No Access

 What happened when Representative Melanie Stansbury visited the Albuquerque Social Security Office to see how staff and budget cuts were affecting her constituents.

                                  __________________________

"At least 40 Field Offices across the country report that these staffing reductions result in the loss of more than a quarter of their staff. This means longer wait times for appointments and longer lines once people arrive.

That’s why I visited the Social Security office in Albuquerque to conduct oversight and find out more about what is going on. We were denied entry past the waiting room and instead given a generic phone number in another state to schedule a meeting. Folks, this was AFTER our already scheduled meeting was cancelled last minute for no good reason. Here’s what I was able to uncover: staffing is down by over half, computer systems have been crashing, call times have more than doubled, it is taking days for members of our communities to reach anyone who can answer questions, and people are now being forced to come in person and can’t get appointments for months out to get their issues resolved around the country.

These impacts are hurting real people, including our seniors, people living with disabilities, and survivors. As the Ranking Member of the DOGE Subcommittee on Oversight, it is my job to get to the bottom of this. Hands off Social Security! "
 

Fifty Years

 It seemed like the Viet Nam war would never end.  When it finally did I could hardly believe it.

How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America (New York Times)

Kyoichi Sawada/Bettmann/Corbis, via Getty Images

At The Ponderosa

Our favorite nearby brew pub.  We nearly always order fish and chips.
 

Margaret gets a glass of Kölsch.  I like the Ripsaw Red.

Something to Declare

An online search failed to turn up anything interesting to read, so I started poking around in my book shelves.  I found a copy of Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez that I had somehow never read.  That was a surprise because she is one of my favorites and I have read most of what she has written.

The book is a collection of short articles and essays written over a period of years about the author's experiences as an immigrant to the U.S.  She recounts her early childhood in the Dominican Republic within a large and prosperous family, including her three sisters. Her father was a doctor and her beloved grandfather a cultural affairs delegate to the United Nations. What soon became obvious was that status and wealth were no barriers to the scrutiny of the dictator Trujillo's secret police.

The family's vulnerability was increased by the fact that Alvarez's father owned a prohibited firearm and he was a participant in the clandestine resistance to the dictatorship. When a secret police vehicle started blocking their driveway at night it was clear that the time had come to escape the island.  

Permission to travel to the United States was narrowly obtained on the pretext of advanced surgical studies by the father.  The family's wealth and connections allowed them to fly to New York where they found asylum, and thus began Julia's challenge of learning to navigate a new culture and a new language. Her long list of well-received books in her adopted language is a testament to her arduous but successful journey.  

Alternative Approaches to Tariffs

As Trump's devastation of the economy progresses it is worthwhile considering what a thoughtful use of tariffs might look like.  Zyphyr Teachout's latest column in The Nation explores that idea, with dissections of both the MAGA and the neoliberal Democrat strategies.

"Trump’s chaotic, personalized trade agenda is certainly extreme. But so is the opposite vision: tariff abolition, with no guardrails, no democratic planning, and no strategy. Real industrial policy—the kind that builds capacity, disperses power, and supports workers—lives between those extremes. That’s the tradition we should be reclaiming."

Read:

 Trade, Monopoly, and the Fight We Can’t Let Trump Define

Trump's Tariffs Policy Explained

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Planet of the Apes

 It seems every generation of Americans have to relearn the lessons of the past about the irrational fear of the other. 

The task is always made more difficult by systematic efforts to obscure and rewrite well documented accounts of previous intolerance such as we see now being conducted by the Trump administration.

Fortunately, there are still many easily accessed resources for learning and teaching about irrational and destructive prejudice.  One very good one is the non-profit densho.org which got its start twenty-five years ago in Bellevue, Washington.  The area's Japanese-American community drew on its own experience with WWII internment as inspiration to put together a thorough multi-media effort to create a fact-based tool-set for combating intolerance.

While the primary focus of Densho is based on the personal history accounts of the Japanese-American community, the website also provides a good overview of the many versions of intolerance which have plagued the country.  The highlights of the story are told very nicely in the short film, "Other": A brief history of American xenophobia.