Some Corpses Are More Worthy Than Others

 In a macabre exercise in  Orwellian double-think, President Biden has officially declared that a "prayer for peace" be uttered by one and all on this Memorial Day. Even the chattering war-mongers of the weapons manufacturer-sponsored  corporate media followed orders and at least shut up for a hot minute of silence - before drowning out the sacred bell-tolling with the normal discussion of who to bomb next.

And even as Biden and his fellow politicians all bowed their own heads in simulation of prayer for peace, the bombs and ammo were en route with a vengeance to Israel, Ukraine,  and wherever else on the planet that fine war products are sold.

Honoring all the dead American troops for having made the "ultimate sacrifice" for the sake of an "idea"  serves the purpose of our never-ending state of war by separating the dead professional killers (potential if not actual) from the killed. Those who die while waring a uniform and holding a gun are declared to be more respectable, and thereby more  more grievable,  than "official" enemy combatants and unarmed civilians alike.

Putting a halo on dead soldiers also lets the masters of war ignore the fact that war is in its modern essence a capitalistic enterprise, designed to protect and enhance the power and the profits of the few.  So if they use words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "sacred" often enough to justify their mass murder, it is that much easier to separate, demote and dehumanize all those non-uniformed men, women and children. At best these victims  are barely sympathetic "collateral damage." At worst they are the complicit "human shields" of the latest designated enemy.

They are deemed not worthy of grief on this Memorial Day. 

As  Simone  Weil wrote in her brilliant antiwar essay, with the epic antiwar poem  the Iliad as her centerpiece, the victims of war are conveniently transformed into "things."  If If the masters of war can magically transform people into things even before  violently killing them, it naturally follows that they are also mere things after their deaths.

Weil's opening paragraph:

" Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors."

War, she continues, makes a person into a thing by literally turning him or her either into a pre-corpse or an actual one. "Somebody is here, and the next minutes, nobody is here at all."

The occult purpose of Memorial Day, therefore,  is not so much about honoring the designated  war heroes as it is  it is about honoring - and fearing -  the force and the power that they represent. It's a bait and switch holiday that allows "us" to mawkishly bow our heads for a minute before firing up the barbeque for the official start of summer.

And even as they're urging us to join in their maudlin festivities of death, hamburgers and fun in the sun, they're also trying to make us feel guilty that we ourselves have not been elevated to their rarefied ranks of either  potential or actual war dead. 

In both the  United Kingdom and the United States, there are renewed calls from rulers for more lumpen folk to enlist for Permawar - euphemized as patriotic "national service."

"Only one percent of Americans serving in the military is problematic"  scolded Rep. Pat Ryan, Democrat (from my own Hudson Valley district). The military-industrial complex sent him and his GOP partner, Mike Waltz of Florida, to a Sunday talk show in order to gaslight the audience on Memorial Day weekend. The public-private war industry made sure to send bona fide US Army veterans. It simply wouldn't have done to use, for example, the actual commander in chief, who during the Vietnam war enjoyed five separate draft deferments due to a case of chronic asthma from which has since apparently recovered.

Ryan and Waltz were quick to deny that their bipartisan push for enhanced financing for military recruitment in any way presages a return to the draft, (which was more egalitarian in the Vietnam era, when even upper middle class guys couldn't always avoid becoming cannon fodder). Recruitment will still be done according to class and be heavily concentrated in low-income school districts.

Moreover, they are insisting that mandatory national service wouldn't necessarily entail putting on a uniform or carrying a weapon. They do understand that there are still some pacifists out there, especially among the young people protesting their genocide of Palestinians.

Rather, they mask their nationalistic propaganda in the rhetoric of  social service, with Waltz gushing that it "could" include "national parks, inner city tutoring, elderly (sic) care."

And we all know (wink, wink, nod) that not only would this national service be either low paid or voluntary, it would also free up more money for the weapons contractors - money which is now being wasted on the public education of poor Black and Brown kids public schools in those "inner cities" and that all that Medicare money going to nursing care for old people could be going to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, not to mention their  Wall Street investors.

In other words, they have "things"-both with uniforms and without - all figured out.

War Crimes and Punishment

On the same day that a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister for committing genocidal war drimes in Gaza, Julian Assange has won the right to appeal his extradtition to the United States to face charges of committing journalism.

As far as American officials are concerned,  the exposure of their war crimes is worse than the actual commission, or aiding and abetting of, war crimes. They've already been caught aggressively trying to quash the warrants against Bibi and his fellow genocidaires. Some hardliners in the US Congress had even explicitly threatened  to invade The Hague if Bibi should  ever be captured and held for trial there. (Congress already passed a law that requires the US military to swoop in and rescue, say, George Bush or Dick Cheney if they are ever brought to international justice for their Iraq war crimes. So l imagine Lindsay Graham and Tom Cotton feverishly writing legislation right this minute to codify things and specifically add Bibi to the official rescue list of mass murderers kidnapped by those vicious human rights terrorist folks.)

 At the same time, both political parties in the United States have ensured that Assange continues to rot in jail. This is notwithstanding President Biden's recent vague mutterings that his administration is considering dropping the Espionage Act charges against Assange.

He left the impression that they're running out the clock on the ailing Assange. They have already done their utmost to destroy both his physical and mental health.  By the time Biden belatedly decides to set him free. Assange's condition will have deteriorated to the point that they feel he no longer poses a threat to them, His appearance upon release will be so shocking that it will put the big chill on aspiring truth-tellers all over the world. The lucrative US war racket will survice and thrive while killing and maiming and displacing even more victims.

As I write this post, there still has been no official reaction from the White House concerning the ICC request for the arrest warrants against the Israeli officials as well as for two top leaders of Hamas. There also has been no reaction from the Biden administration regarding the granting of the Assange appeal.

Coverage of both legal stories has been relatively muted in the mainstream media, what with the helicopter crash killing Iran's president and the overheated saga of the ongoing Trump hush money trial, both of which were taking pride of place on the New York Times digital home-page this morning.

The two separate court cases, regarding as they do US-financed and abetted violations of human rights - against Assange as an individual and against innocent civilians in occupied territory in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself - do not put the Biden administration in a good light, as they attempt to install the aging president in another four year term. 

It wouldn't even be a stretch for the ICC prosecutor to include Biden and the entire US Congress in his arrest warrant request. After all, without the billions of dollars in American military aid, this genocidal rampage would not be possible.

One ominous sign that the ICC will never touch the United States with a ten foot pole, and that this legal process is as much about political theater as it is about justice, is that prosecutor Karim Khan singled out human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of George Clooney, for special thanks for her assistance in building the cases against Israel and Hamas leaders.

Her husband is set to headline a gala fundraiser for Joe Biden next month before heading to Broadway to reprise his film role as  legendary journliast Edward R. Murrow. Playing a journalist beats actually working as one every single time. Just ask the stenographers in the modern war-funded corporate media.

The War Comes Home

 The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at our local state college, about a half-mile from where I live was so new, so quiet and so relatively small compared to the scenes at other schools, that I didn't even know it existed. Not, that it is, until I started hearing the ominous droning sound at around 10:30 Thursday night.

Since we don't live below any flight paths, my first naive thought was that the waxing and waning noise above us was a small plane making helpless circles and that its pilot was either incapacitated or dead. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before it ran out of fuel and crashed in a blazing fireball somewhere in the immediate vicinity. I almost called  the town police to report the noise - before it dawned on me that there was probably nothing they could do to bring the plane's distressed pilot safely down to earth.

It's a good thing I decided not to bother them because it turned out that they were otherwise occupied, with more than a hundred state, county and local police in riot gear and armed with nightsticks and zip ties  arresting more than a hundred State University of New York demonstrators right down the road. The sounds I heard were surveillance drones and perhaps a helicopter sweeping relentlessly back and forth for over an hour the dark skies above.

Everything I later learned about the police crackdown on campus came from the excellent student newspaper, The Oracle. It is the best source of local news around. What still remains of local mainstream media in this area (and in most of the rest of the United States) is behind a paywall. And anyway, what little information that could be obtained from a larger-circulation daily in Kingston came from a New York State Police press release. Just the facts, ma'm, with all the details and local color professionally omitted for your protection.

They were so professional, in fact, that they herded the arrested students, some of whom were injured, straight  into the parking lot of the Student Health and Wellness Center for initial processing. Because the local town court and lockup was too small to host them all, they were transported to facilities far away from the actual scene in order to to be formally arraigned.

By the next day, the number of student demonstrators had swelled and hundreds more of them walked out en masse from classes at noon Friday, bringing the protest directly to the office of the college president.  

 Participants chanted “40,000 people dead, you’re arresting kids instead” and sang the protest song Solidarity Forever. 

First-year education major Soph Rullo said, “I wasn’t too involved in what was going on. I saw what happened last night, and it was completely unnecessary and disgusting. Now, I feel like I need to get involved.

 Another first-year student who attended the walk-out said, “I’m here for the people who were arrested last night and couldn’t come here today. I want to stand for Palestine but also for the students that were taken.” 

Although The Oracle reports that students at the New Paltz campus were inspired by the protests at Columbia University, this was not their first protest gainst Israel's genocide of the Palestinians. 

In February, they'd demonstrated against the presence of three IDF soldiers, who had been brought on campus by the  Students Supporting Israel, an international group which is not an officially recognized group at the school.

Anticipating violence among students that never occurred,  college officials had limited attendance at the SSI lecture and slideshow to 60 ticket-holders, whose bags were checked and whose bodies were canned  before admittance. The barricaded event was guarded by state troopers, both inside and outside the venue. The anti-genocide protesters outside were peaceful and vocal.

So much for politicians like Joe Biden decrying the non-existent violence and "chaos" of student protesters rising up throughout the country. Although of an age to have participated in the youth demonstrations against the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago, Biden was too busy studying to land near the bottom of his Syracuse University law school class to have participated. No wonder he always brags that his wars will entail no American boots on the ground, when he hiimself had  balked at ruining his Weejuns in the antiwar protests he found so annoying.

The preppie college boy with the sweater wrapped strategically around his neck has ungracefully aged into a president whose strategic foreign policy is endangering and killing people all over the world.  So says career diplomat Hala Rharrit, who just publicly resigned from the State Department to protest the genocide of Palestinians.. In a devastating interview on Democracy Now!, she effectively and accurately called Biden a war criminal who is making everybody less safe, both at home and abroad.

As disgusting and maniacal he and his merry group of war profiteers are, however, they're doing us a pretty big favor. They are radicalizing a whole generation of young people, whose protests are already expanding from fighting against one genocide into fighting the whole corrupt military industrial complex. As I watch these young people, I feel the knot in my stomach relax,  knowing that the current gerontocratic regime will not last forever despite all the concierge health care their ill-gotten money can buy. Biden, far from squelching the righteous outrage on college campuses and in the streets, is only feeding it. His piecemeal loan forgiveness crumbs are blowing away on the hot air of his own sneering bombast.

Solidarity is rearing its lovely head. And the empty rhetoric of powers-that-be is falling into a million little pieces. 

A sure sign that they're losing their messaging war is that  they interrupted Friday's White House press briefing with Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame playing "Joe-E-Wan-Kenobe" in Biden's trademark aviator shades.

The fawning Guardian reporter gave the performance a rave review, even detailing the hilarious and supportive and appreciative reactions of the supporting players in the press corps.The writer further noted that Biden has enlisted both the dollar and performative help of Hollywood in an effort to boost his sagging poll numbers.

So it was a bit jarring to read at the end of the piece that actor Robert De Niro had gone on MSNBC to apparently commit the heresy of fuming  “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s fucking scary.”

It turns out he fooled you. He was talking about Trump, you utterly silly people!

I think I'd better stick with reading student newspapers, the last bastion of a free and independent press.

The Cast-Iron Heart of Imperalism

Joe Biden's "ironclad support of Israel" has become so mindlessly repetitive, so unthinkingly reactionary, that it is rendered practically meaningless, if not a parody of itself.

Ditto for his hair-trigger response to the anti-genocide protests - that  they are "anti-semitic" to their core.

He might as well be saying that if you don't support Israel's ethnically-motivated right to mass-murder upwards of 30,000 Palestinians, you're simply the wrong kind of racist. It's kind of similar to to what he blurted out during his first campaign:

 "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't black." The hidden meaning of that taunt, issued to a Black radio host, was that oppressed people will embrace their tormenters if they want to survive in the prison-industrial complex that he himself had been so instrumental in creating. 

All the racist tropes in the world can't keep up with Biden. He is getting so desperate he spun a yarn last week about his uncle possibly being killed by cannibals on Papua New Guinea during World War II.  He might have been thinking of cartoon characters with a human bone through their noses who kidnapped and devoured all those brave white settler-explorers in the jungle back in the day.

 If you can't have a heart of darkness to go along with your ironclad mania, then what good are you as an overlord?

And why did he settle for the retrograde "ironclad" loyalty to an apartheid regime? After pocketing millions of dollars from the Israel lobby over the course of his 50-year political career, iron is so stingy.  Why not upgrade to "tungsten steel-clad" or better yet, "diamond-clad" loyalty? Those are materials which unlike iron, can never rust.

 the Biden regime's use of the ironclad metaphor is not only cheap, it's getting downright flaky, not to mention riddled with holes. A lot like whatever passes for their ancient, rust-eaten brains. 

Meanwhile, although regular people have been massing in the streets for more than half a year in support of the Palestinian people, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets were not covering these events with any regularity. Not, that is, tuntil they converged on elite college campuses, especially the campus of Columbia University in New York City. The biggest media personalities are in town anyway, covering the Donald Trump trial. You will be relieved to know that this hush-money trial is the lead story, despite rumors of World War III already breaking out. Forget Joe Biden's pig-iron brain. Donald Trump is so old and decrepit and sociopathic, they'll have you now, that he keeps nodding off after lunch right in the middle of the trial of the century.

Trump is so guilty in fact, that the Los Angeles Times spotted him emerging from O.J. Simpson's prison cell during the writing of the their O.J. obituary last week.

 suffice it to say that we probably never would have learned about the self-immolation of Max Azzarello had it not happened right outside the Trump courthouse in full vew of the TV cameras. Of course, when it turned out that the victim was not a Trump supporter, they lost interest as soon as was indecently possible.

If you feel like you're trapped in a Theatre of the Absurd, you are not alone. Only in a world this topsy-turvy would the genocidal Israeli prime minister Netanyahu accuse the Biden White House of "the peak of absurdity and a moral low," for merely considering the sanctioning of a particularly brutal IDF battalion indulging in non-sanctioned genocide in the occupied West Bank. Bibi definitely got the absurd part right, given that the US just voted to give more unconditional aid to Israel.

"The horror! The horror!" -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

The November Lottery: A Boycott, Divest, Sanction Scenario

When six white Western aid workers and their Palestinian driver were droned to death by Israel in Gaza last week, Joe Biden was so livid that he got right on the horn with Bibi. It turned out that the dead workers were employees of a wealthy personal friend of his. 

Joe has frequently dined at his high-end restaurants and had even appointed him to lead a White House nutrition council.

And just like that, Netanyahu withdrew his troops from the section of Gaza territory that his troops  were occupying and destroying. Biden had finally threatened to stop sending him the American weapons and ammunition that are so essential for the continued genocide of Palestinians. 

The deaths of six white Westerners with connections to a wealthy mover and shaker within Biden's own Beltway Bubble moved Biden like the deaths of more than 32,000 Gazans had not. After all, Palestinians all look alike to Biden.

He as much as admitted this fact to a Muslim doctor he'd invited ibto his inner sanctum to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. She had shown the president photos of injured  starving Gazan children in an attempt to move him. But all that he muttered in response was "I've seen those."

As the physician later told NBC News, however, this would have been impossible,  since they were private unpublished pictures she had taken herself. 

They all look alike to Biden because he is a racist, unable or unwilling to see the humanity of children with a darker skin color than his own. The Gaza genocide itself is the extreme manifestation of a global racialist capitalism, which grows and grows even to the point tof its own extinction, by extracting wealth and even life itself from various populations in the Global South. 

So how long will this de facto "truce" last? Some say Israel is only regrouping and preparing for a final assault in the south of Gaza, where more than a million refugees are trapped. 

Through  their favorite New York Times mouthpiece, Zionists say they fear that even Bibi's temporary acaquiescene to Biden's selective rage will lieave Israel vulnerable to attack by Hamas or even directly by Iran, in retaliation for its bombing of its embassy in Syria. Perhaps the embattled Netanyahu is even hoping for another  epic attack on his own people  thus giving him all the justification he thiks he needs to wipe out the entire Palestinian population with the help of those 2,000-pound American bombs.

Speaking of the New York Times, the paper of record devoted the prime upper left real estate of its digital front page Sunday to the plight of Biden and other Democrats who are finding no peace of their own, thanks to the thousands of protesters converging on their high-dollar  campaign events and even in front of their own luxurious homes. The way the Times frames it, you'd think that verbal attacks on these politicians and the inconvenience caused to their families are worse than the assault on Gaza itself. Protesters even poured buckets of fake blood on the heavily armed chauffeured car of the Secretary  of State himself!

The not-so-subliminal message in the Times piece is that if Biden loses to Trump n November, it will be the fault of the protest movement. The Times even grouses that the protesters are not also showing up at Trump campaign events- as if supposing that The Donald is also sending bombs to Israel despite not currently being in power. Maybe he stashed some ammo at Maga-Largo along with all those top-secret purloined papers.

Buried deep within the Times article is the chilling revelation that the Biden campaign and/or the FBI are screening the social media accounts of all the ticketholders to his campaign events. Several people were denied admission to his Radio City extravaganza because they were deemed to be anti-genocide threats. One elderly ticket holder, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, was escorted from the premises to that the Biden people called the "Solutions Tent" to get an explanation. All decisions to admit or not to admit, were of course Final.

But the suppression of protest by this division of the Censorship-Industrial Complex was not entirely foolproof:

One protester, Hannah Ryan, 33, a photographer from Brooklyn, said she had been flagged by the campaign, asked a battery of questions about people she knew and how she had acquired her ticket, and had then been allowed in. She shouted at Mr. Obama, who told her and other protesters, “You can’t just talk and not listen.”

The Times omitted the  last part of Obama's retort,  when he scolded that people who rudely interrupt their betters and speak out against genoicde are behaving just like "the other side." He is still operating under the delusion that people primarily identify themselves as members of a corrupt duopoly. If the Times had completed the quote, it would not have been a good look for him, comparing lefty protesters to right-wing rudeniks  at Trump rallies. It would only have highlighted the thoughtless Manichean mindsets common to politicians whose whole reason for being is to serve the 'rules-based order" - their euphemism for the reign of voracious, predatory, unfettered global capitalism. It would have exposed Obama's insistence that bland civility is the very essence of democracy to be the fraud it always has been. His  attempted repression of public voices is rapidly losing its overhyped "rock-star" punch -  if it hasn't collapsed from the cloying weight of its own hot air already.

Thus are Democrats beginning to openly avoid the public sphere,  because they fear the public. If Trump wins in November, he too will fear the public. And this "public" will have nothing to do with the phony bourgeois pro-Hillary "pink pussyhat" crowds  hurling invective at him from their tony neighborhoods. Hillary Clinton herself was heckled by savvy students at her Wellesley alma matter over the weekend. They correctly pointed out that her neoliberal brand has aided and abetted the mass murder of women in Palestine.

Like Obama, Clinton is so arrogant that she she doesn't seem to realize that telling protesters to "get over yourselves" on the Jimmy Fallon talk show is not a winning strategy for getting Biden re-elected.

Since voting for either Biden or Trump this November is providing the neoliberal capitalist world order the fig leaf of consent for its continued oppressive rule, I won't be   partaking in this fraud at all, unless it is to vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West. A vote for Republicans or Democrats or even RFK Jr. is essentially a vote for the militarized world banking system and transnational corporations. These are the entities profiting from plunder and genocide in all their varieties. The politicians we elect are simply the middle-men and women acting as financialized capitalism's buffer zone.

So my vote is for the brave protesters making both the oligarchs and their political lackeys so uncomfortable and feeling more vulnerable than they're used to. That is why they are lashing out at us and attempting to censor us.

We are at a time of great crisis and a time of great change. Fighting for Palestinians is a fight for ourselves. Now that more and more people, especially the young, are realizing that capitalism  itself is the real monster behind the evils of the world, the many will find the wherewithal to defeat it and the  precious few corporations and billionaires currently at the increasingly uncontrollable controls.

Socialism is no longer a dirty word, especially for the young and the downtrodden. That is what gives me such hope.

Angels and Demons Come Out To Play

 Former President Barack Obama compared anti-genocide protesters to rude Trump supporters Thursday night as they repeatedly interrupted him and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton at their $26 million schmoze-fest as Radiio City Music Hall.

As one audience member shouted that they have blood on their hands, Obama - rather than addressing the accusation or defending himself and his two fellow war criminals - scolded: "You can't just talk and not listen. That's what the other side does."

 This was according to a press pool report of the paid-admission-only event, where the cheapest nosebleed seats went for $250 and where  even remotely accessing to the live-stream cost viewers $25. 

According to Obama, no matter how outrageous the behavior of their leadesrs may be, now matter how much death and destruction these powerful leaders spread throughout the world, the only permissible response of the citizenry is abject silence. Protest is not civil, and civility trumps everything else. If you want to be a loyal Democrat more than you want to be a free-thinking humanist, then you will pretend that Clinton, Obama and Biden are angels and that it is only the "other side" (Trump) who is the demon.

The Catholic Marxist critic Terry Eagleton had Obama and Company absolutely pegged when he wrote in "On Evil" that

"The United States, unusually among nations, is angelic and demonic at the same time. Few other nations combine such high flown public rhetoric with that meaningless flow of matter known as consumer capitalism. The role of the former is to provide some legitimation for the latter....

"Rather as Satan combines angel and demon in his own person, so evil itself unites these two conditions. One side of it - the engelic, ascetic side, wants to rise above the degraded sphere of fleshliness in pursuit of the infinite. But this withdrawal of the mind from reality has the effect of striking the world empty of value. It reduces it to so much meaningless stuff, in which the demonic side of evil can then wallowl"

This is another way of puttinng the specious "lesser evil" rationale for holding one's nose and voting for Democrats rather than Republicans, who more verbally and loudly  wallow in the dark side.

That Obama would attempt to silence a person speaking out against the US-financed mass murder and starvation of 30,000 Palestinians is just one more indication of his being, as the late Glen Ford posited, the more effective evil."

While Donald Trump wallows in his own assigned role of being the devil incarnate, sacrilegiously selling $60 Bibles to defray his legal expenses while his slimy son-in-law Jared Kushner openly scopes out Gaza oceanfront property to add to his real estate portfolio. the Democrats chide Israel in public even as they finance its genocide, thus making all of Jared's obscene dreams come true, sooner rather han later.

Not that Joe Biden is above self-deprecatingly embracing his demonic "Dark Brandon" persona. Last Saturday, to mark "National Puppy Day," his campaign was marketing blankets emblazoned with the cartoon image of Biden with glowing read orbs in place of eyes.  I guess the idea is to toughen up all those whimpering little doggies out there so they can grow up to be just like Biden's German Shepherds and get away with two dozen biting incidents before finally being banished from the White House.

And nothing screams "Get Off My Lawn!" to disrespectful protesters and annoying neighborhood kids like a yard sign featuring a smalevolently grinning Joe Biden decked out in red aviator sunglasses.

They're even selling a Joe Biden coffee mug whose eyes glow bright  crimson as soon as you pour hot liquid into it. Because, folks, Biden is red hot and Donald Trump is nothing but a limp white fleshly noodle with less of a campaign war chest than Biden.

For some mysterious reason,  I have been getting five or six spam emails every day from the Biden campaign. This is because, the Act Blue money laundering outfit explained, I had supposedly donated to Democrats in the past. But since they only have  my email address and call me "folks" or "friend"  - or when they come from Obama a derisive but very cool "Hey!" - instead of by my name, this is an obvious con. The last politician I gave money to was Bernie Sanders, back in 2016 when I still believed in him, so they could have gotten it from him. 

I have not unsubscribed because I was curious about the "messaging" to voters. These fund-raising appeals to "grassroots voters like me" have one main theme. Give $3 or $25 or buy some Biden bling. It is the only way to keep Trump out of the White House. The spam contains nothing about what Biden wil do for you to make your life better. A few of them did offer a chance to win a ticket to Radio City Music Hall, if I would fork over $25 first.

Other than that, it's all about the fear and fomentation of same just in case you haven't  developed it independently yet. Their records also show I have not yet contributed, although 239 people in my town did, today alone! I should be ashamed, not to mention feeling left out of the in-crowd.

They are asking people to hop on the money bandwagon in support of a cartoon character with a cynical grin and glowing red eyes. And if I don't, Trump will win, and it will be all my fault.

Fortunately for me and I suspect for many others,  these political marketeers are themselves the cartoon version of the nuns in my Catholic School, who were much more effective gaslighters.

And unlike the mass protests of Occupy Wall Street and the protests against the George Floyd murder, neither Democratic nor Republican politicians have yet found a way to co-opt the anti-genocide protests. They can't very well do photo-ops with their own victims. These mass killers and career warmongers are not about to co-opt either themselves or the predatory capitalists that they work for.

Saving Democracy By Killing It

The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is dispatching a whole "army of lawyers" on a special mission to aggressively seek and destroy any and all challengers to the unpopular incumbent's continued reign in the White House.

What - you still thought that democracy included giving voters an actual choice on Election Day? To the contrary. Anybody still operating under the delusion that our form of government is anything but a fascist oligarchy should be getting a cruel wake-up call with this latest news. Not only are they acting like the dictators that they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to be, they are flaunting their own authoritarianism right out in the open. No matter to them that they are also flaunting their abject fear of the voting public right out there in the open.

Not for nothing does the Times headline characterize such anti-genocide candidates as Cornel West and Jill Stein as "threats" - literal enemy combatants of the World Order.

These and other upstarts are, according to the article, "peeling away" votes that Joe Biden presumes that he, and he alone, rightfully owns. If this tired old flaying-alive nonsense doesn't plant an image in your head of a puckered rind being pulled off an old lemon whose pulp is revealed to be covered in toxic mold, then I guess you're not as much into horror as I am.

According to one of Biden's lawyers, the aim of the anti-peeling op is to police the usurpers and pretenders to ensure that they are playing by such rules as jumping through all the artificially narrowed ballot access hoops in the proper, normative order. If they should accidentally graze the top of the pole vault bar with a pinky finger, or trip over one of the many tripwires that the corporate Democrats have placed on the obstacle course, "we will hold them accountable."

Or as the Times more primly puts it, 

Gaining access to the presidential ballot is a complicated and expensive process for candidates, particularly for those not affiliated with a party, even a minor one. Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

The lead legal warrior trying to purge the ballots of all challengers is former White House Counsel Dana Remus, currently a partner in the Covington and Burling white-shoe law firm. She is married to a State Department undersecretary for security who previously ran financial security for the Capitol One bank. Remus once clerked for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade last year.

When, several years prior to that notorious ruling Alito was accused of misogyny by columnist Dana Milbank for allegedly making mean faces at the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg behind her back, Remus defended him against the charges of sexism, gushing in a letter to The Washington Post that her former boss "is a good man, who serves every day with humility, dedication, and incredible intelligence and insight."

It's really incredible how misused and overused the word "incredible" has become in polite, fawning discourse.  Whenever I hear it uttered by a famous or powerful person, my bullshit detector goes into full gear. An alternate interpretation of Remus's statement is that Alito's alleged respect for women and his integrity and brains are beyond belief. Her glib statement is simultaneously meaningless and non-credible. Ditto for the projectile belching of all the U.S. politicians and media stenographers who regularly proclaim themselves "unbelievably heartbroken" about the genocide in Gaza.