Ian Welsh

On October 21, 2025

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $8,180 from 72 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

As I write this I’m eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.

I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.

Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.

They knew they weren’t staying there.

When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.

And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I’d even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I’d pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.

And that’s what I expected my life to be.

When politicians participate in one of those “live on Welfare for a week/month” programs I’m happy, but I’m also dubious. The difference is that they know they’re getting out in a week or a month. They know it’s going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn’t eat for days, that was her choice.

Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that’s just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you’ve got now is probably about as good a job you’re ever going to have, changes you.

And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I’d watch all the soft office workers with their un-calloused hands come out for lunch, and I’d wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn’t have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I’d go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.

Of course, I got out of that. I’d say “I went back to university”, but even though that’s true, it’s not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do—I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don’t have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard labor, but it also involved luck.

But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren’t really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they’ve got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there’s something not quite right in their brain chemistry. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren’t lucky and their parents weren’t well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.

But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it’s barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.

But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they’re one bad break away from losing even the little they have—one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.

They don’t have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won’t get worse. The life they live now is the best it’s probably gonna get.

Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone’s going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they’re abused by their boss is as good as it gets.

This all comes to mind because of how Congress and other politicians have acted throughout the auto bridge loan debate. Folks who passed a bill giving their sort of people: wealthy people who went to good colleges, who work with their minds and not their hands in the financial industry, 700 billion dollars without any real oversight wanted to force a cram down of wages and benefits on auto workers. Journalists on TV who were sympathetic to the bailout, dripped with palpable contempt for the idea of “subsidizing unprofitable companies”, something that didn’t bother them when it was soft-handed professionals like themselves on the dole.

The narrative of the GI generation was “first person in my family to go to college”. They came up from poverty, they probably expected to live in poverty all their life, but when the world changed so changed their chances.

It was a generation of opportunity, but what has happened since them is the “closing of the American elite”. Every generation the odds of someone born poor making it into the elite decrease. At this point about 80% of the working class don’t get degrees. The US now has the least inter-generational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets.

As a result they have no real empathy or understanding of the vast majority of the middle and working class. The elites know they worked hard to be where they are, what they don’t see is that their feet were put on the path from birth, and that every opportunity was given to them. Opportunities that were not so open to those below them, who have to virtually bankrupt themselves to go to university and whose schools were completely broken, even as the value of BA declines to multi-generational lows. Put yourself in debt for 20 years, and it may still not buy you the good life.

That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America’s elites have never experienced and don’t understand. For them there’s always another opportunity, always another chance: always hope. And what matters to them is when the “deserving”, which is to say, their own class, is in trouble. So they’ll bail out the financial sector, even though it hasn’t made any more profit than the Big 3 in the past 8 years, and unlike the financial sector, didn’t bring down the world economy, but they won’t help out the undeserving whom they don’t understand.

America has become the most class ridden society in the Western world, far worse than Britain. Congressional seats are passed on to family members and friends like corrupt boroughs in 18th century England. The rich are bailed out and ordinary people left to sink. Responsibility is enforced on the least in society while the privileged are allowed to skate. Sell a gram of pot, go to jail; but kill hundreds of thousands in an illegal war and it’s no big deal.

The elites don’t live in the same world as ordinary people. They have become completely disconnected from that world. This is entirely logical on their part, because for 30 years they’ve gotten rich, rich, rich at the same time as ordinary people haven’t had a single raise. When you’re sitting on the top it’s very clear that all boats don’t need to be lifted and that Americans aren’t all in it together. The elites have done just fine, for over 30 years, while the rest of society went to hell.

So there’s no empathy born of shared experience, of the knowledge that sometimes life sucks and no matter what you do, it’s going to suck, and that that’s the way many people live. And there’s no acknowledgment of a need to make America work for everyone, because for the elites, that’s simply not true: America doesn’t need to work for everyone for things to be good for them.

This then, is how they’ve acted. Plenty of help for themselves, for the people they see as part of their group. And very little help for everyone else. Because the elites aren’t like ordinary people, they don’t believe they have many shared interests with you, and they no longer have any real shared experience.

Expect to eat a lot of cake over the next few years if this attitude doesn’t change. The elites, of course, are wrong. At the end of the day a nation without a solid working and middle class always falls into steep decline.

But, as Adam Smith once said, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”

Nonetheless, as many nations have discovered, that amount isn’t infinite.

This is a republished article from 2009. I think it’s worth putting some of these up occasionally, because most readers won’t have seen the original.

Has China Put America Into the pre-WWII “Japan Trap?”

On October 20, 2025

Most modern weapon systems require rare earths to manufacture, including expendables like missiles and drones. Rare earths are less mined than they are refined, and China controls over 90% of the refining capability. Rare earths are generally found in small amounts in other ores. For example, Gallium in Aluminum. To get Gallium, you have to refine mountains of aluminum. Gallium comes from Bauxite as part of the refining process.

Fifty grams of Gallium per metric ton of refined aluminum.

China produces 98% of it.

Now Canada used to produce a lot of Gallium, as a side benefit of processing a lot of aluminum. But Canadian aluminum wasn’t as cheap as Chinese Aluminum. And this is the problem, if you want to scale you need long term contracts not just for Gallium but the Aluminum. (Do you trust any contract underwritten by the US government? If so, many bridges are available for sale to you.)

Every rare earth has similar issues.

Now cast your mind back to pre-war Asia. Japan is kicking ass, especially against the Chinese. They’ve conquered Taiwan, Korea and South Manchuria. All of this requires lots of oil, and they buy that oil from America, primarily, which was the Saudi Arabia of the day. FDR (who hated the Japanese and was a Sinophile) cut off oil exports to Japan.

Japan had only so much in the way of oil reserves. It decided to use them to go to war, grabbing as much territory as possible, while they still existed. Some of their conquests: Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and Borneo, had oil.

The situation today isn’t identical. There’s no non-China rare earth production to seize. Everyone else is pretty much happy to sell to America, they just don’t have enough to matter.

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,885 from 68 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

But what does matter is that if China’s rare earth ban continues, America loses the ability to make large volumes of advanced weapons. Every time I look into estimates of how long it will take to get rare earths production up and running the West, the optimistic numbers are at about ten years, with a median around twenty. China itself took about twenty years, in the 80s and 90s.

China is getting stronger over time. Everyone with sense admits that. Even before the rare-earth ban it was clear that the West is growing weaker. In ten years, let alone twenty, no one will be able to pretend America can win a war against China.

So the rare earths ban means that if the US wants war against China, it has to be soon. Within a year, I’d say.

Note that this isn’t just about China. The West supplies Ukraine and Israel, for example, with weapons which have tons (literally) of rare earths in them. The ability to keep doing this is being taken away.

Heck, forget arming proxies, the West won’t be able to produce enough missiles and drones and radar and so on for its own military needs, meaning its ability to project power and keep other nations cowed and in line will go way down.

(At this point many of you are thinking “and this is bad, how?”)

So this is fairly existential for America. Its ability to bully everyone is about to be reduced significantly for ten to twenty years, by which time all its enemies will be well supplied by the Chinese and Russians with weapons more advanced than American ones.

Use it or lose it. I suspect this may be part of the reasoning (by the few parts of American government capable of reasoning) around attacking Venezuela, for example.

But the reason that America officials are freaking out about the rare earth ban is it really does matter. That America and the West let themselves get into the position is insane, people (including me) were pointing out this vulnerability twenty years ago. But if there’s one thing the West can’t do any more it’s definitely think beyond three months or “but China’s rare earths are cheaper, so we can’t do anything!!!!!”

Assuming a war can be avoided, the best outcome here (but bad for most citizens of the West because there are a lot of civilian rare earth applications) is for China to just leave the restrictions on permanently.

Oh, and as a ray of sunshine. If the US can’t supply Israel with weapons and if Russia and China won’t, well… More on that later.

China’s finally flexing its muscles. It spent the last eight years, ever since Trump’s absolutely crazed and stupid Huawei sanctions, making sure it has all the trump cards and no significant vulnerabilities.

And it had done so. Goodbye (not) Pax Americana.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 19, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On October 19, 2025

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 19, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Are We the Nazis Now? How do we meet this moment?

Joyce Vance, Oct 13, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

It’s hard to watch. People being treated like they are less than human because of their perceived immigration status….

In early October, federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI, and ATF arrested 37 people in a raid on a Chicago apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. They banged on residents’ doors overnight, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times, “pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said.”….

Earlier this month, at West Loop Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois, ICE was forced to release two sisters it pulled out of their car at a school pick up, because they have legal status under DACA. But that didn’t stop the masked agents, captured on video by a quick-thinking teacher, from surrounding the car and smashing its windows before dragging the two out. One of the sisters cried out her name and where she lived to bystanders, an apparent effort to prevent being “disappeared” into ICE custody….

In Portland, Oregon, on October 5, ICE agents threatened to arrest and kill an ambulance driver. The incident is documented by witness reports filed with the ambulance crew’s employer and its union by different individuals, as well as 911 calls, dispatch reports, and emergency communications. The ambulance was called to the ICE office to treat an injured protester, but agents refused to let the ambulance leave once the patient was loaded….

A video filmed in September that recently went viral shows ICE firing on protestors and hitting Presbyterian minister David Black in the head with a pepper ball. The minister, who was injured, is now suing. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin tweeted that the shooting was justified because….

There are now so many of these stories flooding the country, and they come with such rapidity, that it’s impossible to keep up with all of them. In other words, these incidents aren’t the exceptions. They aren’t unusual. And there’s every indication that they are tolerated, even encouraged, by Trump’s machine.

Trump promised he’d deport violent criminals. Instead, ICE is going after legal residents and terrorizing children. The message: if you’re an American citizen, don’t exercise your First Amendment rights unless you want to become a target too….

Leak: Feds Think Protests Hide Terrorism

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-15-2025]

WHY ARE US TROOPS OCCUPYING AMERICAN CITIES?

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2025]

…The Trump administration is playing another long game, or trying to, in the streets of US cities under Democratic Party governance, using existing presidential emergency powers to send National Guard, Army troops and ICE agents to hunt down and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants and detain and deport them, without the due process demanded by the Constitution. What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections. I’ve been told by someone with inside knowledge that planning for such action is now under way in the White House….

Inside the War on Antifa

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2025]

Open Thread

On October 18, 2025

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. You know the drill. Hup, Hup!

China Seizes The Master’s Weapon As It Makes Itself The New Hegemon

On October 17, 2025

I’d like to highlight something Matt Stoller (the anti-trust guy) recently wrote:

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes believed that ideas, hospitality, travel, knowledge and science should move freely between nations. if a country could reasonably produce something physical it needed, it should. Trade should exist, but be kept to a minimum.

In May of 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared its economic strategy, using the phrase “dual circulation.” Dual circulation meant fostering a domestic productive apparatus that is independent of foreign technology and finance, while making sure the rest of the world is dependent on Chinese control of key supply chains, whether it’s shipping, railroad construction, electric batteries, or solar panels. Chinese ‘grand economic strategy,’ in other words, is to operate as a giant monopoly on which the rest of the world must rely.

Matt says this isn’t about Trump, but notice it’s from 2020. It is about Trump: Trump in the first term, with his anti-Huawei sanctions. The Chinese realized they were vulnerable and the national effort became making sure they controlled all their own critical supply chains. Having seen how the US used financial sanctions and supplier boycotts, they regrettably decided to reverse the situation.

Now what one needs to understand is that after WWII American controlled most of the key supply chains outside of the Russian bloc. They had over 50% of the world’s industry. If you wanted something, you have to get it from them. Over time, this franchise expanded, first back to the Euros, as they re-built their industry, then to the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans. All of these nations were firmly American vassals. Not allies, vassals with military bases in their countries.

The West, led by America and the USSR had all the advanced tech. In the 70s the USSR fell behind, they couldn’t manage the digital revolution happening, and then the USSR collapsed and the West, really America, ruled unchecked.

If you wanted any advanced tech: planes, cars, computers, weapons, etc… it had to come from America or one its vassals. The US effectively had “dual circulation”, especially since it also had full control of the international finance system and could lock anyone out at will.

This wasn’t theoretical, US sanctions on Iraq in the 90s under Billy Clinton killed at least hundreds of thousands of people. I once talked to an Iraqi oncological pediatrician from the 90s and her incandescent rage over all the children who died of cancer she couldn’t save because of American sanctions was so hot it blotted out the sun.

Once such sanctions had been rare (though there are cases back in the 50s.) The most notable is the multi-generation trade blockade of Cuba.

But from Clinton on use of these sanctions became routine, “Treasury’s Wars.” Millions died, many more were impoverished.

So, China has learned from the evil master. And it has decided that if there is such a weapon, it will have it and use it and no one else can have it.

Everyone who rages against this is correct. No country should have this power. Not America. Not China. No one.

We’re about 2 1/2 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,695 from 64 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

What should be the case is a trade regime where everyone makes most of what they need. Need medicine? Make it in your country. (Shut up about prices, if the supply chain is domestic then almost all that crap that MMTers go on about becomes true. Prices are irrelevant, it’s all in money you print.) To the largest degree possible, everyone makes what they need. Smaller countries will have a harder time, and trade-states like Singapore obviously can’t, but this is what a good world looks like.

This maximizes political autonomy, too. You can’t be blackmailed by other countries. Spread nukes around, and much military force goes off the table too. (And they are going to spread. The US has taught everyone that if you have nukes you’re safe, and if you don’t, you’re dinner.)

So. China is teaching the Western world the same lesson America taught China and Africa and Iraq, and Iran and Cuba. We: Europe, the Anglo countries, South Korean, Taiwan and Japan, were inside the bubble during the period when the US allowed its vassals decent lives. (Oh, they destroyed Japan’s tech and industrial lead, they gutted Britain after WWII, they forced Canada to destroy its world leading aviation industry), but overall, if you were on the inside of the “Golden billion” or, early, “the golden 500 million”, life was pretty damn good.

America used the whip, its vassals jumped to obey and everyone else was poor.

Then Americans got stupid and thought that China was like Japan, they could ship their industry there, makes lots of money and if necessary bring China to heel if it got out of hand.

Wrong. Morons. I and others warned about this for decades, how stupid it was, but no one in power listened. Probably a good thing, since it led to a billion people getting out of poverty, but it’s not going to be fun for those us living in the West.

So: the weapon is being wrested from the old hegemon’s palsied hands, and being wielded by the apprentice, the new master, the new hegemon.

Bow, insects, the new lord is here. And no, America isn’t going to get its hegemon status back, nor should anyone who isn’t American want it to.

The actual solution is Keynes solution. No one should have the weapon—the power—because every country should make, grow and dig as much of they need as possible, using trade only for what they genuinely can’t make or for luxuries they can do without in a pinch.

Opposition to the Trump Takeover of Chicago

By Nat Wilson Turner

On October 16, 2025

Update 10.17: Added some of Gov. Pritzker’s threats of legal reprisal against Stephen Miller and my commentary on it at the bottom.

Opposition to the Trump regime’s infusion of ICE agents into Democrat-helmed cities and states is manifesting in two separate forms, seemingly uncoordinated: street-level resistance and state and local governments (the latter sometimes includes law enforcement).

I wrote yesterday for Naked Capitalism regarding the Trump administration’s increasing takeover of the federal government (headed up by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought) and expanding ICE and National Guard assaults on Blue State cities (headed up by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller).

I thought a round-up of various efforts in Illinois to oppose the Trump takeover would be a good sequel to that piece.

Keep in mind that these oppositions are separate efforts.

We’re about 2 1/2 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,045 from 63 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

The New Yorker summed up recent Second City confrontations efficiently:

The most dramatic operation to date occurred on September 30th, at an apartment building at 7500 South Shore Drive. Hundreds of federal agents from Customs and Border Protection, the F.B.I., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives stormed the hundred-and-fifty-unit building and questioned most if not everyone inside, allegedly because some people staying there had connections to drug and weapons crimes and violations of immigration law. Many of the building’s inhabitants, including children, were restrained and marched outside. A video of the operation, produced by the Department of Homeland Security, showed agents lining people up and loading them into vehicles, with the whirring of Black Hawk helicopters and a soundtrack of dramatic music in the background. By dawn, thirty-seven immigrants had been arrested. Hours later, Trump addressed leaders of the armed forces, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had summoned to Quantico from around the world. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump told them.

The Chicagoans resisting federal agents include immigrants and their communities: elected officials, immigration attorneys, faith leaders, teachers, and many others who’ve felt compelled to fight for their neighbors. Quincy Worthington, a pastor at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, has been going to demonstrations at an ICE facility in Broadview since the beginning of September. A fellow-pastor had said that he feared violence at the facility. Masked ICE agents wielded guns, and protesters hurled insults at them. The other pastor told Worthington that “police seem to respond well to clergy,” and asked Worthington if he would “mind going there and maybe being a police liaison, talking between law enforcement and protesters to make sure everything goes as smooth as it possibly can.” Worthington went with him, and now, he said, the protesters at Broadview feel like “another congregation to me.” The day I was there, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Unitarian Universalist, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ ministers huddled in a circle with protesters and shared communion. But the main way that Worthington uses his religious training, he told me, is “by being present, listening to people, comforting people, helping people if I can.”

In an October 4th memo to Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump ordered the deployment of the Illinois National Guard, writing, “The situation in the State of Illinois, particularly in and around the city of Chicago, cannot continue.” Federal facilities, he said, “have come under coordinated assault by violent groups intent on obstructing Federal law enforcement activities. These groups have sought to impede the deportation and removal of criminal aliens through violent demonstrations, intimidation, and sabotage of Federal operations.” National Guard troops from Texas and Illinois began to assemble on October 7th at the Army Reserve Training Center in Elwood, about fifty miles southwest of Chicago. Some went to the Broadview ICE facility; according to a statement from the U.S. Northern Command, the troops were assigned to protect federal property and personnel in the Chicago area. Two days later, a district judge, in response to a suit by Illinois and Chicago, blocked the National Guard’s deployment. The D.O.J. immediately appealed the court order, but, at least for now, the National Guard cannot help ICE carry out Operation Midway Blitz. Seemingly prepared for more court losses, Trump has also talked about the possibility of invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military in American cities, and against Americans, if courts, mayors, and governors were “holding us up.”

Citizen Activism in Chicago

From WBEZ in Chicago:

Cristóbal Cavazos leads the People’s Patrol, one of many volunteer rapid-response networks countering a Trump administration deportation blitz in the Chicago area. The idea is to locate immigration enforcement activity, record it, document abuses and, right on the spot, voice community opposition.

Cavazos’ network focuses on Chicago’s western suburbs. It’s housed at the Casa DuPage Workers Center, a small nonprofit devoted to immigrant rights.

…

Cavazos says the People’s Patrol includes 180 people, all volunteers. The center holds trainings for the work every other Friday.

As the volunteers go about their daily lives, they all keep an eye out for immigration enforcement activity. Some make a point of driving past parking lots and businesses where the federal authorities typically gather before a day’s operations.

The ICE officers usually drive unmarked vehicles. But People’s Patrol volunteers sometimes manage to tail them. If the officers stop a motorist or try to take people from a house or workplace, the volunteers send an alert through a Facebook page and through text groups.

“We’ll send people to go check it out,” Cavazos says. “We want to go in and show the community ‘Hey, we got your back.’ We’re in the midst of a historic fight-back right now against ICE. We’re not going to leave any space to ICE. The People’s Patrol is there to fill these spaces of terror and fear with solidarity and strength.”

Chicago organizer Kelly Hayes has posted about her efforts:

I left my apartment on foot, in the clothes I had slept in, and made my way up Clark Street, watching for any signs of ICE. When I saw a suspicious vehicle, I relayed what I’d seen through neighborhood channels that coordinate ICE watch activity. When I reached the intersection of Clark and Lunt, where the abductions had occurred, other neighbors, including some old friends of mine, were already assembling and taking directions from local organizers who had been preparing for this moment for months.

While some parts of Chicago have been targeted relentlessly during the recent federal onslaught known as “Operation Midway Blitz,” Rogers Park had seen more scattered reports of ICE activity—until Thursday, when their presence was confirmed at the start of the day with immigration arrests, and continually reported throughout the morning and afternoon. Neighbors fanned out, searching streets and alleyways for any sign of ICE activity, following up on reports, and communicating what we found. Before long, there were dozens, and then hundreds of people in the streets, watching and responding.

“Clark Street was flooded with people,” Daniel*, an activist with Protect RP, told me. “We had over 200 people on the streets. That was power.” Daniel noted that many people left work early, or “dropped whatever they were doing” to join the effort.

Longtime ICE watchers wore bright orange whistles around their necks, which are used to signal the presence of ICE. Newcomers received whistles from volunteers distributing them in the streets, making the crowds of ICE watchers a clear presence. The corridor of businesses on Clark Street, where many immigrants shop and work, was clearly defended by this mass presence.

Block Club Chicago has more on their efforts:

Ravenswood Community Services gathered volunteers Monday evening to assemble 600 whistle kits to pass out to parents and students. Pilsen Arts & Community House has a tutorial how to publish and distribute itsone-page whistle zine, which is available along with other printable resources online, and has been handing out whistle kits to local businesses to distribute.

Belmont Cragin United distributed 5,000 whistles at a recent event and is looking to hand out more than 12,000 by the end of October, said organizer Alonso Zaragoza. The organization recently launched Whistlemania, where volunteers assemble and distribute whistle kits across multiple Northwest Side neighborhoods. Each packet includes information on recognizing federal agents and advice from the ACLU, as well as a whistle to alert others in emergencies or during ICE encounters.
…

A new “walking school bus” program aims to provide a sense of security for families as they go to and from school, Zaragoza said. Seven or eight volunteers will position themselves along school routes, mirroring Safe Passage routes established by Chicago Public Schools. Similar corner watches have launched in Irving Park and Albany Park on the Northwest Side, as well.

“It’s about having bodies out around the school, keeping an eye out and making sure everybody’s safe,” Zaragoza said. “So that the kids who haven’t been going to school in the last couple weeks feel comfortable enough to come back and finish their education.”

After early challenges, the community-led effort is gaining traction as educators and parents work together. “Now the pieces of organizing are starting to fall into place,” Zaragoza said. “Everybody’s clicking together.”

I’ll wrap this section with a public Facebook post from K Hurley Wales:

Yesterday started like many others. Craig made us coffee. My neighbor offered us some freshly baked scones. The girls ate their breakfast, excited for a three day weekend and their daddy’s birthday.

At 8:15 AM, we learned that an elderly man had been tackled by border control in a nearby alley.

At 8:30 AM, ICE detained two landscapers near Foster and Lincoln, a few blocks away. The entire neighborhood came out to help by recording and protesting, one of whom happened to be a WGN producer. She was violently abducted. ICE slammed into a neighbor’s parked car during their rapid getaway and kept right on driving.

At 9 AM, our school principal initiated our rapid response network and hundreds of parent, staff, and communities mobilized to patrol our school in support of our at-risk families and to allow our children to safely play and learn outdoors.

At 10 AM, ICE arrived fully armed near Ravenswood Elementary, a local public school where many of our friends go and teach. I spoke directly with my dear friend who teaches there immediately after it happened and, as you can imagine, she was terrified and traumatized.

At 10:15, ICE was reported outside a local daycare, where many of our neighborhood kiddos go. As the day unfolded, at least 8 of our neighbors were detained, and there were dozens of confirmed ICE sightings outside local schools and businesses. Craig and I spent a collective 10 hours patrolling our daughters’ school. Several schools went into lockdown, following the same protocol response we’d follow for an active shooter.

Chicago and Illinois Elected Officials and Police

The Washington Post claims that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker “finds his place at the ramparts of the Trump resistance:”

Pritzker has positioned himself among the most visible and unflinching figures of the resistance. The mutual antagonism between him and Trump has escalated to a point rarely seen between a president and the governor of a large state.

A billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, Pritzker will be on the Illinois ballot next year for a third term, but he is also assumed to have national aspirations. He brought his battle cry to the traditional first-in-the-nation presidential primary state of New Hampshire earlier this year.

“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker declared in a speech that brought Granite State Democrats to their feet. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”

Pritzker’s rhetoric is aggressive, but the actual steps he’s taking to resist are small beer:

As a governor, Pritzker has little by way of formal power to stand in Trump’s way, but Illinois has joined a lawsuit by state attorneys general against the president’s executive order banning birthright citizenship and led one to block the administration’s freeze on federal grants, which the White House subsequently rescinded. He has also barred rioters pardoned by Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol from holding state government jobs.
…

“One reason that so few people have been picked up is because we have done, I think, a terrific job in our state of educating people about what their rights are,” Pritzker added, including the fact that a detainer issued by ICE does not have the force of a warrant issued by a judge or give agents the power to demand entry into a home.

The city of Chicago has at least deployed its Police Department, per the NY Times, which has come into direct conflict with ICE, although it’s not clear that was intentional on their part:

Federal agents deployed tear gas on Chicago residents and more than a dozen police officers on Tuesday, the latest clash in the nation’s third-largest city as the Trump administration has carried out its immigration crackdown.

The clash began on Tuesday morning when federal agents were seen chasing a car through a working-class, heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s far South Side, witnesses said. An S.U.V. driven by the federal agents collided with the car they were pursuing, the Chicago Police Department said, sending that car into another vehicle that was parked nearby.
…
As the agents left, they released tear gas, apparently without warning, sending people coughing and running for cover. Among those affected by the gas were 13 Chicago Police Department officers, the police department said, and at least one officer was seen rinsing his eyes out with water from a neighbor’s garden hose.

Chicago PD Pissing Off National Police Union

One sign that the local authorities are at the very least, not helping with Trump’s clampdown is the angry objections of the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) via Fox News:

The nation’s largest police union condemned reports that Chicago officers were told not to help ICE agents surrounded by protesters, calling it “shocking” and a violation of law enforcement’s duty to protect fellow officers in danger.

Presidents of the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and Illinois State FOP expressed shock at reports that Chicago’s chief of patrol directed officers not to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as they were surrounded by protesters on Saturday.

“Details are still emerging, but it appears that officers from the Chicago Police Department were ordered not to assist a group of ICE agents while they were physically threatened by what appeared to be an angry mob,” said National FOP President Patrick Yoes in a press release. “Let me be clear, both the National FOP and the Illinois FOP believe that when an officer calls for assistance, you answer, no matter what.”
…

They cited the Illinois Trust Act, which limits local police involvement in immigration enforcement, and said it is contributing to a breakdown between local and federal law enforcement, particularly in sanctuary cities like Chicago.

Their comments followed Fox News’ report revealing that Chicago police officers were ordered by their chief of patrol not to respond after Border Patrol agents called for help, saying they were boxed in and surrounded following a ramming incident outside the city, according to multiple federal and Chicago law enforcement sources.

Fox News reviewed the computer-aided dispatch message sent to Chicago police officers by their chief of patrol. It instructed officers not to respond to a Saturday morning ramming incident on the southwest side of the city in which an armed woman was shot and agents were boxed in and surrounded.

The Chicago Police Department issued a statement on Sunday disputing claims that officers failed to respond, saying they were on the scene to maintain public safety and document the incident.

“To clarify misinformation currently circulating, CPD officers did in fact respond to the shooting scene involving federal authorities on Saturday to maintain public safety and traffic control,” the department said.

According to Seymour Hersh, the Trump administration is reportedly using these actions in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. as a setup for more ambitious moves:

The Trump administration is playing another long game, or trying to, in the streets of US cities under Democratic Party governance, using existing presidential emergency powers to send National Guard, Army troops and ICE agents to hunt down and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants and detain and deport them, without the due process demanded by the Constitution. What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections.

None of this is going in a good direction, and I must commend the discipline of Chicago activists who have been restrained and seemingly effective in their ad hoc resistance efforts. I’m more skeptical of the efficacy of the actions taken by their elected representatives and local law enforcement.

Update: Found this Common Dreams post by way of Naked Capitalism:

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is warning top lieutenants of President Donald Trump’s violent and unlawful immigration enforcement policies that they will not always have the protection of presidential immunity and that lawmakers in the future will seek to hold them to account for their behavior, including unlawful orders given at the behest of the president.

With episodes of violent raids, unlawful search and seizures, and the mistreatment of immigrants, protesters, journalists, and everyday citizens, Pritzker, in a Thursday evening interview on MSNBC, specifically named White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, border czar Tom Homan, and Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Patrol commander operating in the Chicago area, as people whose actions will not be forgotten.

Pritzker said that all the people serving the president, “including all the way down to ICE agents, can be held accountable when there’s a change in administration that’s willing to hold them accountable when they break the law.”

Calling out Miller in particular, the governor charged that the xenophobic Trump advisor, who has been a leading champion and director of the harsh crackdown measures and federal deployments in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, and elsewhere, has “clearly ordering people to break the law.”

Pritzker: “Stephen Miller is clearly ordering people to break the law. So he should know that yeah, it may be three years from now that he is held accountable, but I think it’s important for them to know that whatever they do now, it’s not like we’re going to forget.” pic.twitter.com/ExpdyijtnO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2025

I gotta say this strikes me as foolish. Threatening the White House Deputy Chief of Staff with prosecution serves no one’s interest. If Pritzker gets elected, he should, by all means, prosecute Miller and any other Trump official who violated the law, but in his current position of impotence, it’s best to keep his mouth shut.

There’s every reason to believe that the misguided Russiagate lawfare and impeachment over Ukraine bullshit radicalized Trump and made him more determined to seize the full reins of the Federal government in his second term.

Miller, et al., are chomping at the bit to pre-emptively prosecute Democrats. Pritzker is bringing a knife to a gunfight, something any Chicagoan should know not to do.

There’s A Reason I Say “Climate Change and Environmental Collapse”

On October 16, 2025

A lot of people lump all environmental issues under “climate change.” It’s the big bad boogeyman, the easiest to observe, and the first that’s likely to cause catastrophe. This also leads some to think that the problem is relatively easy to deal with. We can simply do aerosol injections into the upper atmosphere, and that will reduce the temperature. (Once we start, however, we can’t ever stop.)

But this isn’t the case, the environment is under assault in many ways, and simple solutions may help, but won’t deal with the issue as a whole and may even make parts of it worse. Sulfate Aerosol injections would reduce the temperature, but actually cause acid rain and increase ocean acidification. That means phytoplankton still die off, algal blooms still happen, and we still lose most of the phytoplankton oxygen production.

Cirrus cloud thinning, in which we inject ice-nucleating particles into high altitude cirrus clouds to thin them, allowing more solar radiation to escape is less effective, probably damages the ozone layer, increases UV radiation (which damages phytoplankton, again) and deposits chemicals into the ocean whose effects are probably not benign.

And, again, once we start, we can’t stop, unless we have reached a point where we’re pulling significant CO2 from the atmosphere first.

There’s no free lunch here. This is a system with complicated feedback mechanisms which was more or less in homeostasis (it was actually tending to cool down very slowly and the long term trend was to another ice age. A little bit of extra CO2 was a good thing, but only a little.)

But the real issue is that climate change is only one issue out of a large number. The Earth has a bunch of systems in homeostasis, which have been that way since the end of the last Ice Age, or much longer. Each of them is required to sustain life. When they get knocked out of balance too much, mass extinctions follow and in every mass extinction, the top predator dies.

The”planetary boundaries” system is one way of thinking of it. Here’s the 2025 visualization:

7 of 9 planetary boundaries crossed

You’ll notice that biosphere integrity is actually worse than climate change right now and that’s why I say “environmental collapse” in the same breath as climate change. The ecological web of life, from microbes to apex predators, if it collapses, leads to a huge die-off very fast. Think of the famous example of “what if all the bees die?” But humble organisms which renew soil like various microbes and earthworms and insects matter. (We’ve lost most of the world’s insects already.) Those phytoplankton which produce most of the world’s oxygen. The Amazon and Congo rainforests which used to produce so much oxygen and store so much carbon.

We’re about 2 1/2 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,045 from 63 people out of a readership of about 10,000.