Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 10/22/2025

By AVA News Service on October 22, 2025

SNEAKER WAVE and large surf risk continues through the week. Confidence remains high for an atmospheric river storm impacting Northern California Friday into the weekend. Additional rainfall is forecast to continue through Sunday and possibly into Monday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 54F under a mix of fog & high clouds this Wednesday morning on the coast. Some southern showers heading our way should stay south of us but bring us plenty of clouds today. The southern system will give way to a northern system dropping down on what looks like later of Friday thru the weekend.

LISA MARIE BROWN LEE

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Lisa Marie Lee, 59, on the morning of October 18, 2025, at Pioneer House Health Center in Sacramento, California, with her devoted husband Mike by her side holding her hand, after a courageous but brief battle with glioblastoma.

Born in Bellflower, California, Lisa brought love, laughter, and creativity to everyone who knew her. She will be remembered for her loud, contagious laugh, her artistic spirit, and the joy she shared with family and friends. Lisa delighted in making hand-painted wooden Christmas yard decorations, a hobby that showcased her talent and creativity.

Lisa is survived by her loving husband Michael Murphy of Fort Bragg, CA, her children, Justin Murphy, of Fort Bragg and Taylor Murphy of Ukiah, CA, her grandchildren, Alexia Renteria and Colson Phillips, She is also survived by her mother Rachel Brown of El Paso, TX and her siblings Sheri White (Rich) Grand Junction, CO Kerry Brown (Cheryl) Santa Rosa, CA. Kevin Brown (Sheila) Mesquite, NV Erika Blanshard (Johnny) El Paso, TX and Nikki Estep (Terry) Centennial, CO.

She is preceded in death by her father, Alfred Brown and her sisters, Susan Larsen and Michele Nicoli. Lisa will also be remembered by her extended family, including Aunt Tina Cervantes, Aunt Esther Nevarez , Uncle Danny Nevarez and numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews.

Lisa’s warmth, humor, and love for her family will be deeply missed but never forgotten.

Arrangements for a memorial or celebration of life will be shared with family and friends at a later date.

CHINESE PISTACHE TREES of UKIAH

One of Ukiah’s absolute glories is the run of pistachios along School Street in the fall. Don’t let the city take them down to repair the sidewalks! Do a work around!

SUPERVISORS TO CONSIDER REVERSING AUDITOR-TREASURER CONSOLIDATION

by Mark Scaramella

At their typical snail’s pace, Mendocino County finally seems ready to correct the rash and ill-advised December 2021 decision to consolidate the County’s Treasurer/Tax Collector and Auditor-Controller offices. Not only did the County lose several experienced financial officials in the move, but the offices were disrupted forcing remaining staff to scurry around trying to keep up with reporting deadlines. Among other negative impacts, the County’s tax collection office, already depleted and delayed by covid at the time, suffered further delays in collecting taxes due as the County fell deeper and deeper into a burgeoning budget deficit.

On Tuesday, current Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison urged the board to begin the process to disentangle the offices, pointing out that the Board has to make an official decision before the end of the year so that it can be on the ballot in June of 2026. Why the 2021 Supervisors (John Haschak dissenting) could consolidate the offices without an election but the unconsolidation requires an election was not explained.

Back in 2021 everybody but the four supervisors who voted for the consolidation — chiefly former Supervisor Glenn McGourty and current supervisor Ted Williams, along with Supervisors Dan Gjerde and Maureen Mulheren – were against the idea, including the officials involved, the Mendocino Farm Bureau and everybody else who had an opinion on the subject. The basic idea that the person in charge of revenue should not be in charge of expenses was unceremoniously tossed out the window by the Board based on unfounded charges from Williams that the Board wasn’t getting financial status reports from the Auditor — reports that the CEO ought to provide (and still does not).

The consolidation of the offices coincided with the now-discredited charges by District Attorney David Eyster that elected Auditor Chamise Cubbison had somehow connived to pay the County’s payroll manager for overtime that the payroll manager actually worked. After more than 17 months of legal stalling and obstructionism by the County, those charges were dramatically tossed last year by Superior Court Judge Ann Moorman at Cubbison’s long-delayed preliminary hearing with Moorman denouncing the County’s “investigation” and the convenient post-charge disappearance of exculpatory emails.

That hearing also uncovered the fact that District Attorney Eyster had met with the Sheriff’s investigator multiple times to steer the investigation against Cubbison that lead to the bogus charges being filed.

Prior to charges being filed District Attorney Eyster, irked by Cubbison’s questioning of his asset forfeiture spending, emailed former Supervisor McGourty outlining how the Board could oust Cubbison by combining the financial offices. That backfired when Cubbison was elected to the newly created Auditor-Treasurer position. Eyster then filed the charges that were later tossed, but on which the Board had wrongly based their suspension of Cubbison without pay.

Cubbison filed a civil suit against the County for denial of due process, defamation and wrongful suspension which is still underway as County officials drag their feet running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside attorney fees in advance of what many believe will be a multi-million dollar settlement.

Interestingly, Tuesday’s belated unconsolidation proposal comes at a time when the County is being audited by the State Controller leading to speculation that the Board is anticipating criticism of the consolidation since the state controller has already gone on record saying that the consolidation was made without a required “risk analysis.”

On Tuesday, Board Chair John Hashack revealed that he has been working on an agenda item to unconsolidate the offices for some time after Cubbison and several others, including the County Farm Bureau reps, urged the County to undo the misguided consolidation on Tuesday.

It is also interesting that Haschak’s previously undisclosed plans to introduce an item to undo the consolidation was happening while Cubbison’s suit is pending.

Haschak said that he expected to have an agenda item for the mid-November Board meeting so that the unconsolidation process can proceed to the June 2026 ballot on time.

Also on Tuesday, onlookers were surprised that the two current supervisors who supported the consolidation back in 2021 — Maureen Mulheren and Ted Williams — offered no objection to Haschak’s plan to undo it.

But anyone who follows County affairs knows that such intentions, perhaps well-meaning but very belated, are unlikely to unfold in anything like a timely manner.

FORT BRAGG KIDNAPPING LEADS TO TWO ARRESTS

On October 20, 2025, at approximately 11:04 p.m., the Fort Bragg Police Department received a report of a possible kidnapping that had just occurred in the 700 block of North Main Street. The reporting party stated that two male suspects forced a female victim into a white sedan before fleeing the area.

Officers immediately issued a “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) for the suspect vehicle and began canvassing the area. Within 9 minutes of the initial call for service, officers located the suspect vehicle parked behind the Fort Bragg Fire Department occupied by both suspects and the female victim. The suspects, Jose Plascencia (25) and Douglas Hance (45), both from Fort Bragg, were detained. The victim was rescued and taken to a safe location nearby.

Through their investigation, officers determined the victim had been forcibly pulled into the vehicle, threatened at gun point, and sexually assaulted.

Additionally, both suspects were determined to be on active probation out of Mendocino County.

Based on the investigation Plascencia was arrested and booked into the Mendocino County Jail for Kidnapping, False Imprisonment, Conspiracy to Commit a Crime, Probation Violation, Assault with Intent to Commit Rape, Possession of a Loaded Firearm,– Possession of Ammunition by a Prohibited Person,– Possession of an Illegal Firearm. Hance was arrested and booked into the Mendocino County Jail for Conspiracy to Commit a Crime, Kidnapping, False Imprisonment, and Probation Violation.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is encouraged to contact Sergeant Frank at (707)961-2800 ext. 223 or email [email protected].

This information is being released by Commander Jonathan McLaughlin. For media inquiries, please reach out to him directly at [email protected].

In 2018 the following article was submitted to the AVA from the Delinquency Prevention Commission of Mendocino County:

Stabbed!

by Jose Plascencia

It all started with a bottle of alcohol. I was headed to the store with a friend after drinking a whole bottle of Bombay together; we stopped to talk to two older men. My friend asked one of the guys for a cigarette and he got a rude answer. At that point I jumped in because I knew they were going to start fighting. The guy’s drugged out friend said he had a knife, and I heard him unstrap it from his leg. He took two steps and drove the long buck knife through my left arm. It went in one side and came out the other. I was too drunk to feel anything.

It all happened so fast. I was trying to protect myself by putting my hands up to my face. My blood came spilling out like a waterfall. I didn’t know how bad it was or how to help myself. I was mesmerized because I could feel the warm blood running down my fingers as I pushed the piece of meat that was dangling down from my arm back into place. I needed help right away, so I ran home with my arm sliced open. I was panicked; my body was trembling and my head was somewhere else, but the blood just kept pouring out.

When I got home I found my mom, her boyfriend and my sisters. Everyone was screaming and yelling because there was blood everywhere. My whole body felt tingly because blood thins out and flows faster when you drink.

On the way to the hospital I was fading in and out of consciousness. At the hospital, the nurse took one look at my arm and knew that I needed to be flown to a hospital in Sacramento. They weren’t trained to handle this severe of a wound. I was really scared because they said I needed microscopic surgery. They started cleaning and pulling at the flesh that was dangling from my arm. That’s when it hurt the most.

After that, they gave me some drugs for the pain and laid me flat on a gurney. They cut off all my clothes and started inspecting every part of my body for more wounds. I felt really embarrassed, frozen and powerless. I was in surgery for ten hours. The cut ran from my palm all the way up to my elbow. It took three weeks for it to fully close.

If I had been sober it would have ended differently. Being intoxicated can lead to death or life in prison for hurting someone and not even realizing it, like what happened to John Mendoza. I never wanted my mom to see me in so much pain. She was so worried; she was crying about what happened. It is mentally exhausting to know that what happened was my fault for drinking a bottle. I love my mom with my whole heart. She is the strongest woman I know. I put her through so much worry and pain in the past few years, because I have been incarcerated several times for fighting. The most painful part for me is watching my mom suffer. No one ever warned me about much, so I learned the hard way, through what happened to me with my friends.

Taking things for granted is not an option for me because I know how much my mom really loves me. When the phone rings it makes her jump, because she doesn’t know if something has happened to me. For that reason, I try my best to stay out of trouble. She doesn’t deserve all the pain I’ve given her.

Another important lesson I learned is that the people who you drink and do drugs with won’t reach out with their hearts and treat you right when you really need it. The friend I was with when I got stabbed told me, “Everything will be all right. Don’t call the cops,” when blood was spilling from my arm. Everything was not all right!

Looking forward in life makes me think about the whole situation. I want to evolve to be a better, stronger person and hang out with people who do care and will be there to help when I need them. Hopefully, my story can help other young people step back and analyze what they are doing to themselves and to others when they drink alcohol.

(This essay by 17-year old Fort Bragg High student Jose Plascencia won the $500 first place award in a recent contest sponsored by Heroes for Youth and the Delinquency Prevention Commission of Mendocino County.)

BOARD OF SUPES TO CONSIDER SEPARATING FISCAL OFFICES OF AUDITOR-CONTROLLER AND TREASURER-TAX COLLECTOR

Separation could take place before 2026 election if board acts promptly

by Elise Cox

Mendocino County’s top fiscal officer, Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison, urged the Board of Supervisors Tuesday to undo a 2021 ordinance that merged her office’s functions and called for both positions to once again be independently elected.

“It remains my professional opinion that the offices of the Auditor-Controller and Treasurer-Tax Collector should be independent offices elected by the people,” Cubbison told the board. “It is also the professional opinion of my colleagues throughout the state.”

Cubbison said her request reflects the consensus of members of the California State Association of County Auditors and the California Association of Treasurer-Tax Collectors, both of which favor keeping the fiscal offices separate. She noted that Lassen County recently reversed a similar merger, passing an ordinance in April 2024 to restore separate elected offices starting in 2026.

The Lassen County ordinance followed a 2023-24 report by the Lassen County Civil Grand Jury, which criticized the consolidation of the Auditor-Controller and Treasurer-Tax Collector offices, citing significant administrative and oversight problems after the merger.

“I fully support and request this board take the necessary steps to repeal the ordinance that was enacted in 2021,” Cubbison said. “I implore you to please take this action as soon as possible and have an item come back before you in November and December.”

Supervisor Ted Williams asked whether anyone was already working on the proposal.
“Yes,” Cubbison replied.

Cubbison advised the board to direct staff to bring an item forward. “It does not appear to be very complicated,” she said. “But it does need to happen either at the November 18 and December meetings or some other combination of two meetings.”

Supervisor Bernie Norvell said he supported that idea. “My only concern is the timeline. I believe when the offices were consolidated, the board didn’t take the necessary steps of … a risk analysis… I think it would be prudent to try and get that done instead of making the same mistake twice.”

Norvell volunteered to serve on an ad hoc committee to complete that work. Chair John Haschak agreed, noting he had already been in communication with Cubbison. “If you want to work with me on it, that’s great,” he told Norvell.

The ad hoc committee was formally created with the expectation it would report back to the board on November 18.

Public calls for accountability, transparency

During public comment, speakers overwhelmingly supported restoring the two elected offices.

“It was a mistake,” said Theresa McNerlin. “I think it’s okay to accept that a mistake was made in consolidating them, and I think we should just own up to it and fix that mistake.”

McNerlin said the Mendocino County Republican Central Committee, Democratic Central Committee, and Farm Bureau all back separating the positions. “Every organization wants these to be two separate offices with two separate elected officials for the utmost accountability,” she said.

Kerri Vau, chair of Mendo Matters cited outside findings. “You also have had the State of California Comptroller’s Office that did an audit that suggested that this happen,” she said. “You’ve had the grand jury that has also suggested that this could help you … including the transparency that’s needed.”

Julie Golden, who serves as chair of the Hopland Municipal Advisory Council, urged quick action before the next election cycle. “The elected officials like the treasurer-tax collector and auditor provide a layer of independence and direct public accountability that we deserve,” she said. “I strongly encourage you … to not just think about this, but to take action immediately.”

Estelle Clifton, president of the board of directors of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau, echoed that sentiment. “You lose checks and balances,” she said. “So it’s even more important … that you take the timeline seriously and do your work.”

Online, Adam Gaska of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau also voiced support. “I just wanted to reiterate Mendocino County Farm Bureau’s support of separating the two offices back into two elected offices,” he said. “We urge you to move forward … as soon as is legally possible.”

Next steps

Chair John Haschak said an agenda item could come to the board as soon as November 18, depending on scheduling. “We do understand that there are time considerations,” he said. “To get it on the ballot and everything.”

If the board acts before the end of the year, the separation could take effect in time for the 2026 election.

(www.mendolocal.news)

COASTAL HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER STRIKES OUT ON REHAB; NOW HEADING TO STATE PRISON.

Finally overcoming Hofstadter's law (“It always takes longer than you expect”), the prosecution of defendant Gina Rae Bean, age 47, of Fort Bragg, came to an anticlimactic conclusion Tuesday afternoon in the Mendocino County Superior Court.

Having recently been found to have violated the terms of her supervised probation for a second time, Bean was finally sentenced by Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Keith Faulder to 36 months in state prison, the prison sentence that was imposed but suspended by Judge Moorman back in December 2021.

As background, defendant Bean was the driver of the automobile in July 2019 that hit 21-year-old skateboarder Calum Taite Pulido, age 21, as young Pulido was traversing Highway 1 on his skateboard.

Rather than stopping to render aid, the defendant instead drove away and later enlisted the aid of a friend to hide her hit-and-run vehicle in a local auto body shop.

Without somebody to render assistance who could and should have quickly called for medical help, young Pulido died from his collision injuries.

After being convicted by guilty verdict of felony hit-and-run driving causing death on September 30, 2021, the defendant was shown leniency by the court at the December 2021 sentencing hearing.

That leniency manifested itself as an opportunity to participate in alcohol and drug rehab, as well as to demonstrate a change in lifestyle by complying with other terms and conditions of formal supervised probation.

To incentivize the defendant to get it right and make amends, the court ordered that Bean serve a three-year state prison sentence but suspended the execution of that sentence pending the defendant’s successful completion of probation (to mean without committing a probation violation).

It took less than a year for Bean to screw up and violate her probation by being in unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia.

At a November 2022 probation violation sentencing hearing before coast Judge Clayton Brennan, the imposition of the suspended state prison sentence that should have happened did not happen.

Instead, Judge Brennan simply ordered the defendant to serve the original local jail sentence that was part of her probation from December 2021 that she had not yet begun to serve plus 60 extra county jail days.

Upon her release from that county jail time, defendant Bean was ordered by her probation officer to report immediately to and complete residential rehab at a program located in Santa Cruz. The defendant did not show up on time as directed and eventually left that program without permission.

Having left the program without permission, the defendant thereafter went underground and dropped from sight and supervision for over two years.

When she was eventually back in custody, the second round of violation proceedings got underway leading up to today's conclusion.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Eloise Kelsey personally handled the prosecution of Bean through the original trial and the first violation of probation proceedings.

District Attorney David Eyster personally handled the prosecution of Bean in the second violation of probation proceedings and represented the People of the State of California at Tuesday's sentencing hearing.

THIS IS CLAY THE FROG at Mudhut Ceramic Studios (Tina Tenzel)

FORT BRAGG APPROVES UTILITY ASSISTANCE FUNDING FOR LOW-INCOME FAMILIES

by Devon Dean

On Oct. 13, the Fort Bragg City Council unanimously approved a resolution to offer financial assistance to residents needing help paying utility bills through a Community Development Block Grant.

Fort Bragg received a first-time federal grant of $300,000 for the 2024 funding year to facilitate a Utility Bill Assistance Program that would provide payments directly to utility providers on behalf of qualified households and cover staff expenses.

“This is assistance in its purest form,” City Grants Coordinator Lacey Sallas explained at the most recent City Council meeting. “This helps them dig out from an emergency. It’s a one-time payment to aid Fort Bragg residents who are in danger of having their utilities turned off.”

City Manager Isaac Whippy said in an interview that now, once the resolution is passed, the focus will now shift to spreading the word on how people can apply. “Reaching out to our utility customers,” he said. “It’s income qualification and sending it specifically to our past due customers in paper utility bills or in the form of an email notification.”

Whippy says notices will blanket Fort Bragg social media, and the City Manager e-newsletter will spotlight the application process, which anyone can subscribe to via the City of Fort Bragg website. He says the city also wants to work with local nonprofits like Project Sanctuary to ensure as many people as possible know about the program and have the chance to apply.

Qualifying households must be within the Fort Bragg city limits with an income at or below 80% of the area median income for Mendocino County. Payments can be applied to water/sewer services, electricity, waste collection and gas services.

“This iteration attempts to combine elements that make the program accessible, efficient and equitable,” Sallas said in the meeting. Residents can receive up to $800 in assistance as a one-time payment and can reapply if additional aid is needed.

This is not the first time Fort Bragg has stepped up to aid its own. City officials offered financial aid to low-income families in need twice before in recent years. The city operated a utility bill program from 2021 to 2023 to address needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also offered water and sewer bill assistance from 2015 to 2017 through the HELP H2O program.

“We see it every day,” Whippy said. “Folks sometimes struggle to pay bills on time and end up getting shut-off notices. We always want to be flexible by having the utility companies offer payment plans, waiving late fees, etc. Programs like this really fill the gap and help. We’ve seen it the two previous times we’ve offered similar aid. We want people to get caught up on paying the necessary bills.” He said these programs go a long way to relieve pressure on hardworking families at a time when energy costs are on the rise across the country.

Aid will be distributed through 2028 or until the funding runs out.

Anyone wanting to apply for assistance can do so by picking up an application at City Hall at 416 North Franklin St. or emailing [email protected] for a copy. The city finance department is also offering guidance on how to fill out the form and can be reached at (707) 961-2825.

(Mendocino Voice)

Botanical gardens…Fort Bragg CA (Nancy Lou Milano)

PROTESTERS FILL THE BRIDGE - FORT BRAGG’S ‘NO KINGS’ MARCH DRAWS OVER 2,000

by Carole Brodsky

On Saturday, October 18th, approximately 2,300 people lined the east side of Fort Bragg’s Noyo Harbor Bridge, beginning at Oceanview Drive spanning Main Street to North Harbor Drive as they participated in the second “No Kings” March, organized locally by the Mendocino Coast chapter of Indivisible, the national organization responsible for coordinating the previous No Kings March last June, as well as other peaceful protest activities.

Organizers estimated that attendance on Saturday’s march exceeded the previous high number of 2,000 protesters who came out in June of this year. “It is very difficult to estimate the exact size of the crowd, noted one volunteer. “People aren’t standing still. They’re walking up and down the bridge.” At the peak of the march, protesters stood 2-3 persons deep along the bridge, with a nearly constant stream of cars honking their horns in support of the marchers.

“We’re here to show our determination to save our democracy, to save our freedoms, and to preserve rights for all,” said Cynthia Gair, a local Indivisible volunteer. “America doesn’t ‘do’ kings,” she continued. “We’re here for all Americans, regardless of party. This is a crisis point for our country. We’re here together, trying to prevent an autocratic takeover of our government.”

Nearby, a group of musicians sang the classic, “Down By the Riverside” to the assembled, and further up the sidewalk, another group of musicians sang the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land is Your Land.” One protester walked with a boom box, loudly broadcasting Jean Knight’s classic, “Mr. Big Stuff,” a not-so-veiled reference to the Commander-in-Chief.

The mood was decidedly upbeat. No law enforcement presence was noted, nor was one needed. The recent utilization of inflatable animals at the recent Portland demonstrations seems to have taken hold, or maybe it’s just a nod to the Halloween season. There were no shortages of blow-up characters, from dinosaurs to dragons to chickens and aliens, parading up and down the approximately half-mile span of the bridge.

Bess Power is a Navy Veteran. “I served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1971,” she explains. “I’m trying to save our country and our rights. What this administration has done to VA benefits is criminal,” Power continued, adding that she became “nauseated” while watching the recent speeches presented by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Trump to 800 decorated Flag Officers. “I just tell people to get out and vote. Please help save our country.”

Another family with a sign in support of Proposition 50 drove to the march from Hendy Woods. “We live in Dublin. We were camping in Philo, but we didn’t want to miss this important event,” said the parent. “It was important that we were here to protest.”

One protestor held a sign with a picture of 1715’s Mad King George III, alongside a similar photo of Donald Trump. “My grandson helped design the poster, so it was a great way to get him involved. I’m here because of what ICE is doing, because our government is ignoring due process with the killings taking place in international waters, and because of the treatment of so-called ‘illegal aliens,’” she notes. “We have to fight back against the corruption and the grifting by the elite and privileged,” she continued, adding she feels Democrats are letting down working people by not fighting more powerfully during the governmental shutdown.

One man walked through the crowd, his aging dog assisted by a canine wheelchair supporting the pup’s back legs. He carried a sign, saying, “Kristi Noem would have shot me.” The vast majority of protestors chose to display signs full of wit, sarcasm, love, and historical references as they faced the weekend stream of drivers on Highway One.

“You will meet people here from all parties,” said one protester. “I almost fell over in shock when I saw my next-door neighbor out here,” said another gentleman. “I’m so glad to see him here.”

Other marches and events were held in Willits, Ukiah, Anderson Valley, Point Arena, and Gualala.

Nationally, Indivisible announced an estimated 7 million individuals attended one of more than 2,600 protests nationwide, making it the largest protest in US history.

Long-time Mendocino County resident Esther Faber was volunteering at the event. Her sign bore photos of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump, with the words, “I Know Who I Trust. How About You?”

“We are here because we are trying to push back against the potential takeover of our democracy,” Faber noted.

Indivisible Mendocino Coast holds regular marches every Saturday at the Noyo Harbor Bridge from 11:00 to 12:00. To get involved or for more information, visit their Facebook page.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

DAM REMOVAL PROPONENT: ‘You can’t own water.’

by Justine Frederiksen

Most of the arguments for and against the proposed removal of the Potter Valley Project dams in recent years have pitted the rights of humans against the rights of fish when it comes to determining the best use of the water that has been trapped and pulled from the Eel River for more than 100 years.

But one woman representing the Round Valley Tribes of Mendocino County recently argued that the rights of the Eel River itself should reign supreme, as she described the water in the river “as a living thing” that deserves to be freed from both Scott Dam and Cape Horn dams as soon as possible.

“We see the water as having rights of its own and needing protection, as well as being respected as a living being, and that the natural system of this river is to be flowing,” Nikcole Whipple told the California State Water Board Friday during one of four “scoping meetings” held while state officials prepare an Environmental Impact Report for the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project Surrender and Decommissioning, which was applied for by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the owner of the facility built 12 decades ago.

To begin the Oct. 17 meeting, Wilhelmina Chon, Hydroelectric Project Manager, described herself as an “environmental scientist in the division of water rights,” and that the State Water Board was involved in the decommissioning process because it “has authority over water rights and water quality in the state,” and is tasked with “preserving and protecting the state’s water.”

Chon further explained that state officials were preparing an EIR for the proposed dam removals because “PG&E is not a public agency.” She also noted that the Eel-Russian Project Authority, which seeks to modify the existing diversion facilities during the dams removal and create a “New Eel-Russian Facility, or NERF,” will be submitting a separate EIR for that project, and that the “State Water Board’s EIR will evaluate the potential cumulative impacts of the Proposed Project (i.e., surrender and decommissioning of the Hydroelectric Project) together with construction and operation of the NERF.”

“I ask that you understand that about water rights and how they apply,” Whipple further urged the board, explaining that the Round Valley Tribes represent “seven different Tribes all connected to the Eel River,” and that water rights do not give anyone ownership of the water, rather only “the right to use the water. There is no alternative than to take (these dams) down.”

In contrast, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors this week is considering passing a resolution declaring the importance of maintaining the Potter Valley Project dams, arguing that the “water diverted through the PVP has formed the foundation for community development, agriculture, and economic stability throughout Mendocino County including Potter Valley, Redwood Valley, Ukiah Valley, Hopland, and other downstream Russian River communities; and the removal of Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam would eliminate this critical water source serving community health and safety, causing significant harm to residents, agriculture, property values, and the long-term viability of rural communities and the region; and it is the strong desire of Mendocino County constituents and communities directly impacted by the Potter Valley Project to see the existing infrastructure maintained, protected, and responsibly managed.”

The proposed resolution was scheduled to be discussed by the Board of Supervisors “no earlier than 11 a.m.” on Tuesday, Oct. 21.

In the meantime, the State Water Board will be preparing a draft EIR for the proposed PVP Surrender and Decommissioning and “is seeking comments from trustee agencies, responsible agencies, Tribes, and interested persons concerning the scope and content of the environmental information to be included in the EIR.”

Please provide the name and contact information for a person that may be contacted if there are questions about the comment(s).

The comment deadline is 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. Please title your comments as ‘Potter Valley NOP Comments’ and send them to Wilhelmina Chon, Hydroelectric Project Manager, (email preferred) to: [email protected]

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

NAME THAT TUNE!

BIG RIVER - WHAT IS OWED

by Jennifer Rumble

A commercial business on Big River is, in this case, the prize. Keep your eyes on that. It is not a judgment of a young family with great initiative and the wherewithal to build a novel business in a location prized by residents, enchanted visitors and generations of wildlife.

We owe each other the focus to ensure that the system, established to preserve and honor this particular environmentally sensitive habitat, remains intact.

After that sauna door opens, it is not simply steam, smoke or resultant healing that is the concern. Precedent produces policy-in time. Food services, board rentals, whatever enhances the experience at the beach could become the next commercial proposal. Selling points that change overall use patterns on the beach by people and native species.

This “beach” is a conservancy-it is, by policy, established to be shared with other species striving to survive. The Big River Conservancy is there to conserve all that exists within its bounds-from the hauled out seals, the osprey, the innumerable aquatic species, the land corridors, and on.

That is our responsibility and legacy.

100 WOMEN STRONG MENDOCINO COAST

Fall event: October 23, 2025 | 6-7:30 p.m. | Eagles Hall, Fort Bragg

Fall 2025 Nominees

Mendocino County Safe Space Project
Mendocino Dance Project
Redwood Coast Seniors

https://communityfound.org/community/leadership-projects/100-women-strong-mendocino-coast/

If you have any questions or concerns, please email [email protected]

LOCAL EVENTS (this week)

MENDO IS CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF NEWSOM'S REDISTRICTING PROPOSAL

by Anabel Sosa

Californians will soon be casting their votes on Proposition 50 to decide whether the state should redraw its congressional districts. While the measure would ostensibly help state Democrats by creating new districts that are more favorable to liberal candidates, some Democrats are opting to stay out of the discussion.

That includes supervisors in Mendocino County, a lush and rural swath of Northern California, which is literally at the splitting point of these proposed maps. If Prop. 50 passes, the county would be divided in half, and its voter population would be spread out between two congressional districts.

But in a vote last month, only one of the five politicians who sit on Mendocino County’s Board of Supervisors wanted the board to publicly support Prop. 50. He reasoned the measure is in the best interest of their rural voting base.

“An endorsement would have sent a signal to the public that is where we stand as a board and county. And it’s important to take a stand on this vital issue,” said John Haschak, a Democrat on the Mendocino County board who told SFGATE about why he pushed for a public endorsement of the measure.

But all four of his fellow supervisors — two Democrats and two Republicans — disagreed, saying they’d prefer to stay out of national politics. Board Vice Chair Bernie Norvell said during a public meeting at the end of last month that it’s not the “board’s purview to get into the circus of what the Republicans and the Democrats are doing at the national level.” Other cities have come forward in support of Prop. 50, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as Marin County.

Some voters living in rural communities fear new maps will give urban residents outsize political weight and consequently dilute the rural voice and bury critical rural issues. Haschak, however, points out that under the redrawn maps, Mendocino County would be represented by two members of Congress instead of one. This, he said, would substantially help voters by giving them more representation in Washington.

“They were saying we will lose representation, we’ll split the county. … They used that as all negative, while I think that’s a real positive,” he said.

Haschak said rural issues like fire management and health care access would still be at the forefront. He said 47% of residents in his district are enrolled in Medi-Cal, a federal health care program that is being slashed under Republican leadership.

Mendocino County is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, whose 2nd District stretches all the way to the Oregon border. If Prop. 50 passes, Huffman would instead represent a smaller swath of Mendocino and also liberal Marin and a section of Sonoma County, as well as a strip of rural coast into Humboldt, Siskiyou and Modoc counties. The redrawn 1st District would cover another section of Mendocino, Santa Rosa, Ukiah and Chico.

That would dilute the Republican vote in a historically conservative district and put longtime Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Republican, at risk of losing his seat next year. One Democrat, Audrey Denney, has already put her name in the hat to run against LaMalfa.

Mendocino County Supervisor Maureen Mulheren told SFGATE in a phone call that she personally is voting “yes” on Prop. 50, largely because she fears that under a GOP-led Congress, her county will continue to see devastating cuts to federal programs including food stamps and health care.

She voted against Haschak’s resolution for the board to publicly support the measure, though, because she doesn’t “believe our role is to take up these kinds of issues. … Haschak can think that if he wants to. We just disagree on what the board’s role is.”

Haschak pointed to the irony of the board refusing to take up a position on redistricting, even though both the board and the county sheriff publicly endorsed a controversial criminal justice reform measure last year.

Meanwhile, conservative Supervisor Madeline Cline told SFGATE in an email that redistricting is a “step backwards” and that “our role as supervisors” is to be nonpartisan.

“I do not feel it is appropriate for us to be weighing in as the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors,” Cline wrote. “The way this conversation came before our board was inappropriate and had nothing to do with the impacts to Mendocino County and its constituents."

Gov. Gavin Newsom has pitched redistricting as a way to counter Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas and Missouri. He has garnered high-profile supporters.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, October 21, 2025

JEANNETTE BARNARD, 52, Ukiah. Grand theft, theft by use of access card info, conspiracy.

ROBERT BELL, 42, Laytonville. Under influence, probation revocation, bringing controlled substance into jail.

DUNCAN CHARLES, 28, Fort Bragg. DUI.

KENNETH DEWITT JR., 44, Ukiah. Parole violation.

DOUGLAS HANCE, 45, Fort Bragg. Kidnapping, false imprisonment, conspiracy, probation revocation.

LAMONT JONES JR., 48, Ukiah. Trespassing, probation revocation.

HEATHER MARSH-HAAS, 35, Ukiah. Parole violation.

CHERRAL MITCHELL, 41, Ukiah. Check forgery.

JOSE PLASCENCIA, 25, Fort Bragg. Kidnapping, assault with intent to rape, false imprisonment with violence, loaded firearm in public, ammo possession by prohibited person, undetectable firearm, conspiracy, probation revocation.

NATALIE RODRIGUEZ, 34, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, parole violation, resisting.

QUADE SMITH, 23, Covelo. Attempted witness intimidation.

FROM EBAY, ANOTHER POSTCARD OF SEMI-LOCAL INTEREST: Cloverdale Citrus Fair, 1907

MCKINLEY REDUX

Editor:

When candidate Donald Trump declared “make America great again,” I wondered what age or century he was talking about. Today it looks like the Gilded Age presidency of William McKinley (1896-2001), which was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. A champion of tariffs to protect American industry against European imports, McKinley launched a new wave of imperialism, seizing Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. Although Filipinos fought for their independence, 200,000 “insurgents” were killed in the Philippines-American War before it became a colony. In Central America and the West Indies, U.S. Marines and gunboat diplomacy protected American interests.

It was an age of xenophobia, nativism and racism: California excluded immigrants from China, ethnic restrictions were placed on immigration, and Jim Crow enforced white supremacy in the South. Robber barons dominated industry and finance, controlled state and national legislatures and accumulated huge fortunes, while the National Guard shot and killed striking workers. It’s déjà vu all over again: Corruption reigns, oligarchs rule, tariffs jumped prices, troops occupy cities, justice is denied, friendly neighbors are threatened, gunboats are sent to the Caribbean, and white South Africans are welcomed.

Tony White

Santa Rosa

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I think the 60s might have been the last time protests were effective. But Nixon still managed to get elected and re-elected. In honor of those protests, whenever I see a protest, I will offer up the chant, "Hell no, we won't go!" Fewer and fewer know what I am talking about.

OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO SAY, NO TROOPS!, NO KINGS!

Photoessay by David Bacon

OAKLAND, CA - Thousands of people rally in Oakland’s Wilma Chan Park, and march to Lake Merritt, to protest the illegal actions and immigration raids of President Trump, and his threat to bring the National Guard to Oakland.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Thousands of people rally at the Embarcadero, and march to the San Francisco Civic Center, to protest the illegal actions and immigration raids of President Trump, and his threat to bring the National Guard to San Francisco.

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2025/10/photos-from-edge-21-oakland-and-san.html

WHO CARES?

by Holly

Asked by the New York Times about the October 18 "No Kings" rallies, White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson replied, "Who cares?”

Saturday, October eighteenth, 2025

I wish I could stay at home and did not have to drive.

But I’ll leave my house today for more important things:

Standing side by side with people who protest NO KINGS!

CHORUS ( optional)

Old folks, young folks, we can co-exist

Saying no to tyranny, we shall all resist.

ABC and CBS and MSNBC

Sent out their reporters to see what they could see.

“Nobody has ever held a protest on this scale!”

“Who cares?” said the White House secretary Abigail.

Elvis, frogs and unicorns are singing into mikes

Folks are tossing off their clothes and hopping onto bikes

Did our twenty million marchers catch you unawares?

And your best response is meekly muttering, “Who cares?”

We care, though we’re frightened of your weapons and your clout

This is so important even introverts came out.

“Twenty million people!” Said the TV and the press

“Who cares?” answered Abigail.”They’re foes of the US.”

We fought back in Germany in 1938.

We won’t knuckle under to an autocratic state.

Some of us remember, ’cause our grandparents were there

They fought back so we could live and that is why we care.

TURNING POINT

Editor,

On Saturday, millions of Americans demonstrated their disgust with President Donald Trump, with his attempt to turn our democracy into a dictatorship, with his disregard of the rule of law and with his pathetic attempt to play the king.

Not one protester was arrested during No Kings demonstrations in hundreds of American cities. This was a perfect example of a peaceful protest, as sanctioned by the First Amendment.

How did Trump respond on Sunday? By posting a vile artificial-intelligence-generated video showing a smirking Trump at the controls of a jet fighter, wearing a crown and dropping what appears to be feces on the demonstrators below.

This is incredibly vulgar. This is the kind of turning-point moment that leads to regime change, mass protests, uprisings by thousands in the street. These turning points have happened before: storming the Bastille, Pearl Harbor, the Boston Tea Party.

Where are the brave people in our government who will stand up for democracy, for rule of law, for human decency?

Bill Parks

Palo Alto

ECHOES OF CHICAGO

by David Gurney

They say history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. The years of 1968 and 2024 are such times. I wouldn't say history is repeating itself or rhyming, but I do hear echoes of Chicago.

In '68 with the Vietnam war raging, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race and supported his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey. A similar thing happened when Joe Biden resigned from the 2024 race and turned things over to his vice president Kamala Harris. Both Humphrey and Harris were equally unpopular, which led to the election of Nixon and Trump respectively.

The key difference between these two scenarios is that Johnson pulled out of the race in late March, creating a wide-open race between Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy and even George Wallace, while Biden waited until late July, leaving only a few precious months for the unlikable Kamala Harris to mount a candidacy, in a non-starter, pre-rigged Democratic primary. The Chicago of ‘68 and 2024 were very different times. Only the place remains the same.

1968 is remembered as a chaotic and tumultuous year. There were two high-level assassinations of nationally famous figures, Martin Luther King on April 4th, and Robert F. Kennedy on June 5th. Over a month of violent riots in numerous cities resulted after King’s assassination. But back then, nobody was worrying about an 'Insurrection Act' or the U.S. military invading American cities. By the time the August 23-26 Democratic National Convention took place in Chicago, people were generally pretty riled up.

The chaotic demonstrations at the DNC, mostly led by disgruntled veterans, students, draft dodgers, and the "Yippies," ended up triggering what were called "police riots," when the notorious Mayor Daley unleashed his Chicago Police Department to brutally and indiscriminately Billy-club demonstrators.

You might wonder why I’m writing this. It's because with all the "Department of War" militarism, the ICE raids, the big city invasions by masked camo-buddies and the terrifying anonymous abductions of private citizens and immigrants, particularly in the city of Chicago, that I started thinking about protest songs against militarization. The "Draft Dodger Rag” by topical folk-singer Phil Ochs immediately came to mind. After doing a little research, I found out that Ochs played at and took part in the Chicago DNC protests of ’68. But he was a pacifist, and supported the more mainstream peace candidate Eugene McCarthy. This made him very unpopular with the more radical and violence-prone Yippies, including Jerry Rubin (whom he called “Bloodbath Rubin” to his face) and Abbie Hoffman, both later charged as part of the “Chicago 8.” The Yippies were notorious for goading and provoking the police, and very early recognized the power of using the media to project their message through outrageous and borderline acts of civil disobedience. They did talk Ochs into buying a 145-pound pig from a farmer, which they then ran as the official Democratic candidate under the moniker "Pigasus."

I remember in the 60’s when every adolescent American male had to think about what he was going to do if he got drafted into the US Army to go fight in Vietnam. A lot of options opened up, but if you registered with the Selective Service System at age 18 (as required by law) and got classified “1-A,” you could be shipped off to war anytime on short notice, up to the age of 24. If you got a “4-F,” that meant for whatever reason – bad vision, orthopedic handicap, psychological incapacity etc. (or even “flat feet” or “bone spurs,” as in Trump) you were stamped “unfit for military service,” and left alone to be a hippy.

There were other ways to get out of the Draft – becoming a “Conscientious Objector,” which meant you could not intentionally kill another human being for religious reasons, or flight across the Canadian border, since Canada decided not to deport US boys for trying to escape the draft. You could also get out of military service by being the sole provider of care for a medically dependent relative. Or perhaps the most popular, a Student Deferment, which meant you were exempt for the entire time you went to college, up until your graduation. If you were a poor white, black, native,or any other cllass of social reject, you were cannon fodder.

But now, that's all been answered by our brand new "Department of War." They're eliminating the Department of Education, so forget about a student deferment and who needs a draft, when you can get poor, uneducated, brainwashed computer-game dummies to volunteer as "Warfighters"?

Echoes of Chicago. They are deafening.

The Draft Dodger Rag, by Phil Ochs (from the album "I Ain't Marching Anymore")

Oh, I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and a-keepin' old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve I knew "better dead than red"
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said:

[CHORUS]
Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my asthma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a DEE-fense plant

I've got a dislocated disc and a wracked up back
I'm allergic to flowers and bugs
And when the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits
And I'm addicted to a thousand drugs
I got the weakness woes, I can't touch my toes
I can hardly reach my knees
And if the enemy came close to me
I'd probably start to sneeze

I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my asthma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a DEE-fense plant

Ooh, I hate Chou En Lai, and I hope he dies,
Onething you gotta see
That someone's gotta go over there
And that someone isn't me
So I wish you well, Sarge, give 'em Hell!
Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
I'll be the first to go

Yes, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my asthma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a DEE-fense plant

CALIFORNIANS MAY NOT GET FOOD STAMP PAYMENTS NEXT MONTH, GOVERNOR SAYS

by Aldo Toledo

As the federal government shutdown stretches into its third week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is warning that the state’s SNAP recipients may not receive their November payments — a disruption he says could be “devastating” for families as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches.

President Donald Trump has not yet indicated how he intends to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for up to 42 million people amid the shutdown, about 5.5 million of them Californians, according to Newsom’s office.

The governor said in a statement Monday that the California Department of Social Services began notifying all California counties about the expected delay in the program, which is 100% federally funded.

“If President Trump and Congress do not reopen the federal government by Oct. 23, or take action to fund benefits, CalFresh benefits will likely be delayed in November,” Newsom said.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters at the White House last week that the food stamp program is running out of money in two weeks. Rollins posted later on X that “there are not enough funds to provide SNAP for 40 million Americans come Nov. 1.”

The government shutdown began on Oct. 1, and has no end in sight. Republicans, who control the White House, Senate and House, continue to blame Democrats, who have held firm against Trump’s latest spending proposal and its cuts to health care tax credits.

“Democrats are putting free healthcare for illegal aliens and their political agenda ahead of food security for American families,” Rollins wrote. “Shameful.”

Newsom characterized the impending food crisis as a“disastrous and harmful impact” of the “MAGA majority in Congress” who have “allowed Trump’s shutdown to continue for one month,” he said in a statement.

Newsom’s office said about 63.2% of SNAP beneficiaries are children or the elderly.

The Trump administration has made other changes to SNAP that the governor’s office says make it harder for people to receive benefits they need. The federal government directed the state to hold November 2025 benefit data that would normally allow CalFresh funds to be allocated to people with benefit cards, Newsom said Monday.

The governor’s office said the impact of that policy is impacting people newly enrolling in CalFresh during the second half of October, and could affect all enrollees if the shutdown goes past Thursday.

(SF Chronicle)

THE COST OF PROPOSED HOMELESS RESTRICTIONS in Palo Alto, esp. new RV street parking rules:

You don’t often see municipal cost charts on the local Bay Area news. But this one caught our eye Tuesday morning showing that just to put up signs around town in areas where RVs would not be allowed to park would cost over $7 million. There was no mention of how much housing could be built for $7 million. (Mark Scaramella)

TALKIN’ JOHN BIRCH PARANOID BLUES

Well, I was feelin' lowdown and blue,
I didn't know what in the world I was gonna do,
Them Communists they wus comin' around,
They wus in the air,
They wus on the ground.
They wouldn't gimme no peace…

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society,
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin' down the road.
Woah boy, I'm a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!

Now we all agree with Hitlers' views,
Although he killed six million Jews.
It don't matter too much that he was a Fascist,
At least you can't say he was a Communist!
That's to say like if you got a cold take a shot of malaria.

I got up in the mornin' 'n' looked under my bed,
Well, I wus lookin' everywhere for them gol-darned Reds.
Looked in the stove, behind the door,
Looked in the glove compartment of my car.
Couldn't find 'em…

I wus lookin' for them Reds everywhere,
I wus lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair.
I looked way up my chimney hole,
I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
They got away…

Well, I wus sittin' home an' started to sweat,
Figured they wus in my T.V. set.
Peeked behind the picture frame,
Got a shock from my feet, right up in the brain.
Them Reds caused it!
I know they did…them hard-core ones.

Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes.
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!
Ol' Betty Ross…

Well, I investigated all the books in the library,
Ninety percent of 'em gotta be thrown away.
I investigated all the people that I knowed,
Ninety-eight percent of them gotta go.
The other two percent are fellow Birchers…just like me.

Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,
Roosevelt, Lincoln, and that Jefferson guy.
To my knowledge there's just one man
That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus.

Well, I finally started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out nothing…good God!

— Bob Dylan (1962)

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Moscow (1918) by Moisei Solomonovich Nappelbaum

THE CHILL OF AN EARLY FALL

Well, her old friend from her own end of town dropped by today
And way down deep inside me something died
When he came ′round to see her that way
Here it comes again, that same old chilly wind
Will blow like a cold winter squall
And I'll begin to feel the chill of an early fall

And I′ll be drinking again
And thinking whenever he calls
There's a storm coming on
It won't be too long ′til the snow falls
Oh, I′ll be sobersome
But when October comes and goes
And no time at all
I'll begin to feel the chill of an early fall

Oh, how quick they slip away
Here today and gone tomorrow
Love and seasons never stay
Bitter winds are sure to follow

Now there′s no doubt
It's gonna be cold out tonight
I′ve shivered all day
And when I look in her eyes
Needing to hold her so tight
She just looks away
Oh, she'll swear that it′s true
He's just someone she knew long ago
But I'll know that′s not all
And I′ll begin to feel the chill of an early fall

— Green Daniel and Gretchen Peters (1990)

VICTIMS WITHOUT VICTIMIZERS

How Corporate Democrats Led to the Trump Era

by Norman Solomon

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.

Taking the Government to Market

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.

Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.

A Small Business Shell Game

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.

In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

(Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area. TomDispatch.com)

TOM HOMAN, who was the acting head of ICE during Donald Trump’s first term, was widely expected to join him in a second.

In September, 2024, F.B.I. agents, posing as businessmen, sought his help securing government contracts in the event of Trump’s reëlection. Homan reportedly accepted $50,000 from them, stuffed into a takeout bag from the restaurant chain Cava. According to numerous news outlets, there is an audio recording of the transaction. The investigation was dropped once Trump took office, for reasons that remain murky. Did the President’s enablers in the Justice Department kill a criminal case against one of his top advisers? Or did weaknesses in the evidence, combined with the Supreme Court’s recent hostility toward public corruption cases, compel prosecutors to stand down? Meanwhile, another basic question remains unanswered: Where’s the $50,000?

“The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the Cava bag, the missing cash,” Ruth Marcus writes. “You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in Trump’s orbit.”

AT THE PARTY

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed
The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust.

The names in fashion shuttling to and fro
Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe.

You cannot read me like an open book.
I'm more myself than you will ever look.

Will no one listen to my little song?

Perhaps I shan't be with you very long.

A howl for recognition, shrill with fear,
Shakes the jam-packed apartment, but each ear
Is listening to its hearing, so none hear.

— W.H. Auden (1938)

HEALTH CARE, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:

AS A CANADIAN, I love our socialist medical system. You should try it, it's awesome. And I'm not taking the piss, you seriously should. Listen to Bernie -- he's looking out for you. Privatized health care is 100% a scam. On a PPP-adjusted dollar-for-dollar basis, Americans pay twice -- twice! -- as much per capita in health care costs as Canadians do, and you're certainly not twice as healthy. In fact, the US is increasingly lagging the rest of the developed world in health outcomes, notably life expectancy.

It's not hard to understand why, either: supply and demand simply don't work when it comes to medical care. Whether you're buying a house or a chocolate bar, you have the option to walk away and just not pay. This means there's downward pressure on prices. But what if you're sprawled in the street with a broken leg because of a hit and run? Does anyone ever bargain shop in that situation? What if you have cancer? What if your kid has cancer? (Fun fact: retinoblastoma is a common childhood cancer of the eyes. So maybe your kid won't die, they'll just be blinded. Fun!) The idea that anyone has freedom of choice in that situation is a mockery. To force market economics in health care is enforcing extortion dynamics. You live in an extortion racket masquerading as a health care system.

The idea that I pay 'onerous' taxes is a scam, because I have zero health insurance costs and basically zero out-of-pocket medical expenses. Yes, zero. That's not a fantasy, it's good governance. Whereas you live under an all-pervading extortion racket that uses medical care as a way to string you along in desperation and fear. When the CEO of United Health was assassinated, the truly amazing thing wasn't that it happened -- it was the absolute unanimity of the response. Across the board, left and right, red state/blue state, absolutely every American (with an income below $150K, at least) was celebrating. What kind of society works that way?

A COUPLE JOURNAL ENTRIES of Luigi Mangioni from 2024

8/15

1 month in SF.. crazy slow, lack of urgency. Lack of routine/sleep schedule/exercise. See spiral re: catch-22

That said, I finally feel confident about what I will do. The details are finally coming together. And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified. I’m glad — in a way — that I’ve procrastinated, bc it allowed me to learn more about UHC.

KMD would’ve been an unjustified catastrophe that would be perceived mostly as sic, but more importantly unhelpful. Would do nothing to spread awareness/improve people’s lives.

I’m feeling foggy, so I can’t write w/ speed + clarity + confidence, but these ideas have been floating around for last few days and I want to write them down.

The target is insurance. It checks every box.

10/22

1.5 months. This investor conference is a true windfall. It embodies everything wrong with our health system, and — most importantly — the message becomes self evident.

The problem with most revolutionary acts, is that the message is lost on normies. For example, Ted K makes some good points on the future of humanity, but to make his point he indiscriminately mailbombs innocents. Normies categorize him as an insane serial killer, focus on the act/atrocities themselves, and dismiss his ideas. And most importantly — by committing indiscriminate atrocities — he becomes a monster, which makes his ideas those of a monster, no matter how true. He crosses the line from revolutionary anarchist to terrorist — the worst thing a person can be.

This is the problem with most militants that rebel against — often, real — injustices they commit an atrocity, either whose horror outweighs the impact of their message, or whose distance from their message prevents normies from connecting the dots. Consequently, the revolutionary idea becomes associated with extremism, incoherence, or evil — an idea that no reasonable member of society could approve of. Rather than win public support, they lose it. The revolutionary actions are actively counter-productive.

So let’s say you want to rebel against the deadly, greed-fueled health insurance cartel. Do you bomb the HQ? No. Bombs = terrorism. Such actions appear the unjustified anger of someone who simply got sick/had bad luck and took their frustration out on the insurance industry, while recklessly endangering countless employees.

What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents. Most importantly, the point becomes self-evident. The point is made in their news headline: “Insurance CEO killed at annual investors conference”. It brings to light the event itself — a bunch of suits from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley meeting at a fancy NYC conference to discuss growth rates and “MLR” of a company that literally extracts human life force for money. It conveys a greedy bastard that had it coming. Members of the public can focus on greed, on the event, through reassurable, acceptable discussion. Finally, the hit is a real blow to the company financials. All those analysts and institutional investors who came to be wooed by insurance execs? That opportunity is snuffed in and instant. Instead, the company becomes a hot topic — perhaps best to invest elsewhere and let that one cool off ...

EDWARD SAID: THE LAST INTERVIEW screens in two weeks.

On Sun, November 2 at 12:30, with a special post-film conversation with writer, activist, and Barenboim-Said Foundation VP Mariam C. Said, wife of the late Edward Said, and their daughter Najla Said, author, actress, playwright and activist. Moderated by D.D. Guttenplan, special correspondent for The Nation and the host of The Nation Podcast.

“Enthralling… touching, melancholic, and fierce.” – Times (U.K.)

Co-presented by the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA), dedicated to the empowerment of young musicians from the Middle East and North Africa.

Part of the worldwide “Edward Said Days” festival, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Palestinian-born literary critic on November 1, 1935, with events in New York, Berlin, and Ramallah.

LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT

America’s Retreat From Aid Is Devastating Somalia’s Health System

Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases

In a Reversal, Trump Will Not Meet With Putin in Coming Weeks

Trump Nominee for Watchdog Role Is Out After Report of Racist Texts

Bird Flu Is Back

Shutdown Brings More BASE Jumpers and Drones to Yosemite Skies

QUAERE

If the President
Pretends to crap on people
Doesn't he need help?

— Jim Luther

TRUMP POSTED A VIDEO OF HIMSELF DUMPING EXCREMENT ON OUR CITIES. IT’S A GLIMPSE OF HIS DEEPEST DRIVES.

by Michelle Goldberg

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.

What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.

A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.

There’s a tension, however, when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level he and those around him have a deep instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate traditional aesthetics; an August executive order on federal architecture disavowed modernism and called for classical designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of America’s system of self-government.” At the same time, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to make it look like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that his construction crews have begun demolishing the facade of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom.

The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better. (Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese Studio Ghibli animation.) Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimize a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire “Idiocracy.”

The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.

Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandize the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits of his dominance.

In “The Emergency,” an allegorical novel coming out next month, the writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with fecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.

“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”

Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine rapprochement with those who want, above all, to befoul us.

(NY Times)

U.S. ATTACKS MORE BOATS AS TENSIONS WITH VENEZUELA RISE

The Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, while striking vessels that it says are trafficking drugs.

by Charlie Savage

Tensions between the United States and Venezuela continue to escalate as the U.S. military keeps attacking boats in the Caribbean Sea that it says are suspected of smuggling drugs for cartels and criminal gangs the Trump administration has labeled terrorists.

The administration has focused its rhetoric on President Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020. President Trump has authorized C.I.A. operations in Venezuela, and the administration is weighing land strikes as some of his aides push to oust Mr. Maduro.

But the boat attacks have not been limited to Venezuelan targets, and turbulence over them is spreading to other countries, especially Colombia.

Here is the latest on the U.S. military operations:

What’s the latest on the attacks?

On Mr. Trump’s orders, the U.S. military began attacking vessels in the Caribbean in early September. The Trump administration has maintained that the operations have taken place in international waters and that the passengers were members of drug cartels who it says were trafficking narcotics. It has cited intelligence but not offered evidence for its accusations.

By official estimates, seven strikes have killed 32 people so far:

• Sept. 2: The first U.S. first strike on a boat killed 11 people, according to Mr. Trump. He said they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which his team has deemed “terrorists.” U.S. officials later said the boat appeared to have turned around before the attack.

• Sept. 15: A second strike killed three people, according to Mr. Trump, who called them “narcoterrorists from Venezuela” but did not identify a specific group. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia later said one was a Colombian fisherman and accused the United States of murder.

• Sept. 19: Mr. Trump announced that the military had attacked a third boat in the Caribbean, killing three people, without providing details. The authorities in the Dominican Republic later said they recovered cocaine.

• Oct. 3: In a fourth strike, the military killed four men. Mr. Petro later said the boat had been carrying Colombian citizens.

• Oct. 14: In the fifth strike, the military killed six people in international waters but “just off the coast of Venezuela,” according to Mr. Trump. Relatives of a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago said he and a neighbor were killed in the attack.

• Oct. 16: The sixth strike targeted a semi-submersible vessel, killing two people, Mr. Trump later said. The Navy rescued two survivors and repatriated them to Colombia and Ecuador.

• Oct. 17: In the seventh strike, the military killed three men accused of smuggling drugs for a Marxist insurgent group in Colombia known as the E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997.

Why is Trump taking military action in the Caribbean?

The Trump administration has justified the boat attacks as a matter of national self-defense at a time of high overdose deaths in the United States. But the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico. South America is instead a source of cocaine, much of which originates in Colombia.

The administration has moved a large amount of naval firepower into the Caribbean — far greater than is commensurate with the task of destroying small boats — and is weighing an operation to remove Mr. Maduro, whom it calls a drug cartel leader. The proponents of a regime-change push include Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, and the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe.

How has Venezuela responded?

Mr. Maduro has called the strikes a “heinous crime” and “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country.” He said that if the United States believed that boat passengers were drug traffickers, it should arrest them.

Mr. Maduro has also warned that he will respond to any U.S. military action with an “armed fight.” In mid-October, his administration said it had launched a broad military mobilization and started training civilians for defensive combat against a potential U.S. invasion.

Are the attacks legal?

A broad range of specialists in the laws governing the use of force have disputed the Trump administration’s contention that it can lawfully kill people suspected of drug trafficking as if they were enemy troops in a war. The United States has traditionally dealt with maritime drug smuggling as a law enforcement matter, including Coast Guard interdictions.

The Trump administration has asserted that the killings are legal. In a letter to Congress after the first strike, Mr. Trump justified it as “self-defense.” In a notice to Congress about the Sept. 15 strike, the White House said Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was now in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels that his team has deemed terrorist organizations.

The administration has resisted requests that it provide a legal theory or analysis that supports its conclusion that the situation qualifies as an armed conflict, including how it is bridging the conceptual gap between drug trafficking crimes and armed hostilities.

Does Trump need Congress’s approval?

Congress has not authorized any armed conflict with drug cartels. Apart from whether it is lawful to summarily kill those suspected of smuggling drugs, the question of whether or when any president needs congressional authorization for military operations is murky.

Under both parties, the Justice Department has opined that a president, as commander in chief, may carry out limited strikes in the national interest on his or her own, so long as the anticipated nature, duration and scope fall short of “war” in the constitutional sense.

As one-off strikes evolve into lengthier military campaigns, however, pressure to obtain congressional approval tends to mount. The War Powers Resolution, a Vietnam-era law, says presidents must end deployments in congressionally unauthorized hostilities after 60 days.

(NY Times)

REQUIEM FOR GAZA

by Chris Hedges

The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble. My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.

Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.

The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.

The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.

The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death,” Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, bellowed. “I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force. Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed. Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favor of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept. The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.

When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.

The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.

This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.

As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.

Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.

Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.

The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1,700 and injuring thousands more.

The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.

The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation – Yemen – which has tried to halt the genocide.

The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book “Rise and Kill First” in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.

Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.”

The moral philosophers who make up the western canon – Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke – excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonized people, women of all races and the criminalized from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.

So, when you hear that the western canon is an imperative, as yourself for whom?

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.

The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque - the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army - to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.

There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad -- who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.

We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialized nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable. It is the curse of Cain. And it is a curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.

21 Comments

George Hollister October 22, 2025

There are lots of things wrong with the US Navy blowing up boats in international waters off Venezuela. If drug traffickers are declared to be international terrorists by a president, it seems anyone can get the same designation.

How do we know these people getting blown up in boats are drug traffickers? We don’t.

What is this action of blowing up boats doing to alleviate the illegal drug use problem in America? Absolutely nothing.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar October 22, 2025
  
  Exactly. Venezuela contributes little to our drug problem. This crazy administration has a thing about that country. This is an issue where military commanders should refuse to act on illegal orders. The U. S. military commander in that area recently resigned, but did not speak out as to why. Just what we need, messing with another Latin America country, as we’ve stupidly done many times in our history, while our country is in such great shape now.
  
  Reply
  - Whyte Owen October 22, 2025
    
    Oil
    
    Reply
    - George Hollister October 22, 2025
      
      People’s beliefs and faith are more powerful than money or oil. To put material things above belief and faith is to underestimate the potential for bad things to happen, and of course good things as well.
      
      Reply
- Bob Abeles October 22, 2025
  
  Agree with you 100% on this one, George. The administration is setting up a Gulf of Tonkin incident to grab Venzuela’s oil.
  
  Reply
Marshall Newman October 22, 2025

Gretchen Peters is an impressive songwriter and performer, one worth knowing.

Reply
Norm Thurston October 22, 2025

Supervisor Haschak has shown himself to be a principled man, on both the Cubbison matter and the Prop. 50 question. We could use more like him.

With regards to Prop. 50, there seems to be quite a few “principled” people against it, from whom we never heard a word during the past several years that Republicans have been gerrymandering every thing they could get their hands on. Are they just trying to continue having one set of rules for Democrats and no rules at all for Republicans? Sure feels that way.

Reply
- Paul Modic October 22, 2025
  
  In Eureka yesterday I saw only “No on 50, Protect Out Elections” signs in yards and by ranches but nowhere did they say “No on 50 Because I Like Trump’s Policies,” which would have been honest.
  I understand elected officials taking a middle ground, ie no ground, as for them it’s all about avoiding tough issues which could alienate a variety of voters in the future.
  Lying and obfuscating is part of the job in politics, unless you have someone like B. Anderson running and he never won.
  That said, I felt a little dirty voting Yes on 50, like really, Trump made me do it?
  Yes.
  (I felt like I was signing up for an uncivil war, or something, but it had to be done.)
  
  Reply
  - Marco McClean October 22, 2025
    
    Yesterday afternoon I was driving south on 101. Before I got to Santa Rosa, the north-facing chain-link fence on a walking/bicycle bridge over the highway was festooned with plastic American flags and signs saying NO ON 50! and Protect Your Vote! One man was on the bridge, fastening signs on the south-facing fence.
    
    Reply
  - Norm Thurston October 22, 2025
    
    All well taken. But when I voted Yes on 50, it felt like I had finally been given the same weapon that had been used by Republicans for years. We tried playing by the rules, to our own detriment.
    
    Reply
  - Marshall Newman October 22, 2025
    
    Gotta love Republican hypocrisy regarding Proposition 50. After gerrymandering Texas WITHOUT a vote of the people, they castigate California for letting the people decide.
    
    Reply
Harvey Reading October 22, 2025

TURNING POINT

For Trump, the sort of behavior you described is “high class”… The guy being prezudint and getting away with all the illegal actions he take is proof that MAGAts have rudimentary, simple brains.

Reply
Harvey Reading October 22, 2025

REQUIEM FOR GAZA

If the US had any decency at all, it would cut ALL AID to the Zionist savages…immediately, and permanently.

Reply
Kirk Vodopals October 22, 2025

One good thing you can say about that Trump AI video is that we can all now agree that he is completely full of shit.

Reply
Julie Beardsley October 22, 2025

This is the post that you don’t want to read. And you don’t have to. But in a very short period of time, these things will find you anyway.

First, I’ve pointed out three areas of the most current American cognitive dissonance. I guarantee you are struggling to navigate AT LEAST one of them.

Second, I’ve listed nine reasons why the House of Representatives specifically is no more. I saved the most devastating reasons for the final few. Read them, if you dare.

And it all has to do with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson…
But first…the cognitive dissonance of the Right:

Observing Trump bend, circumvent, or break the law to benefit his friends yet pervert the law to terrorize his enemies is somehow ‘good for America’ and will only help Republicans while only targeting Democrats.

Bolton and Comey are both Republicans. No one is safe from the whims of the Great Leader.

And…the cognitive dissonance of the Left:

You can’t believe the 2024 Presidential election was manipulated and not ring every alarm to ensure it can’t happen again.
If everything is left exactly the way things were left in November, the Democrats will mysteriously never win a majority again.

Finally…the cognitive dissonance of America:

No Speaker of the House who seriously wants to end this government shutdown would disband Congress with no firm date to return. Period.

It is simply impossible to navigate negotiations of any kind and also not be at work. In fact, not only do the actions of the Speaker more closely align with those of a person not planning to reopen the federal government anytime soon, his actions suggest he isn’t planning to reopen it at all.

Never before has a Speaker kept the House out of session for this long during an active shutdown. The House has been in continuous recess for weeks, not holding even pro-forma sessions.
Never before has a Speaker used congressional recesses as leverage to halt all legislative business during a national funding crisis. Johnson’s open-ended congressional recess is being used as a shield from responsibility rather than as negotiation pressure. That’s entirely new.
No Speaker in American history (Democrat or Republican) has refused to seat a duly elected and certified member because of a shutdown, recess, or fill-in-the-blank. Even during the Civil War, both World Wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic, members were sworn in and seated promptly. Johnson’s delay in swearing in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva until “the government reopens” is therefore without modern or historical precedent.
No Speaker has ever blocked continuing resolutions (CRs) altogether. CRs are standard tools to reopen government temporarily while negotiations continue. Johnson refusing to bring any CRs/short-term funding bills forward at all unless Democrats accept his policy terms effectively freezes the process and weaponizes the shutdown itself.
This is a biggie: In 114 years of congressional history, no Speaker has neutralized the power of the discharge petition through calendar manipulation. By extending recess sessions in order to prevent members from gathering signatures or filing new discharge petitions, Johnson is effectively freezing an essential minority power. It was invented specifically to prevent a Speaker from doing what Johnson is now doing–controlling the floor so tightly that a bipartisan majority can’t act.

The petition process depends on the basics of a functioning House: It has to meet every few days. The Clerk has to be present with the Clerk’s desk open for signatures. A House in recess has neither, functionally suspending majority rule. Now, even if a majority of the House wanted to act on government funding or transparency, it literally cannot because the Speaker’s recess schedule makes democracy procedurally impossible.

No Speaker has ever paused virtually all committee activity, including investigations unrelated to appropriations because that dismantles one of the foundational doctrines America was founded on: our system of checks and balances. Oversight is Congress’s core check on executive power. Under Article I, Congress has both appropriations (the power of the purse) and oversight (the power of inquiry). When oversight is frozen, the executive branch effectively operates without scrutiny and without fear of subpoenas, negative testimony, or being compelled to produce any necessary documentation. This reduces government accountability.

Agencies (like ICE) can act without fear of being questioned by committees like Oversight, Judiciary, or Homeland Security. Inspectors general, whistleblowers, and watchdogs lose their main allies in Congress. While the freeze continues, the Executive Branch (the President) becomes functionally unchecked, a condition the Founders explicitly tried to prevent.

No Speaker in American history has skipped pro-forma sessions… because doing so effectively causes the House of Representatives itself to stop existing as a functioning body for that period.
In modern history, the House and Senate always hold pro-forma sessions during recesses and shutdowns. They often appear silly, sometimes with just a single member of Congress present, but in doing so, they guarantee that Congress is never fully adjourned, even during a recess.

Speaker Johnson choosing to skip them:

means that the House is not legally in session at all. That’s rare outside of wartime emergencies or pandemic lockdowns.
raises serious constitutional questions. If the House is not meeting at least every three days, it arguably violates Article I, Section 5’s adjournment clause.
disables mechanisms like the filing and signing of discharge petitions, the introduction or referral of bills, and prevents an immediate congressional response to national crises or budget deadlines.
neutralizes formally convening oversight
committees, giving the President free rein to do whatever he wants as long as the freeze continues.
places the entire House in suspended animation: legally silent, procedurally frozen in amber, and unavailable to act…until the Speaker calls it back.
concentrates total control of the chamber’s calendar–and its very existence–in the Speaker’s hands.

The Hidden Coup Within the Calendar

By failing to publish a calendar or set a date of return, the Speaker of the House caused the House of Representatives to cease to exist as an active governing body… and nobody noticed.

I know it sounds like I’m trying to make the most benign-sounding entry on this list into the worst of conspiracy theories, but as Samuel L. Jackson says in Jurassic Park, hold onto your butts.
It’s a huge and complicated ploy. (Spoiler alert: It’s devastating for America.)

I. The House of Representatives just … stopped.

The House isn’t a continuous institution, it only exists when it’s formally in session. Committees can’t meet or issue subpoenas if the chamber isn’t convened. The Clerk’s office can’t receive bill filings, amendments, or discharge-petition signatures unless the House is legally “gaveled in.”

Without a live session, even the most redundant action freezes: you can’t introduce bills, record testimony, or exercise authority. Every mechanism just … stops. On paper, the House still exists, but in reality, it’s in suspended animation. And the Speaker’s 48-hour recall rule is actually a death note of paralysis dressed up as flexibility. Members are told to stay “on standby,” ready to return to Washington within two days of notice.

You see, it’s the calendar that makes the Participation, even possible. Members juggle hundreds of staff, district obligations, and fixed travel windows. A published schedule lets them plan hearings, show up for votes, and coordinate oversight. Without that schedule, they’re forced into immobility, for fear of missing a vote entirely.

This tactic keeps Congress in permanent limbo. It’s neither adjourned nor active. It’s just … waiting.

II. Accountability and Oversight Evaporates

By withholding the public legislative calendar, the Speaker sealed the only real window the people have into how their government works. Without a predictable schedule to anchor responsibility, nobody knows when the government is failing in its promises or whom to blame.

When the public can’t see Congress work, they lose their most basic tool of oversight: knowing when government business happens. The House calendar decides when members must be in Washington, when votes will be held, and when committees meet. It is the frame that keeps the window clear. When a Speaker hides or shifts that calendar unpredictably, transparency vanishes, and the public can’t tell when—or even if—their representatives are working. Reporters can’t pinpoint when a missed vote, broken promise, or delayed bill should have been handled. Constituents can’t say, “You failed to vote on X last week,” because there was no published “last week.”

No votes can occur. There’s no mechanism to restart proceedings or challenge the Speaker’s schedule. The Speaker becomes the sole decider of when government acts, making criticism easy to deflect. Skipping a voicemail is far easier than facing an enraged constituent outside the Capitol.

The public loses its ability to monitor its government, and the government loses the ability to monitor itself. Oversight, subpoenas, and investigations are all creatures of the calendar—every act of fact-finding, every witness summons, every document request, every hearing notice depends on a legislative day to give it legal force. When the calendar stops, compliance deadlines freeze, giving targets an excuse to stall or destroy records. Agencies can ignore document requests without consequence because there’s no convened authority to back them.

Congressional subpoenas draw power from an active committee of an active chamber. When the House is not in session, the Clerk’s office and the Sergeant at Arms can’t process or enforce them. If a committee’s authority expires or the session lapses, pending subpoenas can be challenged in court as unenforceable because Congress itself is technically adjourned. Recipients exploit that, arguing that “no active Congress” means “no active compulsory power.”

Without a session to hang them on, committees can’t schedule hearings, report findings, or issue subpoenas. Extended, unscheduled recesses break quorum cycles, which means committees can’t technically meet at all—let alone vote to compel testimony.

Whistleblowers have no entity for which to whistle. Staff authority to conduct depositions, interviews, or travel investigations exists only “under direction of a sitting committee.” When the House isn’t formally convened, that direction disappears; staff are barred from continuing fieldwork, their authority dissolved. Investigations stall, evidence vanishes, witnesses step back, and oversight momentum dies. The power to demand answers—a cornerstone of congressional authority—simply evaporates.

III. And then there’s the Constitution…

Under Article I, the House of Representatives exists not merely to legislate, but to serve as the people’s check on an unruly executive. It is the constitutional barrier through which every act of presidential power must pass for scrutiny. When that barrier is suspended, even briefly, the balance between the branches tilts. The executive no longer faces a coequal body capable of restraint—only a silent one.

When one person controls the calendar absolutely, Congress stops being a collective body. The House’s institutional independence erodes; it ceases to function as a body and becomes an extension of the Speaker’s whims.

Over time, a presidency-heavy balance starts to feel normal, shrinking the legislative check. The legislative branch fades into irrelevance, granting the executive freer rein.

The Founders explicitly feared an unrestrained executive and deliberately empowered the House to prevent it. America was created by escaping a belligerent king. So the Founders designed the House to be the most immediate representative of the people—directly elected and frequently renewed—so it could check executive excess in real time. That is why the House’s ability to convene, investigate, and hold hearings is not procedural housekeeping. It is the mechanism of the republic’s self-defense: the process by which abuses are exposed, the President is called to account, and every branch is reminded that it serves the people, not itself.

Without that mechanism, the President faces no scrutiny, no subpoenas, no deadlines, no check on unilateral action. What the framers feared most—an executive governing without oversight—arrives not through war or revolution…but through the quiet absence of a calendar.

This is not the government they designed. It is the one they warned us about.

IV. The Quiet Erasure of a Branch

Congress’s most fundamental check on executive and corporate power—the foundation of its very existence—dies. The House has been silently defunded, not through legislation but through time itself. When the Speaker erased that calendar, Congress’s authority to find facts, question power, and enforce accountability—the lifeblood of its legitimacy—was quietly gutted. Johnson hollowed out its agency and relevance by the simple act of not calling the House back to work.

This is why the calendar is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the heartbeat of constitutional oversight. The genius and danger of this maneuver is that it leaves no clear act to challenge. Johnson doesn’t have to suspend Congress formally (which would be unconstitutional); he only has to never reconvene it. As long as the Speaker’s chair remains vacant, so does the House itself.

In effect, Johnson has done through omission what extremists and hostile powers could never achieve through force: he has hollowed out the investigative heart of Congress while leaving its shell intact. The chamber can no longer investigate anything—including the Speaker himself. This maneuver accomplishes what no coup, insurrection, or hostile power has ever managed—the quiet nullification of the legislative branch through mundane procedure.
By weaponizing time, Johnson found that the soft underbelly of the republic isn’t ideology or partisanship—it’s process. Through the manipulation of something as ordinary as the congressional calendar, the United States has stumbled into the unacknowledged suspension of its own legislative branch.

The result is a Congress that looks alive from the outside—members still going on CNN and FOX News, staff still answering phones and dodging constituent questions. But that normal-seeming routine is a façade, concealing Congress’s current reality: the slow, bureaucratic death of representative democracy.
And the longer this continues, the harder it becomes to turn things around. Every day that passes without a published calendar, without pro forma sessions, without committees in motion, is another day the legislative branch erodes. The return of what we once took for granted grows less likely, and the idea of a permanently diminished Congress begins to feel normal.
The longer this goes on, the longer the President acts without fear of constitutional consequence.

That is why this point matters more than all the others combined: through silence and scheduling, the Speaker has rendered Congress unable to do the one thing that defines it—to seek truth, demand accountability, and defend the republic it was created to protect.

This is what first made me question what’s happening with the House. I had heard the outrageous news that the Speaker of the House was delaying swearing in a duly elected member of Congress and making it contingent on the reopening of the government. And I also know that Speaker Mike Johnson does everything Donald Trump wants him to do. That’s how he got his job and that’s what he’s all about. Full stop.

So when I hear this man declare that the 218th vote needed to release the Epstein files will be sworn in when the government reopens, that broadcasts to me that the government will never reopen. By making her oath dependent on an event he alone controls, Johnson ensures that both the swearing-in and the reopening remain perpetually out of reach.

Once Grijalva takes her seat, the House regains the 218 votes needed to compel action on multiple fronts, like removing the Speaker’s power to single-handedly dissolve the House of Representatives for one thing and another would be the long-delayed release of the Epstein files. That single vote would unlock subpoena power, trigger committee filings, and make it procedurally impossible to continue hiding what powerful people most fear seeing made public.

Trump’s motivation couldn’t be clearer: keeping those files buried is existential. Johnson’s job is to make sure the vote that could unearth them never happens — and the easiest way to do that is to keep the House itself dormant.

And if you think it’s speculation, you haven’t paid attention to all the other points on this list. All of his actions are pointing in one direction: The federal government is done. And certainly the House of Representatives.

The Speaker’s “wait until the government reopens” line isn’t a promise. It’s a firewall. It transforms the shutdown from a crisis to a containment strategy — a way to freeze the legislative branch precisely where it is safest for those who have the most to lose.
So let’s call it what it is: the government isn’t “waiting to reopen.” It’s been locked shut, deliberately and indefinitely. The only question I have is how long is it going to take for the rest of the world to realize it?

Copied from White Rose Resistance

Reply
Norm Thurston October 22, 2025

Or maybe they just don’t want to release the Epstein files, to protect Trump.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar October 22, 2025
  
  Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing to see Trump go down–like Prince Andrew did–over this sordid mess. It would give new meaning to that old term, “just deserts.
  
  Reply
  - Lee Edmundson October 22, 2025
    
    I think you mean ‘just desserts’, though ‘deserts’ may well apply.
    
    Reply
    - Chuck Dunbar October 22, 2025
      
      I looked this one up, was not sure, but most sources say one “s” fits, though it defies common sense.
      
      Reply
Jayne Thomas October 22, 2025

Bruce, thank you so much for running Chris Hedges’ column. Lays it all out. Devastating summary. I need to send it around. It’s all hopeless. As Michael used to say, “Thank god we’re old.” (not “God”…..)

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar October 22, 2025
  
  Yes, a most powerful piece by Hedges–he was there, he knew it–now it is gone. Indeed a powerful MCT overall today.
  
  Reply

Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 10/22/2025

LISA MARIE BROWN LEE

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