the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt five)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

On March 3, shortly after the Anzoras left for El Salvador, a Black man named Rodney King was hurtling down Interstate 210, drunk and speeding. When the police caught up with him near an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley, there were more than two dozen officers on hand. King emerged from the car, laid down on the ground, then stood back up. He wobbled a bit, and staggered toward one of them before the beating began. The officers formed a circle, while three of them took turns kicking him and hitting him with batons. They landed fifty-six blows in all—shattering one of King’s eye sockets, fracturing his cheekbone, breaking his leg, and knocking multiple fillings from his teeth. From across the street, a resident with a camcorder captured everything, including the scream of an onlooker: “Oh, my god, they’re beating him to death.”

In the weeks and months after the incident, snippets of the video footage were shown on a loop on local news, and city officials announced charges against the officers. The King beating was the latest in a series of city tragedies. A handful of police brutality cases had left several Black Angelinos injured, dead, or dispossessed. A predictable set of acquittals had followed. One of them was of three officers who faced misdemeanor charges for destroying the apartments of Black and Latino residents at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, during the raids a few years before. They were acquitted in June 1991, three months after the King footage surfaced. The following month, a commission appointed by the mayor, a Black political veteran and former cop named Tom Bradley, released the findings of an extensive investigation into police misconduct. “There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public,” its authors wrote. By then, Bradley was openly feuding with the white police chief, Daryl Gates, whom he was trying to oust. There were calls for Gates to resign, but there was resistance inside the department. In August, three Korean markets in South Central were firebombed, including one where a Korean grocer had shot and killed a Black teenager she’d accused of shoplifting. In November, a judge granted the grocer probation rather than jail time, which unleashed a wave of street protests.

Bradley and Gates hadn’t spoken for a full year when, on April 29, 1992, a jury reached a verdict on whether the three officers shown on the video beating Rodney King, along with their supervisor, were guilty of violating his civil rights. The acquittal was announced that afternoon, from a courtroom in Simi Valley. It struck like an earthquake. Within hours, rioting had broken out across the city. At six forty-five p.m., a group of Black men pulled a white truck driver out of his vehicle on the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues and beat him, bashing his head with a brick. An hour later, a liquor store nearby went up in flames. The city had become a hotbed of tribalism and racial tension: Blacks against Koreans, Latinos against Blacks, the police against everybody. The king verdict lit the fuse of an all-out war. Store owners armed themselves with pistols. People were attacked at random. Shoplifters ran through streets, clouded with plumes of smoke, carrying whatever they could take. Others drove in to haul their loot in the trunks of their cars or strapped to the roofs.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt four)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In the spring of 1981, Reagan’s advisers were so divided on immigration policy that they could agree only that the president should avoid the subject altogether. It was a “no win issue,” one of his counselors wrote in a memo. “Given the difficulties that can be expected,” another noted, White House action “may be more detrimental to domestic standing than living with the current situation.”

The current situation was this: There were somewhere between three million and six million people living without legal documentation in the US, and another four hundred thousand to a million migrants crossing the border that year. The budget of the INS was less than half that of the Philadelphia police department. “Nothing short of a Berlin Wall could keep illegals out,” one of Reagan’s advisers confessed. The country was in a recession, which further inflamed the public against immigrants who were seen as competitors for their jobs. The president also had to think about his core political supporters. Growers, industrial farming operations, hotels, restaurants, and manufacturers along the border and in the Sunbelt depended on cheap labor, and already there was a shortage of unskilled workers in the Southwest. In May, a well-connected California farmer sent an angry letter to Willian French Smith, Reagan’s attorney general, complaining about INS activity in Fresno. Arrests by Border Patrol, he claimed, were costing him an average of seventeen hundred workers each month. He was losing crops.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt three)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, controlling the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department in New York was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the US, to say nothing of the countries under American sway.

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.

Over the following year, the CIA and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. “He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time. His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. The State Department helped select the members of Castillo Armas’s cabinet.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt two)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In El Salvador, the political left extended well beyond the Christian Democrats, and included a spectrum of smaller parties ranging from armed guerrilla groups to nonviolent Marxists, socialists, and unionists whose views fell to the left of the governing junta. On November 27, six leaders of the non-guerrilla left—formally called the Frente Democrático Revolucianairo (FDR)—were preparing to deliver a statement at a Jesuit high school in San Salvador. They had decided to negotiate with the junta, which was significant, because the Christian Democrats in the government had been struggling for support from the country’s leftists. Before the leaders could speak, however, two hundred officers from the state’s combined security forces surrounded the school, while two dozen men stormed the building and kidnapped them. Soon afterward, their bodies were found near Lake Ilopango, just east of the capital, showing signs of torture. CIA cables at the time cited intelligence that Garcia and other high-ranking military officials had backed the operation. Ambassador White sent a message to Washington: “The military have explicitly reject dialogue and heralded a policy of extermination.”

On the evening of December 2, Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, arrived at the San Salvador airport. They were picking up two Maryknoll Sisters in their forties named Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua. The funeral of the murdered FDR leaders was being held the next day. The four women had just merged onto the highway outside the airport when a truck full of National Guardsmen pulled them over and placed them under arrest. They were raped and murdered later that night, their bodies thrown in a ditch by the side of the road.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt one)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

The revolt in 1932 sputtered in a matter of days, but the repression it provoked went on for weeks. The military intervened on the side of the landowners. They were joined by members of the National Guard, who had been suppressing labor disputes for years. Together the soldiers slaughtered some thirty thousand people—roughly 2 percent of the Salvadoran population. Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. Corpses were dumped in public or left hanging to instill terror. In one town, troops rounded up prisoners in groups of fifty and brought them before firing squads.

La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.” Roque Dalton, the Salvadoran poet and activist, put it more succinctly: “We were all born half dead in 1932.”

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt nine)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $ 1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them.

Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future.

This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation.

The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt eight)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

That Alito served as the mouthpiece for the majority was probably all one needed to know. Where Chief Justice John Roberts cuts a genteel figure, Alito wages Kulturkampf with the ferocity of a man who views himself as civilization’s last best hope. He has the zeal of the late Antonin Scalia without the humor or the need to be liked.

The decision, in draft form, wasn’t Solomonic reasoning. It read like a strident essay in National Review, not even bothering with the pretense of persuading the other side. He wrote, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

For months, the White House knew there was a possibility a decision like this might land. A small working group, led by Jennifer Klein (director of the White House Gender Policy Council) and Dana Remus (White House counsel), prepared options for the president—a slate of policies and executive orders that he could roll out in the event of a decision like Dobbs. With the Politico leak, the White House was no longer dealing with hypotheticals. It knew roughly what it would confront. The time had arrived to get Biden’s take.