Roaming Charges: The Trick of Disaster
Jeffrey St. Clair+ Give Trump some credit. He has no interest in faking empathy, as Biden did so ineptly. In Trump’s playbook, empathy is a weakness, even amid tragedy. Instead, each disaster is an opportunity to go on the attack, to ascribe blame on his enemies, to aggrandize himself, and to find ways to profit from the carnage, financially and politically.
+ I’m reminded of Robert Musil’s sprawling unfinished satirical masterpiece, A Man Without Qualities, set in what Musil called the “pseudo-reality” of pre-war Vienna. Trump is not Musil’s Ulrich, by any means, an insignificant man trapped in the machinery of a world going mad. Trump is Ulrich’s inverse, a self-inflated man driving the world mad. He is the man without empathy, who feeds off catastrophe, confusion and anxiety.
+ Thus, it was no surprise that only moments after an American Airlines plane collided with a Blackhawk helicopter near National (aka, Reagon) Airport and crashed into the Potomac, killing 67 people, Trump, constitutionally unable to console, went on the attack, casting blame before the bodies could be recovered and identified.
+ Last week, Trump fired 400 FAA senior officials, including the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee and the head of the TSA, and froze the hiring of new Air Traffic Controllers. Now, an American Airlines plane collides with a Blackhawk helicopter outside DC, killing 67 people. But before any investigation can be done, perhaps because there’s no one left in the government to investigate, he took to Twitter to target the helicopter pilot and the air traffic controllers…
+ The next day, Trump scuffled his way into the White House press room and suggested that the real cause of the collision may have been DEI hires…
Reporter: Are you saying this crash was somehow caused by diversity hiring? What evidence do you have to support these claims?
Trump: It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a much higher standard than anybody else. And there are things like this where you have to go by brain power, you have to go by psychological, uh, quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it. These are very powerful tests that we put to use that were terminated by Biden. And by a standard, that is the exact opposite. So we don’t know. We’re going to look into that, and we’ll see. But certainly, for an air traffic controller, we want the best, the brightest, the sharpest. We want somebody that’s psychologically superior.”
+ Then Trump affixed his grandiose signature to an imperial edict (which is apparently how the government will run for the next four years, independent of Congress), effectively blaming Biden and DEI for the DC plane crash.
+ One can only hope that none of the crew of the Blackhawk or Air Traffic Controllers were black, Hispanic, gay, trans, or women…They’ll be targeted regardless of any culpability. DEI will be the go-to culprit for any major government fuck-up during the Trump years, and there are bound to be many with this crew in the cockpit.
+ As Trump targeted DEI, the NYT reported that staffing at the air traffic control tower at D.C. airport was “not normal” at the time of the collision. Only one controller was handling helicopters while also giving instructions to planes, which is usually done by two controllers. Meanwhile, according to The Verge, Trump ousted FAA commissioner Michael Whitaker on January 20 at the behest of Elon Musk, who was furious that the FAA fined SpaceX for failing to get approval for launch changes.
+ Not only doesn’t Congress work for you, but it actively puts your life in danger to appease its corporate political donor class. According to a report in The Lever, “airline-bankrolled Democratic and GOP lawmakers recently joined together to brush off dire safety warnings & stealthily pass a bill expanding flight traffic at Washington National Airport – even as the region’s lawmakers begged them not to.”
+ Over to you, Neil…
Stick around while the clown
who is sick
does the trick of disaster…
+++
+ It’s hard not to conclude that Trump’s weeklong shock-and-awe bombardment of executive orders and mass firings–many blatantly illegal, others unenforceable–is designed to cause chaos and confusion and then exploit the widespread panic he has instigated. Consider the OMB memo this week freezing all federal grants, aids, and loans, an executive action aimed directly at low-income families, including Medicaid, school breakfast and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance, Title I education grants; Temporary Assistance to Needy Families; state grants for child care; Head Start and SNAP.
+ Oregon’s Senator Sen. Ron Wyden: “My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night’s federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health insurance from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.”
+ As the dread and trepidation spread, from universities and homeless veterans groups to school lunchrooms and health clinics, Trump’s OMB, run by only Stephen Miller’s scalp-polisher knows for sure at this point, sent out another 2.5-page memo of clarification, which only added to the growing discomfiture. Republicans, like Rep. Rich McCormick, the Republican from Georgia, volunteered to defend even the most heinous cuts. McCormick told CNN that the cuts were “an experiment” designed to prove that poor kids should get jobs at places like Burger King and McDonalds instead of receiving free school lunches. The school lunch program serves grades pre-K through high school, meaning it feeds children as young as four. Hey, if Trump can work the fryer at McDonalds, any four-year-old could, right?
+ Trump’s theater of cruelty also exposed the impotence and absurdity of the Democratic leadership, none of whom was more impotent and absurd than Chuck Schumer. How the Senator From Citibank closed his press conference this morning on Trump’s spending freezes, which threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions in the US: “People are aroused. I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.” Likely not since Chuck snuck in the back entrance of the Peepland on Times Square to see Debbie Does Dallas…(Schumer’s aroused by the fundraising opportunities it presents without him having to do anything to stop it.)
A few more hours of madness passed before the Trump White House issued a terse memo rescinding the OMB letter.
Then, just as things began to calm down a bit, the White House press secretary announced that the rescission was only for the OMB “letter” and that the freeze on spending was meant to stay in place. Under what authority, who knows?
+ I’m told you could hear the gleeful cackling in the Oval Office all the way from Baltimore.
+ Some politicians take power, some have it taken from them, and others, namely our Congress, give it away.
+++
Dr. Phil rode along with ICE agents on raids in Chicago.
+ Deportation TV is set to become the “Cops” of the Trump Era, hosted by … Dr. Phil.
+ As I noted last week, American attitudes toward immigration are bracing. According to a new Quinnipiac Poll, 44% of Americans support deporting all undocumented immigrants, and 39% support deporting only the ones convicted of violent crimes. More ominously, at least 60% of Americans support Trump’s plan to send 10,000 US military troops to the border.
+ Once again, Americans have been pre-conditioned for Trump’s militarization of the border by his predecessors: Clinton (Operation Gateway), George W. Bush (Operation Jump Start) and Obama (Operation Phalanx).
+ Hours after someone in Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet (aka, Fox & Friends) suggested it, Trump vowed to imprison undocumented migrants at Guantanamo Bay.
+ Trump: “We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”
+ FoxNews may have put the idea into Trump’s head, but Clinton and Biden gave him the blueprint for how to do it.
+ Gitmo, where 15 detainees from the Forever Wars continue to languish, doesn’t have anything close to 30,000 beds. Trump’s role model, Bill Clinton, crammed more than 30,000 Haitians there in the ‘90s, but in what the NYT referred to as “crude tent cities,” similar to the tent camps in Gaza’s “humanitarian safe zones” (which were bombed twice a week for more than a year).
+ As with the Forever War detainees, the primary motive for the scheme to imprison migrants at Gitmo is to remove them from the lawyers, courts and social services that they will need to survive their detention.
+ The Navajo Nation says at least 15 Native Americans have been detained by immigration agents in Arizona and New Mexico since Trump took office.
+ Efficiency in Government Under Trump Update:
Cost per migrant deported on US military flights to Guatemala: $4,675
Cost of a one-way first-class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala City: $853
+ In 2021, ICE reported its deportation flights cost around $8,577 per flight hour. But because Trump wanted to highlight using the military for deportation purely as a performative gesture, the most recent flights using C-17s cost $28,500 per hour.
+ The Portland Police Department announced this week that they would not cooperate in Trump’s immigrant raids. Good. But having plenty of experience with the Portland PoPo, I believe it’s reasonable to assume they prefer to do their own harassment.
+ Origin of immigrant populations Trump wants to deport:
Mexico: 4 million
El Salvador: 750,000
India: 725,000
Guatemala: 675,000
Venezuela: 600,000
Honduras: 525,000
China: 375,000
Ukraine: 250,000
Dominican Republic: 230,000
Brazil: 230,000
Haiti: 200,000
Colombia: 190,000
Canada: 160,000
Ecuador: 140,000
Afghanistan: 100,000
+ Poll of Greenladers on Trump’s quest to annex Greenland…
Those who want to leave Denmark for the US: 6%
Those who want to stay part of Denmark: 85%
+ Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, wearing a gold cross nearly as heavy as the one Jesus lugged down the Via Dolorosa, said on Tuesday that the “legal opinion” of the Trump administration is that the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship is “unconstitutional.”
+ Number of ICE arrests in week one of the Trump administration: 3,552
Ave number ICE arrests a week during Biden’s final year in office: 2703
+++
+ Ken Klippenstein, a human magnet for leaked documents, was slipped an internal memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency ordering it to “pause” all commemorations for MLK Day, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Pride and Juneteenth, among others…
+ The Project on Government Oversight reports that Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and insistence on loyalty to President Donald Trump, has been installed as general counsel for the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
+ Still, Kloster may largely be a yes man for the real power behind the scenes, Elon Musk, who Wired says has apparently seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—which it calls “the human resources function for the entire federal government”—and has loaded it up with people who worked for him at Tesla, X, and Neuralink, among them a recent high school grad who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.
+ In another blatantly illegal purge, Trump has removed Biden’s appointees from the National Labor Relations Board. Another blatantly illegal purge: “As the 1st Black woman Board Member, I brought a unique perspective that I believe will be lost upon my unprecedented and illegal removal,” said Gwynne Wynne. “I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent.”
+ Make America Healthy Again, unless it interferes with the Boss’s dining habits…RFK Jr: “I don’t want to take food away from anybody. If you like a McDonald’s, cheeseburger and a Diet Coke, which my boss loves, you should be able to get them.”
+ Caroline Kennedy: RFK, Jr “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.” What a weird tribe the Kennedys are…
+ The stupidest thing (out of many contenders) RFK, Jr said during his confirmation hearings: “Americans like their private health insurance.”
+ Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee to be the next attorney general, owns more than $3.9 million in stock in Trump’s “Truth Social” platform. Bondi received $2,969,563 worth of shares at the time, which she received as compensation for consulting work for the company when it went public last March. She’s earned almost $1 million from the investment in the previous nine months.
+ Wednesday’s nonsense from Trump: “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. And you know what? They used them as a method of making bombs.” Move over, Underwear Bomber!
+ Pamela Zoslov: “Trojan missiles?”
+ Trump says he’s going to deny visas and deport any pro-Hamas college students in the US. Will ICE try to determine the kids’ political sympathies by searching their dorm rooms for Hamas condoms?
+ Can someone send Rafael Edward Cruz Julie Greene’s two definitive histories of the Panama Canal, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal and Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers and the Panama Canal, on the tiny chance he might read them and comprehend just how wrong he is on every assertion…
+ They Were Just Not That Into Her…According to Bloomberg News, Kamala Harris’s campaign appearances on YouTube-distributed shows received 6.8 million views. Meanwhile, Trump’s added up to 113.6 million. (It’s astonishing that Trump didn’t win by several million more votes.)
+ Sen. Chris Murphy on why the Democrats must fight Trump harder (or get more aroused, in Schumer-speak): “This has been a red-alert moment for weeks—now no one can deny it. For my colleagues that didn’t want to cry wolf, the wolf is literally chomping at our leg right now.”
+ Rep Jim Hines, the Democrat from Connecticut, who is a former investment banker, told CNBC that Trump’s appointees culled from Wall Street “know what they’re doing” and that “I actually think the economy is in relatively good hands.” Whether the economy is in good hands is up for serious debate; whether the Democrats are in good hands isn’t…
+++
+ On Tuesday night, this Tweet appeared out of the blue…
+ But the US military didn’t enter the state of California. They didn’t turn on “water flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.” The federal government turned on water pumps that had been shut down for maintenance for 3 days. Other than that, what’ve you got, Mr. President?
+ Number of fire alerts in LA County during the first three weeks of 2024: 183
The average number of fire alerts in LA County in the first three weeks of the year from 2012 through 2024: 1.5
+ So, maybe the problem isn’t the Delta Smelt?
+ Maybe part of the problem was private equity’s increasing stranglehold on the fire truck industry, which left more than half the fire trucks in Los Angeles out of service as the fires raged through the Palisades and Altadena.
+ The once giant Ogalla Aquifer, the largest groundwater source in the nation, dropped by more than a foot last year in western Kansas.
+ A new study published in Environmental Research under the ungainly title, Quantifying the Acceleration of Multidecadal Global Sea Surface Warming Driven by Earth’s Energy Imbalance, warns that: “Policy makers and wider society should be aware that the rate of global warming over recent decades is a poor guide to the faster change that is likely over the decades to come, underscoring the urgency of deep reductions in fossil-fuel burning.”
+ The rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled since 1985, which is pretty clear evidence that global warming is rapidly accelerating.
+ Outside of China, the oil sheikhdoms of the Middle East are the world’s fastest-growing markets for solar power. What do they know the USA doesn’t?
+ Ominous. A new variant of H5N9 bird flu has been found in California. It shares the same clade (2.3.4.4b) with H5N1. Both H5N9 and H5N1 were detected at a duck “farm” in Merced County, forcing nearly 119,000 birds to be killed.
+ More than 3.8 million commercial chickens and over 86,000 commercial turkeys in southwestern Ohio’s Miami Valley tested positive for bird flu.
+ Since March of last year, China’s CO2 emissions have stabilized, a result of a record surge in clean energy production. While emissions grew by 0.8% overall, they were actually lower than in the 12 months prior to February 2024.
+ Electric/hybrid vehicles now account for more than half of passenger vehicle sales in China
+ Noah Smith: “America looked at solar power and electric cars and said, “Oh fun, here’s another thing to have culture wars over!” China looked at them and said: “Wow, these technologies really work, let’s build them!”’
+ New research published in Nature Medicine shows that climate change will likely cause 2.3 million additional temperature-related deaths in Europe by 2099, far outweighing any lives that might be saved by warmer winter temperatures. “‘The results debunked theories that climate change might be a net lifesaver in Europe by reducing the number of people dying from cold,’ said Antonio Gasparrini, the paper’s lead author and a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “This study provides compelling evidence that the steep rise in heat-related deaths will far exceed any drop related to cold, resulting in a net increase in mortality across Europe.”
+++
+ The world’s 500 wealthiest people, led by Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, lost a combined $108 billion in Monday’s crash. Let it spread!
+ US businesses are hiring at the lowest rate since 2013, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
+ From an analysis by Bank of America, “Women are officially the economy’s power players—outpacing men in both income and spending growth.” This must explain Trump’s bizarre ad hominem attack on Bank of America last week…
+ The Canadian government is demanding that Amazon “immediately” reconsider its decision to close all its distribution centers in Quebec, threatening to review its commercial relationship with the online retail giant if nothing is done.
+ In 1982, 40 percent of new homes built in the US were starter homes. Last year, according to Census Bureau data, that number had fallen to just 9 percent.
+ The least affordable home markets in 2024 were Los Angeles, San Francisco and Anaheim, where homebuyers would have to spend over 75% of their income on monthly housing costs, according to Redfin. Pittsburgh, Detroit and St Louis were the most affordable.
+ Trump’s tariff guru, the economist Brad Lighthizer, “has come to believe after nearly half a century working on the issue that free trade is a fiction, believed only by Americans and economists (and, intermittently, by the British).” You don’t say…
+ Trump announcing more tariffs on Friday against Canada and Mexico: “We’ll be doing pharmaceuticals. Importantly, in drugs and medicines, etc. All forms of medicine and pharmaceuticals. And we’ll be doing steel very importantly, and we’ll also be doing chips. And things associated with chips.” So, not only microchips and Doritos but bean dip, guacamole, and beer, too?
+ Reporter: “In his Davos speech, Trump demanded that you cut interest rates.”
Jerome Powell: “I haven’t heard from him.”
+ A More Perfect Union: “Working from home just two days a week saves workers anywhere from $305 to $2,357 per year on travel, parking, food and work clothes.”
+ Jamie Dimon: ”There are signs that the US stock market is overheated.” The guy who helped “overheat” the housing market and burn down the whole economy should know…
+ According to CNBC, the share of credit card holders in the US who are just making minimum payments rose to 10.75% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest ever in data going back to 2012.
+ A Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data finds that for the first time in nearly twenty years, the share of unpartnered adults — who are neither married nor living with an unmarried partner — in the United States has declined. Is this because Elon moved his entire harem into one compound?
+ They may be living together (out of economic necessity, most likely), but they don’t seem to have much interest in the reproduction of the species. According to a piece in the Financial Times, fertility rates have collapsed in some of the world’s biggest economies (one reason, especially in China, is the rush to develop AI and automated workforces)…
Live births per woman…
Australia
1950: 3; 2024: 2China
1950: 6; 2024: 0.7France
1950: 3; 2024: 1.8Germany
1950: 2; 2024: 1.3Italy
1950: 2.7; 2024: 1.2Japan
1950: 3.5; 2024: 1South Korea
1950: 6; 2024: 0.5Spain
1950: 2.5; 2024: 1UK
1950: 2.5; 2024: 1.5US
1950: 3; 2024: 1.7
+ Who can afford to have kids in a cat food economy? (A cat food economy where the cat food is now too expensive to afford cats.)
+ Five years after Brexit, the share of Britons who now think leaving the EU was a good Idea has dropped to a new low: 30 percent. This could have been a life raft for the floundering Keir Starmer, whose approval ratings are in the Liz Truss Zone, but he was too dumb and conceited to seize it.
+++
+ Trump on Monday (after smearing an Episcopal Bishop for paraphrasing the Beatitudes in his presence): “We’re bringing back religion in a big way.”
On Wednesday, MAGA targets Catholics for putting into practice the social teachings of their church…
+ From Mike Davis’ last interview (Guardian):
Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history,& they have no vision, no strategy, no plan. The climate crisis, migration crisis and pandemic have shown us the truth about how supposedly democratic states react to globally threatening events: they pull up the drawbridge.
+ Both the Democrats and Tulsi Gabbard made themselves look ridiculous this morning during her confirmation hearing on Edward Snowdon. The Democrats for assailing Gabbard for being photographed with the whistleblower and Gabbard for refusing to just say “Yes” when asked whether she believed Snowden was “courageous.” It’s obvious Snowden has more guts than any of the senators interrogating Gabbard, whether you believe he did the right thing by exposing the US government’s illegal mass surveillance system or not. (How many senators knew what Snowden knew and didn’t say anything?)
+ Edward Snowden on X: “Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today. I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff. In D.C., that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance.”
+ More vexingly, Gabbard, who appears so eager to get the post as Trump’s DNI, has now done a complete about-face on Iran. Five years ago, she denounced Trump’s hawkish policies on Iran as “neocon warmongering,” Now she supports Trump’s plan to take out Iran’s nuclear sites, topple the government and immiserate its populace.
+ Sen. Tom Cotton during the Gabbard hearings: “In a fallen world, what matters, in the end, is less whether a country is democratic or not, more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.” This is a remarkably forthright description of US foreign policy since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. (And, increasingly, it will matter less whether a country is pro-American or anti-American and more whether a country (or a citizen of this one) is pro-Trump or anti-Trump.) “In a fallen world…” Fallen from what? The alleged grace of Cotton’s scornful deity, who couldn’t tolerate Eve’s desire for knowledge about the world she’d been thrust ex nihilo into?
+ Stop this country. I want to get off…Trump’s approval rating after one week is 52%, matching the highest of his first term.
+++
+ The living time machine (it only runs in reverse) known as the Idaho House of Representatives just passed a resolution urging the Supreme Court to overturn marriage equality. They are calling on the Alito/Thomas Court to reinstate the “natural definition of marriage,” calling gay couples “illegitimate.”
+ Indeed, support for gay marriage is declining among church-going youths in the US…(Unfortunately, this decline is not, I fear, attributable to the entirely rational opposition to marriage itself as a reactionary institution that should be abolished for all sexual preferences.)
The share of young Catholics who favored same-sex marriage in 2018: 84%
In 2022: 70%Young evangelicals
2018: 55%
2022: 47%Young mainline Christians
2018: 90%
2022: 75%
+ Jim Naureckas: “I don’t know if this is hopeful or not, but churchgoing among young people is in sharp decline–it looks like regressive social values are part of what’s keeping those who are staying.”
+ Elon Musk feels unbound, free to tell everyone who he is. Earlier this week, he took a break from his work dismantling the federal government in the US to give a speech endorsing the AfD, the über-rightwing, ethno-nationalist (there are shorter words to describe it) party in Germany, where he made clear what may have still been opaque to some: “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents…It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,”
+ During his speech at the National Pro-Life Summit, Father Calvin Robinson concluded his harangue by throwing a Nazi salute in honor of Elon Musk (and, I suppose, Pope Pius VII). The crowd of embryo and fetus defenders cheered…
+++
+ Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the former Democrat from South Florida with a fondness for posting selfies in a bikini, has officially introduced legislation to put Donald Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore…If it happens, I’ll bet there’ll be a lot more people following in Russell Means and John Trudell’s footsteps to climb to the top and take a piss on their noses.
+ Irish novelist Dan Sheehan (Restless Souls), now replanted with his family in Wyoming: “I am so bone-tired of living in this ignorant, hateful, all-powerful circus of a nation. There are not enough hours in a day to even track the grotesqueries—from politicians, public figures, ghoulish private citizens, both Republican and Democrat. This is an utterly lost place.”
+ The latest from Trump’s Department of Renaming…
+ Google Maps says it will change ‘Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘Gulf of America’ once it sees an update in the US Geographic Names System. Really? How long will it be before West Palm Beach is renamed Trumpgrad?
+ How Americans feel about renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America…
Approve: 28%
Disapprove: 50%
Not sure (i.e., too embarrassed to say or couldn’t find it on a map): 22%
+ David Rovics’ new album, From the Ashes, is out on Bandcamp this week. It’s made up of 10 songs he wrote over the past 3 months, on subjects including Israel’s genocide, riots in Amsterdam, fires in LA, an assassination in Manhattan, the death of Cornelius Taylor, Blinken’s last presser, & Trump 2.0. It’s a terrific record and I’m not just saying that because the cover features my photo of Mt. Hood under a skein of smoke from forest fires. You can listen to and download it here…
+ Marianne Faithfull wasn’t merely a muse or a victim or a survivor. She was a fighter, a creator, an innovator who cut just as many edges as Jagger, Richards, or any of the other male luminaries who intersected her wide-ranging orbit. She was a flare across the sky. A transcendent beauty who lived rough for over a decade, lost her voice, and remade it, Faithfull came off the streets with a vengeance in 1979 with her album Broken English. Recorded 15 years after her “As Tears Go By” debut and her first descent into the Underworld, it stands as one of the signature records of the punk/New Wave era–emotionally raw, politically charged, and more musically adventurous than anything the Rolling Stones had recorded since Let It Bleed. Significantly, on Broken English Faithfull covered a Lennon song (Working Class Hero), scaldingly rearranged for the coming Thatcher austerity and took at least two kill shots at Jagger (Guilt and Why’d Ya Do It?) Along the way, she wrote one of the Stones’ most authentic songs, Sister Morphine, about her pal Anita Pallenberg, who made her own difficult extrication from a scene that was sucking her dry.
Cold, lonely, Puritan, what are you fighting for? It’s not my security…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth and a Hundred Years of the Great Gatsby
John Marsh
(Monthly Review)
Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers and the Panama Canal
Julie Greene
(University of North Carolina Press)
You Must Stand Up: the Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America
Amanda Becker
(Bloomsbury)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Sol y Sombra
Rose City Band
(Thrill Jockey)
Playfair Sonatas
Ethan Iverson
(Urlicht Audiovisual)
Salt River
Sam Amidon
(River Lea Recordings)
It’s a Strange World
“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”
–Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.