Bernie Sanders: We Must Never Stop Fighting For Our Vision For the Future

Bernie Sanders has long been among the rare and few members of Congress who is not in the pockets of big wealthy donors. He has indeed spent his lifetime speaking truth to power and acting fiercely on behalf of the highest good of us all. This post by Bernie is absolutely spot on. Deepest bow, as always, to Bernie Sanders and to all who stand in unwavering integrity, courage, truth, wisdom, and protection of our nation and life on Earth. May we all be inspired! And, no matter the odds, may we never stop doing what is right and just as best as we can each and every day. — Molly

John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx/AP

Our opposition to Trump is based not only on our profound disagreement with him on most of the important issues facing our country but, even more importantly, the lies, fear mongering, bigotry and xenophobia which underlay those policies. Democracy flourishes where differences of opinion are respected and debated. Democracy is severely undermined under the barrage of bigotry, hate and disinformation that Trump and many of his acolytes propagate.

Further, as Trump returns to the presidency, there is deep frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to provide a clear alternative to Trumpism. It appears that most Democrats have learned little or nothing from the recent disastrous elections. It's just not good enough to critique Trump and right-wing Republicans. That's been done for the last 10 years. You have to stand FOR something. You have to provide an alternative to a status quo economy and political system which is just not working for the average American.

This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world and major advances in technology can make us even wealthier. There is no rational reason why 60 percent of Americans should live paycheck to paycheck or why we have massive and growing income and wealth inequality. There is no rational reason why we are the only major country not to guarantee health care for all, and why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. There is no rational reason as to why 800,000 Americans are homeless and millions of others spend more than half of their limited income to put a roof over their heads. There is no rational reason why 25 percent of seniors in America are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less, why we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any wealthy nation, why young people leave college deeply in debt, or why childcare is unaffordable for millions of families.

We can do better. We must do better. But, in order to effectively move forward, we need to explain to the American people the role that Oligarchy and corporate greed have played in destroying working class lives in this country. We need a progressive agenda that addresses the many crises that working families face and points us forward to a better life for all.

Short-term, as Trump comes into office, we must call his bluff. In the recent campaign he ran as an anti-establishment populist prepared to take on the political class and act on behalf of working families. Well, let us hold him to his words and demand that he do just that. If not, we must expose him for the fraud that he is.

During his campaigns Trump has said that the pharmaceutical companies are "getting away with murder" and that he wanted to lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country. If that is true, we should be willing to work with him to make that happen. We have made some good progress under Biden in this area but much more needs to be done. If Trump is unwilling to stand up to the power of the pharmaceutical industry, we must make that clear.

At a time when many financially strapped Americans are paying 20 or 30 percent interest rates on their credit cards, President Trump stated that he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent. I agree and will soon be introducing legislation to do just that. Let's see if he supports that bill.

Trump has rightfully pointed out that disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR with China have cost us millions of good-paying American jobs as corporations shut down manufacturing in this country and moved abroad to find cheap labor. As someone who strongly opposed those agreements I look forward to working with him on new trade policies that will protect American workers and create good paying jobs in our country. Is he serious about this issue? Let's find out.

Some of Trump's nominees have also made important points. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that food corporations are "poisoning" our young people with highly processed foods that are causing obesity, heart disease and other serious health problems. Is Trump willing to take on the greed of major food corporations that are making record breaking profits? I doubt it, but let's give him the opportunity.

Trump's Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been supportive of the PRO Act, which would protect a worker's right to join a union and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions. She is right. Workers must have the right to join a union without illegal interference by their bosses. Will the Trump Administration stand up to corporate interests and work with us to pass the PRO Act into law. Stay tuned.

No one denies that we must end waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Elon Musk, for example, is correct when he points out that the Pentagon has failed seven audits and cannot fully account for its budget of over $800 billion. We must make the Defense Department far more efficient. If we do that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and cut Defense spending.

While we should be prepared to work with the Trump administration in areas where we can find agreement, we must also be prepared to vigorously oppose them in the many areas where they are not only wrong, but are bringing forth extremely dangerous policy.

We must vigorously oppose Trump, his multi-billionaire cabinet and Republicans in Congress when they try to pass massive tax breaks for the rich while cutting Medicaid and other public health benefits desperately needed by working families.

We will oppose them when they try to privatize or cut Social Security, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, public education, the postal service and other important public agencies.

We will oppose them why they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away health care from millions of Americans.

We will oppose them when they represent the needs of the fossil fuel industry and try to rollback climate protections that put at risk the very habitability of our planet for future generations.

We will oppose them when they try to further take away the rights of women to make health care decisions about their own bodies.

If there were ever a time when progressives need to make their voices heard, this is that time.

We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy and for the very well-being of our planet -- because that is precisely what is at stake.

Let us not forget that Republican margins in the House and Senate are very slim. If we mobilize effectively we CAN stop some of their worst proposals. It was not that long ago, for example, that people making their voices heard all across the country saved the Affordable Care Act from Trump and a Republican majority.

It is also critically important that we never stop fighting for our vision for the future -- one in which we have a government that works for all of its people, and not just a wealthy few.

Can we, one day, create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.

Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.

Can we make health care a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life-expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.

Can we, in the wealthiest country on earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from child care to graduate school? Yes, we can.

Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.

Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.

And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is imperative that vision be maintained and that we continue to fight for it.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is one of the most pivotal and difficult moments in the history of our country. What happens in the next few years will impact this country and the world for decades. Despair is not an option. We must aggressively educate and organize and go forward together.

Thank you for standing with me in that fight.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

https://berniesanders.com/

Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin: The New Beatitudes for a Just World

Photo by Molly

The New Beatitudes for a Just World

Blessed are those who fight for equality,

for they will dismantle systems of oppression and create a world where all are valued.

Blessed are the marginalized,

for their voices will be heard, and their experiences will shape the future.

Blessed are the climate activists,

for they will inherit a planet where justice for the Earth and future generations reigns.

Blessed are the refugees and displaced people,

for they will find sanctuary and solidarity in a world that welcomes them with open arms.

Blessed are those who advocate for workers' rights,

for they will ensure fair wages, dignity, and respect for all labor.

Blessed are those who seek racial justice,

for they will dismantle racism and build a world where all skin colors are celebrated equally.

Blessed are those who stand up for the oppressed,

for they will be a voice for the voiceless and bring about true liberation.

Blessed are the homeless and the hungry,

for they will find nourishment, shelter, and hope in a society that finally cares for all.

Blessed are the advocates of mental health,

for they will tear down stigmas and build systems of care that nurture all minds, hearts, and souls.

Blessed are the truth-tellers,

for they will challenge power, expose corruption, and speak for those who cannot.

Blessed are the healers and peacebuilders,

for they will restore communities broken by violence, poverty, and division.

— Mark Sandlin

https://progressivechristianity.org/author/rev-mark-sandlin/

EXCELLENT — Why Trump Really Wants Greenland: And How This Neo-Imperialism Unmasks the Right's Hypocrisy On Climate

This is such an excellent article! I had no depth of understanding of why the new administration seeks, and has sought in the past, to acquire Greenland. Now it makes sense in a way that it hadn't before! And it is also now obvious to me that those in power who deny the reality of the human caused warming of our planet are actually planning to seize greater power and wealth exactly because they do believe in climate change and want to capitalize on it — AND with the unknowing support of millions of Americans who they've convinced that global warming is a "hoax." This is the darkest of the dark, the most evil of evils, the greatest greed-soaked intentional drive to send us all into oblivion. For profit and power. Madness!

Thank heavens for The Ink, which is yet another independent resource that I've only recently subscribed to after hearing and reading this excellent piece by Anand Giridharadas: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/01/excellent-please-read-and-share-anand.html. I was so moved and once I learned that Anand writes for The Ink, I became a paid subscriber. Those who tell the truth are priceless. And it is so vital that we become an increasingly informed populace! Deepest bow of gratitude for all of the courageous truth-tellers in our midst! May they inform and inspire us all! — Molly

Why Trump Really Wants Greenland

And how this neo-imperialism Unmasks

the right's hypocrisy on climate

The Ink Jan 31

Why does Donald Trump want Greenland?

“National security” may seem like a weird excuse for Trump’s demand that Denmark turn over that island to the United States, but turns out it’s not just a distraction.

Trump’s imperial fantasy is rooted in a very real struggle between nations for control of the submerged world under the Arctic ocean, and has everything to do with what’s happening to the region as the climate warms.

The real reason Trump may want Greenland turns out to be below the surface. Literally. We’re talking about a secret mountain range you’ve never heard of.

And this strategic impulse reveals that the right feels differently about climate change than it lets on.

To explain all of this, we talked to paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and veteran science communicator Neil Shubin. Dr. Shubin — who’s famous for his co-discovery of Tiktaalik, the “fish with feet” that lived 375 million years ago and is one of the likely common ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates — has worked in the polar regions for more than 30 years, and has a new book out next week, titled Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future, which is a history of exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, a meditation on how humanity’s story is one of our relationship to what happens at the poles, and an unlikely guide to current events.

Your new book about the history of polar exploration ends up in a discussion of the politics of today, of saber-rattling over Greenland and secret missions to stake out claims on the continental shelf at the North Pole. And now a lot of people in the United States and northern Europe are going to be thinking a lot more about the Arctic. Why is it so important now for people to understand their connection to the poles?

There's a synergy, a dynamic, between us and the poles. The choices we make down south affect the poles, which in turn — as those polar regions change, ice melts and so forth and ocean currents change — will affect us. Many people deny climate change, and they don’t see the importance of the changes at the poles in their daily lives.

But witness what Donald Trump is doing with Greenland right now. He's not making that push for Bermuda, right? It's Greenland. And there is a reason why he's making that push.

You talk about some important reasons in this book that I think get left out of the conversation when the Trump people talk about “national security,” and it seems so ridiculous. But they are actually referring to something specific, and it’s something that major news organizations don't seem to be picking up on.

I think a lot of people just have no idea. What's really lost here is that countries are now jockeying for the biggest undeveloped patch of the earth, and Greenland is a very big piece of that, but not the whole story.

A lot of the conversation right now is around the mineral riches and resource riches of Greenland itself. And that's one way of looking at it. If you have an extractive mentality, you're gonna look at places and look and see extraction there. That's not how I see the world, but that's how many do. But when you look at Greenland, at northern Ellesmere Island on the Canadian side, and Siberia on the other, there is a real geopolitical struggle that is not being talked about that's at stake.

And that is control of the entire ocean floor underneath the North Pole, an area many times the size of Texas, on the seafloor. And what you have by a quirk of nature, by a quirk of geology, is an underwater mountain range that extends from Ellesmere Island and Greenland on one side, all the way to Siberia on the other, running right below the North Pole.

Now, remember, the Arctic region is not a continent. It's a frozen world over the ocean. And so what that means is when people study geology — when various expeditions, Russian, Swedish, Canadian —

And Danish, importantly.

Danish, exactly. When they have gone up there to map the seafloor, that mountain range is actually not just ocean floor. It's a piece of continental shelf, which has historical relationships to Siberia, historical relationships to Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland.

Now that seems esoteric, but the reality is by the law of the sea, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, nations can claim an area about 200 miles from their part of the seafloor as part of their domain, which means they can own the mineral rights, the fishing rights. Other rights are unclear, but they clearly can own or claim to own a vast tract of the earth that is rich in resources.

And this is largely undeveloped?

Massively undeveloped, massively underexplored, and increasingly accessible, with global change.

So what you see is one of the major frontiers that's up for grabs. It's the largest piece of the earth that's up for grabs among countries. And Canada through Ellesmere Island, Russia through Siberia, and Denmark through Greenland, each can make a claim to this.

The U.S. cannot make a claim there now because our Arctic piece is Alaska. It doesn't extend to this ridge, which is called the Lomonosov Ridge, and that’s why there’s this interest in Greenland.

It's a very touchy time because the Arctic is divided up among countries. The Arctic is heating up militarily, economically, socially, and physically. And it’s changing fast. It’s becoming more accessible. That’s affecting our lives down south.

But importantly, it’s heating up in a political struggle that's going to play out over the coming decade. Because different countries have made their claims and they're all probably going to get approved. And now the diplomats are going to have to try to figure that out or that's going to be solved militarily.

And that's a bigger problem now with the new U.S. administration. We've now pushed things in that direction in a significant way, potentially.

Oh, absolutely. Who knows what the actual impact will be. I wasn't entirely surprised when I saw Trump going for Greenland, knowing as I do about its geopolitical importance. If you view the world hegemonically, that's an obvious place.

As somebody who loves these regions so much it's an area of great concern. Number one the peoples who are Indigenous to them — they're they're lost in this. They're not a part of this conversation, at least in terms of mineral extraction and so forth, about the Lomonosov Ridge geopolitically.

But their lives are changing, too, in really remarkable ways. Just witness some of the communities in Alaska that have to relocate the entire town. There are multiple of them where they're losing miles of coastline, in over a decade and they have to move whole cities, whole towns.

But the challenge is really that the whole place is getting militarized. Both Russia and China now are making claims, building bases and so forth. The U.S. has had a military presence that's driven a lot of the science that I've done; the Cold War era militarization of the Arctic, first out of the worry about nuclear bombs, that paid for a lot of science up there.

One thing that people don't get is that there is already a big military presence in Greenland — and it's the U.S.

Exactly. We are the military presence in Greenland at this point. We're very large.

The Russian footprint in the Arctic is huge, as you'd imagine, because Siberia is so long. They've also made a major investment in icebreakers, which we haven't. We're really catching up on the icebreaker game. And that has affected science, honestly. When you work in Antarctica, everything has to be brought in and brought out. And we have a very limited number of icebreakers to support that mission.

When you're a scientist there, you realize a lot of the reason you’re here — you’re here for discovery, for ideals, to learn about the world. Yet what's funding my research, what powers it is geopolitical struggles among countries. Science is part of that game. I wouldn't call myself a pawn, but it's definitely a piece of it. And it always has been.

So there’s something I wanted to ask about. It seems like there’s a weird contradiction. These saber-rattling nationalist regimes, a lot of the leaders are climate change deniers or depend on the support of climate change deniers.

Oh, it's crazy, isn't it? It's almost hypocritical.

Yet the possibility of resource extraction in the Arctic is based entirely on climate change being real and understood by scientists, who are pointing them to where they might look.

These guys, Putin and Trump, who have dismissed the notion of climate change politically, are making policy based on their understanding — and the understanding of their advisors — that this is a serious issue and it's going to have a real effect.

They want to deny climate change, so why not go for Bermuda? It's not Sierra Leone they're interested in. Their interest is in the Arctic, what’s going on in their geopolitical interest, is in the Arctic. And the reason why is you can't deny the changes that are happening. You can't deny that the place is more accessible. You can't deny that geopolitically, increased accessibility means it's much more important.

So embedded in the wave of interest in Greenland is an acceptance of climate change, by the biggest climate-change deniers.

Exactly. Trump going after Greenland is an acknowledgment of climate change.

That's the thing that drives me crazy as a writer. The support for the adventure — and this is true of Russia and of the U.S. — it's dependent on the support of people who don't believe in that. It strikes me as a discordant note, and you feel it acutely when you see the places themselves.

They’re having their ice cream cake and eating it, too.

Yeah, exactly. But it's going to affect us down here. It's not just the geopolitics up north. Look, the amount of melting is enormous. In Antarctica in the 1980s, it was melting about 40 gigatons per year. When you map it through the satellites, now we're at about 280 gigatons per year. Greenland, about the same, a little bit less. That's an enormous amount of fresh water in the oceans. Obviously, sea level rise is a big piece of that. Obviously, coastal communities are affected by that. When you have that much fresh water in the oceans, you're changing global circulation, global climate. Agricultural belts can change, habitats can change, you name it.

And I think people don't really appreciate the extent to which things can change in the coming century.

Maybe this is too speculative, but what do you want to see happen in the Arctic? What do you think is going to happen? And what do you hope will happen?

Honestly, a dream that will never happen, if I'm just wishing, I think the Antarctic Treaty, in its core, was a very idealistic thing where no country claimed the Arctic, where it was purely for scientific purposes and investigation and exploration. It was a world resource where countries didn't recognize each other's claims — they're allowed to make claims, but nobody recognized them — it was sort of this weird balance they came to.

You talk about “Antarctic exceptionalism,” a norms-based understanding of cooperation that kind of overlays all the treaties.

We talk about competition there, but a big piece of the work, historically, a big piece of the international work there was cooperation. There was something about the place that did breed competition, but it also, like the yin and the yang, had a high degree of surprising cooperation as well. So when I think about the future I'd like to see, it's really one that has cooperative management, cooperative appreciation, a cooperative approach to discovery in the Arctic.

Now, that's so idealistic. I know it sounds painful, but it's an ideal. And if we don't have ideals, where are we? We're just tacticians.

And so I think building on the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty, It has been gamed, but at its best, it did work. There's nobody building military bases in Antarctica at all, on a continent the size of North America. And that there's a reason for that. That's because of the treaty, and people adhering to the treaty.

That could change. And I worry about that. That's what I'd like to see: that people learn from the cooperation that's necessary for doing polar work. And that's also true for going to Mars. The U.S. is not going to be able to do that alone if we decide to do it. It's going to be an international effort.

And I'd also naively like to see it as the change there is so obvious. The Arctic, by some estimates, is heating five times faster than the rest of the Earth on average. The change is so visible that that maybe it becomes the canary in the coal mine that does force global cooperation. That's naive, but it is so visible.

Ocean level rise could get us there; there’s not a good solution.

Absolutely. I spend the summers at a marine lab, when I'm not in the Arctic or the Antarctica, I'll spend the summers in a marine lab in Massachusetts. They're concerned about climate change. Their utilities are all below in the basement and below sea level. So there's this weird tie between the places.

One of the reasons why I wrote the book is really an aspiration that walking a terrain that is so fragile, that is so important for understanding ourselves and our place in nature and so forth, can really change you as a human.

And naively I think that, by people encountering that themselves, either through literature or through documentaries or however they do it, that it does it for them as well and impacts the kind of choices they make in life. It certainly has changed and impacts mine.

But I think people have to feel it in their daily lives. The Arctic and Antarctica have been this invisible factor in our lives for a long time. They have been on a knife edge from the beginning. It doesn't take much change for ice to appear or disappear and when that ice appears and disappears it affects the entire planet. It has done that over history, and it just so happens that the fragility of that place was behind our origin as a species and much of our evolution as a species — and it's behind our future as a species.

People have to feel the effects. A tragedy is most acute if it's felt personally. And unfortunately, right now, the people who are feeling it most, at least up in the Arctic, are the Indigenous communities in Alaska and so forth. But coastal communities and others in the United States, in Asia are going to feel it as well. Pacific Island nations can virtually disappear.

There's a community called Grise Fiord, near where we work, which was created by the Canadians in the early-to-mid-1950s. But you talk to the people there, they're really worried about ships up there. They're really worried about an oil spill or a slick or something like that. Because they're living on a knife edge with the environment. And all it takes is one push to put it into a rather catastrophic state

You write about how they live with a yearly cycle of famine.

It's a rough thing. You go to their co-op, which is their store supplied from down south, and everything's really expensive, a bag of Doritos is $14 or whatever. It's a lifestyle that's hard to maintain.

There's a story you tell in the book about a veteran climber who's walking a steep ridgeline with a newcomer. They're tethered together and the newcomer falls and without thinking about it the veteran dives over the other side to balance his fall.

That's the knife edge, yes. In a way, climate change impacts put us all on this knife edge. We're going to have to make that kind of decision ultimately for one another or suffer the consequences.

Please go here for the original interview: https://the.ink/p/walking-the-knife-edge-in-greenland-neil-shubin-interview-polar-science-imperial-ambition-denmark-trump-climate-change?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan — Know Your Rights: Voices from the Frontlines of Immigrant Communities

This nails it, the truth about the terrorizing, targeting, brutalizing, and dehumanization of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers: “If this really was about public safety and legality, we would not have seen the 1,500 pardons of people that stormed the Capitol and committed violent crimes on police officers... I believe that this is a very high media strategy that’s being used to elevate what this administration is trying to push, which is a white supremacist agenda.” — Molly

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

On Inauguration Day, President Trump launched his campaign of mass deportations. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested over 5,000 people. ICE raids have been launched with much hype and publicity across the country, including in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Houston, San Antonio, Tallahassee, Miami and Newark. CNN reported that ICE agents were told to be “camera-ready,” while Phil McGraw, the unlicensed psychologist and TV talk show host better known as “Dr. Phil,” “embedded” with ICE on a Chicago operation. Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem accompanied one arrest in New York City, live-tweeting it.

In the midst of this, Trump signed his first bill into law, H.R. 29, the Laken Riley Act, named after the 22-year-old nursing student murdered in Georgia in 2024 by an undocumented immigrant who was subsequently arrested and prosecuted. The law allows DHS to arrest non-citizens who have been charged – not convicted but simply charged – with burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.

Trump has also said tens of thousands of arrested migrants will be imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In addition to the notorious U.S. prison there that houses 9-11 suspects (many of them never charged), now numbering at most 15, the base also has a migrant detention area. At the height of its use in the 1990s, as many as 30,000 people, mostly Haitian, were held there behind barbed-wire, without charge, in a squalid camp.

But people aren’t just standing by amidst this intensifying, militarized attack on immigrants. Years of organizing, educating and empowering people to defend themselves from racist immigration policies are showing results. Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan appeared on CNN, lamenting the degree of organization among immigrant communities:

“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. And I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs. Here’s how you escape ice from arresting you, here’s what you need to do. They call it, ‘Know your rights.’ I call it ‘how to escape arrest.’ There’s a warrant for your arrest, and they tell you how to hide from ICE. Don’t open your door. Don’t answer questions.”

Harold Solis is the legal director of one of those organizations that Homan bemoaned, Make the Road New York. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour this week, Solis explained,

“There is no one single legal definition of what it means to be a sanctuary jurisdiction, but, essentially, many people agree that it means being a welcoming place, a place where the jurisdiction is not looking to do more harm, number one, to its residents.”

Fernando García is founder and executive director of the El Paso,Texas-based Border Network for Human Rights. He said on Democracy Now! “We’re just reminding people that the Constitution of the United States still exists, that under the Fourth Amendment, they only have to allow somebody into their property or house or workplace with a search warrant or the permission of the owner. Or, if they are confronted and being asked questions by law enforcement, that they have the right to remain silent.”

One of the first Trump raids took place in Newark, NJ. ICE did not have a warrant. One of the first people detained was an Army veteran from Puerto Rico–yes, a U.S. citizen. Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, explained on Democracy Now!:

“Unless an ICE officer produces a warrant with your name clearly and correctly spelled, and signed by a judge, you do not need to answer their questions. If you understand that, you can also develop an analysis that everything that ICE officers do outside of that warrant is a deception tactic, it’s manipulation, just like they use the theater of fear and panic to intimidate people into giving more information than they should.”

The U.S. Secret Service attempted to enter an elementary school in Chicago, but was denied entry.

While this nationwide, high-profile immigrant round-up is unfolding, Trump supporters convicted of participating in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol were pardoned by Trump on his first day in office, and now walk free.

“If this really was about public safety and legality, we would not have seen the 1,500 pardons of people that stormed the Capitol and committed violent crimes on police officers,” Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas in Chicago and a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, said on Democracy Now! “I believe that this is a very high media strategy that’s being used to elevate what this administration is trying to push, which is a white supremacist agenda.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/30/know_your_rights_voices_from_the

TRUMP TRIES A JANUARY COUP — AGAIN

This is really freaking serious — a second attempted fascist coup taking place right now here in America that MUST be stopped! — Molly

The president wages war on the separation of powers

The Ink

Jan 28

Conservative activist and amateur comedian Grover Norquist famously joked in a 2001 interview that he planned to spend the next 25 years making the federal government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And here we are, with the Trump Administration moving this week to paralyze a wide swath of critical government programs by abruptly cutting off their funding.

This is no mere bureaucratic adjustment. This story, first reported by Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket, is best understood in the context of something else that happened this past week: the mass pardon of the more than 1,500 insurrectionists who tried to seize the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and overturn a free and fair election.

What’s happening here is, as Daniel Hunter of the group Choose Democracy put it, a coup. This is Trump’s second coup attempt.

As Hunter writes:

It's an administrative coup. Trump has ordered tens of billions (maybe up to $3 trillion) of budget halted indefinitely in a blatantly illegal move. He's claiming power to halt and potentially redirect funding that's already been authorized by Congress — a classic authoritarian move.

As David Dayen writes over at The American Prospect, this coup works by striking directly at all the stuff the government does to make a real difference in people’s everyday lives:

The pause would include student loan payments to universities, grants for basic research, grants to state and local governments for a wide variety of purposes, and much more. The OMB memo claims that Social Security and Medicare benefits are exempted by the order, as well as grants delivered specifically to individuals, like Pell grants or veterans’ benefits. It’s unclear how much money is at stake, but it could range into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The spending freezes have already paralyzed foreign aid, stalled medical research funded by the NIH (the world’s biggest funder of medical research) and funding for basic science by the NSF, and halted ongoing efforts against AIDS by the PEPFAR program (the crowning achievement of the George W. Bush administration and possibly the most successful foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan). In short, the White House has launched an attack on the institutions that have made America an economic powerhouse and the institutions that help maintain global order.

OMB director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought

You could look at that as fulfilling the nativist impulses of the MAGA movement, but this all culminated in a bizarrely worded two-page memo from the Office of Management and Budget (headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought), refusing to spend the great majority of the money currently allocated for domestic programs.

As Senator Ron Wyden points out, this is attacking the programs that keep people alive. And it is not a hypothetical. It’s happening now:

My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.

The original memo is brief and unclear, but the language suggests that it disrupts not just Medicaid (which provides healthcare to some 80 million Americans) but programs like SNAP and WIC (which provide food aid for families and children), FAFSA (financial aid for college), Medicare (which serves another 65 million people), and more — the programs that keep people healthy and safe, and let them build futures.

As Shannon Pettypiece and Julie Tsirkin report for NBC, the OMB sent another memo, asking for a huge range of agencies to prove their funding didn’t support programs that didn’t align with the White House’s agenda of blocking diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, stifling discussion of abortion, and so forth:

It’s not clear exactly which programs will be halted, but OMB also sent a separate document, asking federal agencies that provide financial assistance, for details on more than 2,600 programs, including:

• School meals for low-income students

• The WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants

• Wildfire preparedness for the Department of Interior

• The Medicare enrollment assistance program

• USAID foreign assistance

• Mine inspections

• A reintegration program for homeless veterans

This is much more serious than the tentative media language about a “pause” in spending indicates. Much of the reporting by the mainstream press on this memo has failed to transmit the gravity of the situation. But even if The Washington Post’s headline — “White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion” — suggests a bureaucratic snafu, the report cites Senator Chuck Schumer pointing to the real legal problem at the heart of Trump’s moves: the fact that this is an attempt to disable the legislative branch and seize omnipotence for the executive. That is to say, it’s a coup.

They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement. “Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.

Trump and his team are using a strategy called “impoundment” (basically refusing to spend money that had already been legally allocated by Congress). Impoundment had been used occasionally going back to Thomas Jefferson’s administration but was most widely and infamously employed by Richard Nixon. Congress found Nixon’s use of the tool so beyond the pale that it pushed back on it and asserted its constitutional prerogative with a law, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

Congress passed the ICA in response to President Nixon’s executive overreach – his Administration refused to release Congressionally appropriated funds for certain programs he opposed. While the U.S. Constitution broadly grants Congress the power of the purse, the President – through the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and executive agencies – is responsible for the actual spending of funds. The ICA created a process the President must follow if he or she seeks to delay or cancel funding that Congress has provided.

Nixon had tried to block Congress when it did things — passed laws — that he didn’t like or disagreed with. And in that context, David Dayen goes on to lay out exactly why what Trump and Vought are attempting to do here is not just dangerous, but illegal. This is breaking the law, pure and simple — illegal and unconstitutional.

To state clearly, Congress has the constitutional power of the purse. Presidents can sign or veto a budget; that’s the extent of their role. After that, they must take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Refusing to spend money because of a policy preference is the opposite of faithful execution. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 1988 agreed that there just isn’t any authority for presidents to defy appropriated funding.

How is government meant to work? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that agencies are meant to call OMB director Russell Vought and ask, hat in hand.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com

Asked how organizations that rely on federal funding should make payroll, Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says they should call Russ Vought and make a case

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:26:15 GMT

Not only is there no possibility of actually running a government this way, but this is all going on, as Donie O’Sullivan and Katelyn Polantz reported for CNN, as the Trump White House attempts to erase the historical record of the January 6 coup.

As President Donald Trump this week sought to rewrite the history of his supporters’ attack on the US Capitol, a database detailing the vast array of criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters was removed from the Department of Justice’s website.

States are pushing back already. That pressure is what America needs now. All is not lost. During the first Trump administration, as William E. Nelson writes at The Conversation, public and governmental pressure got the administration to walk back the shutdown.

The shutdown illustrated what some advocates have long wanted: a shrunken government. And it was an experiment that, as the above examples and many others illustrate, was not viable. Public pressure forced the reopening of the government – at the same size it was before the shutdown.

This was a coup, plain and simple. More than the last one, it must be clearly answered.

Please go here for the original article: https://the.ink/p/trump-tries-a-january-coup-again