Thanksgiving Greetings

Facing the reality of stark differences

Thanksgiving Greetings

November 24, 2023

Emanuel Pastreich

Candidate for President of the United States

I wish to extend my Thanksgiving greetings to all Americans and to affirm that we will return to true thanks giving on this day in the years ahead, embracing the sustainable and thankful, tolerant and deep minds of the native peoples who inspired this tradition in the first place, and overcoming the malicious, extractive, exploitative, narcissistic demons that have possessed Thanksgiving and rendered it a time for distraction and consumption, not the affirmation of our place in the natural world as one of the humble inhabitants of an ancient planet.

I know just how hard a Thanksgiving this has been for so many of you. I know that the Covid operation has destroyed local economies, that many of you are homeless, or in effect homeless, buried under debt to pay for medical bills, or for the most basic of services.

We know that every form of benefits to help the ill, the poor, and the unemployed have been stripped to the bone.

We know that while American food is shipped overseas to produce hundreds of billions in profits for multinational agribusiness, those at home go hungry because hunger has been rendered invisible in our “market economy.”

The Food Research and Action Council released a report indicating that although endless profits for banks, endless military aid to Ukraine, Israel and other nations, is the highest priority for the establishment, Americans who work for a living essentially do not exist. No, the politicians are not discussing how the political games surrounding a fabricated “government shutdown” has left out funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

Some 6.7 million women and young children, about half of the children born recently in the United States, are dependent on WIC for support and services. Its evisceration under the knife held by both Democrats and Republicans has produced one of the most grim Thanksgivings ever—unless we assume, like the Democrats do, that if you don’t qualify as “middle class” any more, you simply do not exist. Single mothers working at convenience stores with no benefits who try to give a Thanksgiving for their children simply don’t count.

The reign of terror known as COVID continues. The destruction of the economy by operation COVID created dependence on food stamps and other faltering public assistance programs. The Democrats have teamed up with the Republicans to destroy these programs, and the printing up of Federal Reserve money for parasite investment banks is driving inflation for every necessity in life, a trend that has poverty knocking on the doors of many Americans who thought they were safe.

But, as they say in luxury department stores, if the stock market keeps going up, thanks to corrupt stock buybacks, who cares what happens to working Americans?

And then there is the decimation of food production and food distribution systems over the last two years, the result of a policy of “starve the poor” that is just getting started. Many neighborhoods far from upper middle-class disticts no longer have supermarkets, or if they do, most nutritious vegetables have disappeared leaving behind “food deserts” in the midst of the obscene wealth of billionaires. That wealth was not produced by innovation but stolen from working people.

Some of you remember a Thanksgivings from childhood that you cannot enjoy today. And many younger Americans have no such memories at all, but they are still jolted, shamed, and humiliated to see lavish feasts devoured by the elites that are shown on television and that make it seem as if everyone in the United States enjoys such luxuries—implying that somehow those of us who do not are somehow deficient.

Ignore such false images and false words. They do not represent the United States as it is.  

The value of human experience is found in your bonds to family and friends, coworkers and neighbors, to nature and the divine. True human values have nothing do to with how much money you have, or how much you consume. Nevertheless, your freedom from hunger and want is critical to me, the highest priority for our campaign, and for our nation.

I want to wish a happy Thanksgiving to President Biden as well.

President Joe Biden is spending his Thanksgiving holiday at the lavish estate of billionaire David Rubenstein in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a popular destination for the wealthiest Americans whom the corporate media tells us we should envy and emulate, rather than condemn for their criminality.

David Rubenstein, did not become a billionaire, and close friend of President Biden, by accident.

No, David Rubenstein founded the Carlyle Group, the hedge fund private equity firm that made a fortune over the last thirty years by snatching up smaller companies, firing all their employees, liquidating all their assets and property, and then selling off the carcasses for a hefty profit. The Carlyle Group is one of the most aggressive parasitic institutions in the United States, one deeply involved in promoting the foreign wars that have crippled some of your sons and daughters now home for Thanksgiving.

The Carlyle Group that produced the wealth that built this mansion where President Biden feasts was the employer of former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and was home to both former presidents of war George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

If there were Turkeys on plates awaiting the Bidens at the Rubenstein estate, there were C-17 Globemasters hovering overhead to deliver equipment to the airport for that event. For security bureaucrats, and the security firms to whom big budgets were granted, this Thanksgiving dinner was a bonanza.

We do not know what comments President Biden made on the occasion of this banquet, but we can be certain there were similar to what he said at a

Manhattan fundraiser for Wall Street backers in 2019.  He assured the rich back then that his campaign rhetoric about the rich “pay their fair share” should not worry them because “Nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”

Yes, the Biden Thanksgiving was most certainly a Thanksgiving to remember. Whereas we may be thankful that we have food to eat, that we have survived, so far, the campaign of the superrich to exterminate working people, President Bidem was giving thanks where thanks was due. Not to nature, which his administration has destroyed; not to God, whom he has betrayed in every sense; not to those who worked so hard to make his meals and to polish his silverware. No, his Thanksgiving consisted of giving thanks to the founder the Carlyle Group, a criminal enterprise that created billions of dollars in wealth by printing up its own money through the Federal Reserve, by pushing the COVID 19 reign of terror, by impoverishing working people through artificial means, and by promoting dozens of pointless, overpriced military adventures that have killed and wounded millions.

Let this be a Thanksgiving where we pray for deliverance from the parasite class; I say to President Biden what Moses said to Pharaoh Ramses II: “Let my people go!”