on Sunday. Maybe I am paranoid, but we just might be seeing a major move by this administration to consolidate human services from locally controlled non-profits to multi-state, for-profit firms, and the Illinois-based groups that are large enough to survive some time without being paid. Just some food for thought.

Let's unpack that before we start thinking.

The KWQC-TV news report notes that an out-of-state private firm called Help at Home Inc. plans to take over Intouch, the adult day care service provided by Lutheran Social Services of Illinois in Moline until LSSI downsized last month as a result of the state budget impasse.

And the DHS memo, a copy of which was obtained by CapFax, discusses "strategic mergers among service providers that were struggling financially and/or did not have the back office expertise to support their business" and recommends Jim Lewis of Chicago Community Trust, "who some of you may know has been working with their resources to support non-profits interested in these strategic merger opportunities."

Nothing there that's necessarily illegal or unethical, obviously. But enough to cause me a little cognitive dissonance.

Connecting the dots ...

Food for thought, indeed --

Today's exercise in connecting the dots came in an item headlined "Home-care agency to slash worker pay to stay alive" -- a report in the Trib that Family Home Services, a home-care agency that assists hundreds of seniors in the Chicago area, plans on "cutting agency workers’ pay by half ... because of the ongoing Springfield stalemate," according to the SEIU.

Which prompted the following comment:

- wordslinger - Tuesday, Feb 2, 16 @ 9:49 am:

Is the governor’s office going to give us the skinny on the “merger” strategy for social service agencies that was revealed here yesterday in that DHS email?

Sounds like a big deal, something you should share with the public.

If you’re going to willfully push social service agencies into financial distress, then urge those in financial distress to contact a specific group to discuss mergers, it would be nice for the game plan to be transparent.

Otherwise, some could get the impression that it’s just a bust-out; running going concerns into the ground so that some favored few can swoop in, pick at the remains and pick up future state contracts.

I still can't quite get my head around the idea of a Wall Street bust-out artist seeking profits in the 501c3 sector. It just doesn't make sense financially. But nothing else that guys like Rauner do makes financial sense, either. And the people who comment on Capitol Fax aren't wingnuts. If they think the dots may be connected, I'm going to start looking for the connections.

Corporate school "reform," Opt Out movement and grass-roots opposition in a nutshell, with a good summary of Tennessee's "achievement school district"

Comes now Salon.com with a pretty comprehensive takeout on corporate school reform, hardly unbiased -- the headline refers to "phony education reformers" -- but well documented, the kind of story I've wanted to link people to for a nuts-and-bolts explanation of why I get so upset by self-styled reformers from President Obama and Governor Rauner on down.

I especially like the attention it gives to Tennessee's so-called "achievement school district," a scheme for putting schools that don't perform well on standardized tests into a statewide "turnaround" system operated by charter school companies. Partly because I'm suspicious of anything that has the word "turnaround" in in and partly because I'm even more deeply suspicious of Rauner's rhetoric about consolidating downstate schools, I suspect we're going to see something like it proposed in Illinois.

Here's what Jeff Bryant of Salon.com says about it:

In Tennessee, also an early adopter of reform fads, leaders had put into place a system that used student scores on standardized tests to pronounce schools as “failing” and provide the rationale for the state to take over management of the schools by an appointed board. What follows these takeovers, invariably, is that the agency, whose officials are handpicked by conservative lawmakers, transfers the schools to privately operated charter management organizations.

In Tennessee, the state takeover agency is called the Achievement School District, but the model is being adopted under other guises by many other states.

Now Tennessee’s much-lauded takeover program has run into “political trouble” according to a recent article in Education Week.

“Several Democratic state lawmakers,” according to the article, “will propose bills this upcoming legislative session to either shut down the turnaround district, which mostly is based in Memphis, or severely limit its authority to take over schools.”

The legislature’s Black Caucus, the representatives of the communities most often targeted by the takeovers, are helping to lead the pushback.

In Memphis, where the ASD has charterized more than two dozen schools, parents are leading the fight as well. As Chalkbeat Tennessee reports, members of the district’s neighborhood advisory councils have called the takeover process a “scam” and claimed the method for taking over their neighborhood schools “was rigged in favor of pairing struggling schools with charter operators.”

But the trouble with the ASD isn’t purely “political.” The takeover effort is also in trouble because it doesn’t work. The EdWeek article points to a recent Vanderbilt University study that showed district-led turnaround efforts had performed better than the the ASD. The study concluded, “Until the state-run district can begin to show academic progress, it shouldn’t be allowed to take over more schools.”

Cite: Jeff Bryant, "We’re onto the phony education reformers: Charter school charlatans and faux reformers take it on the chin." Salon.com 9 Jan. 2016 http://www.salon.com/2016/01/09/were_onto_the_phony_education_reformers_charter_school_charlatans_and_faux_reformers_take_it_on_the_chin/.

Illinois bobkitten makes Archaeology magazine's Top 10 list while governor fiddles with SB 317 veto

D R A F T

This may be the saddest story to come down the pike in Springfield for a long time. It's a local story, but it shows that in spite of what they say, all politics isn't always local. Here's what I posted to Facebook:

Here's a link to the story in Archaeology, monthly magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, at:

http://www.archaeology.org/exclusives?slg=top-10-bobkitten-discovery

Be sure to link through the the Illinois Archaeological Survey's video. It's also available on YouTube at xxxx.

Save the Illinois State Museum, the local single-issue advocacy group that formed when Gov. Rauner closed the museum in connection with his budgetary spat with House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, posted the Archaeology magazine's Top 10 story this afternoon to its Facebook feed.

This year archaeologists announced that bones discovered in a Hopewell Mound in Illinois did not belong to a dog, as previously supposed, but to a baby bobcat. It is the first known example of a bobcat buried like a human and is one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2015.

The bones remain in a collection housed at ISM's research facility on 11th Street in Springfield. But they are no longer accessible to scholars since Gov. Rauner closed the museum. The true cost of his political tactics came in the comments section, when A.R. Perri said:

We are really proud of this research. If the ISM reopens we can continue our work on this exciting bobcat find. Until then, any work on the bobcat has to be put on hold, sadly.

A.R. Perri's name isn't a household word, but she has a perspective here. A postdoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, she is the scientist who discovered the bobkitten skeleton in an ISM collection and began looking into its significance.

More details here, in http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3955-illinois-hopewell-bobcat-burial, on another magazine webpage:

[Perri] determined that the nearly complete skeleton belonged to a juvenile bobcat, between four and seven months old. The bones show no signs of trauma, indicating the bobkitten likely died of natural causes, probably malnutrition. “It looks like they came across a baby that they tried to raise but failed,” says Perri. “When it died they had become close enough to it that it warranted this special burial.”

Along with the bones, Perri found four shell beads and two carved effigies of bear teeth worn as a necklace—grave goods common to Hopewell human burials—making this the only decorated burial of a wild cat found in North America, as well as the only animal buried alone in its own mound. Though the Hopewell had had domesticated dogs for hundreds of years, Perri says that having a tamed bobcat would have been “a very uncommon experience.”

Links to today's YouTube posts:

• https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1639393496321690 -- to my FB feed.

• http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3965-top-10-archaeological-discoveries-of-2015 -- to the Archaeology story and ISM video. Dr. Perri's is the first comment.

Cartoons and political discourse

Rich Miller, who runs the Capitol Fax legislative information service and is easily the most incisive political blogger in Illinois, had an especially thought-provoking post today. It wasn't about Statehouse politics: It was Miller's personal reaction -- which he called a rant -- to the death of Fox Lake police lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz, who committed suicide after embezzling an estimated $50,000 from a scout post affiliated with the police department.

It was anything but a rant.

Basically Miller added his voice to other commentators who said the circumstances of Gliniewicz's life and death were too complex and nuanced for a good cop-bad cop story:

Too much about our society isn’t real. Our public discourse is too often based on way too little information and way too much ideology, all intensified by our too-quick reactions in an age when everybody has access to their own online megaphones.

Many of us in this Statehouse business got a close look at how this works when Barack Obama ran for President. He was quickly turned into a cartoon character that few of us recognized. Hero or villain, that just wasn’t the person we knew.

Cartoon versions of reality abound. Just read any newspaper comment section for two minutes (or more than a few newspaper opinion pages), or browse your Facebook feed. It’s not only disappointing, but downright dangerous that so many people choose to live in their own black and white fantasy worlds and forcefully believe that everyone else should, too.

Miller quoted Greg Tejeda of the Chicago Argus blog, who resisted the knee-jerk impulse to paint Gliniewicz as a "crooked cop" and leave it at that. "They’re human beings! Just like everybody else," Tejeda said, and Miller agreed:

We are, indeed, all just human beings. We’re all a little different and strange in our own dark little corners. Even so, most of us try to do good things. ... We should recognize that, once we’ve grown into adulthood, everybody will occasionally disappoint, some much more than others. It’s simply the reality of being an adult and part of the oftentimes puzzling beauty of living on this planet.

(I'll fight off the temptation to quote Luther -- we're all in bondage to sin -- and leave it at that.)

Miller's right about something else. We do make cartoon characters out of our public figures, and it does get us in trouble. It devalues our political discourse. He's right about Obama, too.

Letter to state representatives regarding closure of the Illinois State Musuem

Email message(s) sent today to:

• Robert Pritchard, 70th Dist. -- R-Sycamore
• Carol Ammons, 103rd -- D-Champaign
• Scott Drury, 58th -- D-Highwood
• Norine Hammond, 93rd -- R-Macomb
• Donald Moffitt, 74th -- R-Galesburg

Paragraph in brackets was sent only to Rep. Moffitt.

I am writing to urge your support of SB 317, which would mandate reopening the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and its satellite facilities in Lewistown, Rend Lake, Lockport and Chicago. My interest in the issue is personal, since on Sept. 22, 2010, I discussed my research on the topic "Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and the Roots of Oldtime Music" at an Illinois State Museum Brown Bag Lecture in the ISM’s Research and Collections Center in Springfield. The opportunity to present my findings to a group of my academic peers at the Museum was important to my personal and professional development; in fact it helped me clarify research questions that led me to develop a proposal for the Illinois Humanities Council’s Road Scholars Program in 2014. I am retired now from my position as an associate professor at Benedictine University-Springfield, but I believe it is of utmost importance that younger scholars in Illinois have the same opportunities that I did.

[I have also presented talks on musical history in Andover and Bishop Hill in your legislative district, so I speak from experience when I say the impact of closing the ISM goes beyond the communities where its facilities are located.]

My interest in reopening the ISM facilities goes beyond that, however. As you are no doubt aware, the Accreditation Commission of the American Alliance of Museums has voted to put Illinois’ state museum system on probation. According to Commission Chair Burt Logan, “The actions by the Illinois state government that forced the Illinois State Museum system to close to the public left us no choice but to place this museum on probation pending further information from the museum system. We have grave concerns about the impact of this closure on the long-term viability of the museum, including affecting its ability to retain a professional staff and operate at the highest professional level; impairing the museum’s ability to care for the 13.5 million specimens in its collection; impacting donor support; risking its role as a major educational resource in the state of Illinois; and harming its reputation as a premier international museum and research institution.”

Senior administrators and scientific researchers have already found employment elsewhere, and some of the damage done by closure already is irreparable. If AAM is forced to pull accreditation, it will be terribly difficult to get it back. For all of these reasons, and because of the adverse economic impact that closure is having in the affected communities – and among artists and craftspeople statewide – I urge a yes vote on SB 317.

-- Dr. Peter Ellertsen (Ph.D., English; M.A., history and journalism)

One of my all-time favorite New Yorker covers

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2015-10-05

https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1626741690920204?pnref=story

“Cats and dogs are just like people—they have their own likes and dislikes,” the artist Peter de Sève says about this week’s cover, “Catnap.” “When I see dogs dragged out by their masters for a run, I wonder whether they may not rather be doing something else. As for cats, there’s never a question about what they want: a nap. We have both a cat and a dog, and in fact, both are on that cover. That’s our cat, Cleo (short for Cleopatra), and Henry, who has already been on a New Yorker cover. He’s blasé about the whole thing.”

Jeb Bush: Shakin' up Washington?

Olivia Nuzzi, who's been covering the presidential primary campaigns, had an article on the Daily Beast website yesterday headlined "Jeb Wants a Recession in D.C., Having Forgotten That Real People Live There."

Anything here sound familiar, Springfield?

Nuzzi reports:

In New Hampshire on Wednesday, speaking to Sean Hannity in front of two plastic pumpkins and a Jeb! 2016 placard, the former Florida governor was asked how he would make the argument to voters that the Democrats’ plans to expand the safety net would bankrupt the country.

“We have the benefit now of all of this philosophy of offering free things to people not working,” Bush said. “I think the better message is, let’s disrupt Washington. Let’s create a little bit of a recession in Washington, D.C., so that we can have economic prosperity outside of Washington.”

Bush added that as governor, “I got to do that," and it resulted in the Sunshine State leading the nation in job growth for the majority of his tenure.

Asked if Bush really meant that he would like to create a recession in Washington, D.C., the country’s fourth-largest metropolitan economy, his spokesman, Tim Miller, responded, “We should shrink D.C. so we can grow the economy of the rest of the country.”

But Bush said recession.

She adds:

Shrinking the size of the federal government is a vastly different endeavor than creating a recession in the city in which the federal government is based. Asked if Bush is aware of the definition of a recession, Miller said, “a period of temporary economic decline generally identified by a fall of GDP in two successive quarters.”

Asked why in the hell a candidate for president of the United States would wish such a thing on an American city, Miller didn’t respond—not even to suggest it was a joke.

For future reference -- Rauner bumper stickers

$4 from the Sangamon County Democratic Party http://www.rauneriswrong.com/