White Settler Colonialism Remembrance Day

 The myth of Thanksgiving has deservedly been collapsing in recent decades. Like US Empire itself, the story is a picked-over turkey carcass.  with unsightly shreds of dried out flesh and gristle clinging to the wishbone of American exceptionalism. 

This official day of celebrating family and friends by way a of unabashed gluttony and watching the violent, all-American sport of football is just a little different this year actually in a good way.

 For the first time in nearly a decade, we're not inundated with advice on how to deal with annoying relatives who are not of our own political persuasion. This "divisiveness" within families was apparently a national epidemic until it miraculously disappeared from the corporate news narrative this year.

Since the elites both liberal and conservative seem to have made their peace with Trump, then so should we, by golly! That whole battle for the soul of our democracy has ended in a truce. The rich will still get richer and the poor will still get poorer.

It is so peaceful that even the door-busting riots of Black Friday are largely a thing of the past, thanks to the online marketplace. It's all about the Black Friday cybe-deals that now get underway just after Halloween.  Nobody gets trampled to death in the mad rush to score the one $50 smart TV the store has on offer as a bait-and-switch.

But we must not give up on the Thanksgiving myth completely. It is coming to life every day in the state of Israel, where white settler colonialism thrives in the West Bank and genocide proceeds with a vengeance in Gaza.  They cling to their Zionism, and their shining city on a hill the same way that the English pilgrims did all those centuries ago.

The "true meaning" of Thanksgiving was never the true meaning of Thanksgiving in the first place. As David J. Silverman recounts in his book "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving," traditional puritan thanksgivings were marked by fasts, not feasts. It's a sham of a holiday whose original purpose was to put a feel-good gloss on imperialism and racism. The English passengers of the Mayflower were members of a severe religious cult whose 1620 voyage was financed by a proto-capitalist group aptly called The Adventurers. These financial backers expected a big return on their investment. And the Pilgrims got the message. Before even reaching their ultimate destination at the future Plymouth colony, the storm-tossed refugees landed at Cape Cod, where they proceeded to desecrate and rob graves, steal buried stores of corn, and burglarize the homes of the Wampanoag tribe, who had already left their shoreline abodes for their winter sojourn in the inland forest.

The pilgrims did not consider these crimes to be crimes, but rather opportunities granted to them by Divine Providence. They were the chosen ones, The Elect.  They were the true ancestors of our own modern criminal capitalist class and its Republican branch-centered unholy collaboration with religious fundamentalists, or what Chris Hedges so aptly calls the Christian fascist movement.

The original Pilgrims pretty much got everything they wanted for the first 50 years or so of their invasion. For starters, the Wampanoags had already been traumatized by a series of Euro-epidemics which had reduced their numbers by at least two-thirds by the time the pilgrims arrived in 1620 and which had left them vulnerable to assaults by the enemy Naragansetts.  They were among the hundreds of millions of human victims throughout history of what is now known as The Shock Doctrine, which as Naomi Klein explains, is how the wealthy and powerful create crises, exploit them for their own benefit, and then portray themselves as heroes for "saving" the system they helped to destroy in the first place.

Myth-making with the aim of enforcing public compliance with wars for profit, various forms of mass imprisonment and forced labor and exploitation of the poor by the rich is an integral part of any capitalist success story. Myths don't have to be old to be effective. But it helps, especially when the white Christian supremacist myth of Thanksgiving, with the Indians portrayed as perpetually prehistoric cardboard cutouts, is rammed down the throats and implanted in the brains of whole generations of school-children, regardless of their own races, colors and creeds.
As Silverman writes, 

"Subtly, the Thanksgiving myth buttresses this fallacy by making the Mayflower passengers the dynamic initiators of contact with a Wampanoag population that seems to have been waiting passively to be discovered. In turn the portrayal of Indians as static contributes to a sinister racist double bind of long standing in American culture. It posits that the Native way of life at the time of European contact was and is the only authentic Indian culture. Nobody expects the Pilgrims' modern descendants to look and act like their seventeenth century ancestors, yet the public commonly judges that indigenous people who have changed since 1492 or 1620 have somehow relinquished their claims to be Indian."

The reality of the first Thanksgiving is that the Wampanoags viewed the English not as friends, but as potential necromancers, swindlers and slave traders, just as their previous encounters with Europeans had taught them to believe. The feast they shared one year after the landing of the Mayflower was conducted in an atmosphere of fear, mourning, desperation and suspicion. "This is the most basic element missing from the Thanksgiving myth," writes Silverman.

That the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians co-existed more or less in peace for the next half-century is testament to both the relatively low, "pre-swarm" numbers of English settlers and the pragmatism and political savvy of the Wampanoag sachem Ousamequin, who is more commonly known in "mythistory" as Massasoit. That was his title and not his name. It's as if historians referred to Lincoln as "President" assuming that is all the identity he'll ever need.

Speaking of Honest Abe, it was he who proclaimed Thanksgiving to be the national holiday that we celebrate today, moving it beyond its regional New England roots. It was designed to promote unity after the Civil War and also as a propaganda tool to justify Western expansion and the extermination of more Indian populations. Just as they were at the original Thanksgiving, the propaganda went, the Indians were just waiting around ready to be colonized wherever in Exceptional America they lived. And if they balked, then it just went to prove to the colonizers that they were nothing but ungrateful savages.

It was only after Ousamequin's death that his son Pometcomet (anglicized as "King Philip") and the Wampanoags finally balked in the 1670s and joined forces with other tribes to fight the English, who were doing such un-Christian things as fining and imprisoning natives who killed the colonial pigs and other livestock encroaching on their own plots of land and eating up their crops. If the natives couldn't pay the fines they were levied for defending their own existences, they often were seized as slaves and transported either to Europe or Caribbean sugar plantations. The pilgrims were truly doubling down on the capitalistic greed, given that their domestic animals were already being imported to feed the enslaved Africans toiling away on the sugar plantations.

As Trumpian precursors, they even separated children from families, erected walls around their enclaves, and banished thousands of non-combative, Christianized Indians to an outdoor gulag on Deer Island, where most of them starved to death. 

King Philip's War, as it was called in order to spread the desired narrative that it was the Indians assaulting the colonists rather than the Indians reacting to vicious English aggression, was short-lived but lethal, both in terms of casualties and in the lasting animus that it spawned.

Silverman writes:

"The war spread so quickly and unexpectedly that many English concluded that the Indians were an instrument of God's judgment. The question was for what. Staunch puritans in Massachusetts blamed lax morals and passed sumptuary laws banning men from wearing long hair, women from 'following strange fashions in their apparel,' and unmarried couples from riding from town to town unchaperoned.... Plymouth leaders wondered if God smote them because of their lax treatment of Quakers.... All the English could agree about was that the war had little to do with genuine Indian grievances."

Fast forward almost 400 years, and abandoned CIA assets ("Infidels") bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon because "they hate us for our freedoms." 

The late Haitian historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot said that it is the silences of history along with its mythical narratives that are at the root of power. We become "complaisant hostages of the pasts they create."

"The production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unusual access to the means of such production."

All facts are not created equal. To paraphrase Orwell, some facts are more equal than others.

So let us give thanks that the Censorship-Industrial Complex has not yet succeeded in relegating all of recorded history down the memory hole. Books are still there for the reading, despite thwe best efforts of deficiti hawks to 

shut down local public libraries.l 

The "true meaning" of Thanksgiving was never the true meaning of Thanksgiving in the first place. As David J. Silverman recounts in his book "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving," traditional puritan thanksgivings were marked by fasts, not feasts. It's a sham of a holiday whose original purpose was to put a feel-good gloss on imperialism and racism. The English passengers of the Mayflower were members of a severe religious cult whose 1620 voyage was financed by a proto-capitalist group aptly called The Adventurers. These financial backers expected a big return on their investment. And the Pilgrims got the message. Before even reaching their ultimate destination at the future Plymouth colony, the storm-tossed refugees landed at Cape Cod, where they proceeded to desecrate and rob graves, steal buried stores of corn, and burglarize the homes of the Wampanoag tribe, who had already left their shoreline abodes for their winter sojourn in the inland forest.

The pilgrims did not consider these crimes to be crimes, but rather opportunities granted to them by Divine Providence. They were the chosen ones, The Elect.  They were the true ancestors of our own modern criminal capitalist class and its Republican branch-centered unholy collaboration with religious fundamentalists, or what Chris Hedges so aptly calls the Christian fascist movement.

The original Pilgrims pretty much got everything they wanted for the first 50 years or so of their invasion. For starters, the Wampanoags had already been traumatized by a series of Euro-epidemics which had reduced their numbers by at least two-thirds by the time the pilgrims arrived in 1620 and which had left them vulnerable to assaults by the enemy Naragansetts.  They were among the hundreds of millions of human victims throughout history of what is now known as The Shock Doctrine, which as Naomi Klein explains, is how the wealthy and powerful create crises, exploit them for their own benefit, and then portray themselves as heroes for "saving" the system they helped to destroy in the first place.

Myth-making with the aim of enforcing public compliance with wars for profit, various forms of mass imprisonment and forced labor and exploitation of the poor by the rich is an integral part of any capitalist success story. Myths don't have to be old to be effective. But it helps, especially when the white Christian supremacist myth of Thanksgiving, with the Indians portrayed as perpetually prehistoric cardboard cutouts, is rammed down the throats and implanted in the brains of whole generations of school-children, regardless of their own races, colors and creeds.

As Silverman writes, 

"Subtly, the Thanksgiving myth buttresses this fallacy by making the Mayflower passengers the dynamic initiators of contact with a Wampanoag population that seems to have been waiting passively to be discovered. In turn the portrayal of Indians as static contributes to a sinister racist double bind of long standing in American culture. It posits that the Native way of life at the time of European contact was and is the only authentic Indian culture. Nobody expects the Pilgrims' modern descendants to look and act like their seventeenth century ancestors, yet the public commonly judges that indigenous people who have changed since 1492 or 1620 have somehow relinquished their claims to be Indian."

The reality of the first Thanksgiving is that the Wampanoags viewed the English not as friends, but as potential necromancers, swindlers and slave traders, just as their previous encounters with Europeans had taught them to believe. The feast they shared one year after the landing of the Mayflower was conducted in an atmosphere of fear, mourning, desperation and suspicion. "This is the most basic element missing from the Thanksgiving myth," writes Silverman.

That the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians co-existed more or less in peace for the next half-century is testament to both the relatively low, "pre-swarm" numbers of English settlers and the pragmatism and political savvy of the Wampanoag sachem Ousamequin, who is more commonly known in "mythistory" as Massasoit. That was his title and not his name. It's as if historians referred to Lincoln as "President" assuming that is all the identity he'll ever need.

Speaking of Honest Abe, it was he who proclaimed Thanksgiving to be the national holiday that we celebrate today, moving it beyond its regional New England roots. It was designed to promote unity after the Civil War and also as a propaganda tool to justify Western expansion and the extermination of more Indian populations. Just as they were at the original Thanksgiving, the propaganda went, the Indians were just waiting around ready to be colonized wherever in Exceptional America they lived. And if they balked, then it just went to prove to the colonizers that they were nothing but ungrateful savages.

It was only after Ousamequin's death that his son Pometcomet (anglicized as "King Philip") and the Wampanoags finally balked in the 1670s and joined forces with other tribes to fight the English, who were doing such un-Christian things as fining and imprisoning natives who killed the colonial pigs and other livestock encroaching on their own plots of land and eating up their crops. If the natives couldn't pay the fines they were levied for defending their own existences, they often were seized as slaves and transported either to Europe or Caribbean sugar plantations. The pilgrims were truly doubling down on the capitalistic greed, given that their domestic animals were already being imported to feed the enslaved Africans toiling away on the sugar plantations.

As Trumpian precursors, they even separated children from families, erected walls around their enclaves, and banished thousands of non-combative, Christianized Indians to an outdoor gulag on Deer Island, where most of them starved to death. 

King Philip's War, as it was called in order to spread the desired narrative that it was the Indians assaulting the colonists rather than the Indians reacting to vicious English aggression, was short-lived but lethal, both in terms of casualties and in the lasting animus that it spawned.

Silverman writes:

"The war spread so quickly and unexpectedly that many English concluded that the Indians were an instrument of God's judgment. The question was for what. Staunch puritans in Massachusetts blamed lax morals and passed sumptuary laws banning men from wearing long hair, women from 'following strange fashions in their apparel,' and unmarried couples from riding from town to town unchaperoned.... Plymouth leaders wondered if God smote them because of their lax treatment of Quakers.... All the English could agree about was that the war had little to do with genuine Indian grievances."

Fast forward almost 400 years, and abandoned CIA assets ("Infidels") bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon because "they hate us for our freedoms." 

The late Haitian historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot said that it is the silences of history along with its mythical narratives that are at the root of power. We become "complaisant hostages of the pasts they create."

"The production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unusual access to the means of such production."

All facts are not created equal. To paraphrase Orwell, some facts are more equal than others.

So let us give thanks that the Censorship-Industrial Complex has not yet succeeded in relegating all  of recorded history down the proverbial memory hole. It's there for the reading, in whatever local library hasn't yet been shut down for "budgetary" reasons..

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Dear readers: My post actually ended several paragraphs aA formatting problem on the Google platform kept repeating parts of it. despite repeated attempts on my part to delete the duplication. This platform is, frankly, becoming unusable, what with comments disappearing for no reason and being kicked off Google without warning and having my work lost. So I will be migrating pretty soon. I am looking into Substack to see if that might work out. I am so sorry for any confusiion. Hope everybody has a peaceful holiday weekend!.

Strangelove In the Jungle

The prospect of Dr. Oz turning Medicare and Medicaid Services into his own private snake oil emporium seems almost beneficent compared  to the truly terrifying reality of Dr. Strangelove in the Jungle.

Biden is using his waning days in power to wreak all the global havoc at his disposal. This vicious, vacuous, vindictive old fool couldn't even travel all the way to the Amazon to announce deployment of American long-range missiles into Russia without shielding himself with a  cheap portable presidential podium. That, and his casual military style jacket and the sinister ubiquitous aviator shades made him a worthy successor indeed to General Jack D. Ripper in  Stanley Kubrick's satiric Cold War masterpiece. 

If Biden has ever seen this movie, he probably thought it was an instruction manual - the difference being that in the film, they started World War III by accident, and Joe Biden is doing it deliberately.

It's enough to make you count down the days until Trump's inauguration, not with trepidation, but with the faint hope that his regime will be somewhat an improvement over  the current disaster.

You have to hand it to Trump - unlike Biden, he knows how to use satire. His cabinet appointments are specifically designed to send the establishment into conniption fits. It doesn't matter if most of them will never survive confirmation in the Senate. It's the theater that counts. The liberal media-political complex is already overwhelmed as the targets of a massive trolling campaign. Unable to keep up the outrage,many elites have already given up even pretending. Witness MSNBC's Joe and Mika already traveling to Maga-Largo to make nice with theirmanufactured nemesis.

This not-too-painful readjustment the elite class to the reality of Trump is, of course, just the sort of enteraining intrigue to distract us from the prospect of total global war.

War is capitalism's fever dream. It's a hugely profitable enterprise for the select few, who insanely believe that retiring to a private island, a mega yacht or even to outer space will save them. Or perhaps they're like Joe Biden - so old that since they're bound to die sooner rather than later, they may as well take the rest of us with them.

Follow the money, even if it leads directly to a mass grave. War, as General Smedley Butler so correctly observed, is a racket. The organized crime cartel running the enterprise makes Tony Soprano look like a choirboy.

Take, for example, the Biden administration's decision to deploy landmines to Ukraine. As the New York Times so euphemistically explains, these "anti-personnel" explosive devices are banned in most advanced countries, tending as they do to blow off the limbs of innocent passersby, often decades after a war has officially ended.

Without a hint of irony or satire, the Times helps the racket justify the carnage by gruesomely insisting the devices are aimed solely at the Russian and North Korean "foot soldiers" who are currently infiltrating Ukraine territory. The landmines will blow those feet right off.

But since the United States is the good guy, the Paper of Record notes that these modern day landmines are "smart" landmines. They are apparently designed to simply self-destruct, all by themselves, if nobody steps on them during actual war-time.

This is a crock of crap right on its face, given that war profiteer Raytheon won the  contract for an anti-anti-personnel system that purports to detect and destroy unexploded landmines.

 So which is it? Landmines so smart that they blow up themselves, or landmines so stupid that they need outside help to do the trick?

To be fair, it is possible that not so long ago, the US planted landmines in places like Southeast Asia that were so stupid and inhumane that they continue to blow the feet off children to this very day. 

So that a merchant of death like weapons manufacturer Raytheon would now be rewarded for fixing the atrocities it has helped cause in the first place should not be deemed at all surprising. It's the neoliberal American way of disaster capitalism. It is the same mindset that decreed that the very bankers who caused the 2008 financial collapse would be tasked with "fixing" their own crimes by being given carte blanche to commit more crimes. In a smarter, more modern way, of course.

And that is why outgoing defense secretary Lloyd C. Austin III will no doubt be re-welcomed with open arms to his old corner office at Raytheon, if a competitor has not already snagged him.

It was Austin himself who announced the deployment of the landmines to Ukraine. His company stands to rake in even more protits if its smart detection devices if it is forced to manufacture even more of them.

The Raytheon system can also be used for detecting hidden tunnels in places like, say, Gaza. Did I mention thatL loyd Austin is a huge supporter of Israel's genocide in that locale? The hardware to find all those tunnels does not come cheap. 

So although on first glance, Joe Biden's war proclamations in the middle of the Amazon  might have seemed out of place, it was really quite appropriate. Thee platitudes and euphemisms of the military-media complex are them peeing on our heads from a rain forest canopy absolutely dripping with lies.

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To my readers: My annual fundraiser is off to a very slow start, for which I largely blame myself. I had meant to write extra "content" until a flu-like illness laid me low for the past week. So I will keep this appeal notice going for awhile longer. Even a $5 or $10 donation would be immensely helpful and much appreciated. Thank you in advance!

#Resistance, Inc

Back in June, before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris would run on an unappetizing campaign of canned joy and fear, the New York Times ran an article outlining plans for a new anti-Trump resistance movement. The Democratic Party was essentially admitting that lacking an agenda of its own for the greater public good, it fully expected that Donald Trumpwould prevail once again in November. To that end, it was already making plans to produce an epic multipart soap opera to play out in the courtrooms of America and, of c,ourse, the consolidated corporate media matrix that still poses as journalism in the public interest. 

They were not kidding. In a follow-up piece published on Thursday, the Times dished that a team of 800 lawyers, salaries paid by the party's myriad veal pens, had been working behind the scenes for the past two years readying a lawfare campaign for the ages. It will not be the weakened Democratic minorities in both houses of congress that will be Trump's foes. It will be teams of unelected lawyers for hire.

The consortium of nearly 300 liberal organizations has dubbed itself Democracy 2025, presumably as a dig at the right-wing Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's wish list of antisocial measures.

Ron Klain, Joe Biden's outgoing sidekick, has already scored a seat on the board of directors. That was so fast, you might even suspect that the current administration was not only planning for "defeat," but hoping for it. Because although ordinary people may have lost, there will always be paid political functionaries who win, no matter which "side" they are on.

As far as Democrats being chastened for abandoning the working class and poor in favor of sucking up to Wall Street and Hollywood, far from it. 

Thanks to Donald Trump's cooperative casting of cartoon villains to his cabinet, professional Democratic operatives will now get to play heroes straight out of the Justice League franchise. We will be asked to enjoy dystopian dark times by settling back into our seats to watch the next exciting episode of superheroes vanquishing the Joker. Until he rises again to create even more havoc.

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash a flurry of lawsuits immediately.

“We’re leveling up and lawyering up,” Skye Perryman, the chief executive of the organization, said. “This wasn’t something that just everybody woke up the day after the election and started to plan.”

Just think, too, if Kamala had defied their rosy expectations and beaten Trump. Perryman and her team of 800 legal warriors might be languishing in some low level government job or second tier law firm, destined to live out their careers in crushing anonymity. This way they get to don a crusading cape and eke out at least their requisite 15 minutes of fame. They will get invited on MSNBC and maybe even be able to parlay their performances to permanent gigs.

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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.