You have heard that the ten richest of the 750+ US billionaires enjoyed a gigantic pandemic windfall that raised their fortunes by at least 70%. How about that for a return on your investment! In this country it is no crime to exploit your advantages to get as super-rich as you can, even if it brings an American authoritarian to power based on calculated misinformation you help to proliferate, or casts people out into the streets to live dangerous, shortened lives in makeshift homes. Why should real estate billionaires not have the same chance to profit from misery that tech billionaires enjoyed?

That’s what America is all about, the right of winners to win, in a totally Free Market, no matter how many millions of losers might quibble and commit mumbling class warfare against them, as each of those losers rightfully and legally lose a safe place to live. Don’t let anybody tell you anything else, loser.

As this recent Washington Post article points out (and the graph above, from the article, shows) average rents across the nation have gone up 14% over the second half of 2021.

Average rents rose 14 percent last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40 percent, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise — by about 10 percent this year — according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired. . .

Let’s hit the old calculator, see how many hours a $15/hr minimum wage worker has to work to pay an average rent of $1,877. 125.13 hours. Shoot, that’s barely three full forty hour work weeks… and a half day shift.

The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in many parts of life, and housing is no different. Homeowners benefited from rock-bottom interest rates and surging home prices, while renters have faced surging costs with little reprieve. And unlike markups in other categories — such as food or gas, where prices can waver in both directions — economists say annual leases and long-term mortgages make it unlikely that housing costs will come back down quickly once they rise.

And, an added benefit of wildly increasing residential rents, for opponents of social change and the right to live in a home instead of on the street, is that skyrocketing rents fuel inflation. Inflation makes Biden look weak, even as the overall economy has exceeded all recovery expectations, even as most of his larger, ongoing economic stimulus plans have been filibustered. So, by all means, raise the rents, fuel inflation, make Biden a one term LOSER. It’s win-win, for the winners, just another loss for the vast population of powerless American losers. USA! USA!!!

It sounds like a sick joke, I know, but my favorite book (aside from Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories, Walter Morrison translation — out of print) is Hannah Arendt’s readily available masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’ve read it several times recently and listened to it a few more, in the beautiful reading by Wanda McCaddon, a reading that makes you feel like you’re listening to the author herself (though with an English accent). It is a book many American fascists, on school boards and state legislatures everywhere, would happily ban, based on how bad it makes their German predecessors, many other Europeans and perhaps also present day American anti-Semites, look, how bad it might make their innocent children feel about themselves. Why should the kids feel the sting of being unfairly judged for an honest belief that 91 year-old George Soros is the source of all evil, head of a global cabal of powerful freedom-hating, Christ-denying, child-blood drinking Jewish monsters. Who are they to judge us?

Listening to, or reading, the thoughts of a brilliant thinker who spoke knowledgeably, calmly, frankly and with wit about an extensive historical and legal record she had mastered, and was attacked for decades for her assessment of a trial she attended and followed closely in the original language, I feel each time I open the book that I’ve entered into an ongoing conversation with a remarkable woman. Nobody in the world was better positioned than Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, to analyze that important trial, which is why she petitioned the New Yorker to send her. In verifying just now that it was that magazine that sent her, the first few search results were present day critiques of Arendt. Still. Some Jews are still furious at Hannah Arendt. I wonder how many of her angry critics have actually read her book.

One uncomfortable fact Arendt establishes throughout the book is the utter ordinariness of Adolf Eichmann. He was as ordinary as someone like Jeffrey Clark, the corrupt DOJ official appointed by Trump who was ready to aid Trump in insurrection by making false claims about a stolen election under the DOJ letterhead, or a poisonous troll like Stephen Miller. Every totalitarian needs an army of dedicated bureaucrats like Eichmann, blindly obedient, ambitious followers willing to do whatever they are told, to the extent of their abilities.

Eichmann, as Arendt shows over and over, was, outside of his undeniable organizational ability, something of a dolt. Arendt translates some of Eichmann’s doomed wrestling matches with the German language and concludes that his inability to speak was an outgrowth of his inability to think. Neither educated nor curious, Eichmann, who bemoaned his bad luck throughout the trial, was, to the end, an unquestioning follower of the Fuhrer. Eichmann was certainly not alone in this, every deranged utterance of Mr. Hitler’s immediately had the full force of German law, some of the best legal minds in the world stayed busy transcribing it all into the law books of The Thousand Year Reich.

Still, during the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann was treated as the mastermind of the Final Solution, and tried before the world in a trial intended to show the massive inhumanity of the Third Reich, in revolting detail, as personified in this powerful Nazi monster. The trial was necessary, and, as Arendt described it, effective in directing world attention to Nazi horrors, but Eichmann was no mastermind of anything but filling the trains with victims and carrying out increasingly insane orders from his bosses. Eichmann, to this day is often portayed as the monstrously evil architect of the plan he energetically carried out (he’s described that way in a current Netflix description of a film about him) although he was simply a monstruously ordinary functionary in a morally inverted order, one of thousands, who did their parts to keep the death machine humming. Eichmann had been the industrious head of shipping.

He deserved to die for his role in the mechanized genocide, as Arendt states with no hesitation, as any reader of the book grasps over and over. If anyone deserves hanging, Eichmann certainly did. A big part of Arendt’s literary “crime” was pointing out that there was an element of theatre to the trial which was compromised if the audience learned that Eichmann could have been, rather than a bloodthirsty mass murderer, any banal, blindly ambitious idiot loyal to any powerful, murderous madman anywhere in the twentieth century (and beyond).

Arendt puts her finger on the true monstrousness of Eichmann — how ubiquitous his ambitious, morally debased type is, and how crucial that type is to the reign of every actual monstrous psychopath who bloodies the chapters of human history with their implacable need to dominate and punish others.

Now that we’ve come to that unthinkable place here, in the United States of America, where derangred lies animate millions, books are banned, burned, whole subjects forbidden from history class, insights from books like Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem take on an urgent relevance to our lives. Critique Arendt’s thoughts on the trial all you want, attack a few salty asides about Zionism all day long, but try disputing this bit, a factual, chillingly calm account of the nauseating brutality of the Rumanians under Antonescu:

This horrified even the Nazis, as Arendt informs us. A large group of disparate Nazi rivals, including Eichmann, intervened to make sure the elimination of Rumanian Jews was done in an orderly, efficient and slightly less vomit-inducing fashion.

Deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite follow-up to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.

Hannah Arendt

A truly sickening, somewhat complex sentence. Imagine some kid in that Tennessee county where they just banned the graphic novel, Maus, in which a holocaust (conducted by Nazi cats) is carried out against the powerless Jews (mice), trying to get through that sentence of Arendt’s. How nauseating is the image of suffocated corpses displayed hanging in the windows of butcher shops? And the notion that it was a “favorite follow-up” to the mass killings? Makes you want to vomit, unless you believe the victims only got what they deserved, I suppose.

That sickening image is in the same category, I think, as detailed descriptions of countless ships owned by wealthy entrepreneurs carrying naked human cargo, chained and packed like sardines, from Africa to slave markets in the new world, a lucrative live product with a high death rate crossing the ocean. Equally, horrific, the atrocities of the “Peculiar Institution” for the survivors of the infamous Middle Passage and millions more born into slavery. The grim reality of that is as viscerally upsetting as the hideous practices of the Rumanians, who shocked even the Nazis.

Those who would not be troubled by those atrocious things done by our American ancestors must believe that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, that it was a glorious stand for a cherished way of life, fought over States’ Rights (to keep and torture slaves). And, that it was, and is, strictly States’ Rights to decide who can easily vote and, for a century, who could be lynched for trying to vote.

You hear the same arguments today in justifying the filibuster to protect the core group of angry, frightened Americans who feel truly threatened by the predicted demographic future, as well as by the past, when they may well have behaved in ways, or sat by agreeing with things, might still, in their hearts, embrace things that would justify the just punishment Thomas Jefferson trembled about as he equivocated about the ungodly injustice of slavery.

So, as in anything that can cause shame and a wrenching questioning of core values, the best thing, for many, is denial. It runs deep and it can’t be denied. Just one more reason I love Hannah Arendt, she truly didn’t give a fuck about your denial.

What else is the Grand Old Party for? States’ rights to reject federal efforts to standardize federal election rules and ensure ease of casting ballots for all Americans. Why should there be national rules for national elections? Totally unfair if you control a state government!

These “conservatives” want to make sure their partisan advantage is preserved wherever they currently have it, and are proposing hundreds of creepy new laws in as many states as possible to guarantee partisan advantage. Georgia’s was one of the splashiest, and while litigation continues, it stays in full force and effect for upcoming elections, absent a filibuster-blocked federal law to the contrary.

The Federalist Society 6-3 Supreme Court majority announced, in the recent 6-3 Brnovich v. DNC decision, that, in principle, partisanship is a perfectly fine motive in making laws. There is nothing the Court, or the Constitution, can do about “political questions” like partisan gerrymandering or seemingly restrictive partisan voting laws (mandating masks or vaccines is not considered “political” and can be quickly struck down).

Partisan voting laws that may also disproportionately disadvantage ethnic minorities, under Brnovich, can only be set aside if they are provably virtually 100% racist in expressed intent. Partisan voting laws are perfectly cool with the partisan six, emanators of the stench. Elena Kagan’s dissent had the better of the argument:

“This Court has no right to remake Section 2 [of the VRA]. Maybe some think that vote suppression is a relic of history—and so the need for a potent Section 2 has come and gone. … But Congress gets to make that call.”^[25] Kagan further wrote “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.'”^[29]

source

Although, one could argue that in 2013 John Roberts and four other corporatist justices set the precedent that the Court has the right to void the virtually unanimous bipartisan will of both Houses of Congress and the President, when their then 5-4 majority overruled a 400-20 House majority, a 98-0 Senate vote and the public approval of the sitting Republican president to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, which the five eviscerated without anesthesia or so much as the figleaf of a coherent legal argument. John Roberts based his ruling on a shrewd mix of misconception and lies, dispensed cooly and couched in the most reasonable nd judicious language.

For purposes of the sacred Electoral College, Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes, getting all of their electors. Trump was enraged and did everything he could think of after the election to get Georgia officiald to find 11,780 votes for him. He had Lindsey Graham call Raffensberger, who he correctly felt was ducking his calls.

Republicans in Georgia followed the law, and Trump’s loss stood, so Trump demanded the law be changed, post haste, in every state he lost. The GOP quickly fell into line behind Trump’s baseless, racist rants about supposedly massive, though unprovable, Black Voter Fraud (it’s always Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta… where the imagined fraud all took place, coincidentally all areas with large Black and Brown populations vote, (that’s how you blow a foghorn dog whistle, you angry, paranoid, irrational, superior, urban sodomites).

Here is a piece about how well Georgia’s new voter integrity/voter suppression law has been working so far (pardon the format, fucking YouTube wouldn’t let me copy or share it any other way…)

Make no mistake, these American States’ Rights (except for “anarchist jurisdictions”) authoritarians mean business. Business, literally, the unforgiving, freedom loving religion of the American ruling class. They never lost the goddamned Civil War and they don’t plan to lose this war neither.