RFK Jr. Praises Wellness Crusaders and Blames Fauci For Everything From Depression to Jock Itch

RFK Jr. starts his long diatribe against Anthony Fauci ("The Real Anthony Fauci") with a Heroic Heroes Honor Roll, a rather dubious list of people's champions that includes "holistic psychiatrist" Kelly Brogan, who touts the health benefits of coffee enemas and urine therapy, and alternative medicine practitioner Tom Cowan, whose medical practice was crippled by a five-year probation imposed for his having prescribed an unapproved quack cancer treatment to a patient he never met. Both of these "heroes" deny the validity of germ theory, and Cowan even denies that the heart is a pump. Brogan is particularly eager to convince us that vaccines are part of a spiritual fight to the death with modern medicine. Just as public health officials were struggling to figure out how to respond to the novel coronavirus, she warned that their efforts were akin to the "dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust."  

RFK Jr. appears to be of similar mind. He does not believe that HIV causes AIDS, which he says is actually caused by "the gay lifestyle." He celebrates Christine Maggiore, an AIDS-denier who refused treatment and died of the disease, as did her three-year-old daughter, who was infected and denied treatment by her mother. RFK claims that anti-retroviral drugs prescribed to HIV patients so they don't die of AIDS are actually harming them. The danger inherent in spreading such ideas was illustrated dramatically in the 1990s when then South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki refused to allow anti-retrovirals to be given to AIDS patients, which resulted in 330,000 unnecessary deaths according to a government investigation.

Bouncing from accusation to accusation, RFK makes little if any effort to organize his thought. He seems to have vacuumed up every paranoid anti-vax fantasy off the internet and simply dumped it between the covers of his book, not caring that these recycled delusions have already been thoroughly debunked, some of them many times.

He blames Fauci for every real or imagined negative outcome during the pandemic. Nowhere does he note or care that Fauci's political role was that of an adviser: he didn't create policy, and those who did were free to ignore what he said, and often did. His responsibility for events was drastically more limited than Kennedy wants readers to believe.

Nowhere does RFK take account of the complexity of events that contributed to the unfolding Covid disaster. But any fair account of the pandemic has to note that obfuscation of events early on in China guaranteed that pandemic response would go badly elsewhere. Beijing failed to make clear to the world that they hadn't contained the virus, letting international airplane flights continue taking off after domestic flights had been shut down. 

The U.S. added to this bad response with one of its own. An extensive and detailed pandemic preparedness plan started by the George W. Bush administration and continued by Obama was simply scrapped by Trump, leaving the U.S. unable to mount a rapid response to SARS-CoV-2. To make matters worse, the CDC made a big mistake in testing. WHO had its own test, which they were distributing to various countries throughout the world, as per standard practice, so that monitoring and testing for the virus could begin immediately. But the CDC opted to make its own test, which didn't work, giving lots of false negatives. U.S. health  authorities ended up weeks behind in detecting how far and fast the virus was spreading, which meant they had to rely on more extreme responses like lockdowns than they otherwise might have had to do. 

After more sustainable pandemic restraint measures had thus been forfeited, the Trump administration then made the situation worse by deciding not to lead at all, defaulting to a free-for-all between the states, which wasted colossal energy fighting over supplies and improvising fifty competing ways of responding to the crisis. Washington released general guidelines, but left implementation up to state governors. 

Blaming Fauci alone for all this makes little sense, however gratifying it may be to heap rage and contempt on a convenient scapegoat, and it is simply preposterous to describe the pandemic response as a coup d'etat against democracy, as RFK does.  

Blowing off concern over damage done by Covid, which he dismisses as another name for the flu, he lambastes lockdown measures for having visited immense economic and psychological damage on children.  We have no way of knowing, he says, how many people died of isolation and unemployment and other lockdown induced causes, though he assumes the number has to be immense. He emphasizes that U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during lockdown, but doesn't even consider that that might have had something to do with a deadly new virus killing thousands of people every day. Not possible, assumes RFK, firm in his conviction that the lockdowns did everything and the virus nothing, and that we have "no way of knowing" how extensive the damage was, though feel free to let your imagination run wild, which seems to be the aim of RFK's book. 

Sensible people, however, cannot ignore the fact that Covid itself caused considerable emotional damage. Roughly one hundred thousand children lost their primary or secondary care-givers to Covid, a rather traumatizing experience one would think. Also, many children were hospitalized for Covid in the U.S., and it would be foolish to think that all of them emerged emotionally unscathed. On top of that, children who suffer from Covid can be at risk for Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, and also long-Covid, not to mention that upwards of two thousand children died of Covid. All of these likely contributed to sharply negative mental health outcomes for a wide swathe of the population, but RFK Jr. doesn't mention one of them, so fixated is he on Anthony Fauci as solely to blame for everything bad.

RFK talks about how the rich got richer during the pandemic (bulletin: the rich are always getting richer under capitalism), and notes that small business owners were ruined by the lockdowns. This is true, but RFK's account of these simply notes that they happened and then blames Fauci. There is no proper analysis of the events themselves and no summation of what we ought to learn from them. 

In an effort to convince us that public health officials badly over-reacted to events, RFK laments that we cowered in fear from a mere "flu-like virus," without noting that COVID killed more Americans in its first year than the flu did in the previous ten years. It was a lot worse than the flu.

He complains about "two weeks to flatten the curve," without noticing that that was a political slogan, not a scientific prediction about the expected course of the pandemic. In any event, a prolonged pandemic response occurs by default if we continually refuse the solution, as RFK did. He wasn't listening to Covid policy direction at any time during the pandemic. But it should be obvious that no policy can be expected to work if people refuse to cooperate in its implementation. 

Moving on from Covid, a favorite RFK claim is that none of our childhood vaccines have been safety tested, which is simply false. In fact, every childhood vaccine has to be safety tested, and all of them are closely monitored after being commercially released. That is why we have such an abundance of evidence demonstrating that anti-vax claims are untrue.

RFK Jr. claims to be concerned about the increase in chronic disease in the U.S. starting in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he just blames Fauci and vaccines for the trend, in defiance of logic. In fact, medicine progressed leaps and bounds during this period and before, and children benefited greatly. In the second half of the 20th century childhood mortality rates decreased dramatically, and vaccines helped to eliminate deadly diseases common among children. Examples include childhood cancers, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, leukemia, and sickle cell disease. But RFK just ignores these developments, presenting a uniformly bleak medical picture and blaming Fauci for everything, real or imaginary.

Many of the babies that previously died we are now able to save, although they are often of very low birth rate, which correlates with a higher than average risk of chronic disease later in life. We know that children born to low-income families are more likely to develop chronic disease. This likely has to do with poor nutrition and proximity to pollution sources like waste incinerators and environmental toxins in general. RFK could use his skills as an environmental lawyer here and help discover the actual causes, but he prefers to lazily blame vaccines instead. 

He flatly ignores that vaccines were being administered to children decades before the 1980s, which he identifies as the watershed moment when they started producing increased chronic disease. But why did vaccines suddenly turn toxic in that decade and not before? The question doesn't even occur to RFK.

Unsurprisingly, RFK also believes that vaccines cause autism, a claim debunked to the point of tedium by many scientific researchers, and thus not even worth debating anymore.

Sources:

On RFK Jr., see "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction," Dr. Dan Wilson, Debunk The Funk, 2022

On Kelly Brogan and Tom Cowan, see Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Conspirituality - How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, (Public Affairs, 2023) pps. 85, 159

Trump's Deportation Plan is a Swift Kick in Our Economic Private Parts

While we certainly must take seriously president-elect Trump's threats to carry out the largest mass deportation in history, we should keep in mind that it promises to run afoul of major business interests he can't afford to ignore.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are ten to twelve million "undocumented" or "illegal" immigrants in the United States at the moment. Whatever ideological conflicts their presence generates, we can say with assurance that they are not the cause of the U.S.'s deep-seated economic problems. They did not cause the stagnation and decline of inflation-adjusted wages for eighty percent of American workers going back to the 1970s. They did not cause massive offshoring of U.S. production over the same period of time. They did not cause U.S. medical care to cost roughly double what it costs elsewhere in the developed world in exchange for worse health outcomes. They did not engineer the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top. In short, they are not the cause of the substantial erosion of the U.S. middle-class that Trump claims to want to restore to glory, just one more effect arising from it.

Openly abusing undocumented immigrants will solve none of our problems. The reason employers favor illegal labor is because it cannot defend itself. If wages are owed but not paid, severely underpaid, or contingent on impossible production quotas or a boss's sexual demands, what can undocumented workers do about it? They are here to take abuse, not challenge it.*

The industries in which illegal immigrants tend to be concentrated - construction, hospitality, agriculture - are key levers in managing inflation, the issue that is at least half responsible for Trump being re-elected. Rounding up and deporting millions of illegal immigrants will impose billions of dollars of costs in lawsuits, policing, camps, and possibly riot control if the effort involves "red state" national guard units acting as an occupying security force in "blue state" immigrant sanctuaries. What might be the social and financial costs, for example, of the Texas National Guard carrying out mass deportations in San Francisco? They're not likely to be slight, but they're very likely to be ugly. Restoring anything resembling social peace will probably cost more than Trump is bargaining for.

The national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. What wage would be necessary to get millions of native workers employed elsewhere to drop everything and work in construction, hospitality, and crop-picking in the wake of mass deportation of immigrant workers? Trump has no money set aside for that purpose and has proposed no substitute workers for the immigrants he plans to deport. Artificial intelligence can't do it; most American workers won't do it, at least not for the low wages employers are accustomed to paying for it.

Cheap, cheap, cheap may not be what made America great, but it is what made Big Business rich. If Trump tampers with that, Corporate America will remind him who he works for.

*Undocumented immigrants lack the time, energy, English, and cultural knowledge to even know where to look for help, let alone secure and pay for it. 

Source:

Richard Wolff, "Don't Listen To Liberals, Here's Why Trump Really Won," The Real News Network, November 21, 2024

The Possible Beginning of The End

 

The Possible Beginning of The End

 

Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only thing intellectually lower than Trump is his opposition, he was re-elected by a more solid margin than last time. After one of the dumbest and most slanted hit jobs on American consciousness, with tens of thousands of photos of Harris beaming as in contemplation of dinner dishes filled with food instead of animal waste, and Trump in an equal number looking as though he has not had a comfortable bowel movement in thirty or forty years, the public was expected to react as their keepers, in their incredibly bigoted stupidity, expected. The most dreadful outcome for the owners and operators of market democracy is that actual working people may be closer to some power than ever since the new deal, though one should hardly expect anything nearly that good since there were socialists and communists in the government back in those days and now we’re lucky to have a handful of “progressive” reps left of the American Nazi party. At least slightly.

 

 

 

As further proof of complete failure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was even outspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusion of some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the world brought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds of years ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom and other good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later in Palestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions to brutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teaching us that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our heads filled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.

 

While the USA sinks more deeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world rises and moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, a relative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperately try to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and not just their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closer to ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capital in its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media air contaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderous with each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy that may serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.

 

Those who speak of losing something that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthen the foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matter the fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas those with the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this case was a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy to make the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. While popular comic book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control of the country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They were elected to power in a more democratic though hardly ideal form of elections in which achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here in narcoleptic inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out with nothing. But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather about fascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being given that name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without health care and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spend trillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and well being of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack of any human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocent supporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving that he and they have no idea of Groucho’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s on political economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen people and virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities and other influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, news from the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature in all its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff in existence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction of all of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profit seeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollars to some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majority of humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create real global democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.

 

Most recently the outgoing president who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the usa when such weapons are used on Russia. But of course good and decent Americans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while the U.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of the world but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists are only concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s election may well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of the planet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive or negative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more than great masses of us were lead to believe.

Meanwhile the usual suspects will fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocide and even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes while they learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professional class of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025 gets old.

Jay Bhattacharya To Head Up NIH? Think Again.

President-elect Donald Trump is said to be considering Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up the National Institute for Health. Bhattacharya was one of the three sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated achieving herd immunity by letting the non-elderly continually re-infect each other at a time when there were still no Covid vaccines.

The Declaration was made public on October 4, 2020. It called for "focused protection" for "the vulnerable" and for everyone else (who the authors falsely claimed were not vulnerable) to "live their lives normally," until herd immunity was reached, which they anticipated would be in "three to six months." In other words, immunity would be built up by surviving infection (except for those who died) while the elderly population would be segregated and granted "focused protection." 

In a rare reference to specifics, Bhattacharya claimed that hotel rooms were a possible site where the elderly could safely wait out the pandemic. At the time he made the suggestion, there were fifty-five million Americans over sixty-five and 5.3 million hotel rooms in the United States. In other words, if focused protection had been implemented it would have required housing more than ten elderly people in each hotel room. But it was never a serious plan, and those under 65 did not rush to resume normal lives upon hearing the Declaration. 

Although the Great Barrington Declaration was original - stopping a pandemic by allowing mass infection had never been tried before - it was profoundly counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, Bhattacharya doubled down on its claim that COVID was only dangerous for the elderly throughout the remainder of the pandemic, while predicting that the virus would disappear. Almost five years later, it still hasn't.

Bhattacharya said early on about Covid that "it's probably about as deadly as the flu," and estimated that fewer than 40,000 Americans would die of it.

But, apart from the 1918 flu pandemic, flu has never come close to killing the 1.2 million people in two years that Covid ended up killing in the U.S. in 2020-21. 

Bhattacharya said that the elderly could use Insta-Cart to get food without risking infection, but this was hardly a serious proposal. Instantly delivering food to tens of millions of elderly people would have been a colossal undertaking, and  Bhattacharya treated it as though it were a minor errand. The Great Barrington Declaration offered no plan on how the over 65 population could be segregated and fed for months on end. It was just a talking point, reflecting hope that someone else might be able to figure out how to accomplish it. No one did.

Bhattacharya pronounced it unethical to make children wear masks for the benefit of adults, but found deliberately infecting tens of millions of children with Covid for the benefit of those same adults fine and dandy. While the pandemic raged, he repeatedly announced that Covid had been "defanged." 

Two weeks after the Delta variant became the dominant Covid strain, Bhattacharya, who was an adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, announced on Facebook (July 26, 2021) that "we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population." As though on cue infected Floridians began dropping like flies and hospitals had to order mobile morgues to handle the overflow of Covid corpses. 

At the time, fewer than half of people in the state were vaccinated and Florida had the highest COVID death rate among the country's six most populated states. Three weeks later AARP reported that "Florida led the nation in nursing home resident and staff deaths in the four weeks ending August 22." And the non-elderly were hardly safe, either, as Bhattacharya repeatedly claimed. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis reported that during the Delta and Omicron waves (August 2021 - February 2022), COVID was the second leading cause of death in the age cohort 35-54. 

Bhattacharya regarded school closures as uniformly disastrous, but never even noticed the deadly consequences of putting children back in school before adequate protective measures were in place. A September 9, 2021 POLITICO headline summed up how this oversight played out in the sunshine state: "Child COVID Deaths More Than Doubled in Florida as Kids Returned to the Classroom." 

Not trying hard to limit transmission failed to establish a good track record anywhere. Countries where the virus ran rampant had higher all-cause mortality than New Zealand, an island country that had a zero COVID policy from the beginning. Even Bhattacharya had to concede this: "New Zealand's strategy delayed the inevitable spread of COVID throughout the population to a time after the development, testing and deployment of a vaccine capable of reducing the burden of severe COVID disease . . ..New Zealand has a tiny proportion of the U.S.'s COVID-attributable deaths per capita." 

If the United States had followed New Zealand's COVID strategy, eight hundred thousand fewer Americans would have died of the disease says Dr. Jonathan Howard, author of an important study of the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, Bhattacharya felt that New Zealand had no right to protect its people with "lockdown" when so many other countries just let people die unnecessarily. In fact, he thought that New Zealand was "immoral" for not letting more people get infected before vaccines were available to protect them. 

Bhattacharya and his fellow authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta) presented no scientific evidence and made no real effort to argue their case. They simply started from the premise that abandoning public health measures would be good for everyone, because normal life was better than life under the pandemic, and then made a series of assertions consistent with the pretense that normality would return if we just pretended it had. They made no mention of any public health measures to contain the disease. Again, this was because they assumed against evidence and common sense that mass infection was a benefit to be pursued, not a negative outcome to be avoided until vaccines arrived. 

The Great Barrington Declaration policy was to deliberately sacrifice human life for the sake of "the economy." This herd immunity strategy drew scathing criticism from the world's premier public health organizations. On October 15, 2020 the British medical journal The Lancet condemned the policy as "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." An earlier denunciation was issued by seventeen leading public health organizations, including the Big Cities Health Coalition and the American Public Health Association: "If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise." 

Bhattacharya likes to complain about the "laptop class" shutting everything down during Covid. But he is a tenured professor at Stanford, a laptop class member if there ever was one, and he advocated a do-nothing approach that would have killed far more than the horrifying 1.2 million deaths the U.S. endured in 2020-21.

That is far worse than the admittedly massive disruptions we endured in 2020 and 2021. So just say "no" to a big role for Jay Bhattacharya in public health.

Sources: 

For Bhattacharya claiming that Covid was roughly as serious as the flu, see “The Fight Against Covid-19: An Update From Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,” Uncommon Knowledge, April 21, 2020 

Bhattacharya quotes can be found in Jonathan Howard MD, "We Want Them Infected, - How The Failed Quest For Herd Immunity Led Doctors To Embrace The Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID," (Redhawk, 2023) See pps. 112-14, 118-19, 121, 124, 127, 130-1, 165, 187, 198, 446n.

On the quotes from The Lancet, Big Cities Health Coalition, and the American Public Health Association, see Evan Blake, ed., "Covid, Capitalism and Class War - A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic," (Mehring Books, 2020) pps. 310-11

 

Capitalism and Mass Migration

The immigration wars are surging again, with mutual accusations of "soft on crime" and "racist" (and worse) being hurled by uncomprehending elites in conflict because of a shared commitment to fondling our economic private parts, which is the source of our immigration problems in the first place. 

Democrats want our southern border to resemble a state-of-the-art day care center with a welcome mat out front. Republicans prefer it to look like a concentration camp. Immigrants don't care what it looks like, as long as it leads them to a life without the violence and poverty they are desperately fleeing.

The Wall Street Journal has disclosed that president-elect Donald Trump is elaborating plans to carry out mass deportations once he assumes office on January 20, 2025. Trump advisers are debating what executive actions need to be taken as well as how to finance the operation, which is anticipated to cost around $88 billion a year.

It is likely that Trump will revoke an order given by the Biden administration that ICE not pursue undocumented immigrants who have not committed other offenses, in order to concentrate first on those who have been issued final deportation orders by the courts, as well as those who have criminal charges or convictions against them.

Trump has promised to end the practice of letting foreigners who want to live and work in the United States arrange an appointment over the internet, without having to present themselves at the U.S. border, while also reviving immigration protocols from his first term like Stay In Mexico, which obliged asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for an official response to their application, a dangerous option due to high crime rates there.

Trump maintains that there is no alternative to mass deportation because wave after wave of murderers and drug traffickers are allegedly destroying the U.S. and other countries, too. Whatever it costs, he says, it must be done.

According to Trump adviser Jason Miller, the president-elect doesn't even need an act of Congress to go back to building his border wall and making the asylum process more difficult than it is right now. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the incoming Trump administration intends to eliminate the humanitarian protection against deporting millions of immigrants on TPS - "temporary provisional status" - which currently covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans living in the country.

Representative Chip Roy, D-Texas, believes that Trump should ignore TPS protection because it was granted in an illegal way. 

Trump argues that an aggressive deportation effort is needed in order to get the U.S. back on track after the arrival of what he claims are eight million illegal immigrants during the Biden years.

According to experts, restricting further the already limited ways of entering the U.S. legally will only make immigrants change their plans and rely even more on human-traffickers to get them into the U.S. Millions of real and potential migrants from desperately poor regions of the world will be those most affected, many of them already on the way to the U.S., having sold everything they owned to finance their voyage to fulfilling "the American Dream."

One fundamental contradiction plaguing the immigration situation is that migrants fleeing horrendous economic conditions are hoping to prove they qualify for asylum status in the U.S., which is generally reserved for those whose lives are in danger due to ethnic, racial, or religious persecution. In most cases, they are unable to do this, but the U.S. "catch and release" system allows them to remain in the country while U.S. immigration courts work their way through an immense backlog of similar cases in order to get to theirs. In fact, knowing that they are likely to lose in court, most do not even show up for their court dates, having already gotten what they came for - access to working in the U.S. economy.

Democrats tend to see immigration policy as a vast humanitarian relief program that just incidentally provides them with a wide range of cheap services (jobs Americans "just won't do" because they are vastly under-compensated), while Republicans regard it as a national security challenge - to repel a tsunami of human garbage from "shit-hole countries."  

As the late economist Edward Herman pointed out years ago, Washington pursues what he called a "favorable investment climate" throughout what used to be known as the Third World in order to maintain high-repression governments presiding over low-wage economies, yielding an impressive flow of profits back to the U.S.. It is no coincidence that people flee this kind of exploitation by migrating to where the money is.

This is a problem that cannot be solved by police, soldiers, or turning the government into a welfare agency.

Source: 

"Trump Opens The Way For Mass Deportation," La Jornada (Spanish), November 18, 2024

 

 

DNC: "Nothing Will Fundamentally Change"; Voters: "Wanna Bet?"

 Only a quarter of the U.S. population thinks the country is on the right track, and a big part of the reason is the steady erosion of the middle class. The bottom forty percent of income earners now account for twenty percent of all spending while the richest twenty percent account for forty percent. This is the widest gap on record and is likely to widen further according to Oxford Economics, a consultancy firm. Sixty percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, spending so much on essentials that they can't spend on travel or meals out. Joyless survival appears to be the new "American Dream."

Source: "It's Trump," Novara Live, You Tube, November 6, 2024

According to exit polls 35% of voters felt democracy is threatened in the United States. Those voters favored Trump 53%-46%.  

Source: Jeffrey St. Clair, "Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold" Counterpunch, November 6, 2024

Concern about the high cost of food, housing, gasoline, and medical care, and an effective anti-immigrant message, carried Trump to victory. 

He won increased support in almost every segment of the population. He won forty-five percent of the Latino vote, the highest portion in fifty years for a Republican. Among Latino men, he won fifty-three percent, a ten point gain compared to 2020. Twenty percent of black men voted for Trump, double the corresponding figure from 2020.

Source: "Trump Fascist Threat Materializes" La Jornada (Spanish), November 7, 2024

Turnout was 64.5%, so more than a third of the country, the poorest part of the electorate, still sees no advantage in going to the polls. And they are correct. Poverty can't even be discussed in American politics, much less eliminated by intelligent social policy.

Source: "Congress and the Supreme Court Under Republican Control," La Jornada (Spanish), November 6, 2024

When all of Biden's pandemic relief efforts were still in place, the president's approval rating hit 57%, the highest of his presidency. After he abruptly terminated such efforts and post-pandemic inflation kicked in, his approval rating dropped twenty points. Biden tried to cure inflation with austerity, which didn't work. Child poverty doubled. These are the programs that Biden took away: eviction and foreclosure bans, expanded and prolonged unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for low income earners, free school meals, extra SNAP benefits, Medicaid expansion, a pause in student loan collections, child care provider grants, and WIC increase (nutrition support for women and young children). Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget reached nearly a trillion dollars ($953 billion).

Food insecurity has increased 40% since 2021, with over 42 million Americans now food insecure.

As American purchasing power ebbed away, Democrats lost whatever chance they had had to win the elections. 

Sources: David Doel, "Charts Clearly Explain Why Trump Won," The Rational National, November 11, 2024. Left Reckoning, "Two Charts That Explain Kamala Harris' Loss To Trump," You Tube, November 9, 2024

Donald Trump gained electoral ground in forty-eight out of the fifty states, all except for Utah and Washington. Almost every demographic group supported him, including white suburban women, with notable gains coming from Generation X men and racial minorities, plus overwhelming support from rural areas. As inventive as they are in excuse-making, it will be difficult for Democratic elites to blame James Comey or Vladimir Putin this time around.

Trump out-performed every other Republican candidate and is effectively the King of American politics. The neo-liberal era is dead, killed by Trump, not Bernie Sanders, whose attempt to revive the New Deal roots of the Democratic Party was crushed by the party's own leaders.  Sanders's constituency - the working poor - has fled the Democrats. But when both Trump's and Sanders' "populism" were in play, that demographic favored Sanders more than Trump. 

Hillary Clinton painted Sanders as racist and sexist, a one-issue candidate, that issue being economics, which just happens to be the heart of politics. Breaking up the big banks won't end racism and sexism, HRC lectured us. This is the kind of idiocy we regularly get from "the most qualified candidate" in history.

While Kamala Harris told the world she couldn't think of a single change she would make to Joe Biden's policies, Trump provided an explanation of all that needs to be done to "make America great again": deport illegal immigrants, raise tariffs, and bring back industry to the United States. Something beats nothing every time, and there's no point in blaming voters.

Source: "Krystal and Saagar REACT: Trump LANDSLIDE Victory," Breaking Points, November 6, 2024

Harris out-fundraised Trump by nearly 5-to-1 in the final months of the campaign, collecting nearly a billion dollars in record time.

Source: Alison Durkee, "Trump vs. Harris Fundraising," Forbes, November 4, 2024

Update on U.S. voter turnout. 107 million Americans didn't vote who had the right to vote. Trump got 79 million votes, Harris 76 million. So 262 million Americans had the right to vote, which means that forty-one percent chose not to, more than two out of every five adults. That is "democracy" under capitalism: the poorest part of the population has no one to represent them, so it doesn't vote.

Source: La Jornada, November 13, 2024

 254,000 votes in a handful of "Blue Wall" states turned the election for Trump, in other words 0.16% of the total votes determined the outcome of this year's "landslide."

Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points, November 18, 2024

 

Trump Is The Wrecking Ball Come To Destroy Fake Democracy - If We Survive, Real Democracy May Emerge From The Ruins

For the third election in a row Donald Trump's electoral support continues to rise, most notably from white women and ethnic minorities, who the High Priestesses of Identity Politics tell us must hate his guts.*  Given his growing success with these very groups and the American population in general, his presence at the center of American politics cannot be explained away as an aberration; in fact, Trump is the default setting for all those voters effectively expelled by the two-party duopoly, a large and growing number.

While they are loathe to admit it, the Pussy Hat brigades bear major responsibility for sustaining the Trump phenomenon for nine long years now, with now at least four more to come. When Bernie Sanders asked Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2015, she told him she couldn't because she was beholden to Hillary Clinton. So Sanders ran instead, holding the social democrat banner high and proudly while mobilizing millions to the cause of reviving the New Deal as the center of Democratic Party politics. For his trouble he was tarred as a misogynist and his followers as despicable "Bernie Bros" who detest women. "Sisterhood" prevailed.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton worked assiduously to insure that Donald Trump would win the GOP nomination, as he would supposedly be the easiest Republican to beat. When Trump won the nomination and then defeated Hillary in the fall election, Hillary Inc. said it was an illegitimate and aberrant result and declared itself "the resistance" against Trumpian Evil. 

In 2019, Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard revealed that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the nomination against Sanders in 2016 and were turning the presidential debates into "commercialized reality television" in an effort to do it again in 2020. When Sanders threatened to surge to the Democratic Party nomination anyway, the DNC pulled out all the stops in favor of the doddering Joe Biden, a career Reagan Democrat in cognitive decline whose popularity with voters tended to plummet the more they got to know him. Warren's role was to ambush Sanders in a televised debate with the false accusation that the Vermont Senator had once told her that a woman could not be president of the United States. She remained in the race even after she had no path to the nomination, but just long enough to split the social-democratic vote with Sanders, so that Biden could gain momentum with a win in South Carolina. 

The strategy worked. The DNC candidates united behind Biden, Sanders's momentum stalled, after which Covid surged even faster than his initial campaign had. Biden's handlers knew just what to do. They hid Biden in his basement, limited his public announcements to the absolute minimum, and let the pandemic steadily erode support for the Orange Menace. With no vaccines available until after the elections and Trump reduced to repeatedly announcing that the virus would miraculously disappear, the president went down to defeat while hundreds of thousands of Americans died.

In 2024, Biden refused to allow a party primary precisely so that voters would not be able to canvas the field of potential candidates and select the strongest one for a return match-up with Trump. He was the man for the job, no matter what anyone else might think, though his senile decline often left him with little idea as to his own whereabouts or what day of the week it might be. 

After Biden's handlers had shielded Biden from public contact for years, they affected surprise at the first presidential debate when he was seen to be a vegetable before an audience of 51 million, gaping more in senility than indignation at Trump's toxic rants, which remained largely unrebutted by the obviously incapacitated Biden, who everyone could see was destined to lose the election.

Mama Bear Pelosi told Biden he would have to step aside in favor of his vice-president, Kamala Harris. Harris had zero democratic legitimacy, having soared to three percent support in 2020 and then withdrawn before the primaries even began. All she had to offer was female genitalia and brown skin, but that was enough for the DNC. With deep economic pain etched into the political landscape throughout the country, Harris couldn't talk about jobs or production or really anything convincingly except abortion, which became the central policy theme. Though she obviously needed to distance herself from Biden's horrendous extermination policy in Palestine, she couldn't, because that would require out-debating party hawks on the issue. It's impossible to imagine her out-arguing Hillary or Dick Cheney.

The most obnoxious wing of the party reigned supreme (the DNC), and anyone concerned about anything other than abortion and waxing hysterical about Donald Trump were told they were helping "deplorables" (HRC) or "garbage" (Biden) and pushed out of the party.  

Running solely on abortion-on-demand backfired. The electorate preferred Trump. Even fifty-two percent of white women, supposedly the natural constituency for the Democrats on abortion, voted against them. So did an increasing number of young people, Latinos, and blacks, for whom Trump is supposedly anathema.

Trump is the wrecking ball who destroyed the RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) in 2016 and now has defeated Identity Politics Inc. i.e., the Democratic Party, for the second time. 

The job of the American people is to see that out of the wreckage of these two demolition jobs arises a real democracy, not just another angry toppling of sacred idols that leaves our political problems unaddressed and unresolved.

 

*Trump got 74 million votes in 2020 and 71 million in 2024, but this is the first time he won the popular vote. 

 

Sources:

Jason Lemon, "Tulsi Gabbard Threatens To Boycott Next Debate," Newsweek, October 10, 2019

Simon Pathé "Kamala Harris drops out of 2020 presidential race," Roll Call, December 3, 2019

Irami Osei-Frimpong, "White Women Delivered Trump 2024", The Funky Academic, November 7, 2024

 

 

 

 

Elections 2024 - Day of Civic Pride or National Horror Show?

At last the awful day is here. What to make of it?

The full-scale regional war in the Middle East has not broken out, rather a carefully choreographed exchange of attacks and reprisals continues to threaten that result while mass death has been limited to Gaza and Lebanon, all of it caused by Washington and Tel Aviv. Completely wedded to Jewish supremacy, neither Trump nor Harris will put a stop to it.

On war as a general issue, Trump at least articulates how awful it is, while Democrats distance themselves from the carnage and blindly embrace permanent war as the natural companion to a presumed eternally good USA. Trump is not averse to negotiating an end to the Ukraine war; in fact, he holds himself uniquely qualified to do so, whereas the Democrats will push more pointless death and destruction until Putin wins the war outright. 

But Trump is hardly anti-war - he bombed Somalia, and Syria (twice), assassinated Iranian General Soleimani, vastly increased drone strikes, and fully backed the Saudi "genocide" on Yemen; nevertheless, he is not as compulsively pro-war as the Democrats are. He is thin-skinned, erratic, and impulsive, however, hardly the best qualities for the head of a nuclear state. He nearly touched off a nuclear war with North Korea before putting North-South peace negotiations on a positive footing. It would be nice to be able to get the second result without risking the first, but the (Dick Cheney) Democrats have blocked the possibility by re-classifying North Korea as part of the "axis of Evil."

The Democrats are said to be far preferable to Trump-Vance on domestic policy, but their decades-long support for offshoring production has made a mockery of any alleged commitment they have to workers and their families, who simply must have full-time jobs with good pay and benefits if American families, let alone communities, are to have any chance of flourishing. In practice, the Democrats are anti-family, as they direct ameliorative measures at children only after torpedoing the economic viability of their parents by exporting their jobs. J. D. Vance has some idea about family, and has at least diagnosed the job problem correctly, whereas the Democrats are exclusively committed to professional success, remaining deaf to the appeals of labor, especially hard-hat labor, which is gravitating to the GOP. Vance has proposed $5000 a year per child in government support; Harris has proposed a one-time payment of $6000 per baby.

The decline of unions to a now puny six percent of the private sector workforce is a far more significant indicator of Democratic labor policy than composition of the National Labor Relations board. Harris is loathe to even discuss the issue of jobs, and the DNC only cares about professionals, not the vast majority of workers. Power and freedom are pre-requisites to the good life, but Democrats only dangle trivial bribes to mislead workers into embracing the "goods life," which leaves them permanently in debt, so without the ability to author autonomous lives. Meanwhile, Vance at least talks about wage subsidies, work, and production, essential topics in any full discussion of labor issues, which Democrats ignore in favor of their preferred policy of pricing the vast majority of the population out of housing, child care, medical care, university, and retirement. Their constituency is well-pensioned and enjoys ample private inheritance; it doesn't need to care about labor and it doesn't.

If the Democrats win, anti-war culture will disappear and the future will be war, war, war until the next election season, and then it will be abortion, abortion, abortion, but always as an electoral and fund-raising issue, never as a reasonable policy solution. Michelle Obama lectures men that they "owe more" to the women in their lives than voting for a third party or sitting the election out, because the right to an abortion is foundational. With all due respect for a woman's right to choose, Michelle Obama is the last person with moral standing to lecture on this issue. She did nothing to make sure her husband fulfilled his campaign promise to codify Roe v. Wade in law when he was elected president with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress in 2008. Her clueless liberal earnestness is nauseating.

In any event, it is a sure bet that anyone with concerns about anti-family economics wedded to abortion on demand being a sinister fetal killing syndrome will be dismissed as a "misogynist," just as anyone with concerns about loss of community control when unauthorized immigrants flood particular areas is dismissed as a "racist."  So expect more hysterical conflicts between "Christian nationalist racists" and satanic "globalists" while the private owners of the economy rake off more profits than they could spend in dozens of lifetimes.

On climate break-down, Trump is the absolute worst, blowing off the concern as a "hoax," whereas the Democrats acknowledge reality while leaving policy in aspirational mode, as opposed to realistically treating it as an issue of unprecedented emergency. 

Vote your conscience, if you still have one, and can figure out which candidate stands the best chance of leading us in a direction that deserves the name "forward."

Source:

Irami Osei-Frimpong, "Harris/Wals Dems vs. Trump/Nance GOP (Election Eve Special)" The Funky Academic, November 4, 2024