Decades from now, if the planet is even inhabited by then, we will look back at one 72-hour period as the most crucial in the history of America's last president, Donald John Trump. Between the days of April 5th and 7th, 2017, the Washington political establishment tried to reform our madman president and instead only made him infinitely more dangerous, pushing us closer to doomsday than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.

Welcome to the Trump era, the flushing-toilet-bowl stage of America's history, where every move any of us makes is part of a great swirling synergy sucking us with ever-greater alacrity down the hole of failure and destruction. Good news, bad news, it all heads in the same direction soon enough, after a spin or two around the bowl.

Wednesday, April 5th, began with what seemed like the greatest of news. Former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer who had publicly pledged to destroy government from within, was on the outs for, among other things, calling the president's son-in-law a naughty word. A deluge of gleeful media leaks from the leakiest White House of all time exulted: The witch was dead, Bannon was sidelined, and an "axis of adults" had finally taken over as the key voices behind the president. We were saved!

A few spins of the bowl later, even the sidelining of Bannon turned into bad news. Bannon may currently be America's most infamous racial reactionary, but in the panoply of racist archetypes, he isn't easy to characterize. He's not a gun-toting, moonshine-swilling backwoods Klansman, which is at least a lifestyle one can sort of be born into. His background instead is as an effete suburbanite who went to Virginia Tech, Harvard and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, made a small fortune in banking and entertainment (he worked for Goldman Sachs and, according to legend, owns a piece of Seinfeld), and only later made promoting ethno-nationalism as an intellectual choice his life mission. If you're sending a child away to college, Bannon is pretty much the worst-case scenario of what might come back - someone who will spend a lifetime inspired by literature to get more in touch with his inner troglodyte.

Bannon is said to have spent much of his adult life reading books that contain some combination of the following elements: violent collapses of Western civilization, invading hordes of dirty foreigners, elitist plots, murder and revolution. Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, a book so dumb it makes The Turner Diaries seem like Huck Finn, is a favorite; the novel is a grimy fantasy about Europe overrun by brown immigrants who have les bras decharnés de Gandhi ("bare, fleshless Gandhi arms") and whose children are "all wormy inside." He is also said to be a fan of Italian fascist Julius Evola, and of The Fourth Turning, a book that insists America goes to hell once every four generations. He has also said he likes Trump's books, a seeming impossibility for a college graduate - about the only Trump-Hitler comparison one can safely make without trampling on Godwin's law is that it is impossible to say which of the two demagogues is the worse writer.

Bannon drifted into politics after his career as a Goldman Sachs banker led him to Hollywood. He began producing movies with political content, including the historically awful Sarah Palin hagiography The Undefeated. This experience seems to have put him on the shortlist of figures to take over the leadership of the right-wing provocateur site Breitbart.com, after its Buttafuocoid windbag founder Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure. Bannon was in the process of turning Breitbart into a model of modern race-baiting efficiency when he was pegged by then-candidate Trump to help run his foundering campaign. Nothing underscored the limitless awfulness of Trump's judgment better than a decision to make this nakedly abhorrent thinker his key adviser.

In the late Nineties, Bannon was a Hollywood banker who'd be in the room for important deals, but was never himself the most important person in the meeting. A reporter who knew Bannon in the early aughts recalls that even then he was sort of a misfit. Away from his job, he'd regale the reporter with his blistering observations about various film-industry titans, people like Disney chief Mike Ovitz and former Warner Music head Edgar Bronfman Jr., painting them as caricatures of dissolute nobles destined to piss away fortunes.

"He was a great talker," the reporter recalls. "He would go on and on about these people." And he liked talking to the press, the reporter noted, hinting at a flaw that would later prove seriously problematic. This reporter never caught a whiff of the future culture-first ideologue who would become the pope of the alt-right movement. Bannon was then just an eccentric pseudo who didn't quite fit into the world he had chosen for himself, a theme that followed him throughout his life.

History is filled with whisperers behind the throne: Machiavelli, Richelieu, even Thomas Cromwell, to whom Bannon once compared himself. Most of these were smart enough to stay in the background. Bannon went the opposite route. He burnished his Rasputinite legend at every turn, making himself the subject of a Time cover ("The Great Manipulator") and pumping up his brand by dressing like a Banana Republic version of Charles Bukowski. The bloated and tieless Bannon's permanent 10-o'clock-shadow look, which any man knows takes more time and narcissistic grooming to maintain than a clean face, stood out in a Trump inner circle made up of men in square suits and power ties.

Bannon embraced the role of the evil Svengali in a way no one in recent American history had, at least not since Joe McCarthy's henchman Roy Cohn - coincidentally, one of Trump's first mentors. "Darkness is good," Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter, with Cohn-ian verve, in the weeks after Trump's electoral win. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power."

His signature moment came at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in late February. The elephantine Bannon waddled onstage with chief of staff Reince Priebus (a classic donor-stroking, risk-averse Beltway weenie who represented everything Bannon's alt-right movement hated about the Republican Party) and announced a revolutionary agenda to the world. The Trump administration, he said, would seek nothing less than the "deconstruction of the administrative state." This revolution would face its toughest opposition in a "globalist" and "corporatist" (read: Jewish) media that disavowed Trump's "economic nationalist agenda."

Trump seemed to embrace Bannon's revolution, appointing to his Cabinet a string of dunces and anti-government zealots like Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt who fit the "deconstruction" plan. Bannon looked triumphant. The fact that The New York Times had dubbed him "President Bannon" no longer seemed like a joke.

Priebus, representing the Republican establishment, made a halfhearted effort at that CPAC event to look like he didn't despise Bannon with the heat of a thousand suns. "We share an office suite together," Priebus insisted. "We're basically together from 6:30 in the morning until about 11:00 at night."

I was in the crowd that day and could feel the discomfort onstage from 50 yards off. When Bannon reached over to affectionately touch Priebus on the knee, the latter recoiled like a schoolgirl sitting next to a subway flasher. The moment was an instant YouTube sensation and captured the untenable inner dynamic of the Trump White House, which had already become the locus of a mountain of Kremlinological speculation by Beltway experts.

Who was really running things in the new administration? How long could the Republican old guard and the alt-right revolution coexist under one roof? And how long would a notorious attention hog like Trump put up with the media calling someone else the president?

"You can't really call it Kremlinology," says a renowned Sovietologist, "because with this White House, there are so many leaks, every one knows what's going on." From Day One - from before Day One, in fact - there have been few secrets in the Trump presidency.

At first, it was outsiders who did the dirty work. Intelligence sources hostile to Trump seemingly leaked almost everything Trump and his associates did to news agencies. Some of these leaks turned into explosive news stories, like a Washington Post report about Gen. Michael Flynn talking out of school to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Others involved more mundane embarrassments, like a play-by-play summary of Trump's braggadocios phone call to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that made the newspapers.

"Officials" likewise told the Post that Trump had bragged about his inauguration-crowd size to Turnbull and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. No matter where the new president went, or how private the setting, his bloopers kept ending up in the papers. It's shocking that video of Trump's first visit to a White House toilet didn't make it to America's Funniest Home Videos.

But by April, and despite Trump himself having essentially declared war on the media, calling reporters "the enemy of the people," Trump's closest advisers began to spend an increasingly large amount of time talking to the press anonymously.

On April 6th, in a piece by the Daily Beast, "senior officials" leaked a spate of sordid details about a growing feud between Bannon and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The headline read that Bannon had called Kushner a "cuck," right-wing slang derived from the lurid porn term describing a white guy who likes to watch his wife take it from black men.

"Cuckservative" in the modern right-wing lexicon is the more hardcore replacement for what used to be called "RINOs," or "Republicans in Name Only." According to the Beast, Bannon spent a lot of time using such goofball slang terms to complain about Kushner - saying Trump's son-in-law wanted to "shiv him and push him out the door," adding that Kushner was a "globalist" - and apparently considered him worse than a Democrat.

Bannon with Jared Kushner in the Oval Office

"Did you see this crap?" Trump reportedly said.

All of these lurid details coincided with news that Bannon had been removed from the National Security Council, where, of course, a political strategist like Bannon should never have been in the first place (even Karl Rove never wormed his way into that kind of job). Not long after, a Bannon confidante - fellow alt-right journalist Mike Cernovich, perhaps the most loathsome American left who hasn't been hired by the Trump White House - promised to release a "mother lode" of stories that would "destroy marriages" if Bannon were fired.

"I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill-popping, the orgies. I know everything," said Cernovich.

By any normal standards this was all madness: a president perhaps making staffing decisions because of a Saturday Night Live skit, a chief White House strategist calling the president's son-in-law a cuck, a Web journalist blackmailing senior White House officials in public. Worse, all of this took place with the whole country following along in real time with a flattening pulse rate, two years of lunatic politics having made the daily soap opera of our collapse as a global superpower seem normal, like no big deal.

No sooner had Bannon been sidelined than another set of signals came from the White House that Washington mostly applauded. Earlier that week, news had broken of a horrific chemical-weapons attack that left 86 people dead in the rebel-held Idlib province in Syria. And at first, Trump appeared determined to stick to his "I don't want to be the president of the world" campaign stance, which was part of an isolationist posture seemingly chalked up to Bannon's influence.

But that Thursday evening, with Bannon appearing disgraced, Trump suddenly reversed course and lobbed 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria, killing seven and destroying at least six warplanes.

In an instant, the entire narrative of the Trump presidency was altered. Leading Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi took time out from calling Trump a Russian agent to praise the attacks. Even more bizarre, a smorgasbord of "liberal" press outlets now sang his praises. This was what happened on Day Two of Trump's 72-hour makeover: The until-then unrelentingly hostile Washington punditocracy suddenly began slobbering all over the missile-throwing version of Trump.

The New York Times said that by launching a military strike "just 77 days into his administration" (what difference did that make?), Trump might yet "change the perception of disarray" in his presidency. CNN, which on the very morning of the missile strikes had run a monster investigative report detailing Trump's alleged Russia ties, now breathlessly lauded His Orangeness.

Fareed Zakaria said, "I think Donald Trump became president of the United States." Over on MSNBC, a tumescent Brian Williams raved as he watched video of Trump's missile attacks, twice calling them "beautiful." He even stole a line from Leonard Cohen, saying, "I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons."

Trump responded to the press love with the obedient habituation of Pavlov's dog. He'd spent his first few months in office trying (and failing, mostly) to fulfill campaign promises to his base: a "Muslim ban," a face-plant effort to overturn Obamacare, an order to start building his "big, beautiful, powerful wall." For his trouble, Trump earned nothing but Mendoza-line approval ratings and a string of vicious new caricatures on Saturday Night Live.

But fire a few missiles, Trump learned, and suddenly even your enemies love you. Encouraged, Trump began frantically chucking campaign promises overboard.

The man who once promised to label China a currency manipulator in the first 100 days of his presidency now said of the Chinese, "They're not currency manipulators." Candidate Trump courted end-the-Fed conspiracists by bashing Fed chief Janet Yellen ("Very political . . . she should be ashamed of herself"). New-and-improved Trump's take on Yellen? "I like her, I respect her," he said. Candidate Trump said NATO was "obsolete"; new Trump said NATO was "no longer obsolete." Old Trump said it would be better "if we actually got along" with Russia; new Trump humble-bragged that relations "may be at an all-time low." All of these reversals had one thing in common. They ran in stark contrast to the nationalist, anti-globalist, Bannonite rhetoric Trump had sounded not only as a candidate, but in his much-ballyhooed joint address to Congress just a month before.

Trump in that speech described his own rise as a "rebellion" of voters who were upset that America had spent "trillions and trillions of dollars overseas" in military interventions while ignoring domestic problems. Those voters, he said, "were united by one very simple but crucial demand: that America must put its own citizens first."

President Donald Trump leaves after delivering a statement about missile strikes on a Syrian airfield, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Between all the leaks and dysfunction, by late April the American government looked to the outside world like a mad-house with glass walls. Here in America, of course, the reaction was different. Officially now, we've been in this water too long to notice it boiling. Instead of fleeing to the hills in panic, the most common reaction to the latest Trump rebrand was to cheer.

A week after the Syria missile attack, the Trump administration dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on a remote corner of Afghanistan. The 21,600-pound MOAB, which stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb in reality but is cheerfully known by bloodlusting Americans as the "Mother of All Bombs," reportedly killed at least 94 people, all of whom we somehow determined were either ISIS fighters or commanders.

Ironically, even before the Tomahawk and MOAB attacks, Trump had overseen a massively increased campaign of bombing. According to the British monitoring group Airwars, the U.S.-led coalition killed some 1,755 civilians in Syria and Iraq alone in March, a nearly ninefold increase over last March's total of 196.

But to the Beltway priesthood, even a mere massive increase in civilian deaths qualified as Trump accepting the "constraints" of Bannonite America-First-ism. To really win over the capital's beautiful people, and convince them of his capacity for responsible interventionism, the new president needed to get rid of the one tiny part of his entire barking-mad worldview that made a small bit of sense, i.e., his reluctance to start schoolyard brawls abroad.

By firing missiles at a Russian client state and dropping the largest non-nuclear bomb in history, Trump won over both the Fox-watching bomb-porn crowd and the neo-liberal pros who run Washington. In Washington terms, he proved he was "serious."

The revelations of the past month show the Trump White House to be a kind of bizarro version of Real World or Amish in the City - a bunch of loutish out-of-towners granted undeserving residence in a classy downtown mansion wired in every corner for the world's amusement. Ditsy Kellyanne Conway rubs her feet on the furniture, blabbermouth Sean Spicer loses battles of wits to Rob Gronkowski in the press room, and grandpa Rex Tillerson spends every episode hiding from the press, maybe behind the new gold drapes (they really changed the color of the Oval Office drapes). The remaining zoo animals are split in a perfectly disgusting caricature of the modern American political divide. On one side rests Bannon, a fascistic creep who represents the tens of millions of "deplorables" who rallied to Trump because he validated their zombie-movie fantasies about armies of wormy Mexicans staggering up the isthmus ("tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border," as Trump put it).

Bannon hasn't been fired, and Trump's recent bleatings about rewriting trade deals are supposedly due to his continuing influence. But there are many reports that Bannon has lost influence to Kushner and former Goldman Sachs deputy Gary Cohn, a noted monster of the financial-crisis era who represents the opposite vile brand of American politics, a Wall Street kleptocracy that has spent decades robbing Main Street blind through bubble economics and sleazy asset-hoovering schemes like sub-prime-mortgage fraud.

If there's a better metaphor for the depressing nonchoice of modern Western democracy than the intramural struggle for influence between these two arch-fiends, it's hard to imagine. Bannon and Cohn, two bilious, overweight ex-Goldman bankers, now sit on either side of the throne, each whispering his respective villainous ideology into the president's ears.

It'll be backlash ethnic nationalism against sociopathic finance capitalism, foreigners-suck versus screw-the-poor, depending on Trump's mood. That's assuming the president hasn't been distracted by some insane civilization-imperiling military adventure recommended to him by "adults" like Defense Secretary James Mattis, Homeland Chief John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Who's really running things in the Trump White House? The more we hear, the less we seem to know, but none of the choices seem to be good. 'Round and 'round the bowl we go; God knows when we will hit the bottom.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

I REMEMBER the first few Independence Days, just after the foundation of the State of Israel. There was spontaneous jubilation, we were all out in the streets, the celebration was real.

That was long ago. This years Independence Day, last Tuesday, was not a very happy affair. The holiday was subdued, even sad. Old-timers felt that "this is not our state anymore", that "they" have stolen Israel". "They" - the rightists.

One of the reasons may be that there is no real unity any more. Israeli society has fallen apart into a number of sub-societies, which have less and less in common.

There are the Ashkenazim (of European descent), the Mizrahim (Easterners, from Arab countries and Iran, often erroneously called Sephardim), the "Russians" (from the former Soviet Union, who live a separate life of their own), the Haredim (God-fearing, ultra Orthodox, non-Zionists), the National-Religious (religious Zionists (including the settlers in the occupied territories and fascist elements), and, of course, the Palestinian-Arab minority, who constitute more than 20% of the population, and who exist outside of almost everything.

Lately, some of the Mizrahim have developed an almost pathological hatred of the Ashkenazim, feeling despised and discriminated.

So all the routine Independence Day ceremonies were observed as scheduled, without much enthusiasm and without anything new. The fireworks, the Air Force fly-by, the Bible quiz, the official torches lit by outstanding citizens (including a leader of the settlers who excels in driving Arabs out of Jerusalem.)

The Chairman of the Knesset said in his speech that "Not all the Leftists are traitors."

Interesting. How many are? Most of the ceremonies were just occasions to show the King, Binyamin Netanyahu, again and again on TV. His queen, Sarah'le, also got the measure of exposure she demands. Woe to the TV editor who does not give Sarah'le her due!

What is her merit? Well, she married Netanyahu when she was an airline stewardess and he was just a young diplomat, twice divorced.

I DON'T like officially-decreed holidays and official days of mourning.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, I was 9 years old. I had the impression that almost every second day had become a national holiday, commemorating a German victory in a forgotten war or some Nazi event.

On such occasions, all the boys (there were no girls) in my highschool were assembled in the Aula (Latin for hall), listened to patriotic speeches, raised their right arm and sang the two anthems - the national and the Nazi one.

This particular occasion was the 17th century Battle of Belgrade, in which the Austrian Prince Eugene beat the Turks. I was the youngest pupil in the lowest class, and the only Jew in school. I stood at attention like everybody, but did not raise my arm and did not sing the Nazi song. My heart was pounding.

My class teacher, a Catholic priest, protected me. A few weeks later, we were on our way to Palestine.

Since that day, I don't like officially ordered celebrations.

IN ISRAEL we are blessed, perhaps more than any nation in the world, with official days of joy and mourning, some national and some religious, with no clear difference between them.

By my count there are 15 in the Jewish-Israeli year, but I may have omitted one or two. They are:

New Year: a religious holiday. It arose long ago in an agricultural society. In Palestine, autumn is the time of re-awakening of nature, like spring in Europe.

Yom Kippur: the holiest day of Judaism, when God finally decides on your fate for the next year.

Succot: the feast of the huts, commemorating the 40 years of wandering in the desert after the escape from Egypt. In the desert, there were no houses.

Shmini Atseret: the eighth day of Succot, when God gave us the Ten Commandments.

Hanukkah: the feast of the lights, commemorating - what? For nationalists, the victory of the Maccabees over the "Greeks" (actually Syrians). For the religious, it is all about a miracle, when God made a lamp burn for eight days in the Temple on enough oil for one day. Now, Jews light candles over eight days.

15th of the month Shvat - "the birthday of the trees", honoring all the plants in our country.

Purim - a jolly day, like carnivals elsewhere, when the anti-Semite Haman in Persia was about to kill all the Jews, but Queen Esther, a Jewish girl who succeeding in marrying the drunken King Ahasuerus, convinced him to change the decree and allow the Jews to kill all their enemies, especially Haman and his sons.

Passover: the feast commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, when Jews are forbidden to eat real bread and commanded to eat matzot, a kind of unleavened bread.

Second Passover: the last day of the feast. The days in between are half-holidays.

Holocaust Day: day of mourning for the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis by gassing, shooting, starvation and disease. Practically every Ashkenazi Jew had relatives among those who perished. Since only very few Mizrahim were among the victims, this gives rise to a lot of jealousy.

Remembrance Day: in commemoration of the fallen in the wars of modern Israel. They amount to about 23 thousand, but this year the public was astonished to learn that this number also includes all soldiers who died in road accidents or from disease.

Independence Day: starts immediately after Remembrance Day.

Lag B'Omer: an ancient agricultural festival, announcing summer, but linked in Jewish mythology to several different historic events, such as the last rebellion against Rome, which put an end to Jewish statehood in Palestine. Children light bonfires all over the country.

Shvuot: the feast of harvest, also the feast of the Torah.

9th of the Month Av: The day on which the Temple in Jerusalem was twice destroyed, first by the Babylonians and, centuries later, by the Romans. A day of mourning.

On most of these days, everything in Israel is closed. Some observe even more days commemorating calamities of the past.

WHAT IS the reason for this proliferation of joy and mourning?

For many centuries, Jews were an ethno-religious community, without a territorial homeland. They were not an exception. In Byzantine and Ottoman times, communities were organized that way. A Jewish girl in Antioch (today's Syria) could marry a Jewish boy in Alexandria (Egypt), but not the Catholic boy next door. Communities were largely autonomous, ruled by religious functionaries.

Such communities disappeared long ago. People adopted new forms of human organization. But the Jews clung to their ancestral habits. All these ceremonies and holy days were necessary to hold them together. Jews in Riga read the Passover Haggada in exactly the same way and at the same time as Jews in Cape Town.

Some 250 years ago, human communities became nations. As these nations became the norm, Jews were becoming more and more "abnormal" and hated. The founders of Zionism decided that Jews, too, must become a nation.

How to turn a religious community into a modern nation? All the important rabbis of the day cursed Zionism and its founder, the Viennese journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl. In order to overcome this resistance and lure the Jews to Palestine, Herzl and his disciples adopted the religious holy days and poured into them a new nationalist content.

These, then, are the Jewish-Israeli holidays: a mish-mash of ancient religion and modern nationalism, many of them including both.

At the beginning of modern Zionism, such a proliferation of holy days may have been necessary to hold the new society together. But now?

WHAT'S SO bad about that?

The bad thing is that these holy days create an endless continuity of indoctrination, of brain-washing. Every child absorbs the national story almost from birth. The parents see to that. In kindergarten, these ideas are deeply implanted in their minds, in school the indoctrination is deepened from feast to feast and from year to year. The end result is a community totally absorbed with itself, half-religious and half-ultra-nationalist, cut off from all other nations, lacking universal values.

Expressions like "all the world is against us" or "they all want to destroy us" or "all the Goyim are the same" are heard quite often. The great majority of Israelis of all hues believe in them deep in their hearts.

Perhaps it is true that there exists no really secular Jewish Israeli. Take a secular specimen, dig into his consciousness and you will find the traces of all these holy days. Very few escape.

Perhaps the most characteristic is the transition we experienced last Monday evening. Memorial Day for the fallen soldier turned into Independence Day, with nothing between them.

Extreme joy after extreme mourning, almost merging. A masterpiece of emotional manipulation.

President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are old school "segregation academy" politicians with strong ideological investments in private school vouchers. They will not be deterred by a new study that shows the Washington DC school voucher program actually detracts from student achievement. The people of DC never wanted vouchers, but school privatization has nothing to do with democracy.

The nation's only federally funded private school voucher program, foisted on the overwhelming Black student population of Washington, DC by the George Bush administration in 2004, inflicts negative effects on student achievement levels, according to a new study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. Low-income students who were selected by lottery to receive the taxpayer-funded "scholarships" performed 7.3 percent worse on math and 4.9 percent lower in reading than students from similar backgrounds who remained in public schools because they did not make the lottery pick. Parents of voucher kids seemed oblivious to their children's relative underachievement, but believed the private schools they attended were "very safe, compared with the parents of students not selected for the scholarship offer" - confirming ample anecdotal evidence that safety concerns are at the root of much pro "school choice" sentiment in the Black community.

If President Trump gets his budget passed, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the billionaire school privatizer who was rescued from rejection by the Senate by only one vote, will have an additional $250 million to fund private school voucher programs in Washington and, she hopes, the 13 states that currently finance their own voucher schemes. Trump proposes an overall increase of $1.4 billion for school voucher and charter programs, with the goal of ramping it up to $20 billion -- while immediately cutting the total federal education budget by $9 billion, or 13 percent.

Neither facts nor democracy have been allowed to stand in the way of the school privatizers. Polls showed 85 percent of Black residents and three-quarters of DC voters of all ethnicities opposed vouchers in late 2002, as did most local elected officials. The exception was Mayor Anthony Williams, whose avowed mission was to draw more "middle class" residents to the nation's capital through "quality education." (When Williams declared that Washington could easily accommodate 200,000 new residents, everyone knew he wasn't talking about additional Black people. By the 2010 Census, DC had lost its Black majority.) In 2004, Williams endorsed the Republican plan to impose an "experimental," five-year private school vouchers program on Washington, using Congress's unique powers over the District to make it the only federally-funded vouchers scheme in the nation. "We had never had a locally elected black official, a Democrat from a city like D.C., asking for something like this before," said Shokraii Rees, an operative for George Bush's Department of Education. "That's the single strongest factor that got people's attention."

Most of the nation's Black Democrats opposed vouchers, as did large majorities of the Black rank-and-file, because of the scheme's roots in Jim Crow-era white "segregation academies." Never in history have Black Americans marched, rallied or petitioned for private school vouchers. Therefore, the corporate privatizers had to create a Black pro-voucher "movement" out of thin air -- or rather, through the political "astro-turfing" power of their checkbooks. In 1999, some of the most right-wing foundations and fat cats in the nation spent millions to found the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which then tapped into additional millions in direct federal funding once George Bush won the presidency. Among the BAEO's founders was the first-term Newark, New Jersey, city councilman, Cory Booker, a true believer in privatized education who helped operate two private schools and evangelized about forming a national movement to spread the "choice" gospel. (See "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree," The Black Commentator, April 5, 2002.) While rising steadily in Black Democratic politics, Cory Booker was also a star in the rightwing corporate political firmament, serving for ten years with the American Federation for Children, a leading school voucher and charter advocacy outfit founded by Betsy DeVos, and chaired by her until last year.

Booker joined all of the Senate's Democrats in voting against Devos' confirmation, claiming he had problems with her positions on school safety issues. It is surely true that Booker's efforts to distance himself from his private school voucher roots have a lot do with his presidential ambitions. But, much more importantly, vouchers have long been eclipsed by charters as the most effective means of wholesale privatization of public education. As two-term mayor of Newark, Cory Booker was largely responsible for boosting charters to one-third of total school enrollment. Charters now account for 44 percent of Washington, DC public school enrollment, while voucher schools serve only a small fraction of the city's students.

Corporate America, the real force behind school privatization, found its education champion in Barack Obama, whose "Race to the Top" program coerced states across the nation to create a "market" for charter schools, which tap directly into the public school funding money-stream.

A true troglodyte from the "segregation academy" school of politics, Donald Trump wants to throw billions of dollars at private voucher schools. He and DeVos will doubtless do a lot of damage with their voucher schemes, but the main thrust of privatization will continue to be the methodical construction of an alternative -- and, in much of Black America, dominant - charter school system that is accountable only to its managers and corporate service providers.

Congressional demands for personal and business information from several of Donald Trump's campaign advisers demonstrate how the Russia-gate investigation continues to spill over into a new breed of McCarthyism infringing on civil liberties, including freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The original thinking had been that congressional and other investigations would concentrate on specific concerns from alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, such as whether a Trump intermediary somehow conveyed purloined Democratic emails to WikiLeaks for publication on the Internet.

WikiLeaks denies getting the leaked emails from Russians and the Trump campaign denies colluding with Russians, but President Obama's intelligence chiefs claimed that Russian agents hacked the emails and then used intermediaries to get the material to WikiLeaks - although no real evidence of that has been presented publicly.

However, instead of zeroing in on that central question, the Senate investigation appears engaged in a fishing expedition looking at virtually every contact between Trump advisers and Russians, who may or may not have ties to the government. The demands are so broad that they could entrap the targets for perceived obstruction of an official investigation if some name or contact is left off, intentionally or by accident.

For instance, the Senate Intelligence Committee has demanded from ex-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business dealings and personal contacts in Russia, the names and details of pretty much anyone he contacted over an 18-month period who could be a Russian official or somehow connected to a Russian business.

In a letter dated April 28, the committee's top Republican, Richard Burr of North Carolina, and top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, gave Page until May 9 to provide: "A list of all meetings between you and any Russian official or representative of Russian business interests which took place between June 16, 2015, and January 20, 2017. For each meeting listed, please include the date, location, all individuals present, and complete copies of any notes taken by you or on your behalf."

Meetings with Campaign

Further, the committee set a deadline of May 19 for Page to also supply: "A list of all meetings of which you are aware between any individual with the Trump campaign and any Russian official or representative of Russian business interests which took place between June 16, 2015, and January 20, 2017. For each meeting listed please include the date, location, and all individuals present."

Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally
at Fountain Park in Fountain Hills, Arizona. March 19, 2016.

Similar information requests reportedly have been sent to other Trump campaign advisers, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.

Given the extent of Page's dealings in Russia, which included having lived there for several years, the broad information demand amounts to a perjury trap because even if Page tried his best to supply all the personal, phone and email contacts, he would be sure to miss something or someone, thus setting him up for prosecution for obstructing an investigation or lying to investigators.

A FISA Warrant

Also, since the Obama administration reportedly obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Page last summer, the U.S. government may well have more complete records of Page's contacts and communications than he would, thus putting him into even greater legal jeopardy for an omission.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack
Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present.

In an article about the origins of the investigation of Page and other Trump advisers, The New York Times characterized Page's July speech to the New Economic School in Moscow as critical of "American policy toward Russia in terms that echoed the position of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia."

The Times then quoted one line from the speech in which Page said, "Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change."

The Times article by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman added: "His [Page's] remarks accorded with Mr. Trump's positive view of the Russian president, which had prompted speculation about what Mr. Trump saw in Mr. Putin - more commonly denounced in the United States as a ruthless, anti-Western autocrat."

In reality, Page's speech was much more nuanced than the Times presented. His central point was that the hasty transformation of the former Soviet Union from state-controlled to free market economies led to unintended consequences, including increased corruption.

"As the state remained dominant and new markets were simultaneously established following the breakup of the Soviet Union, members of these societies devised other methods and means of survival through corruption," Page said, adding that the West was not entirely innocent of similar problems:

"These approaches mirror several corrupt tendencies at times found in Western societies. Some may be clear-cut such as the Bernard Madoff scandal in financial markets and Enron in the energy sector, while others are more subtle such as the perceived societal injustices highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement."

Echoing Putin?

But note how The New York Times characterized Page's remarks as having "echoed the position of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia," suggesting that Page, a former U.S. Navy officer, was somehow demonstrating disloyalty.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015.

Normally, such intrusive government action against a citizen for expressing his opinions - whether they "echoed" the views of President Putin or not - would alarm defenders of civil liberties. However, since Page briefly served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump - and much of the civil liberties community has enlisted in the #Resistance to Trump over his presumed threats to civil liberties - there has been extraordinary silence about the McCarthyistic treatment of Page and other Trump advisers.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served briefly as President Trump's national security adviser, has already had a taste of how the U.S. government's surveillance powers can entrap a citizen in a "process" crime, such as lying to investigators or obstructing justice.

On Dec. 29, 2016, several weeks before Trump's inauguration, Flynn - while vacationing in the Dominican Republic - took a phone call from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which they apparently discussed mounting tensions between Washington and Moscow, as U.S. intelligence officials surreptitiously listened in.

Because Flynn was not officially part of the government at the time of the call, Obama administration appointees at the Justice Department created a pretext for a criminal investigation by citing the Logan Act, a law enacted in 1799 to prohibit private citizens from negotiating with foreign adversaries but never used to convict anyone, ever. The law also is of dubious constitutionality and was surely never intended to apply to a president-elect's advisers.

However, based on that flimsy pretext, FBI agents - with a transcript of the electronic intercept of the Kislyak-Flynn phone call in hand - tested Flynn's memory of the conversation and found his recollections incomplete. Flynn also has come under criticism for giving a paid speech in 2015 to a dinner in Moscow honoring the tenth anniversary of the Russian television station, RT. Under mounting media and political pressure, President Trump fired Flynn.

The New McCarthyism

So, while one can legitimately criticize Flynn's judgment, the larger civil-liberties issue surrounding the Russia-gate investigation is the prospect of criminalizing otherwise innocuous contacts with Russia and punishing American citizens for resisting the New Cold War.

Green Party leader Jill Stein and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn attending a dinner marking the RT network's
10-year anniversary in Moscow, December 2015, sitting at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the precedents that are being set could be very dangerous for the long term. If Americans can be put under invasive FISA warrants for going abroad and criticizing U.S. policies or if intercepted phone calls can be used to test the memories of citizens during FBI interviews, many of the warnings from civil libertarians about the dangers of "war on terror" surveillance powers being applied more broadly may be coming true.

After receiving the sweeping congressional demands for documents and other data, Carter Page, who is an oil industry consultant with numerous foreign contacts including in Russia, responded by taking note of the reported FISA surveillance of him, writing to Senators Burr and Warner:

"I remain committed to helping the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in any way that I can. But please note that any records I may have saved as a private citizen with limited technology capabilities will be miniscule in comparison to the full database of information which has already been collected under the direction of the Obama Administration during last year's completely unjustified FISA warrant that targeted me for exercising my First Amendment rights, both in 2016 as well as in years prior.

"As a starting point for this latest step in the witch hunt which you suggested per the cumbersome chores defined in your ... letter, I would request that you please begin by sharing [with me] the same information which you currently have ... Based on the database of my personal information already collected during the Obama Administration's domestic political intelligence operations which reportedly began at some point last year, it seems clear that many of the weighty task[s] you assigned will have already been largely completed.

"As a lone individual, I can assure you that my personal administrative capabilities pale in comparison to the clerical juggernaut represented by the numerous staff in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. Government which have heretofore been allegedly involved in this unscrupulous surveillance for many months on end."

In an interview on Friday, Page told me that he was a small player who was innocent of violating any laws but who became an "obvious" target for the Obama administration's effort to undermine the Trump campaign.

"I don't have [political] protection and I have genuine, deep Russian connections," he said, adding that compliance with the Senate's demands would require him reviewing "thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls. ... It defies all logic and common sense."