Letter to the Fifth Circuit re: the ACA

Dear Justices.  I am writing you today because I do not know, truthfully, what to do nor how I as an American citizen and lover of my country can express an opinion that

could have some thoughtful influence on the case that is, I believe, due to come before you soon.

Perhaps, it is my political philosophy I have honed for decades trying to weigh what rightful powers government can and should possess in a free society.  I have dedicated many hours of thought into this question, perhaps, being slightly influenced by my own circumstances and by my father's love of this nation, its history and most especially, even though he was Republican, his love for Franklin Roosevelt.  Although I was born during the Truman administration my father's thoughts of FDR influenced the trajectory of my own political thought.  Yes, I am progressive on most policies but I am not progressive because I think government should simply hand out money to all but because I believe as FDR did that government's proper role is to help its people most especially in extreme social circumstances like the Great Depression or to avoid living in abject poverty when our bodies fail us and we grow old having no money to secure our lives. 

In my own life I was one of the last who contracted polio six months before the vaccine came out.  It has had in my senior years some dire impacts.  In my youth I remember when my father, a small business owner, could not get insurance for me because, yes, I had a preexisting condition.  Polio has been a life long preexisting condition.  The effects of the virus are not only horrifically impactful to one's body it is also very expensive to address it in one's entire life.  One long leg brace amounts now to about $5,000.  There were and are other accoutrements of this malady including surgeries, casts, crutches, braces, and much more.  In my later years I have fallen so many times including three femur fractures and one surgery for it that I thank God every day for the blessing of Medicare and the blessing of living in a country where I can get help.

My plight is shared now by millions who will face the loss of their healthcare entirely if the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare is struck down.  I believe the Texas Court was in great error in its opinion and I hope and pray fervently that this Court will come to a different conclusion and save the ACA.  Why on God's earth someone so cruelly and without empathy would deny millions health care and ensure that many will die without it I do not know.

Therefore I ask you, no I beg you, to consider my simple argument when deciding this case.  Without healthcare people die -- many people die.  Without healthcare even those nearest and dearest to lawyers, judges or to just the average person will die without healthcare.  Healthcare today is unduly expensive and is costing more and more each day. People are signing up for the ACA and it has been saving lives.   As the great orator and my hero FDR said:

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."

 

 I hope this email can be sent to the justices on the Fifth Circuit who may decide the fate of this important legislation.

Thank you for your consideration.

My Second Letter to Special Counsel Mueller

Dear Special Counsel Mueller:  I wrote to you yesterday before General Barr released his letter on your lengthy investigation of collusion with Russia by the president or anyone in his administration.  General Barr in his report also put forth his edict on obstruction of justice.  I wrote because I love my country and I value any person's ability to address power.

I had high hopes yesterday of finding out that which I had been longing to find out over the past two years.  In truth, I believe very little was answered and to the contrary the decision by General Barr to clear the president of obstruction of justice created more questions and wondered if you, the special counsel, so highly regarded by all, would have ever wanted more discord between factions of our nation to reach another fever pitch.  I cannot believe that is what you wanted nor can I believe that you would have left in Mr. Barr's hands the very question we all knew he addressed months ago in order to secure the job of AG.  Mr. Trump knew, I allege, that Mr. Barr would show allegiance to him and not to the greater American public good. I wondered, too, if you knew it would be handled as such and not be handled as it should have by Congress as it was in the Watergate era.  You cannot be pleased with this besmirchment of your professional actions. 

I implore you to clear this fog of discord and anger on both sides each accusing the other of destructive actions flying in the face of truth.  Only the release of your report and testimony by you can rectify our angst.  My fantasy would be for you to address us directly as others have done with other investigations.  Perhaps, I am dreaming but in our great democracy it is right and proper that one dream to save this great Republic.  Mr. Franklin said when a woman asked what kind of government the Founders had created he said:  "a Republic if you can keep it."  Keeping us in the dark with respect to this huge investigation serves only to continue keeping us apart.

Miscarriage of Justice

Attorney General Barr systematically made a decision on Obstruction of Justice he had previously stated last June when nothing had come out on it upping the chances of Trump picking him as his own personal AG which Trump erroneously thinks the AG is. It was NOT NOT NOT Barr's decision to make exonerating Trump of Obstruction. It is Congress who should make that determination.

Muller needs to come out to clarify how this report was handled by AG Barr and this report needs to be made public--Not in two weeks, not in two days but NOW!. This entire investigation where it stands now is an obstruction of justice. Does it surprise me? No. Much of US history is a miscarriage of justice whether it's Vietnam, Iraq, voter suppression of persons of color in our time or this investigation of the most corrupt president in US history. The people are NEVER going to be heard but they ARE going to be hurt -- a LOT! Elections have consequences.

If you are as furious as I am about this miscarriage of justice of Mueller and Barr then you WILL vote Democrat in 2020. It is the last hope of justice this nation has!

RESIST!

My email to Attorney General Barr

Dear Attorney General Barr:  The Mueller investigation as you know has been proceeding for 2 years.  Two years the American public has been awaiting this nation's most well kept secretes about Russian collusion in the 2016 election and the president and his minions alleged involvement in it. It has cost the taxpayer 26 million dollars.  It matters not whether one is a Republican or a Democrat these are our hard earned tax dollars at work.  I will not try to hide my affiliation.  I am a Democrat who came from a Republican household. I made the change because one word interests me -- justice.  I want justice to be done and that can only be done through clarity, openness and truth.  Wherever the chips may fall I am ready but I  want them all to fall with nothing hidden from view.  I could have thought of more just ways to do this and that is by not having a seeming ally of the president guarding the chicken coup.  How will we know you have given us the document in its entirety and not let your Republican allegiance lean toward the president?  I beg and implore you to do the right thing and not hold anything back if for nothing else but justice to be served.  Whether it clears the president or impugns him I simply want the unvarnished truth.  I am on the side of believing that you want the same as I do.  I hope and pray I am right.  My heart is with you for the most difficult task that lies ahead. 

ANOTHER VIEW--WHAT THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION ACCOMPLISHED

My Comment:  I still want to see the Trump syndicate locked up!  We'll see what the report discovers and if it will be open for the people to see what 2 years and millions of bucks later has uncovered!

MUCH HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED

By Matt Zapotosky and Rosalind S. Helderman WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — He pulled back the curtain on a sophisticated Kremlin hacking operation — identifying by name the 12 Russian military officers who he said sought to sway a US election.

He exposed a Russian online influence campaign, bringing criminal charges against the 13 members of a Russian troll farm accused of trying to manipulate US voters and sow division through fake social media personae.

And he revealed how those closest to President Trump defrauded banks, cheated on their taxes, and, time and time again, lied to deflect inquiries into their ties with Russia.

After 22 months of meticulous investigation, charges against 34 people — including six former Trump aides or confidants — and countless hours of all-consuming news coverage, Special Counsel Robert Mueller Friday submitted the long-anticipated report on his findings to Attorney General William Barr.

Barr said in a letter to lawmakers that he may be able to inform Congress of Mueller’s ‘‘principal conclusions’’ as early as this weekend.

But through legal documents and court hearings, Mueller has already revealed rich details about the Russian attack on the US democracy in 2016 — and his investigation has triggered unpredictable ripple effects.

The special counsel indirectly helped expose hush money that Trump’s lawyer paid an adult-film actress, shed new light on secret foreign-backed lobbying efforts, and helped force a reckoning at major technology companies over how social media can be used to divide and inflame.

Mueller’s investigation also severed the bonds between Trump and some of his most loyal confidants, brought down a national security adviser, and spawned spinoff criminal probes that appear likely to live on, even after the special counsel’s office disbands.

“He’s almost like a venture capital incubator who has spun out multiple lines of business,’’ said David Kris, a former Justice Department national security division chief and founder of the consulting firm Culper Partners. ‘‘He’s shown us an awful lot, and yet I think there’s an awful lot more to come.’’

From the start of his investigation, Mueller and his team followed a consistent pattern. They would toil in silence for months, and then — often on a Friday — they would reveal indictments packed with more detail than needed to substantiate the charges.

Mueller struck first at the heart of Trump’s campaign, charging its former chairman, Paul Manafort, and deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, with crimes related to their work for a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine.

The infractions Mueller alleged were not related to possible coordination with Russia, a fact that Trump and his allies were quick to seize on. But the October 2017 indictment sent a message: Mueller was alleging that the president’s campaign had been led by people who had engaged in serious criminal wrongdoing.

Mueller also revealed that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had secretly pleaded guilty earlier that month to lying to the FBI about his contacts with foreigners claiming to have high-level Russian connections.

He was one of at least 14 Trump associates who had contact with Russian nationals during the campaign and transition.

Papadopoulos’s plea agreement described his extensive efforts to try to arrange a meeting between Russians and the Trump campaign. And he said that in April 2016, a London-based professor claiming to have Russian connections confided that he had ‘‘dirt’’ on Hillary Clinton, including ‘‘thousands of e-mails.’’

That same month, Mueller would later allege, Russian hackers had accessed the networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee.

The plea deal previewed what Mueller would show over and over: Those surrounding the president sought to hide or downplay their dealings with Russia.

One of the persistent mysteries has been why.

In December 2017, former national security adviser Michael Flynn admitted that he lied to the FBI about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Flynn had claimed the two did not discuss Obama-era sanctions directed at the Kremlin, when in fact they had.

Nearly a year later, Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen similarly pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to pursue a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow.

When longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted in January, accused of making false statements and obstruction, he became the sixth Trump aide ensnared by Mueller’s investigation.

Earlier this month, Manafort was sentenced to a total of 7½ years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Cohen is set to start serving a three-year prison sentence in May.

‘‘These aren’t bit players; these are people who were part of the heart and soul of the Trump operation,’’ said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University.

One of Mueller’s core assignments from the start was to dissect exactly how Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

Four months before Mueller was appointed, the US intelligence community laid out in a terse 14-page report how it said Russia — on the order of President Vladimir Putin — had waged an online campaign to help Trump win the election.

The special counsel added to that 66 richly detailed pages of his own, outlining in two indictments the specifics of the cyberoperations.

In the first, which accused 13 Russians of waging a social media influence effort that ran afoul of US law, Mueller revealed he had access to the group’s internal communications, including an e-mail from September 2017 in which one of those charged wrote to a family member: ‘‘The FBI busted our work (not a joke).’’

Mueller also described how the group worked offline, visiting states to gather intelligence on US politics and enlisting unwitting Americans to hold rallies in support of Trump, providing the clearest window yet into Russia’s covert efforts.

In the second, which charged a group of Russian military officers with hacking Democrats’ e-mails and laundering them through fake online personae so they could be posted online, Mueller identified by name those he asserted were responsible for the attack. The indictment expanded considerably on the intelligence community’s assessment.

Notably, the indictments did not accuse any Americans of conspiring with Russia, one of the main questions the special counsel was asked to examine.

Mueller’s impact has gone far beyond the work of his own prosecutors.

His revelations have fueled calls for greater government oversight of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, following years in which the tech industry grew into one of the nation’s wealthiest and most important economic sectors while facing little regulatory scrutiny.

Mueller has also referred additional investigations to at least three US attorney’s offices.

One of those cases, a handoff to prosecutors in Manhattan, led to a guilty plea from Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations that he told a judge were directed by Trump.

That case ruptured a key personal relationship for the president, spilling into public view embarrassing details about Trump’s efforts to pay off the adult-film actress known as Stormy Daniels and allowing prosecutors to pry into Trump’s personal business.

The Cohen case appears to have been the spark for yet another investigation, this one related to Trump’s inaugural festivities. Prosecutors in Manhattan issued a wide-ranging subpoena in February to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee seeking records related to its fund-raising and spending.

Meanwhile, this summer in Virginia, prosecutors will try a former business partner of Flynn, the former national security adviser, on charges that he acted as an illegal agent of Turkey. The case underscores how the Mueller probe shined new light on a lucrative and largely unseen American lobbying industry financed by foreign interests.

Teachers Reportedly Shot ‘Execution Style’ With Pellets In Active Shooter Drill

They lined teachers up against the wall facing it. It was a "drill" with teachers unaware of either the drill or who the shooters were? Is 1/2 of our nation certifiably insane? I guess the school board sanctioning of this crackpot idea is to show how much teachers need to carry guns. Just how would that work in a room full of screaming frightened children facing live ammunition of terrorists?

New Zealand's response to 50 people slaughtered by a right wing Trump-influenced terrorist was to make assault weapons, AK 15s and the like, extended ammunition magazines illegal. Why does sanity exist in this small nation and insanity rules in a nation with over 350 million people and over 300,000,000 guns?

Law enforcement and the military should be the only ones to carry assault type weapons. If it were up to me I would love to repeal the Second Amendment. Fat chance. Think about it when our Founders wrote the second amendment into the Constitution they were thinking of 18th century muskets that only kings possessed. They were not thinking of modern-day military rapid fire assault weapons with extended magazines in a democratic nation.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teachers-shot-active-shooter-drill_n_5c93fc99e4b0a6329e142b5a

Trump’s Acting Defense Secretary Faces Ethics Investigation Over Boeing Ties

 

 

"Patrick Shanahan, the Pentagon’s acting chief, allegedly touted his former employer while disparaging competitors."

Conflict of interest?  Naturally, of course he is Drumpf's pick:  If he knew he should be tried and executed for murder if he left this flawed plane in action!!! Over 300 human beings were killed on two similar if not exact flaws in the gd tech system that keeps the plane straight up except it failed and the planes went down.  The pilots did not know how to bring it up because Boeing never told them about a problem of the known flaw.

They did not ground the planes after the first crash and did not make a statement of the investigation of this flaw. The US was the last nation to ground the planes after the second crash! Yet another Drumpf CORRUPT BEAST IN POSITIONS OF POWER THAT CAN KILL US! Shame on Shanahan and most of all shame on Drumf. What did they know and when did they know it in this corruption plus administration.

Condolences to the Muslim Community

Dear Brothers and Sisters:  I want to express my sincere condolences to all those who suffer and are in mourning because of murders in the two mosques in New Zealand by a right wing white supremacist racist.

I, a Jew, am struck by the senselessness of the demented perpetrator and the deep sadness he inflicted on Muslims and, indeed, on all the world.  It is clear both of our peoples should be allies to fight discrimination and hate wherever it exists because we both have suffered from it.  Count me as one of your allies with the hope that the better angels of our nation and the world will come together for our mutual security and love for the humanity of us all.

As-salamu alaykum

Shalom

Boeing Crashes

The Boeing crashes -- Trump and his administration are the most corrupt, unethical, unsympathetic, cruel, bestial administration in US history. The US was the last to ground the Boeing Max planes. Trump and his corrupt administration and cronies MUST be taken down lawfully and electorally and FAST before they literally kill us all.

Statement from the former Commissioner of Consumer Protection 2-13-18

"After the 2nd crash I could not believe that the Max planes were not grounded. And even though there was an Israeli, Israel will continue to support Trump.
Even though there is now a temporary grounding in place, can we trust President Trump, knowing Boeing’s president was one of the parade of supplicants who visited him at Mar-a-Lago, knowing that he has installed a former Boeing executive as the acting secretary of defense, and knowing Boeing gave $1 million to his inaugural committee? 

That is where we are in this country right now. The Republicans who have controlled the federal government these past two years have been so maniacally focused on “deregulation’’ that they refuse to see how critically important federal safety regulations are to each of us individually and to our economy as a whole. And in their zeal to deregulate, they have allowed the very industries most in need of uniform safety regulations to take over the federal agencies formed for the purpose of protecting consumers. 

The result is stark: 

We no longer trust the words or actions of our federal safety agencies to protect us in the ways we have come to expect over the past many decades. The chaos in the White House and Congress over the past two years has provided a distraction from the administration’s steady and frighteningly effective destruction of consumer protections in most of our federal agencies, whose very purpose for decades has been to protect American consumers. The foxes are definitely in charge of the hen houses; the regulated control the regulators...

...Marietta S. Robinson was commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission from 2013 to 2018...."

A

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots--By Adam Serwer in The Atlantic--A must read + My Comment

 

 

 A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/

My Comment:  After you read this historical analysis of race in America, if you read it, stop and think on why our nation today is having convulsions over race and why our nation has become, especially on the right, so imbued with hate, cruelty and violence with laser focus on immigration. There are historical American roots of reasons for this. Think on the early authors mentioned by this historian and what they said about Eugenics and the movement of it that followed. Think then on films like Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" or D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" starring Lilian Gish.

Think on who composes this nation. The citizenry of this nation comes from every continent on earth; from western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Baltic, Russia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South America, North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is an amalgamation of gold leading to greatness.

See our history in this piece as a rationale for what is happening now. Then resist and refuse to repeat it.

New Zealand shooter called Donald Trump 'a symbol of white identity' as he murdered 49 people

Right Wing Hitlerian extremists are the most violent of all terrorist groups in the US. They include such notables as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, Dylan Roof killer of 9 African Americans as they sat in prayer at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina, and Robert Bowers killer of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to name a few.

These Nationalist right wing killers exist all around the world and sadly have been inspired by the Nationalist swill of which Donald Trump is an advocate. They are cruel, fanatical and brutal. There is zero humane policy behind their beliefs and they will ultimately kill anyone who opposes their white supremacist philosophy. The fact that our so called president plays footsie with them to protect the only supporters of him -- his base -- is sickening.

Trump and his administration are a threat to all people of humanitarian, democratic and egalitarian ideals. They must be stopped -- no crushed -- electorally by the Democratic Party and those moderates in the former Republican Party who have left it after the Trump authoritarian takeover of it.

RESIST AMERICAN FASCISM AND RIGHT WING EXTREMISM OF ALL STRIPES ALL AROUND THE WORLD. Ask yourself what kind of a nation do you want to leave the generations to follow. Certainly right wing fanatical Trumpian politics of the far right would not be your choice!

Mass Shooting At 2 New Zealand Mosques 49 People Dead--The face of White Nationalism

Violent,right wing EXTREMIST, white Nationalism lives to strike another day this time in New Zealand. It is ugly and it is probably Trump inspired. It is mean, cruel and murderous. This is the face of Nationalism. It was the face of Mussolini and Hitler's white Nationalism in the 1930's and it is the face of 2019 Trump Nationalism and what has been unleashed all over the world.

Will Trump condemn it from the oval office? We shall see.

 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christchurch-mosque-shooting-new-zealand_n_5c8b08e5e4b03e83bdbeebc3

Maybe there is a God

Beto O’Rourke Is Running For President

"The 46-year-old former congressman brought the state of Texas into play for Democrats for the first time in a generation."

OMG I'm speechless. Maybe our national nightmare is heading to an end. With all the evidence mounting against Drumpf, with investigations up the ying yang of corruption everywhere including his rotten family, with the Southern District of New York and even other states going after those bastards that Drumpf cannot pardon, with Mueller the Great first responders coming to the rescue there is hope, I think, for the first time in two long very long years I am dizzy with enthusiasm.

The west and the south are being devastated by a weather cyclonic blizzard snow bomb yet another proof of climate change (as if we needed anymore proof) that science is our best approximation of truth. The House has been taken by Democrats who care about leadership, intellect and veracity and our nation may rise again from the depths of insanity! There are protestors in front of gd Fox No News News -- the real Fake News!

Okay, I know I've been enthusiastic before and it's come to naught but I think, I hope and yes I pray this is different. Maybe just maybe there is a God and so many infinite prayers have been heard by some force in the universe. For once I wake up with guarded optimism.

RESIST fascism and the hate of Trump and help Democrats anyway you can. I don't care if it's Beto for president and some smart Dem VP or if it's Biden/Beto whoever is the Democratic choice HELP them, contribute, work, phone, smoke signal do anything you can to beat the Beast!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/beto-orourke-is-running-for-president_n_5c4117e1e4b0bfa693c17f35

Jews and the GOP -- With all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might

It cannot be true that a man like Trump who sees the fascist Nazi white supremacist Nationalist element of the GOP and the Charlottesville killing as good people and further that Jews will accept him and the GOP as the proper Party for whom to vote. This will never happen.  Trump's moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a Trojan Horse for which Jews will not be fooled.  Trump is as antiSemitic as those Nationalists who support him profess to be. 

Trump and the Republicans many antiSemitic tropes will not be lost on most Jews. This Jew, as most Jews, will vote overwhelmingly for humane policy, humane Democrats and against hate. Jews will see and have seen Trump and his GOP self identified Nationalists as the conduits for lies, cruelty, racist inhumanity and violence. The GOP's philosophical reflection, to the extent they have a cogent one, is wholly unacceptable to most Jews. Most Jews and I know as well that the extremes on a political spectrum always spell danger for the Jew.

This man Trump who allegedly has the speeches of Adolph Hitler on his night table and pays homage to Hitleresque authoritarians will be repulsive to most Jews. Hitler the killer of 6 million Jews and the one responsible for 50 million others slaughtered during WWII is, I allege, the authoritarian image Trump in his heart of hearts wants to emulate. Authoritarians like Kim Jong-Un and Putin who subjugate and murder millions are the ones admired by the perpetrator of evil and the slaughterer of hope, Trump.

Jews who make up millions of members in the ACLU, who fought along side of those who marched at the Emund Pettus bridge, the Schwerner Goodmans and Cheneys who died so that civil rights in the south would live will NEVER support in great numbers the GOP and Trump. 

May Donald J. Trump and the poisonous GOP he created be crushed like no other American political Party in history has been crushed. RESIST this menace to our democratic way of life with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

Newsweek: Jared Kushner Is 'Beating Heart' of 'Corrupt and Deeply Evil' Trump Administration, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe Says

https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-corrupt-evil-trump-administration-1357606

Why I am in love with science: Because it works!

Could gene therapy cure sickle cell anemia?

Watch and be amazed!!

https://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/kaxgqzPGVQulVXxP2ilWPqMZvWeraYeq/could-gene-therapy-cure-sickle-cell-anemia-/

Why hide academic evidence?

Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to hide all of his academic records.  Michael Cohen has testified that he threatened various institutions that Trump attended with litigation if his grades or his SAT scores were revealed.

If one is such a stellar student, as Trump says he was even claiming he graduated first in his class at Wharton, then why would he and so many of his henchmen go to such great lengths to hide all his academic transcripts and records. Me thinks, Mr. Trump, thou doth protest too much.

The only conclusion one can reach is that Trump was a less than stellar student.  One need only look at his presidency, his plethora of grammatically incorrect tweets filled with spelling and capitalization errors or listen to his rambling often incoherent speeches to see the evidence of that!

Tax expert who wrote Trump biography says public would be 'shocked' by Trump's true financial status

My Comment:  Trump is a liar and a con, a showman who thinks hugging the American flag at the right wing extremist CPAC conference of hate is proof positive he is a patriot.  I think his life and his presidency is proof positive he is a Benedict Arnold traitor.  See link below.

RESIST and JAIL HIM!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/1/1838587/-Trump-biographer-says-he-has-lifestyle-of-a-billionaire-without-any-kind-of-wealth?detail=emaildkre

S.I. Rosenbaum: "A shocking number of Jews have become willing collaborators in white supremacy" + My Comment

My Comment:  He, as a fellow Jew, S.I. Rosenbaum columnist for the Boston Globe, said it better than I ever could. I weep.

By S.I. Rosenbaum Boston Globe March 01, 2019

"This week, the son of a Holocaust survivor sat before Congress and testified about how he had helped install a white supremacist “autocrat” as President of the United States.

Nothing better illustrates the liminal position in which American Jews find ourselves now.

We have witnessed a powerful resurgence of anti-Semitism that has infiltrated both places of power and the public square. We’ve seen it marching through the streets of Charlottesville, slaughtering 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and snaking from the mouths of politicians and elected officials in the current administration.
Yet even as white nationalists wish us dead, a shocking number of Jews have become willing collaborators in white supremacy — not only public bigots such as Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz, but kapos in the openly ethnonationalist Trump regime, such as Stephen Miller or Jared Kushner. 

Thus we are capable of being both the target of racism and a part of its apparatus.

That could not be clearer than in the tragic figure of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer.
In his opening statement to the House Advisory Committee this week, Cohen made a point of mentioning that his father, Maurice, had survived a concentration camp before immigrating to the United States. Cohen went on to describe, with understandable irony, the decades he spent enabling the rise of a “racist” — Cohen’s word — who used xenophobia to consolidate his power, and tore apart families to put children of immigrants seeking asylum into camps. 

“I let you down,” he said, addressing his father.
Maybe he was talking to all of us.

On the stand, Cohen wasn’t the sad-sack schmendrick we expected from his perp walk photos. Instead he was uncomfortably familiar — another striver hungering for power, money, and affirmation.
And something more: survival.

Cohen grew up knowing, better than most — better than the many American Jews who experienced the Holocaust at a further remove — that white supremacy could turn on us at any moment. “Wherever we go, Jews are like guppies swimming in an ocean filled with sharks,” the writer Peter Trachtenberg put it: “Or with big, unidentified fish that may turn out to be sharks, we’re never sure.”

In his life, Cohen chose one of the oldest minority survival tactics — assimilation into white supremacy and its agendas. The essence of this strategy is collaboration, capitulation, and cowardice. It’s the hope that when they’re rounding people up, they’ll come for someone else first, and maybe never get around to you and yours. Maybe you can even slow that progress by rounding people up yourself.

In doing so, Cohen was following in the footsteps of Roy Cohn, Trump’s old mentor. Cohn had been Joseph McCarthy’s right hand in the Red Scare witch hunt of the 1950s, the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, a gay Jew who sold out Jews and homosexuals without a second thought.
Like Cohn, Cohen was willing to cozy up to the racism of those he sought to serve. Growing up on Long Island, Cohen had been a Trump stan since high school. Trump’s bigotry was already obvious then — it runs all the way back to the 1970s when the Department of Justice took him and his father to court for discrimination. Perhaps that very bigotry was part of Trump’s allure for Cohen.
In 2001, Cohen began investing in Trump properties and convinced his own family members to do so too — literally buying his way into Trump’s regard. By 2011, Cohen — who at 22 had volunteered on Mike Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign — was an executive in the Trump Organization and had become known as Trump’s “pit bull.” It was actually Cohen’s idea, that year, to start exploring the possibility of a Trump presidential run.
Cohen continued to cover for Trump — even assembling a “diversity coalition” to give his boss’s xenophobia plausible deniability — right up until the end.

But just as Trump dropped Roy Cohn when Cohn got AIDS (“Donald pisses icewater,” was Cohn’s judgement on his former protegé), he had no compunctions about treating his new fixer with contempt, barking at him in front of others, and playing him off against other retainers. Rather than a pit bull, the New York Times called Cohen Trump’s punching bag. 

On June 20 — six weeks after the FBI raided his office, and five days after Trump publicly disowned him, refusing to pay his legal fees — Cohen began to display something like a conscience.
He resigned as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, reportedly citing a conversation with his father as a turning point. Maurice Cohen reportedly told his son that he hadn’t survived the Holocaust just to see the family name “sullied” by Trump.

“As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor,” Cohen wrote in his resignation letter, “the images and sounds of [Trump’s] family separation policy is [sic] heart wrenching.”

On Monday, when Cohen used the national spotlight to address the president directly, he sounded like a new man: “You don’t separate families from one another or demonize those looking to America for a better life,” Cohen said. “You don’t vilify people based on the God they pray to.”

He continued, “To those who support the president and his rhetoric as I once did, I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes I have made, or pay the heavy price that my family and I are paying.”

He could easily have been addressing his fellow Jews.
Cohen’s collaboration with a racist regime was simply a more extreme version of the same deal so many light-skinned Jews make with white supremacy. 

Even those of us who consider ourselves liberal or progressive can be deeply ambivalent about the conditional whiteness bestowed upon us in the United States over the past 60 years. We work in the all-white office and we never point out that it’s all white. We move our children to a whiter school — not because we care about race, we say, but because education is so important. We laugh at the racist joke. We hedge our bets. White supremacy is a protection racket; it offers security on one hand and a lethal threat on the other. 

Other minorities make this bargain too, sometimes — look at Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas — but Jews more easily succumb because so many of us easily pass as white.

Note that this strategy has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.

And it certainly did not work for Cohen.
At the heart of this moment is the question of how we survive as a minority population. As history curves in on itself, as fascism repeats itself, we have only one advantage: unlike other places where ethnonationalism has flourished, the US is fast approaching a plurality of minorities. Coalition is white supremacy’s worst nightmare — that’s why so many white supremacists are fighting so hard against it. Look no further than former Republican Maine governor (and proto-Trump) Paul LePage, who the day after Cohen’s testimony publicly defended the electoral college on the basis that it keeps minorities from having an equal vote.
A rising tide of racism drowns us all. White supremacist fears of a majority-minority nation don’t target any one group alone — they are interconnected, as we saw when anti-immigrant xenophobia fueled the killings of Jews in Pittsburgh.

If Jews are going to survive the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit. 

In the final moments of Wednesday’s hearing, Representative Elijah Cummings — the black son of sharecroppers — preached a sermon of redemption. 

“I don’t know why this is happening for you,” he told Cohen. “But it’s my hope that a small part of it is for our country to be better.”
Standing before him, Cohen wept." 
And I weep too!