Revolution Anyone?

Super Grotesque Disparties, Diversion, and Genocide Under Capitalism-Imperialism

Revolution anyone?

Obscene Opulence Above…

Before the Super Bowl that ended with the predictable Patrick Mahomes drive for the team whose fans who engage in the mass racist ritual that is the Kansas City Chiefs’ Tomahawk Chop, one could read on Business Insider about the grotesque ruling class excess underway in the big game’s hosting city, Las Vegas.

“The Super Bowl has always been a draw for billionaires and powerful executives,” Business Insider noted, and for “business types using their corporate cards to cozy up to clients, plus the uberwealthy who simply don’t want to miss out on the fun.”

Forget about the droves of affluent people who spent $10,000 and more for game tickets (the cheapest seats sold for $8,000), hotel rooms, and flights.  The real extravagance was brought as usual by the “ultrarich,” who spent millions for the annual week-long festival of top dog narcissism and super-capitalist self-admiration that the Super Bowl has become.

Billionaires and multi-millionaires crowded to purchase game suites for over $2 million, 50 yard line seats for $80K, presidential hotel suites for $18,000 a night, and charter jets billing out at $25,000 an hour. (The jet companies “cater to clients' needs,” including “the brand of water they prefer at their preferred temperature, Nobu meals, cupcakes, and even balloons in their favorite team’s colors.”) 

…Rising Evictions and Homelessness Below

The contrast is starkly Dickensian between this grotesquely flaunted opulence and the lives of the tens of millions of US Americans who struggle to maintain decent existences from paycheck to paycheck.  Four days before the Super Bowl, the Associated Press reported that  

“A record number of Americans can’t afford their rent… Monthly rent has outpaced income across the U.S. and forced many to make tough decisions between everyday necessities and a home. In turn, a record number of people are becoming homeless and evictions filings have ratcheted up as pandemic-era eviction moratoriums and federal assistance ends. ..a report from Harvard University found 22.4 million renter households are rent burdened.”

The AP told the all too typical story of a single Denver mom who has “watched as rent for her two-bedroom apartment doubled, then tripled and then quadrupled over a decade in Denver — from $750 to $3,374 last year.” Further:

“Every month, like millions of Americans, [the single mother] juggled her costs. Pay rent or swim team fees for one of her three kids. Rent or school supplies. Rent or groceries. [The mom], a social worker who helps people stay financially afloat, would often arrive home to notices giving her 30 days to pay rent and a late fee or face eviction…Millions of Americans, especially people of color, are facing those same, painful decisions as a record number struggle with unaffordable rent increases, a crisis fueled by rising prices from inflation, a shortage of affordable housing and the end of pandemic relief.”

The Harvard study finds that half of US renters nationwide are spending more than 30% of their income on rent in 2022.

The AP reported the case of a Massachusetts mobile home park where tenants who are mostly “seniors and others on fixed incomes” are struggling to pay rent increases of 40%. A 49-year-old resident of the  park asks how she can meet a recent $345 monthly rent hike when she already spends $200 a month on medications and for biannual MRIs to track her brain tumor. 

Capitalism Doesn’t Care

Evictions and homelessness are rising nationwide.  So what? Capitalism doesn’t care.  It never has and it never will.  A human right to decent food, clothing, and shelter for all does not and cannot exist under the capitalist system. As the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian says, “there can be and is no right to eat under capitalism. If you can contribute to the reproduction of capital on an expanded scale in profitable enough terms for this or that capitalist or aggregation of capital, you can eat to one degree or another.” If you do not at some level serve capital, good luck. The same goes for shelter and decent clothing and much more beyond those basic needs. How would masses of people feel compelled to rent out their labor power and life force to serve the profit needs of capital if their basic needs were met without subordination to the parasitic investor class?

“Costs of War”

This and much more that could be said about poverty and insecurity in the United States is quite horrific.  But contrast the extravagant hyper-opulence  on outrageous display in Las Vegas last week with the Palestinian horror that was politely reported by The New York Times just one day before the Super Bowl.  While the super-rich channeled their inner Calilgulas in Sin City, a million Gazans in the city of Rafah were living in abject terror of an ongoing genocidal assault by the US-backed apartheid and occupation state of Israel:

“Terrified Gazans Await an Israeli Advance in the … the southern Gazan city where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have fled since the war began… Rents have skyrocketed, and multiple families share small apartments. Tent camps have taken over most open areas. Food and fuel have become so scarce that [a female resident] burns old clothes and pages from books to heat canned beans and bake flatbread…Israel’s stated intention to expand its ground invasion into Rafah has left her terrified, with no idea where she and her family could flee.

More than two dozen people were killed on Saturday as Israeli forces continued to bombard the province of Rafah and other parts of the southern Gaza Strip with airstrikes…More than a million Palestinians are stuck as the Israeli military says it is preparing for a ground invasion there.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have flooded into Rafah during four months of Israeli bombardments, a ground invasion and warnings by the Israeli military to flee south. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled this week that Israel intended to push farther south into Rafah, which he described as the enclave’s last Hamas stronghold.

On Saturday, Israeli airstrikes struck a vehicle and homes where displaced people were sheltering. Palestinian media and The Associated Press reported at least 29 people were killed, including children, but the Gazan health authorities did not immediately confirm that death toll.

A 6-year-old Palestinian girl and the two rescuers who went looking for her nearly two weeks ago were found dead on Saturday, the Palestine Red Crescent said, ending a desperate effort to discover their fates. Two rescuers with the Red Crescent were dispatched in an ambulance on the evening of Jan. 29 to find Hind Rajab, who was believed to be trapped in a vehicle in Gaza City with six dead family members. The aid group said they had been killed by Israeli fire. A Red Crescent statement on Saturday accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived ‘just meters away from the vehicle containing the trapped child Hind,’ and killing the two rescuers inside. It said this happened ‘despite prior coordination’ between the Red Crescent and the Israeli military.”

In an openly US-backed campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing, Israel has killed at least 30,000 Gazans over the last four months.  Two million Palestinians in Gaza—more than 80 per cent of the population—have been displaced. The US-Israel bombardment of Gaza has damaged over more than a quarter million housing units and destroyed more than 50,000 units. More than 1 million people in Gaza lack a safe and secure home to return to.  And now the leading US imperial asset, the Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, is targeting Rafah, a southernmost city to which that neo-Nazi Israeli Defense Forcers directed Gazans to flee. 

The Palestinian misery inflicted by this US-Israeli crucifixion of Gaza (the “Israel Hamas War”) is normalized in US imperial corporate media, which obsesses over the fate of Israeli hostages while treating the mass destruction of Gazan families, lives, and abodes as a sad but unavoidable collateral “cost of war.”  

This genocide is being conducted  with the help of billions and billions of US tax dollars spent on racist and imperialist war crimes while masses of desperate people need basic assistance at home and especially – on a far, far greater scale – abroad.

A Genocidal Commercial

Israel put an at once Orwellian and Huxlean exclamation point on the grotesque contrasts by paying many millions of dollars ($7 million per each 30 second spot) to run a series of Super Bowl commercials to sell their genocidal policy to the US public. The racist ad started by showing an NFL athlete playing with his son and then cut to clips of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza playing with their kids before being swept up by Hamas last October 7th. It ended with the hashtag “Bring all dads back home.”

While the propaganda commercial ran, US-Israel bombs killed 100 Gazan civilians in an act of diversion for a rescue operation that freed two aged Israeli hostages.

“Zionist” Joe Privately Grumbles but Grants “Unequivocal Support” to Judeo-Fascist Genocide

The day after the Super Bowl. NBC News reported Biden insider revelations that “Genocide Joe” has been privately grumbling about Israel’s fascist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigent refusal to conduct his ethnic cleansing operations without any respect for the humanity of the Palestinian people — more importantly, for how the genocide is complicating Biden’s re-election prospects. Biden has apparently called Netanyahu an “asshole” three times (strictly in private) and told campaign donors that the Israeli head of state is “a pain in my ass.”

So F’ng what?! NBC reports further that:

 “people familiar with Biden’s private comments said he has told them he believes it would be counterproductive for him to be too harsh on Netanyahu publicly…Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu have also not led to a major policy shift… even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one… At a fundraiser Biden attended in the past few weeks, he spoke about Israel and his frustrations with Netanyahu to a small group of donors. In response to being thanked for standing with Israel and against antisemitism, Biden took the opportunity to lay out some of his views, according to a supporter who was present. ‘I’m a Zionist,’ Biden said, reiterating his views that Hamas must be destroyed and that Israel must be protected…”

Biden’s behind the scenes bitching is besides the policy point. The Empire under his decrepit command remains committed to “unequivocally supporting” its imperial pit bull Israel as it continues its sadistic, Nazi-like assault on masses of civilians in Gaza.

“Frozen Bodies Recovered From Rivers and Forests”

Another New York Times report, this one on Super Sunday itself, informed readers that an increasing number of people trying to escape horrific and largely US-imposed exploitation and oppression in Latin America are dying from hypothermia while trying (thanks to the big jam up on the southern border) to cross into the United States from Canada :

 “perilous conditions have led to repeated rescues of migrants who get stranded in dark woods or have to be treated for hypothermia. At least a dozen migrants — families, children, a pregnant mother — have died attempting to cross [the US northern border] in the past two years, their frozen bodies recovered from rivers and forests...Officials at the northern border recorded 191,603 encounters with people crossing into the United States in 2023, a 41 percent increase from 2022.”  

Unmentionable Taproot

In this as in all the mainstream reporting on the migration crisis here and in Europe, nothing can be said about the historical-material root of the problem: the generation of mass misery across the desperately poor and oppressed global periphery by the US-led imperialist, racist, and eco-cidal capitalist system — the system within which Israel has played a critical enforcing role since at least 1967.

This is not life as such, this is life under a thoroughly rotten system that needs to be overthrown!

Anti-capitalist-imperialist revolution, anyone?