The Cackle of Corporate Hyenas has to be Exposed, not tacitly Endorsed

A Cackle of Hyenas is like a murder of crows or a sounder of feral pigs, only without the charm of the crows or the social conscience of the pigs. In many parts of Africa, there's no predator group that is more dangerous, cunning or merciless.

But what’s a corporate hyena?

Look at the numbers and start doing the math!

Harris raised 1.003 billion dollars and spent 1.37 billion.

Trump raised 381.54 million and spent 345.42

The additional irony with the imbalance in the two campaign budgets is that the Harris marketing group outspent Trump's by at least 3 or 4 to 1 (I heard 5 or 6 to 1) in swing states and then lost all 7 of them.

I'm wondering if, after repeated exposure to negative ad messaging ("He's a Hitler worshipper, he'll be coming after you and your personal freedoms"), people instinctively began to identify most of that talk as possible projection -- the accusation that's actually more of a confession?

After all, it's mostly been the Dems; arbitrarily switching candidates without a single vote cast in a primary, totally brushing off Muslims and Palestinians at their convention and then placing many more demands for compliance ("speech guardrails") with their chosen foreign policy, economic policy and race and gender(s) based narratives; who've behaved like the anti-democratic party.

It's not as if Dems didn't make it seem as though, "they doth protest too much," for some good reason. Like some really massive sins or crimes that they needed to hide. (Genocide, Forever Wars and the borrowed money to pay for them?)

Okay, yes. I am giving voters credit for seeing through some of the foreign policy hypocrisy there and wondering why none of the officially endorsed Democratic apologists for this resounding defeat (not Robert Reich, the Atlantic or New Yorker magazines or ChatGTP) even tried to estimate the numbers and add up 1, 2 and 3?

1.) Trump, despite all the "gotcha" sound bites and negative campaign ads, kept most of his own base from the previous 2 elections and likely added to it.

2.) Harris was caught up in an impossible tangle of inertia. Trying to hang on to as many legacy Biden administration supporters as possible, while at the same time, she had to clearly define a different path forward. In the end, she very possibly achieved neither of those goals, losing some folks who came out to vote in 2020 but fell off the face off the earth in 2024. (How many millions of fewer votes did Harris get than Biden in 2020? Whether it turns out that it was 10, 15 or 20, in the final tabulation, it was literally, "millions" of voters, rejecting the repeated calls to support Kamala and Tim.)

3.) Disaffected Democrats and Independents -- or the reasons that quite a few former Democrats now consider themselves Independents -- all those people who would have happily voted for either RFK jr or Tulsi Gabbard for President, if they'd been allowed to stay in the Democratic Party -- most of them very likely voted for Trump.

Because Trump got fully on board with RFK Jr's one good antiwar policy:

"Let’s end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible."

+ Too many hundreds of thousands are already dead.

+ Millions have been forced to flee the country and they're probably never coming back.

+ The hundreds of billions spent on Project Ukraine (not to help the Ukrainians in the central and western parts of the country but to "weaken Russia"), on top of the other trillions spent on completely unaccountable wars of aggression, are driving up inflation and destroying our economy -- not Russia's -- and the economies of our NATO allies. (Most of all, Germany's, where VW announced the closing of three assembly plants.)

+ Ukraine doesn't have even the smallest whisper of a prayer of beating back the Russian Army. But you'll never hear that said on corporate media.

+ The only hope of something like a "victory" for NATO and their Ukrainian hired guns could come through some ridiculously dangerous escalation of the war. From the limited scope of a regional war being faught to define Russia's western border lines and Ukraine's outermost eastern edges, to an expanded battlefield that would spill over into Russia but draw in China and very possibly India, on the side of the global majority of countries.

+ But that lunatic goal, of "weakening and balkanizing Russia," so that the American military industrial global financial cartel can keep on earning off the charts Return on Investment -- that could accidentally end human civilization.

+ With Artificial Intelligence already creeping and insinuating itself into all kinds of digital networks, from the simplest ioT (internet of things) residential matrix of toaster, thermostat, refrigerator; to a battlefield autonomous flying squadron of killer robot drones, to the automatic early warning missile defense system that's part of a national military command and control automated super computer network -- it becomes a little muddled. Who's in charge of what part of the system? What could go wrong if a signal that's supposed to be amplified is instead canceled and gets ignored, at a critical moment?

+ What part of the decision making process is in the hands of the generals and what part is the final responsibility of the politicians? How many of those politicians ultimately report to some kind of bankster super criminal investment syndicate? Those Big Donors who can whip up a cool billion or two to finance a 74 day presidential campaign, in the blink of an eye or with just a few keystrokes.

+ We rely on (and take for granted) digital communication, so much so that the lines between success and failure and what's real and what's virtual can be made to blur completely and just disappear. Especially when there's a lot of money on the line. Take just one example, Kamala Harris. She went from being the first candidate to withdraw from the primaries in 2019 [thank you, Tulsi Gabbard]

to being the most unpopular vice president in recent memory and then, almost immediately after her nomination; the "Joy" candidate and most every media outlet's recipient of favorable coverage.

And then, soon after she's lost the election and been completely shown up; Jon Stewart pops up to open the "Daily Show" with a very dramatic close up (the camera zooms in to what feels like inches from his face), speaking very slowly to promise that 'for the next four years, the Daily Show will be the voice of... Resistance.'

+ Malcolm X said it best, many years ago; “If you're not careful, the newspapers (today we'd say, the corporate media) will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” The whole focus of the corporate media (aside from making money by selling advertising) is to make people believe they're plausibly, "well informed," when all they're really aware of is a highly selective mix of amplified factoids and omitted, larger factual context and details.

+ For example, 10% of the world's lithium is in Ukraine and that's just a fraction of the natural resource wealth there. There's an estimated 500 billion in oil and natural gas reserves sitting off the coast of Gaza. No coincidence that funding for the military takeover of those regions; no matter the staggering and completely revolting cost in human lives -- the real truth of what's happening -- and why -- it has to be, "shrouded and protected with a bodyguard of lies."

+ There is no industrial scale lying going on only where it's much better to keep it on the down low, about the scope of the natural resources exploitation (or potential for it), and to minimize public attention on the human collateral damage that is the price of extraction. Very few people are talking about what's been happening in the eastern part of Congo, where it borders Rwanda. But since 1997, 5 or 6 million people have been murdered in that region; by the criminal gangs that are in charge of making sure all of our electronic devices are only assembled with affordable metals and rare earth minerals. No matter how many child miners die before they reach adolescence, the digitized circuits feeding signals and directing the movement of elecrons throughout all nodes of the Vast Machine have to remain powered up -- 24/7/365.

+You may very well be holding one of those nodes in your hand, right now. Be careful! Your "handy" device is for the most part made available and affordable for you so that (as Edward Snowden showed the world), it can be used as a listening and surveillance device. And it's also a passive "infotainment" toy that keeps you very selectively informed about what you're supposed to think about and what your attitude should be; through a whole range of politically sensitive topics and issues.

But never forget you can also use your 'handy' (that's the shortened form of the word, "mobiltelefon," in German) horizontally; node to node, to share insights and connect your observations with those of others.