Fright Fest '24

a Who needs Halloween when the politicians and the pundits are already force-feeding us so much doom and dread candy that we're apt to fall into a mass post-apocalyptic coma before the actual Apocalypse even gets a chance to happen on November5th? We may be so overdosed on manufactured terror that we won't even have the strength to shamble to the polls like the good patriotic zombies they want us to be.

There hasn't been this much  manufactured hysteria since the Y2K disaster turned out to be a big fat epic  bust. I will never forget how disappointed I was on waking up on Jan. 1, 2000 to discover that the clocks were still working.

I suspect many of us will feel the same way on Nov. 6, when a presidential winner will have been announced and the world has not come to an end. Even if there is no clear winner, we can at least count our blessings when the campaign ads and money-grubbing emails and robocalls suddenly stop and we can get back to the same old comforting consumer cons of yore.

Not that whatever the outcome, we are well and truly screwed. All this talk of the fate of  Democracy itself hanging in the balance  seems so quaint, given that democracy  has become just a code word for the neoliberal capitalism that's destroying the  planet and causing mass economic inequality, along with war and genocide. Why else would the corporate media be keeping such a breathless scorecard on which candidate is winning the billionaire sweepstakes?

The funniest-scariest headline I've read all week was the one that screamed "BIll Gates Has Privately Endorsed Kamala Harris," as though that pronouncement from the billionaire buddy of Jeffrey Epstein will send thousands of wavering voters to the polls in a burst of trans-class solidarity.

Meanwhile; Donald Trump has snagged the currently reigning world]s richest man, Elon Musk. It is now predicted that should Trump win, he will install Musk as his top White House adviser, if not his de facto co-monarch.

The media are also making a big deal over Kamala Harris finally daring to Go There and call Trump a fascist. She made the stunning accusation at yet another corporate-sponsored staged "town hall"  event. This was during the same week that her campaign had to clap back against the vile rumors that Harris is not a loyal and full-fledged supporter of the joint US/Israel genocide of Arab populations in the Middle East.. It is so unfair that Trump keeps  accusing her of being a radical Marxist and a hater of imperialism and mass death. That is rank disinformation, given that Kamala has worked tirelessly to advertise her neocon values, what with dragging Liz Cheney to so many staged events that you might even think she's secretly dumped Tim Walz from the ticket, leaving him to languish in the woods with his pheasant-shooting gun. The least the veep candidate could do is to emulate Liz's own creepy veepy daddy and shoot somebody in the face  with i tand then demand an apology from his victim.

Meanwhile, we must not let the manufactured doom and gloom get us down. We must look forward to Barack Obama pivoting from his current stand-up routine of guilt-tripping black male voters and making fun of Trump's McDonald's stunt, not to mention his faltering mental capacities.

It was Consoler-n-Chief  Obama, remember, who comforted the nation after Trump's 2016 victory, by insisting (correctly) that the Duopoly is really an intramural team, all playing within the same cosy 40-60 yard line.

Maybe he can tweak the platitude just a tad, assuring a divided nation that  the players are cosily scrimmaging within the 10-20 yard line  or whatever real estate is closest to the right-leaning goal post. They are all part of the same fascist team. Both are financed by billionaires, both are beholden to white supremacy.  Donald is the snarling fascist, and Kamala plays the "compassionate" fascist, each giving the wealthy exactly what they want, giving the lucrative "defense" industry exactly what it wants, all under the guise of a two-party system whose only internal differences are in  style and cultural tastes.

Meanwhile,  we will have to endure fantasy scenarios of what will happen under a second Trump term and even consider the possibility that Trump will still  take over the whole country even if Kamala wins.  He will  deport immigrants, ban Muslims and throw his political enemies in jail by fiat.  Thankfully, though, Congress has appropriated far more funds for the construction of shiny new prisons than it has for affordable housing. These elite enemies won't be out in the streets or living under bridges during the Trump dictatorship that they have so thrillingly forecast for our Halloween viewing pleasure.

Protesting the Brutes of Capitalism

More than 200 people were arrested Monday outside the New York Stock Exchange, where they were protesting the US-financed genocide in Gaza as well as the escalation of Israeli aggression against the citizens of Lebanon and any day now, of Iran. The demonstrators were charged with blocking the entrances to thefortress wherein the stocks of such war profiteers as Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin are bought and sold at record profits.

Given the escalating slaughter in the Middle East, it was wholly appropriate that the protest was staged on Indigenous People's Day, which is still officially called Columbus Day in the United States. 

It's  been a near- unbroken line of genocide by various imperial powers in various parts of the globe ever since Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492 and began wiping out the Taino people.

Now it's Israel,  the proxy of the West in the latest campaign of murderous ethnic cleansing and land-grabbing. Joe Biden admitted as much years ago, when he kvelled that if Israel did not yet already exist, the US would have had to invent it, in order to protect American "interests" in that oil-rich portion of the world.

Populated as it is by descendants of European refugees from pogroms and by descendants of victims of the Nazi genocide, the Israel proxy/client state is the perfect actor to carry out mass extermination in Arab lands, in the interests of its Western investors, funders and zionist idealogues. The Holocaust, one of the most grotesque and well-documented acts of mass murder in modern history, is repurposed as  the perfect weapon of "self defense." wielded by a nation-state made up of a historically oppressed ethnic group. It enables the United States and its European allies to wallow in their own historic racism even as the liberals among them pretend to be staunchly ant-racist as they pander for political support in their home countries.

Meanwhile, the same politicians badger their own citizens, claiming if they're against their leaders' campaign of genocide,  then they must be antisemitic.

Besides being a proxy, Israel has also been the West's insurance policy. Remember that it was only a few years after the 1948 Nakba (forced expulsion of Palestinians) that the CIA fomented the coup in Iran and installed its own puppet on behalf of British Petroleum. Now that Iran's counterrevolution is a done deal, it's been a imperative ever since to topple the Islamic regime in the interests of controlling the global  oil supply. The defense of Israel is their only excuse... and it is wearing mighty thin. The rest of the world is simply not buying it.

It is only because a presidential election is looming that the current Democratic administration is feebly demanding that Israel tone down the rampage just a bit. The Biden crew wrote a letter threatening to withhold "some" future arms shipments unless food and water relief is allowed in Gaza. This is tantamount to ensuring that the lambs are fattened up before the slaughter.  It would never do to have images of delib erately starved, emaciated children circulating over the Internet before they are rendered out of sight and out of mind under tons of rubble.

The main difference between the joint US-Israel extermination campaign and all the genocides of the past is that the people back at home are now all too aware of the atrocities being committed in their name. And the imperialist propaganda simply iis not working as well as it once did.

Back in the 19th century heyday of the British Empire, for example, there were few critics and no crowds of anti-genocide protesters storming the Chancellor of the Exchequer or Buckingham Palace. People had only the complicit news sheets to keep them informed. They were not about to  question the sources of the sugar they put into their imported tea or coffee. And if  they did consider themselves to be informed, they were taught that exterminating lesser people was humane, because their very backwardness and "savagery" were already condemning them to extinction anyway. Imperialsts were only too happy to pounce on Darwin]s new theory of evolution and use a specious "survival of the fittest" excuse for their mass murders.  

As Sven Lindqvist writes in his magisterial "Exterminate All the Brutes"  - 

"After Darwin ,it became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide. If you were upset, your were just showing your lack of education. Only some old codgers who had not been able to keep up with progress in natural history protested."

Now, of course, trhere many more codger-critics, both young and old. And since so many of them are Jewish themelves, they are more impervious to the antisemitism whose increasingly desperate ubiquity are rendering them ineffective if not totally meaningless. To the extent that antisemites do exist, they are becoming more emboldened, feeling free to verbalize their own racism against both Jews and Muslims. Antisemitisim and Islamaphobia are indeed two sides of the same coin.

"We do not want to remember," wrote Seven Lindqvist back in the 90s in his history of genocides which did, in part, inspire  and enable Hitler to conduct his campaign of human annihilation. :We want genocide to have ended with Nazism, That is what is most comforting.... The air he (Hitler) and all Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable  destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application."

Perhaps, at long last, the cycle of mass public acceptance of, or ignorance of, the long history of genocide has come to a long overdue and much-deserved end.

And for those who think that Donald Trump is the only source of fascism, just remember that the highest ranking members of the New York City police state apparatus are either under criminal indictment or have already resigned in disgrace. It is cause for optimism when the lords of genocidal capitalism are threatened with even a momentary loss of their publicly funded private security forces. At the very least, brute force capitalism is losing more face by the day when it arrests peaceful protesters for the offense of resisting the corporate education being foisted upon them.

Biden: Brain-Dead Is As Brain-Dead Does

You have to be "brain-dead" if you don't believe in climate change, remarked Joe Biden as he briefly peered at the catastrophic damage in North Carolina this week. This was just days before an even deadlier storm blew up in record time to a Category Five monster in the  overheated Gulf of Mexico.

Now, as much as we might be tempted to accuse Biden himself of being effectively brain-dead, he still has enough functioning  neurons left not to say the quiet part out loud: that there is a proven connection between the trillions of gallons of water unleashed by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the trillions of dollars expended to wage the US Hegemon's endless genocidal wars around the globe.

The American military is the world's single largest greenhouse gas polluter, consuming and spewing more hurricane-spawning hydrocarbon than any other institution on earth.

And ironically enough, Biden has been forced to cancel a meeting in Germany to plot and finance another escalation in his Ukraine-Russia war. And then he was due to fly to Angola immediately thereafter to plot how best to plunder that poor African nation of its oil reserves and precious minerals with which to fuel "the greatest and most lethal fighting force the world has ever known." 

So as much as Biden often brags that "we're the United States of America for God's sake - there's nothing we can't do!" the president has been forced to stay in Washington so as to "oversee" preparations and response to the latest hurricane. This oversight, as the White House readily admits through its New York Times mouthpiece, is largely cosmetic, to avoid accusations by Republicans that Biden is ignoring a crisis in the Homeland. So he will don his special NOAA bomber jacket for the usual photo-op. He should probably continue wearing it as he phones Netanyahu to tell him on what refugee camp or apartment complex or humanitarian food aid convoy to drop his endless supply of those Made-in-the-USA 2,000-lb bombs.

And with FEMA grotesquely underfunded  only 10 percent staffed. what of the climate refugees back in the states? Even what remains of the middle class can't escape the devastation. Witness upscale Asheville, North Carolina and what's in store for Tampa, Florida, where gas stations have already run dry in the mad rush to escape.

Something tells me that Democrats sneering at the Trumpies who don't "believe," as they so piously do, in climate change, is not going to impress voters for much longer. They're already trying to sell us on "resilience" rather than such rectifying measures as stopping the wars and imposing huge fines and taxes on billionaires who fly on private jets, sail the seas on their mega-yachts and can't even remember where their multiple mansions are even located.

Of course, to paraphrase Frederic Jamison, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. So we have to struggle all that much harder, not  not to get sucked into their propaganda matrix, not to descend into their horrific maelstrom.

A Plague of Election Year Drought

As a consolation prize to make up for the orchestrated dearth of meaningful choices on the ballot, New York is letting us vote early this year.  For the first time in my voting career, all third party candidates have been erased from the official document that just arrived in the mail. No Green Party, no Libertarian party, not even a Rent Is Too Damned High Party. The document is a vast desert of wasted white paper. The tiny printed names of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the mirages, cruelly mocking all of those vainly searching for an oasis of democracy.

 The parchment offers no respite to the parched.

Not that the pair of candidates vying for the 18th Congressional Distric seatt are any more promising. Far from it, in fact, given that each of them is a xenophobic reactionary.

 The incumbent,, Pat Ryan, was one of only a couple dozen of "moderate" House Democrats who voted to censure their own Palestinian-American colleague, Rashida Tlaib. He gave a big thumbs-up to a resolutions that defined  opposition to Israel as anti-Semitism. He has enthusiastically voted for every war appropriations  and surveillance bill  put before him. As a former Army intelligence officer stationed in Iraq, Ryan is stll every inch the military man. His campaign ads and incessant robocalls boast that he is "not your usual Democrat".  One TV spot actually shows him wrestling with his young children rather than, say,  hugging them or reading to them. He suggests it was he, and he alone,  who dared to talk tough to Joe Biden about supporting Donald Trump's draconian border policies so as to convince Republicans to support Ukraine War funding. No matter that it was a moot point, because Trump himself nixed the cruel border legislation out of pure partisan spite... and the Ukraine War funding was approved anyway.

Ryan's Republican opponent, Alison Espositio, is a retired New York City police inspector who is laboring under the delusion that this bucolic upstate district is rife with violent crime perpetrated by - who else? - those alien hordes. So her platform is pretty much limited to restoring cash bail, thus ensuring once again that poor defendants will languish in jail pending trial - or to be completely accurate about it, a forced plea deal simply because they can't afford a private trial attorney.

The main difference between Ryan and Esposito is that he supports abortion rights and she does not. The Democrats didn't codify Roe v Wade when they had the chance for the very important reason that doing so would have robbed them of their best campaign wedge issue.

All is not lost, however. The incumbent Democrat in my State Senate district, Michelle Hinchey, is reliably progressive on most issues. And in the Assembly, incumbent Sarahana Shrestha is a self-described socialist who recently introduced a bill which would  take our privately-owned utility (Central Hudson) public after it bilked customers out of millions of dollars in a crooked billing scheme. (Pat Ryan's boast of fighting the utility involved his office forwarding constituents' complaints to the state's regulatory Public Service Commission and a floor speech demanding the resignation of its former CEO, who was promptly replaced by another market-based, investor-serving company apparatchik.)

So, since October is the storied month of surprises, and events are bouncing off each other with the speed of blight, I have placed my precious voting parchment into a drawer with no plans of sending it in until the very last possible minute. 

Any of the aforementioned candidates who renounce war and capitalism and, for good measure, kicks at least one of their billionaire donors in the rear end in full public view has a pretty good chance of earning my vote. I say "chance" because some or even most of them will say anything or pull any stunt to retain or gain power.

Meanwhile, how  ironic that in such an orchestrated electoral drought, we keep getting flooded with their calls, their ads, their fear-mongering appeals for the "grass roots" cash that for many of us, doesn't even begin to cover the food, the rent and the medical bills.