THE FREEDOM AGENDA -Once More Into The Breach

by SE 5/13/15

Today or was it yesterday, The Huffington Post (or as its referred to in our house "Mama Bear's Gazette") is featuring  an article by the wonderful Toni Morrison calling attention to an effort by New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio and the new silent majority with a document they are calling "The Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality". Its a 13 point plan that "identifies the pillars upon which healthy social structures can be built. Each pillar is designed to improve, even save, the lives of vulnerable populations. Addressing everything from financial traps to failing schools to jobs to methods for strengthening families and communities, each pillar of support enhances the lives of the poor and middle class, which in turn benefits the whole society." 

Its agenda is worthy of a great nation which seeks a fair and just and healthy life for all its citizens:      

      (from the website)

• Raise the federal minimum wage, so that it reaches $15/hour, while indexing it to inflation.
• Reform the National Labor Relations Act, to enhance workers’ right to organize and rebuild the middle class.
• Pass comprehensive immigration reform to grow the economy and protect against exploitation of low-wage workers.
• Oppose trade deals that hand more power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment.

• Pass national paid sick leave.
• Pass national paid family leave.
• Make Pre-K, after-school programs and childcare universal.
• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.
• Allow students to refinance student loan debt to take advantage of lower interest rates.

• Close the carried interest loophole.
• End tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
• Implement the “Buffett Rule” so millionaires pay their fair share.
• Close the CEO tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs.

With a few updates the Agenda echoes other attempts that have been put forward   by good and decent citizens of our Republic from the not too distant past, including an organization named Demos who had a 14 point plan a couple of years ago that  was eloquently described by the great Bob Herbert in the Mama Bear Gazette also.  It was a plan that recalled an earlier one submitted by two giants of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph and enthusiastically endorsed by the Rev. Dr. Martin L. King called "The Freedom Budget". This plan was revisited 45 years later by the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College (May 2011

        Working Paper No. 668

The Freedom Budget at 45: Functional Finance and Full Employment

by

Mathew Forstater

Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

May 2011

The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals.

Levy Economics Institute P.O. Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 

http://www.levyinstitute.org

Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit,

nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service.

Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy

responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in

the United States and abroad.

Copyright © Levy Economics Institute 2011 All rights reserved

As with all good plans these were not given the serious consideration they so deserved ( at least I don't recall them making the rounds of our favorite Sunday morning newt-appearing TV programs) or perhaps it was the attention-deficit disorder that all Americans seem to (market -ly) have. As for my own worthy readers I can't begin to say how many requests I have had to re-post the following in light of this most recent agenda - 

The Country We're Not, But...
originally posted by Sam Enderby , Sept. 7, 2012

Bob Herbert working out of some worthy Think-Tank is currently writing about a great and large-hearted effort to save the Amercian Middle-Class through shared sacrifice and a "substantial financial investment on our human capital" and assorted resources.  Now Bob Herbert doesn't need a think-tank to help him tell us what's wrong with Amercians or what we should be doing to make this a better place for everyone (the answer is always easy we just have to make more Bob Herberts and fast) but hopefully there's a bunch of Bob-Herbert-types over at this www.Demos.org for the rest of us to feel confident about their work. The Report Mr. Herbert cites is called "14 Big Ideas to Build a Strong and Diverse Middle-Class" and you can read all of it by clicking on their link yourself (go ahead, I'll wait). According to the Huffington Post where I first came across Mr. Herbert's article about this venture there were 280 people who had already tweeted about this. Now in a world where good people tweet and read and discuss and vote and care and do 280 could exponentially grow to include the whole country which would be great if everybody in that country gave a you-know-what and the fact that we are in this mess to begin with doesn't bode well that there are even enough people in this country to care enough about it or else why would..oh forget it. Needless to add, the 280 needs at least 6 more zeroes trailing behind and then the work "to re-imagine," as Mr. Herbert writes, what this country can truly be can begin. The following is a summary of the "Plan' as offered by Mr. Herbert's colleagues and deserves our attention and of course the attention of our elected representatives, which is always the problem:

Investments in Human Capital and Education | MILLIONS TO THE MIDDLE
SUMMARY OF POLICIES
INVESTMENTS IN HUMAN CAPITAL & EDUCATION:
THE ZERO-16 CONTRACT FOR EDUCATION
• The American Family Trust
Enable working people to care for a new child or a
loved one in need without losing their paychecks or
their jobs through a family leave insurance system.
• Early Care and Education Plan
Invest in affordable, high-quality child care and
education to ensure all American children a strong
start in life and enable them to begin school ready
to learn.
• The Contract for College
Reinvent the federal financial aid system to double
the percentage of college-qualified students from
low- and moderate-income families who enroll and
complete college degrees.

SUPPORT FOR GROWTH, JOB CREATION,
AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT
• Public Jobs for Economic Recovery
Directly create jobs for the unemployed by hiring
them to produce goods and services for the public
benefit while we recover from the Great Recession.
• Public Investment Plan
Provide a foundation for sustained private sector
growth and productivity through improvements in
physical infrastructure, investment in clean energy,
and the creation of state-level public banks.
• Level the Playing Field for
American Manufacturing
Support the growth of middle-income manufac-
turing jobs by ending tax breaks that encourage
offshoring, strengthening Buy American provisions,
and improving the safety net for workers impacted
by trade.

• The Career Opportunity Plan
Offer job training and career ladders to boost
economic mobility.
• Federal Reserve Mandate for Full Employment
Use monetary policy to explicitly promote full
employment.
• Raise Work Standards
Ensure that all American jobs meet basic standards
of decent employment by raising the minimum
wage, guaranteeing paid sick days to working
people, and ensuring that worker protections are
effective and are applied to everyone.
• Strengthen the Rights of Working People
to Organize
Rebuild labor rights so that Americans can band
together to negotiate pay and benefits that enable
them to enter the middle class.
HELPING AMERICANS BUILD ASSETS
• American Retirement Accounts
Create voluntary annuitized pensions with a guaran-
teed minimum rate of return to increase Americans’
retirement security.
• A Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
for the 21st Century
Establish a new public agency to acquire distressed
mortgages from private lenders and directly refi-
nance them under more affordable terms.
• Fairness in Bankruptcy Act
Allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the mortgage
principal on a primary residence and to discharge
student loan debt.
• Borrower Security Act
Ensure the nation’s lending industry provides credit
to individuals on fair and responsible terms by creat-
ing a floating federal usury limit and capping loan
penalty fees.

Of course in Amercia everything New is Old again or is that the other way. Even the Republicans, who in a sense(less-way) are no longer Republicans but a sort of nasty mob of ideological fanatics; governed by the Fear that their amorphous group is somehow threatened and so become unreasonable; how many times must we hear or read that "their" small-town White Amercia is disappearing and they can't abide a Black man in the whitehouse? And that's being kind. They're imprisoned by this stifling mind-fix that has gone on too long - how it feeds from one generation to the next is a wonderment to me something to do with how our children learn or don't learn (see previous post)- and must suck the rest of us in because obviously we haven't done enough to stop it. A collective amnesia or a catastrophic failure of our public education system which is always good for a lot of scapegoating; who said when faith in education is gone anything is possible? Well, I'd hate to be the one to blame our public and parochial ways for the way we are right now but, seriously folks, Sarah Palin? Paul Ryan? These are the best put forward to be leaders of a party that as a comedian once said thinks that the Flintstones are a documentary? The very first words Ryan spoke upon being named Mitt's mate were, "I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the Amercia that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old."  Not only is that first sentence a blatant lie, head of a long list during his big Public Amercian Debut but he wants to give the children what? Is it the Amercia that the Republicans and George W left behind in January, 2009- an Amercia literally at the brink of an unfathomable disaster- the economy imploding,  unemployment rising, fighting two wars in foreign lands, or is it the Amercia that Ryan was born into in January, 1970? I would refer to any number of well-attended histories of the Nixon-Era, paying close attention to Vietnam and his "very Republican" wage and price control dicta of the following year, Paul being a 1 yr. old little Nixonite at the time. "The Amercia that was given to us".  When the infant Paul was but a month old Richard Nixon and his coterie came up with the concept of Vietnamization which was such a big success then that Amercia is trying it again but in Afghanistan and to a lesser degree Iraq. Almost two generations after and we have learned nothing except perhaps to have finally realized that it may be decent of us to welcome home our fighting men and women with a little more grace than we did then. That same year saw the first EARTH DAY, an idea and concern that Lil' Paul's party scoffs and ridicules today; for the first time in a very long while Amercia actually had a debt and a trade deficit thanks to, well, an unpaid war. A war that expanded not so surreptitiously into Cambodia during young Paul's first Springtime. Anti-war protests were more prevalent then. Four students were shot and killed at Kent State University during one of those protests. Students were referred to as Bums by Nixon and his henchmen then; today, I guess, Paul's colleagues would just call them "snobs". In a show of Big Government take over of the airwaves cigarette advertising was banned on TV and Radio. Fox news hadn't come along yet to save Amercians from fairness and truth. Within a year of Mrs. Paul's blessed event the Pentagon Papers were able to be published, there was a missile agreement with our arch foe, and 18 yr olds. were given the right to vote. Young Paul would just miss out on voting for his hero, Ronny Reagan. By the time our young (gun) hero was three Nixon had broken chopsticks with Mao and the Supreme Court had decided Roe v Wade. By the time he turned 4 1/2 Nixon would resign in disgrace and Chrysler would receive a life-saving BAILOUT. I for one would certainly like to know which Amercia or what Amercia Mr. Ryan thinks he would like to give the "younger generation". Such a giver.

But I digress. If the younger generation is stuck with the likes of and the rest of the Republican "young guns" waiting for him at the old corral or with a very watered down and accommodating Democrat Party, even with its superior oratory and exuberant inclusiveness, then they should not necessarily cast their glances too far forward but harken to what was once set down as a potential nation-changer but for a stronger political will and a non-declared war in a far off Asian land and perhaps the usual dose of Amercian racism may have made all the difference. History is full of this stuff; of why such and such happened this way instead of that; why if they only did this and not that; I guess its all part of what the cliche-mongers say being human is all about. Not really, but it salves the pain a little. We suffer and die unnecessarily because we won't figure out how to live on this planet without fear and hatred. We will come up with any excuse -in the mass- not to help those who need help-and at a time when we have the wherewithal to do so. No wonder God casts Truth down to the ground with the proviso that truth must spring from the earth itself. Well good luck to us.

A few years before Mr. Ryan's parents decided to grace the world with his presence ( see our previous blog) and just a year or two after the Voting Rights Bill was signed (see another previous blog)

  Mssrs A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin with the strong participation of a guy named Leon Keyserling (kids, you really should check these gentlemen out, you won't be sorry- get a bibliography from google or a teacher you like or maybe a parent) came up with what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr called a sort of "Marshall Plan" for the poor and disadvantaged. They called it THE FREEDOM BUDGET and it was, according to Dr. King, "a basis for common action with labor and other groups in utilizing the economic growth of this nation to benefit the poor as well as the rich. It raises the possibility of rebuilding Amercia so that private affluence is not accompanied by public squalor of slums and distress." There were to be 10 or 11 goals and they included:

1. Abolition of Poverty
2. Guaranteed full-employment
3. Full production and high economic growth
4. Adequate Minimum wage
5. Farm Income Parity
6. Guaranteed incomes for all Unable to work
7. A Decent home for every Amercian family
8. Modern health Services for all
9. Full  Educational opportunity for all
10. Updated social security
11. Equitable tax policies

Of course there was always the question of how but as unreal as this appears now there was some very serious support for these proposals but as it is with Amercians there was an on-going unpaid for war still going on, the South and some other neighborhoods were still fighting the civil war, and some just thought it pie-in-the-sky- liberalism run amok. Forty-Five years later some citizens over at Bard College took another look and  put together this little report written by a Matthew Forstater of the Levy Economics Institute and published in May, 2011. It makes for some inspiring reading - and pay close attention to the how of "functional finance".

FREEDOM BUDGET + 45

from the conclusion:

"The choices for the future are clear: functional finances or dysfunctional finance? A pool of unemployed to hold prices down or a flexible system of public service to maintain stability? Exploding prison systems* and deteriorating skills or increased community services and more social cohesion? Poverty wages, no health care; no child care, or living wages and universal care? Fallacy of composition or sensible macroeconomic common-sense? technocratic individualism or humanistic social policy? Involuntary part-time, involuntary flextime labor market treadmill or life-sustaining, life-enhancing employment"? 

Of course if I'm thinking about this you know someone else has already written a bit about it. A Chester Hartman of something called "Poverty and Race Research Action Council ( and they really should change the name) wrote in The Huffington Post (damn that Arianna) about the Freedom Budget ( anent MLK birthday) on Jan. 18, 2010! listing 7 of its main objectives. It was undoubtably-if memory serves- buried in the "Black Voices" section. Now if we can just get the councils of Amercian power to dust it off .

Do you suppose 

that Bob Herbert's friends over at Demos. org are in touch with Dr. Forstater at the Levy Institute? This is good stuff as that daffy Chris Matthews would say and what is more we may even deserve it. And in Amercia 2012 someone should print up Young Gun Ryan's Budget for Amercia on one half side of the page and the combined Demos/ Freedom Budget on the other side and - well, don't even bother to ask.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*In Re: Those "exploding prison systems" :

"California struggles to comply with a court order to reduce its prison population, a new study finds that the state now spends more on its correctional system than on higher education. Since 1980, the prison population has skyrocketed 436 percent, while spending on higher education has decreased by 13 percent adjusted for inflation, "

via California Spends More on Jails than Higher Education.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Criticizing Fears: Excerpted from Unpublished & Uncompleted Blog Page

5/5/15

It is interesting to note - another American appoggiatura if you will, unfortunately its not a verb (see Arban's) - that among the more notable people who were approached to lend their name and reputation to the Anti Nazi boycott was Waldo Frank, at the time a well-known writer who was associated with several left-liberal causes and enterprises; a novelist and literary critic during the post-World War I years and was most identified with his writings about Spain and South America. He was, back then, a sort of celebrity; a public intellectual who seemed to be everywhere and seen everything and was invited to speak on his various adventures. He was as well-known in his time as a writer and journalist as Judith Butler is in hers among the academy movers and shakers, women's rights groups and left-leaning political conferences. When asked by the "non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League if he would participate in some way with their boycott he wrote ( in November, 1934): 

"...I am aware of the fact that there are several organizations in the country conducting antiNazi activities on non-sectarian grounds; indeed, I serve on at least one such committee. But I am afraid that this does not cover the point which I made..that the Jews as a group (insofar as they have spoken with group emphasis) have based their opposition to Hitlerism on the chief ground of the oppression of Jewry; and that they have permitted the boycott to become identified in this country principally with their racial or sectarian grievance against the Germans as oppressors of Jews. Whatever common cause has been made with the socialists and liberals and communists in Germany has been done so inconspicuously as not to have borne weight.

      This is one point. My other grievance relates to my general skepticism about boycotts in any form. They are a dangerous weapon, because they can not be intelligently controlled. If for instance the Jews claim that they are interested in a boycott against Germany primarily because of their championship of human rights, why do they stop at Germany? What will they do if someone shows them that human rights are also being tramped down in Italy, in Japan?

     I have found no reason to withdraw my conviction that the Jewish boycott action against Germany has been against the best interest of the Jews(in the long run): and it is this interest, believe me, which I have at heart." 

Ouch. Now this is a kid from West 78th St ( another New Yorker- from comfortable middle-class Jewish home), A DeWitt Clinton grad (when it was on 10th Avenue and 59th St, where John Jay College is today) his folks were able to send him to school in Switzerland before he enrolled in Yale where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Class 1911. Sound familiar, eh? But he worked summers on ranches out in Wyoming and Montana and after college lived in Greenwich Village as a struggling? writer.

He was photographed by Stieglitz, found work with some of the newer journals and magazines, started to travel more and by the time this letter had been written he had traveled down South with the Black poet, Jean Toomer - he actually put on "blackface" to be able to stay with Toomer during this time (now therein lies a good tale); was beaten by fascists in Buenos Aires, flew in a single-engine plane over the Andes, and was run out of Harlan County, Kentucky by coal-company goons and sheriff deputies while investigating a coal strike in the early 30's. Eventually during his lifetime he would meet seemingly everyone from Kahlil Gibran to Charlie Chaplin to the President of Mexico to Fidel Castro to fill-in-the-blank. He would describe himself as a Jew without Judaism and an American without America; a true man of the world. It is the markedly avowing socialist-weltanschauung (thats right two u's) that still resonates among the social-justice seekers and anti-war advocates and hope-filled dreamers; nation-states are passe and we all should just be concerned with each other while singing John Lennon tunes ( I mean that's what we all should be striving for). Frank would later on write books about Jews and Israel always emphasizing what he considered to be the paradox of Israel: 

"their belonging within their not-belonging and it is unthinkable without the participation of its neighbors who, in their cultures, have been both the Jews' heirs and their enemies.

       Because the Zionists reject this paradox, I have never been and could not be a Zionist. By Zionist ideology, the Jews do not belong in Europe. But if, more than any other culture including the Greek, they created Europe, who with better right than the Jews belong in Europe? and in the West that Europe fathered?"  

Waldo Frank was certainly not an unintelligent man. He was a man with deep wellsprings of compassion and humanity. The quote is from his book, Bridgehead, The Drama of Israel, published in 1957-58, not quite a decade removed from the War of Independence and only 13 years since the "liberation" of Auschwitz, etal and yet just as sure as a passing remark by the once lovable HelenThomas made over a half century later would mirror in its latent way that same sentiment I don't think there's a Jew on earth - from whatever side of the political divide- that does not do a double-take, physically and philosophically, when they hear or read "the Jews belong in Europe".

"By Zionist ideology, the Arabs are and ever will be outsiders-however amicable and at peace. But the consanguinity of Arab and Israeli is deeper than blood, more substantial than the machines and technics of the West which today separate "modern" Israel from "feudal" Islam. For the machines of Christian Europe, as I have elsewhere shown, spring ordinately from Israel's culture as it wedded with the Greek; and the religious nationalism of the Arabs is a version...virulent and misguided...of the immanence of God in human conduct, first expressed in the Jewish Torah and today secularized in Palestine no less than in the surrounding hostile Islam." 

Sounds a bit Freudian, however, it is a large hearted internationalist who can hope that the very spirit- his word- that divides Israeli and Arab - its interesting to note and I don't want to make too much of it in this context but he never addresses the Arabs as Palestinians- (that very spirit)must bring them together. 

Belonging in Europe was a feature of quite a few Jewish scribes writing in the wake of the First World War and the nutty time that was the 20's- especially in Germany and France

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News Brief

Jewish groups decry National Front election successes in France

April 1, 2014 7:16am

(JTA) 

– Jewish groups in France and Europe blamed voters’ indifference for the success of the far-right National Front party in French local elections.

National Front candidates were elected mayors in 11 municipalities in the vote on Sunday — a dramatic increase over the party’s previous record of four mayors in 1997, the news site europe1.fr reported. A record number of French voters did not cast ballots.

“The message is loud and clear that the French electorate is either not taking the threat from the far right seriously or they do not care,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the European Conference of Rabbis, said in a statement Monday.

Jewish groups and leaders have feared National Front’s rise because its leaders include politicians with a penchant for anti-Semitic and xenophobic rhetoric. Among them is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party founder and honorary president, and the father of current leader Marine Le Pen.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has several convictions for inciting racial hatred against minorities and denying or minimizing the Holocaust.

“This result should sound alarm bells across Europe and indeed the world, that the politics of hatred are making a formidable comeback,” Goldschmidt said.

The Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF, said in a statement Sunday following the close of polls that it “regrets the success of National Front in many municipalities” and blamed the result on the indifference of voters and authorities to efforts by organizations such as UEJF to prevent National Front victories.

Goldschmidt also referred to perceived inaction, saying, “No doubt most analysts will characterize the success [of the National Front] as a protest against what many see as the failings of [French President] Francois Hollande, but there is no question that it benefited enormously from a record abstention of 38.5 percent.”

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Joseph Roth, another "famous" Jew of his time; a liberal journalist/novelist from Austria, traveled throughout Europe as sort of a freelancer and being paid very well as a noted writer-spent the post-war (I) years in Berlin and many in Paris where he was living just before he died in the last spring before the second world war. A contemporary of Frank's -he was 5 years younger- Roth, too, felt that who but the Jew had a better right to live in Europe. 

 His writings reflect almost a cosmopolitan ( another loaded word) arrogance as if daring his fellow Jews -or anyone else- to be anywhere else - who would give up Paris for Jerusalem (How ya gonna keep'em down on the hof(?) after they've seen Paree?). He could imagine the passing scene on the Grenadierstrasse in Berlin as a kind of metaphor for the place and plight of all Jews as literal wanderers on the face of the earth - not really at home anywhere yet at home everywhere. "He sees," writes his translator, Michael Hoffman, "in their daily perambulations up and down the street the will of history being played out. This is what we Jews were meant to do":

 "Of all the thousand ways that they have gone, and go, and will go, not one is a way out, not one leads to a concrete, earthly goal. No "fatherland", no "Jewish homeland", no "place of refuge", no "place of liberty". Not exactly a Zionist, Roth thinks that "in seeking a "homeland" of their own, they are rebelling against their deeper nature." 

And Roth:

"...zionism can only be a bitter experiment, a temporary opportune degradation of Judaism or perhaps merely the reversion to a primal, long since outmoded, form of national existence. Maybe it has succeeded in arresting or delaying the assimilation of Jewish individuals or groups. But in return it seeks to assimilate an entire people. If it appeals to the warlike traditions of Judaism, then one should counter that the conquest of Canaan is less of an achievement than the Bible, the Psalms, and the Song of Songs; also, that the present of the Jews is greater, possibly, than their past: being more tragic."

Roth could have been arguing with the right-wing Zionists of today, I mean he's writing this just after the Arab pogrom in Palestine in 1929 and like Frank he's certainly no idiot- but there is a romantic/political take to his Jewishness- the kind Waldo Frank and to an extent Judith Butler and even your fearless blogger have expressed- Jews are better than this better than statists who insists on the all-importance of The State- nation- states are so passe..etc. And then in the midst of this riff on how Zionism really isn't good in the long run he turns into a Tevye-like chronicler (listen):

"With the help of these terrible jagged letters he gave the Jews the first terrible moral law, for them to spread among the cheerful, blithe peoples of the world. It takes, I thought, a truly divine love to choose this people. There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well-trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing, the hardest law and the most difficult mission: to sow love on earth, and to reap hatred." 

Far from loveliest? Thanks a lot. Still he was able to write about the dissolution and utter destruction of his world and people that few writers have ever matched and it remains for others to say whether he was spared the catastrophic horror that was to come when he died- a young man-in that spring before the war. (If you must know- he drank alot...and who could blame him given the time and place?)

Judith Butler, a smart, precocious Jewish girl from Cleveland - and I think we all know how hard that can be on a kid- will take issue with anyone who equates Jews with Zionists or as she writes "Jewishness with Zionism". We can use precocious because we know from an interview she once gave that she was thrown out of her Hebrew school class (in Cleveland?) for talking too much. She was a discipline problem (I know...who wasn't in Hebrew school?) Waldo Frank, too, was thrown out of DeWitt Clinton for refusing to take a Shakespeare course because he said he knew more than the teacher. (Who doesn't like a smart-ass Jewish kid?)

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In Hungary, Anti-Semitism Lingers 70 Years After Nazi Occupation

Religion News Service  | by  Trevor Grundy

Posted: 03/19/2014 3:54 pm ED

BUDAPEST, Hungary (RNS) Seventy years ago today, shortly after the German army invaded Hungary, thousands of Jews were prodded by bayonets and swords into the freezing waters of the River Danube.

But first, they were ordered to remove their shoes so that others could walk around in them.

For Jews worldwide, March 19 is a horrific anniversary.

During the 12 months after the invasion, more than 450,000 Hungarian Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo with the enthusiastic help of its Hungarian equivalent, the Arrow Cross Movement, and sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps in Poland.

Of an estimated 800,000 Hungarian Jews at the beginning of 1944, fewer than 200,000 were alive at the end of the war. The Nazis and their allies murdered three-quarters of Hungary’s Jewish population in the last year of the Second World War.

Today, many Jews are wondering whether the passage of time has done much to quell this nation’s troubling history of anti-Semitism.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is seeking re-election on April 6, said at recent meetings of the World Jewish Congress in Budapest that his government is determined to stamp out the rising tide of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. He described the latter as “unacceptable and intolerable.”

Earlier this month, unidentified vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery in Tatabanya in northwest Hungary, daubing slogans such as “Stinking Jews” and “There was no Holocaust but there will be” on gravestones.

In February, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called in the Hungarian ambassador to Jerusalem in a rare move to voice Israel’s “deep concern” over growing anti-Semitic incidents in his country.

The envoy heard Jewish concern about the Hungarian government’s apparent unwillingness to deal truthfully and courageously with its past.

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To be continued- by popular demand or not- SE