NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(April '05)
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04/03/05
Ho now, big fella...
Got a cigarette? Good. No, I don't want one... just wanted to know. How about some spare change? Ticket stubs to yesterday's matinee at the Rialto? Muffin remnants? Don't get annoyed. Lookit, somebody's got to do inventory. Am I right? Okay, then. (Better write that down, as well.)
Yeah,
we're taking stock here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Every once in a great while,
it's a good idea to pause and measure up all you have to be grateful for... so
that's what we've been doing this week. Matt dug up a bunch of old,
distressed-looking tape measures and we've been ranging all around the mill,
checking the dimensions of the rooms, measuring the 
furniture, weighing all the
discarded knick-knacks, twanging chalklines across linoleum floors, and
docketing all the figures in a big old bound ledger, which we can then misplace
along with every odd sock we've never found. You may well ask yourself, why
would we engage in such an obviously pointless endeavor when there's an album to
be finished and other important tasks to perform? You may well ask. Will
you get a satisfactory answer? Well.... you may well ask.
I'm
a little concerned about Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Oh, sure, he's
helping us with our inventory... but in his spare time he's been glued to a p.c.
in the local internet cafe, sometimes for seven hours at a clip. Typically, that
might suggest some kind of interactive gaming or virtual life experience, like
piloting a digital cruise ship around the world in real time. (I've actually
participated in that one as a passenger -- the lush in cabin 17b. Sing-alongs
were part of my scenario, like "Ninety-nine virtual beers on the wall,
ninety-nine virtual beers! You load one down, email it around, ninety-eight
virtual beers on the wall!") But Marvin was not into anything like that. In
fact, when John dropped over to check up on him, he found our automatonic friend
logged in at the site of the dreaded band "Captured by Robots." Some
of the more die-hard readers of Notes from 
Sri Lanka (now in it's fifth glorious
year) will recall that Marvin once before came under the spell of this
malevolent concept group -- malevolent in the sense that the very notion of
robots as captors is something you just want to keep out of your automaton's
little tin skull. No lie.
It
calls to mind some guy who came to speak at my elementary school (that's a few
weeks ago) -- a chimp trainer who claimed that chimpanzees become
"mean" when they get to adulthood. (I don't doubt that that was his
experience, since he probably treated them like shit.) Well, Marvin's reaching
that age (4) when robots start getting kind of mean -- you know, they give you
surly answers and grunt when you call to them, then they mutter just beneath
their clockwork whirring sounds. I've seen this coming with Marvin for quite
some time, and it isn't just me. Lincoln mentioned it the other day -- it was
when we were all at table... I was passing him the boiled cabbage. Our
illustrious president (or some illustrious facsimile thereof) suggested that
people often disassemble their robots when they reach "that age", or
at least that's what they did back in his day. (I think he meant the Monitor,
but I'm not 
certain.) I'm afraid Marvin may have picked up on this somewhat
indiscreet comment. (He was waiting for the cabbage on the other side o'
Lincoln.)
Well, so now Marvin is keeping his own counsel almost exclusively, and this is indeed cause for concern. Disgruntledness has a tendency to spread and fester like the pox -- ask anybody who's ever shared an abandoned hammer mill with a robot and they'll tell you. Just today I saw the man-sized tuber reading a book titled "To serve man." Sounds harmless enough...but if he starts a new group called "Captured By Tubers," we'll know there's trouble ahead.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
On
Getting Better. It seems that in the midst of the political/media culture's
obsession with the late Ms. Schiavo (now free of scoundrels) and the sordid
details of Pope John Paul II's seemingly final days (feeding tube up the
nose...thanks for that, guys), it's been agreed that the Iraq conflict is going
better...better enough to relegate it to page 10A, at least. Oh, sure -- people
are being shot by the dozen, bombs are going off everywhere, airstrikes continue
to kill numberless Iraqis, the roads are among the most dangerous in the world,
the new parliament's inability to form a government is a source of growing anger
and disillusionment, people still don't have power or water and have to wait in
endless lines (and risk their lives) for gasoline. But the White House and
Pentagon say things are "better", so that's what goes into print, on
the air, and over the web. Hey, what the hell -- I'm sure they figure most
people enjoy the luxury of pretending there's no war to begin with, so how hard
would it be to imagine that things are going 
swimmingly
and that George Dubya has not only shown the world we mean business but actually
instigated some kind of alternative universe "Arab Spring" that the
Chuck Krauthammers of the world can celebrate at a safe distance?
It seems a pretty good idea to take a closer look at what this "going better" means. There's an implicit assumption in what passes for public discourse (certainly mainstream Democrats subscribe to this) that this war should be won, and that the only problem with it is failure to achieve the lofty objectives of peace, freedom, and self-determination for Iraqis. That's why you hear mutterings of "Golly, maybe Bush was right" from watery liberals when Junior takes credit for the demonstrations in Lebanon, for instance. But the objectives of this war are clear and odious -- a permanent military presence in Iraq and total transition of its economy to an "open" neo-liberal model. These goals support America's announced strategy of global power projection and "preventive" war. They also portend a political and social disruption in the Middle East that will likely lead to disaster for the region and, ultimately, for all of us, not just those unfortunate enough to be shipped over there. Mubarak's "1000 bin Ladens" are already in the pipeline, thanks to Dubya and the armchair bombardiers who planned this invasion. In fact, one of them may have driven the truck bomb that killed former Lebanese PM Hariri...so Bush may be partly responsible for the demonstrations, but not in the way they suggest.
Perhaps
it's thanks to the reactionary media machine and the larger corporate media echo
chamber that this is possible, but the truth of this war never seems to coalesce
into an overwhelming public sentiment against it. Oh, sure, the polling numbers
are there, but people aren't angry enough to demand an end to this madness, even
after revelations of how the original rationale for war was a pack of lies, how
our torture of detainees has been widespread and condoned at the highest levels,
how terrorism is now a greater threat because of the war, etc. And still
the administration just waltzes along, smashing lamps and vases as it goes. This
week they announced the sale of nuclear-capable F-16's to Pakistan -- this just
as Pakistan tests a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon anywhere in
India. Now there's a policy that promotes regional peace and stability.
After all, fighter-bombers don't kill, dictators do...but -- and this is
important! -- not all the time. Still, this stuff is reported blandly on
an inside page, along with the bloody news from Iraq. Ho-hum.
Face it, it's not a flea on the Pope story.
luv u,
jp
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04/10/05
So, then...
I'm thinking of a number between one and nine. No, don't ask me what it is. Now double it, then subtract seven. Carry the two -- that's right. That should give you another number that's greater than, equal to, or lesser than the first one. How do I know? That would be telling. Okay, now...are you still carrying that two? Good. Gooooood.
Okay,
enough with the shoddy mentalist routine. We've got work to do around here,
serious work. Welcome back to the crumbling abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now
essentially the permanent abode of those shiftless sods in Big
Green, the band that is happy to play anywhere but on the surface of
the Earth. (Yes, we do play planet Earth...just not on the surface. More
in the extreme sub-strata. Just browse through our inner-planetary
tour of Autumn 2002... once you've seen a Morlock disco, you know 
you've
been around the block once or twice.) Yes, this is where you can find us pretty
much any day of the week, toiling at many jobs, in relentless pursuit of a
one-armed man we saw leaving the scene of our wife's murder, staying just two
steps ahead of the dogged inspector Gerard... No, wait -- that's Richard Kimble!
Or is it Jean Valjean? (I always get those two mixed up.) We're more like a rock
band that also happens to be in the witness protection program. Our mail follows
us everywhere.
Plenty
of people (don't ask how many) have asked us about our creative process -- what
makes us tick as musicians, composers, performers, snake charmers, pretzel
vendors, and so on. Well, that's a pretty easy one to answer -- we tend to draw
our inspiration from very traditional sources. No, I don't mean drugs and
alcohol, though they do have their place. I mean the palpable urban angst of a
decaying industrial economy -- namely, the piles of discarded and disassembled
hammer lying about this old mill, the idle machines, the abandoned loading dock.
All of this is grist for our creative mill, if you will. (Will you?) Just
the other day, I saw Matt clapping old hammer stocks together like claves. That's
the sort of creativity I'm talking about, here. We're retooling the 
abandoned
Cheney Hammer Mill for the twenty-first century, fashioning the remnants of its
gilded past into the anthems of its pointless future. What does that mean,
exactly? I haven't any idea. Believe it or not, it just floated to the top of my
alphabet soup. (I get a lot of useful marketing copy that way.) That's nothing
-- I once pulled an entire album worth of lyrics from my morning bowl of
Alpha-Bits. There's your creative process.
But
enough about the art of what we do. Let's get to the science. Now that Marvin
(my personal robot assistant) has become a devotee of the fanatical concept
group "Captured by Robots," our lives have become dominated by a sense
of foreboding. What is Marvin saying in all those instant messages? Is he
communicating with (gulp) other robots? If so, when will they make their fatal
move? And when they do, will we hear the creaking of their joints and the
squealing of their wheel bearings before they fall upon us like assassins in the
unforgiving night? I don't know about you, but I get the subtle feeling that
Marvin is no longer that selfless servant of man he was when he rolled off Mitch
Macaphee's assembly line. It's almost as if he's been reprogrammed, bit by bit.
How do I know this? Well... he just seems different, that's all. An 
element
of meanness (or, at least, not-niceness), however imperceptible it may be. Call
me paranoid, but it's there. I can feel it.
Of course, Marvin's not the only technical problem we have to grapple with. There's the leaking roof. The electrics went out again this week -- Jesus, I'm glad we're not paying for the stuff! Oh, and the man-sized tuber got too close to Trevor James Constable's spare orgone generating device, and now he's glowing like a 75-watt light bulb. You can read by that crazy root vegetable. What next?
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Paper
Promises. What won't this Dubya do to make a point? I must admit, this
week's antics take the prize. Recognizing that their Social Security
piratization (yes, you read it right) scheme has been getting little traction
(except with brokerage houses), the administration decided to do a series of
show-and-tell events in hopes of capitalizing on their single foothold into the
American psyche on this issue -- the misconception that the 70-year-old pension
system faces insolvency and ruin. Congressional Republicans pitched in with a
ludicrous news conference where they compared Social Security to a vintage car
(needs maintenance) and a 30's era phone (um...old and outmoded?). 
Pretty
tortured analogies, to be sure, in support of their usual murky argumentation.
But the kicker had to be Dubya's trip to a trust fund office on the banks of the
Ohio river, where he indicated a filing cabinet full of Treasury Bonds issued as
promissory notes for the trust fund and said, in essence, that they were
valueless -- that there was no Social Security trust fund, just a filing cabinet
full of paper. You heard me right -- the President of the United States looked
into the camera and publicly questioned the value of Treasuries... the same
"paper" held by our creditors the world over.
Well, I have to think John Snow was probably grateful that the Pope's upcoming funeral was "story of the week" again, since it seems to me that a large portion of his job is convincing foreign banks (notably those in China) to take on more and more of our Treasuries...which nominally, at least, are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government. It's hard to know what Karl Rove was thinking when he cooked up this little P.R. stunt. Does he think Americans don't know what bonds are? What does any debt look like? For that matter, what does credit look like? Do those pieces of paper in your wallet (the ones with smarter presidents on them) have any intrinsic value, or do they simply represent a promise of compensation? Anyone who has seen "It's a Wonderful Life" could figure this one out, for Christ's sake. I suppose if these people are dedicated to anything, it's plumbing the depths of American ignorance in hopes of getting whatever it is they want -- in this instance, turning the entire country into "Pottersville." (Hey, it worked with the Iraq war.)
But,
talk about reckless! If I didn't know they were a bunch of overfed white dudes
in expensive suits, I'd think they were pointy-bearded nihilists. With today's
global media culture, the president can't sneeze without political and economic
elites in every corner of the world saying "bless you" (and in some
cases, 
"bless
you, fucker"). Surely those people understand what debt is -- many
of them hold Treasuries or securities derived from our government bonds. With
the rise of competing currencies like the Euro, how is it that Dubya and the
boys feel so confident that they can make wild statements like this and not
undermine the very essence of their political survival -- the ability to borrow
trillions of dollars in our name? Without willing international creditors, they
would be faced with asking Americans to foot the bill for their wars, their tax
cuts, and their "Missile Defense" protective shield for favored
contractors. That's to say nothing of chipping away at the foundation of our
21st Century debt-driven economy. Sheesh -- what a bunch of barn-burners!
Lose the Middleman. Now that Peter Jennings has a serious illness (God help him), maybe ABC will consider getting a new anchor who better fits our 24-hour religious-military news cycle. The name Jerry Boykin comes to mind. Just a thought.
luv u,
jp
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04/17/05
Yo-we-yo...
Hear that hum? No, not that cheap printer of yours. That deep hum. Now you hear it. Practically rattles your molars, it's so deep. Hmmm--reminds me of a song. A ship there is that sails the sea; it's loaded deep as deep can be. But not so deep as the love I'm in; I know not how I sink or swim....
All
right, that's enough singing for now, lads. That so-called hum you keep going on
about (see how you are?) is nothing more than Trevor James Constable's spare
orgone generating device, which he left in storage here at the Cheney Hammer
Mill when he lit out for greener pastures some months back (before our last
disastrous tour). That's the same mysterious device that turned the man-sized
tuber into an 
enormous
40-watt night light just last week. Now somehow it has become activated again
and there isn't a soul in this cavernous old mill who has any clue on how to
turn the sucker off. (As one might expect, Trevor James's orgone generating
device does not have a conventional control surface of any kind -- I think our
friend uses some kind of metaphysical command system based on thought
waves...either that or there's a universal remote lying around here somewhere.)
So far, our attempts to reach Trevor James at his office in California have been
unsuccessful. No reply on emails, instant messages, smoke signals, or semaphore,
either. (Next: lettered helium balloons.) His answering service has a single
repeating outgoing message on it, to wit:
I'm in the middle of an experiment. Please go away. Come back later.
Yeah,
sure. Mitch Macaphee pulls that shit all the time. The "experiment"
could be just about anything, from a trade journal to a south sea cruise.
Meanwhile, we've got this bizarre-o invention of his shaking the place to its
very foundations. Pretty soon the local merchants started to complain, and we
decided to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) down into the catacombs to
investigate. As you know, Marvin's been a bit disgruntled lately, so he was slow
to respond on this particular detail. You're going to think it's rather
underhanded of us, but while he was downstairs with the orgone generator, John
slipped into his 
workstation
at the POSH local internet cafe he's been frequenting and responded to a few
instant messages sent by one of Marvin's "Captured by Robots" cult
cohorts -- a cyborg who operates under the "buddy" name QludiumBX5.
The brief exchange raised more questions than it answered, frankly -- they
appear to communicate in some arcane robots-only lexicon that none of us could
crack. (Though the English word "Wednesday" kept coming up over and
over again. Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.)
Anyway...
Marvin managed to gruntle himself long enough to determine that the rogue orgone
generating device had created a warp in the very fabric of our time-space
continuum already -- a veritable "doorway" into another dimension, or
(perhaps even more intriguing) into another room of the hammer mill basement!
[Key suspense music here] Clearly,
this was not something best left to an automaton whose long-term gruntlement was
in serious question. We needed a willing volunteer to pass through that portal
of St. Elmo's Fire, stepping between universes (or *gulp* between rooms)
to tell us what lies on the other side. We all looked around helplessly (much as
we do when we need a guitar part done) in hopes of spotting a suitable volunteer
we could cajole into risking his or her well-being for nothing in particular.
Actually, it was Matt who first thought of Lincoln -- though to be fair, Matt's
always thinking of Lincoln 
in
one respect or another. (He would have liked Lincoln.) On my brother's
suggestion, we waylaid the Great Emancipator while he was taking his Great
Morning Constitutional and put the task in his capable hands. (Hey -- the guy's
been stone cold dead for 140 years...what's he got to lose, right?)
So...off he strode, honest Abe, into the warp between here and wherever, his back straight, top hat firmly seated on his noble brow, his copy of the Gettysburg Post-Gazette draped over his easy chair, awaiting his return. Now there's the guy we sang about in Quality Lincoln -- a man who laughs at uncertainty and thumbs his nose at inter-dimensional space-time anomalies. What will he discover? We'll be waiting by the phone. (Hope he keeps a quarter or two in those trouser pockets.)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
No
News=Good NewsOur planes dropped explosives on an area of the
so-called "Sunni Triangle" in Iraq last week, killing about 20 people,
including children. I heard about it on Democracy
Now! -- otherwise it was apparently deemed unworthy of comment, at least
in the small urban newspaper galaxy most of us inhabit. Non-story. They weren't
holding purple fingers aloft or pulling down statues of Saddam Hussein for the
cameras, therefore the dead and injured belonged to that mass of Iraqi humanity
whose lives count for less than nothing. Oh, you'll hear commentators deploring
the sickening atrocities committed by elements of the anti-occupation forces,
but when it comes the many thousands who wither beneath our matchless firepower,
it's dead silence. Frankly, 
I'm
not convinced that my fellow Americans would care if they were afforded the
opportunity to learn the truth. This war has been such an abstraction for most
of us, it would probably be no more upsetting than an earthquake or shipwreck in
some distant part of the world -- just one more authorless disaster.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. It would be interesting, at least, to see what would happen if reporting on, say, the Israel/Palestine conflict reflected some measure of reality. Right now, the "debate" seems bracketed between Sharon's position and Bush's. The press sees conflict in Sharon's refusal to take direction from Dubya, but there will be no real conflict here. The administration will cave. There is such a long established identity of "national interest" between the two nations that the media is incapable of talking about it rationally. I heard one talking head on PBS sounding astonished that the U.S. and Israel actually had different agendas going into this summit.... almost as if they were, what, two separate countries or something! Stop the madness! Listening to this, it's clear to me that almost no one in America probably has any reason to know that Israel has been steadily building and expanding a network of settlements, roads, and now massive isolation barriers throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem (i.e. not Israel) for more than 35 years, through Labor and Likud governments, "peacetime" and war time, in a process of illegal land appropriation that is making true peace impossible.
So...
if there's no news, does that mean nothing has happened? If a bomb falls in Samara
and there's no reporter there to hear it, does it make a sound? If it doesn't,
does that mean it's safe to move Rumsfeld's office to 
Baghdad?
(One can only hope.) I think this is the operative principle behind the selling
of the American empire to us Americans -- if they can keep it out of the daily
newspaper, the nightly news, etc., it never happened. Of course, this creates an
enormous incentive for the suicide bombers of the world to strike at targets
large enough to get them back on the media radar screen. It's a dynamic that has
played out time and again in Israel/Palestine: if there are no major attacks on
Israeli civilians for a stretch of time, Sharon and his army of ideological
allies here in the U.S. crow about how the wall is working and that all
"Arabs" understand is force...ergo, they continue expanding
settlements, building roads, and making life impossible for Palestinians. Then
when the inevitable response comes in the form of a bus bombing or some other
atrocity, they declare that all "Arabs" understand is force, and
continue expanding settlements, building roads....you get the idea. They have
created a political economy that thrives on incitement and dramatic violence,
which is only reported on when the perpetrators are Palestinians.
How to stop it? We need to pay closer attention, all of us. And to give a shit.
luv u,
jp
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04/24/05
Tar-nation.
Anybody need anything from the trading post? Matt -- you want something? How about you, Johnny? Man-sized tuber? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Everybody's good? What the hell -- did they open a Wal-Mart in the basement while I was sleeping? It did seem like a long night...
What
the fuck, friends -- here we are again. That greasy little blogspot in this dark
corner of the World Wide Web where Big Green
shares its inane secrets with an anxious public. Some people think this is all
we do -- just sit here and tap away at the computer keyboard, posting one highly
plausible account after another. Not so. No, sir -- while it has taken on the
dimensions of a Herculean labor, we are in fact hammering away at full-length
album #2, the long anticipated follow-up to 2000 
Years
To Christmas, which we released late in the last century. (The very end...in
the "before time", just before "the awful things.") At a
snail's pace, we are tracking about ten songs, with at least another half-dozen
in the hopper, waiting for pre-production. And, as always, we are tossing
instruments about haphazardly, rolling xylophones across the studio at one
another, giving Marvin a cow bell and the man-sized tuber a Melotron. So yes,
we're behind schedule, and yes, we've been recording at a dead man's pace for
more than a year now....but we're getting there, dammit! We've turned the
corner. There's light at the end of the tunnel. The ostrich has pulled its.....
Damn -- I've run out of intelligible clichés. No matter.
What
about the spare orgone generating device running amok in the basement of the
Cheney Hammer Mill as we speak? Well, as you may recall, Trevor James
Constable's strange invention has created the equivalent of a "Time
Tunnel" in the bowels of our squat house -- a portal backward through the
ages into which strode our own local anachronistic figure, president Abraham
Lincoln. We were able to track the progress (or regress, if you will) of the
great man by parking our ancient tube-driven TV set within a few feet of the
time warp and clicking it on. After a few minutes of warm-up, the image appeared
of Lincoln traversing a somewhat familiar-looking time-space continuum thingy,
turning slowly but surely (but Shirley!!) in a clockwise direction 
(or
if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, a counter-clockwise direction). The
console speaker crackled a staccato accompaniment of water-drop like sounds,
with the occasional bongo roll and what sounded like bell hits on a medium
ride cymbal. No doubt about it -- this was good television.
Then,
dramatically, the scene changed. Our man Lincoln appeared to have come to rest
on the deck of some kind of cruise liner. He took a moment to get his sea legs,
then started making his way along the railing, tipping his hat to the occasional
well-fed looking passengers. Somewhere in the background, a dog was barking.
Lincoln looked a bit like Gregory Peck's Ahab as he swaggered across the deck in
that 18th Century way (never really saw him in a nautical setting before, now
that I think of it). Our window into his new world was interrupted momentarily
by Marvin switching channels to see who was going to be on the all-robot version
of Jeopardy this week. When we managed to click the channel back to
"U", the fuzzy image of a distant past gradually sharpened and we
could see Lincoln walking past a large white lifesaver with the name "HMS 
TITANIC"
printed on it. I heard my partners gasp -- how can we warn the president? How
much time did we have before disaster struck. And, most importantly, would
Robbie the Robot prevail in Double Jeopardy?
Right now, the answers to these questions are, as Rumsfeld would put it, "unknowable." Our superannuated console TV set blew a tube while we sat frozen with suspense, and the picture went dark. As Matt and John rummaged around for a replacement, I grappled with the question of whether to send the man-sized tuber into the time-space vortex with or without his little pushcart. (I'm not sure that thing would work so well on a ship -- no brakes, you see.)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
We
Own The World. Every once in a while you run across an article that makes a
light bulb fire up in your head, and you think, "now I get it."
This week it was an extended
column by Naomi Klein in the Nation about what she terms "Disaster
Capitalism" -- the government-corporate partnership that rolls into
war-flattened Iraq or tsunamied Sri Lanka and sets about socially and
economically re-engineering those societies for the benefit of foreign
investors. I must admit, I was amongst those who were scratching their heads and
saying "Whaaaa??" when Dubya appointed Wolfowitz to head the World
Bank -- it seemed like little more than a "fuck you" to Old Europe or
perhaps 
a kind
of exile for his abysmal planning for post-invasion Iraq. But thanks to this
reportage -- the only place, incidentally, I have seen this appear -- it's easy
to see how Iraq "reconstruction" (or deconstruction) could be
considered a substantial success in terms of the kind of business the World Bank
is in right now. Something like a quarter of the bank's budget goes to projects
of this kind, wherein $1,000 a day consultants come in and sell the land, water,
and mineral wealth out from under the survivors. Reconstruction aid money is
contingent upon cooperation with radical privatization plans for public assets
-- and that aid often comes in the form of loans, so that the affected societies
will end up even more on the debt hook than ever. So... Wolfowitz is an ideal
choice, once you fully appreciate the cynicism of the enterprise.
In
fact, it gets even worse. Klein reports on a new White House office established
in August of last year (with zero coverage in the corporate media) for what is
called the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. This new entity is
creating detailed plans for the "reconstruction" of about 25
countries, nearly all of which have not been destroyed yet. These plans include
signed, pre-negotiated contracts with key consulting firms -- the Bechtels,
Halliburtons, etc. -- and large NGO's to engage in the highly profitable work of
rolling into a stricken country in the wake of a disaster and implementing
economic "shock therapy" while people are too sick, demoralized, and
consumed with mean survival to resist. As in post-invasion Iraq, post-tsunami
Sri Lanka, and pretty much anywhere else they set up shop, the result for 
the
local population can be an unmitigated catastrophe, so long as key companies
benefit and the nation's economy is opened to foreign plunder. This is
post-modern colonialism, to be sure, with a standing (and secret) hit-list of
potential "failed states" all drawn up and ready.
So...it looks like Bush was right when he described Iraq as a "catastrophic success." If you thought it was going badly, it's because you didn't understand what the point of the whole enterprise was -- namely enriching US-based companies and creating an economic free-fire zone which will allow for the further enrichment of (wait for it!) US-based companies. The Iraqi people are decidedly not better off than before, but they are not what's at issue. All this blather about "freedom" and "democracy" is just that: blather. Our government thinks democracies are fine, so long as they do as we say. Dictatorships are fine, too...so long as they do as we say. (See... Donny gets it now. Good boy!) And now, with an established policy of preventive war and a fully articulated institutional means for post-conflict exploitation, our model for the first truly global empire is complete.
The only thing that stands in our way is all those pesky people.
luv u,
jp