Immigration – Page 14 – The Tarbabys Blog

Superbug crisis could get worse, killing nearly 40 million people by 2050, study estimates

CNN

Superbug crisis could get worse, killing nearly 40 million people by 2050, study estimates

Jacqueline Howard – September 16, 2024

The number of lives lost around the world due to infections that are resistant to the medications intended to treat them could increase nearly 70% by 2050, a new study projects, further showing the burden of theongoing superbug crisis.

Cumulatively, from 2025 to 2050, the world could see more than 39 million deaths that are directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance or AMR, according to the study, which was published Monday in the journal The Lancet.

Antimicrobial resistance happens when pathogens like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to evade the medications used to kill them.

The World Health Organization has called AMR “one of the top global public health and development threats,” driven by the misuse and overuse of antimicrobial medications in humans, animals and plants, which can help pathogens develop a resistance to them.

The new study reveals that when it comes to the prevalence of AMR and its effects, “we expect it to get worse,” said lead author Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

“We need appropriate attention on new antibiotics and antibiotic stewardship so that we can address what is really quite a large problem,” he said.

Older adults bear the burden

The researchers – from the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and other institutions – estimated deaths and illnesses attributable to versus associated with antimicrobial resistance for 22 pathogens, 84 pathogen-drug combinations and 11 infections across 204 countries and territories from 1990 through 2021. A death attributable to antimicrobial resistance was directly caused by it, while a death associated with AMR may have another cause that was exacerbated by the antimicrobial resistance.

About 520 million individual records were part of the data to make those estimates.

The researchers found that from 1990 to 2021, deaths from AMR fell more than 50% among children younger than 5 but increased more than 80% among adults 70 and older – trends that are forecast to continue.

It was surprising to see those patterns emerge, Murray said.

“We had these two opposite trends going on: a decline in AMR deaths under age 15, mostly due to vaccination, water and sanitation programs, some treatment programs, and the success of those,” Murray said.

“And at the same time, there’s this steady increase in the number of deaths over age 50,” he said, as the world ages; older adults can be more susceptible to severe infection.

The researchers found that the pathogen-drug combination that had the largest increase in causing the most burden among all age groups was methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. For this combination – the antibiotic methicillin and the bacteria S. aureus – the number of attributable deaths nearly doubled from 57,200 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2021.

Using statistical modeling, the researchers also produced estimates of deaths and illnesses attributable to AMR by 2050 in three scenarios: if the current climate continues, if new potent antibiotic drugs are developed to target resistant pathogens, and if the world has improved quality of health care for infections and better access to antibiotics.

The forecasts show that deaths from antimicrobial resistance will increase by 2050 if measures are not in place to improve access to quality care, powerful antibiotics and other resources to reduce and treat infections.

The researchers estimated that, in 2050, the number of global deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance could reach 1.9 million, and those associated with antimicrobial resistance could reach 8.2 million.

According to the data, the regions of the world most affected by AMR and attributable deaths are South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa – and many of these regions don’t have equitable access to quality care, Murray said.

“There are still, unfortunately, a lot of places in low-resource settings where people who need antibiotics are just not getting them, and so that’s a big part of it. But it’s not just the antibiotics. It’s when you’re sick, either as a kid or an adult, and you get sent to hospital, and you get a package of care, essentially, that includes things like oxygen,” Murray said.

“In low-resource settings, even basics like oxygen are often not available. And then, if you are very sick and you need an intensive care unit, well, there’s big parts of the low-resource world – most of them, actually – where you wouldn’t get access to that sort of care,” he said. “So there’s a spectrum of supportive care, plus the antibiotics, that really make a difference.”

But in a scenario where the world has better health care, 92 million cumulative deaths could be averted between 2025 and 2050, the researchers forecast. And in a scenario where the world has new, more potent drugs, about 11 million cumulative deaths could be avoided.

‘There is possible hope on the horizon’

The “innovative and collaborative” approach to this study provides a “comprehensive assessment” of antimicrobial resistance and its potential burden on the world, Samuel Kariuki, of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, wrote in a commentary that accompanied the new study in The Lancet.

Yet he warned that the forecast models do not consider the emergence of new superbugs “and might lead to underestimation if new pathogens arise.”

Overall, “these data should drive investments and targeted action” toward addressing the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance in all regions of the world, Kariuki wrote.

The new paper represents decades of research on the global burden of antimicrobial resistance, said Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, associate dean of global health sciences and distinguished professor at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

Strathdee saw firsthand the effects that antimicrobial resistance can have on health when her husband nearly died from a superbug infection.

“I’m somebody who’s lived with antimicrobial resistance affecting my family for the last eight years. My husband nearly died from a superbug infection. It’s actually one of the infections that’s highlighted in this paper,” said Strathdee, who serves as co-director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics at UC San Diego.

During a Thanksgiving cruise on the Nile in 2015, Strathdee’s husband, Tom Patterson, suddenly developed severe stomach cramps. When a clinic in Egypt failed to help his worsening symptoms, Patterson was flown to Germany, where doctors discovered a grapefruit-size abdominal abscess filled with Acinetobacter baumannii, a virulent bacterium resistant to nearly all antibiotics.

The annual number of people dying from gram-negative bacteria, like A. baumannii, that are resistant to carbapenem – a class of last-resort antibiotics used to treat severe bacterial infections – rose 89,200 from 1990 to 2021, more than any antibiotic class over that period, according to the new study.

“That’s one of the urgent priority pathogens, which is one of these gram-negative bacteria,” Strathdee said. “And my husband, when he fell ill from this, he was 69. So he’s exactly at the age that this paper is highlighting, that older people are going to be affected by this more in the future, because our population is aging and people have comorbidities, like diabetes, like my husband has.”

Strathdee’s husband recovered after treatment with phages, viruses that selectively target and kill bacteria and that can be used as a treatment approach for antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections.

“The most important alternative to antibiotics is phage therapy, or bacteriophage therapy, and that’s what saved my husband’s life,” Strathdee said. “Phage can be used very effectively with antibiotics, to reduce the amount of antibiotics that are needed, and they can even be used potentially in livestock and in farming.”

The new study gives Strathdee hope that the world can reduce the potential burden of antimicrobial resistance. That would require improving access to antibiotics and newer antimicrobial medications, vaccines, clean water and other aspects of quality health care around the world, she said, while reducing the use of antibiotics in livestock, food production and the environment, which can breed more resistance.

“There is possible hope on the horizon,” Strathdee said. “If we were to scale up these interventions, we could dramatically reduce the number of deaths in the future.”

CNN’s Sandee LaMotte contributed to this report.

Low-Wage Corporations Are Fleecing Their Workers to Massively Inflate CEO Pay

In These Times – Viewpoint

Low-Wage Corporations Are Fleecing Their Workers to Massively Inflate CEO Pay

Why don’t low wage workers earn more? Because their bosses plowed $522 million into manipulating their stock price—and CEO paychecks—instead.

Sarah Anderson – September 16, 2024

Chipotle restaurant workers fill orders for customers on April 27, 2015 in Miami, Florida.(PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES)

Most people believe in fair pay for honest work. So why aren’t low-wage workers better paid?

After 30 years of research, I can tell you that it’s not because employers don’t have the cash — it’s because profitable corporations spend that money on their stock prices and CEOs instead.

Lowe’s, for example, spent $43 billion buying back its own stock over the past five years. With that sum, the chain could have given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year. Instead, half of Lowe’s workers make less than $33,000. Meanwhile, CEO Marvin Ellison raked in $18 million in 2023.

The company also plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Lowe’s ranks as an extreme example, but pumping up CEO pay at the expense of workers and long-term investment is actually the norm among America’s leading low-wage corporations.

In my latest “Executive Excess” report for the Institute for Policy Studies, I found that the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages — the “Low-Wage 100” — blew $522 billion on buybacks over the past five years. Nearly half of these companies spent more on this once-illegal maneuver than they spent investing in their long-term competitiveness.

This is a scam to inflate CEO pay, pure and simple.

When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80% of CEO pay. The SEC found that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.

I also looked into what these corporations contribute to employee retirement — and found that it’s peanuts, compared to their buyback outlays. The 20 largest low-wage employers spent nine times more on buybacks than on worker retirement contributions over the past five years.

Many of these firms boast of their “generous” matching benefits, typically a dollar-for-dollar match of 401(k) contributions up to 4% of salary. But matching is meaningless for workers who earn so little they can’t afford to set anything aside.

Chipotle, for example, spent over $2 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years—48 times more than it contributed to employee retirement plans. Meanwhile, 92% of eligible Chipotle workers have zero balances in their 401(k)s. That’s hardly surprising, since the chain’s median annual pay is just $16,595.

The conclusion is unmistakable: CEOs are focused on short-term windfalls for themselves and wealthy shareholders rather than on long-term prosperity for their workers — or their companies.
“Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat, and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots.”

As United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain put it in his Democratic National Convention speech: “Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat, and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots.” Public outrage over CEO shakedowns helped the UAW win strong new contracts last year with the Big Three automakers.

Support for policy solutions is growing as well. The Democratic Party platform calls for quadrupling the 1% federal tax on stock buybacks. And a recent poll shows strong majority support among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike for proposed tax hikes on corporations with huge CEO-worker pay gaps.

Extreme inequality isn’t inevitable — and it can be reversed.

Forty years ago, CEO pay was only about 40 times higher than worker pay — not several hundreds of times higher, as is typical today. And just 20 years ago, most big companies spent very little on stock buybacks. At Lowe’s, for example, buyback outlays between 2000 and 2004 were exactly zero.

Corporate America’s perverse fixation on enriching those at the top is bad for workers and bad for the economy. With pressure from below, we can change that.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

SARAH ANDERSON directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.

After possible assassination attempt, Trump decries ‘rhetoric’? Spare me the sanctimony.

USA Today – Opinion

After possible assassination attempt, Trump decries ‘rhetoric’? Spare me the sanctimony.

Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – September 16, 2024

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that “rhetoric” from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her campaign led to a possible assassination plot against him that the Secret Service foiled Sunday.

He wants you to believe that as he simultaneously hurls inflammatory rhetoric at Harris and while he sits idly by as Springfield, Ohio, suffers bomb threats and school evacuations over his outrageous and racist lies about legal Haitian immigrants.

Early Monday, Trump spoke with Fox News and decried statements from Democrats calling him “a threat to democracy.”

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country – both from the inside and out,” Trump said, referring to Harris and Democrats as “the enemy from within” and “the real threat.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump addresses journalists at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles on Sept. 13, 2024, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

Trump denounces political rhetoric while hurling inflammatory nonsense

The logic in Trump’s statements is twisted beyond comprehension. It’s schoolyard-level reasoning, effectively saying: “You called me a threat to democracy, and that’s a terrible thing to do. And besides, you’re the enemy and you’re destroying the country.”

Let’s start with the apparent assassination plan the Secret Service thankfully foiled. An advance agent spotted a rifle sticking through a fence several hundred yards away from where Trump was playing golf. The agent fired at the gunman, and the man, who didn’t fire any shots, was later apprehended.

The 58-year-old suspect appears to be, as one would expect, a nut whose politics are all over the place. NPR described him as a “vocal supporter-turned-critic of Trump who was passionate about defending Ukraine in its war with Russia.”

In the July assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, the gunman was a registered Republican, and his motive remains unclear.

There is zero evidence connecting either gunman to Democrats calling Trump “a threat to democracy.” More important, however, that label is not hyperbolic.

Trump is a threat to democracy. That’s a fact with ample evidence.

Trump is a threat to democracy. He has made that clear with his constant election denialism, the way he riled up the crowd before the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his incessant lying about disproven claims of voter fraud, his vocal support for the convicted and imprisoned Jan. 6 domestic terrorists and even his comment about being a dictator for one day.

The idea that Harris or her campaign should stop talking about the threat Trump poses to our democracy is absurd. Democrats aren’t encouraging any form of violence against him or anyone else. They’re speaking a self-evident truth and asking voters to respond accordingly at the ballot box.

Republicans reject Trump: Former VP Dick Cheney picks Kamala Harris, giving conservatives a final path to save GOP from Trump

A number of high-profile Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative legal scholar Judge J. Michael Luttig, have said the same thing about Trump.

Cheney said in a recent statement endorsing Harris that “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

Look at Trump’s recent rhetoric and note the stunning hypocrisy

Beyond that issue, the idea of Trump trying to condemn any form of rhetoric borders on satire:

On Friday, Trump called Harris “a radical left Marxist communist fascist.”
On Sunday, before the incident on the Florida golf course, Trump posted on social media: “The Democrats are DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!”
On Monday morning, he posted on social media: “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse! Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin. OUR BORDERS MUST BE CLOSED, AND THE TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY INSANE, IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS, DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR COUNTIES OF ORIGIN.”

Trump’s racist lies have terrorized an Ohio town

That comes on the heels of a campaign of vile lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio ‒ lies that have led to repeated bomb threats and widespread fear among a community of hardworking, legal immigrants.

On Monday, two elementary schools in Springfield had to be evacuated due to threats, the third consecutive school day in which children in the community have been impacted.

On Friday – days after spouting nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating pets – Trump lied, saying: “In Springfield, Ohio, 20,000 illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life.”

Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck releases a statement in September 2024 saying there's no evidence of any cats or other pets being harmed or eaten by the Haitian immigrants. Springfield, a central Ohio city of 58,000 about 50 miles west of Columbus, is experiencing a "significant housing crisis," according to a letter from Heck. He says the city's Haitian population has increased to 15,000-20,000 in recent years. — Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck releases a statement in September 2024 saying there’s no evidence of any cats or other pets being harmed or eaten by the Haitian immigrants. Springfield, a central Ohio city of 58,000 about 50 miles west of Columbus, is experiencing a “significant housing crisis,” according to a letter from Heck. He says the city’s Haitian population has increased to 15,000-20,000 in recent years.More

On Sunday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, effectively admitted that the campaign’s vicious lies about Haitians in Springfield were made up, and that he didn’t care: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Except, according to the Republican governor of Ohio, Vance and Trump are also making up the part about the suffering. Springfield has had challenges with an influx of legal immigrants, but the city has not been “destroyed” in any way, shape or form.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said: “These people are here legally. They came to work. They are looking for good people. These are hardworking people.”

Trump has based his entire political identity on inflammatory rhetoric

Trump has called his political opponents “vermin,” echoed Adolf Hitler in saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and referred to himself as “a very proud election denier.”

JD Vance shrugs at school shooting: Vance says school shootings are ‘a fact of life.’ That’s cowardice, not leadership.

So spare me the sanctimony over anyone describing him as a threat to democracy. That’s what he is.

Democrats haven’t promoted violence – only voting

Political violence, on any side and of any sort, is abhorrent. Whatever the suspect arrested Sunday was plotting, I’m immensely glad it was stopped.

But whatever the plot was, it can’t be blamed on directly and factually highlighting the threat posed by a man who spews anti-democratic and racist lies without the slightest concern for others.

Trump and his campaign, through their dishonest rhetoric, are wreaking havoc on a Midwestern town. That’s a fact. Through his statements and actions past and present, he poses a threat to our democracy. That’s a demonstrable fact.

The only solution to those concerns, the only action being promoted by Harris and her campaign or people like me who care about America’s basic sense of decency, is simple: Vote.

Vote, and don’t be cowed into silence by a dishonest hypocrite.

Trump’s getting desperate: Now he turns to failing Moms for Liberty

Salon – Opinion

Trump’s getting desperate: Now he turns to failing Moms for Liberty

Amanda Marcotte – August 30, 2024

Donald Trump Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Donald Trump has a woman problem — and it’s not just his pending court cases regarding his sexual assault of journalist E. Jean Carroll. Polling shows a growing divergence between male and female voters that could become the largest election gender gap in history. A new CBS poll found that 56% of women say they plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, while 54% of men say they’re backing Trump. The problem for Trump is that women historically vote more than men, and the percentage of the electorate that is female grows more each presidential election cycle.

It’s not hard to see why most women despise Trump, a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women on tape. On the policy front, of course, Trump is the single person most responsible for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The published agenda for his second term, Project 2025, includes plans for a national abortion ban and restrictions on contraception. Not only does Trump not try to hide his misogyny, but his campaign makes it a selling point in a bid to win over bitter male voters. On Wednesday, Trump posted a sexually explicit comment about Harris to Truth Social, accusing her of selling sex because she dated other men before she met her husband. As Anderson Cooper noted on CNN, this is not “out of character” for Trump, who usually calls women “pigs,” “dogs” and “nasty” for showing anything but submission to him.

Trump’s campaign is in danger if he can’t get at least a few skeptical women to vote for him. So on Friday, Trump is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the third annual Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, D.C. It’s another sign that his campaign has run out of ideas to appeal to women. Moms for Liberty’s fall from political grace has been as rapid as their rise to prominence. Associating with the group is more likely to hurt Trump with female voters than to help him.

Moms for Liberty was founded in January 2021. Initially, the group found success in helping Republicans claw back support from suburban women that had been lost during the Trump presidency. By channeling the frustrations parents felt over pandemic school closures, Moms for Liberty positioned itself as a moderate-seeming “parental rights” organization. In reality, the group was controlled by far-right activists with deep ties to Christian nationalism. When Moms for Liberty-linked school board members started taking actions like banning books and vilifying LGBTQ teachers, it provoked a nationwide backlash, with parents in affected communities coming together to kick Moms for Liberty members off their school boards.

It’s safe to say the “Moms for Liberty” brand is toxic now. One of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, got caught up in a sex scandal when a woman she and her husband were meeting for threesomes accused her husband, Christian Ziegler, of rape. (The case was eventually dropped after police claimed insufficient evidence.) With the pandemic over, all the group had left, issue-wise, was their zeal for book banning, which is a wildly unpopular position. In addition, they’re closely associated with Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who has become something of a punchline after spending $160 million in the GOP presidential primary only to be handed a humiliating defeat by Trump.

“DeSantis and MfL appear to have lost their juice,” journalist Kelly Weill wrote in her recent MomLeft newsletter. “In 2022, the group claimed to have elected approximately half of its 500-plus school board candidates,” reaching an 80% success rate in Florida. In 2023, however, the group only won 35% of its races, and that’s after dramatically scaling back the number of candidates they were running. This month, Moms for Liberty got another shellacking, as only 6 out of 23 candidates backed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty in Florida even won a primary.

“Big losses across the state for candidates who advanced the group’s agenda, including efforts to ban library books and restrict lessons about race, sex and gender, pointed to mounting dissatisfaction with an organization that had quickly gained sway with powerful Republicans amid the anti-mask, parental rights politics of the pandemic,” reports the Tampa Bay Times.

Despite this, Politico reports, “Republicans show no signs of changing their strategy.” Last year, Trump’s speech before Moms for Liberty drew heavily on plans outlined in Project 2025 to gut public education altogether, starting with abolishing the Department of Education. This year, Moms for Liberty head Tiffany Justice said she hopes “to hear some more plans” regarding this, because “it’s a little more complicated than just waving a magic wand and making it go away.” Democrats no doubt agree they’d like to hear more about Trump’s plan to end the Department of Education, as 64% of Americans oppose the idea.

That Trump and Republicans are sticking with Moms of Liberty suggests they’re desperate. Polling shows that since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the nominee, there’s been a major uptick in female support for the Democratic ticket. On Tuesday, Democratic research firm TargetSmart published a new report chronicling the surge of voter registrations since Harris joined the race, including a whopping 175% spike in registrations from Black women under 30.

Harris’ appeal is a huge part of this, but it’s also driven by women’s outrage over Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Vance can’t seem to pull his nose out of women’s uteruses. New quotes of Vance painting childless women as “miserable cat ladies” and “sociopathic” are released practically every day. Like Trump, he has a special zeal for attacking hardworking schoolteachers, claiming teachers who do not have biological children “disorient and really disturb” him.

In response, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said, “It sure seems like Vance lacks an empathy gene—thank goodness he’s not a teacher.”

This rhetoric seems like it will only further alienate female voters, especially mothers who tend to have close relationships with local teachers and know they don’t need to be parents to be skilled professionals. (For one thing, most start teaching full-time at age 22. That’s five years younger than the average age of a first-time parent, and 12 years younger than when Vance had his first child.) It just reinforces the accusation of the Harris campaign that Vance is “weird” and out of touch with how normal Americans live.

But it’s not like Trump and Vance have a lot of options for reaching out to female voters. Moms for Liberty’s brand is failing and their views are unpopular, but they do have “Moms” in their name and female leaders for Trump to be photographed with. If you squint hard enough, that could look like Trump playing nice with women. Moms for Liberty doesn’t offer much, but it’s the best the Trump campaign can do.

How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption

The New York Times

How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption

Ralph Vartabedian – August 29, 2024

Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois. (Getty Images)More

LOS ANGELES — Jose Huizar’s downfall at Los Angeles City Hall was as stunning as his rise to success, a political tragedy that, like many in the land of dreams, has become a familiar one.

Born to a large family in rural Mexico and raised in poverty near the towering high-rises of downtown Los Angeles, he overcame enormous odds to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and UCLA law school.

He returned to his old neighborhood in East Los Angeles to run for the school board and eventually the City Council, where he gained control of the influential committee that approves multimillion-dollar commercial development projects across the city.

His spectacular fall — after FBI agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of cash and prostitutes from Chinese developers — was cast by federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges of tax evasion and racketeering.

“He was the King Kong of LA City Hall for many, many years,” Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court. “And with his fall, a lot of devastation was left in his wake.”

This week, when Huizar is scheduled to report to prison, he will become the third recent Los Angeles City Council member to go down on charges of corruption, part of a much larger circle of staff aides, fundraisers, political consultants and real estate developers who have been charged in what federal authorities called an “extraordinary” recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.

Two other members of the City Council, Mitchell Englander and Mark Ridley-Thomas, were convicted earlier on various corruption charges, as was the former head of the city’s Department of Water and Power. A fourth City Council member, Curren Price, is facing charges of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest.

Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.

A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.

In Los Angeles, Huizar’s influence was even greater than that of most other council members: Not only did his district include downtown Los Angeles, where billions of dollars of foreign investment was transforming the skyline, but he also controlled the Planning and Land Use Management Committee that approves major developments all over the city.

“When you have that kind of power, pay-to play schemes run amok,” said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, whose office has led many of the recent prosecutions in Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t call it ordinary what these folks did. It is extraordinary.”

Huizar, 55, pleaded guilty to racketeering, a charge often used in prosecuting organized crime or street-gang cases. The $1.8 million in bribes he received was twice the amount that recently convicted Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was charged with accepting.

In March, a jury convicted Raymond Chan, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor whom prosecutors called the “architect” of the Huizar conspiracy, also on racketeering charges. In all, more than 50 key political figures and executives in Los Angeles and San Francisco have been convicted since 2019. Many more were investigated or resigned after allegations surfaced.

California also had cases of corruption in the days, now in the distant past, when Republicans held statewide office.

But political analysts say the Democrats’ present lock on political power leaves little opportunity for Republicans to effectively raise the issue of corruption as a campaign issue.

“When a political party enjoys that much uncontested power, there’s no penalty for stepping over ethical or legal lines,” said Dan Schnur, a former head of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and a former Republican who is now an independent.

A two-year-old reform effort to curb some of the extraordinary power conferred to individual council members in Los Angeles has foundered.

“When you talk about reducing individual council member discretion over land use, there is real pushback,” said Nithya Raman, a council member who sits on the city’s charter reform committee.

What happened in Los Angeles had been playing out on a smaller scale for years in the small industrial cities of Los Angeles County that have been described as a “corridor of corruption”: South Gate, Bell, Lynwood and Vernon, among others, where civic leaders were prosecuted for taking bribes or tapping into city funds.

“You have large immigrant populations, largely marginalized communities that do not have the resources to watch their politicians closely,” said Estrada, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala. “I think you have a pretty unique cauldron of factors in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area that allow for these things to happen.”

The arrival of large-scale investments from China starting in 2011 heightened the risks.

Over the next half-dozen years, about $26 billion of direct investment from Chinese firms and their billionaire owners arrived in the state.

Downtown Los Angeles underwent a dramatic revival. New high-rise condos and hotels went up, abandoned warehouses were converted into loft apartments and galleries and expensive restaurants opened.

The 40-year-old Grand Hotel, a rundown eyesore used until recently by the city as a homeless shelter, was at the center of one investor’s grandiose plan.

The investor, Wei Huang, a billionaire owner of the development company Shen Zhen New World, bought the hotel in 2010 with plans to convert it into a 77-story tower, the highest in the western United States.

What he needed was help managing the byzantine political approval process. He found it, federal prosecutors said, with Huizar, who had been elected to the council in 2005.

Starting in 2013, federal prosecutors said, Huizar took the first of 20 all-expenses paid trips to Las Vegas with Huang, during which he was supplied with about $10,000 worth of casino chips each time.

Their involvement deepened just before a 2015 election, when Huizar faced allegations from his deputy chief of staff that he had sexually harassed her. Huang, prosecutors said, provided him with $600,000 of collateral for a loan to settle out of court.

But it was the free casino chips in Las Vegas that would ultimately unravel the arrangement. During one trip to the Cosmopolitan casino in 2016, its security chief, a former FBI agent, spotted Huizar playing a $16,000 pile of chips at a card table. When he asked his identity, he became flustered and walked away, leaving the chips.

“Who walks away from $16,000 of casino chips?” said Carlos Narro, who was then the chief of the FBI’s public corruption section in Los Angeles, who got a call from the security chief.

In short order, Narro had the casino’s video of the scene at the card table and flight records. With those, the FBI got court approval for wire taps and searches of Huizar’s text messages and emails.

Ultimately, the investigation found that Huang had paid roughly $1.8 million to Huizar, but that was only part of a much wider network of corruption, investigators found. The wide-ranging racketeering indictment to which Huizar pleaded guilty also targeted a City Hall aide, a deputy mayor, a lobbyist and a political fundraiser, all of whom were also convicted.

Huang was also indicted and is now a fugitive, believed to be in China. His company was fined $4 million.

Also included in the indictment were three other large development projects whose backers, prosecutors said, obtained Huizar’s help in exchange for bribes.

The scandal was almost inevitable, said Miguel Santana, the former top administrative officer of Los Angeles.

“The depth of power that a council member has around development in their own districts almost facilitates the level of corruption that took place,” Santana, now president of the California Community Foundation. “That level of power still exists today.”

San Francisco has had its own round of corruption cases, many of the recent ones surrounding the former Department of Public Works chief, Mohammed Nuru, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to accepting gifts, including a tractor for his ranch outside the city, a Rolex watch and millions of dollars, from various people with business before the city.

Florence Kong, the owner of a recycling company, pleaded guilty to offering some of the bribes in exchange for city contracts. Zhang Li, a Chinese developer also accused of offering bribes, signed a deferred prosecution agreement.

Now scheduled to surrender to prison by Saturday, Huizar made a public apology at his sentencing hearing, saying he had long been dedicated to his community. “Shiny things were dangled in front of me, and I could not resist the temptation,” he said in a letter to the judge asking for leniency. “The money, the fancy dinners, luxury flights. It was there for the taking, and I could not say no.”

Estrada, the U.S. attorney, said that Huizar’s corruption offended him as a Latino.

“It feels like a real betrayal,” Estrada said. “Because for those of us whose families came from Latin America, and know that system, there’s just rampant corruption there. You come to this country, you have more opportunities, you are offered to be part of a system that is theoretically supposed to operate cleanly.”

The Big Border Change Harris Isn’t Talking About

The New York Times

The Big Border Change Harris Isn’t Talking About

Hamed Aleaziz – August 28, 2024

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

The situation at the southern border looks very different these days.

Gone are the headlines about surging border crossings crushing border communities and cities like New York struggling to fund housing for migrants who recently came to the country.

The reality is that the numbers at the southern border have dropped to levels not seen before in the Biden administration — and lower than they were during parts of the Trump administration.

The dramatic drop in border crossings came after a Biden administration policy seen by White House officials as a major success for an administration that has spent three years fighting Republican attacks over its handling of surging border crossings.

Vice President Kamala Harris, however, has not focused on the dramatic change at the southern border in her presidential campaign. I’ll explain what’s happening at the border, and offer some theories about why Harris isn’t talking it up.

A Border Shutdown That Worked

The border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation.

Since then, the results have been clear: Border arrests are down, asylum claims are plummeting and fewer newly arrived people are being released into U.S. communities.

Crossings have gotten so low that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has stopped busing migrants to Democratic-run cities, a political tactic he wielded to force the public to pay attention to the border. There are simply no longer people to send.

Harris Steers Clear

During her speech in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Harris discussed immigration — but focused on blaming Republicans for the collapse of bipartisan legislation this year. It would have increased resources by providing more money for detention, border agents and asylum officers.

“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” she said to the crowd in Chicago. “The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.”

That deal would have allowed the president to shut off asylum access at the southern border if the crossings reached a certain level — but Harris did not mention the fact that the administration went ahead and did something similar anyway.

So why isn’t Harris talking about it more in her run for the presidency?

There could be several reasons.

1. The number of arrests at the border often fluctuates and could spike at any moment.

Last summer, the Biden administration cautiously hailed a brief dip in crossings after a different asylum restriction took effect. By the end of the year, record numbers of people were crossing into the country, and the administration needed to send top officials to Mexico to figure out a solution. Migration experts have also said that smugglers can adapt to new policies in the United States, and that could happen with President Joe Biden’s asylum limit as well.

2. Democrats don’t want to revive ‘border czar’ attacks.

Focusing on border policy could also draw renewed attention to a Republican talking point that has dogged Harris’ vice presidency and presidential campaign: Is she in charge of the southern border or not?

Harris was asked by Biden early in her vice presidency to focus on “root causes” of migration, and Republicans seized on that assignment to describe her misleadingly as responsible for crossings overall. Taking credit for border policy successes now could leave Harris more open to criticisms if crossings rise; it could also give Republicans an opportunity to point to the record number of arrivals before 2024.

3. The border still divides Democrats.

Discussing a restrictive policy could inflame progressives who have seemed energized by Harris’ run for the presidency, and dampen the overall vibes of joy and unity that have given the campaign a burst of momentum.

Immigration advocates have already sued over Biden’s policy and denounced the administration for turning back migrants who they believe have rightful claims to protection in the United States.

Harris’ presidential campaign is just over a month old, and a pair of high-stakes moments are approaching when the border may come into focus: Harris’ first major interview as a presidential candidate Thursday on CNN, as well as the planned debate between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10.

The campaign has found places to mention the dip in crossings, including in emails to the press. But it has not become a standard part of her speeches, which is notable given how closely she is associated with the topic of border control, fairly or not.

“The VP is proud that their administration’s actions have led to significant reductions in border crossings, and the campaign has and will continue to talk about that,” Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “But she also knows we need to go even further, which is why you hear her talk about the urgent need to get the bipartisan border bill passed and her commitment to doing that as president.”

On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks

The New York Times

On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks

Emily Baumgaertner – August 27, 2024

Visitors on the Coney Island boardwalk on the Friday ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2024. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)

Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.

COVID-19?

The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.

“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.

Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.

In the fifth summer of COVID, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with COVID is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75% from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.

As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.

Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.

“I no longer even know what the rules and recommendations are,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who came down with respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife had tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue, but still went to the grocery store.

“And since I don’t test, I can’t follow them,” he said.

Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available (despite the poor turnout during last year’s round).

But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While COVID cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-COVID world, but a postcrisis one.

Epidemiologists have long predicted that COVID would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”

Certain threats remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long COVID, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.

But the CDC director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided this year to retire its five-day COVID isolation guidelines and instead include COVID in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of COVID, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lifts. The updated guidelines were an indicator that, for most people, the landscape had changed.

Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”

“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”

The absence of stringent guidelines has left people to manage their own risks.

“I don’t bother testing myself or our kids for COVID,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband doesn’t test himself either. Knowing if it’s COVID wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”

In some social circles, diverging choices can make for uncomfortable dynamics.

Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stayed home from a recent indoor party because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID three days before the gathering, but still planned to attend.

“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a bad cold, we wouldn’t stay home for a cold,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed considerably.”

But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for COVID three days into a trip to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.

“A number of people asked me, ‘Why did you test? You could have carried on with your vacation,’” she said.

For Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgue trucks of 2020 and anticipating the vulnerable people she might see on her flight home — people in wheelchairs, or people on oxygen, she said.

“I’m trying to avoid a moral judgment of people who make other choices,” she said. “To me, it was inconvenient and it was unfortunate, but it was not a tragedy.”

In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59% of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching COVID has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.

That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70% of people said they had been through a COVID infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.

If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seems to have exhaled as well. In Tokyo in 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass dividers between cafeteria seats and absolutely no live spectators; the arenas were so empty that coaches’ voices echoed. In Beijing in 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.

But in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.

There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals despite it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly COVID curfew) did not even count.

In the United States, about 57% of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.

The years-old social-distancing signage is faded and peeling from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand-sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. The summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to bring a face covering — not to protect other children, but the animals.

Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: COVID variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” COVID into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.

Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington this month — a number of whom were older than 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.

“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”

Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Osterholm laughed.

Trump Picked Worst Possible Spot For New Border Wall Stunt

HuffPost

Trump Picked Worst Possible Spot For New Border Wall Stunt

Ed Mazza – August 26, 2024

Donald Trump boasted of building the “Rolls-Royce” of walls during a visit to a segment of border barrier in Montezuma Pass, Arizona, last week.

There was just one problem: That segment of wall was actually built by the administration of President Barack Obama, according to The Washington Post.

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the portion where Trump spoke was built under the Obama administration, the Post added.

The newspaper said a nearby extension was started under the Trump administration ― at a cost of $35 million a mile ― but didn’t get very far, with much of the construction material left in piles at the site.

Trump in 2016 repeatedly vowed to build a “big beautiful wall” across the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border if elected.

He has claimed that he completed the task.

“I did finish the wall,” he said on CNN earlier this year. “I built a wall.”

He didn’t.

His administration replaced about 400 miles of existing wall and added about 52 miles of new wall.

Some of the wall built under Trump fell in a storm.

A 2022 report found the wall built under Trump was breached thousand of times using “inexpensive power tools.” Others reported the wall could be breached with a primitive ladder made from about $5 in material.

A report last year also found it did significant environmental and cultural damage to the region.

Trump also promised Mexico would pay for his wall.

It didn’t.

Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise

The Anchorage Daily News

Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise

Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O’Connor,

The Washington Post – August 26, 2024

MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. – A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right – “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it – and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected.

“Where you were, that was kind of a joke today,” John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, said while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. “Had to be in front of Trump’s wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that’s Obama’s wall.”

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday’s campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.

“If Kamala truly wanted to close the border and continue building President Trump’s wall, she could go to the White House and do it today,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Only President Trump will get it done.”

This spot along the U.S.-Mexico border, quickly accessible from nearby Sierra Vista, has often served as the backdrop for Republican photo ops. The scenery here did not attest to the fearsome migrant caravans or invasions of military-age foreign men that Trump often describes. There was no evidence here of Trump’s depiction of vicious criminals and terrorists, cannibals and infectious hordes, or people sent directly from prisons and mental institutions pouring over the border. There was no sign of foot traffic over such hostile shadeless wilderness, other than a small patrol of Mexican authorities on the other side.

Nor did this site show the very real conditions that exist in other parts of the border: Towns teeming with displaced people, cars backed up at legal crossings and swept for smuggling, bodies recovered from the Rio Grande.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in front of the US-Mexico border, Thursday, Aug 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

For Trump, a campaign stop here on Thursday had larger meaning. It was an attempt to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrapped up an ebullient Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday evening. For Trump, visiting the border was also something of a spiritual homecoming to the place that has animated his candidacy and movement since 2015.

But the reality on the ground was not as straightforward as the “Build the Wall” chant that electrified his campaign eight years ago suggested. His vow to finish the wall, now formalized in the Republican Party platform, highlights the uncomfortable fact that he did not finish it in his first term, and Mexico did not pay for it, as he once promised it would.

“I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t build the wall’ – we built the wall,” Trump said defensively on Thursday in front of the unfinished barrier. “We built much more than I was anticipated to build.”

The day before, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump responded to a supporter who shouted “Build the Wall” by saying, “Well, the wall was largely built. We were adding space onto the wall.”

As president, Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history. During the primary, some GOP rivals experimented with attacking Trump for failing to finish the wall, but Republican voters largely shrugged or scoffed.

He references the wall in a smaller percentage of his social media posts and speeches than he did eight years ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. Instead, he has emphasized plans for large-scale, militarized roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. To justify such drastic measures, he has frequently used dehumanizing language to vilify undocumented immigrants as violent and dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people in removal proceedings do not have criminal charges, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security records by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.

Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the Biden administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access.

A short walk from the spot where Trump spoke on Thursday, the barrier crosses a dry stream bed, and the uniform bollards give way to storm gates. The gates were wide open, to accommodate the sudden floods of the summer monsoon season, spanned only by a few strands of barbed wire. The base of some of the nearby slats show the scars of erosion that have sometimes left the fence dangling above the ground.

Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.

The wall’s defenders argue that, as part of broader border enforcement, it helps slow down crossings and free up Border Patrol resources. The border wall “completely changed the operational environment and allowed Border Patrol to secure those areas with significantly fewer agents,” said Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Trump and under Biden until August 2021.

But some policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants’ home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.

“It’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of the wall because it’s one piece of a larger puzzle in U.S. policy on immigration, and even though it is a physical barrier, there are so many other reasons why migrants end up where they end up trying to cross into U.S. territory,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

In his first term, Trump used executive power to bypass congressional opposition to the wall. In late 2018, his fight with Congress over funding led to the longest government shutdown in American history. When Congress refused to budge, Trump declared a national emergency in order to divert money from the military budget.

Former administration officials and the Trump campaign said he would be determined to use every available power to complete the wall in a second term.

“There’s no doubt in my mind … he will, I hope on day one, declare a national emergency,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Trump. “On day one, that will give him the ability then to tap into those [Department of Defense] funds … while at the same time working with Congress … You’re going to see the same approach that he used during the first administration.”

The former president “will utilize any and all appropriate authorities necessary to continue construction of the border wall and protect America’s homeland,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.

If Trump were to declare a national emergency again in a second term, outside groups would likely sue to stop him. But the legal process could take a long time, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Trump might be able to complete large sections of wall in the meantime, she said.

“The appeals would run the entire course of the Trump presidency and even though there might be, and I think there are, meritorious legal challenges … it’s still quite possible that the Trump administration could continue to rely on that power while this process played out, if the lower courts stayed their rulings,” Goitein said.

A changed political environment might also make it easier for Trump to complete the wall. The Republican Party has become more Trump-aligned, and should Trump become president and Republicans control the House and the Senate with significant margins, border wall funding is likely to increase in the annual appropriations process.

The border wall has also become more popular with the public than it was during the Trump administration. A Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored the border wall in February 2024, the highest share since Monmouth began asking the question in September 2015, when support for the wall was at 48 percent. Support for the wall hit a low in September 2017, with 35 percent of Americans in favor.

Mexico has opposed the construction of the border wall and has pursued more aggressive enforcement along the border, helping the Biden administration reach its lowest level of illegal border crossings in almost four years.

But as long as construction takes place on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico can’t do much to stop it, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Even if he gets the funding, Trump might face obstacles obtaining the land he needs for construction. Much of the land along the border in Texas is privately owned, and some landowners are reluctant to sell.

Trump might also face environmental opposition to renewed wall construction. The incomplete border wall has already affected the migration patterns of many northern American wildlife species, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on sustaining biodiversity. The current barrier will also require constant, expensive maintenance, Traphagen noted.

“There’s going to be this big albatross hanging around America’s neck to continually maintain this beast,” he said.

For many Americans, though, the border wall has become a symbol. Traphagen added: “The border wall reinforces that, okay, this guy is doing something.”

Nick Miroff, Clara Ence Morse, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered

Los Angeles Times – Opinion

Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered

Joel Edward Goza – August 25, 2024

FILE - In this March 30, 1981 file photo, President Ronald Reagan acknowledges applause before speaking to the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO at a Washington hotel. In 1981, Reagan signed an executive order that extended the power of U.S. intelligence agencies overseas, allowing broader surveillance of non-U.S. suspects. Recent reports that the National Security Agency secretly broke into communications on Yahoo and Google overseas have technology companies, privacy advocates and even national security proponents calling for a re-examination of Reagan's order and other intelligence laws. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File) — President Reagan, shown in 1981, based many of his policies on ideas from the Heritage Foundation publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” Project 2025 makes up a majority of the latest edition of this title and recommends many of the same extreme policies. (Ron Edmonds / Associated Press)More

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.

Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.

If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.

This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.

Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.

All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.

To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.

And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.

If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.

History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.

Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.

Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”