"Which is unfortunate because this video has become ammunition for council critics."

How is this unfortunate when The Stranger has had three posts about it with links to the video?

And nobody needs any ammunition to know that the Seattle City Council is a despicable assemblage of self-promoting corrupt elitists.

$21.05??

How could a family not know that they didn't have Nazis in their past? It wasn't even 100 years ago. My dad was in WWII (on the US side, I hasten to add).

As for Avenatti, the difference between him and trump is that trump had the establishment behind him, and he was claiming to be a Democrat. Otherwise, they're cut from the same cloth.

Once you've publicly blackmailed the president and been lauded for it, a mere multinational corporation worth over $100b should have been a walk in park. Au Contraire!

@5 probably a lot like now knowing which of your ancestors were slave owners or at least anti-abolitionists. Who in your family?

@5 It’s curious that a family still living in Germany wouldn’t know. But there may be plenty of Americans of European descent who don’t know their family history, especially if past generations knew there was a Nazi in the family and tried to hide it out of shame. Not everyone spends their free time on Ancestry.com. Most people just believe the family stories that are handed down (see, eg, Elizabeth Warren).

RE Seattle city council behavior- context is only important when it's something the stranger cares about. Got it.

Sportlandia dear, granted I am of an extremely advanced age, and my parents had me at a shockingly late age (Mother Vel-DuRay was 40!) but most people my age had, if not parents, then grandparents who were in or around THE war. Growing up, almost every adult male had been in WWII. On the other hand, the civil are ended in 1865. Do you see the issue there?

But since you bring it up, the Vel-DuRays are of good yankee stock, and have been here since Colonial times. Before that we were in England. A Great, Great, Great, Great, Great-Uncle was one of the signers of the US Constitution. We stayed in New England until Pullman invented the dining car, at which point we determined that it was OK to go as far as Iowa.

On Mother Vel-DuRay's side of the family, we came over on the boat as soon as the potatoes started going bad. So I can say with certainty that we were not slave owners, and we were almost certainly abolitionists - or at least on the Union side. It pays to know something about ones family.

Krispy Kreme donuts are delicious.

The guy at the city council meeting wasn’t following the rules. He should have been ejected from the room. Follow the rules, otherwise you’re just being disruptive.

Hardly very late Catalina. I had my last child @47.
In those days yes.. I remember a neighbour being pregnant at forty, married and all, and it was a little scandalous.
What did Michael do? His crime makes no sense to me. He was fun, though. Stormy sure can pick ‘em.

It was clear from the start that Avenatti was a huge sleazy scumbag, but I had no idea he was so astronomically stupid as well.

@2 I was wondering about the $20.05 as well... Hell, let's match it.

Not everyone who lived in the North was on the Union side.
In fact; in 1864, after 4 years of war and hundreds of thousands of lives paid to secure a victory that was in sight, 45% of Northern voters supported the Democrat Party and it's platform of ending the war and leaving slavery intact.
Not everyone on the union side was abolitionists.
In 1863, weeks after the crucial victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, New York City residents (mainly white Irish) waged a week of race riots that killed over a hundred Blacks.
It was the moral leadership of Lincoln and the Republican Party that turned a war to preserve the union into a crusade to end slavery and free Black Americans.

It is very satisfying to condemn Nazis but decades after Adolph got unclose and personal with his Walther PPK American Democrats were still lynching and burning Black Americans on public squares.

We wonder how familiar Americans are with their family ties to the Democrat Party?
We wonder when Democrats will call on themselves to pay reparations to Black Americans?
If the Catholic Church can pay for it's sins certainly The Democrat Party can.
What Democrat candidates for 2020 will call for this?
Will Democrat voters demand it?

It is so easy to see the speck in someone else's eye.....

15

....uPclose and personal....

In South Africa they have a holiday called the Day of Reconciliation. Wonderful concept.
A day to make peace with former foes and renew a vow to move forward together.
This stupid idea that virtue or sin can be inherited has to go.
I don't give a fuck if your ancestors fought on the Union or Confederate side or if they marched with John Lewis or rode with Forrest Bedford.
Who are you now and what direction are you going in the future?
Dead Nazis are dead.
There was a commonly employed expression in my youth - 'the sins of the family fall on the daughter.'
We recognized the injustice embedded in that then and the principle still holds.

Thank you for the history-ish lesson, Arun Nayet dear. The election of 1864 had to do with opposition of the Emancipation Proclamation, but also war fatigue. The riots of 1863 were about racist Irish, but also resentment against the policy that allowed rich men to buy their way out of the draft - sort of like president trump did, so that he could be the joke of the Manhattan Disco Scene.

But it is undisputed that the Republican party, under the leadership of our first Gay president, was the true moral leader in the Civil War era. How far they have fallen in the last 154 years. Now it is nothing but horrible people - grifters, conmen, and bible-addled nitwits. The good news is that they are largely elderly, and elderly people tend to move on.

Now Cat, you know you'll miss us when we're gone...

@2 & 14. Bloomberg says they donated $11 million. I'm not sure where the $21.05 came from.

Also Cat, Im not an expert on Nazi history, but I think there were several people who were Nazi supporters, but not very public about it. Like the portrayal of Oskar Schlinder in the beginning of Schlinder's list, going to Nazi supporter events etc.

Arun dear, I hope to have that opportunity for regret one day.....

@21 Drid, according to the article, quoting Bild am Sontag, the family were not simply opportunists like Schindler, but "convinced, enthusiastic Nazis". There's no way the family didn't know this. Their acting "shocked" to learn this now doesn't help their image a bit. It oughtn't shock anyone else, either. The bedrock of dynastic wealth is oppression and crime—sic erat semper.

Though it makes little sense to assign guilt to the sons and daughters of the lumpen mass of Nazis, who largely were left destitute and indigent after the war, the Reimann family empire (estimated at €33bn, which would make it Germany's second-wealthiest family), like most European family wealth, was built upon the crimes of their elders. So while the decendents and heirs are not directly guilty of crimes, the brands Krispy Kreme, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Panera Bread and other JAB Holding companies (Keurig and Dr Pepper beverages, Coty Inc beauty products, Jacobs and Douwe Egberts coffee and the Pret-A-Manger sandwich chain) were built on blood money, and benefitted mightily from collaboration and worse.

It took IG Farben decades to close down after the war. And that was when the presssure on them to do so was intensified by the recently of memories associated with the use of slave labor.

Club cells, formerly known as Clara cells, were discovered by a nazi war criminal by performing sadistic experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Yeh war crim was Max Clara, hence the name. After the war, he’d managed to hide his past and how he found these cells in human lung tissue. After his death, the truth was found out, and the entire medical community rushed to scrub his name from anything associated with western medicine.

It seems the only honorable thing to do. We must honor the dead, and not those who murdered them.

If we're going to boycott Krispy Kreme because owners of the company that owns them who died as late as the 1980's were Nazis, then we better get busy boycotting BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Siemens and any other German company that was in business during the Hitler years. They all supported him and were active participants in the Nazi war machine.

Schwartz, like Alex Zimmerman who preceded him during the comment section, is well-known to the SCC and has a reputation for constantly veering off-topic during his innumerable appearances - although unlike Zimmerman he doesn't tend to get regularly ejected from chambers. They know the rules of decorum when in council meetings - and yet they repeatedly violate them (and these examples are literally the tip of the proverbial ice berg), thus abusing the privilege of public comment - so I honestly see no reason why they deserve the same level of respectful attention as a regular citizen would when appearing. I suspect very few of you-all would exhibit such saint-like patience were you in any of the Council's seats and encountered one of these nut-cases for the umpteenth time; hell, most of you wouldn't give either of them the time of day if you encountered them in public even just once.

25,

Don't forget Hugo Boss and Volkswagen.

@27:

We can cut VW some slack, since the British essentially rebuilt the company from the ground up during the Allied Occupation.