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Opinion
More and More Americans Want to Abolish ICE
Even before the Minneapolis shooting, polls showed public support for dropping Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Jan 11, 2026
In polling conducted on January 8, YouGov showed that American public opinion has turned sharply against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This polling was conducted on the same day Renee Good was killed during an ICE operation in Minneapolis, so it does not fully incorporate the public outrage generated by this event.
Fully 52% disapprove of how ICE is doing its job (42% strongly disapprove), while 39% approve. Furthermore, 51% say that ICE’s tactics are “too forceful," while just over 1 in 4 (27%) say they are “about right.” A 44% plurality (30% strongly approve) approve of “recent protests against ICE.”
Support for ICE’s work is clustered strongly among Republicans (53% strongly approve, 27% somewhat approve). Democrats give ICE failing grades by an overwhelming margin (72% strongly disapprove, 13% somewhat disapprove). The most significant finding in the YouGov poll is that a 56% majority of Independents (44% strongly, 12% somewhat) disapprove of ICE.
To put this issue in perspective, in February of last year YouGov polling found that ICE had a plus 16-point approval rating.
As more people see video from the Good killing, public opinion will continue to shift.
Axios points out that support for abolishing ICE has dramatically increased.
- In September 2024, just 19% supported abolishing the agency, according to survey data from research firm Civiqs, while 66% opposed.
- This month, 42% support abolishing the agency and 49.5% oppose.
- Abolishing ICE has become a consensus view among Democrats, per the Civiqs data, with 69% of Democrats now supporting the idea.
As more people see video from the Good killing, public opinion will continue to shift. In response to the White House reaction, we may see more Republican support for ICE. An equally likely conclusion is that ICE will hemorrhage support from Independents.
Despite what President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say, the polling data clearly shows that the majority of Americans are not on the side of ICE, but are with those putting their lives on the line to protest ICE’s aggressive actions.
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Canada, Stop Using the US to Launder Complicity With the Gaza Genocide
Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.
Jan 11, 2026
For decades, Canada has carefully cultivated a global reputation for principle, human rights, and moral clarity. However, that image is now cracking, and cracking fast. For too long, Canada has cloaked its inaction and complicity, rather spectacularly, behind political correctness. But as the global crises grow more brutal—and more visible—it has become harder for Canada to maintain this facade.
Canadians and people around the world are catching on to the gap between what the country claims to stand for and what it actually does. That gap is just impossible to ignore when it comes to the situation in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 80,000 Palestinians—and that figure represents only the confirmed deaths, excluding those trapped beneath the rubble. Experts have estimated that nearly 600,000 total Palestinians have lost their lives, including thousands of children, and nearly 2 million more have been displaced, an overwhelming portion of the strip’s population.
United Nations experts and international human rights organizations have increasingly raised alarms, calling this horrific massacre what it is: a genocide. Gaza now lies beneath 68 million tons of rubble, roughly the weight of 186 Empire State Buildings—enough debris to spread 215 pounds over every square inch of Manhattan. Meanwhile, the United States continues to ship to Israel, and Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.
The latest Arms Embargo Now report documents hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made fighter jet components, explosives, and propellants flowing through US facilities to Israel. Shipping data, contract records, ports of exit, and delivery timelines confirm that Canadian military goods are directly sustaining Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between late 2023 and mid-2025, over 360 shipments of Canadian aircraft parts reached Lockheed Martin's F-35 assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of commercially available shipping data revealed that at least 34 shipments were forwarded from US facilities directly to Israeli military bases and defense firms. Canadian explosives and propellants, including the M31A2 triple-base propellant and TNT, transshipped through the Port of Saguenay, Quebec, were routed through US munitions plants to produce bombs and artillery shells used in Gaza.
Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada?
The report further shows that many of these controlled military components were transported from Canada to the United States as cargo on commercial passenger flights, departing from major airports such as Toronto Pearson and Montréal-Trudeau. These components support both new aircraft production and ongoing maintenance, keeping Israeli F-35s operational during the Gaza assault, while the use of civilian airlines blurs the line between ordinary passenger travel and an active military supply chain. Every shipment appears to flow through a calculated, politically engineered pipeline fueling war.
This evidence exposes a stark truth: Public assurances by Canadian officials are incompatible with reality. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly promised that Canada would not allow “any form of arms or parts of arms” to reach Gaza, directly or indirectly. Her successor, Anita Anand, repeated similar commitments. Yet the shipments continue. Canada has not stopped sending arms; it has simply outsourced accountability.
The government’s defense relies on the so-called US Loophole: Military exports to the United States are exempt from Canada’s permit requirements and human rights assessments. Once in US hands, Canada claims no responsibility for where the arms go next. However, international law does not vanish because weapons cross a border. The Arms Trade Treaty prohibits authorizing transfers when there is a substantial risk of facilitating serious violations of humanitarian law. Knowledge, foreseeability, and contribution still matter.
The pattern of misrepresentation is clear. From December 2023 to January 2024, officials, including former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and GAC Assistant Deputy Minister Alexandre Lévêque, claimed no arms exports or permits had been issued to Israel, a statement contradicted by nearly $30 million in new export permits. Early 2024 saw a pivot to “non-lethal” exports, with night-vision goggles and protective gear cited to obscure lethal shipments of bomb accessories and explosives. Parliamentary motions and public statements claiming a halt to arms exports were largely symbolic, leaving the vast majority of existing permits intact.
By 2024-2025, claims that exports were restricted to “defensive” uses, such as the Iron Dome, or would not reach Gaza, were impossible to verify and did not prevent Canadian-made components from being incorporated into Israeli munitions. The government’s narrative meandered endlessly, offering Kafkaesque explanations that dissolved accountability into legalistic semantics.
If Canada were truly innocent, it would have promptly and publicly refuted the findings of the Arms Embargo Now report. Instead, it has responded with silence. Even after Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan introduced Bill C-233 in September 2025 to close the US loophole and impose meaningful parliamentary oversight on arms exports, the bill has been left to languish untouched. This legislation offers a straightforward safeguard to prevent Canadian weapons and components from being routed through the United States to fuel conflicts abroad, yet the government refuses to move.
If this were merely bureaucratic oversight, and if sending arms indirectly to Israel were not the objective, why has there been no momentum on a measure so clearly aligned with transparency and human rights? Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada? And why do weapon components and ammunition continue to flow even as Canadian representatives and humanitarian delegates are barred from entering the occupied West Bank, prevented from witnessing conditions on the ground themselves?
At this point, one can only wonder how much longer Canada’s moral facade can plausibly endure. As Aldous Huxley once observed, “The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.” This appears to be the goal here. The government has offered no coherent defense, only theatrical explanations in which responsibility dissolves into process and legality is reduced to paperwork. There is no counterstrategy, no rebuttal, and no attempt at persuasion. There is only silence, complexity, and delay.
Perhaps the unspoken calculation is that this response will be enough. After all, when public schools report alarming declines in reading and comprehension skills, critical engagement becomes harder to sustain. If citizens struggle to parse policy documents or follow supply-chain evidence, denial need not be convincing; it merely needs to be exhausting. In such an environment, ignorance becomes not a failure of governance, but a quiet line of defense.
In light of all this, recognition of the State of Palestine now reads like a scripted apology: Yes, we see your suffering, we hear your cries, but don’t worry, we’ll keep arming your oppressor through the US. Meanwhile, Canadian factories quietly churn out fighter jet parts, explosives, and munitions that fuel Israel’s assault on Gaza. As Joseph Heller observed in Catch-22, “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.” It is a brutal reminder that, regardless of what the government says, Canada’s military industry has reduced Palestinian lives in Gaza to expendable instruments, sacrificed to preserve contracts, alliances, and profit. Words without action are meaningless; they are a costume of virtue, while the violence continues unabated.
Canada’s reputation cannot survive on statements alone. It rests on the belief that credible evidence of mass harm would prompt action. That belief no longer holds. The facts are documented. The loopholes are exposed. The silence is deliberate.
History will not remember Canada for its statements or parliamentary motions. It will remember the arms it allowed to flow, the civilians killed with its components, and the moral compromise it has embraced. Canada’s rhetoric of principle is a veneer, one that is cracking as a majority of Canadians now demand recognition of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Behind this veneer lies complicity, deliberate and undeniable.
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Will Employers Invest in Our Kids? An Interview with Nancy Folbre
Children are getting more expensive for parents even as investment in future workers is becoming less cost-effective for employers. What should be done about it?
Jan 11, 2026
The Trump administration has suspended over $10 billion of federal childcare funds for five Democratic-led states over alleged fraud. So what if childcare in the United States is already outrageously expensive, much higher than in other developed countries? And why is it that childcare in the US is so expensive?
Socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre sheds light on these questions in the interview that follows by pointing out the various changes that have taken place over time in the organization of social reproduction and argues, in turn, that universal childcare, an idea that is becoming increasingly popular with voters across many parts of the United States, is very much needed.
Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
C. J. Polychroniou: You’ve written widely about the rising price of parenting. Despite concerns about a national birthrate that is now below replacement level, there seems to be relatively little public effort to increase economic support for parents and children in this country. Why?
Nancy Folbre: The undeclared wars the Trump administration is conducting include a brazen process of reducing public support for the next generation. This process began last spring when billionaire Elon Musk spearheaded budget cuts and layoffs in programs benefiting children and began dismantling the Department of Education. It escalated in the first week of 2026 when the administration used accusations of fraud from a partisan video of childcare centers in Minnesota as an excuse to freeze federal childcare funds to five Democratic states.
The strategy is transparent: Tar all social spending with a sticky claim of fraud and abuse. This includes spending on parents and children, already hurt by cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. These cuts have reduced the affordability of family care for all but the affluent, making a mockery of the Trump administration’s promises of prosperity for all.
An understanding of the deeper forces driving this strategy requires a deep dive into historical changes in the organization of our social reproduction.
A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.
Children are getting more expensive for parents even as investment in future workers is becoming less cost-effective for employers. Economic pressures became evident centuries ago when child labor was outlawed and technological change increased the demand for skilled labor. This shift in demand helped incentivize investments in public health and education that were financed by higher taxes. The need for future workers—and soldiers—also intensified the need for wages sufficient to support at least a modicum of family care.
While employers constantly sought ways to reduce labor costs, their need for an ample supply of skilled labor at least partially aligned their incentives with those of workers themselves through support for the so-called welfare state (better termed a “social investment” state) that helped develop and maintain the capabilities of the working population.
Fast forward to the present. The huge amounts of money being invested in artificial intelligence represent a new bet on reducing labor costs both directly (through reduced employment and wages) and indirectly (through reduced investment in health, education, and social services).
A recent Wall Street Journal headline put it this way: “AI Job Losses Are Coming, Tech Execs Say. The Question: Who’s Most at Risk?” The answer: most of us—because general artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to reduce private incentives to invest in humans rather than data centers. Elon Musk, who spearheaded efforts to cut federal spending in early 2025, is happily promoting Tesla’s new Optimus robot.
C. J. Polychroniou: You seem to be suggesting that class conflict affects public policies, which affect demographic outcomes (and vice versa). How do most economists think about these issues?
Nancy Folbre: Mainstream economists seldom pay much attention to collective identities or interests such as those based on class, gender, citizenship, or parenthood. Their general confidence in the efficiency of market forces makes them hopeful that that the labor market will adjust to changing prices—that new jobs will replace those rendered obsolete. However, college-educated, entry-level workers in the US are already experiencing diminished job prospects. Some economists predict that the “adjustment costs” will be high—a polite way of saying that the younger generation is in for an unpleasant economic shock.
Some ideological adjustment is also underway. The theory of “human capital” successfully promoted the view that the labor market would reward the skills represented by a college degree, reinforcing the claim that employees are generally paid according to the value of what they produce. The very term “human capital” suggests that there is no real distinction between capitalists and workers—everyone can be a capitalist by investing in their own earning power.
This utopian fantasy has long been countered by evidence that the environment people grow up in—including many factors well beyond their own control—shapes their economic trajectory. The fantasy is countered even more powerfully by evidence that the returns to a college education are now declining for individuals coming from low-income families. The surge of investment in AI raises the distinct possibility that the supply of “human capital” is likely to further exceed the demand for it, threatening downward mobility for a segment of the paid labor force once considered relatively secure.
Of course, even conservative economists recognize that a good education—from preschool to college--does more than merely increase lifetime earnings. It enhances the skills that people need to manage their own lives—skills like troubleshooting phones, making good decisions about what to buy, how to save, how to vote, and how to parent. Well-educated people live longer—and not just because they tend to earn more money.
But these benefits are not as profitable as increased productivity for a private firm.
Because they have characteristics of a public good, their economic contribution is difficult to measure, much less privately capture. Policies such as universal childcare, paid family or sick leave, and options to engage in employment from home yield significant economic returns, but these are not channeled directly to those who pay for them.
Standard economics textbooks note that firms have economic incentives to pollute the environment if this increases profitability, even if future inhabitants of the planet will pay a high price. A similar logic applies in a different direction to investments in us and our children—why risk them if they are not cost-effective? Robots may soon be cheaper, and they never go on strike OR vote.
C. J. Polychroniou: It sounds like you’re arguing that the theory of “human capital” no longer holds much water. But there are some economists out there who have articulated larger criticisms of capitalist institutions in general. How do these criticisms connect the rising private cost of children, fertility decline, and the possible obsolescence of the white-collar labor force?
Nancy Folbre: Kind of a long story, but I’ll keep it short! Economists like myself, influenced by socialist and feminist ideas, highlight the institutional arrangements that shape the distribution of the costs of raising children and the reproduction of human society itself. In many precapitalist societies, parents enjoyed at least partial payback for the costs of childrearing, as adult children contributed to family income and the support of their elders. Capitalist institutions encouraged labor mobility and reliance on individual earnings, weakening such family and community-based transfers.
Democratic engagement and bargaining over the role of the state gradually led to a different system of intergenerational transfers, taxing employers and the working-age population to help finance public education for the young and pensions and healthcare for the elderly.
This institutional compromise helped stabilize the process of “social reproduction” but also led to unequal distribution of its costs. It allowed employers to keep their contributions to the production of the next generation relatively low. It delivered fewer benefits to parents (those devoting time and money to producing new workers and taxpayers) than to non-parents. It also reinforced a gender division of labor that imposed a disproportionate share of the private costs of family care on women.
We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.
These inequalities amplified increases in the private cost of raising children (for mothers in particular), encouraging efforts to limit family size. New technologies, increased demand for skills, and opportunities for employment outside the home also played an obvious role.
Until recently, fertility decline was considered an economic boon, allowing more women to enter paid employment and promoting the growth of Gross Domestic Product. As is now widely recognized, however, below-replacement fertility poses problems of its own. When women bear less than about 2.1 children over their lifetime, they don’t generate enough surviving children to “replace” their biological parents.
If this rate persists, the size of the youngest generation declines steadily over time, increasing the share of the elderly population relative to the employment-age, tax-paying population. The economic burden of increased old-age dependency increases political conflict over who should pay the costs—and can intensify the economic stresses of caring for younger dependents as well.
Reduction in the size of the global population offers some potential benefits, given current threats to the global environment (not to mention the dicey future of decent jobs). But if we prove unable to get back up to replacement levels of fertility at some point in the future, we will render ourselves extinct. I’d call that a pretty acute crisis of social reproduction.
C. J. Polychroniou: How can we avert such a crisis? Are you suggesting that we adopt pronatalist policies? How do responses in other countries differ from those in the US?
Nancy Folbre: No. We’re not in a state of demographic emergency and we don’t need to encourage a higher birth rate. Much of the global population is suffering from lack of decent employment. And the number of children in the US harmed by poverty makes investment in child health and education a much higher priority than increasing births here.
However, investments in child “quality” can help stabilize and strengthen private commitments. Many other countries are implementing policies designed to make family care more affordable. As is well-known, most affluent European countries have put such policies in place. South Korea began providing universal childcare services in 2013 and is now increasing parental leave allowances. Canada is a more nearby example, with its rollout of a new federal childcare system that will offer universal childcare services at a private cost of $10 a day. Within the US, both New Mexico and New York City are setting an example with new initiatives.
The US as a whole is lagging beyond for several reasons. Racial and ethnic divisions, regional differences, and exceptionally high levels of earnings inequality have weakened the solidarity needed to build a “pro-care” coalition. Imperialist rhetoric and illegal military actions have literally bloodied the water.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, Making Care Work, we need to do a better job explaining the public benefits of investment in human capabilities, including the care of people experiencing illness, frailty, or disability. We can’t continue to treat care as a kind of expensive hobby rather than a productive contribution to our collective future.
Let’s talk about how to move forward in another interview—I think that a universal basic income will be part of the solution, even though it will face vehement opposition. Will employers invest in our kids? Only if we can make them.
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Trump Is Just the Latest Strongman to Think He Can Control Venezuela
Again and again, external actors arrive convinced that this time, through capital, force, or expertise, they have finally grasped what Venezuela is and what it needs. The confidence never lasts.
Jan 11, 2026
When US forces carried out a large-scale military operation in Caracas on January 3, 2026—capturing President Nicolás Maduro and transporting him to New York to face US indictments—Washington framed the moment as resolution. President Donald Trump declared Venezuela’s long crisis effectively over, announcing that the United States would “run” the country for a period of time and openly discussing the reinstallation of US oil interests. The language was casual, almost improvisational, as if Venezuela were an unruly subsidiary finally brought to heel.
What the operation revealed, however, was not strategic clarity but a familiar blindness. Once again, US power moved decisively while understanding lagged far behind. Leadership was removed, headlines were captured, yet the deeper structures shaping Venezuelan life—its history of extraction, its social networks, its hard-earned skepticism toward imposed authority—remained untouched. The episode fit neatly into a long pattern: Outsiders mistaking control for comprehension.
For more than five centuries, Venezuela has attracted this kind of attention. It has been treated as a resource cache, a geopolitical puzzle, a cautionary tale, or a problem to be solved. Rarely has it been approached as a society with its own internal logic. Again and again, external actors arrive convinced that this time, through capital, force, or expertise, they have finally grasped what Venezuela is and what it needs. The confidence never lasts.
The misreading begins early. When Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci reached the northern coast in 1499 and named it Veneziola, they imposed a European metaphor on a place already dense with meaning. Indigenous societies—the Timoto-Cuica in the Andes, Carib and Arawak peoples along the coast—had built complex agricultural systems, trade routes, and ecological knowledge. Spanish conquest dismantled much of this world, extracting pearls, gold, and cacao while concentrating power in Caracas, a city whose monumental architecture masked the fragility beneath it.
Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms.
Colonial Venezuela was never cohesive. Authority flowed downward; legitimacy never followed. The German Welser banking house, granted control of the territory in the 16th century, pursued gold through enslavement and violence. Later, the Guipuzcoan Company monopolized trade, choking local economic life. Periodic uprisings were crushed rather than resolved. The lesson repeated itself quietly but insistently: Wealth could be extracted, order imposed temporarily, but social trust could not be engineered from afar.
Independence did not resolve these tensions. 19th century unfolded through fragmentation, regionalism, and civil war. Simón Bolívar understood Venezuela better than most foreign admirers or critics since, yet even he struggled to translate military success into durable political unity. The Federal War left the country devastated and more unequal, reinforcing a pattern in which power was centralized while social cohesion remained elusive. European creditors and early oil prospectors took note, circling patiently.
Oil altered Venezuela’s position in the world but not its underlying dynamics. In the early 20th century, Juan Vicente Gómez offered foreign companies stability and access in exchange for political backing. Later, Marcos Pérez Jiménez presented a gleaming vision of modernization—highways, towers, civic monuments—that impressed visiting dignitaries. The spectacle worked. Venezuela appeared governable, even exemplary. Yet outside the frame, inequality hardened and participation narrowed. Development was visible; legitimacy was thin.
By the time the bolívar collapsed on Black Friday in 1983, the illusion was difficult to sustain. An economy tethered to oil rents proved dangerously exposed to global shocks, while political institutions remained distant from everyday life. The Caracazo riots of 1989 were not a sudden breakdown but a release, an eruption from a society that had absorbed decades of exclusion. International observers described chaos. Venezuelans recognized continuity.
Hugo Chávez entered this landscape not as a rupture but as a condensation of long-simmering forces. His rise drew on popular frustration with a system that had promised stability and delivered precarity. The brief 2002 coup against him, quietly welcomed in Washington, collapsed almost immediately, undone by mass mobilization. Power changed hands; legitimacy reasserted itself. Chávez’s social programs produced real gains while deepening reliance on oil, leaving unresolved the same vulnerability that had defined Venezuelan political economy for a century.
After Chávez’s death, Nicolás Maduro governed a system already under strain. Falling oil prices, hyperinflation, protest cycles, mass migration, and partial dollarization followed. External pressure mounted, sanctions, recognition battles, diplomatic theater, often treating Venezuela less as a society than as a message. Leadership was personalized; history flattened.
The capture of Maduro followed this script. It was decisive, dramatic, and legible to a US political culture that favors clear villains and clean endings. What it did not do was engage the complexity of Venezuelan life: the informal economies that keep neighborhoods fed, the communal networks that substitute for absent institutions, the cultural memory shaped by centuries of extraction and resistance. These dynamics do not disappear when a president boards a plane.
Venezuelan resilience rarely makes headlines because it lacks spectacle. It is found in Indigenous land stewardship, Afro-Venezuelan cultural traditions, cooperative food systems, remittance networks, and everyday improvisation. Migration, so often framed solely as collapse, has also become a form of continuity, extending social ties across borders rather than severing them.
Oil still looms over everything. The 1970s boom, including Saudi-Venezuelan cooperation, promised autonomy through abundance and delivered deeper dependence instead. Resource wealth invited intervention and centralization while postponing harder questions about participation and governance. The pattern has proven remarkably durable.
Venezuela’s history does not yield easily to slogans or interventions. It resists tidy moral arcs and quick fixes. Again and again, external actors—most recently the Trump administration—have approached the country as if force, markets, or managerial confidence could substitute for understanding. Each time, they discover too late that Venezuela is not an abstraction but a living society shaped by long memory and adaptive survival.
Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms. And so the cycle continues: decisive action, confident declarations, and, beneath them all, a society that endures—complex, unfinished, and stubbornly beyond control.Keep ReadingShow Less
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