Roaming Charges: If You're Not a Scumbag, You're a Nobody
www.counterpunch.org
If the ranks of ICE had been filled by a draft, we wouldn't be seeing this kind of mass brutality. Normal human beings would recoil from committing daily acts of violence against defenseless people and would question the psychological health of those giving them orders to do so, as we ultimately saw in Vietnam. But instead, ICE is populated by people who signed up for this, people who are eager to terrorize, abuse and inflict gratuitous brutality on others. Sadists, in other words.

Still from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

  • One of the world’s richest jerks is gutting the once-storied newspaper he bought as a vanity project, used to promote his own narcissistic and predatory brand, eventually grew bored with and shredded like yesterday’s news…

  • My first experience with just how petty and mean-spirited Jeff Bezos could be was in the early 2000s. Cockburn and I were giving a book talk (Imperial Crusades, I think) at one of the country’s best bookstores, Elliott Bay Book Company, when it was located in the beautiful brick Globe building on First and Main Street near Pioneer Square in old town Seattle. As we were walking in, we noticed a semi-trailer truck driving slowly down First Avenue. The trailer featured the Amazon logo and, in large letters: “Buy Your Books From Amazon at 20 to 30% Off.” When we were walking out with the very kind and efficient events staffer a couple of hours later, we saw the same truck coming down Main Street, turning on First Avenue and driving slowly past the storefront. I asked the Elliott Bay staffer, What the hell’s going on? She said, “This goes on all day. The truck just drives in circles around the store, trying to drive us out of business, I guess.”

  • Here was this insatiable international behemoth targeting an independent bookstore for extinction. It didn’t seem possible at the time, because as bookstore experiences go, Elliott Bay’s was one of the best ecosystems imaginable for bibliophiles. But Bezos (and Seattle real estate prices) eventually drove them out of downtown and up to a nice store in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. But it’s not the same. The culture as a whole, not just Seattle, has been cheapened, short-changed and made cruder, lazier and more socially isolated by this self-obsessed maniac and his ravenous cohort of like-minded billionaires.

  • Lenin sent this text from the Bardo about Bezos and the Ellisons: “All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

  • The world’s biggest book seller just axed one of the last book review sections in a major newspaper, his own.

  • Firing correspondents in a war zone really says it all about the moral character of Bezos and the crew he hired to demolish The Washington Post…

  • Trump’s new tax law decreased Amazon’s taxes 87%, while the corporate behemoth’s profits grew. The company’s U.S. taxes fell from $9 billion to $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, Bezos gutted the Washington Post and Amazon is slashing at least 30,000 jobs.

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Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

  • ICE and CBP ran out of “legit” targets about 2 months into the purge and then just started going after random people who fit their racial profile: “Email obtained by NBC shows Bovino grew frustrated this fall when he was asked to do “targeted operations” in Chicago. (Despite Noem insisting all operations are targeted).”

  • Trump’s immigration Storm Troopers killed at least 9 people in January. Here are their names…

Alex Pretti Renee Good Keith Porter Parady La Heber Sanchaz Domínguez Victor Manuel Diaz Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres Geraldo Lunas Campos.

  • Hakeem Jeffries: “ICE agents should conduct themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country.” Police killed 1314 people in 2025. Is Jeffries arguing that ICE should be killing even more?

  • On January 31, 3000 people joined the union-led march on the ICE family in South Portland. They were met by a vicious crackdown by ICE’s militarized agents, who fired rubber bullets, flash bang grenades and tear gas at the protesters. ICE agents even lobbed tear gas canisters into low-income housing units across the street from the detention “center” here in Portland….

Witnesses:

Brenda Worthington, a resident at the Gray’s Landing apartment complex, which was hit by ICE tear gas canisters: “Saturday was a nightmare. We watched people crying. Children, old people like me, everyone. It was awful…We have suffered. We are collateral damage, everyone. We don’t deserve this…Let’s all stick together and get these people to move. They need to move.”

Nick Caleb, the vice president of a communication workers union: “One of the biggest shows of union solidarity that I think I’ve ever seen in Oregon history…We just have to now update our risk profiles. Now we know that if you have a peaceful march in the middle of the day, the federal government might shoot you with chemical agents and pepper balls and things like that.”

  • Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, who could hardly be called a radical or even a progressive: “To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”

  • The Eugene Lunatics, as Trump called the heroic band of protesters down south on the I-5 corridor, would be a great name for a minor league baseball team.

  • Oregon Governor Tina Kotek: “We know the Trump administration’s aggressive ICE tactics are creating fear, they are tearing families apart and, as we have seen, taking lives. It’s wrong. It’s un-American, it’s immoral and we as Oregon will stand together to say no to that.”

  • You just knew a pre-mature ejac– I mean– capitulation was inevitable. But even I thought they might hold out longer than this…They’ll end up adopting a position that’s somewhere to the right of Homan and Noem. Plus, ICE agents have almost absolute impunity. What do they care? If they shoot a kid next time, Fox News will lionize them and they can cash in, ala Rittenhouse. How much has the Jonathan Ross GoFundMe site raised? Nearly a million by now, I think, and the “F-in’ bitch” line was probably worth at least $250K in donations…

  • Memo to Schumer: All protesters are considered “domestic terrorists” by ICE, CBP, DHS, Trump and Vance and even the Democratic Party itself, according Trump’s Rasputin, Stephen Miller.

  • There’s a lot of talk about how Trump is planning to use ICE and the Insurrection Act in an attempt to rig the mid-term elections. It’s certainly possible, even probable. But I’m not convinced the Democrats would take the House in a “clean” election, though every historical trend suggests they would by force of political gravity alone. The GOP probably doesn’t have to rig the elections through gerrymandering or voter roll purges. The Democrats are quite capable of blowing it themselves. Their leadership has never been weaker. For all her faults, Pelosi was a fighter and a shrewd politician. So was Harry Reid. Schumer and Jeffries are embarrassments, both of them timid, docile and out of touch with their own base. But, yes, the prospect of ICE policing poll stations in the name of snatching “illegal voters” is pretty ominous and must be resisted, even if you enter the polling places planning to vote for Greens, libertarians, the Rent’s Too Damn High Party or none of the above….

  • Steve Bannon on his War Room show last Tuesday: “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.” Why mail-in ballots are essential to the preservation of, not democracy, that’s long gone, but at least what’s left of the right to vote…

  • Sen. Tammy Duckworth: “ICE investigators were supposed to investigate the killing of Alex Pretti. Instead, they investigated Alex. Not his killers. With the FBI now leading this probe, I’m calling on Kristi Noem and Kash Patel: Remove all ICE agents from this investigation completely.” (Duckworth’s benign views of the FBI must have been reformed from repeated viewings of Mississippi Burning.)

  • The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors in Minnesota had gotten a warrant to collect evidence from Renee Good’s Jeep, but the Trump White House ordered them to drop the inquiry into her killing.

  • Wired reported that two agents involved in the shooting deaths of US citizens in Minneapolis are part of highly militarized DHS units whose “extreme tactics are generally reserved for war zones.” In other words, the agents involved in the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were very well trained…in the techniques of terror and killing.

  • ICE agents have been leaving behind customized Ace of Spades playing cards after raids in Colorado. The cards, which read: “ICE Denver Field Office,” resemble the infamous Death Cards left behind by U.S. soldiers after raids on peasant villages during the Vietnam War.

Photo: Voces Unidas.

  • Marta Escalante Perez, the 29-year-old single mother of a 5-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, who has survived years of extreme spousal abuse, was arrested on her way to work picking berries in Oregon’s Willamette Valley by ICE agents and quickly transported out of state to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. She was detained at the border, but later released after an immigration judge terminated a deportation order against her.

A member of the indigenous Mam community in Guatemala, Perez came to the US more than a decade ago, after being sexually abused and gang raped as a teenager. Several years later, Perez was again the subject of sexual and physical abuse. This time, by her partner, who was convicted of assaults on her and her daughter in 2022 and 2024. At the time of her arrest by ICE, Perez had pending applications for asylum and a U-Visa, which allows victims of crimes to remain in the United States legally.

Rep. Andreas Salinas, a Democrat from Oregon: “Under any sane administration, including previous ones, ICE would have already released her and anyone else who was on the path toward receiving their U-Visa.Sadly, this is not a sane administration. Instead, ICE is keeping her from her children and traumatizing their family.”

  • Another Oregon woman named Maria, this one a US citizen, suffered a concussion, a torn rotator cuff and bruised ribs after immigration officers stopped her on a Salem, Oregon street, broke her driver’s side window, dragged her out of the car and then left suddenly after finding her passport in her purse…ICE agents stopped the woman about 11 a.m. last Thursday after apparently racially profiling her. The woman, who is Latina, asked her SEIU union rep not to release her full name because she was still in shock and feared reprisals.

  • Marimar Martinez, the Chicago woman, who was shot five times by ICE, then, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, smeared as a criminal (she wasn’t) who tried to kill ICE agents: “I had never even had a parking ticket. They were calling me a domestic terrorist and said I rammed agents. I was shocked. If they only knew I was a month away from paying off my truck and I would never intentionally damage it, much less be crazy enough to hit law enforcement.”

  • U.S. Army veteran, Godfrey Wade, who had lived in the United States for more than 50 years, was deported by the Trump administration to Jamaica last week. Wade, a Jamaican-born lawful permanent resident, was taken into custody last year by ICE and ultimately kicked out of the US, despite appeals from his family, advocates and lawyers.

  • In a Portland (Maine, this time) raid, ICE agents broke into the car of Hassane Barry, grabbed him, and left his distraught wife, Nene, and their infant son alone in the vehicle. Barry is an asylum-seeker from Guinea with no criminal record. Witness:

There was a car seat in the back with one of those baby blankets you get at the hospital. There were broken glass shards all over it. I carefully pulled back the blanket and there was just this tiny peanut of a baby. He was crying. I picked him up and hushed him, told him it was gonna be OK. He nuzzled into my neck and stopped crying. I almost broke down right then and there.

  • Chris Godshall-Bennett, lawyer for ICE detainees at the Dilley “facility” in Texas: “I’ve been representing a mother and her 5 children. The two youngest children have lived 20% of their lives in that facility. We’ve had awful reports of mental health deterioration. This facility is a jail. It’s unconscionable that there are children at this facility.”

  • Child separations didn’t originate with Trump. They’ve been taking place since immigration into the US was criminalized. As a matter of policy, however, they kicked into gear under the deporter-in-chief, Barack Obama, whose brutal enforcement chief, Tom Homan, put forth the perverse idea that ripping children from their parents’ arms and caging them would serve as a deterrent to border crossings. It didn’t. However, the policy’s failure didn’t deter its continued implementation, more or less aggressively, under Trump One and Biden. But the number of juvenile detentions is now skyrocketing. Under Biden, ICE had an average of 25 separated children a day. Under Trump, the average for 2025 soared to 175 per day, rising to more than 400 after the surges in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and North Carolina. But this chilling number only applies to the children held by ICE. It doesn’t include those in the custody of Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

  • Shortly after an ICE agent shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas-González during a racial profiling traffic stop in the Franklin Park suburb of Chicago, some local cops huddled together to determine who would investigate the shooting.

One officer said, “Wouldn’t it be the state’s, at a minimum?”

But Franklin Park police chief Mike Witz quickly dismissed the idea of the state holding the feds accountable for killing an Illinois resident. “No, because it’s a federal shooting. You’re not going to investigate a federal officer.”

  • The Intercept: The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis “nominated over 4,600 people to the terrorist watchlist” in the last year. (I like the notion of being “nominated” to the list, as if we’re all up for an award.)

  • As Bondi’s prosecutors filed felony charges against people who protested against ICE at a church in St. Paul and the journalists who covered it, Trump’s immigration agents launched a violent raid on a church and food bank in Los Angeles…

  • If the ranks of ICE had been filled by a draft, we wouldn’t be seeing this kind of mass brutality. Normal human beings would recoil from committing daily acts of violence against defenseless people and would question the psychological health of those giving them orders to do so, as we ultimately saw in Vietnam. But instead, ICE is populated by people who signed up for this, people who are eager to terrorize, abuse and inflict gratuitous brutality on others. Sadists, in other words.

  • The abusive treatment of Kilmer Abrego Garcia exposed the brutality and duplicitous nature of Trump’s mass deportation scheme and turned the majority of the country against it almost overnight….

  • Doran Schrantz:” One aspect of the Trump Administration’s assault on MN that is underreported—the MAGA social media grifters on the ground. The spectacle of violence and the propaganda machine are integrated. It’s a secondary layer to the violence being done to Minnesota residents. Smearing, distorting, lying, doxxing to harvest content at our expense and their profit.”

  • Ken Klippenstein was leaked a CBP inventory that revealed 35,765 less-lethal munitions on hand by January 21, including tear gas grenades and rubber bullet rounds. This arsenal is heading for Portland now, I presume…

  • I don’t often promote articles from the National Review, but this one by Karl Marlantes, on the increasing trend of domestic police agencies dressing up in combat gear, is worth reading and not only because KM’s an Oregon writer who has written one of the best novels about the Vietnam War, Matterhorn, and the best novel about the PNW since Sometimes a Great Notion, Deep River.

  • A retiree wrote an email to a DHS attorney urging leniency for asylum seekers. Less than five hours later, DHS demanded Google turn over his account records and sent “investigators” to his home.

  • For Dante, “Inferno” did not mean a large pit of leaping flames. It meant “Hell.” And his Hell didn’t burn its eternal residents; it froze them. Purgatory did the burning, purging the sins from those in the waiting line for entry into Paradise. Hell for Dante was ICE. And so it remains for us…

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  • Stephanie Savell, director of Brown University’s Cost of War Project: “Every single person in Gaza is sick, injured or both.”

  • Abu Mohammed Haboush on the Israeli bombing in Gaza on February 4 that killed 26 people: “It was about 1:30 in the morning—and we were sleeping peacefully. There was nothing around us, nothing near us. We were far from the yellow line. We were sleeping peacefully in our house when they shelled it. My son was martyred, my nephew was martyred, my niece was martyred, and other children were martyred.”

  • Here’s Phil Gordon, Kamala Harris’ National Security Advisor, responding to a ludicrous allegation by Israeli polemicist Amit Segal, that the Biden administration was responsible for Israeli soldier deaths by not giving Israel a free-enough hand to kill in Gaza, admitted that Biden/Harris violatedUS law by refusing to condition weapons sales on Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.

  • Mariam Barghouti: “With all of the documents from the Epstein files, it really becomes much clearer why current policy-makers tend to force themselves on other nations. It’s rape culture. We’re literally witnessing a world run by pedophiles and rapists and it’s reflected in global policy. They just keep forcing themselves on people and finding ways to distort it, justify it, get away with it by sheer force and war-mongering.”

  • Too bad that it took Pete Hegseth to cut ties with Harvard, instead of Harvard cutting ties with the Pentagon and potentially saving thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.

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  • $955: the amount of savings of US workers. Financial experts recommend people have 3 to 6 times their monthly expenses saved in case of an emergency, which works out to between $14,100 to $28,200 for the average American.

  • The Nebraska state legislature just approved a bill that lowers the minimum wage for young workers from $15 an hour to $13.50.

  • It still mystifies me that Americans elected, then reelected a land/slumlord to be their president…

  • I hope for nothing but the worst to happen to the sweatshop-labor-exploiting executives at Nike. But now that Trump has declared Nike the enemy of white people, perhaps Phil Knight, the largest funder of the GOP in Oregon, will dump a few of his millions into the defense of immigrants in Oregon in retaliation, if not out of conscience, which he has hitherto shown no evidence of possessing. Yeah, probably not…

  • What Twain said about statistics also applies to charts, especially from this White House…

  • According to the WSJ, only a few days before the inauguration in January 2024, Eric Trump secretly signed away 49% of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto company, in a $500 million deal with a member of the U.A.E. royal family. A few months later, the U.A.E. won access to U.S. AI chips.

In exchange for releasing federal funds for the NY/NJ tunnel, Trump demanded that Penn Station and Dulles International Airport be renamed after him. The Nazis (and their admirers) tended to name streets after Hitler. But I don’t think the Führer issued the orders himself; perhaps it was implied. Stalin, on the other hand…

  • Trump’s approval rating among the Danes is now -97%. He’s single-handedly unified the country in their hatred of him. Moreover, 52% of Danes now view the US as an enemy state, while only 33% view China as such. Such a skilled diplomat…

  • How many politicians see this kind of poll movement…in their favor, I mean? Right after his election in November, Mamdani polled at 55-31 percent approval in NYC. Three months later, he’s at 68-20. That’s a net shift of approval of 24 points in three months.

  • Trump wants the GOP to nationalize the voting and let him do the counting: “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least, many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

  • Down in the “free state of Florida,” Aaliyah Steward, a third-year law student at Florida A&M University, says that school administrators ordered her to remove the word “Black” from the flyer promoting a Black History Month event.

  • Party like a MAGA-Diva by forcing your staff to make midnight Tequila runs while you do shots praising the “little people”!

During her first term, staffers say Nancy Mace would command them to bring her liquor after midnight to keep parties going at her home, which is technically an abuse of her office according to House rules. “Look, when I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,” a former staffer claimed of incidents they recalled going back to 2021.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene: “MAGA was all a lie.” An early clue: the MAGA hats were made in China…

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As Daniel Dale and others have pointed out, during his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump broke off from the teleprompter text to make the ludicrous claim that he had freed a Christian woman facing the death penalty in Sudan in 2014, under the Obama administration…(See also his line about: “We don’t kill Christians here. We protect them.” Almost all of the people ICE is deporting, brutalizing, and killing are Christians, many of them devout.)

Implausibly, Trump kept his role in the release of Miriam Ibrahim a secret for the past 12 years, given that her case was a cause celebre for American Christians and Trump’s compulsion with broadcasting every little thing he does or wants people to believe he’s done. Trump claimed that he freed Ibrahim with a single call to the “powers that be.” That power in Sudan in 2014 would have been the genocidal warlord Omar al-Bashir, who at that point had ruled Sudan as a military dictatorship for the last quarter of a century. It’s impossible to imagine Bashir accepting a call from Donald Trump and absurd to believe that he called anyone “sir” at that point, especially a washed-up real estate tycoon and reality TV celebrity.

  • After his bizarre address to the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, Trump returned to the White House and later that night posted (or ordered posted) a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes. There seems to be no bottom to this pit…

  • Instead of an “autopen,” the enfeebled Trump apparently uses racist junior staffers to publish things in his name. Although Trump had someone delete the post 12 hours after it appeared, he later claimed that posting it was “not a mistake.” No one really thought that it was, Don…

  • Sorry, Karoline, nice try, but there were no “apes” (gibbons, chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas) in The Lion King…

  • BREAKING from the No Shit Newswire (i.e, New York Times): “A flurry of posts from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security have included images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right.”

  • Speaking of scumbags, Elon Musk’s X awarded a $1 million “content creator” prize to someone with a history of writing racist, anti-immigrant posts, including one praising Adolf Hitler.

  • Least surprising news of the week: “Newly released files from DoJ show the pair [Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein] making plans in 2012 and 2013 for the Tesla CEO to visit Epstein’s island.”

  • Down in the “free state of Florida,” Aaliyah Steward, a third-year law student at Florida A&M University, says that school administrators ordered her to remove the word “Black” from the flyer promoting a Black History Month event.

  • Trump, when asked if he’s going to tear down the Kennedy Center: “I’m not ripping it down. I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure, we’re using some of the marble and some of the marble comes down.” So, yes, he’s tearing it down. Has Trump ever built–or branded with his name–a single building of even the slightest architectural significance? Who is Trump’s Albert Speer?

  • Kennedy Center’s workers’ Union responds to Trump’s plan to close the venerable venue, layoff the workers, demolish the building and reconstruct a monument to himself…

  • Things I wonder if Donald Trump has ever done: played catch or shot baskets with his sons, gone to a parent/teacher conference, made breakfast, fixed a flat tire, hiked a trail, done the dishes, mowed the lawn, changed a diaper, read a book to a grandchild, taken out the garbage, folded the towels, found the remote, shoveled the snow off the driveway, gotten the groceries, clipped his own toenails, unclogged a toilet…

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Photo: California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

  • Does anyone remember that old Missing Persons song, Nobody Walks in LA? Well, for the first time in more than 100 years, the lobo now walks in LA and his/her hair is perfect. Stay safe and draw blood…

  • A paper published last week in the journal Science Advances found that from 2006 to 2020, chronic exposure to tiny particulates from wildfire smoke contributed to an average of 24,100 deaths a year in the lower 48 states. “Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health,” said Yaguang Wei, a study author and assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

  • Tom Hickman writing in the LRB on international law and climate justice:

It is frequently pointed out that the climate crisis cannot be solved by litigation or by judges. While obviously true, the point can be overstated. One of the purposes of international law is to protect states from harm caused by other states, and governments have chosen to coordinate their efforts to combat climate change through treaties. Laws and the impartial adjudication of laws by courts are therefore central to the global response to climate change.

+A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that “urban heat islands” in many tropical and subtropical cities will warm faster than rural areas under 2°C of global warming. “Urban heat stress under climate change is an increasing concern, as many cities in the tropics and subtropics can be warmer than their rural surroundings, heightening their vulnerability to rising temperatures, said the study’s co-author Professore Manoj Joshi, from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. “This analysis shows even state-of-the-art projections likely underestimate future urban warming. For example, our results suggest that several cities in North-East China and northern India are projected to warm by 3°C, despite Earth system model projections of their hinterlands showing a warming of 1.5-2°C.”

  • $185 billion: the amount Google plans to spend on data centers this year alone.

  • In 2025, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil sources for the first time in the EU.

  • Even though both Trump and Biden kept Chinese EVs off the streets of the US, they now account for roughly two-thirds of all EVs sold in the world.

  • According to a report by Rystad Energy, “battery storage is no longer just enabling renewables — it is actively replacing gas generation.”

  • By 2050, an estimated 92 million people could die prematurely from obesity-related diseases in OECD, G20 and EU countries.

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  • I started getting press calls about Chomsky and Epstein, before I’d looked at the new revelations and saw just how deep the relationship was. (“Why is the press calling the press,” I said, “if I have anything to say, I’ll write myself,” refusing any comment.)

The latest batch is very ugly and, I think, indefensible. It’s especially disgusting that Noam saw it necessary to shame the victims as hysterics. When it was first revealed that Chomsky had some kind of relationship with Epstein, I was surprised, but not terribly shocked. I assumed he was trying to pick Epstein’s very deep pockets for money for his MIT projects. Hell, Noam had taken money from the Pentagon, DIA and other unsavory sources in the past. There’s no such thing as clean money. But still…

It’s also very hard to understand how he could have maintained such close ties to someone who was a hardcore Zionist and, if not an Israeli agent himself, certainly an asset whom Israeli intelligence used frequently. It’s baffling. A couple of years ago, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote off his dismissal of Epstein’s predatory sexual behavior as similar to Nader’s stubborn refusal to endorse gay rights during the 2000 campaign, when there were several gay marriage/rights initiatives on state ballots, by saying, “I don’t do gonadal politics.” But this is much more appalling and inexplicable.

What was it about Epstein that could cloud Chomsky’s judgment? If it wasn’t the money and wasn’t the opportunity to rape young women? Look at Epstein’s writing: it’s scarcely literate. The sex-trafficker masquerading as a financial genius and consciousness guru was just not that smart and you’d think Noam, of all people, would be immune to intellectual seduction and flattery.

The last time I talked to Noam was a couple of years ago to beg for a blurb for our book An Orgy of Thieves, which he graciously delivered almost immediately. He still seemed to have all of his faculties, which, as we know, are more faculties than almost anyone else on the planet has ever had. So I don’t think you can blame it on dementia–maybe the new wife (always the first reaction when your hero stumbles)? But Valeria apparently only wanted Epstein to put them up in NYC and Noam said, “I fantasize about the Caribbean.” Read that how you will, but I prefer to believe Noam was thinking about Cuba.

The right, of course, is, as Doug Henwood pointed out, scurrilously trying to link this perplexing friendship to Chomsky’s politics, which is absurd. In fact, the relationship is a contradiction of nearly everything Chomsky has stood for over the last 60 years, which is why the revelations have proved so confounding for so many of us.

  • Several people have asked what Cockburn would have thought about Chomsky’s unsettling relationship with Epstein. It’s impossible to say, really. Alex and Noam were friends and Alex was intensely loyal to his friends. Given Cockburn’s writings on sex panics, I’d guess that he would have been more unnerved about Epstein’s role as a Zionist hardliner (and probable Israeli agent) than Noam’s bizarre dismissal of Epstein’s, by then widely-known, predilection for sex-trafficking and pedophilia. At the very least, Noam’s ties to Epstein were evidence of seriously bad judgment, intellectual and moral, from someone who usually made such considered and thoroughly reasoned decisions. At least that’s how it appears on this misty morning in the Oregon country….

  • Norman Finkelstein for the win! (Too bad Chomsky didn’t have the same response.)

  • I unearthed this photo of Alexander Cockburn doing one of the few things he enjoyed more than poking fun at Bernie Sanders, barbecuing tri-tip for his 60th birthday party. (I presented him with a Laura Bush bobblehead for the occasion, though the head wasn’t the only body part that “bobbled.” He harbored an explicable attraction for her.)

  • 38,000: Number of times Trump, Melania, and Mar-a-Lago are mentioned in the released Epstein files, according to a report by the NYT.

  • Mike Drucker: ‘Internal White House meetings goin on, like, “Hopefully the racism will distract from the pedophilia which will distract from the killings which will distract from the pedophilia again which will distract from the economy which will distract from the pedophilia a third time.”’

  • MeToo’d Melania director, Brett Ratner, was in the Epstein Circle, was feted by Netanyahu, and had his career resurrected by the Ellisons, Bezos and Trump… In MAGAland, if you’re not a scumbag, you’re a nobody.

Jeffrey Epstein and Bruce Ratner. Photo from Epstein files.

  • Here’s my review of “Melania”, written, like Norman Mailer’s infamous review of Waiting for Godot, without having seen it: Melania Trump is one of the world’s most boring people. There’s nothing the least interesting about her. She’s not even evil enough to waste time condemning. Her soft porn photo shoots lack the faintest hint of eroticism. Even the great Helmut Newton would have failed to coax any intimation of suggestiveness or carnality out of her stiff posture and bland, expressionless visage. Her entire adult life, she seems to have willingly played the role of a walking manikin. Which made her the perfect match for Trump, of course, who views wives, like he views everything else, as acquisitions, objects for display. But is that the real her? Only her mani-pedicurist knows for sure. The lone memorable thing she’s ever done is wear that Zara jacket with the faux graffiti reading, “I Really Don’t Care, Do You?” when she was forced to a migrant children’s detention “camp” in Texas. Now, that was a little punk, a little spark of rebellion. But then she almost immediately reverted to her drone-like essence, which she has scrupulously maintained ever since.

  • Alex Cole: “Melania: is a documentary about an Epstein girl, who married Epstein’s best friend, directed by an Epstein client.”

  • Why does Sen. Josh Hawley keep surrendering to his compulsive urge to watch shows that “offend” him?

  • Injecting acid into your penis? Sounds like something Hunter Thompson might have tried…

+House Speaker Mike Johnson on the world’s most widely-streamed music artist being picked to lead the Super Bowl’s halftime show: “I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was, but it sounds like a terrible decision. He’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience. There are so many eyes on the Super Bowl—young, impressionable children. In my view, you would have Lee Greenwood.”

  • On Bob Marley’s 81st birthday, I spent most of the afternoon listening to Babylon by Bus, while assiduously avoiding writing. The fourth time through, I was still puzzled by the catalog of characters out on the streets in “Rat Race,” like a bizarre retinue in a reggae Desolation Row or the gloriously weird cast of faces in James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels. I had to consult a dictionary of Jamaican patios to discover that a “guine-gog” is a “very (self) important person.” There are almost certainly some tech-bros and politicos in our long-running opera bouffe who are that species of rat…

Some a-lawful, some a-bastard, some a-jacket Oh, what a rat race, yeah! Rat race! Some a gorgon-a, some a hooligan-a, some a guine-gog-a In this ‘ere rat race, yeah!

Rat race!

Rasta don’t work for no EYE-CEE-EEE…

Booked Up What I’m reading this week…

The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles With People and the Planet Ann Pettifog (Verso)

Naturekind: Language, Culture and Power Beyond the Human Mieliss Leach and James Fairhead (Princeton)

Before the Flood: a Gaza Family Memoir Ramzy Baroud (Seven Stories)

Sound Grammar What I’m listening to this week…

One Mississippi Eric Bibb (Repute)

Gospel Music Joel Ross (Blue Note)

CBGB: a New York City Soundtrack, 1975-1986 Various Artists (Cherry Red)

A Tough Life Needs a Tough Language

“I had no one to help me, but T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange, stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

– Jeanette Winterson, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?

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