Glad to see that Naomi Klein is back on the job – last week’s column in the Nation about the World Bank and Wolfowitz was a welcome antidote to the conventional wisdom that gets peddled in the mainstream media and on NPR. The 
World Bank in particular and the “international community” in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as “anti-poverty”). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years ago, and subsequent change of course. (There’s a success story!) Advocates of the system point with pride at Russia, where millions have lost their pensions and billions of dollars in public assets were ladled out to friends of the late Boris Yeltsin.
Look upon this and lament, fellow Americans. You – yes, you – and I are, at best, one misstep away from penury… and the same “market forces” that have been unleashed upon most of the rest of humanity are now growling at our door as well. Just glance at our national priorities and you can see the game that’s being played. We’re spending borrowed money on military technology and a criminal war to export not democracy but neoliberal economics to Iraq. That massive increase in our national debt will, if allowed to go unchecked, force the downsizing of public services and the eventual piratization (er, I mean, privatization) of such public institutions as Social Security. That’s the intention, it would appear – kind of a win-win for the masters of neoliberal economics. Not only do we help them scuttle the Iraqi state, but in so doing dig a hole under our own public sector, as well.
What’s their latest target? That country in the horn of Africa that we’ve helped out so much through the years (note: irony) – Somalia, now the subject of a massive U.S. supported occupation by neighboring Ethiopia, reported on by Salim Lone of the Kenyan Daily Nation, on Democracy Now! This is the war you never hear about – the war that the major news media can’t find space to report; that the United Nations has virtually ignored, except to attempt to round up a “coalition of the willing” to help prop up the puppet government Ethiopia has installed there by force of arms. Yes, the stated reasoning behind this mess is terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, but there’s little evidence to back up that reasoning, and there appear to be more concrete motivations – the U.S./Ethiopian-backed regime is congenial to the return of western oil companies, which have been out of the country since 1991. Somalia also has a strategic location U.S. planners have coveted since the Carter administration, when Iran stopped being a client state and we started pumping money into the corrupt regime of former Somali president Mohamed Siad Barre.
Look out, Mogadishu. More help is on the way.
luv u,
jp
First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there’s week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people.
I suppose you’re wondering how in the world our elected officials could possibly have been coaxed away from their posts by large amounts of cash… how proffered piles of filthy lucre could convince them to abandon their constituents to other worlders… how the promise of permanent paid vacation could somehow outweigh their dedication to public service. Well, stop it. Of course they took the money and ran – that’s their job. Damnit, if our public officials weren’t corruptible, we would never have been able to remain in our adopted squat house for lo these many years. Our corporate label – Loathsome Prick Records – understood this very well. It’s thanks to them, in part, that we were able to keep Marvin (my personal robot assistant) under our leaky roof. Apparently there’s a local ordinance against harboring mechanical men. (You’d be surprised what kinds of Byzantine laws lurk in the dusty volumes stacked down at your local codes department.) Nothing a little palm grease couldn’t finesse. 
there was a loud knock on the door. It was some of Marvin’s old colleagues from the local constabulary, only they weren’t collecting quarters for the annual charity cotillion. They were putting us out on the street, in effect – a 10-day eviction notice, signed by someone named Gizmadiyar (apparently the acting mayor… and between you and me, I don’t think he’s acting). Even Marvin’s timely intervention seemed to have no effect – the constables seemed quite happy in their work…. almost… TOO… happy….
on any of his former selves that the public will buy – Mister Independent, Mister Inevitable, Mister Iraq Victory, etc. Pick your favorite McCain… or collect all three! At this stage, the Arizona senator’s flagging campaign appears to be centered on his dogged support for the Iraq project, albeit a “better managed” variant of that catastrophe. The calculation is a simple one – McCain supports the troop increase because he believes it’s right, even though it’s unpopular; a position that is supposed to lend him an aura of integrity and moral authority. Everyone else is playing politics with the war, but not McCain. That’s his card, and he’s playing it for all it’s worth, equating troop withdrawals with “surrender” and any war funding conditions with abandonment of our troops (mainstream G.O.P. positions, in essence).
McCain talks as though he has the right to speak for everyone in uniform. Frankly, I don’t see why. He is not the only person who suffered during the Vietnam War, not by a long shot. Plenty of Americans had a rougher time of it than McCain, and something like 58,000 never came back at all. That’s to say nothing of what the Vietnamese and other southeast Asians endured during that war. From what I’ve seen, I doubt very many of those incarcerated by the Saigon regime or the U.S. military / C.I.A. during those years are now trotting around the countryside angling for votes. (Most are in unmarked graves or sleeping with the fishes, as they say.) Just this week 
Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That’s right… astroturf.
You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up residence the normal way: the way we got here… find an empty house and squat. No, that wasn’t good enough for them. They had to bring their own houses. And before you say anything, no, I don’t have a “problem” with space people. In fact, some of my best friends are from far beyond the confines of our little solar system. Did I mention Big Zamboola? I did. Okay. Well, there’s also sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in guitarist. He, of course, is from the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy far, far, away. sFshzenKlyrn and I go way back, so you can’t say I don’t like space people, even if they do keep me up all night with their smelly lawn mowers and their noisy stellar infrarometers running incessantly over the same measurements. (Ooooooh, I hate them, I hate them!) Don’t listen to Mr. Subliminal. I love those dang space people, I really do. (RRRRrrrrrr)
robot assistant) did serve with distinction in the local constabulary. And we have, in fact, generated a little bit of economic activity in the area with the occasional payout we receive from our new corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, which has been willing to advance us a bit on our upcoming release (still in the mixing stage – arrrrrghhh). Yeah, we help keep the pizza joint and the pub in business, so that’s probably worth an ordinance or two from city hall about unauthorized extraterrestrial housing and landscaping. (Turns out, it isn’t even real grass. It’s like a freaking lawn toupee, man!) So one would expect a little cooperation from the authorities, eh?
The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven’t yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it’s not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation.
cowardly on this topic. I’ve heard some tepid discussion thus far of re-regulating assault weapons, but it seems like you can only hear that kind of talk when it’s balanced out by some right-wing nut job who wants to arm ALL students so that they can shoot back. (I’m not making this up. Hey dumbshit – Cho was an armed student.) And while boneheads on CNN and Fox debate the merits of facilitating schoolhouse shootouts, over in Iraq incidents like Virginia Tech happen on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine how soul-crushing that must be.
Whoa – that didn’t take long. Is it Saturday already? Guess those orgone energy waves have an affect on your sense of time. As Dylan once sang, now things just keep getting uglier, and I have no sense of tiiiiiime…..
Next thing I knew, something hit me square on the back of the head. Youch! Everything went black (actually, it was kind of a midnight blue, really, with orange and yellow sparkles – very nice). Not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had a headache and something Mitch Macaphee calls “frontier accent syndrome” – a dreaded disorder that people in the mad scientist community have been grappling with for nigh onto a hundred ‘yar. Dag nabbed syndrome makes yuh talk like a gall dorn character actor at least every other sentence that festers outa’ yer gob. (I have a particularly strange variant that appears to incorporate some elements of archaic British slang… most curious… dash it all….) Mitch and others tell me that I was struck by the hull of the bouncing ship driven by our turf-obsessed space invaders – apparently the fucker busted through the roof and into my private study… and dang near knocked my fool head off. (Haw…)
upstate village. (Quiet though it may be, there is a lot of sewage that runs through this place – just ask the DEC… if you can catch them not hunting…) Though my head was, well, a bit more dented than before (dag nab it!), our little experiment appeared to be a success. But as you know… appearances can be deceiving. Within the next couple of days, similar mysterious space ships had appeared in the courtyards of many of our neighbors. Lawns were soon sprouting up all around us…. green, carpet-like landscaping. It was terrifying!
It bears pointing out that these are issues key to us, not them, and that if these people represented the vast majority of Iraqis, they wouldn’t be substantially made up of recently arrived exiles and wouldn’t have to meet in a fortified pillbox. Be that as it may, the finger of blame on this attack points inevitably to the “friendly” Iraqis. I heard one pundit opine (when she managed to tear herself away from talking about Don Imus) that this was an “inside job”. What that means I’m not certain (they only discussed Iraq for about 30 seconds), but as I’ve said before in these pages, when this Iraq policy is finally over, its failure will be the Iraqis fault… so much so that you will think they had invaded us.
Give up? Well, I’m gon’ tell yuh. It’s because we aren’t fighting for our lives. Not really. Sure there’s danger – there was danger during the cold war, too – but that danger is being aggravated by the war in Iraq, not reduced by it. There is no clear existential threat to the U.S. posed by the Iraqi insurgency, and that’s why our government feels it has the luxury to play only the safest political cards and avoid all the dicey ones. Draft? No need – we’ve got an all-volunteer force we can deploy again and again (and again…). Taxes? We’ll cut those and just borrow the billions we burn in Iraq – free money, folks! Vote for me!! Rationing? That’s just plain unAmerican and unnecessary… unless you’re (wait for it) under attack, which we plainly are not. We’re not fighting the Nazis across a 1,000 mile front. We’re not withering under the Luftwaffe’s nightly terror bombings. We’re fighting a war of choice, with the objective of securing a pro-western government in Baghdad and opening the Iraqi economy to the kind of extreme neoliberal exploitation that must surely inhabit Paul Wolfowitz’s piratical dreams.
Got a bead on it yet, Trevor James? Try 16 degrees azimuth something-the-fuck… you know what I’m trying to say. Ready? Steady…. Fire rockets! No rockets? Well, then, let’s just settle for etheric energy waves.
planning to stay a while when they somehow generated a rich carpet of suburban lawn in the area immediately surrounding their vessel. Now, we’re not fond of grass, okay? Marvin (my personal robot assistant) particularly loathes the stuff, and he’s not alone. (I think it’s the sound of lawnmowers and sprinklers – reminds him of the primordial shop floor from which his ancestors emerged, their brass knuckles scraping the cobblestones as they slouched toward the homes of their new owners. Just a guess.) I’ll tell you, these fuckers must be from a whole planet of lawn freaks – they never stop working on that thing.
guys to putrefy the neighborhood with their toxins… but they never actually come out of that ship. Even so, it was clear that they had to go before our entire squat house was converted to suburban domestic sprawl – a nightmare in ubiquitous green. Matt, resourceful fellow that he is, thought to ask Trevor James Constable to train his patented orgone generating device on their craft. Matt’s theory (totally unencumbered by scientific validity) was that the etheric energy would excite the atoms of the unearthly metal in their hull, generating an uncomfortable temperature within. (Hot? Cold? Not sure about that part….) That was good enough for Trevor James (or T.J., as I call him) – he duly positioned the array and flipped the “on” switch.
God be praised! What are we to make of this great triumph? That the incalculable suffering of the past four years has somehow been worth it now that McCain and some other bonehead politicians can go shopping in downtown Baghdad under heavy guard? Not sure, but I think they could have done that more easily before they started this stupid war. (One can only hope they’re not planning any shopping trips to Tehran in the near future.) It’s obvious that McCain is playing to the idiot Republican base – those folks that would support Bush if he knifed their grandchildren in front of them. And the administration, desperate for any sign of success in Iraq, is more than glad to glom onto the senator’s grandstanding.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity for the anti-war movement in all of this happy talk. What the hell – if it’s going so well over there, why don’t we leave? Let’s call their bluff. Baghdad is safe? Fine! Everybody go home. That’s what a majority of Americans and a supermajority of Iraqis want, right? There’s one way to make everybody happy. Of course, that would bring us down to the core issue of this whole bloody enterprise – our government doesn’t want to leave Iraq. They didn’t go through all the trouble of contriving and sustaining this invasion just to be pushed out a measly four years later. For all intents and purposes, America is in Iraq to stay, which means we won’t leave until there is simply no other alternative. I happen to believe only Americans can bring and end to this, but so long as we as a nation behave as though the war doesn’t exist, it will go on and on and on. 
What the….? Marvin (my personal robot assistant), is that you? No, wait… you’re over there. Well then, what the fuck is causing that glow if not your power-on indicator? Why it’s… well… unearthly.
(*whew*) Are you sitting down? Okay, good. Clearly, someone needed to see what was up outside. And just as clearly, that wasn’t going to be me. Or Matt. Now John, maybe, but he was otherwise occupied, so really… not him either. My vote was for Marvin to do the recon, which of course he more or less willingly acceded to, being a soulless machine with no overriding inclination towards self-preservation. Yes, he did need a brisk push out the door, but I attribute that to my laziness about oiling his foot-casters. (The yodeling and frantic arm waving might have been the result of some kind of computer error – I’m having Mitch Macaphee look into that now.) In any case, the intrepid Marvin cantered out into the cobbled courtyard, while we watched on his chest-mounted Web cam. (The view was momentarily obscured by one of his robotic fingers… I think it was the middle one… but pretty soon we had a look at what was happening.)
with windows on the upper flank. Stranger still was the racket it was emitting – sounded like a lawn mower more than anything. We tried to get Marvin to circle around, but there appeared to be something wrong with his audio receiver – he turned on his heel and sprung through one of the mill’s cellar windows. (Definitely a software glitch – gotta be a patch available online somewhere….) Well, it took about an hour and a half to convince him, but we eventually got Big Zamboola to float himself up above the mill and get some pictures. And what we saw… astounded us. (Well… me, anyway. I admit, I’m easily astounded.)