TRUMP ON ‘REMIGRATION:’ HEED THE RHETORIC

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 8, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TRUMP ON ‘REMIGRATION:’ HEED THE RHETORIC”

 

Even now, six months into President Trump’s second term, there’s a tendency to disregard President Trump’s sometimes fiery rhetoric as mere big talk. Americans ought to know better by now. Iranians certainly do, after Trump sent bunker bombs into their most secure nuclear facility.

 

Similarly, when he ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Southern California and told them to “do all in their power to…deliver the single largest mass deportation program in history,” he wasn’t kidding. His order led to weeks of protests in affected areas, demonstrations that made no discernible dent in the president’s plans.

 

This suggests that when Trump employs white supremacist memes in speeches and social media posts, he also means it.

 

He did that just after the “No Kings” movement produced the largest one-day set of anti-government demonstrations in U.S. history.

 

In a little-noticed rant on his Truth Social service the next morning, Trump announced that “Our government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.”

 

Never mind that one would have to be a mind reader to tell in advance which prospective immigrants threaten domestic tranquility.

 

It was Trump’s use of the term “remigration” that should have raised eyebrows, but drew little notice. Historically, the word has meant the voluntary return of migrants to their countries of origin. But, as reported by the British newspaper The Guardian, in modern usage, especially among white supremacists in America and Europe, it’s a euphemism for indiscriminating mass deportation and ethnic cleansing. The term is often used to target non-white immigrants, regardless of their origin.

 

In countries from Albania to Serbia and Tajikistan, that word also has been used in efforts to create all-white enclaves, with some such efforts backed by governments.

 

So it was no surprise when ICE agents without a warrant entered the Montebello auto body shop of Brian Gavidia, twisting his arm and demanding he tell them in which hospital he was born, in order to prove his citizenship. Incidents like this, first reported in local newspapers, have been common in the Southern California sweeps.

 

In the end, Gavidia used his Real ID drivers license to prove citizenship, after being unable to recall the name of the hospital.

 

The incident was not unusual. Gavidia told a reporter, “Latinos in general are getting attacked. We are all getting attacked.”

 

Documented or not, immigrants all over California now experience terror over the possibility of being picked up and deported with no due process, as has been reported in hundreds of cases so far. Construction workers stayed home in droves, roofing and drywall jobs halted, nannies refused to take their young charges to parks and some normally busy neighborhoods became sudden ghost towns.

 

The racial profiling in the ICE raids has been beyond doubt, striking fear in millions of the brown-skinned and netting some U.S. citizens. There’s also no doubt about agents attempting to hide their identity. In an era when almost all local and state police carry body cameras to ensure their behavior is correct, not only do ICE agents carry no cameras, they often wear ski masks to hide their identity. If their actions are correct, why do that?

 

It's in keeping with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem’s remark to a news conference that ICE raids on everything from convenience stores to family homes will continue indefinitely. Said Noem, “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and burdensome government that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country and this city.”

 

Just two days after Noem made that admission of the purely political nature of the ICE presence in California, Trump ordered raids to intensify in Chicago, New York and other Democratic-run cities.

 

Republican states need not worry much – yet – even though Texas called up more than 5,000 national guard troops to ready for responses to possible upcoming raids there.

 

For the other cities and states Trump vocally targeted, none of which voted for him last year, the message is clear: Heed what Trump says. He means every message, even if he backs off or softens some.

 

 
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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

OFTEN-DESTRUCTIVE POT NOW TREATED LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “OFTEN-DESTRUCTIVE POT NOW TREATED LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS”

 

        California voters legalized recreational marijuana via a ballot initiative in November 2016, almost six years ago. Since then, the weed has evolved into something like a normal business, complete with webcasts on operating efficiently, disputes about where stores can be located and gripes about underground operators siphoning off too much of the take.

 

        But there’s little normal about pot itself. First made semi-legal by the 1996 Proposition 15, which allowed medical marijuana use with a doctor’s “recommendation” (not a real prescription, since pharmacies never sold it), medipot operated in a kind of gray legal area for 20 years, but was nevertheless in common use.

 

        But this is no ordinary business. It involves selling a substance at least as debilitating to many as alcohol, but while legal standards govern the purity and strength of various liquors, there is nothing to assure marijuana’s consistent purity, especially on the black market where police say at least two-thirds of pot sales occur.

 

        Then there are the medical effects of the weed, both long-term and short-term. The immediate effects are well known: spaced-out behavior, impaired judgment, both clouded and heightened senses depending on your personal biology, a distorted sense of time, slower reactions and lowered motor skills, lowered inhibitions, less mental focus and memory – and more. On the positive side, there’s also pain reduction and better tolerance for some medications and their side effects.

 

        For those who make it past these frequent and fleeting issues, now there’s proof of long-term mental harm from prolonged pot use.

 

        This has been suspected for decades, but a report published this spring in a journal of the American Psychiatric Assn. makes it definite: If you want to be mentally sharp and capable in middle age or later, don’t use pot regularly.

 

        Concluded the report, “At age 45, people who (said they used) cannabis weekly or more frequently over the past year showed greater cognitive decline than those who never used cannabis.”

 

        This was based on a study of 938 persons in Dunedin, New Zealand, 93 percent of them Caucasian and all born in 1972 or 1973. Starting at age 18, all participants were interviewed at least once every six years about their use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. Cognitive tests were given at ages 7, 9 and 11 and again at age 45. Close relatives, spouses and friends also completed questionnaires about whether the participants experienced memory or attention problems over the past year.

 

        The 86 participants classed as long-term cannabis users had normal average IQ’s of 99.3 as children, but dropped to below-average as middle-aged adults with average IQs of 93.8. Meanwhile, participants who reported never using marijuana saw their IQs rise slightly (by 0.7 points) between childhood and middle age. At the same time, long-term tobacco and alcohol users also experienced IQ drops as they aged, but these averaged more than 4 points less than the IQ loss among users of the weed. Pot use is illegal in New Zealand.

 

        Their friends and relatives also described long-term marijuana users as having more attention, concentration and memory problems than non-users or those who smoked pot only occasionally.

 

        The test cohort, of course, is still too young to assess how pot use might affect their rates of dementia as they reach their 60s and 70s.

 

        The conclusion here is obvious: Anything that increases cannabis use or encourages regular or habitual usage should be discouraged.

 

        But that’s not happening in California, where more and more cities are making it easier and easier to open dispensaries within their boundaries.

 

        The long-term New Zealand study and other indicators from American sources make it clear that marijuana affects much more than highway safety, although it surely has a negative impact on that.

 

         Rather than encouraging pot dispensaries strictly because they are legal, sane policy would be the exact reverse. Plus, schools and colleges need to warn their students on a regular basis of the weed’s negative effects.

 

        Anything different invites a steady decline in the intellectual abilities of average Californians.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

THERE SHOULD BE NO WAITING AROUND BY SANCHEZ

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “THERE SHOULD BE NO WAITING AROUND BY SANCHEZ”

          Once California’s primary election season ends in early June, most candidates go into a sort of stasis for almost three months, until just before the traditional Labor Day start of the fall political season.

          But if Loretta Sanchez is smart – and no one ever suggested she’s not – she will not wait months before resuming an aggressive campaign for the U.S. Senate. Sanchez on Election Night in June eased into a November runoff against state Attorney General Kamala Harris, beating out five Republicans who split the GOP vote while Democrats – already more numerous – were only divided two ways.

          There’s every reason to believe that if Sanchez slacks off over summer vacation, she’ll put herself out of politics indefinitely. Every post-primary poll has shown she lags far behind Harris.

          Just such slacking off is a California political tradition. To keep campaigning means keeping up the spending and energy levels of the primary season. Just a month before the June 7 primary, Sanchez had raised slightly over $2 million, a paltry sum compared with the usual $30 million to $40 million that’s spent on successful top-of-ticket California races.

          The best historical lesson about what can be accomplished by staying active on the campaign trail was taught in 1978 by current Gov. Jerry Brown, when he sought reelection to a second term during his first gubernatorial era.

          When the primary ended that year, incumbent Brown trailed his upcoming Republican challenger, the popular state Attorney General Evelle Younger, a former district attorney of Los Angeles County, in all polls. California was not yet a safe Democratic stronghold state in that era.

          But Younger took the traditional path. Just after the primary, he left for Maui and stayed on vacation almost a month, figuring no one would heed politics until summer’s end. But that year was volatile, just like 2016. In the June vote, Californians had passed the landmark Proposition 13 property tax limits over Brown’s objection, so there was plenty to talk about.

          And Brown did. Overnight, he pivoted from the Jarvis-Gann Initiative’s leading opponent to its foremost enabler. He traveled up and down the state, campaigning not merely for himself but also discussing how the new property tax law could be codified and made to work smoothly without destroying public education, parks and other services the initiative’s opponents had worried about.

          Brown put up two series of television commercials that summer, too. He was seemingly everywhere, campaigning far harder than his current older incarnation ever has.

          All this buried Younger, who became a sure loser in the fall, and was finished politically.

          Observed Brown later, “You get some results when you advertise prolifically and no one else is on the air.” For him, that was a vast understatement.

          No one has needed even to consider this kind of summer campaigning in recent years, when incumbents like Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have not felt seriously threatened after the primary. Partly, that’s been because California became a “safe” Democratic state and partly that’s because none of their opposition was either well-funded or determined enough to go on a summer offensive.

          Helping make summertime campaigning effective is the reality, documented in a broad body of psychological research going back to World War II, that the more often people hear positive messages about a person they have only recently begun to like, the more solid that feeling becomes.

          This could make a post-primary offensive from Sanchez extremely effective, especially because even though Harris has been in office six years and has vast poll leads, she’s somewhat lesser-known than many other public officials of similar status.

          It also means, of course, that Harris, could conduct a summer offensive of her own, especially since she had far more money on hand than Sanchez at the last reporting date. But a radical departure from traditional politics seems more up the Sanchez alley, since she’s by far the more outspoken of the two.

          That’s a quality she’ll need to take advantage of, because she starts the runoff as a distinct underdog, just as she did in the primary season.

         
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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

CALIFORNIA FACES DICEY NEW ROUND OF BASE CLOSINGS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 8, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “CALIFORNIA FACES DICEY NEW ROUND OF BASE CLOSINGS”

    

    When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel asked Congress the other day to authorize a new round of military base closings and consolidations in 2017, alarm bells should have gone off in many parts of California.

          For this state has been victimized more than any other in the last two such rounds, with profound economic effects in many parts of the state.

          Sure, there have been positive new uses of some old bases, from parkland in the Presidio of San Francisco to a college campus on the former site of Ft. Ord near Monterey. But the jobs lost when those bases closed, plus the ones lost from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, the El Toro Marine Air Station, March Air Force Base and many others, still have not been replaced.

          Nor have the ripple effects stopped, as many surviving businesses near those bases now are far less profitable than before, employing many thousands fewer than they once did.

          This new potential round of closures comes at a particularly dicey time for California, which has lost or is about to lose some of the veteran members of Congress who might have fought for a fair deal for their state.

          Of course, there’s little evidence that the likes of Democrats Henry Waxman and George Miller, or Republicans Gary Miller and Buck McKeon (current chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, no less) ever did much to spare California pain.

          The base closures are one reason California ranks 43^rd among all states in federal per capita spending, getting back just 78 cents for every dollar its taxpayers put into the U.S. treasury.

          Those veteran congressmen and the rest of the state’s 53-member largest-in-the-nation House contingent couldn’t even get a single Californian onto the Base Realignment and Closure Commission in the early 2000s. In the previous closure rounds, that commission each time presented Congress with one complete package of cuts, with the lawmakers committed to a yes-or-no vote on the entire thing, no amendments allowed.

          Just as it was almost inconceivable at one time to imagine the Army’s huge training facility at Ft. Ord disappearing, so it now seems impossible that the Marine Corps’ giant Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego could be closed.

          But the real estate on which that base sits is so prime that a federal commission might decide to take the money and let it be built over, as seems the likely fate for the mostly vacant former El Toro base in Orange County, now that park proposals for that land have been thwarted.

          With U.S. policy leaning against new desert wars, will Ft. Irwin and its desert warfare training facility be scrapped, some of the land perhaps to be used for trendy solar thermal electricity projects?

          The last two times around, Californians in Congress overwhelmingly backed both the creation of BRAC and its plans. It’s no coincidence that once the closures in those plans occurred, California dropped 20 places in its rank among the states in federal spending. Meanwhile, the last U.S. Census showed Texas, site of the Army’s troubled Ft. Hood, now home to much of the training that once took place in California, got $19.7 billion in military salaries in 2010 compared with just $10.3 billion for California.

          Does anyone doubt that an extra $9 billion in personal income being spent and re-spent in California might have some effect on the state’s chronic unemployment? Similarly, is there any doubt all that extra income had something to do with Texas weathering the Great Recession better than many other places?

          The upshot of all this is that Californians in Congress must make sure any new round of cuts does not again make this state its prime victim. One way to do this would be to insist that the House and Senate get some control over who serves on the next BRAC commission and that any new plan not be presented on an all-or-nothing basis.

          But Californians in Congress have rarely shown much appetite for working together for the welfare of the whole state. This has to change, or we could see a California with no Seabee base in Ventura County, no Travis Air Force Base in the East Bay and no Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley. And as many as 120,000 more related jobs gone, as happened in the last round.

                       
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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHO’S CLEAN AMONG POTENTIAL BULLET TRAIN BIDDERS?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WHO’S CLEAN AMONG POTENTIAL BULLET TRAIN BIDDERS?”

With China’s high speed rail system and the companies that supply it in financial and technological trouble, it now appears the bids for major components of California’s projected high speed rail system will come from big companies based in three countries: France (Alstom Group), Germany (Siemens AG) and Japan (East Japan Railway Co., better known as JR East).

The problem: All of them have histories or association with war crimes, genocide or other atrocities. Of this group, only Siemens has actually apologized and made significant reparations for its past wrongdoing.

Criticizing any one of them for their history leads not merely to defensiveness and corporate counterattacks, but also to complaints from victims of the others that their grievances have been ignored.

So it was when this column described how the Alstom Group’s corporate sister company SNCF, the French national railway, has never specifically apologized or paid reparations to survivors or heirs of the tens of thousands of Jews it was paid to haul to the gas chambers of the Holocaust run by Germany in Poland and other Eastern European countries.

One agent of the SNCF wrote to a newspaper that it would be false to say the railroad carried victims to be murdered in Germany. That’s technically correct, if not morally so. The Jews who made up 90 percent of those deported from France were taken to places like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, in Poland.

But the loudest complaints about that column came from those who felt the crimes of Japanese companies involved in the upcoming JR East bid have been ignored.

And those crimes are substantial. Aspects of JR East’s bid will be done by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Sumitomo Corp. and Nippon Sharyo Ltd., maker of most engines and cars for Japan’s famed bullet trains.

The Washington, D.C.-based Asia Policy Point non-profit analysis group reports five World War II prisoner-of-war camps near Sumitomo facilities in Japan’s home islands provided slave labor by American POWs to Sumitomo, two did the same for Kawasaki and two for Nippon Sharyo. Prisoners were forced to work in mines, factories and on docks. Reports Asia Point, “The suffering the POWs endured at the hands of the employees of these companies was comparable to, and sometimes worse than, that inflicted upon them by the Japanese military.”

None of these companies – or other big Japanese companies like Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Hitachi – has apologized or paid any reparations to anyone it enslaved. Altogether, 30,000 Allied POWs, 40,000 Chinese and 670,000 Koreans were involved in slave labor in Japan under conditions including torture, abuse and starvation.

Japan’s government issued one formal, tepid, apology in 1995, 50 years after the fact. Also, Japan’s ambassador to the United States in May 2009 went to a convention of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a national veterans group, and apologized for “suffering there and in other places.” But his embassy never posted that weak apology on its website, and Japan has never paid a yen to any victim or heir.

Wrote Bataan Death March survivor and former POW Lester Tenney of Carlsbad in San Diego County in a January letter to Gov. Jerry Brown, “I ask that you insist that (the Japanese companies) acknowledge their role in violating the human rights of American citizens…without this, accepting Japanese bids and financing on high speed rail components is tantamount to accepting blood money.”

Meanwhile, Siemens may have gotten rid of all vestiges of its wartime use of slave labor from concentration camps and it may have apologized profusely and paid reparations, as has the German government, and Siemens is now largely owned by American pension and mutual funds.

Even so, the notion of a German firm that often worked its deliberately undernourished slave laborers to death building all or part of a major American institution makes many understandably uncomfortable.

Of course, the same companies bidding here will also be competing for other high speed rail projects in other parts of America, from Texas to the Midwest to the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C.

Which means that if either Brown or President Obama wants Californians and Americans in general to be completely comfortable with the planned high speed rail system, it would help a great deal to somehow enable an American company to join the bidding. If General Motors, Chrysler, Ford and defunct companies like American Motors and Studebaker could gear up quickly to build tanks and jeeps and artillery during World War II and other wars of the 20th Century, why can’t one of them now be enabled to build high speed rail engines and coaches?

Nothing could be better for America and California, both morally and financially.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net