From the Archives: Election Chaos and Our Last Hope (Hint: Not Bloomberg)

Editors' Note:  How often have you, when pondering whom to vote for this fall in the Presidential Election, asked yourself  “Gee, I wonder what a finagling Harvard-educated billionaire like Lloyd Blankfein thinks.”

Wonder no longer, you miserable wage slave!

According to Politico,

And why is that?  Let's skip answers one (who gives a f***?) and two (what do you think?), and let the wise Mr. Blankfein hang [Surely, speak for? – Ed.] himself:

On policy, Blankfein railed against Sanders' backing of a wealth tax, an idea that multiple Democratic White House hopefuls have also endorsed.
 
“I don’t like that at all,” he said in the Financial Times interview, likening it an "assassination by categorization."

On second thought, we can stick with answers one and two.
 
But lest you think that his answer was predicated solely on the narrow self-interest of a economically-unproductive finagler (excuse us, “proprietary trader”) , there's more:
 
“Look, it’s crazy not to acknowledge the economy has expanded under Trump,” Blankfein said, attributing the growth in part to the 2017 GOP tax law and Trump’s elimination of “dopey regulations.”

Like the one limiting how much risk institutions like Goldman Sachs can take with what turns out to be government-guaranteed debt?

And how is the economy doing anyway?  Well, if you had a billion dollars in the stock market on January 1, 2019,  you ended the year $288,000,000 richer without lifting a finger.  Like Lloyd.  If on the other hand you, like Ivonne Hernandez, were working for a living, you were reduced to living on a sofa in the house of your boyfriend's parents, according to yesterday's New York Times.  So maybe the U Bum economy looks better to Lloyd than to Ivonne.  But Lloyd's a rich white man and Ivonne is a working-class woman of color so really who gives a s***?

Anyway the contrast between Lloyd's views on the threat to American democracy represented by U Bum and the calamity that would result from his re-installation in office led us to wonder if there was any other time when rich a**holes made electoral choices they would come to regret.

There were, as this Spy dispatch from January, 1933 recounts:

GERMAN INDUSTRIALISTS
BACK HITLER-LED GOV'T


From Sally Bowles
Spy Berlin Bureau 
with additional material from 
The New York Times News Service

BERLIN, Jan. 30 – Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has finally realized his ambition of being named Chancellor of Germany after at least two failed attempts last year.  The decision, approved by President von Hindenburg with the backing of conservative forces led by former Chancellor Franz von Papen, may spell the death knell of democracy in Germany.

However, New York Times Berlin Correspondent Guido Enderis, who comes in here most every night, reported that “The composition of the Cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for gratification of any dictatorial ambition. . . . He swore obedience to the Republican Constitution today. . . ”

Informed sources told Enderis that Hitler's room to maneuver will be severely limited by the preponderance of Conservatives in his Cabinet, representing the interests of landed Junkers and prominent industrialists and capitalists.

Crucial to the agreement to install Hitler in power, political insiders told the Times, was Hitler's promise not to engage in any form of economic or currency experimentation, including higher spending and currency inflation to relieve German unemployment or higher taxes on the rich to finance social welfare programs.

German industrialists have made no secret of who they prefer in the coming elections, and it's not the socialist parties who threaten to increase their taxes and reduce their wealth.  Instead, they're going with Adolf Hitler.  The Hitler Government can take power only with the agreement of other parties, because the Nazis lack a Reichstag majority.

Although official Nazi reaction was restrained, the Associated Press reported that thousands of torch wielding brown shirts paraded down the Siegesallee in Berlin cheered by thousands more, with similar scenes of triumph playing out in smaller German cities.

Hitler's decision represented something of an about-face from his earlier reluctance to join a coalition government.  The foreign press reported that he had been pressured by right-wing industrialists that had bankrolled the Nazi Party, through former Chancellor von Papen, to take power with the support of other severely conservative parties.  The industrialists were said to believe that only a Hitler-led coalition could prevent their nightmare scenario of a Social Democratic government committed to protecting the rights of labor unions and increasing taxes on the wealthiest Germans.

Among the most vocal opponents of the new Government are the trade unions affiliated with the Socialist and Catholic Center parties, who said that the new rulers are committed to suppressing workers' rights and democracy itself.  But to the German banking and industrial classes, this only proves that Hitler and the Nazis were the only force capable of saving Germany from the menace of democratic Socialism.

In a statement, the German Federation of Jewish citizens expressed confidence that despite the resurgence of anti-Semitism following Hitler's rise to power, “the power of the public authorities will protect the Jews.”

Said Lloyd Wertheim, owner of Berlin's finest department store of the same name: “the calls of the Socialist Left to take away my wealth and redistribute it to idlers and slackers really hurt my feelings, so they leave me with no choice but to support Hitler on March 5.”

Other wealthy Germans of Hebrew descent profess a lack of concern over the new Hitler Government.  They say they don't take him seriously and expect the institutions of a civilized Germany to protect them.  Marcus Goldman, a Berlin investment banker apparently not entirely familiar with American geography, said “it's not like the Nazis would invade our synagogues and shoot us in cold blood.  This isn't the Wild West.  This is Berlin, not Pittsburgh.”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

By Emma Goldman
Immigration Correspondent

From time to time we have heard that some of you think that the title of this Department is a tad hyperbolic or, as proud Brandeis grad Marty Peretz [Louise, please check if Marty is alive or dead.  Thanks. – Ed.] once said of the late great Village Voice, “reeks of stale menace.”  To which we say: meet Strike Force BORTAC, coming soon to a Democratic city near you.

What's BORTAC?  It's the heavily armed branch of US Customs and Border Protection, used to conduct border operations against presumably equally heavily armed adversaries like Mexican drug cartels.  Here they are in action:

Scary stuff, no?  And why is this paramilitary force being redeployed from the southern border to Boston, Massachusetts?  We'll start with the Trumpublican party line as reported in The New York Times (and other places):

The Trump administration is deploying law enforcement tactical units from the southern border as part of a supercharged arrest operation in sanctuary cities across the country, an escalation in the president’s battle against localities that refuse to participate in immigration enforcement. 

The specially trained officers are being sent to cities including Chicago and New York to boost the enforcement power of local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, according to two officials who are familiar with the secret operation. Additional agents are expected to be sent to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit, and Newark. 

The move reflects President Trump’s persistence in cracking down on sanctuary cities, localities that have refused to cooperate in handing over immigrants targeted for deportation to federal authorities. . . . . .

Among the agents being deployed to sanctuary cities are members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol. With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records. 

So who's the enemy here?  Is it those ferocious “criminal aliens” stalking the streets of our cities, making life difficult for dirty dishes in restaurants, crabgrass on suburban lawns, and salt stains on mag wheels, to name three common targets of their nefarious activities?  Or is it Democratic cities and states who have had the nerve to oppose impressment into the Trumpublican war on the undocumented and their families (who often by the way are U.S. citizens)?

It appears to be the latter, as the corrupt drug-addled Othello of Mar-a-Lago continues to rage against those who dare oppose him, by, for example, not keeping state prisoners locked up without charges just because an ICE agent hands the jailer a piece of paper asking them do so.  Our old classmate Ralph Gants '76 (and his colleagues on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court) had to point out that Massachusetts cannot in fact lock someone up indefinitely just because another government asks them to.

This and other sullen acts of defiance have sent President Pussy Ass Bitch and his white supremacists Iagos into conniptions, leading to the dramatic spectacle of heavily armed CBP SWAT teams deployed into the streets of Brockton, Mass. to – well, we'll get to that in a moment.

The other motivation for this useless display of force seems to be to avoid repeats of disasters like the one that went down in Brooklyn last week, when ICE agents tried to take an alien into civil custody but were met with an entirely expectable show of defiance on the part of his friends and family.

Instead of retreating to snatch another body, or the same one another day,

As the officers, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, tried to detain him, Mr. Avendaño was shot with a stun gun. One officer then fired a gun at a second man, the son of Mr. Avendaño’s longtime girlfriend, with the bullet piercing the young man’s cheek.

That went well! Of course, if the shooter had been a Latino and the victim the Old Bill, the story might have read “shot the officer in the head,” not the cheek, but we'll leave that for another day.

The ICE agent had no choice but to use lethal force against an unarmed civilian because the dangerous criminal alien they were bravely seeking to apprehend had been, according to paragraph 97 of the New York Times report, “arrested earlier in the week after being stopped for failing to signal a turn, driving without a license and improper license plates, according to court records.”

This sort of heinous crime may be just another day in Brooklyn, but can you imagine what might happen in Boston if miscreants thought they could get away with brazenly and wantonly making a turn without signaling?  It would be the end of life in the Hub as we know it, unless of course Boston drivers were permitted to administer vigilante justice: six honks and a finger.

Perhaps the body snatchers honestly believe that deploying heavily armed paramilitary units onto the streets of our cities might prevent future efforts to save our citizens from the plague of unsignaled left turns without inflicting life-endangering injuries on their friends and relatives.  Perhaps they believe that the existing force of 7,700 kidnappers is really insufficient.

Or perhaps the whole thing is no more than bigotry as performance art, because it turns out that the BORTAC team can't in fact do, to use the technical legal term for enforcement jurisdiction, jack shit:

Even with the added show of force from BORTAC, agents will be limited in their abilities compared to the police or sheriff’s deputies. Unlike operations on the border, where BORTAC agents may engage in armed confrontations with drug-smuggling suspects using armored vehicles, immigration agents in cities are enforcing civil infractions rather than criminal ones. They are not allowed to forcibly enter properties in order to make arrests, and the presence of BORTAC agents, while helpful in boosting the number of agents on the ground, may prove most useful for the visual message it sends.

There's a fun fact concealed in all this send-in-the-Marines crap: US Customs and Border Enforcement has no jurisdiction outside the, wait for it, U.S border (with the exception of a self-proclaimed zone extending 100 miles from a U.S. land border).  That means that the BORTAC teams with their shiny tanks and machine guns can't do anything except stand around and look tough, just like the clowns who parade around state capitols in war-surplus combat gear and assault weapons to protest efforts to keep high powered weapons out of the hands of immature idiots.

Which leads to a possible avenue to protect anyone who speaks Spanish and has undocumented friends or family from being shot full of holes by a trigger-happy hit squad.  If these federal agents do not have any federal authority to do what they are doing, then they are not acting within the scope of U.S. Government authority.  Therefore, their actions can be limited by state and local peace forces, who have their own tanks and assault weapons.

What about the Supremacy Clause, which stands for the proposition that states cannot restrict the acts of federal officers acting within the scope of their authority?  Does it cover actions of federal officers acting outside the scope of their authority?  Like robbing banks, shooting civilians, or making a left turn without signaling?  We may yet find out.

Bostonians have had experience with this sort of thing.  When the Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which granted federal power to snatchers of runaway slaves, the good citizens of our town did not acquiesce in the return of criminal aliens to their enslavers.  In fact, they were quite ornery about the whole sordid mess.  In 1854, when an enslaver named Charles Suttle came to Boston to retrieve his fugitive slave Anthony Burns, 

Coming soon to a Hub near you.

under the pretext of being charged for failing to signal for a left turn [Surely, robbery? – Ed], Burns was arrested. Boston abolitionists, vehemently opposed to the Slave Act, rallied to aid Burns, who was being held on the third floor of the federal courthouse. . . .

The crowd outside the courthouse quickly grew from several hundred to about two thousand. A small group of blacks, led by white minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, charged the building with a beam they used as a battering ram. They succeeded in creating a small opening, but only for a moment. A shot was fired. A deputy shouted out that he had been stabbed, then died several minutes later. Higginson and a black man gained entry, but were beaten back outside by six to eight deputies.

Boston inhabitants had successfully aided re-captured slaves in the past. In 1851, a group of black men snatched a fugitive slave from a courtroom and sent her to Canada. Anthony Burns would not share the same fate. Determined to see the Fugitive Slave Act enforced, President Franklin Pierce ordered marines and artillery to assist the guards watching over Burns. Pierce also ordered a federal ship to return Burns to Virginia after the trial.

Burns was convicted of being a fugitive slave on June 2, 1854. That same day, an estimated 50,000 lined the streets of Boston, watching Anthony Burns walk in shackles toward the waterfront and the waiting ship. 

Burns's freedom was eventually purchased by public subscription, but besieging the courthouse seems to have had a cooling effect on the ardor of persecutors deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act.  And those thugs were in fact acting under federal law.  You can't say the same thing about the Trumpublican SWAT teams deploying their tanks and machine guns in the streets of Everett and Brownsville to perform for the entertainment of a corrupt Russian-owned bigot and his legions of white enablers.  The only question is whether state governors and local officials will allow the the star-spangled hate fest to proceed.  Maybe someone should tell Boston Mayor Marty Walsh that the CBP strike force won't hire union stagehands.

UPDATE, February 17:  Speaking of the majesty of federal law enforcement, here's The New York Times's 1619 Project on the fate of Mr. Anthony Burns:

Next to the I-95 highway in Richmond, there’s a fenced-in area that for about 20 years starting in the mid-1840s was home to a compound owned by the slave trader Robert Lumpkin. Called Lumpkin’s Jail, it included a pen to hold enslaved people — many of them fugitives — before they were sold in auctions and private sales on the property. The site, one of the few in the country that are marked, is part of a self-guided slavery tour in Richmond. . . .

One person held at Lumpkin’s Jail was Anthony Burns, an enslaved person in Richmond who stowed away on a ship in 1854, escaping to Boston. When he was captured shortly after, thousands of local abolitionists tried to prevent him from being re-enslaved, but the courts ordered Burns returned to Virginia, where he was soon jailed in a small cell in Lumpkin’s Jail, painfully manacled much of the time. “The grip of the irons impeded the circulation of his blood, made hot and rapid by the stifling atmosphere, and caused his feet to swell enormously,” reports his biographer, Charles Emery Stevens. Burns was kept in this jail for four months until he was purchased there by a plantation owner from North Carolina. But he had not been forgotten by a black congregation and other abolitionists in Boston, who purchased his freedom. He went on to study at Oberlin College and spent his final years in Canada as a Baptist preacher.

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Spy Fun Pages: Impeachment Bingo!

Editors' Note:  The House impeachment managers marshaled their evidence and argued eloquently that a President who extorts a foreign country for solely political gain and then stonewalls the Congress merits impeachment and removal from office.  While they were doing so, compelling new evidence emerged, irrefutably proving the facts of the House's case.  So what happens?  The entire Republican Senate bands together to cover up and dismiss the charges, thereby ensuring that the Grifter-in-Chief will commit even more flagrant misdeeds to ensure his continuing grasp of power.

Kinda depressing, no?

Fear not, the Spy will cheer you up.  Instead of throwing your shoes at your television this week as the sorry spectacle of Republican complicity in high crimes plays out before you, why not have some fun with Spy Impeachment Bingo?  It's so simple – every time a Republican Senator spouts one of the ridiculous rationalizations they have been fed for voting to cover up Presidential crimes, just check the box.  First one who wins gets an NFL tryout, just like Colin Kaepernick!

Extorting campaign help wrong but not impeachable	Dems are trying to overturn 2016 election	Sen. Warren asked a mean question	Like his tax cuts and judges	House should have waited to enforce subpoenas
If he thought his re-election was a good thing, it's OK - that's what a smart Jew lawyer says	Too close to 2020 election	Schiff referred to CBS news report re U Bum revenge plan	House rushed inquiry	You can't introduce new evidence at a trial
Desperate Ukraine leader said he didn't feel extorted	Witch hunt	Hunter Biden	House delayed inquiry	Bolton a far-left stooge
Don't need evidence; we know what happened and it's OK!	Hoax	Impeach- ment too divisive	They all do it, what- ever it is	Senate needs to get back to not working
He probably won't do it again	Hearsay	President denied due process	Presi- dent didn't say "quid pro quo"	Benghazi [How did that get in there? – Ed.]