CARL DAVIDSON
By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Weekly, Jan. 5 2025
 We’re observing the fascism now taking posts of power in Washington, DC, but we will examine it here in an American grain. We don’t see it as merely a copy of Mussolini or Hitler. We think its roots are in American soil and especially in the Slavocracy, rather than European soils.
Harsh rule against the enslaved and those marked for extermination was subdued for a brief period by ‘abolition democracy’ in post-Civil War Reconstruction but was soon overthrown violently by the Counter-revolution of 1876. The open terrorist dictatorship of the reborn ‘Southern Bourbons’ and their death squads, the KKK and the ‘Red Shirts’ deprived African Americans of any semblance of bourgeois democratic rights across the South. Moreover, ‘Jim Crow’ reached to the Canadian border with the 1898 ‘Plessy vs. Ferguson’ ruling of the Supreme Court, even if the terms were less harsh above the Mason-Dixon line. Thus to an important degree, European fascists of the 1900s borrowed some ideas from our example. Hitler even sent law students to our universities to figure out how Jim Crow laws could be adapted to his outlawing of the Jews.
In 1945, Woody saw fascism was defeated in Japan and mostly defeated in Europe. Spain’s Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. (Unfortunately, Woody, who died in 1967, didn’t live to see it). In the U.S., 'Jim Crow' fascism in the South was set back with what we now can call the ‘Second Reconstruction,’ from 1955 to 1975. It began with civil rights and school desegregation battles and ended with the assassination of MLK and the violent repression of the Black Panther Party, along with the use of troops against the Black uprisings that followed for several years into the 1970s.
A New Right emerged and aimed for power after 1975. It started with the work of Richard Viguerie, a rightwing ‘direct mail’ expert, with a staff of 250 centered in a headquarters just outside DC. Viguerie and his crew came out of the religious fundamentalist and anti-communist youth organizations of the 1960s. In 1976, his team became the chief fundraisers of the George Wallace campaign. With Wallace defeated, Viguerie continued working for a variety of far-right causes to build his infamous lists, even with the Korean Rev. Moon’s Unification Church for a time. He soon was convinced by Howard Phillips, Paul Wyrich, Phylis Schafley and others like them to work on electing Ronald Reagan.
But Reagan was too moderate for the New Right. So Vigeurie’s team hooked up with Jerry Falwell to build ‘the Moral Majority,’ initially around opposition to desegregation and only later to abortion. To make a long story short, the major result was the formation of the ‘Tea Party’ caucus in Congress. Together with rightwing ‘Christian nationalist’ evangelicals, this cluster in the GOP became the mass base for Trump’s winning rightwing populist campaign in 2016. Once in power, Trump’s bloc was soon joined by several fascist groups and their militias—Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others.
Trump’s main target was the ‘Third Reconstruction’ politics that had regained power with the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Trump’s 2016 victory marked the start of a political see-saw trying to crush any Third Reconstruction. But it was diverted by Biden’s victory in 2020, followed by Trump’s attempted coup in January, 2021.
Now we start 2025 with Trump about to resume residence in the White House again. But it won’t be the same as Trump 2016-2020. To begin, Trump has purged the GOP of nearly all traditional Republicans. It’s now completely the Party of Trump, with ‘The Donald’ operating as a mafia don. To have any status, let alone positions of power, any wannabe GOPer now has to pledge fealty to Trump the person, not the Republican party or even the Constitution.
Trump also now has about 30 billionaire donors grouped around him. Elon Musk is simply the richest of them, donating some 250 million of his $440 billions in wealth to the latest Trump campaign. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had the lion’s share of the very wealthy, while Trump then only had a few. In 2024, while Harris still had a 3/5s majority of the very wealthy; Trump’s 2/5 share is far larger (and more publicized) than before—and the shift is in his direction.
Our ruling class today is thus sharply divided. So is the electorate, with neither candidate getting above 50%, and only 1.5 percent separating them. In Electoral College terms, if only 250,000 voters across three swing states had flipped to the Dems, Kamala Harris would be our new president.
The working class (of all nationalities) was roughly divided evenly too. Of nonunion workers (88% of all workers), the Dems got 48% to Trump’s 51%, while union workers (12% of all workers) were 57% for Harris, and 40% for Trump. Counting white worker voters alone, a majority of 55-60% goes to Trump, depending on what’s counted. It should be noted that 40% of these, while a minority, is still a sizable one, and it’s the more class-and-union conscious of the whole. Trump also made significant gains in a sizable minority (40%+) of Hispanic voters and small gains among Black male voters—about 3 in 10 of younger Black male voters under age 45 went with Trump. Black voters overall, naturally, voted overwhelmingly for Harris.
We go into these numbers to counter hype and get a more accurate assessment of the entire electoral terrain. ‘The working class is backing Trump!’ is clearly overstated hype, even if counting white workers alone. But it’s also clear that the left is in dire need of an overall assessment of the politics of the working class, voters and nonvoters alike. Then, we need the numbers also subdivided by nationality, religion or non-religion, sex, gender, and others. Do we see who might be advanced, middle or backward politically? How much is insurgent, and how much passive? How many are antifascist? (We suspect a good majority) Or socialist? (We would guess a much smaller minority, say 5 million or so).
If you think all this is leading up to a quote from Sun Tzu and ‘The Art of War,’you’re on target: ‘Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This quote is common, but the entire small book is worth studying by those serious about strategy and tactics. Go here to take a look.
Our main resolution for 2025 is to be resolute. The numbers would indicate that the left has a very tough battle ahead, and the progressives and liberals toward the center are not likely to do well without the left. Likewise, we will not do well without them. So our next resolution is to make as many new friends in real life as we can, especially friends we can count on to protect us and, even better, to fight alongside us. Here are some guidelines we learned in Beijing long ago, by those who had also studied Sun Tzu:
On strategy: ‘Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over many of the middle forces, then isolate and divide the backward forces, so as to crush our adversaries batch by batch.’ On tactics: ‘Seek common ground, isolate differences, then solve problems one by one.’ Then: ‘Wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage, and with restraint.’
Trump enters the White House also facing a tough task. It is one thing to win high posts in an election. It is quite another to consolidate fascist rule across the country at all levels and across all the institutions of civil society. He and his billionaire buddies and fascist militias are getting started. We have to do so as well. Surrender nothing without a fight or a contest.

Also: see post below.  We must be ready. 
 

 
Friends,
I sometimes share with you perspectives about what we’re up against from non-American writers and journalists. Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and a former journalist, published this short essay recently in Politico Magazine. As we prepare for Trump’s regime, I thought you’d find her views useful.
***Robert Reich. 
​
American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test. I know how it feels, in part because I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Over a decade as a high-profile journalist, I covered Turkey’s descent into illiberalism, having to engage in the daily push and pull with the government. I know how self-censorship starts in small ways but then creeps into operations on a daily basis. I am familiar with the rhythms of the battle to reshape the media, state institutions and the judiciary.
Having lived through it, and having gathered some lessons in hindsight, I believe that there are strategies that can help Democrats and Trump critics not only survive the coming four years, but come out stronger. Here are six of them.
1. Don’t Panic — Autocracy Takes Time
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power is unnerving but America will not turn into a dictatorship overnight — or in four years. Even the most determined strongmen face internal hurdles, from the bureaucracy to the media and the courts. It took Erdoğan well over a decade to fully consolidate his power. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party needed years to erode democratic norms and fortify their grip on state institutions.
I am not suggesting that the United States is immune to these patterns, but it’s important to remember that its decentralized system of governance — the network of state and local governments — offers enormous resilience. Federal judges serve lifetime appointments, states and governors have specific powers separate from those granted federally, there are local legislatures, and the media has the First Amendment as a shield, reinforced by over a century of legal precedents. 
Sure, there are dangers, including by a Supreme Court that might grant great deference to the president. But in the end, Donald Trump really only has two years to try to execute state capture. Legal battles, congressional pushback, market forces, midterm elections in 2026 and internal Republican dissent will slow him down and restrain him. The bottom line is that the U.S. is too decentralized in its governance system for a complete takeover. The Orbanization of America is not an imminent threat.
2. Don’t Disengage — Stay Connected
After a stunning electoral loss like this, there’s a natural impulse to shut off the news, log off social media and withdraw from public life. I’ve seen this with friends in Turkey and Hungary with opposition supporters retreating in disillusionment after Erdogan’s or Orbam’s victories. Understandably, people want to turn inwards.
Dancing, travel, meditation, book clubs — it’s all fine. But eventually, in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, opponents of autocracy have returned to the fight, driven by a belief in the possibility of change. So will Americans.
Nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democracy. That’s why millions of Turks turned out to the polls and gave the opposition a historic victory in local governments across Turkey earlier this year. That’s how the Poles organized a winning coalition to vote out the conservative Law and Justice Party last year. It can happen here, too.
The answer to political defeat is not to disconnect, but to organize. You can take a couple of days or weeks off, commiserate with friends and mute Elon Musk on X — or erase the app altogether. But in the end, the best way to develop emotional resilience is greater engagement.
3. Don’t Fear the Infighting
Donald Trump’s victory has understandably triggered infighting inside the Democratic Party and it looks ugly. But fear not. These recriminations and finger-pointing are necessary to move forward. In Turkey, Hungary and Poland, it was only after the opposition parties faced their strategic and ideological misalignment with society that they were able to begin to effectively fight back.
Trump has tapped into the widespread belief that the economic order, labor-capital relations, housing and the immigration system are broken. You may think he is a hypocrite, but there is no doubt that he has convinced a large cross-section of American society that he is actually the agent of change — a spokesman for their interests as opposed to “Democratic elites.” This is exactly what strongmen like Erdoğan and Orban have achieved.
For the Democratic Party to redefine itself as a force for change, and not just as the custodian of the status quo, it needs fundamental shifts in how it relates to working people in the U.S. There is time to do so before the midterms of 2026.
4. Charismatic Leadership Is a Non-Negotiable
One lesson from Turkey and Hungary is clear: You will lose if you don’t find a captivating leader, as was the case in 2023 general elections in Turkey and in 2022 in Hungary. Coalition-building or economic messaging is necessary and good. But it is not enough. You need charisma to mobilize social dissent.
Trump was beatable in this election, but only with a more captivating candidate. For Democrats, the mistake after smartly pushing aside President Joe Biden was bypassing the primaries and handpicking a candidate. Future success for the party will hinge on identifying a candidate who can better connect with voters and channel their aspirations. It should not be too hard in a country of 350 million.
Last year’s elections in Poland and Turkey showcased how incumbents can be defeated (or not defeated, as in general elections in Turkey in 2023) depending on the opposition’s ability to unite around compelling candidates who resonate with voters. Voters seek authenticity and a connection — give it to them.
5. Skip the Protests and Identity Politics
Soon, Trump opponents will shake off the doldrums and start organizing an opposition campaign. But how they do it matters. For the longest time in Turkey, the opposition made the mistake of relying too much on holding street demonstrations and promoting secularism, Turkey’s version of identity politics, which speaks to the urban professional and middle class but not beyond. When Erdoğan finally lost his absolute predominance in Turkish politics in 2024, it was largely because of his mismanagement of the economy and the opposition’s growing competence in that area.
Trump’s appeal transcends traditional divides of race, gender and class. He has formed a new Republican coalition and to counteract this. Democrats too, must broaden their tent, even if means trying to appeal to conservatives on some issues. Opposition over the next four years must be strategic and broad-based. 
Street protests and calls to defend democracy may be inspirational, but they repel conservatives and suburban America. Any grassroots action must be coupled with a clear, relatable economic message and showcase the leadership potential of Democratic mayors and governors. Identity politics alone won’t do it.
6. Have Hope
Nothing lasts forever and the U.S. is not the only part of the world that faces threats to democracy — and Americans are no different than the French, the Turks or Hungarians when it comes to the appeal of the far right. But in a country with a strong, decentralized system of government and with a long-standing tradition of free speech, the rule of law should be far more resilient than anywhere in the world.
Trump’s return to power certainly poses challenges to U.S. democracy. But he will make mistakes and overplay his hand — at home and abroad. America will survive the next four years if Democrats pick themselves up and start learning from the successes of opponents of autocracy across the globe.

​










​EdEdwin F. Ackerman
December 29, 2024
Jacobin
 
How AMLO turned an anti-corruption campaign into an opportunity for economic redistribution.
Excerpt: 
If there was a distinguishing feature of AMLO’s political style, it was his ability to treat neoliberalism as synonymous with corruption. Historically, anti-corruption politics has been the mainstay of the neoliberal right seeking to privatize graft-ridden state industries. In Latin America, at least, the middle and upper classes have been the most reliable constituency for this brand of politics. But AMLO adroitly repurposed anti-corruption politics to garner mass appeal without embracing neoliberal anti-statism or a technocratic anti-politics that empowers unelected officials.
“It sounds harsh, but privatization in Mexico has been synonymous with corruption,” AMLO said in his inaugural speech in December 2018. “Unfortunately, this malady has almost always existed in our country, but what happened during the neoliberal period is unprecedented in modern times — the system as a whole has operated for corruption,” he added. “Political power and economic power have mutually fed and nurtured each other, and the theft of the people’s goods and the nation’s wealth has been established as the modus operandi.”
The key features of the Mexican neoliberal state were an increase in outsourcing of services to private companies, subsidies to a private sector encouraged to compete with state-owned companies (electricity is one of the most egregious examples), mechanisms for ceding control of public monies through privately administered fideicomisos (trusts), and sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of tax evasion. At the heart of AMLO’s diagnosis of his country’s malaise lay a fundamental redefinition of neoliberalism. Contrary to the common belief, neoliberalism was not about the contraction of the state. For AMLO, it represented the instrumentalization of the state to serve the rich.
Republican Austerity
AMLO’s reinterpretation of neoliberalism has lent a sophistication to discussions of the economy that remains alien to much of the anglophone world. Thanks to Morena, the debate in Mexico is not, as in the United States, about small government versus big government — Mexico operated under “big government” during neoliberalism, but it consistently served the upper class through both legal and illegal means. Recognition of this fact provided the basis for a class politics of anti-corruption.
Editors Note.
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/a-class-in-politics
How neoliberalism shifted resources from the state ( taxes) to the oligarchy and upper classes. 
 
Important: a similar process occurs within the U.S. Government budgets are restricted. Health care is privatize ( except for the VA).  Public Schools are underfunded. Public universities are underfunded. Roads are not repaired. Homelessness is criminalized ( rather than building housing). 
The money is extracted via taxes and goes to fund projects of the Oligarchy such as Musk’s space exploration, privatized health care, private (charter) schools, and , of course, the military equipment and munitions.  
 
 

​​BY
DAVID BACON
 
The US working class has a long tradition of standing up against immigrant repression. This history is a reservoir of inspiration and strategic thinking — and it can help immigrant workers and communities confront Donald Trump’s promised wave of repression.
 
The history of working-class organizing in the United States is full of examples of immigrant resistance to mass deportation, sweeps, and other tactics. Time and again, immigrant worker activity has changed the course of society. It has produced unions of workers ranging from copper miners to janitors. It turned the politics of Los Angeles head. And it is this tradition of worker resistance that is the real target of immigration enforcement waves, both current and threatened by the incoming administration.
Organizers of the past fought deportation threats just as we do today, and their experiences offer valuable insights for our present situation. Not only did they show tremendous perseverance in the face of direct threats to migrants, but these organizers also envisioned a future of greater equality, working-class rights, and social solidarity — and proposed ways to get there. Increased immigration repression has a way of making the bones of the system easier to see and the reasons for changing it abundantly clear. These organizations and coalitions defending immigrant workers, their families, and their communities have often been building blocks for movements for deeper social change.
The rich tradition of worker organizing against immigrant repression is a story of courageous struggle and a reservoir of strategic thinking that can help immigrant workers and communities confront the promised MAGA wave of repression. It involves far too many organizations and fights to list here. This article aims to show what people faced, how they fought, and what kind of future they fought for.
The Old Threat of Mass Deportation
In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Donald Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels to the mass deportations of 1932–33. At the height of the Great Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of working-class people, relief authorities denied food to Mexican and Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been recycled over the last century, repeated most recently by the MAGA campaign.
Hunger was the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave. Thousands were swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of the terror these raids produced. Voluntarily or not, people were loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of the ’30s was “repatriation.” Today’s immigration enforcers call it “self-deportation.” The idea remains the same, and Trump and J. D. Vance are only the latest proponents of this inhumane policy.
People resisted deportation through the radical organizations of the era, from the Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española to the unions formed in bloody strikes in mines and fields. The largest farm labor strike in US history, the Pixley cotton strike, erupted in 1933 across the barrios of California’s San Joaquin Valley during that peak deportation year. Radical activists were singled out for deportation and defended by communist and socialist defense organizations, including later the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. The Mexican government of the time, only a decade after the revolution, also protested and tried to help deportees.
This history of resistance is as important to remember as the history of the deportations themselves. The organizations created by resistance, and the larger working-class movement of which they were a part, survived the deportation wave. While many groups were put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations during the Cold War, others emerged during the civil rights era. When the immigrant rights movement peaked again in recent decades, it inherited this legacy.
​More: 
 
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/deportations-unions-immigrants-organizing-trump
 

Gratitude to Ukraine (2024)
Security, Freedom, Democracy, Courage, Pluralism, Perseverance, Generosity, Tymothy Snyder.
 
https://snyder.substack.com/p/gratitude-to-ukraine-2024?
 
Debts are awkward, especially debts of gratitude. When we owe others too much, we can find it hard to express our appreciation. If we are not reflective, we might minimize our debt, or simply forget it. If we think highly of ourselves, we might ignore a debt to someone we regard as less important. In the worst case, we can resent the people who have helped us, and portray them in a negative light, just to avoid the feeling that we, too, are vulnerable people who sometimes need a helping hand.
Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression. For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this. To do so, we have to find the words. Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.
Perhaps the most important and the most unacknowledged debt is security.Ukrainian resistance to Russia has vastly reduced the chances of major armed conflict elsewhere, and thus significantly reduced the chances of a nuclear war.
Before this war began, one scenario for a major conventional conflict with nuclear risk was a Russian invasion of a NATO country. Ukrainian resistance has revealed the weaknesses of the Russian armed forces, and destroyed much of Russia's fighting capacity. Thanks to Ukraine, this scenario is far less likely than it was a year ago, and will remain unlikely for years to come.
The major scenario for global conflict in the twenty-first century was thought to be a Chinese-American confrontation over Taiwan. As a result of Ukrainian resistance, Beijing sees the difficulties it would face in an offensive in Taiwan. The flashpoint of what most analysts regarded as the most likely (or even inevitable) scenario for major war has essentially been removed.
This debt is all but impossible for Americans to register. In daily press coverage, we are drawn to the headlines that make us feel threatened, or suggest that the war is somehow about us. This can prevent us from seeing the overall picture.
For American policymakers and security analysts, it is literally dumbfounding that another country can do so much for our own security, using methods that we ourselves could not have employed. Ukraine has reduced the risk of war with Russia from a posture of simple delf-defense. Ukraine has reduced the threat of a war with China without confronting China, and indeed while pursuing good relations with China. None of that was available to Americans. And yet the consequence is greater security for Americans.
For me personally, the greatest debt concerns freedom. This is a word that we Americans use quite a lot, but we sometimes lose track of what it really means. For the past thirty years or so, we have fallen into a very bad habit of believing that freedom is something that is delivered to us by larger forces, for example by capitalism. This is simply not true, and believing it has made us less free. "The whole history of the progress of human liberty," Frederick Douglass said, "shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle." It will always be the case that freedom depends upon some kind of risky effort made against the larger forces. Freedom, in other words, will always depend upon an ethical commitment to a different and better world, and will always suffer when we believe that the world itself will do the work for us.
By choosing to resist invasion in the name of freedom, Ukrainians have reminded us of this. And in doing so, they have offered us many interesting thoughts about what freedom might be. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, for example, makes the interesting point that freedom and security tend to work together. Throughout this war, speaking to Ukrainians, I have been struck that they define freedom as a positive project, as a way of being in the world, a richness of the future. Freedom doesn't just mean overcoming the Russians; it means creating better and more interesting lives and a better and more interesting country.
It is hard to overlook what Ukrainians have done to defend the idea of democracy. In a basic sense, this is what the war is about. Vladimir Putin represents the twenty-first century practice of managed or fake democracy,in which an oligarchy preserves some appearances and rhetoric of democracy, because it has no alternative to propose, while hoarding wealth and power and making any meaningful political participation impossible. The Russian system relies on a televisual spectacle that assures Russians that everyone else is just as corrupt, and so they should love their own Russian corruption because it is Russian.
But what if everyone is not equally corrupt? What if there were a neighboring state, Ukraine, where elections are actually free, and where unexpected people can come to power? This is what has to be made unthinkable, by hate speech directed at Ukrainians, and by war since 2014, including the full-scale Russian invasion of this year. Its goal, precisely, was to physically eliminate the legitimate Ukrainian government as well as the leaders of Ukrainian civil society, and thereby make of Ukraine a kind of Russian hinterland.
 
Read more.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/gratitude-to-ukraine-2024?


 
 
 

​To transform the world to more closely align with our principles, we must think and act politically.
Leo Casey ▪ October 8, 2024 
 
To transform the world to more closely align with our principles, we must think and act politically.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-dilemmas-of-democratic-socialism/
 
Leo Casey ▪ 
 
This essay will elucidate four interrelated concepts—principles, objectives, strategies, and tactics—that often feature in democratic socialist political discourse in the United States and elsewhere. Despite their common usage, there is not a common understanding of what each concept entails or how each relates to the others, let alone to political power. Elucidating these concepts will allow us to think more clearly about our political work and the choices we make in it; in turn, this will better situate us to build and use political power for progressive change.
 
Our Principles
For democratic socialists, our politics are ultimately based on principles: values that give us both our vision of a better world and our motivation for engaging in political activity. Solidarity—our dedication to and action for the common good—is one of these foundational principles, and the one that most distinguishes us from the political perspectives of the right and center. Any list of democratic socialist principles would also include values we share, at least in part, with other democratic political philosophies, such as equality and liberty, as well as respect for human life, dignity, and well-being. Yet democratic socialists have more expansive conceptions of such principles. For example, our understanding of democracy is not limited to support for the institutions of representative government, as important as they are, but extends democracy to the workplace and the community, with a focus on giving a voice to ordinary people in the decisions that impact their lives. We are democrats, but we are radical democrats.
 
Much of what we think of as central to democratic socialism—such as our commitments to working-class empowerment, anti-racism, feminism, and LGBTQ rights—follows from these foundational principles. Still, there are real challenges to honoring these values. Our actions are often fraught with dilemmas simply because the world rarely presents us with unambiguous moral choices.
 
Read more.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-dilemmas-of-democratic-socialism/
 
 
 
 

Herewith, a union leader’s suggestions on why they left and how to win them back.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON DECEMBER 9, 2024
 
When much of America’s working class is downwardly mobile, and when 40 years of neoliberal policies have only made it harder for those workers to amass the power they’d need to better their lot, is it any surprise that those workers vote for a strongman who vows to circumvent the government that’s failed them and champion their interests through brute force?
 
That was the starting point of the analysis that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten laid out in an address last week to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And that was the starting point of the challenge that Weingarten posed to American liberals: Either empower American workers or face the prospect not just of the coming Trump second term, but of subsequent MAGA-esque regimes.
 
Weingarten’s speech stands as the clearest description and prescription that a labor leader has offered to the broad liberal community in the wake of Trump’s victory. It is, of course, filtered through the lens of a teachers union leader, but her proposals also address issues that resonate well beyond the classroom.
 
She begins, as any serious liberal must, with the economic plight of key segments of working-class America—and not only with their current struggles to afford food and housing. “Men with [no more than] a high school degree,” she said, “make 22 percent less than they did 45 years ago.” Is it any wonder, she continued, that “the party of working people lost working people” in November’s presidential election.
 
The immediate way to begin winning those workers back, she posited, will come “if Trump does the bidding of Big Tech, Big Oil and the billionaires who bankrolled his campaign” to betray those “who voted for him seeking lower costs and a better living standard.” To do that successfully, though, means that “Americans who care about our democracy have to recognize the needs of, and respect the agency of, low-income and middle-class Americans. This means breaking with decades of neoliberal, trickle-down economic policies.”
 
To that end, Weingarten called not only for legislation like the PRO Act, which would remove many of the hurdles that keep workers from joining or forming unions. She also called for making schools a place that enables working-class kids who choose not to go to college to access the skills that will enable them to live successful working-class lives.
 
“High school must be more than college prep,” she said. “Every student deserves opportunity, whether they are immediately college-bound, eventually college-bound, or among the more than 60 percent of high school graduates who don’t go to college. Whether the next stop is a university, a microchip fabrication plant or a small business, young people need to be adept in four skill sets: critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience and relationships.”
 
“The high school experience must be transformed,” she continued, to include “career and technical education [CTE] … in everything from healthcare to advanced manufacturing to automotive repair.” Weingarten cited programs in which her union had linked up high schools that offer such courses with employers: “Here in New York, we’re working with Micron Technology, a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, to train middle school and high school students for high-tech careers. And with Microsoft, we are helping educators from communities as varied as New York City; Wichita, Kansas; and San Antonio, building students’ artificial intelligence literacy.”
 
“These experiences,” she concluded, should be the norm.” But, she added, “all of this takes resources, which is why Trump doubling down on his pledge to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and expand school vouchers is dead wrong.”
 
Weingarten didn’t specifically address issues of cultural leftism and identitarian politics, though she did affirm that the AFT’s free book program, which has given away ten million new books to children, includes books with “characters who, kids exclaim, ‘look like me,’” and that the union is devoted to defending the civil rights of all students. But the larger point she made was that absent the kind of working-class advocacy and engagement that she laid out, liberals would likely fall short of re-engaging and winning support from working-class Americans.
 
To that end, she noted that her union was not only endeavoring to make schools more working-class friendly, but also to increase literacy rates. No working class can be empowered, she made clear, in the absence of widespread literacy and widespread unions. Coming from a teachers union president, of course, that’s a truism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also very true.
 
That turned her to the vexing issue—and not just in the U.S.—of angry and alienated young men. “Nearly 90 percent of Americans under age 30 support unions—a group that swung toward Trump in this year’s election,” she noted. “Yet only 1 in 10 workers in America is in a union … No wonder so many working people feel hopeless. Feelings of loneliness, hopelessness and lack of agency are especially acute for young men.”
 
To those of us who believe that addressing that lack of agency isn’t solved by freeing those young men from the norms of the cultural elites, Weingarten’s diagnosis and cure appear on the mark, and emblematic of the labor movement at its best. “The downward mobility and anxiety facing working people today,” she said, “are the result of a trickle-down economy enabled by our political leaders. Over the last 40 years, a new set of economic rules have prioritized wealth over work, corporate profits over worker pay, shareholder returns over societal value, and the bogus claim that, in a plutocracy, economic benefits somehow will trickle down to the rest of us … It’s no coincidence that as worker power has diminished, wealth has been consolidated at the top, inequality has grown and public confidence in democracy has weakened.”
 
Saving democracy from the appeal that would-be, scapegoating tin-pots exert over angry young men requires something well beyond cultural readjustments. It requires genuine worker empowerment and a level of economic security that is beyond the grasp of many—make that “most”—American workers. That’s why unions are indispensable in the fight not just to win the working class’s political support, but to preserve and strengthen American democracy.
 
 
 
 

What is the Insurrection Act?
The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations. The statute implements Congress’s authority under the Constitution to “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” It is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, under which federal military forces are generally barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.
 
The Insurrection Act, in principle, only allows the American president to use the armed forces to assist civilian authorities to enforce some law in the presence of an insurrection. But the language of the law is quite vague. Trump makes it clear that he has in mind invoking the Insurrection Act to very broad purposes, essentially to change the regime.
 
It is important that free states take action now  to resist this growing authoritarian menace of the Trump/MAGA forces.
Here is how the former slave states are cooperating with Trump and promoting mass deportations and preparing to profit from mass detentions. 
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/us/texas-abbott-trump-border.html?searchResultPosition=1
 
 A key variable will be the resistance to mass deportations often organized in the free states.  To consider resistance, we  need to know the provisions of the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act. ( see above)
 
Here is a mass effort of cooperation among progressives to resist the deportations and other anti constitutional actions. 
 
Democracy 2025. 
https://www.democracy2025.org
 Emphasis on legal responses. 
 
 The Democracy 2025  site is also listed on our NS site for promoting resistance. 
Having states and localities taking action of non cooperation is probably more effective, or at least as effective as complaining on line. 
 
North Star has created a new hub for participation in popular front activities and organizations to defeat MAGA fascism.  We hope that you are engaged. 
 
Resources for 2025 North Star 
Defeat Fascism / Fight for Democracy: 
Action Opportunities:
 
Similar to our  NS 2024 hub, this site is for finding opportunities to take actions which make a difference.  It is not a site for opinion essays.  Essays should continue to be posted on this list serve.  Reports on your engagement continue to be welcome on our list serve. 
 
The hub is here. Feel free to share with others. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cRIJsSJwtF72ckJ8QLQu5cDCGnoeh5OIIjwqRkDKdBg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.es6myhajhn20
 

Separated: Documentary
 
Showing Dec. 7, on MSNBC.
 
Trump Administration Separated Children from their families.

 

​









Joel Cano
November 26, 2024
infobae.com
 
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sent a letter to president-elect Donald Trump, addressing the issues of border crossings and labor mobility, the fentanyl epidemic, illegal arms trafficking, and tariffs
​
In a letter, Claudia Sheinbaum responded to the statements made by the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump , regarding the imposition of tariffs on Mexico.
At her morning press conference on Tuesday, the federal president announced the letter she will send to Trump regarding fentanyl consumption , the migration phenomenon , and tariffs.
The letter written by Sheinbaum Pardo is in response to Trump's post on November 25 on his Truth Social network, in which he announced that one of his first executive orders will be to impose a 25% tariff on products from Mexico and Canada.
This measure, according to the Republican, will remain in place until fentanyl trafficking and migration are stopped. In response, the Mexican president wrote a letter in which she expressed her position on this announcement. Its content is as follows:
​
Dear President-elect Donald Trump, 
I am writing to you in response to your statement on Monday, November 25, regarding immigration, fentanyl trafficking, and tariffs.
You are probably not aware that Mexico has developed a comprehensive policy to assist migrants from different parts of the world who cross our territory and are destined for the southern border of the United States of America. As a result, and according to figures from your country's Border Patrol and Customs ( CBP ), encounters at the border between Mexico and the United States have been reduced by 75% from December 2023 to November 2024. By the way, half of those who arrive do so through a legally granted appointment by the United States program called CBP1, for these reasons migrant caravans no longer arrive at the border. Even so, it is clear that we must jointly arrive at another model of labor mobility that is necessary for your country and to address the causes that lead families to leave their places of origin out of necessity. If a percentage of what the United States allocates to war is dedicated to the construction of peace and development, the mobility of people will be fundamentally addressed.
On the other hand, and for humanitarian reasons, we have always expressed Mexico's willingness to prevent the fentanyl epidemic from continuing in the United States, which is also a problem of consumption and public health in the country. So far this year, the Mexican Armed Forces and the Attorney General's Office have seized tons of different types of drugs, 10,340 weapons, and arrested 15,640 people for violence related to drug trafficking. A constitutional reform is in the process of being approved in the Legislative Branch of my country to declare the production, distribution, and marketing of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs a serious crime without the right to bail. However, it is public knowledge that chemical precursors enter Canada, the United States, and Mexico illegally from Asian countries, for which international collaboration is urgently needed.
You should also be aware of the illegal arms trafficking that comes to my country from the United States. 70% of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country. We do not produce the weapons, we do not consume synthetic drugs. Unfortunately, we are the ones who die from crime to meet the demand for drugs in your country. President Trump, it is not with threats or tariffs that we will address the migration phenomenon or drug use in the United States. Cooperation and mutual understanding are required to address these great challenges. One tariff will be followed by another in response, and so on until we put common companies at risk. For example, the main exporters from Mexico to the United States are General Motors , Stellantis , and Ford Motors Company , which came to Mexico 80 years ago. Why impose a tax that puts them at risk? It is not acceptable and would cause inflation and job losses for the United States and Mexico .
I am convinced that North America's economic strength lies in maintaining our commercial partnership, so that we can continue to be more competitive against other economic blocs. I believe that dialogue is the best path to understanding, peace and prosperity for our nations. I hope that our teams can meet soon.
Sincerely, 
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo
Constitutional President of the United Mexican States
 
 Courtesy of Portside 

 
North Star has created a new hub for participation in popular front activities and organizations to defeat MAGA fascism.  We hope that you are engaged. 
 
Resources for 2025 North Star 
Defeat Fascism / Fight for Democracy: 
Action Opportunities:
 
 This site is for finding opportunities to take actions which make a difference.  It is not a site for opinion essays.  Essays should continue to be posted on this list serve.  Reports on your engagement continue to be welcome on our list serve. 
 
The hub is here. Feel free to share with others. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cRIJsSJwtF72ckJ8QLQu5cDCGnoeh5OIIjwqRkDKdBg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.es6myhajhn20
 

Editors Note
As a first step. Note  74,118,950 people in the US voted for our positions. They voted for a continuation of democracy. That is an incredibly strong force to work within.  In California 9, 036, 667 voted against the Trump campaign and 5,220, 663 voted in favor. 
 
Certainly the left lost.  And, some in the left contributed to the loss including the elected leadership of DSA. That issue requires some deep thinking. 
 
Bernie Sanders.  November 12, 2024.
 
The results of the 2024 election have confirmed a reality that is too frequently denied by Democratic Party leaders and strategists: The American working class is angry — and for good reason.
They want to know why the very rich are getting much richer, and the CEOs of major corporations make almost 300 times more than their average employees, while weekly wages remain stagnant and 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
They want to know why corporate profits soar while companies shut down factories in America and move to low-wage countries.
They want to know why the food industry enjoys record breaking profits, while they can’t afford their grocery bills.
They want to know why they can’t afford to go to a doctor or pay for their prescription drugs, and worry about going bankrupt if they end up in a hospital.
Donald Trump won this election because he tapped into that anger.
Did he address any of these serious issues in a thoughtful or meaningful way? 
 
Absolutely not.
What he did do was divert the festering anger in our country at a greedy and out-of-touch corporate elite into a politics that served his political goals and will end up further enriching his fellow billionaires.
Trump’s “genius” is his ability to divide the working class so that tens of millions of Americans will reject solidarity with their fellow workers and pave the way for huge tax breaks for the very rich and large corporations.
While Trump did talk about capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent, and a new trade policy with China, his fundamental explanation as to why the working class was struggling was that millions of illegal immigrants have invaded America and that we are now an “occupied country.”
In his pathologically dishonest world, undocumented immigrants are illegally participating in our elections and voting for Democrats. They are creating massive amounts of crime, driving wages down, and taking our jobs. They are getting free health care and other benefits that are denied to American citizens. They are even eating our pets.
That explanation is grossly racist, cruel, and fallacious. But it is an explanation.
And what do the Democrats have to say about the crises facing working families? What is their full-throated explanation, pounded away day after day in the media, in the halls of Congress, and in town meetings throughout the country as to why tens of millions of workers, in the richest country on earth, are struggling to put food on the table or pay the rent? Where is the deeply felt outrage that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care for all as a human right while insurance and drug companies make huge profits?
How do they explain supporting billions of dollars in military aid to the right-wing extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has created an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is causing massive malnutrition and starvation for thousands of children?
In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.
This election was largely about class and change and the Democrats, in both cases, were often on the wrong side. As Jimmy Williams Jr., the president of the Painters Union, said, “The Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working-class message that addresses issues that really matter to workers. The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump. That’s not good enough anymore!”
As an Independent member of the US Senate, I caucus with the Democrats. In that capacity I have been proud to work with President Biden on one of the most ambitious pro-worker agendas in modern history.
We passed the American Rescue Plan to pull us out of the COVID-19 economic downturn; made historic investments in rebuilding our infrastructure and in transforming our energy system; began the process of rebuilding our manufacturing base; lowered the cost of prescription drugs and forgave student debt for five million Americans. Biden promised to be the most progressive president since FDR and, on domestic issues, he kept his word.
But, unlike FDR, these achievements are almost never discussed within the context of a grossly unfair economy that continues to fail ordinary Americans. Yes. In the past few years we have made some positive changes. We must acknowledge, however, that what we’ve done is nowhere near enough.
In 1936, in his second inaugural address, FDR spoke not only of his administration’s enormous achievements in combatting the Great Depression, but of the painful economic realities that millions of Americans were still experiencing.
Roosevelt’s words remain relevant today: “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day … I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children … I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”
Of course, the world is today profoundly different than it was in 1936. We are not in an economic depression. Unemployment is relatively low. People are not facing starvation.
But the Democratic leadership must recognize that, in a rapidly changing economy, working families face an enormous amount of economic pain, anxiety and hopelessness — and they want change. The status quo is not working for them.
In politics you can’t fight something with nothing. The Democratic Party needs to determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times, and it needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for. Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class. You can’t represent both.
While Democrats will be in the minority in the Senate and (probably) the House in the new Congress, they will still have the opportunity to bring forth a strong legislative agenda that addresses the needs of working families.
If Republicans choose to vote those bills down, the American working class will learn quickly enough as to which party represents them, and which party represents corporate greed.
In my view, here are some of the working class priorities that Democrats must fight for:

• We must end Citizens United and stop billionaires from buying elections.
• We must raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage to a living wage — at least $17 an hour.
• We must pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act to make it easier for workers to form unions and end illegal union busting.
• We must protect senior citizens by increasing Social Security benefits and extending the solvency of the program by lifting the cap on taxable income.
• We must bring back defined benefit pension plans so that workers can retire with security.
• We must do what every other wealthy nation does and guarantee health care to all as a human right, beginning with the expansion of Medicare to cover home health care, dental, hearing, and vision.
• We must cut prescription drug prices in half, no more than is paid in other countries.
• We must provide guaranteed paid family and medical leave.
• We must guarantee equal pay for equal work.
• We must create fair trade policies that work for workers, not just corporate CEOs.
• We must build 3 million units of low income and affordable housing.
• We must make public colleges and universities tuition free, childcare affordable for all, and strengthen public education by paying teachers the salaries they deserve.
• We must adopt a progressive tax system which addresses the massive income and wealth inequality we are experiencing by demanding that the very wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes.
• We must save taxpayer dollars by ending the massive waste, fraud and abuse that exists in the Pentagon.

These are extremely popular ideas. The Democratic Party would do well to listen to the clear directive of American voters, and deliver. The simple fact is: if you stand with working people, they will stand with you. In my view, if Democrats deliver on an agenda like this, they can win back the working class of our country and the White House.
Bernie Sanders is an Independent US senator from Vermont.
 
 
 

The results of the U.S. election have left many of us in shock and we want to take a minute to honor our outrage, our grief and our fears.  But as human rights defenders, we cannot afford to let the moment paralyze us. 
During the first Trump administration, we witnessed firsthand the horrific violence inflicted upon our communities:  the racial violence, the brutality of family separation, the  Muslim bans, and  attempts to decimate  asylum.  In this second term, we are expecting  the trauma and rights’ violations to escalate. 
The crisis we face is not new. A massive deportation machine has been built over years of racially discriminatory policing, designed to criminalize, scapegoat, and label migrants as a security threat. These securitization narratives provide the physical and ideological infrastructure for Trump to normalize the deportation of millions of people. The key elements include an expansive immigration police force, a heavily fortified border, and a rapidly expanding surveillance infrastructure that enables data-sharing and collaboration between local police forces and ICE. All of these factors, along with an expanding network of both private and public prisons, contribute to the detention of immigrants under inhumane and deplorable conditions. 
The dangerous normalization of this system means that we are facing not only unjust immigration policies, but an existential threat to human rights—one that we must fight with every ounce of courage and capacity that we have.
[email protected]

A New Wave of Movements Against Trumpism Is Coming
Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Our job is to translate outrage over his agenda into action toward a truly transformational vision.
Originally Published in Waging Nonviolence
For many of us, the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory has been a time of deep despair and mourning. There has been plenty of commentary trying to make sense of Trump’s win and the factors that led to it. But no analysis changes the fact that the outcome represents a serious blow to our most vulnerable communities, a sharp setback for causes of economic and social justice, and a profound challenge to whatever semblance of democracy America has been able to secure. We have lived through it before, and it feels even worse the second time around. It is right that we take this as a moment to grieve. 
But even amidst our feelings of sorrow or hopelessness, we can recognize that political conditions are not static. As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge. And in making this happen, we can draw on lessons from what has worked in the past and what we know can be effective in confronting autocrats. Our job will be to take advantage of the moments of opportunity that arise in coming months to hold the line against Trump’s authoritarianism — and also link them to a vision for creating the transformative change we need in our world.
Here’s why we can expect a new wave of movements to arise.
 
Different strategies for change can work together
 
Trump is a trigger. Read more.
 
https://forgeorganizing.org/article/new-wave-movements-against-trumpism-coming
 
 

 
25 Points on Trump's 2024 Win: What Happened, Why, and What Next?
 
We don’t yet have all the facts about the election. But we have enough information to examine some of the most important aspects and at least start to answer some key questions.
PETER DREIER
Nov 08, 2024Common Dreams
 
Key point:  Trump got roughly the same number of votes in 2014 than he did in 2020.  Harris got about 10 million votes less than Biden did in 2020.  The Republicans didn’t win this election so much as the Democrats lost it.
 
Questions: Why?  Was this something that the Harris campaign could have done differently? What is the problem with the Democrats’ voter outreach/turnout strategy?  Is it solvable?
 
4. There are many hard truths we have to face if we're to move our country in a better direction. Trump is a fascist, but most Americans are not fascists. Even so, more than half of those who voted, voted for a fascist, mostly over their concerns over the economy, and next most important over immigration. There's no doubt that Trump has an emotional hold on a large number of Americans, who either forgive him for his personal flaws (liar, rapist, felon, grifter, corrupt businessman, etc) or don't think they are actually flaws. Many Americans who are angry about the state of the country or their own circumstances revel in a candidate who focuses on his grievances and promises to solve their problems, even if his often vague policy ideas will make their lives worse. Trump is a unique figure in the history of American politics—a demagogue, the leader of a personality cult, and pathological liar. So it is hard to evaluate this election and compare it with other elections, because doing so tends to normalize what should be causes for outrage. Even so, we can analyze this election to understand how Trump won the White House, and how the Republicans took back the Senate. We don't yet know whether the Republicans will hold onto their House majority.\
5. Post-election polls show that the most important issue, by far, was the economy and prices. In the AP post-election survey, 37% of voters thought the economy was "excellent" (7%) or "good" (30%), while 64% of voters thought that the economy was "not so well" (40%) or "poor" (24%). By a margin of 50% to 41%, more Americans think Trump—who inherited his father’s real estate empire and lost billions in bad investments and bankrupt businesses—would be better than Harris at handling the economy. This despite the fact the American economy is currently the best in the world and is improving, that wages are going up faster than prices, and that unemployment is at a record low. Many polls show that most Americans don't give Biden credit for the improving economy. In fact, many blame him for what they perceive as a "bad" economy. Trump kept repeating that the economy is terrible and media let him get away with his lies, as Steve Greenhouse reported for The Guardian. Thirty-nine percent of voters ranked the economy as the most important issue. Among those who said that this was their biggest concern, a large margin (60%) voted for Trump, according to an AP survey. This anomaly showed up in Missouri, where about 58.5% of voters voted for Trump while, at the same time, 58% voted for Proposition A, which will hike the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave. Trump is against raising the federal minimum wage and against paid sick leave, while Harris is for both of them. But obviously many Missourians voted for Trump AND Proposition A. 
​
6. Immigration ranked #2 as a top concern. One-fifth (20%) of voters said that immigration was the most important issue in the election. 88% of those voters voted for Trump. Trump's racist stereotyping and scapegoating of immigrants was effective. This was his most fascist demagogic issue and it worked. It appears that Trump paid no political price for his lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, his lies about immigrants involved in higher crime rates than other Americans, or other lies he used to demonize immigrants. Nor did he pay a price for his failure, in his first term, to build a border wall and get Mexico to pay for it.
 
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/25-points-on-trump-s-2024-win-what-happened-why-and-what-next
 
 

The Resistance Starts Now
I still have faith in America, but we must mobilize to protect those at risk if Trump achieves his worst impulses.
ROBERT REICH
NOV 06, 2024
Friends,
I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too. 
Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.
I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.
Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.
Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.
America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.
Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.
Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.
Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.
Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.
We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.
We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.
We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.
We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.
We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.
How will we conduct this resistance?
By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.
We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.
But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.
We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.
The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.
We the people will fight for the general welfare.
We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.
This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.
I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.
If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.
All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.
We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.
Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.
It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.
We will never give up on America.
The resistance starts now.
 
 

Justifiable fury at the loss of innocent lives in Gaza shouldn’t lead to the destruction of millions of innocent lives here at home.
by Harold Meyerson
October 31, 2024
 
With polls showing that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running even in nearly every swing state, this election will turn on the decisions of very small subsets of voters. One of those subsets surely isn’t contemplating voting for Trump, but may end up electing him anyway.
I refer to those voters so understandably appalled by Israel’s war on Gaza and the toll it’s taken in innocent lives that they may not vote, or vote for Jill Stein, as a way of protesting the Biden administration’s continued provision of arms for Netanyahu’s war, and Harris’s refusal to cleanly break with that policy.
It’s by no means clear how not voting for Harris will stop Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the attendant slaughter of innocent lives. It is perfectly clear, however, that it will imperil millions of innocent lives right here in the USA should it lead to a Trump victory.
 
I refer to the immigrants among us whose forced deportation is the fundamental plank in Trump’s platform, the one issue he stresses in every one of his otherwise disjointed speeches, the sine qua non of his pledge to make America great again. To accomplish that deportation, he’s made clear he’d order the National Guard to sweep through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, and might well order the Army to clear out areas like the Bronx, East Los Angeles, and Chicago’s West Side as well.
 
The government’s count of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is roughly 11 million, but Trump and JD Vance routinely inflate that number to 20 million or more. And even in the very, very, very unlikely event that deportations are confined just to the truly undocumented, they would still separate immigrant parents from citizen children, and banish Dreamers—undocumented immigrants brought here as children by their parents—to countries that are utterly alien to them. At minimum, the process will destroy hundreds of thousands of families and devastate entire communities. The toll in innocent lives—not killed, but effectively crippled—will be huge.
 
And this is the most predictable consequence of a Trump victory. His demonization of immigrants is the central message of his campaign, and a campaign (inevitably entailing some violence) to deport them follows as the night the day.
I don’t doubt that those campaigns will meet serious resistance in our cities, as those opposed to them will take to the streets in very large numbers. I also don’t doubt that the ranks of those demonstrators will include some of those whose opposition to the U.S. military aid that has enabled Israel’s war on Palestinians impelled them not to vote for Kamala. After all, if they’ve refused to vote for Harris due to their revulsion and rage at the loss of innocent lives, the assault on immigrants will likely lead them to feel comparable revulsion and rage.
 
It’s by no means clear, however, that those imperiled immigrants will welcome those Harris-abstainers to the ranks of their supporters. They may reason—actually, they almost surely will reason—that progressives who didn’t vote for Harris didn’t think that the innocent lives of the immigrants among them mattered very much. Some of them might even conclude that those Harris-refuseniks didn’t give a flying fuck about them.
This is something that voters infuriated by U.S. Gaza policy and still wrestling with how to vote might want to think about.
 
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-10-31-refusing-vote-for-harris-mass-immigrant-deportations/

Also listen to an update to Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny.
 
Update audio
https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny-right-now-audio      
 

https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny-right-now-audio


https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny-right-now-audio



​

​ 
Sanders 10/29/2024
 
I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them.
While Israel had a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th, which killed 1200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, it did not have the right to wage an all out war against the entire Palestinian people.
It did not have the right to kill 42,000 Palestinians, two- thirds of whom were children, women and the elderly, or injure over 100,000 people in Gaza. It did not have the right to destroy Gaza's infrastructure and housing and health care systems. It did not have the right to bomb every one of Gaza's 12 universities. It did not have the right to block humanitarian aid, causing massive malnutrition in children and, in fact, starvation.
 

 Francesca D'Annunzio
October 21, 2024
Texas Observer

The Lone Star State is home to millions of undocumented residents and members of mixed-status families critical to the state’s economic success, yet Texas leaders are cheering on Trump anyway.

 “This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X.”
 
Former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised, if elected, to implement the “largest deportation in the history of our country.” If such an operation were carried out, a second Trump regime could target around 11 million undocumented people in the United States. Trump’s running mate, vice presidential candidate JD Vance, has suggested starting with 1 million deportations a year—a figure that dwarfs the total reached in any year of Trump’s presidency or that of Barack Obama. The proposal has become a rallying cry for Trump’s base, with supporters brandishing matching signs at rallies reading “Mass Deportations Now.” 
Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—second in the United States only to California—and another roughly 1.4 million U.S. citizens in the state live with at least one undocumented family member, per studies in recent years. Unauthorized workers form the backbone of crucial sectors; in the construction industry, up to 50 percent of laborers building the state are undocumented, according to a 2013 survey by the advocacy organization Workers Defense Project. All this means Texas would be uniquely disrupted by Trump’s plans, with the tearing apart of mixed-status families placing a possibly massive burden on the state’s meager social services systems, and the exiling of a chunk of its workforce imperiling the economic development and affordability known as the so-called Texas Miracle.
Yet Texas’ statewide Republican leaders are full-throated backers of a Trump return to the White House, leaving dissenters within the immigrant and business community and Democratic Party to advocate for millions of Texas families, workers, and consumers.

Trump has said that his deportation scheme would follow the “Eisenhower model”—an apparent reference to the 1950s immigration raid and roundup deportation program “Operation Wetback,” named after a racist slur. The raids, which lasted around a year, rounded up hundreds of thousands of Mexicans—including Mexican Americans—who were rounded up by truck, train, boat, and plane and deported. Around two decades prior, up to 2 million were deported, again including U.S. citizens, in a yearslong effort known as “Mexican Repatriation.” 
In an email to the Texas Observer, Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro said Trump’s proposal was also a threat to Latino U.S. citizens. “The last time the United States launched a mass deportation effort … U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent were rounded up and sent to Mexico—a place that many had never been before. The mass deportations that Trump is proposing would be devastating for our economy and dangerous for American Latinos.” 
Stan Marek, CEO and owner of the Houston-based construction enterprise Marek Family of Companies and a cofounder of Texans for Sensible Immigration Policy, told the Observer that mass deportations would exacerbate an existing construction labor shortage. Plus, he added, there is no easy, reliable way for employers to verify someone’s immigration status—and there has not been any significant immigration reform or citizenship pathway created for undocumented people since Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Marek, a lifelong moderate Republican, instead proposes a mass work authorization plan to protect immigrant workers from the possibility of employer exploitation, increase the labor force, and ensure workers can pass background checks and pay federal income taxes.
“There hasn’t been any way for a worker, a blue-collar worker, to come into this country and get a job legally since 1986,” Marek said, referring to the Immigration Reform and Control Act. (Some short-term temporary and seasonal work visas for blue-collar workers do exist.) Now, Marek said, we have a situation where we have millions of undocumented in this country, “and now we’re totally dependent on it because we need them.” 
Beyond construction, heavily undocumented workforces labor in agriculture, food processing, house cleaning, and other industries. “Immigrants exist across our economic spectrum. They’re everywhere. They’re us,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the progressive think tank Every Texan. “When we talk about eliminating them from our society, it’s like not just talking about cutting off a finger. We’re talking about cutting off entire legs from the thigh down.”
Nationwide, the shock would be on par with the Great Recession of 2008, according to economic projectionsfrom the American Immigration Council. And, despite claims of politicians like Trump and Vance, “Mass deportations are not going to lead to more Americans getting jobs,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “There’s no evidence for that whatsoever.”
In a recent X post, Trump announced more details of his envisioned machine for deportations and targeting transnational crime: He wants to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—the same law that formed the basis of the executive order that put Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. 
The likely scale would be much more massive than the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when approximately 112,000 people were displaced, said Reichlin-Melnick. And some civil liberties may have to head for the chopping block to achieve Trump’s goals.
Presently, Reichlin-Melnick explained, the United States does not have a system designed to find undocumented individuals who are not already on the government’s radar. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) does not know the identities and addresses of the majority of undocumented people. In order to carry out a mass deportation operation, agents would need to go out into communities around the country to find people—who are not already on their radar—and round them up. 
“You create a surveillance society in order to root out millions of people, because there’s really no other way to do it,” he said. “Creating an apparatus to hunt down and identify millions of undocumented immigrants would require turning the United States into a police state.”
ICE raids impact more than just immigrant families, according to Caitlin Patler, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley focused on the detentions and deportation pipeline. These operations are “traumatizing for entire communities, whether somebody’s directly impacted or not,” she said. “Your kid would go to school and next to them there would be an empty desk.”
Raids also negatively impact the health of children whose families have been targeted for detention or deportation. Patler said even unborn children have been impacted, and her work has found the following outcomes: children having trouble sleeping, trouble eating, crying uncontrollably, and “clinging to their remaining parent, refusing to leave the house because they’re so scared that the other parent will disappear or be taken from them in the same way that the first parent was,” she said. “You can see a very clear pattern of worsening health among people exposed to the deportation and detention systems.”
The fear of a raid, detention, or deportation also pushes immigrant and mixed-status families to avoid interacting with law enforcement. University of Colorado Denver professor Chloe East said that creates problems for police, who rely on community members for tips and interviews when solving crimes.
Economically, however, there is one sector that would likely flourish under a mass deportation regime: the prison industry. Texas is already home to some of the nation’s largest immigration detention centers, many of which are operated by private, for-profit companies. 
If deportations increase, the feds would likely build or lease even more space for the detainees. Because Trump has proposed mobilizing troops for immigration enforcement, mass military camps also aren’t out of the question, said Bob Libal, an Austin-based consultant at Human Rights Watch who has worked on immigrant detention issues for years.
“I thought the idea of favorably talking about Japanese internment was over in this country,” Libal said. “And yet—here we have people talking about the utilization of mass deportations in a positive light. And frankly, that should terrify everyone living in Texas, whether you’re an immigrant or not.”
Francesca D'Annunzio is a Roy W. Howard investigative reporting fellow at the Texas Observer.D’Annunzio has reported on topics ranging from deportations in the Dominican Republic, Christian nationalism, US-Mexico border colonias, right-wing sheriffs, to zoning and housing policy in Texas. Her work has been published or syndicated in The Guardian US, The Dallas Morning News, Religion News Service, The Global Investigative Journalism Network, The Texas Standard, and The Arizona Republic, among others. She received her master’s in investigative journalism from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and is an alumna of the Arabic Flagship and Humanities programs at The University of Texas at Austin. She is proficient in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.
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Henry Wallace. Vice President of the U.S.  1941-1945
​
The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” Wallace wrote in his landmark essay “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in The New York Times Magazine on April 9, 1944.
Wallace’s thoughts and words are even more relevant today than they were then. Here are additional excerpts:
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.…
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…
It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.…
Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Wallace saw the connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who spoke of a master race. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism,” he warned. And “the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions.”
To avert the rise of American fascism, Wallace argued that America must champion “the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy, and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.”

Detroit, MI – New polling of UAW members and member households across key battleground states demonstrates strong support for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, with Harris’ lead over Trump surging in the last month. 

The poll, conducted among union members in key swing states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—shows Harris leading Trump by 22 points. These results underscore the impact of the UAW’s most ambitious political program in decades, which has engaged 293,000 active and retired members, as well as their families, in battleground states. 
The union’s comprehensive outreach program, aimed at connecting with every member, has been crucial in building support for Harris. In addition to a robust phone, text and mail program, UAW members are engaging in conversations at worksites and within their communities. In Michigan, they have participated in an intensive door-to-door campaign, reaching over 200,000 union households so far. 
Among members who reported hearing from the UAW about the presidential election, Harris’ lead over Trump grows to 29 points. These numbers highlight the effectiveness of the union's aggressive strategy to inform members about the candidates' positions on key economic issues, including protecting overtime pay, overhauling harmful trade deals, preventing offshoring, expanding retirement security, and taking on corporate greed. 
Polling data also show significant movement among key demographics. Among white UAW members without a college degree—a group that has leaned towards Trump in recent elections—Harris now holds a five-point lead. 
"When members hear directly from other members about what’s at stake and which candidate will have their backs, we’re able to break through," said UAW President Shawn Fain. "By engaging our members and highlighting the issues that matter – their paychecks, their families, and their futures -- the union makes a real difference.” 
Fain added, “The candidates’ track records speak for themselves. Harris has been in our corner in tough fights. Trump’s been a scab who passed NAFTA 2.0 and wants to bust unions. When you break it down like that and reach members in one-on-one conversations, the choice for president becomes clear.” 
Additional Poll Findings: 

• Harris’ lead expands to 29 points among those who say they have been contacted by the union.
• Michigan UAW members favor Harris by a 20-point margin, with 54% supporting her compared to 34% for Trump.
• Support among non-college-educated men—a key demographic—shows a 14-point margin in favor of Harris.
• UAW members support U.S. Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin by an 18-point margin.

The poll results make clear that the UAW's broad engagement program is not only resonating with members but also translating into increased support for Harris in states that could determine the outcome of the election. By focusing on face-to-face communication, worksite outreach, and personalized engagement, the UAW is driving a significant shift in voter sentiment, positioning the union as a powerful electoral force. In 2020, the UAW’s membership accounted for 9.2% of Biden-Harris' votes and 84% of their margin of victory in Michigan alone. 
The UAW’s plan to win stems from the vision that launched 2023’s Stand Up strike and movement. By putting out the facts, uniting the working class, and letting members lead the way, the UAW’s “Stand Up, Speak Up, Show Up” campaign has mobilized a mass campaign to defeat corporate greed at the ballot box.