How support for genocide gave the election to Trump

Let me start up by saying that I don't see this as it is often discussed. I don't think that the US voters were sufficiently concerned about the genocide taking place in Gaza to swing the election against Harris/Biden. I don't think this was like 2016, when Trump was elected to his apprenticeship term. Then the white Left, as represented by the Green Party did actually have the power to swing the election towards Trump. In that election, the votes for Jill Stein in three critical states, PA, WI & MI, were enough to swing the election to Clinton had they chose to vote for her rather than use it as a "feel good" vote. In 2024, the white Left had no such clout. Even if the uncommitted movement gave MI to Trump, he would have done perfectly fine without their help. Nevertheless, those who used Israel's genocide in Gaza in a bid to defeat Harris will still own what Trump helps Israel do to Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon going forward.

In my telling of this tale, it is the corporate media, most notably MSNBC, that is most responsible for a white supremacist and fascist being elected president of the United States. While MSNBC was the most vocal of all the corporate media in voicing opposition the MAGA movements bid for power, it has also been the most silent about Israel's crimes in Gaza, and its massacres in the West Bank and Lebanon. CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS have similarly been engaged in a cover-up of Israel's war crimes. While Fox News did give more time to these stories, they did so from a racist  Christian-Zionist perspective, which is arguable worst than silence.

Those that know better what has been going on in Gaza from the daily news reports from Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, and other more truthful news source, have a much clearer idea of what is going on in Gaza. Those daily reports on the Israeli attacks and Palestinian deaths make it obvious why so many international organizations have branded it a genocide. But those well informed Americans are still a minority of US voters.

Most US voters live in an alternate reality carefully cultivated by the US corporate media, and its masters, with regards to what has been happening in Gaza in the last 13 months, or even the last 13 year times three. 

The problem for anyone running for president with the intention of actually winning state power and being able to affect US policy from that position, as opposed to someone running a performative campaign designed to seize the moral high ground and garner like minded votes, is that they have to win a majority of voters who see the conflict through the lens of this alternate reality. 

By representing this limited, and warped, view of what has been happening in Lebanon. Israel, the West Bank, and particularly Gaza, this supposedly liberal media undermined the fight against the Trump takeover in two fundamental ways:

1.) By forcing the whole discussion around Gaza to operate within their alternate reality, they also undermined the ability for a politician to take a position based of justice and still win a majority of US voters. This made the alienation of many voters that demanded justice from the Harris campaign inevitable.

2.) By revealing to those in the know that they were willing to countenance genocide, they undermined their own calls to defend democracy, as many saw it as a call to defend a social order where genocide is okay. And who would want to vote for that?

Based on this thinking, I have conclude that was most necessary from the pro-Palestinian community in the past year, and still most necessary going forward, is a sustained campaign that simply demands that the US corporate media tell US voters and tax payers the truth about what our government is supporting in Palestine.

Clay Claiborne

18 November 2024

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 

On Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and how I "decided" to be Black

Mom, Dad & Me circa 1949

Recently, my sunset watching gang at Venice Beach had a gender reveal party for a pregnant couple, and we were all asked to bring baby pictures. The best one I could find was this picture of me as a toddler, sitting between my mother and father. As you can see, my father was quite dark, and my mother was fair skinned, which accounts for my medium shade.

I first became aware that I was black—and that this was a bad thing—three or four years after this photo was taken. 

I was born in 1948, and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, but my mother, and her family, were from Dudley, NC. Every summer we would drive down to spend a few weeks with the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins in the South. That is where I first learned what it means to be black in America. I can still remember the shame and rage as if it was yesterday.

Mom had taken my younger brother, Cory, and me into Goldsboro, NC, the closest city. As we passed a Woolworths, my brother and I started clamoring for some ice cream, a regular treat from the Woolworths in Atlantic City, and my mom was forced to tell us that we couldn't get ice cream at this Woolworths because we were black! 

Every black child in America has endured a similar dark epiphany.

With her fair skin, straight brown hair, and green eyes, my mom could "pass" for white, and did so as a college student in Savannah, which meant that she didn't have to ride in the back of the bus, and probably could slip into Woolworths for an ice cream without being challenged—provided she was alone. But she couldn't do that with her children, her husband, or even her North Carolina family. So, other than those exceptional college years, she was black all of her life.

I could never "pass" for white, and neither could Kamala Harris. She could have told the bus driver or the people at Woolworths that she was Indian, or South Asian—and see how far that got her. They would have told her to get to the back of the bus and out of the store because as far as they were concerned, she was black. If she had insisted on her rights as another racial identity, the cops would have been called to show her just how black she was.

Trump & the NABJ

To a room full of black journalists, Donald Trump promoted the racist fairy tale that Harris had formerly identified as Indian or South Asian, and only recently decided to be black. This has been met with a flurry of responses showing that she identified as black as early as when she went to Howard University and joined AKA. That's bad news for me because I was one the few blacks in my freshman class at Washington University (St. Louis) and joined SDS because all the fraternities were white—but then, so was SDS, but at least it was radical.

All of these rebuttals showing that she has always identified as black miss the point, and that's the beauty of Trump's racist attack. He's positing racial identity as a personal choice, whereas for people of color, your racial identity is what white people say it is. That central fact seems to be missing from this whole dust up.

One difference between gender and race is that while gender, however you define it, represents an organic category, race is a completely synthetic one. It has no basis in biology. We are all one species. Grouping people by skin color makes about as much sense as grouping them by hair color, which would be our most prominent color identifier if we were still mostly covered by hair, as most mammals are. Instead, we adapted to the sunlight provided at different latitudes by allocating different melanin levels and types to adjust the bare skin to protect us while still producing the necessary vitamin D.

Since race is a completely synthetic category, your race has always been determined by what your white supremacist society says it is.

Keep in mind that the "white" race was invented in the mid to late 1600s, less than 400 years ago in the soon to be United States, and it was invented for purpose of making negroes a permanent slave class. Just consider how the label "white" first made it into Virginia laws. It was in a 1691 law titled “An act for suppressing outlying Slaves”:

And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawfull accompanying with one another, Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever,...

That appears to be the first use of the label "white" to describe people in a law anywhere, but since most Europeans in the colonies had referred to themselves as English or Christian, "white" had to be introduced as a synonym for English or the reader might not know who they meant by "white." Please note also that this first ever use of the "white" label in law was to outlaw intermarriage between the newly created race and non-whites. Also note that negroes were not yet labeled "black," that only came several decades later. Even the Virginia Slave codes on 1705 makes no mention of the "black" label (no pun intended), although it uses the label "negro" 16 times, and the label "white" 9 times.

It has historically been a truth that a fair complexion was no guarantee of the ability to adopt a white identity. Initially, the Irish weren't considered white. The Italians neither. The Poles of Chicago didn't get the "right" to be "white" until the race riots of 1919. The view that Jews couldn't be white was the ideology behind the Holocaust, and the controversy over that question roils the extreme right til this day. 

It's also been shown that even the fairest skin, bluest eyes, and blondest hair haven't always provided protection against being branded black. Such was, by all accounts, the description of one Jane Morrison, 15, who via a complicated odyssey ended up being sold in January of 1857 to the slave trader James White in the slave market in New Orleans. Once sold into the slave trade, she was categorised as a negro or black. Her "white-like" features only made her a more valuable "black."  She ran away, and with the help of a benefactor, sued for her freedom in October of that same year in a Jefferson Parish courtroom. In a case that wouldn't be settled until after Lincoln's assassination, it would be heard by no less than three juries, and the Louisiana Supreme Court twice. The rich court records these proceedings left provide a unique window into the way race is defined in America.

While her blonde hair and blue eyes seemed to broadcast the conclusion that she was white, jurors were told not to believe their eyes. It was said that the mere fact that she had been sold into slavery was enough to prove her a negro. The defense said that while the required "drop of African blood" might not so easily visually detected, it could be proven by "scientific" racism with regards to her bone structure, by claims about her demeanor and sexuality, and lack of "feminine whiteness." In the end it would take a civil war for Morrison to claim her white identity. Race has never been about self-identification because race was developed as a method of social control.

In Conclusion

Trump's claim that:

"I didn't know she (Harris) was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.",

turns the racist paradigm completely on its head. It's not the person of color that informs the white world what his or her racial identity is. It's quite the opposite. It's the white world, and white supremacists like Donald Trump, that inform the non-white people what subhuman category they have been lumped into, and almost nobody is talking about that. That's the beauty of Trump's gambit. 

Clay Claiborne

3 August 2024

I prefer to be identified as African American, but have used the label black for the purposes of this essay even though it has certain negative connotations embedded in it. 

So Joe Biden is 81 now! Never saw that one coming.

Warren Buffet, 93

At 93, Warren Buffet is 12 years older than Joe Biden, but you don't see a lot of people pleading with him to step down as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. That's because he's still making money for himself and the capitalists associated with him, and they value his 57+ years of experience as its CEO. Every year thousands flock to his annual meeting, and hundreds of thousands watch it online, because they value his capitalist wisdom, born of the better part of a century spent becoming a very successful businessman. They don't mind that his speech maybe rough and slow. They are there for the content.

Buffet isn't the only Fortune 500 CEO older than Biden, like Robert Greenberg, 83, who runs Skechers, and Roger Penske, 87 of Penske Automotive. Corporate shareholders tend to select their CEOs based on earnings, not age. Given how much the US economy has turned around since Covid-19 was sent to the background, the stock market has never been higher, Biden should be a shoe in with the donor class. But we are told that some big donors are now abandoning Biden, while at the same time others are embracing Trump for the first time. Are we witnessing a shift in the capitalist class, or a part of it, away from traditional bourgeois democracy, and in favor of authoritarianism, less regulation, and lower taxes for the rich? We all know the lousy debate performance was the trigger, but are there unspoken motives behind the movement to oust Biden suddenly?

How did we get here? When did the presidency become performance art?

Under the careful tutelage of the mainstream media (MSM), much of the public, including the Left, has lost sight of what the real requirements of a good POTUS, i.e. CEO of the United States are, or in anycase, should be. Ever since the 1962 Kennedy-Nixon debates, having the best screen performance has had an outsized influence on our choices. And since then, the right wing has refined the art of selling contentless candidates with on-camera performances. Ronald Reagan would never have been able to sell himself into the presidency without his decades of movie and TV exposure, and performance practice. And now we have Donald Trump, a grifter who honed his craft before the NBC TV audiences before selling it to the most backwards Americans to become the first US president to be branded as a felon or a rapist.

My take on The Economist July cover

Obviously, we live in an age where a bad TV performance is enough to get some key leaders and donors in one's own party to call for your head. We also live in an age where one party to a debate can spew nonstop lies and hate:

We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world – considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world.

Oh, really? More dangerous than Gaza, Sudan, or Ukraine? CNN did him a real service by refusing to fact check him. If the moderators feared they would have to interrupt too often, they could have just noted when he said something that was true. That would have eased their burden considerably.

Trump mixed his vitriol with the occasional nonsense such as "So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever," and the other guy is considered to have the bad performance because his voice is soft and slow, and makes the occasional gaffe. Well, guess what? Joe Biden has been making these verbal gaffes his whole career, that's why they call him the Gaffe Factory. In this 5-year old Guardian article he calls himself the "gaffe machine." Here's a YouTube video of his 10 biggest gaffes of 2020, to refresh your memory—and remember, he won that campaign.

Joe Biden has also had a lifelong struggle with stuttering. This is also something mocked by many. for example Oakland Socialist, which wrote recently, commenting on his ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, who the post mistakenly, and embarrassingly, referred to as "Democrat Stephen Stephanopoulos":

He once again had trouble putting sentences together. “After that debate, I did 10 major events in a row, including until 2 in the morning after the debate," he said. “I did events in North Carolina. I did events in — in — in Georgia, did events like this today, large crowds, overwhelming response, no — no — no slipping. And so, I just had a bad night. I don’t know why.”

Obviously, a problem with stuttering is a serious defect for any politician in our media performance driven world. Could it also be an asset, in curious way, in a president? I have found, in my 75 years, that a white person saddled with a disability may often, through that disability, gain valuable insight and solidarity with other people seen as less than the social norm. They may come to know what white men, like Trump, may otherwise never know. They come know what it's like to be discriminated against, and that's an important life lesson for anyone that aspires to be president of these United States. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and having to listen to a stutterer seems a small price to pay if it contributes to a president's humanity. Some of our most consequential presidents have had issues;  Abraham Lincoln suffered from depression, Dwight Eisenhower had dyslexia and John F. Kennedy wore a back brace.

Addressing that old age question: What are the chances either one will live another 4 years?

After consulting life expectancy tables and actuarial data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ChatGPT told me:

An 81-year-old white male in good health has approximately a 79% chance of living another 4 years, based on current life expectancy data and survival rates.

After I rephased my question slightly, ChatGPT did the math, showed me its work, gave me this conclusion:

An overweight 78-year-old white male has approximately an 83.1% chance of living another 4 years, based on current life expectancy data and adjusted survival rates for overweight status.

That's a 4.1% difference in the probability that either of these presidential candidates will be able to complete his term in office. That's already within the margin of error in some polls. When I ask ChatGPT to factor in Donald Trump's known health issues, I get back this conclusion:

Given his age and health issues, Donald Trump has approximately a 78.3% chance of living another 4 years, based on adjusted survival probabilities. This estimate reflects the impact of his cardiovascular health, obesity, and other factors while considering the general life expectancy for his age group.

When I ask it the same questions about Joe Biden, it comes back with this conclusion:

Given his age and health issues, Joe Biden has approximately a 75.5% chance of living another 4 years, based on adjusted survival probabilities. This estimate reflects the impact of his managed cardiovascular and chronic health conditions while considering the general life expectancy for his age group.

So, when perceptions aren't influenced by hair dye, fake tans, and the manic energy that hate can generate, and the question is looked at cooly and objectively by an AI bot consulting real data, we find that Donald Trump, who isn't as healthy as Joe Biden, has only a 2.8% greater chance of completing his term, even if he's willing to leave after four years. When the fact that a POTUS gets much better healthcare than even the average white man (AWM) is factored in, I assume the likelihood that either of these candidates will complete his term in office goes up, but the differences will remain.

2.8% is well within the margin of error in anybody's poll. I think that pretty much takes the question of age off the table as an issue in any rational employee selection. Especially when the job is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," and the slightly younger applicant is vowing to tear up the Constitution! More on that in:

A few thoughts on the question of Biden's age

Stephen Hawking c. 1980

So, Joe Biden is 81. He has had a long history of gaffes, and a long struggle against stuttering, and those problems aren't getting better with age. He's also prone to tripping when very low barriers are placed in his path—thank you, Secret Service. None of this supports claims that he's suddenly "losing it" or going senile. None of that  justifies calls for him to step down, or for his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. At the almost hour long press conference after the NATO gathering he gave a master class in foreign policy that the other guy couldn't do in his dreams. I don't agree with that foreign policy—I think he's held Ukraine back with the weapons he's given them, and how he's allowed it to use them, and I think he's earned the appellation "Genocide Joe" for his support for Israel's massacres of Palestinians—but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about his command of the facts, broad overview of the overall situation, and ability to provide leadership. That's the kind of thing you need for a good CEO; media performance ability should be well down the list. Hell, If Stephen Hawking were an American, I'd voted to elect him president, if I agreed with his politics and his genius was in politics, rather than physics. Nevermind that he needs a wheelchair and an artificial voice.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, arguably, the most consequential US president of the twentieth century—he served 12 years, led the US out of the Great Depression, and then led the world in the defeating fascism in WWII, and he did it all from a wheelchair. That's why I mock the recent Economist cover by replacing their walker accompany the statement "No way to run a country," with a wheelchair.

So, what's going on here? 

Why did all of MSM focus on Biden's poor debate performance to the exclusion of Donald Trump's lies and hate? I've grown even more suspicious of them after seeing them all move in lockstep to defend Israel, and cover up a genocide. Do they have other motives for wanting to ease Biden out of the White House that aren't age and gaffe related? Why suddenly the panic among some big Democratic politicians and donors, i.e. representatives of the capitalist class? Why are they all arguing that in order to save democracy they need to so by the undemocratic method of forcing out the candidate that got 87% of the popular votes in the Democratic primaries? It can't be that they are surprised that Biden is 81 suddenly. If age is a problem, it was entirely predictable, and those that thought it a problem had plenty of time to field candidates to challenge Biden in the primaries, and give Democratic voters a democratic choice of a younger candidate. But to pull this stuff now only helps Trump, and lessens the chance that any Democratic candidate can defeat him.

We should question whether there are ulterior motives for pushing Biden out among some Democratic members of the capitalist class. It seems like a kind of herd mentality took over where MSM suddenly focused on Biden's age and mental fitness to hold office, to the exclusion of almost everything else, including the on going genocide in Gaza. FoxNews, and that whole crowd, has been pushing this stuff for years. If you'll remember, it was a big part of their playbook against Biden in 2020. Now all of MSM is piling on, and mostly ignoring the worst of Trump. It's almost like they feel that Biden's pro-labor policies in his 1st term, and the promise to do more in a 2nd term, are a little too much for them. They have warmed to Trump, and his pro-business policies in Project 2025, and are using the manufactured "Biden age crisis" to put their fat thumbs on the scale for Trump.

What about Kamala Harris?

For those looking to bump Biden, there's also the sticky question of who will replace him. It's not like the party is united around an alternative. Kamala Harris is the obvious choice in many eyes, but other politicians and donors are calling for an open convention—meaning they want to put somebody else in. That's problematic. If they push out Harris, as well as Biden, they will alienate many of African American women and other core constituencies of the Democratic victory in 2020. And if not Harris, who? CA governor Gavin Newsom? He came in 2nd with 7% behind Harris's 29% in a recent poll comparing 30 Biden alternatives, and he also says he doesn't want the job. So, who else? Plus, I'm not so sure that an America where Trump may even be ahead is ready to elect its first woman president, and second black president this year. So, while Harris is obviously much younger than Biden, she comes with her own demographic issues.

So, it's my advice to all those that see the imperative of defeating Trump and his Project 2025 that they put aside all this defeatist talk about replacing Biden at this late date, focus their fire on the forebearer of fascism, and get behind the last man standing after the Democratic primaries. Those who favor replacing Biden with Harris should see that they campaign as a team, and that she is put out front where the nation can get to know her as an able leader more than qualified to fill the shoes of the presidency should Biden not hit the tape on this track. That would seem like a win-win for the Democrats because no matter how the second Biden term ends, Kamala Harris will be well positioned to succeed him with two full terms.

my 2¢
Clay Claiborne

14 July 2024

Some preliminary thoughts on Donald Trump assassination attempt 

I was working on this post yesterday and had the Butler, PA Trump rally on in background, so I heard it in real time, and started watching immediately. Based on what little I've heard so far, I wonder if the point of the operation by the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was to commit suicide by Secret Service. From his perch on the roof of a building just outside of the rally perimeter he was in a good position to target the former president, but he had to know that as soon as he fired, hit of miss, he would be killed by devastating return fire from the SS counter-snipers positioned on other roofs with better equipment.

If he felt so strongly that Trump had to be assassinated that he was willing to give his own life to do so, that's a level of fanaticism that has yet to be revealed. If he was just looking to go out in a blaze of glory, that might explain why he used an AR-15 type weapon, when a hunting rifle would have been better for the long range work, and why he didn't use a scope, for the most important shot of his life. Is it possible that he was more interest in killing himself than killing Trump? Either way, it's important to understand his motivation. Violence in this country has many.