Soil to bury our dead
I was on the treadmill when all of the TVs at Planet Fitness switched to coverage of Iran's strike on Israel. I'd never seen them do that kind of thing before. Even the ones that usually show commercials for Planet Fitness while you're at Planet Fitness. Almost all of them actually. One still had Pat McAfee talking to Aaron Rodgers. Not even the imminent threat of a large scale war will relieve us of these men.
And then... I just kept working out. It was such a strange feeling. I figured if it's going to be World War III then I had better try to get in shape.
There's too much happening. I can't get to it all. The poisonous chlorine cloud looming over Georgia for starters. Check this out this won't come as a surprise: "Private equity barons just pocketed as much as $850 million from the company behind this week’s massive chemical blast in Georgia," The American Prospect reported.
Stories like this one from PBS are about a different disaster but it's the same root cause:
As the nearby Nolichucky River swelled from rainfall, employees in the Impact Plastics factory in Erwin, a small community in rural Tennessee, kept working. Several asserted that they weren’t allowed to leave in time to avoid the storm’s impact. It wasn’t until water flooded into the parking lot and the power went out that the plant shut down and sent workers home.
Several never made it.
The raging waters swept 11 people away, and only five were rescued.
They will work us to death one way or the other. The rich will have their money and they will climb over a pile of our bodies to get it.
This tweet got most of the way to summing things up I think.
Here's another story from Documented about ICE holding fascist fantasy camps for civilians to prepare for rounding up immigrants:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has run a secretive program for years where ICE agents have trained hundreds of civilian volunteers on how to operate multiple types of firearms, conduct investigations and surveillance of immigrants, and use lethal force on human beings.
The program, known as Citizens Academies, includes role-play scenarios for civilians to conduct fictional raids on immigrants and is active in New York and in more than a dozen cities across the country.
Maybe they can get in on this sort of thing reported on in the Washington Post too:
And while I'm thinking of it read this from the Guardian:
A New Jersey couple seriously injured when their Uber driver ran a red light and collided with another car has lost a bid to take legal action against the company in court.
John McGinty and Georgia McGinty argue Uber is enforcing an arbitration agreement after their daughter clicked “agree” when presented with updated terms and conditions while ordering food via her mom’s Uber Eats account.
Uber says that Georgia McGinty’s account on its app received a “full-screen pop-up” on several occasions, which required the user to accept updated terms of use before accessing its service.
I thought of a bit I wrote in ACWF about concurrent calamities:
At least twenty-five people are dead after a boat fire off the coast of Maine and at least five people are dead after a hurricane pummeled Connecticut and seven people are dead and twenty-two more are wounded after a shooting in Pennsylvania no not that one a new one and you can turn on your TV right now and watch them all being talked about one after the other if you want just flip back and forth from one channel to the next and it’s like a scene in a disaster movie where the person is watching TV in the background to let you know things are going to all hell. They flip channel by channel and weirdly even now in movies they still do this as like a stylistic choice they make it so the channel changing has that old percussive chunking sound where you’d hear a bit of static in the spaces in between. TVs don’t do that anymore they don’t make that sound anymore the toggling between everything is a lot more seamless and streamlined now.
And all the while Israel is killing and killing and killing in Gaza and Lebanon. More on that down below in a new piece about the similarities between the current Israeli genocide and the Vietnam War by Arvind Dilawar. Paid subscribers can also go directly to it here.
Luke O’Neil
You've probably seen this clip by now but watch it if you haven't. My god the way this smarmy fuck tries to jam up Coates from the jump. The first question is basically "You're no different than a terrorist isn't that right?" I would not have handled this with a fraction of the patience and calm that Coates does.
“Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong. It’s really really simple," Coates said.
Rest in peace to Kris Kristofferson who among many other admirable traits shared that sentiment.
It's hard to focus on any one thing for too long but this sort of shit next really gets up my ass in particular. Probably because it's such a succinct demonstration of How Things Are and Are Going to Be.
Police in Black Mountain North Carolina were standing guard outside of a grocery store preventing the people whose homes had been destroyed by the hurricane from getting inside. In South Carolina Greenville County Sheriff Hobart Lewis reminded anyone that was considering "looting" a store that local business owners are well armed and that he and the coroner's office would be the ones dealing with them if they tried. "You certainly won't need EMS," he said. In Swannanoa North Carolina hundreds of people had lined up outside a brewery hoping to find some water the Washington Post reported. "Nearby, someone discovered that an 18-wheeler wrecked during the storm was full of bottled water, and dozens of people came to grab cases and hand out cases to others, until police officers arrived and shouted for them to leave. 'You are stealing!' one shouted as the crowd dispersed."
I'd call this sort of thing an outrage but it's not it's just police functioning exactly they way they are supposed to. Prioritizing the protection of property over people's lives. We're often happy to deputize ourselves in their ranks as well as I wrote in this piece back in 2018 about the aftermath of hurricanes Florence and Katrina and what happens to prisoners during violent storms and the little fascist that lives inside of us all.
Luke O’Neil
Here's another story that has superlatively pissed me off this week. Longtime Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown announced that he will be stepping down with more than a year left in his term to take a job as the CEO of an off-track betting corporation. That's already a pretty good metaphor for the state of things as it is but more to my point here it's a reminder of the lengths New York Democrats went to rat fuck India Walton – a socialist who beat this turd in the primary before he ran a successful crybaby write-in campaign.
Read this one from October 2021 if you never did.
Luke O’Neil
Earlier this summer India Walton won the mayoral primary by defeating four term incumbent and replacement level capital-backed Democrat pud Byron Brown. Typically one Democrat defeating another in a city election would not be cause for too much alarm among a state’s party leadership but Walton as you likely know is a former union organizer and community activist and nurse and more to the point a Democratic Socialist and so now everyone is acting real fucking weird about the whole thing. First Brown refused to even debate her during the election. Then upon losing he thought I’ve made a huge mistake and almost immediately announced he’d be running a cry baby write-in campaign against the “inexperienced” “radical socialist” which a judge allowed him to do even though he had missed the deadline to declare. So scared were some of the city and state leadership at the prospect of a Walton win that in July the Buffalo Common Council started batting around the idea of eliminating the position of mayor altogether. Fuck it better to completely reorganize our system of city government than let a socialist come in and try to help people.
Next the rat-fucking tales of Walton’s “shady” past started to emerge. In a story seized upon with glee by much of the local press it was reported that Walton had committed “welfare fraud” and hadn’t paid some of her taxes and had been caught driving with a suspended license. In 2003 Walton a young struggling mother had received a grand total of $295 extra dollars in food stamps which she was later ordered to repay and which she did. In 2004 she was charged with owing $562 in back taxes which grew to $749 with fees and penalties which she also repaid. Years later she was stopped while driving with a suspended license due to failure to make an insurance payment.
None of this matters at all or speaks to her fitness to govern to be clear. In fact I’d say the exact opposite. This is the type of shit a normal person goes through in a normal life. Having been recently poor is about as good an endorsement as I can think of for a politician. I’m just trying to illustrate how much they’re throwing at her. This is exactly the tightrope we force poor people to walk in order to make their lives even more miserable and keep them in poverty. $295 extra in food stamps for a young mother. What is that? What are we even talking about here? Who is victimized by that? Do the good people of the state of New York deserve vengeance for such a crime?
Get involved in local politics they say. Run for office they say. Change things from the inside they say.
Up next we have Arvind Dilawar on the parallels between and lessons to be learned from Israel's ongoing genocide and the Vietnam War. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it all. Thanks for supporting our work here if you can.
If Gaza is the new Vietnam, then this is just the start
by Arvind Dilawar
Similarities exist between 2024 and 1968, but our current moment is more akin to Vietnam pre-1965 — before the US really got involved.
A surprise attack on a U.S. ally shifting the course of a long-running conflict, a Democratic president’s re-election campaign subsequently aborted, his party holding a contentious convention in the aftermath, and the conflict rapidly escalating into a regional proxy war — is this the year 2024 or 1968?
It’s a question that commentators from The New York Times to The Nation have implicitly posed in editorials comparing aspects of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza to that of the Vietnam War. And there is something to it. In January 1968, the Chinese-backed Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, a surprise attack on the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese and U.S. troops, which would be a turning point in the war. It would also have profound implications in the United States, including the abortion of Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign in March and the Democrats’ riotous national convention in Chicago in August. Overseas, the U.S. government would respond to the Tet Offensive by further expanding its military operations in neighboring Laos in July and Cambodia in March of the following year. Substitute Iran, Hamas, Israel, Biden, Lebanon and Yemen, and you’d have a rough summary of 2024, give or take a few months here and there.
While there are strong similarities to 1968, our current moment is actually more akin to Vietnam pre-1965, before the United States began its ground war and consequently expanded the draft. Accordingly, the challenge for opponents then and now remains the same: organizing against a conflict that is not yet directly touching the lives of most people in the United States — before we're all dragged further into a genocidal war.