A week of the Kenyan president ordering the police to shoot protestors, learning private equity is taking over healthcare, and two Black men being terrorised by the state

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live in Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My newsletter has evolved into this beautiful news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

Today I’m sharing my feelings the Kenyan president ordering the police to shoot protestors, learning private equity is taking over health care, and two Black men being terrorised by the state

Onto the news… 

News that made me feel like lack of public bathrooms is peak coloniser behaviour

The current top coloniser of Kenya, William Ruto, also referred to as the president, called for the police to shoot protestors who destroyed property in the legs. I call Ruto top coloniser of Kenya because of his eagerness to please the IMF at the expense of his so-called constituents. 

Last year Kenyan zoomers stormed the parliament to remind Ruto who he should be working for when he tried to raise taxes to pay off IMF loans. Ruto walked back his tax raises like a teenager walks back into their room when their plans to sneak out are thwarted by their parents’ late night snacking.

To be honest I call anyone who is the “leader” of a state a coloniser because all states are colonisers, it doesn’t matter who the leader is. If you come to my home and tell me you have authority over me because I fall into some border made up by a white man, you are a coloniser.

Also, has Ruto been brainstorming with Donald Trump on how to suppress protests? Yes, Trump did ask at some point if protesters could be shot in the leg to which the military general responded, we don’t shoot Americans in the legs, we save the bullets for imperialism. 

Okay he didn’t say that but this man who orchestrates the murder of people clutched his pearls at the thought of a president suggesting he shoot his own constituents. Everyone knows you aren’t supposed to murder the people who you are pretending to protect and serve. It sends the message that you are in fact not there to protect and serve them which is very inconvenient to maintain the pretense that states are here to serve the people and not business interests.

Nonetheless, it does make sense that Ruto would instruct the police to shoot protestors who threaten property because policing in Kenya originated from the Imperial British East Africa Company. One can only assume that an entity with the words imperial, British, and company did not create anything for the common good. The company created policing to protect its business interests. 

A coloniser using violence to protect their stealing is obviously more predictable than me choosing to be constantly dehydrated when I leave my apartment so I don’t have to worry about finding a place to pee. Is it good? No. Will I change? Probably not until we live in a society where finding a public bathroom doesn’t feel like playing pokemon go. Which means we would have to live in a society where colonialism doesn’t exist. As we know the goal of not having public bathrooms is to make people who can’t or refuse to serve capitalism uncomfortable which is peak colonizer behavior.

Which brings me back to Ruto. How deeply colonised does your brain have to be for you to use a police force to serve the colonisers goals of protecting capital over people? How deeply colonised does your brain have to be for you to publicly misconstrue peace and stability as a state where people suffer and businesses thrive? More colonised than Beyoncé fans who think financially supporting a billionaire who wears pro-Indigenous genocide merch is woke and that’s saying a lot.

News that made feel like the universe should smite a specific landlord

I went to the dentist and as he was gently cleaning my teeth (this is why I love him) we started talking about politics. I don’t know what it is about me that makes people want to whisper in my ear, Luigi did the right thing. It’s not like I go around screaming I hate capitalism to everyone who will listen. 

My dentist revealed to me his landlord doubled his rent, ALAB! After we both wished the universe to smite the landlord, my dentist continued to tell me that most private practices in healthcare have shut down. He found this to be really upsetting because the larger corporations want to make money from healthcare which is not the purpose. What was additionally upsetting to him is that the state of healthcare will get even worse. I didn’t know trash could get worse than trash but in this dystopia anything is possible.

I got home and researched the extent to which healthcare private practices were shrinking because I’m a nerd and I can’t help myself. If you give me a crumb, I will go looking for the whole cake. It didn’t take much of a search to find out that doctors working in private practices is down from 60% in 2012 to 47% in 2022. For private dental practices the decrease is from 84.7% in 2005 to 73% in 2021.

So if healthcare providers aren’t working in private practices owned by doctors, who are they working? Hospitals and private equity. If your first instinct was to scream as I’m wont to do when I hear unsurprising yet terrifying news, your feelings are right. Yes, private equity, the evil entities who only care about money that want to turn everything into money as if we can swim in and eat money. Even Harvard’s school of public health wrote an article titled “Private equity’s appetite for hospitals may put patients at risk”. The article mentioned an instance where the CEO of Steward Health Care bought a 40 million dollar yacht while the hospitals faced financial strain. I swear these people are comic book villains. Who is coming up with these ideas for world domination, an unimaginative 2 year old?

Look, I’m not going to sit here and say that doctors owning their own practices is the way to go. I don’t know much about healthcare provision, but I do know healthcare is a human right. Nothing that’s a human right should have a profit motive, period. No one should die because they don’t serve capital. Instead of having private practices we should have community run practices. The Black Panthers did it with their free clinics.

While I was writing this I wondered how did my people provide healthcare before colonialism? I learned that Luo people passed down herbal remedies from generation to generation. I wonder if part of community healthcare is also for everyone to have a basic understanding and access to resources to care for each other when they can. I’m not saying everyone should be able to do open heart surgery, but maybe everyone should know how to do basic first aid. Instead of us learning how to diagram sentences maybe we should learn about herbs that keep us healthy.

News that made me say the NYPD should arrest themselves

Jakhi McCray, a young Black man was forced to turn himself in to the police after his family was terrorised by the NYPD. A couple of things the NYPD is good at is terrorising citizens and being evil which makes sense because they share their best evil practices with the IOF. 

The NYPD forced themselves into Jakhi’s family and other homes looking for Jakhi who they claim set 10 NYPD cars on fire. Jakhi insists he didn’t set the cars on fire but the NYPD insist there is “evidence” linking Jakhi to the crime. Funny how the NYPD can easily “find” evidence for someone setting their cars on fire but no evidence that they are complicit in genocide and should arrest themselves.

One thing that I cannot stop thinking about from reading an article about Jakhi, which sounded like it was written by the police, is the US attorney stating, “Setting police vehicles ablaze is not a form of protest — it is a federal crime.” It’s as if the US attorney is acknowledging some people would consider burning down terrorists’ cars to be a form of protest. This statement both angered me and excited me.

It excited me because here is a stooge of a terrorist state feeling the need to advise anyone who is anti-terrorist that destroying weapons required for terrorism is unlawful. Which means the stooge of the state is scared that there are people out there who think this act is justified, just like there were people out there who threw a party when the United Healthcare executive was sent to hell early. I love that! The state should be scared of us because oppressors should never feel safe. If anyone from the FBI is reading this, remember I’m a comedian. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

The statement from the US attorney also upset me because burning down police cars is unlawful BUT pulling a Black man out of a car in broad daylight and beating him to the point that he needs stitches can be LAWFUL? Yes, some terrorists in Florida dragged William McNeil Jr. out of his car for questioning why they stopped him and not just acquiescing to his kidnapping. After the video went viral Sheriff T.K. Waters said, “I will neither defend nor commend officer Bowers’ response to resistance until all the facts are known and the investigation is completed.” What investigation? We all saw what happened. So what the sheriff is saying is yes there is a situation where it is okay to beat up someone for existing.

What the experiences of these two Black men exposes is that we don’t have the right to defend ourselves against state violence. We live in a world where state violence is acceptable but burning cars that are used for state violence is unequivocally unacceptable. The state can kill us, starve us, but we cannot fight back according to the state. Which is precisely why the Palestinians are being starved for defending themselves.

We can’t live in this world anymore. Not a world where autocrats have the impunity to kill. We have to support those who reclaim their right to self-defense from the state. If anyone asks you why you support those who violently protest the state, just point to that hypocritical document called the declaration of independence that states we have the right to abolish a government that violates our rights then burn an American flag (just for fun).

I took a break from the news to talk about policing while Black

 

@feelthenewswithmarcela Come to Feel the News the comedy show on August 2nd @friendsandloversbk to see tell the news live! Link for tickets in bio! #feelthenews #jokes #comedy #standup #ancestor ♬ original sound – Feel the News

See ya later,

Marcela