Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 8
August 31, 2025
August 30, 2025
August 30, 2025
Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.
These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.
Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.
Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy. On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.
The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.
“Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.
Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”
“It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”
The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.
More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.
Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.
The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry. Cheaper electricity there is expected to make it more attractive for future investment.
Renewable energy is crucial to addressing the existential crisis of climate change, but as former president Joe Biden emphasized, developing the sector was also key for building a strong middle class. Well-paying jobs, in turn, help to protect democracy.
Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. The extractive systems in the pre–Civil War American South, where cotton concentrated power and wealth, and later in the American West, where mining, cattle, and agribusiness did the same, nurtured political systems in which a few men controlled their regions.
As president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Chrissy Lynch said in July after the Republicans passed the budget reconciliation bill cutting clean energy tax credits: “Working families shouldn’t have to purchase energy from billionaire oil tycoons and foreign governments or let them set the price of our energy bills.”
Her observation hit home earlier this week, when Joe Wallace, Costas Paris, Alex Leary, and Collin Eaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that the comments of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump at their meeting in Alaska on August 15 in which they talked about doing more business together were not vague goodwill. ExxonMobil and Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft, have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, that had been severed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.
Lou Antonellis, the business manager of the Massachusetts International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, added that the cuts to renewable energy projects in the U.S. were not just cuts to funding. “[Y]ou’re pulling paychecks from working families, you’re pulling apprentices out of training facilities, you’re pulling opportunity straight out of our communities. Every solar panel installed, every wind turbine wired, every EV charger connected, that’s a job with wages, healthcare, and a pension that stands for dignity for the American worker. You don’t kill that kind of progress: you build on it.”
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Notes:
https://ctexaminer.com/2025/08/30/dangers-of-pulling-the-plug-on-revolution-wind/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/16/climate/china-us-wind-solar-energy-trump
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/blog/policy/how-clean-energy-creates-more-jobs/
https://www.energy.gov/eere/job-creation-and-economic-growth
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-rosneft-russia-oil-talks-f524e81f
August 29, 2025
August 29, 2025
Chaos continues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where President Donald J. Trump stepped in on Wednesday night to support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his crusade to fire recently-confirmed Susan Monarez when she refused to rubber stamp his attack on vaccines.
With her ouster, three top scientists at the CDC resigned: Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Daniel Jernigan. “The CDC you knew is over,” Daskalakis said. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
On Thursday, CDC staff and supporters rallied outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, whose windows are still pocked with bullet holes from a terrorist who had become convinced the coronavirus vaccine had injured him, to honor the resigning leaders.
In place of Monarez, the White House has appointed as acting CDC director Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor close to billionaire Peter Thiel and a former speechwriter at the Department of Health and Human Services during the presidential term of George W. Bush. O’Neill has no training in either medicine or the science of infectious diseases. As Maanvi Singh and Robert Mackey of The Guardian reported, O’Neill supported the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid despite no evidence that they worked. He also has embraced conspiracy theories about covid online.
The administration’s chaos extends to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”
In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within [the Office of Management and Budget] on the Federal [Chief Information Officer] Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.
The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.
Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.
This morning, the White House budget office announced it was unilaterally cancelling $4.9 billion in foreign aid funding passed by Congress. The Office of Management and Budget is overseen by director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, the plan from right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation designed to decimate the modern U.S. government and replace it with Christian nationalism.
The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power of spending money, and the executive branch has no authority to refuse to spend that money. Vought has argued that because the law permits the president to send to Congress a request to stop spending on certain items and gives Congress 45 days to consider the request, Trump can send a request with fewer than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year and consider the request rubber stamped.
Both Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Patty Murray of Washington, who are the top two lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee, reject the move. Collins called it “a clear violation of the law.” Murray called it a “brazen attempt to usurp” the power of Congress.
Another major area in which Trump has simply done as he wished without regard for the law or economic reality is tariffs. The U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs, but in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for new blanket tariffs.
Congress could have ended Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
Importers hit by the tariffs sued, along with Democratic-led states, and in May a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” it wrote, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” “Congress manifestly is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to other the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested,” the court wrote. It blocked the tariffs Trump imposed under the IEEPA. The administration appealed.
Today, by a 7–4 majority, a federal appeals court upheld the decision, striking down Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. “[W]e conclude Congress, in enacting IEEPA, did not give the President wide-ranging authority to impose” sweeping tariffs, noting that such an authorization would mean “Congress had bestowed on a federal agency the taxing power.” Such an authorization would be “a sharp break with our traditions.”
The decision will not take effect until October 14 to allow the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court. For his part, Trump seemed to think the court would bend to his will, which is, in turn, based on an ideology that the last few months have proven demonstrably wrong. Shortly after the decision came down, Trump posted on social media:
“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else. If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America. At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products. For many years, Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians. Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation, and Make America Rich, Strong, and Powerful Again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/28/monarez-cdc-vaccines-rfk-trump-00533358
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/28/jim-oneill-cdc-profile?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The BulwarkCamelot for CraziesNo newsletter Monday—enjoy the holiday. Happy Friday…Read morea day ago · 570 likes · 313 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swifthttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105.159.0_1.pdf
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 29, 2025, 6:10 PM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/08/29/epa-dissent-letter-employees-fired/
https://www.wired.com/story/charles-borges-resignation-email-disappearance/
https://www.advocate.com/politics/demetre-daskalakis-cdc-resignation-interview
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-28/trump-s-global-tariffs-blocked-by-us-trade-court
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-08-can-congress-take-back-tariff-authority-from-trump/
X:
NickNehamas/status/1961507992857157861
Bluesky:
August 28, 2025
On August 29, 1970, journalist Rubén Salazar died instantly when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson fired an 8-inch bullet-shaped tear gas projectile into the back of his head. Salazar and his colleague Guillermo Restrepo had ducked into the Silver Dollar bar after fighting had broken out between marchers and police officers during the massive National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War that drew more than 20,000 people into the streets of East Los Angeles.
Restrepo later recalled that Salazar told him they were being followed, so they slipped into the bar to lose their trackers and use the restroom. The bar had a curtain over the door. An eyewitness recalled that when two sheriffs came to the door, one held back the curtain and the other—Wilson—shot the projectile. Restrepo recalled the gun was aimed directly at their heads.
When homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department interviewed Wilson hours later, he said a bystander had thought he saw armed men enter the bar and had fired his weapon to get the men to come out. Witnesses told the detectives there had been no gunmen at the bar. A coroner’s inquest determined Salazar’s death was accidental. Wilson resigned from the Sheriff’s Department and left Los Angeles. The county admitted no wrongdoing but paid Salazar’s widow and three young children at least $700,000, worth close to $6 million today.
At the time of his death, Salazar was the most famous and influential Latino journalist in the United States. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928, Salazar grew up in El Paso, Texas. After graduating from high school, he served in the U.S. Army and became a U.S. citizen after his service. He graduated from Texas Western College in 1954 with a degree in journalism and went to work at the El Paso Herald-Post, where his deep investigative work caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation almost immediately as Salazar exposed corruption and violence in the El Paso City Jail.
By 1959, Salazar was working at the Los Angeles Times where, among other assignments, he covered the Vietnam War. Back in the United States in 1968, he began to focus on the lives of Mexican-Americans, especially those in East Los Angeles. The media largely ignored the Latino community there except when it covered crimes.
In those years, the Mexican American community in the United States was building an exciting new intellectual and social movement: the Chicano Movement. In the introduction to his 2015 book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, historian Mario T. Garza explained that an earlier generation of Mexican Americans had focused on assimilating to Anglo culture, working to break down barriers to jobs, housing, education, the legal system, and voting, and fighting cultural stereotyping.
But in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people—Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders—had settled there.
Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.
The Chicanos saw parallels between their own history and that of colonized peoples around the world. And in the 1960s, as new nations rebelled against the colonial powers that had sought to erase their culture, Chicanos worked to address poverty and racism by recovering their cultural identity and determining their own future.
This cultural autonomy manifested itself in the public schools. Los Angeles County had the biggest Latino community in the United States and sent more than 130,000 students to the public schools. But officials expected the students to become manual laborers and made little effort to steer them toward college, while they denigrated Mexican American history and forbade the students to speak Spanish. Graduation rates were abysmal: at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the dropout rate was 57.5%. Those who did make it to college despite their lack of college preparatory classes fared little better. Mexican American students had a college graduation rate of about 0.1%.
Social studies teacher Salvador Castro at Lincoln High School urged Mexican American students to see themselves as central to the development of the state and the nation. In 1963, he and other teachers organized the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference to inspire students to address the failures of the educational system for Mexican American students and to urge those students to graduate from high school and college, as well as to demand better from their local schools.
Filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who attended the Youth Leadership Conference in 1965, recalled how life was changing in the late 1960s. “This is 1967, while the Vietnam War is in full bore, and protests are growing, and the Civil Rights Movement is flourishing. And throughout the world, young people are looking to change the world. And this was not lost on the kids in East L.A. They were able to see what their own circumstances were and how they were being oppressed, how they were being denied an opportunity for an education, an opportunity to fulfill their lives. And so, it was not difficult to organize them. They wanted to be organized. They wanted to do something.”
The students decided to launch walkouts, or “blowouts,” from school in March 1968. In the first week of the month, an estimated 15,000 students walked out of Woodrow Wilson, Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Belmont, Venice, and Jefferson High Schools. Administrators barred the doors of the schools, and police officers beat the students with nightsticks, but still they walked out.
On March 28 they produced a list of demands, asking that teachers who showed bias toward Mexican American students be removed and that curriculum center Mexican American history and experience in schools where a majority of the students shared that heritage. They demanded that curriculum in the schools acknowledge Mexican American history as American history.
The Los Angeles Board of Education rejected their demands, and three days later the police arrested thirteen of the walkout organizers for “conspiracy to disturb the peace.” Esparza later recalled that the press portrayed the protesters as “un-American. That we were outside agitators in our own community. That we were ungrateful, and that ‘they’ were doing the best they could for a population that really didn't have (what it took) to succeed.”
Salazar covered the blowouts for the Los Angeles Times and, in February 1970, wrote a column titled “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?” “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself,” Salazar began. “He resents being told Columbus ‘discovered’ America when the Chicano’s ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’” Salazar noted that “Mexican-Americans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically. Chicanos feel cheated. They want to effect change. Now.” “Chicanos,” he wrote, “are merely fighting to become ‘Americans’...but with a Chicano outlook.”
In April 1970, Salazar left the Times to become the news director for the Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles, KMEX. Salazar said in an interview that he “wanted to try my hand at communicating with the Mexican American community directly and in their language.”
But relations between Mexican American journalists and the police were deteriorating as police cracked down on the movement and on Chicano protesters increasingly frustrated by their exclusion from political power. Salazar collected information on police abuse, and in June he captured the paranoia and harassment of the Nixon administration toward protesters when he wrote that the “mood is not being helped by our political and law-and-order leaders who are trying to discredit militants in the barrios as subversive or criminal.”
Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam dovetailed with the high school blowouts to push Chicano organizers toward anti-war protests. Because the public schools did not encourage them to go on to college, Mexican Americans did not qualify for the draft deferments that kept middle-class white Americans out of the war. This meant the government drafted them in disproportionately high numbers.
Chicano activists organized demonstrations against the war beginning in December 1969. They planned a large march for August 29, 1970, where they could illustrate that the Chicano Movement was not confined to students. As many as 20,000 Mexican Americans—entire families—turned out for the Chicano Moratorium in a festive spirit that celebrated their history and culture at the same time they spoke out against discrimination and the war.
But, as historian Garza records, county sheriffs and the Los Angeles Police Department refused to let Chicanos control the streets of East Los Angeles and attacked the participants at the end of the march. Police violence sparked a riot that led to injuries, more than 150 arrests, and the deaths of three people: two Chicano activists and journalist Rubén Salazar.
In the aftermath of Salazar’s death, organizers shifted from demonstrations to political mobilization, building the Raza Unida Party to achieve economic gains, social justice, and political self-determination for Mexican Americans.
When reporter Bob Navarro asked Salazar in May 1970 if he thought the Vietnam War had put the country in danger of a revolution, Salazar answered: “I think we are in a revolution. I think the United States is traditionally a revolutionary country.”
Navarro countered: “But I’m talking about it in the more sinister sense, an attempt to overthrow our more established institutions.” “I think that’s nonsense,” Salazar replied. “We are going to overthrow some of our institutions, but in the way that Americans have always done it: through the ballot, through public consensus. That’s a revolution. That is a real revolution.”
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Notes:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-19-me-14742-story.html
https://documents.latimes.com/salazar-el-paso-fbi-attention/
Mario T. Garza, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement (University of California Press, 2015).
https://www.chicano.ucla.edu/files/events/Castro%20Program%20B%26W_52606.pdf
https://www.inmotionmagazine.com/mesparza.html
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/truths-unsilenced-the-life-death-and-legacy-of-ruben-salazar
https://documents.latimes.com/fbi-monitors-activists-after-salazar-dies/
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2;brand=ucpress
https://rubensalazarproject.com/2012/06/14/the-story-of-ruben/
https://rubensalazarproject.com/2013/08/20/ruben-salazars-road-to-citizenship-2/
https://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/31/slain_latino_journalist_ruben_salazar_killed
Ruben Salazar, “Don’t Make the ‘Bato Loco’ Go the Way of the Zoot Suiter,” June 19, 1970 at: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2&chunk.id=d0e8517&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e6486&brand=ucpress
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-aug-05-la-me-0805-tobar-20110805-story.html
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/raza-unida-party
https://documents.latimes.com/fbi-monitors-activists-after-salazar-dies/
YouTube:
watch?v=FAxLv9bx-IM
August 28, 2025
August 27, 2025
August 27, 2025
The image of National Guard troops, some of them from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi, in Washington, D.C., spreading mulch around the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin and picking up trash, illustrates that President Donald J. Trump’s insistence that he needed troops to crack down on violent crime in the nation’s capital was always a cover for an authoritarian takeover.
As Kate Riga and Emine Yücel noted in Talking Points Memo today, earlier this spring Trump and congressional Republicans did all they could to weaken Washington, D.C. In March, Congress passed a resolution to fund the government temporarily while also freezing all federal spending. That included the District of Columbia, whose budget has to be approved by Congress although the monies involved come from local taxes, not federal funds.
Because those budget monies are local and not federal, according to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, the Washington, D.C., budget is routinely exempted from federal spending freezes. But the House did not carve it out this time, leaving the city with a shortfall of $1.1 billion. The Senate unanimously approved a bill to fix the error, letting the city continue to operate under its current budget, but the House never took it up. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser and local officials found a workaround to restore some funding but have had to freeze hiring and cut contracts, grants, and expenditures across the city’s agencies.
Cuts to city services have made it easier for Trump and his loyalists to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, although violent crime is dropping there, not rising, and the Department of Justice’s own numbers show it is at a 30-year low. Now, with troops stationed in the city, Trump and his MAGA loyalists are demonstrating that they control the federal capital.
Today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the administration will also take over Union Station in Washington, D.C., from which Amtrak and the city’s commuter rail lines run, saying such a takeover was part of Trump’s “beautification” program.
Amtrak took control of the station in July 2024, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of the Biden era provided $22 billion to Amtrak to modernize trains and stations. The administration cut a $120 million federal grant to Amtrak in April. Taking control of Union Station will put the administration in charge of key transportation lines into and out of the city. It also will create a federal presence in an area where veterans have been protesting.
The freezing of D.C.’s budget is a different process from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made across the federal government, although the effects of the two are similar. As Tara Copp of the Washington Post noted today, custodial work like that being done by the National Guard troops normally would have been performed by National Park Service employees. But that service was already short staffed when the administration slashed through the federal workforce. The park service used to have 200 people assigned to the thousands of acres of gardens and trees in the capital. Now it has 20.
A park service official told Copp: “It’s everybody—the masons, the maintenance workers, the groundskeepers, the plumbers. Every shop is short.”
The Trump administration inherited decades of Republican rhetoric insisting the federal government was bloated and inefficient. It set out immediately to gut the civil service through hiring freezes, reductions in force, and impoundment of funds.
In an interview with Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times on Thursday, August 21, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor said that by the end of December 2025 there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers than there were in January. Sullivan notes that this is the largest single-year reduction in civilian federal employment since World War II.
But even before these cuts, the federal workforce had not kept pace with the growth of the nation. The workforce when Trump took office in 2025 was about 2.4 million people, roughly the same number of government workers the nation had in 1969. As Bill Chappell of NPR reported in March, in 1969 the U.S. population was about 202.5 million. Now it is about 341.1 million.
The U.S. public workforce was about 14.9% of overall employment, significantly lower than our 37 peer nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, where public sector employment averages at 18.1%. In Canada, that number is 19.4%. Chappell also noted that an OECD report showed more than 90% of U.S. civil servants believed it was important for their work to serve the public good.
The old Republican argument for getting rid of civil servants was that private contractors would be more efficient, and so in place of civil servants, the U.S. has relied on private contractors since the 1990s. While the U.S. spent about $270 billion on federal workers’ salaries before the 2025 cuts, it spent $478 billion on government contractors. Public policy scholar Elizabeth Linos explained that even before the recent cuts, the U.S. had “something like three times as many [contractors] delivering the work of government” as it had civil servants.
The Trump administration’s drastic cuts were almost certainly designed to speed up the shift to private contractors. Under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cut jobs willy-nilly, apparently under the impression that replacing people with AI contracts and consolidating databases would make civil servants redundant. But like the D.C. budget freeze, the cuts have weakened the nation and make it more susceptible to an authoritarian takeover.
Yesterday news broke that a whistleblower, identified as Social Security Administration chief data officer Charles Borges, claims that a former senior DOGE official put a copy of a key Social Security database on a server that was vulnerable to hacking. The DOGE employee copied the names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers of more than 300 million Americans to an unsecure cloud server accessible to other former DOGE employees.
Borges alleges that the copy “constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.” He also said that as of late June, there were no verified audit or oversight mechanisms in place to oversee where DOGE was sharing that data or what it was using the data for. The agency assessed that a breach of the database would be “catastrophic” for Social Security beneficiaries, making them susceptible to identity theft, the loss of health care and nutrition benefits, and so on.
Last week, as the Trump administration prepared to fire nearly 90% of the workforce of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, virtually all pending matters flagged by bank examiners were simply closed without action.
Layla A. Jones reported last week that while the administration insisted it was targeting “bias” at NPR and PBS when it defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the $1.1 billion in cuts means that the CPB can no longer provide public broadcasting stations with severe weather alerts. CPB administered the Next Generation Warning System in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to issue alerts and information over radio and television stations, many of which are in rural America, and can continue to operate when other systems fail.
Yesterday, 182 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote to Congress to warn that one third of FEMA’s full-time staff have separated from the agency this year, eroding institutional knowledge and relationships, even as FEMA employees have been reassigned to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The administration has cut funds for FEMA, has removed both public and internal information related to climate change, and has not appointed a qualified FEMA administrator as the law requires.
In this document, which they called the Katrina Declaration in memory of the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast almost exactly 20 years ago, they warned that the administration was making it impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters. “FEMA’s mission to provide critical support [is being] obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency’s existence but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people and the communities our oath compels us to serve.”
Thirty-six people signed their names to the document; 155 did not put their names down out of concern the administration would target them in retaliation for speaking out. They were right. All of those who used their names received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on administrative leave.
Tonight, Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Lauren Weber of the Washington Post reported a battle at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When recently-confirmed director Susan Monarez refused to agree to change coronavirus vaccine guidelines without consulting advisors, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged her to resign. Monarez refused and called Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who was instrumental in securing Kennedy’s confirmation and who pushed back against him. Her involvement of the senator apparently infuriated Kennedy, and the department simply announced on social media that Monarez was no longer the CDC director.
Hours later, Monarez’s lawyers responded that she had neither resigned nor been fired, accused Kennedy of “weaponizing public health for political gain,” and said that his purge of health officials put “millions of American lives at risk.” “This is not about one official,” they wrote. “It is about the systematic dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science. The attack on Dr. Monarez is a warning to every American: our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within.”
The White House then formally fired Monarez, saying she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” The attacks on Monarez came as administration firings, budget cuts, and policies prompted the resignations this week of the CDC’s chief medical officer, the director of its infectious disease center, the head of its center for immunization and infectious diseases, and the director of the office of public health data. One described Monarez as “hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.”
On August 20, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former deputy secretary of state William Burns thanked America’s fired public servants for serving their country with honor and told them they deserved better than the “gleeful indignity” inflicted on them by this administration. The current process of cutting the government is “not about reform,” he wrote, but about “retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.”
Deploying National Guard soldiers away from their families and sending them to Washington, D.C., in the heat of August to respond to an “emergency” only to put them to work spreading mulch and picking up trash certainly seems to fit the idea of inflicting indignity to break the nobility of public service for the nation.
The firefighters at work combating a wildfire in the state of Washington likely also felt the indignity inflicted by the government today when ICE agents showed up and made them line up so the agents could check their IDs. The agents arrested two firefighters, and when the a member of the crew asked for the chance to say goodbye, the agents responded: “[Y]ou need to get the f*ck out of here. I’m going to make you leave.” One firefighter said: “You risked your life out here to save the community. This is how they treat us.”
In his resignation letter today, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre Daskalakis set an example for those refusing to be cowed. “The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning,” he wrote. “My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/washington-dc-budget.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-allies-weakened-dc-occupation-budget
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/doge-social-security-data.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-federal-workers.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5310542/federal-workforce-other-countries-compared
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security-doge-privacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/doge-social-security-data.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-public-broadcasting-cpb-npr-rural-severe-weather
https://www.standupforscience.net/fema-katrina-declaration
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/climate/fema-suspends-staff-who-criticized-trump-cuts.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/27/susan-monarez-cdc-director-ousted/
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/27/g-s1-85911/cdc-director-susan-monarez-ousted-leaders-resign
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/trump-retribution-public-servants/683914/
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/28/kennedy-cdc-vaccine-chief-resignation-post
Bluesky:
August 26, 2025
August 26, 2025
Today, for the second time in as many days, President Donald J. Trump suggested that Americans want a dictator. In a meeting in the Cabinet Room that lasted more than three hours, during which he listened to the fulsome praise of his cabinet officers and kept his hands below the table, seemingly to hide the bad bruising on his right hand, Trump said: “The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.’”
With Trump underwater on all his key issues and his job approval rating dismal, the administration appears to be trying to create support for Trump by insisting that the U.S. is mired in crime and he alone can solve the problem. The administration’s solution is not to fund violence prevention programs and local law enforcement—two methods proven to work—but instead to use the power of the government to terrorize communities.
There is a frantic feel to that effort, as if they feel they must convince Americans to fear crime more than they fear rising grocery prices or having to take their children past police checkpoints on their way to school.
Last night, speaking with personality Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the person behind the draconian immigration raids in the country, seemed to be angry that Washingtonians weren’t sufficiently grateful for Trump’s takeover of the streets. But Miller indicated that the administration is really focused on splitting Republicans and Democrats who disapprove of the administration's policies, demonizing the Democrats.
Miller asserted to Hannity that the “Democrat Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization…. The Democrat Party, Sean, that exists today,” he said, “it disgusts me.”
Now, with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker taking a stand against the deployment of troops in Chicago, Trump appears to be nervous about sending troops on his own hook and instead trying to pressure Pritzker to ask for them. In the Oval Office today, he complained that Pritzker wasn’t asking for troops, and on social media tonight he called Pritzker “an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.”
And yet, for all their talk of dispatching soldiers to combat crime, National Guard troops today were picking up trash in Washington, D.C., and working on dozens of “beautification and restoration" projects.
The administration’s focus on crime to win back support for the president is going to have to overcome increasing uneasiness with Trump’s attempt to take control of the nation’s monetary policy.
In a letter posted to social media last night at 8:02 Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump announced that he was removing Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook from her position “for cause.” That cause, he claimed, was the allegation from Trump loyalist William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook had made false statements on a mortgage years ago. With Pulte’s help, the administration has gone after a number of Democrats with such allegations. Cook has not been charged with any crime. Historically, “for cause” has meant corruption or dereliction of duty.
Trump has been at war with the Federal Reserve for months. The Fed is an independent institution that oversees the nation’s economy and manages the nation’s monetary policy, which means the Federal Reserve sets interest rates for the country. Trump wants it to lower interest rates to make it easier to borrow money. Cheaper money will goose the economy, but it is also likely to spur inflation, which is already on the rise thanks to Trump’s tariff war and massive deportations of migrant workers. Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates or, failing that, to resign.
Trump has mused about taking control of the Fed himself, but the politicization of the nation’s monetary policy so it responds to the whims of Trump rather than actual economic conditions makes economists and most elected officials recoil. Today in his newsletter, economist Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s illegal firing of Cook is allowed to stand, “the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent. And,” he added, “the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.”
In May the Supreme Court suggested it would overturn an almost century-old precedent saying that the president cannot remove the heads of independent agencies created by Congress. But even then, it protected the independence of the Fed, writing: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
Trump administration officials appear to be trying to find a way around that ruling by going after Cook on trumped-up charges. After serving as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Cook has been on the board of governors since 2022. She is the first Black woman to sit on the board and might have drawn Trump’s ire as well when she noted publicly that the jobs report earlier this month could signal an economic turning point.
Cook responded to Trump’s letter in a statement saying: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”
The administration’s apparent persecution of undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it unlawfully deported to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March and then refused to return despite court orders to do so, is a more immediate illustration of the lawlessness of authoritarian rule.
The government finally returned Abrego to the U.S., only to announce that it had secured an indictment against him in Tennessee for allegedly conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants for financial gain, charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop for which Abrego was not charged with anything. He was jailed in Tennessee, and a judge ordered that he remain in jail to protect him from the government, which threatened to deport him again if he were released. He was finally released on August 22 and went home to his family in Maryland, but when he attended a mandatory check-in at the ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland, on Monday, August 25, he was arrested.
Members of the administration routinely describe Abrego, who has no criminal convictions, as a gang member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser, and child predator who is terrorizing the United States. Trump referred to him yesterday as “an animal.”
Now, as Jeremy Roebuck, Maria Sacchetti, and Dana Munro of the Washington Post explained yesterday, Abrego’s lawyers say the government is trying to coerce him into pleading guilty of human trafficking, offering to send him to the Spanish-speaking Latin American country of Costa Rica if he does, but threatening to deport him to Uganda if he does not. As legal analyst Harry Litman notes, deportation would enable the government to avoid “having to show their hand on what seems to be a very threadbare case.”
The official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet-level department of the United States government—trolled Abrego, whom the media often identifies as a “Maryland man,” by posting: “Uganda Man.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, whose order to return Abrego to the U.S. the government ignored for months, indicated she had no faith that the government would obey the law. She temporarily barred the administration from deporting Abrego until she can make sure the government follows the law, making Department of Justice lawyer confirm he understood that “[y]our clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”
Tonight, Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority and flipping a seat in a district Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Drey won the seat by 10.4%, showing a swing of more than 2o points to the Democrats. And in a seven-way race in Georgia for the state Senate in a deep red district, the lone Democrat, Debra Shigley, came in first with 40% of the vote. Since no candidate won 50% of the vote, Shigley will face whichever Republican candidate comes out on top—the top two are currently hovering around 17%—in a runoff on September 23.
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 25, 2025, 8:02 PM.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fedexplained/who-we-are.htm
Paul KrugmanIn the Matter of Lisa CookYesterday Donald Trump said that he had fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. My wording is advisable: He “said” that he had fired her. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems clear that he does not have the right to summarily fire Fed officials, certainly on tissue-thin allegations of mortgage fraud before she even went to the Fed…Read morea day ago · 2310 likes · 496 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/supreme-court-federal-reserve-trump.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-lisa-cook-jobs-report-concerning-economy-turning-point/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/trump-cabinet-meeting.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/08/25/kilmar-abrego-garcia-detained/
https://georgiarecorder.com/2025/08/26/live-results-for-georgias-special-state-senate-election/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5471284-drey-victory-breaks-gop-majority/
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