The other side of the Trump Campaign's racist Puerto Rico comment

There has been a lot of very righteous criticism of the Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's racist crack that:

"there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

While this obviously racist attack on Puerto Rico has been called out by everyone that's not a shameless Trump supporter, this comment has two edges, and it cuts both ways. Whereas the insult to Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people has received a lot of attention, the insult to the Earth has received none that I've seen. 

That's why I'm writing this blog post. In all this discussion about the racist nature of the Trump comedian's comment, somebody needs to point out that there really is a floating island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is already twice the size of Texas—and that's no joke!

This other side of this racist attack, treating this massive attack on the Earth's oceans as a joke, is also a component part of white supremacy, as I noted in a blog post more than six years ago:

Why white supremacy is a danger to the Earth

While the skin color differences between the European colonizers, and the people of the southern hemisphere may have provided the original impetus for the white and black categorization, the adoption of the symbolism of white by Europeans at the beginning of the imperialist period has been used not only as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the thereby newly created "non-white" people, it has been used as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the entire planet. Therefore, we can conclude that the problems inherent in a group of people being called white is not merely a race problem. It would be a problem even if there were no other people. This attitude of whiteness has been invoked not just against the "black people of the Earth" but against the Earth itself.

The array of political forces around the climate change debate is but one example of how white supremacy isn't just an attack on the better part of humanity, but on nature itself. At first glance, the global warming question has nothing to do with race, and one would think that even the most extreme racist, that envisions an earthly future free of people of color, would still be fighting to see that the Earth did have a future, if only for white people, and yet there they all are, firmly on the denial side of climate change.

White chauvinism therefore is the practice of white supremacy, not just towards the excluded peoples, but towards the entire excluded natural world. It underlines and legitimizes the operations of capitalism not just in exploiting "people of color," but in ruthlessly exploiting the resources of the Earth as well.

Anyway, the Trump comedian's so-call joke so clearly illustrates this dual nature of white supremacy that I just thought someone should point this out is all.

Clay Claiborne

Halloween, 2024

Occupy LA, October 2011

 

  

The genius of "The Wire" shown again by the 2024 US Presidential election.

The Wire, is cop/criminal TV series located in Baltimore that played on HBO between 2002 and 2006. Some consider it the best series ever produced for TV, and I proudly count myself among them. This is the scene that opens the series. It runs before the title and song, and involves a conversation between Baltimore Det, Jimmy McNulty and an eyewitness to the the murder of Omar "Snot Boogie" Betts, a street hustler:

-So, your boy's name is what?
-Snot.

-You called the guy Snot?
-Snotboogie, yeah.

-"Snotboogie."
-He like the name?

-What?
-Snotboogie.

-This kid whose mama went to the trouble of christening him Omar lsaiah Betts? You know, he forgets his jacket...so his nose starts running, and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him "Snot." So, he's "Snot" forever. Doesn't seem fair.

-Life just be that way, I guess.
-So who shot Snot?

-I ain't going to no court. m*therf*cker ain't have to put no cap in him though.
-Definitely not.

-He could've just whipped his ass, like we always whip his ass.
-I agree with you. 

-He gonna kill Snot. Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know how long. Kill a man over some bullshit. I'm saying, every Friday night...in the alley behind the cut-rate, we rolling bones, you know? All the boys from around the way, we roll till late.

-Alley crap game, right?
-And like every time, Snot, he'd fade a few shoots. Play it out till the pot's deep. Then he'd snatch and run.

-Every time?
-Couldn't help himself.

-Let me understand you. Every Friday night, you and your boys would shoot crap, right? And every Friday night, your pal Snotboogie, he'd wait till there was cash on the ground, then grab the money and run away? You let him do that?
-We catch him and beat his ass. But ain't nobody ever go past that.

-I gotta ask you. If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and run away, why'd you even let him in the game?

-What?

-If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?

-Got to. This is America, man.

Crazy, right? When you hear it from a corner boy in Baltimore, it sounds crazy that they would continue to let Snotboogie play when they knew he would try to steal the pot. One of the most fundamental rules of any game is that all the participants agree to abide by the rules of the game, i.e. you can't just steal the money if you lose. One of the most fundamental rules of elections is that those participating in the election agree to abide by the outcome of the vote. Otherwise, what's the point?

Yet, here we are, about to hold a national  election with a Snotboogie as one of the major candidates. He lost the last election, tried to overthrow it, and still won't admit he lost it.. He has also announced loudly, and often, that he won't abide by this election if he loses. So, why is he even allowed in the game?

Got to, This is America, man.

Clay Claiborne

28 October 2024

Fox News advertises support for Hitler ahead of critical election

I first blogged about the white supremacist numerical symbol "1488" over 8 years ago in "Why Green Party's @DrJillStein should drop her presidential bid" when I said of Alt Right Trump supporters:

Dylann Roof was part of the 1488 movement

The most extreme elements of this alternative right are the 1488ers, the numbers stand for the 14 words in the Nazi slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children," and the 8th letter of the alphabet twice to signify "Heil Hitler."  According to the Anti-Defamation League "the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs. As such, they are ubiquitous within the white supremacist movement - as graffiti, in graphics and tattoos, even in screen names and e-mail addresses, such as aryanprincess1488@hate.net. Some white supremacists will even price racist merchandise, such as t-shirts or compact discs, for $14.88."  1488 showed up in Dylann Roof's manifesto too, and he was suppose to be a lone, unconnected, racist killer. Now that you know what to look for, you will start to notice it.

And now you will notice in on Fox News with the My Pillow guy running a $14.88 special on his pillows. Don't let anyone gaslight you that they are clueless to this well known "hidden meaning." In the ad, Mike Lindell says "I can't believe I'm even saying this, only fourteen eighty-eight." By which he means that he can't believe that in a few short years this racist homage to Hitler has made it from backrooms of Discord chat rooms to the front page of a major cable news channel.

Well, we better believe it, and it's just a small sample of what's to come if Trump is elected the next president of the United States. They are promising a Civil War not a pillow fight. So, get out there and vote against him, and get everybody you know to vote against him This is a question of avoiding the next holocaust.

In Solidarity,

Clay Claiborne

16 October 2024

Trump's rants about Hannibal the cannibal show that his racist attack on the Springfield Haitians has been planned for some time

Donald Trump's wild debate claim that Haitian immigrants living Springfield, OH are eating the cats and dogs of the residents of Springfield shocked most viewers. As a matter of fact, it was debunked by everyone from Ohio's Republican governor on down. But for the white supremacist resurgence being led by Trump and Vance, it was never about facts, it was about mobilizing one of the oldest racist fantasies about people from Africa—that they are cannibals—in their bid to win a senate majority in this year's election.

In these stories, the people's pets, their cats and dogs, are avatars for the people themselves, and so their consumption represents a kind of cannibalism in the unconscious mind. In our country, vegetarians are a true minority group. Most of us have no problem eating meats of all kinds, whether from fish, or fowl, or pigs, goats, cows, etc. The list is almost endless. It stops at cats and dogs because we keep those as pets. Dogs are man's best friend, and cats give comfort and affection to childless people everywhere. So, we universally find the very idea of eating them abhorrent. Even horses, which may be considered more as work animals and companions, have only been allowed to be eaten in times of extreme deprivation, like the Nazis failing to take Stalingrad. And when you hear that they are reduced to eating cats and dogs anywhere, you know they are just one step away from cannibalism. Which is why the extreme claim that Haitians are eating their neighbors cats and dogs masks the even more extreme, but nonetheless deeply embedded in Western cultural, fantasy that all people originating from Africa are cannibals in their hearts.   

Looney Tunes - Jungle Jitter

In his discussion of racists fantasies, Joel Kovel, in his White Racism: A Psychohistory, 1970, spoke about the role of the fantasy of African cannibalism:

The fantasies express certain more or less distinct forbidden instinctual trends—not the trend in itself, but the trend as actualized in some form of historical reality. To choose an obscene example: scarcely anyone grows up without exposure to the myth of African cannibalism: grinning black devils with bones stuck through their nostrils dancing about the simmering pot containing the hapless missionary. What child has not contemplated this scene in one form or another? Now, we know that cannibalism is both a universal infantile wish arising in the oral sadistic phase of development (by virtue of which it becomes an element of the mass unconscious), and a well-defined cultural custom in some aboriginal groups. Both of these truths are being represented here, but are combined with a third one: that the culture of the West is representing by projection what it has done to the culture and peoples of Africa, namely eaten them up. 

Disney's Cannibal Capers, 1930

Donald Trump has been talking about Hannibal Lecter for more than four months now: 

The late great Hannibal Lecter. He would like to have you for dinner. 

That rant has become a regular, and predicable, part of his stump speech. This deviation has been highlighted by his opposition as a prime example of how he's losing it, and how his speeches go off the rails with obsessions that have nothing to do with winning the election. But in those same speeches Trump has responded to his critics by plainly stating his desire to associate cannibalism with immigrants of color:

They say "He mentions Hannibal Lecter. It doesn't make any sense." No, it makes a lot of sense. They're coming into our country.

We can now see that it was a measured prelude to a larger plan to marshal this ancient racist fantasy of the African cannibals in his re-election bid. It's no coincidence that this introduction of the unlikely subject of "cannibalism" into the 2024 US presidential election landscape is now followed with this racist accusation that legal Haitian immigrants are eating our pets. 

Trump is often portrayed as mentally deficient with no self-control. Here I think he shows an ability to mobilize our darkness fantasies from the deepest recesses of our psycho history in the service of his election bid in a way that would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Clay Claiborne

15 September 2024

And BTW, the decision to do this in Ohio is strategic. They need to knock Sherrod Brown out of the senate if are to have any hope of winning a majority in that body, and their candidate, Bernie Moreno, is a real turd, ala George Santos. 

Also, can't Haiti ever catch a break? Why do they still have to pay for winning their freedom in the first place?

UPDATE 16 Sept 2024: In the darkest recesses of the Internet, they are already accusing Haitians of eating humans as well as cats, of cannibalism directly, as in this NewsMax report here:

Haiti's Voodoo Culture Consists Of Sacrificing Cats, "Eating Animals, And Humans," According To Reports

Has Kamala Harris been Joe Biden's co-president?

The correct answer to that is no.

The Vice President has never been seen as a co-president. The US Constitution gives the vice president no executive powers and only the legislative power of presiding over the senate. Donald Trump tried to claim there was real power vested in that position, but he was wrong, it's merely ceremonial. This is how Google describes the "power of the vice president":

The Constitution names the vice president of the United States as the president of the Senate. In addition to serving as presiding officer, the vice president has the sole power to break a tie vote in the Senate and formally presides over the receiving and counting of electoral ballots cast in presidential elections.

The vice president has no executive powers at all, and no role in the military chain of command, which flows from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of the various services, bypassing the vice president entirely. And this is where state power really resides—in the control of the instruments of  state violence. 

 According to whitehouse.gov:

The primary responsibility of the Vice President of the United States is to be ready at a moment’s notice to assume the Presidency if the President is unable to perform his or her duties.

This would require that the Veep be read-in on everything the president is doing, but it doesn't require input from Veep into anything the president is doing. Historically, vice presidents have had no control and very little influence over the policies of their presidents. So, clearly, the vice president is not a co-president, and there's no real basis for treating Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's co-president. 

Never in a thousand years did I see myself writing a blog post arguing that the vice president is not a co-president, but this is the silly season and ever since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee, at least two groups have found it necessary, or convenient, to treat Kamala Harris as Biden's co-president so that she can be held equally responsible for all the supposed evil he has done.

One group is Trump, and his supporters, obviously. They've spent years building a campaign against Biden. Trump, himself, complains they've spent "hundreds of millions" attacking Biden, before "they" pulled the switch. They'd like to be able to use as much of that as they can against Harris—although they haven't been able to come up with a Hunter angle yet. Still, it's very convenient for them to be able to blame Harris for everything they blamed Biden for. That way they don't have to change their playbook very much, and they can recycle all the old material. Who cares if it really equally applies to Harris? Their job is getting Trump elected, and any mud that might stick to Harris will do, so for all intent and purposes, they have named Kamala Harris Joe Biden's co-president over the last three and a half years.

The other group is those now protesting for Palestine outside of the DNC in Chicago AND are seamlessly replacing their previous invocations against "Genocide Joe" with chats against "Killer Kamala." 

Joe Biden, because he had command authority over all military aid flowing to Israel, because he directed the US military to defend Israel while it was assaulting Gaza, and because he casts the US veto to block any meaningful UN action, while more than 40 thousand Palestinians were massacred, may have well earned the label "Genocide Joe."  But what has the vice president done to be called a killer? Is everyone in Biden's cabinet also a killer? Everyone in the government? Everyone in the military? On account of what the US has done for Israel? Or is it just convenient for the campist-led pro-Palestine movement to come up with a catchy new label for Harris, "Killer Kamala," recycle the old material, and treat her as though she has been Biden's co-president, and equally responsible for his genocidal Gaza policies.

Harris has her own views on Gaza, and we got a rare window into them through her "Remarks by Vice President Harris Following Meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel". In them she gave perhaps the strongest condemnation by any major US politician of what Israel is doing in Gaza:

I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.  And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.  And I will not be silent.

Over at Al Jazeera, commentators were ecstatic! While they have been reporting on these conditions for months, it was the first time they had heard anything like this from a spokesperson for the US government—and she said this to Netanyahu's face! Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said.

“She talked about the number of starvations. The number of people who are food insecure. The number of people who have had to move several times. She talked about seeing pictures of dead children. You don’t see that in the US media. You don’t see it on the front pages of newspapers. Almost hardly at all. There is very little discussion about the plight of the people in Gaza.”

What Harris said certainly wasn't news to them, but they knew it would be news to millions of Americans who got their news on Israel-Gaza solely from US corporate media. Certainly, Biden never spoke out like this. To the "Killer Kamala" crowd it makes no difference. They've got their program and they're sticking to it.

Never mind that the other guy told Netanyahu "It has to get over with fast. ... Get your victory and get it over with," and promised to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again." Or that there is no split in his party over the question of uncritically supporting Israel no matter what it does. They will focus their anger at Harris, just as if she were Biden, and there is no daylight between them. 

With the Republicans, its easy to see why they want to use the same playbook against Harris as Biden because their goal remains the same—to elect Trump. It's not so easy to see why those protesting the suffering in Gaza are falling back on that same approach. There is a opportunist element in this "Uncommitted" movement that support it as a way to take votes away from Trump's opponent. They have backers in the Kremlin, the GOP, and other places where the advantages for Trump of this campaign are well understood. So, it's easy to see why they would follow the MAGA tactic of treating Harris as Biden's co-president. But what about those sincerely in the movement to stop the carnage in Gaza? Shouldn't they allow that Kamala Harris has not been Joe Biden's co-president, should be considered on her own merits, and may be a better choice than Donald Trump when the welfare of the people of Gaza is considered.

Clay Claiborne

20 August 2024