Dispatches February 2026

 NATIONWIDE RALLIES PROTEST ICE KILLING OF RENEE GOOD, FASCIST TRUMP. Hundreds of demonstrations took place in cities large and small across the United States the weekend of Jan. 10-11 to denounce the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration enforcement officer Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, Jon Queally noted at CommonDreams (1/11).

The wave of “ICE Out for Good” protests arrives as a consolidated expression of outrage directed at President Donald Trump for his authoritarian tactics, cruel policies, and a lawlessness seemingly without end. Just a day after Good was killed in Minnesota, two other people were shot and wounded by federal agents in Portland, Oregon.

“Renee Nicole Good and the Portland victims are just the most recent victims of ICE’s reign of terror,” said the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind the weekend protests, said in a statement. “ICE has brutalized communities for decades, but its violence under the Trump regime has accelerated.”

The killing of Good by Jonathan Ross, a 10-year veteran of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency, came just days after Trump’s unlawful military attack on Venezuela which culminated in the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Many who protested noted that the two events are deeply related as they epitomize the increasingly violent nature of the president’s second term.

Also notable is how the act of war against Venezuela and the killing of Good bookended the fifth anniversary of the Trump-backed insurrection that took place on Jan. 6, 2021. While many marked that occasion with solemn remembrances, the Trump administration released a fabricated version of the day that was denounced as Orwellian and gaslighting of the highest form.

As Mother Jones’ David Corn wrote on Jan. 8: “The military assault on Venezuela, the shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent, the launch of the White House’s new revisionist website about Jan. 6—these three events convey a powerful and unsettling message from Donald Trump and his crew: Violence is ours to use, at home and abroad, to get what we want.”

The Jan. 10 protests—organized by the Not Above the Law Coalition, MoveOn, the ACLU, Indivisible, and others—took place from Minneapolis to New York and from Chicago to Los Angeles. Demonstrations and rallies also took place in Portland, Oregon as well as Portland, Maine, with hundreds of events and rallies in smaller cities and communities nationwide.

“It feels like maybe we’re hitting a tipping point,” 49-year-old Ben Person, who marched in Minneapolis, told The New York Times.

“The shootings in Minneapolis and Portland were not the beginning of ICE’s cruelty, but they need to be the end,” said Deirdre Schifeling of the ACLU. “These tragedies are simply proof of one fact: the Trump administration and its federal agents are out of control, endangering our neighborhoods, and trampling on our rights and freedom. This weekend, Americans all across the country are demanding that they stop.”

At a rally in Portland, Maine the evening of Jan. 10, Troy Jackson, the Democratic former president of the State Senate now running for governor, said the killing of Good in Minneapolis made clear to him that such violence against regular citizens could indeed happen anywhere:

For one demonstrator in Minneapolis, the imperial and authoritarian drive of the Trump administration reminded him of the galactic villains of the Empire in the Star Wars series:

The organizers of the weekend protests said that public shows of dissent will remain key in the coming days, weeks, and months.

“We will resist the government’s attacks by building community, by documenting atrocities, by protesting nonviolently, by showing kindness and solidarity at all times,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, another of the organizing groups.

“We will meet them in the streets, in the courts, at the day labor corners. We will meet them everywhere. And we will win. We are not afraid or discouraged. And we will not be defeated,” Alvarado added. “The more we stand together as a community of determination and love, the harder it will be for them to divide and destroy us.”

GOP EAGER TO DEFEND ICE AGENT WHO KILLED RENEE GOOD. In a sick and twisted way, Republicans have proved President Donald Trump right when he said that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (1/11).

In the wake of a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting and killing an unarmed U.S. citizen during an immigration raid in Minneapolis, GOP lawmakers have all lined up behind Trump and the agent, while making vile and defamatory statements about the victim.

The most despicable comment came from Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who said that he feels no remorse for Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother who was killed on Jan. 7 while serving as an observer of an ICE operation in her community.

“If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what’s coming to you,” Fine said in an appearance on Newsmax. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved.”

But he was hardly alone in disparaging Good and parroting the Trump administration’s lies about the killing.

Trump falsely said that the agent who killed Good was injured and that Good was trying to run him over with her car—even though the incident was captured on video from several angles, showing that the agent was not in danger and was not injured as Good tried to slowly drive past him.

Republicans then pushed those same lies, which Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said is a naked attempt to help the agent avoid accountability. 

“It appears that the ICE agent was struck by the car, and in the first video you just showed you can see the agent limping away after he fired shots,” Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on Fox Business. “So I agree with President Trump and Secretary Noem that this was an act of domestic terrorism. These were, it appears, paid agitators.”

Most Republicans who commented on the killing said that they stand with ICE, while Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee goes as far as calling ICE agents “heroes.”

“ICE officers are heroes, not villains,” she wrote on X.

Other lawmakers absurdly blamed Democrats for the killing, saying that their criticism of ICE’s lawless and violent behavior is what led to this.

“This clearly appears to be the result of this just months-long rhetoric against law enforcement and people encouraging that kind of violence,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Jan. 8.

“I pray that every federal law enforcement officer on the ground in Minnesota right now remains safe as they carry out their vital mission,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer wrote on X “Tim Walz and [Minneapolis Mayor] Jacob Frey are cowards who are inciting violence to distract from their own failures. It’s dangerous. Stay safe, @ICEgov.”

FED CHAIR POWELL SAYS HE WON’T BOW TO TRUMP AS DOJ LAUNCHES CRIMINAL PROBE. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed in a defiant statement Jan. 11 that the US Department of Justice is threatening him with criminal charges, a step the central bank chief condemned as “intimidation” for not bowing to President Donald Trump’s demands on interest rate policy, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (1/12).

“I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law,” Powell said in a video statement. “But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.”

Powell said the Justice Department, which Trump has repeatedly wielded against his political opponents, served the Federal Reserve Jan. 9 with grand jury subpoenas related to the central bank chair’s congressional testimony on Fed office building renovations.

But Powell, who was first nominated to his role by Trump in 2017, said accusations that he misled lawmakers about the scope of the renovations were a “pretext” obscuring the real reason the Justice Department is pursuing a criminal indictment.

“The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president,” said Powell. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

The New York Times reported Jan. 11 that the investigation into Powell was approved late last year by Trump loyalist Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host now serving as US attorney for the District of Columbia. Trump claimed he didn’t “know anything about” the Powell investigation, but added, “He’s certainly not very good at the Fed, and he’s not very good at building buildings.”

Powell, whose term as Fed chair ends in May, has repeatedly defied Trump in public, dismissing the president’s threat to remove him from the helm of the central bank as unlawful and, at one point, fact-checking Trump to his face about the estimated cost of Fed renovations.

Powell has also publicly blamed Trump’s tariff policies for driving up inflation.

“It’s really tariffs that are causing the most of the inflation overshoot,” Powell said last month, following the central bank’s December 10 meeting. The Fed cut interest rates three times last year, bringing them down by a total of 75 basis points.

But Trump has pushed for much more aggressive rate cuts and attacked Powell—who does not have sole authority over interest rate decisions—as a “moron” and “truly one of my worst appointments.”

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, applauded Powell’s “bold defense of the rule of law” and said that Fed policy “should not be subject to intimidation and bullying by Trump loyalist prosecutors.”

“The Department of Justice should serve the rule of law, not the vindictive instincts of an authoritarian president,” said Gilbert. “And it should never misuse its criminal enforcement powers to pursue pretextual prosecutions against the president’s political opponents or those who show a modicum of independence.”

Democratic members of Congress also rose to Powell’s defense.

“Threatening criminal action against a Fed chair because he refuses to do the president’s bidding on interest rates undermines the rule of law, which is the very foundation for American prosperity,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on social media.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) added that “no one should lose their sense of outrage about what is happening to our country.”

“This is an effort to create an autocratic state. It’s that plain,” said Murphy. “Trump is threatening to imprison the chairman of Federal Reserve simply because he won’t enact the rate policy Trump wants.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a frequent critic of Powell and Fed rate policy during his tenure, wrote late Sunday that Trump “wants to nominate a new Fed chair AND push Powell off the board for good to complete his corrupt takeover of our central bank.”

Powell’s term as a Fed governor runs through January 2028. Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, is widely seen as the president’s likely pick to replace Powell as chair of the central bank.

EU WARNS OF ‘END OF NATO’ AS TRUMP RAMPS UP THREATS TO TAKE GREENLAND. The European Union’s defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, said Europe must build up its military capabilities as President Donald Trump threatens to rip up the central agreement that’s underpinned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than 75 years with his escalating demand that the US should be able to take control of Greenland—a semiautonomous territory of NATO founding member Denmark, Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams (1/12) .

Kubilius said he agreed with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s recent assessment that a US takeover of Greenland, home to about 56,000 people, “will be the end of NATO.”

“But also among people it will be also very, very negative,” Kubilius told Reuters at a security conference in Sweden.

Trump first expressed a desire to take control of Greenland during his first term. The vast island is in a geopolitically strategic location as countries begin to use the Arctic Ocean for shipping routes, and has stores of rare earth minerals.

The president has intensified his threats against the territory following his invasion of Venezuela and the US military’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, with White House officials saying Trump has the right to take control of any country he wants, in order to control their resources.

On Air Force One on Jan. 11, Trump told reporters that he has not yet proposed a deal to Denmark and said “Greenland should make the deal.” He added that he does not care whether a takeover of Greenland “affects NATO.”

“They need us more than we need them,” said the president.

Trump also said in the Oval Office Jan. 11 that owning Greenland is “psychologically important for me.”

“Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base,” said Trump.

The US already has a military base in Greenland, but Trump has claimed military presence in the territory is not enough to fend off what he claims are imminent threats from China and Russia.

‘DOJ CAN’T BE TRUSTED,’ SAY KHANNA AND MASSIE, SEEKING SPECIAL MASTER FOR EPSTEIN FILES. The congressmen behind the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Jan. 8 asked a federal judge to appoint a “special master and/or independent monitor” to ensure that the Trump administration actually releases the documents from the trafficking case against deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as required by the new law.

Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) led the monthslong congressional effort to pass the legislation, which Trump—a former friend of Epstein who’s repeatedly mentioned in the files—signed in November. Since then, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has published some heavily redacted materials but blown the Dec. 19 deadline to release everything, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (1/8).

“We have offered for six months to meet with the Justice Department to help them get the right documents out, and we’re now going to be intervening with the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to ask those judges to appoint a special master and ensure that all the documents are released,” Khanna told NPR.

Khanna and Massie did so with a  letter to Judge Paul Engelmayer, writing to the appointee of former President Barack Obama that “we have urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the act as well as the department’s violations of this court’s order.”

As MS NOW—which initially reported on the letter—explained, “Engelmayer oversees the case involving Ghislaine Maxwell, and last month, the Justice Department obtained Engelmayer’s permission to release grand jury materials and other evidence provided to Maxwell in discovery that were redacted or sealed per a court order.”

On Dec. 24, DOJ announced that it had received over a million more documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and SDNY “to review them for release, in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, existing statutes, and judicial orders.” The department added then that “due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”

Khanna and Massie noted in their letter that the DOJ’s most recent court filing Jan. 5 states the department has only produced “approximately 12,285 documents (compromising approximately 125,575 pages)” and there is still “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the act in various phases of review.”

As the lawmakers pointed out: “Other reports suggest that the DOJ may be reviewing more than 5 million pages. Because these figures are self-reported and internally inconsistent with prior representations, there is reasonable suspicion that the DOJ has overstated the scope of responsive materials, thereby portraying compliance as unmanageable and effectively delaying disclosure.”

AMERICA ISN’T ON BOARD WITH TRUMP’S MURKY PLAN FOR VENEZUELA. On the third day of this new year, the U.S. military abducted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro on orders from President Donald Trump. And while the American public’s initial response has been split, there’s good reason to think the abduction could hurt Trump in the long run—and perhaps especially in November’s midterm elections, Andrew Mangan noted at Daily Kos (1/11).

An average of 39% of Americans approve of the strike, while 42% disapprove, according to a Daily Kos analysis of the four polls fielded since Maduro’s capture. More telling, an average of 25% of Americans aren’t sure of their feelings about it. (The numbers do not sum 100% due to one survey excluding a “Not sure” response option.)

At first glance, the operation seems to be a wash for Trump, right? Not so fast.

Such high levels of uncertainty are common when it comes to foreign policy. Studies find Americans to have a fairly poor understanding of world affairs. For instance, a 2018 survey from Gallup found that just 47% of American adults could identify Afghanistan as the nation that provided safe haven to al-Qaida ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Due to such lack of knowledge, people often make up their minds by looking to the opinions of others, whether they are people in their own life or public figures they trust. 

Nevertheless, as the authors of one study about this “signaling” phenomena have said, “Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles.” 

And that’s where Trump could find himself in trouble. Though public opinion on the abduction itself is split, data shows the public largely opposes Trump’s behavior around the operation and his stated intentions for what may come next.

For example, Trump didn’t seek congressional approval ahead of the strike, but 63% of Americans think he should have, according to a poll from the Washington Post/SSRS. And 69% want him to get Congress’ okay before conducting any more strikes, per a poll from YouGov/CBS News. Put simply, while the public is well aware of how often Trump breaks norms (and laws), they will surely have less tolerance for it if it leans to a greater conflict. 

At the moment, though, the bigger threat to Trump and the Republicans is whether he will stick to his word and “run” Venezuela post-Maduro. Only 1 in 3 Americans supports that idea, according to YouGov. And only 1 in 4 independents do—which matters greatly in an election year. 

But it’s not just that Americans are broadly opposed to Trump’s imperialistic tendencies. They also don’t agree with his motives for the strike in Venezuela.

Despite originally claiming the raid was carried out to combat drug smuggling into the U.S., Trump has spent most of his time since then talking about one other thing, something that appears to have been his main motivation: Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Venezuela has about 17% of the world’s proven oil reserves, more than any other nation. And when Trump was asked what would happen to that oil, he replied, “We’re going to run everything.” In a later interview with The New York Times, he held firm: “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.” 

How long will this thievery last? Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the U.S. would control Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely.” And the profits from all this? Well, according to Trump, the profits “will be controlled by me.” 

As such, it’s little surprise that Americans see oil as the primary reason the U.S. conducted the operation, with 59% telling YouGov/CBS News that it had “a lot” to do with it—a higher share than any other motivation given in the survey. The catch is, Americans also don’t see that as a good reason for the strike. Only 1 in 4 Americans wants U.S. oil companies to take over Venezuela’s reserves, according to YouGov. Not even a majority of Republicans wants it to happen, with just 43% backing the president’s plan.

Now, there’s a good chance those numbers will move in Trump’s direction. Republicans should start to fall in line behind their leader, and independents may drift toward him as well—especially if this stolen oil drives down domestic gas prices. There is some evidence that a president’s approval rating correlates with the price at the pump—the higher the cost, the lower the rating, generally. 

At the same time, it could also drag Trump down even further if the situation spirals out of control. Only 36% of Americans told YouGov they are confident in Trump’s ability to handle an international crisis. And nearly 3 in 4 Americans (72%), including a majority of Republicans (54%), are concerned the U.S. will get “too involved” in Venezuela, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. 

What might getting “too involved” look like? Sending in ground troops, for one. Trump is toying with the idea, and it seems like it’d be a necessity if the U.S. were to “run” the country, especially if this oversight is expected to last for “much longer” than one year, as Trump has said. However, the latest YouGov/Economist poll finds that just 26% of Americans support using military force to invade the nation.

N.Y. GOVERNOR BACKS MAYOR MAMDANI CHILDCARE EXPANSION PLAN. Thousands of parents in New York City will have access to free childcare after Gov. Kathy Hochul joined forces with Mayor Zohran Mamdani Jan. 8 to roll out the first steps of his campaign promise to make childcare universal throughout the city, Stephen Prager noted at CommonDreams (1/8).

The governor announced $1.7 billion in this year’s budget that will seek to create childcare access for 100,000 more children, part of a plan to spend $4.5 billion on childcare across the state during this fiscal year.

She said she is committed to “fully fund the first two years of the city’s implementation” of Mamdani’s program, which he hopes will one day provide free childcare to kids between 6 weeks and 5 years old.

According to the childcare marketplace website TrustedCare, the average cost of daycare for children in New York City ranges from $2,000 to $4,200 per month, depending on the child’s age and schedule.

“This is something every family can agree on,” Hochul said at a press conference Thursday at a YMCA in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. “The cost of childcare is too damn high.”

The governor and mayor will begin by increasing funding for the city’s existing 3K program, created under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, which extended free pre-K, which was already available to all 4-year-olds, to 3-year-olds when spots are available. Hochul said she and Mamdani will seek to “fix” the program and make it truly universal.

After initially promising to make it available to all 3-year-olds, Mamdani’s predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, instead slashed funding for it and other early childhood education programs, which children’s advocates said drove kids out of the public school system and left many unable to find seats in nearby areas.

“We stand here today because of the young New Yorkers who were no longer willing to accept that the joy of beginning a family had to be paired with the heartbreak of moving away from a city that they have always loved,” Mamdani said.

In addition to making that program universal, Hochul and Mamdani are rolling out a program offering childcare for 2-year-olds, known as “2 Care,” which will first be available in “high-need areas” before being rolled out to all parents by 2029.

Mamdani has estimated that the plan to make pre-K fully universal will cost about $6 billion per year, with funding made more challenging by the fact that President Donald Trump recently cut off federal childcare subsidies to states, including $3 billion to New York, amid a manufactured panic about rampant fraud. Hochul has said the state is mulling its legal options to fight the funding freeze.

In the meantime, she plans to spend $73 million in the first year to cover the cost and creation of 2 Care, and $425 million in the second year as more children enroll.

While the source of the funds was not immediately clear, Hochul has said that money for the initial phase of the rollout will come from revenue already allocated by the legislature and not from any tax hikes in the coming year.

From the February issue of The Progressive Populist.

Editorial: Trump's Taste for Crude

Donald Trump showed a taste for empire and plunder when he sent U.S. special forces to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas in an overnight raid Saturday, Jan. 3. The couple were brought to New York, where Maduro faces Trumped-up charges of supervising drug-running between Venezuela and the United States, and his wife, Cilia Flores, is charged with conspiracy. 

The abduction of Maduro killed more than 100 people, most of them military, including 32 Cuban military and officials, but The New York Times confirmed at least two civilians, one of whom was 80-year-old Rosa Elena González. whose apartment in Catia La Mar, near Venezuela’s main airport, was bombed. And Johana Sierra, a 45-year-old woman was killed in a house in the southern part of Caracas that apparently was targeted because it had an antenna.

At his arraignment Jan. 5 in Manhattan, at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan US Courthouse, Maduro said in Spanish, “I am the president of Venezuela, and I consider myself a prisoner of war. They captured me in my house in Caracas.” He added, “I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I remain the president of my country.” Maduro told Alvin Hellerstein, a 92-year-old judge appointed to the Southern District of New York by former President Bill Clinton. The next hearing is set for March 17.

(Maduro and Flores were arraigned just around the corner from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where Trump was convicted in 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.)

The indictment claims Maduro, who has been president of Venezuela since 2013, “has partnered with co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.”

Previously, Trump had claimed Maduro led the illegal export of fentanyl into the U.S, and Trump ordered destruction of at least 35 motorboats traveling off the coast of Venezuela, resulting deaths of at least 123 presumed “narcoterrorists” as of Jan. 7, claiming they carried dangerous drugs, but evidence was not produced. 

Maduro has been president of Venezuela since March 5, 2013, when, after six months as vice president, President Hugo Chávez died. Maduro was named acting president until he was narrowly elected president in an April 14, 2013, special election, but his popularity declined following shortages in Venezuela and a drop in living standards, aggravated by U.S. sanctions placed on the Venezuelan economy, which led to a wave of protests in 2014 that escalated into daily marches nationwide and repression of dissent.

Maduro “now sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking,” the indictment continues. “That drug trafficking has enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite,” it claims.

Like her husband, Flores pleaded “not guilty, completely innocent,” during the arraignment. 

The raid and abduction of Maduro on Jan. 3 was not authorized by Congress, which has not declared war on Venezuela. The U.N.’s top official, Secretary-General António Guterres, said the invasion violated the U.N. charter, but that doesn’t bother Trump, who doesn’t respect the authority of the Constitution any more than international law. Trump told The New York Times Jan. 7 only his “own morality” constrains his power as commander in chief, and he might use the military to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world. He still has designs to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, by force if necessary, despite a treaty with Denmark that allows the U.S. to build military installations in Greenland. But Trump said ownership is necessary, even if it results in the dismantling of NATO, which would be a major victory for Trump’s mentor, Vladimir Putin. 

The Trump team defended the attack on Venezuela as a law enforcement operation, but 100 dead seems like a high body count to capture an alleged drug kingpin. Since the abduction Trump has been obsessive about controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves, but he found out when he brought top energy executives to the White House Jan. 10 they were not interested in investing billions of dollars to upgrade Venezuelan oil facilities because of the high cost of producing and refining extra heavy Orinoco crude oil and the instability of Venezuelan politics. The cost of drilling new American shale oil wells is about $62 a barrel while the break-even costs of drilling in Venezuela amount to $80 a barrel. “Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, blurted out the awkward truth — namely that Venezuela is ‘uninvestable’ under current conditions,” Paul Krugman noted in his Substack column.

Trump responded by saying that he was “inclined” to block ExxonMobil from investing in Venezuela. “I didn’t like their response,” he said. “What’s next?” Krugman asked. “Will the Justice Department find some excuse to open a criminal investigation into Wood, the way it has against [Fed Chair] Jerome Powell?”

Then there was the killing of 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jan. 7 after she failed to obey his order to get out of her car (after another ICE agent had ordered her to move her car). That got people’s attention, not only that the immigration shock troops were out of control, but Trump has no intention of bringing ICE under control. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE officers were out in an enforcement action when they got stuck in the snow in Minneapolis. “They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle,” Noem said.

The video of the shooting shows nothing of the sort—no stuck vehicle in sight, nor any ICE officer being attacked. But Noem used the incident to accuse Good of being a domestic terrorist who was paid to disrupt ICE’s work. 

Trump piled on with a bigger lie, posting on social media that “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. ... it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. ... We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!”

Videos show Good was trying to steer away from the ICE agent, as another agent had ordered her to do, and Good told the aggressive agent she wasn’t mad at him, but the agent pulled out his gun and fired three shots at her, then he walked away with no apparent injury. 

On Jan. 11, Trump backed off his lie that the ICE agent was injured, but when reporters asked him if he thought the agent’s use of force was warranted, Trump said, “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement.” He added, “They were harassing, they were following for days and for hours, and I think, frankly, they’re professional agitators. And I’d like to find out and we are going to find out who’s paying for it,” he said.

Trump must be impeached for many crimes and misdeeds. Republicans won’t do it. Voters in the midterm election must put Democrats in the majority in Congress to call the demented extortionist to account. Either that or pray an aneurysm finally takes him out.     — JMC

From the February issue of The Progressive Populist.

Dispatches January 2026

Another Mindless Thug,

Pam Bondi has proven to be a truly incompetent Attorney General.

Her mishandling of the Epstein files have brought the threat of inherent contempt charges being filed against her. She missed the December 19 deadline for release of the files and if enacted, the charges would force her to pay hefty fines for every day she is not in compliance.

This on top of every other prosecution she's botched.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

MIKE JOHNSON TOUTS $901 BILLION MILITARY BUDGET PLAN AFTER GUTTING MEDICAID, SNAP. Republican congressional leaders unveiled a sprawling military policy bill Dec. 7 that would authorize $901 billion in US military spending for the coming fiscal year, just months after GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump pushed through the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who aggressively pushed cuts to Medicaid by peddling false claims of large-scale fraud, touted the 3,086-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as legislation that would “ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world.”

The bill, a compromise between House and Senate versions of the annual legislation, would authorize $8 billion more in US military spending than Trump asked for in his 2026 budget request.

If passed, the 2026 NDAA would pump billions of dollars more into the Pentagon, a cesspool of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse that Johnson and other Republicans claim to be targeting when they cut safety net programs, stripping health insurance and food aid from millions. The Pentagon has never passed an independent audit and continues to have “significant fraud exposure,” the Government Accountability Office said earlier this year.

Final passage of the NDAA would push total military spending authorized by Congress this year above $1 trillion, including the $150 billion in Pentagon funds included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.

In November, as Common Dreams reported, a coalition of watchdog and anti-war groups implored Congress not to approve any funding above the originally requested $892.6 billion, warning that additional money for the Pentagon would enable the Trump administration’s lawless use of the military in US streets and overseas.

The groups also noted that “the surge in Pentagon spending stands in sharp contrast to the drastic cuts in healthcare and food assistance programs imposed by the reconciliation package.”

“At such a time,” they wrote in a letter to lawmakers, “bipartisan agreement to provide additional funds to the Pentagon would deliver a cruel message to the American public, one out of step with Democratic messaging over healthcare, reconciliation, and the shutdown.”

DEMOCRATIC GOVS 2026 MESSAGE HITS TRUMP’S SORE SPOT. Meeting in Arizona Dec. 6-7, Democratic governors said they would continue to push policies meant to address the issue of affordability. The Democrats renewed focus on the key issue comes while President Donald Trump has falsely described affordability as a phony issue made up by his political opponents, Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos.org (12/8).

The Democratic Governors Association held their meeting after a successful campaign cycle in 2025, where their candidates in states like Virginia and New Jersey won while making affordability central to their campaigns.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chair of the DGA, told those in attendance, “We have to be laser focused on people’s everyday concerns and how hard life is right now for the American people. He added that the gubernatorial races in Georgia, Iowa, and Nevada would be the top three races the organization would focus on flipping during the 2026 election cycle. 

The Democratic focus on the issue stands in stark contrast from Trump, who has been dismissive of the issue.

“There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about—affordability. They just say the word, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” Trump said. He also claimed affordability is a “con job” and a “Democrat[ic] scam.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has a similar point of view to Trump. Asked by a reporter the previous week if Republicans are doing enough to address the issue, Johnson said the public should simply “relax” and that “it’s gonna be fine.”

The public disagrees with Trump and Johnson.

A recent poll from Politico/Public First found that Americans generally say the current problems with affordability are Trump’s responsibility. Even 37% of voters who backed Trump blame him for the economy’s current crisis. 

After campaigning last year on lowering prices, Republicans have failed to do anything to address the issue. Conservative ideology runs directly opposed to the notion of using the government to fix or ease these problems, presenting a huge obstacle to Republican action.

In fact, the key piece of Republican legislation passed since Trump took office—the “Big Beautiful Bill”—has caused more problems. Cutting funding for vital programs like Medicaid and curtailing Affordable Care Act subsidies increases costs instead of cutting them.

Trump’s tariff policies also hurt the U.S. economy by raising prices for middle- and working-class families, leading to reduced spending and job cuts.

In Tennessee, Republicans saw more evidence that ignoring the affordability problem is a political loser. While the party held on to their seat in the special election for the state’s 7th District last Tuesday, the Republican candidate trailed Trump’s performance in 2024 by 13 percentage points, which encourages Democrats heading toward the midterm elections.

Trump can continue to argue that affordability is a myth, but voter anger is very real and aimed directly at the GOP.

REPORT TRACKS TRUMP ‘WAR ON FREE SPEECH,’ URGES SYSTEMIC RESISTANCE. The US advocacy group Free Press on Dec. 8 released a report examining how President Trump and “his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment” since the Republican returned to the Oval Office in January, and Free Press called on all Americans to fight back, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

For “Chokehold: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance,” Free Press analyzed “more than 500 reports of verbal threats, executive orders, presidential memoranda, statements from the White House, actions by regulators and agencies, military and law enforcement deployment and activities, litigation, removal of website language on .gov websites, removal of official history and information at national parks and museums, and discontinued data collection by the federal government.”

“While the US government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association—be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress—the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive, and escalating,” the report states.

The five recurring attack methods that Free Press identified are: making threats of retribution against would-be opponents; emboldening regulators to exact penalties; supercharging the militarized police state; leveraging heavyweight corporate capitulation; and ignoring facts, removing information, rewriting history, and lying on the record.

“Trump’s censorship playbook is responsible for the administration’s central retaliatory ethos and inspires a set of strategies that loyal actors in government use to silence dissent and chill free expression,” said the report’s author, Free Press senior counsel Nora Benavidez, in a statement. “This playbook is to lie, distort reality for the public, and deploy a cadre of henchmen to carry out Trump’s threats of reprisal.”

Free Press compiled a timeline of “nearly 200 of the most potent examples,” including Trump’s blanket pardon for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists shortly after beginning his second term, the White House taking control of the presidential press pool in February, the president’s alarming speech to the US Department of Justice in March, and the administration blocking the Associated Press from the Oval Office in April over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

In May, Trump, among other things, signed an executive order to defund National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service. In June, he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles. In July, he sued Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over reporting on the president’s ties to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In August, he deployed the National Guard in Washington, DC.

In September, under pressure from Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, ABC temporarily suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. In October, the Pentagon’s new press policy—which journalists across the political spectrum refused to sign—took effect (The New York Times, which faces a defamation lawsuit from Trump, sued over it in early December). In November, Trump threatened to sue the BBC over its documentary about Jan. 6, 2021.

The administration has also targeted foreign scholars and journalists for criticizing US policy, from federal support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the president’s pursuit of mass deportations. The report stresses that “no one is safe from attack in Trump’s quest to control the message, though the administration targets the press most of all.”

The publication also pushes back against “Trump’s claims that he’s protecting people and defending free speech,” and acknowledges that “the administration’s censorial tactics are amassing tremendous resistance across political and geographic lines, with a majority of people worried about the government’s attacks on free speech.”

Benavidez emphasized that “if only one person speaks out against injustice, their speech is notable, but it is also more vulnerable to attack and subversion under this administration.”

“If more people speak out against injustice, the collective drumbeat can more easily withstand government reprisals,” she continued. “Democracies erode little by little; would-be dictators need to scare only some of us, and the rest will follow. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.

LEAKED MEMO SHOWS PAM BONDI WANTS LIST OF ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISM’ GROUPS WHO EXPRESS ‘ANTI-AMERICAN SENTIMENT.’ A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment,” Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams.org  (12/7)

The memo, which was obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands upon National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The new Bondi memo instructs law enforcement agencies to refer “suspected” domestic terrorism cases to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), which will then undertake an “exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7” that will incorporate “a focused strategy to root out all culpable participants—including organizers and funders—in all domestic terrorism activities.”

The memo identifies the “domestic terrorism threat” as organizations that use “violence or the threat of violence” to advance political goals such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Commenting on the significance of the memo, Klippenstein criticized mainstream media organizations for largely ignoring the implications of NSPM-7, which was drafted and signed in the wake of the Sept. 10 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious,” he wrote. “But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not—and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.”

Klippenstein also warned that NSPM-7 appeared to be the start of a new “war on terrorism,” but “only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

GROUPS URGE CONGRESS TO IMPOSE MORATORIUM ON NEW AI DATA CENTERS. Environmental and economic justice advocates alike have been sounding the alarm for months regarding the Trump administration’s push to built massive data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency in communities across the United States—regardless of local opposition—and on Dec. 8 Congress heard from a coalition of more than 200 groups demanding action to stop what they called “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation,” Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8)

Led by Food and Water Watch (FWW), which originally demanded a moratorium on new AI data centers in October, more than 230 organizations have signed a letter warning that thus far, Congress has failed to take action to stop the rapid expansion despite the fact that “the harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive.”

The national and state groups, including Greenpeace USA, Oil Change International, and the Nebraska-based Save Rural America, pointed to a number of harms associated with the expansion of data centers in places including rural Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Virginia.

They warned that pushing the build-out onto communities—many of which have protested the approval of the centers to no avail—will lead to:

• Enormous electricity consumption, with a tripling of data centers in the next five years projected to result in the facilities consuming as much electricity as about 30 million households;

• Unsustainable water consumption, with those data centers requiring the amount of water normally used by 18.5 million households, just for cooling the computer servers;

• The worsening of the climate emergency, with 56% of the energy used to power data centers sourced from planet-heating fossil fuels;

• Surging electricity costs for people living in the vicinity of energy-sucking data centers; and

• Skyrocketing job losses as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs are projected to become obsolete due to the growth of AI and companies’ investments in the technology, even as corporations report they’re not seeing a significant positive impact on their bottom lines.

“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security,” the groups told Congress. “We urge you to join our call for a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment, and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting.”

The groups noted that electricity costs have risen 21.3% since 2021, a rate that “drastically” outpaces inflation, driven by the “rapid build-out of data centers.”

As CNBC reported in November, residential utility bills rose 6% in August compared with last summer, and though price increases can be due to a host of reasons, electricity prices rose “much faster than the national average” this year in states with high concentrations of data centers. Consumers in Virginia paid 13% more, while those in Illinois paid 16% more and people in Ohio saw their costs go up 12%.

SENATE GOP SENDS TRUMP BILL HANDING ARCTIC REFUGE TO BIG OIL. Climate campaigners, conservationists, and Indigenous people vowed to keep defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after US Senate Republicans on Dec. 4 sent legislation that would restart fossil fuel leasing in ANWR’s Coastal Plain to President Donald Trump’s desk, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

All Republicans present except Sen. Susan Collins of Maine supported House Joint Resolution 131. The 49-45 vote came after three Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)—joined all GOP House members but Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) in advancing the bill in November.

If Big Oil-backed Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval, as expected, it will nullify the Biden administration’s December 2024 efforts to protect over 1 million acres of land in Alaska from planet-wrecking oil and gas exploration.

“Simply put, the Arctic refuge is the crown jewel of the American National Wildlife Refuge System,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in a Dec. 3 floor speech against the measure, noting that the area is “home to hundreds of iconic wildlife species.”

“The Arctic refuge is also deeply connected to the traditions and daily life of the people who have lived there for thousands of years,” the senator continued, ripping “the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on public lands.”

Heinrich’s speech was welcomed by groups including the Alaska Wilderness League, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose vice president of government relations, Robert Dewey, also blasted lawmakers’ use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the refuge’s protections.

“Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change. In these instances, the use of the CRA accomplishes nothing meaningful and instead harms iconic species such as polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds,” Dewey said after the vote. “In addition to threatening wildlife, severe regulatory disruption in Alaska is the inevitable result of targeted rollbacks in one of America’s most ecologically critical regions.”

‘SOMEBODY’S GETTING RICH’: SENATOR SUGGESTS TRUMP PARDON SPREE IS YET ANOTHER GRIFT A Democratic US senator suggested during a television appearance Dec. 3 that President Trump’s flurry of pardons for fraudsters and other white-collar criminals—from disgraced politicians to former corporate executives—is yet another cash grab concocted by the president’s inner circle and lobbyists with ties to the White House, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

“My sense is that somebody is getting rich, ultimately,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes shortly after Trump pardoned a former entertainment venue executive who was indicted by the president’s own Justice Department over the summer.

“There is a cabal of administration officials and MAGA-friendly lobbyists that are in league together,” Murphy continued. “They all huddle together at these elite restaurants and clubs in Washington, DC, and they likely hatch deals in which, if somebody pays a MAGA-affiliated lobbyist a couple hundred thousand dollars, then maybe you’ll be able to get a pardon.”

“There’s clearly a whole group of people around him that are making millions of dollars, and they’re handing out favors to folks in the form of pardons in order to make sure that they get their pockets lined,” the senator added. “That’s just, like, bread and butter corruption.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has used his pardon power to rescue well-connected executives and political allies from accountability, invariably claiming—without evidence—that the Biden administration manufactured the charges.

Many of those pardoned have been accused or convicted of white-collar crimes; “fraud” appears 57 times on the Justice Department page listing the names and offenses of those who have received clemency from the president this year.

Trump’s willingness to unthinkingly pardon fraudsters has spawned a lucrative business for lobbyists and consultants linked to the administration. NBC News reported earlier this year that “two people directly familiar with proposals to lobbying firms said they knew of a client’s offer of $5 million to help get a case to Trump.”

Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, reportedly had a lobbyist working to secure his pardon, which came in late October.

“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said when asked about the decision, adding that “a lot of people asked me” to pardon Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.”

Trump also made history with what’s believed to be the nation’s first-ever presidential pardon of a corporation: HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of crypto exchange BitMEX. The company was sentenced earlier this year to a $100 million fine for violating anti-money laundering laws.

The watchdog group Public Citizen estimates that the Trump administration has halted or dropped more than 160 corporate enforcement cases since the start of the president’s second term.

“Corporate pardons are just one of the ways that Trump is replacing democracy and rule of law with authoritarian power and rule by personal favor,” Murphy wrote in his report. “If we are going to save our democracy, we need to act now.”

IN TRUMP ECONOMY HOLIDAY SPENDING PLUMMETS AND LAYOFFS HIT HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE COVID PANDEMIC. A new batch of data is offering more evidence that the US economy was in rough shape heading into the holidays, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (12/4).

The latest Economic Confidence Index released by Gallup on Dec. 4 found that Americans’ confidence in the economy has fallen by seven points over the previous month, and stood at its lowest level in more than a year.

Overall, Gallup found that just 21% of Americans currently describe the economy as excellent or good, while 40% describe it as poor. The outlook for the near future also looks grim, as more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed said the economy is currently getting worse.

This deteriorating economic confidence is weighing on Americans’ holiday shopping plans, as Gallup found that planned holiday spending expenditures have “plummeted” from just over $1,000 in October to $778 in November. The decline in spending expectations also occurred across all income groups, although it was particularly steep among low-income households, which slashed their estimated holiday spending by an average of $267.

Gallup noted that while it’s common for shoppers to trim their spending plans the closer it gets to the holidays, the drop between October and November this year was the biggest it has ever recorded, even “surpassing the $185 drop seen during the 2008 global financial crisis.”

The Gallup survey was not the only troubling economic data to drop on Thursday, as outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas released its latest report showing that hiring in the US has slowed to its lowest level in the last 15 years, while layoffs now total their highest level since 2020, when the country was at the peak of the Covid-19 global pandemic.

The data on layoffs came just one day after global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs in November, with small businesses shouldering by far the most job losses.

President Donald Trump, who had dismissed concerns Americans might have about affordability as a “Democrat scam,” has reportedly decided to hit the road in an effort to convince voters that they’ve never had it so good.

According to Axios, Trump will start touring the country to tout his administration’s economic policies, and he is expected to “aggressively push back against criticism over the cost of everyday essentials—an issue that helped propel him to victory over Kamala Harris last year.”

However, a new poll published by Politico Dec. 4 shows that Trump may have an uphill climb selling his economy even to his own voters.

Overall, the poll found that 37% of voters who backed Trump last year now say that the cost of living crisis is the worst they have experienced in their lifetimes, while only 24% of 2024 Trump voters say that the cost of living crisis at the moment is “not bad.”

The poll also found that Trump’s efforts to blame former President Joe Biden for the current state of the economy aren’t flying, as 46% of voters say that Trump is most to blame for the current state of the economy, compared to 29% of voters who put the primary blame on Biden.

IN FOX’S BIZARRO WORLD, HUGE LAYOFFS MEAN ‘GOOD NEWS’ FOR TRUMP. Following a report that showed a spike in layoff announcements, a Fox Business reporter said it could be “good news” for President Trump, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (12/4).

The consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report on Thursday, revealing that companies have announced 1.17 million layoffs in 2025, the most in a single year since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For about 8,000 of those layoffs, Trump’s tariffs have been cited as the reason for job cuts.

Despite the dire economic sign—one of many in recent days—Fox Business reporter Grady Trimble saw an upside for Trump while discussing the new report with pro-Trump anchor Stuart Varney.

“This signifies the cooling job market that we’ve seen for some time now, Stu, but it could be good news for the president in the end because he wants the Fed to cut rates and this jobs data increases the chances of that happening next week,” Trimble said.

The Fox News spin (Fox Business is owned by Fox News) comes as a series of economic indicators show weakness under Trump after years of improvement under former President Joe Biden.

On Dec. 3, payroll processor ADP’s November report showed a total 32,000 drop in private-sector jobs for the month, with 120,000 jobs lost for small businesses. Two days before that, the Institute for Supply Management said the manufacturing industry has lost jobs for nine consecutive months this year.

In response to the bad economic news and ongoing concerns about affordability, Trump falsely said on Dec. 2 that the entire issue was a “fake narrative,” “scam,” and “con job by the Democrats.”

Fox’s overly optimistic reporting is in line with the network’s attempt to prop up the sagging Trump presidency.

For instance, after Trump failed to do much of what he said he would do in the first 100 days of his presidency, Fox ran a list of supposed accomplishments. Among them were nonsensical issues like ending federal support for paper straws, eliminating production of the penny, and establishing a “White House Faith Office.” Those topics were a far cry from lowering grocery prices and ending the Russia-Ukraine war, which Trump had said he would do.

Fox has spent the first year of Trump’s return to office inventing a cringe-inducing parade of excuses and justifications for his failures and shortcomings. In that context, a surge in layoffs can easily count as “good news.”

Editorial: Congress Must Stop Trump's Terrorism

 War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered murder on the high seas as part of his effort to implement Donald Trump’s ambition to invade Venezuela, and only Congress can stop them. Not that congressional leaders will stand up to Trump.

U.S. surveillance aircraft followed a boat, which special operations force believed carried illegal drugs in the Caribbean Sea on Sept. 2, when Hegseth, who was watching from the Pentagon, gave a spoken directive, two people with direct knowledge of the operation told the Washington Post. “The order was to kill them all,” one of them said. 

A missile struck the vessel and ignited a blaze from bow to stern. Special Ops commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed for minutes, but as the smoke cleared, they were surprised that two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Ops commander, Admiral Frank Bradley, ordered a second strike to finish the job, and the two men were blown apart in the water.

It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere, who Trump considers “narco-terrorists” who are subject to lethal targeting. But experts on the laws of war have said the lethal campaign, which has killed at least 83 people in 23 attacks so far, is unlawful and may expose Americans directly involved in the attacks to prosecution. 

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat to the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has argued, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign, speaking to the Post.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success,” but that leaves a number of questions Pentagon officials won’t address, such as why a motor boat carrying perhaps a ton of cocaine needed a crew of 11 people and actually was headed to Suriname, which is southeast of Venezuela and usually is on the drug traffickers’ route to Europe. Blowing up the boats and killing the passengers also eliminates evidence and the opportunity for investigators to gain testimony on who else was involved in the trafficking. The U.S. Coast Guard manages to seize drug vessels in territorial waters without casualties.

The protocols were changed after the strike to emphasize rescuing suspected smugglers if they survived strikes, the Post reported. It is unclear who directed the change in protocol.

In an Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean that killed two, another two men were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador without charges. In a series of strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific on Oct. 27 that killed 14 men, one apparent survivor was left to the Mexican coast guard to retrieve. The body was never found.

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has formally introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “murder” and “conspiracy to murder” in the extrajudicial execution of the two survivors in the Sept. 2 boat bombings.

“He gave direct, unlawful orders to kill every single person on a civilian boat from Venezuela, violating the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual,” Thanedar said. But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is not inclined to push the issue of impeachment, saying it’s almost impossible that articles would reach the House floor with a Republican majority.

“Republicans will never allow articles of impeachment to be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we know that’s the case,” he said. “Donald Trump will order them not to do it.”

But Trump ordered Republicans not to call for release of the Epstein files — until it became inevitable. Now five Republicans could join Democrats to force an impeachment vote, and some have expressed dissatisfaction with the White House’s answers.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which launched an investigation into the strikes, said Dec. 4 that “members are very concerned” about the accuracy of the information being shared with Congress. Turner previously said if Hegseth indeed ordered the execution of survivors, “that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.” Turner should get a chance to vote on whether extrajudicial executions on the high seas are grounds for impeachment, and it’s worth Democrats’ time to put Republicans on the record on whether they approve summary executions.

Trump also paused immigration applications from 19 Third World countries, with a Dec. 2 tirade falsely portraying Somali Americans living in Minnesota  as layabouts who sponge up welfare money.

He singled out U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a refugee from Somalia, as being “garbage,” and added that “her friends are garbage.”

In an op-ed published Dec. 4 in The New York Times, Omar defended her community against false stereotypes spouted by Trump.

“He fails to realize how deeply Somali Americans love this country,” she wrote. “We are doctors, teachers, police officers, and elected leaders working to make our country better. Over 90% of Somalis living in my home state, Minnesota, are American citizens by birth or naturalization.”

In a social media post, Omar characterized the president’s remarks about her as clear evidence that he’s unwell.

“His obsession with me is creepy,” Omar wrote. "I hope he gets the help he desperately needs."

Circulation Comes Back Home

The Progressive Populist has restored circulation processing in our own offices after the company that handled our circulation customer service in North Hollywood, Calif., abruptly went out of business in late November. We got the data back from Stark Services before they shut down, but if you have received a renewal reminder, please return the renewal form with a check or your credit card information to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588 instead of the address in California, or call us at 1-800-205-7067 to charge the renewal fee to your credit card. You also can renew online at Populist.com.

Thanks for sticking with us, and you can help us shore up our financial reserves in these turbulent times, so we can keep The Progressive Populist affordable for readers with limited funds, by sending a check to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588 or calling in a contribution by credit card. — JMC

From the January issue of The Progressive Populist.

Why Do Farmers Vote Republican?

 

Why do farmers vote Republican?:

President Harry Truman said that any farmer who voted Republican "ought to have his head examined." Currently, a lot of them are about to go bust. Their devotion to Trump is being severely tested.

Farmers are facing financial struggles due to high input costs, low commodity prices, and falling prices for crops due to trade wars, tariffs and market shifts.These pressures have led to increased  bankruptcies within farming communities throughout the country, decreasing the likelihood that family farms will be passed from generation to generation.

Still, many of them express a mindless devotion to Trump. Why?

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

Just Another Trump Thug

 

Just another Trump Thug:

Without a doubt Kash Patel's tenure as head of the FBI has been chaotic.

Not surprising.

Before his nomination, he'd never spent a day working in the FBI and was not familiar with the bureau or its traditions .

He'd never spent time in the military or served in the DOJ. He had no experience leading a governmental agency the size of the FBI.

The list goes on and once in office he started firing agents who'd worked on investigations into Trump's many scandals. He instead started using the office to investigate perceived enemies of Trump.

Former attorney general Bill Barr thought he was a terrible choice.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

A War of His Own Making

 

A War of his own making:

Trump wants a war with Venezuela and is willing to throw anyone under the bus to make it happen.That includes Navy personnel like Admiral Bradley and quite possibly Defense Secretary Hegseth.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite