Watching segments of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is like stepping into a
circus fun-house. It is disorienting for me because no one bothers to point out the obvious elephant in the room.
No, it’s not a matter of race. All of Rittenhouse’s victims (the word outlawed from the courtroom by the judge) were white.
It’s not about Jacob Blake, the black man shot seven times in the back by police at close range, whose shooting sparked the Black Lives Matter marches in Kenosha, WI were the shooting occurred.
The disorienting factor to me is the fact that a 17 year old kid crossed state lines (with his mother), purchased a semi-automatic rifle he could not legally own, and then casually walked the streets, parading himself before city police doing fist bumps with relaxing officers, and nobody stopped him.
Then after he murders a man, numerous onlookers try to disarm him (however ineffectual their attempts) as he casually walks away from his first victim (yep, there’s that word again). At that point the “active shooter”, aka Rittenhouse, believes he has the right to shoot more people “in self defense.”
I’m sorry but America has gone crazy.
The undeniable evidence of America’s insanity is not Black Lives Matter protests, or antifa agitators, but gun advocates’ and the Right-Wing’s unwillingness to acknowledge heavily armed, juvenile reckless endangerment as it parades through our streets after dark.
Nowadays such blatantly antisocial, dangerous, frightening, and ultimately deadly, behavior is perfectly acceptable. No one bats an eye (provided the shooter is a white male. So maybe there is a racial tint here, after all.)
And Rittenhouse will almost certainly be set free.
On an even more depressing related note, Matt Taibbi (one of my favorite journalists) points out the truly monumental economic story that is being ignored as the media keeps its cameras fixated on Rittenhouse.
“As America Falls Apart, Profits Soar” is the title of Taibbi’s article. You can find it at his substack site.
It’s a common yet commonly ignored story. The rich get richer while the rest of us become poorer. And nobody acts to stop the huge economic disparities that are becoming worse and worse.
Our growing wealth gap and class divisions are a much bigger pink elephant in America’s living room. A dangerous problem that billionaires and CEOs prefer to ignore…at their own peril.
Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article (all emphases are mine):
As the country again prepares to go to war with itself, this time over a high-
profile trial, a bigger story goes unnoticed.
. . . On the day the Rittenhouse trial began, the financial data firm FactSet released an eyebrow-raising report about the Covid-19 economy.
The firm noted that companies in the S&P 500 were set to post a net 12.9% profit in the third quarter of 2021. They pointed out this was the second-highest result since the firm began tracking the number in 2008. . .
. . . Remember last year’s long summer of riots, that period that saw the whole world arguing over the definition of “mostly peaceful,” and saw Rittenhouse go charging into the streets of Kenosha? During that long stretch of unrest, corporate America, which had been headed for a depression in March of 2020, was soaring above the fray on an apparently endless, and endlessly escalating, ride to record profits. Take a look at this graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and focus on the Jeff-Bezos-rocket-like ascent beginning in the second quarter of 2020:
Corporate profits in the second quarter of 2020 sat at $1.58 trillion. One year later, that number was $2.69 trillion, a roughly 71% increase. How many stories have you read in the last year telling you about how well the top end of the income distribution has been doing, while the rest of the country seemed to be falling apart?
Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.
In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all).
All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.
It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency. Keeping the volk at each other’s throats instead of pitchforking the aristocrats is an old game, one that’s now gone digital and works better than ever. That might be worth remembering after the coming verdict, and ahead of whatever other hyper-publicized panic comes down the pipeline next.
You can read the entire article here.