Arrowhead Indivisible

My name is Amy Wilfahrt (pronounced Wil-fert), and I grew up in the state of Minnesota and have lived in Cook County, MN since 1989. My job with the USDA Forest Service, Superior National Forest is what brought me to this area of the State. One of my main jobs with the Superior National Forest was to keep the waters of the forest cool, clean and clear! It was one of the most important tasks I was assigned, amongst numerous other tasks related to water resources. Thus, I am very concerned about the Trump Administration's view on the environment and potentially allowing this State to mine copper so close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area.

Once you scar the land you cannot remove that scar not to mention the potential serious impacts mining could have on the water resources. Take a look at southern MN where I grew up and how the forests and prairie have been plowed/drained for farming practices. I am not against farming, but I am against the fertilizer companies that convinced the farmers they needed fertilizers to farm, and the draining method required to remove open water wetlands from the land! That section of the State already has dead lakes from too much phosphorus due to agricultural practices and my sister and brother-in-law cannot drink the water from their well because of e coli contamination!

In this day of age, it is ever more important to keep the environment as pure and clean as we much as we can! Secondly, I am 67 years old and beginning to think about taking social security benefits of which I have been paying into since I have been 16 years of age. I am worried the Trump Administration will hamper with that as well as my Medicare. I am a single, female and in this country defined as a senior citizen so give us oldies who have lived on this planet a long time with limited income but still goodies a break!! Thank-you for submitting my comments!

STOP THE SAVE Act: Safeguarding American Vote Eligibility: The bill would require all voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote or updating their voter registration — An estimated 69 million American women — and four million men — have a birth certificate that does not match their legal name. “So 25 percent of the voting population would either have to change their birth certificate or pay to get a new passport just to be able to register in a federal election. STOP the SAVE Act!

In my lifetime, as a 74 year old woman, I have lived in a society where women didn't have the right to choose what happened to their bodies (and anyone assisting them with an abortion could be prosecuted and sent to prison,) to women finally having the right to decide what happened to their bodies (because of all the brave women who fought for that right), to losing this essential right to choose.

Birth control was strictly opposed and monitored by the Catholic Church. It was not taught in public schools, and women had little choice but to bear children, many of whom they could ill afford to feed or take care of. Other religious institutions brought home the message of “populating the earth” with little regard for those left to care for the end result. Any hope for a career or creative future was quickly thwarted, as other “duties” presented themselves.

I was a teenager living in a rural community in the 1960s. I saw the mothers of many of my friends who, by the age 40, were wearily trying to raise 9, 10, and sometimes more children. Birth control was not an option for them.

I remember vividly, as a freshman in high school, when the football coaches “kidnapped” a star football player so he wouldn't show up at the wedding of the young girl he had gotten pregnant. You see, it would have ruined his life! She and her parents were left to raise the child.

I'm going to tell you a story….

There was a teenager who became pregnant with her high school sweetheart. They were engaged, planning to be married after she completed nurses training. She felt afraid and alone, consumed with shame and guilt.

Not wanting to cause her parents embarrassment and a loss of standing in her small community, someone close to her offered to help end the pregnancy. It was a failed attempt that could have cost a young woman her life.

While the couple wanted to marry, and although not a perfect situation, her parents were willing to support them in any way they could. His parents refused to meet, refused legal permission to marry, and immediately began to erase the young woman from their life. She was no longer welcome in their family.

Back at nursing school, the young woman came in contact with the Unitarian Church and a minister who was helping young women obtain safe abortions in other countries. He arranged for her to go to Mexico, and her parents took her there for a safe procedure. How lucky she was to live in a white, middle class family where the financial means were available to make such a trip.

The young woman was one of thousands of women across the United States who faced such circumstances. Women continued to have children that no one would help take care of, sacrificing their health in the process. Period, many women tragically died due to unsafe abortions and back street procedures.

Several years later, in 1973, a women's right to choose became law in the Supreme Court of the United States of America, with the benchmark decision of Roe v. Wade. For almost 50 years, women finally had the right to choose what happened to their bodies and their lives.

Tragically, in 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned by a Trump-influenced Supreme Court in a ruling which effectively rescinded the women the right of women to choose.

Now in 2025, in many states, a women's right to choose is gone.

Women, married and unmarried alike, are being arrested for seeking abortions. Physicians and qualified health care professionals are being arrested for trying to assist those women who can neither feed nor care for more children. Many women are dying due to complications because doctors are afraid, or refuse to carry out procedures that would save their lives. Women are being denied vital birth control services, and many are denied employment or fired because they are on birth control. Women and healthcare professionals are being exposed for seeking help to control the outcomes of their bodies and their lives.

In the first 100 days of Trump's second term, stories of what women are facing is appalling. Women have been thrust backward into the Dark Ages of women's rights.

As you may have guessed, that scared young woman was me. But rest assured, one day, this could be the story of your daughter, your granddaughter or your niece.

Unless you are a woman you cannot understand. But please do try, for there are those who will come to you for help in the future, and they will need you desperately!

I want you to know two things: First of all, no woman making this decision does so easily! Secondly, it is the right of every woman to live the life she was meant to live. She can only do this by having the right to make her own choices. Trump, and “those who sit at his right hand”, have and will continue to take those choices away!

If you think Trump will stop at women's rights, you are wrong…Get ready. Your rights are next.

With urgency,

Kathleen (Mahan) Rice

Dear Book Club Friends

Funny how a seemingly small thing can suddenly slap you upside the head and create a rage in your brain.

At our Indivisible monthly meeting Tuesday night one of our members, who was a professor of Information and Library Studies at U Michigan, reported that the Institute for Museum and Library Services has been destroyed - staff let go, website taken down and funding withdrawn. It was tasked with (among other things) distributing funds to states under the Library Technology and Services Act. Some of these funds were used to build and maintain the Inter Library Loan systems for statewide access to loan services for public libraries and schools. It’s all about resource sharing and access. Compared to many other government services, their funding was almost miniscule.

You may have heard me happily talking about how easy I have found it to get our monthly Book Club reads from the public library in the 1,300 person town of Grand Marais. They sometimes have the book on their shelves as was the case with our current book, “The Women," or they can get it from another library in their system in a few days. This as opposed to often when I would try to get a book from our local library in Mpls and hear something like: “Well, we have 400 copies in the system and a waiting list of 800.

Would you like to be put on the waiting list?”

So this news hit a nerve. Maybe it was the proverbial “straw."

If you are: bothered by/angry/enraged and ready to take constructive action because of the illegal and unconstitutional crisis we are in, I invite/urge you to take action. If you are able, please attend a national mass mobilization Hands OFF! Rally tomorrow, April 5, in defiance of the Trump/Musk billionaire take over and assault on our freedoms and democracy. There will be over 1,000 rallies in the US. You can find one by going to Indivisible.org.

Thanks for reading.

With appreciation and in friendship,

Barbara

In Cook County, many of us have been affected by the BIG I and 3 C's that are the brand of the Trump administration. To cite just three examples from the April 22 "Practicing Democracy" Town Hall meeting:

1. INCOMPETENCE. The many reports of difficulty confirming their Social Security payments by phone or website concerned several in attendance, who noted that after decades of payments, it's only the arrival of DOGE that they came to fear their payments were at risk due to websites crashing and phone calls unanswered. To call this level of public service "unprofessional" is perhaps over polite. Incompetent it surely is--also cruel, chaotic and criminal. Social security is federally protected.

2. CHAOS + CRUELTY. In a poll taken by the "Practicing Democracy" civic engagement group led by Jen Schultz of Duluth, former candidate against Rep. Pete Stauber, 74% of us in Cook County's chief concern is loss of democracy. The evidence abounds; ignoring Supreme Court 9-0 ruling through "creative listening" and misinterpretation of the ruling; denial of due process to American residents and citizens, deportation to a third -world gulag. And more.

3. CHAOS + POSSIBLE CRIMINALITY. As we heard from a Grand Marais resident, obtaining her online tax return was chaotic, inept and possibly criminal--or gives rise to thinking it may be so.

Why? Because it took 2 hours for her to prove to the IRS website interface--which kept crashing, stalling and switching screens--that she was in fact the party she claimed to be. "I've been using computers since the 1960s. I know what I'm doing, and I know how to file taxes and get returns online," she said, explaining that the errors were not on her end. More concerning than the inefficient and unprofessional performance of the website were the requests for her to provide pictures of her driver's license, front and back, and to video herself with her head moving to prove she was a living person, not a still portrait. None of this has happened before, and none of it was explained. "It's very worrying" she concluded.

I have a list ready so I can explain to neighbors and friends who are not alarmed by the current regime's undermining of American life and stature in the world, and why it must reversed by the force of our communal raised voices in protest. I just updated it, courtesy of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in his recent Substack post:

1. The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disaster. Hegseth didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.

He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesman, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The Defense Department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”

It’s not just the Defense Department. The entire federal government is in disarray.

2. The Harvard debacle. Trump is now claiming that the demand letter sent to Harvard University on April 11 was “unauthorized.” Hello? What does this even mean?

As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”

Even though it was “unauthorized,” the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.

3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of our trading partners — based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone — than the U.S. stock and bond markets began crashing.

To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145 percent — causing markets to plummet once again.

To stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.

Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target, and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero. It used to be zero.” Markets soared on the news.

4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve — calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates — Trump unnerved already-anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.

Then, in another about-face, Trump said Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.

Bottom line: An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.

Who’s profiting on all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.

5. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Abrego Garcia to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.

To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele — who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons with no due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (i.e., American-born) criminals or dissidents.

Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of migrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the Supreme Court blocked it from deporting any more migrants.

6. ICE’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, ICE has been arresting American citizens. One American was detained by ICE in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because ICE didn’t believe he was American. Meanwhile, ICE handcuffed and deported a group of German teenagers vacationing in Hawaii because they turned up without a hotel pre-booked, which ICE found “suspicious.”

Bottom line: Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigrants are threatening everyone.

7. Musk’s DOGE disaster. Where to begin on his? Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated. Remember the claim that $50 million taxpayer dollars funded condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from DOGE, but as we know now, it was a lie. The U.S. government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50 million would buy a billion condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022, or 2023 fiscal years.

Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after DOGE fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. A similar callback has ensued at the Social Security Administration, after fired workers left the agency so denuded that telephone calls weren’t being answered and its website malfunctioned.

Bottom line: Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans — for almost no real savings.

8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”

In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Kennedy Jr. also says, “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, the U.S. saw some 3 million to 4 million cases per year. Now, it’s usually fewer than 200 in a normal year.

9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is now requiring households to resume payments. This has caused the credit scores of millions of borrowers to plunge and a record number to risk defaulting on their loans.

Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance into a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing Education Department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often-shifting rules of its myriad repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.

10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS has had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS ended DOGE access to the agency.

What happened? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complained to Trump that Musk did an end run around him to install Shapley (who had been lauded by conservatives after publicly arguing that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes).

Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half — starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are acts of sabotage against the very agency meant to keep billionaires accountable.

At the same time, trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks” and referring to Navarro as “Peter Retarrdo.”

The State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID. Career officials charged that Marocco, a MAGA loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s MAGA followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.

Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials on the advice of the far-right agitator Laura Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.

Bottom line: No one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.

**

All this ineptitude in just the last few weeks reveals that the Trump regime is coming apart. Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.

While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.