Normalizing Trump

-Donald Trump won so decisively, across so many demographics, that the "opposition"has no other choice but to accept his regime graciously.Only a week after the New York Times and other liberal media were braying that the end of the world was nigh in the event of a Democratic Party defeat, those same outlets are reporting with grave respectful seriousness the various cabinet appointments and proposed executive orders.

 After four long years of harping on a mythical "battle for the soul of America", Joe Biden has amiably changed his tune. Looking downright ebullient during post election remarks in (where else?) the White House Rose Garden, Biden pivoted from calling Trump supporters "garbage" to chiding Americans to be nice to one another. The electoral apparatus put in place to honor the interests of the ruling class no matter which legacy party wins worked, and it worked well, Biden boasted. At long last, Uncle Joe can drop the pretense that Trump poses an existential threat to "democracy". Since, historically speaking, capitalism has always been a gracious host to fascism, Biden has invited his doppelganger to the White House for a Wednesday photo-op to display the continuity of oligarchic power.

 Former first lady Melania Trump will not, however, take up the dainty invitation for tea extended by Jill Biden.Melania  reportedly cannot forgive or forget Biden s Justice Department goons or rifling through her underwear drawer in search of those purloined documents. In the interests of aforesaid ligarchic continuity, that case and all the various indictments and the one criiminal conviction based on the Stormy Daniels payoff case, will all magically disappear. It's as if the January Sixth spectacular never even happened. For one thing, the complicit corporate media have their careers and their continued "access" to power to think about.

 Now, the controversy of whether Trump is or is not a fascist is actually moot, given that the United States was not only built on fascism, its history also served as inspiration for Hitler's own regime. From the enslavement of Africans to the extermination of the indigenous populations throughout the Americas, the Trump reelection was entirely predicable. As I outlined in my previous post, the Democratic Party, with its own hard right turn via the Kamala Harris candidacy, ensured it.

 Why else would the historically reliable Black voting bloc not come out for Kamala? At least Joe Biden did not directly prosecute minority people, even though, as a senator, he engineered the racist, ethnic cleansing piece of Jim Crow legislation known as the Crime Bill. Liberals love to point to Donald Trump's notorious full page New York Times ad demanding death to the (later exonerated) Central Park Five, while giving Biden a relative pass for his own racist actions and rhetoric in the creation of the permanent racial carceral state, aka the Prison-Industrial Complex.

 As George Jackson wrote in one of his prison letters collected in Blood In My Eye, 

 "When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape recorder that cost him a week's labor. and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism as simply as an economic geopolitical affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed."

 So it will be that Biden and Trump, brothers under the botoxed skin, will canoodle in the White House this week. We would do well to ask why and call out the fraud of the Duopoly once and for all - what the late Christopher Hitchens memorably dubbed the two tightly fused cheeks of one corrupt buttock.

Trump 2.0....

... brought to you, once again, by the Democratic Party. which spent billions of dollars doing its damnedest to lose this intra-oligarchic contest. Let us count just a few of the ways:

--Setting up Kamala Harris to take the fall. Her failure to win even a single primary vote in the 2020 contest made her a shoo-in for defeat, which is what Democrats wanted all along. Their whole purpose is to fund-raise by blaming everyone but themselves. You almost have to feel sorry for Kamala at this point. I don't imagine that she'll follow in the footsteps of her predecessors, the Clintons and the Obamas, cashing in with Netflix deals, speaking tours and self-glorifying charitable foundations..

--Their implicit goal of achieving lifetime status as martyred elite losers was cemented in the final weeks of the campaign. To ensure that Harris would lose, Bill Clinton told Muslim voters that Israel had a right to commit genocide because the Bible essentially had declared the zionists to be the chosen people. That was meant to supplement Michelle Obama waving her blue-taloned finger at men - who apparently do not empathize sufficiently with their womenfolks' menstrual cramps and the horrors of menopause to cast a vote in solidarity for Kamala Harris. It was really quite a retro argument, when you think of it, because the patriarchy has always pointed to female biology as the excuse to not grant them pay raises, promotions or even basic respect. Barack, for his own part, reverted again to his habit of denigrating Black men. His audience was not so much Black men as it was the white liberal burbs who feel more comfortable when it's a Black former president who utters their race stereotypes for them. 

-- Ignoring the dire economic straits many if not most people are now facing. Ignoring homelessness, sickness and despair. Championing a genocide.

Now, if you're imagining that the return of Trump will cause the Democrats to do a little introspection, think again. If the march of the scapegoats hasn't already begun, it will get underway with a vengeance very soon. The usual suspects will vie for supremacy: racism, sexism. Jill Stein, Russian interference, social media... you name it.

 There may one silver lining to this debacle. With the Senate now in Republican hands, a President Harris would have made all kinds of deals to keep the government open - cutting Social Security and other social benefit programs would have been at the top of the agenda. Such back-stabbing of regular people  can only succeed with bipartisan complicity and cooperation. No one party is accountable and therefore no one party need take the blame.. It is why Republicans failed to pass NAFTA until Clinton came long. And the only thing that prevented him and his GOP partners in triangulation from privatizing Social Security was the Lewinsky scandal. 

Make no mistake. If Trump is a fascist dictator, it was Democrats who opened the door for him and his movement. They are the ones who abandoned their disaffected constituents and chose instead to serve financialized capital.

 Cynics and cowards, they have delivered the population to corporations and oligarchs. They should fade away with pathetic whimpers that nobody will listen to.  

The way forward, if we are to survive this dark age, is to band together in acts of mutual aid, both large and small, both loud and quiet. Any resistance movement must be from the bottom up and remain as far as possible away from the Democratic Party and its various veal pen think tanks and its corporate media partners. 

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.

How the Times SugarcoatsTerrorism

 If its coverage of the explosions in Lebanon of  booby-tapped pagers and radios hasn't been implicitly admiring of Israel's technical "prowess" in causing at least two dozen deaths and thousands of gruesome injuries, the New York Times added insult to injury by proclaiming that Hezbollah militants are feeling mighty "embarrassed" for having been such unwitting dupes of Israel.

In framing the atrocity in in such a "was my face red!" manner, the Times has tried to deflect readers' attention from the actual blood streaming down all those faces and from the fact that many of the victims literally had their faces blown right off their skulls.

I thought I was beyond feeling shock and disgust at how the pro-Zionist New York Times regularly dehumanizes the targets of this settler-colonialist apartheid state. But its coldly clinical coverage Israel's latest sadistic mass murder went beyond the pale, even for the Times. The Gray Lady has exposed herself in all her ghoulish nakedness.

Nowhere in the rapidly dwindling  coverage does the paper describe the carnage as an act of terrorism On the contrary, it is an act of counterterrorism.  You see, It's only terrorism if Arabs and Muslims do it. Or maybe if a white guy like Putin does it. I can assure you that the coverage would be very different if Russia had sent explosive devices to Ukraine and thousands of innocent people had been torn apart.

So the Lebanon massacre must be downplayed at all costs. One article headlined "Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah" served both to minimize the horrific injuries and to give the false impression that only militants were injured. Israel apparently possesses so much technical prowess that the throngs of passersby were magically erased right out of the picture. As is its wont, however, the Times did deign to mention the death and funeral of one child.

As "eye-catching" as  the carnage (Israeli prowess) certainly was,  writes reporter  Patrick Kingsley in another article published on Wednesday, the usual experts in the statecraft biz are very confused as to why Israel has not capitalized" on it. It was a tactical success but not the ultimate victory over the entire Middle East that warmongers of all nations crave.

Because if nothing else, Kingsley grotesquely writes, the mass slaughter in Lebanon "has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for." (Sadly, the nearly year-long genocide in Gaza has failed to impress the more discerning among connoisseurs of cruelty as not being sufficiently prestigious.)

That Israel has foresworn bragging rights is just the Times being its cute disingenuous self again. Why would Israe boast and dish on all the details when it has as its partner  the United States do it for them? For the most powerful and lethal fighting and intelligence force the world has ever known and feared, the US sources dishing to the Times certainly seemed instantly aware of every detail of the planting of explosives in the hand-held devices, despite their claims of having no knowledge of the booby-trapped devices and terror attacks in advance.

The terror is, of course, the whole point. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. It can happen to us. It's just a short step from surveilling us and censoring us to physically mangling us. Look at  how easily, to give you just one example, that the FBI was able to  crack iPhone security without Apple's help.

I don't think  I was being overly paranoid when I fleetingly wondered why my iPad gave out a cheery little ding the other day.

***

Books don't explode, thank goodness, despite the reactionaries wanting to ban them. So I am reading a lot these days, fiction and nonfiction. This passage from a book by James Baldwin that I just finished really hit a nerve in me, so allow me to share it with you:

"The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct. they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply. Life is their only weapon against life, life is all they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may coerced) in hte population control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring on the fields which others own, with their transistor radios on their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world. forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them. the wretched. quite coldly and deliberately. znd do not intend to change the satus quo; they are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement' rain down their bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced. and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life. or the 'conscience' of the civilized world There  is 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the 'vital interest'' of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child."