Bank Bailout Blues: A Toxic Train Blows Up And Poisons An Entire Working Class Community And Biden Is AWOL
But A Bank Blows Up And Biden Can’t Bail Out The Rich Fast Enough
Always Trillions For Banks, Wall Street, And War
There is no better contrast to expose the current economic and political reality in the United States today than to compare the response of President Biden to the East Palestine toxic train catastrophe versus his response to the Silicon Valley Bank.
The backdrop being $113 billion to wage a proxy war in Ukraine and a record near trillion dollar Pentagon budget to prepare for another war with China.
Biden flew thousands of miles to Ukraine to promise even more.
Trillions for banks, billionaires, speculators, and war – including even paying the pensions of Ukrainian civil servants – but didley squat for the people of East Palestine.
Old “AMTRAK Joe” couldn’t hop a train to Ohio (but Bi-partisan Joe and his corporate Dems moved almost as quickly to crush the railroad workers union).
Deregulation for the banks and the railroads!
Subsidies and investment for the high tech suburban Silicon Valleys, deindustrialization and disinvestment for manufacturing and the rural Rust Belt.
(take a look at what Neoliberal policies (e.g. deregulation, privatization, globalization – free-trade agreements, austerity, et al) and corporate finance capitalism have done to northeastern Ohio rust belt towns, look:
What the hell is going on here?
An entire generation of self described “progressives”, “activists”, Movement for Black Lives, and other social and economic justice advocates seem to have missed the US history class when the works of Dr. King were presented.
What else could explain not only the total invisibility of an anti-war movement, but actual SUPPORT for the war?
And it’s Not only SUPPORT for the war, but ugly scenes where so called “progressives” actually SHOUT DOWN war protesters who are attempting to hold Congresspersons accountable for their votes in support of the war.
Down Orwell’s Memory Hole is the history of how Dr. King excoriated war, and not only for the immoral and evil murder and destruction it caused but for the diversion of billions from LBJ’s “Great Society” to the Pentagon war budget.
In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech – exactly one year before and the likely cause of his murder – King said:
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. […]
We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. […]
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
All while real journalists – i.e. Sy Hersh, the man who broke the My Lai massacre story among many others – are forced to publish anti-war war crime stories on Substack.
What the hell is going on here?