Palestinian Activist Just Says No To Lesser Evil Gaslighting

"I'm here to send a clear message to the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates for office this fall that the people will no longer support unconditional aiding and abetting of genocide, and we stand for a complete arms embargo on Israel, sanctions, end of U.S. aid to Israel, and a permanent and immediate ceasefire."

Question: "What do you say to people who say, 'Well, you're gonna get Trump elected?'"

"That's a form of emotional blackmail. This is the rhetoric of abusers, right, that we say, 'Oh, well, you don't like one thing, well, what are you going to think of the other guy?' And I think that this is an unsustainable system and I'm actually looking out for the sustainability of our country in years to come. Because if we continue to tell ourselves that we're stuck between the healthier of Pepsi and Coke, we will only have the healthier between Pepsi and Coke. 

"But if we don't threaten a vote, if we don't say, 'no arms embargo, no vote, no sanctions, no vote,' we will never be able to leverage any real political accountability. And we've seen the effects of this only in just a few months, I mean, Governor Wals got up right after the Minnesota primaries on CNN and he said openly, that was the first time he said the situation in Gaza is intolerable. He hadn't said a word about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and what prompted him to do so was that one in five Minnesota Democrats voted uncommitted. Because of a one week, grassroots movement to get people to vote uncommitted. 

"Now think about how far we will go if we can leverage more civic momentum if it's not just a one week long movement in which voters across the board are rising up and saying, 'We will no longer vote for this just because it's better than the other guy - that is not going to be our standard anymore.' And when we tell ourselves that that is our standard we will only be stuck in this bind between two options and in years and years to come our children and grandchildren will be told that they have to vote Democrat they will have to vote for unconditional Zionism just because it's not as Zionist as the other guy. Slaughter, but better slaughter. Slaughter, but more effective slaughter."

Question: Does the Tim Wals selection as VP make you want to change your mind?

"This is short-sightedness, and actually this is blindness towards Wals's history of policies towards Israel and towards the Palestinian people and his Palestinian constituents. So I am from the state of Minnesota, actually, and I am a leader in the Minnesota community, and I was actually just part of a delegation of Minnesota Palestinian families that had a meeting canceled on the spot (with Wals), like literally two minutes before it was supposed to happen, as we were seated in the room, after ten months of Wals refusing to meet with Palestinian constituents. But, on the flip side, he right away rushed to synagogues and Stand With Israel rallies fight after October 7. So I'm living proof of how Wals treats his Palestinian constituents, and that is that he turns a blind eye to them. He doesn't treat them with respect at all. He treats them as subhuman. But also, if you look at it materially, Wals sits on the Minnesota State Board of Investments, which invests over $157 million  in Israeli companies, and that's just Israeli companies, $157 million of state pensions in Israeli companies. That doesn't include, by the way, weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, like Boeing, like security companies like Elbit, etc. that are also complicit in violence against the people of Gaza. 

"So he is investing Minnesota money in the Military Industrial Complex. He is also funded (sic) a $1.3 million Minnesota state taxpayer subsidized grant, funded by Minnesota taxpayer money, a grant to construct a Lockheed Martin facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he called that good news from Minnesota. He has a history of being a friend to war, a friend of slaughter, of the Palestinian people, and we ought to not turn a blind eye to it."

-----Sana Wazwaz, American Muslims For Palestine, Minnesota 

Source:

Due Dissidence, "Ceasefire Activist Gives BRILLIANT Interview at DNC Protest," August 20, 2024

A Tale of Two Apartheids

In a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent book on apartheid Israel (The Message) Breaking Points commentator Krystal Ball's examples of the persistence of racial horror in the U.S. were pretty under-whelming. Does Trump falsely blaming Haitian immigrants for eating American pets really stand out as worthy of mention in the longstanding U.S. tradition of slavery, lynching, and mass black imprisonment?  Realistically, that has to be far down the list of racial priorities in the U.S., where black people still don't have capital four hundred plus years after being wrested from their homelands and brought to the U.S. as slaves.

 

Forty acres and a mule for all former slaves never happened, and that failure has obvious repercussions down to the present day. Pretending it isn't so solves nothing. 

 

On the other hand, it's easy to give up on Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially after he preposterously claimed that Barack Obama was the only legitimate heir of Malcolm X. Malcolm was a revolutionary, the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th Century, in fact; Obama was what Malcolm called a "House Negro," the Great Half-White Hope of corporate America. Advertising Age gave him an award for the slickness of his 2008 election campaign. When did Malcolm ever win acclaim from corporate America?  Never. 

 

It is certainly a blessing that Coates is now bringing to a mass audience the news that Israel is an apartheid state, which is all to the good, albeit a bit late in the day. 

 

Ball's co-presenter Saagar Enjeti is incensed at Coates for quite another reason, specifically that he paints the U.S. as as much of an apartheid state as Israel is, where segregation is codified in law. That is too much for Enjeti, who vehemently denies it. 

 

Actually, Coates's explicit comparison between the two apartheid states is drawn between the Jim Crow south and Israel, and there the comparison is not far-fetched.  As much as Palestinian Arabs today blacks in the old south had no rights anyone else needed to respect. Both groups were subjugated and terrorized by overwhelming force.

 

Any comparison between Israel and the U.S. in the post civil rights era would be more problematic, though not entirely out of bounds. While one would not want to dismiss the immense civilizing influence of the civil rights movement on American society, especially the end of lynching, at the same time we remain deeply segregated fifty-six years after MLK was gunned down for correctly connecting racism in U.S. foreign policy with racism at home, an analysis that has never been allowed to move us to overcome the deep racial divisions that continue to scar American society. In other words, it's far from a simple matter to assess the gains and losses of the civil rights era, and specifically to what degree legal segregation may have been worse than the de facto segregation that succeeded it.

 

As educator Jonathan Kozol has pointed out for years, photographs of students in American public schools today look remarkably similar to photos taken during the Jim Crow era. Nowhere do large numbers of white children go to school with their black counter-parts, and nowhere do blacks have access to the same level of funding as whites enjoy. Has the U.S. really changed all that much? We may like to think so, but the facts on the ground say we're kidding ourselves.

 

Every inch of the land of Israel is built over destroyed Palestinian villages, and over ninety percent of it is permanently held in trust for the Jewish people. In the United States black-white relations were founded on sexual violence and wills and trusts deliberately excluded blacks from all but a miniscule portion of the national wealth. Purposive striving by individual blacks will not overcome this problem, which is national, not personal.

 

Unlike in Israel where apartheid is backed by law, in the U.S. it is the custom of the country, a force stronger than law. In both cases it is a deep and enduring ugliness that mocks all pretensions to civilized existence.

 

 

 

 

Dick Cheney Endorses Kamala Harris - Why Do Plundering Mass Murderers Like Her?

Dick Cheney's career outline - Oil executive, member of the White House staff (1975-77), Wyoming representative (1979-89), Defense Secretary, (1989-1993), CEO of Halliburton Oil, (1995-1999)

"I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support and what he has done to serve our country."

-----Vice President Kamala Harris to Liz Cheney, October 3, 2024, about one of the most detested public figures of all time, who left office with a 13% approval rating.

Cheney in the U.S. Congress was the Strom Thurmond of the West, voting against: 

The Equal Rights Amendment

Funding for Head Start

A resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison

Federal funding for abortion even in cases of rape and incest

Restrictions on plastic guns that could easily be slipped through airport security

Safe drinking water standards

Establishing the Department of Education

A waiting period for handgun purchases

The Panama Canal Treaty

Imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa (but he only voted against it ten times)

Cheney was U.S. Defense Secretary in 1989 when the U.S. invaded Panama and restored the traditional white European elite to power. According to the Panamanian Human Rights Commission, the invasion killed between two and three thousand civilians in Panama. He was also Defense Secretary during the first Persian Gulf War (1991), when the U.S. killed 200,000 Iraqis (Pentagon estimate) to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy. 

While Cheney was still at the Pentagon, the Defense Department commissioned  a Halliburton subsidiary - Brown & Root - to do a classified study on whether it was advisable to contract out more military work to the private sector. To no one's surprise the answer was "yes," and over the next eight years Brown & Root and another company were awarded 2,700 federal contracts, while Cheney got to serve as CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 1999, nearly doubling the value of the company's federal contracts while becoming fabulously rich himself. (Having had zero business experience did nothing to hold him back.) Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity explained the incest-is-best relationship between government officials like Cheney and the private sector:

"They [military officials] have classified clearances; they go to classified meetings; they're with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts; and their disclosures about their activities are classified." 

In other words, the "free market" in action.

When Halliburton got to rebuild Iraq's oil industry after Cheney and Company destroyed it in the Persian Gulf War, Cheney expressed no reservations about profiting off relations with Evil Incarnate Saddam Hussein (so we were led to believe). Nor did he have any objection to Halliburton working with the repressive government of Burma, or with Chevron and Shell in Nigeria, another country with a chilling human rights record. At the same time, leaders like Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso were enriching themselves and their families with the revenues provided by Halliburton-built offshore oil platforms while brutally crushing their political opposition.

As soon as the U.S. took over Baghdad in 2003, a familiar team won out again as tens of billions of dollars worth of government contracts were awarded based on secret bidding arrangements. Hallburton subsidiary Brown & Root was selected to put out oil fires and handle other duties involving damage to Iraq's oil industry. Cheney's relation to the company was hardly coincidental.

Back in the mid-1990s Cheney had helped Halliburton avoid tax liability. During his term as CEO, Halliburton created dozens of dummy offices in offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands. The number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax havens went from 9 to 44 in the years Cheney was at the helm. Halliburton's federal taxes dropped from $302 million in 1998 to a negative $85 million, that is, the company got an $85 million rebate in 1999. At the same time, Halliburton received $2.3 billion in government contracts and $1.5 billion in government financing and loan guarantees. During his vice-presidential debate with Joe Lieberman in 2000, Cheney insisted that the government had had "absolutely nothing to do" with Halliburton's financial success. In other words, he claimed that $3.8 billion in government contracts, loans, and financial guarantees, had zero impact on Halliburton. Sure.

When he left Halliburton, Cheney received $13 million in severance pay and left behind millions of dollars in losses from bad investments, a spate of SEC investigations, and a pile of lawsuits. The value of Halliburton stock plunged.

When the GW Bush administration abandoned its campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, Cheney justified the betrayal on the basis that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant. Remember, Kamala Harris is deeply honored to have this lunatic's endorsement.

When Cheney was faced with a series of potentially ruinous asbestos-related lawsuits at Halliburton, the company decided it should lobby for a change of law rather than argue the cases in court. So Cheney and the company shelled out nearly half a million dollars to congressional candidates between 1997 and 2000, with $157,000 directed to 62 lawmakers who co-sponsored bills limiting the liability of asbestos manufacturers. Bribery loves a "free market."

At a fund-raising appearance in the summer of 2002 Cheney praised the White House's commitment to "more accountability for corporate officials." This from the man who charged the public $750,000 for work that actually cost Halliburton $125,000 when Cheney was CEO there.

When the state of California spun into financial disaster from a phony energy crisis arranged by Enron, Cheney's fingerprints were all over it. He had six meetings with Enron representatives, including two with CEO Ken Lay, the last one just six days before the company disclosed that it had vastly overstated its earnings. While Enron executives cashed out $1 billion in company stock just before the day of reckoning, their employees lost their pensions and their jobs - just in time for Christmas season.

Of course, all this pales in comparison to the vicious mass murder campaign Cheney and GW Bush unleashed on the people of Iraq in 2003, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians five years after Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponek had resigned their UN posts declaring Washington's pre-invasion Iraq policy "genocide."

So the questions are, why do plundering mass murderers like Kamala Harris, and why is she proud to represent them?

Sources:

Kamala Harris quoted in CBS News online, October 3, 2024 

Cheney's voting record: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec00/cheney_7-26.html

www.abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/Cheney_GMA000727.html

"Cheney at the Helm," the Progressive, September 2000.

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy

Michael Parenti, Democracy For The Few

Arianna Huffington, Pigs At The Trough 

Michael Lind, Made In Texas

Charles Lewis, 60 Minutes, April 27, 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

In Bloodshed We Trust

"They wanted to use the prospect of future NATO membership to integrate Ukraine into NATO's military infrastructure, which they've done, on this show (Useful Idiots) we've covered the fact that it only recently got admitted that the CIA has built up bases inside Ukraine since the coup of 2014, so under the guise of giving Ukraine this membership far in the distance, that allows NATO to integrate Ukraine as a proxy without the obligation to defend it, if it gets into a war with Russia, which was the goal, to use Ukraine as bait to bleed Russia. And to bait Ukraine they dangled the prospect of future membership (in NATO). It's the perfect scam for people whose goal is to bleed Russia and possibly overthrow Vladimir Putin. That's what their goal was. And, of course, now it's having its predictable result, where Ukraine is being decimated and has lost one-fifth of its territory . . . . 

"Ukraine is being told it's too corrupt to join NATO, so this is what Ukraine gets for going along with this scam of future NATO membership, it's being told it's too corrupt. 'Sorry, we're going to use you; we're going to not negotiate with Russia, we're going to refuse to discuss the prospect of Ukraine's NATO membership, and then after the damage is done, after hundreds of thousands of people have died, we're going to turn around and tell Ukraine, sorry, you're too corrupt.' And by the way, who's telling Ukraine it's too corrupt? It's President Biden, whose son got a lucrative energy board seat in Ukraine shortly after his father, Joe Biden, helped overthrow the government there. So Joe Biden's now lecturing Ukraine about corruption after using Ukraine for his real goal of bleeding Russia and using it to the benefit of his son, who is now advising Joe Biden to stay in office, even though he can't function." 

------Aaron Mate, "Aaron and Daniel Mate Find Out If Biden Will Run," Useful Idiots, July 8, 2024

Netanyau Wins "Nazi of the Year" Award!

 First-Ever Jewish Recipient of Highly Coveted National Security Prize

by Michael K. Smith / June 4th, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made history today by winning the prestigious “Nazi of the Year” award, the first ever Jewish leader so honored. Recipients of the award must demonstrate outstanding achievement in wholesale barbarism to qualify. For 2024, Netanyahu won in a landslide vote.

Chairman of Slime Magazine‘s award committee Wilhelm Broder said Netanyahu’s burning babies alive on film after promising their families safe harbor was one among many instances of sub-human conduct that made Netanyahu the overwhelming favorite for Nazi of the Year. “When it comes to perverted cruelty, he has few peers and no superiors,” said the Chairman.

The award comes with unlimited free armaments for life to use as Netanyahu sees fit, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. “Nothing is too good for Bibi,” said President Joe Biden, reacting to news of the award. “He’s a real Fighting Jew.” Fighting Jews are said to have arisen from the ashes of the Holocaust to end the plight of Victim Jews and insure that genocide would be consigned to the category of “never again.” At the time no one anticipated that genocide would become a field of Jewish achievement, but in the era of affirmative action racial, ethnic, religious, and national groups are breaking down barriers in all directions. It is Netanyahu’s singular achievement to have made “Jewish-Nazi” a meaningful term instead of an oxymoron.

Congratulations poured in to the Prime Minister’s office from around the world, although there was one dissenting vote from the family of the late Henry Kissinger, which thought the former U.S. Secretary of State’s conduct in the Vietnam War should have made him the first ever Jewish Nazi. “Anything that flies on anything that moves,” that was Dad’s motto, said one of the Kissinger children, recalling their father’s exterminationist bombing campaign that killed millions in Indochina. “What’s not genocidal enough about that?”

The Slime Committee has promised to review the matter.

Trans-Class Pride Day

Trans-Class Pride Celebration Planned

 

By Frank Scott

 

A spokesperson for Trans-Class-Pride said a massive parade and rally for the hundreds of millions of working class and poor Americans who feel rich but are disrespectfully not allowed to be what they feel is planned for a weekend soon.

“ A day would be much too short for all our members to be able to participate and we may need a week rather than a weekend’ said cis-working class member George Melissa Mulatto who delivers for amazon but feels like the people he delivers to - a member of the upper middle class.

 

“We are sick, tired and fed up with being denied the American dream and forced to live the American nightmare of the gig economy at best and street poverty at worst” said the poorly dressed but academically rich even though only having been to college to make deliveries and clean toilets spokesperson, whose pronouns are homeless/houseless.

 

‘When we march together we feel stronger and at peace without seeing therapists which we cant afford or using drugs which we cant afford either.”

 

“I have a good friend who is a woman with a penis and shim gets to use toilets of shims choosing, play on men’s sports teams and is respectfully treated as trans female. If shim can have their feelings acknowledged why cant we? Just because some of us have no bank accounts is no reason to deny us credit or because we are without wardrobes deny us money for rent. After all, Americans spend billions on our animals and even call them members of our families. Cant we give that much respect to the majority of us Americans who struggle to get by let alone the substantial minority of us who have no shelter and are forced to live under conditions many of us would not tolerate for our pets?

We may no more be middle class than my friend with a penis is an actual female but we deserve at least the trans rights being enjoyed by so many citizens. How about trans class Americans who are possessed of testicles, vaginas, both or neither but nonetheless are members of the human race who deserve at the very least what a tiny minority of us have: equality of transism!”

 

Congress is considering legislation to ban any public display of trans-classism unless it can be shown that all trans classists are not inspired by Chinese or Russian or Socialist or Communist or Catholic or Jewish or Agnostic or Atheistic propaganda and all have testacals, vaginas, both or neither and firmly believe in the American constitution and the right of people to spend trillions of social dollars on war, hundreds of billions on pets, while poverty, injustice and other marketable commodities remain available to all Americans without discrimination.

 email: fpscott@gmail.com Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate  http://legalienate.blogspot.com)  

 

 

 

 

Cop City

Cop City

 

 

The alleged cost of this training center is put at 90 million dollars which may be the only thing to be critical of, if it weren’t that we spend hundreds of thousands times more money on incredibly bigger threats to all life on earth but especially in the usa. For instance, we spend more than two billion – TWO FRIGGIN BILLION! – every day on what is called a defense budget which is like a rapist defending himself from his victims.

 

And if this deal better trains police and firefighters to bring more safety to all of us the cost might even be worthwhile. But first the bigger deal, which is making the police the scapegoat for a corrupt, debased, bigoted immoral society that spends trillions for war, billions for pets, leaves hundreds of thousands without shelter and claims world leadership while being the all-time greatest threat to humanity.

 

Many police are incompetent and need to be replaced, at the very least, but the overwhelming majority perform on the public behalf and just because my neighborhood or yours sucks is not reason to blame that on the police. They are not vigilantes but state employees and unless we transform that state to one that is truly democratic any flaws on them are because we have not yet been capable of changing the murderous state! Police do not create low-income high crime areas, the political economics of capitalism do so and that is what needs to be dealt with.

 

 Unless you are in the habit of calling Girl Scouts or Black Lives Matter or Catholic Sisters of Charity if your car is stolen, your store robbed, your home burglarized, you hear a gunshot or scream in the night or some other form of what makes American reality for so many (violence, weapons and the profits they create) you are among the majority. We just had a slight decline in the murder rate and that means close to 19 thousand  americans were murdered last year! As long as that is material reality and not some comic book fable should we expect to have a police force composed of choir boys and girls to sing songs of mourning for the bereaved and suffering? What can we expect from professionals hired to protect us from those extremes while also dealing with tons of responsibility for more everyday needs like traffic – where we also kill 100 people on an average day. All of that is next to nothing compared to what we do to people in foreign countries whom we slaughter directly with our own forces or finance governments and militaries owned and operated by American capital and paid for with our taxes.

 

We are devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to murdering Russians, Palestinians and more, while surrounding Russia and China with our military and navy while screaming about Russian and Chinese threats to us all. Hello? Please, get with reality. Most Americans are served by the police and while too many are abused that happens across the board.  As a small example there are teachers who shouldn’t teach and medical workers who should not attend to illness but the overwhelming majority of teachers and health care workers, like the police, are dedicated and highly competent public servants made to look like lower forms of life by an economic system that rewards theft, murder, violence and contempt for humanity while worshipping weapons and animals.

 

We need to stop dumping on minorities as being guilty for the atrocity of our society and culture which under minority control thinks far far more of profits and murder than of many of our people, and that is not because of the police any more than our foreign policy of mass murder is all because of evil soldiers. Please face reality and soon and build a better relation between the public and the police rather than become enemy camps as too many seem to support. All Americans will be better served by police who are treated with respect by those who employ them and as long as we tolerate a rich minority who are always served by all facets of the state instead of all of us it is our responsibility to bring about radical change. Meantime, better trained police and firefighters will be beneficial to us all at least temporarily.