AN OPEN LETTER

Dear Fellow American Citizens:

This is an open letter, for anyone, but really for those Republicans and others who continue to support President Trump, even after all that the Mueller Report has documented. Yes, I am a Democrat most of the time, but I speak to you not as a Democrat but as a fellow American citizen, so please hear me out. In fact, this letter is not about Republicans or Democrats at all, or even about policies or programs you might support as a Republican.

Just so you know, if any other Republican president were in office, acting under the proper Constitutional and moral guidelines appropriate to that office, I wouldn’t be writing this letter. I very well might disagree with you about policies or programs, but that would just be normal politics.

But Donald Trump is a different story altogether. He is not really a Republican president, or even a normal president, in the way that this country has ever seen. He is, more than anything else, president of himself, with no respect for the country, for you, for the laws and customs applying to a president, or for the democratic form of government that is truly what has made this country great. He is a serious threat to our country and our democracy, whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a Green, or anything else.

Let’s first consider the Mueller Report and the issues of collusion and obstruction of justice. I know, you are probably tired of hearing about it, and maybe you accept what Mr. Trump and Attorney General Barr have said – that there was “no collusion, and no obstruction.” What they are telling you is not true. Don’t take it from me. You can always look at the actual report and fact-check me. Here are a few real facts from the Report:

• Was there Russian interference in the election? Oh yes, there was. A lot. The Report documents a wide campaign of Russian attempts including interference in social media and communications in order to create false information and support, interference in electoral systems, stealing and releasing private emails, and interference by actual people who worked to gain influence among Republican supporters. Many of these activities were successful and were intended to influence the 2016 election in favor of Mr. Trump. No responsible U.S. government official disagrees with that. The Trump team knew about this and went right along with it.

• What about “no collusion”? When Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr, or anyone else uses the term “collusion” this is completely misleading. It is a way to fool you. The Report clearly states that “collusion” is not a legal term and that the Mueller team was not making a legal judgment about collusion. They were just looking to see if there was any criminal conspiracy, which is an offense under the law. For there to be a criminal conspiracy, the Trump team would have had to make a specific agreement with the Russian government, almost like a contract – you do this and we’ll do that in return. They did not make that kind of agreement, as far as we can tell from the evidence Mueller found, so Mr. Trump can’t be indicted for criminal conspiracy. But that is very different than saying there was no collusion! There was in fact a massive amount of collusion.

• Plenty of evidence about collusion. The Merriam-Webster definition of collusion includes “cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose.” The legal dictionary at thefreedictionary.com includes the phrase “pretending to be independent of each other when actually conspiring together for their joint ends.” So think about it. There were more than 100 meetings between the Trump campaign and representatives of the Russian government – which includes businesspersons with ties to the Russian government. Trump campaign officials lied about many of these contacts. There were communications between WikiLeaks and Trump staff about the release of emails stolen by Russian hackers that were damaging to Ms. Clinton. There were discussions about ongoing business deals Trump had with Russia. There is, as the Mueller Report puts it, clear evidence that the Russians expected to benefit from a Trump victory, and the Trump team expected to benefit from what Russia was doing. Was that the kind of cooperation that is defined as collusion? Yes it was. There was no need for a specific agreement. What other president in our entire history has cooperated with a foreign adversary during an election? None. Not one. So when someone says “no collusion,” I am telling you, straight ahead, that is pure bull. It is an attempt to confuse the term collusion with criminal conspiracy, so that you won’t understand what really happened. Think of it this way: Say that the legal definition of stealing a car is that a person has to take your car without permission and drive it at least 100 miles. So, if someone takes your car without permission, but only drives it 98 miles, did they steal your car? Hell yes, they did. But you won’t be able to charge them in court because they didn’t go 100 miles. That is the difference between collusion and criminal conspiracy, and that is the only reason Mr. Trump and his team can’t be charged with criminal conspiracy. Basically, he took the car but drove it 98 miles. But did he engage in collusion? Absolutely. It is truly a disgrace that Mr. Barr, an attorney, misused those terms. He should know better. He does know better. But he, and Mr. Trump, do not think you will understand the difference. 

• What about “no obstruction of justice”? There is only one basic reason that Mueller did not recommend indicting Mr. Trump for obstruction of justice. The Department of Justice has a policy against indicting a sitting president. Why? It was intended as a way to respect the electoral process and to be fair to any president, because if a sitting president could be indicted, convicted, and sentenced by a court while in office, that would allow a judge, or a 12-person jury to decide the fate of a president that was elected by the country as a whole. So instead, what Mr. Mueller said in the Report was that there was substantial evidence of obstruction, but that he would leave it to Congress to indict Mr. Trump through the process of impeachment, or to the people to vote him out of office. And when out of office, as an ordinary citizen, Mr. Trump could absolutely be indicted in court for those offenses. So what the Report does is lay out all the evidence of obstruction so that Congress or the people can take the appropriate action.

• Overwhelming evidence of obstruction. The Mueller Report documents – and I mean really documents with a lot of evidence — at least 10 instances of obstructing justice. These include the firing of James Comey, lying about the reason for doing that, directing White House Special Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller and then to lie about why he was firing him, repeatedly demanding that Attorney General Sessions put himself back in charge of the Special Counsel (against what the law required) and limit the Mueller investigation, doctoring up a press response about Trump Tower meetings with Russia to falsify the reason for the meeting, threatening potential witnesses, attempting to influence others not to testify with promises of support or hinting at pardons, and more. If you had evidence that any other president had done this, what would you think? It is hardly different than the kind of coercion of witnesses and obstruction that you have seen and heard about with mafia bosses and corrupt dictators in other countries. But this is the United States, my friend, the United States! Is this the country you want, one where presidents are no better than tin-pot dictators?   

• Many individuals already indicted, and convicted in court. You have no doubt already seen this. If you are wondering about collusion and obstruction, you can see that the Mueller team has already indicted or obtained guilty pleas from 34 individuals and three companies (including 26 Russian nationals). And there are more legal processes underway. This could not have happened without evidence to back it up. So regardless of what you may have heard, the investigation was not a “witch hunt,” and it was not started by Democrats. It began because a country that is our ally reported to U.S. intelligence agencies that there were unusual and alarming contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russians. That’s all. That’s it. Any administration would find it necessary to investigate such a thing. You can fact-check me.  

So, the message here is that YES, THERE WAS COLLUSION, AND YES, THERE WAS OBSTRUCTION. Anyone who tells you otherwise is misleading you. Pulling the wool right over your eyes. Do you want Congress to just accept that the president has done this? Do you want to accept this yourself? Again I ask, is this the America that you are proud of?

Mr. Trump talks about “making America great.” He sure is not doing that. He has colluded with a foreign adversary, obstructed justice, lied to you right and left, and no longer even seems to care whether he lies or not, even when confronted by direct evidence. He has ignored all the principles that this country used to stand for in the world, and, believe me, the rest of the world knows it. He has made friends with the kinds of leaders we used to either fight against or reject (at least most of the time) – the dictators and autocrats of the world, like the leader of the Philippines, or the North Korean dictator, or Russia’s President Putin, who do not care about human rights or democracy. He has done that while snubbing and rejecting the allies who have stood by the U.S. and helped keep us safe and strong. Sure, right now the economy is improving, and that’s great, but in truth it has been doing that since before Mr. Trump became president. It may not last, though, because Mr. Trump is engaging in trade wars that can ultimately damage our economy and our economic relationships, which has already hurt farmers in the Midwest among others. He has pulled the U.S. out of leadership roles in foreign affairs, on important environmental issues, on human rights, and in almost every other area where the U.S. once had a good reputation. And, Democrats along with Republicans know the immigration system needs fixing — but instead of fixing immigration problems with an approach that is smart and decent, he instead engages in ugly rhetoric that denigrates people (including children) who are often in very difficult circumstances and wants to put billions of dollars on a wall that doesn’t fix anything, taking that money away from things that would be much more useful. On and on, he is not making America great like he said he would. This is not about being Democrat or Republican. If you are Republican you have every right to want a president who pursues Republican policies, including economic and social policies. But if I were a Republican I would not want a president who has no regard for the country that elected him, no regard for its laws and its Constitution, no regard for our history and what we stand for, and who is only out for himself and his own protection.   

Think about it.

Best regards,

Dr. Common Good

On Criticism of Israeli Policies vs. Anti-Semitism: They Are Not One and the Same

Dr. Common Good

The recent controversy surrounding comments made by new Congressional Representative Ilhan Omar about money and the influence of AIPAC once again raises a thorny issue – the political difficulty of criticizing Israel. To that, my response is the following: It is fair to criticize Rep. Omar’s clumsy use of money-tropes, which have a long history in anti-Semitic narratives. However, it is not fair to suppress and divert legitimate criticism of Israel or of those who support current Israeli policies by throwing up the smokescreen of anti-Semitism when it is not present. There are good reasons to criticize Israeli policy, together with the history of American unwillingness to seriously address or even rebuke Israeli actions when it has certainly been justified. AIPAC has clearly played a significant role in that strange reticence, a pattern documented in a number of serious works of scholarship, including John J. Mearsheimer’s and Stephen M. Walt’s groundbreaking 2008 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Criticizing Israel has become even more difficult under the current administration, which has leaned so far towards Netanyahu and the Israeli right that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has virtually been buried as a news issue, a pattern exacerbated by occasional attempts to minimize the significance of the longstanding dispute at all. Yet Israel, in ongoing defiance of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 446, has, for many years, “relentlessly” (a characterization by Thomas Friedman in an open letter to Trump) expanded settlements, often through intimidation, force, the abuse of the Planning and Building Law, and by other well-documented means, now even enshrining settlements as policy in the recently-passed Nation State Law (July, 2018). This is an abuse of human rights, plain and simple, and criticism should not be censored or hamstrung in any way. These policies have been and remain a danger to U.S. security and interests, and in fact undermine Israel’s own long-term security – a view held by this author and others who otherwise support Israel’s right to a secure existence. And at the extreme, to argue that God is something akin to a land-grant agency that assigns, by divine right, a specific piece of land exclusively to a specific people, even though that entire area has been home to many throughout history, is a dangerous fallacy that can only lead to abuse. Security is a legitimate issue, but it is inseparable from a just resolution of the allocation of land and the formalization of Palestinian self-governance through a two-state solution.  

Last but not least, those who criticize Representative Omar for anti-Semitism yet remain silent about an egregiously racist and anti-Muslim campaign poster that links her to 9/11 have no right, no standing to level any such criticism, period.  

On Immigration Fairness and Justice for Central Americans

Dr. Common Good

The flak, misperceptions, and outright falsehoods about the current immigration situation in the U.S. are hard to tolerate, even if this is not a new phenomenon. Our history is full of periodic anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner flareups. But the stream of hyperbolic, racist fearmongering from the current administration and its loyal pundits has gone beyond the repugnant. Let’s just take a look at a few facts, and at our role in contributing to the crisis surrounding immigrants from Central America. There is a circular transnational history that has to be considered as integral to the migration context. Before the 1970s, Central American migration patterns were seasonal and intra-regional (Castles, de Haas, & Miller, 2014). From the late 1970s through the 1990s and including the recent wave of unaccompanied youth, migration from this region has been closely linked to U.S. policy. Under the umbrella of the U.S.– Soviet bipolar conflict, the U.S. provided support (beginning in the late 1940s) to a number of oligarchic, authoritarian regimes in Central America viewed as anti-communist, despite the violence they perpetrated on their own citizens (e.g., by the Somozas in Nicaragua, Efrain Rios-Montt in Guatemala, the military junta and several successive regimes in El Salvador) and the entrenched poverty. The violence, together with U.S. – supported neoliberal economic policies and debt crises contributed to the wave of Central American migrants fleeing to the U.S. beginning in the late 1970s (Castles, deHaas, & Miller, 2014; ECLAC, 2011). As one historian wrote, “Warfare not only killed thousands and displaced millions, it also institutionalized a migration pattern that heretofore had been very minor: emigration to El Norte” (Mahler & Ugrina, 2006). Ironically, it is these migrants, fleeing from violence, who founded the MS-13 gang, and appropriated the 18^th Street gang, in Los Angeles (where there was, and is a gang-rich environment pushing immigrants to form their own protective structures), both of which were subsequently exported back to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. In an environment of high poverty, government corruption and instability, and proximity to Mexican drug cartels, both gangs grew precipitously. In turn, these two gangs are responsible for most of the severe violence from which youth and families are now fleeing. Moreover, in the migration process itself, these migrants are often exposed to multiple traumas and adverse circumstances, including physical and sexual violence, witnessing violence, involuntary confinement, detention, lack of food and water, and other situations. When they seek to relocate in the U.S., they are faced with legal barriers, economic hardship, discrimination, a hostile political climate, family reunification difficulties, language barriers, and difficulties accessing services – though in truth for some that make it here their situations are still better than what they left. Now they are faced with child separation and worse.  

Considering this, a significant number of these migrants should rightfully be considered as refugees, and as such protected under international law. Some no doubt merit asylum status as well. Of course, there are also those who come primarily for economic reasons – because there is no way to sustain a living in their home country. But that is no justification whatsoever for the vilification thrown at them. Look in the mirror. We are them. They are us. What proportion of the current U.S. population descended from families or individuals who fled from starvation and poverty? Or violence, war and persecution? That IS the body politic. The American essence. The American story.

So it is at the core of who we should be as Americans true to our national heritage and values that we find a better way to address the immigration situation – not by some absurd, offensive “wall.” Given the context briefly described above, it makes sense that we approach this as a regional issue, requiring a collaborative regional solution that includes at least the following (Note: This is in reference to Central American immigration and its context – some of these strategies may overlap with strategies for addressing immigration from Mexico, but there are additional issues to consider for that):

• Multilateral assistance to reduce gang violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. This has to extend beyond police training and security support. The gangs take root in part because there are few alternatives, few competing pathways, not just for individuals but for communities. This must include efforts to combine community security with resources that communities can use to help those in need and to promote educational opportunity and civic engagement among youth, to involve youth in decision-making. It also means working to increase income-generating possibilities at the local level, and efforts to fight corruption (which are, to be sure, difficult).  

• A collaborative approach to address the economic challenges faced by Central American countries. This cannot be a repeat of past attempts to simply impose neoliberal economic policies and requirements that end up primarily benefiting an economic elite and that starve government agencies of funds for health, education and social programs.  

• A rational, just revision of U.S. immigration policy that includes a range of immigration and residency statuses that are a better match for the realities of a globalized international economy in which labor flows are increasingly the norm, that is based on human rights principles prohibiting mistreatment of children or of migrants awaiting status determination, and that contributes to multilateral efforts to address human rights crises. This does not mean uncontrolled, open borders. It means that border control mechanisms are implemented as part of a broader solution.  

References

Castles, S., de Haas, H., & Miller, M.M. (2014). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world (5th ed.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). (2011). Social panorama of Latin America 2011. Santiago de Chile: ECLAC.

Mahler, S., & Ugrina, D. (2006). Central America: Crossroads of the Americas. Retrieved from http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-america-crossroads-americas