Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, August 19, 2017

B3 Mountain Views News Saturday, August 19, 2017 OPINION B3 Mountain Views News Saturday, August 19, 2017 OPINION 
Mountain Views 
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PUBLISHER/ EDITORSusan Henderson 
PASADENA CITY 
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Dean Lee 
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Joan Schmidt 
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LaQuetta Shamblee 
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Keely Toten 
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SUSAN Henderson, Publisher 

U.S.A. ALL THE WAY!!! 
(This article was written on Monday, before the recent unfortunate tweets andpronouncements from Donald Trump) 


I’m in the middle of the country, Des Moines, Iowa. This trip is Bucket List item No. 
1 for us. We are off to the Solheim Cup to see the US Women golfers (LPGA) kick theEuropean Women’s butt! Rah, rah USA right? Former Solheim Cup Captain and the firstLatino American LPGA Champion organized the ‘adventure’, complete with an amateurcompetition for the Lopez Cup. Five friends, 4 from LA, one from Florida are meetingup for a week of all things golf and all things American! The event is held every 2 years 
alternating between Europe and America.

Part of the joy is rooting for your country. Our ‘crew’ ranges in age from late 50’s to 

75. (Late 50s is not me). All of us are African American, accomplished in our careers and 
blessed in our lives. We’ve all lived through enough to make us proud of our country sowe were all prepared to be loud, boisterous, All American sports fans screaming our teamto victory! By the way, two of the members of the USA team are San Gabriel Valley homegirls, Lizette Salas and Angel Yin! The diversity of our nation is apparent everywhere.
We will wear Red,White and Blue attire for every single day, every event as suggested byour Team Captain Julie Inkster because we are proud Americans!

Yes, I am a true blue Americans, but trust me, with 45 in the White House, it takes 
a bit to still be proud of our country. I respect our Democratic process but I am totallydismayed that this man has been elected to the office. There was a part of me that wantedhim to have some modicum of success in those things that would be good for our country.
Like, maintaining the robust economy that he inherited and creating more employmentopportunities. And then Saturday happened. The Rally and protesters are a part of free 
speech in America, but the tragic insane actions of a 20 year old that took the life of a youngwoman just because she was exercising her rights as an American is not. Unfortunately,
freedom of speech, when fed with hatred and bigotry, always leads to the unthinkable.

 What happened Saturday was something that has never happened before in the historyof this country. Never in American history has the person who held the Office ofPresident by his action and inaction displayed such a blatant failure to stand up for thepeople he is supposed to represent. The President of the United States put his own selfinterests in front of those he has sworn to serve. He displayed to the world that he is justabout as reprehensible as anyone we’ve ever had walk this earth. He uncovered the mask 
completely that we have all been trying not to see. He has now displayed his full featuresto America, a face and soul that is bent on the destruction of those who do not act like 
him, look like him and share his Hitleresque agenda. His response to the violence andhatred was disgraceful to most of America but apparently ok with our Presidnent’.

That’s what happened Saturday. In the meantime, I have to search deep for the red,
white and blue in my veins for the strength to shout USA loud enough to drown out thepain. 

DICK POLMAN 


CEOS TO TRUMP: 


YOU’RE BAD FOR BUSINESS 

It’s not often - actually, it’s never happened before - that a Republican

president gets dissed and dumped by corporate titans like Dow, Merck,

Campbell Soup, the Blackstone Group, 3M, Intel, Ernst & Young, JP

Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, PepsiCo, and IBM.

But their CEOs, and many more, rightly decided they should nolonger be associated with the so-called business “closer” who, in truth, couldn’t close a windowif somebody showed him the latch. Trump fooled a fatal number of voters with his pledge to runAmerica like a business, but the aforementioned CEOs have fled with all deliberate speed, lest theybe linked to his apparent quest to run America into the ground.

So much winning! Trump can’t even keep business leaders on board.

There’s a theory going around that this divorce is part of President Steve Bannon’s master planto go full populist (on the 2016 stump, Trump liked to assail the big corporations) but it sure looksbad when a CEO like James Dimon of JP Morgan Chase bitch-slaps Trump in public: “There’s noroom for equivocation (about Nazis and white supremacists). It’s a leader’s role, in business or ingovernment, to bring people together, not tear them apart.”

Not that Trump is capable of learning anything from this episode. As if. When it becameobvious - via mass resignations, protesting his pathetic responses to Charlottesville - that his twobusiness advisory groups were disintegrating, Trump harrumphed in a tweet that “ending” thegroups was all his idea. Another day, another lie. The CEOs had already taken the lead, launchingtheir exodus with barely a word to Trump in advance.

This kind of action is unprecedented. (Hey, what isn’t these days?) Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professorof organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, tells the press: “In American history,
we’ve never had business leaders decline national service when requested by the president. They’venow turned their backs on him.” 

Some of the CEOs were genuinely repulsed by Trump’s amoral equivocations (all of whichwere totally predictable, at least to anyone who has listened to him for years), but CEOs in generalare in business to make money, and they decided that serving on Trump’s Manufacturing JobsInitiative or his Strategic and Policy Forum was potentially bad for the bottom line. Their risk-
averse advisers, who tend to be sensitive about public relations, surely reinforced their concerns.
And their shareholders, mindful of the American majority that views Trump with contempt,
feared that Trump’s taint could bruise their brand.

As one business source tells The Wall Street Journal, the CEOs feared that their advisory boardparticipation “was being conflated with endorsing everything the president has ever said or done.”
Indeed, the joke yesterday on Twitter, clearly initiated by a fan of “Seinfeld,” was that the CEO ofCampbell quit because she didn’t want to be dubbed “The Soup Nazi.”

The bottom line - politically speaking - is that a Republican president (even a nominalRepublican, especially a nominal president) can’t lead effectively if the business communitybails. As the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page pointed out yesterday, “the businesscommunity, is, or ought to be, a natural part of a Republican president’s governing coalition.”
But the CEO exodus is “a symbol of his eroding support beyond his core political base,” as “hispresidency shrinks in on itself.”

Trump and the corporate sector are theoretically in sync on big-ticket items like “tax reform”
(translation: lower taxes for corporations), but if corporate leaders don’t believe he can deliver(because of his temperament, his disrespect for congressional Republicans, his inability to leadon legislation he can’t bother to read, plus his indulgence of Nazis and white supremacists), hispresidency, even if he sticks around, is essentially DOA.

As someone else once said (I love this quote, having cited it previously): “You can’t con people,
at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion, and get all kindsof press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people willeventually catch on.”

That’s from Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Now the CEOs have caught on. 


JOHN L. MICEK 
YOU CAN’T BE AN 
AMERICAN AND FLY THE 
CONFEDERATE FLAG 

OUTSIDE WINCHESTER, Va. -- We were driving up Interstate 81 lastSunday afternoon, the radio on, the sun setting into the hills, when wepassed a tractor-trailer truck, and saw Old Glory proudly snapping in thestrong wind behind the cab.


Twenty-four hours after an avowed white supremacist, terrorist and accused murderer namedJames Alex Fields Jr. allegedly plowed his car into a knot of protesters in Charlottesville, Va., killing32-year-old Heather Heyer, the sight of that flag seemed like a touching gesture of solidarity.

Then we saw the Confederate battle flag on the other side of the truck, also snapping in the breeze,
as much an appalling symbol of racism as it was when the last shots of the Civil War were fired andRobert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse more than 100 miles 
away.

In 2017, it seems ridiculous to have to say this, but here we are:

The values of the flag of the United States of America, a beacon of freedom and hope to millionsaround the world, are not consonant - and will never be consonant - with the Confederacy, whichexisted for one purpose and one purpose only: To guarantee and perpetuate the enslavement of anentire race of people.

To fly the two alongside each other as if they are somehow equal, as if there is no differencebetween them, is an offense to the memory of those who died in the service of Old Glory and thevalues of pluralism and freedom it symbolizes.

To do so is an offense to the memory of Heather Heyer.

And it is an offense to the memories of Lt. H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates,
the two Virginia State Police Troopers who perished in a fiery helicopter crash on Saturday as theywere assisting in public safety at the so-called “Unite the Right” rally.

There will be some among you who say the flag of Dixie is an expression of Southern pride andheritage, that the driver had the constitutional right to display the flag - no matter how offensive itwas in the wake of that tragedy in Charlottesville.

You’d be correct on the latter count: Bad speech, no matter how loutish or hateful, is protected bythe First Amendment -- right up until the point where it becomes a threat to someone else’s safety.

But as to the former, there is no universe, no cosmos, no alternate time-line where that flag is amere token of regional pride, as if it’s as harmless as a glass of sweet tea and a plate of biscuits.

It’s not. It won’t ever be that. Because it’s right there in the black and white of the ConfederateConstitution, Article IV, Section 3, which reads in part, “In all such territory the institution of negroslavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress andby the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territoriesshall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States orTerritories of the Confederate States.” 

That’s for you states-righters and lost-causers out there who continue to delude yourselves intothinking that the Southern states were merely rebelling against the economic hegemony of theNorth. 

They weren’t. They were protecting slavery. Period.

Batting back that hate is what brought Heyer and so many other counter-protesters toCharlottesville last Saturday, to peacefully shout down those who want to sanitize that history andperpetuate the disgusting myth of white supremacy and the hateful philosophy it espouses.

Look, I have no insight into the heart of that truck driver, so I don’t know if he was a whitenationalist. If he was expressing some kind of misguided regional pride, or if he thought he wasbeing “politically incorrect” and defiantly sticking two fingers up to the protesters in Charlottesville.
If I had the chance to talk to him, I would have asked him why he thought it was acceptable to flythose two flags alongside each other. I would have challenged him on the values that the Stars andBars represent and asked him if he thought they were somehow consonant with the values of this 
country.

That’s because it takes all of us speaking up, saying loudly and unhesitatingly that the symbolsof the Confederacy, its statues and iconography belong in museums and history books, not in ourtown squares, and not flying on our front porches.

This one’s a no-brainer. We owe it to ourselves, to our children, to our neighbors, and to ourcountry to immediately confront hate when we see it; to counter it with better speech, and tonot stop fighting it until we banish it from our midst.

Yes, that’s a tall order. And we may never be totally victorious. But that’s the challenge thatflag - Old Glory - poses to each of us. 

MAKING SENSE by
MICHAEL REAGAN 


LEARN WHEN TO SHUT UP, 
MR PRESIDENT 

As we’ve said here before, Donald Trump has to learn tojust shut up and let things go.
The failure to do that is the worst Achilles heel of a 
president who seems to have half a dozen Achilles heels.
Because he can’t think on his feet, because he doesn’t 


know how to say the right thing at the right time, because
he thinks he’s got to win every petty argument with the anti-Trump media,
the president has mired himself unnecessarily in yet another controversy of
his own making.


This time it’s Charlottesville. 

Who didn’t know in advance there was going to be big trouble in thatVirginia college town last weekend?

You had the dregs of this country’s minuscule rightwing hate sector ---about 
500 white nationalists, the KKK,neo-Nazi groups and assorted alliesand hangers-on ---- coming from hundreds of miles in every direction underthe pretext of legally protesting the planned tear-down of a statue to GeneralRobert E. Lee. 

You had their violence-prone leftwing opponents ---- organized groupslike Black Lives Matter and Antifa ---- pouring in from out-of-state to protestthe presence of the white nationalists.

The rightwing hate groups marched around the town Nazi-style, chantinganti-Semitic and anti-black slurs, exercising their First Amendment rightsand putting their moral and political ugliness on full display.

Who didn’t know the anti-Trump media was going to be there en mass torecord everything?

Who didn’t know the liberal media would seek out a visiting professionalracist like David Duke and get him to say something nice about PresidentTrump on camera?
Well, apparently President Trump and his staff didn’t know.

They certainly weren’t prepared to respond to the predictable violence,
which in this case included the tragic death of a young woman run down bya hater who deliberately drove his car into the crowd of people protesting themarchers. 

Charlottesville should have been a no-brainer for the White House ---and 
it should be finished business. 

The president should have read a simple prepared statement last Sundaythat was written by someone who knew what to say and how to say it.

He should have said, quickly and clearly, that the white nationalists, theKKK, the neo-Nazis and their fellow haters were despicable Americans withun-American beliefs ---- true deplorables, if you will.

He should have reemphasized that they and their ilk did not speak for himor his administration. Ditto for the David Dukes of the world. 

Then the president should have issued the standard presidential condolencesand moved on to tax reform or North Korea or whatever important issue hehas on his unfinished plate.

Charlottesville was never Trump’s fight. He should have stayed out of it---- above it -- and acted presidential, which, I know, is asking a lot.

Instead he again took the media’s bait -- and then did his usual clumsy jobof engaging a pack of rabid reporters in full view of the world.

He tried to equate extremist white nationalists with leftwing protest groupslike Black Lives Matters. 

Yes, it’s true that BLM protesters have stirred up violence and said nastythings about cops. And it’s true the militant hard-left group Antifa usesfascist street violence in the name of fighting fascism.

But they are not the equivalents of the racist right-wingers whose “ideas”
include virulent anti-Semitism, the natural superiority of whites, whiteseparatism and a call for America to get rid of all non-white immigrants.

It’s true, as Trump said, that both sides in Charlottesville engaged in actsof street violence. 

But the president was wrong. There is no moral equivalence between thehard-left groups and hard-right groups, and because he tried to make thecase there was he’s made a bunch of new enemies and lost some old friends. 

He has yet to learn that when you’re the president you have to know whento shoot back, when to change the subject and when to just shut up in firstplace. 

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN/CENTER 
Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com