On Our Virtual Route 66: On Our World

Our team pulled A message about Jerusalema and a hope for the future as we present the following snapshot based on thoughts from The Economist of London, The Institute for Policy Studies, The Financial Times of London,  The COOP Scoop as we look forward to the ongoing engagement at hand:

10 of the Biggest Harms from the GOP Budget Bill The new law slashes vital services to pay for tax cuts for the rich and massive hikes in military and deportation funding.

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4 Charts on the Big Ugly Bill The GOP reconciliation plan’s potential impacts on death, hunger, and disparity by the numbers.

Trump’s Budget Will Devastate Health Care for Rural Families Like Mine The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” will throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and put hundreds of rural hospitals at risk of closing.

Politicians Are Betraying Gen Z on Climate While Gen-Zers thrift, knit, crochet, and find other ways to reduce our footprints, Trump and the GOP are greenlighting more climate chaos.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” Will Subsidize the Billionaire Private Jet Class Trump's budget bill will force ordinary taxpayers to pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers.

Until We Raise the Minimum Wage, Tip! While frustration with paying an extra buck or two on top of an already expensive latte is understandable, focusing on tipping is misguided.

Louisiana Wants To Censor Citizen Science, but Residents Are Fighting Back If we value clean air, clean water, and democracy, we need to be vigilant, and to fight back.

Remembering Robert Alvarez: A Life in Activism Few public scholars in history have done more either “inside” or “outside” than our nuclear policy expert, Robert “Bob” Alvarez. Read some of his memoirs about his work.

I'm a Veteran of Organized Auto Boycotts. My Advice to Tesla? Dump Musk During the Great Recession, I organized a Toyota boycott that accidentally paved the way for Musk’s rise. Musk probably won’t tell that story, so I will.

The US Bombing of Iran—How Nonprofits and Civil Society Must Respond The country is in the midst of an authoritarian moment. And that reality creates a need to rethink things like militarism and how to build movements that challenge it.

 

The tragedy of Labour Sir Keir Starmer is rapidly losing his authority As well as his hope of achieving much in office

The British economy Labour is bungling its growth “mission” Blame poor preparation and a habit of picking the wrong fights

Entente royale Macron will beat Trump to London A royal welcome for a republican president

Game of southern cone Inside the secret military dialogue between Britain and Argentina A deal would counter China and please America. It requires deft diplomacy on the Falklands

Hot protest summer Britain’s draconian approach to pro-Gaza activism is likely to backfire Heavy-handed use of anti-terror laws may amplify provocateurs

From our Bagehot columnist Britain is already a hot country. It should act like it A land of long holidays, cool homes and tree-lined streets awaits Stepping off the 9.10 from London Victoria to Whitstable was akin to disembarking from a Ryanair flight in Alicante rather than a former oyster port in Kent. A little before midday, the temperature was creeping towards 30°C. As a wall of heat hit her face, one pensioner despaired: “It’s unBritish.” Increasingly, it is nothing of the sort. Summer days of 30°C are now common in southern England. Occasionally the heat is extreme. Britain hit 40°C for the first time in 2022. In some scenarios, it could hit 45°C, according to the Met Office. Britain is becoming hotter. Each summer brings an annual farce, in which an increasingly hot country pretends it is anything but. Read the full article → The ICEman Cometh? Welcome to America's first national police force. Trump is its Commander The Coop Scoop Jul 12   July 11–13, 2025 By Marc Cooper In our short but magnificent summer here in the PNW, I keep making short two- or three-day runs to the local majestic forests and mountains to keep my head clear. It’s breathtaking but it doesn’t work. The idle time in the idylls only leaves my mind wide open to the shocking news happening, hourly, across the nation. I’m back now in Vancouver (Washington) once again trying to make sense of the crazed turbulence roiling those of us not asleep and it ain’t easy. Gotta say right off the bat that a lot of the political confusion around us is intentional. It’s a deliberate strategy by Trump, borrowed from Putin, to keep people so confused that they get bored by politics and tune out. If they were ever tuned in. They become allergic to facts because they cannot separate them from lies. The more out of touch with the news, the better for any authoritarian. Veteran Democratic consultant Dan Pfeiffer argues this week, with data, that the less news one searches for and consumes, the more likely they have voted for or support Trump. These are so-called “passive news consumers”—those who do not actively seek out news but who become objects of it. Trump was indeed elected by the 38% of the electorate that is less engaged. Says Pfeiffer: The people we need to reach to win back the House and Senate are the 38% of midterm voters who don’t actively seek out the news. These folks have very different media diets than you and I. Social media is where most of them get their news. Only 17% consider CNN to be a major source of news. Only 8% say that about national newspapers. I love complaining about the New York Times’s headlines as much as the next person, but this data makes clear that the voters we need to persuade are paying no attention to the Times. The big battles over their headlines and story choices are mostly an insular conversation among people whose vote was never in doubt. I plead guilty to sometimes engaging in what is, in the end, this ineffective chitter-chatter among a small circle of friends. National TV news is little different. People popped their cookies when Joy Reid was cut from MSNBC (Thank Jesus!) or when some other anchor gets cut or moved. Or when a NYTimes column offends the Speech Police or the hallowed Hierarchy of Oppression. News flash! Most MSNBC show audiences rarely reach more than a million or so viewers (who also mostly all agree with each other), while FOX gets double that with the same sort of True Believer audience — this, out of a population of 350 million. Yet, how many center-left and left substacks are obsessed with “proving” daily that the MSM is a corporate-controlled and tamed puppy? A waste of time, politically. Y’know what? We know that already. And the voters who count don’t even watch or read what we are bitching about. Yet, it’s important that this targeted 38% get credible information because the more they obtain, the saner the electorate. How do we do that? One thing we do is build a progressive mediasphere and that does not include PBS and NPR who will do just fine with Mobil underwriting. Nor does that mean giving money to your local piddly-dink listener-supported radio stations that exist primarily to flatter the incompetent hosts rather than speak in understandable and CREDIBLE terms understood by that 38%. Right now, today, we stand at an historical crossroads. I see only two probable scenarios ahead of us. The Trump administration continues to fall apart, the Democrats win the House next year and MAYBE the Senate, as Trump limps to the finish line as a very lame duck and any random Democrat crushes the execrable J.D. Vance in 2028, returning the country to a modicum of civility. Or…we continue to slide into a presidential dictatorship and a repressive police state with no end in sight. Oh yeah, a third possibility. Jesus returns and we live in perpetual harmony and love. All three are equally possible. Discounting that third option, we ask ourselves (without the help of a couple of hundred fired weather experts) exactly which way is the wind blowing six months into this crackpot regime? Is there forward and mounting momentum toward an anti-Trump opposition that will block his worst plans? Or are we just continuously sliding toward authoritarian dictatorship? My learned answer is both are true, simultaneously. It’s an existential race against time. But the forces of dictatorship are ahead by a couple of lengths…or laps. First, about some forward motion. The protest next week on July 17 will be the biggest to date. It will draw millions to the streets. And that is good. But what will happen the day after? Indivisible is organizing a One Million Strong Rising campaign at the end of July to train people on “non-cooperation” and community organizing. Can’t hurt for sure. I have to say that while I am for it, I’m a bit skeptical about how effective this will be over three nights online. And what does non-cooperation mean? Boycotts? Please. I’d rather see the time invested in organizing local organizing committees who organize face to face and I daresay at this juncture I would find non-violent civil disobedience and a no-business-as-usual lesson plan more to the point. And while I am stalwart adherent to bottom up politics, I also support honest inspirational leaders who guide and motivate. Don’t ask me who? It has to be someone whose name we don’t know yet but who becomes a mobilizing moral beacon in a country that seems to no longer have a moral code. An MLK, a Lech Walesa, a Lula. Certainly not a Schumer. On this subject I suggest you read as little as the Wikipedia version of the Armenian Revolution of 2018 as an example counter to petitions and hopes about a midterm that might not even happen. In brief, a career establishment politician named Nikol Pashinyan who was a fierce reformer and anti-corruption fighter for more than a decade alternated between being elected to parliament, having his newspaper shuttered, serving time as a political prisoner and going into hiding who determined in 2017 he would not tolerate the-then corrupt Prime Minister from serving an illegal third term, (sound familiar?). Though he never got more than 8% in any national election vote, he formed a tiny political party called Way Out, joined up with a few other micro parties and in 2018 announced he would lead a non-violent march of 120 miles to the capital of Yerevan. He started out with a handful of followers that kept growing along his two-week march. By the time the Prime Minister had been sworn in for his third term, some 200,000 people joined Nikol in a sit-in in front of the government palace and the Prime Minister resigned, breaking the back of the corrupt oligarchical omnipotent ruling bureaucracy left over from the immediate post-Soviet era. Government Square, Yerevan 2018/ I was there to witness it and it was a moment of national jubilation when Nikol was elected and sworn in. The country changed overnight. A deep gloom had been lifted and while Armenia is no paradise today it’s a lot more democratic, free and prosperous than before and Pashinyan continues as elected prime minister while young people can now at least imagine a future. This story haunts me when I think of the opposition to Trump. Simply put, we have no electoral mechanisms to remove him from office until 2029 and only God and Stephen Miller know what shape we will be in after another 3 1/2 years of Trump. Armenia has a parliamentary system and regime change can take place with one simple vote. What are our options here? Those who dishonestly ask you to fund support for the No Kings Act forget to tell you they are about 20 Senate votes short and maybe only two or three in sight. Same deal with pipe dreams about the 25th amendment unless you believe the cronies and kooks in the Trump cabinet are going to join the DSA. And on that subject the coming election of a Democratic Socialist as mayor of New York is good news but it ain’t Kansas as the 42nd Street T-shirts say. And Kansas is a much bigger problem than Manhattan. There are the midterms, probably, maybe. Trump, however, has shown he can rule with NO Congress as he rules by decree with a compliant Supreme Court. More importantly, sooner than I imagined, he is starting to politicize and deploy the U.S. Army, Marines and a thuggish ICE corps as America’s first ever national police force. If Trump succeeds in establishing a dictatorship, his initial siege of Los Angeles, which continues as I write, will go down in history as his own Enabling Act with the support of the Reichstag Congress, and the Supreme Court. Yes, the outrageous tax and medical cuts in BBB are cruel and evil. Trump, I suggest, doesn’t give two wanks about either issue, I think many of us have incorrectly second-guessed his real motivation which I declare to be POWER and POWER alone. He is dead set on normalizing the presence of ICE brutes throughout America because nothing says power better than total military control. This is the issue, the issue of freedom, the issue of resisting a police state, the militarization of our cities, the invasion of schools and parks by armored vehicles and troops on horseback carrying no badges but rather locked and loaded weapons of war that we need to block with our bodies if necessary. The upward transfer of money via unequal taxes, and the cuts in medical care are going to take a couple of years to be felt. And when they do hit, Trump will blame someone else, like the Congress of the devil. As Pfeiffer says in the article linked above, for too many people their political affiliation is of ten more important that their religion and have no inclination to change, no matter what, When it comes to a police state there is only one commander-in-chief. Donald J. Trump. The massive budget allocated to ICE by the BBB is four times its current funding and it is set to recruit 10,000 more new agents, as soon as that many overweight and undereducated rejects and failed applicants from other law enforcement agencies can be herded up. A baseball stadium costs about $1.5 Billion. Alligator Alcatraz is costing about 1/2 billion. ICE’s new construction budget is $45 billion. About enough for 30-50 more camps.   I don’t want to overstate this but this is also a fact. With ICE agents now becoming the largest law enforcement force in the country, with its budget now as big as the French military including its nukes and aircraft carriers, America is being radically transformed. Make no mistake, the emergence of this force radically reduces the power of even large states and gives it to the Federal Government. That’s an act as consequential as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which set the stage for the Civil War. Sit through these 3 minutes of video about the recent military invasion of L.A.’s MacArthur Park. After Mayor Bass demanded the troops and cops leave, the rock-headed commander of the operation looked straight into the camera and said “we don’t work for Mayor Bass… we are federal. We’re gonna be here and you better get used to us. It’s going to be normal.” Are we getting used to it? I hope not. Far be it from me to tell you what to do. There are no quick and easy solutions to fighting a dictatorship. If you ignore the threat at this juncture and do nothing about it, you qualify as a Good German and assume a piece of the responsibility for the ongoing ruination of America. And if you think that an enlarged national ICE force, who are far less accountable to the courts than ordinary police, are going to limit their activities to snatching the worst of the worst Mexican gardeners, roofers and abuelitas, you are supremely naive and please pass that joint over to me.. When somebody hands you a nine-pound sledgehammer, not to speak of tanks and troop carriers, you are gonna use them. These goons are attached to the Customs and Border Patrol who love to seize contraband and drugs. They LOVE drug seizures. It’s what the used to do before besieging car washes. It might be far out today but not a year from now that these masked goons will be going after your Vuitton knock-off next time you go to an abandoned car wash even if it holds your U.S. passport. Contraband! P.S. In a couple of recent posts I have referred to ICE agents as the dregs of law enforcement, I stand by that assertion. Look at the videos and see what percentage of them are too fat to be employed as cops. There’s reasons why LAPD recruits start at $88,000 a year and top out at near $200,000 while ICE salaries start at $29,000 and top out at $62,000. Different standards, folks, different training and those will probably be lowered now to find 10,000 more appropriate sub-par brutes. ++ Politics Erdoğan hails new page in Turkey’s history as Kurdish fighters lay down arms President publicly expresses support for peace process with PKK to end a four-decade insurgency JULY 12, 2025 by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul We close out with the following Thought For the Week:

A Declaration: Why We Persist in Spite of the Odds

 

On the Prowl On Our "Virtual Route 66" In America (Special Edition)

 

 

Heather Cox Richardson Jul 8

 

At about 10:30 this morning local time, heavily armed masked agents in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck raided the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Journalist Mel Buer reported that agents from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought what he called a “massive federal presence.”

Fox News Channel personnel were embedded with the raiders and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed for the media as a show of force to intimidate opponents. CBP brought its own press team, and its people were also taking photos of bystanders. After Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrived and spoke with Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, the agents left. It is not clear that there was a specific target for the raid, or that anyone was arrested.

Later, Bovino told Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Immigrants rights groups sued Bovino last week to block what they call an “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids.

Steve Beynon of Military dot com reports that about 70 National Guard troops have been deployed to the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades as the administration “leans harder on the military to enforce its nationwide immigration crackdown.” Unlike the National Guard troops Trump federalized in Los Angeles, these troops are operating as state troops under Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Another 8,500 active-duty and National Guard troops are stationed along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The Trump administration is also sending 200 Marines to Florida to aid ICE, part of a push to increase deportations by using active-duty troops.

The U.S. Marine Corps has launched a pilot program to station ICE agents at Camp Pendleton in California, Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Sarah Rumpf-Whitten of Fox News writes that the plan is to strengthen security at those bases, although University of Tampa defense professor Abby Hall Blanco pointed out: "It gives kind of an odd impression that the Marine Corps is not handling its own security sufficiently. Having known quite a few Marines in my time, I can't imagine that they would find that to be a particularly flattering interpretation.”

As Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol pointed out in Talking Points Memo, it appears that officials in the Trump administration are using immigration as a way to establish a police state. Indeed, they are using the concept that presidents have control of foreign affairs as a way to work around the laws in place to prevent a dictatorship.

In its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision, the Supreme Court majority held that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” as well as “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” In April 2025 the court specified that it considered foreign affairs to fall within a president’s constitutional authority, writing in Noem v. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia that the executive branch was owed “deference…in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Although the Framers of the Constitution put the power to make laws in the hands of Congress, they divided power in foreign affairs between Congress and the president. Almost immediately, presidents began to assert their authority over foreign affairs, noting that the Constitution gave them power to appoint ambassadors and negotiate treaties and pointing to the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the Army. The branches have tussled over this power ever since, but as James Goldgeiger and Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in Foreign Affairs, presidential power over foreign affairs has grown dramatically since 2000.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, members of Congress were unwilling to appear soft on terror and so allowed President George W. Bush great leeway in the nation’s “war on terror,” even after it became clear that Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was failing. In Foreign Affairs last month, Saunders wrote that a lack of accountability for either the failures of the Iraq War or the 2008 international financial crisis fed the idea that the president could make sweeping decisions about both foreign intervention and the international economy without check by Congress.

On February 12, 2025, the Trump administration made clear that its members intended to expand Trump’s power by pushing the boundaries of what foreign affairs entails. In an executive order, Trump claimed the Constitution “vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States.”

Trump’s actual work in foreign affairs has been different from what he promised during his presidential campaign. His vow that he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with one phone call has resulted only in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s accelerating his attacks on Ukraine. As foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote on July 4 in The Atlantic, it is clear that Putin believes he can conquer all of Ukraine because Trump is abandoning the longstanding U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and pivoting the U.S. to back Russia.

Last week the administration said it would not send Ukraine a large shipment of weapons already funded under President Joe Biden. It claimed that U.S. stockpiles of weapons are insufficient, a claim former Biden officials and independent analysts contradict. Applebaum notes that Russia has interpreted the change as a sign that the U.S. is ending its support for Ukraine.

The U.S. is also essentially lifting the economic sanctions that have hamstrung Russia’s economy. By not adjusting sanctions to combat developing Russian workarounds, the administration is allowing Russia to rebuild its economy. In addition, the Trump administration has stopped countering Russian disinformation around the world, while Trump appointees, including Trump’s main negotiator with Russia, Steve Witkoff, regularly parrot Russian propaganda.

Trump’s launching of strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapon production sites without input from Congress earned pushback from congress members who noted that the president’s authority to launch emergency operations depends on an actual emergency. Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in March that the Intelligence Community assessed Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon.

Then Trump’s claim he had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be exaggerated, although as journalists questioned his statement, the administration doubled down on it. Today, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that Israeli officials believe Trump will green-light further Israeli attacks on Iran. Trump has said twice since the U.S. strikes that the U.S. could attack Iran again if Iran renews its nuclear program.

But the claim to domestic power based in the president’s alleged right to control over foreign affairs has fueled much of the administration's domestic agenda. The administration claimed the power to render undocumented Venezuelans to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador by arguing that the Venezuelan government was sending members of the MS-13 gang to invade the U.S. After wrongfully delivering Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration claimed courts could not order him returned to the U.S. because that order would interfere with Trump’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.

Documents filed in court today said Salvadoran officials told the United Nations that the U.S. retained jurisdiction over the migrants it sent to El Salvador, undermining the administration’s insistence that it has no control over migrants once they are out of U.S. territory. El Salvador simply had an agreement with the U.S. to use the Salvadoran prison system to detain U.S. prisoners, they said. “In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.”

In a lawsuit against the administration, Abrego Garcia says he was tortured in El Salvador, severely beaten, deprived of sleep, inadequately fed, denied bathroom facilities, and tortured psychologically. He says he lost 31 pounds in two weeks.

Today the administration ended temporary protection from deportation for about 72,000 migrants from Honduras and another 4,000 from Nicaragua. The decision strips them of their legal status and echoes similar decisions made about migrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Nepal, and Venezuela. A federal court has blocked the early termination of protected status for Haitians.

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Notes:

https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/framework

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#2

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf

https://www.justice.gov/file/147551-0/dl

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/imperial-president-home-emperor-abroad

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/one-voice-for-americas-foreign-relations/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/putin-trump-russia-ukraine/683414/

https://www.axios.com/2025/07/07/israel-strike-iran-nuclear-sites-again-trump

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-suffered-psychological-physical-torture-el-salvad-rcna216685

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/macarthur-park-los-angeles-karen-bass-ice-raids-b2784313.html

Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Marines team up with ICE in bold move to boost ‘threat awareness’ at critical military bases, Fox News, July 7, 2025.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/07/03/guardsmen-help-operate-alligator-alcatraz-trump-increasingly-leans-military-immigration-crackdown.html

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/200-marines-florida-ice/story?id=123466361

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/critical-read-about-the-bbb-federalism-and-the-future-of-american-democracy

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/07/trump-tps-honduras-nicaragua

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-07/immigration-agents-descend-on-macarthur-park

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/americas-spies-say-iran-wasnt-building-a-nuclear-weapon-trump-dismisses-that-assessment

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