Down in the street there is violence

And a lots of work to be done

— “Electric Avenue,” Eddy Grant

We don’t need to invent bogeymen to scare us. We actually elect them to represent our interests. In return, instead of addressing poverty, growing inequality, the broken health care and public education systems, and a raging climate crisis, they manufacture an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world, kicking our children and grandchildren into a darkened future.

Through decades of greed, selfishness, spitefulness, and apathy these political creatures have directly and indirectly unshackled a torrent of monsters. The Orange Blob that is now terrorizing brown people, murdering civilians at sea, corrupting all that he touches, and suffocating an already-fragile democracy was our inevitable nadir.

Political scaredness, not correctness, spawned the king of all monsters, the most vile creature in modern U.S. political history. The People’s House is literally being trashed by its resident evil.

During a government shutdown when federal employees have been furloughed or are working without pay, the narcissistic Blob is tearing down the East Wing of the White House — after lying that the project “won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it” — to build a $300 million, gaudy, Saddam Hussein-like ballroom to feed his enormous ego. The troll who has ripped off contractors, his own charity, and the public for the past six decades says he’s paying for the 90,000-square-foot monstrosity that will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot White House.

More lies. It will be paid for by taxpayers, or by corporate parasites such as Amazon, Apple, Caterpillar, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta, and Microsoft that have bent the knee and kissed the ring. More quid pro quo.

The parasitic Blob loves to shake down taxpayers. He is demanding that the Department of Justice pay him $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into his first-term crime spree. The bootlickers he appointed to run his department of injustice get to decide.

“They probably owe me a lot of money,” the blithering Blob said. “But if I get money from our country I’ll do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House where we restore the White House.”

The grabby Blob’s personal charity was shut down in 2018 after a lawsuit exposed a “shocking pattern of illegality.” The ogre used the charity to pay off legal settlements linked to his businesses, to buy a $10,000 painting of himself to hang in one of his golf clubs, and to boost his presidential campaign.

While the grotesquerie is demanding a massive personal payment from the government he oversees, his monstrous regime has enacted legislation that slashed funding for Medicaid benefits and food stamps that benefit the poorest of us.

The monsters are also preparing a rule that could severely reduce access to Social Security Disability Insurance, which provides critical income and health protection for workers who can no longer support themselves because of severe, long-term disabilities. The proposed rule would reportedly make qualifying substantially more difficult, particularly for older workers.

Shortly before the shutdown began, the U.S. Department of Agriculture trashed the Household Food Security Report, the country’s primary tool for tracking food insecurity, stripping away the infrastructure needed to help remedy rising hunger in a country the MAGA monsters hold at gunpoint.

While the greasy Blob’s tiny hands are constantly looking for a handout, he has threatened to do away with guaranteed back pay for federal employees, despite a law passed during the original “Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue” that mandated federal workers must be paid after a shutdown.


The Orange Blob is able to lie, cheat, steal, kidnap, and murder with impunity because he is protected by a monster mash of racists, bible-thumpers, traitors, and fascists who believe they are more important than the country. They rule simply: reward or retribution.

The corrupt Blob has reportedly amassed some $10 billion in ill-gotten treasure since his return to office earlier this year. His ghastly regime has no economic policy beyond throwing money at creatures it wants to help and tariffs at people it wants to punish. In both scenarios, taxpayers get slaughtered.

The federal government is shut down because the MAGA monsters don’t care if health-care premiums double or triple for millions of Americans, most of whom won’t be able to afford the increase, or that some 42 million Americans struggling to make ends meet will stop receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) on Nov. 1. The petulant Blob links disaster relief and other federal funding with how a state voted for him. If yes, a few dollars may be thrown its way; if no, fugeddaboutit.

Thousands of education and public health officials aren’t considered essential during the shutdown, but the regime believes firearms examiners are. We are able to buy deadly “gangster weapons” again as lobbying forced a key concession from the MAGA monsters. Some of the most highly regulated weapons in the United States — silencers, short-barreled rifles, and vintage machine guns produced before 1986 — are now considered essential. Health care, apparently, is not.

Sales of these weapons had stopped under the shutdown after federal examiners charged with regulating their purchase were furloughed. The weapons have long been recognized as posing an outsized risk to public safety, ever since the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934.

When the swamp creatures who inhabit the bloating White House aren’t stealing taxpayer money, they are ordering ghouls to brutalize, kidnap, and disappear people for simply being brown or Black. Car windows are being smashed, children are being zip-tied, front doors are being knocked down, and families are being destroyed by masked monsters.

The six monsters on the Supreme Court believe racial profiling is an American right.

Many of the people being menaced by these sadists are parents, respected community members, and law-abiding citizens. Few are gang members or violent criminals — even though the monsters would like us to believe otherwise. The monsters are, in fact, actively trying to make cities into the economic and crime-ridden hellscapes they falsely claim they are.

This isn’t law enforcement. It’s certainly not “protect and serve.” It’s a campaign of terror.

Sadly, too many of us find the Orange Blob’s rampage entertaining, funny even. The collective we has never been scared enough of the real monsters. We still aren’t. They are now baring their teeth. Their bite is vicious. No one is immune, not even those living in gated communities or in the People’s Disco.

Among the beasts our elected monsters are nurturing is a “flesh-eating” bacteria. Rising fatal infections are the consequence. In early August, Newsweek reported that Vibrio vulnificus is on the rise, with eight deaths — four each in Florida and Louisiana — and 60 other confirmed cases, including one in Massachusetts.

The deadly bacteria thrives in coastal regions, and with sea temperatures rising and other environmental changes linked to the climate crisis, experts fear the number of Vibrio vulnificus infections could surge.

It has been labeled “flesh-eating” for its ability to cause severe and sometimes fatal tissue damage. About 200 Vibrio vulnificus infections are currently reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annually, with about one in five cases being fatal.

This bacteria lives in salt and brackish water. Most people get infected with Vibrio vulnificus by eating raw or undercooked shellfish, particularly oysters, and others are infected when an open cut is exposed to seawater containing the bacteria. It causes a serious form of the illness vibriosis that can quickly lead to sepsis, shock, and large, spreading blisters that eat tissue.

Our Frankenstein Monster, the climate crisis, which our political creatures have long protected, is posed to unleash more mutants. Last year scientists warned that “zombie viruses” frozen in the Arctic permafrost could one day be released by Earth’s warming climate and unleash a major disease outbreak or two.

Strains of these ancient Methuselah microbes have already been isolated by researchers who have noted that a new global medical emergency could be triggered — not by a new illness but by disease from the distant past. One virus sample was 48,500 years old.

This human-made Frankenstein Monster also breathes fire and whips up sand storms. The climate crisis is disturbing wind patterns across the globe, worsening sand and dust storms and causing more intense wildfires. Mega wind storms now affect an estimated 330 million people — nearly the population of the United States — annually, according to Mongabay reporting.

Sand and dust pollution can travel long distances, and this wind-swept pollution is often carrying more than grime and loose granular material. It picks up all kinds of other pollutants, exposing increasingly more communities to harmful particulate matter and toxic materials that have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.

“‘Nightmare bacteria’ cases are increasing in the US” was the headline to a recent Associated Press story. Infection rates from drug-resistant “nightmare bacteria” rose nearly 70% between 2019 and 2023 was the lede.

In a study published in September, CDC researchers noted bacteria that are difficult to treat due to the so-called NDM gene primarily drove the increase. Only two antibiotics work against these infections, and those drugs are expensive and must be administered through an IV. The cure will be impossible to get without health care. Good thing our political creatures receive health care generously subsidized by taxpayers, including by those who can’t afford their own.

Bacteria with this gene were once considered exotic — linked to a small number of patients who received medical care overseas. Though the numbers are still small, the rate of U.S. cases has jumped more than fivefold in recent years, according to the researchers. They said it’s likely many people are unrecognized carriers of the drug-resistant bacteria, which could lead to community spread.

“The rise of NDMs in the U.S. is a grave danger and very worrisome,” David Weiss, an Emory University infectious diseases researcher, told the AP.

Flesh-eating and nightmare bacteria and zombie viruses are hardly the only monsters our hubris is working to unchain. Drinking bleach, avoiding Tylenol, and/or removing fluoride from drinking water won’t tame these beasts.

The silver bullet is made of science, knowledge, compassion, and humility. But we continue to manufacture bullets out of wrath, ignorance, gluttony, and cruelty.

We relentlessly feed the Frankenstein Monster burnt coal, methane, gasoline, and diesel. We allow the monster to binge on petroleum-derived bits of single-use wastefulness.

Overproduced plastics are choking the life out of us. They also could be making our penises less effective.

Last year microplastics were discovered in the male genital organ for the first time, raising questions about a potential role in erectile dysfunction. The findings came after the pollutants were detected in testes and semen. Plastic has also been found in human blood. Researchers said the penis could be particularly vulnerable to microplastic contamination due to high blood flow during erections.

Microplastics, tiny particles of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size, have infiltrated the ocean, soil, the air, food, and our bodies. With their omnipresence, these petroleum bits are adversely impacting human health. We are all Plastic Man.

Microplastics have been found in bottled water and beer. We ingest plastic through contaminated fish and shellfish. Different chemicals can leach from our plastic water bottles, plastic nips, plastic food containers, and plastic everything. This leakage has been linked to serious health issues such as endocrine disruption, weight gain, insulin resistance, decreased reproductive health, and cancer.

The political creatures, including those in Rhode Island, are too scared of the Fossil Fuel Monster and its lapdogs to forcefully address the plastics pandemic. It’s as if single-use plastics are more important than lungs, livers, prostates, ovaries, and erections.

The longer we allow the monsters to rampage, by voting in swamp things and constantly devouring propaganda, the more the horrors will worsen.

For instance, the first half of this year was the costliest on record for major disasters in the United States, according to a nonprofit that has resurrected work terminated by the regime that had been tracking such things.

In 2025’s first six months, 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage struck the United States, Climate Central calculated. In total, these catastrophes caused some $100 billion in damages in lost homes, businesses, highways, and other infrastructure — a toll higher than any other first half of a year since records on this began in 1980.

The mounting cost of wildfires, storms, hurricanes, drought, and floods — all being intensified and worsened by our Frankenstein Monster — had been charted over the previous 45 years by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, until the MAGA monsters decided they could redirect that money into more important things, such as a $300 million vanity project, a $40 billion bailout for an Argentinian monster, $200 million for two private jets for the Department of Homeland Thuggery, and $50,000 signing bonuses for those willing to execute state-sponsored terrorism.

Meanwhile, as the Orange Blob rages, MAGAs foam at the mouth, and the Frankenstein Monster gets high on carbon dioxide, extreme weather will intensify, flesh-eating bacteria will grow, zombie viruses will escape, and the horrors will escalate.

Happy Halloween.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.