🧵1/ George Clooney is utterly and embarrassingly unconscious as he reveals he thinks “the democratic process” is all about hosting the biggest-ever fundraisers in a column in today’s NY Times calling for Biden’s replacement. Staggering: 2/ “As part of my participation in the democratic process [!] and in support of my chosen candidate, I have led some of the biggest fund-raisers [!!] in my party’s history,” Clooney writes. “Barack Obama in 2012. Hillary Clinton in 2016. Joe Biden in 2020.”

By the logic of those smearing opponents of #GazaGenocide, Albert Einstein should have been driven out of academia! He, with other Jewish intellectual figures, published a letter in the NY Times in 1948 condemning Netanyahu’s political godfather, Menachem Begin, as a fascist 1/ The letter correctly explained that Begin’s party, Tnuat Haherut, predecessor of Likud and the whole present Israeli coalition government, was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties…”2/

Scenes from Netanyahu and Biden’s “Massacre of the Innocents,” and from a selection of paintings of the same name. A popular theme of art beginning in the Renaissance, “The Massacre of the Innocents” was derived from the Nativity story…1/ …of the Gospel According to Mathhew, in which children in Palestine are murdered on orders of King Herod, who ruled as a vassal of the Roman Empire. In metaphorical fashion, Netanyahu today takes the role of Herod, and Washington that of imperial master. 2/

The US media sings hymns to Biden’s immigrant “heritage” during his weeklong jaunt to Ireland, while hundreds of thousands of immigrants are jailed in concentrations camps that he oversees, an American gulag that features the forced separation of parents from children 1/ The NY Times coverage whitewashes the actual “heritage” of the Irish immigrant experience. Like today, the exodus was wrought by capitalism. The first colonized country produced a mass wave of immigrants in the 1840s, coming out of the first modern, ie, capitalist, famine 2/

1/ In an otherwise well-researched article that documents the influence of black nationalism on Nikole Hannah-Jones, @marcweitzmann partially admits the role of the WSWS.org in challenging the 1619 Project. But he pairs it with a gratuitous insult 2/ He writes “The first serious rebuttal to the project was … by the journalists and historians Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, and David North, but was comfortably ignored by the Times, likely owing to its publication in a digital Trotskyist rag, the World Socialist Web Site.”

1/ May Day, international workers’ day, had US origins in the Eight Hour Day movement that emerged after the Civil War. This Marx had predicted. “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class… 2/ “…so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes,” he wrote to Lincoln in congratulation for the latter’s re-election in 1864, in the midst of the Civil War. Just three years later, in 1867, Marx was able to see his prognosis vindicated…

1/ It’s an old historical maxim that plotters of war aim to defuse domestic crises. From Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention, James Madison’s words still ring true: “The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…. 2/ “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people." Madison might have added that wars rarely resolve internal crises.

1/Throughout media a veritable celebration of the cost and “logistics and organization” in the sending of killing machines to Ukraine. But where was the funding, logistics, and organization to send COVID vaccinations to Ukraine, Europe’s poorest country? 2/ Only 34% of Ukrainians are fully vaccinated, lowest rate in Europe. Some 110,000 Ukrainians have died of COVID. The roughly 1,000 deaths so far in Russian invasion are horrific and must be condemned. But COVID took 9,000 lives in Kyiv alone; 6,000 in Odessa; 7,000 in Kharkiv.

1/ Happy International Women’s Day to women the world over. Especially to the women of Ukraine and Russia whose mothers bore the brunt of Hitler’s armies 80 years ago and now face war and inhumane sanctions, caught in Putin’s invasion and Biden’s trap. A little history: 2/ Like May Day, Intl Women’s Day has some American working class and socialist origins. It emerged out of the struggle of women garment workers, Jewish and Italian immigrants, most famously in “The Uprising of the 20,000” in 1909.

1/ The drive to war with Russia bears an eerie likeness to the 1850s Crimean War, when Tsar Nicholas was lured by Britain into a Black Sea trap. (Key difference: cannon shells not nuclear bombs were the destructive weapons) Excrpts of N. Rich, “The Age of Nationalism and Reform” 2/ “As long as Russia was economically technically backward, containment by the smaller states of Europe remained feasible. But were this backwardness overcome, Russia, with great natural resources and a large population, might prove more than a match….”