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.