Sympathy for the Devils...

[blindpig]

How Corporate Democrats Made Trump Possible: A 10-Year Timeline
Posted on December 10, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Paul R flagged this post by Norman Solomon, noting: “Nothing new, and really a bit understated, but shows it’s becoming fashionable to say this stuff.” While Corporate Democrats indeed should be beaten early and often, trying to pin the tail of their spectacular sellout of ordinary Americans as late as Hillary is all wet. Just look at the timeline. Trump was first elected right after Obama left office, FFS. If his time in office had been good for typical Americans, voters might have eaten the Hillary dog food out of a desire to more-or-less continue current policies rather than bet on a grievance-voicing political novice like Trump.

So the question is when the Democrats when irredeemably bad on their slower-motion betrayal of lower and middle class voters. It started started with Carter and got traction with Bill Clinton, witness NAFTA and the super-predators bill. But the big inflection point occurred with the sainted Obama, who still appears to be above reproach in way too many quarters. Amazing what being a well-spoken minority-looking but culturally white sellout of your pretend-class interests will get you.

To get a better sense of what Obama was always about, please read the 2012 post, Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance. Its opening:

Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.

A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.

Even so, this story does not quite add up. Why did Obama not follow the usual, well greased path of becoming a Supreme Court clerk, and seeking to exert influence through the Washington doors that would have opened up to him after that stint?

A remarkable speech by Robert Fitch puts Obama’s early career in a new perspective that explains the man we see now in the Oval Office: one who pretends to befriend ordinary people but sells them out again and again to wealthy, powerful interests – the banks, big Pharma and health insurers, and lately, the fracking-industrial complex.

Fitch, who died last year, was an academic and journalist, well regarded for his forensic and archival work, as described by Doug Henwood in an obituary in the Nation. He is best known for his book Solidarity for Sale, which chronicled corruption in American unions, but his work that is germane to his analysis of Obama is Assassination of New York. In that, he documented the concerted efforts by powerful real estate and financial interests to drive manufacturing and low-income renters out of Manhattan so they could turn it over to office and residential space for high income professionals.

Fitch gave his eye-opening speech before an unlikely audience at an unlikely time: the Harlem Tenants Association in November 2008, hard on the heels of Obama’s electrifying presidential win. The first part contains his prescient prediction: that Obama’s Third Way stance, that we all need to put our differences aside and get along, was tantamount to advocating the interests of the wealthy, since they seldom give anything to the have-nots without a fight.

That discussion alone is reason to read the piece. But the important part is his description of the role that Obama played in the redevelopment of the near South Side of Chicago, and how he and other middle class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and his wife Michelle, advanced at the expense of poor blacks by aligning themselves with what Fitch calls “friendly FIRE”: powerful real estate players like the Pritzkers and the Crown family, major banks, the University of Chicago, as well as non-profit community developers and real estate reverends.

Don’t take my word for it. Download the speech and read it. And then circulate it widely. And thank Michael Hudson, Fitch’s friend for over 30 years, for making this document available.

You can find the speech as an embedded document here.

Let’s provide some updates to the Obama rap sheet from his presidency:

Obama campaigned with Paul Volcker, giving the strong signal that he would use the feared, no-bullshit Volcker as Treasury Secretary to get tough with financiers. Instead he kicked Volcker upstairs to an inconsequential post and picked the toady Timothy Geithner.

The Bush Administration courteously left $75 billion of the $750 billion of the TARP to the Obama Administration for foreclosure relief. Nothing of the sort was done. Instead, we later got HAMP, which Geithner admitted was not actually to help homeowners, but to “foam the runway” for banks by attenuating foreclosures. I have the image of homeowners lying on runways and banks-as-landing-airplanes reducing them to bloody pulp.

Obama promised to increase the Federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It is still at $7.25.

Obama chose health industry lobbyists to draft the Affordable Care Act. Drug and health insurer stocks traded up when it was passed.

Obama tried “reforming” Social Security and Medicare. Luckily his Grand Bargain did not get done.

There may be better ways to cut the data, but this chart illustrates how friendly the Obama years were to the top wealthy:



And remember, Biden’s nomination would have been impossible without the Obama-orchestrated weekend of the long knives, which succeeded in its big aim of knocking out Sanders. And please do not tell me Sanders could have carried on. Key staffers pressed him to quit then. They would have left or continued with little enthusiasm. You cannot carry on a campaign when you are hemorrhaging personnel.

We’ll now turn to the bill of particulars against Team Dem under Hillary’s and Biden’s nominal stewardship.

By Norman Solomon, the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Originally published at Common Dreams

Ten years after Donald Trump first ran for president, he stands at the helm of Titanic America. How did this happen?

No factors were more pivotal than the outlooks and actions of the Democratic Party leadership. Scrutinizing them now is vital not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a clear focus on ways to prevent further catastrophe.

Here’s the actual history that corporate Democrats pretend didn’t happen:

2016: Hillary Clinton offers more of the status quo. Her allies in the Democratic Party pull out all the stops so she can win the party’s presidential nomination. With a big assist from the Democratic National Committee, she prevails over the strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, but her campaign trail goes downhill from there. After rallying behind Sanders’s genuine progressive populism, many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.

2017: Democratic Party leaders can hardly blame themselves or their nominee for the virtually unbelievable circumstance of the Trump presidency. A critical focus on Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street won’t do. Neither will critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. But blaming Trump’s victory on Russia becomes an obsessive theme.

2018: The Democratic leadership is mapping out a battle plan for the midterm elections in November. At the same time, a key priority is to thwart the inside threat posed by progressive forces. Establishment Democrats are keeping a watchful eye and political guns trained on Bernie Sanders.

2019: Democrats take control of the House, and a large cast of political characters is off and running for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are at the left edge, while more than a dozen others jostle for media attention. For elites determined to retain undemocratic power, seeing either Sanders or Warren in the Oval Office would be the worst possible outcome.

2020: Early in the year, the economic populism of the Sanders campaign continues to catch fire, while many forces team up to function as fire extinguishers. The Democratic Party establishment acts to smother the grassroots blaze. After Joe Biden’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary puts his campaign on life-support, rescue comes eighteen days later from South Carolina, where Biden wins a landslide primary victory—and then several corporate-friendly contenders quickly drop out of the race and effusively endorse him. When Biden clinches the nomination, progressives largely close ranks behind him to defeat Trump. Biden squeaks through.

2021: President Biden’s first year includes backing and signing legislation with real benefits for tens of millions of Americans. But his resolve dissipates. Before the end of the year, he abandons Build Back Better legislation that would have been transformational. Notably, Biden withdraws all US troops from Afghanistan in late summer—but overall he opts to fuel militarism, with ever-higher Pentagon spending instead of devoting adequate resources to meet human needs and protect nature. The president goes full speed ahead with “modernization” plans for ever more dangerous nuclear weapons that already have a pre-overrun price tag of $1.7 trillion.

2022: Biden relapses into his customary “moderate” political mode, while his capacity to speak coherently weakens. Party discipline, internalized by Democrats in Congress, precludes independent-minded leadership as they begin to proclaim that Biden should run for re-election. Conformity of groupthink and fear of retribution from the White House keep people quiet.

2023: A real-life Shakespearean tragedy unfolds as Biden throws down a gauntlet to run for re-election even while his mental frailty becomes more evident. Enablers ignore the party’s base, with polls continuing to show that most Democrats don’t want him to be the next nominee (including 94 percent of Democrats under 30). A common canard—pushed by Biden’s coterie of sycophants—contends that because he defeated Trump once, he’s the best person to do it again; the claim ignores the fact that Trump 2020 represented an unpopular status quo, and Biden 2024 would represent an even more unpopular status quo, as “right track / wrong track” polling makes crystal clear. Soon after Hamasattacks Israel on October 7 and the Israeli military starts its siege of Gaza, Biden begins to further alienate many of his party’s usual voters by massively boosting US military aid as the slaughter of Palestinian civilians escalates.

2024: Among top Democrats, denial about Biden’s evident cognitive infirmity grows along with the infirmity itself. Even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June, the political reflex of dissembling prevents him from bowing out for another 28 days. That leaves 107 days for the newly installed nominee Kamala Harris to pick up the pieces before Election Day. At first it seems that she might find ways to depart from coming across as Biden’s yes-woman, but there is no such departure. Nothing epitomizes the Harris campaign’s moral collapse more than her insistence on echoing the Biden line about Gaza while the US continues to arm Israel’s military as it methodically kills Palestinian civilians. In the process, Harris chooses to ignore both human decency and polls showing that far more voters would be likely to cast their ballots for her if she were to come out against sending more armaments to Israel. Electoral disaster ensues.

Last month, two events showed the huge contradiction between the potential for true progressive change and the dire reality of feckless Democratic Party leaders. When socialist Zohran Mamdani won election as mayor of New York after running as a Democrat, he said: “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.” A week later, eight members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus surrendered to Trump, betraying efforts to defend Obamacare and a healthcare status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured. The capitulation meant that the nation’s healthcare crisis would get even worse.

Craven and conformist Democratic Party leadership—coloring inside corporate lines while enmeshed with rich backers—hardly offers a plausible way to defeat the Trump forces, much less advance a humane political agenda. Saving the country from autocracy requires recognizing and overcoming the chokehold that Democratic leaders have on the party.

The timeline above is drawn from my new book about the 10-year political descent into the current inferno, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, which is free as an e-book or PDF at BlueRoad.info.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12 ... eline.html

File this one under 'limited hangout'. True enough, but Dem betrayal, if you can call it that, goes back to Taft Hartley. Because the Dem commitment to the working class only existed 1936-1937, with socialists making substantial inroads in the working class. They were never really on our side except when scared shitless. Sure, people have entered government with sincere intention, but the system eats them up or
compromises them to worthlessness. Consider Bernie, I'm sure he was a decent person at one time...

[blindpig]

Schumer, Jeffries Refuse to Join Democrats’ Growing Calls to Slash ICE Spending
Posted on January 11, 2026 by Conor Gallagher

Conor here: I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything else.

The Democrats are just as responsible for the masked agents terrorizing American streets as the other side. To briefly recap.

Obama

Nate Bear
@NateB_Panic
·
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Always worth a reminder that Obama inherited ICE as a fledgling agency, increased its budget 300%, established a nationwide network of detention centres and expanded the 'secure communities' enforcement program from 14 counties under Bush Jr to all 3,181 jurisdictions in America

Biden



As always, Team Blue positions itself as just a little less bad. In this case, five percent annual increases instead of seven percent under Trump I. Funding under Trump 2.0 has gone through the roof with at least a tripling of the ICE budget.

Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), while always voting to increase ICE’s budget, have in the past released strongly worded statements criticizing the agency. Oddly enough, those stern performative letters didn’t work. Aside from gunning people down, here’s a report from the ground in Minneapolis showing the level of dystopia:


Someone I personally know in Minneapolis posted this to Facebook a few hours ago.

This isnt what orderly law enforcement looks like. No charge, no location info? How do you even know citizens are getting due process here? pic.twitter.com/y2pzvPq7iQ

— Liminal Warmth ‍ (@liminal_warmth) January 10, 2026

And as more evidence of the absurdity of the moment, ICE used to have a “Human Rights Violators and War Crimes” page that promised to “prevent the admission of known or suspected war criminals, persecutors and human rights violators into the United States.”

Funny the masked agents are nowhere to be found when genocidaires like Bibi and the head chopper Al-Sharaa come to town.Alas, the human rights page is now outdated with a note at the top that reads:

In an effort to keep ICE.gov current, the archive contains content from a previous administration or is otherwise outdated. This information is archived and not reflective of current practice.

No doubt.

By Julia Conley, a staff writer at Common Dreams. Cross posted from Common Dreams.

The killing of Renee Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis this week came as Republicans in Congress were planning to bring a homeland security spending bill to the House floor, deciding on whether the agency that’s surged thousands of armed agents into communities across the country should have increased funding—and progressive lawmakers are demanding that the Democrats use the upcoming government funding deadline to hopefully reduce the department’s ability to wreak further havoc.

“I just don’t understand how we provide votes for a bill that funds the extent of the depravity,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told CNN Thursday. “I know we can’t fix everything in the appropriations bill but we should be looking at ways we can put some commonsense limitations on their ability to bring violence to our cities.”

But the top Democratic leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) both appeared to have little interest in discussing how their party can use the appropriations process as leverage to rein in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies that have taken part in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation.

Both Schumer and Jeffries sharply criticized Wednesday’s shooting and the Trump administration’s insistence that, contrary to mounting video evidence, the ICE agent who shot Good was acting in self-defense.

But Jeffries said Thursday that he was focused on passing other appropriations bills that were ultimately approved by the House.

“We’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time,” Jeffries told reporters.

With Congress facing a January 30 deadline for approving government spending packages—and with public disapproval of ICE at an all-time high—several lawmakers have said this week that right now is the “appropriate time” to rein in the agency in any way the Democrats can.

“Statements and letters are not enough, and the appropriations process and the [continuing resolution] expiring January 31 is our opportunity,” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) told Axios.

Schumer also refused to say whether the Democrats would use the appropriations process as leverage to cut funding to ICE, whose budget is set to balloon to $170 billion following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year. Republicans will need Democratic support to pass a spending bill in the Senate, where 60 votes are required.

The Senate leader said only that he has “lots of problems with ICE” when asked whether he would support abolishing the agency—a proposal whose support has gone by 20 percentage points among voters in just one year, according to a recent survey. Both leaders also would not commit to slashing the homeland security budget should the Democrats win back majorities in Congress this year.

“It’s hard to be an opposition party when you refuse to oppose the blatantly illegal and immoral things being done by the opposition,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health.

Sharing a clip of Jeffries’ remarks to reporters about the agency’s funding, historian Moshik Temkin said that “people need to understand that at its core ICE is a bipartisan project, increasingly funded and normalized over multiple Democratic administrations and congressional majorities, and a few of them (not this guy) are starting to realize how foolish, weak, and misguided they were.”

Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are among the progressive lawmakers calling on the Democrats to demand reduced funding for ICE—even if it means another government shutdown months after the longest one in US history late last year, which began when the Democrats refused to join the GOP in passing a spending bill that would have allowed Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire. Ultimately, some Senate Democrats caved, and the subsidies lapsed.

“We can’t just keep authorizing money for these illegal killers,” Jayapal told Axios. “That’s what they are, this rogue force.”

Ocasio-Cortez told the Independent that Democrats should “absolutely” push to cut funding.

“This Congress, this Republican Congress, while they cut a trillion dollars to Americans’ healthcare, and they exploded the ICE budget to $170 billion making it one of the largest paramilitary forces in the United States with zero accountability as they shoot US citizens in the head—absolutely,” she said.

On the podcast The Majority Report, Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder called on progressive Democrats to demand Schumer’s ouster in light of his refusal to take action to rein in ICE as its violence in American communities escalates.

“Change the news cycle and show that you’ll be an opposition party,” said Vigeland. “Call for his ouster.”

Seder added that Schumer “has the ability to wage a fight to prevent the funding of DHS. He has the ability to do that and he doesn’t want it. He’s running away from any leverage he has, deliberately.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/01 ... nding.html

Cuck Schumer is the real Democratic Party. These pathetic 'progressives' are nothing but votes for the ruling class.

The Democratic Party is the piss which sets the Republican dye in the national fabric.

[blindpig]

Zohran Mamdani Is A Tool Of Empire
Nate Bear
Jan 11, 2026



Yesterday the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, condemned people for protesting against the sale of land in the West Bank, sales which were happening in a New York synagogue. As part of his condemnation, he labelled Hamas a terrorist organisation.



I did a tweet in response that said this.



Lots of people didn’t like it. It was reposted by the editor of Current Affairs magazine, Nathan Robinson, who said this.



I stand by everything I said.

If the people you elect to fight fascists are regurgitating fascist propaganda, propaganda that manufactured consent for a genocide, A GENOCIDE, then that is, on a very material level, more harmful to justice than the fascists themselves.

To me this is not complicated.

It’s not the fascists who rob you of hope and the possibility of justice, because they offer none in the first place. The people who rob you of hope and the possibility of justice are those who claim to stand for hope and justice then side with the oppressor.

An ally who stabs you in the back is worse than an enemy who stabs you in the chest.

Again, I struggle to see how this is complicated.

What Mamdani said was shameful, utterly shameful.

Labelling Palestinian resistance ‘terrorism’ is literally how consent was manufactured for a genocide. Doesn’t everyone know this? Did we not just watch two years of Israeli politicians and western Zionists cry ‘Hamas’ to defend, cover and justify genocide? Surely everyone saw this, including Mamdani.

So given this, how can anyone defend what he said? And how can anyone defend what he didn’t say?

I wrote specifically about this a few months ago. I wrote about how western media laid the groundwork for a holocaust by repeating the phrase ‘terror group Hamas’ over and over for twenty-odd years, brainwashing the public into granting Israel the license to murder whoever it wanted in Gaza, whenever it wanted.

“It was essential that in the western mind Gaza was synonymous with terror, so when the timing and conditions were right for a final solution, Israel could apply that final solution without friction. Hamas is the civic authority in Gaza. The armed wing of Hamas has never attacked outside Israel and the occupied territories and never wanted to. Why would they? Hamas is a local resistance group struggling against a nuclear-armed oppressor who stole their land, stole their homes and inflicted generations of apartheid on them. Only ten countries in the world proscribe them as a terror group. Do we believe it’s because these are the best, right and most moral countries in the world? Of course not.”

And Mamdani didn’t even bother both-sidesing it. He didn’t condemn the illegal sales of Palestinian land being held on his watch, in his city. No. He only condemned the people protesting against this.

He picked a side.

He picked the side of Zionism.

Openly, blatantly, unabashedly.

He chose to stand with empire, to stand with the oppressors and against the oppressed, and repeat the brainwashing propaganda that for decades has justified genocide and apartheid.

It’s utterly shameful.

Yesterday when asked why he only condemned anti-apartheid protestors and not the illegal sales of West Bank land, he conceded that the sales break international law. So he knows international law is being broken in the city he runs, but does, and says, nothing about it. His condemnation of the protest and his insistence on ‘protecting worshippers’ ignores the only context that matters. He makes it sound as if protestors are protesting Jews for practicing their religion, when he knows they are protesting direct and illegal complicity in apartheid.

I can only think that defenders of Mamdani have a belief in resistance to apartheid and genocide which is primarily aesthetic. Their main concern is feeling good about their guy, and about the system of American liberal democracy which produced him. The only reason I can think of for a leftist to defend genocidal rhetoric and actions is if you believe, naively, in political heroes. If you’re desperate for the system to prove it can produce good guys.

On some level I get it. We all want to believe that despite our cynicism, despite our knowledge of a crooked electoral system controlled by billionaires and corporations, the possibility still exists that we can find the right combination that unlocks the right candidate who delivers justice.

But honestly, if leftists are not going to set the bar at ‘repeating Israeli talking points that led to a genocide is bad and unacceptable,’ then I have no idea what we’re doing. If they’re not going to condemn their man for facilitating apartheid and the breaking of international law in his city, then we may as well pack up and go home.

I think the fear of Robinson and defenders of Mamdani is that their man might be proof, yet again, that the system is irredeemable. But they can’t bring themselves to see this. Because if liberal electoralism isn’t the answer, what is? Clinging to a belief in electoralism staves off painful revolutionary thoughts.

I suppose the latest from Mamdani is actually not that surprising. He retained ultra-Zionist Jessica Tisch as police chief, partied with celebrities who donate money to the IDF, has droned on about antisemitism since his election, and caved on ‘globalise the intifada’ under Zionist pressure.

I’m not the big shot editor of a New York magazine. I’m just a guy with a blog who wanted, like everyone who cares about Palestine, justice and the future, for Mamdani to be better than this.

But when the evidence is stacking up that he’s not that guy, I’m going to call it out, and I hope most of my readers appreciate that.

What I’m not going to do is ignore obviously appalling actions by progressives in positions of power to protect the sensibilities of liberals and aesthetic leftists like Robinson.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/zohran-ma ... dium=email

That was a real good tweet, Mr Bear. It applies to the Democratic Party entirely, including and especially Bernie, AOC and the rest of the sheepdogs.

[blindpig]

ICE Exposes Democratic Party Irrelevance
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 28 Jan 2026


House Democrats who joined Republicans in voting to continue ICE funding. Image: Facebook, Washington State Memes

The Democratic Party is useful only to the oligarch class, who give them their marching orders. Doing anything that serves the people is never on their agenda. They will not address the ICE violations of law and human and civil rights, or any other needs Democratic Party voters want them to address.

The Trump administration focuses relentlessly on immigration enforcement as a political tool. That focus isn’t surprising considering that an important goal of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is to Make America White Again, or rather more white than it is now. Trump is so fixated on deporting immigrants from the Global South that he even takes this rhetorical show on the road, using part of his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to get his fellow white nations to also act against what he has referred to as an “invasion.”

“The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we're taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed … it's not a nation, got no government, got no police, got no mili… got no nothing. … We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.”

Trump was actually preaching to the choir, as Canada and European states have also enacted laws to decrease immigration and to criminalize immigrant populations. His fellow white leaders are very much on his side. The president who sent National Guard and federal law enforcement to police cities in the U.S. and who warned about a domestic “enemy within” which he said must be dealt with militarily is quite serious about achieving his goal of ejecting Black and brown immigrants and reserving what he referred to as “Black jobs” for Black Americans.

The end result of Trump’s obsession is that two white, U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were recently shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. The killing of first Renee Good and more recently, of Alex Pretti elicited outrage, and the pattern of denial and character assassination of the murdered people became too much for wide swaths of white America to tolerate. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who intended to assassinate ICE officers, even though the plethora of video footage shows nothing of the sort. Pretti, a military veteran and nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital, was beaten and then shot 10 times by ICE officers.

Ironically, the usually gun-loving administration ran afoul of MAGA gun rights supporters after numerous officials used Pretti’s legal gun possession as a justification for killing him. But Minnesota is an open carry state and not only was Pretti acting within the laws of that jurisdiction, but he was doing what republicans usually praise.

Thousands of people had already gathered in protest in Minneapolis and to participate in a general strike on January 23. Pretti was killed the following day. Republicans began to back away from expressing support for the administration’s ICE policy and Trump himself climbed down a bit and declared there would be an investigation. Corporate CEOs also began to offer comments and Jamie Dimon of Chase opined, “I don’t like what I’m seeing,” when asked about immigration enforcement.

While Republicans began to demur and ruling class chieftains expressed opposition, the so-called leadership of the Democratic Party were largely silent. They claimed to be outraged by the ICE onslaught, but when it was time to show opposition, seven of them joined Republicans to maintain ICE funding. Just two days before Pretti was killed, seven House democrats voted with the Republicans to continue ICE funding. House leader Hakeem Jeffries recommended a vote against funding but there was no whip operation to guarantee that his members would stay in line, a sure sign of a political performance. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Laura Gillen of New York, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Tom Suozzi of New York, and Congressional Black Caucus member Don Davis of North Carolina were the seven who voted against the will of most Democratic Party voters.

Jeffries’ protestations were all for show. The Democrats had no intention of opposing Trump and they didn’t until after Pretti was killed and public opinion moved firmly against the ICE operation in Minnesota. Senate Democrats now say they will vote against ICE funding in a vote scheduled to take place on January 30. Should they actually show such a degree of resolve, there will be another government shutdown, which is why no one should trust their word.

Let us recall how Democrats had Trump on the ropes and chose to let him escape when they engineered a rescue. The 43-day federal government shutdown was working in their favor. Furloughed federal workers, low-income Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients and 24 million Obamacare enrollees whose health insurance premiums doubled and tripled wanted the Democrats to come to their rescue. Trump and Republicans were on the back foot until eight Democratic Party senators gave in.

Democrats had done well in the election results in November, winning two governor races and local elections around the country. California voters passed a referendum allowing gerrymandering that would increase the number of Democratic seats in that state. All the stars were aligned for a win against Trump.

At that time this columnist pointed out a longstanding tradition of duopoly collusion. The two parties have roles to play and sometimes that means the Democrats will go through a pretend opposition. In this case Jeffries said he will vote no and recommended that others do as well while doing nothing to ensure that members vote for what he claimed to want. The willing traitors step up to perform their assigned roles and Democratic Party voters get something other than what they wanted.

The reality is that their party is now completely irrelevant. Republicans have the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump is deeply committed to his agenda, while Democrats act like human weathervanes, changing directions along with the political winds. Although that analogy is only somewhat true. They go through the motions to give an impression of taking action when they have already decided to do little or nothing.

Even now, they are talking compromise about ICE body cameras, which they already wear as they shoot people, and rules that already exist that ICE doesn’t follow. A federal judge in Minnesota ordered the ICE Acting Director to show up in court because so many orders have been violated already. “The court’s patience is at an end,” is an indication of how useless any compromises will be.

ICE must be abolished. The federal immigration enforcement agency must be torn up and reconfigured anew. Minnesotans have reached that conclusion and so have millions of other people around the country. Trump has gotten away with detaining citizens and others who are legally in the country, using children as bait to lure their parents, and enriching private contractors to hold people who should be free.

Barack Obama, as president, the “deporter in chief,” wrote a tome displaying vintage bothsidesism, declaring that federal law enforcement has a tough job but also saying that the public want accountability from ICE. The fact that he finally spoke up is an indication that public anger gave him protection, but it is a warning to be careful of the Democratic Party's modus operandi of branding themselves as the people’s party while doing little except giving lip service.

Billionaire donors are calling the shots, establishing think tanks like Searchlight Institute, which tell democrats to be right wing and advise them that voters really do support ICE and don’t want it to be abolished. The control of oligarchs has made the Democratic Party meaningless, an irrelevance that voters must reject once and for all.

The people of Minnesota are still showing the way, despite two deaths. They do what they can to obstruct ICE operations and whether they realize it or not, they are providing the leadership that millions of people so desperately want. They are showing that electoral politics will not save us, that popular action is the only route to change. The danger now is cooptation from Obama and company singing siren songs that are pleasing to the ear but that will send the people to destruction, just as the sirens did in ancient mythology.

Obama and his heirs have nothing to offer. The Democratic Party’s only purpose is to obstruct any progressive change, to convince people that they are on their side when they are actually committed to preventing even the most token reformism, especially in a moment of crisis. The billionaire funders are in charge of that party and the sooner the rank and file realize that the more quickly they can affect the changes they want on their own.

https://blackagendareport.com/ice-expos ... rrelevance.

(The so-called 'big-tent' is a straight jacket imposed by the DNC in the service of the ruling class. DNC delenda est )

[blindpig]

Will Democrats help Trump defuse mass protests over ICE killings?

Finian Cunningham

January 28, 2026

The mass protests in Minneapolis against Trump’s immigration crackdown have the potential to spark a nationwide revolt. Protesters are calling for a national general strike.

The proximate cause of public anger is the lethal violence of federal police raids against immigrants. But that abuse has broadened to trigger a wider range of popular anger with and repudiation of the Trump administration’s increasingly dictatorial conduct.

Two American citizens have now been gunned down in the street by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol. Videos have shown masked agents manhandling peaceful protesters, ramming doors of homes armed with assault rifles and without warrants, and snatching families into detention centers.

Scenes across U.S. cities now resemble how American troops kicked down doors in Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous other foreign places.

Video footage proves that senior Trump administration officials have been telling barefaced lies to justify the brutal violence and violation of basic human rights.

The latest victim was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and intensive care nurse, who was shot in the back as he was pinned to the ground by a group of border patrol agents. Pretti was a licensed gun holder whose pistol was removed from his waistband by the agents, who then shot him 10 times at point-blank range in the back. It was a public lynching.

Kristi Noem, Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who “brandished a semi-automatic weapon” at officers. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, claimed the nurse was intent on committing a massacre. He wasn’t. He was trying to help a woman who had been knocked to the ground by the agents.

Bystanders and several videos clearly show Pretti was not holding a gun. He was holding a mobile phone in the air, above his head, when immigration agents pepper-sprayed him and started beating him to the ground. He was not threatening any of them. He was shot dead without provocation. Executed.

Two weeks before that, on January 7, another Minneapolis resident, Renée Nicole Good, was shot in the face as she politely drove away from ICE officers. Again, Trump officials maligned her with claims that she “weaponized” her vehicle and was putting officers in danger, who shot her in self-defense. Her killer pointed his gun through the driver’s window and shot her point-blank in the head.

None of the killers has been charged. There have not even been criminal investigations. Local police forces have been prevented from securing the crime scenes.

The people of Minneapolis are furious and disgusted by Trump’s goon squads, who have descended on this and other cities under the guise of rounding up illegal aliens.

The cold-blooded murder of U.S. citizens has shocked the nation with a dreadful realization that Trump is running the country like a police state. Even mainstream pundits like Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under Clinton, are using words like “fascism” and “Gestapo” to describe what’s going on.

Worryingly for Trump, polls show that there is mounting public anger among all voters, Republicans, Democrats, and independents. There is a growing sense that the United States is descending into a despotic regime where the Constitutional rights of citizens are no longer respected.

The day after Alex Pretti was murdered, Trump’s top concern was griping about a legal challenge to stop plans for his new $400 million ballroom at the White House. Meanwhile, the First Lady was holding a private screening of a cheesy film, “Melania,” depicting her glamorous return to the White House after the 2024 election.

But it’s the blatant lies and slander being told about the victims of Trump’s immigration paramilitaries. People across the U.S. are sickened by the outrageous White House denials and impunity given to state killers, while innocent victims exercising their right to peaceful protest are denigrated as “domestic terrorists.”

In a telling move, Trump has made a U-turn in a “conciliatory” phone call to the Democratic Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, about the violence in Minneapolis. The president is trying to back away from the false claims that were made by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller.

Gregory Bovino, the ICE chief in Minneapolis, has been transferred. Tom Homan, the White House’s Border Czar, is taking over the anti-immigration operations.

These moves indicate that Trump realizes he is losing the issue of his immigration crackdown, which is being seen as a wider wedge for repressive federal power. A political powder-keg is building, and it needs to be defused.

Trump and his acolytes had for weeks been accusing Walz and other Democratic leaders of inciting the public protests against ICE and border patrol raids.

Trump claims the protests are a cover-up of widespread fraud of state funds by Somali immigrants that the Democrats have facilitated. There is scant evidence of this alleged scam, which appears to have been largely whipped up by MAGA-type influencers to justify the anti-immigrant crackdown.

Border Czar Homan is now reportedly mediating with Walz and other Democratic leaders to dampen the public fury over the ICE violence.

Trump reportedly told Governor Walz that he is considering withdrawing some ICE personnel from Minneapolis. But there is no guarantee that that will happen, nor is there any direction on launching criminal investigations of the ICE agents who have unlawfully killed two U.S. citizens.

It remains to be seen if the mass protests in Minneapolis and seething public repudiation of the Trump regime across the United States will be placated by the latest advertised moves to curtail ICE operations.

There have been growing, widespread calls for a general strike across the U.S. Those calls have come from communities and workers, not from the Democratic Party leadership. There appears to be a revolutionary mass movement to bring the entire country to a halt – infused with anger not just over ICE killings and abuses but also over exploding levels of wealth inequality and Trump’s overseas wars and support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Democratic Party and the Republicans are two sides of the same coin when it comes to supporting capitalist corruption and inequality, and overseas wars. But the Democrats have always had a special function of diverting and defusing a radical public movement rejecting the War Party duopoly.

Trump’s police state has mobilized a wide rejection of the mainstream political and media establishment. Minneapolis is a potential historic turning point towards a genuinely radical popular movement based on values of equality and workers’ rights.

The conciliatory engagement by Democrats with Trump to de-escalate the violence on America’s streets that he has unleashed could end up channeling the protests into a safe dead-end of bipartisan compromise. Then again, the disgust and desire for radical change may be too big to contain.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/ ... -killings/


One thing: if the persons murdered by ICE had been black would the Dems and media raise such a hue and cry? I don't think so.