Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 3/5/2025

Mostly Cloudy | Emil Redzic | Mysterious Lights | Panther Volleyball | MAC Meeting | Remembering Bill | Hospital Stay | Fire Landscaping | History Talk | Variety Show | LWV Meeting | Conk | Ed Notes | The Graduate | Pomo Trade | Trillium | Yesterday's Catch | Aha | To Paraguay | Nam Pilots | Petty Meanness | Dead Here | Harvest Nuns | MCT Monday | Tuba Player | Hearst Contract | Mexican Protests | Beautiful Jeanette | Assault Lawsuits | Do Better | Oscar Choices | Jagger Charity | Back Home | We're Free | Trump Address | Lead Stories | Dead Horse | Tax Cut | Betraying Ukraine | Sally Stanford | Embarrassed Americans | Supercool Names | Putin Bad | Two Poles | Greenland Proposition | Television

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SHOWERS activity is expected this afternoon through Thursday morning, with light rain and mountain snow. There is the potential for isolated brief heavy downpours and small hail this evening into Thursday. Cold morning temperatures on Friday, even along the coast. Dry weather expected Friday and this weekend. Wet and unsettled weather returns early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 47F on the coast this Humpday morning with .08" of rainfall from yesterday's sprinkles. Cloudy today then rain from tonight into tomorrow morning. Dry skies into the weekend then rain returns later Sunday. Lots of rain is forecast for next week although nothing is looking big yet.

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IN CUSTODY DEATH IDENTIFICATION

As a part of this continuing investigation, the decedent from this incident was identified as Emil Redzic, a 29-year-old male from Ukiah. The name of the decedent is being released after the legal next-of-kin and family of Redzic were notified of his death.

An autopsy was performed by a Forensic Pathologist on Monday 03-03-2025, but the official cause and manner of death will not be available until all forensic examination reports and tests have been completed. Additional information related to this investigation will be released as it becomes available.

Anyone with information regarding this investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office by calling the Dispatch Center at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100.

Original Sheriff’s Presser: https://theava.com/archives/261960#4

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A BOONVILLE RESIDENT reports seeing occasional bright lights at night in the hills toward the Coast west of Boonville up near or around Church of Christ ridge over the last few nights. The lights seem to be stationary in an array similar to a sports stadium which come on for a few minutes and then go off. No sounds accompany the lights. Could someone be up there scoping out the place, at night? There are areas in that vicinity that have been heavily logged in the past, but you can’t see large treeless patches from the Valley floor. Pot growers have been known to be in the area in the past, but not lately. Anybody seen any lights up in those hills recently?

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AV ATHLETICS:

Anderson Valley wins its first home game of the season 3 sets to 0 over Round Valley.

The team travels to Rio Lindo today to take on Windsor and host Rio Lindo and will be home again Thursday against Ukiah completing a 5 game preseason stretch this week before heading into league play. Let’s go Panthers!

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REDWOOD VALLEY RESIDENTS PACK MEETING to tackle fire insurance, crime, and controversial energy project

by Monica Huettl

Redwood Valley residents packed the latest Municipal Advisory Council meeting for a deep dive into pressing community concerns, from skyrocketing fire insurance rates to cannabis regulations and energy storage projects. State Farm Agent Jay Epstein tackled wildfire coverage myths, Supervisor Madeline Cline addressed road maintenance and public safety, and Sheriff Matt Kendall discussed crime and immigration policies. Meanwhile, a proposed iron-air battery project sparked debate over clean energy solutions. With passionate discussions on everything from emergency sirens to gas station bans, the February 12 meeting underscored the community’s determination to shape its future.…

https://mendofever.com/2025/03/05/redwood-valley-residents-pack-meeting-to-tackle-fire-insurance-crime-and-controversial-energy-project/

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REMEMBERING BILL HEIL

Tim Scully: I remember Bill Heil and his partner Linda Perkins from when I was working with the Little River Airport Advisory Committee. They originally came to committee meetings because they were concerned about the environmental impact of the airport and airplanes. They expressed their concerns in a civilized manner and as they got more engaged with the committee they provided very constructive criticism. Their deep knowledge of botany and ecology was placed in service of the committee’s decision-making processes and helped produce better outcomes. His community engagement seemed to always be constructive.

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BOB ABELES (Boonville)

I’d like to offer a counter-point based on my recent experience at the Adventist hospital in Ukiah. I had major surgery in October than required a 5 day hospital stay. Everyone, from the kind lady that checked me in and banded me, the pre-op surgical staff, my fine surgeon, the kind anesthesiologist, the OR nurses, and the nursing staff that cared for me post op, treated me with care and compassion. Yes, I was woken up every few hours to check my vitals. Yes, there was noise on the hallway from other patients. The big but here is that the first was absolutely necessary and the later falls under the heading of “Really, What Do You Expect?” I came out of surgery in “guarded” condition, a state that requires constant care and monitoring. Wake me up, take my vitals, rinse and repeat. As far as the noise goes, a hospital is a place where there are sick, confused people in pain. They will not be on their best fine resort behavior.

Nurses are the backbone of any hospital. Without exception every member of nursing staff I interacted with really loved working there, and it showed. I felt a deep connection with many of them.

I think the big difference between my experience and what a big city hospital might offer is scale and size. In this case, smaller is most certainly better.

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HOPLAND HISTORY TALK & PROHIBITION

Hello Local History Fans.

Just around the corner is our March History Talk. We will be meet on Sunday, March 9, in the Rod Shippey Hall at the University of California’s Hopland Research and Extension Center. The event will be a multifaceted look at the history of the research center and the land it occupies. The Tribal Chairman of the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians, Sonny Elliott, will open the program talking about the deep history of Hopland and the Shóqowa People on this land. Other speakers will include Bob Keiffer, retired Superintendent of HREC, serving over 30 years with the UC and connected to the site for a lifetime. We will also hear from John Bailey, current Director of the Hopland Research and Extension Center.

The event will start at 1pm. Please reserve a seat by contacting us at 707-462-6969, or by email at info@mendocinocountyhistory.org. Reserve by Friday, March 7th, so we can guarantee you one of Beth Keiffer’s wonderful dessert treats! Also, remember to check your clocks, because March 9th, is the start of daylight-savings time.

Directions: From downtown Hopland (intersection of Highways 101 and 175), take Highway 175 east toward Lakeport. Cross the Russian River, drive straight across the traffic circle (second exit) onto Old River Road (also marked “Road 201”). Next, turn right onto University Road. (There is a UC sign at the intersection.) Drive up University Road for approximately 3.5 miles, following signs to “Event Parking.” Please park in this area and walk across the road to the Rod Shippey Hall. Blue badge parking is also available if you drive a little further along University Road. Car-pooling is recommended.

Also, our second annual fundraiser is coming up on Saturday, May 17th. The party this year will be “The Speakeasy Soiree,” thematically taking us back to the days of the prohibition era, with blind pigging, bootlegging, and the speakeasy history of the County. If you don’t know what “blind pigging” is, I’ll only tease you for now by saying that the Mendocino County Sheriff’s arrest records were full of this nefarious activity. Note, no pigs were hurt in the pursuit of this crime.

The night will include a dinner prepared by Chef Matt Allison and the good folks at the Ukiah Brewing Company, a silent auction, and amusement by Uklah Players actors. During the live auction, retired Sheriff Tom Allman will be rounding up the usual (and unusual) suspects to raise money for this great cause. Last year’s experience was a real success, with great reviews and a lot of enthusiasm for the next big event. We have some wonderful auction items coming in and planning a night of great food, drink, and entertainment, with some fun history thrown in.

Festivities will run from 5-9pm with dinner at 6pm. Barra of Mendocino is hosting us again this year, at 7051 North State Street, in Redwood Valley. Tickets are $100 per person and will be available soon.

We hope to see you there!

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Hey folks! The 32nd Anderson Valley Variety Show tickets will be available tomorrow (Wednesday 3/5) at Lemon’s in Philo and Anderson Valley Markets! Come ‘n get ‘em! (Cash or check only) “Best show in the universe!” ~Captain Rainbow

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LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS MARCH MEETING

The League of Women Voters of Mendocino County will hold its March meeting on Tuesday, 3/18, from 6-7:30pm, via Zoom. The program will focus on small special districts, such as fire or water, and the costs of holding elections in such districts. For small districts, those costs can be prohibitive, preventing competitive elections.

Mendocino County Registrar of Voters Katrina Bartolomei will join us for the presentation and ensuing questions and discussion. She will explain how county elections are funded, and why the costs for special districts can be so high. Only county-wide and supervisorial races are funded by the county budget; by law, all other election costs must be recouped by the department. Ms. Bartolomei will explain how those costs are calculated and charged.

The Zoom link can be found on the League’s website: https://my.lwv.org/california/mendocino-county; look under the calendar tab.

For more information, call 707-937-4952.

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ED NOTES

FIRST time I’ve ever disagreed with Caitlin Johnston and Taibbi as they denigrated Ukraine’s beset leader yesterday morning. Put alongside the clown show in the White House, Zelensky is positively Churchillian who, by the way, often dressed informally during the war years. Whatever Zelensky’s and Ukraine’s deficiencies, Putin is deliberately shelling civilians and Ukraine isn’t.

UKRAINE will have peace defined for them by Trump and Putin with exile or assassination for Zelensky, but the “peace” will probably consist of Russia keeping the predominantly Russian sympathizing area’s it’s captured with no NATO for Ukraine, and relief for average Ukranians and life for the Russian and Korean soldiers that Putin deploys in suicidal frontal assaults.

WHAT DO I KNOW? My credentials are pretty thin, for sure, but for all I or anybody else seems to know at this point is that the Ukranians just might go on fighting despite having been bludgeoned into rigged negotiations by the Trump Gang. Maybe Europe will make up for the loss of American help, and maybe it will all blow up into some kind of apocalypse. It all seems headed in the general direction of catastrophe, doesn’t it?

FROM the Guns or Butter perspective I’ve seen around, it’s not as if Trump wants peace in Ukraine so he can take all that money squandered on weapons and spend it on help for Americans freezing in the dark because they can’t pay their power bills. The arms industries won’t be laying off anybody as Israel’s mass murders and ethnic cleansing, funded by US, continues in Gaza and is now consuming the West Bank.

ONE OF MANY episodes I’ve always wondered about is the following: How did the kid turn out? The police report said mom was unhappy that not only had her son tried to kill her by putting Drano in her coffee, he’d done some joy-riding in her car and had gone on-line for sexual instruction. She had “disciplined the suspect by taking away certain privileges, such as no computer and no more playing sports at school.”

SO, YOU’VE got a frazzled mother with limited resources, financial and emotional, trying to raise a male child with no man in the family equation. Now lots of NPR-type people will say you don’t need the man in the child-raising equation — remember “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”? — but if the woman has a kid, the preponderance of scholarly opinion says boys and girls tend to do better with a mother and a father.

BUT TAKING A KID who likes sports out of sports is a huge mistake. You want your demon spawn at that age up on his feet and moving around, and even if he occasionally looks in on Debbie Does Dallas he won’t be visiting Debbie if he’s at the ballpark or in the gym.

EXCEPT FOR THE DRANO, which mom immediately realized wasn’t Coffee Mate, and the typically teen death threats, the lad didn’t seem unlike millions of adolescent American boys who grow up without a father to advise them as to who and what lurks in the erotic thickets of our sex-drenched land, not to mention a nearby dad who might help the kid to more or less steel himself for everything else sure to come at him in an imploding society.

OF COURSE this particular young American was likely to be a complete mental case when official Mendocino County was finished with him, and Mendocino County will emphatically be finished with him a minute after midnight on his 18th birthday when the funding for him ends.

JUVENILE MATTERS, I believe, are heard by Superior Court judge Cindee Mayfield. She seems like a smart, sensible person, but then lawyers are good at faking normalcy. Our courts have always had a psycho or two sitting up there all judgemental in black robes. Anyway, like all juvenile court judges, her honor is pretty much a captive of the helping pros she works with every day. And the proceedings are closed to the pesky public. “In the interests of the child,” natch.

MAYBE THE JUDGE got the boy into a stable, male-dominated foster home, but it’s much more likely the kid got the usual — a three-year shunt from serial foster homes until the magic birthday and out onto the streets to fend for himself, angry and without skills.

IT’S A BAD SYSTEM, much like the system surrounding it, but there’s so much money involved in “caring” for dependent children — seems like half of Ukiah is paid to just love the kids to pieces — that the system resists all reform and just keeps on failing, again much like the larger system that includes it.

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“I went to kindergarten there.”

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POMO TRADE ROUTES

by Katy Tahja

If you were a native person in Mendocino County before the arrival of white folks, what trade items would you share with other natives, and what would you want in return?

I docent at the Kelley House in Mendocino and doing research with fellow historian Bruce Levene he introduced me to “Trade & Trails & Economic Exchange Among Indians of California” by James T. Davies in 1974. And I bless an anthropologist that provided the records Davies used, named Kniffen, who in 1939 collected the trade route information. Since “Indian” was the term they used in the documents it is the term I use in this story.

Did you know Patwin Indians in the Central Valley supplied bows for hunting to Pomo’s and in return took clam shell disk beads, salt, and dried fish in return? The inland Yuki tribe traded furs for Dentalium shells used in making personal adornments.

Dried surf fish, Abalone, mussels, seaweed, and kelp were valuable trade items Pomo’s provided because they were salty. Pomo’s received in trade woodpecker scalps to decorate baskets and ceremonial headdresses and belts and in return provided tanned otter skins for trade.

The mineral Magnesite was a greatly valued trade item. A gray white buff mineral, it was collected by the Southern Pomo along Cache Creek in Lake & Napa counties. When burned in a fire bright colors appeared with bands of pink, orange and cream in color and sparkles of melted Quartzite. This rock was made into individual cylindrical beads and they were very valuable, as was Abalone shell.

Pomo traded with northern tribes for Yew wood for bows and wild iris fiber made into string for hunting snares. Those purple wild iris you see in bloom in the spring have strong fibers in their leaves. Natives in the interior of the county traded the long smooth stems of Redbud to be used in basketry and took back sea shells in return

The Pomo people in Hopland took acorn flour to Pt. Arena to exchange for seafood. The text I read had some trade goods coming from “the North” and included things like sea lion bones that were used to make harpoon points and fishing hooks.

The Kato (Cahto) tribe around Laytonville supplied Hazelwood bows to Coast Yuki Indians and accepted giant Chiton sea shells and dogs in trade. (Who would have thought dogs would be traded?…but once upon a time there were no dogs around as they arrived with white folks). Pomo folks made moccasins footwear and traded it to Yuki’s. Obsidian (volcanic glass) was a much sought after trade item because it made great projectile points and Clear Lake Pomo’s provided it.

As a resident of Comptche, I know from local history that trading parties of Pomo passed through our valley on well established trails as acorn flour from inland tribes was swapped for dried seafood. Orr Hot Springs, well known by natives for its healing powers, was a favorite spot for trading and all healing springs were seen as areas free of any hostility between tribes.

I find it distressing in this day and age that the hard work that anthropologists did in the last century is now being looked down on and slighted because the facts were collected by white people, not natives. In today’s politically correct world native history should be written by the people who lived it. That’s fine for the future going forward but I, for one, will remain grateful for all the researchers of the past whose writings educate us today.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, March 4, 2025

JESSICA BAUER, 37, Ukiah. Toluene or similar substance, resisting.

JERALD DIGGS, 55, Clearlake. DUI-alcohol&drugs, under inflence, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

LINDSAY HILDRETH, 42, Redwood Valley. Domestic battery.

TARA HILL, 37. Ukiah. Failure to appear.

VERONICA KERSTEN, 32, Richmond/Ukiah. Elder abuse-theft by caretaker, possession of personal ID info with intent to defraud.

JUSTIN LEE, 37, Fort Bragg. DUI with blood alcohol over 0.15%

JOSEPH SALLADY, 49, Fairfax/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

STACEY SMITH, 34, Navarro. Assault with firearm, controlled substance, paraphernalia, criminal threats, grossly negligent firearm discharge, child abandonment/neglect.

JERONIMO ZARTARIAN-LENCINAS, 31, Laytonville. DUI, controlled substance.

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RANDY BURKE: OMG Are you full of cider and kidding us? After that gut wrenching debacle...hell, I think I'm off to Paraguay...water is good, food is good, and the BULLSHIT remains in the ring. At least down there you don't got some masquera wearing matador, or some other Mike Johnson suckup. And a shortage of couches.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Part of the problem with air travel now is that all the Nam pilots aged out and there are now more non-military pilots than ever. Many of the military pilots have gotten into cargo captain positions so they don’t have to deal with the Greyhound in the sky cattle cars… One of my buddies flew 20 years in the military and went to Fed Ex for slightly less money than an airline because he gets better hours and doesn’t have to deal with doughy mouth-breathers in cut off shirts.

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LEE EDMUNDSON: Opinion | Trump, says Rubio, shows courage. Looks more like petty meanness.

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TAP, TAP, TAPING AWAY

Awoke early at the homeless shelter, and following morning ablutions, went to Whole Foods on H Street in Washington, D.C. for a breakfast nosh (the California food stamps came in last night). Now tap, tap tapping away on a guest computer at the MLK public library, before going to the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil. There is nothing of any major consequence happening in the District of Columbia in response to the meltdown happening across the street at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I told everybody that from now on, whatever I need will be provided by a higher source! On a lower level, it’s dead here. Contact me if you are interested in doing anything of a direct action nature.

Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

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MCT MONDAY

by Fred Gardner

About Tim Lincecum… Just like a drinker to assume he was stoned when you saw him have an off-day! On behalf of the Defense Committee I steer you to the AVA’s account of Lincecum’s bust after the 2009 season: https://theava.com/archives/

• About the N-Judah… In the late ‘90s we were living in the Inner Sunset when Muni, with fanfare, replaced its old N-Judah cars. The new double- and triple-jointed units, manufactured in Italy, were expensive and screeched piercingly for about 10 seconds when they made the sharp turns on 9th Street. Residents, awakened every night, screeched back. Muni brought in consulting engineers and a partial fix ensued. It took about a year… We had a perfect little Dolger-built house –two bedrooms and a back porch that we used as a bedroom, with a basement and a backyard, for $1,250/month. Our landlady was living with her elderly mother in the Excelsior. We understood that when her mother died, we’d have to find another place. She never raised our rent for seven and a half years, never came by to inspect. We left the place in better shape than we found it.

I used to have the real estate knack

but all that I gaineth I giveth back

only to wind up with you in this cozy old

shack in the Sunset in the Sunset years

Obviously I did everything wrong

Except one or two that strung me along

the road to the club we call Chez Nancy Wong

a shack in the Sunset in the Sunset years

Where there’s noodles at midnight

if you’re in need of a treat

Where the Judah car makes an ‘N’

and careens down the streeeeet

I still believe that it’s all within reach

a big enough place between here and the beach

and from each and according to each

a shack in the Sunset in the Sunset years

The blood orange Sunset years

and the cool gray Sunset years

• About Cannabis Use Disorder… For openers, it’s a misnomer. As Benson Hausman, MD, points out – and others in the Society of Cannabis Clinicians agree – it’s not the herb itself but one compound, THC, that is causing dependency in some users. “THC Use Disorder” would be a more accurate term, according to Hausman, because it’s not the plant that’s causing dependence but the one compound that ganjapreneurs are pushing. The American Psychiatric Association doesn’t list “Somniferum Use Disorder” or “Coca Leaf Disorder” in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Specific compounds within the plant are singled out as being addictive – morphine, heroin, cocaine, etc.

For a more detailed commentary, Google “Cannabis Use Disorder BeyondTHC.com“

It’s uncouth to say “I told you so,” but O’Shaughnessy’s foresaw decades ago that “Whiteman is apt to exploit marijuana the way he exploited coca and poppies and ephedra – by creating processed or synthesized versions of the active ingredients that produce effects 10 or 50 or 100 times stronger than people could achieve by smoking or chewing or making tea from the ‘crude’ plants.” And so it came to pass. The Industry that subsumed the medical marijuana movement now peddles products with megadoses of THC appropriate for patients coping with cancer pain.

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Raw Earth

The media generally ignored the President’s use of the term “raw earth” instead of “rare earth” in reference to minerals US companies intend to mine in Ukraine. In his February 28 session with Zelensky (and viewers like you), Trump said “raw earth” four times. If Joe Biden had said “raw earth” instead of “rare earth” four times in a speech, the media would not have downplayed it. Trump is equally demented, it just manifests differently.

When Amy Goodman then used “raw earth” on air, I wondered if the term referred to something other than the rare earths – lithium, titanium, uranium, etal. – as listed on the periodic table of elements that we learned about in high school. [The editor recently ended an otherwise perfect summary of the Communist Manifesto’s demands with an upbeat line about the US still providing free public education. The school systems have been severely degraded and things get worse every year. But the editor is a glass-is-half-full kinda guy. Actually, the glass is half empty and the water isn’t fit to drink.]

Going online I found only one journalist who had zeroed in on Trump’s gaffe. Mike Snider of USA Today wrote, “President Donald Trump wants Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to make a deal with the U.S. over the country’s ‘raw earth’ minerals. But what does that actually mean?”

“Trump described the potential deal on Friday, saying, ‘We don’t know exactly how much because we’re going to be putting some money in a fund that we’re going to get from the raw earth that we’re going to be taking and sharing in terms of revenues, so it’s going to be a lot of money’…

“This wasn’t the first time Trump described the deal as involving ‘raw earth…’“

It took a long time to find a transcript of the whole exchange. Trump said, “And as you know, our country doesn’t have much raw earth. We have a lot of oil and gas, but we don’t have a lot of the raw earth. And what we do have is protected by the environmentalists, but that can be unprotected. But still, it’s not very much. They have among the best in the world in terms of raw earth. We’re going to be using that, taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI and including weapons and the military…

“We have a lot of oil and we have a lot of gas. We have a lot, but we don’t have raw earth. So this has just about every component of the raw earth that we need for computers, for all of the things we do. It puts us in great shape.”

Opportunistic linguists will now decree that “raw earth” is a synonym for “rare earth” based on “vernacular usage.” Afraid to say the President misspoke, they’ll say speaks the language of the common man.

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PRESS DEMOCRAT GUILD SEEKS PROTECTIONS IN IMMINENT SALE TO HEARST

(March 3, 2025) — The Pacific Media Workers Guild shares this on behalf of our members at the papers owned by Sonoma Media Investments (the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Sonoma Index Tribune, Petaluma Argus Courier and North Bay Business Journal. With SMI on the verge of being sold to Hearst, the Guild is seeking assurances that the Collective Bargaining Agreement and all of its terms and conditions will be honored by the new owner.

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Here’s what’s happening:

We’re asking Sonoma Media Investments majority owner, Darius Anderson, and the Hearst corporation to make our contract part of the purchase agreement to ensure essential benefits, workplace protections and wages.

Hearst won’t commit to honoring the contract or even recognizing our local union – Pacific Media Workers Guild, Local 39521. Darius Anderson, hasn’t committed to including the contract in the terms of the deal.

Getting Hearst to recognize the contract is not just about ensuring wages. There are many key provisions covered in the contract including job security, scheduling protections, representation in the grievance process, and health and welfare terms.

The contract covers your local journalists at The Press Democrat, The Sonoma Index-Tribune, The Petaluma Argus Courier and The North Bay Business Journal.

Hearst has refused to recognize contracts and unions in other markets as well. Earlier this year Hearst purchased the Austin American-Statesman from Gannett and has not recognized their union.

Honoring the contract and recognizing the union are the right things to do for the dedicated local journalists who work hard every day to make The Press Democrat, The Sonoma Index-Tribune, The Petaluma Argus Courier and The North Bay Business Journal the essential resources they are for their communities.

Why now: We have been told the deal is very close to being finalized, which means time is short and the issue is urgent. We need Hearst and SMI to do right by the local journalists who keep local North Bay residents informed.

What you can do: Spread the word. Join us in calling for Darius/SMI and Hearst to do the right thing by honoring the contract and recognizing our union. Please share this on your socials and tag Darius’ other businesses on Instagram: @wingandbarrel and @plantinumadvisorsllc.

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MAGA MEANS: MEXICANS AIN’T GOING ANYWHERE

Mexican Communities in US Rise in Protest Against Trump’s Deportation Threats

Photographs by David Bacon

It’s been over a month since Donald Trump took power, after running a campaign soaked in anti-immigrant tirades and threats of mass deportation. The media have concentrated on these threats, but even progressive outlets paid little attention to the responses of the communities threatened. Yet marches and demonstrations have been widespread in Mexican communities.

These protests often take place not in urban centers, which typically receive more media attention, but in the Mexican barrios of the urban fringe. San Mateo is one - on the San Francisco Peninsula south of the city. Fort Bragg is another - a former mill and fishing town three hours north of San Francisco, where Mexican children are a majority in the small city’s schools.

These are not the polite petitions of victims pleading for a softer repression. They are angry protests - people are out in the streets, not cowering behind closed doors. They carry signs with denunciations that declare “MAGA: Mexicans Ain’t Going Anywhere!” or “I drink my horchata warm because Fuck ICE!”

Young Mexican women - some born here, some who came as children, and others who just arrived - carry U.S. flags, not out of false patriotism, but demanding recognition as an essential people, belonging to this country’s fabric. The many, many Mexican flags have important meaning, and are no longer controversial as they were in the big marches of 2006. They speak of pride in Mexico as a country with a progressive government, in contrast to our reactionary one. They demand that the Mexican presence in this country be recognized as well, with rights and respect for Mexican people.

Not all the flags are Mexican or U.S., Hondurans carry their own, as do Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Some marchers wave the Philippines’ flag with a similar message - recognition for a community with a century’s history, starting with the imperial war that made their homeland a U.S. colony.

These marches with their flags and signs are harbingers of change. They’re not yet as large as the protests that took place in 2006, with its millions in the streets. But they are growing. They are overwhelmingly organized and led by young people and women, and they deserve recognition.

The benefit of organized resistance goes beyond fighting immigration raids. The movements of immigrant workers, their families and their communities have historically fought for deeper social change, beyond deportation defense. They’ve shown great persistence and strategic vision, as they fought threats of deportation while imagining a future of greater equality, working-class rights and social solidarity. That vision is as necessary to defeating repression as action in the streets.

In the flow of people crossing the border, “we see our families and coworkers, while this system only sees money,” says Rene Saucedo, an organizer for the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform, a grassroots immigrant rights organization that has organized marches and demonstrations supporting the Registry Bill. “So we have to fight for what we really need, and not just what we don’t want.”

Marchers carried signs promoting an alternative to deportation, the Registry Bill, HR 1511. This proposal would open legal status to an estimated 8 million people by allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for legal permanent residence. Some of the anti-deportation marchers were veterans of earlier marches last year and the year before, demanding the passage of this bill.

Stepping out is the precondition for mobilizing the support of a broader progressive community behind these protests. The photographs here can’t possibly encompass all the marches or show every aspect of them. Their purpose is to make visible the crucial role of the Mexican community in inspiring a fightback to Trump fascism across the board. They show who’s out there organizing and leading it. Their picket signs and flags graphically present their demands.

Because the new Trump regime is seizing the country’s databases, and has sophisticated tools to track those it targets, there are no individual captions for these photographs and no naming of the individuals in them. They were taken in recent days in San Mateo and Fort Bragg, California.…

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2025/03/photos-from-edge-10-maga-means-mexicans.html

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A LOOMING THREAT COULD BANKRUPT CALIFORNIA COUNTIES — AND IT’S NOT FIRES OR TRUMP

by Sophia Bollag

A wave of sexual assault lawsuits threatens to bankrupt Los Angeles County and severely imperil its ability to recover from the January wildfires, lawyers for the nation’s largest county told the California Supreme Court in a filing last week.

Los Angeles County is the biggest public entity sounding an alarm over the crush of child sexual assault lawsuits precipitated by a landmark state law that dramatically expanded the pool of victims who could file claims. But it’s not alone. It joins a chorus of school districts and counties that say the lawsuits threaten their ability to provide for the students and residents they serve. Lawyers for Ventura County said it threatens the “financial viability” of every county and public school district in California. A state agency that advises schools said it could force some districts into receivership.

Los Angeles County faces allegations by more than 7,000 people who say they were abused as children in foster care, juvenile detention or other county programs since the 1950s. They have sued the county under Assembly Bill 218, which extended the age limit to file child sexual abuse claims from 26 to 40 and opened a three-year window for people to file lawsuits for even older allegations. That window closed at the end of 2022, prompting a rush of lawsuits in the weeks before the deadline.

“If all those cases were to proceed to verdict, the estimated liability could be in the tens of billions of dollars and bankrupt the County,” Los Angeles County lawyers wrote. “Even if the County agrees to settle the cases en masse, projected liability is in the billions of dollars.”

That would cause serious financial harm to the county as it recovers from wildfires that represent one of the costliest natural disasters in United States history. The county’s lawyers also argue it will impede Los Angeles County’s ability to combat homelessness. The county has a $49 billion budget.

“While the Legislature’s desire to compensate abuse victims is well-intended, it comes at a crippling cost and without measures to assist public entities in shouldering the resulting liabilities,” the lawyers wrote. “This has produced a statewide crisis.”

Roger Booth, a lawyer who represents about 80 clients suing Los Angeles County under the law, said he’s not an expert in the county’s finances, but cautioned that public institutions often make dramatic claims about their ability to handle liability in cases like these.

“We hear that a lot. It’s hard to gauge how legitimate it is,” he said. “That argument tends to get trotted out whenever you have a government defendant.”

But Deborah A. Carroll, director of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, said it’s very possible that Los Angeles County could go bankrupt over the lawsuits because of the volume of claims against the county and the financial pressures it faces.

Those include the wildfires, but also mass layoffs of government workers threatened by President Donald Trump and efforts by Trump to claw back money appropriated to communities like Los Angeles through the recent bipartisan infrastructure law. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are also threatening to withhold disaster aid for the Los Angeles wildfires, an unprecedented threat in a country where disaster costs have historically been almost completely shouldered by the federal government.

“That is a perfect storm of things that the county is dealing with,” Carroll said.

It would be very difficult for Los Angeles to cover the kind of massive liability represented by the lawsuits without a state bailout or raising taxes, Carroll said.

It’s rare, however, for a county to go bankrupt. State governments usually bail them out before that happens, Carroll said.

But state lawmakers face a tight budget outlook with little room for new spending.

Los Angeles is just one of the entities that may need help covering the costs of the lawsuits, which have targeted a vast swath of counties and school districts across the state.

Los Angeles County is not even involved in the legal case for which it issued the warning.

The county makes its claims about potential bankruptcy in an amicus brief in support of Ventura County, which is fighting a 2021 lawsuit by a woman who says she was sexually abused in 1986 while in foster care in the county. It’s one of seven cases filed under AB218 the county faces from people who say they were abused in the foster care system more than three decades ago.

Ventura County is appealing to the California Supreme Court, arguing that AB218 amounts to an unconstitutional giveaway of public money to alleged sexual abuse victims and their lawyers. Lawyers for Ventura County point to multimillion-dollar verdicts in some cases that have already been adjudicated or settled.

“These gargantuan verdicts are based on historical events completely unconnected to current public-entity administrators and employees, or to the members of the public the entities currently serve,” the lawyers wrote. “Yet these people ultimately bear the brunt of any shifting of current resources to pay ancient claims under AB 218.”

Across the state, public school districts face between $2 billion and $3 billion in costs from the lawsuits, according to a Jan. 31 report by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which helps California schools manage their finances. Much of that liability may be covered by insurance, but the report warns that the massive number of claims from AB218 has made the insurance market for schools “perilously unstable.” The lawsuits have already driven up insurance costs for all districts, even ones not facing lawsuits. The report also notes that the claims can drain programs of resources and impact their ability to deliver services — including to “those who were victimized.”

Michael Fine, who leads the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, said the lawsuits will force some districts to lay off teachers and cut programs. Ones with old claims for which they are uninsured may be forced into receivership, essentially a state takeover of a district that is financially insolvent.

People who have filed the lawsuits, lawyers who represent them and lawmakers who championed AB218 have vociferously pushed back on the argument that settlements and judgments paid to child sexual assault victims are an improper use of public money. In addition to the importance of compensating victims, they argue the financial pressure on school districts and other public entities entrusted to care for children forces them to prevent future sexual assaults.

“Survivors of sexual abuse have a very difficult time coming forward. It can take years and oftentimes what it takes is a critical mass of people coming forward, and that encourages others to do so,” Booth said. “From my standpoint, the law has done an awful lot of good.”

The state Supreme Court has already declined to take up a similar constitutional challenge by a Bay Area school district.

West Contra Costa Unified School District challenged the constitutionality of AB218 as it faces a lawsuit from a former student who says her Richmond High School counselor molested her from 1979-1983. The district argued the law is unconstitutional on the grounds that the Legislature didn’t have authority to allow former students to bring forward sexual misconduct claims that otherwise would have been too old.

Many school districts filed briefs in support of West Contra Costa Unified in the case, arguing that it would force them to fire teachers and end educational programs.

Lawyers for the woman suing West Contra Costa Unified accused school districts of “fearmongering about the impact of AB 218 on public schools,” in their legal arguments against the law.

Opponents’ “overblown rhetoric fails to paper over the absence of evidence supporting this apocalyptic vision,” the lawyers wrote. Opponents “fail to identify a single school district that has gone bankrupt or required a state bailout because of AB 218.”

The woman’s lawyers argued that school districts appear to have enough liability coverage to absorb the costs of the litigation, as well as the ability to issue bonds and pay judgments in installments. Lawmakers, they argued, appropriately determined when they passed the law that people who were sexually abused as children have a right to compensation for their “life-altering trauma” that outweighs the arguments put forward by the districts.

The California Court of Appeal determined that the Legislature had considered districts’ claims of financial distress because of the lawsuits and found that the law was constitutional. The California Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

Thousands of cases filed under the law are still pending up and down the state, but some judgments and settlements have begun to trickle in.

In March of last year, San Francisco Unified agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle with two former George Washington High School students who alleged they were abused on campus by the school’s former athletic director between 2012 and 2016, according to a copy of the settlement agreement.

Later that month, Oakland Unified agreed to pay half a million dollars to settle claims from a student who alleged a school employee molested and threatened her in the mid-1970s when she was 11. The district did not admit fault as part of the settlement, according to a copy of the agreement the Chronicle obtained through a public records request.

Settlement or judgment amounts can vary widely. San Francisco Unified agreed to pay $105,000 to a student who sued in 2017 alleging abuse by a former gym teacher who was arrested that year. In 2023, the district agreed to pay $750,000 to a different student who alleged she was abused by the same teacher.

Even before AB218 took effect, school districts faced potential liability stemming from sexual misconduct claims. For example, Mount Diablo Unified School District in 2023 agreed to pay $3.9 million to a former student who sued in 2017 alleging sexual misconduct by a school employee. But the influx of cases after AB218 took effect ushered in a wave of claims from students, many dating back decades, that school districts and counties still face.

(SF Chronicle)

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MAUREEN CALLAHAN ON THE OSCARS: After all, the biggest winner of the night was Anora, a movie about a young prostitute who gets kidnapped by the Russian mob — a terrifying scene played for laughs — and winds up having sex with one of her abductors.

It was a terrible movie: saggy, aimless, exploitative — young star Mikey Madison is often nude and engaged in demeaning sex — so of course it won Best Picture and a slew of other undeserved awards.

By the way, Anora is director Sean Baker’s fourth film about prostitution. He seems to have quite the fetish — or, in Hollywood-speak, a vision.

“I want to thank the sex worker community,” he said in one speech. “My deepest respect.”

STOP. Just stop. Sex work is the most desperate, demeaning thing a woman can do. These are people who have often been abused themselves, or who wind up in human trafficking, or are drug addicts or otherwise so severely compromised that they have to sell themselves to strangers.

So let’s not valorize this “community,” let alone patronize them.

Finally, to the night’s cruelest cut:

Demi Moore seemed to be on a glide path to winning her first Oscar — for her role in The Substance as an aging actress who resorts to a lethal jab that makes her young and beautiful again, for a time. She was seated front and center, in the literal winner’s circle, only to be humiliated as Anora starlet Madison, 25, won for playing a prostitute.

Moore’s was the one true, feel-good story of the whole night, so how fitting that this entertainment-free show had to deny her.

And Hollywood wonders why we all have ceased to care?

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SINGER MICK JAGGER plans to donate his share of the Rolling Stones catalog to charity instead of leaving it to his children.

Jade with dad Mick and other members of the Jagger family ( Image: Instagram)

The material is valued at US$500 million. According to the artist, his children do not need this money to live. “I want to do something good in the world,” Mick Jagger said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Currently, Jagger’s eldest son is 52 years old and the youngest is six years old. Among his heirs is Lucas, 25 years old, born in 1999, from a relationship with Brazilian woman Luciana Gimenez.

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BACK HOME AGAIN IN INDIANA

(The Major’s mother’s favorite song…)

I have always been a wanderer

Over land and sea

Yet a moonbeam on the water

Casts a spell o’er me

A vision fair I see

Again I seem to be…

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Back home again in Indiana

And it seems that I can see

The gleaming candlelight

Still burning bright

Through the sycamores for me

The new-mown hay sends all its fragrance

Through the fields I used to roam

When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash

How I long for my Indiana home

Fancy paints on memory’s canvas

Scenes that we hold dear

We recall them in days after

Clearly they appear

And often times I see

A scene that’s dear to me

Back home again in Indiana

And it seems that I can see

The gleaming candlelight

Still burning bright

Through the sycamores for me

The new-mown hay sends all its fragrance

Through the fields I used to roam

When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash

How I long for my Indiana home

— James F. Hanley

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The Major’s favorite version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8qJa_vxiiQ

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TRUMP SAYS HE’S ‘JUST GETTING STARTED’ AMID DEMOCRATIC PROTESTS

President Trump, delivering an address to a joint session of Congress six weeks into his second term, aggressively pitched his flurry of actions, including deportations of migrants and the imposition of tariffs against major trading partners, as necessary to restore the strength of the United States. His administration, he said, was “just getting started.”

Mr. Trump repeatedly assailed the Biden administration, seeking to blame the former president for a litany of ills, including high prices and immigration. Mr. Trump also praised the work of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, claiming it had uncovered hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent spending.

Mr. Trump maintained a combative tone throughout his remarks, frequently mocking Democrats. Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, was ejected after heckling the president early in the speech, and some Democrats walked off the floor in protest of the administration’s actions. When Mr. Trump declared an end to the dominance of “unelected bureaucrats,” Democrats scoffed and pointed at Mr. Musk.

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LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT

6 Takeaways From Trump’s Address to Congress

Warning That Trump Will ‘Make You Pay,’ Slotkin Gives Democratic Response

Republican House Members Told to Stop Holding In-Person Town Halls

Zelensky Offers Terms to Stop Fighting, Assuring U.S. That Ukraine Wants Peace

Trump’s Trade War Could Be His Biggest Economic Gamble

‘Final Mission’ for Education Dept. Begins Now, McMahon Says

7 Tesla Charging Stations Torched Near Boston

Concert Ticket Prices Are Soaring, and Busting Gen Z’s Budgets

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The “Dead Horse Theory” illustrates how some individuals, institutions, or nations handle obvious, unsolvable problems. Instead of accepting reality, they cling to justifying their actions.

The core idea is simple: if you realize you’re riding a dead horse, the most sensible thing to do is dismount and move on.

However, in practice, the opposite often happens. Instead of abandoning the dead horse, people take actions such as:

• Buying a new saddle for the horse.
• Improving the horse’s diet, despite it being dead.
• Changing the rider instead of addressing the real problem.
• Firing the horse caretaker and hiring someone new, hoping for a different outcome.
• Holding meetings to discuss ways to increase the dead horse’s speed.
• Creating committees or task forces to analyze the dead horse problem from every angle. These groups work for months, compile reports, and ultimately conclude the obvious: the horse is dead.
• Justifying efforts by comparing the horse to other similarly dead horses, concluding that the issue was a lack of training.
• Proposing training programs for the horse, which means increasing the budget.
• Redefining the concept of “dead” to convince themselves the horse still has potential.

The Lesson:

This theory highlights how many people and organizations prefer to deny reality, wasting time, resources, and effort on ineffective solutions instead of acknowledging the problem from the start and making smarter, more effective decisions.

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THE (FATUOUS) CASE FOR BETRAYING UKRAINE

by Bret Stephens

There’s an argument that passes for a sophisticated defense of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s beat down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday. Here it is in a nutshell:

The United States is spending billions for a war in Ukraine that is not in our vital interests and in which victory is not possible. America’s central foreign-policy concern is our strategic competition with China. But our knee-jerk hostility toward Russia — principally through our cavalier indifference to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, our blind support for Ukraine and our hypocritical posturing about not invading other countries — has merely consolidated Vladimir Putin’s alliance with Beijing and other bad actors in Pyongyang and Tehran.

This is worse than counterproductive; it risks World War III. As with Dwight Eisenhower in the Korean War, the best Trump can do is to bring about a swift end to the conflict through an armistice that preserves Ukraine’s independence but accepts that it won’t be able to reclaim its former borders. If the Europeans now want to take on the risks of defending Ukraine, that’s their business; it is past time they got serious about their own security instead of mooching off the United States, which can ill afford the defense subsidy given our enormous debt.

In the meantime, America expects payback from Ukraine for the support we’ve already given, mainly in the form of critical minerals. And we’ll continue to work to detach Moscow from Beijing’s orbit, not least by welcoming the Russians back to the Group of 7 and other Western councils. As for the moral issue: If Richard Nixon could do business with a monster like Mao Zedong, why can’t Trump do business with Putin?

Now let’s understand why this argument fails.

First, Putin’s grievances with the West did not begin with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine on the eve of the 2022 invasion, or the Obama administration’s support for Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. They did not begin in 2005 — a relatively halcyon period of Western-Russian relations — when Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” They did not even happen with NATO’s enlargement, which, as Rahm Emanuel likes to point out, wasn’t a case of the Atlantic Alliance moving east but of the Eastern Bloc moving west out of a well-placed fear of Russia.

They began in 1989, when Putin, as a K.G.B. officer in East Germany, witnessed the collapse of Soviet power — his power — at the hands of people power. The organizing principle of Putin’s 25-year reign has been the restoration of the former at the expense of the latter. He has done this through the elimination of democracy, the assassination of opponents, cyberattacks on neighboring countries, military invasions, repeated violation of longstanding international agreements and illegal interference in the politics of Western countries.

Putin is not the aggrieved defender of historic Russian interests. He is a malign aggressor in pursuit of a deeply personal ambition. A victory in Ukraine won’t satisfy that ambition; it will whet it.

Second, whether the war in Ukraine is “winnable” in an absolute sense, Kyiv has already demonstrated that it could hold off a full-scale Russian invasion for three years despite painfully inadequate and tardy supplies of Western military equipment. In doing so, it has pioneered tactics that will prove vital to our own defense in future combat — a greater gift to our security than any amount of Ukrainian minerals. And it has destroyed a large percentage of Russian combat power, giving NATO critical time to rearm itself before the next Russian onslaught.

More important, the point of helping Ukraine now isn’t to retake Crimea; it’s to give Ukraine the ability to negotiate an end to the war from a position of strength — and thus to ensure that Russia isn’t tempted to restart the war once it regains its military might. Cutting off arms to Ukraine accomplishes the opposite: It makes a future conflict more likely, not less.

Third, Putin’s closeness to China isn’t a byproduct of the war in Ukraine. If anything, the opposite is true: It was after he announced his “no limits” partnership agreement with China’s Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, 2022, that he felt confident enough to invade Ukraine 20 days later. That partnership, already years in the making, was reaffirmed just days ago — despite Trump’s transparent efforts to appease Putin. The reason is simple: Whatever Russia’s long-term weaknesses vis-à-vis China, Putin and Xi are birds of an ideological feather, intent on overthrowing the U.S.-led liberal international order in favor of a revanchist autocratic order.

That means that the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine won’t strengthen our hand against China: It will merely demonstrate to Xi that aggression ultimately pays and America eventually folds. This will do nothing to detach Moscow from Beijing; on the contrary, it will deepen their alliance and encourage other fundamental challenges to world order, perhaps by jointly helping Iran obtain nuclear weapons — a much surer recipe for World War III than continued support for Ukraine.

How does that sound to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, or Mike Waltz, the national security adviser?

Fourth, the betrayal of Ukraine spells the likely end of NATO. The original purpose of the alliance, in the famous formulation of Lord Ismay, its first secretary general, was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Under Trump, it’s something like the opposite: America out, Russia in, and (the wrong kind of) Germans up.

This isn’t a recipe for getting Europe to shoulder more of the burden for the common defense. It’s an invitation to pandemonium. Some European states will try to preserve a semblance of the old liberal order; others will become clients of Putin; still others will freelance their foreign policy in unpredictable ways. Not least of the fatuities involved in JD Vance’s romance with the Alternative for Germany is that the party is anti-American: its leader, Alice Weidel, has compared Germany’s position to the United States to that of a slave.

Fifth, the idea that we can’t afford to support Ukraine is risible; our aid is a minuscule fraction of the federal budget, and Ukraine could fund its own weapons’ purchases if the U.S. and Europe gave it full access to Russia’s frozen funds. The more important question is this: How much more will we have to spend over decades to defend against a Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis that feels emboldened by an advantageous end to the war in Ukraine?

Finally, it’s odd to think that a MAGA crowd that otherwise rails against progressives for failing to believe in America’s goodness and exceptionalism should take such a naïve view of the motives of our adversaries — or such an unrepentantly cynical view of the uses of American power. Our soldiers didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy for the sake of reaping profits from French vineyards or German coal. They did so to secure a freer world in which America could honorably thrive at nobody else’s expense.

Winston Churchill is often credited with some version of the line about America always doing the right thing only after exhausting all the available alternatives. Under the Trump administration, that wishful thought has never seemed more in doubt.

(NY Times)

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SALLY STANFORD (née Mabel Janice Busby, and political pseudonym Marsha Owen; May 5, 1903 – February 1, 1982) was an American madam, restaurateur, city council member, and a former mayor of Sausalito, California.

From 1940 to 1949, she was madam of a bordello at 1144 Pine Street in the Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, in a house designed by architect Stanford White. Born Mabel Janice Busby, in Baker City, Oregon in 1903, Stanford moved to San Francisco in 1924. She adopted the name Stanford as one of many pseudonyms. According to her autobiography Lady of the House, she saw a newspaper headline about Stanford University’s winning a football game and adopted the surname. In her autobiography, Stanford wrote: “Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you—like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.

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WE DIDN’T HEAR THE MUSK MENTION

Editor:

We’re some of the “whiners and complainers about what Donald Trump has been doing.” Rick Oxford says we weren’t paying attention when Trump was campaigning. We were. We didn’t hear him say Elon Musk was going to be copresident; we didn’t hear him say he was going to fire thousands of federal workers, close important institutions and dismantle the government. We didn’t hear him say he was going to cause confusion and mayhem (although that isn’t a surprise). We did hear him say he was going to bring prices down on the first day and end the Russia-Ukraine war — a bunch of empty promises only his base would believe. How many of those fired federal workers voted for Trump?

The letter also says “he’s only been in office a month. Think what he can do in another three years and eight months.” We shudder to think what this country will look like then. We are embarrassed to be Americans at this point.

Louise & Denny Udall

Santa Rosa

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MEET TRUMP’S NEW BEST FRIEND

by Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump’s attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is dividing the Western alliance, and undermining Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. His actions may prolong the war by convincing Putin he can manipulate Trump into a deal with concessions he couldn’t win on the battlefield.

Trump is cozying up to Vladimir Putin – so, who is Putin?

Putin is a former Soviet spy who spent 16 years in the KGB, where he learned how to manipulate people by playing on their egos, greed and fears. After the end of the Cold War, Putin was named head of the FSB, Russia’s post-KGB intelligence agency. In 1999, Putin was named Prime Minister, becoming president when former President Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin has ruled Russia ever since.

At the heart of Putin’s rule are two forces: corruption and violence.

As Russia’s new leader, Putin, who is now believed to be one of the wealthiest people on earth, consolidated power at home by reining in Russia’s powerful oligarchs. He offered them a simple deal: If they granted him absolute power and shared the spoils, he would let them steal as much as they wanted from the Russian people. The result: while the vast majority of the Russian population struggles economically, Putin and his fellow oligarchs stashed trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens. In the process, Putin crushed Russia’s brief movement toward democracy. He eliminated rivals, cracked down on freedom of speech, and strangled the free media. Political dissidents, investigative journalists, and opposition leaders started turning up dead.

Today, 26 years after he took power, Putin is the absolute ruler of Russia. Russian elections are blatantly fraudulent, with Putin’s lackeys barely hiding their ballot-stuffing. In the last sham election, Putin won 88 percent of the “vote” against carefully screened opposition candidates.

That is Putin’s Russia. There is no freedom of speech. Protests are violently suppressed. Tens of thousands of people are in imprisoned for speaking out against his rule. The bravest and most prominent dissidents – people like Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Magnitsky – are murdered outright. And the billionaire oligarchs become even richer.

That is the leader Trump defends and admires.

But it’s not just repression at home. Putin has also engaged in four brutal wars: in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine (twice). In Chechnya, his forces targeted civilians and medical personnel, flattening entire cities. Against Georgia, he launched an unprovoked invasion and annexed 20 percent the country. In Syria, Russian aircraft bombed schools, hospitals and crowded markets, killing thousands of civilians to prop up the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad. And in Ukraine, Putin has invaded twice, first in 2014 and then again in 2022.

Right now, Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine. Because of Putin’s invasion, over one million people have been killed or injured. Every single day, Russia rains down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin’s forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian “re-education” camps. These atrocities led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 as a war criminal.

Putin has also directly attacked the United States and its allies, repeatedly hacking our computer systems, attempting to sabotage critical infrastructure, meddling in our elections and harassing our diplomats.

That is Donald Trump’s new best friend, Vladimir Putin.

Every American – regardless of his or her political views – should see the current reality clearly. For the first time in American history, we have a president who is prepared to turn his back on our democratic allies and democratic values to align himself with one of the world’s most brutal dictators.

For 250 years, people all over the world have looked to the United States, the longest existing democracy on earth, as a source of inspiration. In many countries, democratic leaders have studied our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution for guidance as to how to form governments of the people, by the people, and for the people. In this difficult historical moment, we cannot let them down. More importantly, we cannot let ourselves down. We cannot turn our backs on democracy and our own history.

We must not allow authoritarians and oligarchs to rule the world.

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FROM COMEDY TO BRUTALITY

by Finian O’Toole

In the 2020 disaster movie ‘Greenland,’ the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States to Canada. We hear on the radio an anouncement from NASA:

“A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will destroy most of Europe upon impact, causing seismic events that will generate 1,000-foot-high tsunamis and 900° surface winds traveling faster than the speed of sound. Within hours, all of the continents will be on fire as the impact’s molten debris rains down from the upper atmosphere.”

The family manages to get on a small plane heading for Greenland. . As they fly, Garrity dreams of a verdant. homeland of lush groves and sprinklers watering the lawn where his wife and child are playing — the lost America from which they are now refugees. He wakes to the sun shining through the window. Then, like Noah on the ark, he spies land: “Look, see it?!” An ice-mottled peninsula, its shoreline washed by a glittering sea, comes into view. A glacier gleams on a craggy, snow-topped mountain. There is more drama with hurtling meteoric fireballs and a crash landing. The family runs to an American air base and, with the military personnel and the other survivors from the plane, finds shelter in a huge underground bunker just as the asteroid is about to obliterate Europe. The screen fades to black. Then we see scenes from the incinerated world: the white of the Sydney Opera House turned a sickly gray by its coat of ash; a twisted and decapitated Eiffel Tower leaning precariously over the dusty traces of Paris; streetscapes that look like the recent drone footage of Gaza or Los Angeles. After what we understand to be the passage of nine months, the doors of the bunker open and the Americans shield their eyes from the dazzling sunlight. Chirping birds fly over the sublime landscape. The survivors emerge into their new New World: Greenland. The next American century begins here.

On January 15, five days before his inauguration for his second term as president, Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland”” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes—long-standing and loyal allies of the US—are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.” Just over a week earlier, in a show of monarchical and dynastic power, Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:

“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland. These events shed some light on the nature of Trump’s second coming. For a start, they mark a transition of Trumpian modes from comedy to brutality. According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in ‘The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,’ buying Greenland was an idea Trump acquired from the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder. But it was not regarded within his first administration as anything other than a flight of fancy:

“After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. ‘You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real’.”

At that time Frederiksen dismissed Trump’s Greenland proposition as “absurd.” And even though Trump was plainly furious at her rebuff, he also played it for laughs. He tweeted a Photoshop mock-up of a mammoth Trump Tower looming over some scattered huts in what looks like an Arctic seaside village: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!” In response the right-wing podcaster Graham Allen tweeted, “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN,” the joke Trump has now repeated not as an absurdist gag but as an American strategic imperative. Trump is signaling that the first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands. “This isn’t real” is a get-out clause for his enablers that has now been canceled. Don Jr. landed in Greenland on the day that devastating wildfires began to destroy the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. Scenes from a disaster movie were playing out in real life as Sunset Boulevard was choked with people trying to flee. The drone footage on the news bulletins was hard to distinguish from the simulated urban wastelands of Hollywood Armageddons.

The conjunction makes a kind of sense: at some level, Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk—a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.

Greenland has an evil double: Puerto Rico. We know from Baker and Glasser that after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, killing more than 3,000 people in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US in a century, Trump asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, “How much hurricane disaster relief are we giving to Puerto Rico?,” and added, “Can we just take that and use it for [the purchase of] Greenland?” Likewise, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, later told MSNBC that in 2018, before a flight to Puerto Rico to inspect the damage, Trump asked him and other officials whether the US could swap the Caribbean island for Greenland.

Thus the cataclysmic consequences of climate chaos — and the people who have to live with them — would become Denmark’s problem, while the US would gain a clean, cool new frontier. The same warped logic was at work in Trump’s expression in early February of his opinion that the United States should annex the Gaza Strip. “I do see a long-term ownership position… Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” (It is telling that, in a Fox News interview six days later, the possession of Gaza had become personal: “I would own this.”) Greenland is largely uninhabited; with 56,000 people living in an area of over 800,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country on earth. Gaza has been rendered almost uninhabitable for its current population, and in Trump’s imagination those people can be made to disappear. Greenland is a postapocalyptic refuge; Gaza looks like the apocalypse has already happened. Each can be envisaged in this twisted thought process as a tabula rasa.

In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business.

Speaking of Greenland after the end of his first term, Trump recalled, “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building, etc. It’s not that different?’ On his flying visit to Greenland in January, Don Jr. may have claimed to be there to see the sights, but he was also no doubt eyeing the sites. Likewise, Trump’s demarche on Gaza follows the rationale of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s public musing in March of 2024 that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…. It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” The template for Gaza is a building in New York City called 100 Central Park South. Trump bought it in 1981. The tenants had enjoyed controlled rents. Trump wanted, as he recalled in ‘The Art of the Deal,’ “to vacate and raze the building.” “It happens to be very easy to vacate a building if, like so many landlords, you don’t mind being a bad guy.” He hired a company that “specialized in relocating tenants.”

As CNN has reported, according to lawsuits filed by those tenants, “Trump had cut off their hot water and heat during New York’s freezing winters and stopped all building repairs.” He was also, for once in his life, overcome with compassion for the destitute and took out newspaper advertisements offering to shelter homeless people at 100 Central Park South. In the end Trump’s plan to demolish the building was thwarted, but the idea has not gone away: force the existing residents out, raze everything to the ground, and you have a site fronting on Central Park or the Mediterranean ready for its lucrative new life. Catastrophes are opportunities.

Climate change has an upside: as the ice sheet that covers three quarters of Greenland melts, enormous mineral and carbon reserves become available for exploitation, and vacant expanses become not just habitable but desirable as northerly refuges from intolerable heat. Israel’s pulverization of Gaza is merely the unfortunate prelude to the creation of what Trump calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Refugees will make way for resorts. The only question, as David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, recently mused on social media, would be whether to call this new US territory “Mar-a-Gaza or Gaz-a-Laro?”

(New York Review of Books)

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