Tag: raids
'No Kings Day': Americans Defending Democracy -- And Health Care

'No Kings Day': Americans Defending Democracy -- And Health Care

I’ve spent much of the past few days mulling the significance of the Trump regime sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles. Gov. Gavin Newsom did not ask for them. Mayor Karen Bass did not ask for them. The tens of thousands of city and state police available to Newsom and Bass were more than adequate to curtail the vandalism perpetrated by some demonstrators during the weekend’s protests against the large-scale ICE raids in the city.

Trump’s action has only one precedent in recent history. In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the National Guard into Alabama against the wishes of Gov. George Wallace. LBJ felt compelled to act to protect civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, who had been viciously attacked and beaten the previous week by state and local police.

Richard Nixon didn’t order the National Guard onto the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State during protests against the Vietnam War in the spring of 1970, which resulted in the deaths of six students. Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes and Mississippi’s Gov. William Winter were responsible for those unnecessary and ultimately tragic actions.

Trump’s order — unjustified, lawless, a gross violation of California’s rights — raises the serious question, as much as anything that he has done to date, of whether we still live in a free country. On a number of fronts, the Supreme Court has allowed his flagrantly illegal actions to proceed unimpeded despite lower courts ruling them either illegal or unconstitutional. Congress lays supine.

The checks and balances envisioned by this country’s founders are no longer operative. They are not providing the basic protections on which freedom depends, which includes above all the government adhering to the rule of law and our elected leaders upholding the Constitution they swore to defend.

Yesterday morning, Newsom promised to sue the federal government. He raised the specter of witholding federal taxes should Trump follow through on his threat to withold government payments to the state (which would be a net plus for California like most heavily blue states, which send more to the federal government than they receive in return).

Those of us who live in major urban areas with large immigrant populations worry that our cities and our states may become the next targets of large-scale ICE raids, which will inevitably provoke a reaction from justifiably outraged young protesters. Let’s not forget that urban economies (as well as many rural agricultural and meat-processing areas) are heavily dependent on the 11 million undocumented workers the Trump regime wants to deport.

Even if a narrow majority of the general public (about 55 percent) back stricter enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, a far larger majority backs adherence to the rule of law. A Pew Research Center poll in April found 78 percent of Americans wanted the Trump administration to follow federal court rulings, which included 91 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans. The overall number rises to 88 percent for Supreme Court rulings.

This coming Saturday, while Trump holds a Soviet-style military parade in downtown Washington, there will be mass protests across the country. People will be carrying banners declaring “No More Kings.” I’ve volunteered to be a marshall to help assure that no misguided demonstrators or agents provocateurs provide a pretext for police action. I encourage all my readers to take part.

But protests are not enough. Only an engaged citizenry can defeat the reactionary forces here at home that threaten the values that truly made America great: equality, fairness, compassion, and equal justice before laws that everyone, including the president of the United States, adheres to.

Health care on the line

With that thought in mind, I hope that you will take time over the next few weeks to let your Senators know that you oppose the vicious cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Congressional Budget Office last week predicted just those sections alone will result in around 15 million people losing health insurance over the next decade.

Let’s put that number in perspective. There are currently around 28 million uninsured in the U.S. or about eight percent of the population, which is down from 17 oercent when Barack Obama took office in 2009. The 2010 Affordable Care Act, for all its flaws (which I won’t go into here), was tremendously successful in achieving its main goal of reducing the U.S. uninsured rate. Add 15 million more people to the ranks of the uninsured and that rate will soar back to at least 12 percent.

Who will pay for the costs of those people when they show up in the emergency room needing health care that they can’t pay for? You and your employers, who will wind up paying higher rates for private health insurance to pay for the cost of hospitals’ and physicians’ uncompensated care.

Rural hospitals, which are heavily dependent on Medicaid funding, will get hurt the most because states where most of those hospitals are located cannot afford to make up for the cutbacks in federal support. The destitute elderly in nursing homes will also suffer as their staffs get cut due to the proposed law’s ending of the Biden administration’s minimum staffing rule.

And to what end? The work requirements that Republicans claim are merely aimed at getting shirkers off the rolls is a smoke screen to hide the bill’s true intent: To keep alive unnecessary tax breaks for the most well-off people in this country. That $4 trillion-plus giveaway is so large that even after making massive cuts in health care and other domestic spending, it will still increase the federal deficit by over $2 trillion over the next decade.

Merrill Goozner is a former editor of Modern Healthcare, where he writes a weekly column. He is a former reporter for The Chicago Tribune and professor of business journalism at New York University. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.

U.S., Arab Allies Strike IS Jihadists In Syria

U.S., Arab Allies Strike IS Jihadists In Syria

Damascus (AFP) — The United States and its Arab allies unleashed deadly bomb and missile strikes on jihadists in Syria on Tuesday, opening a new front in the battle against the Islamic State group.

Dozens of IS and Al-Qaeda militants were reported to have been killed in the raids, which Washington said had partly targeted extremists plotting an “imminent attack” against the West.

Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates joined the U.S.-led operation, which involved fighter jets, bombers, drones and Tomahawk missiles fired from U.S. warships.

The strikes marked a turning point in the war against IS militants, who have seized swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, and declared an Islamic “caliphate”.

The fact that the five Arab nations joining the strikes are Sunni-ruled will also be of crucial symbolic importance in the fight against the Sunni extremists of IS.

Washington had been reluctant to intervene in Syria’s raging civil war, but was jolted into action as the jihadists captured more territory and committed atrocities including the beheadings of three Western hostages.

President Bashar al-Assad’s regime gave a muted initial response, saying it had been notified in advance of the strikes and supported “any international effort” against the jihadists.

The Pentagon said the raids had destroyed or damaged IS fighter positions, training compounds, command centers and armed vehicles in the jihadist stronghold of Raqa and near the border with Iraq.

– ‘Huge impact’ –

An anti-regime activist in Raqa, Abu Yusef, said that IS had redeployed its fighters in response.

“The impact of the strikes has been huge,” he told AFP via the Internet.

The jihadists “are focused on trying to save themselves now,” he added.

The raids prompted many residents to run from their homes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

“Civilians who live near IS positions across Syria have fled,” director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

It follows a recent exodus of tens of thousands of residents into neighboring Turkey in response to a jihadist assault on a strategic Kurdish town in northern Syria.

IS militants have warned the U.S.-led campaign would be met with a harsh response, and an IS-linked Algerian group on Monday threatened to kill a French hostage within 24 hours if Paris did not end its participation in air strikes in Iraq.

The group said it was responding to an IS call to kill Westerners whose nations are among 50 countries that have joined the campaign to battle the jihadist group.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls ruled out negotiation and said Paris would continue its air strikes.

-‘Al-Qaeda plot’ –

Washington said it launched 14 strikes — including 47 Tomahawk missiles — against IS targets around the jihadist stronghold of Raqa, as well as in Deir Ezzor, Albu Kamal and Hasakeh on the border with Iraq.

Its five Arab allies “participated in or supported” the attacks. Jordan and Bahrain said they deployed warplanes.

Four air strikes were also conducted Monday in neighboring Iraq, the Pentagon said, bringing the total number of U.S. raids in that country to 194.

In Syria, eight strikes were carried out on a group of “seasoned Al-Qaeda” veterans to disrupt “imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests”, the Pentagon said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 50 Al-Qaeda militants were killed, as well as more than 70 members of IS.

Eight civilians, including three children, were also among the dead, it said.

The new strikes came less than two weeks after U.S. President Barack Obama warned that he had approved an expansion of the campaign against the IS group to include action in Syria.

Obama was preparing to give his first public remarks on the raids from the White House at 10:00 am (1400 GMT) on Tuesday, a U.S. official said.

Washington has said the goal of the strikes is to degrade the group’s capabilities so it can be taken on by local ground forces including the Iraqi army and moderate Syrian rebels, who are to be trained and equipped by the coalition.

Syria’s opposition — which had pleaded for the strikes — welcomed the new raids, but urged sustained pressure on Assad’s government.

“This war cannot be won by military means alone,” National Coalition president Hadi al-Bahra said.

In a separate incident on Tuesday, Israel downed a Syrian fighter jet over the Golan Heights, indicating that it had crossed a ceasefire line into the Israeli-occupied sector.

Israeli army radio said it was apparently a MiG-21 which was shot down by a surface-to-air Patriot missile, with the wreckage landing on the Syrian-controlled side of the plateau.

AFP Photo/Mohammed al-Shaikh

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Hundreds Feared Dead In ‘Massive’ Boko Haram Village Raids

Hundreds Feared Dead In ‘Massive’ Boko Haram Village Raids

Maiduguri (Nigeria) (AFP) – Hundreds of people may have been killed in a suspected Boko Haram attack on four villages in northeast Nigeria, a local lawmaker and residents said on Thursday.

Gunmen in military uniform struck the Gwoza district of Borno state late on Tuesday, razing homes, churches and mosques and killing residents who tried to flee the violence.

Some community leaders put the death toll in the attacks as high as 400 to 500, although there was no independent verification of the claim because of poor communications and difficulties by the emergency services in accessing the area.

If confirmed, the attack on the villages of Goshe, Attagara, Agapalwa and Aganjara would be one of the deadliest in the Islamists’ deadly five-year insurgency and top the more than 300 who were killed on May 5 when militant fighters laid siege to the nearby town of Gamboru Ngala.

“The killings are massive but nobody can give a toll for now because nobody has been able to go to that place because the insurgents are still there. They have taken over the whole area,” lawmaker Peter Biye told AFP.

“There are bodies littered over the whole area and people have fled,” added Biye, who represents Gwoza in Nigeria’s lower chamber of parliament, the House of Representatives.

Reports from the remote region, said the insurgents continued their attack on Wednesday, stealing livestock and food and burning property.

“Hundreds of dead bodies are lying there… because there is nobody that will bury them,” said one community leader in Attagara, who requested anonymity.

He said the attackers only spared women and that young boys were “snatched from the backs of their mothers and killed”.

Men, women and children fled the villages but gunmen on motorcycles tracked them down, shooting as they ran, he added.

Gwoza shares a border with Cameroon and is surrounded by mountains and the Sambisa forest, a known Boko Haram base and the focus for a Nigerian military search for more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped on April 14.

Many people fled across the border, as soldiers were deployed to fight the heavily armed Islamists, who took over at least seven villages hoisting their black flag, Biye said on Wednesday.

The community leader called the situation a grave “humanitarian crisis” while others called for relief agencies to be allowed in to enable the dead to be buried.

Another, Zakari Habu, said: “The women and elderly men in our villages also need food and water. The injured need drugs and all of them need shelter.”

Military jets bombarded Boko Haram positions in the affected area to try to flush out the insurgents, Biye said on Wednesday.

In mainly Muslim Goshe, where the entire village of about 300 homes was razed with several mosques, local resident Abba Goni said “at least 100 people were killed”.

Bulus Yashi, who lives in predominantly Christian Attagara, said the attack seemed to be a reprisal after four Boko Haram gunmen were killed after they opened fire on a church, killing nine.

Another attack on May 25 had been repelled, killing seven Boko Haram gunmen, he said.

“We believed they came on a revenge mission,” he said.

Residents had allegedly sought assurances from the military that they would be protected from reprisals over Sunday’s church attack but they claimed that no troops were sent.

There was no immediate word from the local military, police or state government when contacted by AFP.

Boko Haram Islamists have recently stepped up raids in northern Borno state near the borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, pillaging villages, looting food stores and killing residents.

The attacks are generally seen as response to villagers forming civilian vigilante groups against Boko Haram, who in turn accuse locals of helping the Nigerian military’s counter-insurgency.

Civilians have increasingly been targets of the violence and more than 2,000 are estimated to have been killed this year alone.

In February, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 people, more than half of them children, had fled their homes in northeast Nigeria since a state of emergency was imposed in May last year.

AFP Photo

Syrian Government Declares War On Its Own Civilians

The now months-old domestic protest movement against the hardline — and less-than-democratic — rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced its most brutal crackdown yet this weekend, with some 75 confirmed dead:

The simultaneous raids on several cities came a day before the holy month of Ramadan, during which activists had vowed to escalate their uprising with nightly protests. The scale of the assault and the mounting death toll underlined the government’s intention to crush the uprising by force, despite international condemnations and its own tentative and mostly illusory reforms ostensibly aimed at placating protesters’ demands.

“Today we are witnessing a major assault,” said Omar Idlibi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committee, an opposition group that helps organize and document protests. “It is a last-minute attempt by the regime to reclaim cities that it lost control of.”

“It appears on the ground that the Syrian government has chosen to engage in full-scale warfare against its own people,” said J.J. Harder, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. “This is a regime that continues to surprise us by how horrific it can be.”

In an interview, he added that Syrian officials were “delusional.”

The Obama administration predictably lambasted the “violence and brutality,” in a Sunday statement, and assailed Assad as a regular practitioner of “torture, corruption, and terror” who has precious little time left before the forces of democracy overtake him.

There’s no sign yet that the Syrian military will hold fire and refuse Assad’s orders at some point, and, just like in Libya, no one’s exactly sure what factions — Islamists? Secular liberals? Disgruntled military officials? — will steer the nascent rebel movement.

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