Sorry not sorry

October 21, 2016

Socialist Worker's Danny Katch, author of Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation, catches you up on news you might have missed this week.

DONALD TRUMP is a unique combination of menacing and pathetic. He's the Ku Klux Clown, the ideal mascot for a fascist softball team.

But it's getting to be a bit much to hear the hourly denunciations of Trump from the kinds of well-heeled people who mingle every day with monsters like pharmaceutical execs who jack up by the price of drugs for lead poisoning in children by seven THOUSAND percent.

The one thing you can say for Trump is that he’s treating this shit show of an election with the level of respect that it deserves. He’s terrible at debates, so he’s using a move he learned from WrestleMania and invites plants to rattle Hillary Clinton from the front row. This time he invited Barack Obama’s half brother, who I guess chickened out on the plan to sneak on stage when the moderator wasn’t looking and hit Clinton with a chair.

Clinton had her choice of literally thousands of sympathetic people who have been screwed over by Trump to invite as her front-row guests. And she chose...billionaires Mark Cuban and Meg Whitman. Is it really that mysterious why she isn't winning by more? To put this in Muppet terms, no one wants to give Animal the nuclear codes, but if his only opponent was Sam the Eagle, he'd probably get 40 percent.

This Week in Capitalism | By Danny Katch

To be fair to Clinton, her first choice as a guest was Michelle Obama, but the debate organizers rejected it when they found out the plan was for the First Lady to take over the podium and debate Trump, while Clinton stood by her side and made millions of viewers squirm by saying things like "You go, girl."

Also, can we stop pretending that the country club wing of the Republican Party is so much more mature? I'm talking about people like Willard "Mitt" Romney, a polished and proper man who harumphs at Trump's crudeness every chance he gets.

Sure, Trump is an entitled baby who never apologizes and uses silly slogans like "Make America Great Again." But four years ago, when Willard wrote a book for his presidential campaign, guess what it was called? No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.


SOMETIMES THE only thing worse than no apology is a bullshit apology, and this was a banner week for those.

Saudi Arabia said it "regretted" the deaths of 140 people it killed by bombing a funeral in its U.S.-backed war in Yemen. It blamed the massacre on bad information that rebel leaders were going to be there--which I guess would have made bombing a funeral okay?

If only al-Qaeda had issued a similar statement after 9/11, saying that they had thought Dick Cheney was going to be in the Twin Towers, I'm sure that would have given Americans a sense of closure.

Samsung apologized for its "unclear communication" to China about the problems that the rest of the world already knew about with its Galaxy Note 7 phone. The company was counting on Chinese customers to not hear about its exploding phones because every time they tried to get on the Internet, their phones would explode.

Finally, the head of the police chiefs association issued an apology on behalf of American police to Black people for...Jim Crow segregation half a century ago. Yeah, some really edgy stuff. Apparently, he had just watched The Help and just felt like he had to say something. Maybe this will finally satisfy the demands of the lesser-known #BlackLivesMattered50YearsAgo movement.

The day after this momentous apology, Bronx cops killed Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old woman suffering a disturbed episode. Ed Mullins of the sergeants union said, "Everyone agrees this is a good shooting." First of all, any time someone is shot, and it's not a suicide, there is by definition at least one person who didn't agree with getting shot.

Beyond that, who looks at a 66-year-old woman lying dead in her apartment after being killed by police who were called to calm down the situation, takes a deep breath and says, "Ahh, now that's a good shooting." What type of Apocalypse Now shit is that?

Protesters have taken to the streets demanding justice. They'll be happy to know that the police chiefs association is planning to issue a statement about the killing in 2066.