Joe Manchin Is A Mass Murderer. Here's Why.

 Global Warming.

These two words are the proof. Here's what I mean.

The "Build Back Better" bill that the Democratic Party hierarchy, including virtually all its Congressional members and the president and vice president of the U.S. have been struggling to pass for months against the unyielding opposition of Manchin, contains the first concrete steps for the U.S. to actually do something about the global warming that is being caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. By in effect vetoing this proposed set of legislation before it even could come up for a vote in the Senate, Manchin is dooming everyone on earth to catastrophic climate change. More powerful and frequent destructive storms is a minor effect compared to the droughts that will eventually result in famines that will kill millions of people.

Without the U.S., the second leading cause of the problem after China, setting an example and taking on its responsibilities, it cannot persuade other nations to do likewise, and many will not.

After jerking around his party leadership, including the president of the U.S., Joe Biden, for months, in a long stalling process mislabeled "negotiations," during which time unilateral concession after unilateral concession was made to Manchin, whittling down what was originally a $6 trillion bill to $1.7 trillion spread out over 10 years, Manchin slapped Biden and the rest of the Democrats in the face by appearing without prior warning to them on the reactionary agit-propaganda "news" channel of Rupert Murdoch, Fox "News," on its Sunday political propaganda show on December 19th, to announce that he would not support the bill. (Of course it was obvious all along that he wouldn't. His long political tease finally ended. And yet the other Democrats, after a few hours of anger the next day, the Democrats were back to "negotiating" and saying they hadn't given up, that progress would be made- all the same delusional verbiate they'd been spewing for months.)

On Murdoch TV, Manchin rehashed a bunch of his well-rehearsed "concerns" and "reasons" for stonewalling the bill. (By the way, going on Fox is another indication of Manchin's reactionary nature. He could have gotten himself booked on any of the Sunday morning political propaganda shows that serve as platforms for D.C, insiders to bloviate on: on CBS, NBC, or ABC.) One of his main talking points was that he couldn't convince "the people" of West Virginia, his state, to support the bill because he couldn't "explain" it to them.

And let's be fair to Manchin: it is so very hard to explain global warming. You have to explain that burning oil and coal and natural gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Then you have to tell them that CO2 stays in the atmosphere and traps more heat from the sun. That heat warms up the air and water. That warming changes weather patterns, creating fiercer storms. Furthermore, it creates droughts that last for years, as happened in California. That leads to crop failures. And ice in Greenland, the north pole, and Antarctica is melting as a result, causing sea levels to rise which will eventually put coastlines and cities under water.

That is so abstruse and complex to explain! No WONDER it is apparently beyond the ken of the people of West Virginia to grasp! Why, they're just a bunch of simple country folk who only have their own common sense to rely on for understanding the world.

Thus does Manchin insult the intelligence of "his" constituents as well as the rest of us.

Joe Manchin is a smarmy, dishonest, manipulative piece of excrement. He is a humanoid, not a human.

 Joe Manchin is quite literally a mass murderer. That is not hyperbole. It is literal truth.

The fact that one person, and not even the president, but just one of 100 U.S. senators, has the power to do that much damage to the world and to all of humanity, is one more indication of just how pathological, twisted, and even diabolical the U.S. power structure is. [1]

One more fact that "the" media never mentions. That $1.7 trillion spread over 10 years averages $170 billion per year. Congress just voted an annual budget for the Pentagon of $770 billion, an increase of the year before, like every year. Next year it will grow larger still. It passed with barely any notice in "the" media, and no political sturm und drang. Unlike with that bill, nobody you hear in the establishment propaganda system ever screeches that the Pentagon budget is "inflationary" or complains "how is it going to be paid for?" or insists it be "revenue neutral" and "not add to the deficit." Thus are the priorities of the corporate imperialist state thrown into sharp relief once again. The people must serve the empire. Their needs are unimportant.

"SCREW YOU, HUMAN RACE!"

1] In case you don't already know, here is the weird political arrangement that makes Manchin powerful enough to overrule the President of the United States. The Senate, as per the U.S. Constitution, has two Senators from each of the 50 states that now exist. Thus 100 Senators. Currently there are 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans in the Senate. Tie votes are broken by the vice president of the U.S. The vice president of course is currently the Democrat Kamala Harris.

But two of those nominal Democratic Senators are functionally Republican Trojan Horses inside the Democratic Senate caucus: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who is bought by the pharmaceutical industry, and the notorious Joe Manchin.

And this body of corrupt millionaire jackals and drooling reactionaries like John Kennedy, the redbaiting Senator from Louisiana, and Ron Johnson, who defends the January 6th insurrectionists who attacked and occupied the Capitol as peaceful patriots, styles itself as "the world's greatest debating body." Unreal egomania there! (Johnson is the GOP Senator from Wisconsin, the state that gave us Senator Joe McCarthy. Kenosha, Wisconsin, is the Town From Hell that aided and abetted the murderous junior stormtrooper Kyle Rittenhouse.)

The U.S. Senate has long been an ultra-reactionary body. Part of that is their "seniority" system. So Southern racist segregationists and Senators from reactionary farm states would get repeatedly reelected and assume control of committees. Here one example of the numerous horrible consequences of this state of affairs. For decades. while thousands of African-Americans were tortured, murdered, and mutilated by mobs of white racist terrorists, these Senators blocks every attempt to pass a Federal anti-lynching law.

By the way, here's another way the U.S. Senate is truly awful. California has about 40 million people. They have 2 U.S. Senators. The approximately 20 least populous states also have about 40 million people. THOSE 40 million, most of them in small reactionary states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the two Dakotas, etc., have FORTY Senators. "World's Greatest Democracy" my ass! The U.S. in this as in many other ways is profoundly ANTI-democratic!

But the populace is expected to worship this power structure and venerate its creators, the "Founding Fathers," as superhuman demigods. Even though they were elitists, many of whom "owned" human slaves as chattel, including the two main men, Washington and Jefferson, who owned hundreds of slaves. Washington was the richest man in America, by the way, a huge land speculator whose motive for rebelling against the British crown was his lust for more land. Which incidentally necessitated expulsion and genocide against the people who were already living there and whose ancestors arrived, according to the latest archeological and paleoarcheological evidence, around 30,000 or more years ago.

Incoming New York City Mayor Eric Adams Already Showing Off His Authoritarian Bent

  Eric Adams, who isn't actually the mayor until January 1st, 2022, is already barking at city lawmakers like a tinhorn dictator. 

Mayor-To-Be Adams announced a cancellation of the putative policy of his predecessor and current mayor, Bill "Big Talk" de Blasio to eliminate solitary confinement on the huge city jail complex on Rikers Island, itself just part of the vast city jail gulag spread over all fie boroughs and including a floating jail barge in one of the city's rivers. (A policy only partially implemented.)

In response, 29 members of the City Council, the elected 51-member legislative body of NYC, wrote a civil letter objecting to this, which they also released to the media.

In reaction to this, Adams burst forth in a public verbal tongue lashing of the letter writers, calling them "disruptive," asserting they had NO RIGHT to weigh in on the issue of solitary since none of them were police, as he had been, and vowing to ignore them. He was especially missed that they had released their letter to the media. In the letter, they cited expert and official opinion as to how solitary confinement can constitute torture.

Thus did Adams, a man with a very inflated sense of self-regard, deemed the council members who objected to his diktat as worthless people to be ignored.

Adams, an arrogant man with a grotesquely swollen ego, is a former NYPD police captain, a high rank. (NYPD is the gang sign for the New York City police department.) Adams ran on a "law and order" platform (i.e. promises of increased repression) during his campaign. (His Republican opponent, the egotistical career vigilante and reactionary radio "personality" Curtis Sliwa, did the same- some choice for voters! Appropriately, Sliwa whole-heartedly congratulated Adams on his election victory and eagerly pledged support to him.) Among other things, Adams specifically promised to reinstitute so-called "anti-crime" units, notorious plainclothes police cells that committed sufficient atrocities, including the murder of a harmless, unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo, who was slaughtered in a hail of 41 bullets by four of these hunters of human prey while standing on his own doorstep, which resulted in the abolishment of these units (though not of plainclothes police work per se). 

The fact that Adams couldn't restrain himself from contemptuously degrading the city council before he is even mayor is an ominous portent for the future.

"NOBODY can criticize ME!"

A note on solitary confinement in the U.S.: the UN deems imprisoning a person in solitary for more than 15 days to be torture. In the U.S., it is routine to subject people to such imprisonment- including people who haven't been convicted of crimes but are awaiting trial in jail, such as at Rikers- for months, years, even decades. Political prisoners such as members of the Black Panther Party have been imprisoned for up to 40 years in solitary, as happened in Louisiana. And of course the U.S. imprisons more people as a proportion of its population than any nation on earth. (Only China, with four times the population, imprisons more, counting the million Uyghurs China has locked up in slave labor-brainwashing prison camps.) With 4.5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's incarcerated people.  Medical care in U.S. prisons is abysmal, beating and murders by guards are rampant, the food is unhealthy. Communications between lawyers and inmates are routinely and illegally surveilled. 

The United States is a savagely repressive nation. In the greatest feat of propaganda gaslighting in history, the U.S. has brainwashed literally billions of people around the world into believing the U.S. is a "free" country, indeed the "freest" country ever, a beacon of human rights. 

Nothing, nothing, could be further from the truth.

The tragic fact is that from its (waning) position of world domination, unparalleled in world history, the U.S. COULD HAVE BEEN a force for good, for the advancement of democracy, human rights, and freedom, like it only PRETENDS to be.

Talk about a squandered opportunity in the history of homo sapiens.

Eric Adams trying out for the part of African-American strongman.

Bill de Blasio's Excellent PR Adventure

 Bill de Blasio's two terms as Mayor of New York City have shown a certain consistency. A very fast-talking con man (he can talk his way around even the most pointed question that nails him dead to rights- for examples, listen to his weekly appearances on a certain radio program [1]), de Blasio's modus operandi is to gaslight people with grandiose "liberal" rhetoric while instituting reactionary policies behind people's backs. In this, he is in the mold of the Democratic Party's poohbah's, Obama and The Two Clintons. Indeed, de Blasio comes from the Clinton's machine, having managed Hillary Clinton's first campaign for U.S. Senate from New York State. If anything, Bill de Blasio is Bill Clinton on steroids, a guy who talks faster and is more disingenuous. An expert sophist, de Blasio manages to rationalize away any damning evidence against him.

Another consistency: he mostly did the opposite of what he promised to do as a candidate (and what he continually claims to be doing). His positive accomplishments are mainly one: pre-K school for children. Give him credit for that, and that's pretty much it. Otherwise it's betrayals and attacks on people's well-being.

Perhaps his most egregious crime has been his full-throated defense of police brutality. The city police (NYPD) brutally assaulted for months on end the protesters who took to the streets in the wake of the graphic murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis, Minnesota police. De Blasio consistently vilified the victims of NYPD violence.

Now what is this Excellent Public Relations Adventure of which I spoke in the title? First this introduction to the theme.

One de Blasio scam was baiting people to get COVID vaccines by offering a $100 "incentive." Only they don't pay up. To illustrate the point, I could relate one person's attempt to get paid, an exercise in utter futility, but that story is too lengthy for this essay. Just briefly, the contractor that is supposed to pay, an outfit called "akimbo," doesn't mail the debit cards, doesn't respond to emails, and is unreachable by phone. City employees for their part put people on a runaround treadmill and tell the victims to inform "akimbo." To add injury to injury, "akimbo" makes extra money selling the emails of the vaccinated to spammers. Immediately after getting vaccinated, the vaccine-related spam starts arriving- the $100 debit card never does.

I have a suspicion that de Blasio never had any intention of paying people. At the least, he doesn't care.  He just wants to be able to boast about how he got people to submit to vaccination. 

Now, de Blasio's Excellent PR Adventure: He pulled a similar stunt to the "vaccine incentive" trick  the first week of December, when he announced- informing nobody in advance, and  consulting with no one, according to the New York Times- that henceforth businesses would be required to insist that their employees be vaccinated.  And that everyone, even children as young as five, would have to be vaccinated if they wanted to eat in a restaurant or enter any other public place. All 184,000 New York City businesses were now under Mayoral orders to REQUIRE all their employees to be vaccinated for the new coronavirus, and to screen all people entering their premises for COVID vaccination status. No exceptions, and no option to be tested for infection in lieu of vaccination.

The fact that there was no plan for any of this, and that he never even discussed it with city officials before announcing it, gives the game away. It's not real, but typical de Blasio smoke and mirrors.

Self-styled caudillo de Blasio's edict nominally takes effect December 27. De Blasio will stop being mayor on January 1st, 5 whole days later. His successor has been coy on whether he will enforce the decree of his predecessor. Even though there is no mechanism to enforce this imperial ukase, media in New York City has given a platform to the frenzied overreactions of a few selected  individuals from "the business community." Thus adding to the illusion that de Blasio actually DID something, as opposed to ANNOUNCING something. ANNOUNCING things that never actually happen has been a hallmark of de Blasio's mayoralty. He's very big on making Grand Announcements, such as there will be "zero traffic fatalities" in New York City, and how he'll build- indeed IS building, "affordable housing," a phrase he must have uttered hundreds of times. 

De Blasio has reaped national media attention for several days running so far for his latest stunt. He even got some international media coverage, for example by the BBC, the main global propaganda arm of the British government. That is the payoff.

But what is the point? Is de Blasio merely a political exhibitionist? Does he have an insatiable need for attention because of a swollen ego? Actually he's running for Governor of New York State (state capital is the city of Albany, a nothingburg far to the north). He's been term-limited out of the Mayoralty of New York City because of a law passed by the city's voters in a referendum, a law that a previous Mayor, Michael Bloomberg Billionaire, ignored and illegally ran for a third term, which he won. His opposition includes the current Governor, Kathy Hochul, who inherited the seat after Governor Andrew "The Molester" Cuomo was forced out and his mousy lieutenant governor, Ms. Hochul, was automatically elevated to the top job. Also vying to grab the top political rung in the state was state attorney general Letitia James, until she announced on December 9th she was quitting. On the same day, Hochul publicly endorsed James' reelection for state AG, indicating prearrangement between the two. Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi is also running. (Another announced candidate for Governor in the 2022 election is Jumaane Williams, who was just elected last month as New York City Public Advocate. Ambitious, no?) These are all Democrats competing in the upcoming June Democratic Primary. [2]

Cuomo was finally exposed as a compulsive molester, and for his role in causing the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents and covering it up. Those things, along with the media finally reporting what they knew for years, that Cuomo is a rage-filled, abusive bully, finally pried his fingers from the levers of power.

De Blasio is deeply unpopular in New York City, with 8 million people has almost half the state's population. Outside of the City, the state is quite reactionary, so de Blasio will have to jettison his fake-liberal outer garb. His opponents will try to keep him from getting away with it. But de Blasio is probably thinking back to how he won the city mayoralty. Low in the polls, he ran in a crowded field, which enabled him to emerge on top.

And de Blasio has "raised his profile" with his latest high-handed "mandate."

If de Blasio were somehow to climb up the next rung of the political ladder, he only good thing would be Andrew Cuomo damaging his teeth by gnashing them. Cuomo as Governor had a hobby of making de Blasio's life miserable. It appeared he did it just for sport, as a cat tortures a captive mouse. What poetic justice that would be for the venal, execrable Cuomo!

My latest scam is working like a charm! Albany Governor's Mansion, Here I Come!

  

1]  For years, de Blasio has been hosted every Friday for an hour on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on "public" radio station WNYC, in New York City. WNYC.org. Brian Lehrer, a classic dweeb, always lets the Flim-Flam Man get away with his evasions. Callers who call in to complain about being screwed by the de Blasio regime would be parried with some Clintonian-like "I feel your pain" verbal jujitsu. No matter what he did, nothing could ever be de Blasio's fault.

 

De Blasio is more slippery than a greased eel and can seemingly fast-talk his way out of anything. While Trump could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and not lose any support, as he boasted, de Blasio could do it and talk his way out of it with a gusher of verbiage.

2] Letitia James gave as a reason to remaining in theattorney general spot ongoing important cases. These cases are a civil suit against the crook Donald Trump, who inflates the value of his assets to get bank loans, and deflates them on his tax returns. She is also working to strip the National Rifle Association of its registration as a charity in New York State, stemming from the major corruption by its top officials who have used millions of NRA funds for personal expenditures. The NRA tried to evade liability by filing a frivolous bankruptcy claim, which the courts rejected.