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.

Up With Outrage!

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

 That's the message we're getting today from the mainstream media in the wake of Bernie Sanders's terrible, horrible, most epic defeat ever in the history of political history. It is the sad duty of the Punditocracy to gleefully inform us that Bernie has been smashed into South Carolina roadkill by the unstoppable Hillary Clinton juggernaut. And just on the off-chance that he's still barely twitching, there's always Super Duper Terror Tuesday. That is when Hillary's metaphorical drones are poised to finish the job with the old one-two punch, aka the double-tap. They hope to finally render Bernie and his swarms of crazy unicorns into naught but a warm fuzzy pink mist of a memory.

But not so fast! We haven't reached the lowest circle of hell just yet. We're still breathing and intact, despite that vaunted Firewall.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of what is essentially a rigged primary process orchestrated by a corrupt party machinery, there is nothing that says the revolution cannot continue. I've said right from the get-go that we mustn't put all our eggs into one Bernie Basket. Let's face it: political parties, especially the Democratic Party, have historically been where popular movements go to die. 

Dejection is the enemy. So is cynicism. The powers-that-be are extremely and inordinately anxious to curb our enthusiasm. And since widespread enthusiasm and trust in a Hillary Clinton presidency is not yet in the offing, despite her very best efforts to portray herself as Wartime Granny Populist, they'll use the fear card to get our votes. Elect the Lesser Evil if you want to survive Benito Trump: that is the not-so-subliminal message of the Clintonian neoliberal thought collective.

And that brings me to Henry A. Giroux, prolific author and public intellectual. In a Truthout interview coinciding with the publication of his latest book, America's Addiction to Terrorism, Giroux says:

We no longer live in an age of long-term possibilities. The certainties of a long-term job, a better future and hope have disappeared in the age of what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity. We now occupy an era of precarity, uncertainty and insecurity. Yet, these conditions do not constitute some inevitable historical evolution. They are politically and socially constructed and just as they were made by human beings, they can be unmade. I think it is precisely this concern about imagining a future that is not a repeat of the present that offers an inroad into addressing the current crisis of historical and political agency at work in the United States. I'm concerned with how you mobilize existential despair away from a paralyzing cynicism and depoliticizing dynamic into a sense of political outrage that can be marshaled into collective action. Trauma is not a psychic phenomenon alone, but can also be a steppingstone to mobilization.

Henry Giroux (who is not endorsing any particular candidate) lists three essential methods by which we can overcome the existential despair that is the byproduct (and pretty much the intended purpose) of neoliberalism: 

There are three pre-requirements for being able to think in utopian terms - that is, in terms that are capable of producing a militant form of hope that not only imagines a better society but also inspires collective action based on such desires. First, a utopian imaginary must embrace history as a resource, willing to engage its "dangerous" memories and to use it as a resource for challenging those discourses that have frozen the present. Second, educators, artists, intellectuals, workers, young people and others must find a way to construct not only a discourse of merciless critique but also a discourse of possibility. Thirdly, politics has to be reinvented so as to recognize that power is now global and that politics is still tied to nation-states.

There's a lot more to the interview. Read the whole thing, and you will probably not only feel better, you'll feel energized and inspired. Better yet, you'll feel the outrage. It's the perfect antidote to the gloom and doom of the New York Times and Politico and the entirety of the corporate owned media/political complex, which would like nothing better than for us all to lay down and curl into the fetal position on the yellow line in the middle of the neoliberal highway to hell.

We must not give in to despair, no matter the outcome of any one election or endless series of elections. Onward and upward!

For your further viewing pleasure and energization: