Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump told reporters he “could’ve done very bad things” to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama. His administration has quietly canceled enforcement actions against 205 corporations. A Republican gubernatorial candidate in Colorado bragged on camera about physically abusing his wife. And ICE is now separating children from their parents and labeling them “unaccompanied.”
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Trump Says He “Could’ve Done Very Bad Things” to Clinton, Biden, and Obama
Lock them up, the sequel nobody asked for.
Trump used an Oval Office event Wednesday to threaten three of the most prominent Democrats in the party. “I could’ve done very bad things” to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, he told reporters.
The comments came during what was supposed to be an announcement about a children’s savings program. Trump abandoned the subject after a reporter asked him about his claims that Democrats would impeach him if they won back the House in November.
Trump said he held back before because “you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect.” He told reporters, “I can do anything I want, if I want,” because Democrats impeached him twice in his first term.
He said many people have told him to “go get them” and that Clinton, Biden, and Obama have “done some very bad things.”
Trump’s impeachments were done by the House of Representatives, and neither Clinton, Obama, nor Biden had anything to do with either of them. Trump was not removed from office by the Senate either time, despite how hard you wished.
Trump Cancels Enforcement Against 205 Corporate Criminals
Remember this the next time you get a fee for overdrafting your account by a dollar.
The Trump administration has dropped enforcement actions against 205 corporations for defrauding consumers and violating federal regulations, according to a report Public Citizen released today. Several executives were convicted before their cases were dropped.
In his second term alone, Trump officials closed 80 federal investigations into corporate fraud and consumer abuse, 10 of which were criminal. They also walked away from 67 enforcement lawsuits against companies accused of similar conduct, including 10 more criminal cases.
Banks and financial firms were the most protected, with 51 cases dropped. Tech firms were next with 28, followed by cryptocurrency and fintech companies with 26. The administration also overturned 54 enforcement actions that had already been settled before Trump took office, granting pardons to 14 corporations and executives and voiding five corporate leniency agreements.
Rick Claypool, author of the report, warned in a statement that “retreat from law enforcement against corporate crime is a signal to Big Business that if you’re big enough, rich enough, and connected enough with Trump’s inner circle, there are no consequences for breaking the law.”
Colorado Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Brags About Shoving His Wife
We wrote this section four times because we kept finding more.
Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, bragged to donors on a campaign video call Tuesday night about physically assaulting his wife. He told supporters he shoved her against a door to teach her a lesson about self-defense, mocking her for “fake-crying” after, then declared he would do it all again.
Marx has been telling this story for years, each version more disturbing than the last. In 2021, the former Marine-turned-minister laughed as he recounted grabbing his wife and throwing her down, calling it “a good shove” and beaming as he described her crying afterward.
Marx also told a local radio show last week that he grabbed his toddler son and threw him across a room because the boy was, in Marx’s words, “hurting his sister.” He confirmed on the same show that he once pulled a knife on a psychiatrist who was trying to treat him.
Marx and his wife co-founded All Things Possible Ministries, a $7.5 million-a-year operation that boasted on Marx’s campaign website of rescuing 45,000 women and children from sex trafficking across Syria, Iraq, and Cambodia. The number was quietly removed from the site after it was debunked.
In September, The Guardian reported that the ministry has funded out-of-state surveillance projects and is part of a network of self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have faced serious allegations. This includes Operation Underground Railroad, whose founder was ousted after seven women accused him of sexual misconduct.
Marx told a local television interviewer in June that he was forced to kill someone when he was seven years old. When asked if he had killed more people, Marx asked if it mattered.
ICE Is Separating Children From Their Parents and Calling Them “Unaccompanied”
You can’t have a family separation crisis if you mark the children as “unaccompanied.”
A sweeping investigation by Mother Jones has revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is separating children from their parents while still in the United States and sending them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency that cares for unaccompanied migrant children.
One was an 11-year-old boy from El Paso who was taken into custody along with his father, a construction worker from Venezuela who has Temporary Protected Status. ICE separated them, and for three days the father could not find any trace of his son in the agency’s system.
The boy, Andrés, was eventually put into foster care in another state, after spending more than three months in government custody. At night, he would scream for his parents, unable to sleep.
When an immigration judge granted him voluntary departure to Venezuela, no one in the administration told his mother what day or time he would arrive. The 11-year-old showed up at an airport in Venezuela with no one there to meet him, and wound up sitting on the side of a road until his lawyer helped his mother locate him.
Interior referrals to ORR, which were 3 to 5 percent of total referrals in previous administrations, now make up about half of all new cases. Average time spent in detention has gone from roughly one month under Biden to roughly six months under Trump, and some children have been detained for over a year.
Attorneys representing detained children say ICE has also arrested guardians who showed up to complete sponsorship paperwork, effectively using the children as bait.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Reverses Course on Taxpayer-Funded Propaganda Ads After Bipartisan Backlash. Trump said Monday he would stop using taxpayer dollars on television ads that praise himself after they drew criticism from both parties, including Republican Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds. At least $1.5 million in public funds had been spent by the White House on three ads that violate the federal statute prohibiting the use of congressionally appropriated money for propaganda. Trump said his super PAC would pay for future ads but gave no details on reimbursing taxpayers for ads already aired.
Vermont Protesters Build Flower Gardens to Block Access to ICE Facility. Around 40 protesters arrived on foot at two federal immigration facilities in Williston, Vermont Tuesday morning and built planter boxes filled with flowers in the middle of the road. It was part of a week of action that has drawn hundreds of people from across the country and as far as France and Germany for rallies, concerts, a mock funeral procession, and a game of pickup soccer outside an ICE building. The town’s public works department destroyed the planter boxes by the end of the afternoon, but organizers said the crackdown has only brought more people out.
A 650-Acre Texas Ranch Will Become the State’s Next State Park. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation has bought a 650-acre ranch on Lake Palestine in Henderson County for more than $10 million, snagging one of the largest remaining contiguous tracts of land on the lake. The foundation will hold onto the land until the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department can purchase it, probably in late 2027, with money from the voter-approved Centennial Parks Conservation Fund, a $1 billion investment lawmakers approved in 2023 to buy and develop new parks. Sam Pollard, president of Texas Pecan Nursery and the property’s longtime owner, said that it means a lot to him that his family can leave a legacy for people to enjoy.
A Southern California Man Has Planted 10,000 Native Oak Trees and He Is Not Done Yet. Jim Crouch has picked up an acorn and planted it ten thousand times. He began by collecting the seeds of native oak trees and growing them in deep pots, then giving away the saplings to anyone who wanted one. He named his organization Re-Oak California, and his operation has since expanded to include a nursery at La Cañada High School, where the trees are grown in a crescent-shaped plot between the track and tennis courts. Crouch is collaborating with a volunteer to formalize the organization as a nonprofit, and UCLA researchers are sequencing oak DNA to find out which trees are best suited to survive a hotter and drier California. His dream goal is to plant 20,000 trees a year.
