LOS ANGELES UNDER SEIGE ... STILL
"Hates California, it's cold and it's damp That's why the lady is a tramp" - Lorenz Hart
California is the fourth largest economy in the world. At this point they could and would easily operate without ever hearing from Donald J. Trump again. Donald J. Trump hates California, fears California, probably would like to use the word “obliterate” when talking of what he wishes for California. “Obliterate” is a word he is very proud to be able to use. Even when it is not accurate. He is currently attempting to obliterate an entire culture in Southern California.
Here are some numbers so you get an idea of what he is trying to destroy:
One third of all the residents of Los Angeles were born outside the United States.
Nearly one half of the city’s residents are Latino.
It is estimated that one million of the city’s ten million residents are undocumented.*
*Sixty-six percent of the undocumented immigrants have lived in Southern California for more than ten years. They pay taxes, they do jobs that need doing, they are part of the economy, that same economy that is the fourth largest in the world.
Maywood, City Terrace, Huntington Park, Boyle Heights, East L.A., Cudahy, Bell Gardens, Commerce, South L.A., Echo Park, Silver Lake, and San Pedro, all neighborhoods of the Greater Los Angeles area, have very high concentrations of Latino residents. For instance, Huntington Park is 97% Latino. The mayor of Huntington Park is a man named Arturo Flores. Mr. Flores was a United States Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq as a military police officer. He also trained dogs to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Understand that he saw combat in Afghanistan and Iraq and he has gone on record to say that what he sees happening in Huntington Park “… is a campaign of domestic terror that is being imposed on our residents on a daily basis. It is level of psychological warfare that I’ve only seen in theaters of war. It’s terrifying to see it being displayed here in my city.”
What he is talking about is the war that Donald J. Trump has imposed upon the City of Los Angeles by sending the masked, armed, yet undocumented agents of I.C.E. in to the city to capture, detain, and disappear anyone who appears to them to be an “illegal alien.” In plain language, anyone with brown skin. When people in the neighborhood protested having their friends, family, and neighbors grabbed off the street by masked men with no credentials and no warrants Donald J. Trump federalized the California National Guard and sent 2000 of them into Los Angeles to protect the I.C.E. agents. He followed that up by sending 2000 more National Guard troops and 700 Marines. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, both told Trump that they had everything under control and implored him not send in the military because it would only exacerbate the problem. That was three weeks ago and it was headlines everywhere on the planet. Only one time in history had the National Guard been federalized against the wishes of a state’s governing body and that was in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to protect the people marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the treatment of African Americans in that state. He wanted to protect them from the police. Trump sent them to protect his gestapo from the citizens who were protesting the clumsy, ill prepared, brutal tactics that they were using while kidnapping human beings and disappearing them. That was then. Now is now.
And it is no longer in the news. However, just because it is not in the news does not mean it is no longer happening. It just means that there are other things in the news that are newer. That’s the way the news works. Like a carrion bird, a vulture, hopping from carcass to carcass stripping the rotting flesh away, gorging, and then moving on. But the people are still terrified. The people are still staying home and not going out unless they have to do so. Businesses are closing because no one is going out to shop. Women are being assaulted and dragged into waiting vans to be taken away from their children, their husbands, their mothers and fathers. Pregnant women have ended up in the hospital because of the trauma inflicted by I.C.E. agents. Los Angeles is not Gaza, but the people living in Huntington Park, Boyle Heights, City Terrace, and other areas of the Greater Los Angeles area feel like their home has become a police state. And for what? Because Donald J. Trump made a campaign promise to execute “the largest mass deportation in the history of the world?” And the rabid fox terrier who licks the wax from Trump’s ears as he whispers his hate, the one who goes by the name Stephen Miller, feels duty bound to get those numbers up? He has been reported screaming that he wants I.C.E. to be deporting 3000 per day across the nation. Since 6 June when the assault on Los Angeles began they have detained an estimated 2000. That either means that we have so much more carnage to look forward to or the people supporting this police state, the cowardly Republicans and the silent Democrats, are going to have to realize that when Trump promised, “a dictator on day one,” he meant “from day one.” He has been doing it now for five months and there is no end in sight.
The Senate has now passed along The Big Beautiful Bill, the omnibus bill that will increase the national debt by anywhere from 3.3 to five trillion dollars over the next ten years. The bill that will throw close to 11 million Americans off of Medicaid leaving them to die with no healthcare. The bill that is cutting the funding to food assistance programs that get nutrition to children across the country. The bill that wanted to sell off 3 million acres of public land, land that by law is owned by the public, by you and I, without asking, to the highest bidder. All of these cuts so that the top 1% of the population can make even more money by paying less taxes and so that the war on immigrants can have 45 billion dollars for new detention centers and I.C.E. can have 30 billion more to get their numbers up so that Stephen Miller can finally go to the bathroom and relieve himself.
But for now, today, in Los Angeles, where ever I.C.E. is kidnapping people off the streets, out of their homes, from parks and parking lots there will be people peacefully protesting. Not with bricks and stones and fire but with their presence. People bearing witness to the crimes of abduction, to the violence, to the insult to democracy. People saying NO! People saying ENOUGH!
Call everybody you can think of, Republicans, Democrats, your preacher, your rabbi, or your pastor and tell them NO! ENOUGH!