Day: July 9, 2025

Operation Wetback

With all the problems in LA with Trump’s immigration so-called round-up….I thought I would do some research and found that it is nothing new.

But in case you are oblivious to the situation in LA….

The tensions in Los Angeles over the city’s protests of immigration raids may play out in the courts as well as on the streets. California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Sunday night that he will sue President Trump over the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard. The governor essentially accused the president of manufacturing a crisis.

  • “Donald Trump is putting fuel on this fire,” wrote Newsom. “Commandeering a state’s National Guard without consulting the Governor of that state is illegal and immoral.” Regarding Homeland Security Director Tom Homan’s threat to arrest the governor, Newsom responded, “That kind of bloviating is exhausting. So, Tom, arrest me. Let’s go,” per NBC News.
  • Trump on Sunday rebuffed Newsom’s request in a phone call to withdraw the National Guard and promised to have “troops everywhere.” The president and his team cast the confrontation in stark terms, with aide Stephen Miller writing that “this is a fight to save civilization.”
  • The war of words played out amid the third straight day of protests Sunday in Los Angeles over the White House’s immigration raids. Police declared all of downtown Los Angeles an unlawful assembly area, a precursor to possible arrests, per CNN. Officers used flash-bangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas to break up protests at various locations, and many dispersed as evening fell.
  • While most protesters were peaceful, some who were blocking the southbound lane of Freeway 101 threw objects at responding police, including chunks of concrete, rocks, and even electric scooters, per the AP, while others set self-driving cars on fire. Officers had to take cover beneath an overpass. The AP reports several dozen arrests were made through the weekend.

That was just a short recap and not the meat of this post….

As much as Donny would have you believe that he is doping something that has been done never in the US…..as usual nothing about the orange man is original.

The year is 1954…..Ike is the president (another Republican)…..that’s right time for the old professor to drop some of his favorite subject history.

Operation Wetback was a U.S. immigration law enforcement program conducted during 1954 that resulted in the mass deportation to Mexico of as many as 1.3 million Mexicans who had entered the country illegally. Even though the deportation was originally requested by the government of Mexico to prevent much-needed Mexican farm laborers from working in the United States, Operation Wetback evolved into an issue that strained diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Mexico.

At the time, Mexican laborers were permitted to legally enter the U.S. temporarily for seasonal farm work under the Bracero program, a World War II agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. Operation Wetback was launched partly in response to problems caused by abuses of the Bracero program and the American public’s anger over the inability of the U.S. Border Patrol to reduce the number of seasonal Mexican farm workers illegally living permanently in the United States.

Mexico’s longstanding policy of discouraging its citizens from migrating to the United States turned around in the early 1900s when Mexican President Porfirio Díaz along with other Mexican government officials realized that the country’s abundant and cheap labor force was its greatest asset and the key to stimulating its struggling economy. Conveniently for Díaz, the United States and its booming agricultural industry created a ready and eager market for Mexican labor.

During the 1920s, over 60,000 Mexican farm workers would temporarily enter the U.S. legally every year. Over the same period, however, more than 100,000 Mexican farm workers per-year entered the U.S. illegally, with many not returning to Mexico. As its own agribusiness started to suffer due to the growing shortage of field labor, Mexico began pressuring the United States to enforce its immigration laws and return its workers. At the same time, America’s large-scale farms and agribusinesses were recruiting ever-more illegal Mexican workers to meet their growing need for year-round labor. From the 1920s until the onset of World War II, the majority of field workers on American farms, especially in the Southwestern states, were Mexican nationals—most of whom had crossed the border illegally.

…

During these immigration enforcement “sweeps,” many Mexican Americans—often based solely on their physical appearance—were detained by INS agents and forced to prove their American citizenship. INS agents would only accept birth certificates, which few people carry with them, as proof of citizenship. Over the course of Operation Wetback, an undetermined number of Mexican Americas who were unable to produce birth certificates quickly enough were wrongly deported.

(read the entire article and learn something for god’s sake)

https://www.thoughtco.com/operation-wetback-4174984

You see there is very little going on right now that is something new….

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

On Political Violence

Recent events got me to thinking about political violence….again.  A sitting rep has killed along with you husband and that is just the tip…..years ago another sitting rep was shot but survived….then there have been attacks on campaign offices about 20 years ago a US Congressperson was shot while practicing for a ball game and an insurrection and yet the violence.

It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America.

Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates.

The same day, during national “No Kings” demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed “safety volunteer” associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester’s leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters.

Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was “run off the road” by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/political-violence-extremism-america

Does this sort of political violence work?

…

These campaigns depopulated, demoralized, and disenfranchised entire peoples—and they worked. Political violence was used to maintain power, suppress democracy, and preserve racial hierarchies. Whether through mob rule or official policy, it has long been a tool of dominance in American political life. The results are still visible in the disparities and structural inequalities of today.

Some argue that violence only provides fleeting success. But in politics, a year can reshape a lifetime. A decade can redirect a nation. Even a single act—an assassination, a bombing, a riot—can reconfigure the structures of power so deeply that nothing returns to its previous state.

In democracies, political violence is supposed to be unnecessary. People are taught to believe in elections, deliberation, and law. But when violence succeeds—when it silences opposition or disrupts government—it sends a chilling message: the rule of law is optional. For those willing to kill, threaten, or destroy, the system can be manipulated or broken.

…

Political violence is still a currency of global power. It is not merely the weapon of the weak, but also the preferred instrument of regimes and elites seeking control. The world has not outgrown violence as a political strategy. It has simply become more selective and sophisticated in its application.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/19/the-tragedy-of-political-violence-it-works/

Was Mao right when he wrote….’political power goes from the barrel of a gun’?

Is there more to come?

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Rise Of The New Confederacy

“The South shall rise again”….has been the war cry of the racist and now it appears that it has happened and all with the help of the Supreme Court, especially John Roberts….

Back in 2011 there was a prediction, a look forward, if you will….

The tactics by the GOP are working the system to return to the 1950s and give racist their wish of a new confederacy…

This is an article from 2011….

The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.

…

For the Confederacy that now dominates the GOP, truth is solid and fixed and divinely embedded in the structure of the universe. Humanity’s responsibility is to accept and believe the truth rather than test ideas against actual experience. The Confederacy’s obsession with ​“originalist” interpretations of the Constitution – a twin of biblical literalism – is the classic example: truth must be eternal, universal.

…

The new Confederacy rejects that process wholesale. Its leaders and authorities are the spiritual descendants of the conservative Christians and charismatic radio preachers who broke away from religious modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. For these leaders and their followers, faith justifies – and verifies – itself. You don’t believe an idea because it’s true. It’s true because you believe it.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/new-confederacy-rising

Now fast forward and to the court….

This mess we find our country in is all Chief Justice John Roberts’s fault. There are many other actors contributing to our current situation, but Roberts has been the most consequential of them. His actions lead to the conclusion that he wants to dismantle the “Second Founding” and return to a Confederate/Jim-Crow-style apartheid system.

Roberts has been working his entire career to undermine the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which were ratified after the Civil War. These amendments are also known as the Reconstruction Amendments. They are considered a “Second Founding” because they reoriented the Constitution from primarily promoting states’ rights to emphasizing individual rights and federal power in protecting those rights.

In 2013’s 5-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Roberts concluded that racism was a thing of the past. Racial discrimination in voting, according to Roberts, simply wasn’t a major problem anymore. This landmark case — by glibly pretending that racism is no longer a factor in elections, while allowing states-sponsored voter suppression and intimidation — reveals Roberts’s own latter-day racism.

When the history of the Trump era is written, John Roberts will be featured as the man who used Trumpism to finally win what southern racists call the “War of Northern Aggression.”

(whowhatwhy.org)

This ought to, if read, should offer up some interesting comments….we shall see.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”