DeVos & Mnuchin: A Peek Inside the (Republican) Cabinet

Trump's exclusive Bild interview [Photo - Getty Images]

With the uninformed and divisive rhetoric of the soon-to-be inaugurated PEOTUS now inspiring ripples of uncertainty and fear across the European continent in the wake of his Sunday interview published in the Times of London and Germany's Bild in which he described the 67 year-old NATO alliance of 28 countries as "obsolete", the world is finally grasping the sense of unease felt by millions of Americans.

Welcome to our world Europe.


Much of the political amd media establishment's attention was justifiably focused on the contentious confirmation hearings of Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, a politically conservative billionaire with no actual education experience who has given large political donations to five of the same Republican Senators sitting on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee tasked with approving her nomination. (Drain that swamp!)

That's a pretty scary thought for advocates of public education as well as the bedrock Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state.

According to an extensively researched and well written article posted today on Mother Jones.com by Kristina Rizga, in a 2001 interview, when asked if Christian schools should continue to rely on the kinds of philanthropic donations ($50 million between 1999 - 2104) she and her husband give to Christian schools and organizations, DeVos famously said:

"Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom."

As Forbes reported earlier this evening, during questioning Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders reminded DeVos that millions of Americans are troubled by the idea of a small handful of conservative billionaires forming an oligarchy that ostensibly controls the country.

He then asked DeVos how much her family has contributed to the Republican party.

She said it's "possible" her family has donated $200 million to various Republican politicians.

"Advance God's kingdom" indeed...

For those who may shudder at the idea of a crusading charter school advocate and Republican rainmaker whose father-in-law (Amway founder Richard DeVos) is worth over $5 billion being given the keys to the Department of Education, today the federal government only contributes about 10% of the funds for American public schools.

So the reality is that there is really only so much damage that she can actually do if she is nominated to the post.

More worrisome was her testimony that she wants to see more control over schools established at the local level.


I'm not an expert on education by any means, but I do believe strongly in the need for federal standards and guidelines for schools, curriculums, teachers, administrators and students.

Should administrators, teachers and parents have influence on the local level?

Absolutely, but when DeVos uses language like shifting control of schools to the local level, it reflects the growing disparity and segregation (both socio-economic and racial) in American schools that stems largely from the steady decline of federal funding for public schools that has taken place since the 1960's.

Back in June I touched on this subject in a blog post after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie advocated for a "Fairness Formula" that would cap per-pupil spending in New Jersey public schools regardless of the school district.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie

Like DeVos, Christie was in essence arguing for the kind of public school funding that we have here in NJ - for the most part wealthier school districts with higher tax bases are able to fund higher quality public school education than urban areas coping with trickier fiscal challenges, less concentration of higher paying jobs, less tax revenue and the steady drain of human capital to the suburbs.



I don't think DeVos is a bad person or anything.

I just don't think it's a good idea to put someone in charge of the Department of Education who never attended public schools, didn't educate her kids in public schools, has money invested in for-profit education and has no degree in education - or ever worked in education in a professional capacity.

Did I mention that she thinks that teachers are overpaid?

Yes, she whose family has given $200 million to the Republican party.

Speaking of controversial cabinet picks by the embattled PEOTUS, the nominee for Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin has certainly raised eyebrows.

Remember during the presidential campaign when Trump berated both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their ties to Goldman-Sachs?

Steven Mnuchin

In addition to Mnuchin, Trump now has no less than four key advisors and cabinet picks who are former Goldman-Sachs employees; including his pick to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Manhattan attorney Jay Clayton.

As has been widely reported, it's not just the fact that the 53-year-old Mnuchin is a former partner at Goldman-Sachs.

His fitness to be placed in charge of the U.S. Treasury has been called into question over his role as part of the management team that purchased the notoriously troubled lender IndyMac during the housing crisis in 2009.

As Kim Masters reported in an excellent article on Mnuchin's rise from Goldman-Sachs to film financier in a recent issue of the Hollywood Reporter, Mnuchin and his investors paid $1.5 billion for IndyMac, renamed it OneWest, then pocketed a tidy $1.9 billion profit after selling it to the CIT Group in 2014 for $3.4 billion.

As Max Kutner reported in an article for Newsweek back in December, some critics and former homeowners charge that Mnuchin ran OneWest when it was a "foreclosure machine" that systematically (and heartlessly) kicked thousands of California homeowners out of their homes in an effort to squeeze profits for investors via the mortgage crisis that almost wrecked the economy.

Mnuchin later became Trump's campaign finance chairman - and presto, is now possibly the man who will take over the Treasury Department.

Take a few minutes to click the link above and read Kim Master's THR article on Mnuchin and his move to Los Angeles, very interesting read.

Is he fit to be Secretary of the Treasury?

By the standards of the political and financial establishment, Yale graduate, Goldman-Sachs partner, he is - he's clearly a smart guy.

But his personal choices and his role in the sale of OneWest call into question what his priorities will be as head of the U.S. Treasury - like Betsy DeVos, I'm highly skeptical that it will be the interests of the American people who are not members of the 1%.

Sir Nicholas Winton - A Humble Hero of WWII Who Saved Hundreds of Lives

Sir Nicholas Winton

Before the month of August fully unfolds and we prepare to say farewell to summer and set our sights towards the general busy-ness of Autumn, I think it's important to remember a remarkable life that came to an end back on Wednesday July 1st.

By all historical accounts the amazing Sir Nicholas Winton (pictured left) had already lived a full life by the age of 36 when World War II ended in 1945, but he lived well into the 21st century until the remarkable age of 106 years old.

His obituary is truly fascinating.

As the opening dialog of Ken Burn's 2006 documentary of WWII, 'The War', reminds us:  

"The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting." 

Not all of those battles to win the war were fought on the battlefield, in the skies, or at sea; many were fought quietly or anonymously on the home front, or in the civilian arena by people like Sir Nicholas and his associates Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick - their story merits its own accounting.

According to the Nichoals Winton Educational Project, over a two year period between 1938 - 1939 at the outset of WWII, Winton, with the aid of associates in Czechoslovakia and England, helped to save the lives of 669 Jewish children by arranging for them to be transported by train from the railway station in German-occupied Prague to safety in England where they were cared for by British foster families for the length of the war.

Jewish children arrive at Harwich, UK December 1938 [Getty]

Sir Nicholas was born to a well-to-do family that emigrated to England from Germany in 1907 and changed their last name to the more English-sounding Winton.

He was a 29 year-old stockbroker in 1938 about to take a ski vacation when an associate asked him to come to Prague to assist with the growing crisis of refugees who'd fled parts of Czechoslovakia and neighboring Poland to reach Prague in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis.

Not long after his arrival in Prague to assist with the refugees, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia itself began in March 1939, just twelve months after the rapid annexation of Austrian territory in March, 1938 known as 'The Anschluss'; when the public humiliation and persecution of Jewish citizens, and the sudden creation of concentration and labor camps quickly revealed the deadly consequences that awaited Jews who remained behind in areas under German control.
 
As a history buff, I'd heard of Winton's story before in somewhat of a peripheral way in the sense that I'd sort of viewed it as being up on sort of a "historical pedestal" and didn't feel a personal connection to it; because I'd never really taken the time or made the effort to read more about it.

But a recent article in the July 24th issue of The Hollywood Reporter about Winton by editor-at-large Kim Masters somehow humanized the story in a way that brought me closer to its subject.

Along with THR Chief Television Critic Tim Goodman and media writer Michael Wolff, Kim Masters is one of my favorite journalists covering the business of the entertainment industry. She's an excellent writer in addition to being balanced and extremely well-informed and I've heard numerous radio interviews with her on public radio as well.      

Statue at Prague's rail station honoring Sir Nicholas Winton

Her fascinating THR article revealed that not only had she personally met Sir Nicholas Winton, Masters' mother Alice was one of the 669 children that were saved by he and his associate's heroic efforts to navigate the bureaucracy of the Immigration section of the British Home Office, the Czech government, as well as the German Gestapo in order to coordinate the transport of Jewish refugees from Prague to safety in England.

As Masters' notes in her THR article she first met Winton in 1996 at her parent's home in Bethesda, Maryland - which caught my eye as I grew up in Bethesda; our family lived there from 1972 - 1985.

Masters wrote that is was her grandmother Sidonia who made the extremely difficult decision to send her three daughters away to England after her brother Heino moved from Berlin to London and found out about the program Winton and others operated known as the Kindertransport and urged his sister to take advantage of it while there was still time.

Personally I was also struck by the heartbreaking knowledge that after getting their children to safety, Masters' grandmother Sidnonia and her husband were eventually forced onto a train train that took them to the Nazi concentration camp in Poland known as Majdanek where they were killed in 1942.

I'd never actually heard of the Majdanek concentration camp until last week when I was searching images online for a photo image of the ovens for a blog I wrote last Wednesday to illustrate why Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's use of the words "marching them to the door of the oven." (to refer to his delusional vision of the consequences for Israelis after a nuclear deal was reached with Iran) was so vile and offensive.

The coincidence really struck me when I read that Masters' grandparents perished there.

Sadly, while a British Act of Parliament in 1938 permitted the children of refugees under the age of 17 to come to England provided money was put on deposit to pay for their eventual return back home at the end of the war, the United States was one of several nations that refused to accept any of the Jewish refugees; as Winton recalled: "I tried America but they didn't take any. It would have made a vast difference if they had."

The Czech Kinderstransport network ended on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, tragically the ninth and final train with 250 Jewish children on board headed for freedom in England was stopped by German authorities after it had departed Prague due to the outbreak of the war; and it, along with their passengers, was never seen again.

Winton (center) serving as an ambulance driver in WWII

Winton went on to become a conscientious objector during the war and served as an ambulance driver before joining the RAF where he eventually became a commissioned officer.

But the incredible legacy of Winton and his many associates is the impact their efforts had on the thousands of lives they affected by saving 669 children between 1938-1939.


To me it also brings the global response of nations to the massive refugee crisis in places like Northern Africa, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Turkey into perspective as thousands flee the ravages of war, poverty and violence from extremist groups like ISIS.

If Nicholas Winton and a relatively small number of people could find a way to save 669 refugees in two years, surely the collective resources of the leading Western nations could find ways to make a difference in the lives of thousands of displaced refugees today.

As Winton himself said, "If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it."