Double Horror: Migrants illegally hunted like animals by ICE and exploited by people who take advantage of them

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts opinion published in the Boston Globe by Marcela Garcia:

New Bedford reels from ICE crackdown

Adrian Ventura sees federal immigration agents hanging around Acushnet Avenue, the heart of New Bedford’s Latino and Spanish-speaking community, almost every day — always in dark, unmarked SUVs with tinted windows.

Ventura, a former undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who now leads New Bedford’s Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, a labor advocacy group, said it seems like the city has been singled out for aggressive enforcement under the Trump administration.

“We haven’t seen the same type of enforcement activity in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance,” Ventura told me in Spanish.

Ventura said he’s even witnessed the agents parked in front of St. Anthony of Padua, the Roman Catholic church on Acushnet.

The federal presence has cast a chill on the avenue, which is lined with check cashing stores and establishments with Spanish names adorned with Guatemalan and Honduran flags selling tortillas and other Latino foods.

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

“We’re very stressed out,” he said.

Last month, the wider public caught a glimpse of the atmosphere in the port city, where roughly 20,000 residents, or 1 in 5, are foreign born.

In a jarring video that went viral, heavily armed, unidentified federal agents surround a car they had just pulled over on a quiet New Bedford street. Inside, Juan Francisco Mendez, a 29-year-old Guatemalan father, sat with his wife, calmly telling the men outside that his lawyer was on the way.

Moments later, one agent retrieved an axe-like tool and shattered the rear window; glass exploded everywhere and Mendez was pulled from the car and arrested. The whole time his wife had been filming the incident, her voice trembling.

Mendez did not have a criminal record and appeared to be in the country legally. Last week, a judge ordered him released.

But the footage has become a visceral symbol of what many advocates believe is a campaign of intimidation targeting New Bedford’s immigrants, especially the roughly 10,000 people who lack work authorization. They now have to weigh the risks of their every move.

Ventura is worried the workplace raids, much like the notorious 2007 operation at the Michael Bianco Inc. textile factory, could be next. That raid resulted in the arrest of 361 undocumented immigrants.

There’s a more subtle impact of the federal crackdown: It may lead to more wage theft and harassment because victims will probably be too scared to come forward.

It’s a well-documented issue: Unauthorized workers fuel New Bedford’s fishing industry, the city’s major economic engine. It’s often referred to as the country’s most lucrative fishing port based on the market value of its product.

The industry has also been a hotspot for labor violations, as reported by my Globe colleague Katie Johnston, who found in 2023, that migrant children were working grueling shifts in the city’s fish plants. Many used fake IDs to secure jobs through staffing agencies, while employers and agencies evaded responsibility, citing difficulties in verifying age and identity.

Ventura is now working on a wage-theft complaint he received from Mariana, a Guatemalan unauthorized immigrant who lives in Providence. Mariana is an alias; she agreed to talk to me if I didn’t use her real name because she is afraid of the repercussions of going public.

Mariana just turned 18 last month but has been working full time at a seafood-processing plant in New Bedford for more than a year. She does everything: cleaning fish, packing boxes, labeling product. Mariana told me that she got the job through a staffing agency. She works varying hours every week — sometimes it’s 8-hour days, sometimes 11-hour days — but, on average, the weekly check she gets from the agency is in the $500-$600 range.

But out of that check, she has to pay around $160 “to the boss who gives us a ride every week,” she told me in Spanish. That would be a third-party transportation provider, a Guatemalan man who provides roundtrip transportation for the workers — around 15 to 18 people each ride — from Providence to New Bedford, she said.

“It’s not fair. He tells us, ‘if you don’t pay, there is no job.’ People are afraid of speaking up. They don’t want to lose their jobs,” Mariana said. Or worse — they don’t want to be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and be arrested.

She’s always afraid during the 40-minute ride in the van “because we can be stopped at any moment” by federal immigration authorities.

On Sunday — Mother’s Day — Acushnet Avenue looked a little deserted, with only a few families venturing out to celebrate with their mothers in the area’s restaurants. 

A grocery store was pretty much empty, an employee telling me that there would normally be a line at the register. A flier from a local advocacy group posted by the cash register advertised services to immigrants: Call us and we’ll shop for you; need to cash a check? We’ll do it for you.

The chill in the air may be the whole point of Trump’s crackdown. But the real winners will be exploitative employers, unscrupulous staffing agencies, and everyone else who stands to profit when immigrants recede back into the shadows. 😞😟😢

Marcela García is a Boston Globe columnist.

Elon Musk uses chaos and cruelty under the false guise of creating government efficiency but his schemes meet resistance

Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times and in Yahoo.com

To the editor: If the chief executive of any private company were to conduct a "downsizing" as chaotically and cruelly as Elon Musk has as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he would be fired. ("Key agencies tell workers not to respond to Musk email demanding to know what they did last week," Feb. 23)😕😟😖😳

Consider Musk's record: Indiscriminate mass firings of employees without regard to qualifications or performance; absurd demands that Pentagon supervisors produce lists within days of thousands of civilian employees to be fired; insulting requirements that government employees explain what they have accomplished in the last week, under threat of termination if they don't; and clueless terminations of employees who safeguard our nuclear arsenal (oops).

In the face of criticism of this scorched-earth🔥 destruction of the federal workforce (will anyone ever want to work for the government again❓), Trump and his wingman Musk mug for the crowd with chainsaws and send out demeaning cartoons on X/ oblivious to the anxiety, fears 😭and uncertainty of each and every one of those fired employees.

No normal CEO would ever survive such a show of incompetence and cruelty.   Brian Gough, Santa Barbara, California 

Vice-President Kamala Harris building a coalition to unite U.S. - gives brilliant speech on the Ellipse in D.C.

The Harris-Cheney partnership is not just a political marriage of convenience- opinion published in The New York Times by David French.

One of the great joys of my life is my decades-long friendships with people who are far to my political left. 

• They’re as pro-choice as I am pro-life. 
• They have different ideas about what religious liberty means.
• They opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, but when I volunteered to serve, they printed T-shirts with my name on them as a symbol of support. 
• After I got there, they helped flood my unit with care packages.

And for election cycle after election cycle, the conservatives and liberals in the group debated the races — sometimes in email threads that stretched into thousands of words — but none of it shook our friendships.

Baseball brought us together. We met in law school, discovered our shared love for the game and formed a fantasy baseball league (yes, I’m fully aware of my abject nerdiness). It was a fun political marriage of convenience between relative strangers that I thought might last through law school, at most.

But 33 years later, our shared values have kept us together — a commitment to truth and compassion in our dealings with each other, a respect for open debate and honest inquiry, an underlying humility that told us that we needed to hear opposing views because none of us is perfect and a willingness to be able to live with disagreement without surrendering to bitterness or anger.

This part of my life is one reason I’m not surprised to see the easy rapport onstage between Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, or to watch the mutual affection between Adam Kinzinger and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention this summer. I’ve seen Democrats erupt in applause and appreciation for other, less famous, Republicans who’ve laid careers (and sometimes their lives) on the line to defend American democracy.

There are political positions, and then there are deep values, and ultimately — when it comes to the deep values — like often finds like, and friendships that seem unusual can suddenly make sense. And so it was with us. Over time, the baseball part of our relationship faded into the background. The friendship is now the core.

It’s easy to be cynical about politicians (and pundits, for that matter). In fact, it can be naïve not to be cynical about politicians (or pundits, for that matter), but it remains a fact that not every move they make is coldly calculated self-interest. Maybe there is some place for some dissenting Republicans in a Harris administration, but if cold self-interest were the only factor in play, there is a much easier path to power for Republicans in 2024. They can bend the knee to Donald Trump.

I’ve spent much of the last nine years in the company of Republicans and former Republicans who can’t abide Trump, and while they’re a collection of human beings like anyone else — full of quirks and foibles and manifold imperfections — there is a common thread. There’s a sense that the Republican Party has changed its deep values, and that any remaining policy agreements are the decaying artifacts of times past.

I worry sometimes that the effort to describe this emerging American realignment is hampered by the shorthand phrases we use to describe big concepts. “Democracy is on the ballot” has a nice ring to it — and the virtue of raising the right kind of alarms after “Stop the Steal” and Jan. 6 — but it’s imprecise and potentially wrong. After all, I fully expect that America will have another election in 2028. My alarm is rooted more in the kind of democracy we’ll have than whether we’ll have any kind of democracy at all.

I’m perhaps more persuaded by a different, far less catchy slogan: the rule of law is on the ballot. If Trump wins and exempts himself and many thousands of his supporters from legal accountability, it’s more like America will have something like royal justice, where accountability exists for all but a ruthless ruling class.

We know that Trump loves the aesthetics and personality of royalty and autocracy. He lives an opulent, gold-trimmed life and has openly envied the perceived absolute loyalty and obedience that kings and dictators command. He has long sought their authority. Now he wants their freedom from accountability.

But when I speak of the deep values that are driving some Republicans toward Democrats and some Democrats toward Trump, I’m speaking of something beyond policy, to ways of thinking, being and knowing that make pluralism possible.

This week, Americans were treated to two very different closing arguments — one in Madison Square Garden (Nazi reenactment rally - 1939 redux) from Trump and his allies, and one in the nation’s capital on the Ellipse, from Vice-President KamalaHarris. The difference was striking.

Esquire Magazine headline: "Kamala Harris Had One Hell of a Night with That Speech at the Ellipse"

At the Capitol, on Tuesday night, Harris made the case for unity. “Unlike Donald Trump,” she said, “I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

Days earlier, at Madison Square Garden, an (flopped) insult comic called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” Tucker Carlson engaged in racist mockery, saying Harris would be the first “Samoan, Malaysian, low I.Q. former California prosecutor” to become president, and Trump himself, well, he was exactly who he’s always been.

When I watched Trump and his allies speak, my lawyer’s mind drifted to a common law concept called the “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” In law, extreme and intentional mistreatment of individuals could be so outrageous that it actually gave rise to a right to sue in court for damages.

That right is rooted in a transcendent cross-cultural revulsion at the idea that one would actually try to inflict pain on a fellow human being. In a very real way, Trump’s campaign — and the entire MAGA ethos — is rooted in a political version of that legal concept. He is trying to hurt his perceived enemies.

When we say that Trump attacks democracy — or that Trump attacks the rule of law — those are just symptoms of the underlying disease. He hates everyone who doesn’t serve him, and democracy and the rule of law have been two of the principal obstacles to his cruelty.

Those obstacles exist by design. The founders feared the damage that demagogues could do in democratic societies, and they placed roadblock after roadblock in their path. They divided power. They ratified a Bill of Rights. They established four-year terms for presidents so that they’d be accountable for their performance. 

During the second founding after the Civil War, the United States abolished slavery, codified equal protection of the law and extended the protection of the Bill of Rights to guard against oppression by governments at every level of American society.

Think back to my description of my friendships. There was passionate disagreement, but never cruelty. In those rare times when anger burned too hot, alarm bells rang in our collective conscience.

These basic principles of friendship are also basic principles of community. We can endure conflict. In fact, conflict is both healthy and inevitable in a diverse democracy. Truth and wisdom are not exclusive to any single American community. But nothing can close our minds and hearts to the virtues of our neighbors faster than outright cruelty and malice. That’s exactly the moment our consciences should rebel, when we should raise our hand and say, “Stop.”

That’s why it’s important to see former bitter political rivals unite as ex-presidents to present a united front in times of political transition or national mourning. That’s why it was important when Tip O’Neill, then the House speaker, was at Ronald Reagan’s bedside after he was almost killed in an assassination attempt. That’s why it’s touching to see George W. Bush and Michelle Obama hug in a moment of seemingly genuine affection.

That’s not the “uniparty” or “regime” or “elite” displaying malignant solidarity against the people. It’s leaders showing us what decency in a pluralistic democracy looks like.

It is just as difficult for a career pro-life lawyer to extend his or her hand to a career pro-choice activist as it is for the career pro-choice activist to take that hand. These are not small differences. Nor was it (or is it) a small thing to disagree over the Iraq War. But none of us should be arrogant enough to presume that disagreement over even the most consequential issues is proof of the thoughtlessness, much less bad character, of our opponents.

The longer that MAGA persists as the dominant faction of the Republican Party, the more we will see this realignment take place. At the level of deepest values, like will continue to find like. It’s not just conservatives who are crossing the aisle to join Democrats, there are liberals who are crossing the aisle to join Republicans.

MAGA brags that it’s expanding the Republican coalition to include Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard and people who like and admire them. Conspiracy calls out to the conspiracist.
Make no mistake, the realignment is not yet complete, and it may never easily track onto partisan politics. I voted for Kamala Harris this week — the very first vote I’ve ever cast for a Democrat in national politics — but if she wins I will oppose any effort to revive Roe, legislatively or judicially.

There will be arguments. Some may be intense. But this much I know — temporary tolerance can build into permanent affection. Wary partners can become fast friends. Many of us have been ejected from places we never thought we’d leave, and some of us have entered rooms where we never thought we’d be welcomed. And it is in these spaces where the seeds of American renewal are planted and nurtured.
Some other things I did:  I thought long and hard about what to write in these last days before the election, and I settled on a trilogy of sorts. Today’s newsletter was the second piece. The first came on Sunday, when I reflected on what I’ve learned from the ongoing failure of the Never Trump movement. Why did so many Republicans seem to change so much, so fast, and why did I misjudge the people I thought I knew so well?

If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.

In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.

Right until they didn’t. Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.

Don’t think for a moment that is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

I also wrote a first round of thoughts for our blog about the Harris-Cheney alliance and the differences between the MAGA movement and the Harris coalition:

MAGA has a high floor and a low ceiling. The ferocity and group solidarity of MAGA means that it’s hard to ever see Trump polling below his 2016, vote share. His (cult❗)support is baked in and unshakable. At the same time, the same characteristics that bind MAGA together repel much of the rest of the country.

Harris’s coalition, which ranges from Liz Cheney to the Squad of congressional progressives, has a lower floor and a higher ceiling. Harris doesn’t enjoy the cult following of Trump, but there are more Trump opponents than Trump supporters, and if she can extend a welcoming hand to as many people and factions as possible — without alienating other people and factions — then she’ll probably win.

"King Maker": Supreme Court conservative majority violates intentions created in the Declaration of Independence

 Trump ‘monarchy’ violates Declaration of Independence

Opinion echo letter published in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper

The news alert came across on July 1: “Supreme Court sends Trump immunity case back to lower court, dimming chance of trial before election.” We received the announcement of the seeming return to a monarchy just three days before the 248th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. Total immunity of the sovereign is the very condition that the 13 colonies were rejecting in the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” The Declaration goes on to cite example after example of the kind of unconstrained powers that the then ruling monarch had used to suppress the citizens of the colonies.

The president does have broad powers, including the power to adjourn Congress until a time of his choosing (Article 3, Section 3), but nowhere does the Constitution specify that the president has immunity from actions in office or after; and nowhere is there reference to, much less a definition of, “unofficial actions.” 

The (IMO "ignorant") actions thbye majority of the Supreme Court in bouncing the definition of unofficial actions back to a lower court was a patently political and cowardly act. If efforts to encourage the overthrow of a presidential election and perpetuate himself in office doesn’t constitute an “unofficial act,” what possibly could? 

Moreover, official or not, how can such an act be any than but unconstitutional and a violation of oath? On this Independence Day, it’s sad day to say goodbye to what so many have worked and fought and died for.

From Bill Thompson Apopka, Florida

President Joe Biden provides highly respectful support Gold Star families

Biden treated fallen service members with dignity

Echo opinion letter published in the Orlando Sentinel:

Let us compare our current and the former guy citizen Trump's feelings towards our military service members who were killed while serving in hostile areas.

Concerning the three servicemen recently killed by an enemy drone, NSC spokesman John Kirby reported President Biden’s communication with the families of the fallen: “He was grateful for their time. He expressed how proud we all are of their service.” Kirby said of Biden’s calls with the families, “We mourn and feel sorrow for their loss.”

Compare those compassionate words to Trump’s (callous and idootic) remarks about servicemembers buried at the Aisne-Marne World War One American Cemetery in France in 2018, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” 

Or, the former guy's statement to his chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, as they were standing at Kelly’s son’s graveside in the Arlington National Cemetery, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”  At this point, I am simply beyond words. 

Carter (Curley) Bowman Maitland

America needs to reinforce the purpose of the Constitution's 14th and 25th amendments

Echo opinion letter published in the Idaho Press:

Department of Justice (DOJ) must update rules about sitting presidents and criminal behavior.

(Maine Writer: In my opinion, the Constitution's 14th amendment's insurrection section* and 25th amendment's** competency statement, must be reinforced by the courts.)

Constitutional amendments are laws - big laws that make big changes. Amendments are laws that are added to the Constitution of the United States.

It’s time for the U.S. Department of Justice to change its “rule” about whether it’s all right to charge a sitting president of a crime. This was never an issue until President Nixon was suspected of crimes during Watergate. At that time, someone in the Attorney General’s office apparently decided a policy was needed to cover that possibility.

In the era of Trump and Trumpzism, the situation has changed. Now we got a former guy who actually boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York without any consequences. Now that court rulings have been issued that he’s liable for criminal acts while in office, it’s a small step to making him liable during his service. Mechanisms are in place to remove and replace him if necessary. While we’re at it, let’s stop a president from pardoning himself, ❗if in fact that could (possibly❗❓)be thought to be legal.😢😡

From Walt Thode in  Boise, Idaho

*... banned those who “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding any civil, military, or elected office without the approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate.

**In case of the inability of the President to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the said powers and duties shall devolve on the Vice President, until the inability be removed.

Gun violence must end! Children are more important than AR-15s. Enough is enough!

Something must be done to prevent gun violence.

An echo opinion letter published in TribLive (Tribune Live), in Pennsylvania.  

I wish something could be done about gun violence, but I think nothing will ever get done. 

I deeply feel sorry and sad for the three children and three adults killed at the school in Nashville. We all mourn with every one of the seemingly endless litany of mass shootings.

There is nothing anyone can say or do to appease the losses especially when more children are murdered in preventable gun violence shootings.

It seems this is what happens when politicians preach hate, lies and fear instead of uniting a country. President Biden wants a simple ban on assault weapons.

Do you actually think some politicians want to solve any problems that make them millions in political donations from the National Rifle Association? 

After a human is born, then look at what happens? The "peaceful January 6th protest"- (HELLO❓) ❗❗❗

On January. 6, 2021, the Trumpzi-ism cult resulted in a violent mob and people getting killed. 

Abortion is another moneymaker for politicians who take donations from right wing religious zealots. 

Nothing gets done as the extremist excuses pile up.

Jokes are made by politicians about another politician’s spouse getting beat with a hammer. There’s a social media post of Donald J. Trump holding a baseball bat next to a picture of New York’s district attorney. Al Capone swung a bat to some of his disloyal criminals. The problem is, some people think this behavior is OK. 

And some right wing politicians are a joke. But the right wing extremist movement must be taken seriously and all the cult political enablers can be voted out of office.

George O. Curry in White, Pennsylvania

Republicans have built a campaign to squelch hard earned freedoms

Freedom helped Democrats prevail in 2022 midterms.

Echo opinion published the Akron Beacon Journal

Democrats defied the pundits, who said their message wasn’t connecting with voters. 

And the Democrats defied history, which portended huge losses for them in the midterm elections as the party in power. Why? Because Democrats united behind a compelling and consistent narrative of the midterms as a showdown over protecting our freedoms, with the Dobbs abortion decision underscoring the stakes. 

Moreover, the January 6th hearings provided another marquee view of precisely what Trump Republicans support and the dire threat we faced.

From our freedom to decide if and when to have children to our freedom to provide for our families to our freedom to make our voices heard in free and fair elections, Democrats have made a wide range of issues personal and potent. They made it clear that the election was a crossroads between Trump Republicans who want to take us backward and voters committed to moving us forward and protecting our freedoms.

Democrats’ victories in passing the Inflation Reduction Act and lowering student loan debt has strengthened their resolve and made clearer the contrast between voters' desires and Trump Republicans' aims.

Democrats across the country, and especially in battleground states, created a consistent drumbeat, repeating “Protect Our Freedoms” through social media, in person events, advertising, and organizing.

The efficacy of zeroing in on “freedoms,” putting Trump Republican villainy front and center, affirming voters as agents with power, and confronting right-wing divide to conquer tactics resulted in wins across the country. Democrats believed that Americans valued their freedom, and they were right!

From Susan Gallagher, Akron Ohio

Warnings continue to stop antisemitism- Holocaust history must be remembered

"...historian Richard J. Evans, 'The Oppermanns was 'the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature'. Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company."

Echo Editorial opinion published in the San Antonio Express-News: 

SAN ANTONIO — In his 1933, novel “The Oppermanns,” Lion Feuchtwanger did what all great writers do: He captured the specific to reveal the universal.

First published in 1934, but fully imagining the future of Germany over the ensuing years, The Oppermanns tells the compelling story of a remarkable German Jewish family confronted by Hitler's rise to power.

"The Oppermanns", represents a dual tragedy, fictional and real, for the author is eerily prescient in his depiction of a Jewish family in Germany. It is a hard read because we know what will happen in the world beyond the fiction. A nation will succumb to hate, and millions of people will perish as a result.

In fact, "The Oppermanns" can be seen, in retrospect, as a warning, a siren alerting the country — and the world — to the evil in their midst. Some listened, but many more did not. The death camps emerged, and the victims multiplied: men, women and children, their bodies stacked in the fields outside Auschwitz and Belzec and Treblinka and …

America is not Nazi Germany, and a second Holocaust is not looming. But the rhetoric of 2022, bears a chilling resemblance to the rhetoric of 1934. Vile words lead to vile deeds. Antisemitic attacks are on the rise — and must be condemned at every turn.

We have heard vile words recently. When celebrities utter these comments, it adds poison to an already toxic environment. It corrodes our national spirit, legitimizing in the minds of some attitudes that have no legitimacy in a just and caring society.

Kanye West, the rapper who calls himself Ye, may be a gifted artist, but talent is no shield against the malignance that can rot a person’s soul. Ye, who sported a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a recent fashion show, tweeted he would go “death con 3” on Jewish people — an ugly comment that sparked a rally in which white supremacists hung a banner from a freeway overpass in Los Angeles: “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933:
Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Unlike the response in 1933, Germany, the reaction here has been swift, just and decisive, especially among the business community. Companies associated with West — Adidas, Balenciaga, CAA and MRC — cut him loose, although we would say it took too long. West claimed he lost $2 billion in one day.

“We cannot support any content that amplifies his platform,” CAA and MRC executives wrote in a joint memo.

Before West unleashed his tirade against Jews, former President Donald Trump said American Jews “better get their act together,” a comment critics decried as condescending and antisemitic.

“No President has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump, who has a daughter who converted to Judaism and Jewish grandchildren, posted on his media platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

In another incident, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving promoted “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America,” an antisemitic movie based on the book of the same title.

“The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have no tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech,” the team tweeted.

Each incident has occurred against the backdrop of rising antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League reported 2,717 antisemitic incidents in 2021, three years after 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue; the figure represents a 34 percent increase over the previous year.

“You had Jews being beaten and brutalized in broad daylight, say, in the middle of Times Square or Los Angeles or the Strip in Las Vegas, where people who were simply identified as Jewish came under assault and attack,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, told PBS. “That was new.”

When antisemitic incidents arise, the entire community must respond in full force.

In a 1933 review of “The Oppermanns,” the New York Times said it was aimed at both Germany and “the world outside.”

“It is … bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!’”

Almost 90 years later, Joshua Cohen expressed a similar sentiment in the New York Times.

“His (Feuchtwanger’s) example shows that art can challenge power, as it were, ‘powerfully,’ and yet have no political effect,” he wrote.

Antisemitism does not sprout from a single seed; it is sown and nurtured across communities and across nations.

Yes, 2022, is not 1933. But the real-life tragedy of “The Oppermanns” is that it may be as relevant now as it was then.

Right wing Republicans are election deniers: Vote Blue!

Election denier right wing Republicans are being sold a "pig in a poke". 

"Something that is bought or accepted without knowing its value or seeing it first. i.e., 'the unwary were apt to buy a pig in the poke'."

To the editor: If you’re one of the millions of Americans who believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen, I’ve got bad news for you — former guy Trump has played you for a fool.

As Jackie Calmes notes in her excellent column, the House January 6th committee has provided an overview of the many ways in which Trump tried to cheat his way into remaining in power after losing the election. After repeatedly failing to win election challenges in courts, Trump motivated his followers to storm the U.S. Capitol by telling them the election was stolen even though he had no credible evidence of fraud.

There is a failure here, and it’s not the committee’s. It’s the failure of many Americans to grasp the seriousness of Trump’s malfeasance — malfeasance that is damaging our democracy by eroding the trust that Americans have had in one another.

And, it’s this trust that has provided America with peaceful transfers of power for the 220 years prior to 2021.

From David Michels, Encino, California

Trump supporters as fools

To the editor: There will not be closure on insurrection until Trump is arrested, convicted and incarcerated for committing seditious conspiracy. What he has done is indefensible. Rioter Ashli Babbitt and the police officers who died during the attack or in the aftermath would be alive today but for Trump’s behavior.

The House January 6th committee has done a remarkable job proving its case, but the Republican Party needs to acknowledge the error of its ways and support the Department of Justice as it investigates and possibly prosecutes Trump.

For now, it is up to the American people to vote Republicans out of office so a Trump-style insurrection never happens again.

From Craig Simmons, Northridge, Los Angeles, California

#VoteBlue  #VoteDemocrat

Holding the former guy accountable for the January 6 insurrection

‘If Trump Is Losing … He’s Going to Say They Stole It,” Steve Bannon said before the election: Audio, published in Rolling Stone.

Editorial: Criminal evidence abounds against Trump. He must be held accountable. Echo editorial opinion published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

WASHINGTON, D.C.- The final January 6th, insurrection committee hearing on Thursday October 13th presented what, in any other historical context, would have been a series of major bombshells. 

But in this shell-shocked nation, numbed by years of daily Trumpian and "Trumpostian" outrages, the idea of a president and his advisers colluding to organize a violent coup no longer seems to spark the sustained outrage it urgently deserves.

Americans should be outraged because the evidence is clear: Donald Trump worked actively to subvert an election and seize power through a violent attack on Congress. An astonishing number of Americans still don’t grasp why that was such a bad thing, as if it’s OK to take up knives, guns, bear spray, battering rams, and military-style body armor to invade the Capitol simply because an election didn’t yield the desired result.

Trump "the former guy" incited a group of seditious election deniers on January 6, 2020.

Evidence abounds that Trump knew weeks ahead of the November 2020, election that his defeat loomed, and he colluded with outsiders to stay in the White House anyway. 

Contacts were established with right-wing militias to lead a military-style assault on the Capitol. Trump advisers Roger Stone and Steve Bannon helped with coordination.

Bannon, (#fake!) chief White House strategist in 2017, said in an audio recording more than a week before the election: “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner. … If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night [on Election Day], it’s going to be even crazier. Because he’s going to sit right there and say, ‘they stole it.’”

Stone, in separate video footage, stated that if the election result was still undecided on election night, “the key thing to do is to claim victory.”

In a subsequent clip, he stated bluntly regarding a Trump loss, “F*** the voting, let’s get right to the violence. We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”

Indeed, the (Bannon asshole) used a broadcast to warn about January 5: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s all converging and now we’re on, as they say, the point of attack, right, the point of attack tomorrow.”

Trump consulted with a close adviser, Tom Fitton, about declaring victory before the votes were counted. Fitton told the House committee that preparations for a victory declaration, even if Trump were to lose, began four months before the election.

Obviously, as the videos show, the Trumpzi let insurrection was premeditated, with The Former Guy playing an active role in the planning. The question is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland has the intestinal fortitude to prosecute. The Supreme Court on Thursday indicated in a ruling in another Trump case that it would not intervene to rescue the ex-president.

If Trump isn’t held accountable, he or someone inspired by his wanton display of criminal conduct will almost certainly try it again. What would they have to lose?

Failed Border Wall: You have to believe "to go" ladder shops are popping up in Mexico

 A Section of Trump Border Wall in South Texas Cost $27 Million a Mile. It’s Being Foiled by $5 Ladders.

Echo report published in the Texas Monthly by Aaron Nelsen.

“Ladders and walls go together like peas and carrots,” says one McAllen Border Patrol agent.

A portion of the US-Mexico border wall stands unfinished near La Joya, Texas, on 14 April 

Trump’s $27m-a-mile border wall being scaled with $5 ladders.

Every month for the past decade, Scott Nicol, a 51-year-old artist and activist, has set out from his home in McAllen to roam the Rio Grande Valley in search of ladders used to scale the border wall in South Texas. On a cool and overcast day in early April, Nicol has centered his hunt on an eight-mile stretch of border between the towns of Hidalgo and Granjeno, where an Obama-era wall meets up with a newly constructed piece of Trump’s wall.

The first stop of the day brings him to a dirt field behind a flea market in Hidalgo. A pair of green and white Border Patrol SUVs are parked atop the eighteen-foot-high concrete levee wall, next to a section of bollard-style fence with a closed gate, their noses pointed toward the Rio Grande. Within minutes, Nicol has spotted a ladder roughly halfway up the levee; it’s about a dozen feet long and has only six rungs. “It’s made of cheap, rough wood, quickly nailed together because it is only going to be used once,” Nicol says. “Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional.”

$2.99 ladder available at Hobby Lobby with a 90-return guarantee!

Just a few minutes later, as Nicol is inspecting the ladder, a group of about thirty disheveled migrants emerge from the brush after crossing the river into Texas from Mexico. Young men and women toting small children in their arms walk to the agents, who jot down their information as the new arrivals place their meager belongings into plastic bags. These migrants are not sneaking in; rather, they are seeking out U.S. Border Patrol in this intensely patrolled area. A half hour passes before the agents open the gate and escort the group of migrants through it single file. They shuffle down the levee wall and onto a waiting bus bound for a processing center where they will request asylum. 

It’s early yet, a border agent tells me, and the groups will only grow larger into the evening. As for the ladder? “That’s from our regulars,” one agent quips over his shoulder.

Nicol, an ardent opponent of border walls, can’t help but note the irony: asylum seekers turn themselves over to agents who then escort them through gates in the wall, while so-called regulars—unauthorized migrants—make use of rudimentary ladders to easily climb a barrier specifically designed to keep them out. “These ladders are probably $5 worth of hardware,” Nicol said, “and they’re defeating a wall that cost $12 million a mile in that location.”

Few possess Nicol’s intimate familiarity with the 55 miles of wall intermittently stitched across the Rio Grande Valley. The artist has spent countless hours over the better part of a decade in the shadow of the wall, picking through the detritus of personal effects that migrants leave behind or lose in the chaos of an apprehension. “I try to understand the realities of migration and enforcement,” Nicol explained, “and the ladders show how absurd the idea is that a wall is going to stop anybody.” He has become a sort of connoisseur of ladders, amassing an impressive collection of several dozen photos of them. Some show the ladders strewn about, while in others they are in disorderly piles or set at varied angles of repose against the wall. They are almost always jerry-rigged, cobbled together from scrap lumber, and they are varied in length. Some are as long as the wall is high—about eighteen feet—and others are just tall enough for a migrant to reach the top.

Rope-and-PVC ladders that make use of metal hooks are popular in areas upriver, but along the Granjeno-to-Hidalgo stretch of border, where it is a short dash from the Texas bank of the Rio Grande to the levee wall, simple wooden ladders seem to be the preferred technology. They are heavy, cheap, and rarely used more than once. Border Patrol agents drive their trucks over the ladders to break the rungs, then toss the mangled wood into piles. When the heaps grow large enough, the City of Hidalgo hauls them off to a landfill.

The agents drive off with the migrants after an hour or so, and Nicol continues his search for ladders, by car and on foot, locating four more as the wall stretches westward. He finds still another in Granjeno, where the newly built 1.3-mile Trump wall joins up with a 1.75-mile piece of wall authorized during the Bush administration and built during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the Trump wall in this area—an 11.4-mile stretch from just west of Granjeno downriver to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge—runs to about $27 million a mile. In recent months, the number of apprehensions has soared. Border Patrol caught more than 171,000 migrants along the southern border in March, the highest one-month total in fifteen years. Nicol is finding more and more ladders—further evidence, he said, that the wall is not about stopping people or drugs. “Border walls are just backdrops for politicians who want to rile up their voters,” Nicol said. “They have political value, and that’s what counts.”

Like something out of a fairytale, a set of shocking pink seesaws sprang up right in the middle of the United States border wall with Mexico.

Despite its obvious vulnerabilities, some border agents maintain that the wall serves a useful purpose. While it won’t stop everyone, it will slow them down and give agents time to react, said Chris Cabrera, a McAllen-based Border Patrol agent and local spokesperson for the National Border Patrol Council, a labor union that supported Trump. “Nine times out of ten we’re going to catch them,” Cabrera said of immigrants who use ladders. But lately, Border Patrol agents have been swamped with the volume of immigrants in the Hidalgo area and cannot effectively respond to climbers. “We have people turning themselves over, and at the same time, when it’s dark we have people with ladders, but we got nobody to go over because we’re tied up.”

One McAllen-based Border Patrol agent, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the media, told me that the number of ladders the agency is finding has increased as well. “Ladders and walls go together like peas and carrots,” he said.

Ladders have been used to counter walls for thousands of years, pointed out Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. “A wall is a medieval war technology, and the responses to it are antiquated technologies that have been proven to surmount it, that includes ladders, catapults, and tunnels,” said Rael, who made headlines in 2019 with a short-lived art project titled Teeter-Totter Wall, which placed pink seesaws between the slats in the border fence that separates El Paso from Juarez.

The fact that a DIY ladder is enough to beat it makes spending billions of dollars on further construction seem folly, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. 

In fact, the sections of levee wall that broke ground under the George W. Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration cost about $12 million per mile. Though contractors are still billing for Trump’s wall, the average cost per mile in Hidalgo County, based on contracts and appropriations, is roughly double that amount. “The companies that build the wall are the ones who are benefiting, not just from building it, but maintaining it and adding technology to it,” said Correa-Cabrera.

Despite securing about $6 billion in funding from Congress and diverting nearly $10 billion more from the Department of Defense budget, the Trump administration managed to complete only forty miles of “big, beautiful wall,” about twenty of them in the Rio Grande Valley. One of its unfinished projects can be found in Granjeno, where a section of levee wall (with no fencing on top) built during the Obama years abruptly ends at the edge of this no-stoplight town. The Trump administration set out to fill in the gap between Granjeno and Hidalgo, building a new section of levee wall topped with steel bollards rising some thirty feet high. But contractors didn’t manage to finish installing all of the bollards before President Joe Biden paused construction. Situated at the base of the incomplete Trump wall is Cabrera’s Bar, an open-air watering hole.

On the day I visited in late March, a band called the House was covering classic rock standards to the delight of a few dozen winter Texans, the retirees who spend their winters on the Texas-Mexico border. I asked the proprietor, Guadalupe Cabrera (no relation to the security expert or border agent), if he had seen any makeshift ladders recently. Without uttering a word, Lupe, as he’s known locally, pulled out his mobile phone to show me a photo of a wooden ladder. It was broken and dumped in his parking lot, he told me, his train of thought interrupted by a pair of white buses with tinted windows driving past his bar in opposite directions. “That would make for a good photo,” Lupe said, “one bus hauling (immigrants) off, the other heading to pick up another load.”

For the better part of the last decade, Granjeno has been smack in the middle of the most heavily trafficked migrant corridor on the southern border. A few of the town’s residents are rumored to offer help to immigrants for the right price, Lupe confided. More often than not, the immigrants Lupe sees around town, and on occasion inside his bar, are doing their best to hide from Border Patrol. “I’ve found them hiding in the bathroom,” Lupe told me. “One guy with tattoos yelled ‘shut the fucking door’ and I knew right away that he was gang member.”

Border Patrol agents and construction crews building the Trump wall also frequent Cabrera’s Bar. After Biden paused construction in late January, leaving a gap in the wall by the bar, some contractors kept on stopping by for a drink. “These guys are making money whether they build or not,” Lupe said of the contractors, “but really, what good is a wall if they don’t change immigration policy?”

A few days before my visit to Cabrera’s, Nicol had paid a visit to the bar. He quickly found a ladder—about twelve feet in length, all wood—lying at the edge of the parking lot. He found another wooden ladder of about the same length on the opposite side of the levee wall. He sent me a photo of each ladder and gave its approximate location using the border wall and the bar as reference points. “There’s a band and the place is packed,” Nicol said of Cabrera’s. “It’s a real party.”