Mostly Labor Day Monday Reads

“The trumps are laboring.” John Buss @repeat1968

Happy Labor Day, Sky Dancers!

Labor Day is the unofficial day that America leaves its summer to start all things Autumn. This is a particularly notable Labor Day because there are ongoing attacks on workers and unions, as well as universities and public schools that are opening up to greet a new fall term. Fall is the time for harvesting. This year’s harvest is full of the results of extremist policies and plots. It’s time to start campaign season with an eye to ridding ourselves of the sources.

I live in New Orleans, which is well known as America’s most European city, and I’m glad of that. It’s surrounded by the Deep South and many rural areas. Things are not going so well there. Resources have been pulled from many of the country’s outlands when they need them badly. I’ll start with this analysis from AXIOS. “Rural South, West states have highest violent crime rates: FBI.”  Contrary to the belief of this racist regime, the nation’s outlands have the worst violent crime rates. Watching what’s become of our Nation’s Capital City sickens me. People feel invaded and demonstrate daily. Our National Guard, needed in their own states, our literally picking up garbage.

Rural states in the American South and West had some of the nation’s highest violent crime and homicide rates in 2024, driven by violence in small communities, according to an Axios analysis of FBI data.

Why it matters: A state-by-state comparison paints a complex picture of U.S. crime trends as President Trump threatens to send the National Guard to Democrat-controlled cities in blue states over concerns about violent crime.

The big picture: The president has already dispatched the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and is threatening to send troops to Chicago, Oakland, Calif., and Baltimore.

• Now Trump is facing questions about whether he’ll send troops to communities in red states — many of them largely rural — where crime rates are actually higher than the areas he’s targeted.
• “Sure, but there aren’t that many of them,” Trump said last week.

By the numbers: The southern states of Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and South Carolina were among the national leaders in both violent crime and homicide rates last year, an Axios review of FBI data found.

• All had violent crime and homicide rates well above the national average.
• Alaska, the country’s most rural state, led the nation with the highest violent crime rate of 1,194.3 per 100,000 residents. That’s more than three times the national average of 359.1.
• New Mexico, another rural state, was second with a violent crime rate of 757.7 per 100,000 residents, more than two times the national average.

Big states such as California and New York, both targets of Trump, ranked high in total violent crime numbers because of their large populations, but their per-capita rates were similar to those of Arkansas and Tennessee, the Axios review found.

Zoom out: Alaska and New Mexico also led the nation in homicide rates with 11.3 homicides per 100,000 residents each, more than twice the nation’s homicide rate of 5 per 100,000 residents.

• Pennsylvania was third nationally with a homicide rate of 10.1, followed by Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee.
• Illinois, home to Chicago, which Trump has called a “killing field,” had a homicide rate of 6 per 100,000 residents, ranked 20th in the nation.

Zoom in: Big-city crime often receives the most attention in political discourse, but an Axios analysis of rural states found that violence in small towns is driving some of the nation’s highest crime rates.

• For example, Fairbanks, Alaska, population roughly 32,000, had a violent crime rate of nearly 700 per 100,000 residents, about twice the national average.
• McKeesport, Pa., a city of 18,000 outside Pittsburgh, had a violent crime rate of 1,693.7 and a homicide rate of a whopping 32.5 per 100,000 people. It consistently ranks among the most dangerous cities in the country, a situation officials have largely attributed to a long-term decline in its industrial economy.

• Dyersburg, Tenn., a community of 16,000, has a violent crime rate of 1,256.5 and a homicide rate of 18.8.

What they’re saying: “If Washington, D.C., (were) a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation,” the White House said in a statement on Aug. 11 before dispatching the National Guard.

• D.C.’s homicide rate was 25.9 per 100,000 residents in 2024.

Yes, but: D.C. isn’t a state, it’s a city. Among the cities with the highest homicide rates in the U.S., Washington is ranked 11th, according to an Axios review of cities with 100,000 people or more with high homicide rates.

• Jackson, Miss., population about 141,500, had the nation’s highest homicide rate last year — nearly 78 per 100,000 residents. That’s more than 15 times the national average. There has been no national discussion about sending troops there to combat crime.

Between the lines: Rural crime often gets overlooked because most media outlets are centered in urban areas and focus just on crime there, Ralph Weisheit, a criminal justice professor at Illinois State University, tells Axios.

• The reasons for crime in rural areas vary, but Weisheit said in many cases, communities have been ravaged by drug addiction.

Mike Johnson really needs to pay more attention to his constituents than he does #FARTUS. The consensus among many analysts is that Trump is militarizing large democratically run cities to terrorize their citizens into not voting. It’s also why he’s so interested in stopping early and mail-in voting.

This is from The Brennan Center for Justice. “Crime as a Cover. The claim that troops are needed to fight local crime is nothing but a pretext.”  The analysis is reported by Michael Waldman. Trump is doing everything he can to become a despot.

President Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago to “straighten that one out.” New York City, he says, might be next.

Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer.

The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab. It runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.

I write history books and consider myself an expert on the presidency. I can think of few analogies — not in this country, anyway — for such a move by a chief executive.

Why is this particular turn so alarming? After all, public safety is important, and fighting crime is a worthy goal. My colleague Liza Goitein explains the legal and constitutional issues:

Trump is on even thinner legal ice with this plan than he is in Los Angeles and DC. Unlike in the capital, the president doesn’t command the Illinois National Guard unless he calls them into federal service (i.e., “federalizes” them). There are various laws that authorize him to federalize the Guard, but none of them would apply here.

In Los Angeles, Trump is relying on a law (Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code) that authorizes federalization when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,” meaning federal law. Immigration law is federal law. Trump claimed that the protests rendered him “unable . . . to execute” ICE raids. Although dozens of raids happened during the protests and the administration did not cite a single raid that was thwarted, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deferred to Trump’s assessment.

But that law simply wouldn’t apply to the type of crime Trump has cited in Chicago — essentially, violent street crime. The laws that are implicated are largely those of Illinois and Chicago, not the “laws of the United States.”

Even under the Insurrection Act — which is the main exception to the law barring deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement — the president may deploy troops to execute the law only in situations involving either federal laws or those state laws designed to protect the constitutional rights of classes of people (basically, civil rights laws).

Nor can Trump ask other states’ governors to send their Guard forces into Chicago, as he did in DC under a law known as Section 502(f), which authorizes governors to voluntarily use their Guard forces for missions requested by the president or secretary of defense. Under this law, presidents have asked governors to deploy Guard forces within their own states, in other states that consent, or (as only Trump has done) in DC without local consent. No governor has sent Guard troops into another state that did not consent, as would be the case here. That’s because Guard forces deployed under this law remain state officers as a legal matter. And under the Constitution, states are sovereign entities vis-à-vis one another. That means one state cannot invade another, even at the president’s request.

If the president wants to send one state’s National Guard forces into an unwilling state, he must federalize them first. But to federalize them, he needs statutory authority. And there is no statutory authority to federalize the Guard to police local crime.

The Pentagon reportedly sees its planned military deployment in Chicago as a model for other cities. And of course, the other cities Trump has name-checked in this context are governed by Democrats: Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland.

Flooding “blue” cities with soldiers on the pretext of fighting crime would be an unprecedented abuse of power that would violate states’ rights and threaten our most fundamental liberties. The plan is profoundly un-American. And it is illegal.

Public safety matters greatly. But facts belie the (ever shifting) rationale. New York, for example, remains one of the nation’s safest large cities. As Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday, crime has dropped dramatically, even this year. Fighting crime is not a rationale — it’s a pretext.

The cities targeted so far have two things in common: a Black mayor and a fusillade of presidential rhetoric denouncing them as “hellholes.”

Bill Kristol, founder of The Bulwark and a longtime prominent Republican, surveyed the past week and put it this way: “What we are seeing is not merely a ‘slide toward authoritarianism.’ It’s a march toward despotism. And it’s a march whose pace is accelerating.”

What can be done to push back? Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker warned federal forces, “Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” Trump, in turn, mused, “They say . . . ‘He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” He added, “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.” (As presidential quotations go, it’s about as reassuring as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”)

Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul can play pivotal roles. States and cities can go to court — an epic legal battle. They can rally the public in their states and around the country. They can monitor and document the conduct of deployed forces.

We must all speak out when our Constitution is under threat.

Get some rest this Labor Day. It’s going to be a busy fall.

I still see most of these actions as enablements of the Supreme Court. I’m not the only one. This is from Justin Jouvenal writing for The Washington Post. “The Supreme Court has expanded Trump’s power. He’s seeking much more. The president’s firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and other cases could serve as major tests of how far the high court is willing to go.” Removing the independence of the FED is another way of turning us into a Banana Republic.

The Supreme Court has already expanded President Donald Trump’s authority in a string of emergency rulings, but he’s signaling in his firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and other issues likely headed to the court that he continues to seek broader powers for the executive branch.

The cases could serve as major tests of how much further the nation’s high court is willing to go to bless the president’s assertion of executive authority. They differ from previous showdowns because of the sheer magnitude of the authority Trump is seeking to wield and because he wants greater control over powers the Constitution ascribes to another branch of government.

In addition to Cook’s lawsuit, which could make its way to the high court after she sued last week, a blockbuster case over Trump’s tariffs is expected to arrive at the high court soon after an appeals court struck them down. The Trump administration’s pushto withhold tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid appropriated by Congress could also end up in the court.

Peter Shane, a law professor at New York University, called Trump’s assertions “breathtaking.”

“Other presidents have tried to use their authority aggressively, but usually it’s been done through aggressive interpretations of statutory law and in a pretty targeted way,” Shane said.

Each of the presidential powers being contested by Trump, he said, “is a challenge to what I think heretofore would have been regarded as a core power of Congress.”

The high court has already signaled openness to broad presidential authority to replace some heads of independent agencies.

The justices handed Trump a major victory in May when they allowed him to remove the leaders of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board while legal challenges play out over their firings. Trump gave no reasons for the dismissals.

The court’sconservative majority ruled the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, so Trump could fire the agency heads “without cause” even though Congress set up the agencies to be insulated from political interference.

There it is. The direct attacks on labor. This is a guest Op-Ed in the New York Times (gift article) by labor historian Erik Loomis.”Trump Is Wiping Out Unions. Why Are They So Quiet?”

This is a most unfortunate Labor Day for labor. The labor movement has taken it on the chin repeatedly in the last several decades, but President Trump is the most ruthlessly anti-labor president since before the Great Depression.

If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.

Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.

If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.

All this is happening at a time when Americans’ approval of unions is the highest it has been since the mid-1960s.

One cannot overstate the significance of Mr. Trump’s attacks on government workers. Public sector work has become organized labor’s power base, allowing the total workforce’s union membership rate to remain at around 10 percent, despite less than 6 percent of private sector workers having unions.

Based on actions Mr. Trump has taken this year — and without any notable public pushback from supposedly pro-labor Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — it is unlikely that there will be any unionized federal workers outside of policing agencies by the end of his term in 2029.

Mr. Trump has attacked workers in other ways. He has gutted the Department of Labor through cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. He is also rolling back Labor Department rules from the Obama and Biden administrations that allowed home care workers to earn overtime and farmworkers to campaign for better working conditions. And he has severely undermined the National Labor Relations Board, which handles thousands of union matters every year by firing its head and nominating corporate-friendly figures to steer its operations away from supporting workers.

“Hurry Sundown.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Read more about the reasons at the link. Russia is getting more brazen, given that Putin has reason to believe the United States will enable his attacks on democracy. This is from CNN. “Plane carrying EU’s top leader targeted by alleged Russian GPS jamming.” This is reported by Ivana Kottasová.

A plane carrying the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was targeted by GPS navigation jamming while trying to land in Bulgaria on Sunday, a spokesperson for the commission told CNN.

The commission received “information from Bulgarian authorities that they suspect this blatant interference was carried out by Russia,” said European Commission Deputy Chief Spokesperson Arianna Podestà.

The plane landed safely, the spokesperson said. A source familiar with the situation told CNN the pilots landed the plane using paper maps.

Von der Leyen and the commission have been staunch supporters of Ukraine as Kyiv tries to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. She was one of the European leaders who attended US President Donald Trump’s summit on Ukraine last week and has consistently urged EU member states to allocate more resources to helping Ukraine.

The incident occurred as the president was about to land at the Plovdiv International Airport in the south of Bulgaria, part of her tour around member states in the eastern part of the bloc to rally support for Ukraine.

“This incident underlines the urgency of the President’s current trip to frontline Member States, where she has seen first hand the every day threats from Russia and its proxies,” Podestà told CNN.

Not only are Russia and China getting brave, but India’s Modi has been driven straight into their arms by Trump. This is an alarming headline from Christian Shepherd writing for The Washington Post. “China tries to use Trump turmoil to unite leaders against U.S.-led order. Twenty leaders — including from Russia, Iran and India — are in China for a summit designed to promote Beijing as a reliable counterweight to the U.S.”  This is happening as Trump cuts more foreign aid and Kari Lake disables the Voice of America. I thought Yam Tits considered them his buddies?

Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday called on the leaders of countries including Russia, Iran and India to integrate their economies and build an “orderly multipolar world,” as he tried to unite them in their shared grievances with the U.S.-led global order and the policies of President Donald Trump.

Xi used the platform of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit here, 90 miles southeast of Beijing, to implicitly criticize Trump’s policies — without naming him or mentioning the United States.

He urged the 20 foreign leaders in attendance to “seek integration, not decoupling” and “unequivocally oppose power politics.”

Member countries should “serve as a cornerstone for the promotion of a multipolar world” and join a China-led “global governance initiative,” he said in closing remarksafter a day in which leaders put on shows of chumminess and met for private talks on the sidelines of the mostly scripted event.

The Chinese leader’s new initiative will help provide stability at a time of rising turbulence and end “the monopoly of global governance by some countries,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a news briefing Monday night after Xi’s remarks.

Xi held a bilateral meeting with India’s Narendra Modi Sunday and will hold a one-on-one with Vladimir Putin of Russia on Tuesday.The three were filmed holding hands and smiling as they chatted on Monday.

Xi also proposed deepening economic ties to take advantage of the group’s “mega-sized market,” including by establishing a SCO development bank. China has already invested $84 billion in member countries and would provide another $1.4 billion in loans over the next three years, he said.

The forum is a key part of China’s campaign to be seen as a reliable partner and a counterweight to U.S. unpredictability in an increasingly multipolar world. Modi’s attendance in particular — his first visit to the country in seven years — is a milestone in Beijing’s attempt to mend ties with an influential U.S. partner that has been alienated by Trump’s tariffs.

California’s Governor Newsom is still trolling Trump. It may not be classy, but it sure is funny! “Gavin Newsom continues to troll Trump by blasting ‘I’m a Survivor’ in post about president’s health. Donald Trump’s bruised hands mocked by California governor in Instagram video bringing together some of the president’s most embarrassing moments.”  This is from The Independent and reported by Joe Summerlad.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has continued his trolling campaign against Donald Trump, this time posting a video on Instagram making light of the president’s health complaints.

The montage, set to the 2001 song “I’m a Survivor” by country music star Reba McEntire, pulls together some of Trump’s most embarrassing gaffes in the public eye, from tripping on the steps to Air Force One to recoiling in horror from a squawking eagle and being bumped in the chin by a rogue reporter’s microphone.

“He’s trying,” the post is captioned.

Drawing an ironic contrast between the president’s opulent lifestyle and the song’s lyrics about a “single mom who works two jobs,” the clip also pays particular attention to the bruises spotted on Trump’s hands in recent months.

The commander-in-chief was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency but speculation about his wellbeing raged well before that and has not abated since the condition was revealed.

JJ has informed me that you must turn off your location before going to Instagram, as they are posting it on MAPS.

I hope you got some rest and relaxation this weekend. I’ve been hanging in the house trying to avoid reality.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?