US Green Card holder stripped naked, interrogated by immigration officials at airport
Trump's casual cruelty and dehumanizing hatred for immigrants of all kinds has clearly been internalized by Customs and Border Patrol as a guiding ethos, because there's no other way to explain the appalling treatment of Fabian Schmidt, a 37-year old German national who has lived in the US since his teen years and is a permanent resident. But that didn't stop CBP from arresting him at Logan Airport and subjecting him to torture, stripping him naked and depriving him of food and water before transferring him to the Donald W. Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island. CBP did not offer any kind of justification for this abhorrent violation of Fabian's human rights beyond "U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot disclose details about specific cases." Buckle up, America. If Trump's goons are willing to do this to a white man who is a legal resident, it's only a matter of time before they'll do it to the rest of us.
Take Action: Tell Congress to protect the EPA from Elon and DOGE!
Trump gets unpleasant surprise in Greenland
Greenlanders came out in force to rally against Donald Trump and his efforts to annex the strategic island. Contrary to what he's been spouting, it is very clear that they in fact do not want to have Trump take over. Wonder why?
Take Action: Stop Trump's illegal takeover of the Post Office!
Elon Musk exposed in plot to rewrite corporate law to pad his wallet
Stop SB21: A Delaware judge blocked the outrageous $56 BILLION pay package that Elon tried to give himself — and now Elon is out for revenge. Musk's own attorneys wrote a piece of legislation, SB 21, that would create convenient carve-outs that would allow him and his billionaire cronies to essentially steal from the companies they control. Delaware Senate Democrats passed the bill despite this flagrant power grab, but the House still needs to vote next week. Will you stand for yet another instance of this unelected billionaire trying to buy his way into power?
The big lesson from Bernie Sanders’s gangbusters anti-oligarchy tour
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "Unless you live in the Detroit metro area, you’re probably not an avid consumer of that city’s CBS station, News Channel 3. So you likely missed some reporting last week from reporter Jack Springgate, in which one area resident spoke out about a matter near and dear to their heart: President Donald Trump’s decision to impose stringent spending caps at the National Institutes of Health, which will cut lifesaving medical research by billions of dollars. That didn’t sit well with Elliot Stephens, who was identified as a cancer survivor. 'They’re cutting children’s cancer research and the NIH and also interfering with grant funding rules for medical research,' he said. 'I have a daughter with cancer, and that for me is unforgivable.' Stephens’s testimony is an important on-the-record account of Trumpian corruption and misrule. But what’s equally important is how Stephens’s account ended up being covered by the news at all. This chance meeting between a local resident and a local news reporter came about because Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has lately been barnstorming some of the Rust Belt’s red-district redoubts, campaigning against the oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government. Sanders has rightly been getting national attention for drawing huge crowds in these MAGA strongholds, amplifying a message that all Democrats should be sending. But there’s an added benefit to his lion’s den tour: It was at one such rally that this connection between Stephens and Springgate was made—putting a human face on the harms of Trumpism. What Sanders has been doing recently is highly instructive—and Democrats don’t need to be die-hard enthusiasts of his particular policy portfolio to extract the key lesson and act on it: Identify the victims of Trumpism, give them a voice, and get their stories told."
Take Action: Tell Congress: don't cut Medicaid EVER!
Democrats must defend Mahmoud Khalil
Branko Marcetic , Jacobin: "Top Democratic officials spent the better part of the last decade warning that Donald Trump must not become president, because he would become a dictator, act like a dangerous authoritarian, and be Adolf Hitler reincarnate. Now, as outrage builds over Trump’s attempt to strip a permanent resident of his green card and unlawfully deport of him over his antiwar activism, many Democratic leaders have either been silent or offered only the weakest of objections. It’s fair to say that the overall Democratic response so far to what has roundly and correctly been called the most serious assault on the First Amendment in years has been a mixed bag. The case is the exact kind of authoritarian overreach that high-ranking Democratic officials have claimed to be fighting the last eight years. On Saturday [March 8th], Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Columbia University student protests against the war in Gaza who is a permanent resident and whose US citizen wife is eight months pregnant. They then spirited him a thousand miles away to a scandal-ridden detention facility in Louisiana, while Trump officials announced they had summarily revoked his green card — something government officials can’t actually do — and were getting ready to deport him. The administration has not only not shown evidence he’s committed any crime to justify this, they are being quite explicit that he hasn’t committed one, but that he has simply been targeted because of his political views. It’s not that all Democrats have been MIA on the matter. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s official Twitter/X account tweeted out “Free Mahmoud Khalil” on Monday. Just yesterday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) put out a statement straightforwardly defending Khalil’s rights, hitting Trump on his hypocrisy here, and explaining why his targeting of Khalil is a threat to all Americans’ basic civil liberties. But most high-ranking Democrats couldn’t muster anything like this. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Democratic leader in the Senate and one of two senators from New York, put out a mealymouthed statement condemning Khalil and justifying some kind of punishment against him. The statement of Hakeem Jeffries, another New York Democrat and the party’s leader in the House, similarly opened by advising that “to the extent his actions . . . created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others, there is a serious university disciplinary process that can handle the matter.” “Did he break the law? Not break the law? Or is it just political punishment? I don’t know that answer right now,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “If he has a gun, he needs to go,” said New York City mayor Eric Adams. (It was unclear what he was referring to.) It is encouraging that there are Democratic officials with prominent voices and in positions of power who are speaking out on Khalil’s behalf and calling this what it is: a chilling and dangerous attack on free speech that threatens everyone’s rights, not just those of immigrants. But the overall Democratic response to something that is so clearly an overstep is still lacking — and may be another sign of the growing misalignment between rank-and-file Democrats and their political leadership.
Take Action: Defend the CFPB from Elon and his DOGE goons!
Donald Trump is crashing the rconomy, but Wall Street is afraid to speak out
Jeet Heer, The Nation: "Normally, it’s a mistake to blame the fluctuations of the stock market on the actions of just one person—even if they are president of the United States. But there is nothing normal about the Trump era. The stock market is in a tizzy, and the fault is not hard to find: Donald Trump. The S&P 500 is down 10.1 percent from its peak a month ago, which means technically we’re in a 'correction.' If this slide continues on its current trajectory, it won’t be long before the correction turns into an outright crash, bringing in its wake a recession. This economic turmoil is due to two factors: Trump’s erratic policy shifts and Wall Street’s initial misjudgment about Trump. When Trump won his second presidential term in November, Wall Street enjoyed a strong rally because it expected Trump to govern as he did in his first term. In 2017, Trump came into office talking like a radical economic populist—but his actual performance was as a standard big-business Republican, more interested in tax cuts and deregulation than industrial policy or empowering workers. Anticipating Trump 2.0 to be a repeat of Trump 1.0, Wall Street looked forward to another round of tax cuts and deregulation, with the threat of a new trade war viewed as largely rhetorical. Unfortunately, Trump and his circle had been radicalized by being out of office. Trump seems to have decided that for his second term as president, he really was going to live up to the MAGA agenda of protectionism and foreign policy unilateralism. The United States suddenly found itself in a series of tussles with Canada, Mexico, China, and the European Union. These trading partners also expected a return to the transactional Trump of the first term and were startled to discover that this time he’s really committed, although erratically so, to trade wars. The pattern over the past few weeks is for Trump to raise tariffs—and then start lowering them when met with retaliation and when the stock market sinks. Trump’s incoherent policy, which shifts wildly from day to day, is spooking Wall Street. Wall Street might be uneasy, but it is also, so far, remaining quiet. A major feature of Trump’s second term is not only a much more radical set of policies but also a pervasive fear in many institutions of offending the president, who has shown every inclination to use both his bully pulpit and the instruments of state power to punish perceived enemies. The self-censorship of Wall Street is of a piece with the larger failure of the American elite in the Trump era. Institution after institution—both political parties, the media, the academy—continue to surrender to Trump despite expressing private concerns about the dangers of his policy."
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