Trapture!!

 

The Democrats: a Modern Day Version of Zombie Politics and the Walking Dead by Henry Giroux

 

Source: CP

Bill Clinton’s endorsement of former governor Andrew Cuomo, coupled with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s refusal to support Zohran Mamdani, the successful Muslim democratic socialist in the New York City mayoral race, reveals everything we need to know about today’s Democratic Party. Add to that the cowardly Democratic lawmakers who stood with Trump to end the shutdown, and the picture sharpens: this is no longer a party of alleged principles but an echo chamber of timidity, moral vacuity, and political emptiness. The failure of the Democrats to defend Americans from the crushing costs and deepening fragility of health care has become a matter of life and death. Studies published in The American Journal of Public Health and updated by Public Citizen estimate that 44,789 working-age Americans die each year simply because they lack health insurance.

By capitulating on this issue, the Democrats bear blood on their hands, proving once again that their vaunted talk of justice and a better life for working-class people is not only hollow but an act of political and moral violence. What we are witnessing is not mere complacency but complicity, a politics of managed decline masquerading as pragmatism, a surrender to cruelty dressed up as bipartisanship. The Democratic Party’s retreat from the language of moral responsibility is more than a failure of policy; it is a betrayal of conscience, an abdication of the very democratic promise it claims to defend.

Nowhere is the collapse of moral responsibility more evident than in the Democratic Party’s unwavering support for the genocidal war in Gaza. Not only have its leaders aligned themselves with Israel’s war criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also supplied the very weapons that have annihilated more than 70,000 Palestinians, men, women, and children. This is not merely a political failure. It is a moral collapse. The complicity of the Democratic Party is written in blood.

The Democratic Party, stripped of moral conviction and political imagination, has collapsed into a hollow centrism, an empty vessel adrift in a sea of political and moral paralysis. As Trump bulldozes the Constitution and transforms the republicinto a warfare state, Democrats respond with platitudes instead of power. They refuse to call for mass movements, summon people into the streets, call for strikes, and fight to dismantle the machinery of the war economy and the obscene inequality it sustains. They are the soft face of neoliberalism’s ruthless cruelty, servants to the corporate–military–techno complex they claim to restrain.

As Richard Wolff has long argued, both major parties are bound by their allegiance to the financial elite and the billionaire class. Neither dares utter a critical word about capitalism, much less connect it to the crises, social, ecological, and moral, that define our time. This silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.

In their cowardice, they have become collaborators, not opponents, of authoritarianrule. Their politics of accommodation mask a failure of moral will. Rather than ignite collective resistance, they drift in the shallow waters of corporate centrism, where compromise replaces courage and the language of reform masks complicity. What remains is a party drained of purpose, incapable of moral outrage, and deaf to history’s warning. Drowning in their own vapid centrism, they offer no vision, no movement, no dream, only the cold echo of a political corpse.

Chris Hedges reminds us, “Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump is not an aberration but the political expression of a deeper pathology: the long-standing war that neoliberal capitalism has waged against democracy itself. This is gangster capitalism in its purest form: a politics rooted in greed, racial hatred, and the legacy of colonial domination. Its endpoint is an updated version of American fascism.

This system produces staggering inequalities of wealth and power, displaces workers by outsourcing labor to global sweatshops, and sustains itself by weaponizing resentment. It diverts the anger of the dispossessed toward scapegoats, immigrants, Black people, refugees, and anyone who does not fit the profile of the white Christian nationalist ideal. The cruelty is deliberate: fascism thrives on manufactured enemies and the illusion of order through violence.

The Democratic Party cannot face their own complicity in pushing gangster capitalism into its current cruel, authoritarian, zombie-like form. The dominant elements of the party just gave Trump another win in their willingness to end the shutdown without preventing the Trump death machine from eliminating health care for millions. In Europe, the Democratic Party would be viewed as a right-wing organization. Yes, there is Zohran Mamdani and younger, more militant members of the party, but until they break with the false assumption that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, they are doomed to a party that has no answer to redistributing wealth, power, providing universal health care, decent housing for everyone, and a social order in which human needs are prioritized over the criminal class of billionaires. America is a criminogenic state and the traditional mechanisms of checks and balances serve that state. Political culture runs on the model of a merger between the Mafia and zombie politics.

Not even liberals are willing to call American society a fascist state. This is not merely cowardice; it is an act of enabling–the kind of behavior that after 1945 put people on trial for crimes against humanity. We need a new version of the Nuremberg trials and until that happens, violence, state terrorism, and the collapse of conscience will burn down the planet, along with the very idea of democracy.

What is needed now is not another party of compromise but a new movement of conscience, one capable of rekindling moral courage and collective imagination. We need a socialist movement willing to make power visible, to revive dangerous memories, and to forge a politics rooted in critique, solidarity, and hope. Such a movement must speak the unspeakable truth: that capitalism is the breeding ground of fascism, and that democracy can only be rescued by those willing to imagine, organize, and fight for a radically different future.

This is not merely a call for reform but for rebirth, a call to build institutions that nourish life rather than destroy it, to mobilize a mass movement that creates a new language of critique and possibility, embraces anti-capitalist values, and fights for a radical democracy grounded in equality and justice. It requires the courage to challenge the machinery of cruelty, to expose the myths that mask domination, and to reclaim education as the practice of freedom and the lifeblood of civic consciousness.

The urgency of this project cannot be overstated. The struggle for democracy is no longer about repairing a broken system, it is about survival: moral, political, and planetary. Either we breathe life back into the corpse of democracy through collective struggle, or we watch it decay under the rule of the walking dead.

History always teaches that resistance is born in the darkest hours. It is sustained by those who refuse despair, who turn critique into action, and who know that hope is not a sentiment but a discipline. The time has come to choose between complicity and courage, between the living and the dead. To fight for democracy today is to reclaim the very possibility of a humane future.

The Mafia Presidency by Adam Serwer

 

Source: The Atlantic

The Sunday before the New York City mayoral race, President Donald Trump told New Yorkers he might withhold federal funding if Zohran Mamdani won.

“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes. Mamdani responded to Trump’s threat of extortion—vote for my preferred candidate or else—by pointing out that said federal funding was not Trump’s to give. “This funding is not something that Donald Trump is giving us here in New York City,” Mamdani said. “This is something that we are, in fact, owed in New York.”

It was not the first time Trump treated federal funds as his personal property that he could use to extort political opponents or reward political allies. Trump has approved disaster aid for red states and denied it to blue states. In the midst of the government-shutdown fight with Democrats, he is refusing to disburse rainy-day funds for food stamps, saying (falsely) that the lapse will hurt “largely Democrats.” The Trump administration has cut funding for projects in states with Democratic majorities. It is withholding federal funding from colleges and universities that do not submit to ideological control by the federal government over whom they hire, what they teach, and what sort of students they admit, and rewarding those that comply.

Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf have received pardons, as have Republican officeholders convicted on corruption charges. Wealthy donors who funneled money to Trump’s family businesses have also been pardoned, such as Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2023. Trump’s selective pardons are balanced out by his selective persecutions. His political opponents, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, have been slapped with flimsy indictments. Cities and states that Trump sees as bastions of his political opposition are subject to occupation by masked federal agents. As soon as Mamdani won, many New Yorkers began bracing for Trump’s retaliation.

Incidentally, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was caught accepting $50,000 from federal agents in a bribery sting—and was not prosecuted. (The FBI and Justice Department “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing, said Attorney General Pam Bondi.) Although Trump frequently accuses others of corruption, he seems to define the term not as profiting from one’s office—something he apparently has zero objection to—but as defying his will.

Elections in democracies determine who administers the government; they do not alter whom the government is for. Under any administration, Republican or Democratic, the United States government exists to serve the people of the United States, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Besides, Americans are not as easily divided as Trump might think. Millions of Republican voters live in New York, just as millions of Democrats live in Texas. He cannot tell whom he is punishing by glancing at an electoral map. But even if he could, Trump’s acts of extortion have no place in a democracy. They belong in a protection racket: If you support Trump, you are protected; if you do not, you are vulnerable. If you donate enough cash to Trump, you may receive favorable treatment, including immunity from the law. If you oppose Trump, you may be prosecuted.

This is not how a representative government works. It is how the Mafia works.

As the Italian historian Salvatore Lupo writes in his History of the Mafia, the core of the Mafia business is protection, which is to say, extortion. Emerging out of the chaos of post-feudal, post-unification Italy, the Sicilian Mafia began as a number of small organizations that could retrieve stolen property or prevent it from being stolen in the first place. Eventually, with the fledgling Italian state unable to impose order, these organizations began to compel legitimate businesses to use their services, and then demanded a greater and greater share of those businesses.

Want your citrus groves to turn a profit? You’re going to have to hire my guys and also let me skim off the top. You want your cattle back? I’ll get them for you, but if you don’t want them stolen again, you should probably cut me in. Mafia organizations turned out to be stubbornly adaptable: When a right-wing government cracked down, they exploited the strong hand of the law to take out rivals; when a left-wing government tried to build infrastructure, they made sure they got their cut.

Their entrepreneurial use of violence boiled down to: If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say. The businesses they attached themselves to, and by extension, the larger economy, ultimately suffered as a result of the parasitic drain on efficiency, innovation, and profit caused by having to cater to these masters in the shadows.

I doubt that anyone would look at that system and think: Now, there’s a great model for the U.S. government. And yet here we are. If you are aligned with Trump, you can expect public services to function normally (although they often don’t), and you may be entitled to exemption from laws and regulations. If you are opposed to Trump, you have to worry about being crushed by the fist of the state.

Trump likes to argue that his intercession in the rule of the law is necessary because Democratic cities are war zones, and because “good” Americans are being persecuted. This, too, is a common ploy; Mafia organizations present themselves as “an expression of traditional society,” as Lupo puts it. “Every eminent mafioso makes a point of presenting himself in the guise of a mediator and resolver of disagreements, as a protector of the virtue of young women. At least once in his career, the mafioso boasts of the rapid and exemplary execution of ‘justice’ against violent muggers, rapists, and kidnappers.”

Such rhetoric is a way of presenting an avaricious and exploitative organization, in populist terms, as a protector of the people. But it’s a fraud. “Greed and ferocity,” Lupo writes, “are intrinsic characteristics of the Mafia,” and its leaders are plenty capable of ignoring “their codes of honor” whenever they become an obstacle.

One could similarly observe that the suffering the Trump administration has chosen to inflict on the American people in an attempt to extort its opposition is a more frank expression of Trump’s beliefs and ideology than his constant bleating about law and order.

The longevity of the Mafia in Italy also serves as a warning that, once these practices embed themselves in the state, they are very difficult to extract; the Italian government’s battle against the Mafia continues to this day. After Trump is gone, restoring integrity to the U.S. government, and curbing the sort of flagrant corruption that has suddenly become commonplace here, will be a monumental task. But for now, Trump’s extortion attempts are offers he has no authority to make, and the American people have every right to refuse them.

Masters of Self-Deception

 

OpenMind · Expertise

Jason Stanley: "I Study Fascism. I’ve Already Fled America"

 

The USA is Isolated on the World Stage

 

 

 

Source: DV 

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

“Imperialism has the tendency to create among the nations a class of ‘rentiers’ (people who live by income from property or investments), a state which lives by the exploitation of labour of several overseas countries and colonies.”

—Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916.

“Deep things are not necessarily complex, and simple things are not necessarily naive,”¹ wrote the novelist and iconic revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. “The real artistic bias is: How can a human being say something profound simply?”

We have already named the lie of the passive citizen. But to understand that lie, we must diagnose the system that requires it. This is not a dissection of a machine’s parts, but a diagnosis of its terminal condition. The great capitalist machinery of the West no longer produces dreams; it produces only ghosts. This is the parasitic, spectral phase of what Lenin identified as the highest stage of capitalism: ‘the dominance of monopolies and finance capital,’ a system whose completion was ‘the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers.’ Its foundations, laid with the stones of stolen continents and cemented with the blood of enslaved peoples, are now haunted by the very violence that built them. The chaos you see—the flailing leaders, the rotting institutions—is not a failure of the system. It is the system in its final, truthful phase, where the parade of clowns and strongmen are not anomalies but logical administrators for a state that has abandoned persuasion for pure coercion.

This is the era of the open secret, the great unmasking. And Palestine remains its crucible. The criminal logic of the settler-colonial project was articulated from the beginning with a chilling clarity. It echoes, right to left, across the foundational texts of political zionism.

The Austrian Theodor Herzl, the founder of political zionism, defined his own project in his appeal for help from the archetypal colonizer, Cecil Rhodes, with unambiguous clarity: “Because it is something colonial.”² This was not an accusation from a critic, but the movement’s own self-identification. A generation later, the Russian right-wing zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky codified the mandatory strategy of all colonization in his “Iron Wall” doctrine: it must proceed, he wrote, “in defiance of the will of the native population.”³ This is not a historical artifact. It is the active, breathing principle of the project.

The same logic was betrayed by the Russian centrist zionist Chaim Weizmann’s casual dismissal of the Palestinian people as “several hundred thousand Negroes”⁴ of “no significance.” It was confessed by the Polish “Labor” zionist David Ben-Gurion’s blunt admission: “We have taken their country.”⁵

Their words are the indictment. A conscious, ongoing program of displacement, articulated from its very origins. A project that became, simultaneously, the perfected model of the imperial enterprise and its most fanatical instrument.

The imperial core, having exhausted the external world to plunder, now turns its cannibalistic logic inward. The frontier is no longer overseas; it is the street, the neighborhood, the dissident. The police doctrines and weaponry engineered for the management of imprisoned populations in Gaza, Occupied Palestine, are now the standard arsenal for the pacification of the marginalized in New York, London and Berlin. The surveillance technology perfected on a captive people is marketed to governments for use on their own citizenry. The rhetoric that dehumanized the “native” as a demographic threat is now seamlessly directed at the immigrant, the poor, the political dissenter within the gates. There is no longer an “over there” and a “here.” There is only the expanding territory of the empire, and within it, a hierarchy of the controlled.

The strongman’s popularity is no mystery in this context. A demagogue is not an individual; he is a phenomenon—the type of maggot that swarms from the rot of a falling empire. This is the magic turning against the magician, the logical conclusion of a society that has dumbed down its population and forged them into consumerist individuals—a populace drowning in the psychic trauma of a meaningless existence. Such a populace will flock to anyone who offers a target for their rage and a spectacle of force. They would rather be actors in a nightmare than passengers on a derelict ship. This is the final stage of the bargain: the Western citizen-consumer, having traded their political soul for material comfort, now finds the comfort disappearing. All that remains is a hollowed-out identity, which the strongman fills with manufactured nationalist fury. They are given a flag to wave as their world burns, a scapegoat to blame for the encroaching cage whose blueprint was drawn in someone else’s stolen home.

Into this desolate landscape, the Palestinian people introduce a radical alternative: not a dream, but a reality.

The indigenous Palestinians are not an abstraction of resistance, but a society of existence—a people whose eternal roots predate the settler-colonial state that seeks to erase them. Their identity is not a reaction to occupation, but a positive, enduring culture built on the land itself; a land that holds their ancestors, their olive groves, and their stories in the language of the place, Arabic. In the face of this deep-rooted reality, the colonial project can only be understood as a recent, foreign implant, a contingent political ideology defined by its violence and its need to negate what was already there.

This is a truth the European zionist colonialists’ most lucid strategists were forced to concede. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky admitted: “They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.”⁶

The Palestinian struggle does not create this connection—it emerges from it. It is a defense born of a profound, pre-existing love and belonging. In the most profound sense, it is the land defending its people as much as the people defending their land.

The Palestinian cause, therefore, is the defense of this tangible, living world. It is the assertion that a homeland was not absent, but stolen—that, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, this is “not a case of a people without a homeland, but of a people with a homeland that was stolen from them.”⁷ Consequently, their resistance is not merely political; it is the active, daily cultivation of life—sumud—in the face of a genocidal machine. It is the olive tree that refuses to wither; the student who learns in the rubble of a bombed university; the archivist collecting names that the bomber seeks to erase. This is the spirit embodied by Handala, the child created by Naji al-Ali—his back forever turned, his hands clasped in defiance, a perpetual witness who “will not end after my end,” as Naji told us. He is the unyielding conscience that the criminal can neither answer nor silence.

In this landscape, Occupied Palestine is the epicenter. It is the laboratory where the techniques of total control were perfected, and it is the mirror held up to the world. The unceasing resistance of the Palestinian people is the single greatest act of truth-telling in our time. Every child that points to the sky and names the bomber, every poem written in the dust, is a strike aimed at the heart of the imperial and colonial narrative, proving Kanafani’s dictum: “bodies fall but ideas endure.”

The struggle is not for a better version of the same system. It is a struggle between two irreconcilable forces. On one side, the force of enclosure, control, genocide, and death, built on the criminal premise that land can be emptied of its native people. On the other, the force of truth, justice, land, and liberation, a cause that, as Kanafani wrote, “is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.”⁸

There is no reforming a machine built on a colonizing, racist adventure. There is no petitioning a butcher to become a vegetarian. This is the fundamental choice. You are either upholding a dying order defined by the criminals who designed it, or you are aligning with a people defending existence and life itself. You are, in Kanafani’s words, part of the “generation who will give [the revolution] life.”

The project of the imperial West, built by war criminals and robbers, offers a future of managed decline and comfortable despair. Palestine, rooted in its people, offers a future, period.

 

Poet's Nook: "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies" by June Jordan

1

I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2

How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3

And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

The Singularity of (AI) Shit by Steve O'Keefe

On the horizon lies a confluence of catastrophe.

One stream is the wealth-concentrating power of capitalism, leading to existential battles between a small group of oligarchs. They have the proven ability to take over states; no democratic force can stop them. Only revolution can re-set the clock. Then growth will resume, along with the concentration of wealth.

The second stream is climate change. It is irreversible now without causing a major economic disaster. The clear response of the increasingly powerful oligarchs is to burn right through it — to use as much fossil fuel as possible, as fast as possible, before it becomes worthless.

The oligarchs believe that if and when climate change becomes expensive enough, the market will fix it. If it kills off 90% of the people on the planet, they’ll be among the 10% who survive.

***

The concentration of wealth can be slowed and even reversed for a time, as it was as a result of the Great Depression and New Deal taxation. But it won’t be stopped. It is as relentless as gravity.

Capital has learned how to capture the state. Representatives will always sacrifice public good for personal gain. If they do not, they are targeted for removal. Officials who refuse to cooperate are set-up, if necessary, and their families and friends are pressured.

AI can manifest any two-dimensional reality one can imagine. The ability to create endless streams of convincing kompromat means that capital has all the tools it needs to compromise power.

***

That brings us to the third stream in the confluence of catastrophe: Artificial Intelligence. AI is supposedly the way out of this mess — the super-intelligence that steps in and saves humanity.

The AI will provide us with nearly free electricity using non-polluting fusion reactors or artificial suns. The electricity will fuel carbon capture, incinerate our garbage, and desalinate saltwater. Since it will cost almost nothing to make almost everything, surely standards of living will rise worldwide?

Not a chance!

The same folks who brought you Exxon, Tesla, and Apple are planning to own the free energy machines of the future and charge a fortune to power your dwelling, burn your garbage, and clean your water.

It does not matter whether it’s the United States that first gets the artificial sun, or China or the U.K. or France or Germany or India or Russia or Japan or Australia or Saudi Arabia. Its use will be controlled by oligarchs selected by capital. The fruits of superabundance will not be freely shared.

***

AI will be used, as it is now, to fuel wealth concentration by disguising it as growth. The stock market goes up! Productivity goes up! Wages flatline. One hundred percent of the increase is hoarded by oligarchs.

Ray Kurzweil’s famous animation showing the steady increase in global GDP conveniently ignores the fact that most people in “the West” haven’t felt any increase in a generation.

The oligarchs pretend that they are building social capital like the stock market that benefits everyone. The stock market isn’t social; it’s private. It’s theirs. You’re welcome to wet your beak a little if you have anything left at the end of the month to invest.

All the leading indicators prove that the world of the super rich is getting steadily better. Too bad about you.

***

In their greed to dominate AI, the oligarchs have released shitty AI that is going to screw up the entire project long before we get to artificial suns.

Soon, teenagers equipped with AI will be able to use drones to deliver weapons of mass destruction. The concentration of capital necessary to build a super yacht will come up against a pissed-off kid with an AI weapon.

Just as Putin’s bombers can be taken out by Ukrainian bots, so any large-scale infrastructure can be decimated with cheap, deadly explosives. War is no longer a matter of defending one’s borders. Today, you must defend every bridge, every building, every person.

***

The idea of a representative government is over. The idea that we can hire a group of people to defend us is over. You have to represent yourself, fund yourself, protect yourself, educate yourself.

The old ways no longer work. They relied on the specialization of labor, where everyone is the master of their own piece of the puzzle. But now the other pieces have turned predatory for profit: the banks, the farmers, the manufacturers, the distributors, the retailers, the media, and the government.

The puzzle is broken because they all want to dominate and they don’t care about the individual pieces or even the whole puzzle. They want to win, even if the result looks like shit. That brings us back to the confluence of catastrophe, the Singularity of Shit.

People used to believe in working together, in making things better, in making progress. But it doesn’t work anymore. No matter the effort or time invested, all progress, all growth is siphoned off by hedge funds. We toil for their gain, decade after decade. If we learn, they win. If we improve, they confiscate the benefits.

Soon it will no longer make any sense to learn anything, build anything, save anything, or even try. When that day comes, the AI will probably take us out.