Jeffrey St. Clair

Roaming Charges: Aspirations to Omnipotence

Roaming Charges: He Loves a (Buff) Man in Uniform

Many of those righteously condemning the rise of "political violence" have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.

There is no legal justification for Trump's military strike on an alleged "drug boat" off the coast of Venezuela. The boat, a simple speedboat, posed no threat to the US Navy vessels. The little boat could have easily been interdicted, searched for drugs and its occupants detained if any were found. No proof was offered that it was carrying drugs or was associated with the Tren de Aragua "narco-terrorist organization." In any event, drug trafficking is not a capital offense, even when it's been proven. Most countries would consider this an act of terrorism and mass murder under international law. Indeed, such a strike is also prohibited under US law.

ack in April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas was on his way to his job at a construction site when he was pulled over by federal immigration officers and Texas police in a joint raid near Bryant, Texas. Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old native of Venezuela, was pressed against his car as his hands were bent behind his back and cuffed. He was taken to a neaby gas station where he was interrogated. He was then arrested and thrown in the immigration detention jail (aka, “Processing Center”) in Conroe, Texas. The officers who arrested him claimed to have a deportation order for Escalona Mújicas based on the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump had recently invoked to speed up deportations of alleged gang members from central and south America. An agent told him: “the President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here.” Escalona Mújicas protested that he wasn’t a gang member and had a temporary work visa. But his denials were smugly dismissed by the arresting agents.

DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it's been almost completely gentrified. I didn't have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU's was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign.

Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. In all, 16 men were arrested and taken into ICE custody in defiance of a federal appeals court.

While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.” "Incomprehensible?" Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives ...If you don't ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.

I bought my first jazz LP in 1974 at a headshop called Karma on the southside of Indianapolis, thinking it was a rock record: Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This genre-melding recording did rock, but in ways I hadn’t heard before. John McLaughlin’s guitar screamed louder than Jimmy Page’s, Billy Cobham’s drums thundered furiously, Jerry Goodman’s runs on his electrified violin spiraled up into the aural exosphere and braided their way back to earth in tandem with Jan Hammer’s trippy chords on the mini-Moog and the basslines of the Irishman Rick Laird held it all together in funky, hypnotic grooves. This was heavy, often blistering, electronic music played in strange (to me, at least) new sonic registers and time signatures, as if the band members were engaged in some ecstatic, ever-branching conversation with each other.

These killings weren’t accidents. They weren’t provoked. They didn’t come about as an attempt to quell riots. The people killed were not collateral damage in attempts to kill Hamas fighters. The shootings were not in retaliation for any violence from the Palestinians. Israeli troops were ordered to fire on Palestinians coming to get scraps of food handed out by the Christian fundamentalists and mercenaries who run the food distribution sites set up by Trump and Netanyahu. Let’s repeat that: Israeli troops were ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians who were trying to get food for their families.