Rage Against The ICE Machine
Sonali Kolhatkar
10-30-2025 ~ Trump’s ICE forces are facing militant and organized opposition everywhere they turn.
A New York City woman wearing a navy blue polka-dot dress has gone viral for her defiant resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a raid in lower Manhattan on October 21, 2025.
Appearing as though she was on her way from work—the woman wore a navy blue blazer and brown shoes and carried a large handbag—the “polka-dot dress woman” as she’s being called, took a powerful stand in the middle of the street. With a military tank rolling toward her, she stopped and flipped off ICE agents with both hands.
She appeared unafraid. She pushed back physically as ICE agents attempted to bully her and others. Her face, hands, and body exuded rage and resistance.
The aggressive noncompliance of the polka-dot dress woman and her fellow protesters is precisely what our dangerous march toward fascism calls for.
There are countless incarnations of such resistance in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere. These resisters are refusing to go gently into the night of fascist dictatorship. They are fearlessly facing off against President Donald Trump’s deployments of immigration agents, National Guard, and other federal law enforcement and military personnel, and are refusing to accept the crushing of dissent, demographic diversity, and democracy itself.
One such activist is Leonardo Martinez, a volunteer and lead organizer with VC Defensa, an immigrant defense group and rapid response network based in Ventura County, California, who found himself on the receiving end of ICE violence on October 16, 2025.
While in the midst of community patrols, Martinez, who is a U.S. citizen, followed ICE agents in Oxnard driving an SUV. It was a routine action for volunteers like him who have been nonviolently confronting and intimidating federal agents away from their communities. But this time, the ICE agents seemed to have had enough. Street-level and dash cam videos show their SUV ramming violently into the side of Martinez’s pickup truck on a relatively empty street.
“I was definitely shocked when they initially hit me because the industrial area that we were in did not have a lot of traffic,” said Martinez. His quick thinking likely kept him safe. “Once they aggressively hit me, I knew that if I pulled over in the moment, that they were going to drag me out and beat me up.”
Instead of getting out of his truck, he continued driving for a few minutes—with the SUV following him—toward downtown Oxnard, where he knew there would be more street and foot traffic. At first, the ICE agents claimed Martinez hit them—not knowing there was video footage. After being arrested, Martinez’s wrists and ankles were handcuffed, but he demanded medical attention to document his injuries. After a stop at a hospital, he was eventually taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and was later released.
“We’ve kind of already practiced a lot of these scenarios in real life and troubleshooted and figured things out,” said Martinez. His fellow VC Defensa activists quickly located him and posted the now-viral video footage of his truck being hit. The incident has drawn attention and admiration for the work of a highly effective organization that boasts 700 highly trained volunteers like Martinez. Read more
Toward A New Common Sense Of Abundance
10-24-2025 ~ Common sense is contested terrain.
“Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know,” the 18th-century British writer Lord Chesterfield advised his son. But common sense doesn’t stay that way. While it appears to most people to be something solid and steady, it changes from age to age, defined and redefined by the push and pull between rival social movements and the social, political, and economic forces that support one social movement over another.
U.S. history—like any other country’s history—is replete with such shifts in common sense. Examples include:
– The American Revolutionary War, when independence from Great Britain rapidly went from being a marginal viewpoint to a majority position.
– The American Civil War, when emancipation underwent a similar shift.
– The New Deal, when a comprehensive social safety net suddenly became an accepted and expected part of the national fabric, and
– The Civil Rights era, when political and economic equality, beginning with the campaigns of Black Americans, at last became applicable to other people of color, women, immigrants, and sexual minorities as well.
These shifts created a new consensus understanding of what we expect of government and what we expect from and extend to one another. They often occur in periods of political crisis or deep economic insecurity, when the entire culture seems to be in peril.
A new common sense can move society in a more inclusionary direction, where an ethos of abundance and embracing the democratic distribution of resources among the public at large seems reachable. When this happens, a common identity is extended to a wider circle within society, and security—physical and economic—is assumed to be possible for all as well.
Shifts in common sense can also, however, move society in the opposite direction sometimes during periods of crisis, but are often driven by fears and anxieties triggered by the very changes that previously moved society in a socially and politically progressive direction.
This occurred in the aftermath of World War I, when the Red Scare hysteria led to harsh new laws limiting immigration by national groups who were viewed as undesirable. Another such shift in common sense was embodied by the opposition to the Civil Rights movement, which generated a campaign of “massive resistance” in the South. In the Reagan era, the common sense of inclusiveness and an expanding field of rights was called into question and began to reverse. Following the apparent end of racial discrimination at the highest levels during the Obama years, Americans again turned to more conservative leadership, and common sense moved right. Today, the MAGA movement shares many of the same impulses that informed each of these previous exclusionary turnings.
The underlying tensions that caused these shifts leverage latent exclusionary ideas based on a single factor: biology. Deploying emotion and often irrational fear, reactionary forces succeed in racializing white identity, making it easier to set those who identify as white against other segments of society. White people of all social classes come to think in racialized terms even when they are unaware of it. For example, their understanding that some problems require social solidarity is checkmated by their fear that they would have to give something up to achieve it.
Often, this new common sense about identity turns the progressive agenda on its head. Suddenly, it’s the dominant white social and cultural group who are oppressed, and the civil concept of rights is redefined as a struggle on their behalf, rather than for the truly marginalized. Fears about economic security and identity built on underlying racial prejudice, against people of color and immigrants, and gender prejudice, against newly assertive women and the LGBTQ+ community, find their focus in a shallow, zero-sum economic calculation that if these groups achieve a better place in society, it must be at the expense of the culturally dominant white community.
The rise to dominance of latent biological biases plays to white people’s narrower sense of identity, even though these biases often work against their own material interests. Examples in U.S. history include: Jim Crow laws that closed off many lines of work to African Americans; intelligence tests in the post-World War I era created to marginalize immigrants; laws restricting immigration, which rob the society of labor and expertise it needs to expand; and cuts to the social safety net that hurt the middle class along with the least advantaged and make social mobility more difficult for everyone. Read more
Does Brazil Have An App That Can Upend Digital Finance?
10-22-2025 ~ Washington’s unease is rising as Brazil’s Pix bypasses U.S.-dominated payment networks. The country’s digital payment revolution may soon be impossible to contain as other countries adapt their own models.
The Trump administration’s July 2025 decision to have the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) investigate Brazil’s “attacks on American social media companies as well as other unfair trading practices,” followed by the launch of 50 percent tariffs, drew immediate headlines and caused predictable market panic. Washington has also placed sanctions on Brazilian officials in response to Brazil’s prosecution of its former president and Trump ally, Jair Bolsonaro.
Tensions remain high even after Trump’s October 2025 call with current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the country’s foreign minister arriving in Washington days later. While U.S.-Brazil relations have long fluctuated between strain and cooperation, Trump’s latest moves suggest his administration sees Brazil less as a partner and more as a trade and political rival, despite the U.S. maintaining consistent surpluses with the country.
Among these punitive actions, the inquiry into Pix, Brazil’s groundbreaking fast payment system, introduced in 2020, stands out. Developed by the Central Bank of Brazil, Pix lets individuals and businesses send and receive money instantly, at any time, via mobile apps, QR codes, or account keys. Transfers between individuals on Pix are free, and all licensed financial institutions in Brazil are required to adopt it.
Pix’s rollout during COVID-19, when no-contact payments were essential, rapidly accelerated its adoption. Around 175 million people use it, and Pix “now accounts for nearly half of the country’s financial transactions,” according to a September 2025 New York Times article. The platform handles everything from restaurant payments and employee wages to billion-dollar financial transactions. Maintenance costs in 2024 were estimated at nearly $5 million, with another $8 million in investments shared across the central bank’s “entire computing infrastructure,” according to data obtained through Brazil’s Freedom of Information Act by Valor International.
Before Pix, money transfers in Brazil were dominated by the “walled gardens” of international card networks, like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and domestic payment processors. Sensing disruption, several of Brazil’s major banks, which “dominate” the financial industry, warned of Pix’s cybersecurity and fraud risks, and certain fintech firms also pushed back, seeing it as a threat to their fee-based business models.
These fears proved justified after revenue from traditional transfer and processing fees declined following Pix’s rollout. In 2022, then-Central Bank President Roberto Campos Neto defended the system by arguing that nationwide adoption would lower cash-handling costs and increase transaction volumes, while creating new opportunities for financial innovation.
Pix did level the playing field for many smaller firms, which could finally compete with Brazil’s major banks without the burden of nationwide branches and ATMs. Many Brazilians were previously tied to employer-selected banks that they rarely used. Pix’s interoperability across all financial institutions eliminated transfer barriers, allowing workers to open additional accounts and shift money to take advantage of better rates and services.
Nubank, for example, is a fully digital bank that grew from 17 million customers in 2019 to more than 100 million by 2024, making it the world’s second-largest digital bank by number of customers, according to the Economist. It is also the largest digital bank by market evaluation, according to Global Finance, and Pix’s digital-first financial environment was central to its rise.
Millions of people from Brazil’s vast informal economy, often in rural areas and favelas with limited banking infrastructure, have also gained access to the formal financial system. Once reliant on cash, bartering, or rotating credit groups, they can now send and receive digital payments seamlessly, broadening financial inclusion through public infrastructure. Read more
How To Build A Closer Connection With The Living World Around You
10-17-2025 ~ Simple daily practices can help us slow down, notice, and build empathy with the more-than-human world—fostering both personal well-being and planetary care.
One morning, I was walking in a friend’s yard in Idaho and saw a monarch butterfly. I stopped to watch him flutter above a purple coneflower—one of his favorite sources of nectar—and admired his striking orange and black pattern for at least the thousandth time in my life.
I live on the coast of central California, where these lovely insects migrate for the winter from places like Idaho. For five months, they sleep in eucalyptus trees down the street from my apartment and take flight to eat and drink when the temperatures are over 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I smiled at our connection: We were both on the same travel trajectory, moving between Idaho and California, exploring and exploiting different ecosystems for the benefits they have to offer us. Despite our enormous differences, we were participating in similar behaviors.
This moment was a bright spot in my day. Any moment in which I get to notice, appreciate, and connect with another living thing is a bright spot in my day. Therefore, I make a point of ensuring that these interactions are a regular part of my life. I know they are good for me; research has shown that being in nature is beneficial to our “cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, mental health, physical activity, and sleep.” And a 2020 article in Current Opinion in Psychology confirmed that “incidental exposure to the natural environment can increase attention to others, facilitate collective engagement, and enhance prosociality–tendencies to care for, help, and assist others.”
But my interactions with nature are good for other-than-human creatures as well. Whether it’s with animals or people, connection is the basis of empathy. We need more empathy for other living things to effectively address the biodiversity crisis that threatens the survival of countless species today.
You don’t have to be a scientist or a wilderness guide to foster a connection to the natural world. You don’t need to travel to other continents or read dense research papers to appreciate other living things. All you need to do is step out of your front door. There are other-than-human beings in all neighborhoods and all ecosystems, all of whom are well worth observing and contemplating.
If you don’t already have a practice that helps you connect to other-than-human creatures, I encourage you to try any of the following six activities to begin one. They are all short and simple, and they can be done in any outdoor space. While walking out your front door and simply observing your surroundings can be effective, you might find that a structured exercise helps you focus your attention and prevents you from resorting to checking your device or making a mental to-do list. Anyone can do any of these activities at any age. The more you repeat them, the more meaningful they will become. Read more
From 1920s Italy To 1930s Palestine To 1980s Ska Scenes, Antifa Has Many Faces
10-16-2025 ~ A historian discusses past anti-fascist organizations and practices in light of Trump’s effort to criminalize “antifa.”
The United States is lurching toward neo-fascism with alarming speed, courtesy of President Donald Trump, who is using all the resources of the repressive apparatus of the U.S. state to stifle dissent and crush opposition to his extreme agenda. He is so keen on imposing his dystopian vision on the country that he has sought to criminalize anti-fascist struggle itself.
How do we fight back? In the interview that follows, Princeton University historian Joseph Fronczak and author of Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism, talks about the global history of “antifa” and the lessons we can draw from the early struggles of the anti-fascist movements in the fight against neo-fascism today.
C. J. Polychroniou: Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” refers not to a unified, defined group but to a decentralized, leaderless network of individuals and groups that self-identify as people who confront and combat fascism and racism. The antifa concept originated in Europe in the 1960s, but its roots can be traced to the anti-fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, the early postwar antifa movements in Europe drew inspiration from the Arditi del Popolo movement, an Italian anti-fascist group that was founded in 1921 for the purpose of defending working-class people and institutions from the assault of Mussolini’s blackshirts. Shockingly enough, though hardly surprising given his innate proclivity for authoritarianism, Donald Trump has designated Antifa as a “major terrorist organization,” which suggests that he considers fascism to be a good thing. Can you discuss briefly the emergence of anti-fascism during the interwar period? Was it the threat of fascism that shaped the left as a “global collectivity?”
Joseph Fronczak: Let’s start with the Arditi del Popolo, which was very much the first anti-fascist organization in world history. In a lot of ways, the Arditi set the general form for anti-fascist politics since, and yet there’s not much of a historical consciousness of the Arditi today, certainly not outside Italy. As you said, the Arditi del Popolo organized themselves to defend working-class people from the violence of the fascist blackshirts. They first got organized in Rome in the summer of 1921, and right away their central idea was that they were willing to stand up to Mussolini’s squadristi; they committed themselves to militant confrontation, to a physical defiance of the blackshirts.
They did so always collectively, relying on strength in numbers. When they first got organized, it was still well before the March on Rome in October 1922, when fascism wasn’t yet a state form, when, rather, it was simply a political movement. It was a very violent political movement, carrying out a sprawling campaign of terrorism. Yet — it’s worth pointing out, not only because you brought up Trump’s “terrorist” designation — the Arditi del Popolo didn’t respond to terrorism with terrorism. They always remained, rather, committed to a very disciplined collective practice of working-class defense. They mobilized to fend off fascist domination, and they did so without mirroring the fascists’ terror tactics or countering them with terrorist violence in kind.
That discipline, though, wasn’t imposed on members from above. The Arditi del Popolo was a radically egalitarian, horizontally organized group. Members were empowered to take on ethical responsibility. You can get a sense of that ethic from the group’s name: “Arditi” is a word in the plural form, meaning the “daring ones.” To speak of just one member would be to speak of an “ardito,” with an “o” at the end. But, tellingly, the Arditi del Popolo as a rule simply didn’t do this. Instead, they were always conjuring themselves in the form of the collective. The name of the group also got across the message that there was no fundamental distinction among the members; their common identity, Arditi, spoke to their fundamental equality within the group. The rest of the name, “del Popolo,” means “of the People.” This communicated the Arditi’s deeply felt populism. They understood themselves as the people’s front line of defense, or even the shield of the popular will. Read more
Green Capitalism In The Americas: False Solutions, Real Threats
10-15-2025 ~ In this special issue of the NACLA Report, we critically examine the rise of green capitalism in the region in the lead-up to COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November.
The promise of a green transition has become a key narrative of our time. Despite persistent climate denialism, governments, corporations, and multilateral institutions present themselves as champions of sustainability, climate action, and environmental protection. In the Americas, this discourse has taken root with force, rebranding old forms of extractivism and accumulation under the guise of “green” development. But beneath the surface, the reality is stark: the transition being promoted today is not a break from fossil capitalism—it is its reinvention as a kind of fossil gattopardismo, in which energy demand expands and the extraction of hydrocarbons intensifies as part of the approach to energy transition, under the illusory umbrella of “net zero” policies. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his 1958 novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
In this special issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas, we critically examine the rise of green capitalism in the region. We analyze how its logics and instruments are shaping policy and territory, enabling new forms of dispossession, and deepening historical inequalities. We expose the traps of a corporate-led transition that claims to be clean and just, but in practice reinforces systems of exploitation and domination. And we highlight the movements, communities, and visions from below that challenge these false solutions and point the way toward just ecosocial transitions.
The idea that capitalism can solve the climate and ecological crisis it has created is not only misleading but also dangerous. Today’s green capitalism extends the reach of markets under the banner of sustainability, expanding profit frontiers while coopting environmental narratives under a new capitalist “decarbonization consensus.” Under this framework, nature is positioned as a financial asset, territories as green sacrifice zones, and Indigenous and traditional communities, once again, as obstacles to development. The result is a green colonialism that naturalizes dispossession, often in the name of climate justice, creating new dynamics of extraction and appropriation of raw materials, natural goods, and labor, all in service of a so-called “green” energy transition.
In this context, COP30—set to take place in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, in November 2025—is both a symbolic milestone and a political paradox. While grassroots organizations prepare to bring local demands and climate justice agendas to the global stage, corporate actors and states continue to define the rules of the game. As gina cortés valderrama and Isadora Cardoso remind us in this issue, the dominant frameworks of climate policy reproduce colonial and racist logics, marginalizing decolonial and intersectional approaches that center justice, autonomy, and care.
The Corporate Transition and the New Face of Extractivism
Green capitalism thrives on rebranding. Across the Americas, extractivism is being painted green to fit into the transition discourse. In Brazil, for example, the so-called “Lithium Valley” exemplifies this shift: a region marked by water scarcity, community resistance, and environmental degradation is now being promoted as a hub for sustainable development and climate leadership. As Bárbara Magalhães Teixeira and Marina Paula Oliveira demonstrate in their contribution, the violence of extractivism persists, even when disguised as energy transition.
A similar dynamic unfolds in Chile, where lithium extraction and green hydrogen initiatives are creating new modalities of sacrifice zones in Antofagasta and the Atacama Desert. In their article, Gabriela Cabaña and Ramón Balcázar Morales reveal how these projects reproduce patterns of territorial appropriation and environmental racism under the guise of decarbonization. The Caribbean, too, is facing new forms of green colonization, as Colin Bogle details in his article on the controversial push for deep-sea mining. This modality absorbs critiques of social conflict connected to mining to recast the ocean as the ultimate “conflict-free zone”—a space empty of social struggle where environmental destruction can proceed unchallenged, treating other species and ecosystems as even more disposable in the absence of humans. Read more