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.

Medical Oddity Roger Ailes Finally Dies at Age 77

In a case of an unexplained medical miracle, Roger Ailes lived to age 77 without a human heart. Scientists have long been at a loss to explain this phenomenon. One theory holds that since Ailes had ice water in his veins and not blood, no heart was necessary to sustain life.

Ailes, better known as a lifelong rightwing political operative and propaganda master, made his first major contribution to making life on earth worse for the human race by helping get Richard Nixon into the White House through his work as a media svengali for Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. Later he became a key henchman to evil reactionary global agit-propaganda czar Rupert Murdoch, a verminous lifeform that arose in Australia. Ailes is credited as the mastermind of Murdoch's Fox "News" channel, a platform for ranting reactionary disinformation and agit-propaganda.

Ailes, a known serial sex offender, is being given a totally misleading and undeservedly respectful sendoff by the U.S. corporate media, which refuses to report the facts of his life's work promoting anti-human policies and power. That media of course is rightwing, a fact it obfuscates by pretending its propaganda is "objective news."

Last July, after a sex scandal finally blew up publicly, Murdoch was finally forced to ditch Ailes, paying him $40 million just to go away.

Unfortunately Rupert Murdoch, a reptilian lifeform, apparently is going to live to be over 100, just like the mother who spawned him.

I'll put you on TV if you give me a kiss, Baby!

HE may be dead, but I'm NOT, Mate!

If You're Seeking Disingenuousness, The New York Times Is A Great Place To Look!

Year after year, the New York Times "news"paper often demonstrates a remarkable ability to be seemingly oblivious to elephants in the room. It even at times flatly denies the reality that the very facts it reports make obvious. One has to wonder why this is.

Sometimes it would seem to be motivated by a desire to avoid conflict with other capitalist industries, or with institutions of state power. There is also a desire to uphold and protect various planks of the ideological system. They don't want to fundamentally change the outlook or consciousness of people. (That is quite distinct from molding opinion on this or that issue, which they do assiduously, every day.)

Now here is a rather glaring example, which the Times put under the heading "Media," indicating that in the print edition it appeared in the Business section. This is from the Times website dated May 30:

           "Television Networks Struggle to Provide Equal Airtime in the Era of Trump." [1]

The article is about Donald Trump's dominant presence in the media vs. Hillary Clinton's much smaller media footprint. This is attributed by the Times to the different behavioral styles of those two presidential candidates, and in Clinton's case, to an active avoidance of the media. Much of the article consists of handwringing by various media executives and on-air figures, which likewise is disingenuous on their part.

The very first paragraph gets things wrong. Quote: "Donald J. Trump relishes the spotlight of live television. Hillary Clinton has long recoiled from it. Now, the television news industry is wrestling with how to balance fairness, credibility and the temptations of sky-high ratings as it prepares for a presidential matchup like none other."

Fairness, credibility and the temptations of sky-high ratings are in reverse order of actual important to the TV industry. Obvious ratings- a surrogate for revenues and profits- is most important. Credibility matters longer term. Fairness? What fairness? Maybe an appearance of fairness, somewhat. Since when has "fairness" (a totally subjective quality in any event, completely in the eye of the beholder) mattered in propaganda?

But no need to dally there. What struck me most forcefully, and revealed the headline to be packed with disingenuousness to the bursting point (remember, Networks Struggle to Provide Equal Airtime) are some facts from the article itself. Namely that when Clinton gave speeches to labor unions, the TV networks blacked out the speeches. In one instance, they instead "covered" an empty Trump podium. (Unmentioned by the Times: the TV bosses did the same thing to Bernard Sanders. On the night of a bunch of his primary wins, they blacked out his speech, focusing instead on an empty Trump podium. But the Times is no stranger to blacking out news itself. Ralph Nader was virtually ignored by the rag when he ran for president, despite drawing tens of thousands of people to rallies, including ones with admission charges such as at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Do I detect a political bias operating in the "objective journalism" of U.S. news?)

Here are the paragraphs from the article that reveal the dishonesty of the headliine:

"Networks are seeking novel ways to maintain balance [between Trump and Clinton], like staging voter town halls that provide candidates with equal airtime; seeking a wider spectrum of on-air contributors and campaign surrogates; and bringing more fact-checking into segments, as Jake Tapper has done recently on CNN to some acclaim. [Acclaim? From who? From other propagandists, that's who! For asking obvious questions! Hey, I could do that job.]

"Still, the presence of Mr. Trump can be irresistible, especially in an election in which viewership and advertising rates have soared, generating tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue for an industry threatened by digital competition. [What "threat"? The networks all ARE online themselves.There are no "upstart" TV networks.]

"Last week, none of the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC — carried Mrs. Clinton’s speech to a workers’ union in Las Vegas, where she debuted sharp new attack lines against Mr. Trump. [Sounds "newsworthy" to me. She had new things to say. But ah, she was talking to workers, in a union, and the capitalist media hates unions and doesn't much like workers either.]

"Instead, each chose to broadcast a live feed of an empty podium in North Dakota, on a stage where Mr. Trump was about to speak.

"The same discrepancy [sic!] occurred earlier this month, when the cable networks aired Mr. Trump’s address to the National Rifle Association live from start to finish. A speech by Mrs. Clinton in Detroit days later, to a labor union, did not receive the same coverage; all three networks skipped the speech, with Fox News airing a lighthearted [read: trivial] segment about a nationwide backlog of cheese." [My emphases.]

I wouldn't call that a "discrepancy." But the Times is right: covering a Trump speech, while totally ignoring a Clinton speech, is indeed not "the same coverage." Just like zero and 100 aren't "the same."

So here's the disingenuousness. Are the networks "struggling" to provide "equal airtime" when they actively black out events involving unions? Doesn't sound like they're "struggling" very hard.

Notice too the attempt to substitute "town hall" bullshit for people in their actual role as workers. The U.S. media always strives to prevent people from thinking of themselves as workers. "Workers" are always somebody else, somebody costing businesses money, or being selfish and inconsiderate by going on strike and causing the public hardship (or at least inconvenience). We all are "consumers." So there's "the consumer" and "the worker," and never do the twain meet in bourgeois ideology (or in "economics" either, it seems).

But you see, this "discrepancy" is because Trump is just so masterful. He's "irresistible" catnip to the media drones and their masters, who count the dollars in the tills. Here's the Times again:

"In interviews, more than a dozen anchors, executives and news producers displayed admiration for Mr. Trump’s facility with their medium. Some expressed a bit of soul-searching, [see the handwringing?] admitting unease at the unfiltered exposure he has received, with one anchor describing frustration about being asked to conduct on-air interviews with Mr. Trump by telephone, rather than in person. But several offered the defense that whatever viewers make of Mr. Trump, he is undoubtedly newsworthy — and always accessible."

Why, it's enough to make a propagandist swoon!

Of course, you have to be "nice" to Mr. Trump, or he'll abuse you ferociously, and in public.

This is such nonsense. It's like "McCarthyism," the idea that one person is making things happen that are in fact institutional activities. "The" media is promoting Trump, although we have to make a distinction here between the broadcast arms and the print arms. The print arms, aimed at more intelligence and intellectually sophisticated people- people who read- has certainly been quite critical (rightly so, and I mean rightly both factually and morally) of Trump and his despicable demagoguery. But there is no question that broadcast media has aided and abetted the Rise of Trump. In fact, the man can be said to be a media creation.

The truth is, the media pick and choose what to "cover" and what to ignore. The only caveat here is that by creating a Frankenstein monster, "the" media have created a self-reinforcing momentum for Trump. Now they feel compelled, for reasons of profit (as the article does admit) and competition with each other, to keep on giving Trump far more attention than his idiotic statements deserve.

But another caveat: now that he's the presidential candidate of one of the two corporate oligarchic political parties of the U.S. two-party dictatorship, he actually is very important.

What happens if this loose cannon, Donald J. Trump, narcissist extraordinaire, becomes president of the globally dominant U.S.A.?

Well, the ruling elites made their bed, now they have to lie in it. They created their monster, and they'll have to figure out how to control his rampages if he attains the top power position in the U.S. and in the world.

As they used to say in Brooklyn, Oy vey!

1] New York Times, May 30, 2016.

Funny thing, when I went to double check the meaning of disingenuous, Oxford Dictionaries online gave a first example sentence that dovetailed nicely with this essay:

DISINGENUOUS
ADJECTIVE
"Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does: 'this journalist was being somewhat disingenuous as well as cynical.'"

Now why did they choose that as an example!

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/disingenuous