Mostly Monday Reads: Whitewashing Indigenous Peoples’ Day

“If it looks like a pig, smells like a pig, acts like a pig….” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Today, we celebrate the Indigenous tribes of America. Joe Biden was the first president to recognize the day in 2021. We still haven’t dropped Columbus Day, which glorifies a man who truly represents the worst of European colonization of other continents.

Christopher Columbus has become a controversial figure over the years, despite the federal holiday in his honor. While many credit the explorer with “discovering” America, many others condemn Columbus for forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity, the use of violence and slavery, and the introduction of new diseases that would cause serious and long-lasting harm to Indigenous people.

In 2021, former President Joe Biden became the first president to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day, celebrating it in tandem with Columbus Day. In 2025, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation condemning critics of Columbus.

Yes, you read that right. Trump issued one of his ugly proclamations, criticizing those of us who don’t stand by whitewashed history.  Yam Tits and his ugly band of White Christian Nationalists reject the idea that anyone but them created places worth saving and celebrating.

On Oct. 9, Trump issued a proclamation titled “Columbus Day, 2025.”

Trump celebrated Italian explorer Columbus as “the original American hero” in the proclamation, accusing his critics of slander.

“Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage,” reads the proclamation.

Meanwhile, in the world of bill paying and trying to live, it’s still the Economy Stupid! This is from Reuters. “How the United States is eating Trump’s tariffs.” This is reported by “Francesco Canepa and Howard Schneider.”

U.S. companies and consumers are bearing the brunt of the country’s new import tariffs, early indications show, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump and complicating the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation.
Trump famously predicted that foreign countries would pay the price of his protectionist policies, wagering that exporters would absorb that cost just to keep a foothold in the world’s largest consumer market

But academic studies, surveys and comments from businesses show that through the first months of Trump’s new trade regime it is U.S. companies that are footing the bill and passing on some of it to the consumer – with more price hikes likely.

“Most of the cost seems to be borne by U.S. firms,” Harvard University professor Alberto Cavallo said in an interview to discuss his findings. “We have seen a gradual pass-through to consumer prices and there’s a clear upward pressure.

A White House spokesperson said “Americans may face a transition period from tariffs” but the cost would “ultimately be borne by foreign exporters.” Companies were diversifying supply chains and bringing production to the United States, the spokesperson added.

Cavallo and researchers Paola Llamas and Franco Vasquez have been tracking the price of 359,148 goods, from carpets to coffee, at major online and brick-and-mortar retailers in the United States.
They found that imported goods have become 4% more expensive since Trump started imposing tariffs in early March, while the price of domestic products rose by 2%.

The biggest increases for imports were seen in goods that the United States cannot produce domestically, such as coffee, or that come from highly penalised countries, like Turkey.

These price hikes, while material, have been generally far smaller than the tariff rate on the products in question – implying that sellers were absorbing some of the cost as well.

Yet U.S. import prices, which don’t include tariffs, showed foreign exporters have been raising their prices in dollars and passing on to their U.S. buyers part of the greenback’s depreciation against their currencies.

“This suggests foreign producers are not absorbing much if any of the U.S. tariffs, consistent with prior economic research,” researchers at Yale University’s Budget Lab think-tank said in a blog post.
National indices of export prices paint the same picture. The cost of goods exported by China, Germany, Mexico, Turkey and India have all risen, with Japan the only exception.

Dr. Paul Krugman has a serious economic analysis of the evolving trade relationship between the US and China today in his Substack. “How Trump Is Making China Great. Why we’re going to lose the trade war, and much more besides.” Yes, we’re still practicing the dismal science, but being forewarned is better than being caught unprepared.

There is, however, one big difference between Trump’s trade policy and China’s. Namely, the Chinese appear to know what they’re doing.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that if America were to get into a full-scale trade war with China, the Chinese would have the upper hand. For one thing, in real terms China has the bigger economy.

Furthermore, while our economies are interdependent, America is more vulnerable to a rupture than China is. True, Chinese industry has relied to an important degree on sales to the United States. But the U.S. economy is dependent on China for critical inputs, above all those rare earths. And here’s the thing: China can quickly compensate, at least in part, for the loss of the U.S. export market by stimulating domestic demand. Given time, America could wean itself from dependence on Chinese inputs — but doing so would take years.

That said, a year ago the United States still had some important advantages over China. Although China has made great strides in science and technology, America still had a commanding position, thanks in large part to our unmatched research establishment, our great research universities, and our ability — thanks in large part to the openness of our society — to recruit talent from all over the world.

Furthermore, America had allies — which, as Phillips O’Brien emphasizes, are a vastly underrated source of national power. China may sometimes make alliances of convenience, but no more than that. The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world. And you should always bear in mind that Europe, in particular, while it sometimes acts weak, is an economic superpower in the same league as China and America.

OK, you know what’s coming: Since taking office, Trump and his minions have been systematically demolishing each of these pillars of U.S. strength.

The first pillar mentioned, and the most obvious, is the destruction of the institutions and incentives that support scientific research, which include universities, private industry, and government agencies. You may read more details on that at the link. It’s been rather obvious to most of us, but his list is a good, quick reference.

This administration is characterized by cruelty and incompetence. The absolute destruction of government institutions and specialists made to enhance advancements that private industries can’t afford to fund profitably is a hallmark of both. Nowhere is this felt more than in institutions that support Public Health. Firing experts, then attempting to either rehire or replace them, is unbelievably disruptive to any science-based endeavor. This article is from CNN’s Brenda Goodman and Meg Terrill. “More than half of CDC staffers recently fired by Trump administration have been reinstated.”

Hundreds of staff fired from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late Friday have been reinstated, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.

After a new round of layoff notices sent late Friday night to around 1,300 workers at the CDC, approximately 700 were reinstated on Saturday, while about 600 remain laid off, according to the union, which represents federal workers.

“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Among reinstated employees are staff that publish the agency’s flagship journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to Dr. Debra Houry, who recently resigned as the agency’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science. Houry and other high-level CDC officials resigned in August in protest over the firing of recently confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez.

Athalia Christie, the incident commander for the measles response, was among hundreds of employees mistakenly fired on Friday. The annual total of measles cases in the US – now up to 1,563 cases since January – is the highest by a significant margin since measles was declared eliminated in America a quarter-century ago.

Staff were also reinstated at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the Global Health Center, and the Public Health Infrastructure Center, which manages more than $3 billion in grants to 107 state and local governments to help build local public health workforces, said Dr. Brian Castrucci, who is president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for public health workers.

Staff and officers at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service who were able to check their emails have also received notices that their firings were in error, according to a CDC official with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

An analysis of the jobs and people reinstated is provided in the article. Meanwhile, the inhumanity and violence surrounding operations by ICE continue. Andrew Schwartz reports this headline. Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver. Feds delayed medics who had come to pick up an injured protester. Then, according to confidential incident reports, the agents became aggressive.”

Late on Oct. 5, a Portland ambulance crew informed dispatchers over the radio that it was attempting to transport a patient from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center but that ICE officers were impeding its departure. Six minutes later, at 9:40 pm, according to publicly archived radio records, the medic driving the vehicle delivered an update: “We are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers.”

Two confidential incident reports obtained by WW offer insight into what was going on inside the South Portland ICE facility at the time. The written accounts were filed by the ambulance crew members shortly after the incident—one report to their employer, American Medical Response, and another to a union representative—as documentation, as one report puts it, of a “conflict with federal agents.”

The two reports, filed by different medical workers, mirror each other’s accounts, and are consistent with publicly available audio recordings of emergency medical services radio communications, as well as 911 calls and dispatch reports obtained under public records law.

Both reports say that federal agents, in an effort to block the ambulance’s departure, stood directly in front of the vehicle. As the delay dragged on, according to the reports, the ambulance operator put the vehicle into park, causing it to lurch forward slightly.

The reports indicate the federal agents did not like this—so much so that an agent threatened to shoot and arrest the driver. The driver, frightened, asked why. An agent, according to the reports, responded that the driver had attempted to hit him with the ambulance.

“I was still in such shock,” the driver later wrote, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”

The latest child abduction by ICE has occurred in Boston. This is from MASS LIVE. “Mass. 13-year-old was picked up by ICE after a police interaction and now he’s hundreds of miles from home.”  The story was filed by Adam Bass. Is this really the kind of country we want to live in?

A 13-year-old boy from Everett who was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been transferred to a juvenile facility in Virginia.

Andrew Lattarulo, of Georges Cotes Law, said his firm received an email from the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirming the child was transferred on Friday at 9:30 a.m. He forwarded the email to MassLive.

The boy is still in custody, Lattarulo said.

The transfer occurred on the same day Judge Richard G. Stearns of the Boston federal court ordered the boy’s release by Tuesday unless ICE and the Department of Homeland Security could provide grounds for continued detention, according to court documents

ICE arrested the boy, whose family is from Brazil, after an interaction with the Everett Police Department, the Boston Globe reported.

The boy’s mother received a call on Thursday to pick her son up from the department; however, an hour and a half later, she was told ICE had taken her son, the Globe reported.

Something is very wrong with a human being who can support this level of cruelty. Meanwhile, The Hill‘s Emily Brooks reports on the callous and snivelling Speaker of the House’s latest shrug. “Johnson: ‘We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history’.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday the government shutdown is on its way to being one of the longest in history unless Democrats accept the House-passed, GOP-crafted stopgap bill to reopen the government.

“We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history, unless Democrats dropped their partisan demands and passed a clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers,” Johnson said in a press conference on the 13th day of the government shutdown.

Congressional leaders have been locked in a standoff over government funding as Democrats demand that Republicans make concessions on health care, notably Affordable Care Act tax credits that are expiring at the end of the year. Republican leaders have refused to negotiate on health care during a shutdown, arguing that that Democrats must accept the “clean” funding stopgap the House passed in September — and which has failed to advance in the Senate seven times.

The shutdown, 13 days and counting, already marks one of the longest federal government funding lapses in modern history.

The longest government shutdown, which was also the last time a federal funding lapse occurred, was from 2018 to 2019 during President Trump’s first term, lasting 35 days.

Things are not going to get better until we’re rid of these tinpot Republicans. The signs of stagflation and the accompanying suffering are on the increase.  I’m going wonky on you again with this article from Investors Observer. “This is stagflation (literally): U.S. hiring crashes to recession levels as ‘second stagflation mountain’ rises.”

Stagflation is no longer just a rhetorical device to describe the U.S. economy in 2025.

Real signs of its toxic mix of stagnant growth and stubborn inflation are emerging across both the labor market and consumer prices, painting a grim near-term outlook.

According to Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, the U.S. hiring rate, a number of hires as a percentage of total employment, has fallen to recessionary levels.

A recent Apollo chart comparing the quits rate and hiring rate shows that hiring has plunged to levels last seen during the 2020 pandemic crash, and is now approaching lows from the Global Financial Crisis.

With slower job growth and rising unemployment, Slok warned that the labor market is nearing a virtual standstill, “where workers are not getting hired or changing jobs.”

At the same time, inflation remains stubbornly high. A separate Apollo analysis found that 60% of the CPI basket is currently rising at an annualized rate above 3%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

While that marks an improvement from recent months, when 72% of CPI components ran above 3%, the persistence underscores how broad-based inflation remains.

“Is a second inflation mountain emerging?” Slok asked, referencing the first inflation surge that began in 2021 and peaked in mid-2022 with headline CPI at 9.1%.

Together, the data of higher inflation and slower growth strengthen the case that the U.S. is now grappling with stagflation, a scenario the Fed may find difficult to reverse without triggering deeper economic pain.

One and done! One of the most disruptive institutions since the Trump regime of Terror has been the Supreme Court. This report by Adam Lipak finally shows how the Republican Appointees really are christofascists trying to hide behind the cloak of Conservatism and Originalism. We’ve seen more radical interpretations by the Roberts court than not. This was published in the New York Times. “Originalist ‘Bombshell’ Complicates Case on Trump’s Power to Fire Officials. As the Supreme Court seems poised to expand the president’s power, a leading scholar whose work the justices have often cited issued a provocative dissent.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics.

There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.

But a new article, from a leading originalist law professor, has complicated and perhaps upended the conventional wisdom. The legal academy treated the development like breaking news.

“Bombshell!” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago who himself is a prominent originalist, wrote on social media. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation” of the Constitution.

Professor Nelson, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the text of the Constitution and the historical evidence surrounding it grants Congress broad authority to shape the executive branch, including by putting limits on the president’s power to fire people.

Professor Nelson’s article was published Sept. 29 by the Democracy Project, an initiative at the New York University School of Law that plans to release 100 essays in 100 days by an ideologically mixed group.

The article is particularly notable, said Richard H. Pildes, who is a law professor at N.Y.U. and one of the project’s founders.

“If a highly respected originalist scholar like Professor Nelson, on whom the court relies frequently, denies that originalism supports the unitary executive theory,” Professor Pildes said, “that inevitably raises serious questions about an originalist justification for the court’s looming approach.”

Professor Nelson’s scholarship has been exceptionally influential. It has been cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions, including ones by every member of the six-justice conservative majority.

Read more at the link.

It’s getting really difficult to be an American these days.

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?