*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve.
IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG
216.296.4617
NATIONAL
347.731.1886
MEDIA
252.907.4443
SOUTHERN
347.731.1886
NJ/NY
202.520.9997
WASH., DC
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Newly released from jail, one Palestinian has no home to return to.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah in the West Bank, February 15, 2025
When Hassan Oweis stepped off a bus on Saturday in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, it was a moment of both elation and uncertainty for his waiting family.
Mr. Oweis, 47, was one of 369 Palestinians released from Israeli jails this weekend in exchange for three Israeli hostages. This was the first time that his relatives had seen him outside of prison since his arrest in 2002 — nearly half a lifetime ago. To celebrate, a crowd of well-wishers lifted him onto their shoulders.
“The first time we see him without bars,” said his son Shadi, 25, who was still a toddler when Mr. Oweis was jailed.
“The most precious moment,” said Mr. Oweis’s mother, Mariam.
But the mood also felt “painful and uneasy,” said Ms. Oweis, 75.
The Oweis family lives in Jenin, in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military is mounting an extensive operation against what it says are militants planning attacks on Israelis. Thousands of Jenin residents have been forced from their homes as the Israeli soldiers battle Palestinian gunmen and demolish scores of buildings.
The Oweis family are among the displaced. Several of them are taking shelter in a farm shed outside the city. Once they return north from Ramallah, via a web of Israeli military checkpoints, they will not be able to return to the home that Mr. Oweis owns with his siblings.
Mr. Oweis, a former a member of the Palestinian security services, is “leaving one prison only to enter another,” said his nephew, Majd, 19.
Mr. Oweis was arrested in a similar Israeli raid on Jenin in April 2002. According to Israeli court records, he was later convicted on several counts of terrorism, including abetting two gunmen who killed two Israeli civilians and wounded scores in northern Israel in November 2001.
Mr. Oweis denied the accusations, according to court records.
In a reminder of those charges, the Israeli prison authorities had dressed Mr. Oweis and his fellow prisoners in sweatshirts emblazoned with a threat in Arabic: “We shall neither forget nor forgive.”
Prison officers had also tied menacing messages around the prisoners’ wrists.
“The eternal nation will not forget,” read the message, an Arabic adaptation of a Hebrew Bible verse. “I pursue my enemies and seize them.”
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed To
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 15, 2025
Ioulex for The New York Times
The first month of the second Trump presidency has put the lie to the widespread wisdom that Donald Trump has no ideology and no ideas, only an insatiable thirst for power and money. Trump has shown that he has ideas. So many ideas. They are just really bad ideas:
The United States can own, ethnically cleanse and redevelop Gaza as a luxury resort. The U.S. will buy Greenland and take possession of the Panama Canal. The government will become more efficient by cutting the Department of Education, U.S.A.I.D., medical and science research and many many jobs. D.E.I. caused the collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane in the air near Washington, D.C. Immigrants and transgender people are an existential threat to Americans. The president can and should rule by decree. These are all ideas, in the sense that they are opinions, beliefs or expressions of a possible course of action.
Some of these ideas would have seemed unthinkable just weeks ago. But now that they have been thought and uttered by the man in possession of the world’s biggest megaphone, all of us are forced to engage with them. Otherwise sane people start debating questions like: Could the U.S. really take over Gaza? Would Egypt or Jordan go along with the ethnic cleansing project? Can trillions of dollars really be cut from the federal budget with a few keystrokes? Is there evidence that D.E.I. caused the crash? Are all immigrants criminals? Do trans people exist? Did the founders intend to check the power of the executive?
Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how — it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable — radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it — they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
Much has been said about the Democrats’ failure to sound the alarm loudly enough, fast enough or broadly enough as Trump has mounted his campaign of destruction. Some of the criticism is not entirely fair. The American system of checks and balances isn’t designed to move as fast as Trump is moving or to stop a bad-faith individual intent on breaking it. A real problem, though, is that Democrats’ objections to these ideas have been primarily procedural. Trump understands politics as the interplay of power and ideology. His opponents see politics as procedure. The contrast has never been starker — and never has the Democrats’ technocratic, legalistic approach been more detrimental to the cause of democracy. It’s not Trump who doesn’t have ideas; it’s the people who should be fighting to stop Trump’s autocratic breakthrough.
It is not enough to say that Trump and his crony Elon Musk are staging a coup, though they are. Many of the people who voted for Trump want to see him smash what he has successfully framed as a useless, wasteful government. It is not enough to say that Trump is destroying American democracy. Many of the people who voted for him did so because they have long felt that the system as it is constituted doesn’t represent their interests — and both Trump and Musk have argued that they are wresting democracy back from unelected bureaucrats. It is not enough to say that Trump’s actions have caused a constitutional crisis or that his executive orders may violate laws passed by Congress. Many of the people who voted for Trump longed to see their frustrations addressed by decisive, spectacular action, which he is delivering.
Not that defending institutions, norms and laws is wrong. It is essential. Contrary to popular opinion, it is institutions, norms and laws — not elections — that constitute a functioning democracy. The mechanisms Trump is destroying are certainly imperfect, but they are also inspired, sometimes brilliantly devised and almost always beautiful in concept, for they are the mechanisms of self-government, the products of deliberation and collective action, the embodiment of our obligations to one another.
It is hard to imagine an American politician saying something like that today. If one did, he would sound like a lunatic, or a pious academic whom Trump would Marx-bait. The idea that government is fundamentally suspect has been around for so long, has become so widely held — and has had such a dumbing-down effect on public conversation — that a full-throated defense of the ideals and institutions of American government seems cringe-worthy.
Trump’s other bad ideas have the same effect. There is no significant political voice promoting our obligations to asylum seekers, arguing against unconditional support for Israel, making the case for the great responsibility that comes with being a great power or mounting a defense of trans rights not merely because trans people are a tiny and maligned minority but because human reinvention is the lifeblood of progress. Instead, the argument Democrats have advanced against all of Trump’s bad ideas boils down to “You can’t do that.”
Actually, it would appear, he can. Less than a month into his second term, Trump cannot yet govern like the emperor he apparently imagines himself to be, but he is actively promoting the idea that he should be able to. His vice president has cast as lawbreakers judges who have tried to stop Trump’s assault on government, and Trump himself has transparently threatened to go after them. Many polls suggest that a majority of Americans like what they have seen and heard so far.
Admonitions to obey the law will not stop Trump and will not dissuade his supporters. Trump’s bad ideas must be countered with good ones. His attack on the government has to be contrasted with a vision of how the system could work and should work — for the people, not the emperor-in-the-making. This is an extremely difficult kind of resistance to muster because it calls for clear thought and inspired vision just when the onslaught of bad ideas, and the anxiety they engender, make it so difficult to think clearly and envision a future.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie
By Alexander Clapp, Feb. 14, 2025
Mr. Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted.
DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times
In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.
Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.
In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.
If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying.
I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering electronics have been “donated” by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met communities of “burner boys,” young migrants from the country’s desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me about coughing up blood at night. It’s no surprise: The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization, will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste.
It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. “For us,” a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, “rubbish is gold.” But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go.
Nowhere does today’s waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong, carbon-spewing journeys from one end of Earth to another. Upon arrival in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems. The process’s ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution, infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death of hundreds of thousands every year.
The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa’s next waste frontier, more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to possess plastic in their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent of discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or another.
That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia. Across the country’s 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons of it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste — toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java’s street markets with tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians.
Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich countries lose a liability, and garbage producers are let off the hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been more dire: A recent United Nations study found that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined.
Most crucially, it’s hard for Western consumers to recognize the extent of the crisis — that the story they’ve been told about recycling often isn’t true — when it is continually rendered invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me, would be to close Malaysia’s ports entirely.
We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.
Here the adage doesn’t ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes anyone’s treasure.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Protesters Rally Against Deletion of ‘Transgender’ on Stonewall Website
Hundreds of people gathered at the Greenwich Village site to condemn what they saw as a chilling strike against the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.
By Liam Stack and Nell Gallogly, Feb. 14, 2025
Jay Walker, center, an organizer of a protest at the Stonewall National Monument site, said he wasn’t sure how long a transgender flag would continue to fly there. Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
A day after the National Park Service deleted the word “transgender” from prominent spots on its Stonewall National Monument website, hundreds of people rallied at the monument site on Friday to protest the move and what they feared might come next there.
It was unclear whether federal officials planned to make physical alterations to eliminate references to transgender people at Stonewall, the first historic site in the United States devoted to the country’s gay rights movement. The Park Service, which had cited a presidential order as the reason for the website changes, did not respond to a request for comment.
So on Friday, at least, a pink, blue and white flag representing the transgender community continued to fly on the flagpole in Christopher Park in the chilly sunshine, and plaques and photo displays honoring well-known transgender activists continued to hang on a park fence.
Still, Jay Walker, a protest organizer, said he was “not sure how long that would last.”
The sudden elimination of the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall website on Thursday — part of a larger Trump administration campaign to challenge the legitimacy of transgender identity — struck members of New York City’s L.G.B.T.Q. community and others as a chilling attack on the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.
“The removal of references to transgender people from federal websites and even from this monument’s history is an act of deliberate erasure,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, told the crowd. “It’s an attack on the truth.”
Chloe Elentári, a transgender woman who lives in Manhattan’s East Village, was among the protesters at the Stonewall site. She said the move was a reminder that the city might be less of a haven than some residents think.
“People say that you know you’re in a safe state, you’re in a blue state, but we’re not,” Ms. Elentári said. “We can’t live under the illusion of thinking that we’re safe just because we’re in New York.”
The Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street, has been seen as a cradle of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement since a police raid in June 1969 set off three days of protests and riots on the surrounding Greenwich Village streets.
Today, the riots are commemorated with Pride marches in New York City and around the world, and many gay rights organizations and venues in other countries use “Stonewall” in their names.
President Barack Obama established the 7.7-acre Stonewall monument, which includes the bar, Christopher Park and several other nearby streets and sidewalks, in 2016. Parts of the site have also been designated as a city landmark and a state historical site.
The Park Service said on Thursday that it had removed references to the transgender community to comply with an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office that was described as “restoring biological truth to the federal government,” and with a second order signed by the acting secretary of the interior last month.
The website changes also included the virtual elimination of a page listing interpretive flags associated with the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, including the pink, blue and white one representing transgender people, and the times when the flags typically fly in Christopher Park.
That the executive orders would affect even just the monument website was an indication of how the Trump administration’s antipathy toward transgender rights is affecting the L.G.B.T.Q. community in New York, a liberal bastion.
In recent weeks, transgender New Yorkers and health care professionals in the city have faced executive orders that seek to bar hospitals from providing certain kinds of care for transgender youth. The orders have caused fear among transgender people and their families, at least one lawsuit and protests outside hospitals.
On Wednesday, the Stonewall website had included introductory text that said, “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” had been removed, along with the letter “T” from the community acronym. By the evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been deleted.
Erik Bottcher, the City Council member who represents the neighborhood that includes the monument, said the removal of some words and letters but not others was an attempt to divide and weaken the community.
“We are here to send a message to Donald Trump,” he said to the protesters. “We will not let you erase the existence of our trans siblings.”
Transgender people played a central role in the Stonewall riots, and two transgender women in particular, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are celebrated at the site with photo displays and plaques. (As of Friday, biographical pages for Ms. Rivera and Ms. Johnson on the Park Service website still described them as transgender women.)
The displays paying tribute to Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera remained in place while the protest proceeded. The two women, and generations of activists like them, were on the minds and the placards of many of those in the crowd.
“The first people that threw the brick at Stonewall, that led the charge at Stonewall, were women of color, trans women of color,” said Eli Shirk, a 19-year-old transgender student at Pace University. “Are we seriously trying to erase, like, entire history?”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Musk Team Seeks Access to I.R.S. System With Taxpayers’ Records
A White House spokesman said that the initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency needed to review data to fix waste within the agency.
By Alan Rappeport, Andrew Duehren and Maggie Haberman, Feb. 17, 2025
The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to give a team member working with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive taxpayer data, people familiar with the matter said.
The systems at the I.R.S. contain the private financial data tied to millions of Americans, including their tax returns, Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
Mr. Fields added: “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard-earned tax dollars on.”
The examination of the I.R.S. system represents the latest move by members of Mr. Musk’s team to push the boundaries of access to government data beyond what is typical for political appointees. The Treasury Department has faced questions in recent weeks after lieutenants of Mr. Musk who were assigned to the agency started scrutinizing the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s system, which directs payments across the federal government.
Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer who was brought into the Office of Personnel Management as part of the DOGE effort, worked at I.R.S. headquarters on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. He will be assigned to the I.R.S. as a senior adviser to the acting commissioner. The tax agency is still working out the exact terms of his work at the I.R.S., though he is expected to have broad access to its systems, according to the two people.
As of Sunday evening, he had not yet gained access to sensitive I.R.S. data, the two people said.
The Washington Post reported earlier on Sunday that the I.R.S. was considering a memorandum of understanding that would give DOGE staff members broad access to its systems, including the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains taxpayer accounts.
Attempts by Mr. Musk’s team to gain access to Treasury Department data have faced legal challenges, and efforts to scrutinize I.R.S. systems could encounter a similar fate.
This month, 19 state attorneys general led by Letitia James of New York sued to block the Trump administration’s policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” led by Mr. Musk access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems. On Friday, a judge extended a court order blocking that access and said she would decide soon whether to keep the restrictions in place until a final ruling was made, which could take months.
The I.R.S. is preparing to lay off thousands of employees as soon as this week as part of the administration’s initiative to cut costs across the federal government.
The Biden administration was in the process of a multibillion-dollar overhaul of its systems, but Republicans have been working to rescind much of the agency’s funding.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that he hoped to upgrade the antiquated technology at the I.R.S.
“I have three goals: it’s collections, privacy and customer service,” Mr. Bessent said on Fox Business last week. “And I don’t think there’s anyone, anyone in the country, who thinks that they — that the I.R.S. has achieved its potential in either of those three.”
President Trump has long been a critic of the I.R.S., often complaining that it was overly aggressive in its audits of his finances.
In a fund-raising email on Saturday, Mr. Trump asked recipients whether he should authorize Mr. Musk’s team to audit the tax agency.
“Are you sick of being targeted and harassed by the I.R.S.?” Mr. Trump asked. “Well maybe it’s time that somebody audited them for a change!”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Palestinian Displacement in the West Bank Is Highest Since 1967, Experts Say
The Israeli military launched a wide-scale operation last month against militants in several cities in the West Bank. Now, roughly 40,000 Palestinians have fled their homes — the highest since Israel occupied the territory nearly six decades ago, according to researchers.
By Fatima AbdulKarim and Patrick Kingsley, Feb. 17, 2025
Fatima AbdulKarim reported from Ramallah, West Bank, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.
A weekslong Israeli military operation across several West Bank cities has displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, in what historians and researchers say is the biggest displacement of civilians in the territory since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Israeli campaigns against armed Palestinian groups in three parts of the northern West Bank have forced thousands of residents to shelter with friends and relatives, or camp in wedding halls, schools, mosques, municipal buildings and even a farm shed.
The Israeli military says the operation is solely an attempt to stifle rising militancy in Jenin, Tulkarem and near Tubas, targeting gunmen who they say have carried out or are planning terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. Palestinians fear it is a veiled attempt to permanently displace Palestinians from their homes and exert greater control over areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous body that has also battled the militants in recent months.
Many of the displaced are the descendants of refugees who were expelled or fled from their homes during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a period known in Arabic as the Nakba. The renewed displacement, even if temporary, raises painful memories of the central trauma in Palestinian history.
While roughly 3,000 have returned home, most remain homeless after more than three weeks — a bigger displacement than during a similar Israeli campaign in the West Bank in 2002, according to two Palestinian and two Israeli experts on the history of the West Bank. That year, troops raided several cities at the height of a Palestinian uprising, known as the second intifada, which began with protests before leading to a surge in Palestinian attacks on civilians in Israel.
The current numbers also dwarf the displacement during intra-Palestinian clashes earlier this year, when up to 1,000 residents of Jenin left their homes, according to a residents’ leadership council there.
As in 2002, some of those displaced during this new campaign will have no home to return to. The Israeli military has demolished scores of buildings in the areas it has invaded, ripping up roads, water pipes and power lines to destroy what it says are booby traps set by militants.
The United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs said that water and sanitation systems had been destroyed in four dense urban neighborhoods, known as refugee camps because they house people displaced in 1948 and their descendants. It added that some water infrastructure had been contaminated with sewage.
“We’ve reached a point where the refugee camps are out of order,” said Hakeem Abu Safiye, who oversees emergency services in Tulkarem camp. “They are uninhabitable. Even if the army pulls out, we are not sure what will be left to repair.”
The full scale of the damage is unclear because the military is still operating in most of the areas it has invaded, but the United Nations has already recorded severe damage to more than 150 homes in Jenin. By early February, the Israeli military had acknowledged blowing up at least 23 buildings, but it has declined to confirm the latest number of demolished structures.
“The soldiers are taking over one area after another, destroying homes, infrastructure and roads,” said Ramy Abu Siriye, 53, a barber forced to flee his home in Tulkarem on Jan. 27, the first day of the Israeli operation there.
“The Israelis have two objectives — first, to push refugees from the northern West Bank toward the central areas, aiming to erase the refugee camps entirely,” Mr. Abu Siriye said. “The second goal is to eliminate resistance and weaken the Palestinian Authority’s ability to govern,” Mr. Abu Siriye added.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said the military’s goal was to root out militant groups, including Hamas, that launch terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.
“The purpose of the operations is to prevent terror from places a few kilometers from Jewish communities and to prevent a repeat of Oct. 7,” Colonel Shoshani said, referring to the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed up to 1,200 people and led to the abduction of some 250 hostages.
Colonel Shoshani acknowledged that in some cases people had been ordered to leave specific buildings close to what he said were militant hideouts. But more generally, Colonel Shoshani denied any wider policy of “forced evacuation or displacement of Palestinians,” he said. “If people want to move around, they are obviously allowed to,” he added. Roughly 3,000 people have been able to return to al-Faraa camp, near Tubas.
But displaced Palestinians said that in both Jenin and Tulkarem they were instructed to leave by soldiers who used loudspeakers to make general evacuation orders.
“We had to leave the camp — the army threatened to shoot at us,” said Aws Khader, 29, a supermarket owner who fled Tulkarem on Jan. 27. “They used megaphones, ordering people to leave or be shot,” Mr. Khader added.
Asked for comment on this and similar incidents, the military repeated in a statement that no evacuation orders had been issued, but that all those who wished to leave had been provided with safe passage. The statement said that troops operated in Mr. Khader’s neighborhood because they had “uncovered terror infrastructure and weapons that terrorists had hidden in a bookstore.”
Palestinians dismiss the military’s explanations, citing calls by key ministers in Israel’s far-right government to encourage the flight of Palestinians from the West Bank, destroy the Palestinian Authority and annex the territory.
Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 from Jordan, expelling Palestinians from several villages close to Israel and prompting the flight of hundreds of thousands of others into Jordan. Since then, Israel has gradually entrenched its control, building hundreds of settlements, often on private Palestinian land, for hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians, and building a two-tier legal structure that critics have described as an apartheid system. Israel strongly denies the charge.
Efforts to cement Israeli control over the territory accelerated after the current Israeli government entered office in 2022.
Bezalel Smotrich, a settler leader turned finance minister, was given authority over part of an influential military unit that controls Palestinian building projects in most of the territory.
His empowerment heightened suspicions about the government’s intentions: Mr. Smotrich published a lengthy plan in 2017 that proposed permanent Israeli control of the territory. Under the plan, Palestinians would be denied voting rights, at least initially, and those who did not accept Israeli control would be paid to emigrate, or killed if they resorted to violence.
The government has also placed growing restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank; banned UNRWA, the United Nations agency that cares for Palestinian refugees and their descendants; and done little to curb efforts by far-right Israeli activists to force thousands of Palestinian herders from remote but strategic areas of the territory.
“What makes this moment unprecedented is not only the scale of the displacement but also the accompanying discourse, which increasingly normalizes the idea of permanent forced displacement,” said Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American historian at the University of Arizona.
“This represents a significant escalation in the longstanding conflict, one that threatens to fundamentally alter the political and demographic landscape of the region,” she added.
Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) Israel Says It Will Keep Troops ‘Temporarily’ in 5 Points in Lebanon
The announcement raised the specter of renewed fighting in southern Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia.
By Patrick Kingsley and Euan Ward, Reporting from Jerusalem and Beirut, Feb. 17, 2025
Israeli soldiers on patrol in southern Lebanon, on Monday. Credit...Rabih Daher/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military said on Monday that it will keep forces in five locations in southern Lebanon after a deadline for its full withdrawal lapses on Tuesday. The announcement raised fears of a resurgence in violence in southern Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.
After more than a year of war, the two sides reached a cease-fire in late November that was contingent on both Israel and Hezbollah ceding control of southern Lebanon to the Lebanese military by the end of January. Hezbollah had long dominated the region, while Israel had captured large parts of it after invading Lebanon in September.
In late January, mediators announced a three-week extension to that agreement, giving Israel more time to complete its withdrawal. The truce has frequently been punctured by bursts of violence — including an Israeli airstrike on Monday that killed a Hamas leader in southern Lebanon — but neither side has reverted to full-scale war.
Now, the specter of renewed conflict looms once more after the Israeli military announced that it will keep some troops in Lebanon beyond the Feb. 18 deadline, potentially preventing some Lebanese civilians from returning home.
“We will leave small amounts of troops deployed temporarily in five strategic points along the border in Lebanon so we can continue to defend our residents and to make sure there’s no immediate threat,” said Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesman, in a briefing for reporters on Monday afternoon.
Colonel Shoshani named several locations spread along most of the length of the 75-mile border, including places across the border from Israeli villages that were badly damaged by Hezbollah rocket fire during the war. He said that Hezbollah had not lived up to its own side of the November agreement and still posed a threat to Israeli residents in those areas. He declined to say how long the occupation would last. It is unclear to what extent Hezbollah has a presence in those areas.
Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, vehemently opposed the idea of Israel keeping troops inside Lebanon during a speech on Sunday. But he stopped short of pledging to resume attacks against Israel.
“Israel must withdraw completely on Feb. 18,” Mr. Qassem said. “This is the agreement.”
“Everyone knows how an occupation is dealt with,” he warned, without giving further details.
The war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out after the Lebanese militia started firing on Israeli military positions in solidarity with its ally Hamas, shortly after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023.
The conflict remained largely contained to back-and-forth missile and rocket strikes, displacing thousands on either side of the border, until it erupted into a full frontal war and wide-scale Israeli bombardment of Lebanese cities in the second half of 2024.
Israel killed much of Hezbollah’s leadership in an aerial campaign and invaded large swaths of southern Lebanon, in moves that collectively displaced more than a million people in Lebanon.
Israel said its intention was to prevent Hezbollah from posing a threat to residents of northern Israel, some 60,000 of whom were forced to leave their homes because of Hezbollah rocket fire.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Refusing to Carry Out Trump’s Flagrantly Dishonest Orders
By The Editorial Board, Feb. 17, 2025
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump’s determination to bend the American justice system to his will, combined with his broad tolerance for political corruption and his abhorrence of checks and balances on his power, slammed hard last week into the commitment to duty, honor and the rule of law shared by a group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C. The confrontation between Mr. Trump’s lieutenants at the Justice Department — led by his former personal defense lawyer, Emil Bove III — and Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and her colleagues is the clearest example yet of this administration’s efforts to bake quid pro quo deal making, coercive tactics, loyalty tests and other dishonorable practices into American government and warp its long-held principle of equal justice before the law.
Those tactics are being used not just in Washington, but increasingly at the state and city level, too, particularly against local policies that Mr. Trump opposes. In this case, the Justice Department has undermined the ethical and trustworthy governance of New York City by moving to let its mayor, Eric Adams, off the hook for corruption charges brought by Southern District prosecutors, in apparent exchange for Mr. Adams’s acquiescence and support for the Trump administration’s desires, starting with its crackdown on illegal immigration.
This board called on Mr. Adams to resign last September, after the indictment was unsealed; the damage and destabilization now resulting from this devil’s bargain between the mayor and the Justice Department make it only more urgent that Mr. Adams step down. If he does not, he must face an investigation and possible prosecution by state officials. New York City voters will also have an important say in the matter. In the June mayoral primary, they will have to muster the clarity and resolve to stop Mr. Adams if he continues his candidacy for re-election.
What is so alarming about the Trump Justice Department’s actions is that the nation’s top law enforcement officials are bent not just on turning an intentionally blind eye to their peers alleging illegal actions and exploiting the misconduct of a desperate lackey like Mr. Adams for their own purposes, but on corrupting the prosecutors and civil servants in the department itself. That much was clear in letters written by Ms. Sassoon and her Southern District colleague Hagan Scotten outlining the reasons they would not obey the flagrantly dishonest and untenable order to drop the Adams charges from Mr. Bove, the acting deputy attorney general who had served (and lost) as Mr. Trump’s criminal lawyer in his hush money case. The resignation letters by the two prosecutors, both with conservative backgrounds, are compelling declarations of why demands like these from the administration are serious violations of democratic practice, tradition, precedent, decency and legality.
“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Mr. Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Ms. Sassoon wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” followed Mr. Scotten in his own resignation letter.
Mr. Adams became the first sitting mayor in modern New York City history to face a criminal indictment when he was charged last September with five federal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and bribery. Since then, Mr. Adams has shamelessly sought to win Mr. Trump’s favor, and the mayor’s lawyers asked for a pardon for him.
In a clear sign that Mr. Trump’s protection comes with expectations, Mr. Adams made a joint appearance with Mr. Trump’s so-called border czar, Thomas Homan, on Fox News, after the deal was reached. They collegially discussed reopening an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at the city’s Rikers Island jail, contrary to New York law. Mr. Homan was unusually forthright during the Fox appearance in saying that the administration expected Mr. Adams to comply with its mass deportation efforts.
“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch — I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” Mr. Homan said.
Mr. Adams, of course, denies that his intent in courting Mr. Trump was ever to have the federal charges dropped and says that he remains independent. And Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams’s lawyers deny any quid pro quo. But as Ms. Sassoon wrote in her letter, the mayor’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” to federal prosecutors, offering to assist in the president’s immigration enforcement in exchange for dropping the charges.
And the deal that the mayor offered “is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo,” she wrote. In it, Mr. Bove wrote that the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violence crime.” It is clear that Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Bove’s claims about the Adams indictment being politicized by prosecutors and the Biden administration are specious. The lawyers installed by Mr. Trump never questioned the validity or seriousness of the charges; their case for dismissal was driven by the mayor’s potential usefulness to the Trump administration.
That follows Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of federal power to squeeze and control officials in realms beyond his reach, from private business to higher education to local government. He has done much the same to federal workers who might demonstrate unwanted independence as they execute their responsibilities or meet their legal and constitutional obligations.
In the case of Mr. Adams, the president and the Justice Department are sending a message that they intend to dispense with the impartiality, precedents, norms and very laws on which the American justice system depends. In seeking dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams “without prejudice,” the Justice Department is sending the clear message that they can be reinstated, should he stray from the Trump line.
All of this leaves New York City with a mayor plainly unfit for office, whose credible accusations of corruption — let’s remember that five aides or associates of Mr. Adams have been indicted as well, and seven others have left office under pressure — are now joined by the strongest possible disincentive to cross the president in any way. If he is loyal to the great city he was elected to lead, he will resign. Many leading New York political leaders have already demanded that he do so. Some of them have also demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul take immediate action to use her legal authority to fire him if he continues to refuse to do so.
Ms. Hochul has wisely resisted that path. At a time when Mr. Trump is so brazenly attacking democratic norms through overreaching assertions of executive branch authority, the idea that Ms. Hochul would take the unprecedented step of removing a democratically elected official outside of the traditional electoral process is unwise. Though the situations are quite different — Ms. Hochul actually has the legal authority for such an action, something Mr. Trump has lacked in so many of his early moves — this is not the time for Democratic Party leaders to muddy the waters around respect for democratic norms, especially when they need to make the case against Mr. Trump’s subversion of the rule of law. More appropriately, the City Charter has provisions for a five-member “committee on mayoral inability” to remove him, though the presence of Mr. Adams’s appointees may make this outcome less likely.
In the meantime, Ms. Hochul, other elected officials and leaders in the city, state and Democratic Party — many who have called for his resignation — should press Mr. Adams to resign on his own accord. And it will be important for officials, including state prosecutors, to continue to hold him to account for any illegal or unethical moves. (Many of the actions cited by federal prosecutors would also constitute state crimes, and could be investigated and charged by the Manhattan district attorney.) If it comes to it, New York City voters will have the final say on Mr. Adams’s political future in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, in which he is likely to be a candidate, or in the general election in November.
Appealing to the better instincts of this new Trump administration — with its open disdain for law and morality — has so far proven a losing proposition. And it would be naïve to hope that the public backlash to this abuse of power will give Mr. Trump and Attorney General Bondi real pause about such further abuses in the future. But the efforts of prosecutors, civil servants, elected officials and others to document and decry this injustice, and to stand up and even resign in the face of this administration’s transgressions, matters enormously. The attempt to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams must still come before the federal district judge assigned to the case, Dale Ho, and he may yet conduct a thorough inquiry on the government’s action.
If so, the investigations Mr. Bove has threatened against Ms. Sassoon, Mr. Scotten and other prosecutors who defied his order, if held in public, will hardly reflect favorably on the Justice Department. Ms. Sassoon and Mr. Scotten could not be credibly denounced by Mr. Trump as woke or radical — she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, a renowned conservative, and is a member of the conservative Federalist Society; he is a decorated Special Forces veteran who clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts.
In his first term, Mr. Trump was often restrained from his most dangerous impulses by people who knew better. He has taken great care this time to exclude such people from his entourage, leaving it to brave and truly patriotic civil servants to stand up to him, like the seven Justice Department lawyers who resigned rather than carry out the order to drop the Adams indictment.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Trump Cuts Target Next Generation of Scientists and Public Health Leaders
A core group of so-called disease detectives, who track outbreaks, was apparently spared. But other young researchers are out of jobs.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 18, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with President Trump after being sworn in as the health secretary on Thursday. Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly said he intends to clean house at various federal agencies. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The notices came all weekend, landing in the inboxes of federal scientists, doctors and public health professionals: Your work is no longer needed.
At the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the “disease detectives” who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.
President Trump’s plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts.
Public health officials, for instance, have been tracking a lethal strain of bird flu that they say remains a low risk to Americans. In recent weeks, however, it claimed its first victim in the United States — a patient in Louisiana who had been exposed to a backyard flock.
“It’s not canceled,” Elon Musk, the billionaire in charge of the downsizing, wrote on social media in response to the blowback about the purported dismantling of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
The firings have also excised the next generation of leaders at the C.D.C., the N.I.H., the Food and Drug Administration, and other agencies that the department oversees.
“It seems like a very destructive strategy to fire the new talent at an agency, and the talent that’s being promoted,” said Dr. David Fleming, the chairman of an advisory committee to the C.D.C. director. He added, “A lot of energy and time has been spent in recruiting those folks, and that’s now tossed out the window.”
The form-letter emails told recipients they were “not fit for continued employment” because their “ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency’s needs” and their “performance has not been adequate.”
On Monday, eight officials who led health agencies under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — including the heads of the C.D.C., the N.I.H. and the F.D.A. — issued a joint statement denouncing the cuts. It listed a string of initiatives, from combating the opioid epidemic to bringing primary care to rural communities, that are “vital to the economic security of our nation” and are carried out by public servants.
“These individuals are not numbers on a spreadsheet,” they wrote, adding, “We owe them a debt of gratitude, not a pink slip.”
The dismissals have also rattled graduate students eyeing careers in public health and the biomedical sciences.
“I just lectured to 42 graduate students this morning whose whole future at this point is not clear,” said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Will they have jobs? Will there be public health employment in the future?”
A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department said it was following administration guidance and “taking action to support the president’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government.”
“This is to ensure that H.H.S. better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard,” the spokesman, Andrew Nixon, said in an email on Friday.
As with the rest of the government, the cuts are aimed at probationary employees with less than a year on the job. But the cuts come as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the prominent vaccine skeptic and newly confirmed health secretary, is starting in his job. Officials at the N.I.H. are especially concerned that he might target more senior employees by asking for their resignations.
Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly said he intends to clean house at various federal agencies. He warned that he would cut 600 jobs at the health institutes. In October, after merging his presidential campaign with that of Mr. Trump, he instructed F.D.A. officials to “preserve your records” and “pack your bags.”
About 700 staff members were cut at the F.D.A., including lawyers, doctors and doctorate-level reviewers in the medical device, tobacco, food and drug divisions.
The cuts over the weekend have touched all manner of health workers. They are not only scientists and disease hunters but also administrators who oversee grant proposals, analysts figuring out new ways to cut health care costs and computer specialists who try to improve the government’s antiquated systems for tracking health information.
Arielle Kane was hired in May to work on a new project that aimed to improve maternal health outcomes in Medicaid. She was assured by a manager on Friday that her job at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was safe. On Saturday afternoon, she received an email that she had been fired for poor performance.
“I was just so excited to be working on maternal health and on Medicaid,” Ms. Kane said. “It feels extra enraging to have finally gotten the job I wanted, to have just had a good performance review and then be so unceremoniously fired for poor performance.”
The Laboratory Leadership Service, a prestigious training fellowship at the C.D.C., was hit hard, according to three people familiar with the program. Of its 24 fellows, four were protected because they are in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, a uniformed branch whose members work across government. The other 20 were let go.
The program, begun in 2015 in response to quality and safety concerns in laboratories, is a sister program to the more prominent Epidemic Intelligence Service, or E.I.S. It was developed to strengthen ties between epidemiologists and laboratory scientists. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in microbiology, organic chemistry or another laboratory-related discipline.
Some of the fellows are assigned to state and local public health laboratories. Others work at C.D.C. in Atlanta. During outbreaks like the coronavirus pandemic, they are sent into the field with E.I.S. officers.
“E.I.S. has such a strong culture and alumni; the response will be, ‘Thank God E.I.S. was spared,’” said Dr. Michael Iademarco, who helped create the Laboratory Leadership Service when he was at the C.D.C. “And my response will be, ‘Yeah, but we just killed the promising half of field investigation, because nobody knows about it.’”
The agency has also lost its presidential management fellows, who were assigned to the C.D.C. under a decades-old government initiative that describes itself as “the premier leadership development program for advanced degree holders across all academic disciplines.”
Veterans of the health agencies said they were troubled by the seemingly random nature of the cuts.
“If there’s a need to reduce the budget, that happens at all levels of government, but there should be a thoughtful approach,” said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a former deputy commissioner of the F.D.A. He added, “For some of these roles, there is very specialized knowledge.”
Dr. Fleming, a former deputy C.D.C. director, said many health professionals can earn more in the private sector but choose to join the government because they are drawn to public service. The terminations would make it harder to attract new talent, he said.
“We’re cutting off our hand to spite our face,” he said.
Christina Jewett, Roni Caryn Rabin and Sarah Kliff contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) C.I.A. Expands Secret Drone Flights Over Mexico
The covert program, begun during the Biden administration and stepped up by President Trump, is hunting for the location of fentanyl labs.
By Julian E. Barnes, Maria Abi-Habib, Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt, Feb. 18, 2025
Julian Barnes, Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Maria Abi-Habib from Mexico City.
The United States has stepped up secret drone flights over Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs, part of the Trump administration’s more aggressive campaign against drug cartels, according to U.S. officials.
The covert drone program, which has not been previously disclosed, began under the Biden administration, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the program.
But President Trump and his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, have repeatedly promised more intense action against Mexican drug cartels. Increasing the drone flights was a quick initial step.
The C.I.A. has not been authorized to use the drones to take lethal action, the officials said, adding that they do not envision using the drones to conduct airstrikes. For now, C.I.A. officers in Mexico pass information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.
The flights go “well into sovereign Mexico,” one U.S. official said.
The Mexican government has taken steps to address the Trump administration’s concerns about fentanyl, deploying 10,000 troops to the border this month to thwart smuggling. But the Trump administration wants Mexico to do more to destroy or dismantle fentanyl labs and to seize more of the drug.
The drones have proved adept at identifying labs, according to people with knowledge of the program. Fentanyl labs emit chemicals that make them easy to find from the air.
However, during the Biden administration, the Mexican government was slow to take action against labs identified by the Americans, although it did use the information to make arrests, according to two of the officials.
The officials all spoke on the condition their names not be used so they could discuss a classified intelligence program and sensitive diplomacy between Mexico and the United States.
The surveillance flights have already caused consternation in Mexico, which has long been wary of its northern neighbor after multiple U.S. invasions and land grabs.
In addition to the C.I.A.’s efforts, the U.S. military’s Northern Command is also expanding its surveillance of the border. But the U.S. military, unlike the spy agency, is not entering Mexican airspace.
So far, Northern Command has conducted more than two dozen surveillance flights over the southern border using a variety of surveillance aircraft including U-2s, RC-135 Rivet Joints, P-8s and drones, said a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The military has also created a special intelligence task force of 140 analysts, located near the border, to analyze the information being collected by the surveillance flights and other sources, Northern Command said in a statement this month.
Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of the Northern Command, told the Senate last week that analysts are providing intelligence that “gets after the cartel networks that drive the production and distribution of fentanyl and pushes it across the border.”
In response to questions from lawmakers, General Guillot said the intelligence was shared with Mexican officials to help them “address the cartel violence in terms of sending more troops.” General Guillot said his command had increased intelligence collection in order to make “rapid progress against this threat.”
Asked about General Guillot’s comments, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said that Mexican sovereignty was “not negotiable, and we will always coordinate without subordinating.”
Officials from the White House, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all declined to comment on the secret intelligence program.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 calling for a crackdown on major cartels. This week, his administration plans to designate a half-dozen cartels and criminal groups in Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations.
The designation gives the U.S. government broad powers to impose economic sanctions on groups and entities linked to them. But the cartels are already under heavy sanctions by the U.S. government, and a foreign terrorist designation would provide no significant new tools to block their financial maneuvering, according to former American officials who have worked on these issues.
While the sanctions are not necessary for the stepped-up intelligence collection by the C.I.A., several former officials said the designation was an important symbolic step that could, eventually, be followed by expanded operations by the U.S. military or intelligence agencies.
The U.S. military’s Seventh Special Forces Group began a training exercise in Mexico this month. Maj. Russell Gordon, a spokesman for First Special Forces Command, said the training with the Mexican Marine Infantry was preplanned and part of “longstanding U.S.-Mexico defense cooperation.”
Still, former officials say they believe that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are likely to increase training with Mexican authorities in the coming months.
Conducting an airstrike on fentanyl labs would probably cause catastrophic fatalities, as they are often inside homes in urban areas, a person familiar with the program said, most likely contributing to the reluctance to authorize lethal force.
The possibility for violence also exists if the Mexican military or police move against the lab.
But the purpose of providing the intelligence to Mexican authorities is not to kill cartel members, but instead to disable the labs, according to American officials briefed on the program.
If the cooperation and intelligence sharing do not lead to the destruction of the labs, the Trump administration has signaled it is considering alternative moves.
In a visit to the southwestern border this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not rule out conducting cross-border raids to pursue cartels inside Mexico.
“All options are on the table,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters.
In the transition to the new Trump administration, a former senior U.S. official said incoming aides had made clear that they planned to use the full American counterterrorism apparatus — surveillance aircraft and satellites, intelligence analysts, as well as American personnel or military contractors — to go after the cartels inside Mexico.
Ms. Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, has been grilled by reporters about the expanded military flights on the border, after they were detected on Jan. 31.
Last week Mexico’s defense secretary, Gen. Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, told reporters that the military had not received any request from the United States to fly in Mexican airspace and insisted that the surveillance flights had not violated international law as they flew above international waters.
Days later, as more surveillance flights were detected along the border, Ms. Sheinbaum said that the flights were not new, suggesting that they took place under Mr. Biden, but did not elaborate. She said the flights were “part of the dialogue, the coordination, that we have.”
Mr. Trump has announced a former C.I.A. paramilitary officer, Ronald Johnson, as his choice to serve as ambassador to Mexico. Former officials said they believed Mr. Johnson was tapped because of his experience working with both the spy agency and military Special Operations forces.
The president also announced this month that he would appoint Joe Kent, a former Army Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) South Africa Is a Warning
By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 18, 2025
Kyutae Lee
This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.
When people in the rich world imagine a migrant from the poor world, I suspect the image conjured is that of a desperately impoverished person with no marketable skills who will travel any distance and brave any risk to grab an unearned fistful of Western wealth.
But the truth is that a migrant is much more likely to look like a man I met last year named Fikre Gebrie Orebo. Growing up in a fertile but deeply impoverished southern region of Ethiopia, he had dreamed of attending university to become an engineer. But he was the firstborn son, and his family depended on him to start working immediately. And so he hit the road, leaving his hometown and heading to the capital, Addis Ababa. He found work as a laborer, digging foundations by hand and moving stones on construction sites.
It didn’t take long for him to realize he’d need to keep moving. The brutal work paid little, and there were few opportunities for young men like him. The government was dominated by a northern ethnic elite that shunned his southern tribe. The last straw came when the government started rounding up young men to send them to fight an ill-advised war with Eritrea. Orebo feared that southerners like him would be used as cannon fodder in a pointless conflict.
But when he finally set off on his cross-border journey, he didn’t head north, toward Europe, or try to somehow get to the distant, prosperous lands of North America, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have settled. He set his sights on Kenya, his country’s neighbor to the south, where he found a job in a cafe, then farther south still, to South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy, where he had heard that an enterprising young person could make a prosperous life.
There, he told me, he was granted asylum as a member of a persecuted minority, and he ultimately settled in Heidelberg, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Johannesburg. Finally, his dreams came to life. He built a successful business, a pair of convenience stores, known locally as spaza shops, in the nearby Black township of Ratanda. He married a young South African woman, and they are raising their children in a comfortable, suburban-style home. He has long sent money home to Ethiopia, supporting his siblings while they were in school and helping to build a house for his father, who had been a farmer, to enjoy a comfortable retirement.
Orebo’s story illustrates an important but often occluded fact in this age of migration. Despite the panic in rich countries over the arrival of people fleeing poor, war-tossed nations, most people from the global south who migrate don’t head north. The majority who flee in haste end up quite near where they came from, hoping to go home as soon as possible. And even those who migrate farther afield — searching for work, fleeing political persecution or simply wanting a new life — tend to remain in their own region or continent. In our hyperconnected, jet-powered age, the median distance traveled by modern migrants is less than 400 miles.
This pattern has been repeated across the globe in the biggest crises of our time. The 2015 surge of Syrian refugees that remade European politics was a small fraction of the total number of Syrians forced to flee; a vast majority ended up in neighboring countries, with Turkey alone playing uncomfortable host to some three million people, roughly three times that of the entire European Union.
More than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country’s long-running political and economic crisis. President Trump’s recent spat with the president of Colombia over deporting Colombian migrants looks quite different when you consider that Colombia, a country of some 50 million people, with a per capita G.D.P. of less than a tenth that of the United States, has taken in about four times as many Venezuelans as America. Indeed, 85 percent of Venezuelan refugees and migrants have remained in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Perhaps the most urgent refugee crisis in the world right now, one of the largest since the partition of India in 1947, was set off by the civil war in Sudan, which has forced some 14 million people to flee their homes. Most of Sudan’s refugees have fled into often troubled bordering nations: Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. Vanishingly few have managed to reach Europe or North America.
Sudan is just the latest of the many long-simmering refugee crises on the continent. Decades of turmoil in Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and more have produced floods of refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in the number of forcibly displaced people, with some 45 million on the move, more than doubling since 2017. But an estimated 96 percent of those people remain within the continent.
While governments across the global north panic over a relative trickle of migrants, a very real migration crisis is unfolding in the global south. And as wealthy countries in the global north raise their fences ever higher and outsource their border control to countries beyond their frontiers while slashing development aid to the poorest nations, the pressure on migrant destinations in the global south is ratcheting up — sparking violence, xenophobia and instability. By closing their borders to the relatively small numbers of migrants who make the crossing, rich countries risk destabilizing some of the most important nations for regional stability across the globe.
That danger is abundantly clear in South Africa, where a country long home to migrants has now turned against them, with devastating effect. For other magnet countries in the global south facing great flows of migrants fleeing war, poverty and the degradation of their land by climate change, South Africa is a potent cautionary tale. And for the rest of the world, it’s a warning.
When I went to South Africa on the eve of its national elections last May, I found unease. The vote came 30 years after the end of apartheid, but the mood was anything but celebratory. Bitter and disappointed by the failure to achieve broad prosperity for Black citizens, political opportunists have redirected resentment from white residents, who still hold much of the country’s land and wealth, and refashioned it into an often violent antipathy toward African migrants who have flocked to South Africa, the continent’s wealthiest nation.
Xenophobia in South Africa is not new, but the issue gained political significance in last year’s elections. Since 1994, the African National Congress has held large majorities, a virtual hammerlock on electoral politics with a broad-church approach that papered over many of the cleavages within the country’s diverse population. But its support has been steadily slipping, and the fault lines within its coalition have taken on predictable if tragic forms: stoking ethnic divisions and scapegoating of foreigners.
“Dissenting politics, arising from the sort of poverty, unemployment and deep problems that we have in our society, will not necessarily produce progressive politics,” Noor Nieftagodien, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, told me. “Xenophobia is an important expression of the kind of regressive politics that can be produced under those circumstances.”
To understand how those politics were playing out ahead of the vote, I went to Ratanda, where Orebo had made his modest fortune. He had been living in South Africa for about 18 years. From the moment he arrived, he felt a sense of optimism and possibility, completely different from the torpor and political conflict gripping his homeland. He quickly found work, selling goods in a market in the center of Johannesburg, then saving up enough money to start a shop of his own in Ratanda.
He told me that he had a great life in South Africa, even if there were problems along the way. Running a cash business in a poor township wasn’t easy. He had been robbed at gunpoint a number of times, but he took these incidents in stride.
“In South Africa, this robbery thing is normal,” he told me. “We don’t mind once the robbery comes. You only take what we sell on that day. But the following day, we will start again. So it was not a problem.”
Orebo arrived in South Africa in 2006, a time when the economy was in the midst of a postapartheid boom and the governing African National Congress saw the country as a beacon for Africa, opening its doors to people across the continent who sought safety and opportunity. “South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” the preamble to South Africa’s Constitution boldly declares, while avoiding the word “citizens.”
The A.N.C. had long embraced a Pan-African ethos, advocating much freer movement across the continent, arguing that antiquated barriers to trade and migration were a colonial hangover. “South Africa cannot be an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty” was a popular refrain in the party, often attributed to Nelson Mandela. Why, the party asked, should the most talented Africans go to Europe or America when there was so much potential waiting to be tapped so much closer to home?
South Africa certainly had abundance. There were seemingly endless tracts of fertile farmland; rich seams of precious gold, diamonds and platinum; gorgeous landscapes to draw tourists from across the globe; and high-quality infrastructure to move people and goods easily within the country and beyond its borders.
But the terms of the settlement that ended apartheid sowed the seeds of xenophobia in ways that, looking back, are painfully obvious. Black South Africans gained political power and freedom of movement. But despite the American right-wing fantasies fueled by Trump and Elon Musk of a persecuted white minority being chased off their land and stripped of their wealth, most of the country’s riches remained stubbornly held by the white minority.
This was the price of a peaceful transition: an agreement to transfer political power without broadly redistributing wealth. A handful of politically connected Black elites, people like the country’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who had played a critical role in ending apartheid as the leader of a mineworkers’ union, had been dealt into the upper reaches of the economy, becoming fabulously wealthy.
Just about everyone else was left behind. When the World Inequality Lab examined South Africa’s economy in 2021, it found that despite the country’s political transformation, “there is no evidence that wealth inequality has decreased since the end of apartheid.” The wealthiest 10 percent own more than 85 percent of the country’s household wealth, it found. About a third of the work force is unemployed.
South Africa had long been a magnet for workers across southern Africa when Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms plunged Zimbabwe into free fall, sending more than a million people across the border not long before the postapartheid boom started to fade. Horrific acts of violence targeting African migrants became commonplace, with widespread riots breaking out in 2008 and 2015.
The mobs would sometimes interrogate suspected foreigners, asking if they knew the isiZulu word for “elbow.” Spaza shop owners, in particular, were frequent targets, including those from Somalia. Many had very dark skin and striking aquiline features that made it impossible to pass for locals, and their work in townships made them sitting ducks for xenophobic violence.
Maybe he was just lucky, but Orebo told me he had not faced such prejudice. There was some rioting in Ratanda 2012, when he and other foreign shopkeepers were looted and closed their shops for a few days, but otherwise he felt welcome in the community. He married a local woman, and their three children were South African citizens. His business thrived, and he told me with pride that at one point he had three cars.
Spaza shops, where locals buy small daily household items like food, toiletries and cigarettes, have long been a battleground in the wars between South Africans and outsiders. Migrant groups, especially those from Somalia and Ethiopia, have thrived in this niche, giving rise to resentment from locals. After years of dodging such violence, Orebo ran out of luck in the fall of 2023.
A mob of anti-migrant activists — including, I was told, supporters of a group known as Operation Dudula — swarmed the township, blocking streets with flaming tires. They burned and looted shops owned by foreigners, including Orebo’s. He went to the township later that night to survey the damage and salvage what he could but was confronted by armed men.
“They came with a gun, and they shot at me,” Orebo told me. “But God saved me.”
Orebo is merely the latest in a centuries-long line of migrants who have made the country we now know as South Africa, which has seen wave upon wave of migration, with each shaping its culture, politics and language in profound ways. About 1,700 years ago, Bantu people from West and Central Africa migrated south, bringing farming and other innovations to lands that had been home to the nomadic Khoekhoe and San communities. Explorers from Europe arrived in the 15th century, followed by waves of white settlers, mostly from the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain. Thousands of enslaved people, stolen from East Africa and Asia, were forced to labor there.
The discovery of diamonds and gold in the 19th century transformed South Africa into a powerful magnet, drawing fortune hunters from Europe, the United States and Australia. The mines created many dangerous and difficult jobs that needed filling, and decades before the formal imposition of apartheid, the government of South Africa created a complex system of recruitment and exploitation of Black African workers from across southern Africa. Unlike white migrants, who were permitted to settle permanently in South Africa, Black Africans who worked in mines could stay only as long as their employers permitted.
Later, it became the explicit policy of the apartheid state to rely on foreign workers from around the region rather than Black South Africans, who were denied full citizenship rights, forced off their land and herded into areas that white people didn’t want, so-called homelands based on tribal and linguistic identities. The prime land freed up by this forced migration of millions of people was sold cheaply to white settlers — a source of profound economic inequality that has endured.
The end of apartheid was supposed to lift Black South Africans and give them a share of the country’s bounty. But when that failed to happen, migrants offered an easy scapegoat.
“There is a long history of the South African elite, largely the white elite, using immigrant labor as a way of undermining Black South African power,” Loren Landau, a leading scholar of migration in South Africa, told me. If antimigrant populists in rich countries are promising a return to a supposedly better past, South Africa’s populists are playing a different game. Agitation against migrants, he said, was a misplaced attempt “to find a way of reclaiming this promised future” of a postapartheid South Africa that never materialized.
In Ratanda these politics were playing out with deadly and mysterious violence. I visited the family of Veli Ntombela, a supporter of Operation Dudula who had opened his own spaza shop after many of the migrant shop owners were pushed out of the township. A few weeks earlier, someone approached the small store attached to Ntombela’s tidy concrete block house and asked to buy cigarettes.
He was running low, so he asked his partner, Sibongile Miya, to go back into the house to fetch some more. Moments later, she heard a series of sharp cracks, at first not recognizing the sound as gunfire. She raced back into the shop, where she found Ntombela lying there, bleeding. She fell to the ground in shock. Later that evening he was declared dead from his wounds.
Ntombela’s was the latest in a series of unsolved killings involving South Africans who had set up spaza shops after the expulsion of foreigners. Ratanda was abuzz with theories about the shootings. The foreign shopkeepers, I was told, were migrants from Pakistan and members of Islamic extremist groups, to boot. No, others said, they came from Somalia and were affiliated with Al Shabab, a militant group. Some thought that foreigners had hired hit men from neighboring Lesotho to kill upstart shopkeepers like Ntombela in the hopes of reclaiming their businesses.
As these rumors circulated, Election Day was fast approaching. Utility poles were festooned with signs from Operation Dudula, which had transformed itself into an upstart regional political party. “Mass deportation of all illegal immigrants,” one read, featuring a picture of the party’s leader in camouflage fatigues. “Our economy. Our heritage.”
The party traces its origins to a vigilante group formed in 2021 in Soweto, the fabled township at the heart of the struggle against apartheid. Dudula is an isiZulu word that means to “force out” or “knock down,” and the group has repeatedly been accused of targeting and harassing foreigners.
Ntombela, who was 39, was a prominent supporter of the party. Tall with a chiseled physique, he had worked on the fringes of South Africa’s movie industry as a stuntman and actor. His relatives proudly showed me a photograph of him, smiling and shirtless, wearing a loincloth on the set of a 2013 film based on Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” starring Idris Elba.
Ntombela’s family, like a lot of Black South Africans, had been supporters of the A.N.C., but worries about crime and migration pulled them away from the party in recent years — first toward a party linked to messianic churches that promised to restore the death penalty and restrict foreign ownership of businesses and ultimately to the even more hard-line Operation Dudula.
As a new party, Operation Dudula didn’t get very far in the elections, winning less than one-tenth of a percent of the vote. But xenophobia was a crucial wedge issue driving voters from the A.N.C. to political parties like the breakaway uMkhonto weSizwe and the Patriotic Alliance, both of which promised harsh border controls. Their success underscored the country’s hardened attitude to migrants and outsiders.
Orebo, for his part, was forgiving. He said he understood why South Africans might resent foreigners who find success in the country, given how many young people struggle to eke out a living. “To be honest, South Africans, they’re very good people,” he said. “South Africans, they have a right to cry, because they overloaded this country. Every border gate is open.”
He has sent word back to Ethiopia, though, warning young people tempted to make the dangerous overland journey that it isn’t worth it. Better to set your sights elsewhere, he advises any young person who asks. Since the attack on his shops, he has not been able to reopen and has been surviving by selling off what he can — the three cars are long gone — and doing odd jobs.
“I’m really struggling,” he told me. For the first time since he went to South Africa, he’s been thinking he may need to migrate once again, perhaps to Canada or the United States. “Really, I give up,” he said. “If I get any chance to go from this country, wherever I can go. Because here, now, I’m hopeless.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) Hamas Says Remains of Israeli Captives, Including Bibas Family, Will Be Handed Over on Thursday
The militant group’s chief negotiator also said Hamas would increase the number of living hostages it would release on Saturday to six from three.
By Adam Rasgon and Fatima AbdulKarim, Feb. 18, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem and Fatima AbdulKarim reported from Ramallah
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, said in a speech on Tuesday that militants intend to hand over the remains of four Israeli hostages to Israel on Thursday in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Mr. Hayya said that members of the Bibas family — some of the most well-known hostages worldwide — would be among the four bodies handed over to Israel on Thursday, without saying how many. The three remaining members of the Bibas family in Gaza are Shiri Bibas and her two children.
The Israeli prime minister’s office confirmed that the bodies of four Israelis would be returned on Thursday, but officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about whether the Bibas family would be among them. The Israeli military had said until recently that there were grave concerns for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though it had not confirmed their deaths.
For many Israelis, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack: Shiri Bibas was corralled by gunmen and taken to Gaza with her two red-haired children, Ariel, 4, and the baby Kfir, who was just short of 9 months old at the time. Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the children’s father, was also abducted, bleeding heavily after an assailant struck his head with a hammer, relatives said. Mr. Bibas was released from captivity earlier in February.
Mr. Hayya and the Israeli prime minister’s office also said the number of living hostages scheduled to be released on Saturday will be increased to six from three. Mr. Hayya said Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, Israeli citizens who have been held in Gaza for roughly a decade, were among the six. It was not immediately clear why Hamas had decided to increase the number of living hostages to be released on Saturday. The original agreement had called for Hamas to release three hostages this Saturday in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
The release of the living and dead hostages this week would indicate that the implementation of the initial, six-week cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas was progressing despite concerns about its fragility. Negotiations over the second phase of the deal, which calls for a permanent end to the fighting, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners, appear less solid.
The two sides were to start talks over details on the next phase two weeks ago, but Qatar, a key mediating country, said the talks had yet to begin.
Hamas has accused Israel of delaying the start of the phase two discussions, while Israel still hasn’t announced publicly when it would send officials to participate in them.
As part of the first phase of the deal, Hamas is supposed to release 33 Israeli hostages, including eight whom Israeli authorities believe are dead. As of Tuesday, Hamas had freed 19 Israelis.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) Native American Activist Leonard Peltier Released From Prison
Mr. Peltier was convicted in the killing of two F.B.I. agents. An order from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will allow him to serve his remaining time under home confinement.
By Shaila Dewan, Feb. 18, 2025
Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist held for nearly half a century for the killing of two F.B.I. agents, was released from a federal prison in Central Florida on Tuesday morning.
Mr. Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota, where he is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
The commutation of Mr. Peltier’s sentence was one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s final acts before leaving office. Those urging clemency for Mr. Peltier, who is in poor health and partially blind, included Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials including one of the lead prosecutors on the case, human rights organizations and celebrities like Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
F.B.I. agents including Christopher Wray, the former director of the agency, strongly opposed clemency for Mr. Peltier, saying that it was a betrayal of the fallen agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Mr. Wray called Mr. Peltier “a remorseless killer.”
He was convicted for his role in a shootout between activists and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 that left two agents and an activist dead. Prosecutors said the agents were shot at point-blank range.
Mr. Peltier has admitted to firing his gun from a distance, but insisted that he acted in self-defense and did not kill the agents.
Of the more than 30 people who were present during the shootout, Mr. Peltier was the only one to be convicted of a crime. Two other Native American activists were tried for murder, but were acquitted. Exculpatory evidence admitted in their trials, including ballistic evidence, was excluded from Mr. Peltier’s, which his supporters argue was one of the ways his trial was unfair.
An appeals court found in 1986 that the government had deliberately withheld evidence, but said that evidence would most likely not have changed the verdict.
Mr. Peltier was set to undergo a medical examination on Tuesday before traveling to North Dakota.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’
By Thomas B. Edsall, Feb. 18, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
President Trump has empowered Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, to fire government employees, eliminate federal agencies and run roughshod over both federal law and the Constitution.
In an unparalleled delegation of executive branch authority, Trump has chosen Musk — who is at once an entrepreneur whose companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts and an open supporter of far-right political parties in Europe — to conduct a radical reconfiguration of the American government in conformity with the ideological agendas of both Trump and Musk.
The two men have at least one thing in common. Both grew up in white enclaves during periods when racial strife was emerging — Trump was born in 1946 and grew up in the affluent Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in New York City; Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban, in South Africa, at a time when whites still ruled the country under apartheid.
The elevation of Musk marks a major reversal of Trump ideology from the angry working class, anti-elitism of his first winning campaign, in 2016, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, to the explicit privileging, this time around, of elite tech oligarchs — rich beyond the imagination of ordinary people — to guide government policies.
It is no easy task to grasp the scale and magnitude of Trump’s appointment of Musk to run the Department of Government Efficiency, better known by its acronym, DOGE. Musk’s declared goal is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, government expenditures totaled $6.75 trillion in 2024.
“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry:
To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the Appointments Clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.
Our Constitution rebels against the idea of empowering any individual, neither elected nor officially appointed pursuant to law, with the sweeping power to control the expenditure of public funds, the hiring and firing of public officials, the deployment of public force, and the organization of public agencies. This is brute dictatorship of the worst kind.
Musk and others in the Trump administration have a very different view. Musk considers what he is doing to be the embodiment of democracy in action.
At a White House briefing on Feb. 12, Musk argued that “a significant part of this presidency is to restore democracy.”
Musk asked, “What is the goal of DOGE?” and answered himself: “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”
Without radical intervention, Musk continued, “we have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected official. This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”
How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?
Musk’s answer:
The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. The president spoke about that at every rally.
The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don’t get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that’s what democracy is all about.
Musk is the latest iteration in a long line of powerful presidential advisers, some in the private sector, others in government jobs. That characterization, however, fails to convey the wide latitude Trump has given Musk to disrupt the executive branch.
The influence of Mark Hanna during the William McKinley administration, Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran and James Farley during the F.D.R. years and Karl Rove, who served as political consigliere to George W. Bush, pales in comparison to Musk’s — so much so that it can be hard to tell whether Trump or Musk or both are calling the shots.
Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, noted that the delegation of policy-making roles to unelected officials has provoked sharp controversies in the recent past.
The mandate given to Musk “truly is unprecedented in U.S. history,” Dorf wrote by email:
By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.
Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.
Even apart from the many conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and Musk’s increasingly far-right authoritarian views, this development is truly extraordinary and alarming.
In the first month of Trump’s second term, Musk and DOGE have created a climate of trepidation among the three million men and women who work for the federal government.
Many of Musk’s attempts to cut back the size of the federal bureaucracy are tied up in court cases, with some already blocked by temporary restraining orders.
His goal is to force budget cuts and reductions in force in virtually every part of the executive branch. Musk has tried, for example, with some initial success, to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the major source of nonmilitary foreign aid; to gain access to U.S. Treasury expenditure data; he led the charge to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, posting on X, which, of course, he owns: “CFPB RIP.” But these examples only touch the surface of Musk’s agenda.
The Supreme Court, which is controlled by a six-member conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Trump, may prove to be the ultimate arbiter of the success or failure of the Trump-Musk assault on the federal work force and on federal spending.
Trump has let it be known that he always abides by the courts, a claim he reiterated on Feb. 11, although other Trump Administration officials have signaled that he may not abide by adverse court rulings.
On Feb. 9, Vice President JD Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
After a series of adverse court rulings, Musk posted on X, on Feb. 12, notably the day after Trump’s latest comment on the subject: “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one.”
Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on the Constitution, replied to my inquiries about Trump and Musk by email, describing the mandate Trump has given Musk as “indeed extraordinary, unprecedented in U.S. history.”
Smith continued:
It violates the Appointments clause in Article 2, section 2 of the Constitution, which requires that all principal officers of the United States be appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The power over every federal agency and employee that Trump has given to Musk clearly makes Musk a principal officer, without Senate approval.
If Trump tries to pretend Musk is merely a consultant, then Musk is the beneficiary of excessive delegation of government power to a private individual, which is also unconstitutional.
In addition, Smith argued, “the Trump administration is ignoring lower court decisions and taking actions it knows to be illegal under existing doctrines in the hopes that it will be largely sustained by the Supreme Court, relying on unitary executive theory’s incredibly expansive view of presidential power.”
“It is hard to see how the administration could win a challenge to Musk’s appointment without Senate approval,” Smith continued, but if the Court “rules for Trump or stands aside, or if Trump ignores it, constitutional democracy in America will be in serious, perhaps fatal jeopardy.”
There may be other motives behind Trump’s empowerment of Musk.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email that Trump may be granting such powers to Musk “either in gratitude for the enormous sum of money that Musk spent on Trump’s election or perhaps for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.”
Another possibility, Cain suggested, is that
having Musk do the dirty work gives Trump the option to come in at the end and bargain away some of the more drastic cuts when it comes to the upcoming reconciliation negotiations. Trump in his first term tended to play both bad cop and good cop. Now he has some even badder cops in Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance.
This is happening, Cain continued, “in the context of the urgency of cutting government spending to make way for the tax cuts President Trump promised to donors and voters during the election. This explains the ‘cut first and ask questions later approach’ that Musk is taking.”
Even before he was formally appointed to run DOGE, Musk has been at loggerheads with Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and a leading figure in the powerful populist wing of the MAGA movement.
Bannon views Musk’s support of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants as a fundamental violation of MAGA’s anti-immigrant agenda.
In a Jan. 13 interview with the leading Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Bannon described Musk as “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.”
Bannon declared, “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time Trump is inaugurated,” a boast Bannon could not make good on. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”
More recently, on Feb. 13, Bannon warned Musk to be very cautious in planning cuts to Medicaid, a program DOGE is virtually certain to pinpoint for major spending reductions in order to meet Musk’s $2 trillion target.
“You’ve got to be careful because a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid,” Bannon continued on his podcast, “War Room.” “If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”
So far, however, Trump has persisted in backing Musk.
Trump has also supported Musk on another front, discounting the glaring conflicts of interest posed by Musk’s work at DOGE and his multibillion dollar companies, including Tesla, SpaceX including its subsidiary Starlink, XAI, an artificial intelligence start-up; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is seeking to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical need,” and X.
On Feb. 11, my Times colleagues Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind described the scope of these conflicts in detail. In “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Lipton and Grind report that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves” — meaning the Trump Administration’s attacks on the size and scope of the federal government — and that these agencies have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.”
In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”
Musk disputes the claim that his work heading DOGE conflicts with his private holdings, contending at the Feb. 12 White House briefing that “we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.”
A reporter then asked:
You’ve received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself on that?
Musk replied:
Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, “Wait a second. Hey, that seems like maybe there’s a conflict there.” I don’t feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.
Then Trump interjected:
We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest We watch that also. He’s a big businessman. He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this. We don’t want an unsuccessful guy doing this.
The exchange is particularly revealing in what is says about Trump’s moral reasoning and its similarity to Musk’s thinking.
The fact is that Musk’s conflicts of interest heading DOGE have been repeatedly pointed out, not only by the reporting in this newspaper but elsewhere, from USA Today to Fortune and by Democrats in the House and Senate.
These claims of transparency, which have also been challenged, are deemed by Trump and Musk to be adequate to protect against abuse, even when the potential for abuse is glaringly obvious.
Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, Harrington contended that what she calls a “tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency. Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them (the broligarchy) in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.”
Harrington was even more direct in an appearance with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the night after Trump was inaugurated, when she compared the relationship between Vladimir Putin and his rich supporters to Trump’s relationship to the wealthy men who backed his 2024 campaign:
At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most they would be his errand boys.
What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said “you bought it, do what you want.”
Musk, in fact, has begun to spread his wings well beyond American borders and has become a major player in far right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, including Reform U.K. in England and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In the case of Reform U.K., Musk has tried to push the party farther to the right, demanding that it support the release from prison of the extremist agitator who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform U.K., has rejected Musk’s demands, saying of Robinson:
I know a lot of Americans see him as a great champion of free speech, but I just don’t see him as suitable for our party. And I’m not someone that budges very easily.
Musk, in a videotaped speech to a Jan. 25 AfD rally in Halle, told party loyalists “I think you really are the best hope for Germany.”
Musk told the crowd, “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” adding that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”
My Times colleague Jim Tankersley wrote on Feb. 15, that the AfD
is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.
Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests, in turn, that his agenda at DOGE is as much — or more — partisan and radically conservative than it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views.
Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.
Musk has the full backing of President Trump and the strongest imaginable ally in Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The three men will inflict severe and lasting damage. The next three years and eleven months — at least — are going to be a living hell for one half of the nation. And perhaps much more than one half.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
