The same party that didn’t arrest Trump even when it was an open and shut case of treason?
The same party that kept ICE funded?
The same one that called out Dubya’s surveillance program after they voted for it, and then tried to arrest Snowden?
The same party that allows border cages for ICE?
The same party that loudly said “we don’t need to defund the police, we need to fund the police!” in a state of the union adresss to bipartisan applause?
I’ll hope that the midterms and next nominee change these lack of action polices, but it seems like the suspected frontrunners are going to aim for the status quo of 2020, not pushing for a better 2028.
Yeah which is why I am actually torn. I’m not sure whether voting Democrat is actually beneficial at this point. The fastest way to defeat Republicans may not actually involve the Democratic Party at all. It may simply be something that requires a few election cycles. People don’t like to admit something so painful, but that may be the truth.
In retrospect, we would have been a lot better off if Hillary lost 60-40 in 2016 instead of just barely losing. This has allowed the DNC to pretend they can still field viable presidential candidates. In truth, voting for a Democrat right now is as futile as voting for the green party. Neither are going to win.
The democrats won the election before this one… to jump from that to it is impossible for them to win is a massive overreaction.
They won because of covid.
How did we stop the SS?
Oh, right, armed intervention from other countries.
Please help.
Good thing those of us that saw this coming spent a decade getting called naïve and hysterical for saying “abolish ice”… by Democrats.
I’d like to see every ICE agent have it forcibly tattooed on their face so that for the rest of their lives they will never be able to hide what they are.
ICEamerica is out of control and beyond repair - Thisagencynation needs to be stripped down to the studs.DemsThe world should start preparing now.That seems better.
Do we have a Project 2029 yet?
LOL, we are in a straight up fascist state now. the only way you getting rid of these people is with bigger scarier people.
The government collapsing so ICE doesn’t get paid will work, too.
Except they’re still getting paid. They’re apparently “essential”, but food stamps and air traffic control aren’t.
Yeah, it hasn’t collapsed yet.
The Dems couldn’t even get on board with local PDs being held accountable for extra judicial killings in 2020.
They called the protests riots and the protesters looters.
Two wings of the same bird.
that’s why they’ll only talk and posture with ice.
because if they go after ICE for abuse violations or fight against their qualified immunity, then it’ll set a precedent against their police.
It horrified me how in sync the Republicans and Democrats were in 2020 when it came to stomping down the last vestiges of the Civil Rights Movement
They aren’t on the same side, they just share corporate donors
Is there a meaningful difference?
only in their branding.
Can you define “the Dems” in this context? I thought a lot of Democrats were on board with that, and some of it did happen. There were police departments defunded. The murderer of George Floyd went to prison because of all the noise made about that brutality.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-fund-the-police-biden-says-at-state-of-the-union
“We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police is to fund the police,” he said. “Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training, they need to protect their community. I ask Democrats and Republicans alike to pass my budget and keep our neighborhoods safe.”
And then it was bipartisan applause from the Neo-Nazi Party known as Republicans and Democrats. https://youtu.be/IsiNDuPAfJg
To a nation currently protesting police brutality, he said shut up and keep increasing the funding of the the militarized police who are killing people via extrajudicial means.
Some equals all. Because thinking in binary terms is the only way.
So do you think Biden was talking about funding only the good cops that evict working families for missing rent or the bad cops who shoot minorities?
Which police departments were defunded?
should start preparing now
The time to prepare was when the Democrats were in power. It’s now too late. MAGA in 2019 could not have telegraphed their moves harder. The plan was always to massively bolster ICE and commence rapid, racist deportations and death camps. And not only did Biden and democrats fail to prepare for this (dismantling ICE, jailing MAGA, chickenshit prodecutor Garland, etc…), but they carried out the biggest federal law enforcement blunders in US history.
On top of this, Biden expanded ICE during his time in office, and literally built the camps that Tump is now utilizing.
It’s just downright pitiful to see a headline saying that “now is the time to act”, as if the people we’re begging to act didnt just spend the last 4 years collaborating with fascists.
The last dude ran on not being Trump, but gave him a faster car after he crashed the last one with his drinking buddies.
Instead of pushing for harder limits to stop hi, he just acted like his hands were tied, he had to fund the Neo-Nazi Police Department, he had to build more of the border wall that Trump wanted, he had to keep Trump’s tax cuts for the rich to afford more propaganda.
It’s too late to avoid damage, but not too late to avoid total destruction.
I wish Lemmy had fewer doomers. I get it - horrible things are happening. Failures are taking place all over the country, and heart wrenching acts are being committed
It’s bad.
This said, things can get much, much worse. People and systems are still fighting, and both are sometimes winning. These are small battles in a larger war, but we shouldn’t discount the bravery and sacrifice that is actually getting results, however small many may be.
So no, it’s not too late to save the USA. But yes, the USA is actively failing, being divided, and breaking under the stress of the cruelty and apathy of countless millions of awful people, chief amongst them those that are currently in charge (the GOP led by Trump).
But that’s the thing… Apathy is an ingredient. Doomerism creates apathy. Fight this just as hard as you fight Trump, everyone. It’s his tool, so stop giving him strength.
Well… now IS the time to act.
Lots of missed opportunity in the past to act. We can’t change that now, we can only try to do better going forward.
I feel focusing the narrative on how we got into this emergency situation to cast blame on past non-action does little to affect any future change and demotivates others from trying.
Can we focus on what we are going to do instead of pointing fingers?
I know it feels good to cast blame, to get our anger out, and gives us the feeling we are doing something. It also weighs us down, directs our focus to the past when we need to be here now focused on what options are still available to us. We can analyze how we got here and what we should have done later.
Now is all we have left.
As an outside observer, the most painful part is the usa’s really weird two team political system and how the people still put any trust into the dems at all. Watching and reading over and over about how things that are happening are “warnings” of the other things that have clearly already happened really puts history into perspective.
The us is now at the point that supporting ether party or even the nation itself would be seen as “crazy” or “misinformed” if reading it in a history book (or wiki article, etc.). The time for happy involvement in the political system to enact change was so long ago it gives me a sense of discordance reading about the actions of the american people vs the actions of their government.
Please, focus on what you can do. But also please, try and be pragmatic and not just put the future of your nation on the party that has clearly shown they are incapable of any action.
The way to act in a two party system is to take over a party and purge the people who were a problem. The Republicans were always bad and always racist, but not like this. We’ve seen a party get consumed by an insurgent faction. There’s nothing forgone about “the Democrats” always being what they have been.
I would hope the way to act in a two party system is to take it down and make a non two party system. Its just not a viable system.
Changing governmental systems to a more representative option without armed revolution is nearly impossible. The people with the power to make a change through legal methods are almost always personally incentivized to maintain it.
But to your point, it’s notable that America basically never institutes its own system when it regime changes a country.
I think america is in the find out part of their great experiment. The current political system has created an almost “sportsball” like interaction where you pick a team and root for them and little else, the parties (both of them) have no reason to want to change this (as you point out). Now you have a massive steaming hot mess of an administration, with no real political opposition and media coverage doing commentary like on the sidelines of a sporting event. There is no meaningful legal way the american people can interact with their government anymore and the media keeps talking about each party “slamming” and “blasting” each other like its a wresting match, and like a wresting match it is all fake without any real world impact (the “slamming” not the awful policy by the government).
Yeah, it’s particularly bad at the presidential level as most votes just don’t matter. People talk about “if you stayed home this is your fault” but it (for the presidential vote specifically) really is pointless for like 70% of the population who lives somewhere that’s solidly one way or the other. I voted in the last election but all my representatives were decided in the primary and my vote for Harris was useless because whether she wins my state by 10% or 30% doesn’t matter.
It was a fine first draft, but technology has changed and we’ve figured out better systems of government in the last 250 years.
Was the expansion of ICE under Biden connected to the centrist delusion that if democrats take these kinds of actions they will bring people from the far right to the left?
May as well off yourself or go into the streets and start shooting if that is your mentality and you think it’s too late to do anything.
It doesn’t need to exist at all…
Wild that the author doesn’t know that, I’m not sure if they’re just ignorant or controlled opposition.
It’s getting really hard to tell these days who’s being intentionally ignorant, or who’s just pretending
Everyone is just pretending to some extent or another. An absolutely sober truth teller would be entirely unpalatable to most voters. There’s always going to be some amount of smoothing over of the facts. It’s just a matter of deciding what’s acceptable. In this case, I’ll take anyone who doesn’t pretend that ICE or the CBP can be somehow reformed. There also have to be criminal prosecutions.
I consider the US to be suffering a mental illness epidemic… ever since 9/11, really. The fervent nationalism and propaganda displayed back then was insane, and it’s only gotten worse.
All of US conservatisms mental-illnesses are self evident, but the “liberals” are also so brainwashed and propagandized that they’re still holding out for future elections while the dictatorship is installed before their very eyes, their only hope for leadership is 1% career politicians and billionaires, and it is well beyond the stage for wide scale general strikes, and preparation of armed insurgency and secession.
ever since 9/11, really. The fervent nationalism and propaganda displayed back then was insane, and it’s only gotten worse.
9/11/02 I got sent home from school because I worse a shirt that said “bad cop, no doughnut”…
Even tho no one could explain to me what it had to do with 9/11, me saying I forgot it was 9/11 didn’t help either.
they’re still holding out for future elections
I’m not saying don’t have a plan b, just that there’s no reason to pre-emptively give up on plan a…
Especially since we finally got a non biased DNC chair. I think you’re upset they’re not overtly progressive, but that is short sighted. If we try to keep the DNC corrupt, but to our advantage long term nothing gets fixed.
It’s like LOTR and deciding Gollum had the best plan. We gotta throw that shit in the volcano or it will corrupt us too. We can’t use something as corrupt as the One Ring for good, that’s why Gandalf didn’t just put it on and 1v1 Sauron, because he’d win and in the process become even worse than Sauron.
For the past 8 months the DNC is being weakened, it’s taking all the money Biden/Kamala had hoarded, and distributing back to state parties. Which is good, we don’t want the Dem party structured with that much consolidated power. Because we can lose it. We want a bottom-top structured party.
But ignorant people think nothing is being done and still rant and rave against the DNC when we just won a 30+ year war over how it should be structured…
Billionaires just ain’t going to let the media companies they own tell the masses the billionaires lost.
This is… Patently untrue unless we’re also going legislate a 100% open-doors immigration policy and global free trade agreements. Which, Ok, i could see a argument there, but is saying something very different than ‘The organization ICE is corrupt beyond recovery and is going to need its own Nuremberg after all of this is over, but they had a day job before they went full brownshirt and someone will need to be doing that job afterwards’ like this article is suggesting.
America didn’t have open-doors immigration before 2003 when ICE was established. Their day jobs were performed by other agencies that, notably, were not private militias of the president.
Whut?
You do know ICE wasn’t created till 2003, right?
What do you think happened before 2003?
Do you think for the 200+ years that America existed without ICE that:
we’re also going legislate a 100% open-doors immigration policy and global free trade agreements
The agency doesn’t necessarily have to be abolished; we do need to enforce immigration laws. But it will have to be completely remade. And it’s not too early to start preparing.
Counterargument: It needs to be abolished. There might be elements of the American state worth salvaging the remains of. ICE is not one of them.
Counterpoint to all of this:
Something I’ve noticed recently in the news is that ICE makes the headlines, and then when you dig down to the details, the real problem is often CBP or some other department that’s along for the ride. Difficult to tell, I’m sure, when everyone is masked and not wearing clear identification.
Just saying that abolishing ICE wouldn’t necessarily get rid of the problem, and I suspect that there’s still a chunk of ICE you never see because they’re actually doing the work they’re traditionally supposed to be doing.
The entire system needs to be fixed, not just abolishing one department that’s been co-opted as the poster boy for the abuse of the system.
It’s always capitalism
It’s the whole DHS (of which ICE and the CBP are a part). It’s a new department with none of the institutional history to resist large scale abuses and created with a fascist friendly mission. The others are in on it, but they don’t go so wholeheartedly because there’s lots of people who believe in the institution as something that will endure beyond the current administration.
you’re right, it’s systemic and deeply rooted. But we also need to start somewhere, and ICE is a great start to dismantling systemic oppression
well yeah ice is under border patrol. and that has to have a total house cleaning but they have basically destroyed the ice “brand” where it needs to be eliminated. It could be replaced but again its not something that has existed for very long.
Just a correction, ICE and CBP are sibling organizations in the DHS.
oh yeah republicans destroyed the brand. it certainly has to be dissolved and im not even sure if replaced as they are relatively speaking new and we did border security without them before.
Yeah, there’s no way that “ICE” or “CBP” is ever going to mean “a neutral and professional law enforcement agency” to people. Even if you could purge (and ideally imprison for crimes) all the “bad apples”, the stain is still there. The FBI has a long history (with admittedly a lot of its own bad actions), so I can see people deciding their collaboration in the effort was a temporary failing to reform, but ICE is both more central to the abusers and has none of the history.
Which is probably why they’ve always been the first people Trump calls on. They don’t have the institutional history or pride to resist. CBP was called to Portland during BLM to ride around in vans and kidnap people. A protest that had nothing to do with customs or the border. They’ve been rotten and off mission well before this.
Why do you think the Confederates funded them like they have?
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