Looking At Horror Straight In Its Face

 Joe Biden wasn't kidding when he bragged in that shambolic Oval Office speech that bankrolling the twin slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza in one mega-appropriation would be a great investment for America.

Dark Brandon knew whereof he spoke.  Weapons manufacturers like General Dynamics and Raytheon are already posting huge profits since Israel declared war on two million imprisoned Palestinians (duly demoted from human being status to terrorists or sub-human shields for Hamas for purposes of brainwashing the public).

As if that gruesome windfall isn't bad enough, the likelihood that the wealthy investors in mass death will have to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains will be practically nil, if newly-crowned House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) gets his way.

That's because the House Rules Committee just introduced legislation requiring that the US's $14 billion aid package to Israel, helping to finance the genocide of Gazans, will be offset by $14 billion in cuts to the IRS.

Not only would investigations and prosecutions of wealthy tax evaders be brought to an effective screeching halt, the cuts would also do away with the free digital tax filing program for regular people. Internet filers would actually have to pay a fee for the privilege of underwriting both the military-industrial complex and the wealthy tax cheats.

The Republicans' rationale seems to be that we have to fight the Palestinian families over there by punishing the powerless families over here.  What more apt day is it than Halloween for us to remind ourselves that capitalism is a zombie that must keep replicating itself by varying its diet. Too much is never enough for the ruling class monsters. They were created without any sense of repletion. They are never full. The more that they eat, the hungrier they get.  That especially goes for funding the forever-wars.

The GOP's bill would, of course, have to pass in the Senate, and then require Biden's signature. It's not the punishment of the working class factor that endangers this noxious piece of racist, genocidal, class war legislation, however. It's yhat the extra billions that Biden is demanding for Ukraine war funding is not included. So it's probably already dead on arrival in its current form. Or should I say undead on arrival. We all know that any legislative monster worth its salt (and blood-spatter) will undergo the good old sausage-making treatment in the secret congressional abattoir.

Congress

As far as the reputedly more deliberative Senate is concerned, they not only joined their lesser congressional brethren in enshrining their support of the Israel government, they unanimously and magically transformed a nation full of antiwar and anti-genocide protesters into enemies of the state. The Senate has officially redefined supporters of the Palestinians as supporters of Hamas terrorists. and anti-Semites to boot.

The corporate media are also doing their village-of-the-damnedest best to squelch actual coverage of the protests in the streets, both in the US and throughout the world. If they ignore it they reason, the majority of people will  not learn of the atrocities - or if they do learn about them, they will not much care. Why else would even the staid New York Times be inundating us with story after story about the death of an actor in the "Friends" TV series?  We are invited to substitute mourning this one tragic celebrity death with a bunch of elite Hollywood types, so as to avoid mourning - let alone thinking about - the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom are women and children.

One exception to this coordinated news blackout of protests came on Halloween morning, when Code Pink activists, red paint on their hands, interrupted the censor-proof,, pro-war  Senate testimony of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Both men sat like stiffs, wearing their terrifying emotionless masks as the protesters were ejected.  

In the age of the Internet, when anyone with a cell phone has the ability  to document the various grotesque realties going on all around us, the ability of the masters of war and the lords and ladies of capital to variously frighten us and censor us is falling apart at the seams. of all their glittery zombie rags.

Instead of shambling around and consuming stuff in order to numb ourselves, regular people are waking up. We're not only taking another long-delayed stand against cruelty and war, we're also going out on strike. And we're winning.

"And then, above all, there is the new arrival - the thinking that does not shy away from the horror of the world, the darkness, but looks it straight in the face, and thus passes over into a different kingdom, which is not the kingdom of darkness." -- Henri Lefebvre.

Comfort Food For Multiple Maniacs

If you're worried about the two million Palestinians starving to death in Gaza as bombs rain down on their heads, maybe you shouldn't be.

Because to hear first lady Jill Biden tell it, our most pressing concern should be that our ruling capitalist predators get enough comfort food to eat. Stuffing their faces with gourmet treats posing as plain country fare eases their stress and strain. Their need for sustenance should prove to us mere mortals that these demi-gods are, in fact, as human as you and me. The poor beleaguered things not only are tasked with waging, marketing and profiting from ongoing multiple wars, they're also busily plotting the total global conflagrations of the future. And it takes a lot of caloric fat for the fat cats to survive and thrive for purposes of your security.

So there was no possible way, genocide in Palestine notwithstanding, that the Biden administration would ever have cancelled the state gala for the prime minister of Australia, which is now the main US base of operations for their hoped-for war with China.

"Nurturing our partnerships and relationships with our allies is critically important, especially in these tumultuous times," Jill Biden euphemistically explained as her rationale for going ahead with the dinner. "Food is comforting, reassuring and healing, and we hope that this dinner provides a little of that as well."

Given that the 300 honored guests at the state dinner included the  bloodthirsty likes of Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin III and Victoria Nuland, one can only imagine the gusto with which they gnawed into such delicacies as spareribs slathered with gobs of sarsparilla sauce.

Jill Biden came off sounding a lot like the clueless hostess in the classic Katherine Mansfield short story, "The Garden Party."  The matriarch scoffs at her conscience-stricken daughter's plea to cancel the festivities because a man had just suffered a fatal accident in the slum neighborhood located just outside the gates of their fancy estate. Putting the feelings of her poor, mourning neighbors ahead of her wealthy guests enjoying her food, her flower arrangements, and her hired musicians would have been just too "extravagant."

"You are being very absurd, Laura," she said coldly. "People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. And it's not very sympathetic to spoil everyone's enjoyment as you're doing now."

But to show that for her own part, Jill Biden is not completely insensitive to what either the Palestinians or the growing number of critics of her husband's embrace of genocide might think, she did cancel the hired entertainment part - dance music by the B-52s.  It might have looked unseemly for the gentry and proxy genocidaires to be seen rocking and rolling  to a band sharing a name with an aircraft that's been used for decades to drop US bombs all over the world, including in the Middle East to this very day.

Instead, Jill opted for the soothing jingoistic sounds of military bands from the Army, Air Force and Marines. The corporate media dutifully downplayed the party as "sedate" and "low-key" and even family-centered, given that the Bidens' grandchildren were there.

(Even as they were playing their appropriate tunes, an Army reservist in Maine - trained as a state-sanctioned weapons instructor -  was shooting up a bowling alley full of kids with his own instrument of choice: the iconic AR-15. Any upcoming sympathy visit by Joe Biden to yet another grieving community might be a little more awkward than usual, given his recent glib remark that dead Palestinian children are inevitable - because war.  Also, there's the inconvenience of his own son being under criminal indictment for an illegal gun purchase.)

But enough of all this angst and unpleasantness. Let's get back to Jill Biden's mission of comforting the comfortable. A few days before the state dinner, she was dining by candlelight with fashion industry donors at former Vogue editor Anna Wintour's multimillion-dollar townhouse in New York City's Greenwich Village. 

She told the group that, given these "fraught times"  she wouldn't trust anybody but Joe Biden to be sitting in the Situation Room for another four years. And why wouldn't she, given that the Situation Room is really a 5000-square foot a mansion within a mansion?

With its recent $50 million renovation, the Biden sitting room is many rooms, including many nooks and crannies and multiple conference rooms and even so-called "breakout rooms." The padded walls are adorned with multiple high-def video screens especially designed for the comfort of aging eyes. Even the presidential seals for the podiums have been supersized and specified to be larger than a human head. The massive main conference table is crafted from the finest fine-grained mahogany. imported from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Far East with a military base. The chairs for the armchair warriors are crafted from the finest leather, flayed from the finest American cows.

But where would comfort food and furniture be without fashion? Jill Biden is also all about the couture to take wealthy minds off all that global "tumult" and other unpleasantness. She told her fashionista donors that couture is "not only the clothes we pull out of our closets each morning, they are statements of our identity. They're our armor."

There is no word yet about "who" Jill will wear as body armor when (in our imagination) she brings baskets full of state dinner leftovers to the UN trucks parked at the Egypt-Palestine border.. It would be a happy ending to ur story. It would be just like the young girl in "The Garden Party" bringing her basket of party food to the bereaved family of the accident victim. She thought she could just leave the offering at the cottage door. But then those sly underclass victims of capitalistic predation actually make her view the dead body.

 It's  nurturing comfort food for the hoi polloi, on those rare gala occasions when the comfortable actually get afflicted for a change.

Who would ever dream of canceling such a tumultuous event?

It's All About the White Settler Colonialism

 What took European invaders close to 400 years to accomplish in the Americas, the State of Israel hopes to accomplish in less than a quarter of that time. I am talking, of course, about the State of Israel's pivot from its protracted ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the outright genocide of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

Just as the Puritans self-righteously justified their own wars against native populations by pointing to their own persecution at the hands of the British, and later, by the often-violent reaction of Indians against the settler-colonists, so too do the Zionists of Israel justify their treatment of native populations by pointing to their own long history of persecution in Europe, which culminated with the Holocaust.  As long as the perpetrators can gloss over their racist white supremacy with the shield of perpetual victimhood, they feel free to do plenty of victimizing of their own. If you criticize their actions, you are labeled an anti-Semite. You might even have a Wall Street job offer rescinded if you're an Ivy League student. (Which might not be a bad thing, in the long run. Maybe these elite college kids can now oot for a teaching job in an underserved public school!)

Joe Biden, on his quick campaign stop in Israel, wasted no time in embracing both Binyamin Netanyahu and Bibi's predictable denial of responsibility for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, which has claimed the lives of at least 500 people. The US president glibly explained his belief that Hamas ("the other team") was responsible by saying that "his" defense department had already told him so. This is the same dude who had enthusiastically embraced the debunked war propaganda of decapitated Israeli babies.

It's all about the solidarity among the settler-colonialists of the world. Both the United States and Israel consider themselves to be exceptional nations, among God's chosen ones. They do pre-emptive war with impunity.

Why else would the US military, in which Biden puts so much demented faith and trust, name a whole series of its lethal weapons and hardware after the native populations it had finally conquered in the late 19th century?  

Here's just a partial list of what the perpetual US war machine has used to maim and kill untold millions of people, the majority of whom have been non-white in the ludicrously-named post World War II "Pax Americana" --

Apache attack helicopter, Tomahawk cruise missile,  a whole series of helicopters bearing such tribal names as Cayuga, Huron, and Iroquois, not to mention the high-tech spy aircraft called Kiowa, Ute and Mohawk. And who can forget that the mission to murder Osama Bin Laden was named after the great Indian warrior against US occupation - Geronimo?

Such naming is a way to continue denigrating American Indians while justifying their own modern wars of aggression. It speaks to a kind of distorted genetic memory  of all those innocent settler-folk being scalped by the "savages" who had the effrontery to resent their invaders. Not for nothing do supporters of the genocide in Palestine attempt to dehumanize the actual victims by calling thenm "savages" and "human animals." It's all too familiar. 

And now, with most of the civilized world aghast and protesting in the streets at the blatant and even downright gleeful genocide of Palestinians, the US has effectively joined Israel in being viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world.  The US itself is still an apartheid state in all but name, discriminating against and punishing its own citizens based upon their race and class and gender - and lately, even their  independent thought - despite all the sanctimonious laws that it has on the books. Jim Crow is still alive and well. Just witness the gross expansion of the US prison system, the largest in the world, with more Black people now incarcerated than there were slaves prior to the Civil War. This statistic is largely the result of then-Senator Biden's crime bills, passed with bipartisan support in the 90s.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 2023, the Biden administration is such an unabashed champion of Palestinian genocide, albeit with the usual ass-covering platitudes about humanitarian concerns. It is somewhat gratifying - or worrisome, as far as the New York Times is concerned - that even timorous "progressive" politicians are just now beginning to make the tiniest possible demands of Biden to broker a ceasefire. It was only a week ago that the Democratic Party was so unified. They voted en masse against ex-House Speaker McCarthy. Most of them already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, for cryin out loud! 

But even the reliably pro-Israel Times isn't quite as gung-ho about Zionist revenge as it was in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas.  Perhaps it has something to do both with the backlash from readers in the comments sections, and from the public at large. Not when "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has been expanded so disproportionately. Like Biden, Netanyahu's political viability was also in question prior to the allegedly surprise attack by Hamas.

Biden's gruesome theatrical embrace on Wednesday of this brutal right-wing leader of Israel was intended to recast him as a courageous wartime statesman rather than as a bumbling old man with low domestic approval ratings. However, any additional support or kudos that he gets from his fellow Neocons in both war parties will be diluted by the two other hawkish xenophobic presidential candidates in the mix. - Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are already indications that his political stunt has backfired.

 This creates a much bigger opening for the lone antiwar candidate, Cornel West. He may not win - actually allowed to win - the election, or even get ballot access. But at least the corporate media are now being forced to give him a regular platform. No matter if it's just an attempt to co-opt him in their corporate fold or boost their ratings among the younger demographic.

Because despite its own ham-handed efforts, the Censorship-Industrial Complex cannot control the narrative. The grotesque reality speaks for itself.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programs...

... To bring you Professor Hillary Clinton's clarion call for an official mass deprogramming of MAGA cultists.

What she would actually RE-program these Trump voters into being or thinking is carefully left unsaid.  But it's easy to imagine them as characters in "A Clockwork Orange" remake. Hillary would open up their eyes with her magical steel retractors, forcing them to watch endless televised Trump rallies interspersed with even more disgusting images of blood and gore. The deplorable lumpens would then find themselves vomitng every time they accidentally caught a glimpse of Trump on TV. The only way to settle their stomachs would be to make a beeline for the voting booth to re-elect the kindly grandpa similacrum known as Joe Biden.

 Third party candidates? Don't even ask. The alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, such as universal healthcare, debt-free education, an end to wars of aggression, stable housing and nutrition must also be surgically cleansed from the brains of every disaffected subject.

If Hillary had chosen to be honest in this interview, she would have proclaimed that it takes a cult to fight a cult. Actually, it takes the parent cult of the Duopoly to expel the bastard child cult. Trump is essentially the spawn of a rampantly promiscuous capitalism; a spawn too tastelessly open about the fascist tendencies long an integral part of the U.S. hegemon.

 Simply think, on this Indigenous People's Day of all days, of the European settler-colonists who began exterminating native populations and enslaving African people whole centuries before sanctimoniously declaring that "all men are created equal."

 Only when the unfortunate Trump byproduct is expelled, Clinton confides to CNN pundit Christiane Amanpour, can the desired make-up session between the bickering Democrats and Republicans finally go full steam ahead for the ultimate and perpetual orgiastic pleasure of the lords and ladies of Capital. Of course Hillary didn't put it that way. The oligarchic orgasm is now defined as "democracy."

 Like many a romantic before her, Hillary still labors under the delusion that it was bipartisanship and not the New Deal and the Great Society social programs that made America, America. 

Listening closely to this interview, you find that Clinton initially only singles out the elected MAGA Republicans of Congress as the insane actors in dire need of her mental cleansing. But then she swiftly pivots to the mass of powerless voters as also worthy of treatment in her asylum.  These voters, according to Clinton, were attracted to Trump by virtue of such pre-existing maladies as xenophobia, misogyny and racism. The false hope he gave to many of them, even previous Obama voters, for relief of their pre-existing economic precarity - has no cure in her neoliberal playbook. Other than shock therapy, maybe.

The fact that she herself had countered Trump's fake populist appeal by lecturing to the voters in 2016, rather than  meeting them where they lived, both geographically and existentially, seems not to have dawned upon her.

This glaring omission naturally segues to the next concerned query by  Amampour : what about those awful third party challengers? Aren't you afraid? She thus hastily absolves Hillary from examining or reprogramming her own brain, to ignore that her own lack of personal charm and political skills were  prime reasons for her defeat by Trump. It was, of course, also the fault of the Green Party's Jill Stein. 

Hillary imagines, therefore, that votes will also be "stolen" from Joe Biden - by some of the very same deplorables who lack the intellectual heft to dive deep into all his alleged accomplishments.

But just in case that kind of shaming won't work on the hordes of thick-headed lumpen, she ends the segment in hoping they still have enough of a vestigial fear center left in their rotting brains to at least stagger to the polls in favor of her own her preferred master-cult.

Fire Alarm Follies

Now that US Rep. Jamaal Bowman's lame excuse that he mistook a fire alarm for an electronic door-opener has fallen flat, he's pivoted to the default position: the Republicans who want him criminally charged or expelled from Congress are nothing but a bunch of "Nazis."

It might have been a lot smarter for him to plead that he was just taking literally the recent overheated "five-alarm" fire rhetoric of Democratic operatives kvetching that the donor money just isn't flowing in as fast as it was in the good bad old days of the Trump presidency. Fire alarm rhetoric had been spreading all over social and corporate media before the Bowman stunt.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, herself the spouse of a Democratic campaign operative, had already gotten the hysterical alarm bells ringing with a piece titled "Where Has All the Left-Wing Money Gone?"

She showcased Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voters party fundraising offshoot, who coined the phrase "five-alarm fire" as what he deemed to be just the right impetus to get people scared enough to empty their wallets for Democrats.

 Goldberg's alarmist lede:

As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”

There's nothing that galvanizes people into giving to politicians than a sentence that not only Capitalizes. Every. Word, but also adds lots of periods for emphasis. When a friendly media publishes your money-grab verbatim, all the better.

The Guardian newspaper also pumped up the "Yelling Fire" method in its own uncritical piece showcasing Billy Wimsatt and his lack of money flowing in. This lack, supposedly, is mostly because their erstwhile cash cow Donald Trump is now sitting in a whole series of courtrooms rather than behind the White House Resolute Desk. Of course, it paradoxically does somewhat help the Dems  financially every time their profit-driven corporate media partners eagerly offer Trump a free microphone with which to urge bodily harm on all the judges and prosecutors leading the "witch-hunt" against him. Because it is so not fair that every time The Donald gets indicted, his own donation money does keep flowing and his own poll numbers do keep rising - while Joe Biden's keep falling. It's so very mysterious. Lacking an agenda to give regular people a better life, the Dems are reduced to at least allowing people to get high on regular doses of shocked, self-righteous indignation. 

Forget the old liberal excuse for colluding with Republicans behind closed doors to slash the social safety net - "you can'tbring a knife to a gun fight." Nowadays, if you can't beat the Nazi arsonists, you may as well fan the flames with your own higher grade of gasoline. Then you can feel all smug, yelling fire in your side of the tottering political theater. 

Absent a Democratic platform benefiting ordinary people, the only way to motivate giving (if not actually voting) is to scare them. Thus does The Guardian newspaper dutifully follow the Times's lead, in pushing the alarm button. It turns out that the opposite of an FDR fireside chat - The Only Emotion To Experience Is Fear Itself -   requires lots of cash and gaslighting.

From the party press release as reprinted in The Guardian.

According to the Movement Voter Project, progressives have “a five-alarm fire going into 2024”. The organization’s director, Bill Wimsatt, said he was “pressing the panic button” because donor inaction is creating a movement-wide crisis.

Wimsatt said there had been a peak for progressive causes around the time of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and amid campaigning to get Donald Trump out of office. “The sense of urgency and existential necessity has dissipated in people’s minds,” he said, “though the situation going into 2024 isn’t any less existential.”

Before becoming the Democrats' go-to alarm bell ringer and Sartre co-opter, Wimsatt was an aspiring rapper and founder and/or leader of what he calls a whole series of "game-changer" networks, including the Alliance of Young Voters, Rebuild the Dream and the Coffee Party. According to his Wikipedia page, he preceded his current "five alarm fire" tour with a PR tour that flattered wealthy young liberal donors as the "Cool Rich Kids."

So, to hear Billy whine about it now, it seems that his fellow cool rich kids are no longer so cool. Therefore, what other choice do kids like Bowman and Wimsatt have but but to pull fire alarms to draw attention to themselves? It's gotten so existentially hard at Hallowed Halls High School (Congress) that they can't even keep their dress codes straight, let alone keep up with all the cheating and corruption scandals sucking the campaign money right out of the room.

But back to those stingy, cool rich non-donors. They still do have a clique called Resource Generation. Members are in the 18-35 age demographic with "wealth and/or class privilege and a commitment to the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power."

In order to continue such good works as protesting in the streets, speaking at city council meetings and becoming heads of their family foundations, members also busily fund-raise from other wealthy people like themselves in order to keep their grassroots networks networking. There's a lot of internal competition for elite cash, it seems.

To apply for membership in the Alliance of Cool Rich Kids, you or your family preferably will belong to the top 10 percent of wealth owners with assets of - and ready access to - at least $1 million in cash. But rest assured, the group is so now so inclusive that they decided several years ago to allow even those who are less-rich to join - just so long as applicants are passionate about rich people's philanthropic causes.  Tellingly enough, they identify their board of directors and staff only by their first names and initials. 

Now, if the following chart doesn't convince you that these wealthy activists are full of shit, that the wealth is actually being mal-distributed with a vengeance, that American rich kids both young and old stay that way by extracting ever-dwindling resources from the poor and working class, then nothing will.

 This is eugenics in action:

The heavy black line at the bottom represents poor people in the United States who, because of predatory capitalism and their lack of a pricey college degree, are literally falling to their deaths in record numbers. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton last week expanded upon the findings of their landmark study "Deaths of Despair" with the undeniable truth that the "mortality gap" between rich and poor is getting worse all the time. In fact, struggling people are prematurely dying at three times the rate that they were in 1992. The wealth redistribution talk of "progressives" is just so much self-regarding hot air.

The Case/Deaton report, not surprisingly, is being ignored by the corporate media, so busily focused on the pressing concerns of the educated and well-off: Trump Derangement Syndrome, Fire Alarm-gate and fund-raising goals.

Meanwhile, rather than re-declare a public health emergency which might include such remedies as direct cash aid, single payer health care, national eviction protections and rent control, and a government jobs program, the Biden administration has just allocated some $200 million for suicide prevention. The bulk of the grant will shore up the 988 suicide prevention hotlines that desperate people can call when they have no money, no health care, no food, no house and no job. This grant, of course, also blithely assumes that desperate suicidal people actually have access to a phone.

The real five-alarm emergency is that the movers and shakers of our corporacracy have completely lost their grip on reality. They're high on their own fumes. If you don't indulge them in their fantasies, they shrill, then you're just repeating Russian talking points.