TomDispatch

10/08/2025

Brad Reed at Common Dreams on a new report that Bernie Sanders just put out on Americans' fears over cuts to Medicaid and ACA subsidies.
—Erika

As the federal government shutdown continued on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders released a report documenting Americans’ fears about the impact of Republicans’ healthcare policies will have on them in the coming months if the changes being demanded by Democrats are not implemented.

The report begins by discussing the impact of the Republican-passed cuts to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year, as well as the expiring enhanced subsidies for people who buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, would have on Americans’ ability to access healthcare.

“Starting this month, millions of Americans are going to get a letter from their insurance companies telling them that their premiums will double, on average,” Sanders explains in the report’s foreword. “Unless we reverse course, the Republican budget will throw 15 million Americans off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”

The Sanders report goes beyond listing numbers and statistics, however, and features personal stories from hundreds of Americans across the country detailing their anxieties on how GOP healthcare policy would affect them and their families.

“I live in fear of whether or not I will be able to afford my life saving treatment,” explained a Wisconsin woman named Laura. “I have a rare kidney disease that requires immunotherapy every nine months. I’m terrified I’ll die.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders' report reveals Americans' fears over GOP healthcare policies, detailing personal stories of struggles with rising insurance costs.

10/08/2025

Matt Simon at Grist on how climate change is impacting the transport of carbon into the deep ocean.
—Erika

The planet would be a whole lot hotter if it weren’t for f***l pellets. Across the world’s oceans, tiny organisms known as phytoplankton harvest the sun’s energy, gobbling up carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. They’re eaten by little animals called zooplankton, which p**p out pellets that sink to the seafloor. What is essentially a giant toilet, then, flushes carbon at the surface into the depths, where it stays locked away from the atmosphere, thus keeping the amount of CO2 up there in check.

But as humans pump ever more carbon into the sky, relentlessly raising ocean temperatures, worrying signals are flashing that this commode could be changing in profound ways. Consider the northeastern Pacific, off the coast of Alaska, where two major heat waves took hold of the sea, one from 2013 to 2015 and the other from 2019 to 2020. A new study found the two events transformed the composition of phytoplankton and zooplankton, essentially clogging the toilet and preventing the downward transport of carbon into the depths.

“These long-term studies help put everything into context and also really sound the alarms,” said Anya Štajner, a PhD candidate in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The ocean is changing. And not only is it going to affect the ocean — it’s going to affect the life in the ocean. And eventually that’s going to affect us, because we rely on the ocean for our air, our food, our climate regulation.”

Of course, each bit of the world’s oceans has its own unique chemistry, biology, and ecology, so what happens there might not happen everywhere. But with these bursts of heat, this swath of the sea saw declines in its ability to sequester the gas that’s heating the planet. That’s a precarious situation, given that the oceans capture a quarter of humanity’s CO2 emissions. “While we can generalize that maybe what we saw here would happen in general across other marine heat waves in the ocean, like the carbon accumulation, I think it’s important to assess that regionally as well,” said Colleen Kellogg, a microbial oceanographer at Canada’s Hakai Institute and co-author of the paper, which published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers tapped a decade of data from Biogeochemical Argo floats, which autonomously wander up and down the water column taking readings of ocean chemistry. When they reach the surface, they ping that data to a satellite. In this way, the scientists got a 10-year stream of readings without having to constantly be on a boat in the northeastern subarctic Pacific Ocean, which is not known for hospitable winters.

Tiny p**ps are supposed to sink to the seafloor, locking away carbon. But scientists have found that heat waves are disrupting that flushing.

10/08/2025

MTG is open to a healthcare deal with Dems. Keep it up, Marjorie!
—Erika

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has indicated she is willing to negotiate with Democrats over healthcare insurance costs – the central political issue that has kept the US government shut down since 1 October.

Indicating that she is willing to stand against her party on the issue, Greene said Monday night in a post on the social platform X that she’s “absolutely disgusted” insurance premiums could double if a system of tax credits dating back to Barack Obama’s presidency is allowed to expire at the end of the year.

But the US House member from Georgia, who has previously criticized her fellow Republicans on several key issues, including funding for Ukraine and the war in Gaza, did not have kind words of the Affordable Care Act itself – which took 427 days to pass during Obama’s first term and stands as his signature legislation.

“Let’s just say as nicely as possible, I’m not a fan,” she wrote. “But I’m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.

“I was not in Congress when all this Obamacare, ‘Affordable Care Act’ bu****it started,” Greene wrote. “I got here in 2021. As a matter of fact, the ACA made health insurance UNAFFORDABLE for my family after it was passed, with skyrocketing premiums higher than our house payment.”

Republican says she is ‘disgusted’ by rising insurance premiums and may defy her party over expired tax credits

10/08/2025

New York Times columnistNicholas Kristoff on Trump inching toward autocracy and why, instead, he should take a naked bike ride in Portland, Oregon. Tom

"The National Guard troops dispatched by President Trump to fight “domestic terrorists” in this “war-ravaged” city of Portland, Ore., will face an unexpected challenge: naked bicycle riders.

Cycling in the buff is a Portland specialty, and one organization has announced a naked ride “in response to the militarization of our city.”

Such is the war zone here.

Indignant Portlanders have been sharing Instagram photos of lovely city scenes to counter Trump’s description of Portland as “hell.” As an Oregonian who lives outside Portland, I can testify that the city has heavenly qualities, with a setting that is divine and food catered by angels, but in fairness, it also has significant problems. Homelessness has been intractable, the murder rate last year was more than twice New York City’s (although so far this year, homicides are down 41 percent from the same period last year), and the downtown has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the country — as businesses leave and create long-term economic challenges.

National Guard troops could help Portland, if they rented office space. But the way Trump dispatches troops to fight a “war from within” won’t solve the city’s problems and may inflame them.

Indeed, my hunch is that Trump’s main aim in sending troops to Portland is to provoke street violence and bolster his narrative as a leader who’s tough on crime while distracting voters from the Jeffrey Epstein files, the weakening economy and rising prices.

Trump’s plan may succeed: It’s entirely possible that he will incite young hotheads into fighting back. Oregon leaders keep calling on citizens not to let themselves be manipulated into reacting. “Don’t take the bait” has been the refrain from Democratic officials.

In 2020 too many Portlanders did take the bait when Trump sent in federal forces to confront protesters in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, leading to violent clashes. In retrospect, those well-meaning protests didn’t advance racial justice, but they did damage both Portland and the Democratic brand. Lawlessness took hold, and homicides soared through 2022.

Crime in Portland, while still too high, has come down since then. And while there have been protests and skirmishes this year outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Portland — this is apparently what alarmed Trump — these subsided in recent weeks (until he announced the deployment).

“Is Portland doomed to be treated like a rebellious territory, regardless of whether anyone is rebelling?” asked a writer for Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper.

It’s also exasperating that the Trump administration, as it cites tight budgets as the reason to push people off health insurance, is ready to spend $10 million to deploy troops in Portland, where they are unwanted and unneeded.

Portland’s new reform-minded mayor, a businessman named Keith Wilson, said that he would be happy to have federal help where it’s actually needed.

“Imagine the federal government sent instead 100 teachers or 100 engineers or 100 addiction specialists,” Wilson said wistfully at a news conference.

Because I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarian governments, I’m particularly alarmed by Trump’s attempt to create, in effect, his own Praetorian Guard, available to punish critics or Democratic cities. That is standard autocratic behavior, and in extreme cases — such as at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — I’ve seen such troops used to massacre protesters.

I don’t think that will happen here, but Trump has long had an interest in marshaling military force to suppress opponents. “Can’t you just shoot them?” former Defense Secretary Mark Esper recalled Trump asking in 2020, speaking of people protesting racial injustice. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And a federal judge, William G. Young, already found that the Trump administration used his immigration enforcers to systematically silence immigrants’ speech in support of Palestinians and chill campus activism.

It astonishes me that conservatives, who denounced what they saw as overreach by federal forces in confrontations in the 1990s at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, now cheer Trump as he sends federal forces across the country. And of course, if he wants to find real-live insurrectionists in Oregon, I can tell him where to find them: Several were convicted of joining the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and are now enjoying the impunity they gained from their presidential pardon.

Trump is turning ICE, in particular, into a powerful armed force, its agents often masked and refusing to show IDs, snatching people off the street into unmarked cars. Judge Young, a Reagan appointee, warned that the mask-wearing by agents evoked “cowardly desperadoes and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and was meant “to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

Trump is enormously expanding these shadowy forces operating domestically. ICE’s budget will exceed the combined budgets of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies.

Trump in September issued a national security presidential memorandum to use federal antiterrorism authority to crush domestic threats, which the directive suggests include those who embrace “anti-Americanism, anticapitalism and anti-Christianity” or “extremism on migration, race and gender.”

All this is accompanied by Trump’s effort to politicize the U.S. military and seemingly turn it into a more personal force. This summer he deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles, in the first deployment of active-duty troops — not National Guard units — domestically in more than three decades. His secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, seemed to indicate that the aim was political, asserting that the intention was “to liberate the city from the socialists.”

Trump has floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing him to use the armed forces domestically. By dispatching the National Guard to Portland, he is inching in that direction — and it’s particularly offensive that he recommended using American cities as military “training grounds.”

“This dangerous pattern of politicizing our military and forcing our troops to intimidate their fellow Americans in their communities is as un-American as it gets,” wrote Senator Tammy Duckworth, a veteran.

So, President Trump, instead of tugging us toward authoritarianism, can I suggest that you instead cool down by pursuing a different path — perhaps a naked bike ride in Portland?"

Trump’s dispatch of National Guard troops to Portland is another dangerous step toward politicizing America’s military forces.

10/08/2025

As the Guardian reports, the latest and hottest (so to speak) Trump cuts include nearly $8 billion dollars for clean energy projects in Democratic states. Sigh... Tom

"The Trump administration is cancelling $7.6bn in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.

The move comes as Donald Trump threatens deep cuts in his fight with congressional Democrats over the government shutdown.

The energy department said in a statement on Thursday that 223 projects were terminated after a review determined they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or were not economically viable. Officials did not provide details about which projects are being cut, but said funding came from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and other energy department bureaus.

The cuts are likely to affect battery plants, hydrogen technology projects, upgrades to the electric grid and carbon-capture efforts, among many others, according to the environmental non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council.

Russ Vought, the White House budget director, highlighted the cutbacks in a social media post late on Wednesday, saying money “to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled”.

He said projects are on the chopping block in: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state.
a man in a suit talking

Vought and the energy department did not explain how they came up with their list of targeted states, considering that dozens of states have clean energy projects. But all 16 targeted states supported Harris, and in each of those states, both US senators voted against the Republican’s short-term funding bill to keep the government working.

The cuts include up to $1.2bn for California’s hydrogen hub that is aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology and production, and up to $1bn for a hydrogen project in the Pacific north-west. A Texas hydrogen project and a three-state project in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were spared, according to clean energy supporters who obtained a list of the energy department targets.

Trump said in an interview taped on Wednesday with One America News, a conservative outlet, that his administration could cut projects Democrats want – “favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut”.

Trump’s comments show that he and Vought are treating American “families and their livelihoods like pawns in some sort of sick political game”, said Patty Murray, a Democratic senator for Washington.

“This administration has had plans in the works for months to cancel critical energy projects, and now they are illegally taking action to kill jobs and raise people’s energy bills,” she said in a statement. “This is a blatant attempt to punish the political opposition.”

California governor Gavin Newsom said the private sector has committed $10bn for the state’s hydrogen project, known as the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, (Arches). The cut threatens more than 200,000 jobs, Newsom said.

Alex Padilla, a Democratic senator from California, called cancelation of the project “vindictive, shortsighted and proof this administration is not serious about American energy dominance”.

The California project is one of seven clean energy projects from West Virginia to Washington state selected by the Biden administration for a $7bn program to kickstart development and production of hydrogen fuel, part of former president Joe Biden’s agenda to slow the climate crisis.

“President Trump promised to protect taxpayer dollars and expand America’s supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy. Today’s cancellations deliver on that commitment,” energy secretary Chris Wright said.

Wright told CNN on Thursday night that the cancellations had nothing to do with the shutdown or politics. “These decisions are made – business decisions on whether it’s a good use of the taxpayer money or not. So, no, these projects will not be restored” when the government reopens, he said.

While the current cancellations are in Democratic-led states, Wright said other projects, including hydrogen proposals in West Virginia, Texas and Louisiana, are being evaluated.

“We’ve announced project cancellations before in red and blue states. And as this fall goes on, you’ll see cancellations in red and blue states,” Wright said. “We’ve got to save Americans money.”

Award recipients have 30 days to appeal the energy department’s termination decision.

The Trump administration has broadly targeted climate programs and clean energy grants, and is proposing to roll back vehicle emission and other greenhouse gas rules it says can’t be justified. Last week, the energy department rescinded $13bn that was intended for clean energy projects. The money was authorized by Congress in the 2022 climate law signed by Biden but had not yet been spent.

Democrats and environmental organizations were quick to slam the latest cuts, saying they would raise energy costs.

“This is yet another blow by the Trump administration against innovative technology, jobs and the clean energy needed to meet skyrocketing demand,” said Jackie Wong, a senior vice-president at NRDC.

Conrad Schneider, senior director at the Clean Air Task Force, said the move “pulls the rug out” from dozens of communities and workers that are counting on the projects. It also “weakens the US’s position in the global marketplace” for innovative energy technologies, he said."

Democrats and environmental groups slam move as ‘sick political game’ and say it will drive up energy bills

10/08/2025

Robert Reich at his substack on just how deeply disturbing -- even traumatic -- this Trumpian world of ours truly is. Tom

"I’d like to talk with you about a difficult subject.

A significant number of you are disoriented by what Trump and his lapdogs are doing. Many are deeply anxious. Some of us are depressed.

For years, medical experts have recommended that Americans be screened for “anxiety disorders.”

But what many of us are feeling now is not a personal disorder. It’s a rational response to a nation that’s becoming ever more disordered.

What we’re experiencing is not a sickness or individual distress. It’s a sensible reaction to a society becoming sicker and more stressed.

Trump and the enablers around him aren’t just violating the Constitution and disregarding laws. They’re not merely doing cruel and vindictive things.

They’re also spreading fear and fueling hate.

This fear and hate are harming every one of us, even the shrinking minority who support the regime. Hate is a corrosive that eventually consumes the haters. Fear breeds more fear, which causes everyone to be afraid.

The harm may continue long after the reasons to fear and sources of hate have passed into history.

I have a friend who suffered trauma at the hands of abusive parents. She’s spent much of her life trying to cope with that trauma, trying not to let it rule (and ruin) her life.

Another friend is the child of a Holocaust survivor. He has spent much of his life trying to escape the ghosts of relatives he never knew who were murdered by the N***s, whose deaths have cast a dark shadow over his own life.

Most of us are fortunate enough not to have suffered childhood trauma from abusive parents or been raised in the dark shadow of the Holocaust or other horrors.

But most of us are now suffering a trauma of a different sort — from an abusive president and his lapdogs, and from the dark shadows of fear and hate they cast.

Just as with my friends, many of us now feel powerless and afraid. We don’t recognize our nation. We’re disoriented, vulnerable, anxious.

Trump apologists call it “Trump derangement syndrome,” but the actual derangement is in and around the Oval Office.

I don’t think we’re talking enough about the national trauma most of us are now enduring.

Some of you may assume there’s something wrong with you when you can’t sleep or awaken feeling anxious. You may feel alone in this.

You should be aware of how widespread, and reasonable, your reaction is.

Trump’s cruelty and vengeance will pass. Years from now we’ll look back on this as a terrible period in America’s history. Our nation will survive.

But the fear and hate he has sown could cause lasting blight.

Recognizing this — being aware of the toll it’s taking and will continue to take on us, even years from now — is important to our eventual recovery, that of our loved ones, and the recovery of our nation and the world."

We need to talk about it openly

10/08/2025

Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams on how the Israelis treated the remarkable Greta Thunberg (and other demonstrators) while in custody. What a nightmare! Tom

"While confirming that she and other Global Sumud Flotilla members were abused by Israeli forces who abducted and jailed them, Swedish climate and human rights activist Greta Thunberg on Monday implored humanity to focus on the genocide in Gaza as it enters its third year.

“I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. Trust me, but that is not the story,” Thunberg said during a press conference at Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport in Greece, where she and other flotilla participants released by Israel were greeted by a cheering crowd.

“What happened here is that Israel, while continuing to worsen and escalate their genocide and mass destruction with genocidal intent, attempting to erase an entire population, an entire nation in front of our very eyes, they once again violated international law by preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza while people are being starved,” she continued.

“This genocide and other genocides are being enabled and fueled by our own governments, our institutions, our media, and companies. It is our responsibility to end that complicity... to use our privileges, our platforms, to take a stance against this, that is in every way unjustifiable,” Thunberg asserted.

“I will never, ever comprehend how humans can be so evil that you would deliberately starve millions of people living trapped under an illegal siege as a continuation of decades and decades of suffocating oppression, apartheid, occupation,” she added.

Thunberg’s remarks came as Israeli forced continued their bombing and invasion of Gaza with the objective of conquering, occupying, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the strip. Israeli airstrikes—which have reportedly killed nearly 100 Palestinians over the past two days—continued despite US President Donald Trump’s Friday exhortation to “immediately stop” bombing the embattled strip, citing Hamas’ willingness to conditionally release the remaining Israeli and other hostages it has held since October 7, 2023.

Trump urged negotiators to “move fast” toward a ceasefire agreement ahead of Monday’s indirect peace talks between Israel and Hamas in Egypt.

Since launching the assault and ”complete siege” of Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, Israeli forces have killed at least 67,139 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose figures are widely believed to be a vast undercount. Most of those killed have been women and children.

Over 169,500 Palestinians have also been wounded in Gaza and thousands more are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza’s more than 2 million people have also been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, while hundreds of thousands of others are starving in an engineered famine that officials say has killed at least 460 people.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and forced starvation. Just under two miles away at the International Court of Justice, tribunal members are weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations and regional blocs.

Thunberg and more than 400 other Global Sumud Flotilla members were intercepted last week by Israeli forces in international waters before being taken to Israel and jailed. Thunberg told Swedish officials Saturday that she had been “subjected to harsh treatment in Israeli custody.”

“She informed of dehydration,” a Swedish Foreign Ministry email noted. “She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.”

Turkish flotilla activist Ersin Çelik said he witnessed Israelis abusing Thunberg.

“They dragged little Greta by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag,” Çelik said. “They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others.”

Italian journalist and flotilla member Lorenzo D’Agostino said that Thunberg was “wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy.”

Abducted flotilla members said they were humiliated by Israelis, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called them “terrorists.” This, from a man who in 2007 was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting the Kahanist terrorist group Kach.

D’Agostino told CNN Monday that “we were shocked by the level of humiliation and gratuitous cruelty that these people used on us.”

“The way we were treated was... pushing the mistreatment and the humiliation to the limit that they could afford,” he said, explaining that his captors “knew that they couldn’t harm us physically” if activists were from countries like Italy.

“I was sharing my cell with a Turkish citizen whose arm was broken and he was left without painkillers for two days.”

“People coming from countries that are not allied [with Israel] were harmed physically,” D’Agostino added. “I was sharing my cell with a Turkish citizen whose arm was broken and he was left without painkillers for two days.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday that flotilla members’ claims of abuse are “brazen lies,” and that “all the detainees’ legal rights are fully upheld.”

As of Monday, Israel had deported 341 of the 479 detained flotilla activists. The remaining detainees are either awaiting deportation or, in some cases—including one Spanish woman who allegedly bit an Israeli medic during a forced medical examination at Ketziot Prison—are facing extended detention.

The alleged abuse of flotilla detainees pales in comparison to what Palestinian prisoners have allegedly endured at the hands of their Israeli captors. Former detainees and Israeli personnel have described beatings, r**e and sexual torture by male and female soldiers, routine amputations due to constant shackling, burnings, electrocutions, attacks by dogs, ice-water dousings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, constant loud music, and other abuse.

The Israeli military has launched investigations into the deaths of dozens of detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.

Another group of boats is currently en route from Europe in another attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

“As more ships set sail for Gaza, we are likely to see a repeat of these events,” Amnesty International said Monday, referring to the alleged abuse of Global Sumud Flotilla activists. “States must act now and make clear to Israel that its suffocating blockade and its ongoing genocide against Palestinians must end now.”

"This genocide and other genocides are being enabled and fueled by our own governments, our institutions, our media, and companies. It is our responsibility to end that complicity."

10/08/2025

Something of a classic on what it means to be the very model of a SecDef from cartoonist Joshua Brown. Tom

10/07/2025

Ian F. Blair at The Intercept on the consolidation of local, state, and federal law enforcement and the military into a political instrument of the Trump regime.
—Erika

The consolidation of the new police state has not been announced. There was no press conference declaring that local, state, and federal law enforcement — plus the military — are all marching to the same drum. No news conference featuring a bunch of police captains standing before a microphone to express their commitment to the new regime.

But it is here.

In the past six months, a quiet, mass reorganization of resources and rules and personnel has rippled across the country in order to enforce the Trump administration’s desires.

This realignment is happening swiftly, smoothly and without fanfare. That the police have been so quiet in a historically loud moment should be a dead giveaway that a shift is under way. The line between order and chaos is moving. And the police are adapting to meet the changing norms.

Politics was always in their job description — whether by origin (slave catchers) or by election or appointment. But under this new order, the police — arm in arm with immigration agents, the military, and the rest of the federal agencies — are starting to function more as political police force. That is, an instrument of a specific regime. City by city, state by state, the police have been reorganizing themselves to align with the priorities of the White House. This is what the free agents of fascism do: They make themselves useful. They figure out how to stay in the mix, how to serve the emergent status quo.

Since the summer, where there have been Trump administration escalations, police have been lurking on the margins — or lending a helping hand.

Sometimes, the assistance matches the fiery timbre of repression put forth by the White House. When thousands showed up in downtown LA to protest federal immigration raids, in June, the Los Angeles Police Department seemed to cast aside decades of sanctuary city policy forbidding cooperation with immigration enforcement authorities by working alongside federal forces to violently repress protestors. LAPD officers on horseback trampled a man and beat him with batons while their colleagues alternated with members of the Department of Homeland Security and National Guard to shoot people — including an Australian journalist — with “less than lethal” bullets and pepper spray.

Other times, the help aids and abets. During a raid, the LAPD blocked in formation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement quarterbacked an operation that resulted in the violent arrest of Service Employees International Union California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta. Then, at an ICE staging area at Dodger Stadium, the LAPD helped federal agents exit though a different gate after one was blocked by protesters and the press. One month later, during “Operation Excalibur” — a “show of presence” by the National Guard and Customs and Border Protection — police officers worked crowd control at MacArthur Park. (Then, when they were done, they swerved at a few Angelenos protesting the federal scare tactics.)

The lines between local, state, and federal law enforcement and the military have blurred.